The Sentence

Let’s say the author sets aside every Sunday, (he calls it the Sabbath, maybe a holdover from the time of certainty he uneasily enjoyed in his youth), to write, and it seems to work, this writing Sabbath, because his shit job, in retail or construction or in a restaurant, always leaves him too tired and dispirited to write at all from Monday through Friday, and then Friday nights he drinks with his buddies, and Saturday mornings are, therefore, pretty much recovery time, and, besides, he has to save his Saturdays for laundry and grocery shopping and unwinding and all that, so the Sunday writing schedule works pretty well for him, except that most Sundays he procrastinates til noon, and, when he finally picks up his pen and notebook and settles into his chair in his tiny apartment, he usually has the same old ideas over and over again, the same two stories he recycles endlessly, into which he plugs settings and characters and which he (sometimes entertainingly) disguises in a variety of styles, though he has but two themes in his life, two psychological or emotional impasses or what we can call stations, like radio stations that broadcast the same familiar bullshit day and night, between which he can choose but beyond which, on the AM dial of his mind, all else is late-night static, so, unless he has some kind of breakthrough, which he has stopped expecting, though for years it felt as though he was always on the cusp of one, he can tune into only these two stations: the station on which, through the velvet hiss of an old vinyl LP, he can always hear the song, a sort of old-timey round, an endless loop, in which the protagonist wanders deep into some unknown territory, (a wilderness; a forest; an abandoned building; an unnumbered and uninhabited floor in a busy building, inaccessible by the main stairs or elevator and somehow, mysteriously and portentously, unknown to the janitor and the landlord; that kind of thing), and makes of the place a beautiful, orderly, but lonely home in which he finds a provisional contentment that he will never be permitted to share with anyone, ever; and the other station, on which one character, usually a man, lives in mute capitulation after some undescribed tragedies that happened not too far in his past  ̶  the kind of tragedies we all endure, the most mundane kind, not the made-for-TV kind  ̶  have left him listless, dull, without passion, defeated, and his life, as the author tells it over and over, is just a repetitive act of mindless perseverance, and the character becomes so disaffected, or alienated, that the world around him (the closed world the author permits him to inhabit, and the only world the reader can see within the narrow aperture of the story) stops making sense and begins to take on a dreamlike unreality, as though underwater or in a nameless gray purgatory in which others are always just disappearing around a corner, just glimpsed at the edge of the frame, (or just out of earshot, or too self-involved, or speaking some language, of which he can’t understand a word, from the far eastern edge of a dingy socialist Europe), and strange things happen, and the author, and the protagonist, do not know why these things happen, and don’t even remember to wonder why, and strange artifacts appear, (which feel somehow like the obscure symbols of an alien allegory, heavy with the penumbra of significance, or immanence, but inscrutable, utterly out of reach), and the protagonist finds himself (or, rarely, herself) participating ineluctably in inexplicable happenings involving bizarre and vast machines (a cast-iron dirigible venting coalsmoke, a submarine commuter train with the flukes of a whale, a sewing machine the size of an apartment building, a footbridge floating out to sea, etc.) and reticent people (a woman wearing a veil sewn from the throatskins of pelicans, a campesino who expostulates preposterous philosophies, an ex-wife whose attorney waterboards the protagonist  ̶  or is it the author?  ̶  to force him to complete some recondite paperwork), and the author asks himself why he has these two particular preset stations to tune into, and if it’s just a phase he’s going through, and whether there is any escape, and, as he writes, as the sun lowers red this Sabbath evening, as his allotted time winds down before he returns to five more days of his shit job, he wonders if it really is enough to just do the work, to put one word after another, or, if an author has to “tap into” something vital and say something true (which is what he thinks he had better do, or why bother?), should he just quit now, or should he trust that he can someday do this right if he keeps plugging away at it?, and he is buoyed by a memory, he remembers that feeling of the deep congruence, let’s agree to call it, that can, what?, bloom?, between content and form, a congruence that feels very, very good, or right (is he remembering this accurately, after all this time?), that keeps him doing this strenuous (and maybe insane) thing every Sunday (but let’s be honest: it is not just the feeling of “deep congruence” that keeps him going; it is also the possibly-puerile fantasy that this will be read, and admired by admired people, and will sit on a long shelf of great books, and, one day, maybe, some other writer whose fire has almost gone out but who perseveres and does the work will take it down and open it and re-read it and use it as a kind of kindling, trusting anew that his  ̶  or her  ̶  oldest, driest, dullest, saddest, stupidest stories  ̶  the ones his shrink and his friends and family are sick of hearing  ̶  will smolder and catch and flare into something bright) with some kind of dogged hope, for what, exactly, he is not sure.

The Secret Divorce

Every morning the young man stowed his backpack in the locker and crossed the ink-black river to the train station. The predawn city was almost silent in cold and heavy fog and he found that, as he crossed the footbridge, the labyrinth of the Old Town disappeared in the gray shroud behind him before the orderly New Town emerged ahead of him, so that in the middle of the bridge he could imagine it was endless, that it came from nowhere and led nowhere, and that it didn’t matter which direction he walked.

Every morning he bought coffee and sat facing the platform and waited for her. He waited all the gray mornings and into the afternoons. He missed her, but the cold and the fog, which hardly lifted, seemed to dull all his senses, and his longing was muted, not urgent. She seemed remote. In any event, he waited.

The trains eased out of the fog, sluicing water, their groaning attenuated and dull, and returned into the submarine gray as though going out of focus. The passengers drifted, silent.

One day a full train arrived, and, after the dark-coated passengers dispersed, one man remained. At first he stood by the doors and peered out into the rain. Then he paced and checked his phone. Then he settled into a bench to wait. Finally, he slept with one hand on his suitcase.

When the young man returned the next morning the man was still there. They avoided each other in the echoing hall. The next day, too, the man waited. Every so often, he went to the curb and looked out into the gray. His hair became oily and his shirt wrinkled.

One morning the young man bought two coffees and approached the man and gave him one. The man smiled and said something in the local language. They raised their cups to each other in the universal gesture of thanks and conviviality.

The last train from the west arrived, and she was not on it. The young man went to the waiting traveler and said, You should come with me. I have a room and supper. The man did not understand the words, but he stood and followed the young man out into the night.

They stopped mid-bridge, between the diffuse blue lights of the New Town and the lights of the Old Town, dim and candle-yellow. Off in the fog and dark, at either end of the bridge, they heard raised voices and the scrape of iron on iron, the clank of heavy chains, and the creak of timber. The bridge drifted free of the embankments, shedding ice. The fog-blurred lights slowly spun and fell away behind them as they floated downriver. Very late, they came to where the harbor widened and the air smelled of brine and diesel. In the deep below them a vast pod of trains groaned out to sea, their hydraulic flukes thrusting, their windows glowing yellow, their passengers breathing ink.