Suddenly Something

Carl looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and an old man stared back at him.  The face had changed, the mirror too, but he could trace a straight line from the old man to the boy he had once been.

“Bullshit!” said the editor, “every face tells a story, but it never follows a straight line. There’s always ups and downs, arcs, setbacks and deviations. You are lying to me and to yourself.” The editor jabbed a finger at Carl.

Carl dodged the finger. “It is just as much effort writing my own story as it is any other,” he said, “and there are many more interesting subjects than me”. 

“You know what they say about the unexamined life, don't you?,” replied the editor, “and, besides, since you’re constantly churning your life story, over and over, you might as well write it down, and stop expending energy on needless repetition, not to mention this 'creative fiction' fixation.  You might even end up resolving a few things along the way... troubling character flaws.”

“What if my story doesn’t deserve to be told?”

“You have a point there,” said the editor, “but let’s stop the quibbling. Why don’t you set the scene, if you still feel compelled?”

“The man in the mirror lived in a house in a town that was heavily populated with the elderly, each growing alike with age, their stories attenuating along that same straight-line and converging on a shrinking punct of irrelevance, and loss. They would all die apart, together”

How dull and dreary, thought Carl, and so he made himself a cup of fresh-brewed coffee and sat at the computer terminal, where he was joined by the editor. They waited, then waited some more, and then – suddenly - caffeinated optimism spilled over them as if the sun had emerged from behind a dark cloud, atoms swerved and – just for the briefest moment, Carl felt close to something so profoundly true and beautiful that it would make the angels weep, and then he started typing. 

“Annabelle Cloud emerged from the dark charnel house carrying a small body, which was that of the child…”

Carl annihilated a trillion planets and a million stars, and where there had been too much or nothing, there were a now a few specific things: Annabelle, the charnel house, the body of a child.

” The blustery rains made London a dreary place in the winter of 1910,” a sentence that dropped like a bomb on hundreds of cities, laid to waste a thousand of years of civilization, until all about Annabelle there lay a wreckage of things that almost existed. Carl had the sense of a beginning, but the editor was lurking around and distracted him.

“I need a muse to go on,” said Carl, wishful, hopeful, maybe the editor would grant him this wish. 

“Not happening,” said the editor, wise to this game, “that whole droopy doe-eyed pre-Raphaelite thing. It’s not fitting, and it’s just a little bit pathetic, don’t you think?”. 

“So how am I going to continue? I’ve got nothing left” said Carl, desperate.

“Suddenly!” said the editor, now poet, "that's how you will proceed".

"Suddenly?"

“Suddenly, from a dimly lit hall… suddenly,” said the editor, grasping at air with his fist. 

Carl was game, grasped at the same empty air, "Suddenly! An interruption of time and space, a dislocation, a dramatic change of state, or a beginning, like the moment of universal singularity. The big bang".

Very dramatic, very earnest, and a little bit melodramatic, but Carl had inspired himself back to the keyboard, which he banged at with abandon.

“Suddenly, from the crucible of flame, Annabelle Cloud emerged in shredded rags and a clinging swath of smoke, carrying the limp child in her shaking arms. A fire man grabbed the infant from her and ran to the horse-drawn cart that was loaded with buckets of rancid water from the marshes. Annabelle fell to her knees, raven hair falling like a veil, swore an oath of revenge in the direction of the stinking sky, and blanked out on the cobbled street.”

“I hardly know where to start”, said the editor, his nose twisted in distaste.

“Why don’t you start with ‘suddenly’?” said Carl.

“Well, that was my idea, regrettably, but – frankly - the bigger issue is your persistent exploitation of women as a means to an end”, said the editor, “I denied you a real-life muse, so you just had to go out and invent one?”

“I like women,” said Carl.

“Yes, I know that, but they’re always young, athletic, beautiful, and more often than not scantily dressed… all action, kicking and screaming… but they lack any kind of emotional substance. You love women, the idea of women, but you are scared to give them real agency or autonomy, so why do you insist on making them your protagonists? It’s beyond your ability and outside your sandbox.”

“They’re more interesting than men, and less threatening”, said Carl, knocked back and down.

“Fascinating, I’m sure, but remember most of your readers are women and they don’t have patience for animated girly-dolls, even when they are presented as ninja assassins, Russian spies, or some other neo-liberal trope... It's not authentic because it doesn't come from a credible place, and it insults your audience.”

The editor placed a compass point at the dead center of Carl's identity and drew a bold circle that defined a small universe of authenticity. Carl felt deflated and responded with a petulance outbreak.

“Suddenly, Archibald Cloud, emerged from the fire, looking glum". 

“Very witty. Was his shirt sweat-soaked? Were his forearms sinewy?” asked the editor.

“Who cares?” said Carl, “it’s a man this time”. Carl wanted to hang with Annabelle, not with Archibald.

He was trying to convince the editor that authenticity originates in something more than identity - in truth, for instance - when, suddenly, Carl’s wife appeared in the den. “I’m going to the shops; do you need anything?” she said, cheerfully.

“Protein. Any kind of protein, but healthy, please,” said Carl, mindful of his cholesterol.

“No, Carl, protein is too personal,” said Shelly, “how about staples? Milk, OJ, bread?” 

He paused just long enough to annoy her, and -suddenly - Shelly went on her merry way, happily putting behind her the dismal solipsism of the dimly lit den. The editor, keen to accompany Shelly to the supermarket, was momentarily distracted, which yielded an opportunity for Carl to proceed unchallenged.

“Suddenly, from the crucible of uncertainty, Annabelle Cloud, auburn-haired, sinuous of limb, clothed in revealing black silks, erupted from the grave, fully formed and of irresistible pre-Raphaelite beauty. Neither Nash, unprepared, nor Le Queux, unequipped, had the strength to resist…”

“Nice try. So here we are, and you’ve still going with the woman idea. You just couldn’t get rid of her, could you?” said the editor, who seemed to enjoy Carl's irritation.

“I’m teasing a story into existence”, said Carl, “I need a woman to motivate me. Creativity is nothing more than sublimated sex, you know?”

The editor was a student of Freud; he knew, he agreed.

“Why is sublimated sex infinitely subordinate to the sublime?” said the editor, for whom this was an agreeable subject of discourse, mano a mano.

“I’m not sure, but if you are right then it’s the specificity, I think. A specific thing that is sublimated is subordinate to the sublime. The sublime itself is oceanic, unifying all things in that universal singularity I mentioned earlier.” Carl imagined himself dressed in a Victorian frock coat, standing at a lectern, pontificating to an audience of men with bushy whiskers, gold fob watches and top hats.

The editor looked at Carl as if he were a talking dog. “Strangely, that actually makes sense to me, though it also sounds terribly pretentious, and it would best if you didn’t write it down anywhere or – heaven forbid - publish it”.

“Strangely? Terribly? As in peak-use-roaring-20s terribly? As in terribly-dull terribly? As in terribly-pretentious terribly,” said Carl.

The editor didn’t appreciate being questioned or mocked by his protégé in this way, and it embittered him. Behind the scenes, second fiddle, pulling the strings, never capitalized, his resentments erupted into venomous spite, “you will never stand shoulder to shoulder with a real writer. If you had any talent, it would have been obvious a long time ago. If you were ever going to become a writer, you would already be a writer... at your age too.”

The profound truth that seemed slightly beyond Carl's grasp, went careening off across the universe. Carl would never make the angels weep and it made him feel desperately sad.

“You are my editor. I expect you to encourage me,” said Carl, shocked, “you’re not supposed to knock me down and destroy my self-confidence”.

“I’m your editor, not your friend. My job is to stop you making a fool of yourself”, said the editor.

“But I can’t stop now, I’ve only just begun” said Carl, appealing for sympathy and accommodation.  “I suddenly have the sense of a good beginning here.”

“And I suddenly have the good sense of an end,” said the editor.