Remy Mallory’s father has been dead four years by the time Remy starts noticing him everywhere: the supermarket, the Laundromat, the Seven-Eleven. Remy sees a convincing permutation of his father in nearly every man past fifty; he recognizes them. Dad has become a businessman. That’s dad and he’s retired.
R.L. Mallory was a wreck of a man long before the cancer metastasized. He was the ravaged brick in a colonial home’s crumbling chimney; paunchy, poorly dressed: a writer’s writer. Clothes hung stiff on his body and reeked of putrescence; the stink of booze sweat out during countless hangovers enlaced itself in his dozen lumberjack plaid shirts, all dotted by straight lines of pinhole burns down the chest like a second shadowy set of buttons. R.L. Mallory was the writer’s writer; a prototype, a stereotype, an archetype, and Remy wants nothing more than to become him.
In its prime, his father’s fiction was an unhinged and satirical romp through the back doors of the twentieth century’s closing decades. R.L. was shortlisted for the PEN/ Faulkner Award once, won an O Henry, ended up anthologized in the Best American Short Stories collection through most of the eighties and again, the year after his death, in 2000.
And now when Remy sees his father out, the man is diminished, trying to decide between Oleo and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter in the midst of the unsettlingly white coolers in the dairy aisle of the supermarket. He’s digging a fingernail into the corner of his eye, removing the dead sleep that has congealed there while dozing, waiting for his load of whites to finish. He’s at the counter of the convenience store, scrutinized by a stoic Muslim with a prosthetic hand, stretching and tugging at the black polybag wrapping of this month’s Hustler.
When Remy sees his father alive and well, only an unrelenting curiosity asserts itself within him; fascination. Remy feels nothing at all. But he wants to.
***
Remy Mallory is twenty years old, five days shy of his twenty-first birthday, and he smokes a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls every day, even though he hates the taste. His smoking habit is a footnote to his father and Kurt Vonnegut. He seldom washes or styles his hair anymore as homage to Bukowski. Remy feels he is the inheritor of a mantle, the willing neophyte practitioner of the rites and rituals in a great and ancient tradition; he wears all of his affected habits with pride and, like any young person, is certain that these things are the resounding footfalls of his walk into adulthood, the first hints of the man he is destined to become.
Remy is a fatalist and knows that a future as a novelist is in his blood.
His schedule is designed so that he writes daily for two hours. He is faithful to it, he writes and writes and writes, but never finishes anything. Regardless of what he does, his stories never end—not with a coda—they just cease to be. Each piece begins with an idea and practically writes itself for one-thousand words. In all the second acts—the de facto finales— Remy Mallory stories become disheveled yarns, and by the third act, all that remains are scores of fibrous and unrelated strands: unrecognizable as component parts of the previous, greater whole. A Remy Mallory piece frays tragically as it flounders, resembles the delta of a dying river. Often, the third act doesn’t even appear at all on the page, remains only implied by its lack.
Remy is shamed by this, has tried several metaphors on for size—a literary premature ejaculator, literarily impotent, literature’s analogue to Male Anorgasmia—but none of them seem exactly right.
***
The first customer in the bookstore is his father. Round-shouldered, eyes almost digitally blue, smoker’s cough. Wet phlegm snaps and pops as his father pounds himself on the chest and back and browses the fiction wall. Remy thinks of asking the man, “Can I help you?” but decides it’s better to remain unobtrusive, a voyeur.
His father has been living alone in this unlikely urban neighborhood and has lost weight—either the result of no longer having anyone to cook for him, or he’s stopped drinking. He has altered his wardrobe to be more nondescript; he fits in with the down and out city people, the Singles Scene lifers. Remy hides his open-mouthed gawk poorly, but his father does not notice.
Remy leers, decides that his father’s condition is the result of an unlikely affair between his mother and a C-Shift security guard. This new life is a redefinition, an attempt at grounding, at dumbing things down. When the metamorphosis has taken place, R.L. will come home and beg to be reintegrated, to try again.
The man approaches the counter and Remy drops from his stool, steel-toed work boots making a series of clumsy sounding thuds as he hits the peeling wooden floor and clomps to the register. Remy’s assumptions are confirmed; the man has an assortment of novels including Tom Clancy, Ralph Compton and Larry McMurtry. Remy takes more time than is necessary to figure the tax on the purchase and squints across the counter—ostensibly he is in thought, really he is searching for the heartbreak and let down he believes he should find.
Remy Mallory is a paralytic, left and right brain tied into a Gordian Knot around the trapped finger of his volition; he worries that someday he will be asked, “What do you want?” and any answer he gives will be a lie.
