My Substack 2.0
This is the first installment as I transition Sex, Drugs, and Public Health from Kerouac-style historical spontaneous autobiographical prose to present-day posts on the process of revisiting my novel
I first started writing fiction as an undergraduate. But fiction didn’t start pouring out of me until I was in medical school. Somehow, in the middle of very active social life and 60-hour workweeks, I wrote two novels. The first, Transition State, is based on my father. The second, The Epidemiology of Flight, is based on my paternal grandmother.
Only my closest friends have been kind enough to plow through the first few pages of Transition State, a novel that I co-wrote with my friend in medical school. We once submitted it to a friend we knew from the East Village who was an assistant to a well-known literary agent in New York.
The next day, she told us she could see the agent in his office with a dictionary and a medical textbook periodically shaking his head as he tried to make sense of the first few paragraphs. Remarkably, he did this for a few hours before letting her know that it wasn’t publishable.
But The Epidemiology of Flight is readable. At least for some.
Now that I have left academia, I thought I would revisit this work.
I’m writing this Substack from the airport on the way to Thailand with my laptop atop a beautiful new backpack that I received as a retirement gift from my wonderful friends and co-workers at Columbia. On to the next chapter in life, and the first chapter of The Epidemiology of Flight.
The following excerpt has actually been edited, which my readers will find strange but hopefully also refreshing. Each excerpt will be presented in a linear fashion with a short preamble about the writing process, roughly one week apart. With any luck, even in late mid-life, this newsletter will still have some relation or sex, drugs, or public health, but most likely the latter. I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter One
The Library
Garcia Ranch
Santiago, Chile
December 8, 1932
Jorge licked the dust from his lips, bringing it into his dry, sticky mouth. He blinked a sticky, hard blink as he slid the 1898 Rand McNally US Railroad Map back onto the shelf. It was a late November day bathed in orange. The southern hemisphere’s summer. Unseasonably hot day and the dust from the old book surrounding him compounded his discomfort. Still, the feeling of the chalky film on his fingers made him feel accomplished.
He was visited by the thought that he could be a scholar conducting research in a forgotten desert outpost in Northern Africa. Precisely lifting his round wire glasses and centering them on the bridge of his nose, he checked his list against the books that were physically located on the shelves in front of him. He then removed the glasses, wiped the dust off the lenses and recentered them before going back to work. The metal was stained a dark gray in spots, giving them an antique look.
Though neither of them wore glasses, in his mind’s eye, the faces of both Engels and Marx hid behind similar glasses stuffed in bushels of beards and hair. He did his best to emulate them, but only managed a scraggly Fu Manchu.
Just as he released his glasses, the grandfather clock chimed, startling him. He stood up and trotted up the sturdy, silent wooden stairs and looked down the long dirt road leading to the highway. The post would arrive soon, possibly bearing the copy of Brave New World he ordered in English from New York City. The thought of unwrapping the brown parcel had not left his mind since he first read the review in Aurora de Chile just a month earlier. The luxury of a book published that very year entering his hands direct from the United States of America...the faint smell of ink and glue rather than mold and dust...the site of Huxley's words printed crisply on the page.
The new, horsey glue of a new book. The spores of an old book
As Jorge sat on the porch staring down the dirt road cut between the forest and the Garcia lawn, he contemplated the idea of place in the world. Until he met the Garcias, he relied on the publicly used books in the library, their bindings broken and lips dirty with the fingers of many before him, each leaving a stain. A few months before, he could not have imagined that he would be sitting on the porch of a mansion waiting for the delivery of any book he desired. To open an uncut first edition book. To carefully split a folded page with a shaving razor. Even to part a freshly printed book, the pages still providing resistance to his delicate touch. These actions on these nouns, unimaginable.
He read The Great Gatsby as an undergraduate. To Jorge, Gatsby’s primary redeeming quality was his use of real books in his library. But one day while weighing a fresh copy of this book in his hands here in the Garcia mansion, he had an epiphany; Gatsby's books would go unread. Gatsby had some genuine qualities, Marxist, even. Yes, it was a Marxist novel, he thought. Gatsby had surrounded himself with phonies who cared about nothing more than picnics or drives on Long Island. Fake bindings produced for the new rich (and unnecessarily cost conscious) of this world would have been a better purchase for Gatsby, if only he had subsidized the content of the real books for the poor.
Imagine, the proletariat having access to The Great Gatsby in Russia, he considered. The Marxist revolution would have happened sooner and spread more broadly. When the collapse of capitalism in Chile began on that famous Monday three years earlier, he imagined that it was just a matter of time before the Garcias’ fortune would vanish. They might have escaped the initial crash, but they would certainly fall victim to the revolutions that would soon spread around the world. A new future was upon us, but it would still take some time. The people would need more education before a just world could be built.
Horrible, but necessary acts of subversion must be performed, he reasoned. Swann's Way was the first to go. The book's innards had been carefully dissected away and had been replaced with those of a German book, with smaller pages and in paperback. (A romance novel.) He simply glued the book in its entirety into the hard bindings of Swan’s Way. The excess horse glue caused some pages of the book to clump together, but no matter. It would not ever be opened.
It was not always possible to find a reasonably-sized match in the pulp stores in town. There was leeway in the girth, but not much in the height and width. He considered the possibility that Garcia would inspect his work and pull a book or two out. Although he had put some hours into extracting these expensive books for his own library, there were many that would have to stay on the shelf for lack of a good match. Home to Harlem was one casualty. It sat there pure and nuzzled between other unopened books from the Harlem Renaissance.
He reckoned, one day he would be back for those books. In the meantime, he wouldn’t stoop to ask for water, drinking instead from his own canteen. He would accept nothing more from these monsters than a scrap of their literary treasure and a small transfer of their wealth once his job was completed.
And the gift of desire fulfilled. His fantasy purchases often merged with his dreams. Once, he jumped out of bed to rush to his desk to jot down titles of great works that he only realized the next morning did not exist. His job felt something like love: fearful and uncertain, pressed and desired, warm but not satisfying until the book was in his hand, his eyes on the text.
A carriage clumped by on the distant highway, parting a herd of cows, their own hoofbeats filtering outward, muted. Jorge squinted to see whether there was a line of car traffic stuck behind the cart, but there was nothing but the fading sound of metal horseshoe against packed dirt. He took a sip of water from the canteen and stared at the cows, which had resettled by the side of the road. When the sun hit the top of the tree to the west, he would go back to work.
He called one of the Mapuche Indian maids.
“The mail has not come yet today?”
He shook her head in silent deference.
“May I have a biscuit?” He followed. This pleasure in the authority to command and have your wish fulfilled.
Home to Harlem. It was almost certainly the only copy in all of Chile. He read it in 3 short days before placing it on the shelf. The advantage of being a graduate student is that the 15-hour workweek began and ended when it fit his schedule. Books were easy to slip in and out. The inventory would be taken at the end.
The maid came in, holding a biscuit on a plate sitting atop a cloth napkin. It smelled of dough and warm butter. Just as he turned to take it, he again heard hoof beats growing louder from the distance.
A carriage had turned into the driveway. The white paint peeled off the carriage. The carefully hand painted letters across the bottom reading, “Service of Mail and Telegrams,” were splattered with mud. The whole affair—the mangy horses, the driver with a torn coat, the wheel missing a spoke—looked even worse for the wear as it turned down the perfectly manicured landscaping of the Garcia ranch. But it came delivering a delicious parcel.
Jorge placed the biscuit distractedly on the bookshelf and went to meet the carriage. This time, the driver gave him the OK sign. Meeting half-way down the manicured driveway, Jorge took the package and decided to leave the rest of his work for tomorrow. The carriage continued forward to turn around in the rotunda of the mansion as Jorge caressed the book in his hand. Hugging it to his chest, he walked down the aisle of low-cut, perfectly square shrubs bordering an level grass lawn. The birds sang from the forest at the end of the road.
The driver was taking his time, chatting with the house staff in the distance. Jorge continued marching slowly down the road waiting for his ride home, feeling the flat book pressing the buttons of his shirt into his chest.
“Oy!” he said as the driver passed.
“No passengers. One of the drivers got into trouble after a package went missing. Hard times,” the driver said.
Jorge looked a little confused, but his attention was so directed at the book, he waived the driver on.
His hunger. Stopping at the end of the road, he weighed the book in his hand and inspected the return address, which had been hand-written rather than typed. He found a stump next to the main road bordering the forest. He gently placed the book on his lap and ran his fingers over the wrapping. He delicately untied the twine, waiting patiently to slip his finger under the threshold of the wrapping paper, feeling the scratchy pages underneath. Lifting the paper by the edges, he slowly slid it off, revealing the bold blue cover.
The book looked as if it had come from the future. The capitalized block white letters that contrasted with the blue ink background felt paradoxically smooth and easy on the eye. A loud whisper. Nestled between the title and the author's name was an abstract image of the world falling far below an airplane. It had a smooth texture to it, even as it had already begun to collect a few scattered particles of dust visible in the late afternoon sun reflecting off the cover. The book smelled of licorice. Perhaps it had been shipped with candy on the way. He slowly opened the cover and began to read until the light faded so much that he had to return to his feet.
Jorge had no lantern, so he had to make his way quickly through the fading light. Soon, he realized he was trapped in the dark. He back traced the road to the Garcia Mansion, following the light brown contour of the dust against the dark green vegetation on the road. He snuck through the back down into the library, feeling the doorknob, the stairs, and the walls in the dark. He slid his hand along the bookshelf in search of the biscuit. As soon as he found it, he could feel the tiny feet of ants tickling his skin. He lifted the biscuit and shook it violently, but some ants crawled up his arm under his sleeve. He lifted it to place it in his mouth, the ants forming a spicy crust on a thick, buttery flour that melted into a dough in his mouth.
Having eaten something, he curled up on the couch. At the top of the stairs, he could see the light from lanterns and hear people talking, eating. The maid’s shoes tapped on the wooden floor in a line from the kitchen to the table. Below him, the ants carried crumbs to their colony and then returned for more.
The next day, he rose with the sun and wandered outside, the book still in his hand. He sat and waited for a carriage or an automobile, but none passed at that hour. Smelling his armpit, he returned to the house and asked the maid for some breakfast. Bread, coffee, jam, and a bowl of sugar. He quickly chewed the bread, wet it with coffee, and swallowed the partially chewed pieces. It scratched the itch in his esophagus. After he had finished the bread, he poured a spoon of sugar into his mouth and let it slowly dissolve with the last sip of coffee. The last jolt that would temper the pangs of hunger.
Then, it was back to dust and old encyclopedias. On the bottom two shelves, he placed sundry atlases, a German encyclopedia set, and various forgotten Spanish titles that were left over from the old library. Above these, and in plain view of anyone visiting the library, was a chronologically ordered selection of books. They started in the 1800s and moved to authors who were contemporary: Emerson and Thoreau were followed by Proust, Twain, and both Wordsworths. He placed Brave New World on the top of the highest shelf for safekeeping.
He followed the Wordswoths with Bertolt Brecht before reaching the recently acquired Harlem Renaissance. After all, this was the New World, he reasoned. There were colonists, and there were the colonized. No matter how much wealth the Garcia family accumulated, the colonized would remain colonized until freed by intellectual curiosity.
The chronological order of the bookshelf from bottom to top, the presence of primarily classic works, and the mostly pristine bindings, generally gave it the superficial appearance of what it was: the wealthy trying to appear more elite still. Claude McKay, Nelly Larson, and other renaissance writers, at the head of the snaking books, along with the strange collection of German titles, maritime maps, and the encyclopedia at the tail, imbued the collection with the sense that its owner was a bit eccentric, and perhaps even genuine. Creating a genuine collection was, after all, what he was paid to do, proud to do.
After placing the last book in the shelf, Jorge couldn’t help but feel a touch of pride. His job was done. Ten book innards had been rescued and only three books had gone missing altogether if one counted the book he would soon take from the top of the shelf. He promised to return once more to place a final book. He never returned, and the Garcias forgot about him no sooner than he left the door. The imagined accountant never visited. Jorge had bindings made for the misappropriated books by a classmate who bound books as a hobby. The misappropriated books would follow him for a few moves before he sold some of them to a local bookshop.
Over the next year, the Garcia’s young maid dusted and reconfigured the senator’s books. Aesthetic considerations demanded that they be arranged by height rather than content, with the smallest books at the top and the largest at the bottom. A knee-high replica of Michelangelo’s David stood by the door, his gaze directing visitors to the maritime books just above the 1876 Rand McNally Railroad Map.
The books sat in this geometric configuration, unread and without any additions, until a curious Mapuche Indian girl, Griselda Amupilmo, appeared in the Garcia household in the spring of 1937. Griselda. The admixture of these books and Griselda Amupilma was a potion that would grind the Garcia household to its raw, fleshy core.