The Supreme Moment

I never really had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, but before the inheritance I wanted to become a writer. Writing sounded like the perfect bullshit job, and my parents were down for it. They sent me to all sorts of writing camps and shit, but in all honesty I never really wrote anything. I just never felt the urge to do it. Anyways, last time I talked to my parents I told them that I just wanted to live off my bank account and backpack around Europe. They didn’t seem too psyched on it. As I left, my mom said, “whatever you wanna do with your life is fine, just check in with us once in awhile, because your father gets worried sometimes”.

My parents were always worried. I think its because they both came from a family of alcoholics. I remember my parents giving me lectures about all of the horrible calamities suffered by my aunts and uncles. “It’s a disease you know,” they used to tell me all of the time and I would sit and nod silently. I always knew they were full of shit. I always maintain my composure. The bigger threat is all of those liver ailments that people get when they’re really old and about to die anyways. Besides, I don’t really plan on making it past forty.

It just so happened that yesterday I decided to call my parents for the first time since I left. Jan, the girl I’ve been staying with, was hosting some after party for her designer friend Rikke who had just graduated from Magretheskolen. The party was packed with “arty types”. They’re here too. The only real reason I was there was because of Andreas Hjort. Andreas was a real douche bag, but he was one of the only dudes in the EU with a legit hookup at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Last time I was at a party with Andreas, about three months ago, I tried to sell him on the novel and he gave a flippant “Well, I’ll look at it when I get back to the states”. I’m convinced he never looked at it because I’d been emailing him constantly and I even called FS&G a few times, but every time he was conveniently “out of the office”. Maybe it just wasn’t that great.

I was a few drinks in at this point, and I was certain that my life was a failure, so I figured it would be best just to hear the words from that asshole Andreas once and for all. First I needed another drink. Champagne perhaps? When I finished that shit off, I found Andreas in the corner, macking on Jan. What an asshole. I walked up to him, put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Where the fuck have you been? Did you even look at my shit?”

Andreas turned around, “Oh fuck, what’s up?” “I’ll tell you what the fuck is up,” I replied. Before I could start my rant, Andreas cut in, “I’m so sorry dude, I had to move out to Roanoke for a few weeks to sort things out with my parents. They’re getting old. Sorry for the wait man. I just heard back from the acquisitions editor yesterday, he really liked it and we want to go through with it. I was gonna call you yesterday, but I figured I’d tell you in person.”

I really couldn’t believe it. I popped off another bottle and danced in ecstasy out the front door and into the poorly lit cobblestone street. “First things first, I gotta call my mom. Just to prove I’m not a total fuck up.” I crossed the train tracks over Tietgensgade and made my way to my favorite telephone booth.

There was my phone, in a red booth designed in the classic British style right across the street from Tivoli Gardens. I could see the neon lights of the tilt-a-whirl glowing like the Christmas lights my mom used to hang up in my bedroom every year. I started to debate the best possible way to break the news.  I put in my coins and got connected. My dad answered the phone.

“Hello it’s your daughter.” “Which one?” he asked jokingly. “The one who just landed a book deal with a subsidiary of a major publishing house!” I said. The call cut off before “just”. “God fucking damn it!” There was no way that I could have fed the coins fast enough into the slot to keep the call going. All I needed was to say, “Hey mom, I made it, I’m OK, I got a major book deal”, then I would be satisfied. I checked my pockets. I left my calling card with my wallet back at home. I needed some coins.

I stepped out of the booth and looked around. The fountain! “Do people throw coins in here like they do in the states?” Indeed they do, and with seemingly greater enthusiasm. I reached in and made a grab for the shiniest ones I could find, but it was too deep. I needed those coins. I had to call my mom; I needed her approval. I carefully climbed over the edge, hanging on to the sides of the fountain, “Fuck it’s deep.”
I pushed off the edge towards the bottom of the pool.

The coins reflected off the lights and I grabbed at them, completely submerged. I had about five in my hands, but I needed one more krone, so I swam as close to the center as my leaden Carhartt work boots would allow. I couldn’t make it. I reached for the surface and gasped for air but got only frigid water. I started coughing, making pathetic little underwater bubbles. I was flailing, thrashing around in an oversized champagne bottle. Soon the bubbles stopped and the neon lights of the tilt-a-whirl were brought perfectly in focus as I looked up towards the surface of the water, “Matters are as clear as crystal.”

Q & A:

Q: Why did you use that quote from Sputnik Sweetheart to end your story?

A: Well, that specific quotation from Spunik Sweetheart, was from Sumire’s first document on the floppy disk and it’s the moment that she decides to make it clear to Miu what she wants. At that moment, the main character in the story has finally found an identity that she’s excited about and she wants to tell her family that she has made something of herself and is getting it together. Unfortunately, her crystal clear vision of the amusement park ride comes while she is drowning only a few inches beneath the surface of the water in the fountain outside the park.

Q: I thought that the main character reminded me of Sumire in many ways, right on down to her Kerouac-inspired work boots, was that intentional?

A: Well, I was actually trying to model the character more after Sal than Sumire. The narration is all in first person using colloquial language, just like in On the Road, and the character shares many of Sal’s mannerisms, including his contempt for the “arty types” and his desire to capture the “it” moment, which she seems to grasp at the end of the story. There were a couple of Sumire references, like the telephone booth where she makes her important calls and the anxiety surrounding her desire to become a writer, which is also in a couple of other books we read for this class, most notably A Concise Chinese English Dictionary, but the use of profanity, the sometimes comedic interior dialogue, and the use of the colloquial was intended to project more of a Sal vibe.

Q: I noticed that there was a lot of drinking, is there any significance behind the drinking, or perhaps the drinks themselves?

A: Well, drinking in this story is more straightforward when it comes to alcoholism than The Sun Also Rises, but in both drinking is associated with having a good time. Alcoholism ties the narrator in with her parents, who aren’t alcoholics, and creates a form of psychological guilt that layers atop her preexisting guilt for skipping off to Europe and living off her inheritance instead of going to college and going through the motions like her friends and her parents’ friends’ kids.

Q: Let’s talk sociological themes; Alienation from a place, search for a new center. Those are a few that pop into mind. How does that play into the story?

A: Well the main character, alienated from her home in the states, goes off to Europe in search of a new center and finds it in Copenhagen. While living the expatriate life for a few years, she embraces her new center, but she also finds that in many ways, like at her friend’s party, it’s just like her old one.

Q: One last thing, what’s up with the title?

A: Well, that’s a snippet of a quote from The Sheltering Sky right as Port sees it open up and take him. There’s this feeling of understanding, a kind of calm that takes over when Port sees the “blood and excrement” converge he reaches out towards the fabric of the sky to “take repose”. Like Port the main character sees a sort of “black star” in the sky in the form of the neon lights of a tilt-a-whirl and experiences a sort of repose similar to Port’s where she stops struggling against death and gives in. Her hands reach up from beneath the “fabric of the sky”, in this case, the surface of the water, and to try to pierce through only to come up short.