M.E. Breen

It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me that I become very lame very fast without structure. Just now, for example, when I was supposed to be working on, oh, I don’t know, a novel? I decided to eat a pomegranate. First, how come I never noticed before how much the seeds look like roe? Second, is there any fruit that takes longer to eat? In a sort of reverse-Persephone I decided to eat the whole thing, every seed, standing over the sink, as though determined to remain stuck for good in this underworld of none-to-low-literary-output.

So why should freedom feel like such a trap? Why should the feeling, I can eat that fruit! mean I must eat that fruit? There’s the problem: when no one is watching you, there is no reason for self-restraint, and without self-restraint there can be no priorities, and without priorities, who are you? If one thing is just as possible to do as another it becomes just as worth doing. And that, I believe, is a disaster.

Let me start at the beginning. I was laid off from my dreamy part time job on November 30. The sensible part of me knew this was bad. I was facing not insignificant losses, among them income and health insurance and colleagues and a place to go that was not my apartment. (I live in the sort of apartment where you can see the bed from wherever you’re standing. You try to write a novel someplace where you can always see your bed.) Anyway, this was a good job. We’d been going steady for about four years. But I couldn’t help thinking it would be fun to hang out more with No Job. The wild times we’d have! The pages we’d write! As the end of November approached, I started to persuade myself that I was breaking up with Good Job instead of the other way around.

“It’s time,” I said kindly to my office desk with its smooth-tracking and capacious file drawers.

“We had a good run,” I said to my office printer of endless cartridges.

“Where’s the magic?” I asked my ergonomically-self-specific office chair.

“I need a challenge,”  I said to the prepaid office postage meter.

So I felt pretty good on December 1st, and I felt pretty good on December 2nd. I was even feeling good on December 10 when I went to Walgreen’s to refill a prescription. I told the pharmacist what I wanted and wandered off to get cotton balls and read US Weekly. Ten seconds later my name sounded over the intercom.

“That was fast,” I said to the pharmacist.

“Your insurance has expired. You still want this?”

The “this” in question is not a life or death prescription. It’s what you might call a vanity prescription. It’s a cream. For the face.

“I’m getting COBRA,” I said. “Obama is paying for part of it.”

“Um,” she said. “You want this now?”

“How much is it?”

“Seventy-three ninety-nine.”

All of a sudden the skinny tube of skin stuff seemed not vain but insane. And I felt embarrassed, like I’d been spotted in the couture section of Saks by a saleswoman who knew I couldn’t afford one of the t-shirts two flights down in Juniors. What I mean is I felt pretentious and guilty for wanting to buy something that cost more than it should have in the first place, and, even weirder, I felt ashamed that I didn’t have insurance. Health insurance allows you access to medications you need, of course, but it also means you don’t have to differentiate between kinds of need. It makes things feel tidy, as though all your wants are normal and important, and everything is ok.

So now I find myself in a position of having to decide, at every moment of the day, what is necessary and what isn’t, what is more important than what, what is worth doing at all. It’s exhausting. I make mistakes all the time, and mostly they’re the kind of mistake that involves outlay and regret. I bought the cream. I ate the fruit. I lay on the bed.

I hope I get the hang of it. I hope one of these mornings it will feel more worth it to get up early than to sleep late. I wonder whether Persephone really ate those three seeds because she was hungry or thirsty. Maybe she just wanted to know where she had to be for three months of every year. Maybe she wanted to know what were the rules and what the limits, so she could plan her damn life.

I spent part of Thanksgiving weekend reading the first two books in a series of comics called Fables. The premise is that all the characters from the world of fairy tales and fantasy have been driven from their homelands by an evil being called the Adversary and forced into exile in the human world. Humans are called “mundys,” short for mundane. The fables who look human (Snow White, Blue Beard, Jack of beanstalk fame, etc.) live in Manhattan, holding various jobs in the fable government. The mice, pigs, foxes, giants, pusses-in-boots, animated playing cards, bespectacled Mr. Moles, etc., live on a farm upstate screened by enchantments.

As the series unfolds you meet different characters from different stories. The Wizard of Oz characters are there, and so is everyone from Lewis Carroll, the Just So Stories, Aesop, the Jungle Book, Grimm’s, Mother Goose, etc. Those last two get the most page time, since the stars of the series are Snow White, who runs the fable government (though merry King Cole is the figurehead), and Bigby Wolf, the chain-smoking big bad wolf who goes around in hairy and disheveled human form. He works as the sheriff for the fables in Manhattan and isn’t allowed on the farm because he’s tried at some point to eat almost everyone who lives there. (All the fables received amnesty for past crimes upon moving to the mundy world, but no one has forgotten or forgiven.)

The comics have their bawdy and violent scenes (they have a Mature rating, I think, or the equivalent of an R for movies), but mostly they’re concerned with the fables’ uneasy relationship to each other in a world much more morally nuanced than their own. They are used to solving their differences by eating each other or tricking each other or getting married and living happily ever after, so it’s fun to see them bumbling through modern life with their basic personalities intact. Prince Charming is a smarmy serial philanderer; Snow White is frosty and rule-bound; Rose Red is a rebel with a permanent chip on her shoulder because people have only ever heard of her sister. Blue Beard is a terrifying millionaire. None of them age, and they all have to support themselves and somehow get along for eternity.

I guess I find this series interesting for the same reason I find the comic Unwritten interesting: they both turn fictional worlds inside out, shaking the characters loose into the real world. I understand the impulse, because maybe it’s a way to see, and test, the strength of a fictional creation. Can your character adapt? Does she have legs of her own, or can she only survive buoyed by magic? Can you shore up someone else’s unsteady creation and make him or her do some different kind of work?

On the other hand, part of me resists this porousness between fantasy and real worlds. I want the world of a fantasy novel or story, perhaps of any novel and story,  to feel complete and intact and, frankly, safe: safe from me as I am safe from it. I don’t want to be bringing my mundanity in with me like some kind of pox, and I also like to take breaks from these worlds which tend to be scarier and nuttier and more intense than daily life. When I set down a book to feed the dog or brush my teeth, I like that feeling of closing a door that I can open again when I want, or leave shut. (I shut the door on Lolita for eight months the first time I read it — I think the longest time I ever did that and eventually opened it again.)

I’m not in any fear of the three little pigs (turned bloody revolutionaries in Fables) showing up in my living room, so I’m not sure what I’m after here, except I think my attachment to reading is essentially that of a child: to run toward danger and yet be safe, to be lost but always feel it in my power to be found. In one scene in Fables Snow White races to Bigby’s assistance armed with the vorpal blade, and you laugh and also feel nervous seeing her carrying it around, because it seems it should never be used against any less (or less ridiculous, or less murkily defined) foe than the Jabberwock. It seems it can only be misused in the mundy world, which is probably one of the points of the comic: look how we misuse our fantasies, or look how they misuse us.

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.