Confessions from Surreality

Confessions from Surreality

I am the greatest writer the world has ever known.

Now that I am old, I no longer care about what other people think, or what may seem to be correct behavior. I ignore protocol. I find it useless and demeaning for a writer of my stature and a man of my age to bother with the please and thank you and how-do-you-do. I have grown tired of the social lies and cultural pleasantries that blind and numb us from the truth, so I discarded them. So in this memoir, I will dispense with the little modesties and small lies, and just tell it to you unvarnished: the good and the bad, the white and the black, the diamond and the coal.

I am the greatest writer the world has ever known.

I found one of my novels the other day, hidden away in a secondhand shop, the cover ruined with water and the pages mottled with age. It was one of my smash hits from antiquity, a slim novel I titled La Forza e il Falco. Don’t be fooled by the title, it was in English. A novel on two Italian Renaissance assassins working for separate factions, it was quite popular, even was optioned for a motion picture release. Nothing happened, but it was only fifteen years ago. Times change.

I took the book up to the desk and set it onto the counter. The clerk was an emo-girl, pretty enough, but into her pinks and blacks and chrome enough that she had turned herself into a freak. She glanced and the book, snapped her gum and said “A dollar twenty-nine.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, the perfect delusional old man, “Only that! This book is one of the greatest works of fiction ever written, and here I find it, only a dollar twenty-nine.”

She took a second, closer look at the book.

“Oh, yeah. That book.” She sounded dismissive. “I started it.”

“How was it?”

“Booor-ing.” She said. “I thought it was kind of stupid how the girl dies in the very beginning, and then that guy Panda-rot or something acts like an idiot over his niece.”

“Pavarotti was a patrician, and they were allowed to marry close relatives.”

“Whatever. It was dumb.”

I paid for the book, and then let my hand with the change hover over the mason jar labeled, “Tip’s”. Then, with a sigh, I dumped the change in my pocket.

The little philistine.

I don’t know why I bought the book. I have a shelf full of the leather-bound, gold embossed copies of my works, in my library. I think that I bought it because it was a symbol. That I used to be the best. That I wasn’t anymore. I laid it on my nightstand, the warped landscape of the pages creating a little network of miniscule caverns between it and the mahogany tabletop.

I remember when I was once the greatest writer in America, no, the English speaking world. I had critics that would do anything I asked. I could have had my cat walk across the keyboard for thirty hours and have them praise it as genius.

Those days have gone.

Never grow old. There’s nothing to look forward to.

I take it back. You are freely allowed to be senile. Forget things, insult personages, be a grouch. Not that people are required to like you.

I don’t know why I did it.

I went back to the secondhand store, gathered all of the copies of my books together that I could find, plopped them down at a table and picked up a fountain pen.

It was almost a joke, a masquerade; a comedy so obscure that even I only half got it. The emo-girl was working again. She glanced at me when I first came in the door, but she was too wrapped up in her phone to pay attention to some idiot customer.

I signed four books. My looping, beautiful signature, one that I had practiced for so long, scrolling across the yellowed pulp paper. Two were to older ladies who had heard of me (they thought) and so bought my books. The money didn’t go to me, I just signed it, but still, it was satisfying. The third went to a young college student who was taking a modern literature course, intrigued that he found me signing books. The fourth, surprisingly, went to the clerk. She looked slightly sheepish when she asked me to sign it, and I almost felt bad that I had baited her yesterday.