Amy Falls Down (33 page)

The woman looked uncomfortable in her skin and not particularly happy to be where she was but otherwise calm. When she asked the audience why they had bothered to come to the conference, she managed to look both exasperated and sympathetic, as though she’d just been interrupted by doorbell-ringing tots selling band candy. And as the tweets began, while she made her way back to her seat at the long table, she fielded three in a row over her shoulder with short-phrase answers, each getting bigger laughs than the one before, all without cracking a smile herself or (thank God) twinkling. What advice did she have for young writers?
Take notes.
What was her favorite novel?
Buccaneer Governess.
Seriously?
No.

The hourlong Battle of the Tweets was also posted in ten-minute increments, all with over ten thousand views. Tom Maudine or somebody had thought it would be a great idea, in addition to reading hand-picked tweets aloud to the panel, to show all the rest of the tweets onscreen. C-SPAN’s clumsy attempt to do this below the writers’ faces had backfired spectacularly. Amy guessed that someone had weeded out obvious tweet-spam and then someone
else
had accidentally fed the weeds into the onscreen caption queue, with results that even Amy found hilarious. Under a snoozing Davy Goonan, electronic ticker-tape read
Magugah
OOH MY OOH MY OOH MY>>>#
TEEN SEX CHAT VIDS.
As Jenny Marzen gamely attempted to address an incoherent tweet about the crying need for a “
Very
Young Adult niche,” all-too-coherent messages crawled beneath her earnest, animated face,
Horndoggie1998
HEY HOTTIE MCHOOTTIE CHECK OUT MY #
GARDEN WEASEL
Tw9lv_C8pcakes
OGLALA SIOUX EMERGNC PLS HEALP
PlumpF4nt45y
NHANCE UR SEXUAL ORGANS IN KENYA NO JOKE
bl00dynylons
LOL!! U SMELL!!
Because the messages were formatted exactly like news-crawl banners, they were impossible to ignore and lent a whiff of global crisis to this least critical of proceedings. Amy watched herself slice and dice a tweeter who had objected to her “community of spiders” remark.

“Bloomsbury,” read Tom Maudine, “was hardly a community of spiders!”

“Does this,” responded Amy, gesturing minimally, “look like Bloomsbury to you? Bloomsbury was the coming together of artists, novelists, poets, philosophers, economists, historians, critics. It wasn’t a guild of memoirists. It wasn’t a mystery writers confab. If Bloomsbury was half as influential in the development of twentieth-century art and thought as it is supposed to have been—which is probably the case—it wasn’t because they were all up to the same damn thing,” while underneath that motherly smile crawled
fstophell666
OBVIOUS DAY AT CAMP STUPID
Nojoke911
TARD ALERT
mnsterm$sh
DID YOU SEE THAT!! LMFAO,
and she was forced to admit that the whole spectacle, including what her own talking head was saying, really
was
Obvious Day at Camp Stupid, and yet undeniably, as the blurbists have it,
compelling.
It was the riotous coming together of a million tiny minds and three slightly less tiny minds over a bubbling cauldron of words and letters.

Entranced, Amy watched them all, then moused through other sites, Epic Fail and the Onion, where the funniest of the bunch were included, and watched again as Tom Maudine read, “Why do you think you’re here just for the moment and by accident?” and Amy sighed, opened her mouth—she was going to say, “Why do you think you’re not?” which would have been a Camp Stupid riposte—and Davy’s sleeping head slid off the heel of his hand and knocked over three open bottles of smartwater, which cascaded the length of the table, thus allowing Amy to answer the question with a deadpan Jack Benny stare into the white light while the hall erupted in laughter and applause and underneath it all
sarge_entwistle
tweeted
ASK ME ABOUT OWL POOP
.

*   *   *

Amy picked up the ringing phone. “It’s two in the morning,” she said.

“I don’t sleep much anymore.”

“I was going to call you first thing.”

“Sure you were.”

“You know I was.”

“What’s the deal, babe?”

Alphonse had given up on Amy ever going to bed and was dreaming about cottontails and coyotes on the rug beneath her computer desk, his stubby legs jerking adorably. “The deal is I don’t fly and I don’t go anywhere without my dog. Otherwise, I’m yours.”

“Back at you,” said Maxine, and hung up.

“I’m a shining star,” whispered Amy, waking Alphonse, and together they toddled off to bed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

There’s Your Story

Amy began the next morning with the assumption that a first-class Amtrak roomette would provide room for both of them, then learned that dogs were not allowed on trains. Unless there actually
were
a Loretta Lynn lit-fic tour bus, she would have to subject him—and herself and the Crown Vic—to an extended road trip. She was trying to imagine how to manage this when Maxine called.

“How would you feel about being bipolar?” asked Maxine.

“Happy and sad. Listen—”

“It’s either that or clinically depressed or—
bad idea
—schizophrenic.”

“Look, they won’t let my dog on the train.”

“Way ahead of you. Here’s the deal. Alphonse can travel with you everywhere
if
he’s what they call a service dog. Unless you want to wear dark glasses and bang into walls, which would be fraud anyway, your best bet is some sort of
mental
disability. You’ll have to get certified, and so will your dog. We can do the whole thing in three weeks. Two. I know people. It’ll cost you a little, though.”

While Maxine rattled off the Service Dog Plan, Amy watched through her back door as Alphonse rooted around at the base of the birdbath. He did not look particularly excited about the investigation; still, this was his yard, his birdbath, and she felt a stab of guilt about her whimsical decision to drag him across the country. He was aging, like Amy. He needed his rest.

“Of course, you’ve got
phobias
up the wazoo,” Maxine was saying, “but those are iffy when it comes to certification. Phobias could get him certified as what they call an Emotional Support Dog, but those aren’t Service and they won’t get him on the train and in the hotel. How about clinical depression, babe?”

“Look,” said Amy. “I really appreciate it, and I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is going to work out.”

“I’m emailing you some material right now. Look it over.” She coughed elaborately and hung up.

Maxine’s first attachment was a color photo of a malamute gazing serenely out a train window. He was sitting on a narrow bed, his owner’s wizened hand resting on the crown of his noble head, and he looked fulfilled. The caption read, “Aurelius guides his partner, a one-hundred-year-old woman suffering from bipolar antisocial personality disorder, across Canada on the fabled Rocky Mountaineer.” Damn Maxine, who knew this would make Amy laugh and weaken her resolve. Amy skimmed electronic brochures. Apparently the basset would have to wear a natty vest of cobalt blue with “Hands Off, I’m On the Job” printed on it in marigold-yellow. There were patches, tags, wallet ID cards, and a certificate suitable for framing. Squinting, she noted that the certificate did not specify the owner’s disability. She called Maxine. “Seriously,” she said. “I’m not disabled. This is fraud any way you look at it.”

“Now we’re talking,” said Maxine.

“How would I obtain this thing, this proof that I’m unable to function without him, except by lying my head off to some official?”

“I know some people,” said Maxine.

“Mobsters?”

“Give me a couple weeks. You don’t have to do a thing. Meanwhile, I’ve got you ten bookings already, beginning the third week in August, so bye.”

Within a week, Maxine had set her up as a certified victim of HPD. Hypervigilant Personality Disorder sufferers were asocial types who upset their fellows and distracted themselves by “constantly searching for hidden meanings in ordinary things.” Apparently this so-called disorder involved both excessive sensory overload, which was silly since Amy had been able to blink away most sensory stimuli since childhood, along with an “unhealthy preoccupation with the inner lives of other people,” which instantly neuroticized every novelist who ever lived. “A typical afflictee is prone to imagine the most outlandish possibilities.
Does the man sitting next to me on the commuter train have a bomb in his briefcase? Will the truck I’m passing blow a tire, swerve in front of my car, and kill me?
” How was this an affliction? Anyway, wondering wasn’t the same as
obsessing
. What the websites described was more along the lines of a benign thought experiment, the sort of thing she routinely engaged in to keep from getting bored. To the HPD brigade, it was a symptom of malignant creativity.

“You’re a natural, babe,” said Maxine, and Amy agreed that if called upon she could probably fake it.

*   *   *

She spent two weeks packing and preparing. The vet pronounced Alphonse hale and in remarkably good shape for a nine-year-old basset, “especially the spine,” which looked youthful on the x-ray. There were no shadows there, no fog either, she was pleased to see. She thought about closing down the house but decided instead to hire a sitter. Ricky Buzza, only fitfully employed and still living with his dad, was delighted. On the strength of five chapters and an outline, he had attracted the curiosity of an agent (a good one, Maxine said) to flog his serial killer novel. “She’s not on board yet. She says
Caligula’s Scalpel
is a mouthful, and I can see that. Plus nobody would name their kid Caligula anyway. I’m calling it
Tiberius
.”

Carla and the gang wanted to throw her a bon voyage party, but she put them off, dealing with their latest submissions electronically. Patrice Garrotte, she was happy to see, had been welcomed into the Birdhouse Retreat—he was actually living on the premises and writing fiction, not memoir. He wrote a story not about his mother, not quite, but about aging sisters, one a writer who lives in a Nantucket beach house with a long white porch. The architectural similarity to her plane-dream, the one at the Lake George cottage, was startling. Not much happened in the story, which was mostly atmospheric, but the women were sharply drawn. She could not see herself full-on in either of them, but she was somehow there in it. When she was young, she had taught graduate students in Orono and had watched workshop writers cannibalize one another in their fiction, stealing names, faces, biographies, social quirks, ostensibly all in fun, but really to diminish their competitors, to pin them to the page, and she had found this an ugly practice, particularly as most of them had no idea of their real motives. Now here was Patrice, and she did not feel pinned. Only taken in. Good for him.

*   *   *

On the 12th of August, Amy and Alphonse set off in a stretch limo for Union Station, Los Angeles. Amy didn’t even argue about the limo this time, which was free anyway, directly paid for by somebody, not Maxine. She had hoped he would snooze on the floor, but car travel had always made him uneasy, and he spent most of the trip pacing the long floor in desperate search for a scent other than artificial new car. Once again she became anxious. How would he survive two full days on a train to Chicago? But five minutes after the Chief began its eastward slide, he clambered up on the opposite seat in their little roomette and, after a cursory glance out the window, fell fast asleep. The rocking of the train was as soothing to him as to Amy.

She did wonder at the outset whether her HPD would cause conductors and porters (now for some reason called “car attendants”) to look at her funny, readying themselves for outbursts of irrational vigilance, but they did not seem apprehensive, and they all smiled at Alphonse. Apparently all the world loved a basset.

Next she fretted about his bathroom breaks, which would require leaping off the train at various stops (she had packed a box of ziplock bags) and frantically searching for a patch of green. The Amtrak people had warned that stops were of an unpredictable length. But the porters looked out for her, letting her know the best stations and longest stops, and the procedure was much less fraught that she had anticipated. By the time they got to Kansas, two Japanese teens in the next roomette, having discovered Alphonse, were attending to his every whim. Before she reached Chicago, Amy realized that she had run out of anxiety triggers. She had nothing to worry about, and for the first time in her life found herself enjoying a journey.

She was having an adventure. She was at home on the road.

Within three days she had done a radio interview, two bookstore appearances, and the first lit-fic panel, joining Jenny M, some poet, and a Booker longlister with a terrible head cold. Amy tuned out of most of it, a series of cliché lamentations on the general illiteracy. Late in the hour, when prodded by the student moderator, she launched into a defense of libraries real and virtual, reassuring the audience that whether books are read or not, they are no longer in danger of disappearing forever. The only way the modern-day Library of Alexandria could burn was if the world ended, in which case illiteracy would be the least of our problems. The poet, who had been silent for the whole hour, countered with something cryptic about the looming Age of Darkness, at which point they all congratulated themselves and broke for prosecco and brie.

This was to be the default script of the traveling lit-fic show as they hopscotched through the heartland through late summer and into the fall, most of the panel discussions set down in university commons rooms, lecture halls, and libraries. They hit DePaul, Case Western, Ohio State, Beloit, and everything in between. All the campuses were green, all of the older buildings Early American Greek. On Columbus Day they crossed the border into Ontario and did York in Toronto, then on to McGill in Montreal. The panel personnel were as interchangeable as the undergraduates who ushered them around.