A City Made of Words Read online

  The older man’s name was Roland Styce. He had been born in Wales. He was a big man, unshaven. For seven years his psychiatrist had been prescribing him a combination of serotonin inhibitors to treat his symptoms, most recently fluoxetine, with an antipsychotic (Zyprexa) to stabilize his moods. Sometimes, though, he tried to do without. As now, for example. Since his mid-twenties he had worked as a teller in a bank. He was forty-seven.

  The younger man lay propped up on his elbows. He had less time behind him. And even barring any sort of cataclysmic interruption, he had less in front of him as well. Soon, he would work another tattoo into the pattern on the inside of his left arm, an image taken from a tarot deck. He would spend six years in jail. Soon after, he’d be dead.

  Even excepting some sort of violent interruption, he would be dead in nine years’ time. He would die in hospital, in the city of Leeds, not a hundred kilometers from the stucco house. Leeds is in the center of the United Kingdom. Above it, in the night sky, there is no trace of the twelfth planet as it approaches perihelion. You can scarcely see the stars.

  “What’s the problem, then? Maybe they can help us sort out some of this mess.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Roland Styce. “They don’t care anything about us. They’re very cruel.”

  Despite his years of service to the Midland Trust, he had never once been promoted, because of his low intellect. His flesh had a pasty look to it. His hands were large and fat, with fingers like moist rolls of uncooked dough, painted with egg white, dusted with red spots of pepper, and then sprinkled unaccountably with hair, according to the recipe of some deranged pastry chef. They were a masturbator’s hands. No one touched them voluntarily to say hello: His superiors in the bank (he had no inferiors) avoided greeting him, preferring instead to touch him vaguely on the shoulder, which, though disgusting in its own right, a wobbly pudding of tufted flesh, at least had the advantage of being clothed. No one had liked him in a long time.

  He was the kind of man who said most things twice. “We’re like nothing to them. Every single one of us could die.”

  “I don’t get that,” said the younger man. “You said we were all mixed in now. Interbred for two hundred generations …”

  “They don’t care about themselves!” Styce interrupted. “They’re cannibals on Niburu. That’s their home planet. We were nothing but slaves to them, slaves to mine gold, which they used to make heat and light. Most of them were eight feet tall. We worshipped them as gods. You can see in those Sumerian bas-reliefs in the British Museum.

  “I read about it in a book called The Twelfth Planet,” he continued after a pause.

  The younger man grimaced, then stretched out his jaw and snapped his teeth together. Yellow and discolored, they made a satisfying snap. In nine years, barring any sort of incomprehensible calamity, he would die of an intracranial neoplasm in the city of Leeds. “So we’ll have to fight them, then,” he said. “We’re not as helpless this time around.”

  “Perhaps not. They do have an advantage, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They can read minds.”

  All day he’d been afraid. That morning he had woken as if under a dim, inchoate nebula of doubt, riven with anxiety as if by spears of light. “The Twelfth Planet,” he had muttered to himself as he had blundered out of bed into his slippers: This mania of his, gathering now, was a way of struggling against these feelings by a process of deflection, the way you might squeeze your thumb with a nutcracker as a cure for seasickness.

  The younger man saw nothing of this. He saw an older fellow, overweight, standing by the window, just beginning to unbutton his shirt. He scarcely listened when the fellow spoke: “The light is dim where they are. Most of the time, except for the foci of the ellipse, you see, they don’t have a setting or a rising sun. They seed their atmosphere with molecules of gold, which reflect light from the rifts in their own oceans, the volcanic activity there. The light is always dim, so they don’t sleep.”

  “What are you, an astronomer, then?”

  “No, I work at the Royal Bank of Scotland. I’m the chief teller there in town,” which was a pointless lie.

  “That’s all right,” said the younger man.

  Roland Styce turned toward him. “There is one advantage, though. A blind spot, if you will.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s because of the way they reproduce in an abnormal way. Because of their reptilian nature, and the way they go into a stasis without sleeping. They don’t understand anything about love. You know, what we call love. It’s like a blind spot. It enrages them.”

  “Well, that’s all right, then.”

  The garden wall was low, about five feet, and faced with yellow stone. Beyond it, and beyond the raised beds, the grass spread flat and featureless to the back steps, like a lava field abraded into greenness under the acid rain.

  The door was locked and barred. Solid oak, imported from Poland. On the other side, a tufted oriental carpet ran the length of the hall, various living rooms on either side. Mr. Styce had inherited the house from his mother in 2016. She had died of an aneurism that same summer.

  Along the way down the corridor, you smelled a number of competing fragrances, more intense at intervals if you licked your lips. Sawdust. Lemon furniture polish. Then you came past the kitchen’s open door, the sealed cabinets full of sealed jars of Indian chutneys and pickles. A bowl of onions. Some wilted flowers. The stair rose up and turned a corner to the first floor. A skylight shone west above the landing, and the air was pricked with motes of gold.

  These people, these creatures, sealed up like jars or cans, struggling to see or know or understand even a little bit, how could you not open them and spill them out? Caught in a spatial moment, how could you not twist them, stretch them out beyond their capabilities? Some broke open and rose up higher and higher until you could see the world and time and space spread away.

  Yet up there, behind that closed door, two men embraced on a yellow bed.

  A Conversation with the Author

  Question:

  Elsewhere you have complained, or almost complained, about the traditional fiction-writing workshop, in which a group of students, selected on the basis of a writing sample, presents a story for critique. Each student says a chunk of words about it, and then the instructor sums up. You’ve suggested, or at least thought about suggesting, that although this method serves the needs of young writers craving an audience, it isn’t really the best method of teaching this particular discipline. Would you care to elaborate?

  Answer:

  “Once I taught writing in an expensive college. I imagined it was an important subject. For one thing, I told my colleagues in the English Department, how could you claim that you were competent to analyze and interpret other people’s stories and novels without any idea of how they were constructed?

  “Mostly I told them this internally, or as soon as they’d stopped listening, or sometimes while they slept. I used a low, quiet, breathless tone of voice. In addition, I whispered, you can’t or shouldn’t write any kind of nonfiction without some knowledge of the basics of storytelling. How do we know? It’s because even mediocre novelists are good essayists. The reverse is never true.

  “And it’s easy to see why: both stories and essays consist of plotted, causally related sequences of events. The basic arsenal of the fiction writer—how to control atmosphere, how to build suspense, how to reach a conclusion that is neither adventitious nor predictable—will make even the weakest argument impregnable.

  “The gifts of a science fiction writer are particularly useful in this regard. Science fiction stories usually carry an unusual burden of exposition. And they usually include either an overt or implied thesis, often one of each.”

  After this harangue, the author lapsed briefly into silence. But already I was sick of his nonsense. He was someone we’d picked up during one of our sweeps of the docks. He’d been apprehended lurking underneat
h the pier and then relocated to a camp for displaced persons. Now we’d brought him in for questioning. Under the circumstances, his well-rehearsed sentences seemed delusional. “I’ve scarcely dinged the surface,” he went on. “There are many other benefits to the study of story writing. I would often notice during the first six weeks, around the time we started to discuss point of view, that my students seemed happier, somehow. In some cases, their skin had cleared up. They had found girlfriends or boyfriends. During office hours, they would admit they had stopped taking their anxiety medications and were suffering no adverse effects. After my unit on techniques of characterization, a young woman whom I had last seen in a wheelchair came in haltingly to class, on crutches. A week later, after my seminar on voice, she had graduated to a cane.”

  He was making a joke, I decided. “Mirabile dictu,” I said. He also, as it happened, was in a wheelchair, his arms strapped down, which was why, perhaps, the memory had occurred to him.

  “I am willing to concede the value of fiction writing as a discipline,” I continued in all sincerity. “Perhaps I should rephrase my question. Is there anything you were unable to accomplish in your class?”

  I sat across a narrow metal table, recording our conversation on a tablet. At the same time I sketched him with the stylus, according to my habit—the front of his shirt, his shoulders. I am not good at faces, so I hadn’t attempted that.

  “Well, there is one thing,” he said. “A detail.”

  “Let me guess,” I said.

  But he interrupted me. “I wasn’t able to improve their actual skills. Their stories never got any better.”

  I took particular pains with the button-down collar points of his shirt, though I omitted some of the dirt. The cave-like opening to the collar itself, I filled with careful cross-hatching. This was in lieu of any head or neck.

  “Let me sum up,” I said. “According to you, the study of fiction writing is important to literary scholars, or might be if they agreed with you. The techniques of your discipline are important to essayists, or might be if they studied them. In addition, you have noticed many ancillary benefits. But the one thing you cannot claim is any improvement to your students’ work. Would that be a fair assessment?”

  And then after a moment: “Why do you think that is?” This is how quickly the cancer spreads. I was curious despite myself.

  And like many people in his situation he seemed eager to speak, to take me into his confidence in order to improve his chances. Though perhaps he had been storing up some venom for a long time. “Because it’s based on lies! The things we teach people, it’s not what we do! No writer in the world takes our advice, or at least no good one. Plot, idea, character, tone, voice, setting, description, exposition—no one thinks about these things. It is a vocabulary invented by idiots to describe concepts that don’t exist. No one has any ‘ideas.’ And if they do, they’re a waste of time. Once you start asking yourself how to do something, you can’t do it anymore.”

  I drew the bookshelf that would have been blocked by his head, if he’d had a head. “I’ve heard that argument before,” I said. “Effects rather than causes.” (Like most people in my profession, I have an MFA from an exclusive midwestern university.) “But what does that mean? Everybody understands we’re talking about a more organic process than the one these words suggest. And we need some kind of vocabulary. Otherwise we’re back in the box with inspiration and the nine muses.”

  That made him angry. I could tell from the way he lifted up his wrists and spread his fingers, pulling away from the cheap, plastic restraints. If I had been able to do justice to his mouth, I would have described his teeth. I sketched for several minutes before I put the rhetorical knife in, the way we had been taught. I leaned forward across the table, close to his ear. “I guess you’re talking about some kind of mystic genius and a process nobody can understand.”

  He had lapsed in the interim into semiconsciousness, but now he started up. “Does it have to be one thing or the other?” His voice was shrill. “A false vocabulary or else none at all? That’s the choice that’s got us to accept so many phony languages. Is it a coincidence that this one is so exclusionary? That it supports a reactionary way of writing?”

  This surprised me. “So you are willing to admit it was exclusionary.”

  “How could I not?” Drool came from his mouth, but he could not wipe it away. “The language we have put together, the assumptions we make about what constitutes literature even for college students, the realist and minimalist tradition that comes down from the Iowa School, show don’t tell, write what you know, that’s the natural language of the American upper-middle class. Because it requires so much unearned and misplaced self-confidence. It’s a language they don’t have to learn; they speak it already. It’s the only skill they actually possess.”

  I drew the buttons down his chest, each with its four holes, but he wasn’t through. “All those early models were reactionary, as it turned out. Supported by the CIA. And it’s easy to see why. It is the language of class privilege. White supremacy, even. It can’t express itself in any other terms.

  “Which is why,” he said finally, “we have to come up with something new.”

  When I say “bookshelf,” to describe the space behind his head, I realize I have given the wrong idea. There were no books. A few manila folders. The books had already been removed and destroyed. “Wait,” I said. “We’re not quite done.”

  I got him to explain to me how the members of his department had selected students for the introductory writing class. “It was always way overenrolled. A maximum of twelve. Some people applied for it every semester and were turned down six, seven times. You had to submit a writing sample. Right away that favored a type of student, someone who already had a sense of themselves, often, as it turned out, someone who had gone to private school. People from another kind of school, maybe someone who had had an overworked English teacher tell them they might have an aptitude, you could see how they gave up after getting turned down once.”

  “I see,” I said, though that had not been my experience.

  “It’s as if you had an introductory class in the trombone,” he muttered. “And you only let in people who could already play. And you reserved all further instruction for that group until their senior year. And the whole process was designed to winnow people away, until the one or two left standing you could take on as your thesis students, and then bicker with your colleagues about who wins the prize. And pretend not to notice how the stories your students produced, year after year, were similar enough to include in the same bad collection, as if written by the same bad artist whose work—what do you know?—bore a bizarre resemblance to your own. The entire college, obviously, was designed as a machine to reward privilege by disguising it as merit. That’s why I’m glad to hear you have dismantled it. But my department was undoubtedly the baldest and least apologetic in the way it functioned.”

  I pondered this. I myself had been a talented story writer at my own top-ten liberal arts college, and had gone through the introductory and advanced classes in preparation for my thesis, which had received highest honors. “Is it possible that your outsider status as a genre writer has colored your perception? That it has made you bitter?” I asked.

  “It is not possible.”

  He had something loose in his mouth that he couldn’t remove, because his hands were fastened down. And I could tell he knew he was in trouble. He could see now that we were at odds, because merit has to be the stone foundation of the new society. Everyone in his situation was to be given a score, and so far he was on the cusp—he must have sensed it. Perhaps he had tried to pander, earlier, to what he imagined was my prejudice. But human beings must be measured and judged and held accountable. I stood up and left the room, abandoning him to others as I had my lunch, a cucumber sandwich cut in triangles and a refreshing cup of lemonade.

  When I returned for the afternoon session he was more subdued, wet and chattering with
cold, the empty bucket tossed into a corner. “So,” I said. “If fiction writing is not a collection of skills to be mastered individually and then internalized, how must it be taught?”

  The metal table was a high one. Someone had pushed his wheelchair under the rim of it, so that he could lay his cheek down on the surface. Now his voice was muffled and distorted, because he didn’t raise his head. His new position had ruined my sketch, though in the margin I was able to create a swift rendering of the slope of his back.

  “We need a new vocabulary,” I think he said. It was hard to tell. He had developed a little quiver in his foot, which I could see under the table close to my own.

  Occasionally I would call in one of my colleagues to wake him. And over the next few hours he offered up a series of ideas about a new course of study. My job is to summarize it and edit it for clarity, and not to pass judgment. My personal opinion, though, is that we must identify talent and separate it out.

  As if reading my mind, he said: “The system … we’d developed … had become … frustrating. The students sat in little circles and discussed their finished work as if they already knew what they were doing. Their parents’ divorce, reassessing their sexuality—all that is fine material, though you get tired of it. The problems of rich white college students. Anything else, what did they know? Could they help a Nigerian student writing about her visit home? Could they help with a story about pirates, or asteroid explosions, or digital florescent number-change?”

  “What would you suggest?” I repeated, irritated in my turn. I am neither white nor rich, but he is, or was. And the last three subjects he mentioned held no charm for me. And the condescending way he talked about his students, I wondered if the choice were privilege disguised as merit, or else privilege undisguised.