To experiment, I spend two weeks in bed practicing stillness. I allow myself to move twice each day: twenty minutes in the morning to floss and stretch my knees; twenty minutes in the late afternoon for an exchange of fluids in the form of a trip to the bathroom and a low calorie, vitamin-fortified meal replacement shake. I prefer the chocolate or mocha flavors, but to deprive myself of pleasure, I only consume vanilla. I avoid sleeping and fight all involuntary muscular urges.
Typically, I’m the sort of woman you can’t help but notice tapping her pen or jiggling one leg as it crosses the opposite knee. Sometimes I can’t help myself. My usual movements do not base themselves in impatience or anxiety but emerge from some sort of biological mechanism that helps me stay thin—a genetic defense against my occasional lusty, late-night encounters with tiramisu.
One morning, a small vicious band of European starlings force a blue jay from its meticulously constructed winter nest. Their screeching victory song grates the air.
Contrary to my habits, I am very good at being still and even better at restricting my diet. I learn to deny my eyelids, the urge to swallow saliva, and the deepening of my breath when I feel short of air. My mind, however, meanders through ten thousand years of feminine subjugation, contemplating the countless women who continue to revolve their lives around self-denial, constraining their true desires, despite recent baby steps toward liberation. My short stint as a bra burner lingers only as mythological history as I force myself to stare at the orbed lamp hanging from my ceiling.
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My preparations end unexpectedly when my home telephone rings a rare, rude interruption. It’s my agent, so I know he wants something.
“What’s the story, morning glory?” I sing into the receiver with false mellifluence.
“I’ve got some big news. Are you sitting down?”
“Fully horizontal, my dear Jeffrey. Sock it to me.” Nearly two decades, and I still hate the man. I’ve always been a sucker for punctuality, though, and the greedy bastard hasn’t been late for a single moment of my career in seventeen years. Plus, ever since he lost his hair, I maintain his services as an act of pity.
“The marketing department’s test groups are apparently thrilled with your book, so they think it will be another big hit. The publisher is planning to print this one at high volume. A large promotion package is in the works.”
“Ah yes, those ex-fraternity boys specially bred to squeeze dimes out of their asses. So the marketing mucky-mucks, though thrice removed from its conception, would like to win big with it, maybe turn it into a special for the holidays. Well, good for them. Do I need to sign something to get the presses rolling?”
“Iris, you know what they want. Will you do it?”
“Shit, Jeffrey, I just don’t think I’ll be able to pencil it into my schedule this year. Can they send in my stunt double?”
“They only want you to appear in thirty cities and do telephone interviews with ten more locations, including NPR. And Vancouver’s on the list—I know you love Vancouver.”
“What’s the point of going if there’s no time for a jaunt in Gastown? Oh, I’m so over the book, Jeff. I think I’ll just make things worse for their sales. Please don’t make me do it.” I roll onto my side and look out the window. Some mangy orange and white stray cat, leaving delicate prints in the snow, moves slowly and deliberately toward one of the starlings. I’m awestruck by the anatomical control it possesses.
“Iris, are you still there?”
“Oh, hello Jeffrey, I was just thinking about dinner. Anyway, dear, it’s been wonderful talking to you, and I wish you the best of luck and all that jazz. Call me when you get a life. Ciao!”
“I’ll see what I can talk them into, all right? You really should get out of the house more often, Iris. Expect a call from me tomorrow afternoon before three o’clock.”
Beyond the glass, I watch the pounce and flutter, the disappointed stray shaking snow from its whiskers.
The next day I agree to a three week, twenty-five city tour—five abroad in other English-speaking nations, all by telephone. I will not leave my house. The publisher will wait for quarterly results before translation into different languages begins. Jeffrey drops by on a Tuesday, with a miniscule cellular phone from the publisher.
I appreciate avoiding the bitter wind and eschewal from deadly wing-deicing accidents at some unidentified Midwestern airport, but I am still irritated by the interruption of my research, even for the smallest parcel of time. I need to be ready for what’s coming.
And it’s such a godforsaken nuisance, all the nonsense they put me through to increase their profits. The completion of a work of art always comes to me like a death, sometimes slow and painful, other times sudden and violent. When I finish a novel, I always mourn. As my creation takes life in the world of others, my pain extinguishes. The book publishers are like morticians, their editors like coroners performing autopsies or surgeons picking the best bits for organ donation, embalming my books with elaborate title designs and acid-free papers. Once they finish, the eerie taxidermal version of my work lacks all soul and I feel nothing for it.
Worst of all, writers who widow really great novels remain tied to their corpus literattus almost indefinitely, sometimes their entire lives, in a funeral procession of readers who wish to resurrect a feeling which died long ago for the author who created it. Instead of bubbling casserole dishes of consolatory food, the writer receives comp tickets to tedious benefit dinners. Instead of life insurance payouts, we cash periodic, paltry royalty checks. It’s something in which I’ve never found comfort.
I always feel so dirty, daydreaming about new stories before release of an old one, but it inevitably happens. And I’m secretly relieved to have my closure.
One week into the terror, I take my first international interview: Oxford. I stay up until 1:30am, waiting for the expensive little hinge of plastic technology to ring, then I answer it—and my voice magically carries into space, bounces against a satellite, and whizzes into an uncharacteristically sunny morning in the United Kingdom. In the trans-Atlantic interview, an English journalist prods me on the issue of truth.
“You’ve been quoted as saying that ‘truth and language are opposites.’ So why do you write?”
“I never said that. I said that truth and language do not peacefully coexist. Like in bad journalism, for example. I think your misquotation makes my point eloquently.”
“What about you? What makes your writing exempt?”
“It’s not—again, language obstructing the truth. What I write, what I say, all these things pervert the truth. Only experience, first-hand and silent, can begin to approximate truth. I could never come close to that with writing, so that’s why I write fiction.”
“Many say you use your personal experiences for material in your books—that you write about yourself, about real people and real events. Is this true?”
“Of course.”
“Yet some of these real people, turned into fictional characters in your stories, object to their presence in your books. True?”
“There have been a few lawsuits.”
“Indeed, your career seems riddled with legal rows since your breakthrough novel Street Walker. You’ve been incarcerated and have paid several settlements. Why do you keep writing this way, posing the real world as fiction, if it keeps stirring up trouble?”
“Because elves and fairies are extinct. I write about what I’ve been through. All literature, in all forms, is eighty percent non-fiction and twenty percent fiction. Fiction necessarily contains a sturdy kernel of truth. My conscience, however, won’t allow me to print something that I know is one-fifth imaginary and treat it as historical fact. So I write fiction. I make things up and realize the story that my otherwise limited perspective would never actually know.”
“Do you consider yourself an existentialist writer?”
“An existentialist writer would never admit to being one. It’s an absurd question and if I said ‘yes’ I would be labeled for life and disappoint everyone when I grow old and sentimental, writing about a first pet or my mother.”
“Do your parents approve of your stories?”
“My parents are dead. And no. And I’m not my parents.”
“What are you working on right now?”
“Do you mean the story that I’m contractually obligated to promote on behalf of the publisher, the reason why I’m sitting here talking to you instead of sleeping, or do you mean what I’m working on right this moment?”
“Your latest book, Sleep Study, hits bookstore shelves tomorrow here in the UK, and chronicles the life of a character that develops insomnia from grieving for a deceased friend, but I’d love to know what’s immediately in the works.”
“A story about an interview gone awry.”
The conversation ends abruptly with a curt thank-you, followed by dead silence on the other end of the line. My attack is successful. I avert the next, inevitable question, the interrogatory standard that has so far graced all of my interviews about the novel: “Did you stop sleeping to prepare for Sleep Study?” Words—those slimy-fanged rumors—apparently spread through the media conglomerate. At each radio station, I sense anticipation in their voices, a vile eagerness to expose me, a forceful urge to marginalize and place my work in the center ring of their vulgar circus.
I could not explain to anyone that insomnia is painful stuff, easily germinated but nearly impossible to cultivate. Sleeplessness tangles its vines around your reality. Artificial light feeds the compulsion to search for something else in the dark, anything to do, to occupy the void, as the rest of humanity resolves internal conflicts through their dreams. I could neither justify nor rationalize about the substance of my novel through a brief cellular phone conversation with some vocally talented stranger. The godforsaken disc jockeys would have to read the book if they wanted to know more about the eyelid twitching or the blizzard vision or the smell of a bakery waking itself in autumn. I did not endure so much suffering for them, for an eleven second broadcast sound byte or one-hundred fifty word Associated Press snippet. I would not be reduced to a spectacle for those who do not honor literature, for those who live to butcher words, always cropping and cataloguing language.
I suppose I have always hated interviews. Decades ago, a writer could tour the country signing books in tiny, shining stores and hear ignorant but honest reactions. In those days, youthful arrogance kept me from appreciating the value of such an experience. I demanded exotic destinations, packed auditoriums in prestigious universities. Now I cringe at the thought of returning to such places. The new world order of corporate force, however, finds a technological compromise. Publishers shove introverted authors into pre-dawn radio interviews with vapid shock jocks who rarely bother to read the dust cover, much less the press kit or the bio, or, heaven forbid, the book. And the names of the little independent bookstores, hand-painted on single pane windows, slowly fade, crack and peel, disappearing with the corrosive march of time.
I finish my last interview sitting at a picnic table in a neighborhood park, watching early morning ice crystals warm and drip from the arthritic branches of an ash tree.
I start taking pills. I buy them from this twenty-something manager of a home décor store—one of those massive box franchises bursting with sentient bathroom scales and Teflon-coated garlic presses. He’s a loosely dressed Jewish boy with translucent skin and raccoon eyes who dabbles in drug-dealing on the side, as best I can tell, to fund his own habits. During the summer, I frequent a friendly pedestrian café downtown to scrawl nonsense in the late afternoon sun. The young fellow shares my affection for the establishment and its oysters at happy hour, often pulling himself from a stupor to ask me about my writing. I feel flattered by his interest and decided long ago that his devious resources might be useful for my work.
Three days after I finish the interviews, on a blustery Friday near dusk, I find him in a booth away from the window, cradling a high-ball glass of gin. I do not reintroduce myself. I do not ask his name. I sit down across from him and make eye contact; his eyebrows raise and tug the corners of his mouth into an understanding smile.
To start, he offers me tiny blue elliptical tablets, each etched with a curvaceous L on one side and the number 50 on the other. They push me into dreamless sleep. I often wake with violent stomach heaves. I start seeing him weekly. He rarely has the same supply, so I choose my purchases by whims of color and size alone or by the expression on his face as I point to each different pill. The wider his grin, the more I decide to buy.
On lucid mornings, I scribble ideas for my protagonist on a yellow tablet of paper. A woman, early thirties. Predictable, familiar, perhaps, but I must rule out the option of a male character. The logic of the premise would be lost in the masculine paradigm—my mother always said that all martyrs are women, even Jesus.
I fill in the woman’s features, line after line. Her hair acquires the color and faint smell of toasted almonds, her lips ripen like a freshly cut fig.
She will be an actress, a slowly warming star in search of her supernova role. Vanity drives her toward something that will inflate her image beyond the confines of the television screen and onto a theater wall. To prepare for her audition as a comatose patient in a major film, she will put herself into a real coma to ‘get into the role.’ Naturally, to fully understand the depth of her experience while captive in the land of Catatonia, I will need to do the same.
Do films even exist on celluloid anymore, or are they now all binary-coded products of twenty-first century technology? I will need to do much, much more research. My last experience with acting was nearly thirty years ago, in a junior high production of Fiddler on the Roof. The lead in this story will need to be someone sharply different than that nervous girl hiding within the chorus of my memory.
On the first Saturday of January, I call the dealer again, determined to find the ideal drug to safely induce a coma. He delivers a bundle to me the next evening and departs in a waiting taxi cab. I try one of the new pills, clear gelatin capsules filled with a powder colored like crushed eggshells; they make my teeth clench and my fingers cramp within fifteen minutes of ingestion. Writing becomes futile. I tremble the cap back onto my pen, and lay on the thick wool rug of my library. Cobwebs cloud the corners of my ceiling, and I marvel at them. Have I ever noticed those before? When did I last look up, for anything at all?
I love my body so much right now. Could I really go through with this? The electronic doctor says I have a 95% chance of coming out free from harm, but if I stay under for more than three weeks, I will promote myself to the status of the rarely reversed ‘permanent vegetative state.’ And if I do wake up, I’ll likely have brain damage, or at least qualify for one of those late-night evangelical miracle specials on television. Jesus, I just don’t want to die. I must have my sense of smell back. I want to see these cobwebs again and breathe deep air and rub my fingers through my hair and drink water. God, I’m so thirsty, I’m so thirsty. I wish I could move—what will I do when I’m stuck in a coma and thirsty? Will I gag involuntarily until a nurse gives me water? Or will I be hooked into machines via a vicious cobweb of tubes for feeding and drinking? My thirst, my thirst, will I ever feel water again? Will I feel anything at all? Will I be nothing more than an imprisoned soul, held hostage in a corpse that still manages to hold a heartbeat? Will I exist in the unconscious or the subconscious or some heretofore undiscovered consciousness and will I instantly recognize the difference? Will I be able to communicate with other coma patients? Or will I be able to dictate to the outside world by blinking my left eyelid like a Bauby butterfly, so heavily while my teeth are grinding this thirst from my tongue, wrenching my fingers with love freely across my chest. Why do I feel so lonely these days? I should go dancing when I get up off this floor and stop to love the cobwebs that cloud the corners of my vision stirring blurry dust bunnies from beneath the divan. My God, I’ve never looked beneath my furniture before, there is so much to see and love. It seems so thirsty of me to not mop here more often but I may not get another chance if don’t recover from this silly little actress who should be a method actor, if that is the politically thirsty term for both genders these days. She must vegetate to break free from the cobwebbed little screens onto celluloid digital pictures, thirty feet wide and luminous, with dust specks catching light between my heavy left eyelid and the corners of my ceiling.
I lay silent, panting, eyes closed.
I awake the following afternoon on the floor, spooning my divan, huddling for warmth. I rise with a tarnished sense of the preceding evening, a shameful aching feeling reminiscent of mornings after my most uninhibited romps in college.
On my kitchen counter I notice the small, clear sandwich baggie and its encapsulated contents. My hands empty the pills into the sink, turn on the cold water, and flip the switch of my garbage disposal. My stomach parrots the hollow, gurgling groan in the plumbing. I feel the swollen surface of my belly and press hard into the empty cavity I have created in the last two months. I decide to eat as soon as my vision clears.
I’ll admit it—I am prone to culinary binges. We are all driven by an internal inclination to feast, to celebrate with hedonistic gorging. If I can fill myself with so much substance and continue to contain it, I must surely exist. If I can confirm my existence, I can justify my actions. If I can justify my actions, I can be happy.
Inside my refrigerator I notice the label on one of the diet drinks: “Treat yourself to a cool, rich, creamy vanilla sensation!” I ponder the difference between sensation and the genuine article then swing the fridge door shut.
A small heart-shaped refrigerator magnet reads, “Get to the Heart of the Matter with Thorpe Heating and Cooling. 720-363-6186.”
Hunger pushes me back upstairs and I begin the process of bundling up for a walk to the store. It always takes so damn long to dress in January, piling artificial skins over my own for warmth. I scratch the tops of my thighs after stretching into thermal tights. Corduroy jeans, wool sweater, facial foundation and blush, suede gloves, cashmere scarf. My old friends, fellow second wave feminists, would scoff at my need for makeup on such a mundane outing but I cannot shake the habit. I cannot face the public without a mask. I complete the lengthy ritual with the hardiest footwear I own—a pair of vinyl knee-high boots with sensible heels.
The market isn’t the culturally prismatic bodega near my old loft in Brooklyn, but I can make it there on foot, which I consider a triumph in this suburban outer orbit in which I now live.
Mounds of snow loiter in the parking lot of the grocery store like filthy, homeless polar bears. I spend a few moments standing on the sidewalk, dumbfounded by the dialectic between the blank white iconography of winter and the gritty, tarred reality of an urban snowstorm. The surface appears crystalline and perfect, but inevitably the heavy machines of modern civilization strip the top layer. As snow-covered streets and well-traveled pedestrian paths are cleared, the grime sticks to the underbelly of these otherwise pristine moments. During warm spells I never notice the dirt and the trash.
The laws of physics conspire against me and I slip on the icy concrete of the sidewalk. Sitting for a moment, I relish the cold sting on my left hip and scan for witnesses of my clumsy display. A handful of mottled brown pigeons huddle together beneath a rusting metal dumpster. Behind me, I feel some sort of switch, or perhaps a fishing pole, swat me lightly on the ass.
“Oh, sorry, excuse me. I didn’t see you there.” The largest blind man I’ve ever seen looms above, his walking stick still firmly against my rump. He silently extends his hand and I feel compelled to take it. He smiles. I balance myself tentatively and swat tiny bits of gravel from my clothing.
He looks at me, motionless, with two completely milky globes for eyes. I think he looks Samoan, or maybe American Indian with a glandular problem. An awkward, prolonged silence grows between us, until I realize he is waiting for me to move. I enjoy that I can stare at him without the usual bashful repercussions.
“My knight in shining armor, you couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Thank you for rescuing me from myself. Please, let me get out of your way.”
“No worries. Are you going to the store?” He motions in its direction with a tilt of his head.
“Oh, eventually I suppose. Of course, they say to never shop hungry and I’m practically starving. How about you, sir?”
“I only need milk and vitamins. What is your name? You can see the ice, and I can stand on it when I know where it is—maybe we could help each other out?”
I peer deeply into his pudgy face, looking for malicious intent but I only find several small shaving cuts near his chin. “I’m Iris, and yes, that would be most appreciated. But only if you tell me your name, of course.”
“Semo Oraserrata. You can call me Sam.”
He bends his left arm into a ninety degree angle and I reach beneath it and place my hand around his bicep. I point my finger in the optimal direction, but when he remains stationary, I opt for verbal commands. Slowly, we zig-zag around obstacles of the season. My face throbs from smiling; I feel giddy with adventure. At the cavernous entrance, I offer to stay with him inside and he quietly accepts.
We each swing a hand basket as we patrol the perimeter of the store. I watch him maneuver quite gracefully, considering his mass and impairment. He pauses in the produce department, just short of the giant glass doors which contain the store’s selection of milk products. I grab a meshed bag of tomatoes, an enormous English cucumber wrapped in cellophane, and a bag of mixed greens, while Sam stops to smell the bananas and avocados.
I cringe when he chooses a carton of milk and naturally disregards the expiration date and fat content. I place a small tub of part-skim cottage cheese in my own basket, and we shuffle along past the refrigerated fruit juices and the bakery, turning into an aisle of little bottles, all lined up like soldiers of good health.
“Could you point me to the vitamin A, Iris? It’s good for your vision, you know.”
I lead him by the elbow to the appropriate legion of containers. “Do the vitamins make a difference? Do they really affect your eyesight?” I ask, masking my incredulity.
“Not yet. Other people buy lottery tickets, I buy vitamin A. It’s a tax on the terminally hopeful, I guess.” He scratches the tip of his nose. “But, you know, I read that vitamin A can be toxic if you take too much. The Inuit warned white explorers in the Arctic not to eat polar bear livers, I guess their livers are full of it, and a group of explorers didn’t listen and died. And I heard somewhere if you eat too many carrots, the vitamin A in them turns your skin orange like an Oompa Loompa.”
I grab a bottle, turn the label, and read the red-lettered warning. The words COMA and DEATH stand out prominently in the caution. I toss the bottle into my basket. How does he know the skin color of Willy Wonka’s indentured servants? How does he know orange at all? I pull another from the shelf and hand it to Sam. “Here you are. Are two-hundred fifty capsules enough, or should I try to lift one of those family-sized buckets on the bottom shelf for you?”
“This will do fine. The pills are only metaphors anyway.”
Sam and I wait in line for the cashier. Seventeen other registers are empty, unmanned and dark. I wonder when, exactly, do all of these queues fill up with employees? Christmas? Easter? What moment celebrating the life of Jesus Christ inspires that much consumption? A loose grape rolls against the moving conveyor belt, holding steady its position.
Sam goes first and pays with cash. He scrapes a fingernail along the circumference of each coin as he counts his change. I wonder how he knows the denominations of his paper money. He waits for me as the cashier works her spell-casting magic, waving my purchases rhythmically over glass and lasers. I pay with a credit card and try to remember the last time I held actual money.
“Have a good day, Ms. Bellows,” the cashier says, reading my name from the receipt.
Sam stays silent until we reach the exit, but his entire physical volume shakes with excitement. “Are you related to Saul Bellows? I know he lives here, and I’ve always wanted to meet him.” Sam looks, or should I say points his eyes, toward his toes.
“No dear, I have no relation to him other than profession. And I’m afraid his surname is singular—Bellow. And worst yet, he passed away last spring.”
“Oh, that’s too bad, I love the character Augie March.”
“Me too, Sam. In ways more than words can say.”
“Wait, but you are a writer, you said? Iris Bellows—you know, I think I know you! Are you that gimmick writer, the one who pretends to be certain people and then writes about herself?”
“Stop it, sugar. If you keep flattering me like this I’ll have to kick myself out.” My eyes swell with tears.
“I read one of your books. I remember your story about the blind priest. They always translate books about blind people into Braille, as if we only want to read about ourselves. I’m sure your other books were great, but of course I could only read the reviews. Did you really blindfold yourself for three months?”
“Absurdly, yes,” I choke and sniffle. “I can’t say I fared as well without sight as you, but I learned to get around.”
“I can’t wait to tell my wife that I went grocery shopping with a celebrity today! Do you live near here? May I walk you home, or at least back across the ice to where we met?”
I take his arm again and we teeter across the glistening asphalt, this time ballasted by grocery bags in our loose hands. I did not know before today that the blind could read my stories at all or that in their visually impaired world I am heralded as little more than a stunt artist. And I can’t believe he’s married. Are there blind dating services? I can’t even remember my last date, much less entertaining the prospect of marrying again.
I cannot decide if I should weep on his shoulder or beat my fists on his chest in a rage of jealousy.
“Can I ask you a question?” Sam’s voice softens to a near whisper. “Why do you write stories the way you do?”
“I think I should experience something before I write about it, or at least engage myself in the reality of my story as best I can.”
“I can understand that. But can’t you just use your imagination? Don’t you want to experience your own life, instead of pretending to be someone else all the time? Is that reality at all?” His enormous face approximates a grimace.
“What am I supposed to do then, Sam? How should I tell my story?”
Across the street, the wind shakes the naked, upturned arms of an elm, shivering in the cold afternoon.
