Dedicated The author set his coffee mug on the grass and climbed the ladder. He was careful to twist the mug a few times, digging it into the dirt, so that it would not spill errently while he was away. He spent so long up the ladder, writing, that by the time he came down, the coffee was always cold, and he always threw it away, but he secured it from spills nonetheless.
He snuck out earlier than his usual starting time, wanting to beat the crowds. People hadn't really begun to gather yet. There were a few of the regulars, the ones who camped out, waiting for him every morning. The die-hard fans.
At first, he had found them annoying. They seemed to love anything he did. He would start a sentence, and they would oooh. A semicolon elicited peals of applause. Every misspelled world drew a gasp from these regulars, and he knew to go back and fix his mistake.
Eventually, he tuned them out. He'd give them a pleasant wave in the morning, but never answer any of the questions they shouted out at him.
"In the story, Jane says she'd rather die than live," the one with the red cap would yell. "What does this mean?"
"Jane's clothing is described as being 'blue, to the threads, blue'. Why do you think this is? Explain your answer."
He'd give his friendly wave, and furrow his coffee cup into the ground, and begin to ascend the ladder. There was an old president who did this, pretended not to hear reporters or citizens with questions or concerns. It seemed to work nicely.
Usually, in the morning, he'd have to start a new chapter. He always hated leaving an idea half-finished through the night, and so he worked as long as it took him to finish a chapter. At one point, during a particularly relevant flashback scene, the author stayed up there until 5 in the morning, furiously working out the italicized thoughts of his protagonist.
This meant that each morning, he faced a blank page. There are few sites as daunting as a blank page, three stories high, daring you to begin your work. And the damn camp-outs, breaths drawn, were all awaiting the drop cap which will start the word which will start the sentence which will start the paragraph which will start the chapter which will start the day.
So the author began.
Jane wasn't feeling so bad when she woke up.(…He wrote…)
She just needed to vomit. She was almost certain what she had done the night before was bad. Her mouth tasted of bad, and in her brain there was a dropping feeling, like she had to remember something. She was not sure at this point what she needed to remember, only certain that she had to, and that she did indeed need to vomit.
The crowd had liked Jane, trapped as she had been. They hung on each word, although each was a word they had used hundreds of times before in their own lives. It was the way the author put them in order that they loved.
So she did. It made her feel better, although she wasn't sure why. She knew she hadn't been drinking the night before; she didn't feel hung over. She rarely drank anyway, they almost never let her. It was something else. Something bigger.She took a few glasses of water to try to rinse the taste from her mouth, and then brushed her teeth. The smell still lingered in her nostrils, and she shot a look around her small apartment to see if anybody would see if she stuck a finger up there.
Of course, nobody was there to see her pick her nose. She laughed, remembering. She picked her nose, picked it long.
Hmm… the author wasn't sure he liked that. Picked it long. That didn't sound right. But the people below hated it when he corrected himself. The trip down the ladder to get the white-out took quite some time, and people grew restless. A few times, he had hecklers in the crowd. "Way to write, man!" a voice would cry out, and although the author tried his best not to react, his shoulders tensed up in a way he was sure the crowd could see.
He took a breath. The line would stay. He'd have to work with it.
Jane walked into the kitchen, still picking her nose. She had rarely had opportunity to do so in the past few months, for even though she had times along, in the bathroom, in the shower, she still had the sense she was being watched.No longer, though. She was free now. Free to… do to what? Jane wondered what her first act as a free woman should be. She thought for a moment that the nose-picking probably qualified for her first act, but this certainly wasn't something she was going to brag to people about. You can't say "I'm so glad they're gone now! I can pick my nose without worry!"
Ice cream for breakfast? Would that be a proper way to ring in the freedom? It didn't matter, they didn't keep any ice cream in the house. And, frankly, Jane didn't want ice cream. She wanted coffee and a bagel, what she had been having for the past two years.
Previously, the author was not famous. He did not have people watching his every word. He toiled away alone, throwing out a few arty novels over the years. Every now and again, a curious child would wander along and stare up at his huge sheets of paper, Some of them asked what he was doing, and he'd answer. Other would ask him to draw them pictures of dinosaurs, which he did not do.
But the author was tired of anonymity, and tired of wandering children, and tired particularly of the best-selling authors, with their gilded cranes and expensive ever-flo pens. So the author had set out to create a new book to challenge them.
It was a satire. It featured a housewife who, after losing her children to kidnapping, both of whom were dying of fatal disease, enlisted the help of angels on high to fight the beaurocracy which held back the medical research, and the kidnappers which held back her children. In the end, the president awards her a medal, which she throws into the reflective pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, exclaiming, "I don't need a medal. I've got the most precious reward of all… my children!" The book was called "The Turning Leaves Of Change"
Jane fixed the coffee. When describing the matter to people, she would tell them that she had ice cream. She settled onto the couch, wondering she even had the spirit to rebel properly. After so many years of being told what to do, she wasn't sure if she had it in her to make her own decisions.Then, of course, she remembered what she did last night. Of course she had it in her to do what she wanted. They never would have wanted that to happen to them. They certainly didn't ask her to do that. She just did.
Thinking over how it transpired, she realized that she would not be able to tell people she had ice cream for breakfast. If people knew she was alone, they'd start asking questions, and if people started asking questions, they would start getting answers. Those answers could get Jane in trouble.
Unfortunately, nobody really understood The Turning Leaves of Change. The fact that it was a satire was first glazed over by the publisher, who, upon reading the manuscript, wept for the final 30 pages. The publisher admitted he would have never read it in the first place (having learned to avoid the author's name) but his wife had picked it up off of his desk at home and fell in love with it.
Who was the author to say "No, don't publish my book. You don't understand, you're taking it too seriously. If you don't get the joke, you can't have it." No, that would be silly… and surely the joke would be even greater when it reached the public. The wool was pulled over the eyes of even the publisher! What a humorous joke!
Well, critics, receiving only warm and glowing press releases, had no reason to suspect the book was a satire at all. The book jacket said that the book was a "heartwarming tale of one mother's love and her desire to never give up." Why should they believe differently? And, moreover, who is going to write a scathing review of a book where children are dying and kidnapped? It would be like the critics were siding with cancer and kidnappers. Nobody wanted to be aligned with that.
Had she cleaned up? Jane searched her memory. It was fuzzy, and with each recollection she couldn't be sure if it was a true memory or a story she was making up to please herself. Perhaps none of it had ever happened. Do people actually dream these things, and mistake those dreams for reality? Or was that just a clever plot device?Jane was sure she did it. Almost sure. Probably sure. Best to double-check, she told herself. That's what they always said. Better safe than sorry.
They were fountains of such cliches. That was one of the things Jane hated most about them. They'd pick up these sayings, as worn and frayed as Jane's simple clothes, and repeat them over and over. The early bird, they'd say. Don't count your chickens, they'd chide. You can't teach an old dog, they'd shake their head. Spare the rod.
The author didn't know what to make of his novel's success. He had always mocked such best-sellers in the coffee houses and studio workshops where he and his friends would gather. They'd throw giant words into the air, and bemoan the decline of literature, and have a few biscotti or whatever the sexy pastry of the season might be. Then they'd go home, and suffer for their art.
Now the same friends were calling him, congratulating him. They wanted to know if he could spare a few dollars for a new ladder, some ink maybe. They'd remind him of times past when they'd covered a dinner bill that he couldn't, for the life of him, remember. He wondered if they were still trashing the bestsellers at the coffeehouse.
The author told himself the joke would be even sweeter if he held out. When that innocent child turned from the emperor's new clothes and picked up his book, he would surely reveal all. "This is a joke!" somebody would finally scream, and the author swore to himself that he'd scream out "Yes! Yes, finally somebody got it!"
But nobody seemed to get the joke, or even admitted they doubted his sincerity. Wasn't this supposed to be the ironic, post-modern age? Weren't you supposed to question everything? Where were the naysayers? There's never a skeptic around when you need one.
Jane went back over her story. She walked herself through last night. Would anybody blame her for what she did? After all, these people were her captors. They had kept her close, never let her free. She was practically a slave.She said that to herself, but she knew it wasn't true. She could have gone at any time, walked out the door. She could have tipped her had and said farewell, she could have cursed and screamed and stormed out, she could have slipped out in the night. There were no physical bonds holding her there.
But outside, she had been there before. It was scary, being there, with only herself. When she was living with them, at least she had somebody. They were mean, yes, and cruel. They were nasty and awful. They worked her hard and never gave her thanks beyond the occasional patronizing pat on the head. But, oh, how she lived for those pats. How her head strained upwards when their hands passed by.
A popular talk-show host had him on her show. She admitted how much the novel moved her, helped her, guided her. One by one, members of the studio audience stood up and told him how much the novel moved them, helped them, and guided them. And, smiling and gracious, the author's stomach was a ravaged pit of seething anger.
He had spent hours thinking he was creating art, and yet only succeeded when he set out to create crap. Who was he to tell these people what was and wasn't fashionable? If his novel made people feel good, did it matter what his intention was? Didn't he once have a passionate conversation with a young painter who splattered her art on sidewalks and city busses to better reach the people? Was he only agreeing with her stance to get her in bed? Did he really want to bring art to the people?
The movie rights were optioned, and the Broadway played opened to rave reviews. The weekly animated series was touted in Newsweek as lowering the child crime rate by 27%. The authorized clothing line was fashionable yet affordable, and gave sewing jobs to poverty-ravaged areas of Michigan.
The author wasn't sure if he was a savior or a devil. He took to purchasing himself extravagant gifts, and then throwing them out. He spent a month eating only bread and water, although he did so at the finest restaurants in town. He became know, in the press, as an "eccentric genius".
Here is what Jane remembered: First, she remembered tying them up. They were large, and slow, and easy to catch. The fact that she was acting up confused them, scared them, and they shied away into a corner as she approached with the rope.Jane remembered gagging them with the rag she used to clean. They had called it the Janey-rag one more than one occasion. They had called her the same thing. In their mind, she was an extension of the rag, a human rag. She removed the rag from their mouths. She wanted to hear them scream.
She cut and cleaned, cut and cleaned. It was amazing to her how much blood one person could create without dying. If you were to, say, cut off a finger, you wouldn't expect it to shoot blood like it did. But it did, oh, did it ever. A torrent of blood as wide as the finger itself, and from their mouths shot screams of pain.
Jane cut and cleaned. She would hurt and then carefully scrub the floor, the chair, even change their ropes and their clothes. She would bandage their wounds and say sweet things to them, hold their heads as they cried, fixed them tea and brought it carefully to their lips. Blow on it first, Jane had said, you don't want it to burn your mouth.
There was murmuring from below as the author wrote this passage. He heard, vaguely, somebody make the "tsk-tsk-tsk" sound with their mouth. By this point in the morning, during his writing, usually a good crowd had gathered. Sometimes the news reporters would be here by now. He wondered how many people were milling below but didn't want to turn to acknowledge them. He didn't want to have them see his eyes.
A news magazine had done a study. The average x-height for his letters tended to be about 35 inches, but when he got excited, he worked quicker, and they shrunk down to as little as 32. The author's publisher was not happy about this. Three inches did not seem like too big of a deal, but when the page was shrunk down to a pocket-sized novel, the discrepancy was very apparent.
The author was excited, hurrying through this passage. After ten chapters of inspiration, of moving passages of love and loss, he was getting to meat. It was getting good, maybe not for them below, but for him. He sped along, wondering what his pen would bring next. He ran back and forth on his platform, racing to start a new line.
This was how it was once, before all eyes turned on him. Screw the people! Screw the crowds! This is why he started writing. He had money now, he didn't have to worry about ever making a bestseller again. Let's bring out the gristle, the grime! Let's go deep into the heart and find what makes it go: sinews and blood and disgusting things. Yes, let's write of the disgusting things.
Jane remembered those desperate sounds they made when the life left their bodies, those pleading sounds that the anatomy makes when you remove the insides, piece by piece. Jane recalled, late last night, leading the body parts, bit by bit, onto the laundry cart and bringing them to the incinerator. She remembered the smell of hair burning, her least favorite smell, yet she stayed for each load, watching the fire flare up with new fuel.Oh, Jane remembered, and giggled, and grew sick to her stomach, and was giddy and nauseous all at the same time. Oh, she hoped she had done it, what she had wanted to do, to set herself free.
She wrapped herself in this story, fresh and warm as a new blanket. She let herself become lost in it for a few minutes, savoring it, replaying each moment like news footage, back and forth, back and forth. She was still not sure she had done it, but the idea of it filled her with joy, and a sense of terrifying liberty.
The crowd below was audibly unhappy, he could tell now. He heard the whir of cameras and the gentle speech patterns of on-air personalities, doing live reports. They probably halted regular programming for this.
He paused, held his pen up for just a moment too long. A collective breath was taken below. He was certain he could hear the gentle whirs of news cameras zooming in, ready to capture his next move. His shoulders quivered, he could feel the sweat on the back of his neck.
Jane crept slowly to their room to test her story. Had she done it? Had she killed them? Could she trust herself to let herself free, or did she need them? She relied on them so much, freedom was almost a punishment at this point.Their door inched open, slowly, and Jane saw them, sprawled on their circular bed, fast asleep. Their bedclothes were tangled around them, like the ropes that existed only in her mind. She didn't even think there was any rope in the house.
As she turned to go back down the hall, she saw an apparition before her.
"Hello," said the figure, "I am Azenialle. I am your angel guide. The path to freeing yourself isn't through violence. Let me show you the way."
The crowd below burst into applause, and the author smiled despite himself. He allowed himself to turn to face them for a moment, and bow to them. They threw kisses, they threw flowers, and the author caught them all.