By Nicholas Rombes.
The plane enters the airspace above Detroit Metro as if being piloted by a person in a state of delirium. Behind me I hear someone getting sick. I press my cheek against the cool window to try to calm down.
“Chill out,” Harrison says. “Don’t be such a crybaby.”
Harrison is not the worst publicist ever. The plane rocks again and an overhead bin pops open and I see the stewardess in her jumpseat reach for the red phone. Harrison puts his hand on my knee. He’s dyed his hair bleach, again. He’s dying to be seen, again.
“Settle down,” he says. “Get a hold of yourself.”
“Um, we’re crashing.”
“We are not crashing.”
It was Harrison’s idea I return to blown-out, occupied Detroit, to my alma mater, for a reading. When my alma mater didn’t return his messages (he won’t admit it but they blocked him) he moved the event to a nearby bookstore on Cass Avenue in need of foot traffic. Harrison has ideas about the new novel, that if I want another two-book deal with the same publisher, or any publisher, I need to at least do a token promotional tour.
The plane lurches again and the lights flicker and then go off I can’t remember if this is always what is supposed to happen.
Do the cabin lights come on when landing or go off?
I don’t ask Harrison because he’d just say if you’d done more book tours you would have flown more and you’d know about the fucking lights. The starched captain, as I imagine him, comes over the speakers but it’s just garbled static nonsense. At least the pilot is still alive.
“You’re going to behave yourself at the reading,” Harrison says. He takes off his ridiculous oversized black glasses, folds them, and puts them in his polo shirt pocket.
“What reading?”
“Erik, a lot is riding on this one. Understand?”
“Riding? Is it an open bar?”
“You don’t drink anymore.”
“But like . . .what if one of my fans sneaks me in some?”
“Fans?” Harrison snorts. “Jesus, Erik.”
*
In the Uber on the way to the hotel in downtown Detroit Harrison gets a disturbing text.
“Well, Marion’s gonna be there.”
The green trees fly by outside the window. Then blank fields. There are apparently towering windmills now. Green energy. Then we enter the city and I recognize Bookies Club 870 where I’d first seen Sonic Rendezvous and later the Sillies. It was just a pile of bricks now.
“Wasn’t she, like, banned or something?”
Harrison puts his phone between his legs and looks, I think, directly at me.
“No, Erik, you were banned.”
“I thought she was too.”
“Nope.”
“So, she can just like, show up?”
“Yep.”
The Uber driver says something in Russian. Or Bulgarian. Or German. Maybe Polish. Harrison gets another text.
“Jesus. They say they can’t read your signature.”
“They?”
“The bookstore staff. It’s apparently illegible.” He holds his phone in front of my face for proof.
“So?”
“So, the books are worthless. Like the old Reichsmarks,” Harrison said. “What’s a signed by the author worth if it’s just a black line with a dot over it?”
“They printed them in the U.S. and flew them in secretly in 1948 in 12,000 wooden crates.”
“Printed what?”
“The new Deutschmarks to replace the Reichsmarks. Anyway, it wasn’t even me who autographed the books.”
“Yes you did. I had them delivered to your apartment.”
“Marcy.”
“Marcy? You mean the high school girl? You’re not even supposed to say her name. What are you telling me?”
“Her handwriting’s better . . .”
“Jesus, Erik. She just made a black line? How’s that even a signature?”
“Who cares who signed them?”
“Well, the bookstore, your publisher, your fans.”
“Fans?”
*
At the plywood podium I’m supposed to stand at while reading there’s a pair of handcuffs. One is closed around a small metal ring attached to the podium, and the other one is open. I don’t need Harrison to tell me what I’m supposed to do.
The reading’s going to start in around five minutes.
We’re in a back room and the bookstore staff all look really tanned.
They’re talking to each other but I don’t understand what they’re saying.
“Man,” I say, “where are we even?” I ask Harrison. “What do you mean?” He’s smoking even though I’m sure you’re not allowed.
“I mean, like, where.”
“Where do you think?”
“Berlin?”
“That’s not funny.”
But then he laughs and then one of the other young workers in white tennis shoes at the black espresso machine laughs. Does she wink at Harrison, too?
“Like, this doesn’t look like Detroit.”
“When was the last time you were here?” He just flicks his ashes on the concrete floor. He’s wearing those glasses again and his eyes look like two fluorescent gleamings.
“What about Marcy?” I ask.
“You mean Marion?”
“Marion?”
“So what if she’s here? She has every right. You get what you deserve.”
“Okay then, what? I’m banned from . . . um . . . my own reading?”
“Not your reading. From Marion. You’re banned from Marion.”
“But she’s here?”
“As is her right,” Harrison says.
There’s a weird pink-orange glow coming into the room from somewhere that I can’t tell. Harrison’s face is in some sort of purple light shaft and I can see in a dark corner of the room stacks of my book on a table shoved against a wall.
“This is not going to be a repeat of Denver, do you understand?” Harrison must have started a new cigarette because it’s not burned down. He looks at his watch.
“Five minutes,” he says.
“Denver?”
“You’re gonna stay at the podium this time. No wandering.”
“It’s all just Trümmerliteratur anyway.”
“What?”
“Rubble literature, it’s all just pieces . . .”
“Snap out of it man! Focus on the reading!”
Then he pauses, Harrison does, and touches my arm gently.
I feel something so profound, like the world is tilting and all I have to do is hold on, hold on, hold on, and even up at the podium holding on for dear life against the words I wrote that are no longer familiar to me as my own words I break free, for an impossible moment, my eyes sweeping the audience and there she is, Marion with her verdigris eyes and so many Marions, Harrisons too and so many and even Eriks and all the dregs of me and all the terrible and shimmering and blossoming versions of me all at last and forever in no country I know.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Rombes is author of the novels The Rachel Condition (CLASH Books) and The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio) as well as the 33 1/3 book Ramones and the experimental film book 10/40/70. He curates the “Minute 9” series at 3:AM Magazine. He teaches at the University of Detroit Mercy, in northwest Detroit.
