3
Jacob lay in bed with a poem wadded up inside his mouth. A dry, papery obstruction. The toxic stinging of ink along the ridge of his tongue. He reached in with two fingers and tried to pull it out, even as his throat, in some sort of horrible reverse gag reflex, tried to contract and swallow the poem whole. Just as his fingers hooked onto one pulpy piece of it, he felt his esophagus swell and take the whole thing in like Jonah’s whale. He pulled, gagging, on the edge of the paper, but it ripped, leaving just a scrap pressed between his fingers. His nightmare ended with a gasping breath, the poem ingested again—again! every fucking night! — and his bleary eyes staring down at the ripped fragment of paper he’d torn free. On it was the first line, in handwriting so messy he couldn’t read it.
And then he’d woken up, and that too, had vanished.
It took him a moment to be sure he wasn’t really choking. He could still feel the lump in his throat. As he got his breath back, he tried to think of where he was. Pete’s apartment, he thought, when he saw Pete snoozing on the right edge of the mattress. He worked from home on Tuesdays and Fridays. Which means that I am in Morningside Heights. Again.
Moving softly so as not to wake the slumbering Pete, Jacob found his pants on the floor, next to the copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that Pete was still finishing. What was it, like a hundred pages? He squeezed himself out of bed and slipped into the bathroom with the blue jeans, button-down Oxford, and brown tweed sports jacket he had worn the night before. He looked out the window at the white light of early afternoon. He remembered he had a night shift up at Anchorage House.
He closed his eyes and tried to see the words from his dream. It was there somewhere; he could hear its footsteps just around the corners of his head. Impulsively, he grabbed his cell phone and texted Dr. Boujedra. Oliver — Under the weather. Won’t make it up tonight. It was a message he sent at least once a week. One of the perks of his relationship with his boss was that he could usually get away with playing hooky when inspiration seemed about to strike — or even on days when he just couldn’t handle spending eight hours in the presence of hallucinating, drug-withdrawn, suicidal teenagers.
Back in Pete’s bedroom, Jacob picked up the Capote. It was the only book in the apartment — practically the only thing in the apartment. Pete owned one pot, one frying pan, one plate and one cup and one fork, a tacky lamp made out of conch shells, the mattress he slept on, one set of sheets — sky blue, with white puffy clouds — a yellow towel, and a cardboard box that contained his three outfits. One dressy, one for loafing around, and one to wear while washing the other two. He had a refrigerator and a stove, only because they’d come with the place, and both were always empty. His apartment was really quite large for a Manhattan studio, and Pete made good money working at Eco-Finance Apps or iPod Banking or something like that. He didn’t belong to any cult or ascetic belief system that Jacob could discern.
You’re such a weirdo, thought Jacob as he kissed sleeping Pete’s cheek goodbye. Then he slipped out through the blank white door, which locked behind him with a click.
Jacob hurried down chilly Broadway and bustled up the icy iron ziggurat of the 125th Street station, just as the downtown number 1 train groaned onto the aboveground platform. He hardly had time to admire the view as he blew aboard just before the doors cinched shut. Morningside Heights yawned before him, and he tried to feel the immensity of the entire island, of the steel tonnage beneath his feet. He willed the whole labyrinthine mess of it to vibrate up his calves and forearms.
He had the first line—he had it—of an epic poem. Or at least it was nibbling on the little gleaming hook that dangled from his spinal cord. He reeled all the way in and recast, way out into the deep white city: the literal soul of a thousand poets who’d come before him; the fishing grounds of two thousand others who’d gotten up earlier, read longer, worked harder, breathed deeper. Still, couldn’t he just snare a little Langston? Snag some Allen or Frank? He barely dared dream of angling for Walt or for Hart — those two slippery silver sturgeons, each eighteen feet long and weighing, together, a metric ton. Guarding their salty eggs, that humble caviar. Walt, the monstrous Methuselah, with his prehistoric whiskers in the murky bottom. And Hart, the lithe Leviathan, his steel-cabled fins propelling him through the upper currents. Jacob blinked twice as the ground outside the windows rose upward on each side, and in an instant he was underground.
Though the 1 train was quiet in an early-afternoon sort of way, Jacob transferred to the express 2 train at 96th Street, hoping to move even more swiftly south to Fourteenth Street and the coffee shop that he required to sit in and write this poem. It was the only place he could breathe easily enough to tease it out. The challenge, as always, was to hold this impish idea in his threadbare net until he could get there.
Jacob’s mind traveled back to a high school biology class where, eighty pounds lighter and half as hairy, he had seen an article in a National Geographic magazine showing an African tribesman extracting a deadly parasitic worm from one of his legs. He grinned with blindingly clean teeth at the camera, as he displayed his affected leg. The onyx flesh was powdered with whitish dust, except for a circle about the size of a quarter that he’d been keeping clean. From a tiny, oozing wound emerged the freeloading worm, thick as a spaghetti strand and, according to the caption, more than four feet long, curled inside the man just beneath the flesh. The only way to extract it was to coax its little exposed wormy tail around a piece of twig. Then at a rate of one quarter-turn per day, the worm could be slowly spooled out of the wound. Any faster than this, and the alarmed worm would break its captured tail off, and the whole thing had to be started over. Between turnings, the twig and its wormy passenger had to be taped down onto the man’s leg so that he could continue to run and hunt and live.
Disgusted, fourteen-year-old Jacob had been unable to rid his mind of the image and, worse, of the idea. Ten years later he found himself haunted by it nearly every day. For this was what writing poetry had become: a delicate extraction, done in quarter-turns, where the slightest jostling meant starting all over.
It hadn’t always been that way, Jacob thought, as he slipped out of the 2 train. He hurried now, as he traversed the long white corridor between the 1-2-3 and the Brooklyn-bound L. In high school he’d written like blinking. On the backs of napkins. In textbook margins. On the edges of his desks. On the dividers in the bathroom stalls. On the chalkboards of empty classrooms. He wrote so easily that he hardly minded giving his little quatrains and sonnets away. He imagined them being found someday by younger versions of himself, who would then be inspired to continue the tradition of guerrilla poetry at Moses Maimonides Elementary School.
In college, he wrote only after four a.m., an hour he’d known intimately. He had to wait until everyone he knew fell asleep — when all excitement was over. With his friends falling down into couches and onto curbs and against the springs of others’ beds, Jacob would scramble up the nearest sturdy tree. It didn’t matter how drunk or how high he’d managed to get. He liked the feel of bark against his palms, the brush of branches on his stubbled cheeks. He liked to imagine that it was his way of tapping into his most primal self — a Paleo-Jacob who still hunted with spears and made fires with flint. But the truer reason was that he’d discovered that the fear of falling was just enough to keep him from going to sleep. More than once his friends had woken up to find him snoring in the embrace of an old oak tree’s roots on the North Quad, having barely made it down before losing consciousness but with a completed poem safe there in the tweed pocket.