Eastman Was Here by Alex Gilvarry

Author:Alex Gilvarry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

13.

Had he been transformed, Eastman reflected, metamorphosed into a man of action, fully restored to his long-lost self, no longer a pathetic being? The trip to Vietnam, as promised in his head, was supposed to incite the change he sought for Penny’s sake. He thought of all the people he had written about over the years, starting with the marines of his first book, to the profiles of actors and politicians and all the imagined faces in his failed novels. These characters followed a simple formula. They are in peril when we meet them and by will or stamina or chance they have a transformative experience. By the end, if they are still alive, they are changed, altered, enlivened, sentimental, gloomy, up, down. Within a book, life was molded, shaped into something that made sense. There was a morality in the act of storytelling. Reporting fact, or creating fiction, they weren’t so different. He was not the author of his own life. He was the author of his own books. Books imitated life but told of life cleanly, in a manner of comprehension. His life was not a book, his purpose in Vietnam was not adding up to a book, and his own story felt backed up like a constipated shit.

A knock on the door and it was the room boy returning. Eastman was no longer in the jovial state he was in when he contracted the room boy to spy on Channing. Things had changed drastically after the murders in the square.

However, the kid had earned his pay. Anne Channing was in room 53. He asked for the room boy’s name. It was Ngài, but he would never remember that name nor would he remember how to pronounce it. So Eastman just called him Nestor because he had remembered a bellhop in the Philippines by the name of Nestor, whom he liked very much. He considered the knowledge of Channing’s room and he told Nestor to come back in an hour. He’d have a letter for him to deliver. Then gave Nestor an extra twenty piastres.

Eastman had his portable Olivetti set up on the desk by the window. Only some of the window panes were crossed with masking tape, meaning some could shatter while he was working, but he wasn’t working, so he didn’t see the sense in moving the desk away from the window. Already the typewriter had accumulated a layer of dust. Had he been there that long? He had the windows open last night during the horrible assassination in the square. The air could have brought the dust in. From his position on the bed he stared at the typewriter. Words needed to be produced. Broadwater would be asking soon enough.

He got to the edge of the bed and stared at it. The typewriter. There it was. He sat at the desk and did have the nerve to bang out a few words. A description of Lam Son Square. When he got stuck he heard the rapping of another typist, working away at high speed.

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