Discipline

Discipline

Chapter 1

Celmins

I was running late, and by the time I got to the gate they were asking people to check their bags because the overhead compartments were full. I was late because I love being in airports—that floating, anonymous feeling—and I had lingered too long at a café, thinking I had arrived early enough to sit with a coffee. I hadn’t, so on the jet bridge I turned over my suitcase and boarded the plane.

After we landed, I went to the baggage claim and stood, waiting, for thirty minutes until I realized someone else had taken my bag. There was a black hard-shell suitcase going around on the belt but it wasn’t mine, and I felt a sudden lightness, a disorientation. By this point I was late again, so after talking to the airline, I took the elevated train to just north of the city, where I was giving a reading at a university. While I was on the train, my phone rang.

The person who took your bag called to let us know they have it, the airline representative said. He’s offering to return it to you, or he can bring it to the airport and you can pick it up there.

I’m fine with meeting him, I said. I pressed a fingertip against my free ear to block out the noise of the train.

I gave the representative permission to share my phone number and stepped onto the exposed platform. A hard wind was blowing over the water. When I turned to look at the shore, a few blocks in the distance, I knew it was a lake, but it extended so far into the horizon it seemed like the ocean. Because it was freshwater, the tides were smaller, I assumed, and posed less of a danger to construction, and so the city was built right up to its edge. That seemed wrong to me. The city felt perched on the lip of nothingness, a settlement on the bank of infinity.

The reading was in a handsome Gothic building set on the quad. It was the first stop on my book tour—I used tour euphemistically, usually when talking to strangers or acquaintances about my trip. I had written a novel, my first, and it had been published by a small press in the spring. Shortly before the book was to come out, my relationship of five years ended. Then I had wanted nothing more than to leave my own life. By cobbling together speaking fees from universities, which had recently reopened to in-person events, and relying on the goodwill of friends here and there for a place to stay, I was able to plan a loose itinerary, moving in stops across the country. I had never traveled through America like this. After my ex moved out, I busied myself with booking events and finding a subletter for the time I would be away from our apartment, which was now solely my apartment, and which I could not afford on my own. This was an issue, I knew, that would become only more pressing with time, but with the month’s rent secured and a subletter installed, I packed my suitcase and departed.

The reading went well. I read from a scene early in the book, the one I had decided I would read at all my events, a scene where the artist is in her studio, waiting for something or someone to arrive. Then I gave a short talk. After, there was a question and answer session with the professor who had invited me to campus, and then the discussion opened up to the students. Though I was still relatively new to the business of being a working writer, I liked speaking at schools—the Q&A always seemed more lively, with higher stakes. I liked seeing the serious faces of the students as they listened, and I liked the way they asked questions that were nearly exclusively occupied with the structures of their own lives. There was something sweet about their solipsism, to witness how visibly they were constructing their convictions, which after this interval might remain in place for years.

Near the end of the event, a student in the front row raised her hand and waited for the mic to come her way. A tiny silver cross glittered at her throat.

When you write, do you have a plan? she asked. Or do you see it as an act of faith?

I wasn’t sure how to answer.

I usually start with a plan, I said. A scenario I want to explore, some kind of relationship or tension I’m interested in, something that provokes the initial impulse. But once I begin writing, things start to change.

She nodded, waiting for me.

So I suppose you could say from that point on it’s an act of faith, I said. I do have to have faith in the characters to tell me what to do, and I have to have faith in my own ability to tell a story. But it’s possible I have a different idea of faith than you do.

Other students had remained seated as they spoke, but this student had chosen to stand. She wore her hair in two puffs high on either side of her head, and they bobbed gently as she nodded, listening.

I see, she said. Maybe it’s not so different. In a way, you’re trusting that the story inside you will come out in the way that it’s intended. Right?

Well, I said. Sometimes I feel more like a conduit for it. At a point, it starts to take over, and I have to listen.

A beautiful expression moved across her face.

I’ve felt that way before, she said. Sometimes, I feel the story in my body. It begins somewhere in my heart and moves all the way down to my hands . . .

She held one out now and flexed it, her painted nails flashing in the low light of the auditorium. And it builds and it builds, and—once, she said, gripping the mic with both hands now, once, I was at work, and a story came to me, nearly in its entirety. And I couldn’t write it down—I had to let it build, this tremendous pressure, ratcheting up and up and up until my shift ended and on the train home I typed it all on my phone, my fingers flying, not looking up until it was finished.

She fell silent, waiting for me to respond. Someone in the audience shifted, as if to release the pressure she had invoked. A restlessness moved through the crowd. In the front row, I saw a woman shake out her hands and reach into her bag.

But it doesn’t happen all the time, the student said. How do you—when that doesn’t happen. How do you know when something is worth working on?

I remembered being her age. Earnest to a fault, so certain of art’s power and possibility. I too had once believed I had special talent, that there existed something only I could make, and that I deserved to make it. The student’s face shone with a lovely, milky opacity. I wanted her to keep believing this—that she was capable of great things. But I couldn’t think of anything to say in the moment that wouldn’t sound bald and false.

You don’t, I said. You don’t know whether something is worth continuing, not until you’ve started it. And sometimes even then you don’t know. But you have to keep working at it, I said.

I was using a microphone too, one clipped to the collar of my shirt. My voice sounded tinny and unfamiliar, lagging slightly through the auditorium speakers, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was actually me speaking. It seemed like the voice of someone else.

When you were writing this book, the student said, how did you know?

I didn’t, I said. But I had to write it.

How many times had I thought this, said it to myself and others. I had to write it. There was no alternative, no world in which I hadn’t.

After the event there was a short reception, and by the time things were winding down it was around three in the afternoon. I had been awake since the very early morning. As part of the speaking invitation the university had booked me a room in a hotel downtown; though perhaps it was too much effort for one day, I’d intended to visit a museum, too. But there was still the matter of my missing suitcase, and I lingered at the entrance to the university building, considering what to do next. In an alcove, next to benches where I supposed students gathered between classes, there was an array of flyers and postcards—advertisements for talks and cultural events. I sat on a bench and flipped through a stack of flyers, phone in hand. A well-known poet was giving a talk in two weeks; looking at the dates, I had just missed the An-My Lê show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Then I saw on one postcard a painting I knew. Or rather, I knew the painter.

My phone rang and I answered it. With my free hand I turned the postcard over so the image was no longer visible.

Hi, said a man’s voice. Is this Christine?

Yes, I said.

Hi, uh, I have your bag.

Oh, good.

I’m so sorry, he said. He sounded embarrassed, young. This has never happened to me before. Uh, I don’t know where you are, but I could meet you in the Loop, if that’s convenient for you. Downtown, I mean.

Don’t worry about it, I said. That’s fine for me. I was actually planning to stop by the Art Institute, so maybe you could meet me there.

On it, he said, his voice swelling with relief. I’m going so fast, I’m already there. I’ve got your bag, I’m waiting for you. I’m sitting on the steps. Man, it’s nice out today.

I laughed in spite of myself. It’s okay, I said. I turned the postcard back, looked at the painting. Abstract. Slashes of violet bleeding over dull gray, a smear of acid green. Then I set it down again. Really, I said. I’ll be there in an hour.