Posterity

Henry Killbride was supposed to have been posthumously famous. He was fixed on the idea of posterity.

After his literary breakthrough was penned that stormy night in Poughkeepsie, he devised a noose with duct tape and hanged himself from a naked pipe in his bathroom. The tape was the color of soot, or charcoal, or deeply tarnished silver. It snapped only seconds shy, allowing for a bruised skull from the rim of the toilet.

If only he had used a rope.

If only he had left the seat down.

The Red and the Black

Four days without sleep made Henry paranoid. He duct taped his blinds closed and glued forks to his doorframe. The walls looked disproportionate, so he wrapped himself in a blanket and struggled to hide under the bed. He managed to squeeze his head under the bed frame, where he wept for nine hours before breaking out in a cold sweat.

Five days without sleep released Henry’s dormant anger. He smashed the burned out bulb that had hung, quite innocently, above his head, and threw the chair against the wall when he stepped on the glass.

He raged and roared within his studio apartment, which gradually began to swing and sway the sixth day when Henry’s hallucinations sank into his skull. The thick red bricks of his darkened walls shifted under his gaze. Dazed, he collapsed on the floor and saw the carpeting buckle, forming a soft wave. He breathed in as much air as he could take and let the wave tuck under his body and lift him up like a giant jellyfish. The forks fell from their post and attacked him on the ground, causing him to roll around in the shattered glass.

On the seventh day he slept, cut and corrupt.

Henry relied on sleeping pills mostly because he couldn’t quite stomach the taste of Nyquil. But the pills were no problem. He liked the way the smooth capsules felt against his teeth, and would go as so far as to pop a few and let them dissolve on his tongue. The bitterness dripped down his throat and spread out over his gums, a grainy layer of sleep that would get stuck in the back of his throat if he didn’t force himself to swallow soon enough. He would stay awake as long as possible, watching I Love Lucy reruns, anchored and immobilized in his bed, his eyes stretched taught open. When the pills kicked in, his frozen eyes would inadvertently well up with tears that would melt down the side of his face and catch in his ears. Then Henry would curl into a ball, pressing his knees up to his fat gut, and let navy waves of sleep wash over him. It was not a sound sleep, rather an empty void of nothingness that overtook his body every night. Henry wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t creating dreams and letting his cells repair while his brain rested. He was lifeless and numb, cutting out hours of his life at a time, shutting his body all but completely off. Essentially, Henry was doing the equivalent of what a drug addict might do to destroy his mind without the fashionable euphoria or weight loss.

In fact, all those sleeping pills did to Henry’s metabolism was help him retain water. His two chins quickly collected their third, and his cheeks grew into paunchy paper bags. Henry’s heavy chest sagged like an old woman’s, though his nipples remained shriveled bits of clay. Fat gathered at his sides and weighed him down in bed, allowing for several broken springs that would stab him in his sleep, though he could never quite understand why his gut was covered in black blueberry bruises.

In the morning Henry would wake with his eyes sealed shut with nasty crust. He would methodically lean over and check AM/FM alarm clock for the time. His eyes would fall on the crimson numbers. To Henry, the red and the black looked like hell. If it were before two in the afternoon, he would no doubt reach for the bottle of pills next to the clock and take one more, just for good luck, like an extra candle on a birthday cake. In his grip, the pills were mere grains of sand surrounded by his fleshy palm squeezed so tight should Henry ever venture to lick his hand he would find that it, too, was bitter. And then, splash, Henry would fall headfirst back into the pool of sleep. And if he had had any friends, they would have seen him drowning in it.

“Merci, mon beau garçon.”

Henry’s package was delivered by a mail truck in France by a driver named Marc-Antoine Polaert who whistled as he drove along the dirty wine stained streets. He ran over a rat or two. They felt like chunky rocks, living speed bumps. Marc-Antoine’s friends called him Marco, and he was only working for Les Internationaux Expriment to make some extra francs so he could prove to his girlfriend that he could treat her to fancy dinners and jewelry. She had quit smoking for him, because he told her that she tasted like an ashtray. He whistled when he thought of her, the way her lips used to hug the filter and blow perfect smoke rings. When she stopped smoking, she tasted better, but she was not the same girl. He didn’t know how he felt about her anymore. Marco whistled to clear his head, to distract himself from the rats. When he arrived at his destination, a small office in a building near the Seine, he chucked the small envelopes into the narrow mail slot, and left an unusually large package at the door with a note. He had stopped whistling, and was eager to move on with his deliveries.

A shrunken woman with a heavily lined face gathered up the deliveries about three hours later. She had not noticed the package on the other side of the door, and when she left, exited out the back way. The oversized delivery stayed pressed up against the door all weekend, gathering rat shit on the bottom. Although it failed to rain, the edged of the yellow envelope curled from the dew, and the rat shit crusted underbelly turned damp. A filmy layer of dirt had settled along the rim.

On Monday, the sky was overcast and threatening rain. Marco returned whistling with a new collection of letters and a yellow slicker, fearing the worst. He immediately noticed the package, picked it up like a child and tried to brush to filth off that had gathered over the weekend. Marco felt obligated to knock on the door and hand it to the addressee, but the package was so disheveled that he was ashamed. He held it for a bit, rubbing off the rat shit and squaring off the moistened corners. Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door. He whistled while he waited, noticing a particularly large rat scuttling up an adjacent alleyway. Marco knocked again. He continued to wait, debating whether or not to write a note. Finally, the door opened.

An older woman stood in the doorway, holding a long, slender cigarette stained with red lipstick. Oddly enough, the woman didn’t seem to be wearing any lipstick. She leaned against the doorway, holding onto its frame like a crutch and waving her cigarette around. Marco noticed that it was unlit. He thought of his girlfriend, and repressed a whistle.

“Madame, est-ce- que ce vôtre est?”

Madame looked at the package and wagged her cigarette in front of Marco’s eyes. Her long bathrobe swayed with her in the doorway, and her head rolled back gently. She began to mumble, and Marco began to whistle. He thrust the package at the woman, who took it clumsily.

“Merci, mon beau garçon,” she muttered, dropped the package at his feet and slammed the door.

Marco’s face fell into a sad grimace. Again he picked up the package and this time took it back to his truck. He found a pen on the floor and crossed off the address and wrote REVENEZ A L’EXPEDITEUR. There was no return address, save the block letters U.S.A. The address said 541 E. 72 Rue, Paris. Marco wrote 541 E. 72 Road, New York. He dropped it in a mailbox on the corner of 541 and Rue D’Église, and walked back to his truck, tripping on an upturned cobblestone. A week later he broke up with his girlfriend and quit his job, deciding he was better of at the university anyway. His girlfriend never appreciated his knowledge of political affairs, and Marco was ready for a change.

After a month touring France, Wooden Circus traveled to New York City, just a short train-ride away from its birthplace of Poughkeepsie. Correctly labeled, a young lady dumped the package in a mail bin outside of an office building in the Upper East Side. Morris, a middle aged black man with a terrible cough, sorted through the mail as he sucked on a cheap cherry cigar. He noticed the stained package, fresh from Paris, and he stuck it on a shelf next to his ashtray, along with other interesting postal addresses he had collected throughout the years. At the end of the day, he gathered up the package and cut off the stamped writing with a sharp exacto knife he carried in his belt loop with a few extra cigars and books of matches. He stuck some of the sticky tobacco on the corners of the neat slice of envelope and stuck it to the wall above the shelf just to the right of the ashtray. Using tape and some left over pages of an old New York Post, he fastened a patch to go over the gaping square that had been cut from the package. The next day, he filed the tobacco-stained package away to the mailroom.

Jazzy found the weird, disheveled package on the floor of the mail room early one morning before the bulk of the day’s mail would arrive in great bins. He picked it up and held it under his nose, smelling a fine blend of cherries, smoke, newsprint and rat shit. Deciding it smelled delightful, Jazzy felt fairly apprehensive about its contents.

The Paris Review’s mail desk sent Wooden Circus to an editor with a post-it on the huge package. The post-it warned that the submission was oversized, and therefore might possibly contain explosive material. It was signed xoxo Jazzy. When Stuart Diamond opened the package, he likes to tell people that an explosion was just what he found.

Hate is a strong word.

There is nothing—nothing—I hate more than this.

I’m his plus one, and he’s deep in conversation with another writer from another publication.

In heels, I’m taller than him, and yet, he walks into the room and because of his stupid job, that (okay, I admit it) I am completely jealous of, people approach him and l0ck him into the type of indulgent, self-satisfying conversation that I can so easily identify because I am, ironically, a publicist, and can spot the body language, the compliments and the fawning.

So I sit here, totally abandoned beside him, watching quietly.

I hate this.

Literrors

Can a writer date a writer?

It’s worked before. Take Mary and Percy Shelley. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Joan Didion and John Dunne. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Just kidding.

But this one might be doomed. We’re all drawn-out-drama, all thunderstorms and lightening bolts. You know, we’re a conversational shipwreck—in a good way. But sooner or later, my head might end up in the oven.

Health Insurance

You may be wondering why I don’t shut down my career and just freelance write.

I, like every other New Yorker with a hysterical Jewish mother, will offer the same explanation:

Health insurance.

It’s weird.

“It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.”

– Mario Incandenza, Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008)

Charlie Darwin sitting in the corner office.

The nostalgia was not strong enough to keep me in book publishing.

Also: I quit smoking.

(NYT)