What I Meant To Say

He has been staring at this empty page for three months now. Three months without a story, a thought, an idea or even a few hundred words strung together to make some kind of sense. Sitting in his study, watching the quadrilateral that the sunshine reaching the floor via the window makes, watching it change shape as the angle changes, watching it shift across the floor soundlessly, sliding across the room on delicate cat’s feet, since the morning he has been suffering this almost itch- the feeling that an idea is there, just beyond comprehension, that some kind of revelation is waiting to happen, and soon the story will write itself. But no ship’s mast emerges on the horizon, no story dawns. He has missed deadlines, made promises to his agent, broken them, re-made other promises, and only words have been committed.

He is not a great writer, or even an ‘important’ one, as critics like to say. He has written one book previously-published a couple years ago, a collection of short stories, which sold just enough copies to earn him an advance on this one, another collection of short stories-and now he has completed enough stories to make a volume, but not the titular story, on which the whole premise of this collection was sold. It has been three months now, four since his wife walked out on him; choosing to go god-knows-where with her stand-up comedian lover, leaving him to pick up the pieces of a frenzied romance which, it turns out now, has not lasted long enough to be of any sustained joy-at least not for her, and now, him. He is in his late thirties, tall-gaunt even, wears spectacles and has had too much hair gray in the past few months. He is also a closet alcoholic who sits down with steadily dwindling bottles night after night and tells bottomless glasses the stories he never completed.

Sometimes in the afternoon or in the evening, as today, Abby comes. Abby is his friend from college who used to be a banker and is now between jobs. He is also turning into an alcoholic, and since he has some money saved over from the times he was with the bank (unlike the writer and his advance, which ran out long ago, and was a pretty meager one, anyway-so he has to get by by writing features for penny-rags, yellow-sheets and pretty much who-so-ever will pay for them), when he comes, he brings the whiskey. Sometimes, as today, Abby comes in the afternoon, and they start getting drunk in the afternoon. Abby is also in his mid-thirties, and has a girlfriend, a black-haired, big-eyed wisp of a girl who works in the bank Abby used to, and is fiercely career oriented, and firmly resists all of Abby’s plans to start a family. All of which, of course, does not make a happy state of affairs as far as Abby is concerned, and so he comes to the writer’s place, and they get drunk together, sometimes, as today, even in the afternoons, trying to drown out their similar, yet different, sorrows in the bottomless glasses.

Like this afternoon. They begin their melancholy orgy and by the time it is mid-evening, the first bottle is gone and the second one is, so to say, on the table (but not quite) when the phone rings and the writer takes the call and it is his agent. She has just called to say that the publisher is done with the proofreading of the rest of the collection, and is waiting just for the final story and that the printer’s deadline is looming and could he please hurry the hell up and finish his story. Three days, he says and hangs up before she can say anything, and Abby looks askance at him, because he knows that nothing has been produced in three months.

They make some desultory conversation, and the second bottle appears on the table like Hobson’s choice, and they refill their glasses and slowly even that conversation dies out, and they just sit there in the fading light, staring into their glasses, occasionally sipping from them, mostly frozen in a grotesque tableau, each man alone with his own questions.

****

‘Which is worse,’ Abby suddenly asks from the depths if his drunkenness, ‘to have not, or to have and have not? For that matter, can different kinds of loneliness be compared? Is there a metric scale to compare how alone different people are?”

He laughs a cold, harsh laugh.

‘You should move into writing stories. You philosophize a lot better than I do. And, would probably be better at writing stories, too.’

For a moment, they sit in silence, the evening now having descended enough that they are merely silhouettes.

‘What is there to forget,’ Abby continues, all of a sudden, without anyone having mentioned anything being there to forget. 'Drinking to forget is like chasing a mirage. You change; your needs to forget change-it is a fucking vicious cycle. You drink to forget, the more you drink, the more you remember, the more you remember, the more you need to forget, and the more you drink, until this whole cycle turns into a physical need- an almost obsessive desire to have the need to forget something having enslaved you.’

‘Concentrate on your booze. You are getting drunk.’

‘Look at you. Why are you stuck without a word for three months now? You say when she left, she took all the stories with her. That all the penny-romances you wrote were in the end, somehow or other, about her. And she left you for a joke. This is all psychobabble of course, dammit! And you are no more good at psychobabble, it seems than I was at being a banker.’

‘I should hit you right now. You would probably be better at writing stories. None of us seems to be particularly good at understanding stories, though,’ the writer says, ‘we seem to have no clue why people do what they do, and we do not know where all the incomplete stories disappear, and what happened to the orphaned words in stories that are not completed.’

‘Shut up,’ all of a sudden Abby explodes, ‘I do not want to talk about this anymore.’

Both men stare into their drinks, Abby’s head rocking gently, as if to the rhythm of some secret song only he knows; the writer frozen as a statue.

****

Abby has passed out, and is snoring. He cannot sleep. The question of what happens to stories that are abandoned still haunts his mind, and somehow, in the early hours of the morning, lit up brighter than a Christmas tree in a lonely yard, he hits upon his big idea. He will write a story about writing a story. More specifically, about writing an incomplete story. And this idea grips his brain like a fever and would not let go, and so the pen is picked, pages fly, and words pour down on paper like that raging summer rain which seems to fall with the single ferocious purpose of purging the world of all that is undesirable and dirty. As his loneliness, his pain, to him seems absolute, so does the catharsis he feels, putting thoughts to paper. Out comes the lonely, frustrated author, his dark life now etched in brilliant royal blue on pristine white paper, each moment relived- the sorrow of a wife walking out, the self-flagellating anger at not being able to stop her, anger so poisonous that it dries up the words, causing even more impotent anger, the alcoholism, the insomnia, the words that were repeated only steadily depleting bottles of whiskey, the self interrogation that permitted or required no answers, and the incessant exhaustion of having to live through it all. In the end, the story is completed, the author having unwitting created a synecdoche for himself.

****

He collects the sheets of paper together and goes through them one more time, as if to make sure the story is ready and complete, as if unwilling to believe the fact of its physical presence in his hands. He wonders about the process of writing, the white-hot, solipsistic pain of listening to voices inside his head and putting them down on paper; articulating the blind panic that comes not with the closing in of the walls, but the thought that the walls will someday crumble and there will be nothing beyond them-only a vast emptiness that echoes with the voices in his head; that there would be no one listening. He looks at Abby, now having slipped from the sofa to the floor, and sees him for what he is-a middle-ages, tired, wrinkled man, shorn of all the elegance and pretensions of his waking-up self, sprawled out in a zone of no-hope, tired of life and devoid of the final shards of dignity that his waking self so desperately clung to. He wonders what he looks like.

All the time he has wondered what it would be like to be a character in a story-to have no emotions other than those given by the author, all his actions directed or misdirected by a hand assured or not assured, having been freed of all choice by the simple expedient of having choice taken away from him. Now he realizes that he has done it, he has become a character in his own story, and he is no longer sure how it is going to pan out. There is completion in his story, but there is no closure. A thousand missteps to take that one right step; and then to realize that what you were always chasing was in fact not what you really wanted-somebody else’s nightmare packaged to look attractive, to make the disappointment all the more bitter. That this façade of a chase cannot be allowed to continue, that this ersatz control he has of his destiny is meaningless. He must find closure, he must sleep. But there is one final thing to do-his hand crawls towards the box of matches.

****

Abby found him in the morning, choked half to death on an overdose of his own failures, clutching the half-burnt pages of a short story. He called the hospital, and then his agent, but it is not sure whether either the character or the creator will survive.