LastWords
The Story
He didn’t know if he had read the story somewhere, in a
magazine or book perhaps, or someone he didn’t know very well,
perhaps hardly knew at all, had told it to him at a party in an
unguarded moment, or he had invented it himself some time
ago and didn’t know how to close it out so he had filed it away
in his mind as something he might deal with in the future when
he had enough distance from it to contend with the material
or—the least likely of his alternatives—something like it
had actually happened to him and, troubled by its implicit
commentary, he had blocked it out and now, for its own
reasons, it had returned to insist on itself, on its prerogatives
as narrative, its bloody need, its inalienable right, to have
a life of its own separate from his uncertain connection to
it, and what was he going to do about it, what could he do
as a writer but honor its insistent presence by retelling the
story in a way that would emphasize its uniqueness as an
imaginative event while at the same time hoping that no
one else after the fact would show up to make claim to it,
which would mean that the story for all its closeness to
his heart, meaning his artistic vision, had never really been
his in the first place and therefore what he had done with it
would be vitiated by the charge of plagiarism laid at
his door, rightful or not, and worse making him regret
his commitment to the story and even regret the story
itself, which would be like falling out of love when
he had announced to everyone that this one was forever,
but then again no one, no one that counted, might show
up to deny his right to the story when he had already
made it his own, covering the traces of its origins in
any event but hadn’t all stories in a certain sense been
told before, which was the word on the media street,
a popular conception or misconception and so irrelevant
to his concerns at the moment (and damn it, where did
the story come from anyway) which were (are) to produce
a memorable version of the story, the best possible version
given his gifts and limitations, whatever they may be,
which is the business of others, critics and such, educated
readers, to determine, his arrant immodesty best kept to
himself far from the public eye or whatever good will his
work has accrued over the years will leak through the
holes in his reputation, which is a small thing as it is
with unspoken aspirations toward bettering its condition
and what did he really know what the general culture
thought of his work if it all, did he even want to know?,
but lets get back to the story, he tells himself, it’s the
story that matters, he is only its executor or caretaker
perhaps, or parent, the one who keeps it clothed and fed
until it is sufficiently formed to deal with the world without
him around to mediate its existence, this story which concerns
a writer not much like himself who has come into unspecified
possession of a story of at once general interest and
self-defining strangeness that seems to insist, virtually
demand that whoever takes it up give it voice
but as it has been entrusted to him, this extraordinary
event, by whatever gods control the destinies of prose
narrative (by chance, he supposed, and vision and luck)
he feels burdened by such responsibility, perhaps even
thwarted by it so it requires of him an act of will or
presumption to give the story in question the kind of
imaginative re-creation it surely deserves and so the
shadow of possible failure, possibly inevitable failure
looms over his endeavor even as he feels he is solving
whatever inherent mystery lies at its core, he is also
falling short of the perfect accommodation of substance
to form but no one will know while it remains in a
state of ongoing inconclusion (in life, all stories
go on indefinitely or slip away into ellipsis) so this
sentence, which is the story, which embodies the
story, cannot be allowed to, has to be held in
abeyance as it acknowledges an implicit mortality
wholly alien to the nature of perfection, achieve
even the illusion of closure without permanently
curtailing whatever hope for the earned unexpected
it brings to the page, it cannot be brought to conclusion,
it cannot be, it cannot, it….
Contributor
Jonathan BaumbachBrooklyn native Jonathan Baumbach is the author of 3 collections of short stories and 11 novels including Reruns, B, Seperate Hours, Babble, Chez Charlotte & Emily and On the Way to My Father's Funeral. His stories have been anthologized in O.Henry Prize Stories, Great Pool Stories, Best American Stories, Full Court, All Our Secrets are the Same, Best of TriQuarterly among other.
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