Not So Fast by Mark Kamine

Author:Mark Kamine [Kamine, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbound

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Chertok finally let me get a full sentence out. That’s the least of it, she tells me.

Say it again, Chertok said. I did. Did you hear it, people? Did you? Good, good. Keep going. Keep going.

I got through a few paragraphs before he said, stop. After he told me why he’d stopped me, he said, but you’re on your way. Keep going. Was it me? Did I do that? Am I that good that I could teach you? Remember when you came to me? Crap. You couldn’t write crap. And now listen to you. Read those first sentences again. Go on.

As if in recognition of the prior week’s achievement, Chertok tipped his head to me as he rushed down the hall on his way into the classroom the following week. In class, he went straight to me, asking if I had more of that thing I’d started. Take it from the top and show me you can bring it home, kid, he said. Batter up.

Eventually I did bring it home. Not that second week. I had a handle on the material – a superintendent in a building placed in an uncomfortable situation – but didn’t at first know where to go with it. If some sentences came together for me as I lay awake in the middle of the night I’d quietly roll out of bed and head down the loft’s ladder to the desk and write up by hand what I would, once Kate was awake, type up. I jotted down notes on the subway or slipped a blank index card under the one I was working on at the gallery in case anything came to me. And one Sunday morning a few weeks after formulating those opening lines I figured out the ending and sat at the desk pounding it out, affixed to the chair, confidence growing as I went along and more than a little amazed when I typed the final word and looked at the clock. Six hours had gone by. I thought I had solved it. And it seems I had. Calling on me last this time, Chertok sat back and told me to take it from start to finish. He even, after voicing his overall approval, asked me to repeat a couple of sentences from the middle of the story and, when I hit the one he was looking for, assigned it a title.

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