Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon
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drapes of his own existence, haunting all of Q.’s personal relationships and all of his commerce with the world; a being unmoved by tragedy, unconcerned with the feelings of others, disinclined to any human business but surveillance and recollection. Only every once in a while, Q. said, did his secret sharer act—overpowering his unwilling captor, so to speak, assuming his double’s place long enough to say or do something unwise or reprehensible, and thus to ensure that human misfortune, the constant object of the Other Q.’s surveillance and the theme of all his recollections, continued unabated in Q.’s life. Otherwise, of course, there would be nothing to write about. “I blame it all on him,” the dapper little man declared, to the apparent delight of his audience, “the terrible mess I have made of my life.”
It seemed to me that Q. was talking about the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to “fit in” by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze.
There was a lot I could agree with in Q.’s argument—but I soon found myself having a tough time concentrating on his words. The mark of Doctor Dee’s teeth on my ankle had dulled with the codeine to a faint pulse of pain, but things had also gone smeary at their edges. I could feel the machinery of my heart laboring in my chest, and there was a jagged codeine cramp in my belly. I was drunk on five swallows of Jack Daniel’s and a heavy dose of oxygen from our run across the campus, and all the radiant things around me, the stage lights, the gilt wall sconces, the back of Hannah Green’s golden head seven rows away from me, the massive crystal chandelier suspended above the audience by the thinnest of chains, seemed to be wrapped, like streetlights in a mist, in pale, wavering halos. As soon as I managed to focus my eyes on them, however, the halos would vanish. I smelled something dank and somehow nostalgic in the air of Thaw Hall, dust and silk and the work of some devouring organism—rotten ball gowns, ancient baby clothes, the faded flag with forty-eight stars that my grandmother kept in a steamer trunk under the back stairs and flew from the porch of the McClelland Hotel on the Fourth of July. I sat back in my chair and folded my hands across my stomach. The warm ache of codeine there felt sad and appropriate. I wasn’t worrying about the tiny zygote rolling like a satellite through the starry dome of Sara’s womb, or about the marriage that was falling apart around me, or about the derailment of Crabtree’s career, or about the dead animal turning hard in the trunk of my car; and most of all I was not thinking about Wonder Boys. I watched Hannah Green nod her head, tuck a strand of hair behind her right ear, and, in a gesture I knew well, raise her knee to her forehead and slip her hands down into her boot to give a sharp upward tug on her sock. I passed ten blissful minutes without a thought in my head.
Then James Leer laughed, out loud, at some private witticism that had bubbled up from the bottom of his brain. People turned around to glare at him. He covered his mouth, ducked his head, and looked up at me, his face as red as Hannah Green’s boots. I shrugged. All the people who had turned to look at James now returned their gazes to the podium; all except one. Terry Crabtree was sitting three seats away from Hannah, with Miss Sloviak and Walter Gaskell between them, and he kept his eyes on James Leer for just a second or two longer. Then he looked toward me, winked once, and arranged his studious little face into a playful expression that was supposed to mean something like What are you two up to back there? and without really meaning to I gave him back an irritable frown that meant something like Leave us alone. Crabtree looked startled, and quickly turned away.
The milkweed tufts of a codeine high are easily dispersed; all at once, in the aftermath of Leer’s mad guffaw, I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in a cage at the zoo, running his fingers back and forth along the iron bars of his home. It was a scene that took place immediately before the five ill-fated endings I’d tried out over the last month, in which Johnny Wonder, the youngest of my three doomed and glorious brothers, buys a 1955 Rambler American from a minor character named Bubby Zrzavy, a veteran of U.S. Army LSD experiments. I’d been trying for weeks to imbue this purchase with the organ rumble of finality and a sense of resolution but it was an irremediably pivotal moment in the book: it was to be in this car, rebuilt from the chassis out by mad Bubby Z., over the course of ten years, according to the cryptic auto mechanics of his addled neurons, that Johnny Wonder would set out on the cross-country trip from which he would return with Valerie Sweet, the girl from Palos Verdes, who would lead the Wonder family to its ruin. That I had written so much already, without even having gotten to Valerie Sweet, was one of the things that had been making it so difficult for me to force the book to any kind of conclusion. I was dying for Valerie Sweet. I felt as though I had been writing my entire life just to arrive at the page on which her cheap pink sunglasses made their first appearance. At the thought of forgoing her, as my zoo-monkey brain returned yet again to the insoluble question of how I could get myself out of the seven-year mess I had gotten myself into, it was as if the power flowing into Thaw Hall had suddenly ebbed. Then a dazzling burst of static passed like rain across my eyes, and I caught a bloody whiff of the inside of my nose, and a bitter shaft of acid rose from my belly.
“I have to get out of here,” I whispered to James Leer. “I’m going to be sick.”
I got up and pushed through the doors to the lobby. It was deserted, except for a couple of kids—one of whom I recognized vaguely—slouched against the main doors, propping them open with their bodies, smoking and blowing their bored smoke out into the evening. I nodded to them and then hurried toward the men’s room, moving as quickly as I could without looking like a man who had to heave and was trying not to do it on the rug. The whiff of static, the burst of red blood in my nose, the nausea, none of these symptoms was new to me. They had gripped me at odd moments for the past month or so, along with an attendant sense of weird elation, a feeling of weightlessness, of making my way across the shimmering mesh of sunshine in a swimming pool. I looked back at the kids by the door and recognized by his goatee a former student of mine, a stunned-looking, moderately talented young writer of H. S. Thompsonesque paranoid drug jazz who had dropped by my office one afternoon last year to inform me, with the true callousness of an innocent heart, that he felt the college was cheating him by taking his money to put him through writing classes with a pseudo-Faulknerian nobody like me. Then the corridor to the bathrooms turned sideways on me, and I felt so feverish that I had to lay my cheek against the cool, cool wall.
When I came to, I was lying on my back, with my head propped up, and Sara Gaskell kneeling over me, one light hand on my brow. The cushion she had fashioned for my head felt soft on the outside, but at its center there was something hard as a brick.
“Grady?” she said, in a careless voice, as though she were trying only to attract my attention to an interesting item in the newspaper. “Are you still with us?”
“Hello,” I said. “I think so.”
“What happened, big guy?” Her eyes darted from one corner of my face to another, and she licked her lips, and I saw that despite her tone of unconcern I had given her a fright. “Not another one of these dizzy-spell things?”
“Kind of. I don’t know.” Your dog is dead. “I think I’ll be all right.”
“Do you think I ought to run you over to the E.R.?”
“Not necessary,” I said. “Is the thing over?”
“Not yet. I saw you walk out, and I—I thought—” She wrung her hands a little, as if they were cold. “Grady—”
Before she could say whatever difficult thing she intended to say to me, I sat up and kissed her. Her lips were cracked and slick with lipstick. Our teeth touched. The play of her fingers along the back of my neck was cold as rain. After a moment we parted, and I looked at her face, freckled and pale and alive with the look of disappointment that often haunts the difficult faces of redheaded women. Presently we kissed again, and I