He had coffee and a sandwich at his desk. Then tapped on the keys, hearing an old watery moan deep in the body. How the day’s first words set off physical alarms, a pule and fret, the resistance of living systems to racking work. Calls for a cigarette, don’t you think? He heard [people] coming down the stairs and pictured them making an effort not to creak, setting their feet down softly, shoulders hunched. Let’s not disturb the family fool in the locked room. He could easily get up from the desk and go to New York and live with [a woman he’d recently met] forever in a terrace apartment overloking the park or the river or both. Staring past the keys. Used to be that time rushed down on him when he started a book, time fell and pressed, then lifted when he finished. Now it wasn’t lifting. But then he wasn’t finished. Live in a large bright apartment with gray sheets on the bed, reading perfumed magazines. There is the epic and bendable space-time of the theoretical physicist, time detached from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there is the haunted time of the novelist, intimate, pressing, stale and sad. His teeth felt soft today. He needed to sneak to the bedroom and mix up some pink-and-yellow flouride multivitamins and in the meantime let’s concentrate on the page, tap a letter, then another. He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let’s face it. Must finish. Can’t die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her … He saw he’d inverted two letters, which he’s been doing a lot of lately, one of many signs there’s something growing on his brain, and he elevated the page and whited out the mistake, then had to wait while the liquid dried. How he punished himself for repeated errors at the machine, eternal misfingerings, how typing mistakes became despair, meaningless flubs bringing a craze to his eyes, and he stared at the white fluid drying and would not resume work until it faded into the page, which was both the punishment and the escape. Her hand on his face, how surprised he’d been to feel so affected by the gesture, the entireness of simple touch. Want to live like other people eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. He examined the immense complexity of changing the ribbon. So many pros and cons, alters and egos. He felt it coming and then sneezed onto the page, nicely, noting blood-spotted matter but thin and sparse. He would not dignify it by calling it snot. She likes my anger. Live at the center of the cubist city, Sunday papers spread everywhere and glossy bagels on a plate. I’m between novels, he used to say, so I don’t mind dying. The problem with his second wife. But never mind. Live near the museums and the galleries, stand on movie lines, uncork the wines, redo the rooms, sleep in the gray sheets, loving her, ordering out, let’s order out tonight, walk the dogs, speak the words, hear the doormen whistle down the cabs, rain beating on the windows.
From Mao II, by Don DeLillo.
