Work Text:
‘The Great Gatsby’ (Manuscript, Draft One)
To my anonymous reader;
If you are holding these scrapped sheets of paper now, there are multiple conclusions that one could draw - firstly, that you are someone whom I trust and hold dearest, or secondly, you have somehow managed to locate this unused manuscript from the dustiest of drawers and I am no longer around to stop you. Gatsby told me himself one particular late night that perhaps I should just throw the crumpled things out entirely - to which I would respond, ‘I am but a sentimental man,’ and the thing would be put to rest. He of all people would understand - but I get ahead of myself.
I can only pray that the one who reads this is of understanding themself - without prejudice, or pride. Otherwise, I fear you may not appreciate this ending.
The truth - the one that cannot in these years be told - I lay bare to your judgment. But perhaps, dear reader, you are of an opposite time. And thus I leave my fate in your hands.
Signed,
[...] I looked outside the window, braced against the counter; the once hot cup whose steam rose between my cupped palms now held itself cold. And I do not drink it, nor do I wish to drink it - and why did I make it? For the earth that had fallen itself into a pit of sullen, uneasy sort of silence. It felt utterly raw to me, as if the ticking hand of the clock was stuck in the same position of one death, awaiting another, and then another. Perpetual, everlasting and perennial doom. Or perhaps it was the unsteady beat of my heart now, baring itself the standalone tell of time, the only sound that of my pulse rushing rivers through my ears. Not even the crickets, tucked between dew and dusk, brought forth a chirp - all of nature stood still with bated breath as if in anticipatory wait for something, anything to occur. Like a band of rubber stretched thin until the burning snap.
And so it came without much shock at all when the first gunshot rang out, echoing past the trees and reverberating through my walls. Funny thing is - it sounded just like the fireworks that often lit the sky above the mansion next door, the ones that exploded and glittered to the ground, seen for but a moment before nothing but smoke and mirrors remained. But, no, it could not have been - and then another, and one more, and the clock shuttered, restarted. The cup dropped from my grasp in a feat of emotion - and I allowed it to happen, allowed the shattering of glass to rattle me awake from the outside in, slow motion fragments of sharpened reflection. I saw myself perhaps for the first time that night, silhouetted deep shadows against the light of the rising moon.
As a young man, I had never been the fastest of runners - but this night, I think I may have won a medal.
Time had kickstarted itself past all reason - I watched the blur of the leering trees, scanned the smear of lights on water through slivers of green as I rounded the giant house to my leftmost side. The vines tangled and basil and spilling over vermillion bricks of perfected masonry, the neatly trimmed hedges around weathered lily and aster brought down with just a brush of wilt. And I saw it, the barrel of the glinting gun stuttering silver against Wilson’s skull, blurring and clattering as with a drunk man’s gait. And his eyes showed white, pits of crazed light that, for the smallest of moments, locked still into mine, and I very nearly had the notion to open my mouth and say something, anything, but as I risked a single breath, hardly an exhale -
Bang!
His body crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, a doll dropped heavily from the child’s small hand. My chest heaved heavy, constricted by invisible rope, a noose around my lungs, and I began to stumble forward, toward the horror, toward the gore - but my eyes caught invisible thorns upon something else -
Crimson red ribboning blue current - ah, the American dream, how could it not be? But I saw another body, unmotivated and sinking, and in that moment I could think of nothing else but him.
I had jumped straight in - no removal of shoes, as I had not bothered to have worn them, and no slipping off of any garment as my mind had already blankened, lost from its small ration of plausible thought, still entrapped within its cage. And the water felt thick, heavy like syrup, and it stung against my eyes as I churned through it, clawing onto him as though he otherwise might disappear from my grasp, never to return again.
I did not feel his weight - I kicked upward, gasping as I broke free into air, freezing the numb state of my skin. I grabbed desperately onto the ceramic ledge of this pit of hell, pulling myself up and throwing my weight down onto the ground, my lungs burning fire as I kept his forearm pressed white against my grip.
“Damn you - “ I seethed despicably through clenched teeth, eyes tightly shut against the strain of muscle and rabbiting pulse, “ - you difficult fool!”
I grasped beneath his other arm, hauling him up and out of the water in one last burst of fighting energy, and he collapsed a dead weight against the stone. I dragged myself above him, exhaling shivering breaths, and my fingers stuttered over his body, afraid to make contact, afraid of what felt to be the most terrifying inevitability I had never considered.
My hands covered his pale face, brushed the cold skin there, and that is when I felt it - my ring finger pressed to his pulse point - and the gentle rhythm of his own heart seemingly jump started my own.
“Christ, of course,” I could not discern if the laugh rattling from my chest and mouth was my own or one of hallucination, and I sat on shaking knees with my head thrown back, looking up at the expanse of dark sky blanketed above us. White milk of moon, delicate twinkle of dying stars. “Of course you’d be the hero.”
When I looked back to him, the warm spread of crimson pooling near his stomach caught my eye as startling as a nightmare, and in my hilarity I had very nearly forgotten about Wilson’s body slumped over only a few lengths away.
I began to grow weak in that moment, perhaps - and I begin to blank here - and maybe this ending did not fully occur as I had just told to you - but, of course, memory is a monster. I faintly remember the feeling of his blood slick over my fingers as I tried to frantically stop the wound from leaking, the feeling of adrenaline-driven nausea and ground tilting around me.
And I recall awakening next in an unfamiliar room, one clad with gold satin sheets and little painted cherubs dancing along the polished baseboards. The blinding light filtering through large windows mocking in its harsh and unyielding defiance. A crystalline glass of flat water sat to my right atop a bedside table of ivory and pearl, and as the sun’s distant rays reached its lip, the thing splayed faint colors of rainbow distinction, slipping up around the sheets as I threw them over and off my legs.
And to my surprise, I was no longer adorning the clothes to which I had last worn, and the pajamas that were on my person now were of ebony silk and champagne trim. They clung awkwardly, not quite fit, and as I examined more closely, I could just make out the initials ‘JG’ along the leftmost cuff.
And I remembered, swiftly as a fox darts across the snow, the events of whenever before. It hit me with a wave of nausea and startled apprehension, raising bumps across my skin beneath the brush of unfamiliar texture. I blinked the sleep away from my newly alert eyes, and began to pad about the room, locating the mahogany door with its expensive finishings, and slowly pushing it open -
Evidently, this was a particular wing of the house that I had not yet bore witness to, and as I tread soft Persian rugs and passed paintings of Renaissance and oil, I came finally to a more familiar opening.
Gatsby’s house was a maze that no one man could ever learn to navigate - but I found my way, through empty halls and dripping wax (because of course the man still feigns by candlelight), and I found myself before a new door, tall but reasonable, and facing a feeling that was anything but.
Looking back now, I do understand the very reasons for my fear, and my acute apprehension in this moment - but to me then, I felt only foolish - because who was Gatsby to me anyway? Was he a friend? An intriguing figure perfectly poised for my writer’s mind? I had not a single idea as to the answer of the shiver of my shoulders, the deep-set beat of my heart, nor to the open-mouthed inhale and exhale that occupied my lungs and chest. The only certainty I became privy to was the instinctual need coursing through my being, telling me to go in and confirm what I had felt must be abominably true.
And so with fluttered motion, I took the ornate handle into my palm, pushing the polished door away from the field of my vision and clearing way into a new room. I recall the almost heavy fumble of my feet as they moved forward, the gentle pounding against uncreaking hardwood.
And at this moment, I believe it began to rain - sudden, throbbing with a feverish intensity that seemed completely appropriate for the scenario of which I found myself within, rushing down against the locked and shuttered panes of glass that shook in their surrounding enclosement of this room.
“I see you’ve found yourself well, old sport.”
His voice jolted me aware from the tip of my skull to the base of my spine, down the bones of unsturdy legs and bolting me straight through my heels into the floor that was still laid bare beneath me.
And I whipped my head around to notice him, laying there pressed against champagne pillow and threaded sheets, washing out an insipid color of weakened skin and dulled eyes. Ah, Gatsby - the man who had once stood the very life of booming fireworks and splashing fountains of youth and intoxication, now drained of all familiarity and light. And yet I recognized him fully - perhaps even more than ever before, and I felt myself being pulled in, lured on a taut fishing line as though lost to a trance that only one Jay Gatsby could ever enact upon another living being.
It seemed that the weight of such a simple phrase held within it such an immense power, that I felt myself drawn down onto the bed without freedom of will nor mind. The mattress beneath sunk down in drowsy response to my weight, and the smile that spread across Gatsby’s face reflected such in the way it could not quite reach the corners of his fatigued eyes.
I cannot quite determine the amount of time that we sat together in this silence, the mingling of his breaths with mine and the ease in which they intertwined with my own, the rhythmic beating of heavy rain droplets falling free against roof and wall. In the moment, it seemed very likely the perfected image of eternity, and I saw it reflected in his eyes as they touched my face in every space besides my own, the only one of extreme significance. I could feel the avoidance, the teetering of everything that we had both each held truest to ourselves for so very long - perhaps even our entire separate existences on this plane of earth - about to fall, a complete inevitability that seemed to never want to come.
But as his mouth, dry and frowning, began to reopen, I felt the surge of urgency as it overcame me in its succumbing wave, and I began to speak in words that felt upon my tongue both foreign and true.
“You nearly died.” There they sat, both increasingly vital and paramount in their weight, and I watched under furrowed brow as Gatsby floundered beneath me, his eyes blinking and seemingly dazed in their pure form of expression. But he looked at me for the very first time, and I could feel the ticking of the clock of before, restarting itself to count the measures to something new - but would it be of life or death, this new day? Or something else entirely?
I continued, as though the words were an alphabetized fountain pouring with neither stopper nor drain, building up as my voice crescendoed in its exigency, “and you didn’t care, did you? You knew taking the blame would put you into trouble and yet you did it anyway, the fool that you are! Why? Do you have not an ounce of self preservation left? Not even an inch of self respect? Christ, Gatsby, and I had genuinely thought that you of all people would be the one to shut us all out - that you would send the hounds and go running. The terrific, great Jay Gatsby, always running. I should have left you in that pool, you miserable thing. I should have left you to stand on that dock alone.”
My breaths were coming out in heaves of chest, and I stood, having wandered the room and made Gatsby to follow my every step with those eyes, forcing him to have to, and I looked down upon him now, and for the very first time - I felt that the only true villain was me.
Gatsby looked up at me now, and his eyes, without a single doubt, bore down into mine with the intensity of a thousand suns. He had flipped the situation on its head in the span of a single moment, and I was suddenly small.
I did not realize then - but he had tears in his eyes as he croaked out a response. Voice quiet in its very first occurrence, he began, “I have the smallest of feelings that this is not about me.”
And that is when my own eyes welled up salty tears, my face burning red with embarrassed passion, and in the utterance of a single phrase, he had once again broken through directly to my core. He had torn down the wall, cut through the thick bramble of thorns with a single flourish that I knew now had surrounded me the entire time. “What?”
His head inclined slightly to its left hand side, locks of shadowed golden hair shifting on the pillow beneath him, mussed and disheveled in a way of distant recognition. He felt both completely known to me and unfamiliar all at once, as though I was seeing this man to which I had grown acquainted unmasked for the very first time - and it seemed almost vulgar in its entirety. Like perhaps I was witnessing something that I should not have, burst into a room whose closed door should have heeded sufficient warning.
The facade to which he held up was a mirror reflected unto me, and as I stared listlessly into the shattered glass, he spoke once more, this time moving against the sheets, which slipped smooth down to above his waist, where his chest revealed to be barren besides the alabaster bandages wrapped tight around his torso. Through these cotton plaster, one could make out the deep red in its desperate attempt to seep up onto the surface, and Gatsby seethed against the pain of the movement, teeth bared in grimace. The very notion had my senses grow dizzy and lightheaded, and I felt myself turn away, only for the grasp of a gentle hand forcing my gaze back upon its sender.
His fingers were thinner than I could have recalled - not that I had ever really noticed - and they were warm, prodding me like a poker directly stuck out of coals - fever, perhaps, but I no longer had time to ponder. Somehow, he had compelled me back to stand before him.
“Nick,” and my name felt intimate on his tongue, “you’re right.”
And I turned full attention to him then, squinting my eyes down as though maybe if I tried hard enough, I could pry inside that head of his and deduce his meaning with the same impatience of a child’s burning curiosity. And he continued to examine me right back, with the same if not even greater intensity, and his exhaustion did nothing to mask it.
“You say that I lack self preservation - that much is true. And you presume that I have not a care for the people around me - that I run, and that I do not understand the affection those same people hold for me. But I do know. And that is precisely why I run. Because I have been terrified of what they may think of me - it is anything but true that I do not care what others believe of me. And I am terrified of death - but the one thing that scares me more is disappointment. That they might hate me if only they understood the truth.”
And I sat, his hand gliding tiredly from wrist to atop of mine, burning a hole straight through the expensive sheets and mattress and hardwood below. “And what then? What is this...truth?”
It was tempting fate - I knew that both wholly and completely - but I wanted, needed to know, like I may die without this knowledge in the palm of my hand. Gatsby tilted his head, eyes softening in a manner of sympathy and pain. I heard his sharp inhale, the thick swallow, the look of searching the room for an answer he wouldn’t find, and his gaze returned to me, heavy and unwavering.
“Do you not see? How could you not see? It was never her.”
My pulse had quickened, throbbing a drowning of sound in my ears, and my vision was blurred as I continued to just look, and listen, and feel. Gatsby shifted in closer, ignoring the flash of pain shooting like the bullet back through his stomach, and he was now looking up at me through hooded eyes. I was shaking - why?
I whispered, voice breaking in near-silent prayer, words tumbling out stones before our fallen altar, “who, then?”
The clock ticked, then stopped - the hand stuck as with the air around us, high strung and fierce in its defiance.
Gatsby, golden Jay Gatsby, had the nerve to trail his gaze down, and then back up to my unblinking, frozen lids, and he further dared his very existence, and mine as well, in the following exhale of words -
“ - you.”
And there I sat, his eyes unblinking into mine, boring down a pressure and a fear for which I had never before known, filling my body from limb to limb, overflowing as my breaths began to grow more and more urgent in both depth and frequency.
At this moment, I did not know of reason - how could I? How could I have ever begun to anticipate such a revelation? And yet, he looked at me with more earnestness than I had ever seen on the face of any man, or even woman, and I felt myself be caught up in it.
I was pinned down, the specimen examined, but, unfathomably it seemed, I did not - no, could not, look away. I could not run, nor could I hide. Deeply, I knew what it was.
I watched carefully as he noticed my uneven breathing, the slight tremor of my hand still splayed numb beneath his own, the gloss of tears against eyes unfallen. And he drew impossibly close then, his golden stare falling to shadow - and my pulse rabbited through my chest as his breath touched the skin of my face - nothing but a gentle whisper, chilling me from the outside to in, placating me completely to whatever was to come.
My senses were both numb and heightened, overwhelming the impossibility with only truth, and nothing was truer then than his palm moving to press whole over my breast, fingers splayed and warm, and as he looked up at me through hooded eyes of navy and sky, I felt I could think nothing more at all.
“Nick...”
I clung to the words like a prayer, hanging on the edge of his quiet voice -
“I love you. Truer than true, fiercer than God, I love you. I speak this to you not only
without reservation, but without single expectation. My dearest Nick, I plead with urgency - know that you are loved beyond any reasonable measure.”
His other hand was now up to graze the bone of my cheek, knuckles slow and gentle as they slid skin against skin, a downward trail without a destination. He touched me like I was delicate - as though if he moved the wrong way, I could disappear, come back to my senses and push him away - but I knew even then I could never do such a thing, and so I drew my hand up to meet his own, covering it like a secret, holding it like an oath - and we both knew.
Fingers slid into perfect place, slotting together like the puzzle pieces that laid finding themselves now in my mind - and I felt myself leaning forward, surging as though the action were brought on by only a sudden gust of compelling wind, and as my eyes fluttered shut, I could see not black but gold, exploding in my mind’s eye like freckles of constellation, bursts of fire and flame, liquid earth and spark. Vibrations of sudden color, there and then gone, and his mouth was so warm it felt a color all its own, something so soft one could not help but fall into it, let it engulf them wholly and completely, become one with it.
And as we finally parted, I remembered the rain - most notably, its newfound absence, with only the small sounds of trickling rainwater and now the sun pushing through the lightened and now parted clouds, shining yellow and white beams into the room across carpet, wood, and skin - Gatsby now leaned back against the polished mahogany carving of a headboard, eyes half lidded and smiling, actually smiling - and he opens his arms to me in a way that flashes me back to that first night standing tall under the singular shining moon, champagne glass spilling over in hand, a hidden declaration neither yet known to him nor I - and a room full of hundreds yet all I could see, know, or feel, was him and only him. I had not thought of what this meant until this very moment in which I sat, folding into his embrace, and I took him in for the very first time in all of his entirety - allowed to look, allowed to touch - and I thought, then, that perhaps the American Dream did exist, and maybe it existed here within these walls, behind these doors, and against his beating heart.
I drew my hand across the bandages that strung taut lines around his stomach, dancing a tightrope along the air above - and was I even allowed? But he took my hand in his, pressed us into the crimson beneath, and though he winced, he did not waver, and as I looked to him, he said, “it’s quite alright - me, I mean - I am quite alright. I will be.”
And I had not noticed the tension of my shoulders, the breath that I had held, the frown that adorned my face to his eyes, and as I exhaled, I let myself fall forward, forehead pressed firmly to his, holding his attention without stutter nor falter. And as our breathing turned to synchronicity, I felt the gentle rise and fall of his stomach against my palm, despite the wetness beneath - his body was fighting - and for a while, I had almost forgotten that he too was a man of war. But he was alive, and as I moved my face to the crook of his neck, I could feel the beating pulse, the warmth that it produced. And I kissed him, not for him but for me, because he was alive and it was okay.
There exists a particular reason for the quality of the tale for which you have just been told - scrapped for evident explanation, I could never have published such an ending - nor could I continue it. And those who knew of Gatsby, which was a great many, knew the supposed truth of the events of my book, and as I published it, what was fiction to me became truth for many. It was Gatsby’s idea himself to have died in the finished manuscript - I had vehemently been against it at first, but in truth, it only made sense - we could leave, and who would bother to follow us? The mansion was sold off to some Wall Street accountant too big for his britches, and before we left, Gatsby had rather mournfully picked a wilted daisy from the south gardens, and tucked it away for safekeeping - “to never forget,” he had said, eyes fixated on that same green light he had stared down time after time. And I took him in my arms, and we left that dock and never looked back. He struggled for a while - and I feel that for some time, he needed closure. Perhaps he had never loved Daisy in the way that he was meant to, but he still cared deeply for her - and I saw the loneliness, the confusion that he felt.
Daisy called a year later. It was the eve before my 31st birthday, and the sun had just finished setting beneath its bed in the horizon, tucked away till morning come. It was I who answered, and the line was silent for perhaps ten seconds - I very nearly hung up before that familiar lilt of voice came through and into my impatient ear; “ - hey. It’s me.”
We exchanged a few words, her mostly describing her newfound life along the Italian Riviera, on a coast of warm water and cobblestone streets, sweets and cuisine she had newly dined upon, the wines and the lemonades. Then the particularly startling revelation that she had divorced Tom back in America, throwing her envied ring in the Atlantic before she departed for bigger and better cities. She did not know of his whereabouts now, nor did she appear to care - and I had never heard her voice laced with such thrill or freedom as when she rightly stated so.
But the conversation eventually trickled out, until the only thing left to do was ask, and how she knew that Gatsby and I stayed together I did not know - of course, I had been writing her letters beneath the shuttered candlelight of San Francisco, spoken of my new telephone and the warm weather. How different it seemed from the frenetic New York City, and furthermore the banks of Lake Itasca and the Mississippi. But I never knew if she had received them until the call, and it almost seemed a shame that perhaps she had read them but never written back. And was it I she truly wished to speak with? Or Gatsby, whose heart could hardly take to hear her voice again, after all of this threadbare time?
I allowed Daisy to reconnect with Gatsby as I paced in the next room over - our house now, and then, is small, but it is cozy even in its darkest of corners. That night, I had been annotating a paper I had received from my newest employer, breaking down numbers that I had vastly preferred to swim in my head over this nausea compelling me now, and when Gatsby appeared in the frame of the door, looking more tired than I seen in a long while, I simply padded forward against the carpeted floors, taking him in and bundling him up into my arms, holding him tight and secure. I felt the wetness against my shoulder, and I hugged him tighter. It would be alright.
Jordan visited the next weekend - she had recently been in Tulsa, and was now brought to California for a particular tournament in Harding Park that evening, to which Gatsby and I were promptly invited (if not forced). She had gotten better - if that were even a possibility - and we watched beneath beating sun as she returned to us without a drop of sweat on her skin. She bought the rounds that night in claims of celebration and long-term absence, and as Gatsby left the table to catch a smoke, Jordan pulled me in, smiling mischievous as a cat. And I suddenly felt compelled to tell her everything, to detail every moment, before she even had the chance to ask, and she listened intent and free of care or judgment. “Congratulations, then,” she drawled, twirling her glass of glinting whiskey, “you deserve each other - I mean that.”
And then, it was Gatsby’s father himself - Mr. Gatz, a feeble old man in appearance, of stark contrast to his son barring their share of sharp cornflower eyes and strong set of jaw. Gatsby had been nothing more than nerves in anticipation of his father’s visit, staring outside the bedroom window at the wooden desk whilst I placated sleep, tapping a silent, restless foot as he worried both brow and lip. Eventually, he would wear himself out and the bed would dip as it always did, and I never slept until I heard his breathing even out - just in case.
Mr. Gatz did not question our unusual living arrangements - he seemed a man too old to care for such things, and took the mostly barren spare room with ease and peace of mind. And I heard him praying, late one night after Gatsby had already passed out - praying for his son, for whom he only wished happiness and peace. Gatsby thought he knew what his father wanted of him - to make of himself something better than the rest - and he believed that by buying him a house, and sending him money and pictures of the mansion that he would be proud. But all Mr. Gatz wanted for his son was but a life worth living.
Right before he left, he pulled me into his frail arms and whispered brokenly against my ear - “take care of him, won’t you? Promise you will - promise you will because I know he would not do it himself.” Of course, I promised.
I no longer wish to lie. I want to write only of truth - and if I were to never publish a thing again, I would be happy - complicit to the world as it appears before me now. I am more than fine with my work as it idles day after day, and even more so coming home to Gatsby (whom I never refer to as such anymore unless particularly angry - rather - Jay, my songbird, my light). Jordan and Mr. Gatz visit every so often, mostly on holidays and almost never without prior reason - Mr. Gatz is growing too old to travel often, and Jordan is becoming increasingly popular in the sporting world, and can hardly get away during the on-season.
I still do not know if anyone is reading this at all, or if anyone ever will - however, I can rest easily in the knowledge that the truth, my truth, exists on paper purely for the sake of possibility. But, if it should, I hope that this manuscript, preamble, epilogue and all, falls into the hands of a kinder world.
Finally Signed,