Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [54]
Once again and with the usual pleasure I entertained the notion of tossing the whole thing out. With this swollen monster out of the way I’d be at liberty to undertake The Snake Handler, or the story of the washed-up astronaut who marooned himself in Disney World, or the story of the two doomed baseball teams, blue and gray, playing nine on the eve of Chancellorsville, or The King of Freestyle, or any of the dozen other imaginary novels that had fluttered past like admirals and lyrebirds while I labored with my shovel in the ostrich pen of Wonder Boys. Then I indulged the equally usual, not quite as pleasurable fantasy of taking Crabtree into my confidence, telling him that I was still years away from finishing Wonder Boys, and throwing myself on his mercy. Then I thought of Joe Fahey and, as always, rolled a blank sheet of paper into the machine.
I worked for four hours, typing steadily, lowering myself on a very thin cord into the dank and worm-ridden hole of an ending I’d already tried three times before. This one would oblige me to go back through the previous two-thousand-odd pages to flatten out and marginalize one of the present main characters and to eliminate another entirely, but I thought that of the five false conclusions to the novel I’d come up with in the last month, it was probably my best shot. While I worked I told myself lies. Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone. Ending the book this way, I told myself, would work out for the best; this was in fact the very ending my book had been straining toward all along. Crabtree’s visit, viewed properly, was a kind of creative accident, a gift from God, a hammer blow to loosen all the windows my imagination had long since painted shut. I would finish it sometime tomorrow, hand it over to Crabtree, and thus save both our careers.
Every so often I would look up from my humming Selectric with its smell of hot dust and burnt wire—tried to work on a computer but hated the way it turned writing into a kind of cartoon you sat back and watched—to see James Leer twisting on the spit of his unimaginable dreams. The sound of my typing didn’t wake him, or did not, at least, disturb him enough to make him want to get off the couch and move into a quieter part of the house.
Then, as I strapped my family of Wonders into the twin-engine Piper that, on its way to Lowell Wonder’s rock-and-roll funeral in New York City, would slam into the impassive face of Weathertop Mountain—such was the ostrich shit I had obliged myself to shovel—I heard a whisper in my ears, like the crackling of soap suds, and a spray of bright static passed across my eyes.
“James!” I said. I clutched at the manuscript of Wonder Boys as if grabbing for a baluster, about to tumble headlong down an infinite flight of stairs. When I awakened, no more than a few seconds later, I was lying on the floor, with James Leer frowning over me, wrapped up in his sleeping bag like a B-movie Indian in a buffalo robe.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just lost my balance.”
“I put you on the floor,” he said. “I was afraid you might, I don’t know, swallow your tongue, or something. Are you still drunk?”
I sat up on one elbow and watched as a last yellow meteor streaked across the dome of my skull.
“Of course not,