But let us now leave my wife in her unconscious state, so that the scene might shift again to the little bookstore named after the kingdom of life-forms with prehensile second antennae, e.g., scorpions, brown recluses, and their kin. I was going to Arachnids, as scheduled, whether I liked it or not, and whether or not there were going to be any listeners in the store. It bears mentioning that I did occasionally visit Arachnids as a customer, because of its excellent used books and digital media. It was a comfortable place for the slaying of time. I belonged there. It was right that I was reading here. I was going to enter the store like some prefab pop singer, therefore, striding onto the stage as if he had ownership. And I would wear the most elegant outfit (I had put some serious thought into this), namely some undertaker’s clothes, because that was how I felt, like a merchant of death, like a man whose everyday affairs had only to do with the lost, with the teeming cities of Hades, where the souls eternally suffered. So I would wear black shiny shoes and skinny tie and black armband, a black knitted cap. Let it be noted, too, that black does flatter a gentleman who has perhaps become spread out in the midsection with the nervous eating of nougat-and-marshmallow treats.
I loitered in the philosophy section of Arachnids until a quarter past the hour. I muttered nervous prayers. Noel then made clear that we would have to make do with the audience at hand, which audience was scattered among folding chairs, and, as I have said, this audience numbered exactly five. I knew three of them. One was Jake Cohn, a pharmacist and enthusiastic supporter of the arts, who owned and operated Mud Hut magazine; then there was Jenny Martini, a flea marketeer like myself who often helped me put up my stand (she sold vintage lamps); besides Jenny and Jake, there was one of the legions of beatnik homeless men who lived in our town, probably an Iraq war veteran, wearing on this night old polyester rags. And then there was a rather stately, motionless, and imposing black man, sitting alone in the back row. He looked drugged.
Noel Stroop began introducing me now, mumbling an entirely incorrect pronunciation of my name, calling me, believe it or not, Montrose Candle, and indicating that I had numerous publications in the local rags. Then, having run dry of material, Noel asked the audience to please give me a warm welcome, which they attempted to do, notwithstanding that they were the proverbial happy few.
There I was at the lectern, with the very bad wireless microphone that had long since been rendered fuzzy, and in my possession were about ninety-five words. I could think of nothing to do at first. I was certain that I was going to void my bowels. There was a uvular tickling, and I fantasized briefly about a burning lava flow coming up past the esophageal sphincter, through my old, compromised esophagus. But then I thought of my Tara, back when she was sitting out in the driveway in a wheelchair, kicking gravel, frozen with terror at the notion that she had to undergo her lung transplant. She didn’t want to have those two pieces of George the biker sewn into her for the rest of her natural life. She didn’t want to corrode her new lungs with the same mucoid rice pudding that had gummed up the last pair. She didn’t want to begin her lifelong regimen of antirejection cocktails. She didn’t want to see both her lungs spatula’d into a medical-waste container and flung into a dumpster out back of the hospital, where the javelinas would likely dig them out and feast. When I thought thus of Tara, and of the drainage that was probably taking place then through the stent above her right nipple, I realized that I could be strong, and I could read my first story, and I could be Montese Crandall, innovator in contemporary letters.
I recited a proper introduction to my work, as follows: “I’m very glad that you have all come, and I would like to tell you about my work, in order to prepare you. My work is about paring away the fat and gristle and imprecision to leave the most rudimentary scaffolding, a process few writers are willing to undertake. As evidence of this, I’m simply going to read you an excerpt from my newest piece. However, before beginning, I think we need to observe a silence for a couple of minutes, so that you can hear my sentences arising from out of a doomed, hushed, forlorn historical moment, and together we remember how language replies always to the nothingness, how the utterance is a pure thing, a pure, uh, musical production, faced with, you know, the thundercloud of human failure sweeping down from the mountains and over the desert.”
I then fell silent for exactly three minutes. It was like this: with only thirteen sentences total, I needed to read one sentence every three minutes, and then my reading would be the ideal length for a reading, which is thirty-nine minutes. While I could have read longer, I decided on the occasion of my first reading to warm up with something a bit less challenging, to indicate that I was taking the needs of the audience to heart. So I vacated the area of the lectern and sat, plunked myself down, in the circle with my audience, and put my wristwatch on the chair next to me, and I closed my eyes.
Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a moment lately to be anything other than the worried lump of a husband by Tara’s bedside, the guy who just hours before had called her parents, with whom she was not close, so that they could imply that I was the reason Tara was sick now and that if she had stayed back in the Rust Belt, and dated Skeet Berman, the venture capitalist, then she would have had a happier and more fulfilling life. I was much too old for her, and my job was not a proper job, and baseball card enthusiasts were shut-ins. Maybe it was because of this stress that, as soon as I was sitting quietly at Arachnids, I felt something profound swoop down on me, some scrolling news bulletin of gratitude and grace, so that my eyes filled with tears, tears that did not quite spill over, but I choked, briefly, began to hack, thinking of my own great fortune to have been given the responsibility of Tara Schott Crandall. To have seen Tara parked in the driveway prior to having George’s lungs sewn into her. To have cared for Tara despite all grim prognostications about her future. This was an honor, this was a life, whether I had succeeded entirely or not. I was confident that the audience shared, if telepathically, in this feeling, or at least shared in the possibility of silence, and it was with this conviction, after three minutes, that I stood.