Embellishments

Embellishments

More Stories, Et Cetera

by

S. P. Elledge

Embellishments

by S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 S. P. Elledge

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Table of Contents:

1. Ogooglebar

2. Pan in the Exurbs

3. Unseen, Unheard

4. The Driftless Area

5. The Vicar’s Wife

6. Lilac and Kerosene

7. Newcomer

8. Hic et Nunc

9. Memoranda Regarding Our Most Preeminent Collectors of Ephemera

10. metasequoia glypto, albino variant: The Ghost Tree

11. The Knacker’s Handsome Boy

12. City of Somnambulists

13. That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do

thanks to David Ferry for suggesting this collection’s title

for my Snudge

Ogooglebar

(Invention in a Diminished Scale)

ogooglebar: Swedish, un-look-up-able

Reader, we must begin with a logical impossibility—the highly improbable and absolutely implausible idea of my meeting you here, at this very moment, on these printed pages, which must within any presumable context remain wholly imaginary—still, while I have the advantage, let me introduce myself: I am... That is, I was... You may call me... Never mind, I simply can’t do it; you wouldn’t have heard of me, anyway; now that I think of it, there’s no sense in using my own name here, or any of the infinite particularities of a failed career that could just as well have been counterfeit. Once one’s shadow has been stolen, in effect, one becomes untethered and floats into the farthest realms of the great blue oblivion. There is nothing left to do perhaps but reclaim oneself and regenerate. Why not, then, construct together, reader and writer, the ridiculous story of a ridiculous person who couldn’t be me at all?

Deception requires the cooperation of at least two willing participants, for, as the prestidigitator can testify, we are only fooled by what we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by. So suppose that, even though there isn’t the flimsiest chance of it ever having happened, you had first encountered me under the very unlikely pen name of, let’s say for the nonce, something like Eixe Whye Zeagh. Pronounce it how you will. Not very euphonious and certainly not easy to spell correctly, such a name would have been intended, frankly, to be no more than an abecedarian’s logotype, a marque, as it were, for a nascent literary persona, a demonstrably bogus appellation one would choose not by drawing scraps from an upturned hat, but by mix and match from chiseled slabs in the immigrants’ cemetery around the corner from the two-room apartment where one once lived (as long as we’re just musing) in the distant days of one’s apprenticeship. To be sure, I would have liked the look of those brisk engraved patronyms, and also that, with minimal substitution or doubling of letters, they betrayed no explicit ethnic or linguistic origins. Absurd to think of it now, how I once (play along with me!) tried to cloak myself in what seemed then a glamorous abstruseness, when an all-encompassing twilight would of course fall upon me—or my substitute self—soon enough. My, that is, this Zeagh or Zedd’s intent, was in part to twit prospective critics and scholars: Go ahead and try to smoke me out, ye varlets and spoilsports! But then some meddlesome reviewer eventually did manage to tear off the grotesque disguise I thought I had affixed a bit more securely, and so the mocker was forced to reconstitute as the yet more preposterous if fairly middling Ellym N. O’Peye, before ultimately exiting stage left as the sinister Abie C. D’Effigie. (Quite regrettable, I concede, even in a sad parody of a life like mine, but maybe not so bad when you consider that he or she was simultaneously the diacritically challenging foreign military scholar, Dr. Hûpp Hoõp Hreéhåa; thankfully, that silly aspirational alias—no easy exhalation for the emphysemic—never traveled further than one privately issued chapbook of topical satire in epistolary form. No sense in leaving any lodestones unturned here, or minding whatever curiously demagnetized things scuttle out from beneath them. Moreover, without online evidence, who could once and for all prove or disprove that a sincerely insincere artist such as myself would go so far as to use a name like one of those above?) Each of these ungainly gender-neutral auto-denominations, the guilty wordmonger—if that’s who you figure I am or was—had probably hoped, would be as memorable as it was ludicrous. Each, so was the gambit, would draw some attention to itself and, more importantly, to the admittedly recondite, sometimes downright oblique, and worst of all, easily obliterable texts attached. Speaking freely in the first person and on behalf of that person, if only because it is easier, I reckon I couldn’t always have been totally unread, for the chances of that being indisputably confutable would be nil. Looking back on it all now, I’d hazard that some few people must have seen my first volume or two somewhere—bought, stolen, borrowed, or bestowed—and maybe a few even skimmed parts of the whole—but don’t try to hunt me down nowadays; as I’ve said, you won’t find me anywhere, no matter how exhaustive the search. The individualized elements of my auctorial embodiments (poetry, prosery, or whatever you call what lies betwixt or beyond) are no longer to be found on any shelves or in the remainder bins of any stores, or even languishing in the most comprehensive bibliothecae or impressively extensive warehouses. For, according to the algorithmic engines that consistently and unfairly overlook me, I do not and never did exist.

Oh, G—gle, oh, G-d! If that’s the way things are, I might as well have not been so self-effacing, but instead feigned to be more multiform than the Trinity thrice invoked or the many incarnations of an Asiatic deity, or have gone about being mistaken for various other transcendent divinities masquerading as a singular godhead, to be so taken for granted, or more accurately, taken for nothing at all, like this. Whether or not I or anybody else had once regarded my role-playing as low prank or high concept, whether or not I was in spirit heterogeneous or homonymic, one acting as many or many acting as one, I—who for so long acted as if I had no history at all—have been buried by history. I, not just this generic Qwertie Azzerty or Loren Ipsum or whoever was invented on the spot, have gone missing from the archives. This is of course not the way things should be. Pseudonyms and noms de plume, anonyms or hoaxes, even the most faceless hacks and the most spectral of ghost writers have or have had real living breathing entities behind their names, however slippery and changeable their exoteric personages. The Bible and The Upanishads, The Popol Vuh and The Book of the Dead, also, were scripted by mere mortal souls, no sense arguing with me about that, my devout friend. But it’s as if I had never been born! Innumerable bloggers and social network columnists and chat-room commentators, not to mention electronic manuscripts and digital scans enough to fill the Libraries of Congress and Alexandria many times over, clutter and clog, populate and pollute this planet’s illimitably expanding binary repositories. But, again, try to find me: No search results! None. Zero. Zippo. Zilch. I don’t believe you, almighty Internet. When something is not to be found in a database or on a website, does it therefore cease to have any value? If someone’s biography and oeuvre are negated by omission, did one live and toil in vain? Let the world’s spurious computations hereby be known as nothing but barefaced lies.

I, now just another inscrutable and untraceable soul—I, I, I who once took dictation directly from Thalia and Erato, am no longer any more than the quotation within the quotation within the quotation, ad inf.; at some point along the line my origins, like the earliest poets’, were lost as irrevocably as my individual voice was muffled by the silence of the ever-encroaching public domain, that demeaning democracy of anonymity we all shall inherit—although I recognize that protesting my existence by affirming that I am dead and undetectable amounts to a contradiction in terms. Honestly, this is rather an untenable position I have found myself in—not knowing in which direction I should wave when all around me are blind or how loud to shout when the entire universe is deaf. And, curses, neither light nor sound travels through an absolute void; the words I once engendered have, without question, long fallen into an abyss—irretrievable, forever ignorable. Others, uncountable others throughout the ages of man, I daresay, have found themselves in the same predicament. One might very well attempt to assuage me by saying that nowhere is essentially equivalent to everywhere in my present condition, that I am henceforth both eternal and timeless. Unquestionably I have been entirely subsumed into the electronified ether; if I might molest other metaphors, I’d say I have been dissipated into the atmosphere like smoke from an idolator’s censer or, to indulge in more direct self-loathing, like stink from a bog. Virtually anyone might regard that as a sort of an esthetical or, more accurately, spiritual fulfillment, to have attained such pluperfect untroubled nothingness, but I—who always liked beingness and a certain earthbound equilibrium in my health and welfare, who liked eating my fill and staking my claims, as it were—I am not so happy with this unkind twist of fate. I and my works were of an analogue age, thick and fleshly and bound to expire; while the modern spirit is quick and heaven efficiently digital. Reluctantly I have conceded that, locked out of the memory banks, no space exists for me up there. Past, present, and future I have none.

To elaborate further upon my thoughts somewhere above: What is ironic, if that is the right word, for in this instance one cannot use it without a touch of irony, is that it is inconceivable that you or anybody else should be scanning a single one of these paragraphs, if I can still call them that, as weightless and immaterial as they might seem to be as they flicker past; it would have been far easier to have literally read my mind, when I was ostensibly alive—for, as a point of fact, it is impracticable to imagine that these words as fleeting as sparks in a dying fire could ever be placed, printed, or published in any manner. And if they were, even if they were, you’d never have the practical means to locate and obtain them, should you for some fantastic reason genuinely want to read them. (Comprehension, sympathy, illumination are triadic components of the whole that the trustworthy wordsmith should contemplate, so an unseen and uninvited counselor advises me; timbre and pitch are other qualities you don’t want to pretermit—that is, tune out. I should endeavor only to please with my endeavors, and other buncombe like that...) But... if somehow you are harking to my otherwise silenced voice, you would be imprudent to swear by everything you think I am whispering in your aural cavity—for if we have succeeded in communicating, then there is something wrong going on here, something out of joint in a toroid cosmos turned upside-down and inside-out. Could you truly be following my faintly phosphorous trail in the dark? Do you too have faith in the hereafter?

There is no way, alas, to certify that I was ever anything more than unreal. To create a mental image, to ideate me, as philosophy says, you would have me make up something viable in an instant or less. In the absence of falsifiable proof, you need at least the suggestion, a tentative outline, a contour to color in. Well, then, painful as it may be, suffer me to go back and array this narrative in the mode of an earlier convention, thereby cloaking myself in yet more semitransparent tissues of conscious deceit:

I was born in the County of ***, in the town of ... , during the year 19—, to the well-respected Mr. and Mrs. ???. At the beginning I was much like other infants, or so was my original premise; I grew at a moderate rate and learned the same valuable life-lessons, followed all the rules and did what I was told, fa la la la la, developed useful everyday skills, la la la la, played the typical games and sports, made common mistakes, accumulated my share of hopes and fears, fell victim to a demographically moderate number of childhood diseases, progressed upward through the universally acknowledged endocrinal and pedagogic stages, went through a phase of adolescent indecision and upheaval as everyone does... until one day I said farewell to my parents and mentors, who were not so very taken aback because they, like most other parents and mentors, had been waiting a long time for this to happen, and without pausing to indite a coming-of-age tract I went my own individualistic way. Afterward there came an inescapable interval of adjustments, with a good share of disappointments and setbacks, but not lacking the normal number of satisfying and, of course, formative experiences that reassured me that somehow I was still on the right track.

Then of course there came Love. Love—you saw it coming... All the usual stuff, love, all that which is undeniably propelled first and foremost by biological urges and societal conventions. When I saw that I was

[several missing pages]

despite it having felt irreparable at the time. Of course, the Other rebuffed me again, but with sufficient courtship and frequent gift-giving was evidently persuaded to desire me in return; we would engage in torrid bouts of recreational skirmishing, parrying, and baiting (from whence should I draw the analogies—war or sport?) whilst trying to outmaneuver one another for the prize; then with the customary last-minute change of heart, found common cause and cast mutual aspersions at the rest of the world, which it was suddenly plain to see had been pieced together solely for the benefit of us two alone. A romance such as you would read in a book (but still disbelieve). Ineluctably, after reaching the apex of our relationship in regimental intercourse of the common variety, we argued, separated, were reunited, then separated again—this time for good. I blamed the other, I blamed myself, I blamed society; everyone knows this plot, alas. But no reason to dwell upon momentary miseries; as soon as I was sound of body and mind again I began trawling for other potential partners. One might go so far as to contend that when I found someone suitable, I excoriated my rivals and practiced no small amount of guile to get what I wanted. This is common practice in both the sexes, I have found, and the things I said or did to justify my actions are not unique, but it could be a precedent had been set. Patterns in my conduct may very well be starting to appear by now, but I’d be wary of electing for the wrong verdict when it comes to sorting out the anagrams of another person’s rudely ruffled life and times. Remember, most if not all of this is purely conjecture on your part, and if I appear vain or shallow, tempestuous or fickle, then it is only you who have fancied me so, though indeed I am the one to have thoughtfully supplied you with ready adjectives. Now that we have these important but tedious ground rules out of the way, let’s go back to playing with this idea of who I might or might not have been...

In the midst of the preceding declarations one would not be amiss in thinking that I should have begun focusing on a vocation, or at least have proposed a system of achieving steady financial security. And I did, viz. shirk duties, abdicate responsibilities, gain the most by doing the least, exactly as I had in matters of the heart. Such, though it might sound antipathetically mercenary, is part of the routine, of course; a representative sampling of the current adult population would reveal nearly the same motives, I am ready to wager. One may assume rightly or wrongly that I tried many things, as sundry opportunities and temporary expedients arose—working in a back office, say, or laboring in the fields, or likewise standing at an assembly line, maybe knocking on doors with a briefcase full of samples in my hand, acting as an extra in movies, driving a truck, substitute teaching; just as well, I could also have been training to be a nurse, blasting dynamite, digging graves, taking dictation, mopping floors, even joining the circus—have I mentioned enough colorful alternatives? In spite of all these dabblings and all my passing enthusiasms, if that’s what they were—even if that’s just another assumption—nothing ever seemed to pan out or interest me for long; after a short while, in any event, my attentions would be deflected again and again by passing thunderheads in the shape of Spanish castles and sundowns the color of gold doubloons. So as not to bore you or myself any longer, let’s speculate that by all outward appearances my conduct began to deviate more and more from an acceptable norm. If I were to rise above the average, it was important of course to fight the averages. Feel free in a few sentences to call my conduct erratic, but let me explain first how such an attitude came to fruition. Sure enough at my game, I was never so sure of my own incontestable self, never knowing precisely what would be best to do or be or pretend to be, when, as the Aristotelean would have it, achieving entelechy, an idealized self-realization, excludes a thousand unfulfilled potentialities. If the dark glass I saw myself in hadn’t been fractured, or if someone had offered to stand in as my understudy, or if I had died young and with a flourish, things might have been different, but it seemed for years that I was doomed to living my entire life in the subjunctive, never knowing exactly what course of action, given that I was properly actuated, would render the most satisfying results. Hurry up, make a definitive decision, figure yourself out and settle down, some unpaid volunteer inside my head kept chastising me: You’re waxing psychoneurotic, losing your willpower, becoming positively and clinically abulic! But as always I was only half-listening to myself. On the application blanks I deliberated over, it was imperative to become someone different in each and every instance. (Must be detail-oriented, must be proficient with numbers, must have own transportation, must like people, must be insane.) At the interview, in training and at trial, from first promotion until final hour of employment, I was ever the actor. In essence having to make myself up as I went along left me dizzy and unable to orient myself in this workaday world I had reluctantly entered. Already, it seemed I was in danger of becoming no one by being anyone: a presage of things to come. An algebraic genius once postulated that he had successfully calculated the solution to the beautiful theorem he had crafted, but regretfully there was no room to show it in the margins; following that example, I can say that I managed to piece together the parts to make a whole person of myself during this state of flux, but that no number of alleged facts, no amount of documentation or sworn affidavits I could lay before you could ever decisively prove that I did so with any favorable outcome. Whereby I mean... I don’t really know what, but it’s a way of getting around, in a roundabout way, to saying that I had always, in my humble opinion, held that I possessed an especially felicitous (if conversely nerve-wracking) way with words, or more accurately, now that I am through with boasting, that words had their way of getting around me, words conveniently routed or replaced reality: for I confess that I kept little notebooks, inside of which I kept little notes, even rehearsed a few rhymes and plotted hit-or-miss schemata; and so, following the signposts, I set my sights on becoming yet another damned writer in a world that demonstrably doesn’t need any more in that line of business—it all sounded very easy at the time, you see, and there was apparently no experience necessary. If I offered reasonable replies to the questions no one had yet asked, I would find my audience, ultimately, and I might even be paid well for it. (Bereft of such naïve dreams, I’d venture we’d never have met like this, within the agreed-upon confines of this private conspiracy of ours.) Even famous authors must begin somewhere, and so I must have gone to work as a midnight-shift proofreader for an advertising firm, or something else, anything else, maybe even meekly peddling photocopied sheaves of my heretical sermons door-to-door, or, or... Or, again, nothing like that at all; to be straight with you, I don’t want to present just another extended menu of options, but encourage you instead to have imagined me doing anything at all during my early unknown years that sounds profitable. As lofty as you very well have anticipated what my ambitions must have been, you’d be right to foresee daily humiliations, offset only now and then by small introverted triumphs coupled with fleeting gratifications. Just wait, I suspect you would have me say to the world, and watch how quickly I rise and conquer! On the other hand, I could just as well have quietly shouldered my burden and merely hoped for an annual raise and a holiday bonus. Maybe did or maybe didn’t; that’s the glory of my life, and if we’re just keeping up pretenses, I’ll say, half in jest, that I penned a popular how-to column (the faqir of FAQs, I once quipped about myself), and when no one was looking I drafted inspirational speeches for illiterate deans and trustees, meanwhile composing term papers for lazy fraternity brothers; above all, it is imperative to append that during my spare time I forged on ahead, if a bit surreptitiously at first, with Something Big (fiction or nonfiction, I didn’t understand why there had to be a difference), when I wasn’t more flamboyantly, for all the world to see or maybe just for my darling of the moment, jotting down a few impressive lines of a sonnet or sestet. And who doesn’t or wouldn’t care to? Everyone, it could be argued, must needs acquire a similar bad habit at one point or the other—in my case, better sooner than not at all.

But probably I shouldn’t have done every improbable thing that I did, or you can once again presuppose that I did or did not do—for after not too long the managing editor found out (or was it the campaign boss, chief executive officer, operations supervisor, etc.?) and said person accused the presumed guilty spouse or business partner and then the betting agency or insurance company or whatever and next me, broke up what definitely looked to my colleagues like an affair or some sort of illicit alliance, and sent me on my way, no one even a tiny bit cognizant of the worse crimes that conceivably were committed regarding my employer’s accounts and my employer’s good relations with sundry politicians, community leaders, or moderately corrupt clergymen. Who wouldn’t I have sold out, double-crossed, two-timed, stabbed in the back, as long as it made for good copy? The smell of blood and newly minted bills had always excited me; I would have done anything in the name of Art. That’s right—make me a terrible person! It could be I technically didn’t do anything morally or legally wrong; it’s a moot point, at any rate, for instigated or impaired by honest-to-goodness events or not, spurred on by a desire for attention or common luxuries, if not just plain revenge, or none of the above, I led myself to believe that I had succeeded in getting what it wouldn’t take an overly indulgent reader to recognize as a viable narrative, drawn from my very own amoral and amoristic experiences, both real and unreal; consequently, merely by dashing off a few dozen letters and licking a lot of stamps (these were the good-slash-bad old days) I managed to acquire an agent who was on intimate terms with a great-uncle or second cousin of mine, doesn’t matter, and thus this agent fellow gladly put his foot in the firm’s door on my behalf, prying it wide enough for me to enter. Not wishing to implicate family or friends, and relatively adroit at, to put it discreetly, drawing a veil across verities, I decided at the last minute to publish under a name nowhere close to my own, something more than obviously spurious, as I explained at the outset. Hence my visit to the graveyard in search of the most outrageous of forenames and surnames. (There were also potential lawsuits and other embarrassing scenarios to ponder, I might add.) After many negotiations, the agreement on behalf of all parties was not to take the risk of representing my brand to the world as anything less than vague, if not to say chameleonic, to imply (nay, to shout it!) that I could be someone far different or far more important than who I actually was. Evocation as provocation, all those involved concurred. A stock photograph was used to portray the alleged wordsmith on the dust-jacket, a portrait so blurred and shadowy one couldn’t even tell exactly what was my age or sex. It wouldn’t require much talent to dream up a better front cover than the one that was used: Telescoped as I am now by time, I can only myopically see something unspecifically seamy, with a quasi-ecclesiastical font in red, bordered in black, over a latticed field, the total effect disturbingly suggestive of budget motel rooms and storefront chapels. The binding would only just manage to hold to its bosom several hundreds of thousands of words, with the accompanying punctuation marks and typographic elements in mostly their proper places; as would be more or less essential, the chapters featured the requisite expository language, depictions of landscape and weather, cursory summaries, prolonged elaborations, inner and outer monologues, dialogues, trialogues, peripeteias, characterizations, personifications, and so on, continuing in obligatory amounts all the way up to the denouement, its aftermath, and the epilogue. Miraculously enough, this initial effort of mine, perhaps only because I was an innocent victim cast oarless upon the seas, was noticed by a couple of eminent reviewers in important periodicals eager for something new to talk about (or could be they were friends of that great uncle or second cousin), and they said I could have done worse, no harm done, the reading public might as well take a look if there was nothing better to do. (I will afford the present onlooker an occasion to judge the book’s worth without having seen the conclusive evidence, though I can assure all interested, while trying my best not to abuse further the double or triple negative, that clearly I wasn’t canny enough to pass convincingly as a bona fide imposter.) There is no use in divulging the work’s title here, for as I’ve indicated, it is no longer cataloged or stocked either in virtual or physical configurations, so for convenience’ sake, let’s just call it something relatively noncommittal like At the Starting Line or Tuning Up. Let the contents fulfill the credits as may be seen fit; the distinguishing marks I’ll prudently keep hidden. It turned out to be—that is, it couldn’t have been anything but—five-hundred-some pages of trivial generalities interspersed with the derisory pronouncements of a kind of phony prophet, someone ought to have said; by and by I manifestly disowned it, if memory doesn’t totally fail me, never realizing at the time that it must have sold a decent amount, enough anyway for me to sign a fresh contract and receive a fair advance on whatever would be my next book. (But again this is only one version of many, and far from the most credible. When I am inside parenthetical remarks like this, I feel like I’m practicing hypnosis before a mirror. If one must improvise a new life for oneself, is that a form of parthenogenesis? And if I have subsequently permitted this verbal abstraction of myself to be erased from all the records, if I knowingly or not participated in this grand elision, isn’t that just another means of saying it was professional suicide?)

Self-satisfied as I fear I may seem to you—best to call it yet another contrivance, this way I have of hedging bets—I’m getting what feels like a vicarious pleasure from this little true-to-life fantasy you and I are weaving out of something that very closely resembles whole cloth. If we are to examine this matter closely, I must attest that I could have been somewhat of a semi-success, even so, hardly a total disaster! Trust me or trust me not, I recognize that such simple statements, like saying by writing this I offer proof that I exist, sound merely axiomatic in the Cartesian tradition. Well, nevertheless, to carry on, if I might... There is nothing like the sudden windfall of an immoderate sum of dollars, combined with callow youth, to encourage one to become indolent, and conversely somewhat reckless. It is not likely inaccurate of you to have foreseen, were events to occur as I have suggested they might have, even if they didn’t, that instead of sitting down to think and write, I would go through a few months or years of the familiar profligate sort, just to see what that would be like, and then, having become bored with myself and my ever-so-lazy and perverse ways, that I should decide to travel; thus, one could easily take for granted that I then embarked on a series of hapless but amusing misadventures in foreign lands among interesting strangers, who I hoped would one way or the other make their way into my next feasibly better-selling book—whenever I should return to that cramped carrel I had for all intents and purposes left far behind, that is. Contingent upon your acceptance of the not-so-farfetched possibility that I could have and therefore did, I journeyed by various methods of transportation here and there, near and far, searching for something, anything, perchance trying to find answers, as so many seekers do, and naturally enough never getting any nearer to (or, I beg of you, farther from) The Truth than someone who just stays at home and only journeys abroad in daybed daydreams. Sometimes, in theory, I spent weeks in one place tracing and retracing my steps up and down endless sidewalks and footpaths, while at other times all I experienced of a city or landscape was what I glimpsed from a bus or streetcar window—and yet that could have seemed all I needed to know of the place. In almost any other’s suppositional ad hominem arguments, things would invariably have gone very much the same; the same caravan routes would have been followed and even the same luggage, albeit with different monograms, hauled aboard a rocking deck or down several flights of a questionable hotel’s backstairs. My letters home became predictably shorter and more evasive with each passing month; that is, they probably would have if I had cared enough to correspond. My funds, I likely as not saw with some alarm, were being depleted much more rapidly than my wanderlust. Well, all for the good of the upcoming book, I told myself, devising exculpations to balance my improprieties, while continuing to crave just one more revelatory encounter with a stranger or a strange land, that epiphanic moment that would inspire unrivaled scenes to fill out the diagrammatic trajectory of that work which I never seemed to get around to begin taking down in shorthand at the instructions of my dictatorial conscience. Given time, whatever it was I hungered for would appear just around the next bend, or maybe over there, up in the shining heavens, beyond that waterfall’s quivering rainbow...

Posit this, if you will, even if I know you won’t: that at last I would have no alternative but to return home, broke, tired, and hoping it wasn’t abashment or regret that would soon be curling up to estivate inside me. Here then comes the hibernation that often serves as incubation, where the world-weary wanderer must sit back and reflect upon his or her many (alleged? authentic?) escapades until they provide their payback. Nothing much materialized out of my recent peregrinations, nevertheless, if that is the premise we must go on, and I was left feeling debilitated by the four dingy walls that now hemmed me in, condemned as I was again to that exquisitely prolonged torture known as everyday life. Just a little more time, for it’s starting to come to me, I kept pleading with both agent and editor, and to my great surprise they coddled me, even pandered to me, if you’re believing any of this—until there came a day, a bright sunny day, which I am unable to substantiate, when they would not respond to my requests for any further extensions, monetary or week-wise. The clock was ticking, the clock was set to go off like a bomb some day soon. And then, marvel of marvels, after I had (if forced to give an example) surveyed my empty larders for the dozenth time in one afternoon and noted the concurrent rumble in my gut, it seemed I could not scroll down the screen fast enough to keep up with the sudden torrent of newly typed words. Well, if I might qualify my assertions for the hundredth time, such actions are not outside the realm of possibility. Delusional or merely disillusioned, I worked furiously as minute and hour hands scoured the bloodless face of the alarm clock, while a story that seemed to have nothing at all to do with me sprang forth almost through no exercise of my own will, a story eager to evade revision and retraction, and it may have been little more than gibberish, or it may have been genius—who was to say such was or wasn’t so, when the tale is all in the telling? No one, it appeared, had noticed that my first book was no good, even if it was very good, or that against all odds I was very good, even if I was no good, so nothing was stopping me—or at least can stop me now—from throwing caution to the four winds and trying my best to act as if I were only doing my worst. (It was that cynicism known only by the young and inexperienced, you will gather, though it seemed to me at the time that I was neither. Again and again, knowing implicitly that there was no answer, and afraid of falling into a trap of my own ingenious design, I paused above the keyboard to ask myself why, outside the bounds of contracts and the thrill of the bookseller’s window displays, I felt impelled to create at all, what it was that called to me, toward what revelations or rewards I was being beckoned. A faint glimmer in the stormy darkness, a foghorn and the clang of a lonely buoy, anything you can place in the scene to illustrate faint hope.) And so I learned—slowly, slowly—that it at least felt better to find myself preoccupied with simply anything than to do nothing whatsoever, worrying not over how little the human race would notice and how unimportant that activity is or isn’t, all things being equal.

As I should have foreseen, no one stooped to notice my energetic but still somehow careless ploy, and in all likelihood the book sold almost as many copies, could be more, than the first, I think, which still meant very insignificant quantities, estimate as you will—but I recognized that it, my sorry lump of wood pulp, had failed me in every way, and/or that I had failed it, and this time I had even more grounds for starting to feel ashamed through and through, as my reviewers probably would have been for me, had there been reviewers—as if that should have concerned me (but so I was). Free in a sense again, yet not free at all, for I was now more impoverished than ever, mentally and materially, I privately vowed to become humbler and wiser; robbed of the chance to live like the wealthy libertine of my dreams, I took on humbler quarters and resigned myself to even longer days at that pine coffin-plank they call a desk. (Is any of that not untrue? I ask myself yet again, wondering if such weak asseverations make for a better or at least a more honorable confession. Guess I’ll never know.) Time passed, more time passed, a great deal of time passed. The third book can be nothing less than my magnum opus, I prompted myself every morning, cracking my knuckles while booting up the machine for the nth time; this masterpiece must seek to confound and astound, while containing all the realistic heartbreak and joy of a life that was, with corroborations unavailable, no more than a figment of someone else’s nervous fixations, compressed into an easily readable nine-hundred and ninety-nine pages (to pull a lazy number out of hazy air). When one hushed midnight I watched the last of the pristine pages come to rest atop the towering stack spat out by the printer, I expect I felt as relieved as a new mother and as proud as a papa. Here at last! I exclaimed without fear of disavowal to the hateful clock that spent all its days watching me, and eagerly I trundled the weighty bundle off to my sleeping publishers. Then I slammed the door, threw off my ego, and took to my little bed, as would be the order of things, and stared blankly at the ceiling, waiting. And of course, if I am not again wrong, waited some more. In the meantime, if I might further hypothesize, I went on to have another disastrous love affair or two and was told on more than a few occasions that I had aged fairly dramatically. Envisage what you like. As the astute observer must have already anticipated, after many weeks my manuscript was rejected, if my memory is not erroneous, because the powers on high had determined that my sacred text was (to interpret their many polite words) what amounted to inchoate as well as interminable, and I was exhorted to cut it down to a more digestible three or four-hundred pages—better yet, start all over again. Oh, dear, I wish there were something remarkable or at least unforeseeable in this familiar sob-story of artistic woe. Life can be so painfully derivative, even when at my most earnest I am not.

Life had also left me no choice but to soldier on, and so, not unlike a soldier left shell-shocked and incapable of extricating myself from the foxhole I had dug myself, I hacked away dutifully at what hadn’t passed for a novel or something really not quite like one, tossing out characters and subplots with the ruthlessness of an impassionate god (ah, impassionate, cursed adjective that contradicts itself), struggling to clarify the language as well as dumb down or else smarten up the sophistical conceits. All to no avail, alas, for the product of my labors was even more maddeningly incomprehensible, I was informed, than the amorphous mass from which it had been hewn. Still not quite ready to wave the blank white sheet, I nearly completed a third or fourth or fifth redraft, I forget which, this round fueled by undiluted anger as well as an increasing sense of abject despair, before going bonkers and sending the computer file to the recycle bin, immediately followed by a period of mourning. Blinds drawn, phone off the hook, suppers in bed, insomnia, sleeping pills, one thing after another. It took a thoughtful house-call from my old agent to demonstrate to me that it was not I who had died, rather my book. I should give it one more go, if only to see what would happen. And so in less than a month I dashed off something fresh and fast-paced instead, with no extraneous conditional clauses or over-exuberant descriptions to impede anyone’s progress, yet that great exploit too, despite several slush-pile readers’ heartening endorsements, was turned back at the gates of my erstwhile publishing house and then another and then another and so on and so forth, without so much as a nod toward my natural abilities or promise, former or latent. Sorry, but not for us, No room on our list for it at present, Come back another century, Who do you think you’re trying to fool, I was told—or things like that. Younger and more photogenic writers were waiting in the wings, I had no need of being reminded: craven scriveners every one, impertinent upstarts, ripe for premature acclaim just as I once had been, and so much more marketable, you know. There was nothing I could do to reverse the ways of the world. And so the good X. Y. Z, of unknown age and address, of dubious merit and questionable wherewithal, met with an early and ignominious end.

Clinical depressions, curious addictions, obsessive behaviors, suicidal thoughts—count them up, subtract them from the years I was allotted to walk this earth... While I was left for untold eternities unable to structure a single sentence, fighting an ice-cold block that left me tongue-tied and word-blind and about as quick-witted as a slow loris. Many persons and even more inanimate objects suffered my frustrated wrath during this pianissimo entr’acte in that melodiously atonal symphony of my own life (which I had been carefully composing all along from themes so highly strung it turned out only I could hear them). Just imagine this: once I tossed a whole set of an outdated encyclopedia from a high window, but never heard a single volume hit the ground. In the end—that is, not the end, not the end at all, if endings count—I mustered from within my dwindling reserve of self-confidence a firm new resolve to belittle my inferiors, those other taradiddlers and yarn-spinners of whom it seemed everyone to the last had heard and, for this reason, everyone to the last must read, for popularity, as is popularly known, only begets more popularity. Perhaps these unnumbered back-pages of my life should be framed with heavy iron-barred brackets, with everything between them mercifully struck out or summed up using the vaguest of euphemisms (such as... see below). Some might even insist that this chapter should be banned outright, cut from the threaded spine, so to speak, and thrown far away, since the alleged episodes contained within amount to no more than the fanciful fictionalization of a dissimulating make-believer such as yours untruly. But I will go on, for I always go on; namely, I never know when best to shut up. Back then, by which I mean to say after my first and only editions ran out, no one wanted the old untrustworthy me; as a result, I must become a very different me, a familiar voice told me, but still I must not give my own self-evident self away. Accordingly, I was not idle in my idle time—there was suddenly an astonishing amount of it—and so several perhaps impracticable tactical maneuvers regarding how to further my career in novel (or not) and innovative (or not) ways occurred to me, including (you may feel free to skip this section):

1) Training myself to think as impartially and yet as productively as a biomechanical or physio-automatic engine, in that way the most emotionally compelling artificers succeed in doing, or so I thought (yes, I know that has been tried by others, surrealists and super-realists, who had arrived upon the scene earlier); verily (usage archaic, that word), I could use my cognitive processes to render a set number of characters from my choice of prefigured templates, and then strategically adjust for their motives, accounting for intrinsic quirks and what are commonly perceived as ethical flaws, wholly within the recursive elements of what is known as a plot (pick any of the low-hanging fruits abundant in mythology or ancient dramaturgy, for instance), subject to expendable or collapsible quantitative elements (that is, time) and general tenor (that is, tone) of the language, chosen from sundry tried and true models–and without too much mental exertion, out would flow the expressive discourse of what would be taken for conventional narration, prima facie, at first glance, and, if I were cunning enough, ultima. The key was to input enough ifs and could have’s and "depending onto absolve one’s fiercely tenacious self-interests. But the labor and discipline required of following through with my plans would not have been worth the hours lost, for after a few trial runs I only proved once more that such ruses only end up sounding exactly like ordinary thinking masquerading as something extraordinary. Besides, in hindsight, I must say that I dislike clever people being clever (including me), I hate wordplay, and I abhor making a guessing game of reality, even if it appears that’s what I’m doing here.

2) Taking two of my previously unfinished drafts, in effect sealing them within the hermetically controlled environment of my cranium, admitting no outside thoughts and so giving them time to steep within the same climate and thence through a form of osmosis or cellular fusion allow them to intermingle and propagate—to explicate, by layering or alternating the voice of one with the design of the other, forcing the disjunctively abstracted elements of the first to commingle with the affectional impacts I had struggled to achieve in the second. But this operation was as difficult to achieve under ordinary laboratory situations as it is to exposit, and no germination was induced, no predicatory gestation attained, and again—too clever. A little too late I recognized this is not exactly the way most successful authors go about it. Ah, me.

3) Taking a random number of words, assigning them each a numerical value, placing them in random order generated mathematically, while obeying a finite number of syntactical rules (for I do like things to make some sort of sense), then manufacturing a random number of chapters aggregated in spontaneously derived sequence until I felt the random harvest was sufficient. In short, what I said about the others. In hindsight, I see that this experiment was maybe just a subset of 1) above. Additionally, provisional results were as a whole disappointing, in parts and places, inconclusive at best. Often what one mistakes for original intuition will sound meaningless to another, so after a false start or two I hesitated going any further with any similar stochastic recipes. I would either end up sounding like an impenetrable sub-genius or a rambling idiot, as here, and I didn’t need to be identified as either.

4), 5), 6), etc. Not even I want to be reminded how many ideas I evaluated at length and then rejected because of one crucial fault or another. This process of excogitative conception, audition, and elimination was taking a destructive toll upon my intellectual capacities; in other words, I was bit by bit being driven to distraction by thought processes I had voluntarily requested to occupy my mind. And however doggedly I tried, my reconstituted psyche could never free itself of the habits and prejudices that a lifetime of second-guessing myself had bestowed upon me; too late had I learned that if you set off to do the opposite of what you want to do, and then you do that, you are still not taking the alternative path. It takes greater powers, much greater powers than I have within me, to truly negate oneself, to become undone, as the trope goes. Leave that to others. It would happen, it would happen.

Giving up at last, I opted for the simple expedient of plagiarism, that swiftest and surest, or so I thought, of the has-been’s time-tested and true fall-backs. Outside all that, literary theft seemed to have grown virtually respectable during my involuntary absence from the world at large. Would it be petty of me to cite several examples right here: [censored], [censored], and [censored]? I could have even claimed that [name redacted] had previously stolen from me. [Expletive deleted]! Nevertheless, these kinds of enterprises certainly seemed to be [illegible]. Once I had begun smattering in such crimes myself, to my dismay I discovered that copy-work is no fun, probably even much duller and more arduous than writing something on one’s own, although the results can afford one a somewhat ineffable (but still I do not scruple to say) almost sensual pleasure, as long as the thievery is done with what is called surgical skill, mindful that making too large a cut too hastily can have tragic consequences. After much research through the dark and dusty lanes of used bookstores, I chanced upon a long-forgotten novel by an unheralded scribe from a far-off decade; with minimum transposition of scenes and a little switching of pronouns or points-of-view, making allowances for changes in costume of the times, even—if it does not sound too boastful—improving on the original in many ways, I had myself a new work to thrust upon the so-called unsuspecting populace. (I can’t even say it was a rapier-swipe at my critics, those from whom I had won some small attention and who I should instead have embraced as friends, for they once had been more than generous to me—and I must add that they also had faded away the same as me.) Despite barely altering the title, and making no attempt to cover my tracks, no one noticed my fraudulence or called it to anyone’s attention; in fact, no one seemed to care about my persistent presence at all—why wasn’t I dead by now, why did I refuse to die? That long-neglected author might as well have been myself, not so many years from the present moment. Allowed the benefit of retrospection, I see how I had made the wrong move once again: My cunning pantomimic camouflage had prohibited myself from stepping forward from that pretty backdrop into which I had meticulously painted myself. Confidentially, I might just as well have handed out old copies of the original novel with my name scratched over the name of Mr. or Mrs. Whoever-It-Was. Maybe if the book had sold more than a few dozen copies, someone might have stirred up a scandal, and the notoriety would have garnered me a modicum of celebrity as well as a new contract, but then you must have noticed the keynote of this humbling essay before you already. (Redact that!) It is easy to see now that I would have been better off committing murder in broad daylight; at least then, no one could have avoided noticing the gore dribbled methodically down the sidewalk, around the corner, up those stairs, and right into my chamber, where I sit smiling in my armchair, lapdog upon my lap, waiting for public exposure. As it was, the humor of a joke is lost if the point of the joke must be explained. Complete and utter failure, however, was not an option I was generous enough to countenance quite yet. Right you are, I could still make a real name for myself in a markedly different fashion. There followed that burst of satiric lyrics in the neoclassical mode (which I had printed myself under one of the names mentioned far above) as well as a sheaf of woefully foreshortened short stories—the aborted false starts of unfinished novels, orphaned chapters, widowed passages in prose—that I began shopping about with all the farfetched optimism of a national lottery player, with even greater odds against me. (It would take years for the other sides of my split personality to mature and fix their names to echt works published by infinitesimally small and then even smaller houses, but I am in no hurry here to give the details. Cherish the thought that we can be precise in fiction while always restricted to the general in real life, which is all I care to discuss at the moment, upon these particular pages.) Details, refutable or irrefutable, should follow; kindly bear with me as I formulate the data... at some point I think I got married, only to divorce soon after. Maybe there was a child or two. It could be that I contracted a nearly fatal disease but made a nifty recovery. Jury duty, bum jobs, broken engagements, unavoidable accidents, friendships that came and went, romantic interludes, manias that peaked and soon waned, taxes... but not yet death.

The years passed me by, the furrows upon my face still not quite equal to the scars upon my heart. You could well not be listening any longer, I might just be humming the words I have misremembered, so maybe I am freer at present to say or write more as I like. Many versions of my life are not mutually incompatible or altogether inconceivable; here’s another one: Late in middle age, having listed a few ever-more difficult-to-find books on my half-fabricated resume, I found an impermanent but perpetually renewable lectureship at a very lenient and sloppily supervised liberal arts college, though records will show that my duties were never entirely specified, and so it is no wonder that after a while I felt no need to show up more than occasionally for my classes. I believe I got married again—twice more, if truth be told, once to a student who really shouldn’t have bothered to seduce me. Fortunately these events happened when I was no longer impatient to earn my keep, for an uncle—no, not the one who might have been mentioned previously, but one near enough to him—died at a convenient time and, as is time-honored tradition, left me a manageable inheritance that would at least keep me (barely) solvent for the rest of my life. (But I am getting ahead of myself—I couldn’t in any event become even conceptually deceased for years to come.) I continued to live on, though without any real enthusiasm.

The point of this apostrophe is not just to give a synopsis of my wonderfully uneventful life or to craft an unusually unreliable autobiography, but to demonstrate how one can fade into the gloaming without trying at all and without anyone in the whole wide world noticing, nonetheless caring. I didn’t die so much as I disappeared: carve that if you must upon my own tombstone. My later books, though much better than my first few, in my humble opinion—or at least cobbled together with a little more forethought—met with ever-diminishing reviews and sales. At last it seemed even I wasn’t reading what, to put it less than decorously, was expelled from the bowels of my word processing software. The most generous of reviewers could justifiably have accused me of falling asleep on the keys. Meaning to say, the words as they electroluminescently flitted past me (so pretty, those falling pixels) seemed as evanescent as rain turning to snow, and the dwindling drifts left behind seemed not so much to melt into microcrystalline rivulets, as to evaporate or sublime, as is the scientific definition for vaporization, from whence they had settled. Seasons came, seasons went, only a gluey, dingy sort of residue upon my morale remained as any trace of evidence. The forecast was gloomy. And then it struck me; yes, it struck me...

Manuscript fragments snatched out of the funeral pyre, extracted from a corked bottle floating on an ebb tide, inky tatters caught whirling within the vortices of a Saharan simoon, discovered by torchlight inside an accidentally exhumed sarcophagus, retrieved from a broken hard-drive, makes no difference: otherwise, I mean to say, notes to my future self, like myself as good as lost forever:

describe limbo, its terrain, the price of its real estate, the color of its sky, what its waters taste like, how barren the soil

show some emotion for a change, damn it, stop being cagey!

it could be a very civilized pleasure, reading a book no longer read, like rarest vintage rescued from deepest cellars, a little soured with age but still supremely satisfying, or so I tell myself

—is that right? that’s what I’m trying to say?

absolutely not!

all the same, could be.

maybe I am only trying to justify myself

define pretermit (my life in absentia)

must first be remembered to be forgotten

must last be possessed to be lost

must have once been happy to know such sorrow

dust that mutes the mirror

(oak) leaves burying the path to the (shining) lake

a broken bell

unsung/unrung

blackout

give further examples...

Coherence balks in what you will think is this, my distinctly unverifiable and irrationally conclusive ratiocination. Kindly disregard what I said near the beginning of this treatise, then, for I wasn’t in my right mind, it doesn’t take some meddling doctor or editor to tell me. From the start we should have only been discussing the fine art of becoming invisible. By vanishing into nothingness, I had at long last realized in my embittered solitude, I was able to encompass everything, I could reverberate throughout all time and space in an endless multitude of providential voices, a magnificent choir of castrated archangels, or just common tree-frogs, if you prefer; I could be anyone or no one, I was not so much words as the echo of words. The last echo, I swear to you, is the purest, the least driven by sublunary anxieties—it is the voice of the ancient bard inscribed upon the rock, decipherable no more, somehow still heard. For oblivion is as a rule the endpoint of all things; lasting fame is that most uncommon of anomalies, a white blackbird, a black blizzard, while I felt nearer and nearer to becoming a shadow with no light to cast it. I was that common but still beautiful coral fungus that sprouts in the dark and arrays its branches in the dark and dies in the dark with no one to see or admire, and yet it was splendid while it lasted, it groped upward toward a heaven only it could have known. I did not so much die as disappear. Lay your wreaths at the tomb of the Unknown Author, lay them here if that is your wont, but remember that, statistically speaking, you are probably unknown, as well.

Slow fade, as I believe they used to say in the motion pictures. It may have been painful at first, like ripping a bandage from a wound, this separation of dreams from reality, but even the worst torments of hell must get boring after a millennium or two. Martyrs at the stake have been known to yawn. Go ahead and flatter me by envisioning someone wealthy and retired, living wherever it’s quiet and the weather’s good, resigned to what chance and circumstance have bequeathed. If some part of me is to live on in the last installment, then give me health, all my teeth, at least half my wits, and mind I have no use for a walking stick. Think how splendid such an afterlife would be for anyone! Spending days puttering in the garden, nights before an unnecessary fire, polishing the brass or is it silver—no, make it brass—walking the mutt who hasn’t been thought up until just this