The Unmaking of Mortimer Williams

Mortimer Williams stood before the bathroom mirror on a Tuesday morning, razor in hand, throat exposed. The blade hovered an inch from his carotid artery while he studied his reflection with the detached curiosity of a scientist examining a particularly disappointing specimen.

"You're going to be late for the budget meeting," his wife called from downstairs, her voice carrying the practiced patience of someone who'd spent fifteen years managing his schedule.

Mortimer didn't respond. Something had cracked inside him during last night's dinner party—watching himself perform the role of Successful Marketing Executive for the hundredth time, laughing at the right moments, nodding at the appropriate political opinions, sipping his wine with calculated restraint. He'd excused himself to the bathroom and vomited up $300 worth of catered hors d'oeuvres.

That's when he'd first seen it—the thing living behind his eyes. His ego. Not some abstract psychological concept, but a parasitic entity that had been puppeteering him through decades of meaningless consumption and achievement.

"The meeting starts in twenty minutes," his wife reminded him, keys jingling by the front door.

Mortimer put down the razor. The antagonist wasn't something he could slice away. It wore his skin, spoke with his voice, and had constructed his entire life. The house with the appropriate square footage. The German luxury sedan. The portfolio diversified precisely according to his age bracket. The opinions formed by the correct news sources.

"I'll be right down," he called, voice betraying nothing of the civil war erupting inside his skull.

He straightened his tie, a Windsor knot executed with muscle memory. The tie belonged to Mortimer Williams, Marketing Executive. The hands belonged to... someone else. Someone who had been asleep for decades and was now awake, horrified, and trapped inside the prison of Mortimer's life.

Downstairs, his wife waited by the door, scrolling through her phone. She didn't look up as he descended the stairs.

"Your mother called. They want us over for Thanksgiving this year."

"I need to destroy myself," Mortimer said.

His wife nodded absently. "We can discuss holiday plans later. You're going to hit traffic if you don't leave now."

She hadn't heard him—or rather, she'd heard Mortimer Williams, who frequently said odd things for attention when stressed about work. That Mortimer was harmless, predictable, and quickly placated with the right combination of affirmation and redirection.

The real Mortimer—the awakening one—realized with nauseating clarity that he existed in no one's mind, not even his own. He was a figment, a collection of social reflexes operating without consciousness. There was no Mortimer to destroy because Mortimer had never existed.

As he pulled out of the driveway in his perfectly sensible luxury sedan, he made a decision that felt like jumping from a plane without a parachute. He would miss the budget meeting. Instead, he would drive until the gas ran out, abandon the car, and begin the systematic dismantling of everything that constituted "Mortimer Williams."

His phone buzzed on the seat beside him. The screen displayed his boss's name above a text asking where he was. Mortimer reached for it automatically, conditioned response overriding conscious intention.

Then he saw it again—the thing behind his eyes, reflected in the rearview mirror. It smiled using his mouth, reaching for the phone that would pull him back into the choreography of his fake existence.

Mortimer rolled down the window and threw the phone onto the highway.

Only then did he notice he was crying.

***

Three weeks later, Mortimer sat cross-legged on the floor of a studio apartment in a part of town where his former dinner party guests would never venture. The space contained a mattress, a hotplate, and seventeen journals filled with increasingly desperate attempts to deconstruct his identity.

His beard had grown in patchy. His expensive clothes hung from a body that had lost fifteen pounds. The wedding ring remained, though his wife had filed a missing persons report, then divorce papers when he finally contacted her to explain he wasn't missing but escaping.

"Escaping what?" she'd asked, more annoyed than concerned.

"The matrix," he'd replied, immediately hating himself for resorting to pop culture shorthand for something that felt far more terrifying and fundamental.

She'd hung up. Her lawyer called an hour later.

Mortimer had imagined his ego-death would be clean—a spiritual experience involving profound insights and perhaps a montage of him meditating beside waterfalls. Instead, he found himself in an endless loop of self-analysis that only seemed to strengthen the very thing he was trying to destroy.

The more he tried to dismantle "Mortimer Williams," the more real that construct became. His attempts at meditation turned into hours of mental self-flagellation. His journals became increasingly self-referential, the writing of a man disappearing into his own navel.

His savings were dwindling. The severance package from the job he'd abandoned would last another month at most.

Mortimer stood and approached the bathroom mirror—smaller than the one in his former master suite but just as effective at reflecting his failure. He'd exchanged one performance for another. Corporate Mortimer had become Spiritual Seeker Mortimer, equally inauthentic, equally desperate for validation.

"Who am I trying to impress?" he asked his reflection. "There's no spiritual merit badge for ego destruction."

The phone he'd purchased to replace the highway sacrifice buzzed on the mattress. His mother. Again. She'd begun calling daily, her voicemails evolving from confusion to anger to tearful concern. He hadn't answered once.

Suddenly ravenous with self-loathing, Mortimer grabbed the phone and pressed accept.

"Hello, Mom," he said, voice rusty from disuse.

"Mortimer? Oh, thank God. We've been so worried. Are you okay? Where are you?"

Her voice—simultaneously familiar and alien—cracked something inside him. Not the dramatic ego-death he'd been pursuing, but something quieter and more painful: the recognition that his quest for authenticity had hurt people who genuinely loved him.

"I'm fine," he lied. "I just needed some time to think."

"Your father and I don't understand what's happening. Emily showed us your letter. All that stuff about breaking free and finding yourself... it sounds like you're having some kind of breakdown."

"It's not a breakdown," Mortimer insisted, though he wasn't sure anymore. "It's a breakthrough."

But even as he said it, he realized he'd swapped one script for another. He wasn't breaking through; he was breaking apart without anything to replace the fragments.

"Come home for Christmas," his mother pleaded. "Just come talk to us."

The Mortimer who'd fled his life would have refused, seeing family obligation as another cage. But the Mortimer who answered surprised himself.

"Okay," he said. "I'll come."

After hanging up, he stared at the wall calendar where he'd been marking off days of his "spiritual journey" with obsessive precision. Twenty-three days of attempting to destroy his ego had only made it stronger, more defensive, and ultimately more destructive.

He'd abandoned his job, his wife, his home—all to pursue an ideal of authentic existence that seemed further away than ever. He was as much a consumer as before, only now he consumed spiritual platitudes instead of material goods.

Mortimer picked up his journal and read his most recent entry: "The ego must be transcended through radical honesty and detachment from societal expectations."

He laughed until he choked, then threw the journal against the wall.

Outside his window, snow began to fall on a city that continued functioning perfectly well without Mortimer Williams.

***

The Christmas tree in his parents' living room was the same artificial Douglas fir they'd displayed every year since Mortimer was twelve. The same angel perched atop it, its porcelain face bearing a chip from when Mortimer had knocked it over during an adolescent tantrum.

His mother had embraced him tearfully at the door. His father had shaken his hand with awkward formality, eyes reflecting concern behind bifocals. They'd ushered him inside to a dinner that consisted of all his childhood favorites, as though proper nutrition might cure whatever had broken in their son.

Mortimer ate mechanically, answering their careful questions with reassurances he knew they wanted to hear. Yes, he was feeling better. No, he wasn't on drugs. Yes, he had plans for the future. No, the divorce wasn't final yet.

After dinner, while his mother washed dishes and his father retreated to his study, Mortimer wandered through the house. In his old bedroom, now converted to a home office, he found boxes of his childhood memorabilia. Report cards. Soccer trophies. A participation certificate from Model UN.

He sat on the floor and methodically excavated these artifacts of his formation. Each item represented a brick in the construction of Mortimer Williams—good student, adequate athlete, politically conscious citizen.

At the bottom of one box, he found a journal he'd kept at sixteen. The lock had long since broken, and he flipped it open to a random page.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm just pretending to be the person everyone thinks I am," his teenage self had written. "Like I'm wearing a mask, and if anyone saw behind it, they'd realize there's nothing there."

The words hit Mortimer with physical force. He'd been having the same existential crisis for twenty years, just dressed in different language. His current "awakening" wasn't a breakthrough; it was the same old pattern, repackaged with spiritual jargon instead of teenage angst.

"Mortimer?" His father stood in the doorway, holding two glasses of scotch. "Your mother's gone to bed. I thought maybe we could talk."

Mortimer took the offered glass. His father settled heavily into the desk chair, knees cracking.

"When I was about your age," the older man began, "I had what they called a nervous breakdown. Walked away from a partnership-track position at the firm. Your mother was pregnant with you. I rented a cabin in Vermont and told everyone I was going to write a novel." He smiled ruefully. "Never wrote a word."

Mortimer stared at his father. In all their years of carefully choreographed father-son interactions, this information had never surfaced.

"What happened?"

"I spent three months staring at trees and feeling sorry for myself. Then the money ran out." His father swirled the amber liquid in his glass. "I came back, begged for my job, and spent the next thirty years telling myself I was making a sacrifice for my family."

"Were you?"

"Partly. But mostly I was scared. It's easy to reject a life you know. Much harder to build a new one worth living." He fixed Mortimer with a penetrating look. "The real question isn't whether you're living authentically. It's what you're living for."

Something clicked in Mortimer's mind—not a shattering revelation, but a subtle reframing. He'd been so focused on destroying his false self that he'd given no thought to what might remain if he succeeded.

"I don't know what I'm living for," Mortimer admitted.

His father nodded. "That's the real problem, isn't it? Not that you're living a lie, but that you haven't found a truth worth living for."

After his father went to bed, Mortimer remained awake, the conversation echoing. He'd been approaching his existential crisis backward—trying to negate himself into authenticity rather than discovering what he genuinely valued.

He opened his current journal and wrote: "What if ego-death isn't about destruction at all? What if it's about recognition?"

As dawn broke, Mortimer reached a devastating conclusion: his entire spiritual quest was itself an ego trip—a dramatic performance designed to prove his specialness, his depth, his superiority to the "sheeple" he disdained.

The Mortimer who sought enlightenment was the same Mortimer who sought corner offices and German cars—a man defined by wanting to be seen a certain way.

He closed the journal and lay back on his childhood bed, more lost than when he'd abandoned his adult life.

***

Spring arrived with a violence of color that mocked Mortimer's internal landscape. Crocuses erupted through soil still crusted with winter's remnants. Trees that had appeared dead now trembled with nascent buds.

Mortimer sat on a park bench, watching children navigate a playground while their parents maintained the illusion of vigilance while scrolling through phones.

Four months had passed since Christmas. He'd taken a job at a bookstore that paid barely enough to cover his studio apartment. His divorce had finalized without his participation. His former colleagues had stopped reaching out.

The spiritual journals had been abandoned. The meditation cushion gathered dust. The quest to destroy his ego had itself been destroyed, leaving Mortimer in a peculiar limbo—neither his former self nor anything new.

He'd been sitting on this same bench every lunch break for weeks, watching the incremental advance of spring with neither joy nor despair. Today, something was different. A child, perhaps four years old, had separated from the playground herd and was staring at Mortimer with unnerving focus.

"Are you sad?" the child asked.

Mortimer considered the question with surprising care. "I don't think so. Just empty."

The child nodded, processing this information with grave importance. "My dad says empty is just room for new stuff."

Before Mortimer could respond, a harried mother appeared, apologizing as she reclaimed her philosopher-offspring. Mortimer watched them return to the playground, the child immediately absorbed in a new adventure, the previous conversation already forgotten.

Empty is just room for new stuff.

The simplicity of it struck Mortimer as profound in its childish directness. He'd been so focused on destroying his ego that he'd never considered what might flow into the space created by its absence.

Walking back to the bookstore, Mortimer found himself noticing details he'd overlooked in his months of self-absorption. An elderly couple holding hands on a bench. A woman singing to herself as she watered window-box flowers. A businessman stopping to help a stranger pick up scattered papers.

Each mundane interaction contained something he'd been missing—not grandiose meaning, but simple connection. Humans being humans together, imperfectly, without spiritual pretension.

At the bookstore, his manager asked if he'd mind staying late to help inventory the new shipment.

"Sure," Mortimer said, surprising himself with the lack of resentment in his voice.

As they unpacked boxes of books, his manager—a woman in her sixties with a lifetime of literature behind her eyes—handed him a volume.

"You might find this interesting," she said. "It's about a man who tries to reject society only to discover he's rejecting his own humanity."

Mortimer read the back cover. "Is it good?"

"It's honest," she replied. "Which is better than good."

That night, Mortimer read the book in one sitting. It wasn't revolutionary, it didn't contain the secret to existence, but it reflected something true about the human condition—that we are all, unavoidably, part of each other's stories.

Near dawn, Mortimer opened his neglected journal and wrote a single sentence: "The ego doesn't need to be destroyed; it needs to be properly placed."

He understood now that his mistake wasn't having an ego—everyone did—but in making it the center of his existence. His former life had been ego-driven. His spiritual quest had been equally ego-driven, just in the opposite direction.

The real freedom wasn't in destruction but in perspective—seeing his ego as one aspect of himself rather than his entire identity.

Mortimer closed the journal and looked out his window at the city waking up. For the first time in months, he felt hungry for the day ahead, curious about what it might contain.

He made coffee and sat by the window, watching people hurry to jobs, to schools, to appointments—each living a life as complex as his own. The thought no longer filled him with disdain but with a sense of connection.

Later that day, Mortimer called his mother. Then his ex-wife, not to reconcile but to properly apologize. He enrolled in a community college course on comparative literature. He volunteered at a local food bank.

None of these actions were part of a grand spiritual journey. They were simply things that felt right in the moment, undertaken without expectation of ego-death or enlightenment.

Six months after throwing his phone onto the highway, Mortimer Williams sat in a coffee shop, writing in his journal. A young man at the next table was describing to a friend his plan to abandon everything and find his true self.

Mortimer listened without judgment, recognizing his former self in the young man's fervent certainty. Then he returned to his writing—not profound insights or spiritual declarations, but a simple record of his day, his thoughts, his gradually expanding life.

The ego he had tried so desperately to destroy had finally found its proper place—not as the center of his universe, but as one instrument in an orchestra of being.

Mortimer closed his journal and stepped outside into the ordinary miracle of another day, carrying himself lightly.