Notes (XIII)

My memories of the following few hours are a Cubist jumble of angles and distances, all invested with grand significances which now elude my retrospective grasp. I can triangulate, from other memories and from forum evidence, that I must have successfully played my part in the TNC group-read even during this fugue. At 3:46 AM (apparently) I wrote that Cafe post about capacitors and dwellings. At some point after that, I must have ended up in Marsh’s bedroom, talking to Jenny, because it’s there, in medias res, that my memories abruptly become intelligible again:

“So as I said I’m finding Caves [unlike Aaron, Jenny preferred to render the title in speech as ‘Caves’] a lot more narratively continuous than I’d originally thought. Like I just don’t really think Aaron’s division, the whole thing with ‘Tales’ and ‘Non-Lucid Sections’ and all that, is really right? Or, I mean, it kind of gets at differences that are there, but it’s a lot fuzzier than that. The whole thing feels like a story, don’t you think? I mean I had tried to read it before, but never word by word like we’re doing now. And I also think that maybe reading it out loud helps? Like it just seems like it makes a lot more sense now than it did before, when I tried to read it by myself. You know what I mean, Paul?”

“Yeah,” I said, not untruthfully.

“I mean think about it—the Tales have their own characters, right? W and the exechamp and Cleanth and Clete and Caracalla and Captain Krylov and all those weird distinct versions of Tom and Sally and Charles, right? But those same characters are also in the parts before the Tales. Like, they aren’t written as clearly? Sure. But there’s a . . . continuity . . . and I’m pretty sure there’s an unbroken narrative thread there. I’m not sure it’s the sort of thing that can be figured out the way Aaron wants to do it, with these very specific connections where one character in one section lines up with another character in the next section. I think it’s more . . . intuitive than that? Like, the characters behave very differently in different sections, to the point that you might be tempted like Aaron to think that they’re not actually the same people. But can’t it just be a literary device intended to show that people are more varied than we usually imagine? Almost as a sort of contrast to Chesscourt, where characters tend to be static even when the setting is very dynamic. So I mean maybe that contrast is what Salby intended and so the reason it seems so weird in Caves is that he’s actually trying to move as far as possible away from static characters and so it ends up with characters so dynamic that we have to stretch ourselves to even see them as people. Stretch our empathy, I mean. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, is it?”

“No,” I said.

I was sitting on Marsh’s bed, on top of a plush blanket with a diamond pattern interlacing together several shades of brown. Jenny was pacing back and forth across the slight span of Marsh’s available floor space. The room was filled with miscellany—cardboard boxes of assorted shapes, a partially disassembled bicycle, dirty plates, etc.—and the remaining floor space was a streamlined little corridor connecting the door to the bed. In this cramped space Jenny did lap after lap, which (I’m telling the whole story, remember) supplied me with a nicely panoramic view of her pleasantly full, solid but feminine form, and the airborne dynamics of her long brown hair, which fell straight down to the level of her armpits and then at once dispersed into a profusion of pretty curls.

“And if we think that way, it explains the changes in the style too, right? It’s just another way of seeing the characters, the opposite of stasis. It’s like what Joyce was doing in the second half of Ulysses, right? Where these very ordinary people, these lower-middle-class clerks and so on, they get described in all sorts of styles taken from the high literary canon, which provides a whole range of perspectives on them you wouldn’t normally get. I feel like this isn’t actually that unusual a technique, is it? I guess it also reminds me a bit of Cortázar’s Hopscotch, where there are several distinct sets of chapters, and they shed light on each other, and you don’t have to read them in order, necessarily. I feel like there are other examples? I just can’t think of them?”

She looked at me. I could not think of other examples. She had very pretty eyes. Her gaze was intense. She knew many things.

There was something twisted in the pit of my stomach, because I knew that the part of me that wanted Jenny to lie down with me on that bed right there and then was not, in the last analysis, compatible with the part of me that wanted to reshape the whole cosmos.

There was not time now for trysts, for earthy joy. The world was in my hands, and I might fail it. I did fancy her, so very much. But—

“You must not imagine that for beings like you and us there can be laughter. The low men laugh, and we envy them. But for us, the higher ones, there is no laughter, only an unending vigil, purely serious, stretching on into the night.”

I took a long sip from the mug of coffee I had placed on Marsh’s dresser. In lieu of an answer from me, Jenny was happy to go on:

“And so I’m really, really happy to be here, reading Caves with you guys, because, I mean, of course it’s amazing to meet you guys, but also—I feel like I’m seeing new things in Caves that I never would have seen if I hadn’t done this with you guys. I could see it becoming my favorite Salby book, even. Because, you know, what I’ve always wanted to do in my fics is take Salby’s world, which is freaking amazing, and add some psychological depth, which I think we can both agree is kind of lacking. But maybe Caves shows that Salby could do psychological depth, too. He might be a deeper, like I mean a richer, author than I’d ever realized. I feel like I could learn things from Caves. New things.”

Something in me weakened then, and I began to speak in an ill-advised way, which threatened to doom my entire scheme, and in doing so, doom the whole world:

“Jenny, this is really interesting. I guess while we’re here, though, taking a break from the group read, there’s something else I want to ask you about. It’s about Aaron, and how he’s doing, and also, I guess, about how I’m doing.”

“Shoot,” Jenny said pleasantly. She was facing me with that intense glare again.

“Well,” I began, “I talked to Aaron earlier, at the start of the night, when he was freaking out, remember? And I think the thing about William Chen, about him dying, hit Aaron really hard. He jumped to the conclusion that Salby murdered William Chen, and it seems like that . . . well, it resonated? I guess? with some sort of depression, or something, he was feeling, when he got here. He sounded almost suicidal for a bit, there. And he seems all right now, but I’m still worried. I guess I wanted to let you know. I want us all to keep an eye on him.”

What was I doing? The world was gravely, hideously disarranged; Aaron did not matter except as an instrument of material rearrangement. But then, I reflected, happy instruments tend to be more effective, as instruments, than despondent ones.

“Huh, I.” Jenny paused for a moment. “I picked up on him not being in a good mood, obviously. But I, wow. I didn’t realize it was that bad. Man. Thanks for letting me know. Because, yeah, I want to keep an eye on him too.” She paused again, and looked at me with a friendly expression. “We’re in this together. Members of Mission Keep-Aaron-Okay.”

I nodded.

“Also,” I continued, blithely plunging headlong off some cliff I did not begin to understand, “I don’t feel especially like myself tonight, either. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I just feel really . . . weird, in this really intense way. And I wanted to let you know because, I guess, it might be good for you to keep an eye on me, too.”

“I will,” Jenny said. “Thank you for telling me.” She was sincere. The sky enveloped the world, and Jenny enveloped the sky. Levels atop levels.

(Jenny, I’m sorry. You’re going to read this after I post it—later tonight, probably—and I know you’re going to be creeped out by some of these descriptions of you. I feel like I need to write this stuff because I need to do justice to what I was feeling and thinking at the time; I don’t want to hide anything. As you of course understand, real people have many different sides, some good and some bad.)

“I think,” she said then, looking at her watch, “it’s time to get back to the living room to start reading again. Thanks for listening to me ramble, dude.”

“No problem.”

“Oh, and also, you know what I just realized? I haven’t eaten since I got here. Like, I never even had dinner. And yet I’m not hungry. Isn’t that weird?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not hungry either.”

“But we should probably eat something, shouldn’t we?” (God it twists my stomach into knots writing this. But I have to record everything. Tell the story straight.)

“Let’s ask Marsh what he’s got in the kitchen.”

“Good plan.”

This seems like a good full chunk—time to post it in my Cafe thread. Then, onwards, further into the caves.