The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  Using open laptops as splayed feet to advance clumsily and slowly across the landscape and to project images onto their monitor screen heads, the Microheavies tried luring suggestible customers nearer with hypnotic spirals, optical illusions, or the words HELP and ANSWERS flashing epileptically. Those who strayed into the range of the Microheavies were either blown up with the raging fireballs cooked up and spat out their washing-machine torsos, or were collected and taken to a secret pen where intricate surgical procedures were performed on them. Thus began the dawn of the first Microhumans. The humans were put to sleep and reanimated with several new features. Their brains were removed and replaced with Windows 14 processors and their stomachs upgraded to consume digi-pets and other scraps for dinner instead of food. Thanks to their inbuilt encyclopedias, the Microhumans were a superior race—the sort of perfect robot specimen humans had been trying to create for decades. The Microhumans, once several dozen bodies were refurbished, could reproduce quickly among themselves, and set about building a large compound from which they would devise their strategies for taking over the planet. Since they were using Windows 14 processors, however, the Microhumans constantly crashed and were caught in a perpetual loop of starting and restarting, so the swift global domination would never come to pass.

  Another tribe eking out life on the concrete fields were the Macrohumans—to survive, their bodies adapted to the various half-animal half-mechanical creatures that had spawned in the fields and were used as food. These people became mere hunters, breeding sheep and slaughtering them for the carcass (reinstating haggis as the most popular dish—albeit haggis boiled through with bits of tungsten and plastic).

  For the remainder of those straining to liberate the ScotCall Compound, a coup arrived swiftly, plunging the phone lines into anarchy. Callers from home and abroad seeking instruction on how to do basic things were instructed to shoot their brains out, and over two million suicides took place in the space of two weeks. Common were such exchanges:

  “Where do the lemons live?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “Does a blade of grass weigh more than William Gass?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “Can a bomb be banned after exploding?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “Where is the ointment?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “Can I use my oven glove as a scarf?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “Is there nowhere on earth I can blend this pomegranate?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “How far in cubic centimetres is it from Krakow to Dublin?”

  “Shoot yourself.”

  “Open or closed or half?”

  “Shoot yourself.” And so on.

  The Farewell, Author! Conference

  8

  A PEEP at the clock: 11:50. The midnight suicide pact was approaching. The writers shuffled nervously, checking their watches, in some cases rewinding them or pretending the clock on the wall was wrong. Mumbled backpedalling followed. Damion Searls couldn’t die as he was raising three mallards and a cockatoo in his Norfolk farmhouse and had to ensure their lives were not at risk; Daniël Robberechts had promised to attend a fun-run in Piccadilly Circus dressed as a chaffinch for the Bulgarian Repatriation Fund; Mati Unt was at present on experimental drug Flummox™ and could not spoil the pharmaceutical company’s efforts with an entirely unrelated self-murder; David Nicholls was expecting triplets from his fourth wife, and wanted to make this, his fourth marriage in the UK, a success; Anna Burns had been implicated in a couscous-smuggling scandal—since the national shortage was declared, bootleggers had been smuggling in illegal and poisonous couscous from North Africa—and had to clear her name; Nicholas Currie was ranked third in the Regional Cribbage Championships and could not perish until he at least ranked second in the Paisley region; Chip Kidd had to acquire the latest album by The Fall, Otex Horticular Drops, to complete his 480-record-strong collection, despite this record being another compilation of B-sides and live scraps, and Mark E. Smith having been hooked up to a life support machine during the studio recordings; Andrew Kaufman refused to die without receiving a review minus the words “whimsical” and “cute”; Greg Boyd had booked a two-week vacation to the Andes where he hoped to retrieve the stapler he had left at the Aconcagua; Deb Olin Unferth had not quite recovered from the bout of pneumonia she contracted in Toxteth and wanted to be fighting fit when she committed suicide; Tom McCarthy still had to explain to the world that necronautism had nothing to do with shagging dead pilots; Chris Bachelder was booked to appear on a panel discussing mimesis in torture porn movies in April; Christian Bök was close to completing the world’s longest palindromic pangram in both Spanish and Malay; Ken Kalfus had to return a lost menorah to his rabbi or suffer forever in damnation; David Mitchell still had to beg forgiveness to the world for the “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” section of his novel Cloud Atlas; Jonathan Safran Foer had left something outside somewhere, he wasn’t sure what that thing was or where outside he had left the thing, only he wasn’t able to commit suicide without retrieving the unknown thing from somewhere, and yes, he was aware this sounded like an excuse, but his wife had made him promise to retrieve the something from the somewhere, and he had promised on his life to retrieve the something, and since he had promised on his life, he would rather kill himself for having failed to retrieve the something rather than as part of a mass suicide, and if people still weren’t convinced, he remembered now that the something was ovoid, that is to say, egg-shaped, and had been lost outside a large structure with two separate entrances, and no, he hadn’t left an egg outside a supermarket, it was something more precious outside somewhere more prestigious, he would need to rattle his recall; Lydia Millet had to tick off the remaining items on her bucket list before she killed herself—shoot heroin, listen to a Robert Fripp solo album, tend bar for two years in Burntisland, Fife, steer a JCB into a bookmaker’s, make a mashed potato mountain on a moat of beans and place a sausage at the summit, utter the word “glassblower” without sniggering, experience life in a Drumchapel tower block in winter after the heating allowance had been cut for those over 60, cease to be troubled when deranged truck drivers load their vehicles with explosives and drive into kindergartens; Jonathan Safran Foer had remembered that he had left one of those 1970s ovoid chairs outside a cathedral, and this item had been a present for their fourth child Resnais, who had taken an interest in 1970s culture and collected period furniture, and that this was his last chance to redeem himself in the eyes of a son who had long ago written his father off as a has-been, and without this chance, he might return to nursing his suicidal urges, and he couldn’t kill himself before redeeming himself before his son and pleasing his wife; Nicole Krauss had to let people know that Jonathan Safran Foer was a fibbing bullshitter, that he had no children, nor wife for over three decades, and that he had spent the last three decades as a hustler on the streets, peddling extendible forks, cruet sets, matryoshka dolls, and fibre-optic lamps, and that he had been postponing his suicide now for over nine months, and after written and spoken promises, still hadn’t produced the desired corpse. These excuses took over two hours, so the writers concluded that since midnight had long passed, perhaps it was a more sensible idea to put some minimalist techno or ambient trance numbers on the stereo and chill until sunrise, and see what the mood in the room happened to be then. Oriana Leckert had a copy of DJ Invernip’s Glucose Intolerant Melatones, a classic in the chillambient category, played in nightclubs at 4am to mellow the hardcore beat freaks before they spazzed out on their E-fed rhythmic thrusts, so I cranked up the music and the room dropped to the floor to chill, remembered the roach-rats, and elected to chill standing up or leaning against the freezers.

  Bizarro Tim

  TIM had to flee the b
izarro fiction department before a neon elephant in a cocktail dress sat on his face. To escape before a dominatrix attached seventeen volts of electric love to his nipples and spanked his swollen rump. To contrive an escape route over the vats of bubbling custard towards the two large raptors whose mouths functioned as lifts. To send an SOS to a small babe in Newark with two enormous brains under her sweater with the sexiest red nodes he’d ever tongued. To free her from the fluorescent amoeba in whose pseudopods she was ensnarled. To telephone the ostrich whose oestrus season was being broadcast on a satellite channel to subscribers from Nepal so the ostrich could send vibrations via his superconnected plumage. To ingratiate a paragraph. To dissolve an albatross in albumin. To suggest a viable method for transferring an asset-backed loan into the account of a squat Dundonian milquetoast. To locate the exact halogen-powered device that might rescue him from the kinetic molars of an alcoholic colander with cholera to be released into the smouldering lips of a sentence. To recall the exact moment he became trapped in thickets of bizarro prose. To extract his brain with pliers and offer it to the Council of Lumpen Delusions. To optimise the elders’ cacaphonics. To swell up to the size of a balloon and circumnavigate the Outer Hebrides while tinkling on a tribe of fork-wielding farmers. To disclose a minor secret to the fortieth member of the Polish Air Force during a sluggish season. To correct a faulty surd on the silver wing of a polished pelican. To slip inside a slot and drip into a drot. To assault the badgers in their dens and make no apologies for the viciousness of Salt Garbald’s empire. To chip-chop the theatre and wear flip-flops when it matters. To run out of time, money, energy, and the fear.

  Mhairi

  9

  IHAD not expected, however, to become infatuated with Marilyn several months later. She began sending me emails about her life so far, discussing the torments she suffered in her childhood— having to endure Marmite sandwiches for dinner, long car trips to relatives’ houses listening to a Beyoncé Best Of compilation on an endless loop, and continual taunts from her brother about her mostly male features. I read these with fatigue and left them unanswered, eventually replying with a request to refrain from the barrage, which she replied to apologetically. Somehow, from there, I found myself caring about her vulnerability, and I softened to the irritating qualities I previously despised, leading to an unexpected flowering of affection. Now we take runs together, make blueberry jam, write two-act plays about dreary astronauts, and make merry spooning in the sleeping bag as the winter months draw nearer.

  This

  9

  IN writing this novel, I have suffered many delusions and breakdowns. As I began, I entertained the delusion that the work would be received favorably by at least nine ecstatic readers, and that the novel would make me a folk hero in The House. The realisation that writing this novel for no monetary reward (not even the teeniest nibble on a mouldy brioche) was not destined to make me semi-popular, and that my peers in the building would pour scorn on me for choosing to spend my miniscule free time punishing myself by writing a reader-unfriendly piece of throwback basement fodder, caused my first nervous breakdown. Upon convalescing I continued to add sections to the novel, entertaining my second delusion, namely that this novel might bring me success via posterity, that I would two hundred years down the line be venerated as an innovator, an atypical genius in an age of the cynical exploitation of clichés. This was followed by the realisation that there will be no books in the future, no literature, no words printed on paper for readers, because once the present handful of readers dies, there will be no one to pick up the mantle, and The House of Writers will be demolished (if it hasn’t caved in already), and narratives will play out on screens, flashily, stylelessly, feeding the viewer their steady diet of clichés, their warm syrupy feel-good portion of the bleeding obvious, and that I will be forgotten as soon as the final printout of this manuscript is tossed from the hands of the unwilling reader, that once the memory of this work escapes my own senile recall, the work will cease, and have forever ceased to exist. I had a second breakdown. And yet, I resumed writing the work. I resumed for no reason I can conceivably fathom. Here I sit, tapping these sentences onto the page, squeezing out my melancholy thoughts even though my hands ache, my fingers are stiff from repetitive strain, and my body slumps over in this stiffbacked chair, utterly depleted of energy, and yet, I limp towards the end of this project ... the only thing that guides me towards an ending that I will have made something ... that I will have written, and been heard, albeit ricocheting in my own cranium, that I will have said something, albeit incoherent and directionless ... that I will have expressed my incoherent and directionless message with passion, determination, and a grim desperation to make words on a page matter again.

  The Trauma Rooms

  9

  AND in a similar vein, meet Hank Zepon.”

  “Hi.”

  “Yeah. Let me explicate. I was struggling to fend off the taxman while writing novel number four, Getrude’s Garters, a pornophantastical hallucination involving Ms. Stein, so I invited donations in return for a namecheck in the text. I received £5 donations from a thousand people, so £5000. This was enough to survive for the next year, allowing me to complete the novel. I chose to insert the names during a hallucinogenic episode, where Gertrude recalls all the people she had insulted over a six-month period. This proved a lucrative method of reader sponsorship. You can’t trust readers to actually buy copies of your novel. Even your most admiring fans will wait for the library stock, or borrow from friends, or torrent ebooks, when that was still an option. I’m told all the computers have exploded outside, or some such bollocks. Anyway, my next novel, Kafka’s Pantaloons, was an eroticophilosophico exploration of the sexual kinks of Franz. This time, 689 people donated. I think some people felt cheated by my long list of their names, expecting a more subtle insertion. So this time I had the names more casually inserted in such passages as: “Felice strapped on her dildo and, approaching Franz’s parted buttocks, noticed out the window her friends Paul Thompson and Linda Stewart walking past.” And: “Dora lowered herself on to Franz’s rigid cock and asked whether he had written back to Julie Driscoll and Nigel Parsons before jiggling into penetration.” This proved more successful. For the next novel, some 300,000 people had donated, meaning I had some work to insert them. I had to write a novel in the manner of Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, rife with lists, so I wrote The Hopscopalypse, about a plague that descends at random on various towns, including several pages listing the dead in each chapter. The novel was panned by Adam Mars-Jones in The Telegraph, who wrote: “Zepon’s latest reader-funded production drowns in its own making.” Meaning: too many names. I had made the cardinal mistake of becoming too avaricious. My next novel received 69 donations. This made no difference, as I had made £150,000 with the previous, allowing me to survive in luxury for a long time. I wrote The Full Sixty-Nine, a sequence of pornohomoeroticophilosophico tracts interspersed with hardcore fucking. This proved so popular, 3,382,818 people donated £5 for a namecheck in my next book. I made £16,914,060. All I had to do was write this novel and retire forever. I had almost three and a half million names to insert into my novel. These alone, providing each consisted of two names, would take up 6,765,636 words, longer than Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, Á la recherche du temps perdu, Zettels Traum, Clarissa, and Poor Fellow My Country combined, with room to spare for an Infinite Jest. I made things easy for myself by writing a meta-novel about a writer attempting to write the longest novel in history (this endeavour minus the creativity had been attempted in halfwit conceptual artist Nigel Tomm’s The Blah Story, where the artist had cut and pasted ‘blah’ in various permutations over 23 enormous volumes), so I could include the names as lists for a few pages without provoking the reader’s ire. The whole thing took over five years, during which time I suffered a nervous breakdown. I wanted to write a work of art and not be written off as a cash-hoovering has-been. I was up to 7,181,819 words, with 2,639,182 names left to i
nsert when I collapsed in the street, the millions of names rolling in a permanent tickertape in my brain, causing me to haemorrhage cerebrally. I recovered a month later to discover some supporters had withdrawn their monies, forcing me to search and replace them with another. A million people believed I wasn’t able to complete the work. I had to prove them wrong. Two years later, I delivered the finished novel, entitled simply i, to be published in thirty volumes, one volume per month for two-and-a-half years. The publisher predicted astronomical sales, but the poorly received first five books led to the novel being shelved. The subscribers demanded their cash back. I had to return a fortune and privately publish a revised version. I cracked up when one subscriber ranted at me on TV for ‘failing to deliver.’ I punched his face to Picasso. After paying £500,000 bail, I fled for Switzerland. I came here to try and sell the original version of my novel, and finally be recognised as a genius. This didn’t happen. I ended up in this ward for nutsos.”

  “That is not the word we use,” the doctor said.

  “What happened?” Erin asked.

  “Other writers stole sections and sold them as their own novels.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks for that, Hank.”

  “Yeah. Cheers.”

  A Better Life

  9

  PETE and Rob, having picked up the pertinent information that I used to be a writer, struggled through the throng to The House. Starting on the first floor, they Tweedledeed and Tweedledummed around looking for me and making brattish diversions. Their inquisitiveness took them to my desk as I was typing out part of my space western. Pete, in his Swiss-cheese boots, and Rob, still resplendent in his sweat-drenched bus driver’s shirt, arrived like two flairless hobos at my desk, attracting the shifty-eyed contumely of my colleagues, who looked up from their intergalactic saloon shootouts to flash their aggrieved miens. Pete launched my stapler towards the ceiling and leaned over my manuscript, making exaggerated sniffing sounds and a peee-eeeew gesture. He read aloud: