The Writer

I only have two or three left, they have taken all the others. All the others that I had, even then it was not a lot. But now they are mostly gone. Only two or three readers left. I am a writer.

Secretly of course. It is not legal to be a writer. And so I hide it. I write in the dark, in the night under the covers of the common rooms while the sentries pace outside and their boots scuff the linoleum and the sound of their boots goes thunk-thunk-thud on the floor.

With their faces all twisted into masks that are featureless and bland and without any expression at all. Their eyes washed out and blank.

All the once-were writers and readers now sentries.

Boots goose-stepping and thunking on the bare linoleum.

I write under the covers, sometimes, with a wax candle, a shortened stub of a wax candle melted into the bottom of a small tin cup, burning slowly and lowly.

Flickering...

Flickering.

Sometimes when I don't have candles, or when it is dangerous to have the light, I write my stories in the dark.

I have trained my hands to shape the letters perfectly, the lines one after the other all perfectly and legibly one line after another, one sentence after another and one page after another.

Story after story, that I will fold the pages of the paper that it is illegal to have and put it in my shirt and hide it. Feel it against my skin as I work in the streets during the day. Sweeping the streets and cleaning the gutters.

Feeling the paper against my skin and the story in my head going round and round and round.

Sometimes when I put the papers in my shirt and I sweat during the day then the stories become stained strains of ink across the damp paper. The stories become illegible, and sometimes when my memory is not good then those stories are lost.

Forgotten.

Sometimes I forget them and lose them and never remember them.

Sometimes.

I write stories.

I am a writer.

I had seven readers.

Readers that would read my work and would walk with me when I walked out in the world, beyond the fenced windows of the sanitarium. Out beyond the institute and the white walled and doored sides of it. Out beyond the sentries standing and marching with their feet all matching perfectly in rhythm.

I had seven, but four of them have been taken away.

The Agency took them.

The Agency doesn't of course know that they were mine. Just that they were readers and they read work and the work was theatrical.

It is illegal to be theatrical.

And more than illegal, it is immoral to be theatrical.

Too bawdy, too much flesh of the mind exposed. Too many thoughts aswirl... drifting, sweeping, rushing through the small space of a single mind... infecting others.

It is immoral to inflict ones thoughts on others.

Even agreeing with the tenets of the open society are not allowed to be openly inflicted.

I had seven readers.

But they caught them one by one...

Michael was caught in the reading room, that has been converted into a solitary silence room, where people will stare out at the walls or the windows with the grates out onto small square little pieces of green that are called grass lawns and birds sometimes sit in the trees close to the institute, but none of the birds sing.

Because it is not allowed and all the birds have been fixed. So their songs don't impinge on one's consciousness and make one believe one way or another or feel one way or another... or make the mind wander... one way or another....

Michael was caught in the room, that still has the name tag on the door that says it is the reading room. Except of course people are supposed to ignore such statements from doors or furniture or signs, as much as possible and after a life time of ignoring them, it is sometimes easy not to see the words at all.

But sometimes I forget to forget and I will read the words and the words will stir a simmering of pictures in my head. Until late at night when I am supposed to be asleep it all comes out in a gush of words onto paper and I make a story.

Michael liked my plots.

"You have marvelous plots, Chris" He would say and I would want to blush and to smile and push out my chest at the same time.

"Your plots are difficult to predict." He would say, "And that is what I most adore about them, they are difficult to predict."

And I once made the mistake of saying in return that I never intended that, and afterward Michael no longer looked at the plots quite as unassuming as before.

But Michael was caught. And went to the siberian coast for eighteen months before he came back here. And his first night back I slipped a copy of my story Madam Metal Butterfly under his pillow and he tore it to shreds and didn't even look in my direction as he spoke to the wall and didn't turn to look at me at all.

"I have no use for upstart miscreants that would think of themselves as elite-ists." And he buried his face into his pillow and I stared a long time at his back and then I turned and left his room. I moved down the hall to the tv room and turned on the news and watched the violence of modern life spread across the screen. The silence of the speakers didn't help to alleviate the shock in me.

"I take my plots from real life, not from fiction." I told the wall. But the wall was not interested and Michael was no longer interested.

Michael was a sentry for over a month before he jumped the bridge on the way to town one morning. The police dragged the river all morning but did not find him until late afternoon. He washed up on the town side with a smile on his face that the coroner couldn't find a reason for.

I miss Michael.

But of course he was only the first taken from me.

Eventually of course the Agency wants to get me as well. But my readers have been loyal. They have only uttered the names of the stories and not my name. And so the agents from the Agency have only come into the sanitarium because so many socialists are here.

They like to come in the Spring, when the weather turns and the beauty of the trees and life makes for wonderful romances and vignettes of placidlife.

They like to come and try to catch us with the inspiration in our cheeks and eyes with the wind rushing and sweeping over the fields and the flowers and the colors and the ribbons of light that move in the air.

I used to have seven but now only two or three. I don't think they have Warren yet. He is a clever man, that. Not likely to be stole up on and caught.

I still write my stories in the night, under the covers and still sign them with my secret name:

CH.

What is CH?

The Agency asked Samuel once, my first reader when they took him from me. What is CH? They asked, and he looked at them, eyes all somber and full of seriousness and replied with a straight face even as the words came out of his mouth: "Charleton Heston?"

But the Agency man called Riveau did not like that answer. He had slapped Samuel across the face and all of us standing in the room watching the interrogation because we had been summoned and had to stand there on the linoleum floor in our bare feet and wait for the session to end. We stood there and watched as he answered,"California Helsing?"

Slap.

"Carbureautors Honking?"

Slap!

He fell onto his face on the linoleum floor and lay there while they beat him.

I stood in line on the side of the room and turned the other way. I didn't say anything. I still believed that what I had to say was worthy. That it was worth the sacrifice. Both his and mine.

They beat him until he didn't move and then they took him out of the room and then dismissed us and sent us along to lunch.

I didn't eat.

Just pushed the food on the tin plate around and around with my spoon. In the afternoon I lay down and took a small nap but had a nightmare.

I have had nightmares for a long time now.

***

Spring has come and gone and summer is here: the vast heat of it, the smoldering intensity of the stories that tell themselves in my mind at night as I lay half asleep with the sound of crickets and frogs in my memory.

They have silenced the crickets and the frogs in the pond at the institute. The frogs move their froggy lips, their mouths puffing up and their cheeks getting full and then small as they exhale and open their mouths. But no sound comes out.

Even the frogs are quiet.

Yesterday they took Nancy from me.

She was sweet.

Kind and she saw in my work, sometimes, things I could only hope I would ever put there. But she saw it, and gave me hope that I could write something that would be meaningful.

They took her yesterday without preamble or wait. Without long interogation or scene. Just came into the sanitarium and took her and walked out through the steel doors at the end of the hallway that lead to the electro shock room. I haven't heard her screaming.

But I am afraid of that.

***

I used to hope that what I had to say into the world was worth something. That it would make a difference. That it would be a scrawl on the wall of the insanity of the world. But perhaps I have misled myself. I used to write my stories at night. I would hide under the covers and write in the dark. I have trained myself to write in the dark. To line up the lines and the words and the letters of the words perfectly. The lines and the sentences and the paragraphs and the pages one right after another.

I only have a single reader left, and I know that they would do the same to you, so I have given myself up. I know that is the best way. They came today and I could see the look on their faces and I couldn't stand it.

I wanted so much to be something that was worthwhile.....

But when they came and stood in their black boots and looked at the room I stepped out of line and opened my shirt and let the papers of my stories fall onto the floor and at first I know that they thought I was only a reader, but then when they found my pens and the inkwells...

Then they knew I was a writer. That is when Riveau stepped forward and struck me with the riding crop that he carries under his arm, as if he were always just a moments breath away from riding a horse through the stations of life.

Haha, I laughed. Even as he hit me and I fell to my knees. I still laughed as I fell. And Riveau kept hitting with his riding crop because he didn't like my laughing.

They sent me to Siberia. It was terribly cold there. I went there in the summer aboard a train when the leaves were all full. The train rushing out over the green and yellow and red ground and the fields in a rush of steam and coal dust billowing into the open air.

***

We may not be superior. Even if we feel we are right. Even the birds and the frogs think they are right, but if one is right then what of all the others? 

That is what the law says and I have memorized the law until I know it better than I know my name. I used to have a name, but that is not as important anymore.

It was Chris something or other.

I forget.

But I didn't forget your name, my last reader.

I did not forget your name. Nor the gratitude for you remembering me. Also I did not forget the name of the Agency man, Riveau. With his tweed smile and his gloved hands holding and tapping the riding crop in his palm.

 With the sneer of his smile pressed against the smoothness of his untortured face.

While I was in Siberia, they broke all my fingers and allowed them all to heal all bent and twisted and so it is painful to write now. And the dogma of the creed I have mouthed over and over at their instruction: I am not more than any other, I have no gifts that are any different than any other, I am not a man nor a thought nor an idea that is any different than any other...

 But in the back of my mind I have concocted a plan that rebels against this.

A wonderful, wonderful plan!

Haha.

I smile in the darkness under the covers as I think about it. I have started a new story and it is very different in style than my other works. I have filled it with duty and with structure and with whippings and riding crops.

And I have signed it RV.

Haha.

I have hidden other copies and with any luck, tomorrow when the Agency comes I will be the first reader of one RV that will be found. I will be sent back to Siberia.

Or perhaps to the shock treatment rooms at the end of the hallway behind the steel door.

But He will go as well. Or they will beat him and that is worth going back to the cold for. There are some things that are still meaningful, and somethings still worthwhile.

Even some worth dying for.

At least I think so.

Bio:I write speculative fiction, including sf and fantasy and some mainstream drama as well. I have been writing for two years, and submitting to the net for the last year. Am married and have three sons and reside in central Florida.

E-mail: claggc@bellsouth.net

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