Americanitis E-Book

Miles Beard

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 368

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'If you look closely you can still see some tear splotches on these pages, here and there.' Following the death of his wife, Miles, an academic and hypochondriac suffering from acute anxiety, finds himself in need of professional help. Back in his native Scotland from a research trip to the US he conducted in the weeks preceding his wife's death, his therapist encourages him to write a fictionalised version of his life in order to pinpoint the sources of his anxiety. In penning this record of his memories, Miles reveals the complicated double life he has been leading – tortured academic by day, Internet troll hounding people under a pseudonym by night – and unsettling details surrounding the US trip begin to surface. As the narrative progresses, questions build as to what actually happened during the final days of Miles and Sarah's marriage. Americanitis is an extraordinary work that mercilessly blends fact with fiction and leaves the reader scrabbling for truth.

Leseprobe

americanitis

Renard Press Ltd

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London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

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020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

Americanitis first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2024

Text © Miles Beard, 2024

Permission has been granted to quote from other copyrighted works in this book. For copyright holders and licensors please see ‘Credits and Permissions’ on p. 263, which forms an extension of this copyright notice.

Author image on p. 264 © Mick McGurk

Cover design by Will Dady

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-80447-104-3

Renard Press Edition (limited printing) ISBN: 978-1-80447-105-0

Miles Beard asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, or is used fictitiously.

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe – Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected].

Americanitis

miles beard

renard press

americanitis

for S J M-B(1989–2016)

mingus at the showplace

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thoughtpoetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long sincedefunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,

casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew twoother things, but as it happened they were wrong.

So I made him look at the poem.‘There’s a lot of that going around,’ he said,

and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He gloweredat me but he didn’t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.If they were baseball executives they’d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the gamecould be saved from children. Of course later

that night he fired his pianist in mid-numberand flurried him from the stand.

‘We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,’he explained, and the band played on.

—William Matthews, 1995

I

i resented the term widower in the same way a postwoman might. Not only did I object to its antiquated invoking of gender, but also its inability to connote me accurately and succinctly. I was only twenty-seven. Sarah had been dead for just over a year. It was almost farcical to describe myself as such, and yet, again and again, was I asked to do so: on bureaucratic forms; in the news media; at the GP; or to well-meaning but ultimately damaging shop assistants inquiring as to whether my partner and I have the same preference of mattress – hard or soft? Well, currently she’s in hard box beneath the soft earth and I’m not sleeping at all, so… And much like Kodak or Bic or Coca-Cola it felt like a word sprung from an unexceptional boardroom with that singular goal in mind: profit.

Everything had been paid for in full – Sarah’s life- insurance policy through her work had seen to that and then some – but still I felt my vulnerability seized upon at regular intervals. I finally got around to cancelling the phone line after a few too many cold calls asking if I or a loved one had been in a serious accident recently, and even then the man at the telecoms company pleaded with me to reconsider. Life’s too short, I’d supposed, so I thanked him for his help and left our contract intact, only dimly acknowledging later that, whatever my intention, I was invoking neither a genuine nor ironic spirit of the phrase by using it to justify continuing to pay for something I didn’t want and actually found quite painful. It was just a phrase that played upon my mind quite a bit in that time, I suppose.

It was something of a joke between us that she would die before me, despite my mysterious ailments, my immediate onset of anxiety at the slightest indication of some nutritional deficiency, some neurological twitch. And yet she never could grasp what would and would not frighten me. I could scrape a knee in the park and throughout her beseeching that I not worry she would stare at me like I was a madman, as I did the same back at her. A scraped knee did not bother me. A jammed finger could never bother me. A blow to the head? Of course. Anything involving my sex organs? Perish the thought.

When Sarah died I had so many feelings. To untangle some such, I even visited a therapist. She (I knew that I would see a woman; I don’t know how I knew and I don’t know what it means that I knew, but I knew despite never consciously looking) suggested that I write down what had happened to me, everything that had happened to me, even events that weren’t true or those that I had wished to be true, but to use our real names, to be myself, and to therefore take ownership of every aspect of our story.

I smirked. You mean autofiction? I teach a course on it.

She returned a puzzled look, so I explained that the most exciting authors of the moment were interrogating the subjective experience of being alive and the audience’s insatiable desires for authenticity and celebrity, even while praising their ingenuous imaginations and fidelity to artful language. (I should say this happened a couple of years ago, before the form began to dominate basically all the serious literary production in this country. So please don’t think I was, like, trying to explain what an epistolary novel was to an attuned reader in the eighteenth century. Or, you know, something else that’s really obvious.)

But she replied that she was familiar with the term. What she was actually curious about was why my first impulse had been to name the form, to genericise the task she was setting before me.

I felt a twinge and adopted a hurt look. Sarah was the same, I said. She thinks – she thought – I was always over-intellectualising things.

We can discuss that at some point, the therapist said, and we should. But to be clear, I wasn’t suggesting that you were intellectualising so much as attempting to exert a level of control that isn’t necessary; to absolve the personal functions of a journal in the service of the literary, distancing yourself from the task before you had even started it. Whereas I am trying to give you the space to put your whole self into your story: your fantasies; your desires; your moral corruptions, even, if you have any. You’re a lecturer?

Yes, I responded, too quickly. (It wasn’t true. I’m only a teaching associate, languishing on rolling fixed-term contracts.)

She pushed the button on her pen and wrote this down, retracting it afterwards. And your doctoral thesis?

I jumped into the thirty-second ‘elevator pitch’ we had been taught to prepare and memorise for our interviews, throughout which her pen remained painfully retracted.

…and so it mostly focuses on Nadar, Tennessee Williams and Charles Mingus, whose archives in Washington, D.C. I was very fortunate to visit on a six-week stay, I finished.

All men?

Yes, I said, guiltily, putting my wrists out before her as if manacled, an expression of mock anguish on my face. Oh, and there was that pen again. What fun we were having!

I left feeling heavier than ever. I was a magician with a secret pocket stored inside his chest that no number of coloured handkerchiefs could ever fill. I was an anti-archaeologist, covering the portentous artefacts of knowledge before him in the sand, looking away, distracted by something glittering on the horizon ahead. A lumbering birdwatcher whose tears obscure the lenses of his binoculars. A warrior monk with a heavy conscience…

But at home, I opened this abandoned jotter and tore out its pages on Propp, the old Russki fool. The first lines I wrote, the only lines I could write that night:

Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.

Write it!

Sarah.

Sorry. I just realised I forgot to include my own name in this. It’s Miles, as in miles gloriosus.

II

none of our friends would believe us, but when Sarah became pregnant again, this time carrying it past the first trimester, I too gained weight in my stomach and struggled with mood swings and nausea. She thought it was sweet at first, but one morning, when I was violently retching in the toilet, I heard her call me something darkly under her breath. (A ponce, maybe? That can’t be right…) It didn’t stop how I felt – nothing could – but I wouldn’t talk about it any more with her after that, and tried to disguise the very real symptoms I was experiencing with ostentatious displays of my prior eating habits: chips piled into polystyrene containers slick with orange grease from the coloured cheese, a battered sausage. Stuffing it into my mouth I would intimate that it was all behind me – silly, really, wasn’t it? – while I thought of an excuse to go out. Into the hedges, beyond the view of our sitting-room window where she watched television, I would spew everything. Eventually, when she lost the baby, my symptoms subsided.

Though we wanted a child more than ever now, we didn’t have sex for months after. I was still finishing my thesis at the time, and Sarah had returned quickly to work. It was a pain neither of us had experienced, almost everyone we knew up until that point having lived full lives, and we were helpless to each other. It wasn’t real, I would say to myself at that time, over and over again. It was never real.

Only a small taste of what was to come, after some time I did start to get over it. Not her. I remember one night we were staying in with a bottle of wine when I put on a funk record I had got earlier in the day at the vinyl-record fair we had walked through on our way home from the park where we still liked to go and throw the frisbee. I didn’t know anything about the album itself, but I had liked all of the bandleader’s output that I was familiar with, and his group’s infectious zaniness always put me into a good mood. But, as we sat there, when the first track opened with the spoken words, ‘Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time’, I knew I had made a mistake. As guitars started to wail – truly wail – over an arpeggiated melody of profound grief and longing, I watched Sarah begin to weep, shuddering as she did so. I didn’t know what to do. Almost five minutes in, without any tonal shift at all from the band – the drummer especially insistent in the lugubrious, absurdly funereal pace he set – she stood up and left the room, calling me a bastard on her way out. I wasn’t offended. I knew I would have to rise above it all or drown in my own shit. But, still, my heart went out to her, even if in the end it couldn’t quite reach.

So I just sat there and let the song play out. There was nothing I could do. My glass again empty, my head slightly spinning, it was another five interminable minutes before the bloody thing was over, pounding in my temples, field of vision decreasing almost imperceptibly. As the music transitioned without counterpoint into the next track, an uplifting gospel-style rock song asking a meaningless question over and over, I let this play out as well, if only so that Sarah might intuit the complete lack of intention in my actions: I wasn’t trying to bring us down; I wasn’t forcing her to confront anything. But she didn’t return. And when we woke up the next morning, neither of us mentioned the incident.

There’s something you should know about Sarah. You’ve probably wondered why we got married when we were so young, for instance. Young for people our age, anyway. Well, as you might already know, her parents are a bit religious, and she used to have to go to the village church with them every week growing up: service and bible study. When they became suspicious that we were living together (we were) it seemed easier to just get married rather than keep lying to them whenever they came into the city to visit us. But Sarah had a lot of lingering questions, more than I had been aware of. Around this time we had been out on one of our ‘constitutionals’ talking about something or other when I made a pun about a soul musician we both liked, putting the word into air-quotes with my hands.

Wait a minute, she said, stopping. You don’t even believe in souls?

Of course not, I responded, laughing a little too absently, my mind far away in that moment as I wondered if I had put enough sun cream on to my face and neck. It was then that I realised she’d had tears in her eyes when she asked me. I’m really sorry, I said quickly. Do you?

I… I don’t know now. I thought I did. But I guess I had never really thought about it, to be honest.

Suddenly connecting this to the debacle of our unborn children, I started to backpedal. (It’s more of a philosophical question than anything else, isn’t it…) But she stopped me and took my hand in hers – my hand devouring hers, really – and said, As long as we have each other, that’s all that really matters, right?

I kissed her on the nose as the traffic roared around us where we waited on an island in the middle of the road, her exasperated arms stretching out towards me, the top of her forehead meeting the bottom of mine. Right, I said.

If you look closely, you can still see some tear splotches on these pages, here and there.

III

at our next meeting, the therapist started our session by asking me to tell her more about my thesis. This surprised me. No one had wanted to talk about any of the research I had done ever since the viva voce, and even then it felt like I was being indulged: I was given the polite number of corrections you would expect, a cheap bottle of fizz bought by the department, and then sent on my merry way with very little regard for what I would do next, left so I was at the end of the student’s road. Though I had already successfully interviewed for a post at another university, I hadn’t told anyone about it. You would think they might have thought to ask about my plans, but whatever. Bastards.

After I had outlined my argument in a little bit more detail than when we’d first met (basically, that the autobiographies of artists tend to present the quotidian sides of the practitioner as metaphors for their craft rather than deal explicitly with that craft) she asked me to locate the centre of my interest in the topic. I couldn’t. Faltering as I spoke, I touched on my own youthful ambitions in music, the chance to go to America, the career prospects for interdisciplinarity in academia, and, finally, the role of the persona in literary interpretation.

Mingus tackles this directly, I said. His book begins with him in a therapist’s office, actually, where he’s told that there are in fact three of him, all real, all to be taken seriously.

Who are the three? she asked.

Um, one is just standing there, unflappable and watchful. One is like a frightened rabbit that’s attacking others out of fear, I think. And then there’s the big, gentle giant, innocent and naïve, but who can turn violent when he realises he’s being take advantage of.

And who are yours? How many Mileses are there?

I was quiet for a moment.

Alazon, I replied.

She judged the word carefully in her mind, eyes betraying her as they darted around, cuing some memory or secret knowledge from long ago. Alazon, she said aloud. Who is Alazon?

He’s who I am on message boards. Online, I mean. It’s the name I use.

Anonymously.

Yes.

Alazon is, well, he’s a stock character in the theatre. From ancient times. A kind of… figure of ridicule, yes? Is that right?

That’s right, I said.

But why?

My heart started to pound.

Well…

She didn’t cut me off.

No one can…

The terrible silence pervaded.

No one can ridicule you if you’re deliberately setting yourself up for ridicule.

I see, she said. Where does Sarah figure in this?

I didn’t say that she does.

No, you didn’t. That’s true. But I’m asking.

Well, literally speaking, not very much. Alazon isn’t married.

Alazon isn’t married, she repeated, spacing the words apart like a line from some exquisite, bittersweet haiku.

I don’t… Or, I didn’t… talk about Sarah. Ever.

Online.

Right.

So what does Alazon talk about?

He, uh, flirts, I guess. More than he ‘talks about something’, if you know what I mean.

I think I’m starting to understand now. Did Sarah know about Alazon?

No. Not as far as I’m aware, anyway.

Let’s leave this there for the moment, she said. Let’s just leave it in the air and see if it’s something we’ll return to at a later point.

I nodded, grateful.

When you came last week, you said you have been experiencing some health anxiety since the death of your wife. That’s perfectly natural – and well done for seeking help – but I’m curious to know when these feelings first started.

Like, from my whole life, you mean?

Sure, if you wish. Had you dealt with this kind of anxiety before Sarah died?

Yes.

Tell me about it. Can you pinpoint it to a time or place?

I told her how it had started when Sarah and I were apart for six weeks during my research fellowship in the States, three years into the PhD. How I couldn’t even recognise it as anxiety. Just a shortness of breath brought about by something lacking in my diet: iron, B12, folic acid, all that shite you’re never really sure of at the chemist’s. Or maybe something that had been introduced to me. A parasite. Over and over, in the shared house in Georgetown where I stayed, I would sit bolt upright and try to yawn, or otherwise just breathe deeply: anything that would allow me to reach that fullness in my lungs, that fullness that my own body was cruelly denying me, and thereby the sense of comfort that only knowing – truly knowing – that, yes, there was still enough oxygen left in this world for me, could bring.

When did you learn it was anxiety? she asked.

When I realised it went away whenever we spoke. Or if I was preoccupied with something else.

Like your research.

That, yes. Also, I had made a friend there and I noticed it disappeared whenever we were together.

Our time was up. She said talking about this might have shifted something for me and that it would be important to watch my own thoughts for the next little while, keep an eye on myself. But in the lift going down I felt more dismayed than ever. I had no idea what we were talking about. I wasn’t sure why I had brought up my forum activities at all, and the only thing that seemed to be shifting for me was the growing awareness that with each day that passed Sarah was further from me. I looked at myself in the video screen next to the door that projected the surveillance footage of the camera above me in real time. I stood without moving, watching myself. I was alone.

At home, I went into my study and turned on the computer. As I drew the curtains, the browser auto-filled with my username and password. Gratified, thrown again into that miserable space where I could be anyone I wanted, but somehow always still chose a version so close to myself, I visited the familiar pages.

board/hotdepressedchicks

@alazon: i am the floor pile. walk over me.

Degrading myself further, the words weren’t even mine.

IV

in an overpriced Capitol Hill bar, we had agreed to meet at five o’clock to laugh about the foibles of our respective subjects and their apparently equally obsessive bookkeeping/hoarding. It was my first day in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress and I was utterly overwhelmed. Having completed all the necessary pre-registration forms online weeks beforehand, after retrieving my Reader Identification Card, I made my way to the Performing Arts Reading Room, only to find that there was some kind of altercation going on inside. I could see through the great glass panes of the door a couple of policemen speaking to a wearied man who remained seated but was gesticulating wildly with one arm while his other rested proprietorially over a vinyl record. Nevertheless, I started to enter on the basis that I had been directed to this location at registration and, in any case, was curious to see what all the fuss was about. But I had only opened the door about halfway when a librarian inside quickly stopped me and motioned me back into the hall with her, where, giving no indication of what was happening inside, she told me that she was familiar with my request and that several boxes for me had been taken down the hall to the Manuscript Reading Room around the corner from where we were standing, and that she hoped this wouldn’t be too inconvenient. But before I could respond, she turned back into the room. I stood for a moment, still watching. It seemed like whatever excitement there had been had tapered off and a stalemate was emerging that seemed to wear thin for every person involved. And as the door swung behind her I was given a glimpse into this disturbance, though it didn’t make much sense to me.

Sir, I will tell you, again, for the final time: you cannot take the Goldberg Variations home with you.

But the humming! he shouted. With the software on my computer, I can remove his godawful humming!

In the next room I was ushered quickly to a table where a trolley was waiting for me. Actually confronting the number of boxes I had requested was staggering, and it was far fewer than the number that would be available to me throughout my time there. As I gazed upon them in all their beige and unhelpful cardboard glory, my head began to swim, and what had started as a nice excuse to go abroad suddenly appeared a Herculean, if not Sisyphean, endeavour that I would surely never find the strength to rise to. I felt very foolish for thinking that I would get much done in six weeks, and I wondered if anyone from the university would notice if the trip they were part-funding didn’t result in the linchpin to my thesis it had been planned for. With only my battered copy of Mingus’s book sporadically underlined and scribbled on during the plane rides over, a pencil I had bought in a gift shop and that neat yellow lined paper you only saw on American legal dramas, I wondered what the hell I was going to do.

Then, on a table not far from me, I saw her. I hesitated. She was clearly engrossed in her task. But she had mounds of material at her table too. And I was very attracted to her. I won’t lie about that. It had only been three, maybe four days – I was also jet-lagged – since I had left home, but already I was craving some socialisation. My new flatmate never seemed to leave his room, or was never there to begin with – I couldn’t be sure of which because his door remained closed regardless, and he never made a sound; only occasionally dirty dishes would present themselves in the sink – and I didn’t know anyone in the city. So I’ll admit right now that I knew exactly what I was doing when I walked over to her, leant down next to her, and asked her, quietly, How do you start?

She looked at me, laughed, and then stifled herself. What do you mean?

How do you start? I repeated, indicating the trolley next to my chair. I have no idea what I’m doing.

You’re a researcher?

PhD student, I said.

First year writing the thesis?

The third.

Oh, that year is the worst. But it doesn’t matter where you start. You just have to start somewhere. Who’ve you got over there?

Charles Mingus – the jazz player. His memoir draft is literally over a thousand pages long. It’s outrageous. You?

Philip Roth. This is just what he lets you see, and it’s still almost three hundred boxes.

What an arsehole. Who keeps all this keich?

I know.

Listen, I’m going to take your advice and get started, but do you want meet at the end of the day and compare notes? Who knows, Mingus and Roth could be more alike than they seem.

She agreed and wrote down the name of a place she said was nearby and told me that she typically didn’t leave the library until the close of each day.

I hadn’t taken my laptop with me (stupid) and only had the burner phone I bought near the airport to use while I was in the US. But when I looked up around closing time she was engaged in a conversation with a librarian that seemed to be distinguishing between the boxes she was finished with and the ones she would need the next day. I didn’t want to interrupt, or seem like I was hanging around waiting for her, so I sorted myself out in the Performing Arts Reading Room – no, I’m not finished with anything yet, unfortunately – and made my way outside with zero indication of where I should go. I remember it was crisp and bright and I was becoming a little giddy. (Desiring simply could not compare with feeling desired!) I walked around aimlessly, hoping that I’d just run into the place, but in the end the assistance of a rowdy crew of men my age, all wearing tailored but slightly ruffled suits, was required.

In particular, she told me, she was interested in Roth’s treatment of women in his texts, and especially the letters he had written to them, but, officially, she was focusing on the ambiguous fictionality of his narratives. Our drinks were in hand and we’d found a table outside on the brick-lined pavement. Laughing ruefully, she told me that one of his correspondents, a well-known English author who wrote only subtle, nearly sexless novels about lonely women, he would savage later with an artist friend, as they faxed each other sketches of her in various compromising positions. Only her side of their dialogue was in the archives, so it goes, but she had heard all about it from Roth’s official biographer, with whom she was sporadically in touch. Now that she was able to read the woman’s cordial and effusive letters to him first-hand, she felt devastated on her behalf.

He actually called me once, she said. I had already received provisional copyright permission from his agent – an assistant of his agent, anyway – for my Newark article, and even when that notice came through it felt like I had received a direct transmission from Jehovah Himself. But I guess Roth was made aware of my project and he had decided to dig deeper into what I was doing. So he calls me up. Random number from Connecticut. I didn’t think anything of it, obviously. (I don’t know if it’s the same in Scotland, but we get these tedious scam calls all the time here in the US that come from numbers similar to yours so you think it’s someone you’ll know.) Anyway, I say, Hello? And this surprisingly soft, almost tender, voice goes, It’s Philip Roth. And I’m like, OK… How are you, Mr Roth? And he just starts laying into me. Says he’s never heard of me; the proposal I wrote doesn’t make any sense; I shouldn’t believe what I read in the accounts of his jaded ex-lovers; how he’s already discussed ‘the woman thing’ at length, etc. – some real senex iratus-type stuff. You know, just circular, obsessive nonsense about himself. Eventually, he pauses for breath, so I’m like, Wait a minute: do you want to hear my side of this or did you just call me up to yell at me? Clearly, it was then that he realised that he was talking to a young woman, because his tone changes completely and he says, Well, I just don’t think you’re getting the full picture here. I can tell you’re at the start of your career. Why don’t you come up and visit me, blah blah blah, I’ll cook you dinner and I’ll show you why you’re wrong to pursue this. I didn’t go, of course. It has nothing to do with him! Everything I need is right over there. So I politely declined and tried to explain: I’m a serious scholar; I’m not writing anything gossipy; and he’ll never hear anything more of this anyway because, like he said, no one has heard of me and probably never will. Except him, I guess! He didn’t seem convinced, but the permission has remained intact ever since – thank God – so here I still am. No idea how he got my number.

I can’t imagine what a phone call from Mingus would have been like, I replied. I don’t believe half of what he says happened to him. I’m approaching it allegorically, out of necessity more than anything else.

You probably don’t remember, she said after a pause, but Bret Easton Ellis had this website up back when he was promoting Lunar Park. You know, that horror/faux-memoir thing he did. On one side of the screen were the biographical details of the ‘real’ Bret and on the other side it had the novel’s ‘Bret’.

She was flattering me to suggest that this was something I had once known but since forgotten. I’d read a few books by Ellis, it was true, but I wouldn’t have thought to do a search of him on the Internet that long ago, I don’t think. But I enjoyed Lunar Park a lot and remembered it well.

Ha, I said, neither confirming nor denying any awareness on my part. I can’t tell if that seems dated now or if it’s actually quite an avant-garde way to go about it. You can interpret it as either a defensive move or an offensive one. But I wonder how much input into it he would have really had. I doubt it was a personal site. It was probably set up by his publisher.

What I can’t remember, she said, is which one was on which side of the screen.

Do you think it makes any difference? I asked. If I had to guess I would bet that the ‘real’ Bret was on the left.

Well, he probably was. But the implications of that are still worth considering, don’t you think? Because we read left to right, placing it there would presuppose the notion that our fake selves are springing forth from our ‘real’ ones; not the other way around. Isn’t it possible, or, to be even more direct, plausible, to say that it’s actually the images that we hold of ourselves that have the greater impact on who ‘we’ are? Or who we are to become? I am who I am because of who I think I am or who I think I want to be. I remember when I first read Lunar Park, I wanted to believe so badly that a version of those events had really happened. The text inculcates this desire, even as the author flagrantly fictionalises himself. And though I knew it simply couldn’t be true – even back then everyone could see Bret portraying himself in a suburban, heterosexual homestead for the piss-take that it was – I was disappointed by how openly he announced it as an homage to Stephen King in his interviews. There was no attempt at the verisimilitude he so deftly portrays in the novel.

I guess for Bret any entanglement there was just a more abstract yet paradoxically more literal layer of what Barthes called the reality effect, another way to signify to us that the story he wanted to tell had ‘happened’, I said. All the through lines he establishes in the narrative to himself, and to his previous works, texturises for the reader what’s really a story of grief for his father and longing for the reassurances of childhood. We’re made to feel closer to him and therefore experience the pain he’s trying to express all the more acutely, as in between old friends whose personal tragedies may not be able to compare, quantitatively, to the staggering atrocities that happen on the news every day, yet because of the trenchant connection that exists between them, what is essentially only a personal woe of, usually, not that much suffering, this tender outpouring of empathy and affection can be drawn, whereas an entire genocide somehow becomes this detached event of unfathomability and meaninglessness, of scorn almost. How dare this disaster intrude on my life? Etc. But outside of the confines of the book object, blurring those lines has no use. As you say, his website formally separated the two.

But what I realised, she started before pausing briefly, is that it is true. Truer than any autobiography he could have written. What better way is there to convey your ambivalent sexuality in the wake of a stuffy upbringing in an upper middle-class WASP’s nest than to portray yourself struggling within the same traditional family structures you were taught to idealise? How can we talk about the role of the father in our society without talking about spectres? The once-powerful tyrant whose vigour will inevitably fail him, his presence still felt long after his corporeal absence. To know Bret, you must first understand ‘Bret’. I checked, and no cover I could find has ever declared the work to be ‘a novel’. That would be too reductive. Lunar Park is the window into someone’s soul. King, horror fiction, pastiche, they’re all just the pathways into it. And what you’re saying, she continued, correctly points to a real limit of the human condition, but it still seeks to depict these aspects as formal characteristics rather than at the heart of the reading experience itself. It’s not just, ‘And now Bret is signifying the ways in which I should be moved’. It is also ‘I am moved’. It’s both and it’s neither.

I think Faulkner might have written something similar about journalism, I said, not knowing quite what else to say.

I knew my instincts were too structuralist to keep up with her on this. To me, everything was just a device. Even at my most inventive – and I’ve never written much fiction – I was still Geoffrey Braithwaite, trying every literary trick in the book to hide myself from the dissolution of my marriage. Everything was a game to me, like I assumed it was for everybody else as well. But there was something about what she said that spoke to me; chilled me, even. It seemed to imply a certain unknowability in the other that only the exceptional artistic act could reveal, and what it then revealed would say as much about the artist as it did about us as an audience. This was information I didn’t know what to do with. What did I really know about anyone? About myself?

I’m sorry, she said. I’m boring you with my earnestly held opinions on authorship.

No, please, not at all, I said. If anything, I’m simply too boring to come up with something interesting to say in response. You’ve given me a lot to think about with my own project.

A moment passed while a dog next to us barked into space, exciting itself.

So have you published any of this, then? I asked.

On Bret Easton Ellis?

She laughed incredulously.

No way, that dude sucks.

Back at the house, I logged on to my email and sent a message to Sarah, telling her about my first day in the library. The first half of it, anyway.

V

the year before Sarah died we were invited to a Halloween party thrown by a work colleague of hers whom she didn’t know very well but had wanted to befriend since she had joined at the office, where they were the two youngest by far. As we’re both big fans of the whole Village scene in sixties and seventies New York, which seemed to us the most ideal time and location for artistic creation and consumption in modern history, we decided to go as Sam Shepard and Patti Smith. I swept my hair back, put some ratty jeans on and a tartan shirt with pearl snap buttons over a vintage tee I had bought for £20, soft and faded from a thousand washes. Basically, I looked like myself. Sarah spent hours with a curling iron and product getting her hair perfectly ragged like an old mop and then dressed herself blindly, having decided to thrust her arm into her closet and wear whatever came out so long as it was black, which was most of her wardrobe, and to throw her leather jacket on top of it all. From this, out of its pocket, flopped a raw steak, folding over on itself, rubbery and thick and revolting, an homage to a key moment from Smith’s memoir when she met Shepard for the first time.

I have to admit we were both excited. Never typically thrilled at the prospect of spending long periods of time with people I don’t already know very well, I warmed to the occasion as we dressed, drinking some beers and laughing a lot as we did so. Sarah clearly wanted to make a good impression on her new co-worker. It was also our first time out of the house in a while.

Everyone was actually really personable, I thought. Helped in part by the abundantly distributed alcohol and drugs, of this there was little doubt. But I was wary of getting wasted. A lot of the drama in people’s lives, I felt, they brought on to themselves with their own unimaginative impulses, and, as in a horrible danse macabre, they paraded fragile, almost ironic senses of their own mortality (the skulls are always smiling) before everyone else as if it was some cute quirk that would make them special. Thematically, I guess, that just didn’t appeal to me. I was also constantly aware of the limited number of braincells that I would be capable of firing in my lifetime, and fervently wished to preserve as many as I would be able to during that lifetime – within reason, of course. Sarah partook freely, which was fine.

After an hour or two, having lost her for a moment, I walked into the small back garden for some fresh air, which, to my dismay, was mostly filled with cigarette smoke. I was about to turn back inside when I heard someone call over to me, Hey, are you supposed to be Charles Bukowski?

Christ no, I replied, turning around to see a woman wearing a suit. I’m Sam Shepard.

But she was right. While the hair and perfectly unkempt outfit might have been working in my favour, going unshaven plainly wasn’t.

Wait, is that your name? she asked. Or is that who you’re dressed like?

It’s who I’m supposed to be dressed like, I clarified.

Who is Sam the Shepherd? she asked.

He’s a playwright, kind of in the same period as Bukowski, actually. He’s an actor too, though. Have you seen Days of Heaven?

No, she said.

The Right Stuff?

Uh-uh.

The Notebook?

Yes! she cried. I thought it was trashy as hell and way too sentimental, though, so if that was some kind of film-buff test, I promise I didn’t fail it. I know who Terrence Malick is, and I think Tom Wolfe is a fraud. But I’ll freely admit I didn’t know they had adapted that into a movie. Not that I would see it regardless.

Fair enough, I said. Astronauts are boring. But I have also seen The Notebook and not The Right Stuff, so no worries. I only mentioned it because Sam Shepard won an Oscar for it. And Days of Heaven is excellent – you should definitely watch that. Anyway, he plays Ryan Gosling’s dad in The Notebook.

She laughed and said, This is getting ridiculous. I don’t even remember there being a dad in that. I’m just going to look your shepherd boy up.

She pulled her phone out and I leant over her as she started typing.

Wow, he’s fit, she said.

Don’t I look like him? I asked, facing her, presenting myself.

She appraised me for a moment and then said, Maybe if you had shaved and contoured your cheekbones a bit.

Ouch, I replied.

I’m kidding, she said. You’ve got that Wild West thing going on with your shirt, I guess. And you are a bit rugged, like a coyote.

Thanks, I said, thrilled with any approximation. So who are you? John Major?

She playfully pushed me away and shouted, Hey! Just because I didn’t know who you were…

OK, OK, I replied. Not Tom Wolfe either, then, I suppose. One more guess… Annie Hall?

Yes! she cried. I’m very sorry to say you’re only, like, the third or fourth person to get that.

Couldn’t the tie be a bit longer? I asked.

Well, I did have some trouble with it, as you might imagine, she said.

Here, I’ll help, I responded, walking around behind her, loosening it all the way out and then starting to remake it around her neck. The tension between us felt enormous as I did this. Throughout our conversation we had been maintaining eye contact far more steadily than any casual dialogue required, and it seemed to be building a palpable sense of propitious expectation. It would need to be broken, one way or another. But for now I planned to avoid it.

So why do you hate Wolfe? I asked. There, that’s better. Very Diane Keaton.

First of all, I didn’t say I hated him, she said. I just think his ‘fictional novels’ schtick is weaselly and indicative of a mind that has general difficulty coping with ambivalence or ambiguity. Like, would Joyce’s ‘kindly lights’ of Dublin really be rendered more acutely through a caricature of some historic Irish resistance figure nobody even remembered five