On January 6, 2012, the federal welfare bosses abruptly demanded to see the Teodora manuscript. Even if unfinished, even if just a draft of the first draft, even if just notes. Longhand is fine, too, exclaimed a Miss Sally Hume on the phone from Washington, D.C., sharpening her “fiiiine” into a curare-poisoned arrow. A lachrymose letter from the über-spic Executive Director followed. He was terrified that Hume’s low opinion of me would tar all other Latinos [sic], including him. Like my mother, he yelped about my betrayal of him, thus shame to the race. That the honkie Hume was his subordinate only frightened him more.
I had no bone left to throw them. Cuntess Hume had specifically nixed any new progress reports of the kind I had masterly conjured for a decade. All payments were suspended. I was threatened with jail unless I returned the welfare money “in its entirety,” or sent Hume the Teodora book. After my phone, gas, and electricity were cut off, and all I had left to eat were camping stove-cooked oatmeal and elbow macaroni, I was forced to sit down and write the first sentence, about Teodora’s birth in a Laredo, Texas hacienda during a snowstorm. I was suspicious when my first writing day ended and I hadn’t gagged or fainted, then creepingly hopeful when a second and third day—then a week, two weeks, a month!—went by without major incident. I was cured, I thought. Vera, my fuckbuddy at the time, mistook my giddiness for cheating and had me followed by a matrimonial P. I. She confessed to me after wasting $500 she didn’t have. Thrilled with my cure, I postponed her punishment. I dumped her at the next New Year’s Eve party. Her lack of faith deserved maximum pain.
That summer, fleeing Hume’s nasty letters, I hid out in a pay-what-you-can arts camp in an obscure knuckle of the Finger Lakes. It was so obscure that it had escaped the locust-like destruction of the Great Hunger migration years, the Reconstruction’s pharaonic zeal and now the attention of bloodthirsty, marauding gangs. Forest, lake, cottages, workshops, barns, main refectory, even the premonitory helicoidal evergreen labyrinth in the middle of an Italianate garden, were exactly as left by the Utopian commune that flourished there in the 1860s. Their sepia pictures—bearded men fanning themselves with their hats, stocky matrons in white perpetually sewing, knitting, and embroidering, golden-haired children, laughing at the enchanted future—looked at us reproachfully from the refectory walls. Everything went swimmingly at first, both at my writing desk in the morning and during my afternoon walks, which were timed to watch the local twelve-year-old girls, mysterious in their final days before their carnality overflowed, play polo by the nearby McDonald’s.
One morning, as I was rewriting the section in chapter three in which young Teodora displays her fondness for Zebu cows, I discovered that I had left out all conjunctions. I checked everything that I had written so far, and found no conjunctions anywhere. Was it a computer glitch or… ? A shiver went down my spine, but I controlled myself. My equanimity was not grounded in character, but in my addiction to the little girls’ knees sweating against the ponies’ palpitating fur, which I was in danger of missing if I didn’t get a move on.
The next morning, after getting lost in the labyrinth and then, suddenly, finding my way out, I decided to insert all the missing conjunctions. I couldn’t. My hands shook, my fingers cramped, my eyes twitched, I was covered in cold sweat. I had to stop and lie down on my cottage’s rough oak floor planks, fearing the onset of epilepsy, Parkinson’s, or worse. That evening I tried again—my knees gave out and I fell to the ground, unable to move for several hours. At dawn I took the first armored milk truck back to the city. Lower Manhattan was a foul furnace teeming with rats even at noon. I was immediately sorry I had returned. Obviously, I had overreacted. At my corner’s public laundry, I traded with a beggar two potatoes stolen from the art camp kitchen for a used Chinese battery-powered fan. Sitting in front of it, all windows shut to keep noise and rats out, I resumed my writing, sans the conjunctions. I imagined Miss Hume inserting conjunctions late into the night after the rest of the office had gone home. By the end of the week, this image had evolved into a delectable fantasy featuring Hume, whom I had never seen, naked from the waist down on all fours (rear view), typing each of my lost conjunctions with one finger. It was a singularly gratifying week. On the Monday after, however, I found I was also leaving out all prepositions.
This time I noticed it immediately. Since the conjunctions discovery, I was on the alert. An attempt to put back the prepositions ended with profuse vomiting and a bout of sciatica. I lost adverbs next. All of them ending in “ly” were the first to go, followed by those ending just in “y.” Then all pronouns fled, except “it,” which I still have. I tried writing simple sentences in French, Spanish, and Elmira High School’s miserable Byzantine Greek, and there too I lost the ability to write conjunctions, then prepositions, then adverbs, and finally pronouns in those languages: each vanished simultaneously from the language loci in my brain. I had no trouble speaking, though. My lapses, or is it lacunae, were restricted to written language. An autopsy of my brain may hold some surprises for science, but the humanitarian whiff of brain donation led me to evade the Central Registry. Safe to say that not much brain matter is left in me now.
I abandoned the Teodora biography in the spring of 2014, thirteen years after I had officially taken up the project. Writing, always repulsive, had become such a ruinous business that no welfare handout or jail threat could put it in the black. My indecent Hume fantasies notwithstanding, I had to hire two dimwitted female NYU graduate students (a quadruple redundancy) to stick in what I left out. Every Friday night, I paid them in speed mixed with pink toilet-scouring powder. In exchange, they took my dictation of the missing words. Oh, they were efficient and vapidly deferential. They saw a spic lady who could be their mother and had no idea what I could do to them in my mind if I wanted to, which I didn’t. I had to tolerate their clean, perky, blond and brunette presences in my midgetty, candlelit one-bedroom. One did have a way of slanting her eyes and touching her cheek with the fingers of her right hand that always gave me pause, but it was a prelude to nothing: an invisible windshield wiper would quickly wipe from her face any fleeting promise of lust. I had to lie to Perky and Clean: I told them that I was writing in a shorthand of my invention. Although obfuscation and delusion are second nature to me, outright lying is an intolerable strain, second only to writing. I disliked P. & C. for making me lie, and, aware that my dislike was unfair and irrational, I disliked them even more. In the end, I had to let them go because I was starving. I needed hard cash for my speed, not lost words. I tried to put back the diabolical conjunctions myself—prepositions, adverbs, and pronouns, one at a time, sitting in my own feces and vomit—but the effort must have broken my last intact synapses: one sunny Sunday morning, after an early spring snowstorm, I lost verbs, and, at dusk, I was unable to write nouns. I had sunk to the bottom of the swamp.