Potboiler

It wasn’t easy. To begin with, he really was a lousy poet. He’d given up on the form sometime in high school. Moreover, the structure of Vassily Nabochka was extraordinarily demanding. Each canto was ninety-nine lines long, broken into nine stanzas of eleven lines of trochaic hendecameter apiece, adhering to a rhyme scheme of ABACADACABA, with triple internal rhymes on lines one, two, five, seven, ten, and eleven. What made the Zlabian language so tricky to master was its use of gendered, neuter, and hermaphroditic forms as well as a system of declension that had been mutating continuously since the days of Zthanizlabh of Thzazhkst. Add in several thousand textual variants, and a state of affairs resulted whereby a seemingly simple sentence—“Verily he loved him, for he was his beloved since days of yore”—could also be rendered “Verily she did love him, for she was his lover since long ago,” “Verily they did love each other, for he was his uncle since many a time,” or “Not necessarily false was her love for it, for he had not fondled it since Tuesday.” Pfefferkorn could all too easily see how this sort of muddiness would give rise to violence. It also accounted for the poem’s sustained popularity, for Vassily Nabochka possessed a quality essential to great literature, one that ensured it could be read by every successive generation and appreciated anew: it was meaningless.

Another major obstacle he faced was that Zhulk kept turning up to chat. Once or twice a day, as Pfefferkorn was getting ready to take another failed run at the thing, he would hear bony knuckles touching the bars. The prime minister wanted to know: was Pfefferkorn comfortable? Did he require more paper, more pens, more books? Was there something else, Zhulk asked, he or his wife could do to ease the maestro’s toil? These questions were but a prelude to the interrogation that inevitably followed, for Zhulk was unduly obsessed with Pfefferkorn’s creative process. When did the maestro like to write? Early in the morning? Late at night? After a large meal? A small meal? No meal at all? What about beverages? What role did carbonation play? Did he get his best ideas standing, sitting, or lying down? Was writing like pushing a boulder? Rowing a boat? Climbing a ladder? Netting a butterfly?

All of the above, Pfefferkorn said.

There was only so much poetry he could produce per day. The rest of the time he was profoundly bored. Other than Zhulk, he saw only Zhulk’s wife, and she resisted all his attempts at conversation. Mostly he was alone. The fluorescent tube never shut off. The lack of sunlight was disorienting. It warped his sense of time and made him drowsy. He dozed. He did push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and squats. He jogged in place, the chain rattling noisily against the floor. He projected maps of the world onto the cracks in the ceiling. He used the finest West Zlabian leakproof pens, all of them hemorrhaging ink, to play the cell bars like a xylophone. He marked off the days on his venereal disease calendar. The clap was rapidly approaching. He pressed his ears to the wall, hoping to catch a hint of the outside world. The temperature in the cell led him to conclude that he was far underground. He imagined what the rest of the prison looked like. He envisioned rows and rows of press-ganged authors, all of them laboring to complete the poem. There have been others like you. None of them have survived. It was like the world’s worst writers’ retreat.

On the seventh day of his captivity Pfefferkorn looked up from his desk to find Zhulk standing outside the cell, rocking back and forth on his heels. His hands were clasped behind his back. He started to speak, decided against it, and without further ado hurled a ball of paper through the bars. It bounced and landed at Pfefferkorn’s feet.

Pfefferkorn uncrumpled four handwritten pages, covered in crabbed script and marred by strike-throughs and carets. He looked at Zhulk uneasily.

Zhulk bowed. “Sir, you are the first to read it.”

Pfefferkorn read Zhulk’s own take on the final canto of Vassily Nabochka. In it, the king died before the antidote got to him, and a grief-stricken Prince Vassily repudiated the throne, deeding the royal lands over to the people and going to live as a commoner, tilling the fields and herding goats, finding redemption in manual labor before dying peacefully beneath a runty tree in the meadows of West Zlabia. It was the worst kind of agitprop: heavy-handed, impatient, and artless. The turns were improbable, the imagery fuzzy, and the characters reductive.

“Wonderful,” Pfefferkorn said in his writing-workshop voice.

Zhulk frowned. “It cannot be.”

“It is. Frankly, I don’t know why you need me at all.”

“It is putrid, disgusting, an offense to eye and ear alike. Please, you must say so.”

“It’s not, it’s very . . . evocative.”