SandScript 2023 [Digital Exclusive]

Vince Says
River Lethe
Some of my last thoughts in this world will be of things Vince said outside the Circle K. The
first time I saw him, he was holding open a thumb-soiled copy of Moby Dick like a filthy bible
and proselytizing to a congregation of pigeons. “Melville was a mystic,” he says, and they nod
and coo like tent revivalists. “Far more coherent than our beloved Jesus.” Vince never feels
misunderstood. I like that about him.
Vince is always around so you’ve probably seen him but never really seen him. He sometimes
holes up in a concrete culvert near my apartment. I go there sometimes when I can’t sleep and
put my face against the grate where he can’t see me. In the flickering candlelight, scrawling
away in a dollar store notebook or flipping the foxed pages of some arcane novel, he looks like
an old hobo in a sepia tintype.
Since he migrated to my part of town, the city block has become a veritable easter egg hunt for
old novels. So far, I’ve found a first edition of Cormack McCarthy’s The Crossing squirreled up
in the shade structure of a bus stop; an out-of-print hardback of The Prophet crammed down a
stack of cinder blocks, and the poems of a Zen hermit cradled in the palm of an olive tree.
Vince should have his own newspaper column. He can sum up any work of literature in under
three minutes and it’s become a kind of game for me to pitch obscure novels at him and listen
while he cracks’em outta the park. This one time, I pulled out a copy of Night by Elie Wiesel
and he went instantly still. After a while, he put his hand over the book and pressed it into my
chest, and never said a word.
Vince survived Vietnam and afterward held it together long enough to raise a daughter.
When she died in a cancer ward, he fell apart and walked into the desert. Some hikers
found him nearly a month later. He says the light and shadow of this world forever
changed after that. He must have wandered onto a reservation, because the way he
remembers it, sometime after the first week he followed a dying coydog into the shade of
a kiva ruin. The walls were scrawled over with petroglyphs and in his delirium, he ran his
fingers over them and found that he could understand them.
He won’t really say much more about it, but I know he’s been trying to transcribe what he saw there
ever since. Vince says that “writing—real writing—isn’t just about making shit up. It’s about digging
up the bones of an ancient city and reading them like a hunter reads tracks in the woods.”
I don’t really know what that means, but whenever I ask him for advice on my novel he says,
“There’s only one answer to every writing question and it’s the one answer nobody wants. You
can find everything you need to write a Pulitzer in a community college kid, but if that's what
you want to do, don't ever forget that every asshole worth their salt in this world can tell plain
as day who’s put in the work and who hasn’t.”
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