CHAPTER ONE
I am dead. I am so dead.
I am dead because I died. I died and so I am dead.
The EKG pulsed slower and slower, arrhythmic; like someone on quaaludes tapping out goodbye in Morse code. And then there was just one long tone. B-flat, I believe. They unplugged all of what had been plugged into me and left the room. And I was still dead. I don’t know for how long. I don’t know because for me time snapped.
Many years later . . .
They knew me at Café Luxembourg. The hostess wore a beige Brooks Brothers trench coat, because she was cold standing by the open door in the middle of December. Smiling wanly, she led me to my table. Sitting, I noticed a woman at the table next to me, apparently also dining alone. I saw her only peripherally, then turned to take her in, and quickly looked away. I could sense that she was young. Her open, unjaded demeanor seemed to emanate from her perfectly poised posture, like a fine mist, like an ephemeral impression of a painting by a French master. Her long dark-brown hair was in a “mixie” cut and she wore a dark-green cashmere cardigan over a black V-neck dress and a necklace of diminutive pearls. Yet, I didn’t take a full glance, not long enough to fully take in her face.
I am alone and at times lonely, yet not lonely enough that I can be lured. I have dedicated myself to only consorting with the city- New York City. Finally I have some means and am putting it to good use. Spending it in fine restaurants, theater, and hearing music at the various concert halls around town. And going to the opera. Tonight, to the Metropolitan Opera House; a new opera, recently commissioned and completed, with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl and music composed by Matthew Aucoin. It tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice—only unlike previous realizations, this opera tells the story from Eurydice’s point of view. Or so I had read in the New Yorker.
I looked over the menu and decided on the kale Caesar and the brook trout. The waitress came over and I gave her my order. I felt that the woman next to me was eavesdropping because she ordered the exact same thing. I took out my little red notebook and started making notes for the novel I was about to start writing.
Then, as if it were inevitable, as if it were always meant to happen this way, I heard the woman ask me if I was a writer. I stopped writing, put down my pen and turned toward her. She looked at me expectantly. I told her that in fact I was or was purported to be. As Georges Perec said: “I wanted to write, and I’ve written. By dint of writing, I’ve become a writer. For myself alone first of all, and for a long time and today for others.” I didn’t tell her this. I only read the Perec after visiting Paris and Shakespeare and Company, in the future. With her.
Now it is because of writing that I could afford all of these luxuries that had been so elusive in the past. I told her that I was working on a novel about a burp fetishist and her eccentric clientele, one of whom stiffs her, so she kills him. It was just an idea and probably wouldn’t go anywhere, yet I found it amusing, and so did she as I told it to her. She had a lilting laugh, at least at first. I discovered later that when she is uninhibited, when she is particularly amused, it can be more of a full, guttural laugh; her eyes alight, she is powerless over the action of laughing, which seizes her entire body. A cathartic kind of laugh, very enjoyable to behold. That, too, is in the future. She asks my name, and I tell her that it is Geronimo Vang. “That's my last name, too!” she says, barely controlling her amazement. At this point in time, that is what my name is. It’s what my passport says, anyway.
I looked at my watch. Almost seven. The opera was to begin at 7:30. The waitress came over and asked if I would like dessert. I turned to the woman and suggested the idea of sharing a dessert. I am not sure why I do this, since I was in a bit of a rush, and again, she was this other person, and it goes against my vow of aloneness; there was something about her. She was quite attractive, in a way that set her apart. In other words, her attractiveness almost transcends societal constructs, because it is unique, only her own, unlike anyone’s I had ever encountered. I found out later that, depending on light and angle, the shape and contours of her face take on an almost unlimited variety of looks, of perception to the onlooker, all her, all unto herself, all, for me, breathtaking; the whole of her face finely corrugated, as if she were a model for a thousand different portraitists. She is young, younger than me. I am not sure how much younger, because I don’t really know how old I am. That is because of all those years I spent in the wild.
As it was, we sat side by side, so I could not take in the full spectrum of her face, and turning toward her was a most awkward contortion. So I had to rely on my senses. Which is what I have come to rely on ever since I died. Sense and intuition. How long to stay somewhere and when to leave. It has kept me in motion and has kept me surviving and now prospering. My intuition says to keep away, stay away from anyone, at least not get too close to anyone. Not that I haven’t slept, or if not slept, had sex with women in all of these ensuing years since I died. A few unremarkable times. But I am alone. Fundamentally alone, and I like it that way. Or thought I liked it that way. She reached for her water glass and touched my elbow, and all of the skin in that region began to tingle. Not static electricity. Not that, it was another phenomenon.
I asked her name, and she told me, Minh. Minh Vang.
I told her about a movie that I had just seen, a film called Licorice Pizza. And how this film, in many ways, mirrored, at least on the surface of it, the novel that I had recently written and that had been published by one of the big five. My novel sold moderately and was picked up by a streaming platform to be made into a miniseries. Both the film Licorice Pizza and my novel take place in the 1970s in Southern California. The film is a lighthearted love story, and mine is more of a bildungsroman murder mystery. I devised the plot and the setting completely from my imagination, from looking at photographs of Stephen Shore’s and reading Roberto Bolaño and Raymond Chandler.
“Yes, I would like to see Licorice Pizza with you,” she said.
“Oh, that’s great. May I have your number?”
She told me her number which I scrawled on the front page of my notebook.
“Are you going to be able to read that?”
“Yes. I think so. Now. What will we have for dessert?”
She looked at the menu and said resolutely, “The banana mousse.”
And even though it did not sound particularly tantalizing to me, the way she said banana did, as if each syllable were a word.
We chatted a little more while eating the banana mousse. I, taking small spoonfuls, and she more vigorously digging in. She told me that she was finishing her MFA at Columbia for literary fiction.
“Where did you go to college?” she asked.
“The streets, baby, the streets,” I said facetiously.
She released a muffled laugh, furrowed her brows, and then said, “That’s where I wish to study. The streets. Yet since I got a full scholarship, and Columbia pays for me to be here, and New York is where I want to be . . . case closed. It’s the old MFA versus NYC debate. The MFA wins the debate by default. Or at least my scholarship makes it moot. Still, I envy you.”
“What’s the old MFA versus NYC debate about?”
“I think it was an argument originally found in a David Foster Wallace essay entitled ‘The Fictional Future.’ That teachers in the MFA program would much rather be writing than teaching, and therefore resent their students who in turn churn out boring, technically proficient workshop stories. And that one could learn more about writing by living and by reading what inspires them.”
“Do you feel that way?”
“Sometimes. Not all of the time.”
“Well, I think you are lucky to be at Columbia, and no doubt talented.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just a feeling.”
I felt myself wanting—no, not wanting—compelled to confide in her. In a manner unlike I have ever confided in anyone. To tell her my whole story. Even though by revealing my darkest secrets I could potentially be putting everything at stake. It was bad enough that I had written the novel. My publisher told me that I would have to go on a book tour and answer questions from the press, and they will investigate my identity, or the identity of Geronimo Vang. But there is not much to go on. Born in Vietnam and died anonymously in San Francisco at the age of fifty-two. And now he is me since I purchased his identity.
I was flummoxed by her attraction to me. I did not feel attractive. Tall, husky build, reddish hair with streaks of gray combed back and over. Not attractive, still, I knew that I was handsome. I knew this by looking at myself in the mirror and by comparing that impression with photo books of old Hollywood. Definite similarities with those arcane leading men. But not attractive. That is because I was not who I purported myself to be. Maybe she saw beyond that. She saw beyond that because perhaps she was not who she purports to be.
On the way to the Met, walking down Broadway, I Googled her on my new iPhone —Minh Vang—and yes indeed, she was in the fiction MFA program at Columbia. A novelist. In a brief interview she gave in the Columbia Journal, she is quoted as saying that her idea of writing is not to be chained to the chair; it is to go out and live life and seek new experiences. I guess I am a new experience, though I feel that there is something more to it. There is a bigger reason why we had been seated together, why we were curious to know one another. This curiosity is new to me, and perhaps a dangerous turn.
I enjoyed the opera, Eurydice, with its contemporary setting and concise storytelling. I was especially moved by the moment when the father, a stentorian baritone singing a devastating aria, goes into the river of forgetfulness and obliterates his memory. The river of forgetfulness where the dead pass through, losing their memories and even language.
