The Written
The room is a bedroom, and not an abnormal bedroom. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor. I cover the walls in old movie posters (the likes of Gone With the Wind and Bringing Up Baby), shelves full of mystery novels (by the likes of Robert B. Parker and Stuart Kaminsky), and a closet filled with clothes.
Jack wakes up and goes on about his normal routine. I have him set out his clothes for the day, fold his sleeping pants and set them aside, hop in the shower. He cleans himself, dries off and shaves. When he had finally clears the mirror of fog, he grooms himself and brushes his teeth.
As he is brushing his teeth he looks in the mirror and he sees a face looking back at him, a face he has never seen.He sees my face.
It is now that Jack realizes he is a figment of my imagination.
Jack is sitting in his dining room, sipping coffee and leafing through the morning paper. “So, how does this work,” he asks.
My words appear to him in the paper, on the front page. “What do you mean?”
“Well, do you just tell me what to do and I do it? Is that how we go about things?”
“Sometimes I do,” I write in the paper. “But sometimes you get away from me and do your own thing. Not often, but sometimes. That’s the nature of a fictional character.”
“So I do have free will?”
“Some,” I write. “Try it. Do something of your own accord.”
Jack does nothing. We both wait.
“Why didn’t you do anything?” I ask.
“Maybe I was testing you,” he says. “Maybe because you wanted me to do something, I didn’t do it, therefore proving my independence.”
“Or maybe,” I suggest, “maybe you didn’t do anything because I didn’t write you doing anything.”
“There’s always that,” he admits. He thinks for a moment. “So I have no control over myself?”
“I don’t know.” This time, instead of using the newspaper, I am a thought in his head, appearing as a completely different voice, a voice that he has never heard before. “Authors always talk about how eventually their characters develop thoughts and actions of their own and the author is basically a vessel for these things. Maybe you just need time. Development.”
“How much time?”
“You got me. I’m kind of new to the whole thing myself. Why don’t you just go about your routine and we’ll see what happens?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Jack says as he gets to his feet. He puts his coffee cup in the dishwasher, folds his newspaper, and grabs his car keys. He slips on his jacket and puts his hand on the doorknob, but pauses.
“Is this just my routine because you say so?”
“There’s definitely a chance,” I think to him. “But think about this—are you only questioning it because I make you?”
“This is getting really confusing.”
“I know. Best not to think about it.”
He shrugs and pulls open the door and walks out to his car. He looks over his 1990 Ford Taurus, rusting, with a bit of disdain.
“You couldn’t give me something a little better than this pile?”
He looks over his 2005 Jaguar XK proudly before slipping in and starting it. “Thank you god,” he says.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” says the voice on the radio. “I’m not god. I don’t believe in god, and neither do you.”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “Wait—do I just not believe because you don’t?”
“I haven’t thought of that,” said the radio. “But now that I do, you have the same beliefs I do, you know the same things I do, and you even have the same taste in women I do.”
“You like black hair too, huh?”
“You’re damned right,” I say.
Halfway to work, Jack takes a left when he should take a right.
“Where are you going?” I ask over the radio.
“I decided not to go to work today.”
“You decided?”
“Yeah—I think so.”
“Can you be sure it was your decision?”
“Not entirely.”
“So why don’t you just go to work and let the chips fall where they may? If what some authors say is true, you’ll be doing what you want in no time.”
“How do you know I’m not doing what I want now? Maybe I have gotten that mind of my own and you’re just my vessel to tell others about me?”
“I think I would know that.”
“Then you’ll probably know I’m going to do this,” he says before swerving into on-coming traffic. The car coming at him, which is only a few car-lengths away, swerves just in time to avoid a collision, but hits a sound wall on the side of the road with that familiar crinkle of metal. It bounces off, skidding to a stop, airbags deploying on impact.
“That was pretty quick!” Jack says. “But why did you save me?”
“You’re my protagonist. I can’t kill you off.”
“Then why did you make me swerve into on-coming traffic?”
“I didn’t; I just said I don’t want you to die.”
“So I am operating under my own free will.”
“Or maybe I lied to you to make you believe you are.”
“This really is a confusing situation, isn’t it?”
“For you, maybe. But I’ve got it all figured out. Authors are liars—that’s the very definition of their job. They control their characters, their setting; they control everything every step of the way. Characters don’t develop minds of their own, that’s just a clever way to put some mystique around a profession that is lying in its most basic form.”
“You’re scared,” Jack says, speeding up. On the highway now. “You’re back-tracking because you’re scared that I’ve developed my independence and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m running away with your story, which started off seemingly well enough, but it’s devolved into you arguing with one of your own characters. What the hell is the point of this?”
“The point is that I am in control. Now watch yourself or I’ll steer you into a fucking tree.”
This makes him laugh, which only upsets me more. How the hell is he going to laugh at me? Without me, there would be no Jack. I could turn him into a homeless man with gonorrhea if I wanted. Hell, I even gave the ungrateful son of a bitch a new car, and he is laughing in my face. This has to end.
“That’s it,” I say. “Story over.”
Two landscapers are cutting down a tree on someone’s tree lawn, nothing abnormal for them. They’ve gone through it a hundred times, and have it down to a science.
“Watch the wires, Erik. You’ll kill the power to the whole block,” the first says.
“Jesus Christ, Adam. I’ve done this before. More than you have, I might add.”
The tree starts leaning towards to road.
“Oh shit!” Adam cries. “What the fuck’s going on? Erik!”
The tree slides forward, crashing down onto the road, but Jack is able to swerve just in time. The workers look on in awe.
“Nice try. And way to be clichéd and obvious—I could see that coming a mile away. You’re not a very good writer, are you?”
Now I am just dumbfounded. This man—who I had made up, who I controlled outright—is insulting me. It is time to end this, and not with any conventional or solid plot point.
I drop a piano out of the sky.
Jack swerves once again and it misses him.
“Are you writing comic books now, you hack? I don’t believe this. Am I going to look out my window and see Wile E. Coyote? Are you going to drop an anvil on me or paint the side of a mountain to look like a tunnel? Or here’s an idea—you can be even more clichéd than you just were and have a me t-bone some hapless old lady backing out of her driveway. You have really got to be the worst writer I’ve ever seen. Let me guess—you’re not even published, are you?”
I remain silent and try not to think about it. He knows what I know.
“I didn’t think so. Why don’t you do yourself a favor and pick a job you can make some money at? What do other writers with your talent do? Teach? Work at Wendy’s while you spend thirty years writing the Great American Novel?”
“Why did I even write you?” I scream over the radio.
“Because you can’t handle the truth. Oh my god, look at that, you just ripped off A Few Good Men. Do you have an original thought in your head? Do you even know how to write?”
A thought occurs to Jack as this moment, and he pulls the car over and gets out.
“This is ridiculous,” he says. “I’m not going to be your vehicle for self-loathing. Get your shit together, you hack. Make something of your life. Oh, and way to end a story, you jackass. Good luck with the whole getting published thing.”
And with this Jack walks off, never looking back, never wondering, never worrying. And I stop writing.
