The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [82]
“Do you read your work out loud when you’re writing?”
“No. Never. The truth is I’m embarrassed by the sound my voice makes in an empty room, that grand pronouncement effect. And there’s something else”—and it hurts, it hurts—“which is that, in my experience, and this might sound completely absurd, but stories have a certain power the first time they’re read out loud, don’t they? An energy, or an honesty. The way the words cut through the air. And it seems a shame to squander that power when there’s no one else around to hear it.”
“This isn’t a question. I just want to say that I enjoy listening to you read, the care you take with your pronunciation. Have you ever considered reading your own audiobooks?”
“Thanks, and no, but nobody ever suggested I should until now.”
“If Twin Souls were made into a movie, who would you cast as Mary Ruth?”
“I get people wondering that all the time, but I never know how to answer. Why, did you have someone in mind?”
In a theatrical, almost moony, tone of voice, the girl who had asked the question said, “I think Julia Krukowski would be perfect,” which made the friend sitting next to her stifle a smile. Nina nodded as if at the essential rightness of the idea, though she had never heard of Julie Krikowski. She suspected the name might be invented—if not, in fact, the girl’s own. More and more, though, she found that she was required to take the stardom of certain people on faith. The world presented an endless sequence of celebrities replacing celebrities replacing celebrities, like cheap wooden nesting dolls, each bearing a tinier and less persuasive likeness than the one that had come before. It exhausted her.
“My son says it would make a good anime film. So are there any more—” She felt an itch in her sinuses and turned her head. A sneeze tore at her lips with a startling photographic flash. She gasped and closed her eyes, waiting for the pangs of light to subside, for the blood to stop beating in her jaw. Make me better. Maybe if she never ate or drank or spoke or laughed or smiled or kissed anyone ever again—maybe then she would be all right. “Are there any more questions?”
The audience took pity on her. She thanked everyone for coming, signed a few books, and phoned for a taxi. Before she left, the manager gave her one of the trading cards he had printed to publicize the event, number 1,972 in the series, with her photo on the front and a description of the book on the back: “In The Age of Girls and Boys, Nina Poggione has crafted an elegant collection of love stories and fantasies, unique, lyrical, and haunting. Whether in the award-winning ‘Small Bitter Seeds,’ with its gifted physician struggling to retain his practice after losing his voice to cancer, or in the daring title story, in which the children of a world sinking into infertility attempt to transcend the circumstances of their lives, she evokes the souls of her characters with compassion and an exquisite clarity.”
She relied on the cabdriver to find her hotel, a narrow brick and stone structure, latticed with balconies, that she recognized from her Twin Souls tour the instant she saw the waxed wooden floor that stretched across the lobby in a sunburst of multiple browns. She had gone directly from the airport to the bookstore, so she had to check in at the front desk before she could ride the elevator to the third floor, unlock her room, and open her night-stand. It held a phone book and a Gideon’s Bible, but was otherwise empty. Two years before, in the same hotel—though not, surely, the same suite—she was searching for a stationery pad in her bedside drawer when she discovered a journal someone had left behind. The cloth had been razed from the cover, revealing a kidney-shaped patch of gray board, and a buckle ran through the first thirty pages or so, as if they had been dipped in water. It was filled with handwritten love notes, she discovered, page after page of them, I love thises and I love thats stacked tight as bricks against one another.