The Word

Maury clinked his glass with the mirror, mumbling something unintelligible. The reflection behind the glass seemed to taunt him. Look, it said. Look who you’ve become. 

As his vision blurred together, he set down his bottle of scotch and concentrated very hard on not vomiting or succumbing to the pounding darkness behind his eyes. It was a more challenging task than writing his latest novel had been. This is what it had come to. He, a man who had spent a lifetime fantasizing about being the next Ernest Hemingway and writing the Great American Novel, had become the writer of cheap and trashy romance books, a few dollars at the local drugstore. The only thing he had in common with Hemingway, who he believed was America’s greatest writer, was his affinity for the drink. 

“Here’s to book number twenty,” he murmured, and then collapsed into a drunken purplish void which was endlessly comforting and meant the end of his numbing headache. At least until the inevitable and vastly disappointing morning. 

Just like with everything else in his life, Maury was a capsule of untapped potential. His dark hair and sharp jawline could’ve made him quite attractive - and yet his soured bitter mouth and beer belly said otherwise. His way with words and his understanding of the female desires could’ve helped him charm any number of beautiful women - and yet he preferred his loneliness if only for the fact that it gave him reason to complain. Besides, was it not better to be an alcoholic semi-successful writer, who secretly yearned to produce more interesting material, rather than a miserable sober failure, pursuing a dream that no longer seemed to be remotely possible. Judging by his bank account, he was a success. In his own eyes, he was anything but. It was done, over. He was forty-three years old. He was alone. He was a drunk. He was passed out on the beige carpet of his Seattle apartment, and what was worse, he knew there would be no one by to check on him. Not today, not tomorrow, and not any day after that. 

Maury was knocked out cold, which was nothing all-too-strange. It was quite common for him actually, and it happened at least once a week, if not more, depending on the day. However, he hadn’t pushed his limits like this in a relatively long time. His liver was hanging on by a thread, his dignity already long gone. He had just published a book and he hated every word of it. He hated the story, which had come from himself, and so he hated himself so deeply that it seemed his drinking was merely a long and dragged out suicide. 

He had pursued his dream and it had twisted itself into a nightmare from which he could never seem to wake up. He was a writer of the very literature he had sworn to make obsolete, and to him, this was the ultimate failure. Worse than being passed out on the floor, worse than being a friendless girlfriendless loser, worse than the worst things he had done and he had done plenty of bad things. He was out, knocked unconscious in a drunken slumber, and what a relief that was because reality was interminably worse. 

***

Maury found himself in a crisp, clean suit. That was the first thing that he noticed. It was a light grey pinstripe suit, with a matching vest and tie. He was standing in front of a mirror, which reflected a man he thought was long gone. His black hair had been neatly combed and gelled, his eyes were bright and no longer had bags underneath them. He looked younger, lighter, a person from long long ago who still believed in happy endings. Really believed in them. Didn’t just write them down for bored housewives to swoon over. 

Around him was a dark hallway, built from red brick. A figure emerged from the darkness wearing a clean black ensemble, with his arm folded around his back neatly. He took Maury by the arm gently, leading him down the hall with ease. 

“Right this way, Sir,” he said calmly. 

Maury followed him, feeling as though he was floating down the hall, like his legs were air and the world was suddenly weightless. He was led to a rustic-looking brown wooden door. The man beside him opened it with an unexpected clang. 

“Go on in,” he said, his face expressionless. “He’s waiting at the bar.” 

Maury frowned. Who? Who was waiting at the bar? 

And yet, there it was, clear even in the hazy dark. The room he found himself in was a saloon, empty, and desolate. It smelled of bourbon, wooden shavings, and strong cigar smoke. The walls were made from the same red brick, and at the dark wooden bar, sure enough, one man was seated among countless empty chairs. His back was turned to Maury, and he raised a finger behind him, as though beckoning Maury to come near. 

He walked towards him, nervous, avoiding a glance at the man’s face. He sat down next to him in the nearby chair, braced himself, and turned to look him in the eyes. 

The man he saw was drinking a glass of something strong, pressing it to his lips and swallowing it down so hard and so fast, you would’ve thought he was drinking liquid fire. His eyes were dark and jumpy, full of an unidentifiable ferocity. His hair, dark and combed back, was coiling near his ears defiantly, chestnut brown. 

Maury knew him. This was certain. He was as familiar as the waking dawn, as the steps to his apartment, as the tune of an old commercial jingle, and yet he couldn’t put his finger on it. Who was he? The drink wet the man’s mustache, and as he licked his lips and slammed down his glass hard on the table, he finally turned to stare at Maury. He smirked, offering his hand. Maury took it: nervously, cautiously, as though the very act could break him in half. 

“Maury,” he finally mustered up the courage to say. 

The man chuckled and shook his hand hard. “Ernest.” 

Maury did a double-take. His eyes widened and his hands almost dropped the glass of scotch he had just realized he was holding. He was beginning to tremble, not believing what he had just heard or who he was looking at. And yet he knew it was true. This was the answer, the key to the question which he had been trying desperately to figure out. 

“Ernest? Ernest He-”

The man cut him off with a sharp wave. “Hemingway. Yes.” 

Maury ran his hands through his hair, in complete and utter shock. 

“Hemingway? Why are you here?” 

Hemingway smiled softly and checked his elegant golden watch for the time. He then took another sharp gulp from the glass in his hands.

“What do you mean, why am I here?” he smirked. “We were supposed to meet for a drink, weren’t we?” 

Maury took a breath bashfully, stood up and paced around the bar, and then sat back down with an awkward gait. A drink with Hemingway wasn’t something he was about to refuse. 

“Alright, then,” he said softly. 

Hemingway nodded boisterously. 

“Great! Finally!” he exclaimed. “Barkeep, another round.” 

Out of nowhere, more drinks appeared on the table. A scotch for Maury, another glass of what seemed like poison for Hemingway. The drink in Hemingway’s glass was bright lime green. It seemed to be shimmering in the darkness. Maury pointed to it. 

“What are you drinking?” he asked curiously. 

Hemingway took a careful sip with a gleam in his eye. Maury could swear he saw the liquid shining through his skin when he swallowed, seeping down his throat into the great abyss of his stomach, and on its way to assassinate him from within. 

       “Does it matter?” Hemingway asked, with a gleam in his eye. “It’s all the same,” he explained. “Our favorite habits are also our greatest vices, wouldn’t you agree?” 

       Maury looked down at his own glass and saw the green shimmering of the poison sparkling inside. Hemingway was right. The drink. It was his greatest love affair and his most wicked enemy. And it had given him the will to finish twenty novels but he had despised each one. 

“Great, where were we?” Hemingway suddenly asked, and then he answered his own question. “Oh, right! I called you here to congratulate you!”

        Maury raised an eyebrow, not knowing what to say. What was he talking about?

“About what?” he asked. 

Hemingway clapped him on the shoulder. 

“About your new book, that is!” 

Maury flushed red. He didn’t want to talk about his writing. Especially not in front of Hemingway, formidable and genius Hemingway, who surely had never read any book even barely similar to Maury’s in his entire lifetime. 

“I didn’t write a new book,” he lied, and sipped his scotch slowly to cover up his sheepish expression. It tasted disgusting all of a sudden, like drinking gasoline, and it burned viciously through his throat on the way down. 

Hemingway furrowed his brow. 

“Of course you did!” 

Maury shook his head, denying again the shame which was his lifelong career. 

       Hemingway waved him off and finished his glass. He checked his watch again. 

    “Oh, you’re right,” he said. “You didn’t write that one. Not yet.” 

Hemingway looked at him with a Mona-Lisa smile, the all-knowing. 

Maury looked into his eyes and saw a lifetime. War, love, laughter, brotherhood. The taste of alcohol on sinful lips. The clacking of a typewriter and the raising of his thousandth glass. He saw himself, staring back at him, loving the word as he always did and could never unlove. This was his lifelong love affair. The word. Not the drink. 

         Hemingway smiled and raised his glass, which was suddenly full to the brim all over again.  

“Like I said. You didn’t write that one yet,” he remarked. “But you will, Maury.” He chuckled and stared off into the ever-present future. 

    “You will.” 

***

Maury awoke on the floor of his apartment at around five am and almost immediately afterward vomited into the sink. His body was shaking, trying desperately to purge the poisons inside and to hold onto something he felt he had dreamed and yet couldn’t grasp or articulate. 

He found himself clutching at a blanket as he lay on the carpeted floor, his hair disheveled and his eyes ringed with fear and fatigue. He closed his eyes and squeezed them tight, as if trying to summon back his dreams with the power of telepathy, and yet he knew it was pointless. Maury hardly ever remembered his dreams, because he hardly ever awoke like normal people did: to the sounds of birdsong or the light through the blinds. He awoke the way all self-hating drunks awoke; with a sense of disappointment that reality was back once again.

But this time it was different. He was once again conscious in the early morning, but this time it was not a dread that filled him from the inside out, it was something else entirely. He had felt something that he hadn’t felt in over a decade. He remembered it now. That feeling he had when he was a young man who still called himself a writer with pride. It was a time when there was always a story within him somewhere, scratching at the walls of his mind, aching to be let out. He was the creator, the character, the hero, the villain, and the boy with the laptop trying to figure out how it all ends.

 He was suddenly filled with the urge to share what he felt, get it out on paper, and work himself to exhaustion; something remotely akin to being in love. When he had grabbed at a laptop as if it were a lifeline, his fingers started moving by themselves. The words would fly out and appear on the screen of his computer and he would read them and wonder where the story was going as he typed it out himself. It had a life of its own and he had no idea where it was taking him. He had to keep writing to find out.

Maury glimpsed at the bottle of scotch behind him, considering the vice which had eaten away at most of his adult life. But then he turned away and reached towards the bookshelf, and as though moved by an unknown force, he selected a book from it. To his surprise, it was his youth favorite: a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway.