Bill spoke into his plate.
"Did I say how much I like this lamb?"
"Then eat it," Scott said.
"You're not eating it," Karen said.
"I thought I was supposed to look at it. You mean actually eat. As in the dictionary definition."
The dining room was small, with unmatched chairs around an oblong table, and there was a fire going in the old brick chimney corner.
"Do you want me to cut it for you?" Karen said.
Scott was still looking at Brita.
"If it's believers you want, Karen is your person. Unconditional belief. The messiah is here on earth."
Karen reached across the table and cut Bill's lamb into neat pieces for him.
"I was telling Scott," she said. "What was I saying?"
"They have a security detail trained in babies," Scott said. "A nationwide chain of baby-proof hotels."
"I was saying about this official orange sign of the state."
Brita gave a delayed laugh, scanning the table for cigarettes.
"I believe in the God of the stumblebum," Bill said. "The waitress with a throbbing tooth."
Scott laughed because Brita was laughing.
He cut some bread.
He said, "The book is finished but will remain in typescript. Then Brita's photos appear in a prominent place. Timed just right. We don't need the book. We have the author."
"I am in pain," Brita said. "Pour more wine."
She laughed, turning in her chair to scan the room for cigarettes.
Scott laughed.
Bill looked at his food, seeming to know it was changed somehow.
"Or maybe not a prominent place," Scott said. "Maybe a little journal in the corn belt."
"No, no, no, no," Karen said. "Let's imagine Bill on TV. He is on the sofa talking."
"We have the pictures, let's use them to advantage. The book disappears into the image of the writer."
"No, wait, he is sitting in a chair facing a host in a chair, leaning real close, a bespectacled host with his chin in his fist."
"Did you actually see the baby?" Brita said.
Scott laughed and this made Brita laugh.
Bill said, "Our theme is four. Earth, air, fire and water."
"What's the Day of Blood?" Karen said. "Not that I couldn't easily guess."
Scott didn't take his eyes off Brita.
"Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force."
"He told me, more or less."
"The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings."
Karen watched Bill touch his fork to a piece of meat.
He said, "I know the road sign you mean. The one for the deaf child."
"And it's not homemade. It's official orange and black and they put it there for one child who can't hear a car or truck bearing down on her. When I saw that I thought DEAF CHILD. I thought the state that erects a sign for one child can't be so awful and unfeeling."
"Yes, it's a nice sign. It's nice to think about a child with her own sign. But this wholly ridiculous contention I've been hearing. Disappear the book. Define a principle. Do I have the words right? Are those the words?"
He lifted the bottle and held the glass in his lap and poured while talking.
"Keep the book. Hide the book. Make the writer the book. I totally fail."
"Why are you still writing if you know the book is finished and we all know the book is finished and we all know you're still writing? "
"Books are never finished."
"Plays are never finished. Books are finished."
"I'll tell you when a book is finished. When the writer keels over with a great big thump."
Karen said, "I'm enlivened by the road sign every time I see it."
"As many books as a writer has published, those are the books he keeps on writing plus the one in his typewriter. Old books haunt the blood."
Brita poured more wine.
"I'm driving, thank you," Scott said.
He drank.
Bill drank and coughed.
Brita waited for him to take out his cigarettes.
"You can't let the book be seen," Scott said. "It's all over if you do. The book is a grossity. We have to invent words to describe the corpulence, the top-heaviness, the lack of discernment, pace and energy."
"Kid thinks he owns my soul."
"He knows. It's a master collapse. It's a failure so deep it places suspicion on the great early work. People will look at the great early work in a new way, searching for signs of weakness and muddle."
"The book appears. I'm going to do it. Sooner than anyone thinks."
Scott was looking at Brita.
"He knows I'm right. He just hates it when we agree. His words in my mouth. It drives him crazy. But I'm only trying to secure his rightful place."
Bill was looking for something to knock over, a thing, a suitable object he might swat off the table and break into pieces.
"I think we need a pet in this household," Karen said.
Scott wiped bread crumbs off the edge of the table into his hand.
"I'm only saying what he deep down wants me to say."
Karen looked at Brita.
They changed seats and Karen sat close to Bill, pushing her chair against his.
"Now do we want a dog or a cat?" she said in someone else's voice.
Bill went for the butter dish, backhanding it across the table.
The lid hit Scott in the face.
This made Bill angrier and he tried to get up and start smashing in earnest.
"I don't think we want to do this," Karen said.
She kept him in the chair.
Scott held his left hand to his face. He still had bread crumbs in the other hand.
"Pets are famously therapeutic," he said.
"Nobody's hurt, so shut the fuck up."
"For the old, the lonely, the stark and the raving."
"Four out of four. Our theme is four."
Karen put her hand over Bill's eyes to keep him from seeing anything that might get him madder.
Brita said, "I want someone to tell me this is a rare occurrence."
A gesture, a look, almost anything might get Bill going uncontrollably.
Scott wiped his hands and face with a napkin and stood behind Brita's chair, taking her by the arm as she got up and leading her from the room.
Karen took her hands from Bill's eyes.
"People who love each other, it's the old dumb story, Bill, which we all know a thousand times over."
They sat at the table for some minutes.
Then Bill went upstairs to his workroom, where he closed the door and stood by the window in the dark.
Scott wanted Brita to see one last thing before they left. They went out the back door and walked a few yards to a low shed built into an angle of the house. She followed him in, hunched over, and he switched on a light and they stood just inside the door looking at the shelves and compartments Scott had built himself-all filled with photocopies of the final draft, carbons of earlier drafts, carbons of notes and fragments, letters from Bill's friends and acquaintances, more galleys, more reader mail in boxed and labeled files, more cardboard boxes stuffed with manuscripts and papers.
The shed was insulated and waterproofed. Brita stood bent and silent and looked at the thick binders filled with words and she thought of all the words on all the pages stacked and filed in other parts of the house and she wanted to get out of here, run down the dark road away from this killing work and the grimness of the lives behind it.