A Brilliant Novel in the Works (8 page)

My brother Joelly was five years old when he realized
you could use a black permanent marker to draw all over every piece of furniture
in your parents’ house. I was eight at the time, old enough to know that when
my dad got home, my brother would be in sincerely deep shit.

I tend to think the world is a dangerous place to be. Even when things
are going well, I’m trying to anticipate how soon I will get screwed. This
holds true for my jobs, my relationships, my friendships, my finances, my
family. I feel helpless against the world and am always expecting that meteor
to crash onto my house. When an ex-girlfriend told me she had been lying to
me for months and sleeping with another man—a bigger, stronger, richer, more
handsome man—I wasn’t angry or offended. I accepted this fact gracefully.
Because that is how the world works. In that same conversation, I even thanked
her for not being more cruel.

But my brother saw things differently. He saw the world as something
amusing, something that could be played with. Even when dealing with my father—a
man who could get so angry you’d have to steer clear of him for days at a
time—my brother looked for ways to make the relationship interesting. He could
be in control of a situation, even at five.

Earlier that day, my mother had read to us. After reading this book,
my mother began cooking dinner, I began playing with my Legos, and my brother
began drawing all over every piece of furniture in the house.

A nasty aspect of my being scared of the world is that I sometimes want
those who live so casually and comfortably to be punished. And when I saw
what my brother had done and that gorgeous smile of his, black marks all over
his face and shirt, I stepped away and savored the notion he would have to
pay for this joy.

When my father came home, he went straight to his office to drop off
his briefcase. I heard him yell out, “What in the hell happened here?”

My father ran into my room with the marker he found on the floor. “Did
you do this?” he yelled. You could see the veins going through his temples.
He shook the marker in his hand and then threw it on the floor.

“No,” I said. “I promise.” And I prayed for him to leave my room.

He then ran into my brother’s room.

“Who did this?” I heard him yell. And I suddenly regretted all my evil
thoughts about wanting my brother to pay for his sins. It was terrible to
think of my brother receiving my father’s wrath alone. So I ran into my brother’s
room as well, thinking he could use my help. I didn’t have my brother’s wit,
but I was another body to stand in the way.

My brother’s face and shirt were all marked up. And he held out his ink-stained
hands, as if this gesture were proving his innocence, instead of sealing his
fate. My father’s hands were tight in fists. My mother had already run into
the room, and we both were too scared to say a thing, for fear of causing
those fists to move.

And that’s when my little brother said with utter confidence, “The gorilla
did it.”

It was unfathomable that my father would let go of what had just been
done to his furniture. But my father’s next words were, “Where the hell is
this gorilla?” And he yelled it like he was going to beat the hell out of
this animal when he found him. “You just missed him,” my brother explained,
and he pointed at the window.

“Well, he better watch himself,” my father said. And he left room while
trying to hold in his smile
.

It should be easier these days. My wife isn’t sleeping with
napkin men. In fact, she even wants to have kids with me. I
apologized for walking out in the middle of our last discussion.
I told her I needed some time to think about it and she said
that was okay. I told her, again, that I would stop cutting
myself, again, and she was okay with this promise, again. Even
my novel is going okay. I have fifteen chapters written so far.
But I know better than to think I can sit pretty. Something
ugly is coming on. So I spend a lot of time pacing around my
house while Julia is away, which is a lot of the time.

Under the mattress, I have a picture of Julia when she was
two years old. It was her birthday. She is wearing a paper
hat that says “Everyone Loves Me” on the front. Julia is in
her mother’s arms and she has a giggle on her face that is
impossible not to smile at. I don’t need to hide this picture,
but I do. I want it all to myself.

Now that she’s proven to me that napkins aren’t malignant
and that she wants to have a family, I feel even less confident
about our relationship. It’s even more unlikely for us to have
normal sex. I’m even more obsessed that she is sick of me,
wants me to be different than the me that I am. And she sighs
too often. And our teasing seems more out of resentment than
out of love.

I’ve never been to Florida or Louisiana or the Caribbean
during a storm but I have this fictionalized image of what it’s
like to be in the eye of the hurricane from watching too many
disaster movies. And that’s what the quiet of my day feels like.
Like a movie version of the eye of a hurricane. And when my
beautiful wife who loves me and wants to have children steps
into my office at a time when she should be busy with her job,
I know she is the ugly hurricane that is all around me.

There is nothing ugly about Julia. Maybe this is part of
the problem. I’m too nervous to pee standing up and she can
arrange a meeting with the governor. I go to the therapist and
she wins a salsa dancing contest. I want to be spanked and she
wants a family.

My wife doesn’t stutter. She isn’t slow to speak. But her
voice is so soft that it is hard to tell where in the room the
words are coming from. “Honey,” she says. “I need some time
off.”

“Well, then get off your feet,” I say. “Let me give you a
massage.” For however soft and thoughtful her voice is, mine
is loud and dumb-sounding. But I stand up. I’m ready. I’m
ready to do whatever it is I need to do.

“It’s too late,” she says. She is too calm.

“No,” I say. “I’ll even put on a new pair of underwear. It’s
only ten in the morning. I could give you a nine-hour massage
before sunset. What’s hurting? Your inguinal ligaments? I just
read a special technique for inguinal ligaments.”

“Honey,” she says. “I’m serious.”

“I am too,” I say. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it.”

The fair skin around her eyes makes the red more
noticeable, and I see that she doesn’t look great today, and I
see she is tired, and I realize she’s been tired for more than just
today, and I realize it’s more than just because of a busy week.

My wife, she looks around my office, a room that reeks
of insecurity. “I don’t need anything,” she says. “Or at least
nothing here.”

“I learned a new recipe for BLTs,” I say. “It involves putting
the L before the B and the T. Technically it’s an LBT, but I
think you’ll still like it. The Protestant Sandwich Committee
gives it five stars.”

I can feel myself drowning. I’m grabbing for anything I can
get ahold of. I’m trying to stay afloat. But it’s too late. All these
stupid jokes when I should be saying: Please don’t leave. I love
you. Let’s talk about it. Give me another chance.

“Honey,” she says in a tone as warm and kind as you could
ever ask for. “I rented an apartment.”

And that’s when it hits me: not even a Protestant sandwich
can save me now.

As Julia packs her things, she sings “Raindrops Keep Falling
on My Head.” Even though she is crying and she can barely
speak, this song continues for what seems like forever. So I
lock myself in the bathroom and cover my ears.

And I’d sooner tell you a story about Uranus than tell you
more about the way Julia leaves me.

Stories never take place on Uranus. But this one does.
And it does so without a lick of mockery for the planet’s name, which typically
finds itself in as many joke books as scientific journals.

The hero of our story arrives on Uranus for one simple reason: to save
our solar system. Our hero is so famous that even an alien stationed on Uranus
wants to meet him. In real life, our hero is a nobody who sits around in his
torn underwear, trying to write a novel about a man trying to write a novel.
But instead, he ends up writing silly stories about Uranus. In real life,
this man is timid and scared. He weeps at night. He has problems communicating.
In real life, our hero is impotent when it relates to the bedroom and his
wife. But in this science fiction story, our hero is blond and bold and beautiful.
He is virile. He is a brilliant tactician, and he is the last hope for mankind.
Our hero is the most famous political advisor on Earth, and now he has one
hour to negotiate with a JuLef alien creature who is tasked with blowing up
our solar system. This creature is the last of his species.

It is worth mentioning that JuLefs look to us like monkeys. This is by
design. It was the 1959 flight when we launched Able and Baker, a rhesus monkey
and a squirrel monkey respectively, into space that the JuLefs first noticed
our solar system and our cute little space program. So the JuLefs sent their
first fleet of negotiators in the form of rhesus monkeys. As far as we could
tell, they were identical to monkeys, arriving even with fleas in their hair.
We would never have been able to distinguish them from our own monkeys—except
they could talk.

At first, the JuLefs inhabited Uranus. Thousands of them.
And they waited. They waited for our knowledge to progress to a point that
merited communication. But after two hundred years, they grew impatient with
our slow progress. “They should have kept the monkeys in charge of the space
program,” the JuLef negotiators agreed. And so they decided to visit the crude
Mars outpost we had recently built.

The story goes this way: we first met them on Mars; we last met them
on Uranus. On Mars, it was charming. We were curious, awestruck. It was incredible.
Intelligent life! Brilliant monkeys who traveled by thought, manipulated time
by choice, and ate entire stars for lunch. They shared their knowledge with
us, and we shared our classic films with them. For us, this meant mental-powered
flight. For them, it meant Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. It was a grand
time. The most saladacious of all our species’ salad days!

But on Uranus, the party was over. They saw us for what we were. Insecure,
afraid of exposing our weaknesses, jealous and angry and destructive. We always
wanted more than what we had and we would destroy ourselves to get it. To
think that we would try to hijack the JuLef/Earth project when these creatures
could see through space and time! It was either stupid or a death wish. Let’s
say both.

On Mars, we were intriguing and cute: funny creatures with that funny
little digestive system and that way we liked to hump each other for amusement.
But on Uranus, our species had been deemed unworthy troublemakers, doomed
to sit in time-out for an eternity. It would take one JuLef thought to destroy
the sun. There goes the neighborhood. And it was up to our hero to convince
this last JuLef negotiator that we were worth saving.

In real life, this meeting didn’t take place on Uranus, it happened at
the Urban Grind coffee shop on 22nd and Irving. In real life, he wasn’t trying
to save all of humanity, he was just trying to save his measly little marriage.
In real life, he wasn’t equipped with a neutron bomb. This man couldn’t even
sustain an erection.

Uranus is composed of gas and ice. Surface temperature—if
you can call it a surface—is negative 360 degrees Fahrenheit. Even with our
newfound skill at M.P.F., it would have taken 10.5 years to make the trip.
And it would have required the latest technology in thermal underwear. But
this JuLef made it happen in a warm seven seconds, which is even faster than
the speed of light. In the early days of our relationship, the JuLefs respected
our laws of physics. But the honeymoon was over.

Our hero steps out of the spaceship and steps into what looks like an
Earth coffee shop. Except instead of soothing café music, there is a screeching
sound from the speakers. This screeching causes our hero to forget the tune
he was humming in the spaceship, a tune he wanted to remember.

The JuLef negotiator is the only one in the place and he is sitting at
a table waiting for our hero. This is the first and only time the JuLefs have
made us visit them on Uranus. They used to come to us. Or meet us at a Mars
café. In either case, they stayed politely in our neighborhood. But after
the little incident—our failed coup—they no longer were interested in our
convenience.

Our hero covers his ears as he sits down next to the monkey-shaped JuLef
negotiator. The monkey snaps his monkey fingers and the noise stops.

“Your species’ auditory sense was always a tricky one for us,” the monkey
admits.

Our hero looks around at the place. It reminds him of a coffee shop from
back home, but he can’t quite place it. The café has the strange quality of
feeling recently inhabited, but also it feels like it has been permanently
abandoned. The cappuccino on the front counter is still steaming.

“Nice work on the café,” our hero says.

The monkey points all around but doesn’t explain what he’s pointing at.
He picks at some fleas and then eats them. “They’ve strapped a neutron bomb
to your genitals.”

Our hero adjusts his pants—the device is incredibly small, but he now
realizes he wore the wrong underwear for the occasion. He points over to the
cappuccino he’s been staring at. “That is exactly what I want,” he says. One
flaw with the Earthlings’ plan to blow up this JuLef with a neutron bomb is
that our hero has about as much interest in saving mankind as does this JuLef.

“Oh yes,” the monkey says. “The cappuccino is for you.”

On the way to the counter, our hero is surprised at how unfrightened
he is by this meeting. But it’s not courage as much as apathy. In his time,
our hero has advised four presidents, three chancellors, two planetary rulers,
and one extremely controversial urologist. His résumé is brilliant but his
heart is cold. Since he saw his father leave his mother alone with three kids
and absolutely nothing other than a collection of useless stamps from our
ancient First Civil War, our hero has been skeptical of the heart. It has
left him as cold as the gases of Uranus.

So now our hero walks over to get his cappuccino, which he has been dreaming
about for hours, for days—it seems like for his whole life. At the counter,
along with the cappuccino, he finds a Lamy pen, which he decides to pick up,
the monkey won’t be needing it anyhow, and then he comes back to sit with
his monkey friend. But as he walks back, he notices one tile on the floor
is missing. The hole in the floor goes straight through to the gaseous mass
of Uranus. He takes the pen and drops it down the hole. It disappears without
a sound.

“Stay clear of the hole,” the monkey says without looking back. For a
minute, our hero thinks of jumping in.

Our real-life hero dreams of having such a detached coldness. But in
real life, when our hero’s wife arrives at the coffee shop, our hero says,
“I missed you so much,” because she left the house a month prior. She left
him because she got tired of him, because who wouldn’t get tired of a man
in his underwear who does nothing other than fail to write a novel? In real
life, after the hero’s wife gives our hero a good, long stare, she sits down
next to him and says, “You weren’t supposed to contact me.”

But our sci-fi hero doesn’t long for or beg from anyone. He sits down
at that table, next to a flea-eating alien, and sips on his triple-shot cappuccino
as if it is the only thing in the solar system that he wants.

“Did you know,” the monkey says, “that Brando improvised that scene with
Eva Marie Saint?”

“What?” our hero says.

“On the Waterfront,” the JuLef says, disappointed again with our species.
“The scene where he picks up her glove and tries it on. That was Brando’s
improvised work.”

“Ahh,” our hero says, more interested in the coffee than a two-hundred-year-old
movie.

“Do you know why I wanted to see you?” the JuLef says.

Our hero keeps sipping his cappuccino. He looks up at the monkey and
wonders how much longer he has left to enjoy this drink.

“It’s because you just don’t care,” the monkey says. “You are unusual
to your species in this way. You don’t care to save your people, your planet,
or yourself. In twenty minutes, I will think your solar system into smithereens
and you don’t give the ass of a r at .”

Our hero’s stomach starts grumbling in a crampy way and he knows he’ll
have to go to the bathroom soon. Maybe it’s good, he decides, that he’ll be
blown up before he has to confront this potentially troubling bowel movement.

“But since you are not driven by fear or longing,” the monkey continues,
“you also have the freedom to choose what you want in any situation.”

“If you can see through time and space,” our hero says, “then why did
you bother with us?” The cappuccino is strong, a little too strong, and he
can already feel the agitation. “I don’t trust my species and I’m one of them.”

“We saw this coming,” the JuLef says. “But we still got what we wanted.”
He takes a deep breath. “Would you like a scone before you finish that drink?”

So this is it, our hero realizes. This will be his last drink. This will
be the last time he eats a scone and has to think: Boy, scones taste like
dried cardboard.

In real life, our hero can’t get food properly through his system. All
he thinks about is getting his wife back. Some days, he’s convinced he is
too sensitive for the world. Even though his parents were loving to him, he
still walks the Earth as if carrying a terrible burden and he doesn’t know
why this is true. He has kissed every single goddamn photograph of his wife
in the house. He hasn’t just kissed them, he has licked every one of them,
front, back, sides, and corners. And for this, he has paper cuts all over
his tongue. This man is nothing if not paralyzing melodrama. But in the science
fiction story, when asked what should be done with the species, our hero says
without a lick of melodrama, “Burn the whole lot of us to the ground.”

As much as our science fiction hero hated his father for leaving, he
still kept his collection of stamps. This is worth noting. He isn’t melodramatic
on the surface, but he has carried these fifteen VacuSealed books from apartment
to apartment, city to city, country to country, as if the stamp collection
were a burden important for him to carry. These stupid stamp books he’s never
even opened to look at. Maybe he carries these fifteen books to remember how
he hates mankind, or maybe he carries them to remember that even with all
our unforgivable flaws, there is still something that we can’t help but carry
with us.

Our hero finishes his coffee. He chews up his scone so that nothing is
left but a pile of crumbs on the table.

“So what did you want from us?” our hero asks.

The JuLef picks at the crumbs on the table and eats them. “The formula
to free will.”

Damn it, our hero thinks. He doesn’t want a goddamn philosophy speech
as his last conversation. A stomachache and a discussion about free will were
not on his wish list. What he wants is another drink.

“I’ve refilled your cup,” the monkey says, and our hero looks down to
see the cup is refilled. This pleases our hero so much that he is willing
to listen to a little more philosophical manure.

“Your species,” the monkey continues, “actually chooses at any given
moment what they want to do. They improvise,” the monkey says. “The sad thing
is that 999 times out of 1,000, they do what we predict they will do and they
do it because of fear.” The monkey shakes his head as if this were a new disappointment.
“Your species isn’t as interesting as we had hoped, but we will still learn
from what we have acquired.”

Our hero is skeptical that anyone could learn from watching Brando pick
up a glove, even though he’ll admit it was a charming scene.

“So are y’all any better than us?” our hero says, a little less impressed
with this brilliant monkey.

“No,” the monkey says and he checks his watch. Our hero realizes that
the JuLef story is long and complex, and there is no time to recount it today.

“I guess it’s time,” our hero says.

“Yes,” the monkey says. “It’s time.”

Our hero laughs, thinking about how hopeful all those Earthlings were
that our hero could save them. That silly scheme with the neutron bomb. In
a way, our hero is disappointed—he had hoped this meeting would inspire something
different in him. Inspire anything in him.

Just then a song starts playing. It isn’t screeching like before. It’s
a regular song. In fact, it is a song that his mother used to sing to him
when he was a child. “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” It was the song
he was humming earlier. How much he misses his mother and her soothing raindrop
voice.

“Ahh,” the monkey says. “They fixed it. We wanted to play something that
would make you feel sentimental during these last moments of life for your
species. This song is playing all across Earth in your honor.”