Giving In

I used to think I could change the world.

I stared into the abyss. The world around me droned, flat and dim, as a kaleidoscope of meaningless shapes assaulted my eyes and blurred my senses. “Sweep me off my feet,” I slurred, already spinning. Lives passed, and I carefully dissected each one like some peculiar new organism, the biology of which kept hidden a world-bending truth. I alone held the key. I alone could save us all.

This is really how I thought.

Searching compulsively for something to latch onto as I hurtled through empty space, there was nothing. And so I drifted, perfectly content in my invisible state. An electron swirling around its atomic nucleus—I was everywhere and nowhere at once. Track me down, and I’d be already gone. A wave of probability—I could be anywhere at all if I chose. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I never did.

“Paul!"

"Hey, paul."

"Look what I found.”

A quiet rush of wind. A lurid flash of color. The pale scent of paper.

“Would you get off your phone?” the voice pleaded, a soft contralto deadened by the flat backs of the books that loomed over me from either side—floor to ceiling—like so many tombstones.

“Sorry,” is all I said, sliding the lifeless brick back into my pocket.

I felt the books, like ghosts, surrounding me. Entire lives, birth to death, trapped between two stiff sheets of paperboard. Each one—the cynosure of the world from which it came—sat tied to the same fate as its neighbors, waiting in the dark for a pair of dispassionate hands.

Worthless relics.

I picked one up, shrugged my shoulders, and placed it back on the shelf to collect dust for another 40 years.

Ancient scribes.

Had they known the fate of their work, would any of them have committed themselves so blindly to self-indulgence? What’s the difference between 30, 70, or 100 thousand words when they’ve all been read for the last time?

I could have buried my face in my phone. I felt it burning against the outside of my thigh, melting my flesh and begging me to bring it back to life. I would have reached for it—saved myself—but I was still being looked at.

“What is it?” were the words that fell mouth—like broken teeth.

Held up was a little black book, covering half a face with wide eyes peering expectantly from behind the slightly worn edges of its matted, leather jacket.

“I’m not sure. It’s just a notebook. There’s no title, but some of this stuff is pretty good.”

“Sure,” I said, holding out my hand.

Words were waste back then. Mine were, at least. They would come out mangled and stuck together—a fatberg. The distance between thought and expression too great to see a place where they might ever meet. It was better to stay silent, I thought.

The little black book.

The leather was coarse and cool to the touch—a small circular relief emblazoned on the front. I traced it with my finger before opening to the first page.

I flipped back to the cover and traced the circle once more, letting my thumb glide along the outer rim, feeling passively for the slightest imperfection in form or texture. I thought back to the worm writhing at my hip, the weightless expanse of pressed glass, and the gentle churn of life detached from my senses.

Recalling anything seen on the other side of that glass was not something routinely achieved. Once my consciousness flushed through my fingertips, there was rarely any chance of being in both worlds at once or taking anything with me in either direction.

But one outpost, seen during a recent voyage, pulled me back: an advertisement.

A contest for a short story, between 600 and 2,000 words, nestled neatly between the pandemic-flouting escapades of my high-school crush and the idolatry of one of the many public figures that filled my feed with lives that were not but could be mine.

The winner would take home a $20,000 grand prize.

It was written in a bold, heavy, serif font. I remember that clearly, because the subheadings looked like an entirely different typefice than the copy.

The little black book, still in my hands, kept me from floating way like a birthday-boy balloon—cried for but quickly forgotten.

I turned back to the first page and stared idly. I would have been angry if not for my indifference. It was dangerous to suggest I might find pleasure in something like a book, back then. Whatever I held in my hands didn’t feel like it had much to offer. Nothing moved.

What effort would it take to turn these words into pictures? Into feelings? Nothing like the idle possibility of the portal—which would subject itself to my voyeurism at will, showing me only what I wanted to see and letting me feel only what I wanted to feel: nothing. That was living. This was work.

On the page, black and white bled. Words sat on the cracked surface of a rocky planet spinning too close to its sun. Burning in the harsh ultraviolet light, they needed saving. I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the first three pages, giving them eternal life.

Nature is bliss and separation from it is horror. Who said those words?

Nature is horror. Nature is bliss. There is nothing else. What, if anything, can be unnatural, when all that exists is born from her womb and her mind—as one.

I crept back to my apartment that night and typed in a rote, mechanical fashion. I couldn’t tell you what any of it said.

I pressed send.

I didn’t blink when I opened the $20,000 check two weeks later—I submitted myself to the same millstones and mishaps, pleasures and promises that guided the hands of the countless authors I disparaged before me.

I gave in.