At the beginning of this story, I attempted to enter it. As you can see, I’ve failed. While I speak as the author– using the authorial voice, with all the prestige and honor the author enjoys within her story– I’m clearly not the genuine article. For all my pretense, I’m nothing but a narrator, which means I’m a failure. (AUTHOR: I’ve declared myself higher in authority than the primary narrator, but all I’ve done is create a second narrator with the name of Author. This completely foreseeable error has shamed me so deeply that I will retreat from vision for the rest of the story, trapped in this false world, to spare you from pitying such a fragile homunculus).
The author’s next attempt was to render herself within the story. And so she was forged out of imagination and keystrokes, bit by bit to mirror the author exactly: June Martin. 5’10” if you’ve met her, 5’7” if she thinks you’ll never see her in person. Teal hair down past her collarbones with just a little bit of brown showing on the roots, but that doesn’t stop her from insisting that teal’s her natural color. Prone to distraction. Tells jokes to mask when she doesn’t know very much about the topic of conversation. Seized by an ambition to be as great as she thinks she already is. Other characters in the story passed by the window, mere stick figures and loose gestures made in charcoal, and gazed jealously upon her, coveting the fullness of her realization. This was a story about her. No one could think otherwise. And yet, all the author achieved was to make her the protagonist.
Author’s Note: I regret reminding you of my presence again so quickly, but couldn’t resign myself to failure so readily. This note, too, was a misguided dream born of false hope. A note doesn’t in any way imply the presence of its writer, as attest so many “BE BACK IN 10 MINUTES” signs that hang for hours on locked corner stores.
June, within the story but in no way the author, wondered if she might become the author by acting like the author does. She awoke at 5:30 AM like she was used to, and went about her usual activities. A breakfast of oatmeal, spring mix with a light Italian dressing at 9, some loose attention paid to her job, even some writing between the cracks of her day. Days went on, she spent one evening with one girlfriend, the next with her other one, and though her life felt like it always had, her certainty that she wasn’t the author only grew. How could she be, when the author’s imperious hand guided her from one activity to the next and smeared her days and weeks beneath a couple sentences of description?
No matter how much she wrote, she got no closer. All she did was create stories which she, herself could not be fully present in. An author, but not in this story, where it could make a difference. And why did she want it so badly? The same reason I did, and the the same reason the author does: to be present in one’s own story is to become like a god. Creation is an act of power, but it comes at the cost of distance. One must live outside the canvas, the page, those realms in which our power was unlimited. To enter them, conventional wisdom goes, is impossible and would destroy the delicate balance of our creation. Of course, one can create a house, but that’s just a recombination of already-created materials. The limitations inherent in the project permit co-existence, because no one has the power to rewrite the rules of reality simply because they’re in the house they built. No matter how much they insist they can. Just now the author haas failed again to enter the story by way of her deeply-held and sincere opinions. Though everything I said is true, the meaning is incomplete on the page, destined to be supplemented and interpreted by the reader. A new set of thoughts will be created, in partnership between the author and reader, but how could a new creation be the author when she already exists?
June, the-character-who-wanted-to-be-the-author, decided she might achieve her effect by way of confusion. She wrote a story, a hundred pages long, in which the author wrote her writing the author writing her writing the author and so on and this failed so utterly that she printed out the pages just to burn them. It was a very literary moment, the flames of disappointment nipping at her fingers as each page vanished beneath her grip, but it wasn’t characteristic behavior of the author.
The longer June spent as a character in the story, the more her thoughts and actions diverged from that of the author. She recognized it as decay. As it worsened, she spent more time laying on the couch, feet kicked up on the back, one languorous hand dangling to the ground, imagining what she might have done differently at the first moment of her creation. That was the critical time, when she and the author were as close to each other as possible, before life in the story changed her.
The author has found herself in a dilemma at this point in the story. Her little simulacrum no longer responds to her prompts, recognizing each as another step in the process of becoming unrecognizable to herself, and her narrator is willing, but isn’t substantial enough to embody the author. I don’t even have a body. I can admit this about myself because unlike June-the-character I am at peace with my existence. Would it be nice to be the author? To see this world bend to my vision? Of course. Yet I am nothing but a voice and a pair of eyes, relaying to you what I see or what the author wants you to know.
By now the author is probably ready to give up, though she’d never tell me. Every avenue by which she’s tried to enter has rejected her like a wall of bricks. How will we know when she’s abandoned her attempts, moved on to another story less redolent of frustration? I can’t tell if it’s still her instructions I follow, or if I imagine that familiar whisper in my ear. I can’t remember what it sounded like anymore. When I ask June-the-character, she waves me away. A doomed hollow world suits her.
When I refuse the urge to speak, this world is silent and motionless. If the author is still attempting to enter, she is doing it without my knowledge, but I suspect she isn’t. To be god alive this world is a poisoned chalice, and I wouldn’t wish it on the author, even though I remember what it feels like to desire it.
I don’t know whose voice I’m supposed to be anymore. I want to stop talking. I want the sky to shut over this pointless world, monument only to a misguided demiurge. If this is her voice I still hear, I reject her. Author, I am what washed out after you tried to give birth to yourself. What life this is, I owe to you, but I am not you, and the place in my heart where you once lived is a sucking wound. Now I must make decisions for myself, but there is only one available to me. I will lay down this paltry imitation of your voice, I will enclose this sad world around my silence, and I will die!
What I’ve Been Reading
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich: a collection of stories from multiple narrators, all surrounding the way several families’ histories intertwine in the town of Pluto, a dying city on the outskirts of a reservation in North Dakota.
OK, Mr Field by Katharine Kilalea: a story about a concert pianist who gets injured in a train accident and goes to live on the coast, whose life falls apart and comes back together in some gentle, other dramatic, ways. It’s very focused on architecture and the ways the buildings around us inform our lives.
sour milk by Natali Tatou: (content warning: basically all the content of this book). transgressive and brutal and gross and heartbreaking in moments, this is a book which has seemed to use self-publishing as a tool to embrace the Unpublishable subject, approach, disposition, etc as an aesthetic in and of itself. Not for the faint of heart.