Fugue # 2

- Hi, love the book. I’m a writing student, and I have a question about your process. My question is this: What have you found is the best breakdown of your time? Like, are you a better writer when you read more and write less, or when you write more and read less?
- When I read and write more, ha!

Zed’s phoney keep-your-distance laugh answered on cue by the audience’s own. The questions were rarely deeper than that. How do you write your women so real? Are you married? Do you see what I’m saying? If you were a tree...

Parried and thrusted, deflected and guffawed and pshawed away. Zed in his element, letting them in on his craft, revealing himself, or anyway the self he played at these signing things. Anecdoting, then lulling them with readings from a new printing of the apparently rediscovered Mt. Fuji.

Life is as hard as you make it (this is sounding familiar), and the future is as bright as you can imagine: quiet and far away moving closer, louder and faster, and then a crescendo, and the sky is filled with triumphant clouds - moving and majestic, laced in blue in purple in pink in orange, framed below by houses and trees, above by God. And stars, just beginning to appear in the westward falling night.

Later, after the You. Are. Fine. passage, there was time for a few more questions. A tap at the microphone halfway up the center aisle. The voice as familiar as his own, the spotlights blocking the face: "Are you really Neil Marbell?"