The Nobodies Album (18 page)

While Frances is away, the university will be hosting a visiting professor. (Also a female neuroscientist—what are the odds?) This other woman, Cleo, is British; she’s a single mother with a young son named Felix. Her research, however, is a bit more controversial than Frances’s, and also less obviously useful: she’s studying what happens to the brain during a near-death experience. For better or for worse, Cleo is portrayed from the very beginning as being more of a free spirit than Frances; in one early sequence, we see Frances preparing a meal of brown rice and vegetables, intercut with shots of Cleo allowing her son to eat waffles and ice cream for dinner because they’ve both “had a rough day.” The two women correspond, and they decide that it makes sense for them to swap houses for the duration of the semester.

Incidentally, Cleo’s research is where the film gets its title. Certain phenomena that occur during near-death experiences are inexplicably universal: people across many different time periods, regardless of culture or religious belief, have reported seeing tunnels, bright lights, a feeling of floating and looking down on one’s body from above, and so on. Those who believe in such things take this commonality as evidence of a life hereafter; scientists and skeptics, on the other hand, have suggested that these effects are merely hallucinations caused by neurons misfiring as the brain shuts itself down at the moment of death. Logical Frances subscribes to the dying brain theory; flighty Cleo would like to prove it wrong.

So, all right. Sara’s got her metaphors all set up and neatly packaged: science and faith, the tangibility of pain and the uncertainty of heaven. The symbolism’s a bit precious for my taste, but I suppose I’m with her so far. Writing the story forward in my own mind, I’m expecting that moving into each other’s houses will change the women more than they expect. Settling into the neat lines of Frances’s life, Cleo will learn to be a more responsible mother; Frances, living in Cleo’s crowded, whimsical cottage, will loosen her restraints and have an impetuous and slightly self-destructive affair with Cleo’s brooding ex-boyfriend. In the process, Frances’s research will benefit from a more creative approach, and Cleo will discover that the dying brain theory and life after death are not mutually exclusive after all. If that’s the way it goes, then as a viewer, I’ll leave the theater fairly satisfied; as a longtime friend-slash-rival of Sara’s, I’ll be positively giddy at the predictability of it all.

But that’s not the way it goes. About an hour in, the story takes a turn I don’t like. Frances, wandering through her borrowed house one rainy day, comes upon some of Cleo’s journals. After an unnecessary and rather drawn-out “will she or won’t she?” scene in which Frances stares at the pile of books as she drinks an entire bottle of wine, she finally opens one up and begins to read. And she learns something disturbing about Cleo. She learns that Cleo has given some thought to the possibility of “inducing” a near-death experience in her son.

It may already be clear that my feelings toward Sara are rather prickly. Our friendship has gone through its share of ups and downs over the years. Once when we were still students, I told her about a humiliating experience I’d had in high school gym class, and she listened with an expression of casual interest; her next short story contained the episode, almost verbatim, and I watched in shocked silence as our professor and fellow students praised her imaginative plotting. Still, we were close for a while; she was at my wedding, and she sent gifts for each of my children when they were born. She published her first book quite a long time before I did—hers came out in 1985, while mine wasn’t until nearly a decade later—but we were good writing friends, exchanging manuscripts long-distance and taking each other’s comments seriously. I didn’t know many other writers, and I valued both her insight and the sense of companionship forged by our shared experiences.

Then Mitch and Rosemary died, and Sara was among the first batch of people that I called. Her reaction was like everyone else’s at first—shocked, sad, kind. And then she said something that absolutely stunned me.

“This is going to sound horrible,” she said, and for one last moment, I still trusted her enough to think that no honest thing she could say to me now would be horrible. She went on: “But I’m almost jealous in a strange way.” I remember her laughing then, awkwardly, a hollow sound. “At least you’ve found your material,” she said. “I’m still waiting for my tragedy.”

I can’t draw the lines easily here. It’s not that she’s Frances and I’m Cleo; it’s never really that simple. And Sara has never once suggested that I was in any way responsible for what happened that day. But the emergence of this plot twist—a mother actually putting her child in danger because it will further her work—reminds me of that comment all those years ago, and suddenly I know that she was thinking of me when she wrote it. And it makes me sick.

I consider getting up and leaving, but endings matter to me, and I want to see how she’s going to wrap this up. There’s some convoluted business about the sudden death of Frances’s mother, whose last words are about a beautiful, shining light, and it turns out I’m right about Frances’s affair with Cleo’s ex. But eventually Frances discovers that Felix truly is in danger, and she rushes back home to save him. Cleo is sent to prison for attempted murder, and in a bit of writing requiring a rather substantial suspension of disbelief, Frances is granted custody of Felix. To top it all off, Frances hits pay dirt in her research and discovers a new way to alleviate human suffering, for which she wins a fictitious award that seems to be just one notch down from the Nobel. And I can only assume that this particular university never again supports scholarship involving any aspect of the afterlife.

I stay in my seat all through the credits, until the lights come on and someone comes in to sweep up the popcorn. I’m thinking about a particularly colorful critique I heard once, years ago, when I was teaching a writing seminar. “Jeff’s stories,” this young woman said, “always make me feel like I’ve stepped in vomit.” (With a mind like that, I don’t know why she wasn’t a better writer.) I’ve been waiting a long time to use that phrase myself, and I’ve finally found the opportunity, even if it’s only in my own head.

I leave the theater and make my way down the escalators. Finally I turn my phone back on, and I see that I have a new voice mail. I listen to it expectantly and find that it’s from my agent, who on most other days is the person whose messages I’m most interested in hearing.

“Hi, Octavia,” she says. “It’s Anna. I hope you’re doing okay in the middle of all this … God, what a horrible situation. I wanted to let you know that I’ve heard back from Lisa at Farraday about
The Nobodies Album
. Which is pretty remarkable, given how short a time it’s been since you sent it to her. Give me a call when you get this. It’s not exactly what we were hoping for, but I think it might be good.”

Her vagueness makes me uneasy. I don’t know if what I’m feeling is typical nervousness—my opinions about my own work are spectacularly unstable, bouncing between swollen overconfidence and debilitating insecurity—or a hint of doubt about the project itself, but I’m apprehensive about hearing Lisa’s reaction to the manuscript. When I first told her the idea for
The Nobodies Album
, the question she asked was,
Why?
It seemed like something I should have an answer for, but the reasons that came into my head—
because I can; because as long as I’m alive, nothing has to be set in stone
—seemed paltry, not nearly substantial enough to justify the outlay of risk and money required to publish a book.

I won’t pretend that there were no personal factors involved in my decision to revisit my earlier novels. From this remove, it’s hard to recapture the desolation of the Octavia who began this project, the woman who was afraid she might die before she ever saw her son again, who would have bet money that she’d never sit on a sofa with a grandchild at her feet. It had been almost three years since I’d spoken to Milo, almost three years since I’d received his brusque note saying that he’d read
Tropospheric Scatter
and would appreciate it if I wouldn’t try to get in touch with him.

My thinking about
The Nobodies Album
with regard to Milo was not quite as simple as “Writing caused this problem; maybe writing can fix it,” but it was along those lines. Rock stars are good at making themselves inaccessible to the general public, and that was the group I had become a part of. Letters and e-mails were ignored; packages were returned undelivered; phone calls dead-ended in high-pitched tones and automated voices that told me the number was no longer in service. I was running out of ways to reach him, and
The Nobodies Album
felt like a loophole, a back door: the plot twist where the guy delivering the balloon bouquet serves you with legal papers. I’d made a name for myself, and I might as well use it to my advantage. I couldn’t make him read it, but if I did it right, there was no way he could prevent it from entering his consciousness.

I didn’t realize then how important the timing would be—that the very day I intended to place the book in someone else’s hands would be the day it became too late. The situation I find myself in now, this gnarl of doubt and accusation and lives irrevocably changed:
this
is what I was trying to prevent.

But redeeming myself to my son was not by any means my only concern. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough. My work matters to me, and I hope that it matters to my readers; I may be self-absorbed, but I would never presume that a public gesture of apology was any basis for a work of literature. The day I began writing
The Nobodies Album
was a day of artistic epiphany for me. It was a day of wonderment and humility and assumptions tumbling to the ground.

I suppose you could say I’d been thinking about endings. I’d had a biopsy; my doctor had found a mass in my breast, and I was waiting for him to call with the results. It was a morning like a blank page, and I couldn’t really do anything but wait and see what kind of words were going to fill it.

My Only Sunshine
had been published a few weeks earlier, and lines from some of the reviews were still floating around in my head. I’ve mentioned, I believe, that critics were not exactly rising to their feet as one to cheer my achievement, and one writer had suggested (not particularly kindly) that the problem with the book was that it covered the wrong period in the protagonist’s life. He said that the only time the novel captured his interest—and this is where I can almost garner some sympathy for the downtrodden reviewer: can you imagine hating a book so much and not being allowed to simply put it down?—was the second-to-last page, when we flash forward to the hours before this unnamed woman’s death. This character lives seventy-one years, he wrote, seventy-one years amid the aftermath of her mother’s committing suicide, leaving her to be raised by an abusive father, and this is the part of the story the author has chosen to show us? Teething and diaper changes?

It wasn’t that I necessarily agreed with him. But from the vantage point of the tightrope I found myself walking that day, I suddenly wished, very much, that I had given that baby girl a chance at a better life than the one she ended up living. It hit me with a force as strong and sudden as grief: I had created this character, made her out of nothing and set her down in the world, and then carefully and systematically sucked away every bead of hope. And I felt I had made a terrible mistake.

Which is not to say that I thought everything should be happy and sunshiny. Her life was her life; unless I started from scratch and wrote something completely new, there were a lot of circumstances that neither she nor I could change. But I wanted to remove some of the bleakness I had written for her so blithely. I wanted to give her a chance.

I went into my office and pulled a copy of the book from one of the boxes I’d received from the publisher. Just as an exercise, just to lessen my own guilt, I wanted to see if there was any way I might have done things differently. I’ve always said that the ending of a novel should feel inevitable. You, the reader, shouldn’t be able to see what’s coming, but you should put the book down feeling satisfied that there’s no other way it could have gone.

And yet, as I paged through the story I’d settled on, I could see the traces of the hundred different stories I’d rejected.
Here
I’d made a choice, and
here
, and
here
. It was all butterfly wings and tornadoes: even a slight deviation in any one of those places would be enough to set the whole book on course for a different outcome.

I hadn’t felt so invigorated by an idea in a long time. It seemed to me powerful, and revolutionary, and … inevitable. The questioning of the artistic process; the redemption of character and author in a single blow. By the time the phone rang—and I picked up to hear the voice of the doctor’s receptionist instead of the doctor himself, which told me everything I needed to know—I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by all the books I’d written, looking for ways to change the course of history.

I look at the time to see if it’s too late to call Anna. It’s after nine p.m. on the East Coast, nine on a Friday night. I have her cell phone number, but I’ve never used it, and it doesn’t really feel appropriate to do so now. She usually answers e-mail over the weekend, so I’ll just have to hope I can get in touch with her that way.

I walk out of the theater. I see that it’s gotten dark, and I feel a sense of loss: another day in my life spent without Milo. A week ago such a thing wouldn’t have been extraordinary at all, but now it feels like a fresh wound. I wonder if he’s punishing me, making me sweat before he reaches out. Or has he decided to cut me off completely once again?

I’m trying to decide whether to go back to my hotel or get something to eat at the diner I see across the street when my phone actually rings. I look at the number; it’s Chloe.

“Hello,” I say, sounding regrettably eager.