Plague in the city upon a hill
Two nights before his death, America’s greatest living writer, a low-rent management consultant, kind as a saint but mealy-mouthed, which constitutes a fatal combination in consulting, is tossing and turning. His moody, syrupy-thick nightmare starts out in the office, within four warped walls. He sits in front of a metal desk, in an ergonomically optimized chair. He blinds his eyes with one mottled hand and with the other, he opens a drawer and begins to feel around. Laminated cards, coated paperclips, the cleaved edge of a broken printer cartridge that reaps grain from his skin. Then, wincing, the manuscript. It is pelted in something soft and fleshy, like soaked and pliant sponge, but its touch strikes something in him beyond only feeling.
He wakes in the sweaty black hole at the center of his bed. His mind is a soupy circle of rain, sediment-heavy, fixed wetly and in pieces on the indented sole of a stray shoed foot. Odd, and painful, to be so reduced, to see faith go so unrewarded. In moments where ego cedes to bitter reality, he admits that he had imagined his future floating through deeper waters than these. A king of the abyssal. Tenderly loved by the fish, envied by the currents. Endlessly shrouded by the rainbow-colored sand.
Two truths.
Like all men of real talent, he feared he didn’t have it.
But like all men of real talent, he knew he had it.
Or one truth, one lie?
Draw out the hand, dreamer. Drink your coward’s potion. Draw back from the water. The manuscript floats down, from the pool to the pit, wet kindling. Draw away from the fire and into the poison. He rises from bed and is in front of a computer less than forty minutes later. America’s greatest living writer, marked for death, slaves all morning over an email. This email is a tower, a prison, a gate, a lock. Forehead haloed by the blue light of the monitor, his mind winds like a music box. His mind cracks like an egg. An egg? An egg yolk is an egg yolk at breakfast, wobbly gold, and that same yolk is the gluey binder in goopy tempera, the paint used by the late medieval geniuses, by Botticelli for Venus emergent, for the blues of her sky, for her sturdy scallop shell. Eggy egg. America’s greatest living writer laughs into his hand.
Later, he is admonished by his supervisor for something trivial, even meaningless. It is only human language, no different from the virgin waking to the screaming of God. But he is no He and neither are you. Huh, to live not in the synod of the sublime but in the covenant of the conventional. A pity. A shame. Quit while you’re ahead, they say. But America’s greatest living writer was never ahead. He couldn’t even see where he was on the assembly line. But there’s always time, they say. Is there?
Back in the apartment with its cheap fixtures, he bangs his clavicle, hard, against the particleboard door of the kitchen cupboard. The wood comes off in dusty, dented flakes that fall slowly to the floor. He retrieves a shiny packet and examines it. The potage inside, visible through a transparent window in the plastic packaging, is colored like a flesh wound. He stands it inside the microwave and presses the textured red button. Resting his forehead against the dirty glass, he watches the turntable inside go round and round. He catches his own reflection and smiles, reflexively, awkwardly.
Three truths.
He is not proud of himself.
He destroyed himself for nothing.
It doesn’t matter, anyway.
Or two truths, one lie?
She eats cookies on camera for a living. Cherry frosting on the edges of her lips and on the tips of her manicure. “Yum,” she says. The ring lights reflecting off her irises like rust. Behind the camera, the master, red-faced, zooms in and out. Heart-shaped peach. Fried chicken mukbang. Online katabasis. 33-centimeter-tall French toast. Everything I ate at the night market in Gehenna. Everything I lost in the flood of blood. A day in the life, tanning hides with blistered hands.
After the plague starts, she lies on the scratchy cot and thinks idly about the trillion sugar molecules in her intestinal walls, packed in like gooey asbestos, like amethyst in dirt. Asphodel, flowers on a spiked ball, radiant in the sleepy green of her genitals. The cords of the IV, draped over her body like a gown. Tightrope, jump rope. Dry eyes, crusted over in glutinous yellow, blinking open. Threadbare curtains billowing over the half-open window. The view of the city that our Lord forgot or abandoned. The nurses stop coming, or they die. She has a nightmare about a latent gene buried in her bloodline, the same one to save her foremother thirty generations ago from purpling bubonic sores, pulsing back to life. When she wakes the room is empty, the hall is empty, the elevator is empty, and the neighborhood is empty save for the unseen master, standing at a street corner. In her striped hospital gown, shaky on her feet, she walks down to the chain store and swivels on a stool until she’s too dizzy to think or feel. The colors on the posters—advertising limoncello, custard-filled donuts and foamy coffee—swirl, rip and bleed.
She wanders the roads, then the highways. The doors on the cars are flung open. The animals watch soundlessly. In the grassy median between the strips of asphalt, forty feet from the crash site, she finds the pages of his manuscript. Most are wet mulch, but a few she is able to rescue, standing on tiptoes, from the dark embrace of the shuddering trees. One day from now, she will cut her leg on broken glass. She will wander, in search of bandages, into a looted pharmacy, where she will be grabbed by the nape of her neck and smashed, face-first, into a window, repeatedly. She will linger there, twitching on the tile, observed by the wildflowers, then the iron-blue night and, then, briefly, by the baby pink morning. Her body is a flag in one color. In search of inflamed time. In search of the way the shadows fall over the sand of the beach, dirty orange and purple, as the knife of twilight approaches from behind.
But for now, she hums “That’s Life”, a little groggily, but contentedly, to the ark of the passing clouds, as she collects the pages of a dead man’s writing. Her naked feet, warm on the grass. She holds the soul of the manuscript and stops the song only to read.
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