Photo by Andrew Seaman, courtesy of Unsplash
I couldn’t place the name Mason Brecker when someone from the conference dedicated to him called me last February. But I’m a good liar, as my ex-wife could attest, so as the director, Colin Lister, extolled the virtues of this rigorous yet collegial gathering, I remained enthusiastic, wondering what I had to do with this event. I made general murmurs of understanding while Lister went on about the groundswell of interest in this novelist’s work, hoping he’d get to the point soon. I’d snuck away from my desk to take the call and needed to get back to work before someone noticed.
At last, he zeroed in. “As you can imagine, we’re all super stoked to host this year’s conference. And when the steering committee discussed keynote speakers, we kept circling back to your name. You clearly have a deep affinity for Brecker’s work. And many of our attendees are writers themselves, so it would be a coup if you’d be willing to come and share your thoughts with us.”
A coup? I’d published three novels, the last one long enough ago that appearances and reviews were in the past. None of the books had broken through, according to my publisher, and after a glance at my latest, in draft form, my agent mentioned going in a new direction.
Every time I tried to interrupt to tell Colin he had the wrong guy, he went deeper into the literary weeds. He explained our shared interest in pastiche, our broad canvases and world views, even the syntactic and stylistic parallels I wouldn’t have seen without a diagram. Once he had praised my work thoroughly and stated a sum greater than any I’d been offered since the halcyon days of my debut, I said yes before either of us could reconsider.
At my local bookstore, one of the employees nodded when I mentioned Brecker’s name. “We don’t sell much of him anymore,” he said. “I’ll check in the back.”
While he did so, the other employee—I couldn’t keep them straight, with their matching Civil War–reenactor beards—nodded. “A shame about what happened.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“On the road all the time, you get lonely and bored. But that? Shit.”
The store phone rang, and while he answered, I took out my cell and searched for Mason Brecker + cause of death. Would that my own eventual death results in so many hits. The first ten highlighted the same sad details. Mason was found in a hotel room in Provo, Utah, with a pair of fishnet stockings wrapped around his neck, the other end secured to the bathroom towel rack. While journalists had foamed at the keyboard over the possibility of foul play, it turned out to be plain old erotic asphyxiation. He’d been forty-one, three years older than I was that day, standing in High Street Books. This year was the ninth anniversary of the literary world’s Great Loss, as one blogger put it.
Beard Number One emerged from the back with what I took to be a stack of books, only to realize, as he approached, that he held a single tome. “This is all we’ve got. But we can have the others by the weekend.”
“Are they all…” I eyed the book, trying to calculate the number of pages. Please God, let them be deckled.
He dropped it on the counter, where it landed with the kind of thud I’d assumed could be produced only by the collapse of a dead body. “The man was prolix,” Beard Number Two said, approvingly. “You’re in for a treat.”
“Too bad the widow won’t release the last book,” Beard Number One added. “It’s supposed to be even longer. Without some new hype, he’ll be out of print soon.”
The Categorical Imperative and Its Discontents was over twelve-hundred pages, its type barely larger than that of the condensed Oxford English Dictionary I’d inherited from my grandfather, which came with its own magnifying glass. The book was seventeen years old, making me wonder why none of the grandstanders I’d gone to graduate school with had limped around campus with it under their arms. Even the guy who’d claimed he understood Finnegans Wake hadn’t bragged about tackling Brecker. Was this writer a misunderstood genius, as Colin Lister assured me? Had he suffered beneath the deluge of books released every week, let alone year? Or was he so niche only a scholar could go for his work? Only time would tell.
I worked full-time as a tech writer for an architecture firm, wrote fiction all morning on the weekends, and spent the rest of my time sleeping or trying to remember that my wife hadn’t left me four months earlier. I’d be lucky to finish this book by June, never mind the other three.
One of The Beards delivered the remaining works Saturday afternoon. They filled both side racks of his bicycle. He told me, solemnly, that dispersing them was the only way to maintain his balance on the turns. In a week, I’d gone from not knowing who Brecker was to owning almost five-thousand-pages of his writing. I’d be lucky to produce as much in a more actuarially conservative lifetime.
In college, a professor had required my class to read Bleak House over fall break junior year, which had destroyed any desire to succumb to additional feats of performative reading. No War and Peace or Infinite Jest for me. But even Dickens’s masterpiece was smaller than Brecker’s by the length of any of my novels. I could have stacked the four Brecker novels and used them as a coffee table.
His prose was denser than the wood of my actual coffee table. He piled clause on clause, emdash winding toward emdash, brackets inside parentheses, like a coked-up Faulkner. Woolf titled the middle section of To the Lighthouse “Time Passes.” Each chapter of The Categorical Imperative and Its Discontents could have been called “Time, Exhausted” for its minute chronicling of the life of its main character, cleverly named Manly Bryan. It was allegorical, self-referential, and absurd. The man had been either a genius or a sociopath, I couldn’t decide which because I could barely read two pages at a time. I would be ready for my talk in two years, minimum. I didn’t know how Colin could have mistaken me for a fellow devotee.
Seeking help, I turned to Google, which spat out more hits than I could work my way through. Once I passed several pages on his death, I encountered obscure blogs with names so referential that I had to Google them to get the gist of their preoccupations. I skimmed ten-thousand-word paeans to the man’s work, both before and after his death, and interviews with likeminded souls. Next, I discovered that few mainstream reviews had appeared, which didn’t bother me considering my own trajectory. My debut had garnered plenty of inquisitive attention, but once I was a known figure, lumped into my particular pigeonhole, the major newspapers passed me by. The main difference in terms of Brecker came when I switched to Google Scholar. There, I found a wealth of articles in places such as Twenty-First Century Literature and The Journal of Post-Post-Modern Studies. Colin’s name came up repeatedly as did scholars from Scotland and Hungary. In this small world, Brecker was a big deal.
Winter gave way to spring, when my divorce became finalized and a month-long bender commenced. I passed the halfway point of The Categorical Imperative and Its Discontents thanks to Bushmill’s and bleary-eyed skimming. I took a five-day weekend at Memorial Day, reasoning that I could knock out the remaining 500 pages like I would the entirety of most big novels. Another hundred pages later, I abandoned the book and bought enough whisky to decimate a small Irish village. I remained drunk for two weeks, past the point when I lost my job and putting me in danger of missing my flight to the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Mason Brecker, a title almost long enough to satisfy its subject. The only reason I didn’t get drunk on the plane was that I couldn’t afford the airline prices. I needed the conference’s honorarium to make next month’s rent. Mason Brecker had ruined me. He might be my salvation.
*
I lived in Minnesota, where the winters were brutal and the summers unpleasant. As my mother said after a visit, “I’ve never seen mosquitos that big in my life. They should have to land at the airport.” Insects and humidity notwithstanding, when I got out of my rental car in Mississippi, I realized I knew nothing about summer. People make excuses for the desert heat by describing it as dry. No one ever tried to explain away the experience of summer in Mississippi. I may have been in Jupiter, Mississippi, but it felt more like Venus. The sun blazed like a heat lamp left on too long at a cheap buffet, and the humidity, real humidity, was such that I felt like I was walking through a heated car wash at full strength. I made it twenty yards from the parking lot to the hotel and needed an ice bath and a clean pair of underwear.
After checking in and accepting the sad bag of snacks that Colin had left for me at the front desk, I took the elevator one flight up to my suite. I didn’t have the resources to walk. It was meat-locker-cold and furnished in dark wood, with a combination sitting room-slash-office, a kitchenette, and a bedroom complete with two king-sized beds. The place was bigger than the townhouse I rented in St. Paul. Colin had left a copy of the itinerary along with fun-sized candy bars and microwave popcorn pouches. Only when I held that heavy cardstock in my cooling hands did it truly dawn on me what I’d gotten myself into.
When my first book came out, I prepared canned talks and ran through interview answers in my mind ahead of time. As a result, I sounded overly rehearsed, forced. Since then, I had learned to wing interviews, enjoying the stunned look on interlocutors’ faces when my meandering answers resolved into nearly enlightening responses. I’d also discovered that my most successful talks occurred when I gave myself only as much prep time as the flight to the event allowed. Occasionally, I went into overtime, thumbing last-minute remarks into my phone while being driven around back on the ground. I’d spent the flight to Memphis trying to flush a hangover out of my system and skimming LitNotes pages about the three-plus books of Brecker’s that I hadn’t managed to finish beforehand. The shivering that took over my body in the suite was in part due to the air conditioning, but even more a result of discovering that Colin and his colleagues expected me to attend the panels instead of holing up in my hotel room trying to come up with something to say during Saturday evening’s banquet.
I barely made it to the toilet in time to throw up. The peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich I’d been relegated to by my meager funds fled my body more quickly than I’d consumed it on the light rail train that morning. I couldn’t even afford to park my car at the airport, and now I’d wasted a perfectly good sandwich. I stared at myself in the mirror as I swished complementary mouthwash and thought, You’re a professional. One look at my bloodshot eyes and damp hairline and I was thinking, You’re a professional?
Right as I finished changing my shirt, I heard a knock on the door and encountered a grad student in khakis and a teal guayabera. He had the kind of mustache I hadn’t seen since eighth grade, and a blond ponytail that hung below his shoulders. This young man, Kenneth Burchhouser, ignored my sad state and led me on what he called a short walk to the conference site. Anything more than four steps was too far in such weather, but somehow, we endured the three-block trek to the Magnolia University Convention Center.
When we arrived, a scholar who seemed too old to be so inept was somehow both mumbling and galloping through a presentation entitled, “Deconstructing Harriet: Aporia and Intention in Mason Brecker’s The Woman and the Woman and the Other Woman.” The AV tech was the true star. She managed to switch slides in coordination with the middle-aged scholar’s ramblings, like a page-turner working with a pianist who insisted on improvising half the score. I’d never been so thankful to enter a room late.
The panel ended, and Colin stepped forward. “Thank you all for your incredible papers on Brecker’s shockingly underappreciated critique of the male gaze. Lunch is in the next room. In keeping with Brecker’s own life, everything is gluten free and vegan.”
Several slices of grim pizza later we were back in the conference room, where another panel of scholars discussed another group of topics regarding another aspect of Brecker’s writing. I was thoroughly lost, which didn’t bother me until I realized they were all discussing CI, as they called it, the lone book I’d started—and almost finished. The first presenter problematized conventional wisdom regarding Brecker’s agnosticism by explicating two individual sentences no fewer than 450 pages apart. Granted, Brecker barely managed to get someone across a room in that space, but this seemed like a stretch to my under-educated ears. As the second presenter began to deploy her own problematization of CI—this one focused on Brecker’s use of Shakespearean characters like the fool and “rude mechanicals,” in the fourteenth of the book’s nineteen sections—I panicked and fled, my two default modes combined into one.
I entered a vestibule with rows of books on Brecker authored by the conference’s participants. There must have been twenty. I considered myself a literate person. How had I missed Brecker for so long? Now that I knew about him, how would I get free? I debated donating my four Brecker tomes to the used bookshop back home or committing the Cardinal Sin of merely throwing them away. I could put them in the tiny library on my block, but the wooden structure would collapse beneath their weight. Before I could decide, Kenneth, my Deep South sherpa, and a young woman his age appeared in the doorway.
“Professor Houser’s talk has reordered the synapses in my brain,” the woman said. “I mean, can you imagine breaking down individual sentences to that degree? The selection process alone would take months!” She had sharp features, a slender nose and pointed chin, and wore capris that almost matched Kenneth’s shirt. A silk tank top showed off her contoured shoulders, in contrast to Kenneth’s hunched stance. She looked like an athlete, confident in her movements and certain she could take any opponent in any challenge.
Kenneth nodded, fingering his wispy mustache. “I heard she has Part One memorized.”
“Only thirteen more to go,” I said without meaning to. The last thing I wanted was to engage in a conversation about Brecker. My best chance to survive the weekend was to avoid such talk altogether.
I hadn’t noticed earlier, but they each held a ping-pong paddle. Kenneth waved his in the air before us as he went on about Brecker’s use of parataxis in Part Three. I hadn’t studied grammar since eighth grade, and even then, I’d bumbled my way through it, so I nodded and tried to look engaged, as I had on the phone with Colin months earlier. The young woman beat time against her leg with her own paddle, as impatient as I was, it seemed, to move on.
“It’s not just that,” she said at last, nearly pathological in her sentence-ending points of emphasis. “The way he explodes idiomatic language and deploys portmanteau in contrast to received speech is… It’s just incredible.” She sighed, either at her own inability to express herself or at Brecker’s greatness.
I pointed to their paddles and said, “Do you play?”
“We all do,” Kenneth said.
The woman with him, who he seemed to be opposed to introducing to me, added, “You know, like in Famous Bathhouses of New Jersey?”
“Oh, right.” Busted.
“Table tennis is a major plot point,” she added, staring me down.
I was ready to take my chances back in the seminar room when Kenneth said, “Join us for a game? I’d love to hear what you think about Brecker’s work, as a writer yourself.”
I demurred as best I could. “I’ll give you plenty to gnaw on tomorrow night.” I almost believed it myself, the good feelings around me were so contagious.
At the end of the hallway opposite the conference room, we entered a high-ceilinged atrium with four ping pong tables. Each one had the same inscrutable insignia painted along the boundary lines, which I was loathe to ask about for fear of exposing even more of my ignorance. Instead, I took Kenneth’s paddle and positioned myself opposite the young woman.
“I’m Paige, by the way,” she said. “Since that guy hasn’t bothered to do the introductions.” She rolled her eyes flirtatiously. It may not have registered with Kenneth yet, but he certainly had a chance with her.
I ran track and played basketball in high school, even spent two years doing hurdles for my college before concentrating on academics full time. This isn’t meant as bragging. It’s merely an attempt to provide context for what came next. I’d never had my ass handed to me the way Paige did at the ping-pong table over the course of fifteen minutes. The woman was a beast. She delivered more types of spin than I’d learned in college physics and was able to control where the ball went with virtually every shot. I was lucky to keep it on the table, given her wonky angles. On the rare occasions when I won a point, she’d grip her paddle tighter and yell, “Come on.” I never could tell if she was berating herself, for her temporary ineptitude, or me, in response to my unbelievably dumb luck.
Paige high-fived Kenneth once she’d taken me apart for the third game in a row. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. Then he turned to me, his face reddening. “Sorry,” he said. “Maybe you’re just rusty?”
“Ping-pong isn’t my game, I guess.”
“Table tennis,” Paige said, glaring at me as she had when I’d revealed my Brecker-related ignorance back in the vestibule. “We’re pretty serious here,” she added, “so if you don’t come to play, I wouldn’t bother.” Then she left the room.
Kenneth took his paddle back and wiped the sweat from the handle on his pant leg. “She’s a little intense,” he admitted. “But…”
“I get it.” Even I felt bereft at her leaving. She was intense, a bad loser in the aftermath of my rare glimmers of success, but there was something beneath all of that that was highly attractive. I’d long fallen for women who were wrong for me, my ex-wife included, and I couldn’t help fearing that I was headed down that path again.
*
I awoke far too early, and hungover, the following morning. A group of grad students and young professors had invited me to karaoke the night before, during which time I’d enjoyed more free rounds than I should admit to, especially because I staggered out just before my turn to reciprocate arrived. But I needed to be awake in time for the free continental breakfast, and for the 8:15 panels, so I turned the shower on full blast, hoping that I could find a temperature hot enough to cleanse the alcohol from my body.
No one I recognized was in the dining room, which made sense twenty minutes later when Kenneth came to usher me to the day’s events and explained that the other participants were staying in a different hotel. “This one’s too expensive,” he said. “We can only afford to put up the keynote speaker here.”
Back in the conference center, I intended to avail myself of the pastries sitting on one of the ping-pong tables until I remembered Brecker’s dietary preferences, so I walked into the meeting room and sat down a row behind Paige and Kenneth, both of whom were drumming their fingers against their laptops. Dr. Lawrence Alexander, Gene H. Paulie Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Confluence College, was droning on about liminality as a trope across Brecker’s work, as expressed via his use of child narrators. Until this talk, I hadn’t even realized that a quarter of the sections in CI were narrated by kids. Dr. Alexander was so interesting I almost wanted to go back and reread the book from the beginning. But then I remembered my previous failures and decided that the good professor’s talk would be a reasonable substitute for ramming my brain against Brecker’s prose again.
After a smattering of applause, Paige leaned toward Kenneth and said, “I know he meant well, but that was a total snooze.”
Kenneth nodded, looking grim. Dr. Alexander had failed to problematize or recover anything in Brecker’s work. He’d merely read it carefully, with more grace and understanding than I’d summoned.
I’d finally heard something thought-provoking only to discover how badly I’d missed the mark in my assessment.
The morning continued in a similar vein: the presentations that strained my faculties almost as much as Brecker’s writing received careful attention and rapturous responses while the few that seemed comprehensible were a total snooze. I didn’t think it was possible to be further demoralized, but that’s what happened, to the extent that I didn’t feel at all guilty for taking the afternoon off to craft some semblance of a talk for the evening’s entertainment, and—please God—edification.
Before I knew it, I was asleep on the love seat in my suite’s sitting room. I awoke just in time to splash water on my face and put on the blazer I’d packed, contrary to the weather, in order to look presentable. By the time I’d grimaced at myself in the mirror, Kenneth was at the door again.
I’d dodged Colin Lister’s emails about my topic long enough that the program merely announced, “Keynote Remarks” as my subject. Still, Colin insisted on a lengthy introduction.
“I want to thank you all for your wonderful contributions to this year’s conference,” he said. “I’ve tried for years to bring y’all down here for this event, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed yourselves enough that you’ll want to come back again in the future. The presentations have been so impressive that I’m sure the published proceedings are going to be a highlight of Breckeriana for years to come.”
He looked around until he located me near the back. “Now, it’s my great pleasure to introduce our keynote. When I read his debut, years ago, I knew this was a writer to watch, one who clearly counted Mason Brecker among his influences. Please help me welcome him to the podium.”
The applause was loud enough that I was taken aback, fiddling with my meager sheaf of papers as I collected myself, and my emotions. Perhaps I’d misjudged this group. Maybe they were more generous in their assessments than I’d imagined. Or maybe that was bullshit. Maybe I was no better than a golden retriever, lapping up attention wherever it was offered.
I looked out at the sixty people gathered around the circular banquet tables. They ranged from MA students to distinguished professors like the one whose talk I’d actually enjoyed that morning. Among them were male and female and nonbinary scholars of varying races and ethnicities, more diversity than I had ever encountered during my previous talks or readings. Perhaps Mason Brecker had been on to something that I’d failed to tap into.
My scrawled remarks might as well have been hieroglyphics for all the help they provided, so I stalled, drinking from the water bottle I found on a shelf inside the podium. I noted Colin shifting next to me on the dais and then noticed Kenneth and Paige in the middle of the room. I could have sworn Kenneth was already scribbling notes on the back of the program, while Paige smirked at me in her oddly attractive way.
“I planned on discussing CI,” I began, “but talking about a single one of Brecker’s works in isolation doesn’t feel as though it’ll do justice to tonight’s subject, so please forgive me if I fumble a bit as I collect myself.” With that, I folded the two sheets of notebook paper into a small enough packet that I could slip them into my breast pocket. I had no idea what was going to come next, seeing how I hadn’t read a thing beyond CI, but I continued anyway. “The passionate regard all of you hold for Brecker’s writing is clear from the elucidating talks I’ve been privy to over the past two days. As a result, I doubt my ability to contribute anything fresh to these discussions, so let me tell you a story instead.” I paused again, took another sip of water, and tried to will myself not to head down the path I was about to forge. I was desperate—not to be found a fraud, or an intellectual lightweight, or an embarrassment. Or to disappoint to such a degree that Colin requested a refund.
I launched into a tale that I insisted I’d never shared before, of my lone meeting with the Great Man himself. I fabricated the encounter as best I could, based on the interviews and profiles I’d studied instead of finishing his actual work. I was ashamed even as I dramatized something that had never happened. I was a writer, dammit. I held the written word sacred. Yet I’d failed in this credo and was substituting pure fiction for a celebration of what lay before nearly everyone in the room: actual books. Many of them carried Brecker’s work as though it were a talisman against the outside world, in all its unpredictability and hazards. A few had even bothered to bring one of my own meager contributions to the Republic of Letters, ceding valuable space in carry-ons to spine-creased paperbacks or rarer first–edition hardcovers that represented my small print runs.
“I met Mason Brecker only once,” I claimed, before obscuring the specifics of time and place to avoid being called out for the liar that I was. I worked from a composite of encounters I’d had with other writers during the increasingly shorter tours for my three books. I’d like to be able to write that the storyteller’s impulse took over and I began to believe my lies. But that didn’t happen. The longer I went on, and the more details I added in response to my audience’s reactions, the more ashamed I grew. Ever the fiction writer, I built this shame into the encounter by creating a portrait of myself as the humble neophyte who learned, albeit briefly, at the feet of The Master. By the end of the story, half the audience was laughing at my young ineptitude, the other blotting away the tears in their eyes at the thought of their idol’s graciousness. No matter on which end of the spectrum they fell, every single person stood to applaud once I’d finished. I’d navigated between the Scylla of my ignorance and the Charybdis of my hubris and saved the day.
Colin brought me to the edge of the stage, eschewing the microphone, and roared, “I love this guy!” The crowd continued to applaud, one person near the back waving a copy of my latest in the air above his head. All I wanted was to escape, to never be heard from again, but Colin gripped my shoulder and added, “We have books for sale in the atrium, which I’m sure our guest of honor will be happy to sign!”
I sold enough copies that evening that I figured my agent would begin returning my phone calls again. I was so unprepared for such a contingency that I had to borrow a pen from Kenneth. The first person in line, who had bought a copy of each of my books, asked me to quote my favorite Brecker line as part of my dedication. I demurred with the justification that my own prose couldn’t stand up to the weight of a direct Brecker reference. Later, a grad student admitted that she was forgoing her meal per diem for the flight home to buy one of my books, which she approved of for its Breckerian title. “May I email you if I have thoughts,” she asked, batting her eyes. I told her there was a contact form on my website.
Near the end, a second person arrived with a complete set of my works. She introduced herself and explained that she was writing the first critical biography of Brecker. “I’d love to talk more about your meeting with Mason. So many people think of him as standoffish, but my argument is that he was both highly introverted and empathic. Your encounter shows the latter side of him. If it’s not too forward, I’d love a copy of your talk.”
I smiled and nodded, the golden retriever once again, before pulling a business card out of my pocket and handing it over. I had no intention of responding to further questions, but I was argument averse, so I couldn’t say that to the woman’s face. Better to ghost her for the rest of my life.
Kenneth saved me once again, ushering me away from the table and outside, into the marginally less oppressive Mississippi night air. I took the passenger’s seat in an overstuffed Magnolia University van, and we headed downtown for drinks. At the Jupiter Icehouse, our group merged with two more packs from the conference, taking over the back deck. Kenneth waved a university credit card in the air and yelled, “Drinks are on Mag. U!” After consulting with Paige, he retreated. “The first round, anyway.”
I couldn’t believe the reception my talk had received, or that so many attendees had read my work. Scholars came over to ask about motifs and controlling images, while grad students tried out nascent theories on Brecker’s work. I had been accepted as one of them.
The night air was warm but refreshing, or perhaps that feeling came from the gin and tonic I sipped from but never seemed to finish. Snacks appeared. Then beef sliders—proper food—and buckets of pony beers beading with condensation. Someone turned up the outside speakers and people began to dance.
After an incongruous blend of classic rock and recent pop hits, the music slowed, a blues tune I didn’t know but that felt elemental in its simplicity, pouring forth from the speakers. Paige slipped away from Kenneth and the rest of his contingent and came towards me.
We met in the middle of the dance floor, where we slid our arms around each other without passing a word between us. The back of her black tank top was damp, trapped beneath her skin and my clammy hands. We pressed together like familiars and swayed to the sound of the old blues man’s voice. She reached a hand through my hair and tipped my head down so that we made eye contact.
I was at least ten years older than her, but at that moment, I imagined chucking in my old life and moving to Jupiter. I would finish my novel while she did the same with her dissertation. And then we’d move on to the next adventure. Some college town somewhere. Who knew, maybe they’d have a job for me, too.
“You’re lucky,” she said, so close to my face it felt as though she was speaking directly into my mouth. “For all their talk, few people here actually met him. No one really cared until he was gone.”
I tried to nod, but she gripped my head with her fingers. The pressure distracted me from the way our pelvises ground together. “Is this where you tell me you’re his secret love child?”
She shook her head slowly, features stern, still making eye contact.
“Did you know CI only sold two-hundred copies in hardback? I found it in college in a Remainder bin.”
“Not everyone hits the jackpot the first time,” I said, thinking of the time my agent had told me the same thing.
The music changed, growing in volume and tempo, but we remained locked together.
“That Saint Mason stuff is bullshit,” she said. “Still, he was a genius, so I forgive him for his trespasses.”
“I don’t follow,” I said, growing breathless from the way her body was crushed against mine.
She pulled me even closer. “You have those people fooled,” she said, cocking her head in Kenneth and Colin’s direction. They both glared at me so fiercely I knew I had more competition than I’d wagered on a few moments earlier.
“And…?”
She blinked twice, so quickly they could have been twitches. But her posture remained as stolid as ever. She held on like we were going down in an airplane, though I was the one looking for a parachute.
“Everybody assumes he was a good person because he read ethics and wrote about people trying to be virtuous in a harsh world. But what they forget is that his characters always fail or become corrupted. Like you.”
I’d grown overconfident thanks to the reception I’d received so far, so I had no idea how to respond. My fiction writer’s faculties—my ability to dissemble and bullshit—failed me completely.
“I won’t say anything about your story,” she explained, the words ominous for their lack of emphasis. “But if you tell it again, anywhere, I’ll put you on blast.”
With that, she let go and walked away. She passed Kenneth and Colin and headed toward the door. A minute later, from my spot on the dance floor, where I remained frozen, I watched her walk along the outside of the fence separating the bar from the neighborhood and out of sight. She didn’t look back.
I considered following her, but once she’d left, even the weather felt more oppressive, too hot for a walk, so I slipped out of the bar and called a ride from the street. While I waited, I considered my options. Paige was correct in calling me out. What I’d done was, if not heinous, at least a crime against literature. I had been corrupted, as she’d said. Part of me blamed Colin for inviting me in the first place. Had I ever mentioned Brecker before? In all the disquisitions on my influences that I’d offered over the years, the man’s name had never come up. The B section of my personal library had no room for the massive space he’d occupy. But the more time I’d wasted trying to read him and figure out something to say about him —about us— the more I’d come to feel a connection. Like my own writing, his was always there, in the back of my mind. No wonder I joined the two in making up a story.
The hotel was almost dark, the entryway lit by recessed bulbs and fake gas lamps on the walls that flickered like strobe lights. I had an early flight the next morning and knew I should go to bed, sleep off some of what I’d had to drink. Instead, I sat at the desk and sketched the basics of the story I’d told hours earlier. I’d never be able to publish it in that form, but the impulse remained. Writers talk about stories that need to be told. This was mine. Even if I could never share it as such.
I finished after forty-five minutes and reviewed what I’d written. It wasn’t bad. A little sincere, but I still gathered the sheaf of pages and placed them in my satchel for safekeeping. Then I slept as though I were dead, never changing position, and woke the next morning not refreshed but relieved to be escaping Mason Brecker after so many months spent living in his fictional worlds. My own life beckoned.
***
I’ve spent more than a year bracing for Paige to change her mind and put me on blast. Even so, I finished my novel, which my agent has no interest in representing. Colin invited me to the eighth annual conference in a reduced role. At least I found another job, doing the same thing for less money. Don’t think of this tale as a ploy for fame, however. I have no interest in going viral and expect few people to care about what happened that weekend in Mississippi.
The more time that has passed, the more I’ve wondered whether Paige even knew, for sure, about my trespass. I’d told what I’d considered an ironclad story. Nevertheless, even if she couldn’t prove it, she did know the truth. We were connected in that way.
I hope that she, Colin and Kenneth, and all the other Brecker people out there will forgive me. I could have declined the offer or made a better attempt at reading Brecker. I could have spent less time getting drunk and more preparing. But I don’t want forgiveness or absolution. I’m a fiction writer. What did they expect?
Matthew Duffus is the author of the novel Swapping Purples for Yellows and the collection Dunbar’s Folly and Other Stories. A former academic, he lives with his family in rural North Carolina and online at matthewduffus.com.
JMWW 