Hypergraphia

The voice on the telephone was sharp and insistent, but Trace couldn’t hear what the man was saying because he was still half asleep and was holding the receiver upside down. He suddenly recalled a Chandler novel that started this way, a sleepy-eyed Phillip Marlowe receiving an early morning phone call from a stranger. And everything goes wrong after that.

“Can you hear me, Trace? It’s Greg. You have got to get over here and see this.”

It was no stranger after all. Greg Harrington was an old friend, a failed sitcom actor turned landlord. He owned a modest home in North Hollywood with rental properties in the rear and another apartment for lease above the garage. It was in the garage apartment a year before that Greg lost one of his tenants to self-immolation, a stunt that Greg, at the time, mistook for a case of spontaneous combustion until Trace proved it was suicide.

Trace flipped the phone around and fumbled on the nightstand for a pack of cigarettes.

“I can hear you now. What goddamn time is it, Greg?”

“It’s seven-thirty. Will you please come over? I can’t even begin to describe this.”

Trace lit a cigarette and raised up in bed on one elbow. “Try. Start at the beginning.”

“One of my tenants died last night.”

“Another one? How did this one off himself?”

“Heart attack, that’s what the paramedics say. You should’ve seen the guy, Trace. He’d really lost it in the last few months, became a hermit and packed on about two hundred pounds. There were empty donut boxes all over the place, looked like that was all he ever ate.”

Trace staggered to the microwave and nuked a mug full of water for instant coffee.

“Fat guy eats a lot of donuts and has a coronary. Tell me why this is interesting to me, Greg, let alone compelling enough to drag me out of bed on a hot goddamn Sunday morning.”

“He has no family. That’s what he told me. So I have to get rid of all of his stuff myself. And I think there’s something here you need to see, Trace.”

Trace poured two teaspoons of Folger’s Instant into the cup of steaming water. “Okay. The suspense is killing me. I’ll be there in two hours.”

“Two hours?” Greg protested. “You’re a fifteen minute drive away.”

“That’s right.” Trace hung up the phone. He had another cigarette with his coffee and then sat down at the keyboard. He had two-hundred-and-fifty words to write before breakfast, a slam dunk piece for an online literary journal about how “The Great Gatsby” influenced him or otherwise changed his life. At least ten other writers had also been asked to contribute short essays. He wrote quickly, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth:

“The drive to Yosemite National Park the summer of 1972 was, as usual, fraught with danger because my stepfather had been drinking again. When Bobby began drinking all of the ghosts of Vietnam slithered out of their graves and encouraged him to sadistic and suicidal actions, such as taking hairpin mountain curves in our family station wagon at 70 miles per hour. He took glee in the terror that invoked in the family, my mom, my younger sister and I.

“I was 12-years-old that summer. Sometimes when Bobby would pull into a mountain pass at breakneck speed I would close my eyes and pretend I was on a rickety roller coaster and prayed for straight-away roads. The rest of the time I kept my nose buried in a dog-eared paperback of “The Great Gatsby.” I absorbed all 218 pages of that lush novel during the drive from San Francisco to Yosemite and heaved a sigh of relief when we made it to the park in one piece. No station wagon crumpled in a heap over the side of a mountain. Limbs and life intact, mental faculties sorely compromised.

“Late that first night, staring at the majesty of Half Dome under a full moon, my young mind contemplated Fitzgerald’s tale of delusional love and I wondered what it would be like to pine for another man’s wife. Decades later, as I grew into a man, I would be accused of suffering from White Knight Syndrome, a need to “rescue” women in perilous situations – usually bad marriages.

“And I am frightened by mountain roads to this day.”

It took Trace less than ten minutes to pound out the 250 words. He did a quick spell check and then e-mailed the document to the editor of the journal. There was no money to be made from the effort but anything that kept his name alive and out there was just fine with Trace.

Two hours later he was standing in a cramped and dark apartment in North Hollywood that once belonged to a fat man with a fetish for Winchell’s Donuts.

“It stinks in here,” Trace complained. “Open a fucking window, will ya?”

“I’m sorry,” Greg said solicitously, cracking open one of the windows. “He’d been dead for three days before anyone knew about it. One of the neighbors told me she was worried about him and I used the master key to let myself in and I found him there –”

He pointed to a small writing desk in a corner of the apartment. On the desk were stacks of journals and loose leaf notebooks.

“He was slumped over the desk,” Greg explained, “and he still had a pen in his hand.”

Trace picked up one of the notebooks and opened it. The scrawl was small and childish and cramped on the pages inside like so many monkeys jammed into a cage at the zoo.

“There are notebooks everywhere,” Greg said excitedly. He opened an old two-drawer steel filing cabinet to reveal dozens upon dozens of spiral, loose leaf notebooks, each one filled from front to back with handwritten words.

“I read some of it last night, Trace. It’s not bad. He was writing a book apparently.”

“He was writing something,” Trace agreed.

Greg had somehow convinced himself that the dead man might be the next John Kennedy Toole, the overhyped novelist whose book “A Confederacy of Dunces” became a cult classic after the author’s untimely death.

“There might be something here, Trace.”

“And if there is, what are you suggesting we do, Greg? Steal his material?”

“No way, man. You know me. I’m more ethical than that. But you know publishers and people like that. We can be credited as the guys who discovered him, you know?”

Trace shoved ten of the notebooks – grabbed at random – into a paper bag and promised he would have a read and render a verdict. He trusted Greg’s instinct for literary material like he trusted those wingnuts in the Pentagon to leave well enough alone in the Middle East.

Late that night, Trace settled in with a bottle of Jack Daniels and the stack of notebooks. Many of the pages were flecked with grease and dried powdered sugar. The man’s name, Oswald McKenna, was written in neat scrawl on the cover of every notebook. On the inside cover of all the notebooks were two simple words: For Cecilia.

By two in the morning, Trace was bleary-eyed and half in the bag from the Jack Daniels and too much bad prose. The book started out as a journey into magical realism, the tale of a coyote in the Hollywood Hills who shape shifts into a human and infiltrates the home of a wealthy record producer. It wasn’t bad. It was awful. The writing was, at best, rambling and incoherent, manic and frenzied, words being spilled for their own sake, for the price of the ink, for the justification of the notebook and the paper, a mind cluttered with words like Trace imagined a mathematician’s mind must be jammed with numbers and equations.

“How old was this Oswald McKenna?” Trace asked Greg the next morning.

“I don’t know. Mid-fifties. Trace, there must be around 400 notebooks here and check this out – I let him use a storage locker above the garage. Well, I opened it this morning and you’ll never guess what I found.”

“Notebooks,” Trace said quickly. “Hundreds of them. Do you know anything about his personal life, like a girl named Cecilia in particular?”

“Nothing. He was a private guy.”

“Okay, let’s try something simple: Where did he work?”

Work for Oswald McKenna was a clerk’s job at the Barnes and Noble book store in the Media Center Mall in Burbank. When Trace located the manager of the store, he flashed a fake L.A. Times press credential in his face.

“We were wondering what happened to him when he didn’t show for work for five days,” the manager said. “He loved his job so I didn’t think he would quit without saying something.”

“Heart attacks have a way of silencing people,” Trace said. “We’re trying to locate the next of kin, in particular a woman named Cecilia. Does that ring a bell?”

The manager searched his brain for a moment and then shook his head. “Oswald was a pretty private guy. Good with the customers, knew a lot about books, fiction was his specialty. He did his job and during breaks he sat over in the coffee shop and wrote in a notebook. Same routine every day.”

“Really? How long had he been working here?”

“Three years.”

“And you saw him writing in a notebook every day for three years?”

“Like I said, it was his routine: coffee, a donut or a muffin, and his notebook. We used to call him The Scribbler behind his back but we didn’t mean anything cruel by it. Oswald was a cool guy. He’d been putting on a lot of weight recently, though, so the heart attack makes a lot of sense.”

“We have a little problem here, Ken.” Trace read the manager’s name off his lapel badge. “Oswald left some … unique items behind and we’re trying to find anyone who may resemble next of kin. Would you happen to have his original job application still on file?”

Trace’s hunch paid off in spades. Cecilia was Cecilia Sharpe of Culver City, her address and telephone number listed as Oswald McKenna’s emergency contact.

When Trace knocked on the door of the modest bungalow in Culver City that afternoon he wasn’t certain why he was there. The woman who answered the door and identified herself as Cecilia Sharpe was a frumpish woman in her early sixties. Her eyes were slate gray and there were still blonde roots in the gray hair that matched her eyes. There was a slight tremble in her lower lip and right hand that mimicked the early stages of Parkinson’s.

“I haven’t heard Oswald’s name in years,” she said when she invited Trace in for tea. “You say he left me something?”

“A lot of something, Miss Sharpe.”

Trace sat down on a sofa that smelled of moth balls and cat litter. When she offered him a nip of blackberry wine in his tea he graciously accepted.

“Oswald liked to write, Miss Sharpe.”

“Oh my. Did he ever. He always wanted to be a writer.”

“Well, there’s a big difference between the craft of writing and the physical act of writing.”

Cecilia Sharpe furrowed her brow, lost in the meaning of Trace’s words.

“From what I can tell, Miss Sharpe, Oswald suffered from a mental problem called hypergraphia – that’s a compulsion to write. It’s caused by a problem in the brain’s circuitry.”

“Maybe. But he was still a writer.”

“Had he ever been published?”

“Not to my knowledge, no. Perhaps, though, I owe you an explanation.”

Cecilia Sharpe met Oswald McKenna, she explained, when they were both in their twenties. She was a waitress at a dive bar on the Sunset Strip and Oswald was an aspiring writer who filled the time between dreams bussing tables. They dated casually – at least as far as Cecilia was concerned, it was casual dating but Oswald fell hard for her.

“He asked me to marry him on our third date. I didn’t know what to say to that. I barely knew the man. So I made him a vow.”

“A vow?”

“I told Oswald that if he ever wrote a book that landed on the New York Times best seller list I would marry him immediately.”

“I think he took that vow very seriously, Miss Sharpe.”

The following morning Trace rented a pick-up truck from the local U-Haul dealer. He and Greg carefully packed the 600 notebooks into the bed of the truck.

“This is insane,” Greg said to Trace. “Thirty some-odd years of writing in the hopes that this woman –”

“Gatsby had his light at the end of the pier,” Trace said. “We all need a light at the end of the pier, no matter how goddamn elusive or misguided the quest.”

“Does she really want all this shit?”

Trace heaved a sigh. “She wept when I told her about it, okay? That’s all I know and, yes, she said she would take the notebooks.”

They lifted the last box into the truck and Trace slid behind the wheel.

“Do me a favor, Greg. Next time one of your tenants dies – keep it to yourself, okay?”

(Originally published in June 2006 under the title “250 Words Before Breakfast.” For some reason this story has been on my mind lately.)