A Novel About the Cost of Greatness
Morning Returns the Truth with Interest
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.
A Novel About the Cost of Greatness
Next: Chapter Seven — The Soup
© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.
