The Between Life of Lisa 2

How a novel became a novel before it almost didn't

I honestly never thought Lisa 2 (which became Lisa 2, v1.0, Calamari Archives) would have any readers beyond myself and a few friends. I’d published two previous novels: The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing with Two Dollar Radio in 2014 and The Rachel Condition with CLASH Books in 2024. Both books seemed to gather small groups of readers, with just enough reviews and mentions to pierce, gasping, through The Noise That Engulfs Us All. If Laing was a challenging book and Rachel a baffling one, Lisa, in comparison, seemed fairly straightforward, both in terms of plot (the narrative shenanigans were profound but directly implicated in the plot itself) and style (two narrative voices rather than multiple). It was, as well, a novel whose setting was closer to home: the northern reaches of Michigan, including the Upper Peninsula.

The novel was also one I could, under certain circumstances, describe in a few seconds, before a poured beer has enough time to settle in its glass: A playwright, Lisa, begins using a vintage Apple Lisa 2 computer to compose her plays which, as a result, begin to take on new and dark and violent plots. It was the most satisfying and easeful novel to write for some reasons that are a bit obvious and banal to anyone who knows me (my wife’s name is Lisa, for instance) and for other reasons that are more obscure, such as the fact that I, like the co-titular character, also used a new medium to compose the novel: an electric typewriter.

In truth, I’d used this typewriter—a Sears Brother electric, circa 1984—for several snail-mail projects many years ago, including Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint, which was the breeding ground for the Laing novel. But neither Laing nor Rachel were composed on that typewriter. Lisa, however, was. Although the process was slower it got me closer to something I’d been missing and that I hadn’t known I’d been missing until I began using the typewriter again. There’s not a word that I can think of that describes what that missing thing was so I’ll go back to an early version of the word copy from the 14th-century Latin: copiare “to transcribe” or “to write in plenty.” This comes close, to write in plenty, because that’s how it felt, as if there were no obstacles (which for me, when it comes to writing, often means overthinking) to obstruct the flow of the story from my brain to my typewriter.

There’s a section near the end of the novel that I remember composing almost as if the process was pure transcription. Lisa’s husband David has been disappeared by the very tools of his own invention. Their daughter Marin, who was eight-years-old when this happened, is now a young woman, an up-and-coming poet who is only now beginning to grapple with the impossible fact her father’s disappearance. Lisa narrates:

Lake Superior is churning now, as it always does in the fall, and you can hear the sound all the way up here in Briggs Hall. My classes are going well and my new play, Alice Doesn’t, opens next Friday at the little theatre on campus. Marin is coming in from Cleveland for the premiere and to read one of her poems at an open mic hosted by the English department. Plus, it’s her twenty-fourth birthday on Saturday.

She now knows what happened to David, for the most part, although I’m not sure she believes it. Although we live in a world where so many counterintuitive things that should be impossible are real—quantum computing!—it’s still hard for her to get her head around the bald fact of the reiterations and how they disappeared David. Her father’s been gone long enough from her life that any attachment she has to him must feel abstract, symbolic.

Does she remember how she used to rush up to him like the wind, shouting Daddy!, without an ounce of reserve or self- consciousness? Does she remember the elaborate breakfasts he made her on Saturday mornings, or the continuing bedtime story he told her about the bottomless hole in the field behind the farmer’s barn?

The thing about that passage, as unremarkable as it is: it emerged with no space between my brain and my fingers. Of course there was space; I’m wrong. What I mean is there was no feeling of space, of distance. There was no remainder, just the full number of the narrative unit. There’s a line in a remarkable novel by Quentin S. Crisp, a novel called Hamster Dam, a bunch of lines actually, but one in particular, (“In the human world, Between Things had been especially prevalent in the 1970s”) about something called Between or Between Things. It’s hard to explain, which is why it’s Between. It has something to do with the spaces, the moments that are offline, both in the WWW sense and in the temporal sense when our thoughts are not motivated by purpose.

Whatever it is—whatever tingling feeling comes with discovering the Between—that’s how I felt while typing Lisa on my Brother.

When I say that Lisa almost didn’t become a novel that’s because its first botched drafts were composed on what I’m using right now: my MacBook Pro. “The computer sits there innocently.” That sentence, which tricked The Paris Review to reproduce it in their “Bookmarks” column, was originally this: “The Lisa 2 looks harmless enough on Lisa’s writing desk.” But in retyping it out on Brother I reduced it to the PR version, a sleeker, more haunted line that’s also, in retrospect, a little bit funny.

In Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder there’s a feeling the narrator is always trying to catch, a feeling of genuine one-to-oneness with his being rather than a second-hand or acquired sense of himself. His evermore elaborately staged reenactments bring him, if only fleetingly, closer to feeling real again. (That none of McCarthy’s other novels manage to capture the woozy stomach free falling experience of Remainder suggests that achieving a Between novel is uncommon.) I’m not sure if I, too, was chasing this sick-pleasant feeling while trying to compose Lisa on my Mac because I had Remainder on my mind or because I sensed the distancing power of the Mac. Is that why I decided to ditch Mac for Brother?

Lisa tells its tale without the friction of telling. Unlike Laing or Rachel, where I felt the rough shells of narrative-as-narrative while I was composing, there was no feeling at all with Lisa, at least not when composing it on Brother. In retrospect, I wish I’d composed Rachel on Brother; a review at 3:AM Magazine seems right to say “The Rachel Condition seems at times marred by its theoretical commitments” which, to me, translates into “The Rachel Condition is not frequently enough Between.”

And yet—my God!—what a tall order to be frequently enough Between, let alone rarely Between. As a child I experienced this Between-ness often enough for me to remember to this day: the turn of my younger sister’s bare ankle as she landed hard from a jump from the swing at its highest point; the sound of the Maumee River outside my bedroom window the night of her funeral, two years later; the palm of my mother’s hand on my forehead as a vomited into the upstairs toilet when I had mono in third grade. I think also of the poets I love. Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from “Brightness from the North”:

We can say no one will come—the day will be empty

Because you are no longer in it. We can say

The things of the day do not fill it. We can say

The eye is not filled by seeing. Nor silenced

By blinding. We can say, we can say your body

Appeared on the table, and swiftly disappeared—

This feels as if it was made with no space between its conception and its presence on the page. (“An intensely private woman, little is known about her life,” reads a line from her Wikipedia entry, which I find sad and almost sweet despite the fact that it brings to mind how an elusive deep-sea creature might be described.) It feels like intensely private might be a code phrase for living Between, as if Pegeen Kelly had access to some space that liberated her from the desire to be seen and the friction that entails, making a life of Between impossible.

But I want that life. Her Between life, as I imagine it.

And Rachel’s.

And Laing’s.

I want Lisa’s, and if not that then Lisa 2’s Between life.

But since I can’t have them I create them, which gets me close but not nearly close enough.