“On the other hand, a novel is a marriage.” Bob hesitated. “It can consume and gut a lifetime.”
Malcolm McCarty agreed.
“No one is born a novelist. The deformations of the personality necessary to achieve the artist’s altitudes are not intuitive. The sacrifice and solitude. You must make yourself a fertile wilderness before you can be a breeding ground,” Bob clarified. His tone suggested confession.
“I see,” Malcolm tried.
Bob Lieberman laughed. He was on the edge of hysteria. “You can’t possibly understand,” he immediately replied. “You’re just an academic.”
“Right you are,” Malcolm agreed. Then he skidded off the road into a long shallow ditch, barely missing a frozen maple tree. Snow was up to his thighs as he examined the damage. The fender was bent nearly in half. It would have to be replaced.
Malcolm took two shovels from the trunk. He handed one to Bob and began digging.
Bob Lieberman leaned against his shovel and directed his words to the dark. “I know the moth kiss of the page that both denounces and saves. I’ve had a spiritual intercession. It’s remarkable, incalculable. I know what resides in the vast aubergine corridors of fall. That’s where our bridges and mirrors are, our biographies, diaries and footnotes. That’s where our real selves are, in the aubergine corridors where streetlights suffocate the night.”
Bob described his transformation while Malcolm dug the car out of the ditch. Artists cast shadows that have nothing to do with their bodies. Bob admitted he was merely an apprentice. When he’s an adept, levitation and spontaneous combustion will be unremarkable frequent occurrences. Artists are clairvoyant and instinctively know procedures for invisibility and seduction. One must avoid the debris of the ordinary to be purified by solitude. Bob’s neurons twisted as lines and paragraphs deposited themselves on the page like shells sea-swells swept onto sand. Channels beneath his flesh ignited. He was beginning to cast spells and translate languages he didn’t know. He was aware of the risks, the toxins and ancient fevers and plagues he exposed himself to. Artists accommodate lethal agents and come to crave them.
“We are the absolution we see,” Bob concluded. He handed Malcolm the shovel, sat back in the car, and let Malcolm drive him home.
Later, Malcolm drove Bob to an open mic night at Penn State. Bob claimed he was having an anxiety attack. He took two tranquilizers and changed his outfit several times in front of a mirror. He finally selected his stylish Barney’s black gabardine funeral suit, a black shirt and black tie.
It took five hours and the highway was closed, roads barricaded and wind brutal. They climbed stairs and walked the corridors of two buildings before finally locating the basement room. SNOWED OUT was taped to the door and the door was locked. Bob turned the handle anyway and threw his shoulder against it. Then he cursed for an hour.
Malcolm was forced to stop in Maple Corner’s. Two trucks had collided, several cars were involved, and the vehicles were surrounded by police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances with flashing red lights. It was an updated version of the protective circle wagon trains used. Paramedics passed with stretchers and gurneys.
Malcolm managed to maneuver to the shoulder and navigate into the parking lot of a closed coffee shop. They’d probably be there all night.
Bob was sullen and agitated. Malcolm wanted to turn on the radio but feared Bob would call it polluting noise and cause an argument. Then he noticed Bob was leaning against the car door, sleeping, his inaudible pages between his fingers.
The landscape reminded him of a black-on-black Rothko painting from the mid-60s. But it lacked the nuances and sense of luminous immanent tragedy. It didn’t even have the promise of suicide. Malcolm fell asleep, rehearsing his speech for in court when he sued Bob Lieberman for the twisted fender.
Malcolm slowly pedaled to the Lieberman house, leaned his bicycle against a side gate, and walked directly to the barn. He was resolved. He pounded his fist against the raw wood. Then he knocked again.
Bob Lieberman opened the door half an inch. A khaki wool blanket was draped across his shoulders, but he was, in fact, naked.
“Did I wake you?” Malcolm inquired, casually.
Bob Lieberman squinted in the sunlight, glanced behind Malcolm as if he expected more and worse, and edged back into the barn. He was furtive and already retreating. He resembled a small mammal — a harp seal or otter — sensing capture.
“I don’t sleep.” Bob was offended. Clearly, sleep was too trivial a state for an artist.
He motioned Malcolm into the barn with two stiff fingers. It was a reluctant invitation. Malcolm glanced at his living quarters. Bob had painted the barn wood black. The room was Spartan. Malcolm noticed a desk with a small lamp, his Smith Corona typewriter, and a metal folding chair. A sleeping bag was on the ground. Papers in the shape of fists and plates of decayed food were scattered randomly across the ground.
“I can’t talk now,” Bob said. “I’m working. Obviously, this novel should be written in Africa.”
“Making progress on the void?” he ventured, cheerfully. Bob’s novel was set in the void of a century that could be the past or future.
“There is no void. That’s the point of my novel. The void is festooned with orphans, runaways, and skeletons of drowned babies.” Bob was angry.
There was no obvious place to sit. Malcolm leaned against the barn wall and realized the barn wasn’t entirely empty. Photographs of goats, elephants and zebras were tacked to the wood walls. Bob had constructed a sort of altar with crates and burlap, and random objects were placed on the top — two oranges, glossy opera programs and a red hawk feather. Perhaps they were offerings.
His desk was cluttered with assorted items — a bud vase with a bouquet of calligraphy pens and sharpened pencils, a magnifying glass, sequins in a glass bottle and a crystal candy dish with fragments of debris that might be gravel or seashells. A cocktail glass was filled with erasers and paper clips and surrounded by dozens of thumb-sized bottles of white correction fluid and extra typewriter ribbons.
Reams of blank paper and a box of black and white magazine photographs were under the desk — children alongside railroads who looked abandoned, high-rise apartment buildings with balconies where sheets and T-shirts hung drying on ropes strung across an alley in a favela, and city plazas with cathedrals and pigeons on smooth gray stones seemed familiar.
The wall beside his sleeping bag was decorated with photographs of elephants and savannah sunsets. Bob had apparently attached squat candles to a pine branch and hammered it into the wall. A rusty iron cowbell, two marimbas, gourds and a tambourine were near his sleeping bag. Bob was still inhabiting his poet as shaman persona.
“Are you engaged in voodoo?” Malcolm decided to ask. “What are these objects?”
“Talismans. I’m a method writer. I told you, this book should be written in Tanzania. I’m compromising and it’s dangerous,” Bob said.
“Sure,” Malcolm replied. “It’s a slippery slope.”
Maybe the barn was an attempt to represent the pre-verbal Paleolithic cul-de-sac of Bob’s void. His faux escapement was designed to evoke a primitive era. Fire was a recent invention, and cave painting, glyphs, prayer and barter didn’t yet exist. There were no permanent myths, but only transitory seasonal entities with inconsistent affections and powers.
Bob’s protagonist was two-foot-high and clawed. Zubo, Master of Meteors, invented flight and wildfires. He carried an acetylene blowtorch, and rode on four-humped camels and the backs of disabled satellites and deserted space stations. His hobby was scorching cities. His consort, Zima, ruled rivers and inland seas, and derived pleasure from drowning children. She lured them and wrapped them in strands of red kelp. Strangled children washed up on shore, drained and weightless. At nightfall, the tribe gathered their dead daughters and sons and praised their generous gods.