January 18, 2005
errorists attack my stories. These terrorists aren’t real
people like you and me, but other literary characters—paper
anarchists and revolutionaries bearing fictional bombs. The evidence
is scattered across my desk, in my smoldering manuscripts. In
yesterday’s attack, an unidentified university student marched
onto page three of my unpublished story, The Triclops,
and detonated a bomb he’d concealed in the lining of his
raincoat. The explosion sprayed shards of nouns and verbs as far
as page six. My protagonist died instantly, while three flat characters
remain in critical condition at an undisclosed hospital in a deleted
scene. The third such attack in as many weeks, I’ve buried
twelve characters.
A delegation of characters from my fictional world, led by Brigid
O’Byrne and Dean Johnson, marched on my office this morning.
Some carried placards that read Books not bombs! and
Stories work because characters do! In unison, my characters
shouted, “How many more of us have to die?!”
I explained that I’d taken strong counter-measures. I’d
created over two hundred new characters in the fields of policing,
security, counter-terrorism, espionage, and interrogation. Thanks
to new security protocols, my literary production has been reduced
to a crawl. I no longer wrote down characters that just popped
into my head. Even characters with bit parts as small as a man
talking on telephone or a woman pushing a stroller
undergo thorough background checks. I’ve instituted a snitch-line.
My agents look through all my characters’ mail and trashcans.
I’ve arrested suspects. I’ve arrested innocents. Look
around you, I assured my characters, this is police state fiction.
“It’s not enough!” they yelled.
“What more can I do?” I pled.
Brigid O’Byrne stepped forward. She looked about twenty
years younger than the bitter, old woman she played in my unpublished
novel. “Alan, we know where the terrorists are hiding.”
She nudged Dean Johnson with a glance.
“In others books,” he said, finishing for her. The
horseshoes of his triceps bulged beneath his t-shirt. “On
your goddamn bookshelves.”
“The books in my office?” I asked.
They nodded.
“You’ve proof?”
“Where else could they be coming from?” Brigid said.
“No one in your stories would undermine a chance to appear
in the World Guide to Famous Characters. To be remembered.”
I showed her a sheaf of papers, notes for my next story. “It
could be a disgruntled bit character wanting more paper time.”
“You’ve arrested all of those.”
“I can’t implicate characters in other books without
proof.”
Brigid raised her voice. “Trick McCabey found traces of
C-4 explosive on your copy of Conrad’s book, The Secret
Agent.”
“Have the police verified this?” I asked.
“They will,” said Dean with a sneer.
“Even if they do, it doesn’t mean anyone in Conrad’s
book had anything to do with this.”
“That book is on the shelf below your copy of The
Koran.”
I shot up from my chair. “We’ll have none of that
scapegoating in my fiction.”
After they left, I thought about shredding my manuscripts, erasing
my hard drive, destroying all my back up cd-roms. Where did my
characters get this vulnerability to public opinion? This intolerance?
From me? I stopped myself before I wasted my time on a nature-nurture
debate about my literary progeny. It didn’t matter how they
acquired this prejudice. The bombing must stop.
January 20, 2005
I recently wrote a story called “We Bomb”. Because
the characters were battle-fatigued veterans, I had my suspicions
and scheduled them for pick up and questioning. Until this morning.
The latest explosion reduced my new story to a few, charred vowels
scattered over four pages. Every character died almost instantaneously.
Before I’d even issued a press release to my fictional world,
Brigid O’Byrne and Dean Johnson were back in my office with
a crowd of twenty-five other characters clamouring for something
to be done. About The Koran.
“I’m not blaming anyone in this book just because
of your prejudices,” I said. “It could’ve just
as easily been someone from the Old Testament or the Bhagavad-Gita.”
My characters announced that they were going on strike: no character
in my fictional world would cooperate with me unless I did something
about this. “Try pushin’ us through a character arc
now, buddy,” Trick McCabey slurred. He even boozed outside
my stories.
“I’ll implicate no one book, without conclusive
evidence,” I said.
My characters stared at me and me at them. They began to jeer.
Trick and Dean said they wanted to work for other writers.
I held my palms out at my side. “What do I have to do?”
I shook my head as they began to chant “Justice! Justice!
Justice!”
I picked up my phone and said, “The police will conduct
a search of ALL the books in my office. That’s as far as
I can go.”
January 21, 2005
With ten German shepherds, my police force conducted a book-by-book
search of my four bookcases. They found nothing. Not a shred of
C-4 or any other explosives not accounted for within the book’s
narrative itself—which amounted to one essay about the conflict
between the Israelis and Palestinians. In my office, I reported
the police’s inability to find anything to Brigid and Dean.
“Do the rights of other author’s characters outweigh
the welfare of your own?” Brigid shouted.
“When B. and I go,” said Dean, “no character
will work for you. You’ll never sell another story again.”
I started yelling. “You want a chance at literary immortality,
then you’ll damn well do as I tell you! I’ll shred
all of you before I bow to your prejudice!”
Before they could answer, my lead investigator, Dick Nettleton,
walked in to my office. He announced his team just found a trace
of C-4 explosive on the spine of Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s
Mouth.
“That’s two books down-shelf from The Koran,”
added Brigid.
“I want that area cordoned off, Dick,” I said, “I
want a scene by scene search. Bring in Gulley Jimson. I want him
questioned.”
Dean slammed his thick hand down on my desk. “Round them
all up. Those mullahs—.
“We do this right,” I said. “By the book.”
Something banged. My computer rumbled and shook. The books on
my desk jostled so much, my thesaurus tumbled to the floor.
“What was that?” I asked.
Sirens wailed.
I started checking my stories. Nothing. Everyone glanced at
each other with worried looks, but no one had been hurt.
I froze. Oh God, my novel.
I checked my manuscript in my file cabinet. Acrid smoke billowed
up from my novel, my first novel. Chapters three through six looked
like someone had detonated a can of alphabet soup in a telephone
booth. The police cars and ambulances roared in and began hauling
off bodies and parts of bodies. Four dead. Eight wounded. Ten
years of my life reduced to sentence fragments zipped up in long
black vinyl bags.
“I co-starred in that novel,” wept Brigid into her
hands. “That was my big chance.”
January 22, 2005
I met with Dick Nettleton in my office. On my desk sat a pile
of three books. On the topmost shelf of my third bookcase, there
was a blank spot a hand width wide where these three had stood
only moments ago.
“You think these are the books, Dick?” I asked.
“The chances of my being wrong are slim to none,”
he said. “My forensic evidence and interrogations turned
up plenty.” He handed me a thick folder, which I opened
in my lap.
“You sound awfully sure of yourself,” I said.
“You made me that way.”
“Could I have made a terrorist, too? Is it literary blowback?
One of my characters pissed off by ten years of rejection?”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
I picked up the The Horse’s Mouth. I bought this
in 1987 for English 101: Introduction to Fiction. The Oxbow
Incident belonged to my wife. And The Koran? I can’t
remember which one of us bought it. It didn’t matter.
“What I don’t understand,” I began, “is
why. Why bomb my stories?”
Dick shrugged. “Who knows? But you better do something
quick. Dean Johnson’s trying to round up the others—to
go vigilante.”
I dug my hand into my forehead. “I’m going to give
them to a used bookstore. These three books.”
“Pass the problem on to another writer, huh?”
“What do want me to do? Burn them?”
“It’s the only way. To be sure. There’s some
naptha in your basement.”
When Dick left, I wrapped the books in a Safeway bag and then
packed this into a cardboard box. I went to my bookshelf and removed
all four editions of The Bible and packed them in the
box as well. I drove to the Public Storage near my house and rented
a storage locker. In one corner, I stowed the box and covered
it with a blue tarpaulin—a little literary embargo. I locked
the door and went out to my car. I sat for a while, before turning
the key in the ignition.
The explosion made me whack my car horn with my elbow. I shot
out of the car and spotted the manager with a flare pistol held
over his head like a starter pistol. “Bear bangers,”
he said. “Scares those birds off the power lines. They crap
on the cars if I don’t.”
I returned to my car and waited for my heart to slow to a heart
attack. It was dusk when I tried the ignition again. U Keep the
Key glowed a neon sign above the storage rental office.
February 3, 2005
“Six more explosions in the last ten days!” yelled
Dean from his wheel chair. Gauzed bandages covered the burns on
his hands, arms, and most of his face.
“Forty-eight dead!” shouted Brigid. Her left arm hung
in a sling.
A nurse had pushed in Dean on his wheelchair.
“All my books are gone,” I said. “Even my
dictionary. Embargo, the cessation of formal literary ties. There’s
not a scrap of fiction or non-fiction in the house.”
“You’re hiding it,” said Dean.
“In your file cabinet,” said Brigid.
I held up my hands palm up and gave them a puzzled look.
“Homer,” said Brigid. “The Iliad.”
“Why would Homer’s characters attack us?”
I asked.
“Get rid of it,” said Dean.
“There’s not even evidence it has anything to do
with Homer.”
“It has to be Homer,” said Brigid. “There’s
no one else.”
“The witch hunt is over,” I said.
In the wheelchair, Dean went rigid and grabbed his chest. A
nurse behind him felt for his pulse. Code blue she hollered into
a two-way radio. Code blue!
I dug into my file cabinet and pull out The Iliad.
I grabbed my car keys.
“I never trusted that Hector,” said Brigid.
March 15, 2005
For a while until it ended, I even thought it was me. That I’d
open one of my computer files and discover a paragraph describing
a warehouse full of C-4 explosive. In my paranoid fantasy, I’d
learn that according to my computer log, I was the one who created
that file; I last modified it on the date of the last explosion—depleting
the inventory by ten pounds of explosive. Yes, it was me along
unconsciously torturing my characters because too late in my apprenticeship
I learned that cruelty is the stuff of great literature. I even
had the motive: I wanted to be a writer of substance.
I never did discover the identity of the bomber, but once I’d
rid my entire house of all my books, the explosions stopped.
I waited for a month after the last funeral before calling my
remaining characters into my office for a story meeting. Everyone
was eager for me to begin a new story. To put this terrible past
behind us.
“What’s next?” they asked, “what’s
your next idea?”
I created a new file and placed my fingers on the keyboard.
“How about something light?” asked Brigid. Some
of the others nodded. There were murmurs of agreement. A comedy
to introduce a little levity into the Dresden that was now my
oeuvre.
I turned to my bookcases. Instinctively, my hand rose up. I
used to grab books at random and just begin exploring until something
stirred my imagination. If I hadn’t picked up C.S. Lewis’
Screwtape Letters and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
all those years ago, I could never have written my novel. But,
as I said, my bookcases are now empty—no Shakespeare, no
Sterne, no Joyce, no Shahrazad. Just row after row of blank veneer
shelves—literary isolationism.
My head ached. I’d never had it like this before: writer’s
block so bad it felt as if ten metre cement walls had been erected
between me and my imagination.
I turned back to my computer.
“Aren’t you going to start writing?” Brigid
asked.
I shook my head. “When I try to think of something, there’s
nothing.”
But at least no one has to die.
[END]
© 2006 A. Alan Beck - Contributor's
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