This Location of Unknown Possibilities (18 page)

She judged the end product to be literary fool's gold. A travesty or else a vapid parody of the genre, it also looked no different from cynical
product
. From the title onward, the thin manuscript existed as a con for the gullible, one whose very purpose transformed Marta from being a last-place-finish nice gal to a predator of the weak and foolish; both roles lacked in appeal. Pangs of apprehension pulsed across her abdomen.

In the ruminative period between completing the manuscript and sending it off, she left the sheets in plain sight. Alone on the vintage yellow Arborite kitchen table, the papers and their implication could not be avoided.
That constant visual cue forced a thoroughly deliberated choice: to act or not to act, that was the age-old question she returned to. Over those three weeks—a gestation period, she came to think of it—Marta toyed with diagnosis. She viewed
The Holiday Archetype Personality
as a shameful mutant, a monstrous birth of a disturbed intellect, a consequence of being overworked, living proof of a bookish woman's variant of a nearing-middle-age crisis, a symptom of an unhealthy immersion in a competitive professional environment, and an empty lark. At last, she chastised herself—
give it a rest
.

Tiring of one's own quirks and neurotic tendencies was as easy as getting fed up with those of someone else, Marta believed, convinced of the drawbacks of the over-examined life. Wedged between narcissism and abject self-loathing, she extracted some comfort with the trick of using self-knowing to undermine her internal drive to fret and over-analyze. As far back as kindergarten her mother had chided her for “making a mountain out of a molehill.” Perhaps Marta didn't possess self-awareness at all; she'd only internalized Dianne's point of view. Sensing imminent, paralyzing uncertainty, Marta focussed on action.

From those public library books she also selected a remote publisher whose tawdry range of bus reading and disposable bold-typeface titles—
Must Love God!: Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Freak
;
The Coming Panic (& How to Profit from It)
;
Marriage
Secrets of the Alpha Delta Pi Sorority
;
Just Pray No: Finding True Love and Stopping Relationship Addiction Syndrome
;
The Oneida Community Diet
—aligned perfectly with the market niche of the project. And if Apate+Global Publications of St. Petersburg, Florida eventually sent a kindly-worded rejection, she would file it away in the home desk's Correspondence: History folder and recycle the manuscript. The entire effort would then be remembered as an ignoble experiment; and she'd forever consider
The Benefit of Risk
so complete a failure that even an idea it had inadvertently spawned amounted to four minutes of chewing for the paper shredder.

Marta included sufficient return postage. Rejected or not she wanted the manuscript secure in her possession, disposal of the body always a crucial point.

The book's concept unfolded easily, simplicity necessarily the foundation. Intricate systems or any ideas that made demands, she'd discovered, were not part of the best selling self-help author's stock of attributes. The lost, curious, or dejected didn't care for and would not read Judith Butler syntax. Simple yet pithy—the trusty voice of common sense—became key, preferably with the promise of thundering Shakespearian or biblical profundity—
love thy brother as thy self
;
to thine own self be true
—but stripped of the antique, off-putting language, of course.

“If every person has a favourite holiday and a seemingly natural affinity for it, that's because holidays evolved in response to archetypal human traits,” she wrote in the enthusiastic letter to the publisher, deciding against an exclamation point in the draft's final edit.

The two-pager explained the basic schema—Halloween as Dionysian, Rabelaisian, festive, anarchic; Easter as introspective, melancholic, Thanatos-oriented, and so on. Before sounding too unappealingly academic and high-minded, or as flaky as a kaftan'd Santa Fe Jungian mystic draped in turquoise healing stones, the letter transitioned from the speculative overview toward what the Director of Sales would expect: practical, tangible, mass market, and salable applications.
HAP'
s qualities, she hoped, would jump of the page as fresh, relatable, and roundly marketable.

Honing the pitch, Marta zeroed in and highlighted the zodiacal parallels: how each individual matched a basic type and possessed, moreover, an
adjunct disposition
, à la Aquarius rising, that could be calculated with ease. Readers could find self-improvement too. For these seekers, new awareness could lead to informed, perhaps life-altering decisions about career and romance. For good measure she added an Enneagram-ish healthy lifestyle component (yes, the functional Halloween archetype can be attained, and the commonplace dysfunctional kind might, with steady effort naturally, be rehabilitated) and provided an example of the romance tie-in: a Halloween person with Christmas rising ought to stand way clear of an Easter type, dysfunctional or otherwise.

“HAPpiness in Your Grasp!” the bankrupt, virtually meaningless tag-line mentioned in the letter, eventually appeared on the book's back cover. Typing it, she'd imagined the phrase appearing on a trademarked cosmetics ad, as empty and alluring as a bubble.

On a par with the zodiac or tarot cards, the concept seemed sensible enough, especially if mental interrogation demanded mere circumstantial proof. Marta had heard people describe themselves as being a Christmas person or as loving Halloween. Some, she figured, would be reassured about the cosmic and fateful explanation for that fondness: “Oh goodness, no way, we're both Easters!”

While polishing the hopeful soft sell, Marta ran into a snag: what name to sign?

Clearly, the wrong choice would be Marta Spëk, Ph.D. Besides the obvious reasons—the manuscript's appalling bad faith, the titanic lack of merit—Marta understood that any faculty trolling the mass market in unabashed pursuit of commercial success would be regarded as ethically compromised and sullied, equivalent to a monk on a talk show circuit or hawking knives on a shopping channel. Not that she would be publicly shamed—she was no Hester Prynne and, in fairness, only a handful of her colleagues could be labeled dour Puritans. Even so, Marta freely believed she'd detect the sulphurous tang of smug unspoken judgment—
At what price tawdry fame, whore?

Until Sadie's reappearance, Marva Longknife and Hortensia Propp—names courtesy of a random literary name generator website—rivaled one another high on the shortlist. Stepping off the campus-bound bus one morning, she discarded them. Sadie glimmered perfectly, of course. Marta had come to view Sadie as a fond middle name, a part of her complete identity, if never used. When the time arrived to append a family name to Sadie, Lightbody materialized, like a stubborn memory disinterred by a hypnotist. The name's unthreatening and airily visionary undertone sounded right for
HAP
, and when Marta thought of the faint but sinister echo with Lucifer, she judged it a weird coincidence, one nobody would spot.

Sadie Lightbody made her first public appearance as a signature. For an authentic touch, Marta used a left hand to sign Sadie's name. Sadie would remain unlettered, Marta decided, street wise and intuitive rather than book smart, a distant cousin of
Angel
's Mae.

With the adoption of a new pen name, Marta thought that a laissez-faire, just-do-it attitude would serve best. The exotic and reckless choice had a singular appeal: it was so atypical. She resisted the mores of civility—good will, integrity, sincerity, honesty—in favour of the wild, nature-sanctioned amorality of
The Benefit of Risk
: capitalize on the thoughtless organicism of the market, survival and dominance of the fittest, and so on. That bracing shift in perspective gave her permission to drop the manuscript in the department's Mail Out basket.

Apate+Global's letter of acceptance stressed the publisher's commitment to Sadie's enterprising vision. Later emails also recycled words—monetize,
incentivizing—and the phrase “capitalize on holiday buying season opportunities” with machine regularity. A+G rushed the manuscript to print, though not before first trimming the “fat,” material the editor had drawn Xs through: arrows to cutting felt pen remarks on the margins identified problems: “obscure” and “
$2
words” and “egghead.” Marta insisted on not making the changes; seeing the relative truth in the adage about leopard spots, she replied to say that market-readiness ought to be left in the hands of A+G's in-house editorial team.

Before signing the contract Marta explained the need for anonymity. Pseudonyms were a dime a dozen in this industry of lifestyle experts, the Spirituality and Self-Improvement Editor told her over the phone. The press accepted Sadie Lightbody, and both sides agreed that Ms. Lightbody's chronic aversion to public appearances added mystique. The seclusion would be good for business—millennia worth of seers had taught the public to expect a masked sibylline cave dweller, or at least an introvert with a great reluctance to bathe in limelight.

A+G updated her with emails about the book's “cleaning up” over the buying season. By late spring the product run flat-lined. Not uncharacteristic,
Holiday Archetype Personality
circulated fleetingly, a flash in the pan—her mother's phrase, dredged up unexpectedly. Marta felt tugs of sadness and relief with the subsiding of Sadie's presence on the popular culture landscape. However many barriers between the limelight and herself she'd insisted on manufacturing, Marta couldn't deny enjoying degrees of its luxurious warmth.

Even at moments of ethical entanglement—reading but never daring to compose replies to aching letters from Carol S. in Atlanta or Shirley V. (hailing from Milk River, a town in Alberta so small that Marta had opened an atlas to confirm its existence)—she pinpointed tingles of pleasure upon receipt of letter bundles and forwarded emails that arrived with requests from A+G to reconsider a publicity tour. Amidst deep sighs and muttered complaints about the effort,
the lady doth protest too much, methinks
never slid far from her tongue's tip.

Marta didn't succumb to the temptation of taking Sadie Lightbody on the road. Savouring the idea of the adventure was satisfactory enough.

A+G sent word about the “mother of all PR events” for a contingent of their authors, the Sacramento Psychic & Well-Being Lifestyles Fair. Like all other colossal opportunities, Marta turned it down as recklessness incarnate: one oversight, a single random moment would tear down her house of cards. The Fair's coinciding with the semester break wormed into her brain; she flew to San Francisco, splurged on a sporty coupe (asking, in Sadie's stead, for royal blue, but settling for black), and wandered around, an anonymous face in a teeming crowd of believers.

If the Floridian publicist had exaggerated the splendour of the gathering, she'd been accurate about the enormity. Wandering through aisles of beeswax-scented booths Marta emoted erratically, astounded by the complex interplay of hope and despair. Crystals, herbs, oils, cards, texts, dolls, rune-inscribed stones, Psychic Answers
100%
Guaranteed, zodiac forecasts, each a curative proffered before a staggering—and apparently endless—litany of woe: heartache, addiction, cancer, depression, curses, bad luck, and worse karma. Stretched out table after table, Marta saw, lay evidence of the human condition.
Sadie Lightbody will not be joining the fray
, Marta had thought. No contrarian voice piped up to debate.

7
.

“Y
ou know, I was thinking it over and I dunno.” Chaz reached over to nudge Marta's shoulder. “Hello, you there? Marta?”

“Reverie.” Marta refocussed, unsure whether she'd fallen asleep. “Sorry. But I have mentioned that I am not really accustomed to fourteen hour shifts, yes? You were saying?”

“Never mind, it was no big deal.”

The rushing air sent pocket currents of pine and coolness through the cabin. They had traveled in silence on an empty road for long minutes when Chaz said, “Crap.” He pumped the brake pedal and made a sudden turn right. “Man, almost missed it. Again.” The lights shone on a gate. Behind it, a two-track roadway sliced into dry grass fields. “Just a sec.” He pushed open the door. “Things look so different in the dark.”

Insects flew into the beams cast by the headlights. Marta watched a dust cloud settle as Chaz untethered the gate and returned to the cab.

“Hold on, it's bumpy from here on in. Do you want to drive down the hill or hike it?

“Let's hike.” Marta would have chosen the other option if Chaz had slowed to a reasonable pace.

“Deal.” He braked and shifted into Park.

Marta searched outside for lights. “There's no one here.” The headlights illuminated the road's compressed dirt tracks and another periphery of dry grass. “I guess that's not really necessary.”

“There should be. ‘Budgetary considerations,' maybe.” He swung open the door and stepped outside. “Safer here too. It'd be a different story if we'd pulled up in the city.”