• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 347 0

no one addressed the dead except in writing, and Who was she? Who had she become? and She sensed that every word had demanded some mysterious payment from him, a fee that could only be understood by those who had already been laid to rest, and by the time she finished presenting the story, reaching the ever and the after, her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she knew for certain—he had given up on her. It was just as well. The ulcer on her lip was still stinging, but a seal had begun to form over it, a clear bandage of skin with the texture of overlapping threads. She was recovering in spite of herself. She gave her mouth a quick investigation with her tongue. Deep in the pocket of her gums was the firm polyp of a sore, like an unpopped kernel of popcorn, that had developed without ever quite breaking the skin. On one of her cheeks was a minuscule dimpled lesion, and on her tongue itself was the same small scuff she had noticed the night before. None of them had become painful yet, though. If, after the reading, she spoke as little as possible, there was the slim possibility they would die away without getting any worse, and the ulcer on her lip would heal, and she would be graced with a few days of well-being before the next outbreak began.

She would bake a pizza—or better yet: a lasagna—and eat until she was stuffed.

She would have a long conversation with Wallace about his father.

She would find someone to fuck and she would fuck him.

A woman in the front row asked, “So that part where the dead begin to glow—is that supposed to be because they’re in pain? Because they don’t seem to be in pain. Are they?”

Well, there was physical pain, Nina answered, and there was emotional pain. This particular story offered little evidence of the former, maybe, but abundant evidence of the latter. Ever since she was a child, she answered. English Lit, she answered, with a minor in biology. No, she answered, not yet. She was afraid that as soon as she decided to incorporate it into her stories, the phenomenon would end as mysteriously as it had begun, and everything she had written would be cemented to a particular time and place. Now, she supposed. Now and here. (What else could she mean?) Constantly, she answered. At least two or three books a week. In fact, it was reading that was truly at the center of her life—experiencing stories, not making them. She was sure most other writers would say the same. No, she answered. Usually, she answered. Once or twice, she answered. Certainly she had changed since then, in innumerable ways. With her first book she had seen the world as a narrative, seen human lives as narratives. Now, instead, she saw them as stories. She wasn’t sure what had happened. Maybe she had experienced too much sickness. Maybe her sickness had made her less intelligent. Maybe her sickness had made her more sentimental. Maybe her sickness had returned her to the simple receptiveness of her childhood, when fitting people together seemed more important than taking them apart. No, it wasn’t that, she answered. She was just as interested in characters as she had ever been. But somehow she’d come to believe that characters were made up of their ideas and perceptions rather than their actions. A mistake, perhaps. She couldn’t argue with that. Yes, exactly, she answered. The traveling, she answered. The fact that she could go to work in a T-shirt and shorts, she answered, along with the privilege of participating in other people’s dreams, and most of all the thrill she got, the feeling of wondrous correctness, when a handful of words she had been organizing and reorganizing suddenly fastened themselves together, forming a chain that seemed to tug at the page from some distant, less provisional place, as if through an accidental pattern of sounds, rhythms, and insinuations she had linked herself to the beginning of the world, a time when words were inseparable from what they named and you could not mention a thing without establishing it in front of your eyes. It was the same feeling, she was convinced, that painters