Chapter Text
My book was empty.
Well, most importantly, my head was.
Being an author had its pros and cons, and being empty headed was the worst.
I could go on for days, just sitting there, staring at the blank computer screen, eating what my wife made me and going to the toilet, and to get experience most likely get as less sleep as possible.
That was me in those times, and I loved those times as much as I hated them.
I mean who wouldn't hate it?! It was my job to write, it was important. To me, to my readers and to everyone else.
But I couldn't help but love it too. Sitting there, staring into the dark, not being able to move only one finger. It was beautiful and frightening at the same time.
This feeling of powerlessness. The pure, perfect feeling of being nothing. Doing nothing.
It was a bliss, an unpleasant bliss, but a bliss. I had never taken any drugs. I'd never want to. But I figured the bliss of not being able to move would be close enough.
And this feeling, the fright, the bliss, all those mixed emotions smashed together inside of me and created an uneasiness. Whenever I wrote, I felt uneasy. I didn't feel bad, no. I felt scared, helpless and happy all at the same time. And all this was the uneasiness. Not to be wrong, I loved it. But it frightened me just the same.
It frightened my wife the most, though. She wasn't a wife anyone else would think of. The perfect, uncomplicated housewife. By god, she wasn't at all like that. She was my wife, she was the one who kept me happy on so it wasn't a big deal. I was allowed to lose my temper, she was allowed to do the same and we lived together, without really living together.
She lived in the house, I lived in the house. She slept in the same bed as me, she slept with me. She made my breakfast. She made me lunch. She made me dinner. She provided me with everything I needed. And I provided her with the occasional fame. My occasional fame. When I say she lived through it, I mean it. She was a tick, feeding of my blood just as much as I was feeding off of her. We needed each other without needing each other.
I guess being an author makes you able to say anything and everything you want. But it is simply not true. You get too carried away, you're crazy. You get too heartwarming, you're weak. Things that you think of are projected onto you and everything that happens on the paper happened in your head. You're batshit crazy. It is what you are. People don't see through who you are and who you seem to be. They see who they want to see, not who you desperately try to tell them that you are.
The word ‘be’ is in general quite a difficult topic. To be or not to be. Well, it is the fucking question, but there's no way any of us could answer that. Except for the brightest, in my opinion. What you seem to be, what you are, what you think you are and what you want to be are all very different things. Even the part ‘what you are’ can be answered very differently by different persons. There is no ‘to be’ and there is no real ‘I am’ in that sense of the word. If course it is logical to say ‘I am’ and mean to be alive. Well, yes, we are. But the other meaning of the word to be, the meaning of really BEING something is too complicated. You could say ‘I am an engineer’. Talking about that sentence a few years later, it would be ‘I was an engineer’. Talking about how a person seems to behave, you have a different opinion than your friends, who would most likely have a different opinion than the people who don't know you or who you despise. It's easy, and then again it's not. It is not easy.
So, here I was. In the dark, and utterly alone. The computer screen went black about 203 times, and still I couldn't get myself to write. Until I finally fell asleep.
The dream was mostly dark, the tension scary and I felt as if I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I tried, but I just simply couldn't. It hurt, not being able to move. But the longer I tried to work my limbs free of whatever held them down the more scared I became. My heartbeat quickened and even though I couldn't move a muscle, I felt as if I had ran a marathon.
My fear grew as much as my heart rate until I couldn't stand it anymore. I screamed.
It sounds like I am a wimp. In the end, writing this I do not have the power to bring my fear to you. That kind of fear is not to put into words.
My wife stood in front of me as I woke up. Shaking and holding a kitchen knife in her cold, pale fingers. I stared at her, my chest heaving and sinking at an incredibly fast rate, and she stared at me. Her eyes were big and black in the darkness of the room and she looked at me as if I was crazy. “You were screaming”, she said and stared at me. It was merely a whisper, her vocal cords gave up at the end of the last word. She looked at me and turned around on the spot, beginning to walk away, into the kitchen. I stared after her, the muscles in my forehead pressing together until it hurt. “The knife, Nora?”, I asked. And then I finally realized what seemed so incredibly wrong with my wife standing in front of me in the middle of the night. The knife.
She stood still for a few minutes, just staring into the abyss. And I stared at her back. Her timid figure was hugged by a light grey nightdress and her pale, skinny legs sticked out of it like toothpicks. My wife was small, scarily thin, but not frail. And she stared into the darkness with such a strong interest, it seemed to me, that there was no way she behaved normally. She moved as if she wanted to turn around again, but she didn't, the arm with the knife fell to her side weakly. The brown hair in her ponytail whipped dangerously from one side to the other.
“You scared me. I thought there was someone else in the house”, she answered breathlessly. I was silent, simply nodded, and she continued walking. You could hear the tipping and scratching sound her naked feet made on the wooden floor. My gaze lay on her until she was out of sight. But still, I kept staring at the place where I saw her last.
It felt like a dream within a dream, sitting there and staring. Nothing happened and nothing was supposed to happen. I blinked a few times and then looked at my hands in my lap. They lay there, as if nothing had happened. Calmly. But I saw how they betrayed me. I saw that they were shaking, like my thoughts still were. The aura of the dream still lay on me. So I stood up and heard my bones cracking. My spine put itself into it's right position again. I sighed and closed my eyes as I felt this, it was relieving. I sighed and made my way into the kitchen.
There stood my wife, putting the knife back into the drawer. I looked her up and down, her small frame towering over the kitchen drawer. “Come to bed, Mike”, my wife said tonelessly. She turned around and stared into my eyes. She had head my footsteps on the wooden floor, just as much as I was able to hear hers. “I have to go to bed, I have work tomorrow”, she told me and walked around me to go upstairs into the bedroom. I nodded mechanically and followed her. Up the stairs I saw that she was already in bed, staring up at me like an infant, waiting to be put to bed. I watched her, sighing and slowly stripped my sweatpants off. I didn't wear jeans or anything at home. I liked sweatpants, and I was an author, for gods sake. My job was writing, not looking good. I nodded again and got into bed next to her. The bed hugged me, the cool surface of the mattress and the blanket soothing my skin. Telling me that everything would be alright. And even though I didn't believe them, I never believed anything anyone told me, I fell into a dreamless sleep.
When I woke up it was 3 pm. That was what my alarm clock told me, standing on my night table and staring down at me like an angry saint.
I grunted, realizing that half of the day was already gone, not for me for the taking. My stomach grumbled dangerously and I realized that I didn't eat well enough yesterday evening. I mean I could have eaten, but I was busy. Busy doing nothing. I groaned again, pulling the blanket back and pushing my body up from the mattress, I felt like a soldier after a battle. My groaning stopped when it made room for a hiss as my feet made contact with the floor. It was cold and my feet were pleasantly warm. Not for long, though. Since it was 3 in the afternoon, I got up to get downstairs to the kitchen, wanting to find something Nora had left for me to eat. But I was greeted by an empty kitchen table and a fridge that held only milk and my plate of the goulash leftover from dinner yesterday. I sighed and decided that the goulash had to do. So I took the plate out of the fridge and put it onto the table, scratching the back of my head and yawning intensively.
My eyes felt dead, as if they would drop out of my head and fall to my feet on the ground. There was this stinging feeling behind the eyeballs, the feeling you couldn't get rid off.
My tired feet heaved me to the drawer where I got a fork and made my way back to the plate, taking it and pulling it with me to the table in the dining room. My eyes fell onto the computer which squatted there like a black and deadly crow.
I sat down opposed to it, on the opposite side of the table, glaring at the monster. I couldn't think of anything. There was nothing in my head except for this pounding, this ravaging tiredness that clung to my brain like a drowning man. I closed my eyes and looked down onto the goulash. The red substance was hardened through the coolness of the refrigerator and it looked like jelly, rather than anything else. The meat in it looked dead and rotten, like a corpse that had been rotting in the sun for far too long. It looked like it was deposing.
My frown grew and I let go of the fork, staring at my food like a predator. I was hungry, but still my head wouldn't let go of these thoughts, twisting and turning everything I saw into the ultimate story. Not ultimate enough, though, since I couldn't think of anything good enough to finally make it. To finally begin my novel.
My wife came home and I, the perfect writer, hadn't written one single word. I had continued to stare at the computer screen and I had then fallen asleep again.
It is strange how people's minds work. Sometimes you're in a flow, you could write forever and never stop. And sometimes your mind is just off. You can't concentrate, you can't think clearly, you can't work. What's the difference? Why does the mind work like this? How does it work? As an author you have to have empathy, a lot at that. Whatever you're writing, who you're writing about; you have to be interested in their profession, in what they do. If you don't it's never going to work. You have to have a lot of interest in what they do. And you have to have a lot will power to do the damn research. Like I said, being an author had its pros and cons.
The importance of the empathy and the empathy itself is tiring. Empathy is tiring. On some point, you're just done with the world, and that was exactly what had happened in the time I didn't write a word. I didn't, I couldn't, and I didn't want to. I had slept, that was positive, but then again I couldn't bring myself to think about anything I wanted to write. I didn't want to, not for myself, not for my wife and especially not for my readers.
But seriously, empathy is sickening and I have no intention to being empathetic. The word itself holds its true meaning. Pathetic. Empathy is pathetic.
Yeah, m way of thinking is not at all like my novels lead readers to think. I'm not a nice person. I'm not anything anyone expects me to be. I don't want to be like anyone expects me to be. I am my own person and no one, no one could ever try to change me. I'm a cynical, uncaring asshole. I don't care about people and frankly, people don't care about me. They read my stories, they watch my interviews. But no one actually cares.
Philosophy is hard, philosophies tell the truth out of the people's point of view. And well, my philosophy is that no one actually gives a shit. You're addicted, no one cares. You die, no one cares. And anything you achieve with hard work is envied. People are assholes. In the end we're all just selfish. You talk to your friends because you like to have some company and because you chose them to help you fight loneliness. If you think about it you're simply using the people you hang around with. Your parents helped you. They chose to have children. But they just help you because of the feeling they have for you. Not because they love you for being yourself but because they love the feeling of loving. We're all just lonely fighters. There's no use in trying to find ‘the right person’ because there is no one. You can live with someone and you use him, he or she uses you and that's it.
My philosophy can be a little frustrating but the nice thing in being so cynical is that you just don't care. I know that the job as a writer seems strange for someone like me, the books I write much too ‘nice’ to be written by me. But pretending is my job. And not just mine, everyone’s. You adjust to the wants of the people who keep you around. Because you want to please them. No one will ever accept you for who you are. I tried, it didn't work. But Nora is close enough. We live together, we please each other, we don't ask questions. I know she sleeps around. I know she has a lover. But I don't care. Nora and I already talked a lot about it when she came home the first time after being with him and telling me that she was sleeping with Brad. Brad, what kind of name is that?! But to be fair I was as cool as a cucumber. And she screamed.
My wife cried for days. Until she finally realized.
There's no way my wife would have noticed before we got married. They say it the aftermath of marrying. My idea on marriage is, like my other thoughts, disturbing to most people.
I don't believe in love. Yes, it sounds simple but in the end it is a devastating idea to most of the people on this planet. I don't believe in love. When I was younger, of course, I did. I even believed that I married her out of love. I brought her flowers, we were the most romantic couple on the street. But seeing clearer the ‘depression of marriage’ got to me.
It's not about Nora. What is it about? We never discussed to go to therapy. In both our minds the idea is stupid. How could an idiot with tons of own problems help us out? I don't know why I began to realize that love isn't what it seems. I don't know why I realized that people aren't what they seem. But I did. And it was the end of everything.
To say that I helped Nora grow up would be an understatement. I helped her to get the right point of view on the world. Some might say that I transformed her into a cynical, depressed woman. Some said I wasn't good for her anymore. That she got an overdose of me. But as it goes overdoses make people become even more addicted. Nora realized and became realistic. Like me. For her the realization lasted days. And she cried.
That was twenty years ago and I began to adapt to the world I see it now. She learned that the hard way. My nerves got harder and I got quieter, becoming the man I am now. Just living the life many dream of but no one actually wants. People lie when they tell you they love the job. You can love writing, you can love the attention everyone gives you but you can't love being an author. There's no structure in life, there's no one to help you with work. There's nothing to keep yourself focused on your work. It's hell in heaven.
I'm a total different person in public. My agent hates me, everyone who really knows me hates me. But for interviews I can be such a nice person. I'm funny, I'm attentive. I'm not me. There's Mike Tailor the author, and Mike Tailor the person. I feel like in interviews I am nothing more than a shell people see and think nothing about. I'm damn superficial. But the real me is not. I am not like the great masses. I'm different. I'm darker. I'm stronger. I'm better. But no one seems to care about that. No one actually cares about anyone.
This is my idea of life and as I said before that's not at all what people seem to believe. But I do, and people don't interest me enough to actually ask what they think.
If you're a fan, you've probably noticed that the way I write has changed in this document. At the time I write this, it's still only a document. But I hope people will read it. You'll see why I hope so once you've finished reading. If I ever get to end this story.
The word ‘story’ is not a good word to describe this. Because story sounds like it's fiction. It's not. What you're reading is dead serious. To you it may be only a story. Maybe a good story, maybe the opposite.
But that's not the point.
The point I want to make is that this really happened.
Now that I've ‘come out’, if you want to call it that way you can decide whether or not you like me. But you can see that I'm real, for sure. I'm not an image anymore, I'm real. Not fake.
Nora woke me from my state of unconsciousness through slamming her bony hand on the table. My head jolted up and I nearly fell off the chair. After leaving my cannibalistic breakfast untouched I had seated myself in front of the monster again.
The angst-inducing, black beast. And I had fallen asleep again. The art of drawing moving pictures through words stayed denied yet again.
My eyes moved from my wife back down to the beast and I saw that I had made a trace of the letters ‘f’ and ‘g’ during sleep. I erased them so the document was once again as white and bright as a computer screen could be.
I looked back at Nora, implying a small smile.
She was a beautiful woman, her dark haired head sitting on a pale, slim neck which led to a pale cleavage with not much filling to it.
Her rather broad shoulders made way for a rectangle shaped body, her flat chest leading down to toothpick-like legs.
She still wore her all time jacket, a black trench coat, the belt tied around her waist. To define a few curves she doesn't have is what she calls it. Work. Right. She came back from work.
“Morning”, I greeted her. She raised her dark brown eyebrows, the most striking feature in her face. “It's 7 pm”, her nude lips formed the greetings she decided to give me.