On Carli

It's four in the morning. I'm sitting on the edge of the sofa in my workroom. No, you can't call Jeremy and go into tough subjects. Such as bar mitzvahs.

I can't find any characters around, no one I know. I set up a scene. They wander in and stand there in Dacron suits, hands lip at their sides, people uninvited to a party they don't want to go to.

I ball up pages. Throw them across the room. I can call that man who copies instruments, objects, or is it genes? He's from Fullbright--or Oxford? Look it up. What's a passing connection becomes a research project. Yes, here he is--John Halloran. He inserts real things into a computer and reproduces them.

I call Jeremy.

"It's four in the morning there, Mom. What are you doing up?"

"I can't write. I think the doctors knew it wouldn't work."

"Don't you remember what Grandfather told his writers? I think I've told you." He probably tolds me and thinks I'm pretending I've forgotten so I get a chance to call him. That's fine. "I know I've told my writers and it works." Like Lynn Nesbit's, Jeremy's voice changes when he talks about writing. The tone mellows and the beat slows way down. "Just write your characters a letter, Mom, and they will answer." Pause. I can tell he's looking at something else. "Is that all?"

"Yes, that's great."

And he's gone, and I forgot what I really wanted to say.

-- from Past Forgetting by Jill Robinson

Dear Carli,

To the best of my knowledge, you've never pulled a Margaret--you've never asked if I was here. And while it seems a bit pretentious to refer to myself as your God, well. I've created you and into you've poured every ounce of normality and conflict and resolution I could find a way to pour into a single female character. For my own pleasure I've refused to listen to that dictate that damns so many male writers, male writers being people who write female characters who they'd like to date, and how that's trouble. Truth is, I dig interesting girls, and I've tried to make you interesting, as well. Totally normal yet normally interesting. (The fact that you wear glasses sometimes is, and I swear this is true, mere coincidence.)

You never really think much about me these days. You stopped going to church when your parents died, which is pretty understandable, but it's also not like you had some kind of huge break with religion, either. You and religion just drifted apart when you realized you didn't have much in common anymore. No mutual grounds upon which the two of you could stand and chat. And by the way, I would like to apologize about your parents, and they way they died, or at least, the way that I think, right now, that they will die, when I get to that part of the text. It hasn't actually happened yet, not for real--you, your parents, your life, everything that happens to you, it's all so tenuous right now. Anything can change, still, I think. Except for your parents. You loved them, I know that, even though you had to get away from them, because you had to find yourself just as much as I had to find you. And you never got to say goodbye to them, you never get to say all the things to them that you wanted to say, when they were around, when you were too busy with your own life, your own self-discovery (as unconscious as it might be), when you were too busy assuming the immortality of everyone around you to believe you'd really need to say the things that were most on your mind. And maybe you'd wish that could have changed, maybe you wish for even a second now and then that your history could have been different. But it can't be. I've thought about it a lot. Your parents, they're going to die, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. And you won't be there for it. And I guess it might be easier if you'd get mad at your creator, but, you don't. You just fade away from God. Or let God fade away from you.

I guess maybe that's something we have in common, you and I. That whole self-discovery thing. That whole assumption of the immediate immortality of those who we care about most. I dunno. I dunno.

But there's plenty we don't have in common, plenty that separates you from me, plenty that makes you interesting to me in a way that differs from the way the rest of the characters in your story--your sister, your ex, your ex's friend, your ex's fiancee--interest me. You, you're not one for getting outside of your head. Okay, and maybe I don't much get outside of my head, either, but I guess it's my job to do so, and I do try. I mean, you wouldn't be here if I wasn't interested in figuring out how you, how someone like you, thinks. What makes you tick, Carli? You'd never ask this about anyone else. It's what made you and James so different. I'm still not sure what he saw in you, and I don't know why you even gave him the time of day. It's part of your history I haven't quite figured out, though I know it's there, and I've got to write it out at some point.

Actually, there's really, really a lot about you, a lot that, you know, if you'd not mind, I'd like to know about you. Because you're something other, something not me, and it kind of scares me a little bit, to know that you're my responsibility, or something like that. Like, what's up with the whole blindness to other peoples' thoughts thing? I mean, it's a little weird to me. I get obsessed with my own mind, which okay is fine, but I'm also interested in the other, and you're just. Just not. I find that strange and intriguing. How could you date James for as long as you did, all the couple months it was, and not once wonder about him? Here you are, this corporate figure climbing the ladder (and that glass ceiling, I'd apologize, but I can't, and I think you'll see why), and here's James, this painter, of art, not walls, who you met in a bar or in some strange circumstance I haven't figured out yet, and. You two, you're so polar opposite. Yet you dated him. Not for selfish reasons, as far as I can tell. And yet not for selfless reasons, either. It's like you did it because you felt you were supposed to. But, what was really going through your mind when you were with him? Why him?

And why the corporate life? Again, I have to apologize, I've put you in an office with no clear mission and no direct purpose right now. I mean at least with Tim, he was in an office until I figured out it made more sense for him to be in a library. You, though, I know it makes sense for you to be in an office, though doing what, to what ends, I haven't figured that out yet. I know you're where you need to be though the details need to be filled in, just yet. But what are you doing, other than accepting papers into your in box, pushing them out the out box? Do you care? I suspect you don't. I suspect you'd be happy in any corporate environment, where you get work to do and you dress nice, and your coworkers don't bother you with their personal details all that much. I can't leave it at that, of course, because the people who will read your story, they'll need to know more about your world, as little as you might care about it, so they'll understand who you are and where you're coming from so much better. And is that weird? Someone as so completely non-exhibitionist as you being the subject of strangers' scrutiny? I try not to think about that too much for fear it will keep me up at night, wondering.

Carli, you've got burden, and that's your word, not mine. You've got a sister to take care of. (She's stronger than you give her credit for, of course, but there's only so much I guess you can be expected to know. When she was getting old enough to know such things about herself, you were busy running as far away as you could. Nobody would blame you for that, but.) On this, I'd like only to say, that I'd like you to get over the hump of thinking of yourself as unfairly burdened, just for a while. Just long enough to show me what's on the other side of that. Are you hiding something, there? Are you actually deeply scared of responsibility? Scared of losing someone else? Denying what life's taught you, so far? What else is there to that? Help me out.

I'm sorry if these letters don't make much sense. I guess I'm figuring you out at the same time as I'm figuring out how to figure you out. All a means of figuring myself out, too, I guess. Because really, I'm no God. I create, I destroy, but in the end, its you who has to react to it. And that's what's most interesting in this story.

More later, if you'll listen.

- Darby