Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

Meanwhile Mattie was waiting, looking at me with hope and anxiety.

“Okay, listen up, school’s in session,” I said. “I am. Believe me.”

“Most critics think Huckleberry Finn is the first modern American novel, and that’s fair enough, but if’bartleby’ were a hundred pages longer, I think I’d put my money there. Do you know what a scrivener was?”

“A secretary?”

“That’s too grand. A copyist. Sort of like Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol Only Dickens gives Bob a past and a family life. Melville gives Bartleby neither. He’s the first existential character in American fiction, a guy with no ties… no ties to, you know…”

A couple of loggers who couldproduce millionaires. They shit in the samepit. “Mike?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.” I focused my mind as best I could. “Bartleby is tied to life only by work. In that way he’s a twentieth-century American type, not much different from Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or—in the dark version—Michael Corleone in The Godfather. But then Bartleby begins to question even work, the god of middle-class American males.”

She looked excited now, and I thought it was a shame she’d missed her last year of high school. For her and also for her teachers. “That’s why he starts saying “I prefer not to’?”

“Yes. Think of Bartleby as a… a hot-air balloon. Only one rope still tethers him to the earth, and that rope is his scrivening. We can measure the rot in that last rope by the steadily increasing number of things Bartleby prefers not to do. Finally the rope breaks and Bartleby floats away. It’s a goddam disturbing story, isn’t it?”

“One night I dreamed about him,” she said. “I opened the trailer door and there he was, sitting on the steps in his old black suit. Thin. Not much hair. I said, “Will you move, please? I have to go out and hang the clothes now.” And he said, “I prefer not to.” Yes, I guess you could call it disturbing.”

“Then it still works,” I said, and got into my car. “Call me. Tell me how it goes with Je, hn Storrow.”

“I will. And anything I can do to repay, just ask.” Just ask. How young did you have to be, how beautifully ignorant, to issue that kind of blank check? My window was open. I reached through it and squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back, and hard. “You miss your wife a lot, don’t you?” she said. “It shows?”

“Sometimes.” She was no longer squeezing, but she was still holding my hand.