Private Novelist (5 page)

Kafka burned many unfinished manuscripts before his death, but he could not stop his intimate confessions from entering the public domain and becoming, by virtue of their authenticity, his most popular works. When we read a work written for publication, we allow a stranger to direct our behavior and narrow our focus. When we read that same
stranger's diaries and letters, our reality is widened and enriched.

It is this voyeuristic urge present in all of us, along with the vogue for books recalling survey courses in comparative literature, which I hope to exploit by promoting, as though it were a novel, this series of elaborately coded personal letters to Avner Shats, written daily for several weeks in the month of December, 1998.

Yigal strolled into the casino at Bern and dropped SF 5,— into the slot machine nearest the door. Immediately it returned SF 15,—. He reinvested SF 5,—, cleared SF 25,—, and bought a whiskey sour from a woman dressed as a milkmaid. They talked. She persuaded him to buy four keno tickets, and at 7:15 he pretended he had won. A blinding light shone in his eyes as the imaginary emcee handed him the envelope stuffed with cash, and he heard scattered applause. In the darkness behind the spotlight he could see someone trying to get his attention by waving a handkerchief.

He felt too drunk to drink anymore, and walked out to the street. A taxi pulled up, then pulled away. He sat on the curb, took off his undershirt, and threw it into the gutter. Then he remembered his plan to go to Biel.

Mary, to do her credit, didn't go straight to Yigal's apartment from the airport. First she walked out into the blazing sun of the runway and shook her head from side to side, hard, as though she had just emerged from the North Sea and her ears tickled. She passed through customs smiling and wriggling with joy after the confinement of the flight. Then she stood under the bus shelter, soaking up the brilliant light with her black, curious eyes. The poured concrete of the parking garage soared overhead like an iceberg, yet everything was wonderfully warm. She squatted down and traced a fingertip
along the pavement. Through the calluses she could feel a ferocious heat, and she laid her palm flat. The sidewalk was like the top of a coal stove, but pale gray as the arctic in winter. She pursed her mouth and gave a mysterious approving look, then sprang into the bus. It was one o'clock sharp, time for news, and the driver turned up the radio really, really loud until a deep, soothing voice filled the cabin of the bus with chiming, incomprehensible sounds. Outside she could see a hot, hard, dry landscape drowning in brightness, the dry brush casting shadows so dark every field looked like a checkerboard. The bus turned toward a residential neighborhood of short white buildings selling ice cream under blue umbrellas, like an aquarium. Mary began to hum a happy song.

When she got to the beach, she had a little swim. She had booked a room at a small place on HaYarqon near the American embassy, but didn't think she was going to need it, and she didn't, since whoever cleaned up after the impact had left Yigal's door unlocked. I first saw her from above, through the hole in the floor, as she was shuffling through his personal papers. They were in Hebrew. She looked frustrated. She had already been working for an hour by the time I thought to ask her what she was doing. I had assumed she was from some competing intelligence agency, perhaps the one that had sent the missile in the first place. She made us coffee in Yigal's kitchen and told me the whole story.

“So Yigal knew you were a silkie the whole time?” I asked. “I don't like that part, it reminds me of this thing my friend Pat Sweeney talks about, where if you look closely at a lot of novels they just add up to fantasies about fucking these easy, available women whose feelings never get hurt, especially science fiction novels—there's so much science fiction about the ethical issues that arise in a man's mind when he finds the
first really convenient sex of his life is with a robot or an alien or something. Pat calls them sheep-farm books—Mary?” She was crying.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “Like in
Runts of 61 Cygni C,
where these astronauts land and they start fucking all the time with these little one-eyed midgets, and they start growing big yellow penises. Then they go back to Earth and of course it's destroyed, just like in
Planet of the Apes,
and they're stuck with these little tiny brain-dead—but, I mean, Yigal left me. . . .” She began to cry again. I saw what she meant. Instead of hanging around to take advantage of the willing alien life-form, Yigal had run off, which might mean, at least in part, what Mary thought it meant: that he was a decent guy. On the other hand, he was supposedly in Tel Aviv, yet not at his own apartment.

With my help, Mary at last found what she was looking for: a list of names and phone numbers.

Now, when you're trying to figure out what sex Americans are, it helps to know their names. Say you're faced with two identical fat boys in flannel shirts, one named Dixie and the other named Doily—I'll give you 7 to 5 that Dixie's the girl. In Israel, names are more help when you're trying to guess someone's age. All Rachels are over sixty-five, for example, but Tals, Gals, Yams, Sharons, Shachars, and even Zohars can be either sex. Fortunately I had noticed that the current crop of what in Hebrew are called “pieces” are all named either Naomi or something that ends with a
t,
and as I expected, Yigal's list had four Naomis, two Osnats, a Nurit, two Dorits, and an Orit, plus an Ilanit and an Ephrat whose names had been crossed out. I wouldn't have known where to start if Yigal hadn't highlighted “Nofar,” a name I'd never heard before, in yellow and circled it twice in red.

“The highlighted one is Nofar, which sounds to me like a girl's name,” I said, dialing the number.

“Yigal?” Nofar said. “Is he a variety of”—I'm translating from Tel Aviv slang—“as-if
Yoram
like that, black hair as-if curls like those?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know him.”

Mary called an Osnat.

“Good afternoon, I'm Mary, assistant to Mr. Francis Ford Coppola. Your name was suggested to us by Yigal Paz. We need actors for some scenes in a café—women aged twenty to thirty, fit and attractive, vivacious, good walkers—to serve drinks. There may be a speaking part. Are you slim? How's your walk?”

“I'm tall and slender, with chestnut hair in long, luxuriant waves, a full, generous mouth, ample breasts, a tiny waist, pert belly, disorienting hips, luscious knees and ankles, and a PhD in Oriental studies, which while you might think it means I can speak Hindi or Japanese, actually involved a lot of time in England. But I can put on an American accent, if that's what Mr. Coppola wants.”

“Osnat, it sounds to me as though you've got exactly what we're looking for. I'm so glad Yigal put us in touch with you. Have you heard from him lately? How's he doing?”

The woman sighed. “Yigal is so strange.”

We waited, and she sighed again. Then she asked, “How well do you know Yigal?”

“Um, pretty well.”

“You know about his hobbies, right?”

“No,” Mary said. “Unless you mean sex.”

Osnat laughed bitterly. “Not that—all men go to whores. I mean the gambling and the cocaine. Yigal has a good job,
and they say he inherited a lot of money. Where does it all go? But the whores too, you're right, I just don't understand it. I've told you what I look like. I've known Yigal since the army and I always followed him around, and not once, never, has he ever tried anything. At first I thought he was gay. I used to . . .” I stopped listening. What Osnat was saying reminded me vaguely of something I'd read somewhere, a clue to something very important about Yigal. I walked around the room, fingering the books and light switches, reading scraps of paper, squeezing my eyes shut tight and opening them again, retracing my steps, struggling physically to remember this trivial fact which might already have escaped me forever, until suddenly it came to me and I opened the closet door.

THE MODEL RAILROAD: IN YIGAL'S
closet was a disassembled model railroad, stacked upright with the locos and rolling stock on display in cellophane cases on a shelf, and as I looked at it I realized that Yigal's Israeli identity had fallen to 49 percent and needs to be jacked up a bit.

For one, there are no closets in Israel. All rooms are bare white boxes with tile floors and small, high windows. Maybe you know someone who runs a catering service out of their basement—that's what it looks like. None of the furniture is built in—it comes and goes with each new tenant, like props on a set. Instead of closets, there are enormous wardrobes ten feet tall.

Sometimes from the bus I see new apartment buildings going up with big picture windows facing southwest, and I imagine what it must be like to live in one between April and October: The central air-conditioning whooshing and clattering like a jet engine, dusty swirls of bone-dry air cooled with difficulty to 80 degrees turning the proud owners' skins—already suffused and boiling in the infrared—flushed and dandruffy until they take to keeping a bottle of
Oil of Olay with the remote control. The cat lies in the sun on the bare floor and breathes twice a minute. The dead fan palm has kept its shape and color, and no one knows it's dead.

Probably they have closets too, and when their fathers visit they look into the closets, shake their heads, and say, “What a waste of space. The walls are three inches thick, and it's half empty.”

Yigal had many thoroughly Israeli qualities which I have failed to emphasize. For one, he loved the Beatles. Also, he loved olives, cheese, and cucumbers. Once a week he rolled up his pants, dumped a bucket of water on his living room floor, pushed it around for ten minutes with a squeegee, and soaked it up again with a towel. He had a feeling of lofty superiority vis-à-vis the sexuality of American men. His number one concern in life was not to be made a fool of, and having money in the bank made him nervous. He drove aggressively, riding the clutch.

It looked to me like he was modeling American steam—there was a beautiful articulated brass 4-8-4 and a half-finished water tower, the shingles still in rows in a tiny Ziploc bag. Hundreds of twisted wire trees with brown trunks and dull green lichen foliage sprouted from holes drilled in the plywood, and a small mountain lay on the floor, complete with rock breaks, brush, and a flock of minuscule goats led by a weency woman in a red skirt. They were walking toward a pond with a wire willow tree and slightly oversized fish frozen in green, murky shellac.

Mary came over to look.

“I don't get it,” I said. “An engine this size on the Durango and Silverton? Goats? There are no hopper cars. What's this all about?” I took down a Pullman car. Inside were real
velveteen upholstery and little brass lamps. A man's tall hat lay on one of the seats, barely the size of a pinhead in HO gauge.

Mary touched the pond. “It's not a model of anything. It's art. It's what happens when you take things you don't know or understand, and use them to make something you love.”

I like books with long irrelevant sections much better than books with long, purportedly relevant sections that exist only to raise the word count into the one-hundred-thousand paperback-original range. Also, coherent novels are never long enough to stand alone. Murakami's
Pinball, 1973
and
Norwegian Wood
put together are probably shorter than the irrelevant material in
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
. Without the etymology and pedigrees,
Remembrance of Things Past
would be just a page-turner in
True Confessions.

Also, Zohar tells me that
Sailing Toward the Sunset
contains numerous unrelated and “found” texts. For example, Shats assigned the production of his own disavowed poetry to his fictional spy, and parodied, in the form of a sexual orgy, the British Famous Five detective novels for children, with no apparent connection to anything else in the novel, one assumes.

I was further alerted that his website, members.tripod.com/~shatsA, includes an excerpt, translated into English, from the Schweipert prize committee's hagiography, and on investigation I saw that Shats had also included quite a few legible clues to the content of
Sailing Toward the Sunset.

“Is mankind descended from the seals?” he asks. “Can one navigate at sea by universal energy?” Yet no one who reads these questions can hope to obtain their answers except by applying himself full-time over a period of years to learn the nuances of literary Hebrew, not only of today, but of several previous eras, according to the prize committee. I
sincerely hope that my re-creation of
Sailing Toward the Sunset
will be complete in time to meet the demand for an English translation.

(Begin irrelevant interlude)

When the mail fell through the slot after breakfast, I ambled with an air of self-conscious leisure to poke through it with the toe of my shoe. Then the mailman cranked his siren. I yelled, “I'm here!” and opened the door. He gave me a paper box, about a foot on a side, and drove on.

I didn't recognize the return address. Bomb, I thought, but it hardly weighed anything. Could have been ping-pong balls or popcorn. I opened it up with scissors. In the box was a thin plastic sack, thinner than dry cleaners' plastic, tied with a knot. It was empty, plump, not taut, as if it had been blown up tight and then lost a little air in transit. Of course my first impulse was to stab it, but I sniffed it instead. The odor was neutral—vaguely plastic and smoky, as if it had been a long time outside. I picked the brown wrapping paper off the floor and sat down again to my cup of coffee. I put the plastic bag on the windowsill next to a glass of tulips.

The return address was interesting.

Society for the Advancing Recognition

354-1,345 301st Avenue, #21159T

Metro U.S.A. ZRHHWEBN

That was only about forty blocks from my house. Whoever had blown sixty bucks to mail it to me might as well have
walked. They had to be rich, or incapacitated, or very busy. A strange gift, I thought. I found some tape and stuck it to the refrigerator. I didn't puncture it, I didn't untie it, I didn't look at it again. In fact, I forgot it existed until two weeks later when the envelope came. “Congratulations!” the note read. “You have not destroyed Part 1. Please submerge Part 1 in a large basin of pure water and immediately add Part 2, enclosed. When the fusion is complete, the resulting stone will be yours to keep.” Part 2 was a chalky blue tablet that smelled of chlorine.

So it was murder cooked up to look like suicide. My assumption was that I'd stand there holding the plastic bag underwater while they killed me with chlorine gas. The police would find me with the bowl, the tablet, the room reeking of poison, note that I lived alone and key in “Solitude” next to “Cause of Death.”

So I did the sensible thing. I took Parts 1 and 2, a large bowl of water, and a broom out to the street. I meant to hold the bag down with the broom handle so I could keep my distance, but as soon as I put the bag on the water, it began to dissolve. As I pushed it down the escaping gas made the water turn golden and fizz like ginger ale. I threw the tablet in and the water was flung out with a loud, sizzling
pop
. When I opened my eyes again, there was the perfect-cut pink diamond, rocking back and forth in the bottom of the bowl. I picked it up. Deep inside it, I could see a tiny twentieth-century scene of cattle eating tall grass. I turned it a hair and saw another scene—six human children holding hands around an enormous tree. Then I grabbed the bowl and broom and ran inside.

There was a different picture in every facet, but the theme was clearly pastoral twentieth century or early twenty-first. You could tell from the colors and the clothes. Fifty-eight pic
tures for fifty-eight facets, each one beautiful and delicate and hopeful as the past centuries, with a tracery of flowers framing some, and leaves framing others, and if you pressed it right up to your eye and looked into the light, the scene came alive in three or four dimensions—the solemn children would seem to smile, the cattle would advance one step, very subtly and almost imperceptibly. It was a bit like something I'd once seen on TV. Except the one I'd seen was smaller, and darker, with a single motionless hologram. The guards carried machetes (guns were too routine, they didn't frighten anyone anymore) because, as the narrator pointed out, a hologrammatic diamond was worth at least $70 trillion. I presumed mine was worth more. I wrapped it in flannel and put it on the shelf with the noodles, and got it out every half hour to look at it. Around nightfall I realized that it was already precious to me. I sat down to write a thank-you note.

“Dear Society,” I wrote. “Thank you so much for the beautiful gem. It is lovely. Thank you for thinking of me. Very truly yours, Cynthia.” I folded the note and wrote the society's name on the outside. Then I put on my boots for the walk to 1,345th Street.

My neighborhood was not a nice one. Its chief drawback was the sewer towers. Some urban planner a hundred years before had thought of instituting permanently recycling antiseptic rivers for universal waste disposal. The towers were the entrances for household trash. They had airlocks to keep the gas down, but they all leaked. As a result, my rent was very low. The air smelled of raw sewage. There was no way anything could decompose down there under the lights. We were slated for renovation, but of course now that the neighborhood had gone down, no one but me lived there, so the renovations were always being put off. But I didn't mind. My
rent was about a quarter of what it should have been for an entire house. I bought a fancy air purifier and never opened the windows. So anyhow, I cut over to 304th Avenue, where the sewers are sealed off, and took the elevated walkway.

It was a warm, humid night with good visibility. The microwave balloons were at full altitude in deference to the high ozone. I could see the towers of Metroform on the horizon, looming behind a monolithic apartment block, and backlit by the fading clouds. There was a light ashfall. I put on my hat.

The walkway seemed to have been abandoned—no lights, no footprints in the ash. Probably there had been some rumor that it was dangerous, and now it was. The tiles creaked as if unused to being stepped on. I enjoyed the warmth of my hands in my pockets and thought about my diamond. It was nothing more than a rock, but seemed warm as another human body. The cool shades of green and blue gave warmth. When I looked at them, I felt my own warmth, as I never had under our sky of orange and brown, with all those cultured red roses, yellow tulips, pink granite—everything designed to be warm and friendly, but in the end no more friendly than the sun at noon.

I thought about the hologram I liked best: a round pool of water, surrounded by trees and overhung with tall grass, with an empty boat floating in the middle. It was the only picture that made room for me. All those happy children, animals, flowers, bright insects; all that cool white morning sunshine—all those self-contained vignettes of the past seemed made to tease me, luring and excluding me at once. To lie in the boat, which rocked a bit when the light changed, on its circular pool—what higher completeness could there be? Tiny green leaves and blue overhead, blue underneath, flowered banks on every side, no possibility of going any
where, just an invitation to me to lie drowsy and motionless and wait. Of course I wasn't ignorant that they might have mailed out millions of them—I don't mean that I thought I was unique, but that the work of art was uniquely moving, in the way you could spend hours and hours looking into it before slowly realizing my point about that little green boat.

When I got to 1,345th Street I took the stairs down into the darkness below. Night had fallen. It was an old business district. It took me a few minutes to figure out which lobby to use, but I realized the
T
in the address referred to the elevator bank. There was no 211th floor in the T elevators, so I rode to 210 and looked for the stairs.

There was an eerie moaning sound coming from the walls. The building was swaying in the night wind as air from the sea rushed in over the warm air of the city. The inversion happened every night and was, I had read somewhere, the reason there are no really tall buildings in the old coastal cities.

I walked around until I found a door labeled “S.T.A.R.” It had a tiny, dark window of reinforced glass and a strong, cold draft whistling around it as the building's motion eased the door in and out of its frame. I looked through the window. The stairs went up to another door, also labeled “S.T.A.R.” In my opinion, they were stairs to the roof. I didn't know where to put my note. Under the whistling door? Certainly not under the next door, outside. But maybe there was a mailbox. I tried the handle. The door was unlocked but wouldn't budge. I waited a few seconds as the structure flexed again, and then I was on the stairs. I walked up, holding the handrail and shivering. The 211th floor had been toasty warm (heat rises, I suppose) but the air circling in that stairwell was very cold. There was no mailbox and the door was locked.

I turned to go back to the lobby. I figured I'd leave my note at reception. Then I heard a loud buzz, as if someone were buzzing me into a grocery store. I jumped back up and leaned on the door. The wind ripped it open and I stood under a sky black as coal, perforated with spots of brilliant light. Around me everything was black too—there were walls fifty or a hundred feet high, I had no way of telling, all around me. I was alone in a narrow shaft, twenty feet on a side, with the freezing wind rising and falling powerfully, as if the walls were somehow permeable to wind but not to light. The roof under my feet was soft and springy. And over my head were stars. The stars are perfectly well known—I'd seen dozens of pictures of them taken from the Chinese mountains and the space telescopes—but it had just never crossed my mind that I might see them myself for the first time from a medium-sized building in the middle of Metro U.S.A. I looked up so long that a few new stars appeared to push the old stars off to one side. Then I set my thank-you note down—it could swirl in the wind up there forever, but it wouldn't blow away—and ran down the stairs to the warmth of the world below.