I’m in an Airbnb. I hadn’t had a home-cooked meal for months, and so was using the kitchen opportunity the short-term let had. As I was squashing some tofu, my agent called.
“Where are you?”
“A few miles south of Des Moines. I hear it’s one hell of a city.”
“Aren’t you meant to be in L.A. by now?”
“You want me to cover the downfall of the American Empire, right? I can only do that by seeing the real America. And by that I mean, anywhere else besides New York or Los Angeles.”
“You barely even covered New York.” My agent says. I look at the edge of their head and the blurred background, the algorithm sometimes mistaking the room they were in as part of their hair.
“Uh, yeah, didn’t you just hear what I just said? Sheesh.” I say, cutting the tofu into cubes and throwing it in the pan.
“I know podcasters in Des Moines, two women that interview authors. Its called ‘Literary Me’.”
“Yeah, well that sounds stupid as fuck.”
“I’m going to book you in for an interview.” They say. I shake my head.
“No etiendo madre. I don’t do interviews.” I say, pouring soy sauce into the pan, followed by some vegetables.
“Don’t you want to promote your writing?”
“Why?”
“Because how will anyone know about? Don’t you want people to read it?”
“I have my fans. From Singapore to Germany, I actually have a dedicated set of readers, can you believe that?”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Look, just go to Des Moines tomorrow and do the fucking interview.”
“I hate all that marketing stuff, you know that. Can’t you just buy some posters and stick them on the side of buses? The tagline could be, ‘America’s greatest writer isn’t American’.”
“Do the interview.”
“None of the authors I like ever did a podcast. They didn’t have to put little pictures up on Instagram. Do you think Franz Kafka would go on Chicken Shop Date?” I whinge.
“I’ve been going through your expenses. How much money are you spending on the dark web?”
“Okay, okay, I’ll do the interview.” I say, tossing the contents of the pan a few times and ending the call. I take a framed print off the wall and start drawing a demon on the other side. The only think I dislike more than doing marketing was having to look at it. There was too much advertising. Almost every vertical surface in America was covered in ads, from pills to make your dick big to IKEA furniture. The onslaught of promotions tended to blot out signs that would be useful, such as ‘No Dogs Allowed’ or ‘Cash Only’, subsuming all words and images into marketing. At least if I did the podcast my agent would get off my back. Maybe if I did such a bad job of it, they wouldn’t ask me again. I giggled to myself. No. I would have to take it seriously. There was the risk that they would fly out a handler, someone to drive me around, take me to photo shoots, hold bags of drugs over my head just out of reach and I would keep hopping up like a silly puppy. I look at the demon I had drawn, add some dribbles of blood from its fangs and start to get scared, putting it back on the wall to secretly watch over the Airbnb guests until the end of time.
The day after I pull up the Hyundai Sonata outside a bookshop, the Barnes & Noble on University Avenue. That morning I had shaved, wore clean clothes (a three piece turquoise suit) and had only taken a small amount of drugs (Seroquel and Lorazepam) on the way there. The meal from the night previously had been devoured by my body desperate for the nutrition, making me feel like a million dollars in unmarked bills. This was as good as it was going to get. I look in the backseat at the skull of Walt Disney and the statue of Shiva.
“Wish me luck!” I say. I get out and walk towards the podcast hosts waiting outside. They introduce themselves and I forget their names immediately. The part of my brain that remembered names had been obliterated via covid, so I tended to refer to people by nicknames like ‘Stretch’ or ‘Big Nose’. The two hosts led me through the bookshop and were talking excitedly about the upcoming interview. We pass between shelves and into a space that had been set-up for the interview.
“Ah shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t realise this was going to be in front of people.” I say. They laugh.
“All of our ‘Literary Me’ podcasts are. Haven’t you listened to them before?”
“Oh, yeah, I just thought, you know. Maybe we’d just be in a small room. I could sit with my back to the window so you couldn’t see my face.” I say, rubbing at my hair like Stan Laurel. It wasn’t a big audience, but big enough that it would make me a little nervous. I sit on one of the chairs on stage, the hosts laughed, directing me to another chair.
“We’ll sit here. Do you want a glass of water?”
“Do you have any beer?” I say. They both laugh. The only thing worse than saying something in earnest and it being taken as a joke was saying a joke and it be taken in earnest. Of course, there were many things worse than that, such as having your body decompress in outer space, but in that instance I felt like pure shit. I pretend to laugh along, sitting in the chair. It seems to be at a wrong angle. It was too square, why did they design chairs like that? My body wasn’t angular.
“Are you ready?” one says. I nod. I needed to concentrate. They pass me a microphone clipped to the front of a book.
“Am I meant to just hold it?” I say, looking confused. They laugh again and turn to the audience.
“Good morning and welcome to Literary Me, America’s number one podcast for all the latest in books, authors and reading!”
“My names Melissa.”
“And I’m Claire.”
“And today we’re joined by an author and journalist all the way from merry old England!”
“Excuse me sir, where can I get a train ticket to Hogwarts?” says Claire in a mock-English accent. The audience bursts into laughter.
“No, but seriously, the UK is home to some of the greatest authors in the English language. Can you tell us why you think that is?” says Melissa. They turn to me.
“Oh, uh…well we invented English I suppose.” I say. There is a pause. Nobody is sure if I have finished speaking or were telling a joke. Instead, there is only silence.
“That’s right! So which author would you say was your greatest influence growing up?”
“Well, I mean, J.G. Ballard, obviously, especially with my earlier stuff.”
“Who?”
“Ballard. You heard of him? Crash? Atrocity Exhibition?”
“Ohhh, hoho, I thought you said J-Jéé. I was like, who is that?” said Melissa. Claire laughs, looking at her phone.
“Yeah, he’s a little bit old fashioned now, but he was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media.”
“Yep.”
“So, what are you writing at the moment?”
“It’s about the death of America.” I say. The podcast hosts laugh.
“Wow, that’s so interesting. What made you choose that?” says Melissa. I shrug.
“For listeners at home, he shrugged!” says Claire. The two hosts glance at each other. I can tell within that glance that it said ‘this interview was terrible’ and ‘I hate this guy’.
“I just think…like, why do I need to talk about it? Can’t you just read it and decide for yourself? People keep asking me, what’s this about, what’s that about, it’s a bit irritating really. If I could just tell you, then why would I write? I may as well just do a podcast or something. No offence.” I say. Melissa opens her eyes wide and looks down.
“O-kay, but you agreed to come on this podcast to talk about your writing. Are you going to tell us anything about it?”
“Yeah, just go to noughtmare.blogspot.com, it’s all there, free.” I say.
“What was that?”
“He’s writing a blog?”
“No, no, its not a blog, that’s just the delivery mechanism. Like a book isn’t the words, it’s just a stack of paper with some glue. It’s the words on each leaf that make up the book, you know?” I say. “The two are interchangeable, but you could have a book filled with blank pages and that’d be a book, or you could have all the words on a pdf, that’s still a book.”
“That’s an e-book.”
“Well, whatever, you get what I mean though, right? Are we going to get pedantic about it?”
“Um…well, yes. This is a podcast about books and writing. Words matter.”
“Words matter.” Says Melissa, nodding. I look out at the audience and hum anxiously.
“Okay.”
“Speaking of words, have any of you guys ever wanted to read a book but find you don’t have the time?” Melissa says to the audience.
“This podcast is brought to you by Audible, and if you sign up now using our promo code, you can listen to your favourite books read out to you! So whether you’re at the gym, doing chores around the house or simply driving to the store, with Audible, you can experience the greatest works of literature at any time, anywhere.”
“I hate audio books.” I say. The hosts look at me, frowning.
“That’s kinda rude.”
“Yeah, it’s also kinda ableist. Not everyone can read.”
“I just find them hard to follow. If you get distracted you have to stop, go back, listen to it again, get distracted again.” I say. The hosts whisper to each other. I am worried that my agent will cut off my supply of crypto I use to buy drugs online. I laugh.
“Hey, I’m only joking! It’s that dry British humour.” I say, smiling at them. They both seem to relax.
“Oh my god, we couldn’t tell!”
“Yeah, we were like, who is this guy!” Claire says. We all laugh and look out at the audience, who have also seemed to relax.
“I love audible actually. And talking about books. That’s why I’m here!” I say.
“You had us going for a sec!” Melissa laughs. I smile normally.
For the next forty minutes we talk about literature. Everything from the smell of books, our favourite stories to read as children, authors we were excited about and some upcoming literary awards. We even field questions from the audience. Throughout all this I keep smiling, talking, get passionate about the smallest things, even share a touching story I had where I would visit my Grandma and read Hermann Hesse to her as her health deteriorated.
“She knew. She knew that we’d never finish Steppenwolf. And in that last visit, I remember holding her hand, that old hand of Grandma and I said to her, ‘We can just read the last page Grandma’, but no, she insisted. She was a fighter, right up until the end, and I remember she said to me ‘It’s not about the end. It’s what happens before.’ And so I kept reading. But when I next looked up…I could see that she…that she had reached the end of her story.” I say, finishing the monologue. I look back at the hosts, lost for a moment in the story and could see tears in their eyes. I had to prevent myself from grinning like a psycho. I had fooled them. I had spun a web of lies so delicate and true that they hadn’t even realised they were trapped inside cocoons and I was about to suck their brains out.
The authentic self had been rejected in the first few minutes of the interview. The fake self was seen as more real, more palatable, more relatable. The fake self had carried me through the interview as it had carried me through many social interactions. Were they, in turn, pretending or were they being authentic? Could they even be authentic if I wasn’t? What if the authentic self included a propensity for acting as the fake self, as wasn't everything a person did authentic by virtue of it being something the person did?
All of
this was a mystery, something with no answer, it was barely even a question. I left
the bookshop and got back to the Hyundai Sonata, waving at Melissa and Claire
as I calmly drove away, flexing the musculature of my face into an
unthreatening smile. This was the way to be. Amateur theatre to give others a
sense of understanding, lifelong method acting as a background character. If everything was bullshit, then it only made sense that the bullshit
version of yourself could fit within the narrow framework of reality
held by most of American society. I arrived at a junction, merging with traffic, blending
in to all of humanity as if I had always been a part of it.
