Part 58: Bobby / Mrs. Brixton / Susan

“Three things. First of all, I’m not Russian. Second, Christ, were you hungry when you wrote that article or what, buy yourself a frigging muffin or something, no one wants to read your drooling. Third, is this pre-orders thing supposed to be some kind of life-imitates-art sort of ploy on your part, in which case thank you very much, or is it legit, do you have some kind of inside source at the record label who knows more than I do. Oh, I lied, fourth thing - the John and Paul line was awfully homoerotic. Alright, call me back when you get this. Or better yet, text me, email me, what the hell was I thinking still calling like it’s two-thousand-four or something. Force of habit I guess, old dog, new tricks, all that. Talk to you soon, or not talk, but you know what I mean. Alright, bye.”

*

It was time to start seriously worrying if she had a brain tumor.

The headaches had been one thing - easy to blame those on stress, and easy to blame the stress on any number of different things or people - but now Mrs. Brixton was becoming forgetful. Losing things. Finding that a piece of equipment that she knew she left on a particular table was not there just one eight-minute cigarette break either. (She didn’t smoke, but took as many cigarette breaks as anyone else at her company was allotted anyway, as a matter of Principle.) Following up with someone about an urgent matter she had asked them to look into to receive only blank stares.

And now, even her computer password wasn’t working. She typed it in eight different times to make sure - slowly and deliberately; quickly, to activate muscle memory; looking at the keyboard, looking at the screen, looking at the piece of paper on which she had written the password in careful print three months ago when the computer insisted she change it. But nothing.

Well, she had plenty of work she could do that wasn’t on the computer. Then she would try again later. It was either that or ask for help, which would be humiliating. Someone in her position asking for help logging into her computer. It made her think of ex-presidents, ex-dictators - Napoleon living in exile - grown old, needing help in the bathroom.

She was getting older, that was true. And you never knew what was going to get you. Brain tumor was just as good as anything else. In fact, cancer seemed to Mrs. Brixton a rather respectable, scientific way to die: it was a natural byproduct of your cells reproducing, the very thing that has kept you going thus far. Just too much of it. Besides, it was the ultimate horizon for science, what they were all aiming towards, in some vague way, the last frontier: the cure for cancer. Surely people in this very building were working towards it, making incremental progress every day. New treatments, new experiments. Maybe she would be the first beneficiary of their efforts. Why not her?

Up until now, the thought “maybe I have a brain tumor” had passed through her head once every few days in an idle, disinterested sort of way, as if it was really a thought about somebody else. A character on a TV show she had been watching the night before, or a distant relative she was resolving to call when she had the time. But now, she ought to put some feeling into it. To panic a little bit about mortality, what would happen to her husband and the children, whether she had lived a good life, all that.

Well, maybe later. Right now, it was more important to find her glasses, which should have been right on her desk, diagonal to her laptop. Where they always were when they weren’t on her face. It was their place, as surely as if it had been marked out for them. But they weren’t there. Had someone moved them? If someone had moved her glasses, he (or she, but almost definitely he) would have to be fired. Her glasses were the means to the rest of her work, and her work was the means to curing cancer, and someone who was going to take the side of cancer, of all things, did not deserve her mercy.

*

Susan knew she had been assigned to read Derrida in school. She couldn’t remember if she had actually read it or not. Probably not, and that was why the name still intimidated her every time she encountered it (which wasn’t all that often, really, maybe ten times in as many years); it still loomed large in her mind as somewhere you could go to learn about the Real Nature of Things, if you ever had time for that. But she had picked up enough to know it was about texts and contexts; authors and meanings; everything that seemed solid really being made of sad. Deconstruction, whatever that was.

It turned out, to exactly no one’s surprise, that you could get through an average life just fine without ever really reading Derrida.

But it seemed there was something Derridan about the whole ordeal with The Letter. There must be, or why else would the name have resurfaced after all this time? Something to do with its layers of authorship and meaning. How Xander (because Susan was certainly, as much as she hated herself for using the term, TX ) had created this whole mythology around the story, bit by bit: first by claiming it was real, then pendulum-swinging to the position that it was written by a shady producer, an example of an Artist being exploited by the Corrupt Music Industry. Making its inauthenticity part of the narrative, lampshading it.

She felt, watching it all unfold via the OBM message boards, like she was watching someone discover postmodernism for the first time, thinking that he was inventing it. It was kind of cute.

It felt a lot like when her kids reached some milestone in life, learning to ride a bike or having their first kiss. (The former James; the latter Becca, just yesterday, having worked out the whole Dylan C. situation somehow.) You remembered doing it yourself, a little tiny bit, but mostly you just knew intellectually that you had, and that exempted you from having to do it again. You didn’t have to go through all the ups and downs and frustrations of learning. You could just watch it happen, knowing how the story ended already. They would learn; they would get over it.

So too with Xander Cross. He would pass through this phase of writing texts within texts, making everything a meta-commentary on itself, because at a certain point, she felt pointedly, it just got boring. You can only say “everything is meaningless” so many times (or wonder if saying “everything is meaningless” is even possible, because then that means it has meaning, which means not everything is meaningless, and so on) before you just get tired of doing it, and you put it in a little box called Derrida and go take the garbage out.

But this train of thought - she was taking the garbage out, Wednesday morning, after a quick, twenty-minute check of the message boards to see the latest developments - did lead her to one pleasurable conclusion. Xander Cross was not her partner in an affair, whatever the male equivalent of “mistress” was; he was no more or less than her newly adopted eldest son.