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Stay Tuned to This Channel

Two years ago I stopped writing. After thirty years of trying to get published, enough rejected manuscripts had dropped through my front-door mail slot to overwhelm my house the way the furniture does in Ionesco’s The New Tenant. Every day my tirades against editors threatened to shatter my bathroom mirror. Enough! The minute I logged in my last rejection, I would slam the door on this wasted life.

Whenever my mail slot flapped, though, my mind raced with desperate anticipation. If Banshee accepted the last poem I’d sent out, I’d get the boost I needed to keep writing. But Banshee sent its usual form rejection. No matter. The verbal flood of my youth had dried in the channel of my middle age.

To dull the pain of closure, I filled my life with jazz, symphonies, movies and theater---anything to avoid the solitude that might start me writing again or, for that matter, reading. Whenever I picked up a book, waves of nausea lapped at the back of my throat; a month before I stopped writing, the Megabook$ shelves loomed over me and jeered me till I ran out of the mall.

It took six months away from the writing life for me to recover the nerve to browse. My first time back in MegaBook$, the mountain range of stacks revived memories that turned my muscles to rubber. I felt like a paralytic trying to walk again.

The safest first step seemed to be the magazine section near the revolving door. My quivering hand groped at the latest Banshee, then bumped it open to the contents page. What a surprise! Banshee published my poem after all. My joy flared like a Roman candle---until I saw the author’s name: Asa Trabula. But the poem was mine, word for word, line for line. My rage blazed, then my confusion smoldered. Did the editor mix up my manuscript with Trabula’s? Was I so depressed that I didn’t even notice the acceptance letter? What happened?

Neither. The poem was in my file, the rejection logged on my computer. In my thank- you letter I mentioned the mix-up politely. The editor answered:

Dear Saul A. Barta:

Thank you for your recent letter.

We received a thank-you letter from the author last week.

The author! I was the author. Or was I losing my mind?

On my next visit to Megabook$, a pyramid of Proper Channels, my poetry collection, rose in the display window. What a surprise! But the cover heralded Asa Trabula as its author. Not another mix-up! Only my pride kept my years of pain from running down my face. Since the notice said the author was there to sign copies, I would confront him.

As the purported author stood in the Poets Corner, my memory searched for his face, his thick hornrims, his baggy khaki pants---any sign of familiarity. Nothing. A stranger. But there he was, signing his name to my work! Despite bristling at the end of the autograph line, I strained to be civil when my turn came.

"Admirable piece of work," I said.

"Thank you." Trabula’s tone frosted my face.

"But there seems to be some confusion..." I told him what had happened.

"This is my work," he insisted.

"I sent it to sixty-one publishers."

"That makes you an agent, not an author," he said, then signaled to the person behind me.

I don’t remember what I shouted at Trabula, but the manager and two clerks rushed between us. They asked me to leave. As I backed through the revolving door, my protest turned my throat raw.

Grappling with my body’s mid-life changes...the painful personal assessment, the fading energy, the blunted sexual edge...was difficult enough. Trabula’s taking credit for my work and then insulting me was more than I could cope with. I fired a letter to the publisher, threatening to sue. Their response? They published Trabula’s work because it showed considerably more promise and originality than mine. So much for the opinions of editors!

Over the next year, my poems, fictions and excerpts from unpublished novels burst out of magazine after magazine on the Megabook$ rack: Paris Review, Story, Playboy and a half-dozen others---all listing Trabula as the author. I thought I was cursing Esquire under my breath until the manager approached, frowning.

"You’re disturbing the other customers."

"This is my work. Under somebody else’s name!"

"If you don’t like your pseudonym, just change it."

"You don’t understand!"

"What you don’t understand is that this is a business!"

Before I could explain, he threatened to call the police.

What was happening to me? Did a hacker steal my work? No. I didn’t subscribe to a computer network. Did someone find manuscripts I’d lost? No. The hard copies filled all four of my file cabinets. The material I’d written before switching to computer had yellowed in my steamer trunk. Could someone have photocopied them years earlier? Doubtful. But...Why would anybody humiliate me this way?

There were no answers to balm my rage as Trabula’s name debased one after another of my poems and fictions in the prestigious magazines that had scorned my work all those years. His prolific publications made Joyce Carol Oates look like a Sunday writer. Headlines splashed his name across The Nation, The New American Book Review, even The New York Times Book Review! The latest darling of the mainstream and alternative media was receiving every honor I’d ever dreamed of! Although I felt some pleasure at my work receiving recognition, my rage at somebody else getting the credit consumed me.

My insides broiled while my entire body of completed work appeared under Trabula’s name. Trabula guested talk shows and college campuses to promote it. Well...heh heh...what else can he produce, now that he’s used up my work?

I’d find out at his Inspiration College reading. Alternative culture aficionados, network news media, local celebrities, even international celebrities, filled the school’s auditorium to hear the burgeoning literary celebrity read his new work. The fools! Now that he’d drained me, he’d reveal himself as the unoriginal hack he was. I snickered in my front row seat.

I snarled when he announced the title of his new fiction, Tabula Rasa. He read my unfinished piece just the way I’d started it. Continuing past my stopping point, he read exactly what I had intended to write.

I charged the stage.

"Now you’re stealing my thoughts!" I screamed. "First my work, now my thoughts!" I repeated over and over, all the while trying to swing my arms and kick my legs free from the blue limbs that grabbed me, dragged me outside and hurled me into a police wagon.

The judge dropped the charges when I explained that Trabula was not only stealing work I’d written, but work that I hadn’t even completed. Clearly I was reacting to some injustice, he said, then paused before adding real or imagined. To help me gain deeper insight into my reaction, he sent me to a state mental facility whose staff would help me develop a more appropriate perspective on Trabula’s work.

"I’m not crazy! I’m not imagining things!"

The judge threatened me with contempt of court if I didn’t control my outbursts.

At the facility I poured out my frustration and bitterness to Dr. Slater White, who said, "I can understand why you would have these feelings. But are your actions appropriate in relation to them?"

I showed Dr. White the books and magazines in which Trabula was publishing not only work that I had started and never finished, but work that I had thought of and never written. "Here’s the evidence," I said, spreading it across his desk.

He glanced at the pile. "This is evidence of Trabula’s work, but not of your thoughts. I’m afraid your actions aren’t appropriate to the evidence."

"How can you say that! My work has been stolen! I don’t know if it’s him or his publishers. All I know is, I’ve been humiliated! Even my thoughts have been violated!"

Dr. White prescribed a medication that dulled my rage until it seemed to belong to someone next to me: a feeling observed, noted and nearly forgotten. When news of Trabula’s sudden death reached me, the self that seemed outside of me stirred with sluggish rancor, then shrugged. I might never receive recognition for my work, but I wouldn’t have to suffer the humiliation of further plagiarism.

If it was plagiarism! The medication’s calming effect allowed me to consider other alternatives. If Trabula’s work included ideas I hadn’t written, I couldn’t accuse him or his editor of stealing my work. If another dimension of time and space had converged with mine, I couldn’t prove it; empirically, my only evidence of anything was my continued lack of success. Then I remembered the days when I came home from work too exhausted to write. Once I sat at the computer, though, a whirlwind whisked together the dust of my tired thoughts and sandblasted literary sculptures with them. My productivity in the face of fatigue suggested that I was a channel for a force outside of me that created the work I used to think was mine. Maybe the force was so strong it needed more than one person to harness it. If so, Trabula wasn’t a plagiarist possessing psychic powers. We had tapped the same source, but he had gotten the credit for the work the force had created. Whether I got credit or not, the acclaimed work which had coursed through me attested to my superior channeling abilities. I was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. But I was an excellent tabula rasa. And prouder than I’d ever been as an egotistical author.

Dr. White considered my perspective delusionary and prescribed a medication so strong that I could barely focus on a page. Still, I followed Trabula’s posthumous publication of finished and unfinished adolescent writing until one magazine published "Prelude to Anarchy," a poem I wrote at fifteen, then burned with a blush at eighteen. Every young writer composed a "Prelude to Anarchy," a gush of sentimental drivel celebrating chaos. The force that I so cherished...that same force had produced this!

Now that I knew the force generated bad material as well as good, I approached Dr. White with humility; as a channel, I had to accept the scope of my output. Since I’d learned Dr. White’s scope of appropriate responses, I told him I’d suffered a sustained hallucination that resulted from a midlife crisis aggravated by my deserved failures as a dedicated but mediocre writer.

Ten days later, he released me. My relief at leaving was nothing compared to the relief of closure. For the first time in thirty-two years, I was neither author nor channel. A trickle of tranquility had replaced the consuming flood of inspiration.

On my way home, I stopped at Megabook$. None of my works under Trabula’s name appeared in the display windows. In the Poets Corner, I was glancing with detachment at Trabula’s work and listening with amusement to the whispers of people gathering for the reading of a rising writer when the idea for my first fiction in two years wrung my mind and spine: after seeing his work appear under someone else’s name, a writer discovers he’s tapped into a universal creative force. Its title came to mind just as the young author, Taras LaBua, announced he would open his reading with his most recent work, a fiction titled "Stay Tuned To This Channel."

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