Authors: Sheila Heti

The Middle Stories (12 page)

Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

He scrambled off the road like a two-bit coward as the horn and the car blazed by him, and a man with a ruddy face leaned out the window yelling, “You miserable motherfucker get off the fucking road!”

What right had he to kill himself when there were stars in the sky, twinkling all innocent and not noticing him and noticing nothing. They were suspended so far and so beautifully, and here he was putting himself on the road to get run over when he didn’t even mean it.

THE NEXT DAY was sunny and he woke on a park bench with a bottle in his hand. He went at once to see his friend Jim.

Sitting on Jim’s couch, while Jim was in the next room stirring macaroni and cheese, just listening, the man with the hat hung his head low and told his story like a man ashamed. Jim interrupted, stomping into the room with the wooden spoon held up.

“You tell me the truth for once you godforsaken bastard.”

Oh, if it weren’t the end of the world already! November thirteenth. A month and a half till the end of the world and everyone else had end-of-the-world plans but him. He didn’t know what he would be doing.

The man with the hat started to sob and Jim went back to stir. Jim liked it real creamy. If it wasn’t real creamy it wasn’t worth shit. His friend had slept all night on a fucking park bench. Jim’s girlfriend walked into the room in a man’s shirt and looked so damn sexual the man with the hat moaned and covered his face with his hands.

“What’s the story, boys?” her voice coming out like a six-year-old girl’s, all turned-up at the end of every word. She pushed her soft hair behind her ear and leaned against the radiator with her leg showing to the hip. She smiled a big-lipped smile at the man with the hat, and in her head: “Madman, you are leaving me in the most beautiful mood of my life, in the phase of my love that is most real, most passionate, and most replete with suffering.”

Jim, who could put his cock in her whenever he wanted and feel her luxurious tits morning noon and night, approached her with the wooden stick held up and suffered down upon her to leave them the fuck alone or else—and he made a sudden motion with the stick that sucked the breath right out of her, and she went to the shower, obedient and aroused.

“Come,” said Jim, and the man with the hat went to the table, still covering his eyes.

“You’ve got to get a grip on your life,” said Jim.

“What does that mean?”

“Oh good, well at least you can hear me. Then hear this: you’re a bum. Don’t you know that one day you’re going to die? And then who’s going to care? Marjorie?”

Marjorie was sunning herself with soap.

“Christ,” said the man with the hat. “All right. I’ll tell you the truth about it, as best I can.”

“I don’t want to hear the truth!” cried Jim. “What’s the truth got to do with it? That’s the problem with you, man, and that’s the problem with your life. Forget the truth. The truth’s got nothing to do with your life. Are you a goddamned philosopher? Do you create anything? You walk around the streets thinking about yourself, thinking about the truth. Didn’t you learn anything in school?”

“Like whad’ya mean?”

“Oh sheez.”

They ate the rest of their macaroni in silence and Jim was so disgusted with the man with the hat that their lunch was unbearable, totally unbearable. They couldn’t talk. They needed the outdoors, which was more vast and more forgiving.

“Come, let’s go,” said Jim, and the two men left and still the bitch was singing in the shower, making the man with the hat tingle with rage all over.

Outside they walked, and the man with the hat calmed down, for he had always walked, and Jim said, his voice contemplative and his skin absorbing the sun: “All right, see. All I’m getting at is this. You’ve got to think about what you want, then make a plan of how you’re going to get it.”

“A plan!” whined the man with the hat.

Jim said patiently, “You came to me didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

They wandered into a park, and now the man with the hat was sitting on a bench and Jim was sitting in the grass before him and they were sharing a cigarette.

“Life,” said Jim, looking at the trees, “is all about plans and action, plans and action. If you have no plan you can’t take action. And if you’re doing something and it’s not in the plan, what do we call that? Messin’ around.”

Messin’ around!
So that’s what he’d been doing! The man with the hat was in agony. He rolled his face up to the sky.

“What I’m saying is making an impression on you,” said Jim, encouraging. “What I’m saying is making sense. All right. Well, that’s all you need to know. What’s your plan? What do you
want
, boy?” Jim smacked him on the knee and stared at him hard.

The man with the hat was thinking, thinking.

Jim regarded him carefully and considered, “You ought, like me, to have studied church history for fifty years, to understand how all this hangs together.”

“All right,” said the man with the hat. “I’ve got a plan. I’ll go home and I’ll write, and for fifty fucking days I’ll write, till the skin shows through my fingertips. Then I’ll throw out every word that’s a lie. Then I’ll send it all in to the
Antigonish Review
. But a real beaut, word-processed and all.”

Jim was thinking about Dolores.

“You’re never going to make it,” said Jim through his lips. “You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying.”

THAT NIGHT THE moon hung like a ball of sticky dough. The sky was a deep, deep purple and children were walking about in Halloween costumes. Jim and the man were walking through the streets and the Halloween costumes sucked. The man with the hat noticed them all, but he was listening to Jim as Jim laid out the plan. Finally they arrived at Cedar Street.

“I’ve got to thank you man, truly. You’ve come through for me like no one has before.” What did it matter that the plan was for a man with abilities—and thoughts not dreams? The man with the hat was through with truth.

Jim looked at him hard.

“You heard what I was telling you?”

“Oh yeah man, absolutely.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Go home, go home and write it down. It’s only seven o’clock. I’m going to get a good night’s sleep and begin anew at 7 AM.”

A skeleton passed them by.

“And you’re not scared?” asked Jim.

“Sure, sure, sure I’m not,” said the man with the hat, shaking his head hard. He was so grateful and so moved. “I’m really going to do it.”

Jim looked once more at the man and then walked off. The man with the hat rolled his eyes up to the sky and some tears dripped down his face. He could see no stars, but he was happy. Oh, he was so happy! There was a heaving in his chest and it was not from the cigarette.

He had never had a plan, and it made everything clear. He knew what he had to do: follow the plan; and what he had to give up: anything that was not in the plan. Like standing on a street corner, looking at the sky.

He made his way home. He caught himself thinking, but his thought was not on the plan, was completely beside the plan, was even conspiring against it. He wasn’t going to be a millionaire, but he would be busy with things to do. He had to make a résumé. First things first, Jim had said.

“I spent the winter in New York as usual, enjoying enormous success in everything I did.” What had he to do with truth? It was a night in November. There were forty-two Novembers still to come.

“IF I SHOULD write an honest diary, what should I say? Alas, that life has halfness, shallowness. I have almost completed thirty-nine years, and I have not yet adjusted my relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too young or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?”

Every plan fails. That’s what the man had refused to tell him. Every single body’s. But that, my friend, is precisely life’s sorrow.

And now that he had it, he clutched it like a penny.

NOTES

In “Janis and Marcus,” Marcus quotes from Saint-Simon’s essay in
Voices of the Industrial Revolution
(Bowditch, John, and Clement Ramsland, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968) when he says, “The philanthropists will continue…” and “In a word…”; Janis quotes from
A Mencken Chrestomathy
(New York: Knopf, 1962) when she says, “Some years ago…”

In “The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates,” the poet says, “It has been so in politics, it has been so in religion, and it has been so in every other department of human thought.” This is a quote from someplace; the author cannot remember from where.

In “The House at the End of the Lane,” the old man quotes from Adam Smith’s
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
when he says, “The institution of…”; Stella quotes from Joseph Fletcher’s
Situation Ethics
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966) when she says, “I am a young married woman…”

In “The Man with the Hat,” the man with the hat quotes from Salvador Dali’s
Diary of a Genius
(London: Creation Books, 1994) when he says, “The tension of my audience…” and “I spent the winter in New York…”; he quotes from
The Heart of Emerson’s Journals
(Mineola NY: Dover, 1958) when he says, “I fear, concerning the manual labour…” and “If I should write an honest diary…”; Jim’s girlfriend speaks the words of George Sand in
Revelations: Diaries of Women
(Moffat, Mary Jane, and Charlotte Painter, eds. New York: Random House, 1979) when she says, “Madman, you are leaving me…”; Jim speaks words from
Conversations with Goethe
(London: George Bell and Sons, 1897) when he says, “You ought, like me, to have studied…”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sheila Heti was born into a Jewish-Hungarian family on December 25, 1976. She published
The Middle Stories
, her first book, in Canada in 2001. She lives in Toronto.

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”

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