some equilibrium between writing and living

I 

They’re sitting together on the couch watching some epic tragedy about obsession and discovery on Lifetime when he suddenly gets that queasy feeling in his stomach and excuses himself. “Going to bed,” he says. “Tired.”

 

“It’s only seven o’clock,” she says. 

“Mm, I know.” 

II

He drinks some gin, walks outside, smokes a cigarette, stares at the sky, and tries to remember one thing he learned about stars from science class, but can only recall something about them being big balls of plasma. 

Then, feeling a chill near his shoulder blades, he goes into his bedroom, sits down at the old portable manual typewriter, writes about autumn roses and winter twilights as metaphors for the blocks and impasses that sometimes impair his life, becomes impatient with its lack of intrinsic drama, rips the paper from the typewriter carriage, and tosses it over his shoulder.

III 

Looking out into the heavy night, he drinks more gin, smokes another cigarette, mutters, “What’s wrong with me,” and wonders when he will give up this pretentious role of asking the immortal questions. 

And then this memory: Living in New York in a basement room. Sitting naked in a broken armchair, drinking straight Scotch, unable to sleep, reading something by Robert Penn Warren. 

“When you get born, your father and mother lose something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back, but they will get as big of a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is like diving into the octopus at the aquarium.”

Going home that weekend, his father, soaked in bourbon and weepy from some deep sorrow, admits that he was in an accident and begged his mother to abort him. 

IV 

After threading another sheet of paper into the typewriter’s carriage, he types, “There’s a chill of solitude in the air,” and shivers. Have I lost the art of being alone? 

V 

He wakes the following morning and wanders into the kitchen, makes a pot of coffee, sits in the breakfast nook, and reads the headline above the fold in the newspaper. Complicated, Opaque, Contradictory and Subtle Man 

Awakes LIMBO (AP) The outlook was uncertain today as he awoke to find the content of his life story had neither arc nor theme, no narrative trajectory, and no central idea. 

VI 

“You were up late,” she says, joining him. 

“Mmm…” 

“Get a lot done?”

He waits before answering. “Never that far away from a Pulitzer,” he says, pouring another cup of coffee. And never that far away from going too deeply inside my mind, he thinks. God knows there’s a lot of room there.