No Two Persons

by Erica Bauermeister

who had never liked meeting people’s eyes. It always felt like looking into a jam-packed closet—or opening the door to your own.

“I live in their world when I am writing,” the author said to the class. Yes, Alice thought, the breath catching in her throat. And in that moment, she changed her allegiance from magic to magician.

then there were tricks you could learn. She was old enough by that point to know that magic in the real world was just a series of illusions, carefully crafted to distract you from what was really going on. A wall of medals. A fresh pie every Sunday. A father home for dinner every night. Look there, not here.

“If you think about it, every story—even the most fantastical—is grounded in things we already know, and every book is about questions that have already been asked.”

“The trick for a writer,” the professor continued, “is to take those eternal questions, those known bits and pieces, and put them together in a way that helps us see our world in a different light. That’s where you come in.”

“the world you’ve created on these pages is extraordinary—but reading this feels like watching a beautiful movie from the back row. I suspect that’s because you’re doing that, too.” He paused, then continued, “If you’re going to write the book you’re meant to write, you’ll have to let it in. You’ll have to let us in.”

Considered the fact that she hadn’t even known Professor Roberts was a father, a grandfather, not because he hid it, but because there are things you can’t see until you are ready to look.

“What is a story if we don’t tell it?” Professor Roberts asked. A secret, she thought.

I am a swamp monster, she thought as she stood over her screaming baby’s crib at 2 A.M. And then, oddly, musingly, Maybe that’s where nightmares come from—babies, feeling that looming, almost inhuman presence standing over their beds—It’s just your mommy, honey. She’s just tired. But maybe babies know it’s not you. Not really.

They went to bed, and when she woke up a few months later, the deadlines for grad school had passed and she had to wonder—if she’d really wanted that, would she have let this happen? Or had it just been a thing to do, a road to follow that was clear and lined with billboards that said things like Good Job! And Wow!

“You’d be brilliant at it,” Leo said. “I’ve never met anyone with better instincts about writing.” “But I’m not a writer,” she said. “You don’t have to be a farmer to cook,” he said.

It was astonishing, Lara thought, the sheer outpouring of human desire. The need to record, to create, to be acknowledged. Read me read me read me.

And she’d tried not to be offended when she suddenly became the go-to reader for every manuscript that had anything to do with motherhood. The mommy memoirs all seemed so snarky, she thought. So exhausted. Needs more perspective, she wrote in her editorial reports, confident in her literary acumen. Oh, she said to herself after the birth. Oh.

“Doesn’t it make you more sympathetic to our masculine plight?” Leo had asked. Lara looked up from the dinner she was eating with one hand, the other supporting Teddy against her chest, his little face hot against her shoulder, and saw Leo wink. Which, whether he knew it or not, saved their marriage. Because honestly, it was beginning to get to her, the way men (okay, Leo) were allowed to add feminism to their identity like a fancy font in the book of their life, while for women it seemed to be viewed more like the plot line—once established, any straying from the path viewed as a fatal flaw.

Wandering is a gift given only to the lost.

It was yet another step away from the career he’d imagined, but when you were moving fast, people looked at the movement, not you,

It was funny, he thought later, how, back when he was handsome, no one ever seemed to treat beauty as something they could catch.

But the problem was, in Hollywood you were known for particular things. A smile. A skill. Your skin. A tweet. And when that thing became too big, too you, good or bad, there was no acting your way around it. The fact that his thing wasn’t life-threatening ironically made it worse, in a surreal sense that could only be true in Hollywood. There was no drama to his situation—it was just a flaw. And thus, fatal in its own way.

It wasn’t easy; he could tell that just by listening. In movies, a single actor was almost always chosen for a single role—unless you were dealing with psychopathic twins or something. In most audiobooks, one voice covered it all. A narrator had to be able to inhabit a myriad of ages and accents, both genders and all their various permutations, without ever relying on the visual of a crooked eyebrow, the mood enhancement of a musical score.

In a separate notebook, he wrote down comments about the times when a narrator’s voice didn’t work, and why. When character contorted into caricature, or when a verbal tic—a fade-off at the end of each sentence, a pause between … each … word—became a dripping faucet in the experience.

the author didn’t know him and likely wouldn’t care if she did—none of this was actually about him. This was about the author and her character. A character she obviously loved with all her soul, with every word at her disposal. A character whose pain she felt on a syntactical level, while still being unable to stop the events that were happening to him.

The photo was taken on some beach—rocky; maybe Maine?—her eyes avoiding the camera in a way the photographer tried to make artistic. But Rowan knew those types, the ones who couldn’t look you in the eye. Sometimes it was because they were hiding things. Sometimes it was because they couldn’t.

In the evenings, he started working with the pens again. He picked out a new color—green—which he used to note punctuation. Commas, semicolons, em dashes. Highlighted, they became like notes in a musical score, the author as conductor, leading his voice, slowing it down, once, twice, speeding it up in a single sentence that ran like a glorious horse all the way to the bottom of a page.

A flowing caftan or beaded T-shirt—aspirational hippie clothes, Miranda’s friend Juniper called them,

answer, “Inspiration.” Because wasn’t that what art was all about, in the end? Mentally shoplifting your way through the world around you, the thoughts inside you? Looking for the thing that makes it all click. Makes it all start. Makes it all worthwhile and whole and good again.

When the vodka or rum or enough of the cheap-ass box wine hit his bloodstream, he could almost remember what it had felt like in that blue world where everything else disappeared.

Saylor was laughter and confidence, the birthright of those who grow up loved.

When Nola was young, her mother used to tell her that books were like a giant neighborhood where every family was different, and every door was open. “You can just go on in,” she’d tell Nola. “Try on a new life. See how it fits.”

The lives in the books not hers, but the pain and tangled love so often the same, creating a community of sorts. Books answered the questions she couldn’t ask people. Why can’t I save my mother? Why can’t she save herself? How can I love so much and be so angry at the same time? The protagonist could be a thousand miles or two hundred years away; it didn’t matter. In fact, in some ways the distance made it better. In some ways, reading about fictional people was like reading about animals, that little bit of distance making it all seem closer, more understandable.

At first, Nola’s mother had tried, worked the only jobs she was qualified for,

One of the tricks of her situation, Nola had learned, was never falling for fiction. Letting your loneliness tempt you into the fantasy of the handsome football star who inexplicably falls for the unkempt outcast. The mean girl who ends up seeing the light. The big-hearted teacher who notices what no one else does and saves the day. Characters like that were what had made Nola stop reading YA. Even vampires were more realistic.

be out of there the first time someone hit me.” That, Nola thought, is where the confusion lies. In Tina’s belief that the you and the I in those sentences, in any sentence, could ever be interchangeable.

in this story, her father would not be her father, but her mother’s husband. The love of her mother’s life. The person she had killed. Unintentionally, yes, but that didn’t matter, because you had done it and now all you wanted was to stay in the dark with him. But you couldn’t—because here was your daughter, who had your husband’s hands but her own eyes, eyes that watched you all the time, asking, needing. And you wanted to give, you did, but there was no one to give to you.

Their dinner-table conversations were free range, oxygen rich, generously competitive.

If the date did get past that first awkward moment, women generally went into fix-it mode, declaring in the most supportive of fashions that he was so smart—he could be a teacher, a professor. The underlying message: You could do so much more with your life. When in fact, he was doing exactly what he wanted.

And if that meant that the mugs always went into the cabinet in a line of alternating blue and yellow, that was fine with him. It was kind of pretty, actually. He’d never thought of making art out of the arrangement of plates, of placing the jars of flour and white or brown sugar so that they stair-stepped down in height. Never loaded a dishwasher so that it could be emptied in eight simple steps.

Then there was the sex, which was phenomenal. He quickly learned that meals were better afterward, which made sense in a way, because Annalise was the opposite of other women he’d dated, who always thought dinner should come before the rest. “I never saw the point in wrapping paper,” Annalise said when he mentioned it. He marveled, both at her answer and her lack of jealousy regarding past lovers and partners. “Why would I care?” she said. “Time moves forward.”

Kit’s mother steadfastly refused to start by asking any guest about their work—that was too easy. Besides, the best stuff resided elsewhere, she always said, and generally this was true, although sometimes a bit more than expected (a discussion of polyamory, started by an innocuous-looking professor of physics when Kit was seven years old, remained a standout). Still and all, it did tend to be exciting, and when Kit had eaten at his friends’ houses, he was often stunned by the vapidity of the conversation. How was school? How did you make this meatloaf?

“Yes, but,” Annalise said, raising an index finger, “it’s not as simple as adding one every five hundred days. The earth’s rotation isn’t predictable. There are earthquakes and volcanoes. The northern hemisphere is sometimes heavier than the south, which throws it off.” Ruby’s mouth opened in question. “Snow,” Kit said quickly. Ruby closed her mouth again.

And that, perhaps, was the difference between the two of them, he thought. Science heard that fragment of a second and wondered how to make it fit into a whole. Fiction wondered what hearing it felt like.

Always start with words, Abigail would say to Clara later, when Clara was a teenager and falling for one beautiful boy after another. Words last.

“That’s what drives me crazy about history, though,” Abigail had said on their first walk. “Historians say a war started on such and such a day, but that war really started years before—when a man got on the wrong train and met a stranger, or a boy wasn’t loved by his mother, or a girl said no. And that war didn’t stop on its end date, either. Its effects kept going, down through the children and grandchildren, but they didn’t understand where it all was coming from because historians care more about the rocks than the river.”

And it was then, looking down at the town, that William truly understood that he would never hear a new story, a new secret, from Abigail. He’d known the physical reality of that, of course. But this was a different understanding, more complicated and subtle. More literary, Abigail said in his head.

A blaze of jealousy filled him—for their time together, their secrets. But then he stopped. He was too hungry, too tired, too alone, for that kind of bullshit. He knew as well as they had that no one had ever asked him to leave them alone. It had always been his choice. He’d been scared of the lush ease of their early intimacy, then, later, scared he’d appear ignorant. At the end, scared of what he’d hear.

“Think of touch in levels,” she told her students. “You can make contact as if you are reaching for skin, or muscle, or bone. Each choice tells a different story.

She’d loved Richard from that first loosened tie. Her hands knew every muscle of his body, her memories held his every gasp of pleasure or pain or frustration. And yet, she realized, these days she felt rather more like a filing cabinet for that information than an active participant.

“Can I listen, then?” Richard said. He had that it’s been five days since I’ve seen you naked tone in his voice. Usually, Juliet thought it was attractive, or at least cute. Now, she put on the face that would normally greet this kind of repartee. I’ve missed you, too. But no, he would not listen to the book, because something told Juliet that he wouldn’t get what she was getting out of it, and his not getting it would absolutely wreck hers.

getting a book sold and published had everything to do with who and what she knew. Yes, the voice, the story, was critical, but perhaps even more so was knowing which editor was secretly pregnant and would be susceptible to a memoir about a mother’s hunt for her missing child, or which one had recently divorced and might relish a snarky female serial killer. Books spoke to specific people for specific reasons, and it had everything to do with where they were in their lives.