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The baby octopuses are delivered alive from Portugal each morning and then massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease; according to the menu, they are massaged “five hundred times.” The beak is removed and the small eyes are pushed out from behind. The corpses are slowly poached and then served with a sauce composed of sake and yuzu juice. It is the restaurant's signature dish and so plate after plate of the world's most intelligent invertebrate infants were being conducted from kitchen to table by the handsome, agile waitstaff. There were three on the plate finally placed before us, and my agent and I, after a moment of admiration and guilty hesitation, simultaneously dipped and ingested the impossibly tender things entire.

I had arrived for what would be an outrageously expensive celebratory meal still incredulous about the amount of money a publisher was willing to pay me to dilate my story, but, after we ordered and before the octopus and flights of bluefin arrived, I had quickly signed two copies of a contract. I asked my agent to explain to me once more why anybody would pay such a sum for a book of mine, especially an unwritten one, given that my previous novel, despite an alarming level of critical acclaim, had only sold around ten thousand copies. Since my first book was published by a small press, my agent said, the larger houses were optimistic that their superior distribution and promotion could help a second book do much better than the first. Moreover, she explained, publishers pay for prestige. Even if I wrote a book that didn't sell, these presses wanted a potential darling of the critics or someone who might win prizes; it was symbolic capital that helped maintain the reputation of the house even if most of their money was being made by teen vampire sagas or one of the handful of mainstream “literary novelists” who actually sold a ton of books. This would have made sense to me in the eighties or nineties, when the novel was more or less still a viable commodity form, but why would publishers, all of whom seemed to be perpetually reorganizing, downsizing, scrambling to survive in the postcodex world, be willing to convert real capital into the merely symbolic? “Keep in mind that your book proposal…” my agent said, and then paused thoughtfully, indicating that she was preparing to put something delicately, “your book proposal might generate more excitement among the houses than the book itself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your first book was unconventional but really well received. What they're buying when they buy the proposal is in part the idea that your next book is going to be a little more … mainstream. I'm not saying they'll reject what you submit, although that's always possible; I'm saying it may have been easier to auction the idea of your next book than whatever you actually draft.”

I loved this idea: my virtual novel was worth more than my actual novel. But if they rejected it, I'd have to give the money back. And yet I planned to spend my advance in advance.

“Also, you have to remember an auction has its own momentum.”

This I understood, or at least recognized, from experience: most desire was imitative desire. If one university wanted to buy your papers, another university would want to buy them, too—consensus emerges regarding your importance. Competition produces its own object of desire; that's why it makes sense to speak of a “competitive spirit,” a creative deity.

With my chopsticks I lifted and dipped the third and final baby octopus and tried to think as I chewed of a synonym for “tender.” Imitative desire for my virtual novel was going to fund artificial insemination and its associated costs. My actual novel everyone would thrash. After my agent's percentage and taxes (including New York City taxes, she had reminded me), I would clear something like two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. Or Fifty-four IUIs. Or around four Hummer H2 SUVs. Or the two first editions on the market of
Leaves of Grass
. Or about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant's labor, seven of Alex's in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held. I swallowed and the majesty and murderous stupidity of it was all about me, coursing through me: the rhythm of artisanal Portuguese octopus fisheries coordinated with the rhythm of laborers' migration and the rise and fall of art commodities and tradable futures in the dark galleries outside the restaurant and the mercury and radiation levels of the sashimi and the chests of the beautiful people in the restaurant—coordinated, or so it appeared, by money. One big joke cycle. One big totaled prosody.

“Of course, as we talked about, there are risks to taking a big advance—because if the book doesn't sell at all, nobody's going to want to work with you again.”

A quiet set of couples left the table beside us and almost instantly a loud set of couples took their place; the men, both around my age, both dressed in dark suits, both in great shape, were talking about a friend or colleague in common, mocking him for drunkenly spilling red wine on a priceless couch or rug; the women, eyes lined with shadow, were passing a cell phone back and forth, admiring a picture of something. I was confident my book wouldn't sell.

“Just remember this is your opportunity to reach a much wider audience. You have to decide who you want your audience to be, who you think it is,” my agent said, and what I heard was: “Develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces, even those at the next table; make sure the protagonist undergoes a dramatic transformation.” What if only his aorta undergoes change, I wondered. Or his neoplasm. What if everything at the end of the book is the same, only a little different?

The sake-based cocktails were making the adjacent quartet increasingly garrulous. Investment bankers or market analysts in their twenties, whose proximity was particularly unwelcome since I was crossing my art with money more explicitly than ever, trading on my future. The first draft was due in a year.

“I think of my audience as a second person plural on the perennial verge of existence,” I wanted to say. A waiter shook the bottle to mix the sediment and turn the sake white.

“They need a highly liquid strategy,” someone at the adjacent table said.

“What happens if I give them a totally different book than the one described in the proposal?” I asked. Small plates of miso-glazed black cod were put before us. Someone refilled my glass.

“Depends. If they like it, fine. But you need to keep the
New Yorker
story in there, I think.”

“I can't see my audience because of the tungsten lights.” I emptied my glass.

“Do you have other ideas?”

“They got married on Turtle Island. Fiji. Karen said she saw Jay-Z on the beach.”

“A beautiful young half-Lebanese conceptual artist and sexual athlete committed to radical Arab politics is told by her mother, who is dying of breast cancer, that she's been lied to about her paternity: her real father turns out to be a conservative professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. Or New Paltz. Wanting her own child, she selects a Lebanese sperm donor in an effort to project into the future the past she never had.” I shook my head no. Swift, Spanish-speaking laborers took away the plates. “Or maybe something more sci-fi: an author changes into an octopus. He travels back and forth in time. On a decommissioned train.”

She excused herself to go to the bathroom and the next small blue bottle was on the table so quickly it seemed to precede my signaling to the waitress, my ordering it. I shut my eyes for a long moment. “Perfume and youth course through me, and I am their wake.” The noise was deafening now that I wasn't talking or listening to anyone in particular. I tasted hints of pear, then peach. For a second all I heard was the desperation, the hysterical energy of passengers on a doomed liner. The rise and fall. The laughter of Mrs. Meacham's class. My parents were dead, but I could get back to them in time. Seventy-three seconds into takeoff, my aorta dissected, producing high cirrus clouds, sign of an imminent tropical depression.

“That market's completely underwater. Probably forever.”

I looked at my phone. “Your presence is requested at the Institute for Totaled Art,” Alena had texted.

Dessert was a yuzu frozen soufflé with poached plums. Money was a kind of poetry. The glasses of sweet wine were on the house. I was drunk enough now to down the remaining sake instead of setting it aside. The ink contains a substance that dulls the sense of smell, making the octopus more difficult to track.

“How exactly will you expand the story?” she asked, far look in her eyes because she was calculating tip.

“Like the princess in
Sans Soleil
, I'll make a long list of things that quicken the heart.” We emerged from the restaurant into moving air. “And you can be on it.” The streets were wet, but it wasn't raining now. We walked to the High Line entrance on Twenty-sixth and climbed the steps. The smell of viburnum, which either flowers in winter or had flowered prematurely, mixed with the smell of car exhaust.

“I'm going to write a novel that dissolves into a poem about how the small-scale transformations of the erotic must be harnessed by the political.” Three-fifths of my neurons were in my arms as I touched each stand of sumac carefully placed among the disused rails. Never again would I eat octopus.

“My advice, having sold some other proposals, is not to wait too long.” Now we were sitting on the wooden steps that overlook Tenth Avenue, liquid ruby and sapphire of traffic. “I mean, to get to work. The more you wait, the more the deadline looms. It can drive people crazy.” She lit a cigarette. “The residency is perfect timing. Don't underestimate how much you can get done in those five weeks.”

I was leaving in two days. A foundation in Marfa, Texas, gives you a house, a stipend, a car. I'd accepted the offer almost a year ago, when I knew I'd be on leave from teaching, but not that I had a dilated aortic root or that there was acute demand for my abnormal sperm. I'd never done a residency or been to Texas. It was where Creeley died in the spring of 2005—they had rushed him to the nearest hospital three hours away in Odessa. My little house would be across the street from his. “I hope there will be another occasion soon to be in each other's company,” I'd written in his voice to a version of myself.

FOUR

 

 

I felt like a ghost in the green hybrid, driving slowly around Marfa in the dark. It was my first night there: Michael, the caretaker of the residency houses, who was also a painter, had picked me up at the El Paso airport that afternoon and driven me in amicable silence for three hours through the high desert until we reached the little house at 308 North Plateau Street; I remember the address (you can drag the “pegman” icon onto the Google map and walk around the neighborhood on Street View, floating above yourself like a ghost; I'm doing that in a separate window now) because I had to have my beta-blockers mailed there twice during the residency, pills I take to reduce the vigor of my heart's contractions, and which have the paradoxical effect of causing a minor tremor in my hand. When I arrived at the house—one floor, two bedrooms, with one room converted to a writer's studio, no internal doors—I had set down my bags and, although it was only late afternoon, gone immediately to bed, not waking until a little before midnight. I lay in the alien sheets slowly remembering where I was: having slept through most of the ride, and then what was left of the daylight, I felt as though I'd moved from Brooklyn to the Chihuahuan Desert without transition. I tried to remember the light snow that morning in New York, beads of precipitation on the oval window streaking as the plane took off. It was Thursday; had I been at home, I would have heard the sound of the poor picking glass out of the recycling set along the street for Friday morning. Here it was quiet enough that I should have heard my heart beating; I imagined it was inaudible because of the drug.

I'd planned to walk around, not drive, but the dark outside was total. I was stunned by the panoramic sky, the impossible number of stars—any remaining jet lag dissipated at the sight. The thin winter air was cool but unseasonably warm; it was probably in the forties. The sound of the garage door opening tore a hole in the night and I sensed, whether or not they were there, small animals fleeing all around me at the noise. I backed out of the garage, remotely closed it, and began to whisper through the streets, as nervous and alive as a teenager sneaking out on some kind of furtive mission in his parents' car. I found my way downtown and circled the nineteenth-century courthouse and turned onto the town's main commercial street; no one was out. I parked under a streetlight and walked past the dark storefronts, a mixture of small-town municipal offices, abandoned spaces, and upscale boutiques. Marfa had been an “art tourism” destination ever since Donald Judd established the Chinati Foundation in the eighties, a museum just outside of town that presents Judd's large-scale works in permanent installation, along with work by his contemporaries. I'd heard New York artists speak of making pilgrimages, that collectors fly down for visits in their private jets, but it was difficult to picture encountering them here. An interesting building across the street attracted my attention and I crossed to take a closer look; later I would learn it was the old Marfa Wool and Mohair Building. I walked around the side of the building, along the railroad tracks, and, stepping over various desert shrubs, approached one of the side windows to look in.

At first I saw nothing through the glass, then slowly made out hulking shapes, shapes that further resolved into what looked like giant flowers of crushed metal or perpetual explosions. I cupped my hands around my eyes and held my forehead to the cool window and slowly recognized what I was seeing as a series of John Chamberlain sculptures, which are largely hewn from chrome-plated and painted steel, often the mangled bodies of cars, an art of the totaled. I'd seen a few of his sculptures in New York, had been indifferent, but they were powerful now, their colors becoming more discernible in the faint glow of some kind of security light. Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn't get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality. I stepped back a little and regarded his work through my own faint reflection in the window. Or maybe I like his sculpture more when I'm lurking at night among creosote bushes in the desert, nerves singing, my life in Brooklyn eighteen hours in the past, receding.