Distance As Measure of Time

See this wall here? This was once a hill covered with scrubby bushes. Now look at it. Perfectly fitted slabs of grey rock of different sizes but all aligned and tall. It’s a tall wall. It's a sturdy wall that gives no hint of what used to be in this place.

Henry Watson Bishop used to sit on that hill and read. The wall has become something of a gallery but Henry doesn’t pay much attention to the commentary. Everyone has an opinion, he muses, on his way over to the park. Reading there isn’t as good because there are people there. The hill was ideal because even though there were peacocks wailing up above the hill and people down on the sidewalk, no one actually came onto the hill.

“Why do you stay in the city if you dislike people so, Henry?” This from Margie, his neighbor.

Margie is one of the three people that Henry Watson Bishop actually speaks to on a fairly regular basis. Now he’s reminded why even that’s something to avoid. Margie’s used to him so that look he shoots her before leaving bounces off and lays twitching on the sidewalk next to the empty chips bag and a couple of chicken bones.

The wall went up about five years ago. Yes, he resents having lost his hill, but he doesn’t necessarily blame the wall. It’s a handsome wall, very well constructed. There were many times when Henry would notice the ongoing erosion of the hill and worry about what would happen to that medieval-looking building up behind him. It had to weigh a lot. Nothing to worry about now however. That wall was going nowhere for many years to come.

But in the past year or so it was beginning to dawn on Henry that he was going to have to go somewhere. The millionairization of the city had been a drag, but that pandemic business seemed to have been the I-beam that broke the camel’s back.

Late at night when he's awake with his lifelong companion, insomnia, Henry is making plans.

He’d been here since the days of staying in after dark and the sound of gunshots at night. That had all felt adventurous to young Henry with his typewriter and his manuscripts. It was material. He didn’t have to be out there risking getting hurt to pirate the lives that were getting hurt. When an agent picked him up he knew he’d made the right choice to live here no matter what his mother's friends back in Manayunk whispered.

Over the years that agent slipped away. Another appeared. That one, also unable to sell any of Henry's strange little bits of fiction, disappeared. It wasn't that Henry wasn't producing work, he wrote compulsively and put manuscript after manuscript in those agents' inboxes. Then Aloysius B. Camembert came on the scene and took Henry in hand.

Over the course of the next two years, Aloysius put the brakes on the revolving door of new work and shoved Henry Watson Bishop's recalcitrant nose into the one story that would be his masterpiece.

"Distance as a Measure of Time" was going to make Henry and Aloysius rich to hear Aloysius tell it.

True, “Distance as a Measure of Time” was a PEN/Hemingway finalist, but it still didn’t sell. Aloysius stopped returning Henry’s calls. In all these years, though, Henry Watson Bishop never stopped writing. He just stopped showing anyone the work. He’d finish a new manuscript and put it out with the recycling never suspecting that Margie was rescuing every single one. Margie, the sly fox, wasn’t just piling those completed manuscripts in a closet. She made it her business to get more eyes, many more eyes, on Henry’s work.

The calls went unanswered and the certified letter was returned. This wasn’t the first time members of the Fellowship Selection committee had run into this situation. But it was sad every time.

Wherever Henry Watson Bishop was, the committee members hoped he was still writing.

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