supplicium post mortem

To: anon@anon.penet.fi
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995
Subject: tbotd
From: cdm

The problem, for Casey, was a matter of degrees.  How could she pay Mark the copious compliments he deserved?  How could she tell him how she’d trembled, laughed uncontrollably, how pins and needles had arisen in a part of her anatomy, how she’d actually sprawled out on her blue painted study floor and gasped?  How could she thank Mark for the most thrilling and, well, affecting, present of her young life without coming off cuddly and anodyne?

She knew her reply should walk a fine line: enthusiastic, yet distant; honest, yet ironic; complimentary, yet dry.  How could she express her affection without inciting his disgust?  In any case, she decided, it was all beyond her on a muggy June day like this.  Her Irish Wolfhound hadn’t moved from the floor all morning.  He sprawled across the cool painted brick and panted.  Outside her window people with parodic accents went about their business, patronizing the hardware store next door.  Eighteen wheelers squeaked through the slender Brooklyn avenues, leaving her window sills layered in filth.  Casey knew she should be progressing, in a steady and disciplined manner, with the dilemmas of her characters – if the novel was really to be finished by the end of summer.  All in all, she was thoroughly disgusted with herself.  She had the twinges of chronic tendenitis in her right wrist, and no real-world accomplishments to show for it.  Mark would have to wait, along with everything else that beckoned her from her internet directory.  The icon of the day would have to be Word 6, and the folder “The Brain People; part 3.”

Because how could she ever express to Mark, in the manner that he expected, what he had done.  She would never bore him with a line-item precis of how telepathic he’d actually been.  How after only six somewhat defensive letters from her, he’d rather read her start to finish.  She wasn’t used to this kind of shock.  With her American friends she was open and generous, not inclined to this sort of oblique… dueling, for want of a better word.  Of course she had her facades, her overdeveloped (for an American) skill with verbal one-upmanship.  But few people ever looked beyond her words to what she was really saying; they were too oblivious, or she wasn’t really interesting enough to be worth it.  But Mark Hastings, this person she’d almost given up entirely after he’d so witheringly allowed that she had “a modicum of intelligence,” this man who often seemed to be a living, breathing example of Cyril Connolly’s perpetual adolescent… how could he have written a story at once conventionally restrained and shockingly empathetic?  Did he know how she’d react to reading a story about herself, particularly given its setting and plot, not to mention the author’s disarming insight and (despite himself) his compassion?  And did he imagine how beside herself she’d be to make an appearance with none other than “Mark Hastings,” whom he must know, if only from her (now embarrassingly gushy) first email, was on the short list of Casey’s heroes?

As she ate her bagel w/cc (rejoicing again at real New York food after two months of South American carne, carne, carne), she wondered how she’d put it to Mark: her admiration, one writer to another, of his lean, wry style (certainly far more economic than her own); his natural flair for storytelling; his use of language, at once so unpretentious and so very awake?  She might very well have told him that she’d never said “chrissakes” in her life, and only uttered the term “geez” in moments of profound self-parody, but that would be nitpicking.

But still, even as she warded off her marauding Wolfhound from the remnants of her bagel, charged snippets of “The Benefit of the Doubt” whispered through Casey’s head, like a simultaneous translation… go with her heart and love it or sick by her head and despise it (her precise feelings about every Englishman she’d ever known)… the arbitrariness of the punishments … her character’s self-righteousness (bingo)… Is this your first caning, her feelings of inadequacy, the pulling out of her school blouse… her curious, engrossed transformation as Mark answered a question so deep it had never been asked (what would the result REALLY be?)… the epiphany, that things had been settled, the warmness, the understated acceptance Casey herself had never known (for she would be the first to admit that the approval given to good students was different from the acceptance given to rebellious ones).

It had made her chest hurt that Mark had given the story to her.  In rereading his note, Casey felt more jabs to her stomach, even though she had long ago lost her appetite for the bagel (Rory was in luck!). The day was working itself into to a real swelter.  Casey allowed herself a momentary indulgence.  For about sixty seconds she gave into England homesickness and longed, in a nauseated fashion, for all those English summers spent peddling her bike through rain or slogging through knee-deep peat on the Pennine Way.  She longed for the geographical scale (the way you could drive across the country in less than a day; the way people in Wharfedale had a name for every single piece of rock).  Her mouth watered at the memory of Crunchie bars.

But the fascist clock was ticking away.  Casey was 26 years old and had not yet won her Nobel prize, so she put away chicaneries and summoned those deep reserves of Protestant Work Ethic.  Yes, Mark Hastings would have to wait for another day.