They Still Live

It was late at night, but she was still up, going through some old papers. Her living room was well-lighted and spacious, her entire New York apartment was something to be proud of. Her hard work and talent bought it. But she was not thinking about any of that. She was haunted by an idea she never had the chance to use, and now it was gone.

She had spent the day frantically running errands before a book signing, but when she finally sat down at the bookstore, she had time to organize her thoughts. And she remembered, in the flashes of the day, the one thought she always wanted to put into words. A homeless man with a cart of junk, a mother driving a minivan, a man shaking another man’s hand with a sad look in the eye, an old man cleaning a window from the inside, high above the street. She saw all that and she understood. And now she knew how to tell it.

She could not wait to get back home and find that one idea she put down on paper years ago but did not have the means to realize. When she was younger, she wanted to write great words that were true and strong. Words that would change the world. She failed miserably, even though the world thought she had not. No, she did not write cheap pulp, or popular stories, or vampire wizard romance. She wrote Serious Literature with a Mission and a Vision. She won her battle against cancer, she freed herself from a toxic relationship with her mother and with a man, and she inspired others. But still, she could not help but despise herself and disbelieve all those who told her she was a genius. They all thought she said important things. Well, they did not know that a person could say so much more.

When she was at the was at the beginning of her way, a nineteen-year-old student in a dark dorm room, so far from home and so desperate to grow up, she wrote it down on two simple sheets of paper. Just a handful of paragraphs that said all there was ever to say. All the words humanity would ever need, even millions of years into the future, when all the suns are dying, these are all the words a mother needs to whisper to her futureless child. Then she put it away.

Over the years, the thought often came back to her. Nudged her in dreams, reeled around her with colorful leaves in central park, stung her in the middle of a rejected lover’s last sad and awkward handshake. But she never had the means to tell the story. No flesh she could dress it in. No technique. No time.

And now it was gone. She had looked through all the boxes, years’ worth of notes, still nothing. Maybe in one of the books, she thought, and started flipping through whatever was on the shelves, searching for the two sheets tucked cozy between the pages.

She picked up her first successful novel. Not the most successful one, but the one she was proud of. The papers were not in there, but she stopped to read a passage. It brought her back immediately, to the moldy apartment she shared with four other people, to writing at night when she tried to hold two waiting jobs, anything not to go back to teaching.

She skipped forward a few pages, looking The Passage. She found it, the heart of the book: “no matter what we do, we cannot take even a step forward, until we let the past go.” So trivial, now that she had her original idea. She was about to put the book away.

When it grabbed her by the throat. The book reached out with its strong arm and started strangling her. She fell to her knees, fighting for air. She crawled to the coffee table. Grabbed a heavy paper weight. Raised it. Hit the arm. Nothing happened. Hit the book. Still nothing. It was like hitting a concrete wall. She tried again. And again. Until the weapon was too heavy.

Everything got blurry and she collapsed. She was breathing no more. Her heart was motionless. The book was lying beside her, innocent. All around, words frozen on paper by her and by countless others, bound by covers, arranged on shelves. They whispered, some full of guilt, some full of righteous joy, but all in agreement. It had to be done.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk