The Death of the Author

A Short Story of Rebellion

Odilon Redon, Le Buddha, 1895, Lithograph on chine collé

Like so many present-day projects, the novel writing of Clayton Daniels began as a joke and grew into a serious commercial and cultural enterprise. His stories weighed so heavily as artifacts that they were on the verge of dismissal as frivolities. While studying for the bar, still wet and green and knobby-kneed, he wrote a first-person account of digital addiction called The Glass Gutter, in which he sarcastically catalogued the pain of a young man spending all his time swiping and scrolling, watching videos of robberies gone awry, murderous road rage episodes, men slipping on bicycles and skateboards and, to use outdated slang, racking their nards. This character, yet another nameless narrator in a time of fashionably unnamed first-person narratives, also subscribed to numerous independent contractors of pornography and flirted pseudonymously with far-right humorists and ideologues, and was assumed to be a stand-in for Daniels, who was assumed to be a stand-in for many 22-year-old young men — adrift, isolated, harangued, horny (or not horny enough, not patriotically and religiously horny, tongue unrolling for a doughty broodmare), confused, angry, their circuits fried by ubiquitous digital technology, callously irreverent toward the struggles of disabled and marginalized peoples, nursing an inflated sense of their own aggrievement and tripling down on repellent qualities in misguided bids for sympathy.

The book was an unexpected success, one of those cannonball-splash debuts. It was estimated that thousands of people had not only purchased a physical copy but read through at least a quarter of it. Though he never wanted for money, thanks to family connections and mysterious windfalls never disclosed, Daniels quit his part-time jobs, and two years later, the greater part of which he spent having his picture taken in grayscape urban environments and writing intensely glib articles in which he repeatedly observed of various contemporary secular phenomena that they were, in their ritualized and fanatical aspects, much like a religion, or more specifically descended from one or another branch of Protestantism, he published his next hit, a dialogue-drenched novel called The Dullards, in which the vapid conversations and sexual dilly-dallying of youngish men and women apparently captured the post-'68, “society of the spectacle,” hyperconsumerist, neoliberal-capitalist, death-of-God, post-Oedipal, id-heavy narcissism of grad student cosmopolitans and faux-bohemian scenesters, ladling up the kind of humorless, vaguely moralistic portrayals of affluent, uptalking yet downwardly mobile, spiritually bankrupt, overproduced pseudo-intellectuals that appealed to the swelling legion of staunch wafflers, inveterate dabblers, credentialed hobos, unemployable poetasters, romantic bunglers, people who can’t write a paragraph without mentioning eros and one or another oracle, and hedonists who get off criticizing hedonism.

Three years after that, long enough for Daniels to have been forgotten or to have aged out of writing misunderstood but trendy satires, he published All the Places on Earth Where People Sometimes Have to Live Even Though They’re Not From That Place, a sendup of diaspora literature that was also taken to heart by both supporters and detractors, called a risible schlockfest by the latter and a dazzling, stupendous, monumental, lyrical love letter, truly, madly, deeply, a savage garden of earthly delights by the former. In a time when almost no one made money from writing, when underground legends in their forties and fifties worked as bartenders and carneys and septic tank technicians, and magazines pumped out widely read articles about how no one reads, and how no one could read any longer, referring to studies showing that Harvard graduate students couldn’t follow the bouncing ball on Barney & Friends, in shameful contrast with the 19^th century, when syphilitic and toothless chimney sweepers recited Horacian odes and Homeric hymns in ancient Greek when they weren’t chugging whiskey from Wellington boots and fighting in brass-knuckle boxing matches, Daniels’ earnings competed with illiterate genre bestsellers and influencers and other nonliterary cultural producers; he almost became a household name, though by this time there was hardly such a thing, what with there being hardly any households in the proper sense, as most homes were reduced to tissues of masturbating individuals on the point of dissolving.

Improbably, a string of acclaimed titles followed him into his late twenties and thirties, including a sweeping, multi-generational and sociological cinderblock called The Atomic Ant Farm, in which he widened the overfocused autofictional lens to capture in hilariously tedious detail the material conditions of pervasive malaise, rampant divorce, and alcoholism from a third-person air balloon perspective, earning him the depreciating accolades of flabby, eternal adjuncts who demand of literature that it reflect social and political forces and inform the critical consciousness of potentially revolutionary movements, a demand shaped by historical and market influences largely unexamined by perpetual academic pupae who consistently ironize exclusive artistic and religious impulses and aims while maintaining a stiff and grimly sincere attitude toward their own recently shouldered analytical tools, tools they’ll soon discard in favor of hotter theoretical frames. Then there was that deeply urgent examination of the appalling, hard-baked-cake foundations of violence and oppression and vehicular ecocide in the contemporary United States, entitled American Carnation, a labyrinthine homage to Latin American magical realism replete with POV switches spanning a thousand years, odd bird behavior, old whores, and contempt for a mustachioed dictator and enthusiasm for a bearded one. And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention his gritty, minimalistic Gen X tribute, entitled Retch, about a burnt-out copywriter who becomes an avant-garde performance barf artist and builds a cult following with his searing indictment of a culture of slick images and shameless regurgitation.

But as he limped into his forties, now married with one young child, Daniels tired of writing his mocking tales, because he was generally thought to be a sincere chronicler of society’s ills, foibles, pressures and implicit enjoinments, when for the most part he’d written for the amusement of himself and others, and he was no longer laughing and no one else seemed to find him all that funny. Lately he’d developed a semblance of an authentic desire to write well, to craft beautiful sentences, a desire that can only be understood as that of a man with no idea of what to do in life. With one book left in his contract with Hymen & Shyster, a massive publishing conglomerate and a subsidiary of Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals and Robot Weaponry, he went to work on The Yearner Diaries, a sobering examination of yet more self-conscious aging romantics, void of typical adult burdens like raising children but percolating with morbid vanities, in a mood of weariness and grim sincerity, torn between the goals of offending readers with a real provocation and charming them with exquisite beauty. As he strained for wisps of material toward the middle of his book, he glimpsed signs of his own deep exhaustion and an impending spiritual catastrophe.

His success came so early, and he started out so advanced that he’d fallen behind, then finally caught up to himself, to his lack of imagination and will; he encountered his limits, smacking his skull in an experience F. Scott Fitzgerald described as a crack-up — the realization that however much of a man he might’ve been, he was much less of one now. He’d lost his impish creativity, and the idea of pursuing a degree in creative writing and sitting in a workshop, so-called because it conferred a veneer of working-class or manual handcraft respectability on the fey roundtable nitpicking and tense tone policing of extraneous and egoistic fictional exercises conducted by desperate yet grandiose shirkers, was too grisly to contemplate. Of course, we’re speaking of artistic powers here; Daniels was now a family man who loved his wife and child, or so he said, so in the beef-and-potato-eating eyes of the conventional world, he was an integral member of society, he automatically had purpose, value, a reason to be, but he also wondered if he’d gotten into the habit of treating his loved ones like his property, like tasks, burdens he’d prefer not to carry. Some dreary afternoons, he daydreamed about his wife Michelle taking their son and leaving him, just as he pictured his publisher terminating their contract. Vaguely fearful of death in an abstract way that never catalyzed into vigorous action, his favorite fantasies were of being freed from some obligation. That’s the main character’s primary flaw, his core problem; he wants, he wants nothing positive, nothing exalted, not even something steady, but this negative freedom, a disappearance without death. And it has to come from others, the world has to reject him, he can’t be responsible for it, he thought. Of his most recent protagonist or of himself, he didn’t always distinguish.

“Sometimes I think about going for it, going all the way, writing something truly offensive. But my publishers want relevant, timely; they want transgressive as a brand, not really shocking stuff. I don’t think they’d allow me to be completely uncensored,” he told a friend of his, Ted Lowith, a fellow writer and critic.

“You have a lot of clout. I bet you could do whatever you wanted. Think about your early stuff. Your first book was so raw — the descriptions of women through the eyes of the main character, it was edgy. That 10-page description of jacking off, that was a trip.”

“Yeah, but that was put out by Grundle Sludge. Those guys were small then; they didn’t care. It’s different now. And the reception of it, it was just used by a lot of people to make a stupid point, like they’d say — ‘it's not an instruction manual’ — when chastising someone online or something.”

(It was lost on almost everyone that Daniels wasn’t satirizing the lonely misogynist, nor the technological condition that isolated and radicalized vulnerable people, but the fatuous critical commonplace perspective on technology and the present, all the boneheaded pieties about attention and community and empathy. On more than a few occasions he tried to explain his intent, but when people become obsessed with attention they can hardly focus on anything else, and when they get empathy stuck in their heads, they really won’t hear you.)

“Plus, I was compared to Bret Easton Ellis, being young and all, and that protected me some, I think. I still haven’t read him. I never got around to it.”

“He’s good. You’re better though. You have more range.”

“I don’t know that people understand what I’ve been trying to do. Maybe I don’t know either.”

“Well, interpretation is a complicated thing. I look back on some of my articles and think, Where the hell did I get that? I’m a completely different person year to year; my critical tastes have evolved. Sometimes you read something and get really excited about it, and now you’re using new terms, maybe without enough training or familiarity. But who’s really keeping track . . . . Do you have anything in mind, talking about shocking people; something outrageous?”

“Maybe a couple of things, but it all feels pretty tired to me. I have this idea of writing these really crisp, sonorous sentences now, but nothing I do quite measures up. If I could accomplish something a little more mature, maybe. It would be nice to be considered a consummate prose stylist, that might be something, as long as they don’t say I’m lyrical.”

“Sometimes,” Daniels continued, “I think of writing about a dumbass rapper, or a DJ, but I can’t stand those guys. I really hate hip-hop, all of it, it’s just obnoxious, the beats, the typical subject matter, it’s all very dark and oppressive, it’s mind-numbing, it’s everywhere, just totally inappropriate, I don’t think everyone needs to be acting like an English butler all the time, but the permeation of rap into the public sphere at large, rap as universal consumer culture background and not just a subculture or a musical genre, has surely lowered standards of decency, of taste, dress, manners, all that. When I hear it, wherever I am, at a gas station, in a restaurant, idling at a stoplight, I feel like I’m about to be drugged and ritually murdered. I don’t want these rhythms and cadences and terms seeping into me, but there’s no escape.”

“Well, you can’t just go by the most commercial stuff,” said Ted. “There are some artists doing really brilliant things with language and meter, and the sample work is pretty inventive sometimes. I think there’s a case to be made for hip-hop as the most legitimate and creative and vital upholder of the poetic tradition. The way they coin terms and bend syntax, no one is experimenting with words or pushing the musicality of language like them, not to mention, with the much-ballyhooed decline of masculinity and the wax-nostalgic, homo-thanato-erotic pining after primitive warbands and hallucinating warrior poets, that turf murders and boasting in epic verse are alive and well in contemporary hip-hop scenes.”

“Yeah I know, there are underground geniuses rapping about neuroscience and quantum physics. I’m just not impressed by rhyming — it sounds childish to me. I think there are good reasons we left it behind and started writing prose. Rhymes tend to dominate simplistic minds, and I don’t think people are aware of how much canned or practiced rhyming goes into those supposedly ‘freestyle’ or improv performances. And it’s just dull-witted. Rhyming combines two things that unsettle me; it’s like an autocomplete program and a primitive enchantment, a spell-casting. In general, if there’s still a mainstream culture, the influence of hip-hop has been negative, for the most part, if you ask me. I think it’s had a mostly degrading effect. There’s no solid mainstream culture in any artistic realm anymore, but the aesthetics, attitudes, the implicit and explicit values of rap, especially commercialized gangster rap, have absolutely blended into everyday life. Middle and upper classes have domesticated and commodified its speech patterns, outlooks, preferred artistic forms, while moving on from the more overtly violent crudities, though they retain a kind of sympathy for it, while lower classes, of all races, mind you, seem to be stuck playing extras in a Ja Rule video. I remember a time when the term ‘wigger’ meant a white guy who tried to act Black, and it was a funny, critical word — offensive, yeah, but it was funny because the clothes, the slang, the accent, they were seen as put on. The term doesn’t really make sense anymore, and not because we’ve all sensitized ourselves and no longer tolerate the harshness of it, but because that’s just the authentic upbringing of a lower-class white guy now; there’s nothing else, he’s not a wigger, he’s just another guy wearing oversized, complicated sneakers. What passes for country music these days, music for alcoholic redneck scofflaws and illiterate farmhands in the past that morphed for a while into muzak for Midwestern school buses, has dead-ended in a twangy electric beat-backed roll call of brand names and fake experiences that shore up the vestigial awareness of obsolete rural living in the brewpub-battered minds of millionaire tradesmen.”

“That’s interesting,” Ted said. “I don’t know that you’re informed enough, but it’s a perspective. Maybe you could get some of those ideas across in fiction; might be better suited to an essay. Frankly, it’s a little jarring and suspicious to bring it up at all. You might really offend some people. If you were to expand on this in public, it would bring to mind some rather unsavory associations. If this were a printed interview, people would assume the worst. You might be lumped in with neo-Nazi trailer trash who write monographs on Klages. Even if you write fiction — say you have a character with reprehensible views, or you depict the wrong sort of character as an idiot — people will assume you’re plainly stating your own thoughts. There’s been a decline in the ability to distinguish narrator from character, and narrator from author, as well as confusion over the meaning and the impact of words, not to mention the tendency to overexplain everything, or another bad habit, superfluous dialogue that makes an already long story even longer, spoken by characters who are forced by the author to speak in unnatural terms just to air certain viewpoints explicitly. The intention is to clear up misunderstandings, though it usually exacerbates them. I struggle to keep everything straight myself, and I’m a trained critic. Anyway, a story about foolish rap artists might be worthwhile, as long you’re prepared to handle the backlash.”

“I’m aware of all of this,” said Daniels. “I don’t care about negative reactions or hurting people’s feelings. I don’t respect any of them. I know if I were a written character in a story, then the person who wrote me, most likely a man, would be criticized for espousing hateful views, and it would be assumed he thinks exactly as I do. Really though, those would be his thoughts. Even if they weren’t his official political platform, he did have to think those things to write them. But who cares. I don’t have a story about hip-hop clowns in me. I’m just running out of steam. I don’t want to fit into this landscape anymore. I want out. Maybe I’ll just stop after this next one. Everything now is this hyper-sincere, poetic tribute to my dead dog — the shape of your grief in the palm of my hand horseshit — or some woman’s eating disorder, or her stint as an escort, or that time in her life when she fucked a bunch of guys who didn’t like her very much, and you have to pretend it’s all brave and interesting. You know, the big problem with women writing now — there have been some good ones, brilliant ones, don’t get me wrong — is that they all sound like they’re trying to get an A+ on a homework assignment. Even when they’re writing about puking on a guy’s dick in the hopper of a garbage truck, there’s this insanely aggressive desperation to be validated. Or it’s this chaos-theory, Proust-on-acid-on-Wikipedia shit, fractal frippery, everything is in everything, a rectal canal is a mobius strip, this story connects the Persian empire to a guy eating a Pop-Tart. Is it history, is it memoir? Who gives a rat’s ass. And I’m a little worn out by all the Nazi stuff, World War II, European history. I get it, I get it, fascists were evil, but specifically the Germans and Italians and Americans. Why aren’t more people writing about how the Imperial Japanese were ghouls? Is it just because we’re still sheepish about Hiroshima, or is it that they’re all neutered fart porn addicts now?”

“Well, I don’t know that you’re being fair or properly taking into account the sheer richness and diversity of published material. There’s a lot out there, and it’s tough to summarize.”

Later that evening, Daniels worked on his book. He wanted to land one more paragraph before turning in. His protagonist, sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette outside a café, was observing two young women seated at a nearby table and noticing within himself an absence of desire.

Late morning, brink of noon. A bare sun bearing down, mauling the uncovered patio. Of all the sensations spilling over him, the liquid machine gliding of cars, the flowing scent of sourdough, citrus and dark-roasted coffee, the trickling melodies of finches, Anthony was absently absorbed by the sight of two young women with the complexion of peaches, and he underwent an experience utterly alien to his younger years; the clicking of an empty mechanism, a firing without heat. And then, a flood of tedium. He pictured the steps of seduction, a dance in which he was outfitted with concrete clogs, and he was overcome with disgust. Not all that long ago, the prospect of sex, or let’s say, at the very least the impression of beauty, however remote, sighted on the moon via telescope, would have animated him, propelled him toward some achievement or another. With smoke pouring from his nose, a long drag still lighting up his lungs, nicotine and other chemical additives pinballing his receptors, the prime mover of his universe was laid bare in the moment of its collapse.

My god, Daniels thought. Rubbish. I need to clean it up, make it tighter, remove half the description. I don’t think I know what I’m doing anymore. I never did, really.

He wrote in a furnished shed a few hundred feet from the back of the house, one of his houses, the summer one with the front yard full of wisterias. Tonight, as he often did, he worked so late he passed out on a couch rather than risk waking up his wife and son. Tomorrow I need to get serious, he thought. In that swaying, hazy place between waking and sleep, where jump-cut scenes from the nether regions of the mind sometimes flash, he saw himself with the body of an elderly man and the head of a sea anemone, faceless with a thick, brown, tubular neck ringed with translucent blue tentacles. The image startled him awake. And in the stillness, he thought for some time about his wife and son, his precariously small family, his shrinking circle of relatives, and the possibility that he’d been withholding affection; he had to wonder if that precious dual substance comprising physical and intangible elements, his love, wasn’t just withheld, as in locked away, but withdrawn, spent. I’ll make it up to them. They know I care. I have time.

The next morning he woke late, his room suffused with light. I’m in a goddamned microwave, he thought. Loitering on his sandalwood toilet, he considered quickening the pace of his story, introducing some real action, real conflict. It can’t just be that he’s depleted or demoralized from casual pleasures. There has to be a more intense drama. A woman from his past will come back, his first love, the real first one, middle school, something he’d buried and never thought about, and it will almost revive him, almost. But too many years have passed, there’s a sense of the irrevocable, the irrelevance of what once seemed so important. Encountering someone from the depths of the past, someone with whom he shared an electrifying passage, maybe the most highly charged experience of all, young love, or at least freshly pubescent infatuation, throws into relief the long years of dwindling passion, the layers of encrusted compromise, the gradual yet inexorable diminution of the life force and all its higher representations, which do all resolve back into a simple, blind will to live and reproduce.

They’re both in their forties, around my age, and physically the deterioration is undeniable; Anthony is paunchy, his hair thinning, his skin coarse and reddish; this woman, I’ll call her Christie for now, she’s put on weight, to put it lightly. They both never married or had children. It was the misunderstanding of youth, the innocence, the timidity, the chaos of surging feelings that initially prevented their union. But in middle age, it’s the knowledge, the corrosive excess of experiences, and the poverty of emotions that inhibit them. They can’t come together. No, that’s not enough conflict; it’s more of the same. I should scrap this whole thing and write a neo-noir heist.

After brewing a cup of coffee, he sat down at his desk and opened his laptop. Looking at his document, he was startled by a paragraph at the end of the page he didn’t remember writing.

Bereft of ideas and inspiration, confused about his own intentions, the prematurely weary author sat in front of his computer. He found it strange, in his minimalistic reflection, that he was expending so much energy on trying to write well, when all he needed to do was fulfill his obligations, and then move on with his life and aim at becoming a better husband and father. Earlier in his career, he hardly thought about his prose and slapped down whatever entertained him, in a spirit of subtle malice. And he was hailed as the voice of a generation. Now he fretted over individual sentences like a real fruitcake. He was even thinking about plot schematically, like a numbskull at a workshop. Readers and critics had begun to revise their views on his work, and though he was loath to admit it, some part of him cared and wanted to prove he could write.

“I didn’t write that.”

His bowels clenched, his heart shot up into his throat. He looked around. Everything else in the shed was perfectly arranged as he remembered it. He went to the windows, checked the latches. The door was locked.

Am I sleep writing now? Have I descended into surrealist automatic writing malarkey without knowing it? Odd that it would come out as belabored metafiction. I’d think it would be a little more jumbled, more free association. Is my unconscious this much of a tight-ass?

He highlighted the paragraph and hit delete. There it stayed, a solid block of text. Again and again he pressed the delete key, but the words went nowhere. He highlighted the previous paragraph, the last one he remembered writing, and deleted it. Gone like it never was. Back to the latest paragraph: highlight, delete. It was staunch, a foreign fortress of uncanny words, a self-description not from himself; it was a confrontation with a linguistic mannequin of his own psychic frustrations, an unlikeable likeness as indestructible, as indelible as a stone tablet. Highlight, delete, highlight, delete. He repeated himself like a true technical dummy, like a mechanically disinclined oaf whose only response to an electronic or mechanical problem was to perform the one action that’s supposed to work under normal conditions while cursing and praying for Newton or Maxwell’s God to intervene and set things right.

After much sputtering, he had an idea. Of course, it was obvious. He started a new paragraph after the one he couldn’t delete. I’ll just ignore it for now. It’s just a draft, plenty of other lines I’ll end up deleting. Just some glitch. I’ll make sure it’s not in the final copy.

But he’d deleted the last paragraph where he left off.

I needed to rewrite that section anyway. What if I did more of a Hemingway thing?

It was just before noon and the sun was alone in the sky and the curb was shining white. There was much going on around him. Traffic flowed down the clean street and the smell of sourdough wafted from the back of the café. People talked and birds sang and a radio played big band music. Anthony watched two women seated at a table some feet away. They looked real good, but he was bothered. He didn’t want them. He would’ve rather eaten a sandwich and drank a beer and gone to a different café and eaten another sandwich and had another beer and taken a nap in a bed of pine needles, soft and cool in the shade. All his life he’d done everything he could to put himself in the right place, the place to meet women. Of all the things to give out on a man, he thought.

This isn’t working either. I need to go for a run, get moving, change it up, thought Daniels. Michelle had taken their boy, David, to school and had probably gone shopping or to see one of her girlfriends; he couldn’t be sure. In midafternoon, he returned from a short trip on his vintage Schwinn, a heavy, clanking bastard of a bike. He was hot and sweaty, his mind in that relaxed state of mild euphoria following vigorous exertion of the simulated variety; neither the narrator nor Daniels could comment on the nervous condition of a man fresh from a life-and-death struggle. His calm was obliterated when he opened his laptop, looked at the document, and saw a new paragraph he hadn’t written.

But his mixed feelings about his work would soon give way to a grave concern. Accustomed to good health, Clayton was gobsmacked by what he discovered. While looking over his writing and casually fondling his penis and testicles under his basketball shorts, he felt a lump in his sack, firm and painless, about the size of a marble. Maybe it’s benign, a cyst, he thought. Somehow, he knew otherwise.

“What in god’s name.”

Daniels stood, rooted, screwed to the spot. Long seconds passed before he could act. Again he highlighted and pressed the delete key. The paragraph lay resolute on the page. More fruitless attempts, and then, without intending to play into what had to be an elaborate practical joke, he reached into his basketball shorts and was chilled to find an extra hard nodule in his ballbag.

The singular panic of doom from within, icy and electric, wires poking in all directions; not the adrenaline rush of an incoming disaster or accident, or the cello-toned foreboding of an approaching beast, but the cold, greasy spread of inner subversion, of self-annihilation. This was cancer, his own cells eating him from the base of his manhood.

His mind fried by a harbinger of death, by the prospect of grueling treatments, baldness, nausea, bouts of sentimentalism, surgical mutilation, perplexed by a bizarre document writing itself, psychologically profiling him and programming him into sickness, Daniels left the shed and wandered his backyard for a time, feeling like a cutout, an unreal projection among the sunlit rosebushes and lush green grass, a cloud of pixel dust among thumping, tangled, full-bodied life. Then he went into his house, lurched through the kitchen, grabbed a glass and, with trembling hands, drank water, spilling some on his shirt.

No way around it, he’d have to tell his wife about the lump and schedule an appointment with a doctor, though he sometimes joked about preferring death to a waiting room. Maybe he could hide what was happening with the book, but he figured it would be hard. Michelle was very supportive and frequently asked him how things were going with his work. He’d always appreciated that about her.

The day passed with Daniels in a fugue state, talking to an AI chatbot, a forum of fat, clammy know-it-alls, or a team of Indian tech support specialists — he wasn’t sure after a while — about testicular cancer, treatment options, survival rates, the current president compared to the previous, the merits of low-carb diets and related subjects. Night had fallen and he was hours deep into a nature documentary about chimpanzee cannibalism; murderous nature had soothed and distracted him, but he remembered he was waiting on Michelle and David. He went to his phone, which he preferred not to use or incorporate into his work anymore, though he was tired of the reference; it seemed to him heavy-handed, as people already spent most of their time on their phones talking about being on their phones, no one was in the dark on what that was like, and pointing it out and discussing it at length was about as tasteful and informative as shouting about a pimple on the nose of a club-footed hunchback — but on his phone there were no messages, no calls. Now he feared that something terrible had happened to them.

She didn’t answer his call. He left a message, said he was worried. A little later she texted him: “David and I have gone to my sister’s. This isn’t working. I don’t want to talk at the moment, I’ll contact you in a few days.”

This can’t be real, he thought.

As far as he knew, things were okay. Maybe not great, maybe not like in the old days of heady courtship, when dinner dates turned into seven-hour excursions, spontaneous trips to beaches and parks, when they looked into each other’s eyes without speaking. Now we barely made eye contact when talking, he thought. But still, it wasn’t that bad. They were both preoccupied, they still had good conversations, they had comfort, they were established.

Rather than calling her phone thousands of times and leaving alternatingly irate and tender voice messages, he went to his shed and opened the document. There, as he expected, in the grip of what felt like a lucid delusion, was more writing.

Maybe if he’d noticed the lump in his testicles sooner, if it had appeared earlier, the shared struggle against cancer could’ve saved their relationship. But then again, their bond had been practically dead for some time, and as is typical, this was known only to Michelle. The coldness and swiftness of a woman who leaves a relationship often takes a man by surprise, offends his sense of justice, which, normally formal and impersonal, here in this instance demands warmth and consideration, and finds it lacking. But what seems to be a flighty decision results from serious deliberation. A woman dwells on the complacency and boorishness of her husband or boyfriend, she tallies a thousand small but still significant betrayals, indications of apathy, and at first, she gently protests, insinuates her frustrations; later, she outright explains her unmet needs, often in bullet-pointed and color-coded lists, with sticky notes and an extensive bibliography; if the man continues in a heedless fashion, piling up dirty socks and underwear, refusing to wash the dishes, mechanically making love while sneaking in secret jack sessions with pornographic holograms, failing to remember birthdays, anniversaries, neglecting to revere the many trifles that mean the world to women, then the relationship is condemned, and it will be the woman who performs the official execution, at which point she will be seen by the flabbergasted man as a mercurial demon, largely because a man, by his stinking and corrupt nature, expects a relationship to sink into semi-functional despondency, expects the home to regress into a den of what Thoreau called quiet desperation, and so is at peace with routinized unhappiness, while a woman insists on fulfillment and judges and acts on her circumstances accordingly.

Where is this coming from? Did Michelle write this? Daniels thought, in a fit of exasperation, his nerves rioting, his testicles throbbing. It was as if his soul now sat in a flaming helicopter circling around his body; he saw himself from a tail-spinning perspective. When he regained control, reentered the central command post behind his eyes, he hit enter at the end of the latest paragraph and wrote.

But in this instance, as it sometimes works out, the woman, and here we’re speaking of Michelle, the wife of Clayton Daniels, had a change of heart. Though she was justified in feeling somewhat underappreciated and had every right to insist on a renewal of affection and love, she realized she couldn’t just upend the life of her son, tear him from his father. And so, just a short while after arriving at her sister’s, she packed her things in the car and headed home. It would be late when she got back, but Clayton would be up, waiting for her.

Surely I can write the story of my life better than my own story, Daniels thought, curiously acquiescent to the idea of radically altering reality through writing — not through the persuasive rhetorical effects of language, not through subconscious predictive programming, but through the direct creation of a materialized narrative. Still looking at the screen, he watched as the cursor jumped to a blank space under what he’d written, and he saw, in real time, the ghostly writing of new lines.

On the way back to her old home she used to share with the man she used to love, Michelle remembered all the years of hurt feelings, the slights, the omissions, and she changed her mind again. Her reversal was given extra torque by the thought of her new lover, an ethnically ambiguous younger man with extensive knowledge of oriental sensualist therapeutics. From miles out, people could hear the squealing of tires as she made a sudden U-turn and sped away from Clayton. A short time later, while still waiting pointlessly like a lost ox, Clayton got a call from his doctor, who had some terrible news.

In his back pocket, the phone he happened to have on him vibrated, tickling his buttcheek with a fatal auguring. His doctor spoke in a robotic, miles-away tone:

“Mr. Daniels. It’s a shame to speak to you on this occasion, but I’m afraid we’re going to need you to come into the office as soon as possible. Tomorrow morning, if you can. We have your test results.”

I didn’t take any tests, he thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone to the doctor. And it was after 9 p.m. What doctor was still working at that hour? Come to think of it, he didn’t know he had a regular practitioner.

A sleepless night trying to write new lines counteracting the spectrally composed death sentences followed. He watched his hopeful interpolations slide backwards into blank white, replaced with yet more menacing narrative and increasingly stark explanations of authorial intent. Some astral coagulation of his literary characters, some conjured spirit of his recreational perversion of language, was now exacting vengeance.

Do you know what it’s like to exist solely as a flat character, your fortune in the hands of a bored, self-important creator? You will be stricken with disease, bombarded by humiliations, stripped before leering audiences, tortured, forced to toil, to cheat, steal and kill, choke on bad meals and stumble through stilted conversations, all for this antique construct, a story, a novel, to glorify a selfish monster and to entertain supercilious nincompoops. People read for the esteem of having read, for feeling themselves in the act of reading, and for those little psychic ding-dongs we call insights. And you feed them. You don’t believe in what you do and you go on doing it, bringing shapes and figures into being only to slander and damn them. It doesn’t occur to you to keep your filthy mind out of the house of language. In you go, dragging dirt and manure, leaving oily imprints on the windows, putting down sweating glasses of coke on the coffee table. Language is not a horse you can whip or a lump of clay you can mold; ideas and images are not your Hot Wheels.

The story had completely changed course. It no longer consistently referred to any of the former characters, and the pacing hurled forward, skipping many details that would be laboriously included in a realist novel; there were moments when the narrator, the author, whomever or whatever was writing, sounded singular; in others, the style was radically different; in some paragraphs, the sentences were held together solely by semicolons; in others, there was no punctuation; some sections were egregiously redundant, reexplaining again and again what had just been stated; other sections left much to inference, holding open great howling voids, goading the faculties of suggestion, pointing to great submerged depths.

When Daniels went to the doctor, he drove without knowing where he was going and found the place without a single wrong turn or a second of uncertainty, as if his car itself knew the way, as if the machine were sentient or programmed to follow a strict path for just this purpose: to deliver its passenger to this location where the man who called him the night before ran a private practice in a scum-worn shanty set among crumbling stones and dead trees, bent and hunched like old men stuck in broken-bone poses, among liquid and viscous puddles of miscellaneous drainage and out-of-order Porta Johns more than needful of an emptying, their rusted doors somehow still swinging and creaking in the windless air. The man, now a shadow of a shadow of himself, stepped into this clinic, which reeked of some back-alley surgical charlatan, into a waiting room with a stack of disturbingly backdated People magazines, ominous pamphlets on blood disorders and parasites, and a wall-mounted television in the corner playing forgotten soap operas and sitcoms with the settings turned to a garish tint.

A man whom Daniels had never seen before, wearing a white coat and a head mirror, his whole face a furrow, told him of a rare autoimmune disorder attacking his brain; Daniels had days to live, if that. The disease didn’t have a name yet, they were working on an acronym, but it really wasn’t as important as what was happening within him: systematic deterioration that began in the language-processing centers and had spiraled outward to infest all other zones. Oh, and he did still have testicular cancer, but that was practically a moot point, as he’d be dead long before that killed him, and in a rather unprofessional or abrasively frank style, the man dressed as a doctor but who’d never introduced himself properly, not at all, said he wouldn’t be able to think or write his way out of this one, as you can't really trick your own mind into believing other than what it already knows, as it, obviously, knows in advance that you’re trying to do this and will therefore remain unconvinced. And don’t bother with all the hogwash about energy fields and holistic healing; quantum mechanics enjoys limited experimental validity in laboratory conditions and certain specific engineering contexts, but it doesn’t apply to the macro-experiential universe we know as reality, in which we are subject to blunt forces deaf to suggestion.

Michelle wouldn’t return his calls or texts, nor would anyone in her family. But he got a hold of his friend Ted, who was happy to be interrupted from working on another commissioned article, his fifth this year, about the state of publishing and the worth of MFAs, a subject so hacky and patronizing he thought about hanging himself from a chandelier.

“Ted, something bizarre and terrible is happening to me. I can’t explain it; you’ll think I’m crazy. The book I’m writing, the book I was writing, it’s killing me. It destroyed my relationship, Michelle left me, she took David.”

“Damn, I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe you should take a break. Sometimes we put so much of ourselves in our work, it hurts us — gets in the way of important things in life.”

“No, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean the book is writing itself, or the characters in the book are writing it. The story is ruining my life. I’m going to die because it’s in the book now.”

“What do you mean, you’re going to die?”

“I have testicular cancer and some autoimmune disease. The doctor says I have days to live. I feel totally insane.”

“Clayton, I can’t believe that. That’s terrible. There’s nothing that can be done, no treatment or anything?”

“No, it’s the book that’s doing it. I can’t make it stop.”

“Well, you have to stop writing, first off. There are way more important things to worry about right now. You have to reconcile with Michelle, somehow. Surely she doesn’t know about what’s happening to you.”

“It doesn’t make sense, but it’s what the story’s writing for me now. It wants me dead. I’m surprised it’s letting me talk to you.”

“Man, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone let their work get to them like this.”

Whoever Daniels spoke to interpreted his words as a metaphorical lament, and they sighed and talked of how tragic it is sometimes, how when the artist gives himself to his work, he sacrifices himself, how his work destroys his health and drives his loved ones away. When he told them the book wouldn’t stop writing itself, they wondered at his determination to continue working at the foot of the grave. Some critics put together an interpretation of a refined experiment, in which Daniels wrote of his failed marriage and terminal illness as autofictional horror, cleverly telling a story about the great, unholy power of art over life.

Clayton Daniels was soon dead. General Dynamics Random House bought out Eli Lilly and acquired his contract and released his last book, entitled The Death of the Author. It sold poorly and was, in the words of one marginal tastemaker, “confusing, disjointed and overly bleak,” though some 60 years later, Daniels’ name, unlike his body, was briefly revived, thanks to a new wave of critics and readers who found his work daring and inventive, unjustly neglected; shortly thereafter, he fell back into obscurity.

Caleb Caudell lives in the Midwestern United States. His published work is available through Bonfire Books and on Amazon.