sat down at the desk as if nothing had changed. But of course something had, and when I looked at the computer screen to the sentence I’d abandoned when the telephone rang I knew it would be impossible to go any further that night.
I got up and moved to my reading chair. I picked up the book from the side table, but found, somewhat uncharacteristically, that my mind was wandering. I stared across the room at the desk, as I had stared at it on countless nights when I’d reached an impasse but wasn’t ready to capitulate. No, I don’t harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it’s work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I’ve always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I’ve never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded café, or so I’ve always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. No, what I was distraught to be losing was the familiar conditions of my work; it was sentimentality speaking and nothing else.
It was a setback. Something melancholy clung to the whole business, a melancholy that had begun with the story of Daniel Varsky, but now belonged to me. But it was not an irreparable problem. Tomorrow morning, I decided, I would go out to buy a new desk.
It was past midnight by the time I fell asleep, and, as always when I go to bed entangled in some difficulty, my sleep was uneven and my dreams vivid. But by morning, despite the receding sense that I had been dragged through something epic, I only remembered a fragment—a man standing outside my building, freezing to death in the glacial wind that blows down the Hudson corridor from Canada, from the Arctic Circle itself, who, as I passed, asked me to pull a red thread that was hanging from his mouth. I obliged, bullied by the pressure of charity, but as I pulled the thread continued to pile up at my feet. When my arms tired the man barked at me to keep pulling, until over a passage of time, compressed as it only can be in dreams, he and I became joined in the conviction that something crucial lay at the end of that string; or maybe it was only I who had the luxury to believe or not, while for him it was a matter of life and death.
The next day I did not go out to look for a new desk, or the day after that. When I sat down to work, not only was I unable to muster the necessary concentration, but when I looked over the pages I’d already written I found them to be superfluous words lacking life and authenticity, with no compelling reason behind them. What I hoped had been the sophisticated artifice that the best fiction employs, I now saw was only a garden-variety artifice, artifice used to draw attention away from what is ultimately shallow rather than reveal the shattering depths below the surface of everything. What I thought was a simpler, purer prose, more searing for being stripped of all distracting ornament, was actually a dull and lumbering mass, void of tension or energy, standing in opposition to nothing, toppling nothing, shouting nothing. Though I had been struggling with the mechanism behind the book for some time, unable to work out how the pieces fit together, I’d believed all along that there was something there, a design that if I could only dislodge and separate it from the rest would prove to have all the delicacy and irreducibility of an idea that demands a novel, written in only one way, to express it. But now I saw that I had been wrong.
I left the apartment and went for a long walk through Riverside Park and down Broadway to clear my mood. I stopped at Zabar’s to pick up some things for dinner, waving to the same man in the cheese department who’d