A Novel in the Present Tense
by Thomas Disch
Nothing so comforts Grania as the present tense. It is like
no it is not like anything at all, for
she refuses to admit the usefulness of metaphor. The present tense kneads
her back muscles with
sure professional know-how; it fills her glass with Diet-Pepsi; it scents
the air till five o'clock,
when Henry, her husband, comes home to remind her of no there is nothing
she can be reminded
of. Reminders imply a past, and Grania has none, nor has she a future. To
suggest she might be
other than she is now would be a betrayal. She does dress well and is an
accomplished ballroom
dancer. The co-op is in her name, by way of helping Henry to certain tax
advantages. She has
read no she cannot have read anything. Her eyes may register successive
lines of print, but the
words do not amass into some boring meaning behind her in that abrogated
realm, the past. She
has better things to do between the hours of now and then.
All these freedoms that Grania enjoys are conditional upon her good
behavior. Were she ever
to do something awful--to kill Henry, for instance, much as he might deserve
to be killed--she
would necessarily enter another post-lapsarian grammatical mode of being
where the past and
her husband's corpse would have to be taken into consideration. Therefore
a divorce, here and
now, looks like Grania's best bet. A clean break and a quick forgetting,
whereupon here we are
again with the fingers of our suave masseur upon us, the paid-for and permissive
present tense,
who regards Grania incuriously, knowing only the information he receives
from the flesh
beneath his fingers.
jump! back to the Home Page!