Louisa May might have been a lesbian or an intellectual. Her book Moods was a precursor to lava lamps. A known civil rights and women’s rights advocate, Louisa installed the first washroom in the Underground Railroad. She had a bout of bad luck and dropped a very expensive jar of jam. Some say her sisters never forgave her. While other women were out dancing and spending money in Europe, Louisa was blowing her parents’ noses.
Her overnight success with Little Women was a shock to the nation. She did cartwheels across a field. Her town was alarmed by the news. The grocer watched her stiffly, unable to make small talk. The librarian got teary-eyed whenever Louisa stopped by. Louisa wrote Little Men but it was less fun than she’d thought. Glumly, she swept her house.
The Boston Review quoted her as saying that she’d “fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” But this was before she met the town sheriff. The Sheriff was great. It was like running into a wall if you ran into his chest. He thought Louisa was really funny. She was used to living in a weird dream world, like Emily Dickinson and other ancient girl authors. Once, when she was drunk, Louisa told a Shaman that enlightenment “was bullshit.” And she was right.
Louisa wore a lot of layers. The Sheriff made her understand how sexy she was naked. She was used to being a tomboy and a shut-in. She didn’t realize she could be those things, but also a really sexy woman, and also an adventurer like Jo from Little Women. Louisa and the Sheriff went square dancing and didn’t care if they messed up. They hustled pool at the pub. Louisa still wrote stories, but the Sheriff was her main priority. And he still was a Sheriff, but a lot of the time he was just thinking about Louisa and what an original she was. All his friends thought he was insane, but once they spent time with Louisa they saw she was smart in a spontaneous, natural way, not just a facts way. And she wasn’t the normal kind of pretty, she was peculiar.
One day, Louisa was out in the fields with the Sheriff and he was showing her how to shoot a gun, but she was afraid to hold it. He said that Jo wouldn’t be afraid to hold a gun and he was right. Louisa laughed her melodious laugh, took the gun and held it. She smiled at the Sheriff because she had finally fallen in love. It was so much more amazing than she’d thought. She had never thought loving a man could outdo being friends with a bunch of eclectic eccentric women, but here she was, in the middle of it, happily proven wrong. The flies in the field chased each other. The sun watched them from behind mountains. Louisa sneezed and her fingers clenched the trigger and the Sheriff was shot in the heart! Down he went like a horse. She fell to his side, mortified, and he held her laughing. He told her he forgave her and he loved her, and she cried and cried and he laughed and he died.
It took Louisa her life to get over her only love. She devoted herself fully to her family and her writing. She wrote letters to women all over the country. Sometimes, she arranged food in a pleasing shape on a plate. Other times, she ate it from the pot. She kept pets and when each died, grimly got another. She sat. She waited. She thought. For years, she wrote an autobiography with flourishes and new additions. In this autobiography, she cared for a lamb named Noelle. She was in a silent movie. When she was finished, she didn’t want to stop working. She began the laborious task of typesetting the book. Long ago, she’d inherited a press and had never before printed from it. Using the old type and new ink, she laid out each page. She made only one copy. It took her half a year. Then she drove to town to get it bound. On the day her book was in its complete state, she read it cover to cover. It is extravagant to read a book all about oneself. Louisa felt vain and excited, and then she forgot about it.
Readers, I am that book. My cover is linen and worn. I am 143 pages in total. I am well over a hundred years old. I am positive I am worth a lot of money. Presently, I am squished between others in a rare books collection. I cannot understand spoken language, so the chatter of my collectors is as illuminating as a baby's babble. This could be any country. Nevertheless, I have arrived at some assumptions of this grand room. I sense carpeting. I believe there to be a loud, clinking (grandfather?) clock, for I can sense even intervals, and have no heartbeat to speak of.
I sit next to a first edition copy of The Great Gatsby, and it’s been sleeping since I got here. I have read that book fifty times since my arrival! I am an avid reader. Many books don’t care about reading. Hoards of books are incapable of reading even themselves.
I have read so many books. I'm wild about Nabokov. I admire Cheever. I am not a fan of Latin American fiction. I dislike Kerouac and the other deadbeats. Tolstoy I adore. Henry James, a genius. Early encyclopedias have implemented me with a foundation and overview of the world. Dictionaries have distilled scores of definitions and obscure usages. When there are no books of value to occupy me, I read myself. I know precisely every word.
There was a whole decade I got bored. I just sat there. I did not read. We might call what I did 'meditating,' but, readers, that would be dressing it up. I was surrounded by slick covers of paperback reprints. I had little inclination to be. Then one day, a reader spoke aloud to me. I cannot distinguish sound into words. To me, it was just a mumbling vibration, but I felt this reader was imploring of me. How I struggled to speak back! My binding made a crack, but that is all, my friends.
My life lacks movement, interaction, and event. But I do not expect these things of it. As a life, mine is vicarious, but I suspect most are. It is seldom a book is exposed to the outdoors. A book must study nature from other books and accept that it has been shelved in an artificial environment, and, likely, it will stay there.
More than anything, I desire to attend a symphony. A zoo would be amusing. I can summon little interest in sports contests, but a botanical garden would certainly be educational. I'm quite sure I have a unique perspective. I imagine I'd teach. I'd teach at the University, but summers I'd travel and paint. I'd keep my shape. Frankly, I do not crave a body. A face is intriguing, how it moves and learns, develops, displays, but the mouth has always seemed messy to me. Hair, I imagine to be a chore.
THE JON LENNIN XPERIENCE
Jason still read actual books. He was skeptical of internet stars. Someone’s cat would suddenly be famous, and Jason wouldn’t understand how. His cell phone was basic. His sister was into reality video games and it was all she talked about. She didn’t call them games, she called them Xperiences.
“I got to a funny part in ‘Dating Kanye,’” she told Jason. “I was tired and snuggling on him, and he asked me which I liked better, dinner or lunch? Well, I was exhausted and happy and I didn’t say anything, just snuggled, so he Tweeted the question and immediately got 400 responses!”
Jason liked old things. Baseball, newspapers, rock and roll. He liked going to the post office. For his birthday, his sister got him an unreleased Beatles Xperience and it stayed in his sock drawer, a computer chip in a ziplock bag. They lived together off her money. In high school, she had serendipitously created the popular phone app Fun Face.
After Fun Face was sold, they moved away from their parents and for two years tried different cities until settling in a lonely loft space in Brooklyn that Jason thought was ruining his life. He took history classes at the New School and played chess in the park against men he was afraid of. His sister ran around museums and had boyfriends and practiced her lousy pool game in bars. After ‘Fun Face,’ no one could tell her what to do. She could buy herself into anything.