I could not sleep the night after the museum—not until I transcribed every word and expelled every nuance of that otherworldly drama from my memory. This process, normally focused to the exclusion of even hunger and fatigue, was interrupted regularly that night as I stared out the window or at the wall, seeing neither. Seeing instead Aubrey’s hand on Richard’s arm, the pink curve of her lips over those perfect teeth, the imperfect shape of Richard’s face, Aubrey’s gaze fluttering between Lucian and me. I searched that memory for any glint of jealousy at the sight of Lucian and me together.
Richard had called her Bree. Aubrey used to hate that.
I replayed the scene in my mind, outfitting it with every witty rejoinder, smug comment, and cryptic well-wish I had rehearsed for months. But finally, upon contemplating yet again the distance in Aubrey’s gaze, the fixed front tooth, I decided that she had retreated too far beyond me to be touched by any of them.
The image of them together, of the formerly faceless Richard, had preyed upon me in waking and dreaming moments for more than a year. But now that it was over, I found something disappointingly unremarkable about the reality.
I had always assumed he and Aubrey had no chance of making it, starting the way they had. But thinking back to Richard’s quick rescues, I wasn’t so sure. She had seemed in utter possession of the situation despite his protection of her. And I found something pathetic in his safeguarding her, in his willingness to be fitted into the mold of her expectations like a mummy in a coffin made for someone else.
I went to work and sat in meetings. But even as I did, my mind roamed the heavens, walked the shore by moonlight, passed among the reeds on the bank of Eden’s river.
At home I made my way through manuscript chapters, jacket copy, and e-mail, my gaze wandering often to that pile of pages, scratched in frantic pen and harried pencil, growing on the corner of my desk, to the rumpled receipt I had saved from the Bosnian Café that first night. It seemed a year, an age ago.
I’m going to tell you my story. . . . And you’re going to write it down and publish it.
Staring at the pile, I considered the narrative tension of his story, the larger-than-life qualities of his characters (and how could they be otherwise when they included both God and the devil?), the unlikely point of view—like the monster of John Gardner’s Grendel telling the tale of Beowulf ripping off his arm. A stepsister’s account of being born ugly. A tale turned on its head, a sympathetic character from an unsympathetic source.
No. There was nothing sympathetic or likable about this teller. I thought again of Sarah Marshall, her hair matted on the pavement.
If it was a hoax, it was the most elaborate one I had ever heard of. And if it was, I found that a part of me did not want my disbelief proven, because through it the wheels of my creative mechanism, which I’d feared indefinitely jammed, had begun a familiar, albeit creaky, new motion in me.
I thought of Katrina’s proposal. L. Legion. How clever. I tried to locate it, but it was apparently buried beneath a ream of paper-clipped proposals and sample chapters.
Later, well past 1:00 A.M., I returned to my account. I had combed it a dozen times in the last week but left each time feeling that something was missing. Even as he took me speeding through the heavens and introduced me to Eden, Lucian was coy, refusing to put me at the edge of his understanding as I demanded my authors do in their narratives, holding back some vital piece of information.
I checked my calendar.
The blank grid stared back.