Weekday evenings, between 7 and 11, were carefully apportioned so he might work uninterrupted; productive time, away from the chatter of work and sequestered—by way of a narrow staircase and a swath of fibrous carpet—from the intrusion of his wife. He never skipped an appointment.
Still, the nature of his nightly engagement had changed. He no longer wrote. Rather, he sat quietly, in a mode of bitter self-reflection, chain-smoking Pall Malls and swallowing Cutty Sark until his throat became raw and septic, his breathing became ragged, and his head spun dangerously like a carnival ride.
Arthur Nolan nevertheless called himself a writer, and was distinguishable from most who self-apply such a dangerous title by the fact that he had once, more than seven years before, actually been published. His novel had been well received: a Gothic tragedy of sorts—decaying locales and grim lives reduced to rubble by the cruel hand of a transient author.
What troubled him tonight, as every night, was the chronic paranoia he had developed—no, developed is not the correct word, he thought now, because he knew it instinctively, knew it immediately; as sure as he knew, yes, that the sun would rise, but more importantly that when it did he would wake to the sour trace of vomit on his tongue and his wife pouring cups of black coffee—in that novel’s wake; that he had, its outward respectability be damned, outright wasted the only good idea he’d ever stumbled his hapless way into. A 300-page manuscript disembowelled and mechanically reassembled, and not the 800-900-1000 pages—each scene immaculately rendered in delicate prose—that it warranted.
Nolan’s face reddened. Inebriation tugged at the corners of his vision. He set his cigarette down in an ashtray and took a pull of Scotch. He was afraid. Not a fear of failure or even of success, but the fear of a man who has moved beyond the threshold of such material designations: the phantasmal terror of the sensation that had crippled him seven years before, as he clasped that final draft between outspread digits.
That moment mowed a clear path through the forest of nebulous inebriation, still gave him cool tremors. He recalled standing immobile and understanding—as though it was historical fact—that the work before him was merely everything: that is, the tangible embodiment of the only creative inclination he would ever have. He remembered the hot panic swelling in his stomach and his brain and his hands and his feet; the cramps, the searing tears, the bile rising—the desire to run, thwarted by a simultaneous recognition that his sinewy legs had transformed into grotesque slabs of Portland cement.
And the irresistible destructive urge he felt at that moment to tear the manuscript to pieces, to pitch scraps across the room and revel in senselessness.
What Nolan didn’t know, what he never understood, was that this is the innate impulse of all creation: that to dwell on a work, to invest so many hours, is to become that work. He simply knew—though he indeed spent seven years in an abortive attempt to prove himself wrong, to thwart predetermination—that there would be for him only one fleeting work of creation.
Perhaps though it wasn’t too late to alter his course, to change what that one creation was—even if, for this to be so, it meant he would have to retrace his steps and make believe the one which he’d already seen to its end had simply never been born at all—and abandon the written word, expressing it instead in the temporal realm in which we cohabitate; to compose his opus on the memory-deficient paper of existence itself; live his art with the foreknowledge that time could not preserve its episodes. He would be free to revise, continually and chaotically, to re-sequence, re-introduce, re-write and omit. He might go on so long as he never set this story down in toner. Pretend that his story was only a series of nows, to be lived tangentially—that yesterday’s episode was, like those before it, nothing but a waking dream, that this was his one creation: a cascade of one-act plays without pretence of order, entropic in meaning.
It had only been, then, his own weakness that salvaged him, the manuscript too thick to rend apart by the force of his delicate hands. He could no more have torn apart a phonebook, though the knowledge that such a parlour trick was possible sent the bile spilling nearly into his mouth then, and even now Nolan could sense its sharp flavour. The alarm wracking his body had given him no other choice but that act of coincident ruin and resurrection.
He settled instead for barbiturates, and for several evenings he gave it—the manuscript or the attic or his ear-splitting doubt, he was unsure which—a wide berth, convincing himself, if only by the percussive force of rote repetition, that this had never come to pass.
Now he stood for a moment to determine the stability of his frame. His surroundings congealed into hazy ponds. He sat again, transferring his gaze to the handle of Scotch on the desk, endeavouring vainly to gauge how much he had already siphoned. Nolan punctuated this complex arithmetic by lighting a second Pall Mall.
He realized that he hadn’t yet finished the first.
It had happened. At no point did he forget this; he merely, by force of will, vigorous exercise, and renewed focus, ceased thinking about it—nestling it carefully in his unconscious, between locker combinations and pop songs. Then the probing callipers of his inner self would settle on it while watching television, or reading, or as he shuffled toward sleep. He would tremble and expunge the sensation.
Yet the feeling would return weeks or months later. Always, though sometimes only faintly, and almost abstractly so, more vividly than before. Until it never ceased to leave.
That was precisely when he began to drown it, or try to drown it, in spirits; pacified by the relief of whisky’s kiss and yet dreading the inexorable reassertion of these memories on his blunted will. Nolan hated this disquiet nearly as much as he loved—not loved in any sane sense, but physically needed, to maintain some oblique normalcy in life—the moments of intoxicated harmony it accompanied.
Tonight Arthur Nolan drank. He smoked. He compiled a mental record of the things he despised.
He hated the effect that this regimen had on his body. Not purely the phlegm in his throat and the dry mouth and the constant train wreck headaches—he expected these, had long grown accustomed—but the way his body leached nutrients. The weight loss, at first a pleasant surprise, quickly becoming burdensome. His jeans sunk past his hips. His sweaters hung gracelessly from serrated shoulder blades.
He hated that he could count the symmetrical arcs of one, two, three sets of ribs, and so on, until they were all monstrously visible, impossibly crowning a distended belly in miniature. The sallow tissue of his face, Play-Doh stretched across bone; deeply-set eyes collared in swollen bags of flesh. Erratic auburn hair stained with gray. He hated that he looked the part of a memento mori, the macabre installation of some melancholic sculptor—a skeleton in repose, whisky glass nestled in the metacarpals of its right hand, another lit Pall Mall between the curled phalanges of the left.
He hated his wife, for not noticing any of this. Or if she had, he hated her more so, for averting her gaze, pretending everything was alright.
He hated himself. Even if he couldn’t say precisely why.
Which explains more or less why Arthur swallowed the barrel of a Beretta 92S.
It was a one-act play, written in the crimson hues of oblivion—in bloody brain matter and exploded skull fragments, in words and whisky and ash, scribbled callously on the folio of his attic study.
