He went to bed in Brooklyn and dreamt his ex in Miami had published a short story in a literary journal he’d wanted to be in for years. In the dream, he stood in a Barnes & Noble in San Francisco, because he used to live in San Francisco, and opened the journal and immediately went to the bio.
He didn’t read the story because his alarm went off. Dazed, he walked to work, but he wasn’t really dazed. He stopped and yelled out, I’m not dazed! Dazed, he continued to walk to work. He stopped again and cried out for understanding. Because his ex-girlfriend could see he was suffering, she let him walk to work undazed, though he was disturbed, because she now wrote the story.
Maybe he had not dreamt what he dreamed and he felt a little relieved because she was just a beginning writer and would make a number of mistakes along the way. The bio was certainly all her—speaking of her man, his muscles and how the hot, happy couple smoked cigars together. He could never construct such a situation, though he had visited the experience of her with another man, and with him for hours, no talking, all eyes, all sides, back and forth, all of him going in and never coming out. She stole lines from Beckett and she didn’t even know who Beckett was.
At work he turned his computer on and wondered why she wrote his thoughts so lyrically. His own writing ambled along on a few well-placed adverbs and snappy, though ultimately melodramatic, dialogue. No wonder he hadn’t gotten into those big journals—he had to be lyrical like her. So, though at work, supposedly creating spreadsheets, he began to go lyrical.
Over and around his reality, he typed up dreamy texts. Ode language, angels, a sentence starting with sinuously and proceeding sinuously. Lyrical enough?
Not really.
Why?
He typed faster, convinced it was all him, but it came out her: Saddish felt he. A quiet creature, his friend. Couldn’t he wet his noodle and stop breathing like a tree? He’d carried him around, glowered foolish and knuckled honey to keep insane all the same. What the fuck was he writing? Breathing like a tree? That didn’t mean anything; she didn’t mean anything. She’d read some Wallace Stevens in an anthology and thought she could make it new, but pound for pound she was wrong. Nobody breathes like a son of a bitching tree and, though he didn’t want to, he looked at the sentences he’d composed. He read and reread and his thoughts told him it was goodish, above quality, above what he’d ever written, and he disagreed, strongly.
He liked to treat his stories minimally, make the mark miniscule. No! He wanted minimalness without the consonance, without loads of luminescent lyrical fever. No! Not without loads of luminescent lyrical fever, just without lyricism.
Let me be! he cried, callously. And he beat his head on the computer, thinking he couldn’t cry callously, but there he was at his desk and the tears were callous, bricks falling from his eyes, not sweet or sorrowful, but dangerous, disarming.