96.
Pfefferkorn got to work.
It wasn’t easy. To begin with, he really was a lousy poet. He’d given up on the form sometime in high school. Moreover, the structure of Vassily Nabochka was extraordinarily demanding. Each canto was ninety-nine lines long, broken into nine stanzas of eleven lines of trochaic hendecameter apiece, adhering to a rhyme scheme of ABACADACABA, with triple internal rhymes on lines one, two, five, seven, ten, and eleven. What made the Zlabian language so tricky to master was its use of gendered, neuter, and hermaphroditic forms as well as a system of declension that had been mutating continuously since the days of Zthanizlabh of Thzazhkst. Add in several thousand textual variants, and a state of affairs resulted whereby a seemingly simple sentence—“Verily he loved him, for he was his beloved since days of yore”—could also be rendered “Verily she did love him, for she was his lover since long ago,” “Verily they did love each other, for he was his uncle since many a time,” or “Not necessarily false was her love for it, for he had not fondled it since Tuesday.” Pfefferkorn could all too easily see how this sort of muddiness would give rise to violence. It also accounted for the poem’s sustained popularity, for Vassily Nabochka possessed a quality essential to great literature, one that ensured it could be read by every successive generation and appreciated anew: it was meaningless.
Another major obstacle he faced was that Zhulk kept turning up to chat. Once or twice a day, as Pfefferkorn was getting ready to take another failed run at the thing, he would hear bony knuckles touching the bars. The prime minister wanted to know: was Pfefferkorn comfortable? Did he require more paper, more pens, more books? Was there something else, Zhulk asked, he or his wife could do to ease the maestro’s toil? These questions were but a prelude to the interrogation that inevitably followed, for Zhulk was unduly obsessed with Pfefferkorn’s creative process. When did the maestro like to write? Early in the morning? Late at night? After a large meal? A small meal? No meal at all? What about beverages? What role did carbonation play? Did he get his best ideas standing, sitting, or lying down? Was writing like pushing a boulder? Rowing a boat? Climbing a ladder? Netting a butterfly?
All of the above, Pfefferkorn said.
There was only so much poetry he could produce per day. The rest of the time he was profoundly bored. Other than Zhulk, he saw only Zhulk’s wife, and she resisted all his attempts at conversation. Mostly he was alone. The fluorescent tube never shut off. The lack of sunlight was disorienting. It warped his sense of time and made him drowsy. He dozed. He did push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and squats. He jogged in place, the chain rattling noisily against the floor. He projected maps of the world onto the cracks in the ceiling. He used the finest West Zlabian leakproof pens, all of them hemorrhaging ink, to play the cell bars like a xylophone. He marked off the days on his venereal disease calendar. The clap was rapidly approaching. He pressed his ears to the wall, hoping to catch a hint of the outside world. The temperature in the cell led him to conclude that he was far underground. He imagined what the rest of the prison looked like. He envisioned rows and rows of press-ganged authors, all of them laboring to complete the poem. There have been others like you. None of them have survived. It was like the world’s worst writers’ retreat.
On the seventh day of his captivity Pfefferkorn looked up from his desk to find Zhulk standing outside the cell, rocking back and forth on his heels. His hands were clasped behind his back. He started to speak, decided against it, and without further ado hurled a ball of paper through the bars. It bounced and landed at Pfefferkorn’s feet.
Pfefferkorn uncrumpled four handwritten pages, covered in crabbed script and marred by strike-throughs and carets. He looked at Zhulk uneasily.
Zhulk bowed. “Sir, you are the first to read it.”
Pfefferkorn read Zhulk’s own take on the final canto of Vassily Nabochka. In it, the king died before the antidote got to him, and a grief-stricken Prince Vassily repudiated the throne, deeding the royal lands over to the people and going to live as a commoner, tilling the fields and herding goats, finding redemption in manual labor before dying peacefully beneath a runty tree in the meadows of West Zlabia. It was the worst kind of agitprop: heavy-handed, impatient, and artless. The turns were improbable, the imagery fuzzy, and the characters reductive.
“Wonderful,” Pfefferkorn said in his writing-workshop voice.
Zhulk frowned. “It cannot be.”
“It is. Frankly, I don’t know why you need me at all.”
“It is putrid, disgusting, an offense to eye and ear alike. Please, you must say so.”
“It’s not, it’s very . . . evocative.”
Zhulk threw himself to his knees. He began to keen and pull at his hair.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Pfefferkorn said.
Zhulk moaned.
“I’m not saying it doesn’t stand to benefit from a little editing. But for a first draft—”
With a howl Zhulk sprang to his feet. He grabbed the bars and shook them like a madman. “It is bad,” he yelled, “and you must say it is bad.”
There was a silence.
“It’s . . . bad,” Pfefferkorn said.
“How bad.”
“. . . very.”
“Use adjectives.”
“. . . sickening?”
“Yes.”
“And, and—and juvenile.”
“Yes . . .”
“It’s repetitive,” Pfefferkorn said. “Pointless.”
“Yes, yes . . .”
“Trite, bland, rambling, overwritten. Poor in conception, worse in execution, just bad, bad, bad. Its only virtue,” Pfefferkorn said, finding his groove, “is that it’s short.”
Zhulk honked pleasurably.
“The person who wrote this ending,” Pfefferkorn said, “deserves to be punished.”
“How.”
“How should he be pu—eh, well—”
“Spare nothing.”
“He should, uh—beaten?”
“Oh yes.”
“And—shamed.”
“Yes.”
“He should . . . be forced to wear a bell around his neck so people can know he’s coming and run away.”
“Truly, he should,” Zhulk said. “Truly, his is a dead soul, and the ending reflects that.”
“You said it,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Yes, maestro. But tell me: if the ending seems bad now, how much worse will it seem when the maestro’s ending is revealed? And how much more glorious will the maestro’s ending be? Speak, maestro: how glorious will the ending be?”
There was a silence.
“Pretty darn glorious, I guess,” Pfefferkorn said.
Zhulk stood back, starry-eyed. “The suspense is killing me, the individual.”
Pfefferkorn did not share his patron’s optimism. Ninety-nine lines in twenty-two days equaled four and a half lines per day. By day eleven, the halfway point, he was still stuck on line nine. He knew exactly what was happening to him. He’d gone through it before, only this time there would be no salvation. He was at the mercy of a villain crueler than any Dick Stapp or Harry Shagreen had ever faced: crushing self-doubt. And he was beginning to understand the word “deadline” in a whole new way.
97.
Late at night, unable to sleep, Pfefferkorn wrote unsendable letters.
He wrote to Bill. He described his earliest memories of their friendship. He remembered their eighth-grade teacher, Ms. Flatt, who everyone had a crush on. He remembered taking the wheel of Bill’s Camaro, only to get pulled over for speeding. He had counted off the officer’s steps in the sideview mirror while Bill fumbled with the glove box, trying to hide an open can of beer. After the cop had ticketed them and sped off they heard dripping. The glove box was leaking into the footwell. He couldn’t believe what they’d gotten away with. Could Bill? Times were simpler then, weren’t they? Weren’t they. He asked if Bill had ever read any of the books he had recommended. He admitted that he hadn’t finished some of them himself. He reminisced about breaking into the university boathouse and stealing a flatbed cart of equipment. The next day they had stood in the quad among the crowd, watching the crew team try to get their oars down out of the trees. He painted pictures of all-nighters at the literary magazine, the two of them hunched over a drafting board, working the monthly puzzle of text, image, and advertisement. He wrote fondly of their basement apartment. He still savored the cheap, greasy meals they had shared. He wrote that Bill was a true gentleman. He confessed that he had been jealous of Bill, but that his jealousy had its origin in admiration. He wrote that once, in the thick of a fight, his ex-wife had told him he was half the man Bill was. He had been so furious that he hadn’t returned Bill’s calls for months. He apologized for punishing Bill for someone else’s sins. He wrote that he still thought of Bill’s first story. It had been better than he had been willing to cop to at the time. He wrote that, clandestine government activities aside, Bill surely would have made it as a writer. He wrote that their friendship was precious to him, no matter what else had been going on behind the scenes, and he regretted that he hadn’t come out to California while Bill was still alive. He hoped it was all right that he had slept with Carlotta. He wrote that he believed Bill would have given them his blessing, because that was the kind of person Bill was. He wrote that he wished he himself could be more generous. He wrote that he was working on it.