Checking in

Metafictional supplement to my last post

Years back I hung out with a group of writers. For the most part we were amateurs. Speaking for myself, I was a hack and a rube with almost no literary education or even idols, except for one or two who, looking back now, I probably admired for the lifestyles they projected. They wrote gritty books about drugs and women. Young people with pretensions to decadence can’t resist such subjects even when they’re crafted like a kindergarten project. A crumbling personal life promises an abundance of easy images; the mind prefers stooping over striving.  

As a cultivator of language I produced few fruits but threw up many thorny tangles. My friends from those days did plenty of their own stray digging and seed spreading and clodhopping; a couple of them published their work in online magazines with readerships reaching the low double digits.  

One guy, though, stood out. He was an actual genius. One of those guys you meet once in a lifetime. James Bennet. He wrote like most of us breathe. No, I shouldn’t say that. Most people breathe shallowly and out of their open mouths, with a faintly stale odor. What I mean is that James wrote in the most natural way possible, fluidly, and yet with an ordered urgency, as if he needed to write to live.  

Of course he never published. He was brilliant and didn’t much care if anyone else knew it. I admired that about him. I always imagined that when you can do something well, whether anyone else recognizes you for it is an afterthought. The rest of us, far less gifted, were much more concerned about praise and criticism. We received little of the latter and an overcooked helping of the former, mostly from the odd owners of the bookshops and coffee stores where we wrote and read and hosted literary events that attracted more vagrants than readers.  

James wrote two novels, a collection of essays and some poetry. One novel was a conventional crime noir, at least in structure, but the pacing would have your heart pounding like a jackhammer. And the characters, while stereotypical on the surface, acted with such consistency, such an absence of artifice, that you felt yourself down there with them on those grimy streets with the rows of buckling old buildings and tattered awnings. When someone gripped their pistol or drew their knife your neck hairs would bristle.  

His other novel was a more experimental affair I can hardly explain. It went a little over my head. I remember the sonority of the language lifting me to a higher realm where I felt myself towering over the turning earth even though I couldn’t clearly see. Something to do with confusion of identity, the artist losing his soul to the artwork and the bitter disappointments of love. But that last part was done without the lurid detail that fascinates numskulls; it even somewhat repudiated certain trashy flashes of his first novel.   

I don’t remember how we met him or why he wasted his time with us. I don’t think it was our admiration for him. He really didn’t need it. He also didn’t try to teach us, and his evaluation of our work was neither positive nor negative, but rather a perfect dodge that would leave you dizzy. Every now and then he’d mock trite phrases in a bored and sarcastic tone but other than that we didn’t know what he thought worthy or loathsome.  

One day he didn’t show up to a gathering. I called him, went to his place a few times. Others did the same. We didn’t know his family and couldn’t get in touch. Days passed without a word. He worked at a stationary store and his boss said he hadn’t seen or heard anything. I believe they fired him at some point.  

We thought about filing a police report or calling some bureau or other but even now the idea of greater involvement with authorities and procedures and forms makes me want to hit my head with the back end of a claw hammer. Part of our reluctance to track him down was our assumption that he knew what he was doing, that he’d vanished for good reason.  

The group lost its members one by one. I found myself alone with my unfinished manuscripts and notebooks of dull character sketches; it was intolerable. I wasn’t creative or ruthless or stupid enough to succeed with art: it was time to embrace living like a normal person. I got a modestly paying job and a modestly pretty wife. We had two healthy boys. My days tumbled along with the occasional back ache and chest pain. There were trips to the grocery store, the movie theater and the doctor’s office. We ordered pizza once a week and I even bought a pontoon boat that I ended up selling for a quarter of its initial value.  

Over time I couldn’t help thinking about my days as an aspiring writer and my missing friend with real skill. I daydreamed about what he was up to, and about what I could’ve done had I been blessed with a bit more silver and gold in my wordsmithing, but that was difficult to picture and I mostly imagined the pleasures of disappearing like he did.  

The others from the group called and texted me every so often. One or two of them still wrote; one published a memoir at 31 years of age about growing up with an unsupportive father; he sent it to me and I read the blurbs about its haunting meditations on memory but I only made it two or three pages in before something or other came up, one of my kids had an ear infection I think, and I never got back around to it.  

Everyone I talked to about James said they figured he was dead or had changed his identity because there was no trace of him anywhere. They said you’ll never get a hold of him. I’m hardly a sleuth and I despise those stories about recapturing youth by seeking old friends and flames. But one night after the dog or the cat or the kid woke me up, someone retching or scratching at a door or spilling a syrupy drink, I sat in my study and wrote an email to James’s old address. I said I’d like to see him.  

He responded within a minute and gave me a cursory overview. Right before he disappeared, a relative died and left him a huge inheritance, freeing him from the last remaining adhesive that glued people together: work. Since then he’d been living in motels and hotels, subsisting on vending machine snacks and Bud Sampson dinners. He hadn’t written a word in years and never would again. I could see him anytime on one condition: I couldn’t bring anyone else or tell anyone where he was staying. For the next week he’d be at the Relax-Inn just off highway 48.  

The next day I called in sick and drove to his hotel, planning to be back home at the usual time I got off work; my wife and kids would hear the garage door clanking like normal and I wouldn’t have to explain my strange excursion. I never told them about the days when I wrote poetry and short stories; it felt like keeping quiet about a few misdemeanors; not serious enough to share but too embarrassing to admit.  

I’m a respectable family man and had played it straight since meeting the woman who’d become my wife. My kids know me as a dependable father. I wear a watch and white underwear and mow the lawn and they’veheard me curse only a time or two. One of those times was after opening a cupboard and getting hit in the face with hastily arranged pop-tart boxes.  

All this to say; I felt like indulging myself. The wife and kids didn’t need the details. Other men lead secret lives far more nefarious, with a hidden trip to the strip club on a tuesday night, slender young mistresses in condosand God knows what else. I could permit myself this slight subterfuge.  

The Relaxinn sat in a divot surrounded by highways with barreling trucks. The parking lot was connected to another concrete patch with a 24-hour diner and a gas station. One of those mercurial skies that splayed its gray and then unrolled a gold carpet of light on the hour. A sky I’d say needed medication, but in so saying would commit the pathetic fallacy, attributing human traits to non-human things. (True I had no formal education, but I’d read a book or two on writing, and for a time followed apparent experts on the internet who gave frequent advice and opinions about the dos and double dos of the craft.  

(But then, at the same time, I’d always thought this fallacy, and many others like it, was unnecessarily restrictive, limiting the scope of language and imagination, when rather the extension of human mood to the world of things invigorates our contact with life, pulls us in deeper and fills empty shapes with a rich and textured significance.) 

I passed through the parking lot and the sliding glass doors and glanced at the man behind the front desk, a lumpy man unevenly stacked like an assortment of lunch meats. The walls of the lobby were painted off-orange. Chairs and tables faded eggwhite. Down the hall on carpet that smelled of industrial cleaner and lingering foot fungus. With one knock I pushed an already open door and saw James in the oversized bed, wearing red and black checkered pajamas. The blinds were drawn. He stared at a television centered in the room, its light like a shining eye.  

After taking a few steps in I waved and said hello and it must have been at least a minute before James rolled out of bed and brushed some crumbs from his loins. He looked me up and down, first with that piercing darkness like a black lance stabbing at your soul, but then he retreated behind a haze and seemed barely to make me out. I was more comfortable with that.  

We sped through the pleasantries, and I got to it: why’d you disappear and why didn’t you keep writing, why didn’t you publish? He told me a few things I’d suspected but never really explored. I couldn’t face up to them.  

Like how in a godless universe where death wipes you away forever the only task is to be comfortable and unengaged. The purpose of history has been to build a state in which life and death register on the soul as little as possible, and that purpose has been realized in the present electric order, which controls human life on a basis of palliative care, treating the fever called living, as Edgar Allen Poe put it. Existential agony can be suppressed most effectively not by God or civic participation, but by entertainment, by immersion in a stream of fantasies. Living and watching are at odds, and the odds favor watching.  

You owe other people nothing, and if your particular circumstances let you off human hooks, you should take advantage and pass your days as painlessly as possible. Rent rooms, eat soup in diners, befriend no one. The best way to pass time alone without giving the floor to inner demons is by sticking to flowing images. The endless pumping external scene machine. Attach yourself to that and the detachment from everything else follows, including yourself, and your own death will bother you less than a cancelled show.  

As for writing and reading; it’s an inferior form of psycho-physical therapy. The electric visual drip soaks to the bone, permeating your being with a liquid oblivion. Writing and reading require an effort that far exceeds their practical effect; fleeting amusement, distraction from the terror of emptiness and the drudgery of life. Movies, shows, media scrolls of digital devices on the other hand; all you need is light enough lids and nimble enough thumbs. (And funny how, earlier in our evolution, the thumb opened the hand for grasping, but had become our primary digit, almost negating full fingered grappling.) 

I didn’t catch everything he said, and I certainly couldn’t remember it all; I tried an objection or two: you can’t step out of life while remaining in it; people depend on us and we depend on them. Without their labor we wouldn’t be able to coast down a lazy river. Shouldn’t we use our abilities to improve the world, help others who help us? And he said it wasn’t worth arguing about; all work is pointless and death is the end; even the greatest achievement will be forgotten, and the best we can do is to never be born, and failing that, to die soon without having to suffer and toil.  

He didn’t answer my questions directly, and I didn’t learn anything more about his personal life, anything about his parents or romantic relationships. I think he was bored by other people in a way that was monstrous and profound, and it surely helped him bring his responsibilities down to nearly none. For I’ve found that most of us go looking for at least a couple burdens. We like caring about things, even if on some level we know they don’treally matter. He had a point about this historical drive toward a numbing automation of spectacles that distracted people from their meaningless lives.  

Like most interviews, like most encounters, I thought I didn’t get what I wanted, but when I thought about what I wanted, what I expected, I saw a void. I’d been taking orders from a blind general, some idiot autocrat, and there was no solid intention beyond a tendency I’d long carried, to slip away from myself, to idle with my imagination, huff the fumes of withered fantasies. And thereby to reconcile myself to the tedium of my days.  

It’s always been a problem, and part of why I delayed adulthood and family for so long; the sense of all these other lives I could fire up anytime, lives that would burn colder and more quietly. I mostly dreamed of becoming less, not more. All my secreted shadows in the back alleys of my mind, they’d never shrink down.  

I have to disagree with this other person who isn’t me but might as well be, because we picked up nothing from others we don’t have banging around within ourselves: but any way you cut it open, the fact is we’re here with others, and we’d better make ourselves useful to one or two of them.  

We talked for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. No one needs more than an hour to say everything essential. He told me he wanted to get back to his shows, back to his electric drip. I still had time, too much, and even though I could go home earlier and wait for my family, I decided to rent a room and spend a few hours pretending to be a lesser version of myself.