Chapter 13 - Writing

The day after Thanksgiving, Jeremy didn't eat.

It wasn't that he didn't have any food. His refrigerator groaned with leftovers his mother had practically forced on him. It wasn't even that he wasn't hungry, although certainly his hunger hadn't risen to the level of demanding attention that hunger always had in the past if he was so remiss in his obligation to his stomach as to require reminding. He had felt rumblings in his tummy, as Pooh put it, but he'd just ignored them, thinking always to himself "Hmm. I need to eat something. I'll go fix myself something to eat as soon as I get this next bit done." And then he'd do the next bit. And the next bit. And before he knew it, it was 3 a.m. and he hadn't eaten and his brain was so fuzzy he couldn't even read what he'd just written and his body felt like several people had been beating him all day with baseball bats.

But he'd written an entire 20,000 word novella start to finish in a single day.

Saturday, Jeremy slept until noon. He got up and made himself an enormous breakfast out of foods not normally thought of as breakfast foods, essentially an entire Thanksgiving dinner, including pumpkin pie. The primary difference between this meal and the one he'd had two days before at his parents' house was that he washed it down with coffee.

Refreshed, he printed out and read his novella to make sure it seemed as good to him as it did when he was writing it. It was a science fiction story about a little girl -- well, a preteen adolescent, really -- whose mother wants her to start treatments that will essentially enable her to be immortal, or at least to live for hundreds of years. Or so people believe, anyway, the treatments are relatively new so the oldest person in the world is only about 200 or so but on the other hand no one who has gotten the treatments has died of any natural causes.

The girl, however, doesn't want to be immortal. Her mother doesn't understand this at all. Doesn't everyone want to be immortal? Aren't poor people rioting in the streets because the treatments aren't covered by insurance and are extremely expensive so only rich people can have them? Everybody wants the treatments!

Except the girl. She doesn't want them. She explains to her mother that it's precisely because she saw the protests on the TV (well, it's not exactly TV -- Jeremy spends considerable time explaining exactly what the 3-D holographic video looks like and hints at how it might work; Jeremy thought of then just going ahead and calling it TV, and thinks himself that if something like this were to actually come about it's entirely possible that people would indeed continue to call it that, but he realized that the reader needed a reminder every time it was mentioned that this is far enough in the future that ordinary TV has been left behind, so he opted to call it "holovideo," or "3V" for short).

Annabelle (that's the girl's name in the story) didn't want to be immortal, she told her mother, because it wasn't fair that some people should live forever and other people should die. "Well, of course it's not fair," her mother had answered, "But it isn't fair that you have a beautiful home and a closet full of clothes and a toybox full of toys and plenty to eat and parents who love you and some children in the world have none of these things. Just be glad that you're one of the lucky ones."

But the girl felt that death was different, somehow. This wasn't just the basic unfairness of the world. This was something else entirely. So she grew up to become an anti-permalife (that's what a major company that held patents on some of the treatments was called, and it came to be the name for the entire phenomenon) activist, arguing that no one should be allowed to circumvent the laws of nature -- to which, of course, the politicians and the businesspeople and the celebrities answered that if you really believed that you'd have everyone living in caves, without even fire to warm themselves; the entire history of man's existence on earth can be easily seen as a series of increasingly ambitious and mostly successful attempts to circumvent nature.

The novella consisted of a full biography of his fictional character, presented in slices from just before her twelfth birthday to her death at the age of 84. And along the way the reader, and finally, long afterwards, Annabelle herself, comes to realize that it is not just the unfairness, not just the fact that poor people will have to die, that drives her unwillingness to get the treatments. Her last, poignant meeting with her mother -- who still, at the age of 122, looks exactly as she has looked through Annabelle's whole life -- reads as a meeting between a human and an alien, one with whom the reader will, if the story works as well as Jeremy thinks it will, sympathize and identify with, and the other totally foreign and incomprehensible and inhuman, and perhaps even ugly and evil. And the tour-de-force was, of course, that in the initial scene it is the mother whose arguments are obvious and understandable and the little girl who seems odd.

It was the best story he'd ever written, and Jeremy was very proud of it. Reading it over, he found it every bit as good as he'd thought it was, although he did find thirteen typos and couldn't help tinkering with a few passages here and there. But it was good. It was very good.

He made the changes on the computer and printed the story out again. He put it aside to mail off Monday.

Then he started working on a poem.

He did remember to eat again, Saturday night, although he didn't eat much. He went to bed before midnight, although not long before. He had a good night's sleep, but he woke up the next morning feeling listless and restless. He didn't feel like writing. He didn't feel like doing anything, really. He sat on the couch and watched the Sunday morning news shows, but he couldn't even work up the energy to get mad at the pundits and politicians the way he usually did. He didn't forget to eat, but he didn't eat much, either.

He thought about trying to write a story, but he just didn't feel like it. He tried to force himself, dragged out the notes to himself that he'd written on the way up to
St. Louis from Caledonia, but while Thursday they had all seemed really great and he was excited to get to them, today he couldn't get excited about any of them. He tried to write a poem, but didn't get very far with that, either.

He sat on the couch with his computer on his lap and just started typing, rattling words out through his fingertips without any thought whatsoever. He started out just complaining about the fact that he didn't have anything to write about and felt stupid doing this, but before long he actually found some things coming out of him, feelings about his parents and the trip to the country, resentments about his job, frustrations about his relationship with Liliana. It all poured out of him.

It wasn't something he could sell, of course, or even anything he would ever want anyone else to read. But it was therapeutic to have it on paper, to read over it and realize, in some cases, feelings he'd been denying but recognized as real as soon as he saw them in black and white.

After doing that for fifteen minutes, Jeremy went back to the pad of paper he used to work out his lines of poetry, and turned some of his pain and anger over Liliana into sonnets. He had three more sonnets by the time he finished, and for the first time they were raw and nakedly honest -- not that the other Liliana sonnets hadn't been honest, they had honestly portrayed a part of what he felt for Liliana. But before he had restricted himself to the kinds of romantic feelings he thought of as being associated with sonnets, even though he knew himself that the great sonnet sequences in history also contained the kinds of poems he'd just written, and indeed were great largely because of those poems, rather than the ones in the more traditional vein of "romantic poetry."

He went to bed that night feeling that he had passed an important marker in his life. Once upon a time he had thought of himself as a writer. When he first got the job at the library, he was a writer who worked at a library. After year after year of not being able to make it as a writer, however, he gradually became a librarian who wrote, and then finally just a librarian, and he had quit writing altogether.

Now, he was a librarian who wrote again, and he suspected that after this weekend he was back to being a writer who worked in a library. If he started selling, maybe he could even move toward just being a writer, and give up the library job altogether, although he knew that that was probably a pipe dream. Writers didn't make much money, except for the few at the very top.

But he was good. He could really do this. He felt a confidence he had never before possessed.

He was a writer. This was going to work.