PLOTS

I feel hopelessly stuck, so I go to the plot store, but everything they have is so relentlessly stupid I feel horribly depressed as well as stuck. But then this lady, dressed entirely in black, lingering in the young striver gets what’s coming to him aisle, looks at me and says, “If you’re looking for plots, go to the cemetery.”

So I go to the cemetery, and I wander around, looking about, thinking if at least nothing comes to me, at least the fresh air will do me some good. I go inside the office to see if they have a map, so I might find the grave of some famous dead writer I can pray desperately to for inspiration, or at least pay my respects.

“You’re a writer?” Claudine, the salesperson working there, asks. “You’ve come to the right place. Don’t tell anybody, but if you hide yourself near the grave of Henry Augustin Beers, on Wednesdays, if you’re lucky, you might spot Thomas Pynchon himself unravelling his next novel. J-448 on the map.” She circles the spot with her pen.

“Thanks?” I say, not sure if I’d want to run into Pynchon.

“But if you’re really serious, you’ll want to buy your own plot. Of course you won’t need it yet, but when you have a spot of your own, you can come by the cemetery any hour of the day or night, whenever inspiration feels most furthest away from you. We give you a special key.”

She holds it up, a long and old-fashioned type, with the bit, pin and post. I imagine it dangling from my keychain, and complete strangers asking me where it goes to, and telling them, nonchalantly, “to my own grave, of course.”

The plot seems like a lot of money, but I can pay it off in installments, and well, eventually I was going to need one anyway. Claudine shows me several, and I pick XD-757, beside a nice tree, on a terrace, next door to a couple of Smiths and a Lee.

Eager to get started, I return right after filling in the paperwork, and I sit there, on my plot, watching the birds and the joggers and the families leaving flowers, and that evening I write a story about a dog who is the reincarnation of an Italian hairdresser.

Everything’s going great, the ideas are just pouring out of me, when one day this guy shows up and even though he doesn’t tell me his name it’s obvious it’s Thomas Pynchon.

He knows my name. “I’ve been reading your latest work,” he says. “And it’s clear you picked a really rich spot.”

I’m stunned as the famous author goes on, praising various stories of mine that have appeared online in places such as BULL, Your Impossible Voice, Waffle Fried and The Heavy Feather Review. Thomas Pynchon, of all people, has been reading my fiction, and he thinks it’s brilliant.

“So I’ve bought your plot,” he says. “Here’s eight thousand dollars for your trouble,” and he hands me a My Pretty Pony lunch box full of money. I don’t know how I manage to do it, but despite the generous offer and my own starstruckedness, I haggle, so he throws in an autographed copy of Vineland he grabs from a box in the trunk of his car.

“Can he do that?” I ask Claudine, after she tells me everything has been paid off and the deed transferred.

“He sure can!” she says. “It’s not just this cemetery either: I’ve heard from folks in the industry that he’s bought up hundreds and hundreds of plots, all around the world. No matter where he goes, should he drop dead, he’d be no more than an hour or so away from his own grave.”

“Why would he do that?” I ask.

“He’s Thomas Pynchon!” she says. “Where else do you think he’s getting so many ideas for all those books of his? Anyway, I’ll need your key, unless you’d like to reinvest some of your good fortune on another plot?”

Of course I buy another plot. I figure if I just keep up the good work, and Pynchon keeps looking over my shoulder, I’ve finally found a way to make money off of my writing.