Smartystan

His books on the inequality of individuals living in the United States illuminated screens. Dr. Strong’s spectacular sales gave him enough financial freedom to continue to live alone in his glass castle. The shape of it reminded anyone of a stack of boxes arranged with such precision and care that you had to ask why the architect didn’t just fall in love with the building and claim it as her own.

He stood up and moved from room to room. He spoke to his digital assistant, Simon. He mouthed off the words that went down on the screen as well as in audio formats. The booming power of his voice created in him a distinct ring that no man could ever touch or fully grasp. He didn’t say it or feel it. He’d never had writer’s block, the squirms, whatever. He, though, did always sense that he could be experiencing it without other people knowing it. To say that he remained prolific would be like saying the universe is vast. An utterly obvious understatement would only rankle him. Instead, he cleared his throat.

“Simon?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Put down this line: The gap in incomes is an expression of a free market….”

The assistant recorded his voice and wrote what he said.

“No. That’s not it. Write this: the income disparity is due to the fact of a laissez-faire social system.” Simon performed the same functions.

That feeling of breaking through the mist and seeing a clearer picture of what you want to say finally came to him. He felt as if there could be no higher plane, no greater depth than the sensation of forming words. Those same words that would fill up another book bringing him further fame and fortune did not stand as his goals. It was the work. For he knew both would have never arisen and both would evaporate with the power of not knowing how to perform his duties as an author and lecturer.

His past life as a professor proved fruitful. There existed a certain kind of understanding that surpassed anything mystical. He had it. Dr. Strong could be a man who could find a space within himself that could be left unbothered by any human. He challenged his students to discover that piece of their fiber to grant themselves a sliver of peace and solitude. What’s still true is the fact that he could feel the weight of not expressing himself in the same ways as when he lectured at New Sweden University.

An electricity surged through his frame in front of a class of mostly twentysomethings. After class, they often asked for autographs. He didn’t mind it but he just liked the charge that he felt upon going to the front of the class and conveying a lesson. As he graded papers he never considered that he would let a computer program do the job for him. Simon was different. He did flirt with the idea. “Simon?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Write me an entire three hundred page screed on economics in the new country.”

Dr. Strong looked at his screen as it filled with words, coherent, clean words.

Each of them spilled out onto the page as if they came from a literary spigot.

“Stop, stop, stop.”

“Is there a problem in the writing, sir?”

“No, Simon. I just couldn’t go on with some artificial intelligence doing everything for me,” he admitted. “No offense.”

“Absolutely none received, sir,” Simon said.

Dr. Strong continued to use Simon as someone to take dictation of his own thoughts. He never wanted to go down that road of relying on a machine to substitute for his brain. The human mind had built the machines and the intelligence. It had to be far superior, no? he thought. His spacious abode set in the woods and with those boxes of glass packed on one another, he could sense the walnut frame that held the boxes in place almost shift. With all of the ways he had avoided writing another book, the idea creeped into his soul and demanded that he produce more, and more, and more.

In the time he had laid out exactly what he wanted to say he had received calls from Go and Dr. Frampton. He ignored him. There existed a sense that he had found the “zone.” He walked on his alpaca floor and still didn’t think anything of the young woman whom he had dismissed at the café. Anger didn’t boil over in him but a feeling of always being on the hunt and looking for the next lady to cross his path had always intrigued him. No wife or children ever damaged him. By never marrying he felt like a full man. His string of girlfriends always fascinated him. It came as a great wonder to him that he now found himself writing another book at age sixty-two. The years that had gone by since the founding of Smartystan truly captured a moment for Dr. Strong.

Ideas continued to permeate his mind. In this mighty mind state, he knew just how to convey those thoughts and instructed Simon on how to best incorporate them in the text and audio. It was like he had become a spacecraft captain and could steer his way through the Solar System. To him, he completed the Lord’s work, even though he knew there was no Lord. His atheistic stance just was like checking his coat in the great mansion of a rational philosophy. At this point, he could feel more of the ideas bubbling to the surface of his consciousness. Without regard, he felt them coming at a fast clip. Now, he was like a butterfly catcher, extending a net to grasp those precious thoughts.

As he worked on the first draft of the piece, a nagging suspicion slithered its way into his brain. He wondered if people actually read his work. Of course they bought the digital copies and the audiobooks, but did they read them?