My Housemate

(After J. David Stevens's "The Death of the Short Story," originally published in North American Review, collected in both Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories and Stevens's Mexico Is Missing, the latter of which appears to be available in its entirety on the Ohio State University Web site.)

The night I first met the short story it had just been beaten up pretty badly by a couple of these aggro publishing kids. You know the type: they had their own lit mag, they had distro and a blog, they had a tire iron and a bone to pick. What is it with these Young Turks, always needing to take a brick to the skull of one genre or another? A generation ago they nearly killed the short story and the chivalric romance in one fell swoop in a bar brawl up in Oregon somewhere. This time around, the kids tried a sucker punch, invited the story to a release party for some new anthology they'd put together, at a swank restaurant down on the Bowery, they said—except there was no anthology, no party, no restaurant, and that's where I found it, bleeding adverbs all over my stoop.

No, the short story is not dead; it is alive, and well, and shacked up in my living room, actually, in a kind of mother-in-law apartment situation I've set up for it. It's constantly hearing reports of its death, though, has been hearing them for forever—or at least since around the time Collier's closed up shop—which, in spite of how often it's been jumped, kicked, pummeled, and stomped, it finds perpetually surprising.

"Like Mark Twain reading his own obit," says the story.

"Word to that," I say.

Almost more troubling than the reports, past tense, of its recent death, are the predictions of its imminent demise. The story gets this horribly anxious look. I tell it not to worry. It's okay. These are just death prognostications, I say—it's not like they're death threats! That thought usually just makes the story feel worse—what's the difference between a prophecy and a fatwah, when you're at the receiving end?—but it always pulls itself together quickly. That's not naïve optimism, that's just science, just the nature of a ruthlessly efficient little body with a spine of infinite possibility running through it.

Is it dead? No. Unwell? Hardly! But is it feeling a little apathetic, a little resigned, about all the diagnoses and prognoses it gets, the perennial baseball bats to its plots? The story shrugs.

"I meet a lot of people," it says.

And it's true. Some of these meetings are as long as the frequent one-night stands the story has. Or weekend-long benders. (I don't even bother asking for it to call me to let me know it's not coming home; I know now how resilient the story is; whether it's off fighting a distant war, or holed up in some hotel with a hooker, a bottle, and a copy of Stephen King's On Writing, I know it'll be back soon.) Sometimes people only meet the story for as long as it takes for it to buy a pack of cigarettes at a deli. Or hold up a bank. Or sprout wings and fly out through the emergency roof exit of the crosstown bus. Or have a quiet epiphany—in the living room, at the county fair, over dinner—about its drunken father and the meaning of life. So many drunk, absent fathers the story has! A million damaged childhoods! So many sad mothers who had to abandon it in the dark of night on the doorstep of their local creative writing program!

And so many quiet epiphanies! It's fun, all these crises, all these realizations; although I have to admit it gets a little exhausting, emotionally speaking, just from crying so much. We both cry a lot.

And yes, sometimes I get confused, living with the short story; sometimes it seems like it's trying to prove something to me, or like it's reverting to some very juvenile stage, where it wants to be smarter and more difficult than it is, where it wants to obfuscate all meaning, all sense. Where it wants to be cool.

Like last night. We were hanging out, having a mellow evening, watching some television. The story always likes to watch these great half-hour dramas you get these days—they're its grandchildren, after all. It's very fond. The story got this funny look.

"I worked for Kristin," it said.

"What?" I said. "Who's Kristin?"

The look got even funnier, like it wanted me to understand what it was talking about, but couldn't, or wouldn't, explain it directly. The story looked the way it often does, like its compact little self was bursting at the seams with meaning.

"Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious," it said.

"Do I know Jeff?" I asked. "Do I know these people?"

The story shut up again.

"Are these people you know from a workshop?" I said.

It waved at me, as if to say, forget it, I'm done with explaining what I'm on about for now. Then it pointed at the television. Check it out, I think is what it was telling me. This is good stuff. There was an hour-long dramatic series coming on—one of these shows with multiple, interwoven plotlines playing out over the years, bloated and baggy, but beautiful, impossible not to watch.

Then the doorbell rang.

"That'll be the novel," said the story. "It doesn't have cable."

Who am I to say no? These old genres have enough problems.

I went to get the door.

"Men and Women in Space" : Notes on a Reading by Don Delillo

We are waiting for Don Delillo to appear.

As usual for events of this sort, there are multiple introductions. Someone from the 92^nd St Y introduces the writer, Dana Spiota, whose job it is to introduce Delillo himself. The earnest reverence in Spiota's speech is both familiar and embarrassing. She praises his books as "the secret antidote to the depressing consumerist hum we all live with," but it's unclear whether she's suggesting that they stop the hum of consumerism or merely cure us of our depression, and, in either case, the claim sounds false. It might be true if you took out the word, "antidote." And what does she mean by "that particular American longing"? Is that an American quality? Is longing - longing itself, not the object of that longing – specific to a culture? No one asks these questions. There will be a time later for "select" questions, but the questions will be reserved for Delillo. In the ritual of the high literary reading, the introductions are only symbolic gestures; each is an incantation to transport the reader from the profane world at large into the sacred space of literature. The more introductions, one supposes, the deeper we go into the world of the book and the less we actually listen to the meta-language of praise.

The applause begins when she says his name.

Don Delillo is bigger in person, leggier, than what one expects. He's almost athletic as he walks to the podium. In his green buttoned-down shirt and brown pants, the author looks like a middle-aged man who has dressed himself. Maybe his wife tried to stop him – doesn't that look too earthy? – or maybe she's given up on trying to change his mind.

"There's a novel, and there is a reading," he says into the microphone. We are quiet. The audience has been awed by his books into a silence some of us believe is holy.

You think of the opening to Underworld: "He speaks in your voice American and there's a …" but he doesn't speak in your voice. His actual voice is not the voice that you heard in your head – why should it have been, when even your own voice doesn't match that sound? Don Delillo speaks in the voice of an old woman who's been smoking for so long that the years of ash and fumes have ravaged her vocal chords to something mannish, but underneath the velvet and gravel, there remains a fundamental womanliness. At times, you wonder if he has a lisp; there's a cottony thickness around some of his consonants, the word "troop" seems to have more letters, an extra 'h.' You hear it again in the end of the first chapter, which sounds stickier than when you read it by yourself: "Call or fold. Felt or baize."

He sniffles.

There is a novel, and there is a reading. The sentence sounds odd; it would be easier to hear if he'd used plurals. He tells the audience that he has reordered the novel for the reading, choosing two characters, Keith and Lianne, and following their stories chronologically, alternating back and forth.

It's surprising to hear people laughing. You never laugh reading his work. Nothing escapes that dire tone or your awareness of his work as the performance of a writer.

He pauses to drink. The microphone picks up and amplifies the fleshy, gurgling sound of a man swallowing. Smacking his lips. The way he might say "Pafko at the Wall."

He says "police" instead of "priest." He is the high priest of American letters, but he looks like the guy sitting across from you on the subway. He shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet as he fields questions from the moderator, questions written by the people in the audience on blank, white index cards that had been tucked into their pamphlets.

In response to one question, he says that he was not happy about the idea of including a terrorist in the novel. He says, "I felt I had to. I felt it would not be a fully responsible novel if I did not include a terrorist." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by the novel's responsibility, except to say that he had to try to understand the individual inside the structure, the individual "bonding with a group of more or less like-minded men…this blood connection that becomes more important than politics or religion finally." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by "finally."

When the moderator, that same boyish, bearded man from the 92^nd St Y who gave the first introduction, asks him a question about architecture, Delillo says that he thinks that his novels are more three-dimensional than others' are. It's hard to know how to take this, except in a literal sense as a joke, and he isn't joking. "I don't tend to feel as comfortable," he says, "with abstract thoughts as I am with men and women in space." This answer catches some people by surprise because it goes against the mainstream criticism of Delillo as a brilliant, heady writer more interested in cerebral dialogue and aphorism than in the way real people interact with real objects in the real world. A friend turns to you and arches his eyebrow. Of course, what makes Delillo feel comfortable is not necessarily what ends up in his books, and what ends up in his books rarely makes us feel comfortable. His books do not stop "the depressing … hum" of the present, but they make the white noise seem meaningful, and that is all the comfort we can hope for.

The moderator, who has been sitting all this time at the edge of the stage in a little chair at a respectful remove from the "talent," thanks the author, and the crowd claps. Some stand in ovation, others gather their things to reach the book signing line first or to catch a cab home. Delillo disappears to the sound of applause, and the holy temple of literature falls apart, but those who leave believe they bear with them its sacred aura like a stone from the ruins.

"Help Me Get Home"

I sat in Washington Square reading Bolano’s novel, The Savage Detectives, and thinking about the aura of genuineness created by all of those raw, rambling monologues, some of them purposefully inarticulate, others insane or visionary. The book wasn’t what I’d expected from all of the praise – from Susan Sontag, from John Banville, Francisco Goldman, Francine Prose, Der Spiegel, Les Inrockuptibles – it was something wilder, more varied, duller, looser, and funnier. I couldn’t read the book without thinking of what had been written about it, in part, because the book designers at FSG had put out an ugly yellow-and-black hornet of a book, striped with scribbled bands of praise, and, in part, because of the mystifying nature of that praise, in particular the puzzling, almost koan-esque blurb from Ignacio Echevarria that ran in El Pais, in which he heralded the book as “the novel Borges would have written.” You could sit on a mountain for twenty years drinking dew from the moss of your cave and meditate on that mantra; it might lead you to satori; it might leave you insane. Either way, it probably wouldn’t help your writing.

While I was reading, turning from that maddening dust jacket back to the chapter at hand, a blonde-haired boy sat down on the bench across from me, took out his guitar, and laid out a mat that said, “HELP ME GET HOME.” He was wearing a sleeveless concert t-shirt, a pair of blue scrubs, and a straw cowboy hat. He was barefoot.

I read while he sang a song about everything that was wrong in the world. Politicians lied. The military dropped bombs. People had to work too hard in miserable, unrewarding jobs. It wasn’t a very good song, and he wasn’t a very good singer. The chorus was something about waiting for love to set him free.

When he was done singing, no one clapped. In the relative silence of that small part of the park, you could tell that he had been expecting applause. In its absence, he struck up a conversation with a young girl reading, Lady Chatterly’s Lover. She was bored with Lawrence. He was in his gap year. Living on the streets in New York was easy, he said, if you didn’t mind sleeping on a little mat. The girl was impressed with his performance if not his singing. She closed her book. “It’s like camping, but everyone pays for your food and clothes,” he added. There was bravado in the way he smiled then. I looked back again at his bare feet. Love was not going to set him free, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that if he was dedicated enough to his art or to his own artful image of himself, the singing barefoot poet, that one day, when he was good and ravaged, he might write an ode to the stupid heroic self-destructive self-proclaiming sensual poetic bravado of his youth, a sprawling, nostalgic “Non, je ne regrette rien” epilogue to an old manifesto, which someone in their tearful exuberance might call “the novel that Borges would have written.”