War Dances (15 page)

“I can’t do it,” Sherwin said.

“Then fuck you. You’re fired.”

It was easy to fire screenwriters. But Sherwin was not just a screenwriter. He was also the author of a book of short stories and two volumes of poetry, and he still wanted to explore the notion of heroic self-sacrifice, so he decided to write a series of sonnets dedicated to smoke jumpers. At his home in San Francisco, he sat at his computer and stared at the blank screen. He sat, silent and unworking, for hours, for weeks, for months. Every time he tried to write a word, a metaphor, a line of poetry, he could only hear the critical voices of the studio executives and the director:
The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit.
Sherwin had fallen victim to his own imagination. He couldn’t create anything on the page, but he was fully capable of creating fictional and aural ghosts who prevented him from writing.

Desperate, he decided the computer’s advanced technology was creating the impediment. He decided to go back to the beginning—to the Adam and Eve of writing—the pen and paper. Yes, he tried to write by hand. He reasoned that if Herman Melville could write
Moby-fucking-Dick
with an inky feather, he could write one measly goddamn sonnet with a felt tip pen and graph paper. But he could still hear the executives and director talking.
The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit.
He was suffering from Hollywood-induced schizophrenia and couldn’t produce a word. Polatkin had always mocked those folks who’d claimed to suffer from writer’s block. But now, he was a writer …

Who could not produce one goddamn word.

The poems had migrated like goddamn birds.

And no matter what you may have heard,

Writer’s block causes physical hurt.

The fool couldn’t wear a goddamn shirt

Because the cotton scratched, bruised, and burned

His skin. His stomach ached; his vision blurred.

What happens to a soul that’s shaken
and
stirred?

What happens to a writer who can’t write?

Who flees his office and drives through the night,

In search of some solace, some goddamn streetlight

That will illuminate and give back his life,

His odes and lyrics? The desperate fool tried

Every workshop trick. The agnostic fool cried

To God for relief. God, can a man die

Of writer’s block? Well, the fool did survive

… the early and most painful stages of his creative disease.

Sherwin grew numb. He became strangely complacent with the idea that he would never write again. Oh, Sherwin still loved words, but he found other ways to play with them. He discovered the magic and terror of crossword puzzles. He read dictionaries and encyclopedias that promised to help him solve the most difficult ones. He soon became good at crossword puzzles. By testing himself using the same crosswords the best puzzlers solved in competition, Sherwin learned that he was probably one of the best five hundred crossword puzzle solvers in the English-speaking world.

He’d become that good after only six months of part-time work. How good could he become if he dedicated himself fully to the task? He figured that by living even more frugally than he had for the last decade, he had enough cash to survive for one more decade. So he decided to become, for lack of a better term, a crossword monk. But instead of praying, instead of keeping a diary, instead of transcribing by hand every page of some holy book, Sherwin made lists of words, the most common crossword-puzzle answers:

That was just the short list. There were a thousand or more common answers. They were the building blocks of crossword puzzles. But the quality—the comedy and tragedy—of a puzzle often had less to do with the answers than with the clues. A great solver understood the poetry of the clues. The most difficult puzzles used puns, misdirection, verb-noun elision, and camouflage in their clueing.

Sherwin believed himself to be a great solver, so he traveled to the American Crossword Puzzle Championship in Stamford, Connecticut.

When he stepped into the conference room, crowded with solvers who all seemed to know one another, Sherwin was nervous and vaguely ashamed of himself. Was this what his life had come to? He’d been flying first class to Hollywood, and now he was paying too much for a king bed nonsmoking in a Hilton in Connecticut? Yes, it was a wealthy, lovely, and privileged part of the state, but it still felt like a descent.

But wait, Sherwin thought, stop judging people. These solvers were a group of people who had to be clever. These people were thinkers. Yes, there had to be plenty of eccentrics—compulsive hand-washers, functioning autistics, encyclopedia readers, and compulsive cat collectors—but didn’t that actually make them a highly attractive group of people? When had Sherwin been anything other than a weird fucker? Didn’t he get paid to be a weird fucker?

“Hello,” he said to the woman at the registration desk. She wore a name tag with her name,
Sue,
spelled out on a crossword grid.

“Hello,” Sue said. “Welcome to the tournament. Are you a contestant or a journalist?”

“A contestant.”

“So this must be your first time here?” she asked.

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, this is a family, really, a highly dysfunctional family.” She laughed. “I know everybody. But I don’t know you. So that makes you new.”

“You’ve got me.”

“Okay, I’ll sign you up for the C Group.”

“C? What’s that?”

“It’s for new solvers.”

“I’m new,” Sherwin said, “but I’m good.”

“Oh, first-timers are always C Group. If you do well enough on the first few puzzles, they’ll consider moving you up right away, but that rarely happens.”

“Why not?”

“Because the puzzles are always more difficult than you’d expect. And because the pressure—well, first-timers have no idea how much pressure there is. And—well, they tend to choke a bit.”

Sue laughed again.

“Are you laughing at me?” Sherwin asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m laughing at myself. I’ve been coming to this tournament for seventeen years and I’m still a C Group. I keep choking year after year.”

“I’m used to pressure.”

“Oh, I’m not judging you. It’s all supposed to be fun. It
is
fun. Just sign up with the C Group and have fun. This is your first time. You have years of fun ahead of you.”

Years of fun? When had anybody ever said such a thing and meant it? Sue meant it. Sherwin shrugged and signed up for C Group.

Later that afternoon, he sat at a long table in a room filled with long tables. He had four pencils and a good eraser. He sat beside an elderly Korean woman who looked as if she’d been born in her sweater.

“Hello,” she said. “You must be new?”

She had a slight accent, so she was probably a first-generation immigrant. She’d probably been in the United States for twenty-five years. She’d been here long enough to become a crossword solver. Sherwin realized that he had no idea if crossword puzzles were written in other languages. Were other languages flexible enough?

“Are you new?” the Korean woman asked again. She was missing a lower front tooth. This made her look somehow younger, even impish. Don’t be condescending, Sherwin chastised himself.

“Yes, I’m new,” he said. “C Group.”

“Welcome, welcome,” she said. “We’re like a family here.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Yes, just like a family. Like my family. My big sister is a legendary bitch. Just like that bitch over there.”

She pointed a pencil at another elderly woman, a white woman wearing thick glasses. Didn’t she know that one could purchase plastic lenses these days?

“Why is she a bitch?” Sherwin asked.

“Because she always beats me. And because she always apologizes for beating me. Young man, you must never apologize for being good. It makes the rest of us feel worse about ourselves.”

“Okay, good advice,” Sherwin said. “So I guess I should tell you that I really don’t belong in Group C. I’m better than that.”

“So you think you can beat me?”

“I’ve timed myself with puzzles. I’m fast.”

“I’m sure you are.”

A volunteer set the first puzzle—freshly printed on fine cotton paper—facedown on the table in front of Sherwin.

“So what happens now?” Sherwin asked.

“When they say
go,
you turn over the paper and do your puzzle. When you’re finished, raise your hand, and somebody will mark your time, and then they’ll collect your puzzle and check it for accuracy. And they’ll measure your score against all the other C Group puzzlers.”

“The woman said they’d move me up to B if I did well enough.”

“Why don’t you just do the first puzzle and see what happens? What’s your name anyway?”

“Sherwin.”

“I’m Mai. What do you do when you aren’t solving puzzles?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh. Have you written anything I might have heard of?”

“Doubtful. I wrote poems and short stories. I never sold much. And never won any awards. I wrote a couple of movies, too. But they never got made.”

“What are you working on now?”

“Oh, I don’t write anymore.”

“Why not?”

“My talent dried up and blew away in the wind,” Sherwin said. “I am the Dust Bowl.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’m sorry to say it.”

Sherwin had never before confessed aloud his fears that his talent was gone forever. And now that he had, he realized that he would never write again. Not like he had. Was that so bad? He’d written two decent books and two bad ones. How many people in the world had written and published anything? Because he’d stopped writing, Sherwin had been thinking of himself as a failure. But perhaps that wasn’t it. Perhaps he had only been destined to be a writer for that brief period of time. After all, there must be at least one person in the world who had loved his books—who still loved his work—so perhaps that made it all worthwhile. Wasn’t everything temporary anyway?

“Okay, wait, Sherwin, enough of the biography,” the Korean woman said. “Here we go.”

“Puzzlers,” the emcee said, “start your puzzles.”

Sherwin and the Korean woman, and a few hundred other puzzlers, flipped over their papers and started working. Sherwin quickly filled three Across answers and one Down, but then stalled. He read through the clues and found that he didn’t know any of them offhand. He was stuck already. Thirty seconds into his first puzzle and he was frozen. Words were failing him. Again and again, they failed him. He stared blankly at his mostly empty grid for one minute and three seconds and was shocked when the Korean woman raised her hand.

“You’re done?” he asked.

“You’re not supposed to talk,” she said.

“But you’re really done that fast?”

“Yes, but that bitch up there beat me again.”

Sherwin checked out of the hotel, caught a taxi to the airport, and the flight to Chicago that would connect him to the flight back home to San Francisco.

On the second leg, somewhere over Wyoming, Sherwin pulled out the
New York Times
and found the crossword. It was Saturday, so this puzzle would probably be difficult to solve. Sherwin vowed to solve it, quickly and accurately. He wanted redemption. Here, in the airplane, he was able to fill in a few boxes, but not many. The puzzle remained mostly unsolved.

He was ready to crumple the paper into a ball and stuff it into the seat pocket in front of him when he became aware that he was being watched. One row behind him, to the left and across the aisle, a man was simultaneously working the airline magazine crossword puzzle and watching Sherwin work his
New York Times
puzzle. The airline magazine puzzles were embarrassingly easy. But the man was obviously struggling and was embarrassed by his struggles.

“I’ll figure this out,” he said to Sherwin, “but you, man, you’re working the
Times
puzzle. You must be a genius.”

“Maybe,” Sherwin said.

Wanting to confirm the man’s opinion, Sherwin again studied the puzzle. He tentatively filled in one answer. It was wrong, surely it was wrong;
ALPINE
could not be the right answer. It made no sense. But it fit the squares. It put ink on the page. Sherwin felt good about that, so he filled in another answer with the wrong word. And then he filled in another. In a minute, he finished the puzzle. He’d filled nearly all the boxes with incorrect and random words like
music
and
screenwriter
and
fear
but the man behind him could not tell that Sherwin was faking it. He could only see Sherwin finishing the difficult puzzle in record time. Wow, the man thought, he’s barely even reading the clues. He’s a crossword machine. He’s a crossword cyborg. He’s a crossword killer. He’s a crossword Terminator.

When Sherwin filled in the last blank, he sighed with satisfaction, folded the paper in half, and slid it into the seat pocket in front of him. Then he looked back at the man behind him and smiled. The man gave him a thumbs-up. It was such an eager and innocent gesture that Sherwin felt guilty for his deception. But then he laughed at himself, at his gift for lying.

I am a lying genius, Sherwin thought. And what is lying but a form of storytelling? Sherwin realized that he’d told a story, the first story he’d told in public for any kind of audience since he left Hollywood. But wait, did this really count as storytelling? Well, he’d entertained one man, right? And then Sherwin realized what he’d truly just done. And he roared with laughter and startled a few of his fellow passengers with the volume of his joy.