The Generalist: A Romance

A young man sets out to catalogue the entirety of subjective experience—an inherently impossible, encyclopedic task that requires him to both act out and witness a series of encounters increasingly outside his usual, mundane routine. The young man focuses the project inside the small city he lives in, working out a schedule that allows him to explore its streets and alleys in the morning, write in the afternoon, then go “night crawling” in the evening. No brothel, bar, meatpacking warehouse, telephone marketing center, or gambling joint/sandwich shop goes unvisited. So as to not miss specific swaths of experience, the young man wakes at three to join the dockworkers beside the hulking ocean liner, rises again at nine to accompany the secretaries on the bus, then arrives at noon to sit with the janitors on their break, playing speed chess with them in the back alley. Each afternoon he types up his elaborate notes. Every four months he heads out into the country—spending a week at the beach, another in the woods, another atop a mountain, another wandering the back roads. He enacts this routine steadfastly for twenty years, at times losing hope in his project (convinced that all attempts are futile and useless in the age of Google and YouTube) and at other times becoming lost in its grandiose mission. His notebooks stack up as high as a barn roof. Rumors swirl around his masterpiece of living, though no one ever reads a page. Everything changes one day when the man—now middle-aged—gets approached by a young woman desiring to become his apprentice. She has been dogging his steps for almost a year. (He has suspected as much but dared not believe it.) He spends three years sharing with her everything he has noted, opening his notes to her, giving her tips on her stalking skills. Together they penetrate cabals of experience previously unobserved. It is on her prompting that they head out on a road trip that will take them further and further into the world, across oceans and over deserts. The day they embark, the man burns everything he has written. (They say a pillar of smoke can be seen from miles away.) What they experience next, the man hopes, will both prove and disprove the results of his decades-old experiment.