Chapter 38
Katie
When I got back to the house on Sunday night, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the sound of laughter,
the smell of take-out pizza, and the back-and-forth of Meredith Bradford and Tyler McNally, the two biggest know-it-alls on
this planet, discussing Infinite Jest, voices carrying from the glowing kitchen.
“It’s not supposed to read like a book! That’s the whole point! It’s more of a narrative geometry. It’s a pyramid—a fractal,
you know? Those stories, getting smaller and smaller, closer to nothing at the center. Closer to—”
“Oh, please. David was just like the rest of us: bickering with his agent, obsessed with his wife, excellent at tennis. And
he revised that thing while watching a movie about a sheepdog on repeat, lest you convince yourself you need to be struck
with divine inspiration to kill your own darlings.”
I tiptoed closer, careful not to make a sound, until I was just outside the kitchen. My back, pressed against the wall right
beside the arch. I craned my neck ever so slightly.
They were sitting at the breakfast table, surrounded by scissors and highlighters and notepads and pens.
Sheets of what must’ve been a completed manuscript—there was no other explanation for the sheer quantity of them—hung like paper chains: black-and-white slices of story taped crookedly to the refrigerator, the cabinetry, the hood of the stove.
Index cards were arranged in haphazard columns on the hardwood; white rectangles scribbled on in green and red and blue.
Meredith held a loose page up to the light and frowned. “These proverbs . . . Can you live without them? I like Shanghai—reminds
me of Nicole Mones’s debut. I appreciate the foreignness, the loneliness. It has a bit of travel memoir in its bones, and
I agree, we shouldn’t disturb that. But the quotes, they’re overkill. We get it: You’ve been to China.”
Tyler sighed, then reached for the page. He looked as alive as I’d ever seen him. He looked like he had that first night at
the diner, and then all the endless summer afternoons on our beach that followed. Like he had a purpose. Like all those broken
parts of him weren’t so big and bad and irreversible after all.
“You’re right,” he said. “Fuck. I mean, yeah, it’s too much. But what else goes there? We need the pauses. They’re spacers.
They give you a moment to synthesize. To exhale. I want that.”
I crept a half inch closer. Pinot slithered by. We locked eyes, but he meowed nothing. I exhaled and remained just out of
view.
“I think,” Meredith said, “those moments are actually an opportunity for lightness. They could poke fun—could be a wink. Maybe
they’re a chance for the author to show his hand, to not take himself so seriously. Think about what he’s been exposed to:
what books, movies, songs. Even if we do age him up, he’s still a kid. Let him be contemporary. Let him play.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
She smiled. “Work on that this week. That, and gutting the whole river sequence. Those flashbacks too. Consolidate them. And then, we can do this again. Next weekend.”
He nodded, grinning, and I—very quietly—hightailed it up the stairs and into my room.