No Time to Die
Meet novelist London Berry, an ambitious mediocrity who couldn't die if he tried.
1.
The Eastern side of every second was still shining pink when London Berry sat down to tweak the incoming blurbs. His friends, all first rate writers and possibly not even his friends, had been sluggish in turning in their due praise for his fourth last book. Due praise as in due last week. Just the night before Nico Sinclair had mentioned on the phone what a feat it was that London had been able to pen a fourth tome since his terminal diagnosis ten years ago and, yes, thanks for reminding him, he’d have the blurb first thing in the morning.
Here it was—or rather, it would be better to give the blurbs in the order in which London received them, for together they graded toward a common vanishing point, whisked away in standard Sinclairean fashion:
“In these farewell essays to a life of bookishness, ironic indulgence and courteous self-effacement, London Berry makes one more last round of the garden of literary delights. The comparison of a favorite book to a radiator is a typical flourish. We shall miss him—when he does go—but if the cliffhanger at the end is any indication, that rare tome [sic] of his voice might even stay with us one tome [?] more. We can only hope.”—Avril Pallas
Tome, thought London. Had the old pals Avril and Nico colluded on blurbs, ridicule? Had the engorging length of his farewell books in the face of what were supposed to be diminishing cognitive abilities become so obvious? He gulped, and flashed toward that anxious email he worked on in the back of his head should anyone accuse him outright of having continued to live, an apologia with the entire world cc’d: “I am wont to know, unfortunately, how a curious dilation occurs so close to death: the ultimate approaches and yet the last page of one’s life lengthens. It is like trying to grab pi by the scruff of its neck. Zeno’s Paradox in real-time. One starts to wonder whether death never actually comes off, but is like forever falling, yet never reaching, the center of a black ho—”
“If you thought Berry’s The Black Whole established an entire secondary literature of deathbed confession, the masterful tome [cut] Last Writes is the nascent genre’s crowning jewel. Yes, fate has been kind, if not to London Berry, then at least to his reader [sic], in allowing what seemed like an immediately fatal death sentence to linger so meltingly in unembarrassed enthusiasm. For instance, we are treated to Berry’s arrival at Yaddo, a theme that has lost no piquancy in his fourth fictional retelling [fifth]. These thoughtful shorts [essays] are immensely appealing, their tone is beautifully judged. With this and his recent poetry, he may outlive us all—if not on the page, then in life.”—Alana Avalon
“With a Trojan stubbornness, Berry has been brilliant to the (near?) end, turning his readings and mediations on shifty, elusive death into sharp, funny prose poems [essays] on American culture. Long may his long farewell last.”—Ancram Avalon
“This is not Berry’s first effort at memoir [essays!], and won’t be his last. The past decade has been Berry’s most successful poetical enjambment. Last Writes are writings that will last—and probably won’t even be Berry’s last, so to speak.”—Nico Sinclair
“Berry couldn’t die if he tried.”—London Berry
Berry could not help but outdo Sinclair. Wasn’t that what they had all meant to say anyways?
They had clearly all read a very different book—or had not read it at all, more likely. In fact, Berry’s Last Writes was a collection of post-irony deathbed auto-fictional lyric essays. (He briefly toyed with PIDAFLE as an acronym in the email to his agent, but its sonic insinuation of “piddle” and artless criminality deterred him at the last moment.) As he’d grown older he’d grown more stylistically adventurous—though his writing hardly benefited from the new heights of his pen. No, not even his pen, for he hadn’t seen his own handwriting in decades and his signature on card readers had taken on the chaotic shape of, what might have occurred to a writer like Alana Avalon but not him, the scrambled brainstorm of the early universe. Regardless, he tweaked his friends’ blurbs, all of them written with a lassitude and barely concealed scorn that even London Berry could not mistake as his first-rate friends’ exhaustion with his impregnable health, probably none of them truly first-rate besides Alana Avalon.
Yes, it was an increasingly tight wire act with his friends, and an increasingly tightening wire. In affected parallel with the supposed degeneration of his disease, in-person visits had anxiously contracted to phone calls with conversations ranging from, “What type of cancer is it again—oh, not cancer, right,” to “Now, with this sort of, illness,” as if skeptical, “living so long is entirely typical…?” Or, “Have doctors been round lately to—no, no,” cut off by a sickly coughing fit (London had only actually swallowed the wrong way, as kind fate would have it), “of course, yes, sorry.”
The haunting, sloppy aurora of Covid (that Godsend!) was waning. It had been a blessed reprieve in which he was able to dash off all 90,000 words of Last Writes (and what a small miracle terminal illness was—no publisher had ever let him crack above 60,000 before!). He had just been about to start receiving friends again when the virus broke out, too. Shame. But now, with the masks off, with years of vaccinations, London was like a ruined temple, visited only by the random, inspired pilgrimage of the winnowing devout.
It’s not that he wasn’t still sick—he was, technically. But he may have been guilty of rushing to the bravura in the first last book, Over My Dead Body, “If you don’t know when they’re gonna cut the lights, you might as well write until they do.” How immortal those lines would have been if only he’d gone belly up straight away! He might have imbued himself into the future, dyed a little of his colors straight through the ghost of the present. The lights, however, were evidently rigged up to an industrial generator. And now, as his life “lingered so meltingly,” as the symptoms fell away and he put on a few stones (referring to the weight as stones helped obscure the import of his native “pounds”), as the world of doctors skirted around the word “remission.” Well.
Yes, it was a blazing first rate morning outside the window when Nico called. Berry’s heart hit its anxious stride. Each phone call was like night opened in lightning. He hunkered his shoulders and lowered his register as he did when talking to his friends, preparing to say nothing for the first few seconds. But Sinclair’s voice broke hurriedly into the silence as if he’d already been talking, “London. Has anyone been in touch with you?”
Berry’s panicked pause sounded rather like a no, so Nico went on, “Are you sitting down? I mean, course you are,” remembering, believing, with sudden fealty, the hospice bed Berry hadn’t laid in for years. “Ala,” that was Alana Avalon’s nickname, “London, she’s. Well maybe you should call her… She’s got esophageal cancer, London. Stage four.” Then he wept, “London…” and rang off.
It all felt like a bad dream—but one gets used to everything.
2.
Often, the objects of the world appeared to London as if in a haze beneath tissue-paper, and no matter how hard he tried he could not denude them, nor could any combination of words hint that they were written by lace-cupped hands. Bumping into the corner of the kitchen table in the Avalon manor in front of Alana’s relatives, he pretended as if he did it on purpose to measure the grade of the wood.
“Very soft,” he told a tween nephew, fondling the corner. Then slapping it with his palm, “and hearty.”
Instead of first walking to the sprawling backyard where his friends were, he found the third floor bathroom of the large colonial home, bought off a Livingston with the dual earnings of Alana’s first-rate novel Still Soft With Sleep—an anomaly of a windfall—and Ancram’s third-rate, possibly even fourth-rate page turner Exit Burger. With its rights bought by Netflix and Ancram’s new podcast on Spotify, they were able not just to buy the farm, but put in a series of tennis courts they had stopped inviting London to play on. London loved tennis.
After sitting for some time in the bathroom with his eyes pinched shut and the upstate April breeze bringing his friends’ voices in through the window—a draft from heaven, from the outer, gliteratti paradise—he rambled through the house and ate Brie cheese for some forty minutes, practicing how he would walk, how one foot before the other might take him back there to Ala. On the advice of Reddit users, he read a fair bit of Thich Nhat Hahn in the days leading up and tried to execute a walking meditation through the colonial tunnels and hidden chambers of the house, but the blueprint was like a grand anti-maze, impossible to get lost in and spilling him back out to the rooms facing the backyard no matter what turns he took or stairs he walked up (he did not remember walking downstairs even once).
“I have arrived, I am home, in the Here and in the Now,” he told himself.
On his third peckish glance through the backyard slider, a hearty cousin approached from the outside and, about to enter the house with empty glasses, stepped aside politely to let London out first. About to retreat, London was walked into by a throng of college boys.
“I’m just saying bruv, get yourself a pair of Uniclo next time we hit Killington. Mine’s got that heat tech.”
“Bruv, you think my North Face doesn’t have heat tech!”
“Bruv, I know your shit doesn’t have heat tech. I don’t want you turtling out there on the powder—oh, sorry. Are you going out, or?”
The direction of the Now was unmistakable.
So too the flushed cheek of the earth, blushing in the noon sun as London made his way over, his stumbles and sallow skin caused by intense nerves actually helping his case to look quite sickly, perennially under the weather and heroic for dashing to Ala’s side as soon as he could. Here was the man whose poor health you had started to doubt!
And there they were, a throng, a milieu of his past and present blurbers around her: Nico (contentedly almost first-rate; not enviously successful), Avril (third-rate; enviously successful), Ancram (does not register on the scale; pungently funded), and the incomparable Keaton Beams (third-rate; successful) who had not blurbed his latest, quite possibly after London had taken his tweaking liberties with Keaton’s blurb for To Die For; all beneath the maple tree that the unsuppressible Ancram, God help him, tapped for syrup in the late winter. Ala was seated in a plush chair. The early spring flowers sniffed her in little upward bobs of their petals. Those brief Spring flowers that only bloomed for a week, and briefer ones too that seemed to manifest just to surround her. There were blue creeks and deltas and rivulets between the green branches up above Ala’s major, first-rate head.
There were cracks and dams and riven gulfs in London’s works, as if the last decisive clinch that could have made him a major writer had not been given by nature and could not be picked up no matter how many writing programs and courses and workshops he attended (and taught), no matter how many Alana Avalon books he read and marked up with a red pen (if only she had been of a previous generation, he could have borrowed from her in a way that paid homage. Instead, her contemporaneity crowded out all possibilities of mimicry). He had talent, sure, he had a nice paintset with pretty little colors. It’s just that his prose was that of a troubled watercolorist, and when he wrote with these colors the paper crimped and the paint all blent into a mucky grey brown.
Hampered too by the fact that he often wrote in the strange, polygonal blandness of Latin, non-Euclidean tenses too complex to even fit against the archaic edges of ancient Greek. His prose was, at times, so sonically obscure that it sounded German, or like poorly translated French, and left an aching warp in the monumental calm of the English language, the way translations can turn the mental furniture of the mind into shivery reflections, as of stars inscribed on smeary waves. Worse, in the rare moments that this muddle verged on the messily pretty, Berry had a way of dropping bowling balls straight through their mirrory seascapes, shattering their reflections. He was not a major writer.
Of course, there were no major writers anymore. Like McDonald’s french fries, first-rate meant second-rate and second-rate meant third. Third-rate entailed, of course, the neatly limited talent that brought fame, blue-light glory. Second-rate, like London, meant a great deal of the talent went into self-doubt, and the hemming and hawing works caught between were destined for American oblivion, a skid row down which so many writers had vanished ahead of him (O how his sentences stretched out into the American oblivion!). As for the ever rare first-rate, there was the dark tunnel of obscurity, lit up at the end with the rapid throb of posterity. And its only American passenger, Alana Avalon, had been given a premature curtain call.
Berry had one turn of the page in the first draft of his debut The Boredom Bedroom, however, which betrayed a hint of possible harmony. There was a scene, for instance, in which a young child sat on the beach, staring at a rock covered in seagull shit, its white paint running down the sides and remarked that God had been sloppy with his paintset. Perhaps a bit of post-modernism, Fourth wall-breaking on His part, Berry implied, the Maker egoically calling attention to His own work—or else the rock was simply the place where He rested his brush after painting the clouds each morning, and the child young enough to see it, the paint of his own mind not yet dry. There was a promise, in this and other uses of language, of a real talent that, at the last moment—the profile of the paragraphs turning to their sharpest, most crucial bend—remained unfulfilled.
Berry’s Bedroom had been through the ringer. Like most young writers, London began writing it in the orbit of other dead and living writers’ influence. Not enough 20 year-old thrust to escape any single orbit, he was merely flung from star to star, planet to planet, plucking phrases here, reconnoitering imageries there. He hoped through pure perseverance to create his own style, or failing that, put his nasally mark on the ancestral voices (owing to a deviated septum). He had difficulties with it—particularly getting an agent’s assistant to open his emails or pass it on to their bosses. But he had had difficulties with algebra and biology when he was younger and a tutor had helped him get back to the B-’s , so he figured an MFA would do the trick. And it did! By the time his professors (one died halfway through) and some twenty randomly assorted 20 year olds (including Nico, Ancram and Avril) had gone through the novel, there was not a trace left of his heroes’ pooled, cribbed voices, nor even his own. As Berry presented his canvas to Nico’s soft pastels, Avril’s more mawkish, harsh tones, Ancram’s white-out, Keaton Beams’ wet rag, which smudged out the child and God’s paint brush, beauty turned away from Berry’s white hot flaw like a scared, darting flame brought outside into the wind. All of which did the divine trick of preparing his novel for immediate representation and publication and set him on the respectable, struggling path of a semi-recognized author.
The muse paid him no attention; Clio would not remember his name; but his clunk and disarray would be published.
After abasing himself for having written The Bordeom Bedroom in his Acknowledgements, he went on at Biblical length:
I want to thank Professor Montour E. Claire (may you rest in peace), Professor Ratko Gudas, Edward Horton, Royce Godwich, Evan Evangel, Eva Wellingsworth, Montgomery Mopp, David Newbourne, Jefferia Jofrantz, Franzette Jeffro (may you rest in peace), Sara Berry, Hal Winchell, Paul Magic, Igor Pretty, Nico Sinclair, Heven Gallup, Gallup Heven, Guarden Hathaway, Elise Guaterra, Charlie Coyle, Gressive Alspen, Bergeron Marchand, Bradley Radic, Ancram Avalon, Avril Pallas, Lorin Lunenburg—my first readers, by no means exhaustive.
As for my second readers, I must thank—
Ala, on the other hand, came as if from another country. Born as she was with her own talent in tact like a foal who knows to stand upon birth, there was a touch of antique exoticism to her and her gifts. She had never, it was almost impossible to imagine, enrolled in any sort of writing program in her life. She had gone to college, yes, but for some reason Berry never grasped, did not attend a single writing class while there. She had no acknowledgements pages. She owed no money on loans. Her novels were not only the best of her generation, they were the best of the fledgling century and sold like hotcakes.
There was a reason her nickname sounded like it meant God.
And there she glowed, like a last, stubborn spot of green inside an oranging leaf, the impossibly dense speck that hunkers out of sight through the cold winter, that lush singularity from which Spring could explode out in all its green, cancellate weaves.
“London! London! Is that you?” spied Avril. It was London, cut down at the fluttery knees by the blonde bobbing head of a rambunctious niece, smearing the brown earth stains on his pants.
“Oh, oh, Berry,” Nico simpered, lowering his glass of French white and giving Berry an indulgent sidearm, holding Berry in a back-breaking midstand.
Alana was quiet, and her face held a beautiful frown as she raised her arms out to him from her chair, like the child whose helplessness she would die through.
“Oh, so good, so good,” said Ancram watching London hamper over in his new rickety gait.
It was like approaching anti-matter. Or rather, he was the anti-matter, and she the leaf that, falling to the glass surface of a pond, cancels his reflection.
In her arms, she cried.
“Oh God,” London thought weakly.
3.
Always the politely avoidant fellow, Berry let himself be interred at the Avalon property for the seven weeks, all 500 acres square in the middle of New York towns and hamlets that sounded like 19th century diseases. Coxsackie, Claverack, Bashbish. The days were like binary star systems with two engulfing holes round which he spun, one in the afternoon and the other at night when cruel physics tried to bring Berry and Ala together alone to talk shop about their impending deaths. The carefully constructed narrative of his illness wanted him to impart his decade-long wisdom, or encouraging example, and though London did his best to faithfully scorn the muse, indeed, Ala was very bucked up by his presence and good health. In turn, London was terrified but also inescapably drawn to these moments, like sinkholes out in the distance just begging to be looked down into. ‘Come come, don’t be afraid, plenty of room about the edges—oh but do be careful, the edges are slippery and it’s a long way down!’ Curious though he was about what dying must actually be like, he did his best to avoid these daily encounters, and often found ingenious ways of getting out of them like cutting all the wires in the house so that the power went out and they all went to bed in 19th century darkness.
Nothing could stop, however, the infallibility of the soul that spreads over every muscle and synapse of the dying. Some hue mixes itself into the palette, or rather gets itself worked into the brush so that without doing anything new with the wrist and the hand, every motion, every word, every blink, every corner Alana Avalon picked out on all the couches in the house were all perfect, were all radiantly sublime.
Knowing that to talk at all would soon reveal to Ala they were not natives of the same country, so to speak, Berry did not speak much, and in that way, and without meaning to, came off like some famous but too fragile amphora, careful not to spill its precious, ancient contents, trying not to bump into any furniture or stray relatives in the house—or any of his blurbers and their agents, also interred at the Avalon’s, Berry like the center of a see-saw, watching them all bob up, despite their talents or lack thereof, into brief, regular notoriety. Nico Sinclair alone seemed to make, like a UAP, brief, lightning quick probes into London’s terrain, inquiries below his sea. At the dinner table, their glances occasionally slipped by one another, and Berry knew.
Ala received a call one day and went to sit by herself quietly in one of the many drawing rooms. Expecting bad news, the second and third rate throng went to go see her. London had not meant to go in by himself but his belt loop caught the door handle and closed it behind him, looking to everyone like he was marshaling sudden, crucial authority.
“Good,” said Ancram to the others. “He knows what to say.”
“London,” said Ala, finally. “That was 60 Minutes. The interview. They had the idea to cut Ancram, and… they want to do it with us… together.”
4.
“How has it been, having London so close at hand, Alana? Is it a comfort?”
“Oh, quite, quite,” she put her hand over London’s, who had a very quiet heart attack inside. “It would be better, of course, to not have to face this at all,” followed by a stroke, “but to be freed from having to face it alone is of numinous solace.” Those upstarts at the end of the tunnel chucked him back down out of the light. He made a full recovery.
London had not known whether to put on fifty pounds or try to lose fifty pounds to help his televisual case, and through sheer anxiety and inaction put on about seven. It was too late for a dramatic maneuver like shaving his head, that would have tipped everyone off. But he did let his beard grow fairly long and did not put in his usual bottle of eyedrops (he had a bottle a day habit). And so sitting next to Alana, her shorn scalp wrapped in a scarf, he felt guiltily robust and looked unhealthy only in the way that every middle-aged man briefly looks, getting a hang of their fifth decade.
“London.” He startled. The chair sounded like he had been immodest. He had balled up a rather large wad of saliva while Ala talked and was afraid now to swallow it in front of the cameras. “As a writer with a decade of experience confronting death, what do you tell Alana?” the interviewer whimpered.
“Ehem,” he said, clearing his throat. “I am solid, I am free, in the ultimate I dwell.” But he did not say this to the interviewer, and he did not even quite say this consolingly to himself, for his head swam and several nuclear explosions went off throughout his body as if the United States military were conducting clandestine experiments in miniature through his Arizonas and New Mexicos. Fate, kind fate, though, had the wherewithal to let slip his ball of spit into his throat, causing London to have the mother and father of all coughing fits and reel over the side of his chair, falling to his hands and knees.
The crew was very considerate and rushed to aid London with zucchini water, hot and cold compresses, and Alana looked on with an indefatigable solidarity, a rung ascending in her: so this is what it shall look like, then.
When London was reseated in his chair, he realized it was a bad time to mention his new book, Even If I Have to Die Trying.
He realized it was a bad time to mention his new book, Even If I Have to Die Trying, to anyone at all. For Alana’s dying was a literary sensation, as was her Dying. Written from various hospital beds trying out various cutting edge treatments as well as various retreats trying out various confluences of Buddhism, yoga and herbalism, Dying was an instant canonical work. The blurbs all said so:
“No one has written of their own dying with half as much knockout brilliance. Steering clear of the genre’s typical maudlin introspection, Avalon proselytizes not just for talent, genius, piquancy by doing them—all the things we already know—but for the courage not to blink until the final lights go out. We can only try to hold her stare. We will fail, but I shall hold onto Dying and its immortal inducements as long as I have strength.” Avril Pallas
“In an age of decentralized tastes and disparate, obscure pockets of success, Alana Avalon has written us our new Hamlet. It is a gift to be grounded round the unconditional warmth and brilliance of a new, centralizing star. The next generations are already organizing around it. No planet shall form and prosper without owing its success to her light. The name Alana Avalon is forever.” Keaton Beams
“Nowhere in the last century has a writer been more breathlessly incomparable. Avalon’s unerring ear, unveering pen, magisterial ebullience and, yes, her scabrous wit, bring the written word as close to the unnameable Beyond as it has ever gone while completely toppling the entire secondary literature of deathbed prose and its tower of cliches. Upon her debut (so odd that such an immortal writer has not simply been around forever), she was hailed as a once in a generation talent. Dying is a once in a canon book.” Ancram Avalon (with the unmistakable aid of Nico Sinclair)
“It is as if the light at the end of the tunnel is yet incandescent, spilling through her body and pen. She is now, without a doubt, on the same mountaintop with Shakespeare. I weep as I think of her, slipping our hands, our loving embrace, and walking that passage alone—but I am comforted to know the handholds she has found, the diverting rooms and passages thereto.” Nico Sinclair
“Alana Avalon is…” London Berry
Words, as they so often did, failed London Berry. In terms of blurbing and reviewing his new book, Even If I Have to Die Trying (EIIHTDT), words failed all the first rate writers who usually made up his inner circle of unequals. Excluding Alana whose talent, so to speak, now went beyond the zero. Not only did it go beyond the zero but it made frequent visits back to the land of whole numbers, sharing access to the zone of death with the third rate likes of her husband Ancram and the middling Nico Sinclair. Death, who granted her its easy confidence, shared all its unguarded moments. Death, who had toppled London Berry’s entire genre of deathbed literature with Alana’s Dying.
And so the arc of EIIHTDT (as writers are wont to abbreviate these days)’s ARC (advanced reader copy) described complete nullity, a hollow thud, a blip. So too Berry’s footfalls in the hospital corridor, tripping over the tail between his legs, tarrying in an obscure corner of the wing where Alana Avalon lay dying.
There was a near solace to the solemnity, a numinous quieting, slowing. One could almost, as if focusing hard enough on the dark tunnel’s light concentrated on Ala, see all of reality in extreme precision, perceive the hue of every ultraviolet second stealing by.
London had not meant to go in by himself, but the door handle snuck up on him, slipped silently, somnolently between the buttons of his shirt sleeve, and the door closed behind him.
He was the first to see, the first to lay eyes; London, a one man multitude, the first to know. Actually, Nico Sinclair must have been the first to know, bent as he was over her body with pursed lips. He did not see London. London was the first to know that, at least.
She lay now, in the immovable state of her indestructible posterity. She dwelled, now, in the ultimate. All in less than a year. Even her timing was impeccable.
No, it was true, London Berry couldn’t die if he tried. Not that he had taken to trying very hard, understandably. So he would do what he always did best, hunker his shoulders and continue to live. He would die, one day, this London Berry, but not today, no, not tonight.
Speaking of night, the Western side of every second was growing pink when, EIIHTDT in galleys, London Berry steadied a rickety hand over an email to Nico Sinclair.
Anthony Burgess would be happy.