ANXIOUS ISLAND
a novel & memoir about love & murder
+ + + + +
This is my last chance.
How many have I already had?
Maybe it is my delusion, but it seems like a million last chances have come and gone and here I am crouched in a hallway trying to understand the language the new girl is speaking: There is a banker in three pieces groaning in the bathtub, wearing only his socks and a grimace, and she has been dialing my number for an hour, furious that I have not answered. She is wearing the magenta bra I bought for her on Christmas Eve, when everyone was spending and hoping the holidays would last at least until April, and in one bloody hand she’s got an axe made in Sweden and in the other bloody hand she’s got a cellphone made in Shanghai, and she’s giving me one more chance to understand what she’s telling me:
“I did this for you, Sean, cut this fucker up and flushed him down the toilet and now you’re going to play games with me and say we’re not making that movie in Spain?”
I never play games. Everyone knows this when they meet me. I am the most honest person I’ve ever met, which makes me a superb liar, but the girl on the phone is the best liar she’s ever met, too, and she warned me on Facebook when we first met that she was a very honest person, the most honest person I would ever meet, so everything we think about each other has been built on a lie. So what do I say now? The truth, or a lie? What she wants to hear, or what I want her to think?
“Put the banker on the phone, Maya,” I say.
I hear the banker gurgle an apology. But I have no time for the nuances of morality. I’ve got to escape.
“Do you have a credit card, Boss?”
“I am sorry for what . . . I’ve done.”
“Can you give me the number of a credit card and your address and your mother’s maiden name, please? I’ve got to get out of here.”
And the banker makes me the last loan he has to give. I have the digits of escape. A cello plays in the background, strings on my soundtrack. Mozart’s memes. Maya is on the phone, asking if I will meet her at the harbor.
“Listen, Sweetheart, I’ve got one thing to say that I want you to remember the rest of your life –”
“You’re junking our movie?”
“Mozart lay dying for ten days in his bed, and clutched at everyone who came to see him, begged them not to go –”
“You’re abandoning another dream?”
“He was hysterical, snot and tears on death row, crying about the fact that he’d spent his whole life making music for other people, paid to play –”
“You said you would make me somebody who would kill if anyone touched her –”
“And here he was, dying, with his first commission without conditions in front of him, and now the world would never know what he could really do –”
“Sean, listen to me, I will not kill you, unless you abandon this movie, and if you do . . .”
“Mozart died like a dog with rabies, heart ripped to pieces, with nobody knowing what he could really do. And that’s Mozart, Sweetie!”
“If you let this movie starve to death I will hunt you down and slice you into pieces.”
We hang up at the same time. Desire is a battery that charges and spends itself according to inspiration or scorn. Maya and me run out of each other at the same time, and silence keeps us separate long enough for me to tell you the rest of this story.
+ + + + +
Every story begins with a publisher. Mine is a banker who has known me for two decades. He remembers the first night he met me, when I was sent for permission to rent a building to stage a revolution that arrived stillborn but kicking throughout its gestation. He remembers me making my pitch and thinking, “Hold on, hold on,” but then he gave me the keys to my revolt and watched me crash into the cancer ward without wearing the wings I’d promised to grow. But that’s another story. No time for that now.
He agreed to back me if I made something tangible he could spread like fertilizer on inquiring minds. All he wanted was a glimpse of what I was trying to do. Some kind of explanation for how I intended to tweak society when he could bring me the billions my plans need. I promised him a high wire crossing in public, between my dreams and the future, and he bought it without condition, as long as I told him exactly when I was stepping onto the wire, leaving my dreams to cross into the future, come wind or high wire failure.
This book, a few short steps between fantasy and the survival of the Universe, is my notice to my publisher that I am stepping onto the wire, and I will cross in a sprint, without a balancing pole or safety net. If you are reading this book, it means my publisher has lived up to his end of the bargain, and you won’t know if I make it to the future unless you read until the end of this book.
I’ve kept it short because I know you are running out of time, too, just like me. And we readers know keener than anyone how time flies as the pages turn.
+++++
This is the opening of “Anxious Island” from Miles Drive Publishing, if we are lucky. I will get you a free copy if you ask me for it.