The Unwritten Man

In the silence of his own dining room, a typewriter sitting on the table amidst a pile of books, the man's hands hover over the keys. His cup of coffee steams, fogging up his glasses. His cigarette burns out slowly in the ashtray. He takes a deep breath and strikes the keys. A paragraph appears on the paper. He takes a smoke and taps the ash. He pulls the paper out of the drum and crumples it into a ball, tossing it over his shoulder in what he hopes is a suitably dramatic motion. He takes a mouthful of coffee, draining his mug. He stands up to refill it, suddenly dizzy from the blood rushing away from his brain. He steadies himself on the table. He sighs heavily, wishing there was someone around to hear him. He fills his cup, takes another cigarette out of the pack and lights it. He decides to stretch his legs for a while before he writes. He walks around the table, paces up and down the kitchen, heads for the sitting room, but changes his mind and instead goes out the back door into his garden. There is no moon and he cannot see very well, the only light coming from the kitchen window. He exhales a cloud of smoke into the night. He looks to the sky, notes the constellations he knows and takes some small comfort in the fact that they are still there, still the same since he first learned their names as a young man. He finishes his cigarette and drops it on the ground, doing the twist with one heel to extinguish it. A cat mewls into the darkness. The man shudders a little and goes back inside out of the cold. Again, he sits at his typewriter. His fresh coffee steams and fogs up his glasses. His fingers hover over the keys. He takes a deep breath and strikes a key, and another and another. A page of text appears before him. This isn't so hard, he thinks, as his fingers spider over the keyboard. A chapter erupts from him in no time at all. He sits back in his chair and reads over his words, taking a drag of a cigarette with each paragraph. His brow furrows. He grunts and crumples the pages one by one, playing basketball with his waste paper basket. He leans back in his chair and chains another cigarette. The story he wants to write isn't at all the story he is writing, not at all the story he has in his head, the story he has been formulating in his mind all these years, the story that was to be his legacy, his enduring scathing insight into the human condition. He was hoping all his life that someday everything that he had read and everything that he had learned and believed would all suddenly synthesize into some crazy work of genius, some materpiece that has been lying dormant for so many years and that someday all the things he had read and all the things he had learned and believed all these years would finally become useful. Today should be that day, but he seems unable to paint his intellectual syzygy to his satisfaction (his words).
    He places his hands over the keys and wiggles them, trying to summon the words. The cigarette clutched between his fingers drops some ash onto the keyboard. He swears and starts to blow between the keys, before seeing a sentence laid out within them. He forgets the ash and types furiously, another paragraph marching its way into existence across the page. He stops and reads it. This is it: this is the one, this is his story. The opening words to his masterpiece resonate in him like no words he has written before. He is not constructing them consciously; rather, they are coming from something beyond him that has finally assimilated, combined and synthesized everything he has ever read, learned and believed. At last, the sum of all human knowledge within him has come pouring out onto this page in the opening paragraph of a novel so perfect he never would have dared believe he was capable of producing it. Now he cannot stop writing. He sees each word laid out in the keys before him, and can do nothing to stop his hands from striking them. His fingers build a world even before he is aware of it himself. He feels like he is sleepwalking through piles of bricks, and building a house even while he dreams he is awake. Each moment, each keystroke, brings a new stroke of genius, a new monumental act of creation which he is unable to control. The telephone rings but he ignores it, not wanting to stop, to stem the flow of prose—of poetry—eruptng from his subconscious mind. In him there once was a mess of ideas, of beliefs, of facts and figures and styles and characters and situations, but now all those things exist separately from him: language has grown sentient and intelligent, and has begun guiding his hand to bring about its own creation, its own very existence onto the pages rolling through his typewriter. What once was inside now is outside, where it belongs, where it can breathe and grow and live by itself and where it will join all the other words in existence: where it will one day form part of what someone else has read and learned and believed, one day become a drop in the ocean of literature, become subsumed and be consumed by the monster of words written since words began. It will fall, and it will drown. Its voice will not be heard over the cacophony of all the other voices. It will disappear, it will vanish. It will be eaten but never digested, seen but never heard, read but never remembered.
    He stops typing. He has no more words, nothing of value left to say, had nothing to say even in the first place. More ash falls on the keyboard. He stubs out his cigarette. The telephone rings and he answers it.