Meadowbrook 135 Media

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Chapter One

The Chosen Life

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

Chapter One

The tent was the kind that pretended not to be a tent, white and high-shouldered, strung with small lights that had been made to look accidental and had cost, Adrian estimated, about as much to make look accidental as the lights themselves. He had been at the wedding for three hours and had already drafted, in the part of his mind that never stopped drafting, four separate observations about the lights, each more refined and less kind than the last, and he was working on a fifth when Daniel found him at the edge of the dance floor and put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You came,” in a voice so plainly glad that Adrian felt the fifth observation die in his throat, unfinished, which was a small mercy he did not thank anyone for.

“Of course I came,” Adrian said. “You only do this once.”

“Twice, statistically,” Daniel said, and laughed, and it was a real laugh, the kind that started somewhere below the sternum, and he squeezed Adrian’s shoulder once more and was gone, pulled back into the gravity of his own celebration, into the orbit of people who wanted to touch him tonight, who had been wanting to touch him all evening, the way you want to put your hand on something warm. Adrian watched him go. He watched the way Daniel moved through the crowd, stopping, bending toward an old woman in a wheelchair, taking both her hands, saying something that made her face open like a window, and Adrian thought, with the precision that was the best and the worst thing about him, that Daniel did not perform any of it, that this was the difference, that Daniel was simply distributing himself among the people he loved without any sense that he was being watched, because the possibility of being watched had never once occurred to him as a thing that might change what a person did.

Adrian had noticed this about Daniel in college and had not had a word for it then either. He had a word now, or several, but the words had never quite closed around the thing, the way a net does not close around water.

He took a glass of champagne from a passing tray, not because he wanted it but because holding a glass gave his hands an argument for existing, and he moved toward the perimeter of the tent where the lights gave out and the real darkness of the field began. There was a seam there, a place where the white wall of the tent met the night, and through a gap in the fabric he could see out across the lawn to the house, and the house had its windows lit, and in one of the downstairs windows a caterer was moving back and forth, doing something with trays, entirely unaware of being seen, and Adrian stood for a while and watched her through the gap because it was easier than watching the dancing. There was a particular ease in watching a person who did not know she was being watched. You could see what a person actually was when the audience was subtracted. The caterer set down a tray and pressed the heel of her hand into the small of her back and arched, briefly, an old animal gesture of a body that had been standing too long, and then she picked the tray back up and went on, and Adrian found the small honesty of it almost unbearable, though he could not have said why, and did not try.

“You’re doing the thing.”

He turned. It was Sarah, Daniel’s sister, whom he had known for years in the loose way you know the siblings of your friends, a knowledge composed entirely of weddings and funerals and the occasional kitchen at the end of a long dinner. She had two glasses of wine and gave him one, taking the untouched champagne out of his hand and setting it on a nearby table with the unceremonious authority of a woman who had decided he needed something stronger.

“What thing,” Adrian said.

“The thing where you stand at the edge and watch everyone like you’re going to be quizzed on us later.” She said it without malice. That was the thing about Sarah, she could say a true thing and let it lie there between you without sharpening it into a weapon. “Danny does it too, you know. Stands back and watches. The difference is he’s checking that everyone’s okay. You’re checking something else.”

“I’m checking that everyone’s okay,” Adrian said.

“No,” Sarah said, pleasantly, “you’re not,” and she touched her glass to his and drank, and he laughed, the real laugh, the one that got surprised out of him, the short bark that he could not control and did not like, because it told the truth about when a thing had actually landed, and Sarah looked pleased with herself, and the moment was nice, was genuinely nice, and Adrian filed away the niceness of it the way he filed everything, as data, as evidence, though evidence for what he could not yet have told you.

The band, which had been playing the sort of music that exists to make weddings feel like weddings, shifted into something slower, and the floor reorganized itself into couples, and Adrian watched Daniel find his wife. Her name was Mira. Adrian had met her three times and had each time conducted the small private appraisal he conducted of everyone, and Mira had survived it, which was rare, because the appraisal was designed to find the place where a person was performing and Mira did not appear to have one. She was a pediatric nurse. She laughed at things that were actually funny and did not laugh at things that were merely positioned to be funny, and Adrian had watched, at dinner, the way she let a silence sit when a silence was the honest response, instead of filling it, and he had thought, that is a person who has been near real things, though he had not extended the thought to ask what real things, or to notice that he was describing, without knowing it, a quality he had spent his whole life unable to produce in himself.

Daniel and Mira danced. They were not good dancers. This was somehow the worst part. They moved with the slight comic earnestness of two people who knew they were not good dancers and had decided years ago that it did not matter, and Daniel said something into Mira’s ear and she laughed and pressed her forehead against his collarbone, and Adrian, watching, felt something move in him that he did not have a clean name for, something that was not quite envy because envy was supposed to want the specific thing the other person had, and Adrian did not want a pediatric nurse named Mira, did not want a wedding tent strung with deliberately careless lights, did not want any of the visible items, and so he concluded, wrongly, that what he was feeling could not be envy, because he had defined envy too narrowly, the way he defined most things too narrowly, building the definition first and then living inside it like a man furnishing a cell and calling it taste.

What he felt, if he had been able to follow it down, was not a wanting of Daniel’s things. It was a wanting of the capacity that produced the things, the capacity to stand in the middle of a tent and not be at the edge of it, to be danced with badly and not narrate the dancing, to receive a Tuesday without auditing it. But he could not follow it down, because following it down would have required passing a door he kept locked, and so the feeling rose in him and found no name and settled, the way water settles, into the lowest available place, which in Adrian was a kind of cool amused distance, and he lifted Sarah’s wine and drank and said, to no one, because Sarah had drifted off to dance with an uncle, “Well.”

He said it out loud. There was no one near enough to hear. He had a habit of this, of small spoken punctuation when he was alone, a well, a there it is, a single quiet word addressed to an audience that was not present, and if you had asked him about it he would have denied it, and if you had played him a recording he would have been genuinely surprised, because the performance ran so deep that it continued even when the theater was empty, even when the house lights were down and the seats were folded and the only person left in the building was the actor, alone on the stage, still hitting his marks for a darkness that watched nothing.

His phone was in his jacket. He could feel it there, the small rectangular weight of it, and he knew that if he took it out there would be nothing on it that he needed, and he took it out anyway, the way you press a bruise, and there was a text from his father, sent two hours ago, that he had not answered. Give Daniel our best. That was all. Our best, the plural of a man who spoke for the family the way a steward speaks for a house, and Adrian looked at the four words for longer than four words deserved and felt the old thing stir, the thing that had no event attached to it, no scene he could point to, just a low pressure behind the breastbone that arrived whenever his father’s particular brevity arrived, the brevity of a man who loved you in a register so quiet you had to strain your whole life to hear it and never could be sure you had. He put the phone back without answering. He would answer tomorrow. He would write something a little too good, a little too composed, the way he always wrote his father, each of them passing the other notes in a language they had agreed, without ever discussing it, to keep formal, because formality was safer than the alternative, because the alternative had never been attempted and at this point the not-attempting had its own thirty-year momentum.

“He talks about you, you know.”

Mira had appeared beside him. He had not seen her come. She had the flushed, slightly undone look of a bride three hours in, the careful architecture of the morning loosening into something better, and she was holding her shoes in one hand, and Adrian thought, there it is, the shoes, the universal tell of the wedding’s second act, and then he stopped thinking it because Mira was looking at him with the directness of a person who was too happy tonight to bother with the usual choreography.

“Daniel,” she said. “He talks about you. The famous friend.”

“I’m not famous,” Adrian said. “I wrote one book that some people who give out prizes liked.”

“He says you’re the smartest person he’s ever met.” She said it simply, the way you report a weather fact, and then she tilted her head and added, with a small smile that had something underneath it, “He says it like it worries him a little. Like he can’t figure out why the smartest person he’s ever met seems so.” She paused. She was kinder than the true word would have been. “Far away.”

Adrian felt the observation land somewhere it was not supposed to be able to reach. He had defenses for cleverness. He had no defenses for this, for a bride in her stocking feet looking at him with no agenda but a vague benevolent puzzlement, reporting that he was talked about with worry. He looked for the joke, found one, and decided, in a small uncharacteristic act, not to use it.

“I’m happy for him,” Adrian said, and the surprising thing, the thing that surprised even him, was that it was true. Under everything, under the diagnosing and the distance and the cool amused water finding its low place, it was true. He was happy for Daniel. He could not be happy with him, could not stand in the warm middle of the thing and be warm, but he could stand at the edge in the cold and be, for Daniel specifically, glad, and the gladness cost him something, the way reaching across a great distance costs the arm, and Mira seemed to see the cost, because her face changed, softened, and she put her free hand briefly on his forearm, just for a second, the way you touch something you have decided not to ask about.

“He’d kill me for saying the worried part,” she said. “Forget I said the worried part.”

“I’ll forget the worried part,” Adrian said. “I’ll remember the smartest part. That part I’m keeping.”

She laughed, the real laugh, and the band started up again, faster now, and someone called her name, and she was gone, swept back into the warm machinery of being the bride, and Adrian stood for a moment with the unfamiliar residue of having said a true thing and not undercut it, and the residue was uncomfortable, the way a muscle is uncomfortable the day after you have used it for the first time in years, and he did the thing he always did with discomfort, which was to convert it into observation, to step back from it and look at it, and he thought: interesting, that I meant it, and the stepping-back was so practiced, so immediate, that he did not notice he had once again declined to simply feel the thing, had once again taken the warm live moment and pinned it to a board to study its wings.

He went out through the gap in the tent. The field at night was cold and the grass was wet and he did not care, the cold was clarifying, and he walked a little way out onto the lawn until the music went muffled behind him and he could see the whole tent from outside, the whole lit white shape of it glowing on the dark field like a lantern, and inside the lantern the small moving shapes of people who loved each other, blurred by the fabric into something almost abstract, a warmth with the particulars sanded off, and Adrian stood in the cold and watched the warmth from outside the way he had watched the caterer through the window, the way he had watched Daniel cross the floor, the way he had, he was beginning to dimly suspect though he would not have put it this way, watched his entire life, from a field, in the cold, looking in.

A figure detached itself from the tent and came toward him across the grass, and for a moment he thought it was Sarah again, or Daniel come to retrieve him, but it was an older man, in a good suit gone slightly rumpled, carrying two cigars, and it took Adrian a moment to place him as Daniel’s father, whom he had met perhaps twice, a retired engineer named Walter who had built bridges, actual bridges, the kind that carried trucks, and who had the unhurried physical confidence of a man who had spent his life making things that either held or did not hold and had made his peace with the binary of it.

“You looked like a man who wanted to be outside,” Walter said, and held out a cigar, and Adrian, who did not smoke, took it, because there are offers you accept for reasons that have nothing to do with the thing offered.

They stood and Walter produced a lighter and there was the small ceremony of the lighting, the cupped hands, the shared brief intimacy of two men leaning toward a single flame, and then they were both looking at the tent, side by side, two figures in a dark field, and Walter said nothing for a long time, which Adrian found he did not mind, and the not-minding was itself unusual, because silence with another person was a thing Adrian normally rushed to fill, treating a silence as an empty chair that demanded a guest.

“He’s a good boy,” Walter said finally, of his son, with the total unembarrassed simplicity of an old man past the age of guarding such things. “Never gave us a day’s worry. People say that like it’s nothing.” He drew on the cigar. “It’s not nothing.”

“No,” Adrian said. “It’s not nothing.”

“You’re the writer.”

“I’m the writer.”

“I tried to read your book,” Walter said, and Adrian braced, because this was a sentence that always ended in a small lie, in I loved it or I didn’t quite get to finish it, in some socially required courtesy, and instead Walter said, “I couldn’t get into it. Too sad for me. All those people in that house, none of them happy, dividing up the furniture.” He said it without apology, the report of a man who had no stake in flattering a stranger in a field. “My wife liked it. She reads sadder things than me.” He turned and looked at Adrian, and his face in the light from the distant tent was kind and unimpressed, which was a combination Adrian almost never encountered, kindness and the refusal to be impressed arriving together, because in Adrian’s world the two were opposites, kindness was a tax the impressed paid and the unimpressed withheld. “Is it true? The book. Are people really like that?”

And Adrian, who had a polished answer to this question, who had given versions of this answer in interviews and on panels, who could speak fluently for ten minutes about fiction and truth and the way the novel tells lies in order to tell the truth, opened his mouth to deliver it and found, standing in the wet field with a cigar he did not want and an old bridge-builder looking at him with kind unimpressed eyes, that the polished answer would not come, that something about the field and the cold and the lantern of warmth glowing behind them had briefly disarmed the machine, and what came out instead, quietly, was, “Some people. The people I know.”

Walter nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he had suspected, not about the book but about the man.

“That’s a shame,” Walter said, not unkindly. “Knowing those people.” And he clapped Adrian once on the back, the way men of his generation did, a single solid blow that was the entire vocabulary of a certain kind of affection, and he turned and walked back toward the tent, toward the warmth and his good son and his wife who read sadder things than he did, leaving Adrian alone in the field with a lit cigar and the slow dawning sense of having been, for once, seen clean through, not by a clever person armed with theories, but by a simple one armed with nothing but a long life of watching things hold or fail to hold.

Adrian stood there for a while longer. The cigar burned down. He did not smoke it, just held it, watching the small ember at its end, and across the field the music played and the lantern glowed and the small blurred shapes of the loved and the loving moved behind the white wall, and Adrian thought, in the part of his mind that never stopped, that he should remember this, the field and the cold and the old man’s clean unimpressed kindness, that there was something here he should hold onto, and even as he thought it he could feel the thing already beginning to convert, already turning from a moment lived into a moment observed, already cooling from experience into material, and he let it, because he did not know how to do otherwise, because the converting was so deep in him now that it ran without his consent, and he stood in the dark field watching the warmth he could not enter and felt, beneath the cool amused water and the diagnosing mind and the polished unspoken answers, a loneliness so old and so total that he had long ago stopped recognizing it as loneliness and had come to experience it simply as the texture of being him, the water he swam in, invisible the way water is invisible to the thing that has never once been out of it.

He dropped the cigar in the wet grass, where it died with a small sound. His hand, going back into his coat pocket for the warmth of it, found the chip. He had forgotten it was there, or had told himself he had forgotten, which was a different operation and one he was practiced at, and his thumb moved over the smooth face of it the way it had learned to without instruction, finding the milled edge, the small worn place where the lacquer had gone soft, and for a moment he stood very still in the dark field with his thumb on the thing and did not let himself think the name of the room it had come from, did not let himself think the word for what the chip was or what it was worth or what he had told himself, the last time, about whether there would be a next time. He let his thumb move over it. He thought about nothing, with great effort.

Then he took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and stood a moment more, and then he said it, quietly, to the empty field, to the dark, to the audience that was not there and had never been there and that he had been performing for his entire life without once being able to find.

“Well,” he said. “There it is.”

And he walked back toward the tent, composing, already, the text he would send his father in the morning.

The Last Honest Man

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Next: Chapter Two — The Prize

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Chapter Six

Morning Returns the Truth with Interest

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

He woke at the wrong hour, the hour that is neither night nor morning, with the specific clarity that too little sleep produces in a certain kind of person, a clarity that has nothing restful in it, a clarity like the edge of something, and he lay in the bed in the gray pre-dawn and did not move, because moving would commit him to the day, and he was not ready to be committed to the day, and so he lay still and let the night assemble itself behind his eyes.

He had come home at some hour he had not let himself note. He remembered the walk back, the reverse ascent, the streets refilling with windows as he climbed back up out of the windowless quarter into the part of the city where people slept ordinary sleep behind warm glass, and he remembered the cold being colder on the way up than it had been on the way down, the way it always was, the room having burned through whatever the body kept in reserve, so that he came back into the world each time a little more depleted than he had left it, a little thinner against the air. He remembered letting himself into the apartment and not turning on the lights and sitting for a while in the chair by the window, the one good chair, with his coat still on, and he remembered that the chair had been a mistake, because the chair was where the world came back, the chair faced the window and the window faced the other windows and the other windows in the small hours had gone dark, everyone asleep, everyone at rest in the ordinary way, and he had sat in his coat in the dark looking at the dark windows and felt the relief draining out of him the way warmth drains out of a room with the door left open, felt the great roaring silence of the interval recede and recede until it was gone entirely and there was only the ordinary silence, the cheap silence, and in the cheap silence Claire’s sentence had been waiting for him, patient, exactly where he had left it, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, and it had been worse on his return than it had been before he left, because now it had a new clause attached, a clause he had added himself by going to the room, and the new clause said: and a man who cannot bear to find out goes somewhere loud.

That was the thing about the morning, about every morning after. The room did not resolve the sentence. He understood this with total clarity in the gray hour, lying still in the bed. The room did not answer the sentence or dissolve it or even, finally, silence it. The room only postponed it, borrowed against it, and the borrowing came with interest, so that the sentence he had fled returned each morning larger than it had been, fed by the very act of fleeing, because now the fleeing was itself evidence, now the going to the room was one more thing the sentence could point to, one more exhibit in the case against him, and the case was building, the case had been building for years, and he was the one funding the prosecution.

He got up. The getting up was an act of will and he performed it the way he performed most acts of will, by converting it into a small narrative of competence, a man rising, a man beginning his day, and he went into the kitchen and made the coffee, and the making of the coffee was the one thing he did that morning without performing it, the kettle, the grounds, the slow pour, the bloom, the ninety seconds in which he was simply a man making coffee and not a man being watched making coffee, and he stood at the counter in the gray light and watched the coffee bloom and felt, for ninety seconds, almost all right, and then the ninety seconds ended and he was Adrian again, and he drank the coffee too fast and it was too hot and he welcomed the small burn of it because the small burn was a fact, was undeniable, was a thing happening to his actual body in the actual present, and he had a sudden hunger for facts that morning, for undeniable present things, the burn of the coffee, the cold of the floor, anything that was not the sentence and not the calculation that he had been avoiding since he woke and could not avoid much longer.

He let himself do the calculation while he finished the coffee. This was discipline of a kind, doing the calculation rather than fleeing it, and he did it standing at the counter, and the number was real and it was bad and it was not catastrophic, which was the worst thing it could be, because a catastrophic number would have forced a reckoning and a survivable number permitted denial, and the number he had lost was survivable, was a number he could absorb, was a number that meant some adjustments in the coming weeks, some quiet rearrangements, a payment deferred here, a thing not bought there, a small lie told to no one in particular because no one was watching his accounts closely enough to require the lie except himself. He had money. This was the thing that made it deniable, that made it possible to keep going, he was a Mercer, there was money behind him the way there was bedrock behind a building, he was not going to be put out on the street by a single bad night or by a hundred of them, the family money sat there, vast and patient, and he had not touched it, had built his adult life on the principle of not touching it, of being a man who lived on what he earned and let the inheritance sit untouched as a kind of proof, proof that he was not merely a rich man’s son, proof that the prize and the professorship and the life were his and not bought, and the bad number from last night did not threaten the bedrock, it threatened only the thin layer of soil he had laid down on top of the bedrock and called his own, and so he could absorb it, and the absorbing of it was precisely what allowed the whole thing to continue, because a man who can absorb the loss is a man who can tell himself the loss does not signify, and Adrian stood at the counter and absorbed the loss and told himself it did not signify and knew, in the watching part of him, that the telling was the lie, and drank the last of the coffee, and went to dress for the university.

The day at the university was a day like other days and he moved through it like a man wearing a suit that no longer quite fit, the suit being his own institutional self, the professor, the promising novelist, the man the place had decided he was, and he found that morning that the suit chafed, that the gap between the man the institution rewarded and the man who had sat in a windowless room until an hour he would not note had widened in the night, so that performing the institutional self took an effort it did not usually take, the way a familiar word can suddenly look misspelled if you stare at it too long. He taught a lecture course, the big undergraduate one, two hundred students in a raked hall, and he was good in it, he was always good in it, the lecture hall asking even less of him than the seminar did, the lecture hall being pure broadcast, pure performance, no one close enough to see, and he stood at the front and was brilliant about a book for fifty minutes and felt almost nothing, felt the brilliance come out of him the way water comes out of a tap, automatic, unattended, and somewhere in the fortieth minute he had the disorienting experience of hearing himself say something genuinely good about a novel and realizing he had not been present for the saying of it, that the performance had run itself while he was elsewhere, while he was doing the calculation again, the number, the rearrangements, and he had to stop for a moment and find his place in his own lecture, a small stumble that the two hundred students did not notice or forgave, and he finished the fifty minutes and gathered his notes and felt the particular shame of having phoned in the one thing he reliably did well, because if the teaching went, if even the teaching became a thing he did absently while the calculation ran, then there was very little left that was actually him and not residue.

There was a thing he was supposed to do that day, a small administrative thing, a recommendation letter for a student, a good student, who had asked him weeks ago and reminded him gently twice, and the deadline was that day, and he had told himself he would do it between the lecture and his office hours, and he sat down at his office desk with the student’s file and the form and every intention of doing it, and he could not. It was not a hard letter to write. He knew the student, the student was strong, the letter would have taken twenty minutes and he had the twenty minutes, and he sat with the file open and the cursor blinking and found that he could not assemble the sentences, that the part of him that assembled sentences was occupied, was down in the windowless room still, or up in the gray hour with the sentence, and the recommendation form sat there asking him to vouch for someone’s promise, to write the word promising about another human being and send them out into the world wearing it, and he found he could not do it, could not put his name to a forecast of someone else’s future when his own forecast had curdled so completely, and he closed the file and told himself he would do it tonight, knowing as he told himself that he would not do it tonight, that the student’s deadline would pass, that the student would never know exactly why the famous professor who had agreed to write the letter had simply failed to, would assume some private estimate had been made, some judgment rendered, when the truth was so much smaller and so much worse, that the professor had been unable to write twenty minutes of routine praise because he had spent the night purchasing intervals in a room with no windows and the cost had come due in the one currency he had not expected, the currency of ordinary function, the small daily competence that he had always taken for granted and was beginning, he realized, to spend.

Office hours were at two. He almost canceled them. He had his hand on the small sign he kept for the purpose, the office hours canceled sign that he hung perhaps twice a year, and he stood with it in his hand and thought about hanging it and going home and sitting in the chair, and then he thought about the chair, about what waited in the chair, and he put the sign down, because the office at least had the possibility of other people in it, and other people, even students, even the obligation of students, were better than the chair and the window and the sentence, and so he left the door open and sat down and waited, and at twenty past two, when he had begun to think no one would come, Claire came.

She knocked on the open door, which he noticed, the courtesy of knocking on a door already open, and she stood in the doorway with a book in her hand and said, “Do you have a minute, or is this a bad time,” and Adrian, looking up at her, felt two things at once and with great force, felt the small lift of her being there, the one person who had said a true thing to him in months, and felt the immediate corresponding fear, because she was the one person who had said a true thing to him in months, and a true thing was the precise thing he had spent the entire previous night and a survivable amount of money trying to get away from.

“It’s not a bad time,” he said. “Sit.”

She sat. She did not arrange herself the way students arranged themselves in his office, did not perform either deference or its studied absence, she simply sat, with the book in her lap, and she looked at him for a moment with an attention he recognized because it was his own kind of attention, the attention of a person who reads rooms and faces the way other people read print, and he saw her read him, saw her take in something, the wrong hour of sleep on him, the thing in his face that the lecture hall had been too far away to catch but that an office was close enough to register, and he saw her decide not to mention it, saw the decision pass across her face and resolve into restraint, and the restraint was its own form of seeing, was almost worse than if she had asked, because it told him she had seen enough to know there was something and enough to know it was not hers to ask about.

“I wanted to talk about the Melville,” she said. “Not to keep arguing it. I’ve been thinking about it since, and I think I was.” she paused, and he understood that she was doing something difficult for her, was walking back toward the thing she had said in seminar, “I think I was harder on Bartleby than the story deserves. I said he was just stopping and dressing it up as principle. But I reread it and I don’t think the story lets you be that sure. I think the story actually does leave it open, whether he’s a coward or a kind of saint, and I closed it too fast, in class, because.” and here she stopped again, and Adrian watched her arrive at the edge of something true and decide how much of it to offer, “because I have a reason to want him to be a coward. And wanting him to be a coward isn’t the same as the story making him one.”

And Adrian understood that she had just told him something, had just told him, obliquely, in the safe disguise of a literary revision, that her reading of Bartleby came up out of a wound, that there was a person somewhere behind her hard reading, the person she had referred to in the hallway, I watched somebody do it, right up until the end, and that she had wanted that person to have been a coward because the alternative, that the person had been a kind of saint, a kind of Bartleby, sincere in their terrible refusal, was harder to live with, and Adrian sat across the desk from her and felt the thing he had been feeling since she walked in sharpen into something almost unbearable, the recognition that she was describing, without knowing it, the exact structure of his own life, and the recognition that she half knew she was describing it, that some part of her had walked into his office to revise the Melville because revising the Melville was a way of continuing to look at him, at the thing in him she had seen across the seminar table, and he had the overwhelming impulse, sitting there, to say it, to simply say it, to say the person you watched, the one who called stopping a principle, I think I am that person, I think you saw it in me before I saw it, and I went somewhere last night to get away from your having seen it and it did not work and now I am sitting here with too little sleep and a bad number in my head and I do not know how to stop, and the impulse rose in him with a force that frightened him, the impulse to tell the truth to the one person who might be able to hear it, and he opened his mouth, and what came out, smooth and automatic and a half-second too fast, was wit.

“Well,” he said, “if you’ve come to tell me my reading was right after all, you’ve left it tragically late. I’ve already revised my entire philosophy of literature on the strength of your objection. The students have noticed. Connell thinks I’m having a breakdown.”

She laughed, a little, because it was funny, he was funny, the wit was good, the wit was always good, and he watched her laugh and felt the small hit of having made her laugh and felt, underneath it, the specific grief of having done it again, of having taken the live true thing rising in him and converted it, in the instant before it could escape, into performance, into the safe glittering deflection that he could do in his sleep, and he saw, this was the worst part, he saw that she saw it too, saw a flicker cross her face, not hurt exactly, but a small registering, the registering of a person who had offered him a real thing, had walked back into his office to revise a literary opinion in order to hand him, encoded, a piece of her own wound, and had watched him receive it and answer it with a joke about Bryce Connell, and she did not call him on it, that was the thing, she was too kind or too proud or too practiced in the watching of such men to call him on it, she simply registered it and let it pass, and something in the room cooled by a degree, and Adrian understood that he had just done, in miniature, the thing he did to everyone, the thing the woman years ago had named when she said she never knew if he was there or taking notes, that he had been offered a door and had, gently, wittily, with great charm, closed it.

“That’s the trouble with you,” Claire said, after a moment, lightly, gathering herself to go, and she said it without weight, almost fondly, but it was not a light thing and they both knew it was not a light thing, “somebody hands you something real and you hand them back something clever. It’s a very good trade if you’re the one doing it. You always come out ahead.” She stood, and put the book under her arm, and looked at him, and there was in her look no anger and no judgment, only that same flat patient recognition he had seen the night before in Marek’s eyes across the windowless room, the recognition of one person seeing clearly into the machinery of another, and it landed on Adrian the way Marek’s had landed, with a force he could not hold, and he looked away first, again, the way he had looked away first in the seminar room, the way he had looked away first from Marek, and Claire watched him look away and said, more gently, “Get some sleep, Adrian,” and left.

She had used his first name. Students did not use his first name. He sat in the office after she had gone and turned that over, the Adrian, the small deliberate intimacy of it, dropped at the end of an exchange in which he had failed her, and he could not tell whether she had given him his name as a kindness or as a way of stepping out of the role of student in order to tell him, person to person, to get some sleep, and the not being able to tell was the sentence again, was always the sentence now, and he sat in the cooling office as the afternoon light went and did not turn on the lamp and did not write the recommendation letter and did not do any of the small ordinary things the day still contained, and at some point his hand went into his pocket and found the chip.

It was different in his hand now. This was the thing he noticed, sitting in the dark office. The chip had been, for a long time, a talisman, a smooth worn object that promised the louder room, that carried in its softened lacquer the memory of relief, and his thumb had gone to it the way a believer’s hand goes to a rosary, for comfort, for the assurance that the thing existed and could be reached. And it did not feel like that now. He held it in his palm in the gray office and looked at it, the worn place, the milled edge, and it felt less like a promise and more like a receipt, less like a talisman and more like evidence, the single physical object that proved where he had been, that he could not explain away or convert into wit, that sat in his hand telling the plain truth about him the way Claire told the plain truth about him, and he understood that the chip had changed not because the chip had changed but because something in him had changed in the night, that the room had given him the interval and taken its payment and the payment was this, that he could no longer hold the chip and feel only the promise, that he held it now and felt the evidence, felt the case building, felt the cost, and he sat in the dark with the receipt of himself in his palm and did not go to the room that night, not because he had resolved anything, but because he was too tired, because the body had its own limits even when the will did not, and being too tired to flee meant that for one night he had to stay, had to sit in the chair by the window with the dark windows across the street and the sentence in the room with him and the chip in his hand, and let the truth he had spent good money to drown come back, with interest, and find him exactly where he hid.

The Last Honest Man

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Next: Chapter Seven — The Soup

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Chapter Five

The Room

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

Inside, the room was warm in the way that overused indoor spaces are warm, a thick used warmth made of bodies and machines and the long absence of any window to let it out, and the first thing that met him was always the smell, a smell he could not have described to anyone who had not been there, the smell of carpet that had absorbed thirty years of cigarettes from before the smoking stopped, and coffee left too long on a burner, and the particular sourness of human beings concentrating, which is different from the smell of human beings at rest, and Adrian breathed it in the way you breathe the air of a place you have promised yourself you would not return to, with a small involuntary loosening in the chest that he hated and depended on.

The room was not one room. This was the thing the movies never got right, that it was not a vast chandeliered hall but a sequence of low connected rooms in a building that had been other things before it was this, the dropped ceilings with their water stains, the fluorescent panels of which one always flickered, the carpet patterned in a busy maroon and gold whose purpose, he had read somewhere, was to hide what spilled on it, and he believed it, because the carpet looked like a thing designed by someone who had thought carefully about spills. There were no clocks. He knew about the clocks, everyone knew about the clocks, it was the one piece of folk wisdom about such places that had penetrated the ordinary world, and yet knowing it changed nothing, because the absence of clocks was not a trick played on you, it was a mercy you came for, the abolition of time being one more window the room had bricked over.

He gave his coat to no one. There was no one to give it to. He carried it over his arm and moved through the first room, where the machines were, the slot machines that he never played and held in a private contempt he recognized as snobbery and indulged anyway, the machines and the people feeding them, and there was the woman he always thought of as the same woman though it was never the same woman, the woman at the machine with the paper cup of coins and the face of someone performing a duty rather than seeking a pleasure, pressing the button, watching the wheels, pressing the button, and Adrian moved past her with the small ugly comfort of a man who has located someone he can feel superior to, and despised himself for the comfort, and took it anyway, because the room stripped you down to the small ugly comforts fairly quickly, that was part of what it did, part of what he came for, the way it dissolved the elaborate self he maintained everywhere else and left only the appetite and the few mean little consolations the appetite permitted.

He did not play the machines and he did not, usually, play the tables in the second room, the blackjack and the roulette, the games of pure chance dressed up as games of skill, and he held these too in a contempt that was, he knew, a way of telling himself that he was not really one of these people, that he was here for something more refined, and the refinement was a lie he needed and he let himself have it, walking through the second room with his coat over his arm toward the third room, the back room, the one without a name on a door because it had no door, just an opening, where the games were played that were actually games, where the chance was real but so was the reading of other people, and it was here, in the third room, that Adrian came, because here at least he could tell himself that the outcome turned partly on him, on his attention, on his ability to see what another person was concealing, and this self-flattery was the last self-flattery the room permitted before it took everything, and he clung to it the way you cling to the last dignity, knowing it is the last.

Marek was there.

Marek was always there, or seemed always to be there, which was different, because Adrian had never seen Marek arrive or leave, had only ever found him already present, the way you find weather present, and he was a broad unhurried man somewhere past sixty with a face that had been handsome once in a heavy way and had settled, with age, into something more useful than handsomeness, a face you told things to without deciding to, and he was sitting not at a table but at the edge of things, on a stool by the wall, with a glass of something clear that Adrian had never once seen him drink, watching the room the way a man watches a river he has watched for forty years, without anticipation, without anxiety, simply watching the thing do the thing it always did.

“Professor,” Marek said, when Adrian came in. He always called him Professor. Adrian had never told him he was a professor. This was the first thing Marek had ever done that frightened him, knowing the thing Adrian had not said, and Adrian had decided long ago not to ask how he knew, because the not asking was easier than any answer would be.

“Marek.”

“You look like a man who had a day,” Marek said. He did not say it warmly and he did not say it coldly. He said it the way he said everything, as a simple observation offered without stake, and this was the thing about Marek, that he had no stake, or seemed to have none, that he profited from the room and was somehow not of it, watched it consume men with neither pleasure nor pity, the way you might watch a tide come in over a sandcastle you did not build and did not mourn.

“I had a day,” Adrian agreed, and Marek nodded slowly, as though this confirmed something, and gestured with his clear glass, the smallest movement, toward the table, and said, “They’re light tonight. You could sit,” and the you could sit was not an invitation exactly and not a temptation exactly, it was a door held open by a man who did not particularly care whether you went through it, who had held it open for a thousand men and watched most of them go through and would hold it open for a thousand more, and the indifference of the holding was the most seductive thing in the room, because everything else in Adrian’s life was conditional, was watched, was scored, and here was a man holding a door with no investment in whether he entered, and Adrian found, as he always found, that the indifference drew him through in a way that eagerness never could have.

He sat.

The table was not beautiful. The felt had a burn near the rail and a pale ring where someone had set a wet glass down too many times, and the men around it were not beautiful, were not cool, were a heavy silent man in a golf shirt and an old man with magnificent white hair and trembling hands and a younger man, younger than Adrian, with the bright depthless eyes of someone in the early happy part of the thing before the part that was not happy, and Adrian looked at the young man and saw himself at the first room, years ago, and felt the small cold thing and looked away. He bought in. The mechanics of buying in he performed without thought, the counting out, the receiving, the small stacks assembling themselves in front of him, and he did not let himself attend to the number, because attending to the number was the beginning of a kind of arithmetic that the room existed to silence, and the silencing of arithmetic was part of what he had walked twenty minutes through the cold to purchase.

This was the thing he could never explain, would never try to explain, to the version of himself that watched from behind his eyes or to Claire if she ever asked, which she would not, that the money was the medium and not the message. It was not nothing. He wanted to be clear with himself, in the rare honest moments, that the money was not nothing, that he was not one of those wealthy men for whom the stakes were theater, that the money he was setting down was real and its loss would be real and the reality of the possible loss was precisely the point, because a wager you cannot lose is not a wager, is theater, and theater was the thing he had everywhere else in his life, the safe performance, the contained risk, and he had come here for the opposite of theater, for stakes that could actually take something from him, and so the money mattered enormously, mattered as the thing that made the jeopardy real, and mattered not at all as a thing he wanted to possess, because he did not want to possess it, winning gave him almost nothing, winning was a kind of anticlimax, winning meant the interval had ended in his favor and the interval ending was the loss regardless of which way it broke. The money mattered and did not matter at the same time, the way a man crossing a high wire needs the height to be real and does not want to fall, needs the drop and does not desire it, and the drop is the entire meaning of the walk.

The cards came.

He would not describe the game. Even to himself he kept the mechanics at a slight distance, because the mechanics were not the thing, the mechanics were the apparatus, the trellis up which the actual thing grew, and the actual thing was not the cards, was not the odds, was not the reading of the heavy silent man’s stillness or the young man’s bright leaking tells, the actual thing was the interval, and the cards existed only to produce the interval, the way a church exists to produce a silence, and Adrian sat and felt the apparatus assemble around him, the small decisions, the watching, the slow accumulation of a hand into a situation, and all of it was prelude, all of it was the long liturgy before the moment, and he moved through the liturgy with the competence of long practice, and his mind, for the first time since the seminar room that afternoon, began to quiet.

It did not quiet all at once. That was not how it worked. At first the world came with him into the room, the day came with him, Bryce in the doorway and Eleanor’s don’t disappear on us and the dead document on the laptop and Claire, Claire most of all, Claire’s sentence, which had followed him down through the descending streets and through the door and into the warm windowless air and was sitting in him still, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, and for the first hands the sentence stayed, the world stayed, he was a man at a table with his whole unbearable day still loud inside him, and this was the part the moralizers would never understand, that the early hands did not help, that you did not come for the early hands, the early hands were the cost of admission, the slow grinding work of getting the apparatus tall enough, getting the stakes real enough, getting the hand built into a true situation, because only a true situation produced a true interval, and a true interval was the only thing in the world strong enough to do what he needed done.

And then there was a hand.

He felt it become a hand, become the hand, the way you feel weather change, a pressure shift in the room, the heavy man committing in a way he had not committed before, the young man already gone, folded, leaking relief, and it came down to Adrian and the heavy silent man in the golf shirt, and there was money in the middle of the table now that was a real amount of money, an amount that mattered, an amount whose loss he would feel for weeks, and the situation had become true, fully true, the apparatus had grown tall, and Adrian sat with his cards and looked at the man and the man looked at nothing and the decision arrived, the decision to put the rest of it in, to commit the whole real frightening amount, and Adrian did not so much make the decision as recognize that it had been made, that the whole evening, the whole day, the whole descending walk had been the making of it, and he pushed the stack forward into the middle, and the heavy man, after a long stillness, called.

And here it was.

The cards were down. The decision was past. There was nothing left to do, nothing left to read, nothing left to control, the entire situation had passed out of his hands and into the hands of the next card, which had not yet turned, which sat in the deck or in the dealer’s fingers in a state of perfect undecidedness, and in the gap between the calling and the turning, in that interval, that held suspended instant before the universe delivered its verdict, Adrian felt the thing happen, felt it arrive the way it always arrived, the great roaring silence, the drowning, and it was this, this was what he had walked through the cold for, this was the thing no prize and no praise and no love had ever given him.

It was not pleasure. He wanted to be exact about this, in the one place he was ever exact with himself. It was not pleasure, it was not excitement, it was not the cheap thrill the word gambling conjured in people who had never felt it. It was closer to anesthesia and closer to prayer and closer to violence than to pleasure, it was all three of those at once, it was the anesthesia of a mind that had been screaming all day going suddenly, blessedly numb, the screaming cut off mid-note, and it was the posture of prayer, the helplessness of it, the total surrender of a man who has done everything he can do and now can only wait for a verdict from somewhere outside himself, the same helpless waiting upturned face that prayer was, except that the god he waited on was not merciful and not cruel but simply, perfectly indifferent, an indifference that asked nothing of him and judged nothing about him and would deliver its number with the same blank fairness to a saint or a fraud, and there was a peace in being judged by something that did not care what you were, a peace he had never found in the conditional judging eyes of every other thing in his life, and it was violence too, was the held breath before an impact, the body braced, the animal certainty that something was about to happen to you that you could not stop, and in the convergence of those three things, the numbness and the surrender and the braced waiting, Adrian found the only silence his life contained.

Claire’s sentence was gone.

That was the thing. That was the whole thing, if anyone had ever been able to make him say it. In the interval, Claire’s sentence was gone, the sentence he could not convert and could not escape and could not bear, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, it was simply gone, drowned, not answered, not resolved, not metabolized, just silenced by a roar so total that no sentence could survive in it, and with it went everything else, went the unwritten novel and the dead document, went his father going back down to his plate, went his mother’s encrypted love that he could not decrypt, went Bryce’s velvet blade and the woman who had left him saying he was always taking notes, went the entire accumulated weight of a self he could not stop being, all of it drowned, all of it silent, for one suspended instant the whole unbearable apparatus of being Adrian Mercer switched off, and there was only the table and the unturned card and the roaring peace, and in that instant, and this was the horror of it, this was the thing he could never tell anyone, in that instant he was happy. Not happy. There was no word. He was at rest. For one held breath in a windowless room over a felt table with a burn near the rail, Adrian Mercer was finally, completely, at rest, the way other people were at rest in love or at rest in faith or at rest in a Sunday afternoon with someone asleep against their shoulder, the way Daniel was at rest in his whole life, Adrian was at rest for the length of time it took a card to turn, and he understood, in the part of him that never stopped understanding even here, that he would pay any amount of money and any amount of his life to extend that length of time, and that the extending of it was not possible, that the interval was indivisible, that you could not make it last, that the moment the card turned it was over regardless of the outcome, and so you had to do it again, and again, not to win, never to win, winning was nothing, winning was the interval ending, you did it again to return to the interval, to the one place the screaming stopped, and that this returning, this endless purchasing of an instant that could not be made to last, was the whole shape of the thing that was going to destroy him, and that he was going to let it.

The card turned.

He had lost.

The heavy man’s hand was better, had been better the whole time, and the money that had been in the middle of the table was gathered toward the heavy man with the small efficient motions of the dealer, and Adrian watched it go, the real money, the money whose loss he would feel for weeks, and felt, watching it go, almost nothing, a small dull pang that was nothing next to the thing he had felt in the interval, because the loss was not the point, the loss had never been the point, the interval was the point and the interval was over and the only way back to it was forward, was another hand, was more money pushed into more middles in pursuit of more intervals, and he sat for a moment in the after silence, the ordinary silence, the cheap silence that was just the absence of sound and not the great drowning silence he had come for, and he felt the world begin to come back, felt Claire’s sentence begin to seep back in at the edges, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, and he reached for his remaining chips, what was left of the buy-in, and across the room on his stool by the wall Marek watched him reach, and Marek’s face did not change, Marek’s face never changed, but Adrian felt the watching, felt himself being seen by the one person in the room who understood exactly what had just happened and exactly what was about to happen next and had seen it happen ten thousand times and would see it ten thousand more, and for a moment Adrian met Marek’s eyes across the room, and there was in Marek’s eyes neither judgment nor pity nor encouragement, there was only recognition, the flat patient recognition of a man who had long ago stopped lying to himself about what the room sold and to whom, and Adrian, who lied to himself about almost everything, felt the recognition land, and could not hold it, and looked away, and pushed his remaining chips forward, and waited for the cards, and waited for the interval, and waited, in the only church he had, for the screaming to stop again.

The Last Honest Man

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Next: Chapter Six — Morning Returns the Truth with Interest

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Chapter Four

The Room Without Windows

By Michael P.S. Rogers

He stayed in the office longer than he needed to, which was its own kind of admission, because the office was where he went when he wanted to look like a man who was working, and there was no one to look at him, and he stayed anyway, performing industry for the empty room and the gray window and the version of himself that watched from somewhere just behind his own eyes and was never, ever fooled and never, ever stopped watching.

He had told himself he would write. He had a contract for the second book, had had it for almost three years, a contract that his publisher renewed its patience on the way you renew a magazine subscription you have stopped reading but cannot quite cancel, and there was a document open on his laptop that he had named, eighteen months ago, with a working title he no longer believed in, and the document contained four thousand words that he had written and rewritten so many times that they had lost all texture, had become a kind of scar tissue, smooth and dead, and he opened the document now and looked at the first paragraph and understood, with the clarity Claire had loosed in him that afternoon, that he was not going to add to it today, that he was not going to add to it ever, that the document was not a novel in progress but a monument to a refusal he had been calling work, and he closed the laptop.

The sentence was still in him. He had hoped the walk from the seminar room to the office would dilute it, the way motion usually diluted things, but it had not diluted, it had concentrated, the way certain things concentrate when you carry them, from the inside the man refusing to be corrected and the man refusing to compromise feel exactly the same, and he had tried, in the office, the only thing he knew to do with a sentence that would not leave him alone, which was to make it his. He had taken out a notebook, an actual paper notebook, the good one, and he had tried to write the sentence down in a way that would convert it from a wound into a possession, to annotate it, to surround it with his own commentary until it became material, until it became a thing he had thought rather than a thing that had been done to him, and he had written the indistinguishability of principle and pathology from the interior position, which was an accurate enough gloss and was completely dead on the page, had none of the live terror of the thing Claire had actually said, and he had looked at his own clever lifeless sentence next to the memory of her live one and understood that he could not convert this one, that the machine that turned his life into material had finally encountered something it could not process, that Claire had said a thing so exactly true that his fluency broke its teeth on it, and he had closed the notebook too.

There was a knock, the particular two-knuckle knock of a colleague rather than a student, and the door opened before he answered, which told him who it was before he looked up. Bryce Connell taught the contemporary novel and had published two books to Adrian’s one and was, by every external measure, the more accomplished man, and had never forgiven Adrian for the fact that Adrian’s single book had eclipsed both of his combined, an injustice Bryce experienced daily and metabolized into a relentless, gleaming collegiality that was the purest envy Adrian had ever encountered, envy so complete it had achieved the appearance of its opposite.

“There he is,” Bryce said, leaning in the doorway in the way that meant he intended to stay longer than the posture suggested. “The man himself. I heard you had a moment in seminar today.”

“Did you,” Adrian said, neutrally, and felt something cold move through him, because of course it had already traveled, the way things traveled in a department, a graduate student had said something to another graduate student in a hallway and now Bryce Connell stood in his doorway with the news arranged on his face as concern.

“Petrosian was raving about it at the colloquium. Some student took you apart over Melville, apparently. He made it sound like a bloodletting.” Bryce smiled, and the smile was warm, and underneath the warmth was the thing, the small hungry thing, feeding. “I told him, that’s what Adrian does. He lets them think they’ve won. It’s a pedagogy. The great ones make the students feel brilliant.” He paused, and the pause was a blade wrapped in velvet. “That is what happened, isn’t it? You let her win?”

And there it was, the question that was not a question, the offer of a frame that would restore Adrian to the position of the master who had staged his own apparent defeat, and Adrian recognized the frame as the exact frame he himself would have offered, would have reached for, would have used a hundred times to convert a real loss into a pedagogical strategy, and he had the strange experience of watching Bryce extend to him the very lie he was practiced at telling, and finding that he did not want it, that taking it from Bryce would be obscene, would be a collaboration in a smallness he could suddenly see clearly, and he heard himself say, “No. She was just right.”

Bryce’s smile did not move but something behind it recalculated. This was not the move. Adrian was supposed to take the frame, accept the velvet blade as a gift, and the two of them were supposed to stand in the doorway agreeing that the students were lucky to have men like them, and instead Adrian had said she was just right, plainly, and the plainness disarmed Bryce in a way that no cleverness could have, because Bryce had no script for sincerity, sincerity was not a currency that circulated between them, and he stood for a moment with his recalibrating smile and then said, “Well. Generous of you to say,” in a tone that meant he did not believe it and could not understand it and would be telling people by evening that Adrian had seemed off, had seemed strange, possibly the second book was finally breaking him, and Adrian watched the future gossip assemble itself behind Bryce’s eyes and found that he did not care, which was itself unusual, because he cared a great deal, ordinarily, about the shape of himself that traveled through other people, had built much of his life around the management of that traveling shape, and the not caring now was either growth or exhaustion and he could not tell which, and the inability to tell was Claire’s sentence again, wearing a different coat.

Bryce left. Adrian sat. The light in the courtyard went from gray to the grayer gray that precedes early winter dark, and at some point his phone lit on the desk, and it was his mother.

He let it ring twice before he answered, not because he was deciding whether to answer but because answering on the first ring would have communicated an eagerness that was not permitted in the grammar of the family, and he picked up and said, “Mother,” and Eleanor said, “I’m not interrupting,” which was how she always began, a statement rather than a question, a small assertion of her own consideration that also, characteristically, foreclosed the possibility of his saying that she was.

“You’re not interrupting.”

“Your father wanted me to call about the thirtieth. The dinner for the Hallorans. He thinks you said you’d come and I think you said you’d try to come, and the difference matters because of the table.” Her voice was warm and exact, the voice of a woman conducting the small administrations of a family with the competence of someone who had been doing it for forty years and had long ago stopped finding it either burdensome or meaningful, and Adrian, listening, felt the old thing, the warmth and the chill arriving together, because his mother had called, his mother had thought of him, and the content of the call was the seating arrangement, was the table, was a small logistical fact that could have been a text, and somewhere underneath the seating arrangement was the actual call, the one neither of them would make, the call where one of them said how are you, really, and the other one answered, really, and that call had never once been placed in either direction in his entire life and would not be placed now.

“I’ll come,” Adrian said. “Put me at the table.”

“You’ll come or you’ll try to come.”

“I’ll come.”

“Good,” Eleanor said, and there was a small silence, and into the small silence Adrian felt, absurdly, the pull of the afternoon, the pull of Claire’s sentence, and he had the brief insane impulse to say it to his mother, to say someone said a thing to me today and I cannot get it out of my head, to use the silence for once for its actual purpose, and the impulse rose and he felt it rise and then he felt the old machinery close over it, smooth and automatic, the lifelong reflex that converted every opening into formality, and he said instead, “How is he. Dad,” and Eleanor said, “He’s well. He’s reading that enormous biography. He reads me the footnotes,” and there was, just there, in he reads me the footnotes, a flash of something, a whole marriage in five words, the long quiet companionship of two people who had made an arrangement and lived inside it, and Adrian heard it and did not know whether what he felt was tenderness or grief or envy, and Claire’s sentence said, somewhere in him, you cannot tell the difference from the inside, and he said, “Tell him I said hello,” which was the family’s way of saying a thing that mattered by saying a thing that did not, and Eleanor said, “I will. The thirtieth. Don’t disappear on us,” and the don’t disappear on us was as close as his mother came to I miss you, was the encrypted form of it, and Adrian received the encryption and could not decrypt it out loud and said, “I won’t. Goodbye, Mother,” and hung up, and sat in the dark office with the phone warm in his hand, having been loved, formally, inadequately, completely, in the only language the family possessed, and feeling the specific loneliness that is worse than not being loved at all, the loneliness of being loved in a language you cannot answer in.

He left the office. He had intended, walking out, to go home, and there was a version of the evening available to him, he could feel it there like a path branching off into trees, in which he went home and made something to eat and sat in the chair by the window and let the afternoon work on him, let Claire’s sentence do whatever it was going to do, sat with it the way she had said the story wanted you to sit with the discomfort, and on the street outside the building the air had the first real bite of winter in it and the city was doing the thing the city did at that hour, the lights coming on in the buildings, the windows filling with the small warm tableaux of other people’s evenings, and Adrian stood on the sidewalk in the cold and looked up at a lit window across the street where a woman was setting a table, two places, moving back and forth, and he thought of the caterer at the wedding, the heel of her hand in the small of her back, and he felt, standing there, the path branching, felt how close the ordinary evening was, how available, how he could simply walk to it the way other people walked to it, could go home and be a man alone in an apartment having a Tuesday, and the trouble was that the ordinary evening would be quiet, and in the quiet Claire’s sentence would be waiting, and in the quiet he would have to sit with the possibility that the thing he called his integrity was the refusal to be corrected, that the unwritten novel was not a high standard but a hiding place, that the woman who had left him because he was always taking notes had seen what Claire had seen, that his whole life was a Bartleby dressed as a principle, and he could not, he found, standing in the cold, he could not go into the quiet, because the quiet had become unbearable, the quiet was where the truth lived now and the truth was too loud to bear in a quiet room.

So he needed a louder room.

He understood this about himself with more clarity than he usually permitted, standing on the sidewalk with the cold coming through his coat. He was not going to go because he loved it. He had never loved it, not the way the word love was meant, there was no pleasure in it of the kind that pleasure ordinarily named, the room was not fun, the room was grim and bright and full of grim bright people and the carpet was bad and the air was wrong and nothing about it was glamorous, the movies had it wrong, there were no tuxedos, there was a man in a windbreaker who had not slept and a woman feeding a machine with the patience of someone tending a grave. He was going to go because something had been made too clear today, and clarity, real clarity, the kind that arrives uninvited from outside and shows you the room you are standing in, was the one thing he could not survive, and the room he would not name had a property that nothing else in his life had, which was that it was loud enough, that the jeopardy of it was loud enough, that in the half-second before the card turned the volume of his own peril rose so high that it drowned everything, drowned the sentence, drowned the unwritten novel, drowned the encrypted love of his mother and the look of his father going back down to his plate, drowned the whole accumulated weight of a life spent at the edge of rooms, and in that drowned silence, which was not silence at all but its opposite, a roar so total it functioned as silence, Adrian could finally, briefly, stop hearing the truth.

He started walking. Not toward home. He told himself, as he always told himself, the small permissions, that he would only watch, that he was tired and wanted somewhere to sit, that he would have one drink and leave, the liturgy of small lies that he no longer believed and still recited because the reciting was part of the going, and his thumb was in his pocket on the chip, on the worn soft place, and the chip was not a temptation, that was the thing the moralizers never understood, the chip was not a seductive object whispering to him, the chip was a tool, was a key, was the smooth worn proof that the louder room existed and could be reached, and his thumb moved over it the way a man going under for surgery watches the drip, with something almost like relief, the relief of a person who has been awake too long and is finally going to be allowed to stop.

The walk took twenty minutes. He could have taken a cab and did not, because the walk was part of it too, the walk was the descent, the gradual leaving of the world of lit windows and set tables and people loving each other inadequately in the languages they had, and the entering of the other world, the world without windows, because that was the thing about the room he would not name, he realized, passing the last of the lit apartments and turning toward the part of the city where the buildings stopped having warm windows and started having no windows at all, the room had no windows, the room was the one place in his life where he was not standing at a window looking in at a warmth he could not reach, because the room had abolished the window, had abolished the outside, had abolished the warmth and the longing for it, there was no inside and outside in the room, there was only the table and the turning card and the half-second of roaring peace, and a man who could not bear to be on the wrong side of a window had found the one room in the world with no windows in it, and he walked toward it through the cold with his thumb on the chip and Claire’s sentence growing fainter with every block, drowned in advance by the anticipation of the louder thing, and he felt, approaching it, the terrible gratitude of the addict who is not addicted to the substance but to the silence the substance brings, the gratitude of a man about to be allowed, for a few hours, to not have to know what he had spent the whole day being unable to stop knowing.

The entrance was a door that did not announce itself, in a street that did not invite you, and Adrian stood at the door for a moment, and this was the threshold, this was the place where, if he were the man he told the seminar to be, the Bartleby, the one who would prefer not to, he would prefer not to, would turn around, would walk back up through the descending streets into the world of windows and go home and sit in the quiet and let the true sentence do its slow work on him, and he stood at the door and felt the choice, felt it fully, more fully than he usually let himself, because Claire had woken something and the woken thing made even this more conscious, and he understood that he was choosing, that this was not compulsion exactly but choice wearing the mask of compulsion, that some part of him at the threshold could still turn, and he stood there with his thumb on the chip and his breath showing in the cold and the door in front of him, and on the other side of the door was the louder room, and behind him, up the hill, was the quiet, and in the quiet was a sentence a young woman had said to him that afternoon, said without cruelty, said almost with sorrow, that he could not tell the difference between the refusal to compromise and the refusal to be corrected, that no one could, from the inside, and that the only way to find out which one you were was to wait, to stay still, to let yourself be measured by something real, and Adrian stood at the threshold of the windowless room and chose, the way he had chosen a hundred times and would choose again, the noise, and put his hand on the door.

The Last Honest Man

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Next: Part Two — Controlled Demolition

Chapter Five — The Room

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Chapter Three

Bartleby

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

The book on the desks that morning was Bartleby, the Scrivener, which Adrian had chosen the way he chose everything he taught, because it was a confession he could deliver under cover of analysis, though he would have denied this with genuine conviction, because the denial was older than the awareness it denied.

The seminar met on the third floor in a room with tall windows that faced a courtyard, and the light at that hour came in long and gray and lay across the seminar table in a way that Adrian had stopped noticing years ago and would have been unable to describe, though it was the kind of light he put into his prose without knowing where he had gotten it. There were eleven students. He knew their names, which was more than some of his colleagues bothered with, and he knew their tells, the ones who had read and the ones who had skimmed and the one who had read so closely that she frightened him a little, though he had not yet let himself notice that she frightened him, had categorized the feeling instead as interest, which was a safer drawer.

“So,” he said, sitting on the front edge of the desk rather than behind it, because behind it was for men who needed the furniture, “a man is asked to do his job, and he says he would prefer not to. And then he says it again. And the entire moral universe of the story organizes itself around five words.” He let the silence sit. He was good at letting silence sit; it was the one thing he could do in a room that he could not do alone. “I would prefer not to. Tell me what that sentence is.”

A young man named Petrosian, who was bright and eager and a little in love with Adrian in the way that bright eager young men fall a little in love with the professor who takes them seriously for the first time, said, “It’s resistance. He’s resisting the whole.” he gestured vaguely, “the whole capitalist machinery. The office, the copying, the.”

“That’s the seminar paper version,” Adrian said, not unkindly, and the class laughed, and Petrosian flushed but laughed too, because Adrian had a way of cutting a student that left the student feeling chosen rather than wounded, included in the cut, as though the two of them together were laughing at the lesser answer the student had momentarily occupied. “That’s the answer that gets a B-plus and a future in administration. Try again. Not what it resists. What it is.”

The room went quiet in the productive way, the way that meant they were actually thinking rather than waiting, and Adrian felt the thing he felt only here, the warm current of a room bending toward him, eleven minds leaning in the direction he was pulling them, and it was, he knew, the closest thing to intimacy he reliably experienced, this, the seminar, the held attention of people who did not know him offering itself up to be shaped, and he was careful never to examine why the only intimacy he could tolerate was the kind that flowed one way and required nothing of him in return.

“It’s a refusal,” said a young woman named Okafor, “but it’s not a refusal of anything specific. That’s the point. He doesn’t refuse the work because the work is bad. He just. prefers not to. It’s a refusal with no demand attached.”

“Good,” Adrian said, and meant it. “Better. A refusal with no demand attached. Hold onto that.” He stood up off the desk and went to the window, which was a thing he did when he was about to say the thing he had built the class around, a small unconscious choreography of approach, the way a man steps back before he throws. “Here is what I want you to sit with. Bartleby is the only honest man in the story. Everyone else in that office has made an arrangement. The lawyer, the narrator, this decent reasonable man who tells us the whole thing, he has made an arrangement with his own comfort. He does the safe lucrative work, he avoids the courtroom, he has, in his own words, a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. He is the most reasonable man in American literature. And he is, if you read him correctly, the most quietly damned, because somewhere in his life he looked at the easiest way and the truest way and he chose the easiest, and he has been narrating his own small surrender ever since in the gentlest possible voice.”

He turned from the window. He had them now. He could feel that he had them, the whole table tilted toward him, and there was a particular pleasure in this moment that he had never admitted was the only pleasure he fully trusted.

“Bartleby refuses to make the arrangement. That’s all he does. He will not trade his preference for his comfort. He would prefer not to, and he will not be reasoned out of the preference, and it costs him everything, it costs him his livelihood and his freedom and finally his life, he dies in a prison preferring not to eat, and the question the story leaves you with, the question Melville will not answer for you, is whether Bartleby is a madman or whether Bartleby is the only one in the building who never lied.” He let it land. “Most of you will spend your lives being the lawyer. Reasonable. Comfortable. Telling the story of your own arrangement in a gentle voice and calling it wisdom. A very few of you will be Bartleby, and you will pay for it, and you will not be sorry.”

It was a good lecture. He knew it was a good lecture because of the silence after it, the particular thick silence of young people who have just been handed a frame that flatters them, that tells them their discomfort with the ordinary world is not maladjustment but discernment, that the part of them that recoils from the reasonable arrangement is the best part, the Bartleby part, the part worth dying for. He had given them, in twenty minutes, a permission and a warning and a way of feeling superior to their own future contentment, and they would carry it out of the room loving him for it, and most of them would never notice that he had said almost nothing about the actual sentences on the page, that the entire performance had been a man at the front of a room confessing his own theology and calling it Melville.

“That’s beautiful,” said Petrosian, quietly, and he was not being ironic, and Adrian felt the small warm hit of it and despised himself slightly for needing it.

“It’s not beautiful,” said a voice from the far end of the table. “It’s a really good way to never have to finish anything.”

The room turned. Adrian turned.

It was the student who frightened him, the one who read too closely, whose name was Claire, and she had said it without heat, almost mildly, looking down at her copy of the book as she said it, as though she were reading the objection off the page rather than launching it, and then she looked up, and Adrian saw that she was not nervous, that she had not said it to provoke him or to perform for the room, that she had said it because it was true and the truth had simply arrived in her and she had let it out, the way you let out a held breath.

“Say more,” Adrian said. It was what he always said. It was the teacher’s reflexive volley, and he heard, even as he said it, that his voice had changed slightly, had picked up a half-degree of something, and he hoped no one else had heard it.

“Bartleby doesn’t refuse to make an arrangement,” Claire said. “He refuses to do anything at all. He stops copying, then he stops doing the work entirely, then he stops eating. You’re calling that integrity. But integrity is when you refuse a specific thing for a specific reason. Bartleby never gives a reason. That’s not honesty. That’s just.” she paused, choosing, the way she chose everything, and Adrian found himself waiting for the word with an attention he did not give to most things in his life, “stopping. He dresses up stopping as a kind of purity, and the narrator falls for it, and I think the reader’s supposed to half fall for it too, and I think we’re supposed to notice that we’re falling for it. Melville’s not telling us Bartleby’s the honest one. He’s showing us how seductive it is to call your own paralysis a principle.”

The room had gone very still. Petrosian was looking back and forth between them like a man at a tennis match who has just realized the stakes are higher than he understood. Okafor was leaning forward. And Adrian stood at the front of the room and felt something he had not felt in a classroom in years, possibly ever, which was the specific sensation of an argument arriving that he had not anticipated and could not immediately dissolve, a counter that did not bounce off the smooth surface of his fluency but went in, found the seam, and he understood in that moment two things at once, that this young woman was the most intelligent person in the room including himself and that she had, without any apparent intention of doing so, with no malice and no grandstanding, simply by reading the story more honestly than he had, put her finger on the exact place where his whole performance, and possibly his whole life, was hollow.

He did the thing he always did, which was to be charming about it.

“So you think Bartleby is a coward,” he said, and smiled, inviting the room to enjoy the framing, to see the contest as a sporting one.

“No,” Claire said, and she did not smile, not because she was humorless but because she could see he was trying to convert the moment into a performance and she declined the conversion the way a person declines a drink they did not order. “I don’t think the story’s about courage or cowardice at all. I think that’s the trap. I think the story’s asking a different question, which is how you tell the difference between refusing to compromise and refusing to be corrected. And I don’t think Bartleby can tell the difference. And I don’t think the narrator can. And.” she stopped, and for the first time something flickered in her, not nervousness exactly, but a kind of restraint reasserting itself, a person who had said a true thing and was now aware that she might be saying it to a man who had built something important on its not being true, and she finished more gently than she had started, “and I’m not sure the difference can be told from the inside. That’s the part that scares me about the story. From the inside, the man refusing to be corrected and the man refusing to compromise feel exactly the same. They both feel like integrity.”

The silence after that was a different silence than the one after Adrian’s lecture. His silence had been warm, a room full of people enjoying a flattering frame. This one was cold and alert, the silence of a room that has watched something real happen and does not yet know what it was, and several of the students, Adrian could see, were uncomfortable, were looking at their books, because a student had stood up to the professor they admired and the worst thing was that she had not been disrespectful, had not grandstanded, had simply been right in a way that made the room rearrange itself.

Adrian became aware that everyone was waiting for his return of serve. This was the moment. He had spent his entire career equal to this moment, the moment when a clever student lands a blow and the professor must absorb it gracefully and turn it into a teaching opportunity, must make the student feel brilliant for having challenged him while quietly reasserting that the challenge had been anticipated, contained, folded back into the larger design. He had done it a thousand times. He had the moves. And he opened his mouth to do it, to say something generous and deflecting, that’s exactly the tension Melville wants us to sit in, something that would have been true enough to pass and would have closed the seam she had opened and restored the room to him, and he found that he could not quite say it, because she had not opened a seam in the story, she had opened a seam in him, and the difference between refusing to compromise and refusing to be corrected was not an abstract question about a scrivener, it was the question of his life, it was the question of the second novel he was not writing and the fellowship he had turned down and the woman who had left saying he was always taking notes and the chip in his pocket worn soft in one place, and Claire had said I’m not sure the difference can be told from the inside, and Adrian, standing at the front of the room in the long gray light, had understood with a small cold drop that she was describing him, that she did not know she was describing him, that she had simply read a story honestly and arrived at the precise sentence that he had organized his entire existence around never having to face.

“That’s.” he started, and stopped, and the stopping was itself a kind of confession, because Adrian did not stop, Adrian was never at a loss, his fluency was the most reliable thing about him, and the eleven students who had watched him be effortlessly brilliant for an entire semester saw their professor pause, saw something move across his face that they could not name, and the pause lasted perhaps two seconds and felt much longer, and then Adrian recovered, because he always recovered, and said, “That’s a better reading than mine.”

He had never said it before. In twelve years of teaching he had never once told a student that their reading was better than his, not because it had never been true but because saying it had never been necessary, the architecture of the room had always allowed him to honor a good challenge without ceding the ground, and here he was ceding the ground, and he watched Claire receive it, watched her not gloat, watched her instead look faintly troubled, as though winning had not been the point and she was sorry to have won, and this, the absence of triumph in her, unsettled him more than the argument had.

“I don’t think it’s better,” Claire said. “I think it’s just. less comfortable.”

“Those are usually the same thing,” Adrian said, and it came out quieter and more honest than he intended, a true thing escaping under the door before he could stop it, and for a moment the two of them looked at each other across the length of the seminar table, eleven other people in the room and none of them quite present, and Adrian had the disorienting sensation of being seen, actually seen, not admired, not received, seen, by someone who had looked at the thing he did and recognized it for what it was, and the sensation was so unfamiliar and so frightening and so much like relief that he had to look away first, which he could not remember ever having done.

He looked at the clock. They had eight minutes left. He spent them on something safe, on the lawyer’s famous closing line, on the dead letters, on the gentle devastating final cry, and he did it well, because he could do this in his sleep, but the room had changed and everyone felt it, and when he dismissed them the students gathered their things more quietly than usual, and Petrosian lingered as though he wanted to say something and then thought better of it, and the room emptied, and Claire was among the last, packing her bag without hurry, and Adrian, who should have let her go, who knew with every instinct he possessed that the wise thing was to let her go, heard himself say, “That thing you said. About not being able to tell the difference from the inside.”

Claire looked up.

“Where did you get it,” Adrian said.

It was not a teacherly question and they both knew it. A teacherly question would have been about the text. Where do you see that in the story. This was a different question, where did you get it, a question that assumed she had gotten it from somewhere, from some experience, that the reading had come up out of a life and not down from a theory, and Claire studied him for a moment, and Adrian had the sense that she was deciding how much to say, that there was a whole region behind the question that she was choosing whether to open, and in the end she chose restraint, but a kind of restraint that revealed more than disclosure would have.

“I watched somebody do it,” she said. “Call stopping a principle. For a long time. Right up until the end.” She shouldered her bag. “It’s very convincing. That’s the thing nobody tells you. From the outside, while it’s happening, it looks exactly like integrity. You only find out it wasn’t after.”

“After what,” Adrian said, and he should not have asked, and he knew he should not have asked, and he asked anyway, because he needed to know, because the chip was in his pocket and the second novel was not being written and a woman had once told him he was always taking notes, and Claire looked at him with something that was not unkindness, that was almost, terribly, the beginning of recognition, the look of one person beginning to suspect they have met another of their own difficult species, and she did not answer the question, which was its own answer.

“I have class,” she said instead, which was not true, he would learn later that it was not true, that she had nowhere to be, that she had said it to end the conversation because the conversation had gone somewhere neither of them had planned, and she left, and Adrian stood alone in the seminar room in the long gray light with the windows facing the courtyard, and he did not say well, he did not have the will to perform even for himself, he simply stood there for a while in the emptied room, holding the book, and then he put the book in his bag and went to his office and sat down and did not work, and discovered that for the first time in a very long time he wanted, with an intensity that frightened him, to know what another person knew, and that the person was a graduate student fifteen years younger than he was who had looked at him across a seminar table and seen, without trying, without even meaning to, the thing he had spent his entire life building rooms full of admiration to hide.

He took the chip out of his pocket and set it on the desk and looked at it. He did not usually look at it. Usually it stayed in the pocket and his thumb did the looking. But he set it on the desk in the gray afternoon light and looked at the worn soft place in the lacquer, and he thought about what Claire had said, that from the inside the two refusals feel exactly the same, both feel like integrity, and he sat with the chip on the desk and tried, honestly, for once, to tell the difference, to feel whether the thing he called his integrity was the refusal to compromise or the refusal to be corrected, and he could not tell, he genuinely could not tell, and the not-being-able-to-tell was the most frightening thing that had happened to him in years, more frightening than the nothing in the chair by the window, because the nothing had at least been his own, private, sealed, and this was a crack of light coming in from outside, a person out there who could see the room he was in, and Adrian sat in his office as the gray light went grayer and did not turn on the lamp, and after a while he picked up the chip and put it back in his pocket, where his thumb found the worn place, and he felt the small familiar pull of the only thing that reliably made him feel real, and he understood, dimly, that he was going to go there tonight, to the room he would not name, and that part of why he was going to go was that a young woman had said a true thing to him in the gray light and the only way he knew to quiet the truth was to go somewhere loud enough to drown it.

The Last Honest Man

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Next: Chapter Four — The Room Without Windows

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Chapter Two

The Prize

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

Chapter Two

The award had been given in a room on the second floor of a building on Park Avenue that had been built for some other purpose, a club or a society, in a century that believed rooms should make a person feel both elevated and observed, and Adrian, two years before the wedding, had stood at the edge of that room too, because it turned out that the edge of a room was a place he could find in any architecture, the way a level finds true regardless of the surface you set it on.

He had known he would win. This was the part he never told anyone, because it sounded like arrogance and was in fact closer to its opposite, a kind of dread. The shortlist had been announced six weeks earlier and his agent had called him within the hour, too casual, the studied casualness of a person delivering good news she wanted you to receive as enormous, and from the temperature of that call Adrian had understood that the thing was already decided, that the announcement six weeks hence would be theater, that he had been selected the way you select a season’s face, and so he had six weeks to prepare for a coronation he could not refuse and did not want and could not say he did not want because there is no language for not wanting the thing everyone agrees you should want, no vocabulary that does not sound like ingratitude or affectation or, worst of all, like a man fishing for reassurance. So he had said thank you to his agent and hung up and sat in his apartment, which even then was nearly empty, and felt the dread arrive, the specific dread of a man approaching the summit of a mountain he has been climbing his whole life and beginning to suspect, near the top, that there is no view, that the top is just more mountain, colder, with less air.

The Inheritors had been published eighteen months before that. He had written it in fourteen months in a sublet in a city that was not New York, because he had needed to be somewhere his name did not precede him, somewhere a barista did not know whose son he was, and the not-being-known had been the most productive condition of his life, which should have told him something and did not. The book was about three siblings, two brothers and a sister, dividing their father’s estate after the father’s death, and on its surface it was a cold clean anatomy of inheritance, of the way money reveals people the way cold water reveals a leak, and he had written it in a voice so controlled that reviewers would later reach, all of them, for the same family of words. Surgical. Unsparing. Glacial, one of them said, and meant it as praise. Adrian had built the voice deliberately and had not understood, while building it, that he was not building a technique but installing an anesthetic, that the coldness the reviewers would admire was not a writer’s mastery of distance but a wounded man’s only available relationship to the material, that he had written the one kind of book a person that frightened of warmth could write and had been rewarded for the fear and told it was a gift.

The opening sentence had come to him whole, in the sublet, at a kitchen table, and he had known the moment he wrote it that the book would work: The lawyer had a kind face, which the three of them distrusted immediately, because in their experience kindness was the thing people wore when they were about to divide something. He had read it back and felt the small electric certainty that he had never felt about anything else in his life, the certainty of a sentence that was exactly itself, and it was the last time he would feel that particular certainty, though he did not know that either.

The reviews, when they came, came in a configuration that he would spend the next two years failing to recover from. They were good. They were better than good. But the praise organized itself, almost without exception, around a single word, and the word was promising, and the word promising is a word that points at a future, that says not this, but what this implies, that takes the thing you have made and converts it into a down payment on the thing you have not yet made, and Adrian, reading the word in the most important of the reviews, in a sentence that called the book the most promising debut of the year, had felt something cold open in his stomach, because promising meant the clock was still running, meant the eyes were still on him not for what he had done but for what he was expected to do next, meant that he had climbed the entire mountain only to be told, at the summit, yes, very good, now the real mountain, and pointed onward into the cloud.

He had tried to explain this once, to his agent, badly, and she had laughed, not unkindly, and said, “Adrian, that’s the best word in the language. Do you know how many writers would kill to be called promising?” And she was right, of course she was right, that was the maddening thing, every objection he could raise was an objection only a fortunate man could raise, every grievance was the grievance of someone standing on a peak complaining about the altitude, and so he had learned to stop raising them, had learned to receive the word promising with a graceful nod and a deflecting joke, had learned to perform the gratitude that he could not feel, and the performing of the gratitude had become one more layer of the thing, one more inch of distance between the man at the edge of the room and the warmth in the middle of it.

His family had received the news of the prize the way the Mercers received all news, which is to say correctly. There had been a dinner. The dinner had been at the apartment, the long table, the good silver brought out not ostentatiously but as a matter of course, the way you bring out the good silver for a thing that is, after all, an occasion. His mother had arranged for a particular wine that Adrian liked and had not mentioned that she had arranged for it, and Adrian had noticed the wine and understood the not-mentioning of it and had felt, as he always felt at the precision of his mother’s attention, the strange double thing, the warmth of being known and the chill of being studied, because Eleanor’s love arrived always as accuracy, and accuracy is a form of attention so close to surveillance that a certain kind of child can never quite tell them apart.

Charles had raised a glass. This was the part Adrian would return to, later, in the worst hours, taking it out and looking at it the way he took out the prize itself, face down, in the dark. His father had raised a glass and said a few words, and the words had been right, had been warm even, we are proud of you, the plural again, we, the family speaking through its steward, and Adrian had watched his father’s face during the toast and had seen there something real, some genuine emotion moving under the practiced surface, and for one second across the long table their eyes had met and held, his father’s and his, and in that second Adrian had felt the thing he had spent his whole life trying to feel, the warmth arriving unconditioned, the eyes staying, and then Charles had finished the toast and sat back down and reached for his fork and looked down at his plate, and the looking down had been nothing, had been a man simply resuming his dinner, the most ordinary gesture in the world, and Adrian had felt the warmth go out of the room as though a window had been opened onto a winter street, and he had not been able to say why, had sat there at his own celebration dinner with the cold coming in from somewhere and his prize on the table and his family proud around him and felt, unaccountably, abandoned, and had despised himself for feeling it, because what kind of man feels abandoned at a dinner thrown in his honor, what kind of ingratitude, what kind of bottomless need, and he had reached for the wine his mother had chosen and drunk it and said something witty and the table had laughed and the moment had passed, the way they all passed, unexamined, into the sediment of him.

Eleanor, across the table, had watched him. He had felt her watching. When he looked up she had been looking at him with an expression he could not read, had never been able to read, an expression that contained, possibly, pride, and contained, possibly, something else, something closer to recognition, the look of a person seeing in another person a thing they knew from the inside, and she had held his gaze for a moment and then lifted her own glass, very slightly, a private toast, just for him, separate from the family’s, and had said nothing, and he had never known what that look meant or what the private lifted glass had meant, and he had not asked, because there are questions you do not ask your mother across a table laid with the good silver, and because some part of him suspected that the answer, if he got it, would unmake him.

The reception after the ceremony, six weeks later, had been the worst of it, though it had looked from the outside like the best. It had been held in the high observed room on Park Avenue, and Adrian had stood in the center of it for once, not at the edge, because the center was where they put you on the night they have decided to give you the thing, and people had come to him in a steady procession, editors and writers and the kind of people who attend such evenings, and they had said admiring things, and the admiring things had been sincere, that was the part he could not get past, the sincerity, these were not flatterers, these were serious people sincerely moved by a book he had written, and he had stood in the warm center of their sincere admiration and felt, with a clarity that frightened him, that not one of them knew him, that the admiration was real and was directed at something that was not him, was directed at the book, or at the idea of him the book had produced, the cold clean prodigy, the surgeon, and that he could stand here all night receiving the sincere admiration of intelligent people and walk out at the end of it as unknown as he had walked in, more unknown, because now there was a version of him in the room that everyone preferred to the actual one, a version made of glacial prose and early promise, and the actual one, the one at the edge even when standing in the center, the one who felt the cold come in when his father looked back down at his plate, that one would go home alone and take off his good jacket and hang it in a nearly empty closet in a nearly empty apartment and stand for a while in the dark not knowing what to do with his own hands.

A woman had come up to him near the end, an older writer, someone whose work he genuinely admired, one of the few, and she had taken his hand in both of hers and looked at him with real warmth and said, “It’s a remarkable book. You must be very happy,” and Adrian had said, “I am, thank you,” and the woman had held his hand a moment longer and her face had changed, just slightly, the warmth complicating into something more searching, and she had said, more quietly, “You don’t have to be, you know. Happy. People will tell you that you should be. You don’t have to be,” and then she had squeezed his hand and moved on, and Adrian had stood there with the strange gift of her sentence, the only true thing anyone said to him that whole night, a permission he did not know he had been starving for, and he had wanted to follow her and ask her how she had known, but she was already across the room, already inside another conversation, and the moment closed, the way they all closed.

He had gone home. This was the part that mattered, the part he had never described to anyone, the private hinge on which the next two years would turn. He had gone home from the most successful night of his life, taken off the good jacket, hung it up, poured a glass of something, and sat down in the chair by the window, the one piece of furniture in the apartment he had chosen with any care, and he had waited to feel it. He had genuinely believed, climbing the mountain all those years, that there would be a view at the top, that the prize would arrive accompanied by a feeling, that he would sit in the chair on the night of his coronation and feel, finally, chosen, finished, real, that the long hum of insufficiency that had run under his whole life would at last go quiet, and he had sat in the chair and waited for the quiet and the quiet had not come, and instead there had been nothing, a flat gray nothing, the nothing of a man who has finally been given the thing and discovers that the thing was never the problem, and the nothing had been so total, so unexpected, so much worse than disappointment, that Adrian had felt the first edge of real fear, the fear of a man who has spent his entire fortune on a cure and taken the cure and woken the next morning still sick, because if the prize did not fix it, if the highest thing the world could give him produced nothing, then either the world was lying about what its prizes were worth or there was something broken in him so deep that no external thing would ever reach it, and both of those possibilities were unendurable, and he had sat in the chair by the window in the dark and looked out at the city, at the lit windows of other apartments where, presumably, other people were living lives that added up, and he had felt the nothing, and then, rising under the nothing, he had felt the fear, and the fear was at least a feeling, the fear was at least something, the fear had a pulse, and Adrian had noticed, dimly, with the part of him that noticed everything, that the fear made him feel more alive than the prize had, and he had not understood yet what that observation would cost him, but the observation was made, was filed, was waiting.

He had not gambled yet. That came later. But it began here, in the chair by the window, with the discovery that the worst feeling in him was more real than the best thing the world had given him, with the first faint understanding that if the rewards produced nothing then perhaps the only access to the feeling of being alive ran through the other door, the door marked risk, the door behind which a man could at least feel the pulse of his own jeopardy, could at least, for the length of a held breath, not know how things would turn out, and not-knowing was a kind of aliveness, and aliveness was the thing the prize had failed to deliver.

In the weeks after, he began to do small things. He would not have called them anything. He turned down a fellowship that any sane writer would have taken, a year in a beautiful place with no obligations, and he told himself and others that he turned it down because he did not want to write in a beautiful place with no obligations, that he needed friction, and the explanation was good enough to pass and contained just enough truth to be unfalsifiable, and underneath it was the thing he could not say, that a year of comfort and security frightened him more than a year of difficulty, that he was already, without a name for it, beginning to flinch from the very safety he was supposed to want. He let a relationship lapse, a good one, with a woman who had been patient with him, and he did it not through any dramatic rupture but through a slow withholding, a gradual conversion of intimacy into observation, until she had looked at him one evening and said, “I never know if you’re here or just taking notes,” which was almost exactly what Sarah would say to him years later at the wedding, and which he had received then the way he received all such observations, as data, as evidence, filing it, not feeling it, and the woman had left, and he had felt the familiar cold relief of a stable thing burned down, the relief he did not yet understand, the relief of a man who can only breathe in the rubble.

And once, in those weeks, he had gone with an acquaintance to a room. He would not think the name of it, even to himself, even now, years later, in a dark field outside a wedding with his thumb on a worn chip. He had gone to the room not intending anything, telling himself he was merely accompanying a friend, observing, gathering material, the writer’s permanent alibi, and he had stood at the edge of that room too, watching, and then at some point in the long bright artificial night of the place he had not been at the edge anymore, he had been at the table, and a card had turned, and in the half-second before it turned, in the suspended instant when the outcome hung undecided and the whole screaming question of whether he was real went silent because the answer was about to be delivered to him by the indifferent universe in the form of a number, Adrian had felt it, the thing, the aliveness, the pulse, the view from the top of the mountain that the prize had failed to provide, and it had lasted exactly as long as the card took to turn, and then it was gone, and he had needed, immediately and terribly, to feel it again.

He had left the room that night and walked a long way home through the cold, and he had told himself it was nothing, an experience, material, a thing a writer does once, and he had almost believed it, and in the morning he had answered his email and graded papers and given a guest lecture and been, to all appearances, the promising young novelist at the start of a distinguished career, and only he knew, and barely admitted even to himself, that something had been set loose, that a door had been opened that would be very hard to close, that he had found, finally, in the worst possible place, the one experience that made him feel the way he had spent his whole life believing the prizes were supposed to make him feel, and that the experience cost money, and that the money was, for now, not a problem.

The chip in his pocket at the wedding, years later, had come from that first room or one like it. He never let himself trace exactly which. His thumb knew it without instruction. The lacquer had gone soft in one worn place from all the times his thumb had found it, in the dark, in fields, in the backs of cars, in the chairs by windows, the small smooth worried object that was the only honest record of where he actually went when he could not bear the nothing, the rosary of a man praying to a god he knew to be indifferent, asking not for grace but for jeopardy, for the half-second before the card turns, for the only proof of his own existence he had ever been able to reliably purchase.

He had won the most promising debut of the year. He had stood in the warm center of a room full of sincere admiration. He had been told by his father, before the man looked back down at his plate, that the family was proud. And none of it had reached him, none of it had touched the cold place, and so the cold place had gone looking, on its own, for something that could, and had found it, and the finding was the beginning of the end, though it would take years, and it would look, for most of those years, like a brilliant young man simply failing to write his difficult second book, and only Adrian would know, and barely, that he was not failing to write it. He was refusing to. Because the first one had told the truth by accident, and to write another he would have to know what he was confessing, and he could not afford to know, and the not-knowing had to be defended, and the defending was expensive, and he had found a way to pay.

The Last Honest Man

A Novel About the Cost of Greatness

Next: Chapter Three — Bartleby

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.