The New Tiburón by Henry Peterson
We’d entered an era in which the significance of literature had detached itself from words. Sentences, heard in snatches on the street, were simpler, the ideas they conveyed more fragmentary. Even my friends were hard to recognize. At New Years, Julianne gave a toast without knowing what she was saying. Michelle handed me a page torn from one of her notebooks, saying she’d written a poem. I folded it in half and put it in my pocket, too scared to look until we’d made it onto the street and I’d sent her home in a cab. It was covered in wavy lines. When I came back inside, the rest of us talked about the buildup of tanks and the ever-rocketing inflation, while the imitation caviar dissolved into a black stain on its lacquer dish.
I didn’t get home from Walter’s apartment until 7AM the next morning. I found a Fedex envelope with a book inside waiting for me in the mailbox. Written by someone named Diane Salinas, it was about a journalist whose recent death outside LA had rocked my world for the better part of a year. His name was Harold Bench.
The book opens on his first job at a Seattle newspaper. Bench covers a group of biologists from UC San Diego studying whales. While they find the songs of whales evolve in incremental changes that make their way around the globe, there’s something about the way these changes move that they can’t explain. Depending on where and when they gather data, changes to the repertoire appear to move forwards or backwards in time. Each local pod occupies a different epoch on the continuum of its cultural history, while each pod, in turn, understands every other epoch through its own. Bench writes this would be like flying to Rome, only to find buildings in the Baroque style going up all over the city, as if the post-modern architecture of the 1800s had opened onto the architecture of late antiquity in the early 20th century, before exploding into a monolithic modernity and the Rococo of the 1970s and 80s.
It’s about these whales, and about this article covering marine life in the Pacific Northwest, that Bench receives his first letter, several months later, from a man who calls himself Carlo Gadda. In a journalistic style, Gadda claims to be creating a body of work that, unlike most literary production, doesn’t replace, but complements life. Given the recent appearance of marine imagery in the novel Gadda’s writing, he explains that Bench’s article—or Gadda’s experience of having read that article—can now be said to form a part of the work.
Five years pass before Bench receives the next letter. He moves to Los Angeles, working as a reporter at the LA Times. Traveling to Mexico to cover the border, he allows himself the luxury of a month’s disillusionment, drinking mezcal at a bar in El Paraíso. One morning, skimming the paper, he reads an article, written in simple, halting Spanish, about a docile shark that’s entered one of the area’s lagoons. There, beneath the subheading, is Gadda’s name.
By the time Bench gets to the beach, children are swimming under the shark’s belly, kissing its nose, clinging to its back. Holding the folded newspaper over his head, he wades hundreds of paces through clear water before he feels the bottom drop away. He reaches out his hand and touches its side.
When he returns to his hotel that evening, he finds an envelope waiting for him at the bar. Though it’s been five years, Bench can tell, as if creating the memory out of thin air, that the enclosed letter picks up where the last left off. Gadda claims that the true art of his life’s work isn’t in his novels and poems—none of which he’s ever finished—but in the relation between their production and the facts of his life. That the true creative material arrives in raw, undifferentiated form, waiting to be worked over by someone else. Someone like Bench.
Gadda proposes a trinity of books: the allegorical book of experience, the biography he wants Bench to write, and the actual literary production, effectively a reference work. So infinitesimally documented are the relations between biographical fact and literary form—the image Gadda calls forth is of a bar in Mexico, in the center of which a man sits nested-in with mirrors before a flaming tumbler, a man whose every movement is distorted and replicated across countless mirrored images, which he then copies, altering their reflections—so infinitesimally documented that a biographer could spend ten years tracking one motif.
Bench lights the letter on fire and drops the flaming cinders into an empty glass. He orders a mezcal. The words coming out of his mouth sound plagiarized.
When he arrives at his house in Los Angeles five days later, he finds an envelope containing the draft of a novel called The New Tiburón. The novel, Gadda explains, is the culmination of his life’s work. It’s gone through hundreds of iterations, has incorporated topics as varied as the sack of Cusco and the immortality of bacteria.
It opens with the protagonist, a man in his fifties, pacing the kitchen of his apartment, going over a line from a coroner’s report in his head. The blinds are drawn. The man sits down at the kitchen table, opens the newspaper, and starts reading the first article he sees. It’s about whales. It says that each population of whales considers its own culture to be the end result of hundreds of thousands of years of cultural evolution. It says that, at the same time every year, the instruments of the whale scientists light up with AN AURORA BOREALIS OF NOISE. This anomaly has caused so much speculation within the cetacean research community that an entire subfield of cultural studies exists to account for it. Its most radical theories are formulated by Peter Cermak, a researcher at UC San Diego. He argues the stability of time for whales is established as a single time in relation to a totality of times, that the songs of the whales form a continuous narration, relative to the dawn of their culture, of the creation of their culture, and of the lives of every whale in that culture singing the biographical song of their lives. The whales of Karelia call Nova Scotia June. Noteworthy is the random occurrence of the word Tuesday. The clear blue sky of the Puget sound.
The protagonist of The New Tiburón folds the newspaper. He stubs his cigarette out, looks absentmindedly at the green face of the digital clock, before turning the light off. Leaving the blinds drawn, but holding them so they don’t make noise, he slips out of the window and onto the metal fire escape. He keeps low to the stairs, hanging for a moment from the retracted ladder before falling into the dumpster and the bags of trash he knows will be there to break his fall. Sirens flare. He runs to catch the downtown line, stepping off the bus as soon as it turns the corner.
The city looms large in the novel. It goes on for another four hundred and fifty pages, framing and reframing itself without any coherent narrative structure. Its most interesting and embarrassing passages are long dialogues between the protagonist and the ghost of Malcolm Lowry. Lowry says things like: I’ll put together a team of the best guys you’ve ever seen. Bench would’ve thrown the novel in the trash if he hadn’t noticed a detail from his own life, on page 132.
He starts to behave erratically. The next week, another draft of the book arrives. It’s terrible, but it’s filled with even more echoes from his life. It begins with the autopsy of a shark-attack victim, a man mauled at twilight by a massive specimen with what appears to be row on row of hundreds of human teeth. After reading the autopsy report in the apartment, the protagonist stubs the cigarette out and sits for a moment in the silence. The blinds are drawn. He puts on a gold Timex and steps onto the fire escape. He hasn’t slept in forty hours.
Bench gets himself checked out. The doctor holds up a scan. It doesn’t look good. He’s listless at work, watching the journalists at the newspaper scurry past the floor-to-ceiling windows that separate his office from the rest of the staff. He plays with the plastic cap on a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He waits an entire week to respond to Gadda’s letter. When he finally types an answer, his hands don’t shake. When Gadda replies with a partial list of his life’s work—an archive containing no fewer than the drafts of some forty novels, thirty-two plays, nine hundred poems, a two volume history of Rhodesia, assorted commentaries, twenty-one boxes stuffed with miscellanea—diaries, cocktail napkins, business cards, any scrap of paper his pencil touched—and the entirety of his library, the majority of which carries heavy annotations—all of which contain, Salinas writes, details from Bench’s life—when Bench reads this catalogue, he shakes.
Gadda’s letters shift into an aphoristic style, his sentences blending with those of the novel. Piecing together the details of their tangled lives, he writes, their collaborative dyad will form the nucleus of A BIOGRAPHICAL ORCHESTRA. Given how complicated the meeting of those lives has already become, the collaboration will remain unfinished. They will have to enlist a legion of literary historians, biographers, and biologists to give a full account of the endeavor, before a second, more substantial biographical orchestra can be enlisted to cover the works and lives of the first.
Bench leaves his house, reading as he walks, stealing a glance into the window of a living room, at a television set, where commandos in a forest keep still.
Within ten years, writes Gadda, the countless drafts of the novel will be visualized as strands of bacterial DNA, the reconfigurations in each draft forming pictures in a time lapse that, when played, give the impression of organic structures. Protein chains expanding and contracting. Shoals of fish. Starlings fly over Bench’s head. They’ll take the translation software Cermak uses to simulate a biology within biology, its building blocks modeled off the novel’s shifting, choral forms, so a new and hypothetical whale—synthesized from those very starling-shaped proteins—can be entombed in lead and sent to Mars.
Bench looks up and sees he’s walked all the way into downtown Los Angeles. He tries to smoke a Marlboro Light in MacArthur Park as he reads the letter’s postscript, where Gadda continues to expound on his plan to reset world culture, the international effort to write the biography of a single person who is himself involved in the construction of that biography, thus taking a single, monadic point of world culture and turning it inside out.
Bench looks at the bench in front of him.
He and Gadda correspond for months. Material that made up the first chapter is reworked and placed at the end of the novel. The protagonist now stands by the entrance to the apartment building holding a warrant. The street lighting and winter rain make his partner’s platinum blonde hair light up in the night. A SWAT team, their black armor glistening, clatters like a disarticulated beetle up the fire escape.
One night, Bench wakes up to a man standing at the foot of his bed. He shoots the man with the Smith & Wesson he’s been sleeping with, and flees. When he pulls into a motel, after driving for hours down residential streets, he finds a letter waiting for him.
It’s an account, in the first-person, and riddled with typos, of the murder, from the perspective of the man he’s killed. Typical of Gadda, the story suffers from poor workmanship. The dead man and his motives are ambiguous and poorly defined, as if the author had dreamt up a scene he couldn’t fit into a novel.
As Bench reads, it becomes difficult not to remember, in place of the pale face he’s seen crumpled in the corner of his room, the sky over the Puget sound. The birds in the sky.
He sets himself alight a week later. In his hand, the story of his immolation.
Salinas pieces together his last week. The staff hardly remember him. When she gets back to her apartment from the motel, she finds a draft of The New Tiburón. It begins with a scene from her childhood.
A diver throws himself from a black cliff.
Henry Peterson is a writer and psychologist living in New York. He received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College. He is currently a PhD student in clinical psychology at the City College of New York, and a Pacella Research Fellow at New York Psychoanalytic (NYPSI).