{"id":19584,"date":"2024-03-24T07:44:32","date_gmt":"2024-03-24T11:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/?p=19584"},"modified":"2024-03-24T07:44:32","modified_gmt":"2024-03-24T11:44:32","slug":"sunk-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/sunk-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunk Costs"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a day of pouring rain, in the lobby of a hotel that has seen better days, here I am sitting at a low, colorless, circular coffee table across from a man I do not know. He wears a blue suit, a white shirt, no tie. He holds a small flask in his lap (I cannot help but notice), from which he drinks occasionally, discreetly. The man is reading a book by Walter Benjamin (One-Way Street<\/em>). I am also reading. We\u2019re a couple of readers. We, leaning back on our separate islands, catch each other\u2019s glances, like flashing semaphores. He motions with his eyes to the book in my hands, an anthology of essays on things (Things,<\/em> edited by Bill Brown, University of Chicago Press). He asks me if the book is any good. I tell him it is a useful sourcebook.<\/p>\n

We talk a bit. The man has come to the city for a lecture titled, if I recall, \u201cFascism\u2019s Aestheticization of Politics and Communism\u2019s Politicization of Aesthetics,\u201d by a visiting professor to the university across the way, a university where the man himself\u2014that is, the man sitting across from me\u2014is also a visiting professor. He pulls out his ticket to the lecture, a printed page, waves it in the air. \u201cI was to have gone with a lady, a beautiful brand-new young lady friend,\u201d he says, gesturing and looking around the lobby, \u201cbut she, it seems, has left me stranded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rachel and I are here for just the weekend. She had been swimming in the hotel\u2019s indoor pool and is up at the room, showering, etc. We are drifting, Rachel and I. That\u2019s clear to both of us by now, if not yet shaped into words exactly.<\/p>\n

I have my books scattered around. They come with me. They are my brood, these little feathered creatures, these unruly little devils. They demand my strict attention. The novel I\u2019m working on\u2014researching for\u2014is now in its ninth, tenth year. I suspect it will never come to end. I call it this\u2014my endless novel\u2014in a display of ironic modesty that I hope somehow conceals my growing anguish on the matter. (Or perhaps I have subconsciously conflated the novel and the woman. Perhaps I have sabotaged things. Perhaps I never want it to end. There is sometimes a comfort, languishing like this.)<\/p>\n

In any case, the man doesn\u2019t ask me about my novel. There is a silence and we sit and listen to the rain, although we actually cannot hear it, or even, from where we are seated, see it. And yet we know it is raining, it is \u201cin the air.\u201d<\/p>\n

The man has begun to tell me how he met the \u201cyoung lady\u201d in one of his classes (I note that he has not referred to her as a student), how they walked together around a little square, talking of the fictionality of all discourse and other such topics. \u201cShe grabbed my hand at a curb somewhere,\u201d he says, \u201cpulled me like a child the several blocks to her building, where, in a little apartment with absurdly bright lighting, she disrobed.\u201d The man tells me how she had tattoos: letters in Arabic, Eastern logographs, runes, calligrams\u2014all blue and green and black, \u201cswirling across her skin, everywhere,\u201d he says, lowering his voice and leaning in a little, \u201cher breasts, her stomach, her buttocks, everywhere\u2014not one word of which I understood.\u201d He leans back, takes another swig of his flask. He does not offer me a drink, which is fine. \u201cShe was beautiful,\u201d he says, \u201cas beautiful as anything so completely indecipherable. And now she is gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWill you go anyway?\u201d I ask, thinking of the lecture. I find myself worrying he will be late.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have spent the money, whether I go or not,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I don\u2019t want to go. It really makes no sense for me to go, not now. In economics, someone said, history is irrelevant. What matters are my options at this very moment. I may go\u201d\u2014he raises one hand, palm up\u2014\u201cor I may stay\u201d\u2014he raises the other\u2014\u201cbut I must admit,\u201d he continues, \u201cthat there is an unconscious calculation of the debt of my emotional balance, a debt which only going seems to absolve.\u201d (These are his approximate words. I will copy them down a short time later.) He tells me how the pain of his regret in not going will be richer, more multifarious, than his pleasure in staying here in the hotel lobby, reading Benjamin.<\/p>\n

\u201cPain, we know,\u201d he tells me, \u201chas a much more complex grammar than pleasure.\u201d He holds up the book. I guess it is a quote.<\/p>\n

A second silence comes over us. Next to the table where the man and I sit is a fountain. The fountain is turned off. Now and then someone walks into the hotel and shakes off an umbrella. I fall into my thoughts again. Here\u2019s one: I read somewhere that infants are able to hear the shadowy echo of colliding air molecules, but by the time the child would be old enough to contemplate these sensations and formulate them into memories and words, the ability is lost, the bones of the skull\u2014the mastoid, the temporal\u2014too dense, too smothering. These are the places my mind goes. And suddenly I look up and the man has left, he\u2019s practically disappeared, like the ghostly evaporation of a fingerprint on glass, or a million other metaphors, and I am alone here in the lobby, with nothing ahead of me but my books, my ridiculous novel, and the end of love.<\/p>\n

Where is this going? What am I hoping to achieve?<\/p>\n

One must persevere, I write on the page.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in way too deep, I write.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve paid too high a price to quit now.<\/p>\n

I turn the page, continue my research.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPain, we know,\u201d he tells me, \u201chas a much more complex grammar than pleasure.\u201d He holds up the book. I guess it is a quote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-erik-harper-klass"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19584"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19789,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19584\/revisions\/19789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}