BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SUMMER 2001

51 :: garbled :: 6/25/01

—So, Freya says. —Are you teaching this summer?

—What? Fletcher says.

Beer. Fletcher's on his third. Bubbles, barely visible in the halfdark of the bar, traveling upwards. There's a small votive candle on the table. Fletcher has been holding up his pint glass, positioning it between the candle and his eye. Using its shape as an amber lens. A second after he says what he realizes that he's actually heard what she asked. Processing lag.

—Oh, he says. —No; I needed a break. I couldn't read any more bad prose.

—So what are you doing?

Freya's just joined Fletcher recently, fresh off a shift at the record store. She's only just starting her first beer. It's been a long time since just the two of them have gotten together — for the better part of this last year, Fletcher has not unknowingly been serving as a bridge to bring Freya and Jakob together, so they tended to meet up as a group of three. But now Freya and Jakob have found their way to some sort of relationship, and Fletcher's out of his interlocutor job. So Freya sort of made a point of getting together with him one-on-one tonight: she doesn't want him to feel like he's become an irrelevant element in her reordered array of human relationships.

—It's kind of awful, actually. I'm working for my dad's company. They put out this yearly catalog that gets sent out to their, whatchamacallim, vendors, I guess. They need someone every summer to put together product descriptions; do some editing, some updating. Dad basically looks at the problem, sees words, and goes: Fletcher knows about words! That kid. Always with the words. So I got the job.

—Keeping it in the family, eh? says Freya.

—Yeah, says Fletcher. —I guess it's his way of subsidizing me into my early middle age.

Fletcher and Freya have known one another for a long time. They met in high school so it must be, what, over ten years now. There are blank spots in their chronology together, patches of time during which they didn't communicate much, but they always eventually return to one another's company, taking comfort in the familiarity of the other. Fletcher has talked to Freya about his father hundreds of times, and she's met the man on at least two dozen occasions, so when Fletcher says my dad, the words are surrounded by a whole cloud of remembered images and stories, a context. And there's something about that that feels pleasing. It is the kind of communication that time generates.

—It's kind of depressing, though, Fletcher says. —To think that my primary literary output from this year is going to be a bunch of technical descriptions of capacitors and shit like that.

—Any chance of using some of that to fuel some poems? (Freya has read some of Fletcher's poems: she knows that they bring in language from all sorts of sources, including ones that she wouldn't normally think of as being very "poetic.")

—Heh, Fletcher says. —Well, I'd thought about that. Some of the language is great: it's all "RF noise suppression" and "high K substrates." But, I don't know. When I use too much of that the poems seem too, I don't know...

—Clinical?

—No; too autobiographical! It becomes less a poem about how language works in the world and more a poem about me and my crappy job. Just me dumping words out of my head without having to go through the effort of finding the right words. It's, yeah, it'd be confessional. And you know how I feel about confessional poetry.

She does. It's not good.

Fletcher looks through his beer again. He's beginning to feel the effects of his first few beers. But he feels happy. He's glad that Freya has gotten together with Jakob; he feels like Jakob might really be good for her. And he feels a kinship with Jakob, so in some way he feels like Jakob and Freya getting involved is a bit like if he were to get involved with Freya himself. Which is something that he wanted, a long time ago. He realized pretty quickly that Freya wasn't interested in him in that way, and he gave up on it, forgot about it and moved on. But to see her with Jakob secretly pleases him because it feels, in a way, like he's finally having his chance. Happy.

—I do believe, he says, —that I will get drunk tonight.

—You're already well on the way, Freya says.

—Thank you, Fletcher says. He drinks.

—I've noticed, he says, —that we think of certain drugs as being 'consciousness- expanding,' and other ones, presumably, as being 'non-consciousness- expanding.' I must say, I think that this is a false dichotomy. I think all drugs expand consciousness, in that they enter their imbiber into an altered state of one form or another. It seems to me that it is this very passage into a new state that expands consciousness, not any particular superficial characteristic of the state itself.

—Uh huh, Freya says, bemused by the shift in conversation.

—It is conceivable, Fletcher says, emphatically, —that one could go into drunkenness in the same way that one enters the psychedelic state: with the hopes of finding and learning. To approach the passage as a sort of quest. Who knows what secrets we might learn from drunkenness?

—You've been drunk enough times, Freya says. —You know what's there to be found: you hanging onto the rim of toilet for dear life.

—Perhaps that is the price one must pay for wisdom, Fletcher says.

—What wisdom? Freya says. —You get drunk, you act like an asshole, you hit sloppily on people, etcetera.

—Ah, but perhaps that comes from entering the drunken state in the wrong mindset. The Sufis, you know, they believed in the mystical virtues of the drunken state. Perhaps we enter it with our eye towards the wrong things. The tempting breasts of our neighbor at the bar.

He turns to look leeringly down the bar, and, after a moment, returns his attention to her.

—Perhaps, he says, —we should forgo the tempting breast.

—Good idea, says Freya.

—Perhaps we should find where the wisdom lies in drunkenness. Perhaps the wisdom lies not in the attractiveness of local breasts and, uh, penises, but in the other aspects of drunkenness. The euphoria, certainly. The vertigo. The particular spin to a room, a restroom. The restroom at this very bar.

—How about the babble, Freya says.

—The babble, yes! Fletcher exclaims. —The way we speak to one another when we are garbled by alcohol reveals a truth to poets. The way our language decays reveals its underlying structure. Truly, truly you are a sage lass. It is imperative for poets to record the way they speak while drunk.

—Should I be writing this down?

—I've got it, says Fletcher, fishing in his pocket for a pen.

—I think I'd better have another, says Freya. She tilts her glass back and drinks.