Seattle, fall 2001. Barry Evans just wants to be a witness to the truth, a writer in the line of Emerson and Ellison. But when he chances upon the manuscript that makes his mentor’s entire career a sham, he finds out telling the truth is not as easy as it seems, and will cost him the only thing that matters to him.
A mossy sidewalk in Pioneer Square.
Barry Evans emerged from his dank hostel into the November drizzle with a dozen job applications wilting in his grip like a soggy bouquet. At last the somber bus lumbered forth from the mist. Inside, he slipped down the crowded aisle and felt his soaked college khakis fusing with the damp pants of the person on either side of him.
This is it. A serious novelist at the beginning of his career.
No, that wasn’t the story he told himself. This was:
There is no narrative. You can make it up. You can. I’m not falling for it.
The result of Barry Evans’ insistence that there was no story of his life was that everything he saw was a pointless string of vignettes—random people, random happenings. Nothing to do with him. The space he took up was an absence: “Wherever I am, I am what is missing.”
Strand.
Impossible to believe that just a year ago, on the University of Chicago campus but two hours from his own much humbler private liberal arts institution, he had met the great Mark Strand. In the flesh. What a way to meet someone: In the flesh. How embarrassing.
At a glance he noticed that the regular sadsack busriders were now joined by yet another batch of the recently laid-off. When he had a chance to move his arms, he would scribble a note about this worsening state of things on the back of his transfer slip. Then he would add it to the other notes filling up a Safeway bag back at the hostel.
But nothing could make those pointless notes come together. No amount of scribbling could get him out of the story he was trapped in.
Is that it? I am trapped in a story? Okay, then whose?
Drops of rain streaked down the window.
Even in someone else’s story, I am but a mindless mote.
Out on the street he caught sight of a sign pointing to his favorite bookstore, Elliott Bay, on First Avenue, two blocks away.
The bookstore is not my destination. His thumb hesitated over the stop button for one turn of the wheels, when he countered himself: But neither is the temp agency.
He got off the bus. It was the bookstore, not the temp agency, that removed him from what passed as the real world, the gray hallways he wandered sheepishly with the grand goal of becoming underemployed.
Elliott Bay’s Dickensian storefront was filled with copies of a single poster:
Double-blind
by New York Times bestselling author
Ryan Clark
A Tale of Two Cities meets The Prestige in this instant postmodern classic.
And beneath these words was an image of two young men sitting across a table, with two panes of beamsplitter glass between them. They could hardly see each other. The vision of each was disturbed by words that appeared only on his side.
Though Barry didn’t know it, he must have sensed it even then: Clark’s book was about him. He’d written the author countless letters throughout his senior year of high school, the year his parents’ marriage fell apart.
“There is much to admire in this story.”
“We are very impressed by your writing.”
“We especially admire the strong characterization.”
“I love the originality ... I don't recall running across a character quite like this before.”
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Where the only secret you don't know is your own.
She reads aloud and stops to tell me what a fool Solomon was. “He went mad at the end, you know. How many wives did he have, anyway?”
I think a moment, then make up an answer. “Seven hundred twenty.”
“See, all those wives drove him crazy. No one needs that many wives.”
At first there were rumors about why Samantha's father disappeared: He had a secret family. He killed someone. He robbed a bank. The only story her classmates came up with on their own was the one about him being a bank robber. The others they brought from home. Pretty soon, though, they settled on one story and that was the one none of them would tell in front of her.
He half-registered that her warm expression was trying to show her effort to remain open-minded about why he had decided to cut the moment short. He pitied her at times like these, when she really wanted to be different for him. But he knew better than to hang around. He knew she couldn’t help herself. “Left the cap off the gas tank,” he said, plaintively, “after filling up the mower.” He was pleased it sounded convincing, even to himself. “I’d better get out there before it all evaporates.”
Dirk called Clairie before too late. Neither had anything to say that the other would understand. Dirk pulled out his notebook and read over what he had written and decided he would never share with her the words there. Clairie talked because she did not know what to say. She stopped when she did know what to say for fear of saying it.
Young women and men try to work out their proper place in the world.
It was then that the listening artist’s dissatisfaction with both the cult in his favor and the cult against him peaked, and he had also had enough of the mass in the middle that didn’t care much either way. If no one was going to get it right, maybe it was time to give it up. He longed for the days when they watched and said nothing, when their biggest gripe was that he wasn’t listening to anything.
He waved her over. She came to him with that tender smile of hers and he got down from the bunk and she stood in front of him at the threshold. She was wearing short cut-off jean shorts and a tank top. Her soft wavy hair touched her bare shoulders. She would never be as beautiful as this the rest of her life.
The absence of eyelids struck us: so fully did we see ourselves in it that we expected its eyes to be like ours. The slap of its fins, useless now on deck, slowed.
Nate scooped it up and threw it in the cooler with the beer. As it suffocated slowly on the ice, I said, "Look at it looking at us."
Nineteen-year-old sophomore and all-around normal-looking college kid Nick Barnes suffered from an as-yet undiagnosed illness: trying to impress people who would forever be incapable of finding someone like him impressive. Ordinary in every other way, there was nothing else wrong with him. His only defect was this nagging need, the need to be perceived as a somebody by people who would always see him as a nobody.
Spouses, sons, and daughters seek release from the accidental encounters and the inextricable bonds that threaten to throw their carefully constructed lives off course.
I was so dedicated to her growth, so unlike the kind of men who had steered her to waste her youth by fulfilling the limited supporting roles they’d forced her into, that we had no reason to suspect any danger in how this orientation to each other was molding our relationship. It made me feel far more useful than I otherwise would have, and before long I could no longer imagine myself in any other role.
It was on one of those pitiless winter mornings when even the dawn refuses to show up. The warm body of my wife lay beside mine but her spirit roamed free. I leaned over her in that miserable boar hole I dare not call a bedroom and scraped the frost from the windowpane and looked down to the street and saw the slush on the sidewalk frozen into the turbulent-wave shapes of sliding footprints.
Henry appeared at the threshold between the sunroom and the study and gave his mother a winning smile. She instantly recognized the insincerity in it, but could not place where the trouble was coming from. She told herself she had no reason to believe it was coming from her, and tried to relax.
The door was pushed open by a firm ghostly hand emerging from layers of heavy dark clothing. Eva was knocked forward. She stumbled and turned, and said, "I do beg your pardon, ma'am, but we are closed, and that was the most unpleasant way of making your presence felt."
"Where is she?" Abigail said. "Where is my sister?"
For hours the boy had been picking up that same rock and throwing it as far as he could and finding it and throwing it again. Still they were no closer to the mountains. And the sun was no closer to the mountains either. If neither they nor the sun ever reached the mountains, then the world they were trapped in did not really exist. If the sun could not get there to cast a shadow over them and hide them from the men looking for them, then maybe there were no men looking for them, and maybe this endless void they were walking across, which they had taken quite naturally to be a desert, was not a void at all, and they were not even walking across it.