THE ABSENCE OF VONNEGUT

“The writer stares with glassy eyes

 Defies the empty page

 His beard is white, his face is lined

 And streaked with tears of rage

 Thirty years ago, how the words would flow

 With passion and precision

 But now his mind is dark and dulled

 By sickness and indecision

 And he stares out the kitchen door

 Where the sun will rise no more…”

~ Rush “Losing It”

This story is dedicated to the person who (along with the Kinks) told me, “Don’t forget to dance.”

Oh, I’m still dancin’ and this little ditty is concrete proof of that.

d

The laptop screen was blank, and it had been that way for many an hour.

His hands rested limply on the battle-scarred keyboard. He discovered an errant Dorito crumb that was living in-between the “N” and “M” keys. He pondered it for brief moment before flicking it away with an exasperated sigh.

The clock sitting in the right-hand corner of his desktop read 7:24 AM; his deadline was a little over 12 hours away and not a word had leaked from his brain onto the digital page set before him.

“Fuck me,” were the only words he could think to utter in this confounding moment.

He stood up and began to pace and to think which is what he did. Of course he had heard of Writer’s Block before, but he had never suffered from its crippling effects…such as not being able to put a goddamn word on the goddamn page no matter how much wanted and/or needed to.

Inevitably his thoughts shifted from the topic at hand, the topic he should be focusing on, the topic that would make him some cold, hard cash, to her. “You can think about the woman, or the girl you knew the night before,” the great Bob Seger once sang.

And think he did…

Emily was her name; the vast digital wasteland of Tinder, where respectability and romance go to die, was their meeting place. Not a rom-com “meet cute” by any stretch of the imagination, but one has to take what they can get in today’s impersonal, electronic age.

Emily was unquestionably adorable, and built like a teenage camgirl to boot, but she was a hyperactive, over-medicated flake who talked way too much nonsense for his liking. He was at the point in his life where he knew damn well that the steak mattered more than sizzle. And, ultimately, this was a person who he just couldn’t spend an extended amount of time with.

He desperately craved a woman in his life who had that subtle combination of beauty, style, and grace that was nigh impossible to find. While Emily certainly had the beauty part down cold (which is the easiest to come by, really, being just a genetic roll of the dice) the style and the grace parts most certainly eluded her as the Accelerati Incredibilus so deftly avoided the Carnivorous Vulgaris for many a decade.

So, after their third date he expeditiously deleted and blocked her number from his phone on the drive home from her apartment the next morning. He was in no way proud of this act of cowardice, but this was something he was wont to do during his latest spate of dating tomfoolery.

Not long after, he realized IT was no longer in his possession…and that Emily had IT.

The IT in question here was his well-worn, paperback copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. After reading this wondrously diverse collection of short stories his freshman year of college he decided that the life of a writer was the one for him. He also concluded in that moment that Kurt Vonnegut was the fucking man, and he set out on a quest to consume every word the man had ever put to the page.

Why he gave IT to her in the first place was a hybrid of intellectual hubris and male ego – trying to be the big, impressive guy he never felt he truly was when push came to shove. Emily mentioned in passing that she had never read any of Vonnegut’s work, but she had heard nothing but good things about it. So, he showed up to their first date with his copy of IT for her to read, telling her rather pompously that IT was the best place to start if she wanted to understand the man as one of the most important authors of the 20^th century.

The ridiculous notion that he was having issues writing for the first time in his career because IT was no longer in his possession struck him while he was waging the constant war against the insects (Ants? Roaches? Some devilish hybrid of the two??) that lived and bred under his microwave. As he was brushing a few of the doomed creepy-crawlers into his sink to drown them in the unholy Charybdis of his drain, the thought became stuck in his addled brain, and it would not leave no matter how stupid or superstitious it seemed to be.

“Native Americans have totems, and the Irish have Lucky Charms. I mean, four-leaf clovers…and other dumbasses have rabbit’s feet and all that, right,” he stammered to no one other than himself, trying to convince himself of this madness.

Another thought occurred to him then: Perhaps he could just replace IT; just buy another copy of IT?

To test this tenuous theory, he drove to the closest bookstore and picked up a new version of IT which sported a detestable, art-nouveau cover. While he waited in line, staring at this cover he hated, he realized that this was not going to work. He needed his original copy of IT; the one he bought in the rapacious college bookstore many moons ago.

He deposited the faux IT on the magazine rack in the check-out isle, hiding the latest, tabloid indiscretions of the royals and internet “celebrities” from public consumption then beat a hasty retreat to his parked car.

There was only one thing left to do now: check the blocked messages and calls on his phone in the hopes that Emily tried to contact him after he callously “ghosted” her. If she did this, perhaps he could sweet talk her into returning IT? That seemed unlikely, but it was all he had in these desperate hours.

A furtive glance at the dashboard clock revealed that it was now just past 2 PM…six desperate hours left until his deadline. Wouldn’t be a cakewalk but could be done. He just needed IT back in his possession as IT was certainly the key to unlocking all this Writer’s Block bullshit – of this he was now certain.

Upon checking the “BLOCKED” box on his phone, there were indeed several confused and angry messages from Miss Emily. She called him every foul and derisive name under the sun…and then heaped on a few more for good measure.

He was all those things, and more. No doubt. But right now, none of that mattered. He needed IT back and he would wriggle his dumb ass through the maggot-infested bowels of Hell to get IT. His life, nay his career and reputation, were on the line here.

He shot her a text: “Hey, can we talk?”

He glared at his phone for what seemed like an eternity, almost willing her to respond to him in his hour of dire need. Finally, a response did come: “Who is this?”

Not a good start. He quickly typed his name, hoping that alone wouldn’t send her into a spasm of indignant, feminine rage.

After a few dragging moments: “Talk about what exactly??”

15 minutes later he was driving to her place with a shit-eating grin plastered on his face. The text conversation went as well as could be expected; she was surprisingly amenable to what he needed. I mean, IT wasn’t hers in the first place, she admitted. And IT was still sitting in the back of her car, unread, as far as she knew.

As soon as he pulled up out in front of Emily’s place, he understood why she had been so accommodating: she was fucking with him in order to exact some sort of twisted revenge. There she was, cute as a button, sitting out on her postage stamp-sized patio (where they had feverishly made out only a week or so ago) methodically ripping pages out of IT then placing them on the small, Weber grill at her feet.

When she noticed him pull up, she smirked then dropped what was left of IT’s carcass on to the blistering grill below her then slammed the lid on top of IT with a definitive clanging sound, almost as if it were a death knell.

His initial instinct was to pounce out of the car in true costumed crime-fighter fashion in an attempt to save IT from the flames, but all he could muster was a plaintive, “Why,” as he was lowering his driver’s side window.

Emily, the demoness, the book-immolator, smirked her wicked smirk once again and spat, “Because fuck you that’s why.”

She turned on her heels to go inside, but before she did, she had one last searing dagger to thrust into his heart: “And try trimming your pubic hair sometime, asshole!”

He drove off. Sadly. Slowly.

He was beaten. IT was gone...nothing but cinders now.

d

The ride home was indeed a somber one. There were no shit-eating grins to be witnessed, not even when his favorite song in the whole entire world (Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”) came on the radio.

Upon returning home, he sat down at his desk. Nothing came. Not a blessed syllable. He had notes and research and interviews and statistics, but he could not think of one goddamn way to make that information coalesce into something both informational and intelligible.

So, he sat.

And he sat.

And he sat.

And he sat.

While he sat, his cell phone erupted with wrathful, screed-like texts and pleading, plaintive voice messages from his editor who wanted to know, simply, where in the flying fuck her story was.

With the prevalent thought of “Hang on tightly, let go lightly,” he tossed his buzzing cell phone out the window.

“That’s where I filed my story, lady,” he deadpanned as he watched his phone hit the concrete below with a shattering CRACK.

“Why the hell can’t you FIND IT!?”

He actually screamed the last part, and that shriek scared the bejeezus out of a little girl on the ground below who wanted nothing more than to understand why it was suddenly raining smartphones.

It was at that moment he decided to go for a drive. A long drive to nowhere.

In the midst of that drive, he came across a massive, high-tension pole that, for some reason, he desperately wanted to drive smack dab into. For a fleeting moment, he had the ridiculous notion that maybe, just maybe, doing that would somehow lift the curse of IT and magically cure his Writer’s Block.

So, he drove smack dab into the pole.

It didn’t feel good, and it cured nothing.

Nothing at all.

d

For a time, all he knew was haze. Confusing haze and agonizing pain. But then there was smoke. He knew this smoke for it was cloying and clinging and unmistakable. It was cigarette smoke – a dense fog of it enveloped the hospital bed to which he was now bound by crazy wires and things that went “BEEP” in the night.

The source of the smoke was man, shadowy, yet familiar, who was seated at the side of his bed. Was this cigarette smoking man a man who was Unstuck in Time? No…no…that was his character. Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim.

This was the man himself.

“I tried this once,” the smoking man said in a measured accent that was entirely hayseed…by way of New York City. “Didn’t take.”

“What…what are you…doing here?”

“Maybe I’m bored. Maybe I’m lonely. Maybe my afterlife, if I believed in that crap, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” the smoking man confessed while expelling more noxious smoke into the air.

“Maybe I have something to tell you…something you need to hear,” the smoking man continued. “I won’t be long. Brevity being the soul of wit and all that.”

He tried to sit up, to lean in closer to hear the smoking man’s wisdom, but a shocking jolt of pain put an end to that.

“That’s what you get for playing chicken with a fucking pole.”

While enjoying a quiet chuckle at his pointed barb, the smoking man stood up. His head was now wreathed in murky cloud which made him look like something out of a sci-fi cartoon.

“Look, kid, it was never about my book. The book possessed no special mojo or magic. C’mon, that’s horseshit and you know it,” the smoking man scolded.

“But it felt…so real. I mean, Writer’s Blo…”

The smoking man impatiently waved his words away like the nonsense they were.

“Writer’s Block is horseshit too. It’s all about you and what’s in your head.”

The smoking man paused for moment, taking a long drag on his cigarette.

“You’ve got the gift. You know that. Don’t piss it away like this.”

“Yeah, but…”

“The one thing you can do is be more kind to people. Karma, as we know, is a real bitch,” the smoking man divulged.

Searching his memories, the smoking man chuckled again: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

“I wrote that a while back. Pretty good stuff…now that I think about it. You can be easier on yourself when you are dead.”

“Am…am I dead?”

“Not yet. But you’ll get there, kid.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“That business with Sports Illustrated back in the day…I mean, why did you just get up and leave? You could have just asked for another assignment. Most people would consider that a dream gig…”

After another long, ponderous drag on his cigarette, the smoking man sighed, “I wasn’t very good at being an employee. I saw the future in that moment, you see. A future chained to a desk writing shit I couldn’t stand. And I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. So, I wrote what I wrote, and I left.”

“The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” he recited as if it was his own memory and not the smoking man’s.

“Yup. That’s it.”

With that, the smoking man, with his craggy face, porn mustache, and shock of curly, brownish hair, grinned at him as dropped the cigarette under his heel to extinguish it.

“See you around, kid.”

d

He awoke three days later.

The only reason he knew that was because the snippy nurse who was now poking something sharp into his arm had told him so.

She continued to complain about smelling smoke and the like as he tried to reacquaint himself with the really real world.

Aghast, the nurse bent over to pick up something clearly horrifying off the floor. She found it, then shoved it in his face. It was a crumpled cigarette butt.

“Jesus Christ! Was someone smoking in here?!?”

“I have no idea. I was mostly dead for three days. You said so yourself.”

With an exasperated sigh, the nurse tossed the offensive butt in the trash.

“Did anyone bring any of my stuff here,” he queried hopefully.

“Your sister did the other day. It’s over there.”

“Is my laptop there?”

“I think so. You want it?”

“Please.”

The nurse rummaged through the bags left by his sister, soon finding his laptop. She handed it to him but didn’t let go.

 “Need to check your online dating profile,” she asked with the hint of a curious smirk playing at the corners of her mouth.

“No. Not at all,” was his curt reply. “I have an idea for something.”

“Allllrighty then.”

So, she left him…as there were other patients to annoy and cajole.

He switched on the laptop; it quickly came to life with a musical jingle. The first notification that popped up was an email from Emily, apologizing for how beastly she acted. She went on to write: “Maybe, just maybe, they could grab a drink sometime.”

He deleted that fucking insanity as quickly as his index finger would (repeatedly) hit the DEL key.

Upon opening his word processing app, he began to write…with passion and precision.

The first words that flew onto the digital page were: “The laptop screen was blank, and it had been that way for many an hour.”

THE END

Illustrations by Noa Cebalo