To avoid writing, he calls a friend because she’s in trouble and he needs to accomplish something. She tells him the trouble has passed and he quotes her some poetry: I’m a martyr to a motion not my own. Who is that? she says. And he tells her he doesn’t know, though he does—he knows the book, the year of publication, and what the poet’s parents did for a living. Soon enough, he names the poet.
His friend is frustrated. Why do you do things like that? Teasing. It’s not teasing, he says. Well, I don’t know what it is.
Ending the call, he claps his hands and walks to the window. The crusty bars of the fire escape look hideous in the high summer light. Someone should do something about that.
Still, it’s so beautiful out. The birds tweet, the airplanes keep to a pattern. It all never seemed so good, except when he had it good and that was a long time ago. He thinks, When you do have it good, you don’t sit around thinking how good you have it—you live the good, you live without thought. But all becomes too much thought and he goes to the Eastern philosophy section in the bookstore to try and regain the good, though he knows Buddha and Lao-Tzu wouldn’t counsel such a term as regain—it’s too late-twentieth century, too clinical, and if he were drunk he might pronounce it Rogaine and he quickly checks his hair, his only good feature.
So he calls the same friend and tells her the situation—it is he, trouble with him. What kind? And he says the kind that makes you think you’re all alone, no-one caring, never did.
I want to hit you, she says. He’d kept blank from her, covered his heart, and why didn’t he say anything before?
Putting it off, he says. He thought if another person was in enough trouble that they said something about it, then maybe his trouble wasn’t too much trouble because he could hardly bring himself to talk.
What you’ve said means you are in the most trouble, she says.
Maybe that’s why he couldn’t write and he wants to tell her how confused and unloved he feels, not to mention in a creative crisis, but he scours his belly button like a cotton candy vendor and produces a leaning tower of his own nervous energy. His nose rankles, but he stares and succumbs, and though she yells for him to speak and not go away again, he already has and is silent for minutes. He writes it out: Seeing inside his dreams, marking the days consecutively, finding pride in his pain and diving into the steam.
He puts his pen down, tells her what he’s done, and voices the lines exactly as they’d left his mind, with no edits, and she says, What steam? What dreams? And, Please come back and talk sense in my ear.
He tells her he has to go and write a little more. He goes and does, but it isn’t as good as the first glimmerings—the words don’t step up, they don’t twin his brain like the first squirt of uncommon sludge and he decides he didn’t write those first lines—it was someone from Yale or a bad translation of Rumi come to the fore, a fore rippled, but stippled, and the thread to all that is valuable falls at his feet and dances away on the floor, no kiss goodnight.
He calls his friend, but she is half-asleep. Is the trouble past? she says softly.
I don’t know, he says. Tell me more.
But you keep calling me.
I’m here for you.