the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt seven)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

“It must be said that he absolutely adored Emmie, and he was great with Emmie in his way; their connection was deep. My dad spoke to children like they were miniature adults and somehow it worked, especially with her, maybe because she is, as everyone has always said, an ‘old soul.’ If anything he was more formal, more of an old-world European gentleman, with kids: he would rise when they entered the room, at least if they were girls. ‘Good evening,’ shake hands, note how the color of somebody’s shorts complemented the rubber bands on their braces or the color of their eyes. Adelle thought it was sweet, hilarious; I’m sure I would have found it hilarious if I hadn’t grown up with it. He had zero interest in Emmie when she was a baby—if you handed him an infant, he’d hold its body as far away from himself as possible, failing to support the head—but as soon as she could really speak, he was smitten. She would sit on his knee on Governor Street and he would tell her long stories in German that must have been utterly incomprehensible to her, and yet she was rapt, her green eyes staring into his. And he would read to her endlessly; she would fall asleep and he’d go on reading, as if following her into her dreams. When she was old enough, they would have these long sessions over the phone—he’d be in his office or traveling and she’d be in bed with my iPhone on speaker; we could hear him from the hall. It was like a radio play. ‘Emmie, before we return to the adventures of this redheaded young woman, I will play for you a passage of music by a man named Debussy that I believe will resonate with our text.’ And then she would slowly read The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking to this cultural giant who was following along; he’d make little exclamations or comments here and there, help her sound out words; somehow his presence, the quality of his attention, would fill the house. They loved each other. Emmie used to sleep with one of his scarves; I’d be startled by the very faint smell when I’d come in to check on her: traces of the eau de toilette and sandalwood aftershave I remembered from when he used to kiss me good night, which he did for a year or two after my mom died. For the last thirty-five years, we only shook hands.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt six)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

“We found Emmie an individual therapist we all liked, and Adelle and I started consulting with everyone with a claim to expertise. Emmie had long outgrown FTT, and soon we had a new acronym, ARFID—avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. You go in with a problem—‘ My daughter won’t eat’—they ask you some questions, then they give you a diagnosis that repeats what you said with more technical-sounding language, as if this process of translation constitutes a gain in knowledge. And then there is a second translation, an epistemological sleight of hand, the magical contraction of the diagnosis into an acronym. ‘My daughter won’t eat’ becomes ARFID. The acronym is like a code, moves the alpha toward the numerical; numbers are objective, right, suddenly it’s science! No matter that ARFID denotes the same mystery, is just an envelope for ignorance; ARFID just means: we have no physiological explanation but it doesn’t yet seem to involve the body-image issues we associate with anorexia or bulimia. Why couldn’t they think of an acronym that doesn’t basically begin with ‘barf’?”

“And that isn’t so close to ‘afraid.’”

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt five)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

“A German fairy tale.”

“Set in L.A. Because how could real parents preside over such a home? While we still made normal meals, of course, and insisted Emmie sit with us at the table, we were not to try to make her eat; following Dr. Saro’s advice, we’d apply no pressure; we wouldn’t negotiate, no ‘just one more bite of chicken, love.’ She could have whatever she wanted, whenever, wherever: take a box of Oreos to the bath, Twizzlers to bed. So we were suddenly living in a gingerbread house. Or it was like Willy Wonka. I was Wonka, establishing a bizarro kingdom of corn syrup and dyes, but a confused, desperate Wonka—Wonka remade by Bergman. (My dad was kind of a cross between Wonka and Bergman, if you think about it.) Or maybe I was more like Faust, a pact with fructose.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt four)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

The restaurant was called Moratín. It was a short walk from the hotel, but I set out early, wandered up and down the Paseo del Prado, then sat and watched some kids play in the little parque infantil. Near the red slide, a man, a young father, was swinging his son around by his arms, the boy screaming and laughing. When Eva was four, I’d dislocated her elbow that way. Now I watched as the boy gained terrible speed, his body at moments parallel to the ground. Or was I seeing it wrong, was my anxiety accelerating what I perceived? I sat and watched and waited for the shrieks of pleasure to turn to pain when a radius slipped out of place.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt three)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

I’d heard voices before. When I had my breakdown in college, I reported two kinds of auditory hallucinations, although the doctors reassured me that it was a good sign my “reality testing” was intact—that I knew I wasn’t hearing what I heard. (Sanity often requires the disavowal of the senses.) The first voice was my own, if a little deeper than when I actually spoke: on more than one occasion, my thoughts escaped from my head into audibility, into space, usually seeming to come from a few feet away, always to my right. There was nothing unusual about the internal monologue itself—the thoughts might even be encouraging, “Here’s what you do: take four deep, deliberate breaths,” etc.—but the externalization, the leakage, was horrifying. It happened only a handful of times, but I will always worry that too strong, too loud, a thought might break out of its silent casing into sound.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt two)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

Thomas had said to let myself in, but I knocked loudly and waited for a while before I opened the door. (Whenever anyone told me to let myself in, I half expected to discover their body.) On the landing—to my right the stairs descended into a dark basement—I stomped several times, as if there were snow on my boots, although it had been a winter without snow, then I opened the interior door and entered the hall and called out hello.

the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt one)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

But as I made my way up College Street, past the war memorials and the court buildings, the reality of Eva receded from me, or I thought of her as safe, singing along to “Anti-Hero” in an adjacent world. I was surprised to feel less upset about my phone as I walked, confident as I was that I’d have a new one in the morning. I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless. If I had a working phone, I thought, I could take a picture of the front of the Providence Athenaeum on Benefit Street, where Poe courted Sarah Whitman, and send it to the forty-four-year-old Mia, but since I didn’t, I half expected to see the twenty-year old version of her leaning against one of the columns, fishing the blue American Spirits out of her messenger bag, her black hair—not yet streaked with silver—wrapped up with a yellow cloth.

As I continued up College, the ghosts gained flesh: that kid with the hooded sweatshirt who just passed me head down—had he looked up, he might well have been Arjun a few years before he fell from the window in St. Petersburg; the older woman in the long down coat leaving the List Art Center as I passed became Caroline Sharpe, a professor who told our class, after someone complimented her necklace, that she kept a cyanide capsule in its opal locket for use in case of nuclear war, a practice she and her friends had started in the late sixties, when they were students, and which had led me to half suspect that any pendant concealed poison. But it wasn’t just people: the light arriving from the stars was younger, too, the birds dreaming in the tree cavities were the birds of the past, growth rings had vanished from the trees in which they slept—and this time travel depended on my being prevented from checking on Eva or Googling “songbird life expectancy” or “Caroline Sharpe” as I walked uphill.