Fugue State: stories

In the Greenhouse

After nearly ten months of struggling to write Craven Words, the introductory study of novelist Roger Craven that he had been commissioned to write by Craven himself, Sindt reached an impasse beyond which he was certain he could not progress. He destroyed the one hundred and seventy page manuscript, abandoning sheets to fire at measured intervals, and then promptly wrote Craven to inform him of what he had done. I cannot, Sindt wrote upon the back of a postcard, complete the study I agreed to write. I fear I find myself inadequate to the task of circumscribing your prose.

This note was not entirely truthful. Rather, Craven’s work, which had initially intrigued Sindt because of its concern with dislocation and possession, its insistence on postulating all human relations as a form of torture, had upon further scrutiny fallen apart. Craven’s oeuvre contained, Sindt felt, not a single original idea. During months of research and composition, he became increasingly convinced that Craven’s work amounted to nothing.

He mailed the postcard and endeavored to force Craven from his mind. After boxing up Craven’s books, he committed them to his basement. He was now Cravenless, he told himself, locking the basement door behind him.

It was thus with considerable chagrin that several weeks later Sindt discovered in the mailbox an envelope inscribed in a familiar hand. There was Craven, in his mailbox, admittedly in condensed form, beckoning to him. When Sindt opened the envelope, the letter within invited Sindt to visit, asking the favor of your company, forgiving all, asking only that you come spend a few weeks with me.

Having failed to accomplish what Craven had asked of him, Sindt had no desire to visit the writer. The visit could be nothing but uncomfortable for both of them. He wrote to excuse himself, suggesting that he could not come at that particular moment, pleading pressing business, urgent matters. Craven wrote in return that he would ask only this single thing of Sindt, that Sindt come stay for a few days immediately, and that he would demand nothing further of him ever again. As you failed to write the study you yourself repeatedly assured me you would write, Craven claimed, this is the least you can do.

To reach the house, Craven had written, one left the train station and traveled west on foot half a mile until one arrived at a taxi stand. From there, one traveled by taxi on what was referred to as the logging road, following it upward to its terminus. There one would discover a footpath that led through a stand of trees — pines — and wound about until it issued into the clearing in which one would find at last the house.

As it turned out, the trip from train station to taxi stand was in fact several miles rather than half a mile, and what Craven had referred to in his letter as the logging road was, according to the taxi driver, properly called the timber road. As the taxi climbed said road, Sindt wondered if Craven had purposefully mangled these details or if he had simply underestimated the mileage, misremembered the road. Certainly Sindt could not blame Craven for having misled him in such fashion, considering his failure to write Craven Words. But in that case, he wondered, why invite me to visit at all?

He paid the driver and then set off through the pines (what was left, apparently, of the timber the road had been named after), coming at last upon the house itself. The house was made all of stone, the roof of slate, a squat tower jutting out. It rested on relatively flat land, with some sort of greenhouse beside it, the mountain rising behind. Like something out of Craven’s work, Sindt thought, and felt a pressure start up in his head. Craven himself was waiting for him under the archway before the front door. He was wearing what could only be described as a Tyrolean walking costume, complete with lederhosen and a hunter’s cap. He seemed pleased to see Sindt, and quickly led him into the house, where he prodded him into the room he referred to as the parlor. It was an uncarpeted and drafty chamber, floored with stone flags, empty save for the two of them and two wooden chairs set before an extinguished fire.

Craven took off his hunter’s cap and scratched the crown of his head, then abandoned the hat on the mantel. He left the room, returned with drinks.

He was glad Sindt had come, he wanted Sindt to know. Salud, he said, and touched his glass to Sindt’s own. He was pleased that they could let bygones be bygones and spend the next few weeks redeveloping their friendship. He admired Sindt’s candor, the audacity of sending such a postcard, and though at first he had been, he had to admit, enraged, he soon came to realize that it would have been a mistake for Sindt to write about his work if he honestly did not feel he could master the prose. Sindt apologized again, more profusely than he had managed to do on the back of a postcard, and they both sat down, sipped their drinks. From time to time Craven would smile at him, perhaps to reassure him that all was well, that he had been sincere about his genuine forgiveness of Sindt, which made Sindt increasingly nervous.

There was, Craven said, just he and his chef in the house, just the two of them, and now, he said, there was Sindt as well. The chef would keep entirely to the kitchen, according to Craven, at most darting into the dining room to serve dinner but retreating as quickly as possible back to the kitchen. In point of fact, the chef kept his bed in the pantry — not because Craven had forced him to do so (for Craven had offered him any of the seven beds in the house) but by choice. The chef wanted his bed in the pantry — it was not a case of a master giving his servant short shrift, and one preferred not to use words such as master and servant in times such as these. It also had to be said that in the case of the chef, bed was the wrong word, as what he slept on was more of a pallet. Craven would show Sindt the chef’s pallet as part of the tour, though it would not, Craven claimed, be the highlight of the tour. He too was not in the main body of the house often, for as you can see by my garb, he said, fondling the embroidered hem of his lederhosen, I tend toward communion with nature. It would not be too much, indeed, to call him an outdoorsman, for the majority of his waking hours he spent either in the remnants of the woods or out in the greenhouse. The greenhouse was admittedly not a greenhouse but rather a modified greenhouse, something he had converted into an enclosure for the growth of the word. In it, he had written not only his most recent book but several books prior to it. It paid to keep one’s writing out of the house, at a certain distance, else the house itself become infected with the imaginative process. The imaginative process could ruin a good house in a matter of days. “This house,” Craven said, gesturing around him, “consider it your own. Your home away from home.”

The tower was nearly as bare as the parlor had been. There was a bed in the center. On the floor beside it was what Sindt judged to be an imitation Persian rug, grown discolored from sunlight, threadbare in its center. Pushed against a wall, just beside a window, was a small writing desk, a place for an inkpot cut into it. A chair sat next to it, the back of it cracked down the middle.

“Satisfactory?” asked Craven, and, when Sindt nodded slightly, he left.

The room was roughly circular. He found, when he went to the leftmost of the three windows, that the tower was high enough for him to see out over the remains of the forest and catch a glimpse of the town below. The rightmost window revealed only the mountain rising beyond the house. The center window looked down on the roof of the modified greenhouse. Sindt ran his finger against the wall and it came away filthy with ash. There are ways, perhaps, he thought, to bow delicately out of this visit to Craven — perhaps by pleading a bleeding ulcer or some other dolorous yet difficult-to-verify condition. Down below, the sun glinted off the greenhouse panels. He could see Craven, even smaller than usual, walking past the greenhouse and then out toward the trees, ridiculous in his alpine costume. Then he lay down on the bed, slept.

He was awoken by a jangling sound, which, as he soon discovered, was coming from outside his door. It was Craven. He had shucked his alpine costume in favor of a pair of slacks and a blazer a decade out of style. In his hand he held a battery of sleigh bells that struck Sindt as vaguely sinister.

“Dinner?” Craven asked.

Sindt rubbed his eyes, buttoned his shirt back up, followed Craven down the stairs. The house had come to him almost by accident, Craven informed him. A train he had been taking had broken down a few miles shy of the town below. Instead of waiting for it to be repaired, he climbed out of the train’s window, hoping to travel on foot to the station. Once under way, however, he left the iron rails and quickly lost his sense of direction. Hoping that by climbing higher he might be able to see the station, he mounted the slope and stumbled onto the logging road—

“—timber road,” Sindt suggested.

“Timber road.” Craved nodded affably. “And here it was, unoccupied, but nearly in the condition you see it now.”

He ushered Sindt toward his seat. The table was already laid, medallions of pork bleeding on their plates, greens in bowls beside, wine decanted, chef nowhere to be seen. They ate quickly, both sitting clumped at one end of the rather large but remarkably crude table. When finished, they repaired to the parlor and sat facing each other, brandy glasses in their hands.

“You don’t mind living here alone?” Sindt asked.

“I’m not alone,” Craven said. “You’re here as well.”

“Just for a day or two,” Sindt said. “My back, the twenty-second vertebra, tremendous pain—”

“No,” said Craven. “I won’t hear of you leaving so soon.”

Not knowing what else to do, Sindt emptied his glass.

“In any case, there’s the cook,” Craven said. “Don’t forget the cook.”

He was oddly beaming as he said it. There was, Sindt realized, a certain resonance in the words. Sipping his brandy, staring into the cold fireplace grate, Sindt realized that somewhere in the middle of Craven’s novel Velvet Fury a variation of the same phrase had appeared, uttered by the parodic detective and protagonist as a kind of obscure joke:

There’s the crook. Don’t forget the crook.

For an instant Sindt held himself perfectly still. He could feel a pressure in his head. The alpine garb Craven had been wearing earlier, he now realized, recalled that of a minor character in Craven’s philosophical novel, Melly & Tate, a character mentioned briefly, passed over in the course of a paragraph. The meal they had had, bloody medallions of pork, greens without other vegetables or side dishes, had appeared, if he was not mistaken, as a dinner eaten by the wife of the protagonist in Knife Diet. Perhaps Craven’s simple outfit now, slacks and outdated sport coat, was an obscure reference to another of his texts. The house was apparently less a literal space than a literary space.

“I’ll leave you in peace,” said Craven. He stood and, after setting his glass on the mantel, picked up the hunter’s cap discarded there earlier.

“And which room is yours?” Sindt asked, choosing a phrase he hoped was devoid of any literary referent whatsoever.

“My room?” Craven said, and frowned. “Hardly important.”

Once Craven was gone, Sindt finished his drink, then set the glass beside Craven’s own. And then, realizing that Craven’s characters were always leaving drained glasses on fireplace mantels, he carried both glasses into the dining room, then set them on the table. He stayed there looking at them and then picked them up again, carried them into the kitchen.

The kitchen was dark. From under the pantry door he could detect a feeble light. Having set the glasses on the counter, he knocked softly. There was no reply. He knocked again, again heard nothing. When he opened the door, he saw that the room stretched back farther than he had imagined, parsed by tiers of shelves. Near the door was less a pallet than a pile of ragged blankets. He pushed at them with his toe. The chef was nowhere to be seen, perhaps hiding back behind the shelves.

He closed the pantry door and then methodically explored the house. There were six other bedrooms besides his tower, the dining room, the parlor, a library (filled only with multiple copies of Craven’s works), a study. The house was sparsely decorated, the walls scorched in almost every room. Craven was nowhere to be seen.

He climbed the stairs to the tower, undressed. Yet when he turned off the light, he realized there was a glow coming through the center window. He watched light play on the ceiling and then, unable to sleep, got up, looked out. He could see, below, the greenhouse, the light from inside it illuminating the whole of the structure and shining up through the glass roof. Craven was inside, Sindt saw, sitting at a desk with his back to him, and Sindt could see that Craven was crouched over something, his right arm hidden before his body. There was a sheaf of papers to either side of him. Sindt watched, first leaning against the windowsill and then pulling the chair away from his own desk and putting it beside the window. Finally he saw Craven add a piece of paper to the rightmost sheaf, take a sheet from the leftmost sheaf. There is Craven, he thought with a certain amount of hatred, desperately adding another insignificant work to an already insignificant body of work, and with that thought, he found himself able to return to his bed and fall asleep.

He awoke several hours later, anxious. He was in a house, living out situations that seemed carefully constructed by Craven out of fragments of his novels. Where finally did that leave Sindt? He was not one of Craven’s characters, was not a literary referent, had no intention of becoming one if he could help it. But perhaps even now Craven was writing about him. He could still see on the ceiling the wash of light from the greenhouse below, and when he stood, went to the window, could see Craven still hunched over his desk, a sheaf of paper to either side of him. He sat there watching Craven, the papers moving slowly from one sheaf to the other, until dawn broke and the transparent glass of the greenhouse turned sun-flecked and opaque.

He dressed, stumbled downstairs to the dining room. Craven was already at table, bright-eyed, a plate of eggs before him.

“Sleep well?” Craven asked, picking up his fork.

Yes, Sindt said, choosing his words with care, he had slept well, no interruptions, but his back — not his problem, the bed, you see, perhaps he would have to regretfully cut his visit short.

“Nonsense,” said Craven. “We’ll ask a chiropractor in from town.”

As Craven ate, Sindt watched. Craven seemed fully awake, his face unlined, his eyes clear, as if he had slept soundly through the night rather than spending all night at a desk in a greenhouse, writing. Perhaps it had not been Craven, thought Sindt, but no, who else could it be? And even from the back he had been certain who the man was. Yet here Craven was, eager and visible despite everything, and well into his breakfast.

Was there anything planned for the day? Sindt wanted to know.

Planned? said Craven. No, nothing. As for himself, he would enjoy a day in the out-of-doors, wandering through the trees, perhaps climbing a little way up the side of the mountain. Sindt, of course, was welcome to join in.

Sindt declined. In the tower after breakfast, he watched from the window as Craven trudged around the greenhouse and set off through the trees. He spent his own day wandering the house, slept for a while in the tower. He wandered the clearing as well, catching glimpses of Craven from time to time. Approaching the greenhouse, he found it locked. Through the glass he could see rows of emptied clay pots along each wall, a dirt floor, the chair, the desk with sheaves of paper on both sides of it. He tried, by moving along the side of the greenhouse, to catch sight of the words on the top sheet, without success because of the angle of the pages, the waver of the glass. The lock on the door was simple, part of the latch, and he thought if he pushed on the door just right he might be able to spring it, though there was always the risk of the panes of glass breaking or slipping out. And what, in any case, would Craven think if he saw him? He couldn’t have Craven thinking he remained interested in his writing. He certainly didn’t care to give Craven material of that sort to use in constructing the Sindt of his novel.

That night, after a light dinner which again recalled Craven’s work — the poached salmon found in the novella Box of Sky—Sindt climbed the circular staircase to the tower and again saw the light thrown on the ceiling. He can’t stay up all night, he told himself. This time I will watch until he falls asleep. I will watch all night. I will find him out.

He stayed up, seated at the window, resting his arms on the sill, watching Craven’s malfocused back, his slight and minute movements only partly available through the glass. If only I had a pair of binoculars, he thought, and wandered the house in search of those or some sort of spyglass, finding nothing save the thick bottom of a whiskey tumbler, which, while it admittedly magnified things, severely distorted them at the same time. This too, he realized, could have been an object from one of Craven’s books, and though it was in none of the published books, perhaps it would be found in the book Craven was writing in the greenhouse now. When Sindt returned to the tower, Craven was still in the greenhouse, still at his desk, the papers in the pile on one side migrating slowly to the pile of paper on the other side. Sindt sat again at the window and for a time moved the tumbler from eye to eye to eye; through it, the greenhouse became a ghost of light, the light striking rings into the poorly ground glass base. After a while, he set the tumbler down on the floor, leaned again on his elbows. A little while more and his chin slipped onto the sill, and then he was waking up, morning having long arrived, his back sore, his body half-slid from the chair.

It was like that the next night and the next, and Craven each morning as bright and unblemished as if he had been freshly created instead of having spent all night at a desk, writing. Sindt, though, felt increasingly disoriented, hardly able to sleep either at night or during the day. It was as if there were more than one Craven: one who wrote, another who appeared in Tyrolean garb by daylight, perhaps others as well. He asked Craven, or one of the Cravens, if he had a pair of binoculars, and though Craven claimed that yes, he did, and that yes, Sindt could borrow them, he never produced them. Their relations seemed to Sindt to become more strained and he felt they spent their days circling one another, excessively formal (he realized this was a description as well of Jansen and Jensen’s interactions in Craven’s Moody Mouths), as Craven or Cravens waited for evening to come so they could write and Sindt awaited an evening of trying to make things out through glass. How is your writing coming? Sindt finally asked, and was surprised when Craven answered, I’m not writing. I haven’t written a word in weeks. Yet there he was, below, scribbling away, night after night. Though Sindt could not, through the glass roof, make out the words — or even for that matter make out that there were words — he sat, peering out over the sill, trying by force of will to make his eyes see farther and farther. But he could never make out enough: only Craven, only the papers’ slow flight from one sheaf to the other, a few sheets a night. He tried to imagine what was on each sheet, pieced together scenes from an imaginary novel, wondering where, if anywhere, he fit in.

By day he went through the house, searching for Craven’s room, but there was no sign that any of the other rooms were occupied. Well over a week into the visit, he had still not caught even a glimpse of the cook. The pile of blankets on the pantry floor never seemed to have been slept in. There were, he thought, too many Cravens and too few chefs, and then he winced as he remembered another line from Velvet Fury

Too many ravens and too few corpses

for it seemed that the syntax of Craven’s sentences was rewiring his head.

He would leave, he told himself, he would pack his things and depart that night. He even managed to fill and close his suitcase and sit in the chair awaiting darkness. But darkness was scarcely come when the light was there again, again cast upon the ceiling. He abandoned the suitcase to pull the chair again to the window, speculating on what Craven was writing, the imagined words swirling about within his head, settling briefly, then swirling off. The words would, he realized, continue to spin about, continue to batter the insides of his head even after he had left the house. Better, he thought, to see the actual words, to read what was there on paper, to allow the words to set and solidify and thus sink lower in his head and be forgotten. The imaginative process can ruin a good head, he thought, and must be brought to a halt before it is too late. The actual was the only way to stop the whirligig of the possible. There seemed no choice but to once again read Craven.

But when, and how, was one to go about it? It could not be done by night, for at night Craven was in the greenhouse himself, composing. Sindt could not simply ask Craven to show what he had written, for Craven had claimed not to to be writing at all. During the day, too, Craven came and went about the grounds and might well discover him as he forced his way into the greenhouse, particularly if there were more than one Craven. And where, too, was the chef? He had never seen the chef, but that did not mean that the chef had never seen him. Perhaps the chef was observing him even now.

He finally settled on early in the morning, thinking it possible, perhaps, to sneak down the stairs and out to the greenhouse after Craven had left it, while Craven waited for him at the breakfast table.

He slept, or tried to, through most of the night, finally jerking fully awake with the cold light of dawn. Having slipped on his socks, he slowly granched the door open. The stairway was empty. He made his way slowly down, turning around the narrow staircase, dragging his hand along the wall for balance. He crossed the hall carefully, eased the front door open, went out.

The air was sharp, crisp. He could feel the prick of gravel through his socks. He picked his way carefully along the side of the house, crossed to the greenhouse.

He peered in. The greenhouse was empty. Trying the handle, he found it locked, so he pressed his shoulder to the metal edging of the door and bore down. He could see the wall and door bulge, the metal grating against the glass, the lock slipping. And then the door burst open and he was in.

He approached the simple desk, the chair. On the desk: two sheaves of paper, the one on the left higher, a pen between. He approached the leftmost, found the paper empty, blank, but of course Craven had always moved the paper from left to right.

He approached the rightmost stack, found the top sheet blank. Turning it over, he found the reverse blank as well. He leafed down through the stack but there was nothing, no words, not a mark.

When he turned he could see, through the ceiling of the greenhouse, the window of the tower. Through that window, distorted by both the glass of the window and the roof of the greenhouse, he glimpsed a figure. Perhaps Craven, he thought, Cravens, one of them. Or perhaps the cook. Don’t forget the cook. He had a feeling that everything had already occurred. The figure was looking down, he thought, looking at him.

Not knowing what else to do, he turned from the gaze, sat down at the desk. He could guess what was expected of him. Picking up the pen, he began to write.

After nearly ten months of struggling to write, he started. He continued writing uninterrupted until he again, both in prose and in life, found himself sitting in the greenhouse, pen in hand. He had, he realized, allowed himself to be used. Yet, nevertheless, I have now approached some sort of conclusion, he wrote. All that remains is for me to destroy this manuscript as well.