Every Day Create Your History

BY Martyn Pedler

Rereread all you like. Roll your eyes through the tiny grooves in the page. You won’t find anything written here. Anything that you do see is your own fault: you’re doing the usual blank-page equations in the back of your head, calculating the potential energy before your eyes. It’s why you can’t draw for fuck but you can’t waste enough ink in your margins, such potential, telling all of you yes, yes, you do have a novel inside you! like a little inspirational whore. But your eyes keep scrolling, back and forth, back and forth.

I’ve been left to write.

This morning, I handmade a skullcap from aluminum foil. I’ve had it on all day, just in case inspiration hits my eggshelled head. In case Hollywood sends its script doctors round while I sleep. Don’t think it hasn’t happened to you. That movie you saw last summer: didn’t you think of something similar, long ago? Hollywood came and took that high-concept right out of your head.

But if I do get an idea, then thanks to this skullcap, I’m holding onto it like cancer.

So who’d play you in the movie of your life? It’s a tightrope line between hunting down the actor who could truly method out your mannerisms, and the square jaw and acute angles that you secretly wish would parrot your words, Godzilla-sized, on the big screen. This question takes up too many of my waking thoughts.

This was meant to be an intro, a glossy airbrushed bang of a beginning. But words keep failing me. You’ve seen them in an order like this before, right? Something like this. Something like this, sitting on a shelf somewhere, in a back room, on late night TV. Doesn’t it seem a little familiar? Haven’t we all met someplace before?

Or has Hollywood just trawled through my thoughts and plot-twisted? Played my ideas back to me before I can get them down? Do I have a novel inside me?

Look at me. I’m meant to be telling a story.

Just look at me.

Look at him.

He’s standing at the bar, looking who’s looking. Clutching his scotch, he weaves back to the table of regulars and they sit in silence. When the fissure in conversation opens wide enough, he drops in a favourite: “Well, you may be wondering why I’ve gathered you all here tonight.” People smile a little, having heard it all before. Martyn says that all the time.

Later that week it gets back to him that later, at home, someone was heard to remark that Martyn really needs some new material.

He’s at his worst when waiting alone in cafés. You can see him striking poses. He’s imagining what he might look like from all the angles and sightlines of passersby, performing for the invisible documentary crew that dogs his every move.

Look at him, trying to process words, chewing his nails until it hurts to press the keys. Why is it? Martyn has all kinds of trouble writing in first person.

Why is it that all the memorable moments of your life are those that you can picture from somewhere outside your head?

It’s a grainy fuzz and the angle’s awkward, but you can still make it out: he’s sitting at his PC, keeping his hands in his mouth so that there’s no way they can type. Closer, readjust the focus, and you can see that there’s just as much skin above the nails as there is nail itself. He’s changed his shape for good. The state of his nervous system is now permanently written into the lines of his body.

Later. Audio: “So, tell me what you’re working on right now.” Play back the tapes. That question’s come from one of ours, trained in deadly ambivalence of every movement, pitch, and timbre. Audit his heartbeat. “And about how far are you into the actual writing?” On infrared, his skin lights up like a post-coital flush. Satellite footage shows him excuse himself and move down the street like a complicated animatronic. If you check the triplicate reports, later, you’ll see that Martyn moves like he’s already guessed that everyone is looking.

Why else be so concerned with what those trained perfectly to be strangers think?

All equipment focuses down tight to his apartment, insinuating into the wiring. He sleeps alone. First, it rummages through all bytes carefully backed-up under the desk and only finds a hundred pages of brainstorming. Half-written fragments with nothing complete. Pan right and find his notebooks on the shelves. Careful. X-ray through the covers, adjusting strength, penetrating by millimetres. Thumb the pages with radiation-gloves. Absorb. Now the wetdrive. Geiger-divine information by measuring the power generated by each neuron’s snap. He dreams: random flashes and bursts of Oscar acceptance speeches, with off-the-cuff interviews the day after. And deeper, into the sludge that even the subconscious won’t play? There’s no sign of a novel in here. Back up.

From orbit, just look at him sleep.

I sit, eat a Zeitgeist Bar, and watch him sleep: He thinks he’s the cat’s pyjamas.

And, while the chocolate sits cozy in my stomach, I activate my mechanical bedbugs. They swarm through his blankets and bite down hard, burrowing in through his temples until his muscles turn to hardwood in response. Boy is he gonna be sore in the morning. Swarming digital through his dreams, the bugs pinpoint what’s passing for a narrative, tickertaping out quietly deep in his head where inspiration will never strike. I go in with the knife, just under the ear. I pry the story out word by word. Soon the sheets are honeymoon-wet with misplaced fluids. I’m still stuck there, extracting chunks of meaning, when I feel the horns growing under my hat. The kooky kid’s awake. Eyes burning newly red, I sigh: “I suppose this means you want to make a deal.”

“Are you here for my soul?” Martyn asks, aquiver. Is there anything more dull than a religious upbringing? As my scalpel’s still buried handle-deep in his neck, I dig around for a moment in an attempt to bleed it out. It’s too deep and too late. There’s already a tail growing like a teenage erection down my trouserleg. I’m getting Faust fast. I can’t help but speak with forked tongue. I offer up the answers to everything – all the trues and falses, the easy answers and the multiple choices and who-really-killed-whos – in a desperate bid to make a deal. “No,” he says, nipping at his tongue as I work out a particularly ugly sentence. “No. Because everyone already knows that everything is true. And no one cares.” My left hand never stops picking his brain.

What’s my usual job description, you ask? I cut and I paste until any story we didn’t want the world to hear was good and Seussed and suitable for all ages. I run a red marker through the whole shebang and leave them wondering why they can never complete a sentence again. But when I finally unpick his storyline and read the hardcopy scattered about the bed, I’m forced to admit that there’s nothing to censor. This housecall must have been made by nothing but his own paranoid surveillance. All these words are hidden between the lines; underneath, he’s a blank page.

I can’t help but whisper into the hole in his neck, “I can get this book written. I can promise you explosions, puns, and a pinch of theory for the critics. Is that what you want?” “No,” he says, again, staring at the roof while blood starts to corrode the whites of his eyes. “All I want… is a book in first person proper.” “Done,” I say, leaking brimstone.

I recall the bedbugs, and they reappear, trailing blood as they leap from his brow to my hand with invisible flea-circus grace. Martyn’s muscles relax so hard that he breaks something. He can barely find the words: “So now I’ll be able to write something down?” Laughing in a sinister fashion seems like the most natural thing in the world to me. “You won’t live till morning. I’m wearing the cat’s pyjamas, buddy. I’m the one with the knees of bees.

“I’m the first person now.”

Martyn’s been torturing himself so long he has trouble finding the words. “But this is my book! It’s about me! Everything in it really happened!” “Really. You really walked around your apartment wearing an aluminium hat.” He’s strangely shy to admit it. “…no. But it was a good idea.” “You wrote yourself into this. You’re fiction now. By the time this becomes a major motion picture, you’ll be played by an extra whose mouth is wired shut to save studio expense. You think that anyone wants to read a book filled with pointless self-reflexivity and a tinge of grunge for the kids?”

Martyn won’t stop spouting last words. “So why should the devil be any different?” he sobs. To hell with this. I lunge back in with the scalpel and don’t stop carving until that lump of childhood religion sits quivering on top of the blade. My horns retract, my tail re-evolves into a latent hump, and I fall back into the fashion that suits my conspiracy of choice. And I say: “Because I’m only words on the page. “Because I’m the man of the moment. “Because I’ve never had an original thought. “Because I’m all style, and no substance.”

I say: “My name is Sue. How do you do? Now you’re gonna die.”

Before I slip my knife back under my jacket, check the angle of my hat and leave, I rummage through his head one more time. I think I saw a movie in there about a guy whose girlfriend and sports car switch personalities after he drinks a zany magic potion, and I think it could be the surprise comedy hit of the summer.

So remember, kids:

THERE ARE NO WORDS ON THIS PAGE

None of this really happened. You were mistaken. You didn’t witness anything unusual on the night in question. Now sleep. And dream of that novel that you know you’ll write one day – you will! – because it’s a story that the world would really like to hear.