How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(36)

After a long pause during which you could hear Brandon telling his assistant, Jacques, to leave the room and get him a warm bear claw with extra glaze, he said, “Bro, you’re the second person to complain to me this morning about how I do my job. The first person had a bit more tact. Honestly,” he said, “reading your work has been painful. It’s business. Take that folksy shit back to Mississippi. I did you a favor. Don’t forget that. You’re just not a good writer, bro. Good bye.”

The next morning you got an email from Brandon with the following message,

“Hey Wanda, I finished the revision this afternoon. It totally kicks ass. Congrats. I’ve sent back a few line edits, but it’s brilliant. Move over Teju and Chimamanda. There’s a new African writer on the scene showing these black American writers how it’s done. I’m so proud of you. Always darkest before the dawn, Wanda. It feels so empowering to work with the future of contemporary diasporic literature. Tell David hi for me. Best, Brandon.”

Your name was not and never will be “Wanda.”

You opened up Facebook to the News Feed page and found that Brandon, your Facebook friend, had posted the covers of recently published and forthcoming books he’d edited. Wanda’s book, and all the other covers, really did look like greasy children’s menus at Applebee’s. Your eyes watered as you googled the published authors Brandon had signed two years after he signed you. You wanted your name on an Applebee’s menu, too.

Even though you were fatter than you’d ever been and the joints in your hip got rustier and more decayed every day, parts of you were a rider. Yeah, Brandon bombed first, you thought, but right there, you felt determined to get your novel out by any means necessary so you could thank him in the acknowledgments:

“… And a special thanks to that shape-shifting cowardly ol’ lying ass, Brandon Farley, the untrustworthy editing-cause-he-can’t-write-a-lick-ass Tom who’d sell out his mama for a gotdamn glazed bear claw as long as the bear claw had been half eaten by a white librarian named Jacques or Percy Jackson. I know where you live. And I got goons. Can you see me now? Goooood. Congrats, BRO.”

Instead you wrote, “Not sure why you sent that email intended for Wanda, Brandon. I hope we both appreciate the distinction between what’s marketable and what’s possible. Glad you’re having success with some of your authors. I think you should give my books a chance to breathe, too. Thanks for the inspiration. Tell Wanda congratulations.”

Brandon never responded to your email.

You stayed in your bedroom for weeks writing essays to your dead uncle, your grandma, the son and daughter you didn’t have. Outside of that bedroom, and outside of your writing life, you’d fully become a liar unafraid to say I love you, too willing to say I’m sorry, unwilling to change the ingredients of your life, which meant that you’d gobbled up your own heart and you were halfway done gobbling up the heart of a woman who loved you.

One Tuesday near the end of Spring, you couldn’t move your left leg or feel your toes, and you’d been sweating through your mattress for a month. You knew there was something terribly wrong long before your furry-fingered doctor, with tiny hands and eyebrows to die for, used the words “malignant growth.”

“It won’t be easy,” the doctor told you the Friday before Spring Break. “You’re the second person I’ve diagnosed with this today, but there’s still a chance we can get it without surgery. You said you’ve been living with the pain for three years? Frankly, I’m worried about you,” the doctor said. “You seem like you’re holding something in. Fear is okay, you know? Do you have any questions?”

You watched the doctor’s eyebrows sway like black wheat. They looked like a hyper four-year-old had gone buckwild with a fistful of black crayons. “I like your eyebrows,” you told the doctor. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just want my grandma to think I’m a real writer.”

“I’d actually like to recommend therapy in addition to the treatment,” the doctor told you before he walked you out the door.

For the next few months, you took the treatment he gave you and prided yourself on skipping the therapy. You told no one about the malignant growth in your hip, not even the person whose heart you were eating. Though you could no longer run or trust, you could eat and you could hate. So you ate, and you ate, and you hated, until sixty-eight pounds and five months later, you were finally unrecognizable to yourself.

One Sunday near the end of Spring, after talking to your two family members who were both killing themselves slowly, too, you made the decision to finally show the world the blues you’d been creating. You also decided to finish revising the novel without Brandon.

“The whole time I’d been in those woods,” you wrote in one of the last scenes in the book, “I’d never stopped and looked up.”

You spent the next four months of your life skipping treatments for your hip and getting a new draft of the novel done. You didn’t dumb down the story for Brandon, for multiculturalism, or for school boards you’d never see. You wrote an honest book to Paul Beatty, Margaret Walker Alexander, Cassandra Wilson, Big K.R.I.T., Octavia Butler, Gangsta Boo, your little cousins, and all your teachers.

You prayed on it and sent the book to Brandon in July. You told him that you had created a post-Katrina, Afrofuturist, time-travel-ish, black Southern love story filled with adventure, metafiction, and mystery. You wanted to call the book Long Division after one of the characters’ insistence on showing work in the past, present, and future.