Billy was closing in on the end of his long, four-hundred-page novel and was planning to release The Souls of Inanimate Things by mid-August. Ron and Peg Pearson were expecting their first child, and Ron, Ann, and Lewis, who had been talking about the idea for over a year, had found a wealthy backer in Ann’s mother’s first husband’s ex-wife to help them launch a new publishing house, Tumult Books, a small press that would bring out six or seven books a year, standard-dimension hardcovers with sewn bindings and traditional typography printed by the same presses that churned out books for other New York publishers. Mimeo was far from dead, but alternative solutions were slowly becoming available because some of the penniless writers from lower Manhattan had figured out where the pennies were.
As for Celia, she too would be summering in Massachusetts along with Noah, Amy, and Luther, not with them in a literal sense but bound for the village of Woods Hole at the tip of Cape Cod’s western peninsula to work as an intern at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Not rats, as Noah had forecast back in the fall, but mollusks and plankton, and although Celia was technically too young for such a position, her Barnard biology professor, Alexander Mestrovic, had been so impressed by her intelligence and innate feel for the micro-nuances of cellular life that he had urged her to accompany him to Massachusetts for the genetics research project he would be participating in there, hoping the opportunity to observe the professors and advanced graduate students go about their business would acclimate her to the rigors of lab work, which in turn would help prepare her for a future in science. Celia was reluctant to go. She wanted to find a job in the city and live with Ferguson over the summer, which was precisely what he wanted as well, but no, he said, she couldn’t turn Mestrovic down, his invitation was an honor of such magnitude that she would regret not going for the rest of her life, and fear not, he added, he had access to a car and would be spending much time in Vermont and Massachusetts over the coming months, visiting Howard, Noah, Amy, and Luther in Newfane, Williamstown, and Somerville, and Woods Hole would be the prime destination on all his jaunts north, he would visit her as often as she could stand it, and please, he said to her, don’t be ridiculous, you have to accept, and so she did accept, and one morning smack in the middle of the Six-Day War, she kissed Ferguson good-bye and off she went.
There was little question that he would be lonely, but it wouldn’t be an unbearable loneliness, he felt, not with the chance to see her a couple of times every month, not with the extended visits to Howard’s farm, and now that his last little book was behind him, the slate was blank again. More than eight months had been put into dreaming up those peculiar meditations on household objects and the imagined lives they had led before he picked them off the street, the nutty excursus on the broken toaster and whether a broken toaster could still be called a toaster if it could no longer function as a toaster and if not whether it needed to be given another name, reflections on lamps, mirrors, rugs, and ashtrays along with stories about the imagined people who had owned them and used them before they wound up in his apartment, such a daunting if not pointless thing to have done, and now there was one more little book for Billy to make two hundred copies of and hand out to their friends. The last chapter of the Gizmo Period, as Ferguson would later come to think of it, three small works of dubious merit, no doubt flawed and stunted but never lackluster or predictable, at times even effulgent, so perhaps not the out-and-out failures he often took them to be, and because Billy and the others were behind what he did, perhaps good enough to have established him as someone with a possible future, the potential for a possible future, in any case, and having spent the past two-plus years composing that trio of frantic warm-up exercises, Ferguson understood that the first phase of his apprenticeship had come to an end. He needed to move on to something else now. Above all, he said to himself, he needed to slow down and start telling stories again, to work his way back into a world populated by minds other than his own.
He wrote nothing during the first three weeks of summer vacation. There was Jim and Nancy’s wedding in Brooklyn on June tenth, there were the splendid days with Celia in Woods Hole from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, but mostly he walked around the city and killed time, making an effort to keep his eyes fixed on the things in front of him as the still unanswered letter from Dana Rosenbloom sat in his pocket. New York was crumbling. The buildings, the sidewalks, the benches, the storm drains, the lampposts, the street signs were all cracked or broken or falling apart, hundreds of thousands of young men were fighting in Vietnam, the boys of Ferguson’s generation were being shipped off to be killed for reasons no one had fully or adequately justified, the old men in charge had lost hold of the truth, lies were the accepted currency of American political discourse now, and every roach-infested, piss-poor coffee joint up and down the length of Manhattan had a neon sign in the window that read: THE BEST CUP OF COFFEE IN THE WORLD.
Dana was married, six months pregnant, and both happy and fulfilled according to her letter. Ferguson was glad for her. Knowing what he now knew about himself, it was clear that she had done well to avoid marrying a man incapable of fathering children, but much as he wanted to write back to congratulate her, other parts of her letter had disturbed him, and he was still searching for a way to answer her. The exultant tone of her comments about the war, the smug certainties of military conquest, the tribalism of Hebrew warriors vanquishing their myriad foes. The West Bank, Sinai, East Jerusalem, all under Israeli control now, and yes, it had been a great and surprising victory, and of course they were feeling proud of themselves, but no good would come of it if Israel persisted in occupying those territories, Ferguson felt, it would only lead to more trouble down the road, but Dana couldn’t see that, perhaps no one in Israel could look at the situation from the outside, they had been trapped inside their fear for so long and now they were dancing inside their newly won power, and because Ferguson didn’t want to upset Dana with his opinions, which could have been wrong opinions for all he knew, he kept putting off the letter he wanted to write.
Six days after he returned from Woods Hole, he went out for another one of his rambles through the city, and as he walked past a vacant lot cluttered with abandoned refrigerators, headless dolls, and smashed-up high chairs, an unbidden phrase surged up in his mind, four words that came to him as if from nowhere and then continued to repeat themselves as he went on walking, the capital of ruins, and the more he thought about those words, the more convinced he became that they were the title of his next piece of work, a novel this time, his first attempt at a novel, a grave and pitiless book about the broken country he lived in, a descent into a much darker register than anything that had come before it, and even as he walked along the sidewalk that afternoon, it was beginning to take shape inside him, the story of a doctor named Henry Noyes, whose name was stolen from pre-med student William Noyes, Ferguson’s freshman-year suitemate at Brown Hall, but a name that was pronounced as if it were the word noise and yet broke down into the words no and yes when you separated the second and third letters was the inevitable choice, the only choice that answered the needs of the story. The Capital of Ruins. It would take Ferguson two years to finish that two-hundred-and-forty-six-page novel, but one day before he set off for Howard’s farm in Vermont, on June 30, 1967, he sat down and wrote the first version of the first paragraph of what he would come to regard as his first real book.