So I wrote a short story for the inaugral publication of Stories From Songs, Summer 2013 (ISSN 2053-4396). It’s called Myth of Fingerprints and is unsurprisingly inspired by Paul Simon’s classic Graceland track of the same name. I hope you like it.
He had made the cover of Time Magazine once. Not his picture mind, but still, Time Magazine.
The show was in its third year then, already sailing up the ratings. It was Raquel breaking down live at the season’s end that really made it happen though. The neritic ingredients of damaged fame had proved to be irresistible. Her vulnerably aging beauty, still striking but tiring around the edges. The kindness of his eyes, her spontaneous tears, the unthinking tenderness he displayed in handing her the pressed white handkerchief from his top pocket. Heavy elements combined to enthral a nation. The intimacy of that moment was somehow lacking in voyeurism. It might just have been the two of them sharing coffee in the quiet of his own home. In fact, it was more like just the 17.8 million of them sharing the stereoscopic space of America’s living room. It was all that anyone could talk about for the next three weeks.
He had been at a party thrown by his agent the following night. One of those parties he had always despised. The memory of it lingered still, garishly bright, even after all those years. A gaudy loft apartment in the Upper-West Side teeming with bottom feeders and glad handers. Perspex smiles smeared with wine bought by the year and label. Windblown vol-au-vents tucked inside sweaty palms and meaty handshakes. Casual lines and fevered eyes. The heady realisation had crept over him unbidden during the evening; his was the name hovering on people’s lips. It was his face at the party’s dizzying heart, fingertips forever feathered his elbow, his stories were the ones unanimously met with rapturous laughter. It was not as though there hadn’t been competition. Chevy had been there, and Ferrigno too, but still, he was the one spinning in the centre of the storm. The woman from Time had pressed her card into his hand with a fevered intensity; “Call me” was more edict than invitation. Somehow he had transformed overnight from being the guy who was a vehicle for the talent, to being the talent himself. It was a disquieting sensation.
It was a sensation he had never adjusted to. Not then and not ten seasons later; standing in the sterile dock of a courtroom as he haemorrhaged money and dignity. It was a rarity back then to have such detail of forensic analysis in a divorce case. It meant extra lawyers, extra experts, extra reporting, extra shame and extra pain. In the end the pre-nup was worth no more than the paper it was written on. An unconscionable recipe of capacity and signatures and fingerprints. There was no relief, ancillary or otherwise, from the litigation of love or the lurid glare of judgment. His name was everywhere once more. He wondered – along with op-eds in The Post and The Times – as to how his glory could have tarnished so spectacularly, so irrevocably. He kept the cuttings hung above an empty desk, framed in mahogany alongside the fabled Time cover. Mythic mementos of a former life.
He was left with enough to buy a small valley home of solitude with only the brooding spectre of Tamalpais for a neighbour. A place as far from the suffocating hauntings of Manhattan as he could find. Three years of eliding West Coast anonymity on local networks slid into a muted and permanent withdrawal from notoriety. Reclusion suited him though. Shedding the chimeral trappings of fame, he learned to live alone. Gliding through steady years of burnished amber with Walden for company was enough. Anonymity wrapped around him like a blanket. Walking was breathing. Stillness was music and silence was song.
Eventually, sometime towards the end, he burned even the letters. Walked deep into the trees one evening, clasping a thick string-wrapped bundle of ochre paper, a box of matches rattling his pocket with each deliberate step. Three hours from home he sat down in a clearing and struck up a small blaze. Fed it with epistles one by one. Years and words burned away, curling to golden filigree before dissolving to ash. The final letter- sealed with her fingerprint- he allowed himself to read one last time. It had been written two days before their engagement in Boston, a lifetime ago. He paused before committing it to the flames, watching the spectral ink of her words wither and return to dust. For a moment, the merest flicker of remembrance, dusted with pain, ghosted across his countenance and then faded in the flames’ dying shadow. Slowly he stood and resumed his measured stride back into the dusk of the black-pit town.