Writer's Block

Sitting on the balcony of her 14th-floor apartment, Miriam Westlake has two options--euthanize the rest of the day by swallowing two Valium with a glass of wine or watch the solar eclipse sober. She decides to stay sober. She lets her fingertips hover over the laptop's keyboard, waiting for something to burst through the monastery-like emptiness of writer’s block lodged in her mind. She resigns herself to the fact that the only thought bouncing against the sides of her skull will concern how long it would take her to walk to the liquor store down the street.

Miriam Westlake is a best-selling novelist living in NYC. She is currently writing her fourth novel, Blacking Out at Midnight. For the past month, she’s wallowed in a cesspool of creative stagnation, a subatomic level of writer’s block she’s never experienced. Miriam blames her inability to write something meaningful and coherent on her sobriety. Three weeks ago, she stopped drinking. Three weeks ago, she stopped writing.

Miriam knows one drink will elevate her writer’s block to the more flexible atomic level. Four drinks would give her the power to solve mathematical equations explaining the universe. Five drinks would inspire her to complete her book and get her agent off her back. Miriam loathes sobriety. She feels like a mass of rancid ocean garbage washed up on a deserted island’s shore. Time is maddening when she’s sober—it accelerates, stops, accelerates again. Vivid dreams interrupt her sober sleep nearly every night. One night, she dreamed she was on a wildly spinning carnival ride operated by one of her ex-lovers. When she felt like she was going to fall off the ride, she abruptly awoke and threw up in bed.

Miriam logs in to her X (formerly known as Twitter) account and scrolls through hundreds of posts about the solar eclipse. She learns the moon will block the sun for about two minutes and then start moving away from the sun. During that time, only the sun’s corona will be visible. Miriam thinks photos of past solar eclipses look like giant black eyes blinded by their obviously diseased edges. She doesn’t think she would experience a sense of cosmic awe at seeing a big, black eye with an inflamed periphery glaring at the world.

Clusters of people scuttle along city sidewalks like amoebas crawling on a microscope slide. The gray sky grudgingly permits thin blades of sunlight to reach the sidewalks. The city is always on the verge of dissolving into grayscale. C. has lived in the city for six months and has yet to have a conversation with someone. She is beginning to realize that amoebas harbor thick scars that function as insulation. Avoiding the other is mandatory for avoiding a breakdown.

Miriam reads the paragraph she wrote weeks ago before writer’s block initiated a blitzkrieg on her mind. For some reason, a CNN segment suddenly surfaced in her thoughts, and a segment she had caught the other night was about who had nuclear bombs and who didn’t. She writes:

Everyone lives with the knowledge that weapons of mass destruction are pointed at them. At any moment, a psychotic leader could launch a bomb that obliterates reality as we know it. How is it possible to know this but remain sane and civilized?

It’s getting darker now. Miriam resists the urge to look at the sun because she doesn’t know if she will be blinded by ultraviolet rays or burn her retinas. She rechecks X and discovers that the partial eclipse is happening in her location. Everybody is excited, anticipating taking that once-in-a-lifetime photo of a solar eclipse and posting it on their social media accounts. The hashtag #EclipseDay is trending.

Miriam considers the words dribbling out of her brain like fluids seeping from a festering wound. She realizes there’s a good chance she will find herself at the liquor store after the eclipse ends. She will drink just until the book is finished and then re-commit to saving her liver. Her agent informed her last week that Blacking Out at Midnight presales have reached nearly $400,000. Who wouldn’t voluntarily relapse to make that kind of money?

The eclipse is happening now. Things fall into the shadows. Miriam wonders if seeing through cataracts is similar to experiencing the opaqueness of an eclipse. It's not like dusk darkness or the darkness caused by thunderclouds. It's a surreal darkness, a Salvador Dali darkness, a darkness pulsating with an unknown intent and meaning. She stands up and scans the neighborhoods stretching for miles below her. The quietness is passive and unnerving. Everybody is somewhere else watching the eclipse. Street lamps flash on suddenly, and cab drivers flip their headlights on. Miriam passes the time waiting for the moon to move away from the sun by thinking about surprising her agent with the finished book and news of her relapse.

When she feels the familiar twinge of soreness in her right knee—one of the consequences of receiving her first and only DUI a decade ago—she realizes she’s been standing longer than two or three minutes. She checks the time on her phone and learns she has been standing for 10 minutes. Placing her hands over her eyes, Miriam looks up at the sky and moves a finger just enough to create a tiny slit—enough of a slit to see what is happening without damaging her eyes.

The corona is still there. The moon is still there, bullying the sun into submission. The darkness still hangs over everything like a shroud. Miriam knows something is horribly wrong but is too terrified to move. The passing of time now feels like a prelude to an extinction event. Continuity is no longer detectable. The strong breeze blowing strands of hair over her face carries terrifying prophecies she does not comprehend. Everything has unexpectedly been stamped with an expiration date.

Miriam doesn’t know how long she sits at her desk typing on her laptop. She eventually hears people screaming, sirens wailing, gunshots, glass shattering, and a message coming from the television she left on in her apartment: This is the emergency broadcast system. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. Stay in your homes until further notice. The President of the United States has just declared martial law…

Two days later, Miriam Westlake walks to the liquor store in the dark of a persistent eclipse. Since the door has been ripped off the store’s hinges, she walks in, finds a fifth of whisky and a pint of vodka that isn’t broken and walks back to her apartment. Martial law and a cosmic prank defying the natural order of things have emptied the streets. Once home, Miriam takes a shot of whiskey and vodka and finishes her fourth book.