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The world is full of misconceptions, and those which concern you personally hurt double when you think about the inherent presumptuous injustice and bias that accompany them. For instance, many people believe that criminal life is nothing but violence, and debauchery, and surfeit that happen while you swing from malefaction to prison and back.
It’s not so, I tell you, and be sure that I know a bit about the subject from personal practice. Before you arrive at debauchery, there’s toil, and risk, and trouble, and above all, disappointment because that’s the crude and ruthless matter most of life is made of. And if anybody thinks that a criminal mind is less sensitive to frustration, it’s just another of those misconceptions I mentioned that should be rooted out from the naïve brain.
It was on one of those spells of meditative inactivity when I was left alone to maintain the solid ratio of an evil act a day and my partner was dallying his time away. He always finds an assortment of trifles to make this dallying appear justified and respectable; that time, he was writing a book.
You might assume that all criminals think of nothing but how to become the most wanted or, better yet, Most Wanted; rivalry is a healthy stimulant but poor and ill-fated is the mind that thinks only about competition and competitors. Such one-trackers constitute your local police report while in all modesty I must say we’ve long been beyond this miserable scale. We’ve always been versatile; it’s the asset I’m particularly proud of, and when we failed it was always with variety.
So, Hades set about writing a book, and I was left to drift on my own. It was a sad period: there’s no fun to sin alone, and besides, when the nefarious isn’t followed by the corrupt, the monetary side of life tends to grow weak. When you’ve been in it for a while, crime doesn’t look much unlike any other job, with the only difference: if you stop doing it, nobody’s going to keep you on the dole.
But I am a seasoned man and able to rough it when needed, even though canned beans, fish and chips as the only menu soon began to seem a bit tedious. I mean, how much time would one possibly need to write a darned book?
I started having suspicions a month later as I took a close look at the litter our rooms were full of. It wasn’t the best of apartments even on the brightest day, and its gloom only increased when crumpled sheets rustled everywhere; when I saw that most of them bore as much as only a word or a sentence, I knew we were in for a long creative vacation.
And this was when my inner vents began to leak.
“Hallo, partner!” I thought it was a good conversation starter since we hadn’t spoken for days. Or weeks. Not for my lack of trying, that’s sure.
“Uh?”
See, it’s hard to keep the ball of small talk rolling without the cooperation of the other side involved. I once read about Cicero – or it might be Demosthenes or any other ancient soap-boxer – who addressed his speeches to the sea; well, for me good chat, like good sex, doesn’t work out without mutual input, and I had been going on for too long without either.
“Any progress?”
“Yes, yes, definitely…Felix, is that you?”
I felt tempted to say no just in spite but thought better of it. Having spent so much time barricaded behind the typewriter, Hades might well have forgotten how I looked like. I, for one, had trouble recognising him. While longish hair and a certain degree of unshavenness have their appeal, excesses spoil the picture. One should know when enough is enough.
“Well, when are we going to celebrate? I’ve been renewing my caviar and champagne orders for forever.” Even then I made an effort to sound positive, although my guts told me otherwise. “You must hurry if you want to make it into Booker shortlist this year.”
“Ah, Felix,” he leaned back with a tired sigh that would make a construction worker proud. “Landmarks in literature aren’t left in passing.”
“Rest assured that you’ve made no such sin. In fact,” I took a meaningful look around, “you’ve been wearing a track across it all right. Speaking of sins…”
“Writing a book,” continued Hades, not quite listening, “is like building a house. There’s dirt, and sand, and clay, and sometimes you have to raze the first faulty version and start anew.”
“I see,” I said and looked at the papery litter one more time. “Except that nobody builds a house for the pleasure of it.”
“Who’s talking about pleasure?”
“I am,” I said miserably, but the hint was lost on my partner.
“The pleasure of writing, my dear Felix, lies in its extreme concentration, in the complete focus and determination needed to distil the vaguely spread essence of our being into the purest and most perfect form. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence…”
“Now you’ve mentioned it, do you think a single sentence on a page…”
“…or a glittering paragraph.”
“Ah! Partner, you’ve moved on to paragraphs?” Hope shone brightly, and I jumped up in glee.
“Not yet. That’ll come with editing.”
My newly-born hope was a supernova that went out with a sizzle. At once the low ceiling of the apartment seemed even lower, the heating even less hot, and my desolation even more desolate. But I refused to give up that easily.
“Don’t you find that at least more convenient surroundings would oil your creative gears?” All options considered, I thought that I could, if nothing was to be done about it, put up with another month of artistic life spent somewhere warm and civilised, like Cannes or Monaco.
“You think so?” Hades looked around the room for perhaps the first time since we moved in there. “Yes, you might be right. For example, Burroughs wrote ‘Naked Lunch’ in Tangiers, and if we only remember what brilliant passages were scribbled down in frontline trenches amidst blood and gunfire, when any moment fortuitous lead could put an end to all expectations…”
“Speaking of expectations,” I interrupted with a sinking heart that was clutching onto the last straw. “How long do you expect your criminal reputation to last if nobody’s heard about our atrocities for a month?”
“Only the young care for such an ephemeral thing as fame. It is earned fast and sold cheap.”
“Acheron, partner, didn’t you always want to be a famous criminal, like everyone else in you family?” I whined, firing my last shot without much hope that it’d hit home. And so it didn’t.
“No,” Hades said firmly and with rare sincerity. “I always wanted to be a writer. That can happen even in such good families as mine.”
And that was when I gave in to alcohol and the inevitable and passed out for another month or so. When I did wake up at last, it was on a day of fine weather and, as far as I could see, another season already.
“Felix! Felix, wake up, I want you to read this for me.”
I blinked, feeling the full effect of a hang-over that had lasted years, during which I must have missed something vital, like any clues as to what the envelope he was waving before my nose contained.
“It’s from the publisher.”
“Ah!” I felt the atmosphere tremble with the bared nerves of anticipation and sat up, thrilled as if I had contributed to the book myself. That I did, strictly speaking, if you consider the various degrees of denial I had gone through but didn’t dwell on out of my modesty and respect for the younger readers. Surely, such great efforts couldn’t be left unrewarded.
“Dear Mr. Hades,” the letter said,
“Having read your manuscript we regret to inform you that our publishing house cannot make you an offer for the book. As an ex-English major you will undoubtedly agree that while the outstanding quality of your writing has its merit, this alone can’t redeem the flaws. The book is gratuitously complicated, the extraneous material and the author’s digressions dissipate whatever excitement it might have had, the pace of action is hopelessly bogged down, and the characters and situations described range from far-fetched to utterly unbelievable. Our thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. Together with this letter we enclose a free copy of Daphne Farquitt’s acclaimed ‘How to write a bestseller in five days’. We believe this concise and informative book will be a valuable aid should you decide to continue with a literary career.
Sincerely yours,
P. Smith and G. Smith, the editors.”
Silence hung thickly. I let the letter fall to the floor, where it rustled sadly among other waste products of creative activity.
“It’s not me, it’s P. Smith and G. Smith,” I said in prevention as the silence acquired dangerous undertones.
“Oh these degenerate days! Daphne Farquitt!” uttered Hades and looked skywards, where Heavens and the seat of ultimate justice were securely concealed by the roof, city smog, clouds and people’s general insensitivity. “In a country where the standards of literature have degraded from Milton and Shakespeare to Farquitts and Smiths, where the excellent reality of fiction is considered far-fetched, where the intensity of feeling is traded for cheap entertainment…”
I held my breath, preparing myself for an outburst.
“I think I must kill someone, right now. It’s the only thing this country deserves.”
My lungs started doing their work again as I looked into his deliciously mad eyes. After all, there are so many gates into the eternity of history, and not all of them are guarded by editing Smiths.