“What do you mean?”
“Well, your first book was unconventional but really well received. What they’re buying when they buy the proposal is in part the idea that your next book is going to be a little more … mainstream. I’m not saying they’ll reject what you submit, although that’s always possible; I’m saying it may have been easier to auction the idea of your next book than whatever you actually draft.”
I loved this idea: my virtual novel was worth more than my actual novel. But if they rejected it, I’d have to give the money back. And yet I planned to spend my advance in advance.
“Also, you have to remember an auction has its own momentum.”
This I understood, or at least recognized, from experience: most desire was imitative desire. If one university wanted to buy your papers, another university would want to buy them, too — consensus emerges regarding your importance. Competition produces its own object of desire; that’s why it makes sense to speak of a “competitive spirit,” a creative deity.
With my chopsticks I lifted and dipped the third and final baby octopus and tried to think as I chewed of a synonym for “tender.” Imitative desire for my virtual novel was going to fund artificial insemination and its associated costs. My actual novel everyone would thrash. After my agent’s percentage and taxes (including New York City taxes, she had reminded me), I would clear something like two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. Or Fifty-four IUIs. Or around four Hummer H2 SUVs. Or the two first editions on the market of Leaves of Grass. Or about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held. I swallowed and the majesty and murderous stupidity of it was all about me, coursing through me: the rhythm of artisanal Portuguese octopus fisheries coordinated with the rhythm of laborers’ migration and the rise and fall of art commodities and tradable futures in the dark galleries outside the restaurant and the mercury and radiation levels of the sashimi and the chests of the beautiful people in the restaurant — coordinated, or so it appeared, by money. One big joke cycle. One big totaled prosody.
“Of course, as we talked about, there are risks to taking a big advance — because if the book doesn’t sell at all, nobody’s going to want to work with you again.”
A quiet set of couples left the table beside us and almost instantly a loud set of couples took their place; the men, both around my age, both dressed in dark suits, both in great shape, were talking about a friend or colleague in common, mocking him for drunkenly spilling red wine on a priceless couch or rug; the women, eyes lined with shadow, were passing a cell phone back and forth, admiring a picture of something. I was confident my book wouldn’t sell.
“Just remember this is your opportunity to reach a much wider audience. You have to decide who you want your audience to be, who you think it is,” my agent said, and what I heard was: “Develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces, even those at the next table; make sure the protagonist undergoes a dramatic transformation.” What if only his aorta undergoes change, I wondered. Or his neoplasm. What if everything at the end of the book is the same, only a little different?
The sake-based cocktails were making the adjacent quartet increasingly garrulous. Investment bankers or market analysts in their twenties, whose proximity was particularly unwelcome since I was crossing my art with money more explicitly than ever, trading on my future. The first draft was due in a year.
“I think of my audience as a second person plural on the perennial verge of existence,” I wanted to say. A waiter shook the bottle to mix the sediment and turn the sake white.
“They need a highly liquid strategy,” someone at the adjacent table said.
“What happens if I give them a totally different book than the one described in the proposal?” I asked. Small plates of miso-glazed black cod were put before us. Someone refilled my glass.
“Depends. If they like it, fine. But you need to keep the New Yorker story in there, I think.”
“I can’t see my audience because of the tungsten lights.” I emptied my glass.
“Do you have other ideas?”
“They got married on Turtle Island. Fiji. Karen said she saw Jay-Z on the beach.”
“A beautiful young half-Lebanese conceptual artist and sexual athlete committed to radical Arab politics is told by her mother, who is dying of breast cancer, that she’s been lied to about her paternity: her real father turns out to be a conservative professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. Or New Paltz. Wanting her own child, she selects a Lebanese sperm donor in an effort to project into the future the past she never had.” I shook my head no. Swift, Spanish-speaking laborers took away the plates. “Or maybe something more sci-fi: an author changes into an octopus. He travels back and forth in time. On a decommissioned train.”
She excused herself to go to the bathroom and the next small blue bottle was on the table so quickly it seemed to precede my signaling to the waitress, my ordering it. I shut my eyes for a long moment. “Perfume and youth course through me, and I am their wake.” The noise was deafening now that I wasn’t talking or listening to anyone in particular. I tasted hints of pear, then peach. For a second all I heard was the desperation, the hysterical energy of passengers on a doomed liner. The rise and fall. The laughter of Mrs. Meacham’s class. My parents were dead, but I could get back to them in time. Seventy-three seconds into takeoff, my aorta dissected, producing high cirrus clouds, sign of an imminent tropical depression.
“That market’s completely underwater. Probably forever.”
I looked at my phone. “Your presence is requested at the Institute for Totaled Art,” Alena had texted.
Dessert was a yuzu frozen soufflé with poached plums. Money was a kind of poetry. The glasses of sweet wine were on the house. I was drunk enough now to down the remaining sake instead of setting it aside. The ink contains a substance that dulls the sense of smell, making the octopus more difficult to track.
“How exactly will you expand the story?” she asked, far look in her eyes because she was calculating tip.