distraction no.99

There Was a Happy Time

Nova Ren Suma

August 7, 2005

It was quite a few years ago, in a place many blocks north of where you now live. The campus was like an enclosed city, magical. Your heart swelled while walking up or down the wide stone steps, unable to believe you were allowed to be there. The grass was green inside the stone walls, the trees blooming with flowers in springtime or strung up with lights when it was cold. The rooms had the largest windows, looking down over pathways and steps and iron gates, people like you and people nothing like you all milling about. In big rooms with wide wooden tables you got to read Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Rhys, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Saunders, Angela Carter, Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson… most of whom you had never read before. To discover each of their books in turn and wonder how you’d lived without them… incredible. The library had ceilings like a cathedral, and the fiction section was in a deep labyrinth of tunnels where you could be in the cool darkness for an hour without seeing another face between the stacks. Any book you could imagine at your fingertips, a new paper assigned? Good. You had keys and an ID card that could get you into any building you wanted, and sometimes you went there just to go there, just because you could.

This was grad school. For me, there was a moment — I remember it distinctly — when I knew it would soon be over, and I knew I had spent so much money I never even had (the vaporous fantasy of student loans don’t feel real till the bills start to come) and I knew it was impractical and it might turn out to do me nothing, and yet I told myself: Remember this time, how happy you are, because if you don’t, it’ll seem like it wasn’t even worth it.

I’m remembering it now.

I was so young, I didn’t realize life wasn’t really like this. You don’t get to read and talk and pass out photocopies of your stories in real life. You don’t have long stretches of time in which you can take a walk, or read another chapter, or stare out a window trying to come up with the most perfect sentence for that particular moment and page. “Living expense” money doesn’t grow on trees forever. People don’t hand out fellowships for good behavior no matter how hard you toil away at your thankless publishing job.

Maybe I could go back there. Maybe you can get four MFAs all in a row and each time you gain a different thing out of the experience: a new voice, a new skill, a new interest, a new box of pages you slaved over for years.

Very few people understand why I did this. For me, really, the only questions are: 1) How could I not? and 2) Can I do it again?
To Do: No-Box

Nova Ren Suma

August 6, 2005

Another short story rejection came today. Just one of those thin photocopied slips without even a name on it. No return address on the envelope. (And they had this story 5+ months.) Whatever.

At some point at some nameless future date when I feel more secure in my footing, I’ll put together a “No-Box” for all the rejections I’ve collected over the years. Some are flattering with typed comments and encouragement to try again, some are scrawled on my own manuscript: “No thanks” with some illegible initials from someone who is probably an unpaid intern, some are cut jagged with scissors, copied 12 to a page. I’ve sent these out personally, so I know how it is. Still, it hurts to get them. I can’t throw them out, yet I can’t stand to look at them, either. I’ll jam them all into a box, shove a rock in to weight it down, seal it up tight with duct tape, and throw it into the Hudson.

I’m looking forward to watching it sink.
Sunday Morning

Nova Ren Suma

July 31, 2005

Out walking Sunday morning before most people are up. Few cars in the streets. The firemen spray the sidewalk in front of their firehouse with a hose. A broken bottle on the corner maybe from a drunken fight last night. The park is being cleaned by women in matching blue T-shirts and garbage bins on wheels (some kind of community service?). They discuss men as they wheel the bins around, commiserate with each other. The fountain is on and a few silent people sit watching. On the bench beneath the knotted tree a man and woman sleep, a giant suitcase by their side. The man sleeps sitting up, slumped forward over his knees. The woman sleeps sideways on the bench, her head as close to him as she can get it without actually touching him. I saw them yesterday morning, too, same bench, same grubby suitcase. The man was yelling at the woman yesterday, telling her to listen, did she hear what he said? Now, this morning as I pass they both snore. Wonder if they live there on that bench, have nowhere else to go. This is the same tree under which some mornings people meet and shake hands a lot. Don’t look too closely, don’t want to know what they’re handing off. Past the park, every restaurant is closed. Chairs up on tables, gated windows. Two boys swaying drunkenly as they walk down the block, passing me loudly, their night not yet over. The newsstand is boarded up. The light is green when I reach Broadway, but there are no cars so I cross through the Don’t Walk sign. There is no line at the coffee shop. In the display windows of the clothing store all the models have had their clothes removed. They stand there, posed plastic, naked. One window contains only naked torsos, perfectly smooth, blank heads. The others show the naked bodies reaching out toward each other, saying nothing. An old man walking a dog stops and looks. In the far window, a store employee slowly dresses the models. She has three more wide windows to go. I reach my building, sign in at the guard’s desk. Each morning he watches a movie on a tiny portable screen, doesn’t even look up. This morning he has let a strange woman use his telephone. She cries. He looks at me helplessly, as she is holding his pen. I sign in with my own pen, up the elevator, and here I am.

There Was a Happy Time

To Do: No-Box

Sunday Morning