Wait. Hold on a minute. What was Monty talking about? Something about not wasting words and keeping things brief? That shouldn’t be too hard. As he finishes preparing the game board I return the letter tile I was holding to the bag and blindly grab seven others.
D S U I R T N.
Rust? Dust? Runt? Sun? Not much to go with here. As I contemplate whether or not ‘TURDS’ is an acceptable word to play, my opponent begins the game, placing the word ‘HASTY’, the ‘H’ on the center star, the ‘Y’ now resting on a double letter tile.
“For thirty points.”
“G-g-g-ood start,” I hesitantly admit, my stutter here the result of nervousness as opposed to whatever it is normally the result of. Maybe it was the word that Max just placed subconsciously urging me to hurry, or maybe it was my own arrogant desire to show him how quickly I can play this silly game, but I made my move almost instantly after he made his. I play the word ‘DUSTY’ using his freshly laid ‘Y’ tile as my anchor.
“Eighteen.”
As Montblanc begins to mark my score I realize the result of my hasty and under-calculated move. Maybe you have too? I could have played the word ‘INDUSTRY’ and cleared my whole row to the tune of seventy-four points. I briefly consider asking Montblanc if I can make a revision, but I decide not to. And just like that the stakes of this game became plain to me—this isn’t a friendly match or a superfluous contest. No, I’m playing this game for the sanctity of my soul—a wager I put up without even realizing. Maximus the Manipulator has goaded me into defending myself against his smiling inquiries into my own redundancy, and by the end of the first turn I’ve already surrounded my pole position. Let me pose a question—if Max can beat me at this game, why does he need me around at all? Let’s review. I’ve dropped what could have been a forty-four-point lead, left now to climb back from a twelve-point deficit. These little maple tiles don’t represent letters of the alphabet and their corresponding point values, they represent a domain that I am expected to have a certain degree of mastery over.
My opponent, who seems to have inexplicably grown in size, plays the word ‘STUMP’, using the ‘U’ that I placed during my premature opening turn.
“For eighteen.”
Fuck you. I know how many points the word is worth you prick. You think I’m too stupid to add up a few small numbers? Why would you play that word anyway? Are you trying to intimidate me or something? To ‘stump’ me? Typical politician. Double-dealing knaves, the whole lot of them. I nod my head, chocking back the urge to flip the board off the table.
“Tell me, Larry, when did you first discover your affinity for the written word?”
The hell kind of question is that? Is he trying to thrown me off? Wait, is he being sarcastic? It’s goddamn Scrabble, did he expect me to recreate Sonnet 18 on the board? The letters you get are random you lack-linen mate! I’m seething now. It has been suggested that I tend to take these things a little too seriously, but this time I believe I am justified. I’m on course to lose this game. And then what? ‘Sorry, Larry, I guess you just weren’t the penman I thought you were, maybe I’d best get someone else to finish my book.’ And there I go, back to B.C. with my tail between my legs. Back to my mattress in the corner of my room. Back to the ever-open gates of oblivion. Forget that. Forget the game. I need to appeal directly to whatever humanity still exists within Mister Meal Ticket. Deep breath, elongate the words if you need to, just no stuttering, this has to be pure.
“I can wrrrrrite your book.”
“Yes, I know, that’s why you are here. Still, I’m curious as to how your creative genesis occurred. Was it simply a matter of being in the company of books at an early age?”
He’s looking at me. He’s having a conversation with me. You see, when two people are engaged in a conversation, they tend to look at each other. What he’s not looking at is the game board. He’s not looking at his letters, in fact, I think he forgot to replenish his tile supply after playing his last word. And just like that the realization slaps me across the face—he doesn’t give a damn about the outcome of the game, he’s just happy to be able to play it with someone. With someone who isn’t on his official staff. With someone who isn’t expected to engage in relentless acts of sycophantism. With someone he can have a conversation with. A conversation that’s not on the record. A conversation that won’t have political repercussions. A conversation with someone that he, for whatever reason, seems to trust. A conversation with me, speech impediment and all. For one flash of a moment my mind dwells on how utterly unlikeable I feel myself to be at times before starkly shifting toward the prevailing irony that surrounds us.
This chapter, which opens with Montblanc outlining the importance of short chapters, is in fact one of the longest chapters in the book.
Wait, what book?
Oh Lord, it’s happening again . . .
26
PORTENTOUSNESS
MIRED IN THE bramble now, sleeping two floors under a man like I was his pet Jojo. Treat me like a Fabergé egg and handle me with your surgical gloves. There’s nothing to be said here that’s worth saying. A book about a writing man writing a book about a man written by a writing man who writes books about writing men. Any writer who writes a book where the main character is a writer is a hack and that’s a fact.
The air is dangerously thin at the top, my friends, but trust that I have noticed the uneasy footing on each of the broken bodies I’ve ungraciously doddered over. Here’s one: disingenuousness is bubbling over the side of the pot. It makes a right horrid mess. The ordeal panics me and in my haste I knock over the whole damn thing. Visions of the glossy pages of office supply catalogues and my duty as an informed and disciplined consumer to select the paper shredder that is right for me. Burn it all to the ground. Kerosene. Ethanol. Frustration begets anger, anger arms the hackneyed legions that insist on calling me ‘brother.’
The first word on today’s practice list is ‘property.’ The ‘p’ words are always tough to begin with, but this one comes with additional challenges. It goes from one hard ‘p’ sound to another with little room between them. Even if I can make it past the first one I can’t waste a moment to celebrate before the spotlight shines on the next. If I’m still standing after that one-two combo, the ‘t’ at the end will try its best to finish the bout.
Be great at the things you are capable of being great at. I thought I knew what those things were. In grade school I was a pretty good distance runner. I abandoned it when the training started becoming too difficult. I remember seeing my former coach a few months later at the grocery store and feeling what was at the time an unfamiliar sensation. It’s been felt often enough since.
Puhrrrroprty. Not bad. We can do better though. We can. We could. We might.
Maybe the difference between me and those who look like me lies in my capacity for acts of extreme bravery. &&*^&((^^!. Something for the cryptographers. But the rest of them? They would never do that kind of shit. Mark it, friends, this will be something special.
No, no, that doesn’t work either. The threads of my disguise are unravelling. But wait! Maybe this inside look endears me? No? Well, it was worth a shot. The problem is that I haven’t any idea what you want. Problem? That’s a good one, let’s make that the next practice word.
I had a friend in high-school who fancied herself an artist. How I loathed that label and my implied association with it! She specialized in drawing skulls with varying degrees of ornateness, but she ultimately failed to develop in her craft. We march now side-by-side, though one day I dream of escaping these synchronized steps and returning to the sea’s expanse. Returning to the longship where I can sit and row anonymously with my Viking brethren. On every third stroke I like to fake it. I haven’t yet been caught.
Alright. Enough is enough. I currently have one singular purpose—to write the memoirs of Maxime Montblanc. He’s sleeping two floors above me now.
Sometimes I feel like his pet Jojo. But that’s it. That’s what I am. I’m an employee. An errand boy. One in my position would certainly benefit from letting go of these delusions of artistry and mockery.
27
PARAMOUR
“THERE REMAINS NOTHING unique left to be said on the topic of love, wouldn’t you agree, Lawrence?”
“I’ve never-never-never tuh-trrrr-tried.”
“No, I never expected you to trespass such quotidian grounds. Though I wonder of the folly inherent in your decision.”
“How do you, how do you muh-muh . . . mmm-mean?”
“There are but a select few matters in this world that so universally flow through us and pump blood through the heart of the human condition. Banal mayhap to you or I, but necessities all the same. Now surely I cannot be expected to omit the role that love has played in my life’s story. My suggestion—I recommend you include only the barest of essentials. I met my wife, we married, and we remain so to this day. I insist that you keep any coverage of my official romantic history as stylistically inelegant as possible, no need for any ostentatious displays. What the people need to know is that I love my wife and that I have successfully maintained the institution of marriage. For what man is fit to reign who cannot hold firm those of his own life? Authenticity and consistency are good enough for them. No need to bleed into scrupulous displays of over-emotion, nothing has been proven to stir contempt so furiously. Weakness come alive. Here we must walk the line with no desire to draw our own. D’accord?”
“Sounds g-g-g-g-good.”
“Very good, however, with this now established I do have a thought beyond this agreement that I would like to share if you would permit me. I will caution you that it addresses what you may consider the tired topic of love in a way that you might find unexpected, though it is a thought that has been weighing heavier on me with each passing year. A thought I have not uttered or exposed to anyone. You surely see that there is an implication of trust in my desire to share it with you. Knowing this, will you allow me to continue?”
“Yes, puh-puh-please do, Muh-Mmmm-Max.”
“My dear accomplice. You have been made privy to my many sins of flesh. You know I have philandered and engaged in a great number of casual dalliances ranging in their perversity. You know my marriage is but a Potemkin village hiding a hollowed husk inside. You know I have little concern to follow the edicts of companionship, my success in life due to a romantic celibacy of sorts. What you know is truth, though a truth incomplete.
“I had known him from the age of twenty-two, blossoming then in the art of interpretation and as a student of sensation, yet to be numbed, yet to be a closed bracket at the end of the page. In his eyes, always unmoved, unsettlingly focused—one of his many skills I would come to adopt—I saw reflection. A comradery of similarities from the profane to the profound. Our story was written with an uncharacteristic haste, curiously devoid of grammatical error and with an unspoken confidence. It was about four years later when I started to digest some of the feelings trepidatiously traipsing around the recesses of my mind. Cavernous icicles melting, drop by drop. In fact, I can place this far more accurately to a precise square on the calendar and specific coordinates on the globe. Enter an odyssey of us, planned in advance for a day when any and all earthly obligations were distant points on the horizon.
“And on that glorious day we knew each other as we knew ourselves. Intimate, exposed, and safely cherished above all. We were the denizens of the Great Mother’s opulence. We were the dirty-footed nomads, graciously stumbling through our dance of elation and psilocybin. We were the caretakers of each other’s concerns, transposed to flat stone and skipped across the water to the eternal rest of the lakebed beneath. Moving seamlessly from one moment of tranquility to the next I caught myself flirting with a path I have known to be dangerous in situations as these. An uninvited thought asking why I had to leave this behind. Why must I awake to the shrill alarms of expectation not of my own definition? What justice is it that I cannot feel like this always? Insomuch that a moment or experience can beg these unanswerable questions, I was quick to acknowledge that my longing for peace was nothing more than a powerful longing to remain in his company. To feel the absence of judgement and the assurance that my words were not just heard, but felt. Does this arouse such excitement as to remain unobtainable? The Christmas mornings of my youth calling to me from the past, a lost time when the overabundance of agency had not yet been introduced.
“But you know the answers to these questions. You know where I am today, in front of you and dwelling on a story that has no sequel. Only recently can I fully admit this, but I have never felt that way about another person before. Whether that makes it love or simply the unfulfilled longing for a sun that had to set, never to be seen again—on that I do not know. Nor do I need to. We tend to construct visions of what could be that are impervious to the harsh conditions of reality. Maybe that is a comforting thought, though I can still occasionally hear his voice in my head. I can still feel him sitting beside me in my fleeting moments of existential dread, assuring me that these are indeed days worth conquering. If these memories, beautiful and forlorn as they are to me, have met you with any discomfort, I surely apologize, but I needed to mention them to someone. I needed to prove to myself that they existed, that they happened, that they touched me and that they shaped me. I have done terrible things to many people, but what humanity remains within me is unequivocally attributable to him. And how real it was.”
“Wuh-wuh-when was the . . . last t-t-t-time . . . you spoke to him?”
“No, young Lawrence, not now. Not now or ever again I’m afraid. It’s long past time I returned these concerns to the soft sand from which they formed—that I might sleep unhaunted once more.”
28
PALLIATION
MONTBLANC IS SLEEPING upstairs. If I were to strangle him in his sleep, the whole country would be forced to learn my name.
Nothing even happens in this book. Why are you still here?
29
PUGILISM
HAVE WE ANY magicians or spin doctors on retainer? The life of one Montblanc comma M proves to be a palette rich with colours not suitable for public consumption. I’m doing my best to cut around the bruises of this apple but what remains edible is disappearing fast. Under finicky angles and fortuitous lighting an attractive form flickers into frame, but too often these ideal circumstances evade us and I’m left with a charge well beyond my limited expertise. I’m no artist. At my best I’m a semi-competent scribe. I know what M wants, he’s been clear about that. Gathering and presenting important dates and milestones in a coherent manner, that’s easy. But portraying Montblanc as an endearing and inspiring figure? Well that might just be my Waterloo.
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