At some point in the second hour of watching with Alex, I noticed she had drifted off, and I surreptitiously checked the time on my phone. Half an hour or so later, I did it again, realizing only then that the gesture was absurd: I was looking away from a clock to a clock. I was a little embarrassed to realize how ingrained this habit of distraction was for me, but decided it revealed something important about the video that I’d forgotten it was telling me the time.
I’d heard The Clock described as the ultimate collapse of fictional time into real time, a work designed to obliterate the distance between art and life, fantasy and reality. But part of why I looked at my phone was because that distance hadn’t been collapsed for me at all; while the duration of a real minute and The Clock’s minute were mathematically indistinguishable, they were nevertheless minutes from different worlds. I watched time in The Clock, but wasn’t in it, or I was experiencing time as such, not just having experiences through it as a medium. As I made and unmade a variety of overlapping narratives out of its found footage, I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction. When I looked at my watch to see a unit of measure identical to the one displayed on the screen, I was indicating that a distance remained between art and the mundane. Everything will be as it is now—the room, the baby, the clothes, the minutes—just a little different.
Now I think it was while looking from The Clock to my cell phone and back again that I decided to write more fiction — something I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going to do — and over the next week I began to work on a story, outlining much of it in my notebook while sitting in the theater. The story would involve a series of transpositions: I would shift my medical problem to another part of the body; replace astereognosis with another disorder, displace Alex’s oral surgery. I would change names: Alex would become Liza, which she’d told me once had been her mother’s second choice; Alena would become Hannah; Sharon I’d change to Mary, Jon to Josh; Dr. Andrews to Dr. Roberts, etc. Instead of becoming a literary executor, and so confronting the tension between biological and textual mortality through that obligation, the protagonist — a version of myself; I’d call him “the author”—would be approached by a university about selling his papers. Just like the French writer in the story Bernard had recounted the night I met his daughter, “the author” would plan to fabricate his correspondence. That’s the prose I generated first, the kernel of the work, and I believed it was viable. I wrote:
The author would go back later and make sure he wasn’t overusing the signature words of the author he was imitating … He would reread the one or two matter-of-fact messages they had actually exchanged, look again at his Selected Letters.
All this was changing as the technology changed. If an author left no electronic archive, so there was no record of what e-mails you might have sent to him or her, and if you did receive some e-mails from the author in question, and so possessed the relevant address, a plausible sense of when the message might have been sent, then you could write yourself from the backdated vantage of the dead, claim to have printed it out years ago.
Here’s a message from a novelist you did in fact meet, verifiably had dinner with around some Festschrift, recounting and expanding on the talk you never had about your novel, then in an embryonic stage. Here a critic responds at length to the input on an essay you never gave. Then the debates with poets over edits you might have suggested, leading some major writers to make some major statements.
It was not only the historical moment in which the technological transition made such forgery practicable, he reasoned, but it was also the moment in which, if one got caught, the crime could largely be described as gestural, falling somewhere between performance art and political protest. Especially if one donated whatever money the library paid to, say, the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street.
The story came quickly, almost alarmingly so — I had a draft finished within a month — and I sent it to my agent, who sent it to The New Yorker, which had expressed interest to her about my writing after the unexpected critical success of my first novel. To my surprise, they wanted it, but they also wanted a major cut: to get rid of the stuff about the fabricated correspondence, the section I considered the story’s core. The editors argued it overwhelmed what was otherwise an elegant meditation on art, time, mortality, and the strange nature of literary reception. But I wasn’t going to be one of those people, I insisted to myself, who lets The New Yorker standardize his work; I wasn’t going to make a cut whose primary motivation was, on some level, the story’s marketability. Although I’d felt a small frisson when The New Yorker had accepted it — my parents would be exceedingly proud of me — and although I wanted the approximately eight thousand dollars, I also relished the opportunity to turn The New Yorker down, to be able to tell the story of my story as evidence of my vanguard credibility. I wrote a hasty and, I later realized, typo-filled message to the magazine, cc’ing my agent, explaining that I was withdrawing the piece, that the change they were demanding — I would later realize they’d never even implied it was an ultimatum — violated the integrity of my writing.
I shared the story and this backstory with Natali during one of my visits to the hospital. While Bernard slept beside us, she read it and said simply: I think they’re right about the edit. I showed it to another writer friend and he agreed. Then I showed it to my parents, who thought I was crazy; what the editors were asking for was clearly an improvement.
Finally I showed it to Alex. Her reaction to the piece in which she figured was understandably complicated — Alex wanted to be left out of my fiction — but about the fabrication question, she had no doubt: the story was better without it. Since I’d stolen the wisdom tooth trouble from her life and put it in the story, she joked, maybe I should pay what insurance wouldn’t cover with money from the magazine, assuming they’d take me back. I saw the joke as an opportunity and I begged her to let me do just that: Then I can tell myself I’m apologizing to them to help a friend, I explained, not because I’m an idiot; besides, it’s a nice crossing of reality and fiction, which is what the story is about in the first place. She was quiet for a minute and then said, “No way,” but in a manner we both knew was just a moment in the dialectic of her yes.
The next day my agent helped me word my mea culpa, no doubt back-channeling with the editors about how all of this was new to me, that I was mainly a poet unused to being edited, that my apparent impertinence was the issue of inexperience, etc. The magazine was gracious and decided to run the revised story quickly — so quickly, in fact, that, a few weeks later, I could read it in the doctor’s office while I waited for Alex to emerge from her extractions.