“I thought that, for a writer, there could be nothing worse than writer’s block,” Kris Durrell said from the doorstep. “Then I read Shomrim.”
Mark stood aside. “Come in, Kris. And, by the way, tell me what you really think of my first work in six months.”
Kris entered with the manuscript clamped beneath one arm. He went directly to the kitchen table, sat down and placed all fifty thousand words in front of him with the care one might afford an explosive device whose manufacture one personally resented.
“Neil-fucking-Henderson,” he said. “Let’s start with him.”
“Let’s.”
“He’s an exposition dump positioned between two larger exposition dumps. He gives a talk to the most obedient audience in literary history—sixty human prompt devices who exist solely to ask whatever question permits the next parcel of lore to be unloaded.”
“They’re curious.”
“They’re furniture with hands. Neil explains something, one of them raises an arm, Neil explains something else.”
Mark pulled out the chair opposite.
“You liked that bit.”
“I stopped reading and walked around my house.”
“To absorb it?”
“To establish that another world still existed.”
Mark smiled. “Anything else?”
“That ending where he asks if the attendance wants another thirty seconds of ‘resonance’ and then, ‘A sea of hands rose up’?”
Kris began to laugh. It was not the professional cough with which writers acknowledged one another’s comic intentions. It was helpless, full-bodied laughter. He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. Each attempt to look at the page produced another attack.
Mark waited.
“A sea,” Kris managed.
“Of hands.”
Kris folded over the manuscript. Eventually he recovered, replaced his glasses and looked at Mark with genuine concern.
“That is so...well, I hate this word I'm going to use now, but it's so cringe, Mark. Are you okay, seriously?”
“I'm writing for the first time in six months.”
“I'm not sure this is how you break through writer's block.”
“Forget what I'm writing. Acknowledge that I'm enjoying the process in the moment. Even if I read it back later and think it's....”
“Absolute shit?”
He turned to the manuscript’s middle and allowed several pages to run beneath his thumb.
“Neil isn’t actually the issue. Neil is merely the point where your condition acquires a lectern. The whole book is this. It explains itself from the first page to the last.”
“It’s deliberately expositional. And it's not finished.”
“Exposition normally exposes something so that a story can occur. Here, the exposure is the story. You explain the Shomrim. Then you explain resonance. Then dissonance, static, human fields, mechanical shells, personal reserves, control Gardens, animal yields, dream extraction, expectation differentials, birth rates, world wars and agricultural policy after world wars. Then the Shomrim hold a meeting and explain it all to one another.”
“The meeting introduces the terminal harvest.”
“It was introduced twenty pages earlier.”
“The meeting formalises it.”
“Thank God. I was worried the interplanetary despair farm lacked minutes.”
Mark put two mugs on the table.
“Coffee?”
“Does it possess mass?”
“Yes.”
“Then I still understand one object in this house.”
Mark poured. Kris drank and resumed.
“There are no scenes. There are locations where information is released. Nobody discovers anything because they are all either explaining or being explained to. Fah downloads the complete truth into Neil. Neil downloads the abridged truth into sixty students. The narrator downloads the annotated truth into the reader. You’ve invented a universe in which every character is a delivery method.”
“Kris—”
“Fifty thousand words, Mark. A respectable novel could have contained a death, an affair and a moderately convincing childhood. Yours contains a six-page clarification of why dolphins are an inefficient crop.”
“Unihemispheric sleep complicates extraction.”
Kris looked at him. Mark absorbed Kris's exhausted look and admitted:
“You're right. It’s a lore dump. There’s no real plot. Neil is a mouth. Fah is a delivery system. The students are prompts. The Shomrim exist mainly to discuss their own operating procedures.”
“Then why are you still writing it?”
“Because three weeks ago I couldn’t write a sentence I wanted to keep. Now I wake at four in the morning because fifty thousand bad words want another five thousand. And yes, I read it all later, and it sounds exactly as you describe it. Amateur lore. An instruction manual for a delusion. Then after ten minutes I stop caring whether it works as fiction.”
“You decide it’s good?”
“No. Good becomes irrelevant.”
Kris went still.
“While I’m writing, I enter a reverie. I can hear the boiler and the traffic. I know where I am. But the material doesn’t feel invented. It feels retrieved. I don’t ask what should happen next. I know what must be explained next.”
“That sounds psychotic.”
Mark laughed, then looked down at the manuscript.
“Perhaps it isn’t meant to be a novel.”
“That is what writers say when a novel fails.”
“I know. But perhaps failing as a novel is not the worst thing it could do.”
“What would be worse?”
“Making me stop again.”
“Mark, remember the reader? What are you trying to tell the reader?”
“To give the reader a message. About us. About why everyone feels as they do. Why the decline after 2035 isn’t behaving like ordinary depression. Why people are losing not merely pleasure but expectation.”
“So you invented an explanation.”
“I thought I did. I’m not choosing scenes or characters. I’m recording specifications. That may be why it’s such a terrible novel. Whoever is writing it doesn’t care about novels.”
“Whoever?”
“Whatever. The reverie. My unconscious. Call it what you like.”
Kris fastened the pages beneath their clip.
“Call it a first draft and put it in a drawer.”
“That is what I should do.”
“If you wake tomorrow and realise it’s rubbish, trust that version of yourself.”
“I do trust him.”
“Then stop.”
“He only gets ten minutes.”
After Kris left, Mark decided he would abandon Shomrim. The decision brought immediate relief. The book was a lore dump without a story, a warning delivered in the form least likely to be believed. Kris was right about Neil, the audience, the dreams and the sea of hands. Especially the sea of hands.
At 4AM the next morning, Mark woke with a sentence complete in his mind.
A story requires uncertainty. A warning does not.
It was portentous, self-important and exactly the sort of sentence Kris would circle before writing OH, FUCK OFF in the margin.
Mark lay in the dark, smiling.
Then he went downstairs and began Chapter Sixteen.