Mark Bourne - Great Works of Western Literature.pdf

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GREAT WORKS OF WESTERN LITERATURE
By Mark Bourne
* * * *
EXHAUSTED, JESSUP SEES THE change as it happens this time. On page 1548
of The Experience of Literature, 3rd ed., in the chronological listing of the works of
Ernest Hemingway, the title The Old Man and the Sea materializes in crisp, black
letters. Other words on the page crawl away to make room for the new addition.
Jessup flips through the dog-eared ricepaper pages to the essay “Papa and His
Time” by Prof. E.C. Gwaltney, Ph.D. Jessup’s margin notes and underlinings from
college are still barely legible as faded pencil graffiti. Then there it is, appearing in a
newly vacant part of the page: “After the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, a
nearly flawless short novel, Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes
with a promptness that suggested an overdue recognition.”
The anger bursts within him more explosively than last time, and Jessup flings
the book at the shelves lining one wall of his cramped apartment.
“It’s mine!” he cries for the thousandth time. “Fucking damn it!” He stares at
his word processor’s glowing screen. Blank. No point in searching through the hard
drive’s files. Sour acid rises from his stomach.
His latest work — another product of solitude, missed meals, and passion —
is gone. Like the others, The Old Man and the Sea has been erased. No, not erased.
Stolen.
Jessup kicks savagely at the books on the floor and bellows like a trapped
animal. He unbars the door, yanks it open, walks stiffly down the dim hallway, and
emerges into the night’s cold, gray rain. The wet pavement sucks up the street
lamp’s oily halo, leaving no color in Jessup’s view. From an open window, a radio
blares. On the Sol Network, His Radiance is announcing another decree to suppress
the latest uprisings on the west coast.
Jessup pounds the iron grating. The door behind it opens an inch. A tired-
looking eye peers through the taut security chains.
“Whoizzit — Jessup!”
The door closes and Jessup hears the chains being unlatched. There is a
moment’s pause. Alya always thinks she looks like shit in the morning, so Jessup
knows she is combing her fingers through her short, brown hair. The door opens.
She unlocks the protective gate and pulls Jessup, shivering and dripping, into her
living room.
“What’re you doing out in this weather? What time is it?” She glances at the
 
clock near the shrine. Two thirty-six. “Sraosh and Rashnu!” she swears. “What’s
wrong.? You want some coffee? Dry yourself off, at least.” She goes into the
bathroom, then returns with a heavy towel and a bathrobe. The towel smells of her
favorite perfume. She helps him remove his soaked shirt and pants. He puts on the
robe. Alya takes his hand and guides him to the couch.
“You shouldn’t be out tonight,” she says, heading for the kitchen. “The
Guard are ready to shoot anything that moves.”
“It happened again.” Jessup says it so softly he wonders if she heard it. She
responds with the sounds of something being put into the microwave. A minute later,
she comes out with a cup and saucer.
“Careful. It’s hot.” The coffee tastes awful, and she chuckles at the look on
his face. “Yesterday’s leftovers. You get the good stuff only when you call first.
What happened again?”
Jessup lets the cup warm his palms. “You know that novella I’ve been
working on? About the fisherman.?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
Please, not again. “You read it last week. Said it was the best thing I’ve
written yet.”
“I haven’t seen anything of yours in months.” She sounds hurt. “You won’t
let me.”
“But I made you read it. You said it moved you.” Forget it. It’s all been
changed. Again. “You promised me you’d remember.”
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her sincerity tempers his
frustration.
“The Old Man and the Sea?” His voice is without hope.
“What about it?”
“Who wrote it?”
“You were the lit major.” She answers his glare with a puzzled expression.
“Hemingway did. Everyone knows that.”
Jessup sighs. It’s the same every time. Stolen, like the others.
He looks hard at her. “The Metamorphosis.”
 
“What?”
“Who wrote the fucking story?”
“Kafka. Franz Kafka.”
“Waiting for Godot.”
“The play? Oh, wait. It’s been a while. . .Samuel Beckett. What’s this all
about?”
They’ve had this conversation before. But of course she doesn’t remember.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
“My favorite poet. Eliot.” She looks at him. A shadow of worry, or fear,
washes across her features.
“Jessup.” She touches his arm. “What’s this all about? Are you all right?
You’ve been working too hard.”
It’s pointless. He has explained it all to her before. But “before” is obviously a
relative word. Twice now, he has told Alya everything, every absurd, unfair detail.
But with each theft everything changes. So he tells her again.
For the past year or so, ideas for new stories or poems or novels have poured
into him as if he were a wine glass filled to overflowing. They appear in his head
complete and whole. He merely releases them through his fingers, the way Mozart
envisioned entire symphonies before transcribing them into corporeal existence on
paper. Just last week, when he showed her his latest work-in-progress, he told her
how wonderful it felt to work on a piece that he knew was something special. Work?
The words flow from his fingers as if he were simply taking dictation. And often, as
his body aches with fatigue, tingly inner voices whisper encouragement and
suggestions in his mind. A writer’s subconscious editor at work loud and clear. It
used to take weeks just to finish the first draft of a short story. But now —
“They practically write themselves,” he says, laughing, but feeling cold and
frightened all the same.
She listens as he speaks — again — of muses and inspired creation. She
grows frightened when his fists beat viciously at the air over his head and he lashes
out at forces he cannot name. Someone, something is helping him create beautiful,
inspired work —prose, poetry, drama. Characters and scenes appear in his dreams.
Faint voices tell him what a fine writer he is. Each new piece is the most fulfilling
work he can imagine. But each time, after he types that final period, then slumbers in
contented exhaustion, something takes his work from him. And gives it to somebody
 
else.
No matter that somebody lived years or centuries before Jessup was born. It
doesn’t even have to be a single person or time on the receiving end. Two of his
fantasies, The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, are now scattered like seeds
across centuries and continents, sown into the cultural loam of lands and languages
that to him are totally alien. Three days after The Odyssey vanished from his screen,
he discovered a tattered Penguin Classics edition in a used-book store. It claimed
that, as with Gilgamesh, no one really knew how Homer’s seminal tale originated.
Jessup threw up in the bookstore aisle.
Nobody even remembers seeing his original manuscripts. History is being cut
and pasted, and in an act of cosmic irony or bad humor, he’s the only one who can
see the edits.
Is he the only one so chosen? Is history being rewritten in other ways by other
hands? If so, who would know it? Maybe there are dozens, hundreds of Jessups out
there, doing the editing and revising and the whiting-out. The typing pool of the
gods. Ha!
While writing The Old Man and the Sea, he recognized Hemingway’s style on
the growing stack of pages. He was proud that he could capture the clean prose of
the man who wrote The Sun Also Rises. Last week, in bed, Alya told him that if
Hemingway had written Jessup’s “wonderful fish story,” the old fart probably would
have won that Nobel Prize after all. (That was before it was taken from him, so of
course she does not remember saying that.)
By then, though, he had convinced himself that the thefts were real, that he
was not insane. So, after saving the file for the last time, he refused to sleep, even
though his body fought him for it. He opened an old anthology from his college days
and, exhausted, he saw the change as it happened that time.
“I’m tired of being the ghost writer for the universe,” he says quietly. He cries
himself to sleep while Alya strokes his hair. She wonders if she should call a doctor.
After a while, she reaches for the TV’s remote control and switches to the
news channel. Even with the sound low, she can tell what is happening. Dark-hooded
Reformists are shot as they pull a Sun off a neighborhood temple. One of the Guard
tells the camera that His Radiance should nuke the whole movement and let “the big
M” sort ‘em out. Alya looks at Jessup, asleep with his head on her lap. He mumbles
something unintelligible, and stirs fretfully. Poor, sweet, paranoid lover. Drunk, he
once told her that he wanted his writing to change the world. Alya clicks off the TV
with a grunt of disgust. No wonder he cracked.
JESSUP IS awakened by the sound of bullets shattering glass. Alya is on the floor,
 
huddled behind a bookcase. For an awful moment, Jessup imagines she is dead.
“Alya!”
She turns her head and presses a finger to her lips. “Ssshh!”
He listens. There are screams outside. The house across the street. A man
sobbing hysterically. A woman shouting. The piercing clap of gunfire. Running
footsteps. Silence.
“What’s happening?” he whispers.
“I don’t know. The Guard. Maybe a street gang. Or Reformists. How the
fuck should I know?”
They listen, and after a while she crawls to the window and peers between the
curtains. Be careful, he wants to tell her, but the words are brittle in his throat from
fatigue and fear.
“Shit,” she whispers. “The neighbors. There’s a Reformist symbol burning in
their yard. He was a priest.” She stares through the glass a long time, then says
“Shit” again, as if punctuating the world.
“Alya.”
She comes to him and he embraces her, comforts her, kissing her slowly on
the mouth and across her neck. She joins him on the couch and for a time the world
just isn’t there anymore.
Afterward, they share each other’s warmth and he listens to her breathing. She
smells wonderful.
“Remind me,” he says, nuzzling her neck, “to tell you about the dreams I had
tonight. Weird.”
She smiles at him. “Was I in them?”
He isn’t sure. There were so many. . .characters. “Maybe. There was a
woman, a mother. She—” But the images are fog now, and don’t make sense to his
wakeful mind. “I don’t remember.” He shrugs. “Just dreams.”
She looks wistfully toward the window. Her smile fades, and near her eyes are
tiny lines he’s never seen before. “It’s times like this when I wish I were religious.”
“Why?” he says. “You never use the shrine. It always looked lost in your
living room.”
 

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