I

The other thing that ruined my day was the death of my father-in-law. My ex-father-in-law. Precision precision precision: I am, after all, a writer. A professional. Arguably our country’s best. You don’t believe me? Check out the magazines, the literary supplements, the interviews, the tweets. And if you want prizes, have your partner take a stroll down the hall.

No, modesty has never been my forte. Socially speaking I’m a realist. Particularly regarding my own work. But I’m not a realist on the page. Literary realism is worthless. Dead as a tin can. Any remotely literary nation interred it a century ago, may Tolstoy rest in peace. Today’s gig is the spiritual striptease, undressing piece by piece so the world can appreciate the beauty of your soul. Fortunately, mine is irresistible. Where’d your teammate wander off to?

Here he comes. You saw the medals? Twenty-seven and counting. But I digress. I was explaining how today ended as dreadfully as it began. I thought that after the morning I’d endured with the kids (who else is going to take them to tennis lessons?) and the racket the neighbors made all afternoon (remodeling again, when the real problem of scaling the social ladder is knowing what to do at the top), I quite frankly deserved some time to work.

Would you care to sit down, Lieutenant? Yes, I’m with you: nothing exudes confidence like a six-foot-four-inch man planted on his own feet. I was about to tell you just how grossly wrong I was. I’d barely turned on my computer when the phone rang. I ignored it. Impossible you’d know unless you’ve followed my artistic trajectory, but when I’m working on a story, I have a hard deadline, completely self-imposed: two days. Chekov, Cheever, Maupassant—that’s how the great writers have always worked. You can spend years, even decades developing the characters, organizing the plot, but for the actual writing forty-eight hours max. I’ve got four left. That’s why I fired up the computer and dove in.

But of course. I read and re-read the sticking point: “in the elevator, they rid themselves of their grubby uniforms like a host of butterflies emerging from their cocoons.” And when I felt the next sentence coming to life inside me, in the same womb that nurtured my firstborn and my second, that contraption rang and rang and rang until an image about to crystallize in pure poetry crumbled into dust.

I was furious. Apparently Ramiro’s father, coming off his seventieth birthday, had the galls to open a window and go headfirst. Twenty floors, Lieutenant. They used a shovel to scrape him up. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if pieces are embedded in the concrete. You’re sure you don’t want to try the couch?

No one, not even the leftest of the left, is doing anything for the poor, the ones cleaning the streets before dawn. Imagine it, Lieutenant: you trade in your badge and your firearm to make an honest living with a broom and a pushcart, and one fine morning, mixed in with leaves and cigarette butts, you find a hunk of septuagenarian skull.

As you wish. The armchairs are something to look at. Kudos to him if you think about it: at the end of his days—the day after his last day—my dolt of an ex-father-in-law finally stirred someone’s heart. Even if that someone is as illiterate as a flagstone, living by the sweat of his brow. Sweat, truth be told, that’s never exactly profuse. I would know: I’ve spent a month studying the streetsweepers. The story—the humble addition to our cultural heritage I have to finish in two hundred and twenty minutes or less—is about them. No, not exactly about them. More about how, through them, the reader sees me. It’s a metaphor.

I’m on the balcony at 5am every morning. Just outside that door. Of course: it slides to the right. Smoking like Geronimo at sunup, I watch how they only pretend to work. They have a private logic, a closed-door competition to see who can do the least. Shirking: you boys wouldn’t know anything about that? Careful! Tell your sidekick the railing’s a little loose. No, I have no plans to leave. Where would I go? This is my home, the source of my literary prowess, the birthplace of all I have to say.

II

Agreed: no more detours. In a sense you’re right. Why waste time watching hobos when I’ve got all the material I need? I have the story. Unfinished, obviously. As soon as you and Detective Joe clear out, I’ll write it straight through. But don’t get the wrong idea. The story isn’t about them. It’s about me. They just marinate the dish.

Let’s pretend I was writing about you and your jackrabbit. Two representatives of the law knock on a novelist’s front door. In medias res. You boys would adorn the first line, but I’d be the central element, because the twenty-first-century reader is most interested in me. The enterprising woman, the devoted mother, the consummate artist—you get the gist. I also embody a certain aesthetic ideal. I know your professional reserve prevents your saying so aloud, but if we’re in agreement, just wink: I still turn heads on a Saturday night.

Why conceal the truth? I was—and am—a first-rate beauty. No stranger to the benefits and perils of a pretty face. I’m delighted you’ll join me in the living room. I couldn’t take another minute standing up. A reader wants to see the world through my eyes and to get inside my skin—not that of an anonymous streetsweeper or, say, a cop. I don’t mean your life doesn’t matter. Simply that, with all due respect, your story’s a bore.

You couldn’t be more correct. I promised to get to the point, and here we go again, circling and circling, never coming down to planet earth. But Lieutenant, I’m not to blame. I’m the victim of my prolific imagination, incapable of keeping so much creativity under wraps. When I finally got to work, after nearly colliding with my maid’s husband in the kitchen (I’m an artist, a creature on a higher plane. How was I to remember that the fix-it man had come to plug a leak?), my ex, with more than seven billion candidates on the planet, had an irrepressible urge to call me.

Was I busy? Inordinately. But the goon didn’t have the tact to ask. The same common courtesy I’ve boorishly overlooked! Can I get you anything? A glass of water? You’re sure? Naturally Ramiro didn’t have the decency to tell me straightaway. Bullseye, Lieutenant. The Ramiro who’s the father of my children. He bumbled through a myriad of half-made phrases. He tripped over his thick tongue. He stammered into a labyrinth of verbal flourishes, his sons being, apparently, the crown, the cornice, and the culmination of a flawless paternal line—as if I had nothing to do with it!

Drowning in so much drivel, I felt sick, physically ill about all the writing I wasn’t doing. Although I wasn’t at his mercy. Multiplicity is the key to the writer’s intelligence. Perhaps, Lieutenant, your eagle eye has noticed? While my ex bellowed in my ear, I axed a paragraph—and “in the elevator, they rid themselves of their grubby uniforms like a host of butterflies emerging from their cocoons” became “in the elevator, they agreed to abide their grubby uniforms until they’d set foot in the apartment.” The difference may be lost on persons of coarser sensibility. But with one flick of the wick, I illuminated a whole chasm. The text had come to life.

You can appreciate the fecundity and the flexibility of the creative mind. While my ex with a capital X blathered, I’d rescued a tentative literary missive from the abyss. Trust me, Lieutenant: I’m not leading you down a rabbit hole. Correcting a text is one thing. Creating it? Totally different. I couldn’t pen two words, not with that man diddling in my ear. Not unless Ramiro—God have mercy—shut up. I’d forgotten how cumbersome he is. The ease, almost the obligation, of despising another human being. Simple self-preservation forced me to interrupt: is the idea to say what needs to be said or to devalue the language word by word? You know what that valiant middle-aged man did? He burst into tears, blubbering like a grade-schooler.

He didn’t love his father! That made the spectacle so exasperating and obscene. If you’d warned him, Lieutenant, that his old man was planning a nosedive from twenty stories, he would’ve unlocked the windows and popped the screens. I can’t interest you in any refreshment? You’re sure? Not even a glass of low-carb beer? No, my ex never loved anyone. Slice off my pinky if I’m wrong. If the window’d stayed open, he would’ve pushed out his mother and said oops.

Tears have always been his calling card. He manipulates anyone gullible enough to listen. Every time we argued, the drama queen devised a way to open the spigot. Hearing his sniffles while I explored the possibilities for saving that defunct paragraph, while I saw in three dimensions all the permutations for making the impossible possible, was infuriating. My inner voice was saying: “unwilling to shed their disguises until they’d sidled into the hall, the three supposed workmen stared at the elevator’s nickel-plated door and eyed each other askance in the mirrors.” My outer one was shouting: you would’ve given your mother the heave-ho!

Either Ramiro didn’t hear me or he pretended not to. Ramiro?! I exclaimed, a thousand faultless phrases disintegrating in my mind’s eye. I stormed onto the balcony. I’ve spent fifteen years hauling around your emotional baggage and I’m done. Not a day more! My eyes took a snapshot of the city workers below. No, Lieutenant. I’m not getting sidetracked. I’m contributing to your investigation. After reminding my ex just how ex we are, I went onto the balcony to study the uniforms that, in my story, become disguises.

Ramiro—yes, my ex-husband, the real Ramiro—had sunk into silence. I settled into that ergonomic chair, the phone stuck to my ear, looking for the equilibrium he’d so uncouthly disturbed. And to my infinite pleasure, the next sentence, despite his intrusion, was waiting: “their disguises were impenetrable. The trio didn’t bother picking the lock. An echo trundled down the hallway when one of them knocked three times.” You’ll understand that his silence was intolerable. The end of the boo-hoo-hoo, his sudden refusal to mutter or even breath was eerie—almost worse than the tears.

He wanted amnesty: I’d like…our children…I don’t mean you…to join me at the visitation. How do you think I felt? Livid. I could’ve killed him on the spot. Don’t expect any shuttle service from me! And trampling my inner voice a second time: you know I write in the morning. That’s why you’re hounding me now! Noon would’ve been too late. But the writer is resilient, Lieutenant. While I defended my creative space, my inner person delivered: “hearing a voice inside the apartment, the false streetsweepers smiled at each other. They stared at the spyhole, convinced she wouldn’t recognize them.”

Amazing how the words knit themselves together, no? The loom would’ve continued if Ramiro hadn’t been, well, Ramiro: don’t worry, I’ll pick them up. Of course you will! I said, pounding the desk with the flat of my hand. Yes, that desk. Touch it. It’s imported cedar. I can keep talking if you can keep listening. I need you boys to clear out! I’m not putting on that primetime gimmick of insisting you show a warrant or allow me to speak with my attorney. I’m saying I need to work. Although the pain throbbed in the palm of my hand, the fertile seed of inspiration plinked against my ear: “convinced she wouldn’t recognize them, convinced that, squinting down the convex tunnel, she would only see blue-collar bums.”

But Ramiro wasn’t done. Before these fingers could flit across the keyboard, writing, “when the woman asked for their name and business, the men refused to break the silence, as if the bulbous, lidless eye had dared them to stare back,” my ex said: God help the sorry soul who asks you for a favor. I wanted to dunk him in a vat of concrete. To cut him into bits. The indignation choked off my syntax: you can’t…I…no one can. But my wily ex—again, the real one, not the bloke you boys think—answered, not unlike a character whispering in a writer’s ear: wake the kids. I’ll be there in half an hour.

He hung up. Before I could pepper his ear. I chucked my phone against the wall. The phone—or the shattered circuitry that once composed it—your guy’s examining at this moment. I shot a glance down the hall, hating my sons nearly as much as I hated their father. Yes, their bedrooms are down there. After the Rómulus Gallego and the portrait of Cervantes. Take a gander. I’ll wait here. But hurry.

I can’t let these trivialities keep me from my work! You’ve left me an hour and a half, Lieutenant—dazzle the world in ninety minutes or less. So get to it. Root around in the closets. Peek under the beds. I’ll be here, creating: “before the voice could ask again who they were or what they wanted, the streetsweepers who weren’t streetsweepers took off their wigs and loosened their collars, sure that the rustle on the other side of the door was footsteps.”

III

“Their surprise, not without a twinge of fear, crescendo-ed. As if the pupil of a prehistoric reptile were embedded in the wood.” That’s where I was when you finished nosing around. Yes, those are my sons’ pajamas. I helped them get dressed since they were still half asleep. When my natural compassion for a creature as vulnerable as Ramiro made me do things his way. That’s what I was up to when you boys waltzed in.

I strode into my sons’ bedroom and turned on the light: wake up wake up wake up. What choice did I have? I wanted to dive into the imagination’s nether reaches, but the inheritance I’ve accepted as my own and the responsibilities I’ve tied around my neck tether me to the surface. It’s the same laborious story every time I interact with the human race. The human experience gags me, it’s a padlock on my lips.

I have so many voices, Lieutenant. The voice telling you how I wedged my kids into black pants and button-down shirts, the voice explaining that you don’t have to be a middle-aged mom to grasp that two half-asleep elementary schoolers aren’t winning any medals for speed or good behavior. The voice that spoke to my sons—the real ones, not the rabblerousers you insist on putting in their place: you remember Grandpa Ignacio? Well, Grandpa Ignacio dove out a window—just how you’re not supposed to jump into a pool—only oops! there was no water. And no pool. So hurry. Your father’s on his way. Or the voice that, while I coddled and coerced those nincompoops, intoned: “the big surprise, the superlative of all surprises that hit like a blow to the teeth, came when the bolt turned over and the taut silence finally snapped.”

Even my longstanding and supposedly deepest relationships have been like a sock in my mouth. The rags of the person I used to be. How about a glass of water? That’s fine. Pardon my insisting. Not exactly the signature of an attentive hostess. Or an accomplished storyteller. You know what my family’s got to offer, Lieutenant? A lifetime’s supply of nothing! Nada from A to Z. To my craft—and to the myth surrounding it—they add exactly zilch. Why should I care that my sickly younger sister lost a baby? The cosmic order goofed and—serving the general good—refused to duplicate the mistake.

And that’s just one example. My mother recently discovered she isn’t attracted to her spouse. So what? It’s astonishing that Mario—the squat, puggy Mario who had the build of a Welsh corgi even before he went bald, gray, and obese—was ever attractive to anyone in the first place! Whenever I, from my balcony or on the street, see a repulsive face, whenever I’m ready to swear before heaven that that’s the ugliest man I’ve ever seen, I recall my stepfather, and the stranger beautifies before my eyes. The trick’s infallible. But we’re offtrack again. This time, Lieutenant, I’m holding you responsible. You could’ve warned me. Where were we? Ah, the children. I dragged my kids—the real ones—to the living room and sat them on the couch. Despite their crying and their confusion, I, to be frank, felt superb. As soon as they left, I could work for hours and hours, until the two days were up.

But Ramiro didn’t show. And once the kids started crying, nothing—no threat or bribe or plea—made them stop. Enough snivels! I said, forgetting that if you tell my sons to do one thing, they’ll do the opposite. I know my kids, Lieutenant. As you, if you have them, know yours. And I know what kids I’m talking about. Just like I know that the others, the ones you insist on mentioning, have nothing to do with me. See how you’re pushing me into the weeds? I was about to say that I changed tactics, anything to shut them up: you’ll have to decide if you want to look into the casket. Your grandpa will be in a thousand pieces. Like a puzzle no one will ever put together.

Never underestimate the impact of well-timed figurative language. And to top it off: you might never forget what you see. Silence. And like a concerto in the background or a brook beneath the trees: “the latch was free but the door motionless. The sweat prickled their backs and pearled their faces. Their hearts raced when the hinges finally creaked, and a thread, a sliver of light between the door and the jamb, connected the apartment to the hall.” That’s when my ex barged in.

His sons jumped up and hurried towards the door. I followed. I wasn’t about to run. From here to the front door is eleven my-size steps. But I veered into the kitchen, towards the drawers beside the sink, while the story, writing itself, continued: “the streetsweepers who weren’t streetsweepers threw their weight against the door, expecting a hand to grapple for the lock or an equal and opposite force to push back.

“But the woman was ready. She leaped away. And when the three fell, she was on them, the knife flashing before they could get up.” That’s what the most fragile of my voices concluded, despite the sirens in the street. You and your lackey came. You poked around, we chatted. And that, Lieutenant, brings us to what we’re doing now: talking about me, as if there weren’t three faux streetsweepers in the next room, dead.