The House of Writers (15 page)

As a side-effect of her erotic tussle with the octopus, Kirsty became a writer of genius, on a par with the fêted and rated down the ages (whose books were swiftly passing from public awareness). The creature had been placed in the cupboard by an under-read SF writer who wrote books too complex for the mass market and, as a two-fingered salute to his failure, bred the octopus to do harm. He created the creature by the cunning manipulation of light, using visual effects, mirrors, and electromagnetic sensations, alongside a powerfully seductive scent, to hypnotise anyone who caught its gaze. There was no actual deep-sea mollusc present. As to its special powers, he had used a rare form of black magic taken from Native American settlers during the time of Custer, filling anyone under the octopus’s sway with unlimited talent, so long as they surrendered their bodies to its love forever. Several SF writers had become office-wide successes, writing work as timeless as Bradbury or Asimov, but became so addicted to the octopus’s love, they suffered multiple strokes through over-exertion. She completed her masterpiece
The Suture,
a sprawling SF epic encompassing particle physics, neuroscience, philosophy and religion, over the space of twenty-nine days, and on the thirtieth day I had to kill her affair before the affair killed her. I arrived to unplug as she was hitting her forty-ninth octogasm. She was too elated to notice anything except the loving fuck-frays of her mollusc lover, but the octopus was alert to the invasion and swung one of its tentacles as I reached for the wall plugs. I flicked off the multisocket, knocked Kirsty off the plinth, and hurled a bucket of water over the electrics, which fizzled and crackled. I fled the room to the sound of Kirsty’s semi-sexy hysterical howls, shooting up to the roof to save my hide from skinning (withdrawal from that thing was TOUGH).

I never completed my book, not with Kirsty hovering. She criticised my every line. “Let me see your opening,” she said.
The mist evaporated over the sullen hills.
“Mist can’t evaporate. It’s not made of water. How can hills be sullen? I’ve never seen a hill looking sullen in my life. Next?”
In the distance, the roar of gunfire pierced the call of the birds.
“Distance from whom? Aren’t all hills, even sullen ones, in the distance? Gunfire can’t roar, it’s not an animate thing. It doesn’t pierce the sound birds make, it pierces flesh and makes holes in people. Who are the birds calling? I wasn’t aware birds could operate telephones while flying over sullen hills. Next?”
Terence turned on his heels and walked the other way
— “Who is called Terence in this day and age? How exactly can he turn on his heels? Does he have castors instead of feet? What way is he walking? You haven’t said which way he’s facing in the first place. Next?” —
towards the horizon where rain pattered down in drops upon his weary forehead.
“Is this horizon in the distance? Does rain patter? I didn’t know rain had feet. And drops? Rain appears in
drops?
Really, that is a revelation! And how exactly can a forehead be weary? Foreheads can’t feel.” And so on. I only wrote four pages before quitting.

A Word from the Team

P
ATRICK:
A classification crisis hit us here in the SF department recently. Park and I thought our writer’s block stemmed from the fact
science-fiction
had become redundant as a classification, since SF referred to a postwar notion of futuristic horrors and had nothing to do with present reality. Since we already occupy the dystopian future popularised in 20
^th
century SF, a new title was needed for the genre that encompassed the kitchen-sink realism at the heart of our writing. Paul and Peter believed a name change would lead to our two readers boycotting the books, that our readers liked SF precisely because it blinkered the horrors of their present reality by keeping them the stuff of books, and they would rather be deluded their whole lives than pick up a newspaper. Park and me decided
horrealism
was a better title, since we were simply taking their ideas from the news and blowing up the most horrific elements of each story anyway. Eventually we came to a truce, keeping
horrealism
as a sub-genre of the larger SF bracket, so we’re open again to take your fresh ideas (and your souls!) So guys—what is SF exactly? Define.

P
ETE:
Seriously?

P
ARK:
Science-fiction.

P
AUL:
Right. Robots and aliens.

P
ETE:
A little more to it than that . . .

P
ARK:
Not much more.

P
ATRICK:
What about ideas? Any top-of-the-headers?

P
AUL:
Here’s one. There’s this soldier . . .

P
ETE:
And?

P
AUL:
And he clones himself to fight in the next world war. So he sends his clone off to fight for him but the clone turns traitor and defects to the other side. When the war ends, the clone evades capture and is assumed dead. But his reputation as the biggest war criminal is so strong a worldwide witch-hunt for his head is on. The original soldier finds himself on the lam for crimes he didn’t commit. He loses his wife and kids and respect in the village and ends up . . .

P
ETE:
And?

P
AUL:
Still working on the ending.

P
ATRICK:
That’s not a bag of old bogeys.

P
ARK:
No magic sperm, at least.

P
ATRICK:
Write it and we’ll publish it. If you have any ideas like that, come work with us in the SF department. Looking forward to hearing from you all.

P
AUL:
And sucking out your souls!

P
ATRICK:
Always.

W
E
escaped Arxle and were downhearted to observe at the end of the road that the small beach we had fought to find had been paved over. I refrained from theatricals since I had expected this and had been clinging to the pleasures of delusion since leaving The House. We strolled along the shore as water lapped against the concrete, hoping still to encounter the commune where a Better Life was supposed to await us somewhere along the way. I had packed provisions and was irked when I had to share a sandwich with Rob, who accepted the pickle and cheese without a word of thanks, resenting that I bagseyed the ham. We progressed along the shore, past a neverending sequence of concrete fields, until dusk approached. As we were about to bed down on the concrete for the evening I noticed a light in the distance, what a more poetical writer (I was never one) might call an
ignis fatuus.
We moved towards it and found a feral black-haired man in a tent eating skate by candlelight.

“Fuck d’you want?” he welcomed.

“Are you the commune?”

“There is no fucking commune. Bog off back to ScotCall.”

“Who are you?”

“I live here
alone
and survive by spearing skate with this twig. There’s barely enough fish for one, so I won’t be having company,” he said. He produced what appeared to be a bazooka welded together with two toasters.

“What’s over there?” I asked, gesturing to the rest of the coast.

“They paved over the coast and put up ScotCall kiosks. Fishermen work there answering questions on how to debone halibut.”

“Right,” I said. “Time to go back ... and kill ourselves?”

“Or . . .?” Rob trailed off.

“Yes? Or what?”

“I was going to suggest we kill all the old ladies in the village and create a commune there using the houses, but that’s probably—”

“—a great idea!”

“Oh! I wasn’t expecting that reaction. I thought you might find it too extreme.”

“No, it’s amazing! We can use that trick you did on the bus.”

“Cool!”

“Wait wait!” the black-haired man said. “You’re going to butcher the entire village and steal their houses? I want in on this.”

“Oh. Not sure about that. After all, you weren’t very welcoming—”

“Let me come or I’ll blow your cocks off with my Man-Blaster.”

“Yes. OK. Nice to meet you.”

His device was a makeshift bazooka. Scraps of fried appliances were fed into the slots and fired with lethal force at the victim. The Man-Blaster would prove a useful device if Rob’s undescribed murder method proved ineffective. We mobilised as a threesome at the Unwelcome to Arxle sign. You have to understand (before I describe the mass slaughter of a dozen senior citizens) that these people were dead inside. We were merely ending their corporeal presence on this regrettable planet, their minds were long gone. Our mass slaughter was—perhaps—a charitable act. Our friend with the bazooka was named Pete and claimed to be the son of experimental writer Christopher Sorrentino (himself the son of experimental writer Gilbert Sorrentino) and docmartined the door to the first house. He fired up his Man-Blaster and blew holes in a bunneted tinker as he was answering a query about the sheerest denier of tights for trainee drag queens. I was somewhat taken aback at Pete’s brutality, but I could see he had been longing to do this for a while and felt the same ecstatic release as I when the victim’s arms were blown from his torso and totalled the phonograph.

“That was easy. Of course, you realise when ScotCall detects an inactive unit there will be inquiries and agents dispatched immediately?”

“Oh.”

“But that’s solvable. You need to keep flicking the switchboard. What we need to invent is a device that automatically switches to a new caller every five minutes. You two work on that while I blow the fuckpants out of this old bint next door.”

“Erm ... all right.”

T
HE
exact number of invited writers turned up before the set starting time, so the organisers closed the Fossilfoods doors, and Julian Porter stood to deliver his welcome address. As he cleared his throat, a knowing Sheila Heti called out “HEARD IT!” as a comment on the clichéd nature of public addresses, implying that delivering such a clichéd address in a room with such august personnel was ill-advised. Sadly for Sheila, no one picked up her subtlety, and Kjersti A. Skomsvold poked her in the ribs.

“Thank you, wonderful writers—”

“And Jonathan Safran Foer!” someone (George Saunders) heckled.

“—for attending this conference, on this special if somewhat sombre occasion. Tonight, we will be reminiscing—”

“On our shit careers!” Joe Matt said.

“Speak for yourself!” Charles Burns said.

“I was!”

“—about your triumphs and failures, and attempting to recall some of your most memorable passages. We had several cups of cola and a few lumps of chocolate, but unfortunately, someone helped themselves!”

“That fast-fingered lardass Picoult!” J.K. Rowling said. “Writes with a pack of Twinkies beside the computer.”

“Shut up!” Jodi replied. Most of the writers smirked at the clichéd nature of this response as being indicative of her unoriginal way with words.

“We encourage several of you to take to the stage here as the evening unfolds and to send off this Golden Age of literature in style. It’s a sombre occasion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have an absolutely fabulous time.”

Before this sentence ended, the insistent fingers of 97-year-old T.C. Boyle clasped the microphone and Julian was nudged off the stage. T.C., with his lean frame and updraught of grey hair, mounted the stage like an anorexic Don King. “I would like to recall some of my work, if I may crave your indulgence. This is from my first story collection,
Descent of Man,”
he began. He read for ten minutes from the same story until an enraged Michel Houellebecq shouted in French: “The fucker’s going to read his collected works!”
¹
A shoe was hurled towards the stage, and boos chased him off.

Joshua Cohen sneaked on stage behind a retreating Boyle, whose sprightliness should have been an inspiration to the assembled, but these people had put up with new novels and collections from him for too long. Cohen was an unsmiling Jewish intellectual with the lost look of a child prodigy whose eagerness to know everything had recently been spiked by the realisation he will only ever know a meagre fraction of some things.

“I would like to read from a new work. Here is a short passage,” he said, and said nothing for two minutes. Some smirked. Others frowned. It was clear he was making a potent statement on the death of literature in this terrifying age, although opinion was divided as to his statement’s overall potency.

“Best thing you’ve done,” George Saunders said.

“So powerful,” Nicole Krauss said.

“Stage-hogging brat,” Adam Thirlwell said.

“Echoes of John Cage,” Jackie Kay said. Reluctant applause followed.

No one approached the microphone for an hour. Reluctant interactions followed. Kirsty Logan spoke to Cris Mazza about whether frozen prawns could revivify themselves after being left in near freezing conditions for four decades; Alan Warner spoke to Stacey Richter about the lurid lighting in the room, and Stacey pretended to love the word “lurid,” despite her dwindling interest in language as a concept; Nicholson Baker spoke to C.D. Rose about the origin of the postage stamp for seven minutes before C.D. collapsed into a heavy coma on a bag of burst sprouts; Julia Slavin spoke to Jeff Bursey about how she had, in homage to her story “Dentaphilia,” a thousand extra teeth implanted in her body, and the adverse consequences this had on her marriage and subsequent short-lived relationships; Jonathan Franzen spoke to Louis Bury on the problem of sourcing special extra-soft linens for those whose skin was sensitive after showering or bathing; Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili spoke to Guy Delisle about having to translate English soft porn into Georgian to make a living between novels, and her struggle to render phrases like “spiffing good fuck” and “pleasant shag” into her native; Stewart Home spoke to Aki Ollikainen about his time singing lead vocals for anarchist punk and dubstep outfit, Faulty Lamenters, in such a fashion that Aki suspected the group might not exist, or that Stewart might be incorporating a pipe dream into conversation for lack of something meaningful to say; Irvine Welsh spoke to Tom Bissell on the challenges of pretending to hail from a working-class background for his entire career, and the unfortunate ways in which he found himself becoming more working class through osmosis; Lynne Tillman spoke to Will Self on once accidentally torching the office where two chancers made a small fortune peddling Wikipedia articles as print-on-demand books to people desperate for reading material on their favourite topics; Antoine Volodine spoke to Stewart Lee about how Holly Golightly’s second LP
The Main Attraction
was released on vinyl in 1995, then re-released on CD in 2001, causing dim critics to label this her sixth solo effort; Lance Olsen spoke to Paul Emond on the impossibility of sourcing his grandson a star-shaped bicycle clip ever since the industry was taken over by virulent anti-Semites who refused to manufacture anything resembling the Star of David; Alona Kimhi spoke to Lasha Bugadze on becoming a bestseller in France because of a naked fat woman on the cover of her novel, and the invites to attend fat orgies in Paris bordellos despite her being a lissom individual, and the backlash from fat people upon realising the author was not one of them but exploiting them for humour; Nicola Barker spoke to Benjamin Stein about the first drive-thru burger restaurant on a train platform to open at Clapham Junction, where customers would phone their orders ahead, and staff would pass the burgers and cokes in through the windows, and how this proved so popular, each station in turn opened a drive-thru until two or three were placed between each station, forcing the trains to slow down so food could be fired in through the windows, causing extreme delays, and often hot drinks exploding over commuters’ faces or chilli sauce staining clothes; Deborah Levy spoke to Ornela Vorpsi on the spate of younger and younger King Lears, culminating in a 22-year-old actor playing the part after his success in a popular TV franchise, and how Shakespeare had been cut to only 40-minute snippets after audiences began walking out of performances over an hour; Alex Kovacs spoke to Christine Montalbetti on the allegations around his business selling 2400GB USB sticks being a falsehood, and how his team had developed remarkable compression techniques so that a staggering amount of data could reside inside a USB no larger than a toddler’s pinkie; Jang Jung-Il spoke to Percival Everett on his desire to exist in a permanent state of movement blur, as in a camera with slow shutter speed, and how this was achieved through clothes exuding a strobe lighting effect; Xiaolu Guo spoke to Sergio de la Pava on her preference for a bag of frozen sweetcorn to be placed on her head in the event of a fever, since due to a traumatic incident with peas as a child that she didn’t wish to discuss in detail, peas left her in a state of manic terror; Robert Shearman spoke to D.T. Max on the surgical procedure he had to place Dalek bumps on his chest and back, and to have a nose that extended outward in the manner of a Dalek’s sink plunger, and his lucrative life as a “man-Dalek,” appearing at fan conferences for extortionate fees, and how the bumps had to be removed when each of them was found to be cancerous; Vendela Vida spoke to Mark Dunn on the outrage at waking up one morning as the face of
Woodlice Weekly,
a weekly periodical devoted to studies and tips for the removal of woodlice, despite having not endorsed her image for this purpose, and the humorous email exchange with the editor, who had mistaken her face for that of Jennifer Bower, Canada’s top expert on treating woodlice in the home, and the settlement of $3,500 for the trauma Vendela underwent at being on the cover of this publication; Todd McEwen spoke to Jacques Jouet about whether this suicide pact was really happening, as he had a debt collector stalking him, and a contract killer on his tail after sleeping with a rich woman in the hope she might toss him a million or so, and was quite keen to end himself that night; Laurent Binet spoke to Jon Fosse on the failure of his daughter to reach the final leg of the world ballet championships in Krakow, and his attempts as a loving father to temper her rage and disappointment at this failure, while suppressing his own rage at not having a world champion ballet dancer for a daughter despite the money he haemorrhaged into this long and time-consuming attempt (during which he had neglected to write a single page of his next war novel); Magdalena Zurawski spoke to Lee Klein on the decent turnout that evening, and Lee nodded in concurrence, before the conversation fell into an awkward silence, and Magdalena looked around for someone she recognised to save her from this pain, and finding no one, made the cardinal mistake of asking Lee what he’d written, thus showing her ignorance of his oeuvre, at which Lee attempted to skulk off elsewhere, but finding himself blocked by a seven-strong wall of writers, was forced into salvaging the even-more-awkward exchange with this writer he had never heard of and who had never heard of him by pretending the offence never happened and naming three of his published works, at which Magdalena nodded in mock-interest, and Lee was forced to ask her what she had written in response, at which she became offended, and finding her side was free for an escape, made this into a thicket of writers, at which Lee breathed an enormous relieved sigh until he noticed someone (Micheline Aharonian Marcom) walking towards him whom he had never read, and that she was spreading her arms with a welcoming “Lee!”, kissing him on each cheek and launching into a thorough appraisal of his novels, at which he muttered thanks, and tried to postpone the mounting dread at having to praise the works of this novelist about whom he knew nothing, not even her first name, and to end the exchange, pretended to need the bathroom desperately, and said that he was frightfully sorry for his rudeness, but that he’d been holding it in for hours, and there was simply not a moment to spare, and Micheline laughed and pointed him towards the toilets, warning him to look out for the rat-roaches that had already bitten Tom Whalen’s penis twice this evening, and Lee muttered thanks, heading towards the toilets, in front of which stood Magdalena Zurawski deep in conversation with Peter Dimock, and since Micheline was watching him to ensure he went the right way, was forced to ask Magdalena to move, interrupting their chat, having to endure the dirty look on her face, and Peter’s message “Watch the rats don’t bite your cock off, chappie!”, at which Magdalena laughed, by way of laughing at Lee, and Lee went into the toilet for his pretend piss, finding Sam Lipsyte on the floor clutching his penis while three rat-roaches circled his body, zoning in for the kill, and Lee picked up a broom and beat the creatures to death, helping Sam up towards the sink to cool his aching penis in the water, wondering if this was a better alternative to an awkward exchange with Micheline, and looked at Sam’s bitten and swollen penis, and concluded that it wasn’t; among other conversations.