C. returned to her E., went back for the first time. On her arrival, a restored citizen, she became an instant curio. She learned that she spoke a dialect frozen in time, steeped in expressions discarded a generation before. And she spoke this dead idiom with a Chicago accent, equated, by the townsfolk of E., with gangsters who had all been shot thirty years before C.'s parents learned their first textbook slang.
I tagged along in C.'s wake. And my first textbook sentence: Nederland is een klein land. A negligible land. A minuscule country that most people in America think lies somewhere in Scandinavia. Ruled the globe once, for two decades.
Adventure ended in further exile. I came back to the States and failed to recognize them. That klein land came back with me, infesting my insides like a medfly slipped past customs. Its national anthem, the most beautiful in the world, with its absurd last line, "I have always been loyal to the king of Spain," hurt me when I caught myself humming it. The thought of those yellow trains, timed to the quarter minute, ruined me for further travel. The sight of an orange soccer jersey still cut into me with a boy's Goliath-killing hope, more cruel because not my boyhood. Syrup waffles in an import store hit me now like a wooden shoe in the chest.
Dutch was a shrapnel wound. Like C., I was a different person with that stranger's vocabulary in my mouth. I hated the sound of those words now. I would have forgotten them if I could. But I still said them to myself, when I needed the safety of secret languages. Each syllable aged me. I could no longer say what the simplest word meant. I'd never be rid of them, whatever my next book succeeded in killing off.
But I wasn't about to give Dr. Lentz the pleasure of this narrative. I didn't much like his type: the empiricist who thought the world outside his three variables worth no more than brilliant condescension. I had met too many of his sort at Center functions. They always ended up by telling me to adopt a pen name. It would do wonders for my sales.
Lentz stood at the whiteboard, connecting the hollow boxes with deft switchboard cables. I cleared my throat. "The Netherlands is one of the two or three places on earth where Western civilization almost works."
"Christ. Give me credit for a little intelligence." He answered without a moment's thought, without even turning around. "If you insist on harping on the Dutch, why don't you do the story of a handful of earnest Moluccan separatists who, lied to and betrayed by their old colonial whore of a mother, hijack a passenger train from Amsterdam to—"
"Don't worry," I told him. "They're history. I'll never mention them in print again."
After that, we left each other alone. When I next saw Lentz by accident in the corridors outside an unavoidable Center obligation, he greeted me in round tones. "Little Marcel! How are the words treating you?"
"Don't call me that. It's not clever."
"Who's being clever?"
"It's self-conscious and patronizing."
Lentz pulled back and pursed his lips. He contemplated finishing me in one swipe. Instead, he did a rapid about-face. "I'm sorry. That wasn't my intention. You see, I'm a bit of a social maladroit. We all are, in this pursuit. Comes with the turf. It's all of a piece, really." He swept his hands around himself the way a magician waves handkerchiefs over the body of a sequined assistant he is about to saw in half. "The myopia, the dwarfhood, the aggression, the affected brusqueness, the scoliosis, the know-it-all mégalo—"
I'd noticed the kinked walk, but scoliosis never crossed my mind. He'd learned to mask it early. I was sorry I'd let him get under my skin. Even someone who has modeled the function of the inferior frontal gyrus might still be plagued by the monsters that gyrus modeled.
"Forget it," I said. "Everybody's a critic."
"I can imagine. Much to resent about your line of work. 'Nobody deserves to get away with life alive'?"
"That, and 'Write me the book I would have written.' " "Universal envy. You folks are king of the cats, aren't you?" "You're joking. Were, maybe. A hundred years ago. It's all movies and lit crit now."
"Well, my defrocked friend. What's it going to be?"
"I'm sorry? What's what going to…? Dr. Lentz, I admit it. I can't always follow you."
"Do come on. The open parenthesis! What would you like me to call you?"
"How should I know? What's wrong with my given name?"
"A bit lacking in imagination for someone in your racket, aren't you?"
I felt twice burned in as many outings. I knew who I was dealing with now, in any event. "I don't care. Call me whatever you please, Engineer."
A low blow, but my own. Philip Lentz smiled, warmly enough for me to see that half his bottom teeth were missing. The remainders had drifted together to cover up the absence. "Little Marcel, I'm not sure I like you." He was quoting again, some dialogue of mine I'd forgotten having written. I said what I had to, what I was already scripted to say. "The pleasure's mutual, Engineer."
Lentz's peace offering came the next week, in my mailbox. He left me a much-thumbed-through short-story collection. He'd affixed a stick-on to a Mishima piece called "Patriotism." In the story, a young husband and wife kill themselves in ravishing detail. The note said: "I hope you get as much pleasure out of this as I did." The signature read, "With sincere apologies, Engineer."
As I skimmed the astonishing transcript, I wondered if he was trashing me yet again. This piece was to be my how-to. A suicide manual for the honor-besmirched author.
Not that I needed any anthology piece to make me want to call it a day. My final revision on the wandering kids was all but done. I was just dragging my heels until New York's deadline. Although they had me under contract for one more book after this one, a well-timed Mishima on my part would have delighted New York and put me, however briefly, on what my editor referred to as the List.
On each of my previous three novelistic tries, some further premise had always presented itself by this point. What the close of the current book did not resolve spilled over into the next. Now, although I spent days doing nothing but listening, the silence at the other end sounded like one of those callers who hadn't the courtesy to tell you they'd dialed a wrong number before slamming down the receiver.
Contract aside, I wanted one more shot. My fourth was too bleak an interval to cadence on. The Blitz wasn't going to have the last word in my fiction, however realistic I wanted to learn how to be. I had one more novel coming to me. But all I could find was the first line.
I knew only that I wanted to write a send-off. My next book would have to start: "Picture a train heading south." The line felt ordained, as liberating as October azure. But I couldn't wrap myself around this opening and begin. I was stalled at departure, for the simple reason that I could do nothing with so perfect a lead sentence but compromise it by carrying it forward.
The words nagged at me, like a nursery refrain. I began to imagine it an unconscious allusion. It felt so unsponsored, I could not have invented it.
I searched the bandwidths, postponing further the hopes of a jump start. I did Boolean searches across incomprehensibly huge textbases. South, train, and picture, ANDed together, within a ten-word range of one another. I substituted every conceivable synonym for each term, verbal almosts piped in from hyperlinked thesauri. But if the world's infant digital nervous system knew anything about my mystery opening, it wasn't saying.
I wondered if my memory might not be going. Like a man who furiously scours the bathroom mirror for signs of recent hairline decampment, I'd test myself from one day to the next. I tried myself on the first lines of books I knew I'd read and those I thought I'd written.