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Completely Unedited part 1
So I’ve been thinking way too much about writing lately. Or, more accurately, I’ve been thinking too much about writing while I write.
Here’s a new project. Something I haven’t thought about at all and will not think about. The rules are simple: Once I put punctuation at the end of a sentence, that sentence is locked and CANNOT be changed, unless something is spelled wrong (and even then, changes are highly discouraged). I cannot go back and fix continuity. I also cannot look forward to plan continuity. I cannot spend more than a few seconds planning out each sentence
All it is is style and story, as fast as I can crank it. Here goes ______________________________________________ The book on the shelf next to me is by a man named “Benamin”-- no wait, it’s “Benjamin” with a very subtle “J”, which makes way more sense but is way less interesting. That easily would have been the most interesting thing in the library, besides of course the sealed letter on the table in front of me.
The sealed letter is sealed into a sealed white envelope with a big reddish-mahogony-ish wax seal on it, almost but not exactly the same reddish-mahogony-ish color as the round wooden table beneath it.
The letters “B.L.” are printed on the other side of the envelope, which I can’t see right now because I’m looking at the sealed side but I know they’re there because I looked at the non-sealed side too and haven’t been just staring at a wax seal for the past thirty minutes like some sort of wax-seal-staring idiot.
The initials-- they’re probably initials, right?-- are written on the side I’m not currently looking at in fancy black pen. They aren’t my initials. My initials are way better than those initials. I have three of them.
Maybe “B.R.” has three initials, too, but he-- it’s probably not a “she” because I don’t know any women aside from Bree and her last name starts with “S”, not “L”-- chose not to use his middle initial, so it can’t be all that great.
Not only does Bree’s last name start with “S”, but her middle initial is definitely envelope-worthy. She leans across the table and whispers to me.
“Open it”
“Why?”
“It’s so mysterious, I want to know what’s inside”
“Well I don’t”
I really didn’t. I decided that I didn’t want to know what was inside at the exact moment that the envelope was handed to me by a man whose face I couldn’t see and whose voice I sadly lack the adjectives to properly describe. If it had been handed to me by a more describable person who had not confirmed my identity by name-- fantastic middle initial and all-- I might have been willing to open it. But the aura of mystery around this real thing was real gut-squishy, the sort of thing you might find in Benjamin Bradley’s “Murder Amongst the Bonzai” right before the everyman protagonist found himself-- or “herself”. I haven’t read it-- tossed out onto the stormy seas of some unbecoming adventure.
“And why don’t you want adventure?”
Bree folded her arms across her green turtlenecked chest. Apparently I had said all that out loud.
“I have plenty of adventure already. I’m writing books. I’m applying to grad school”
“Oh wow, Todd… applying to school? I bet that’s your opening line with all the ladies, right? ‘Hey there, cutie, what do you do?’ ‘Oh, I’m a cheerleader and lingerie model with a degree in astrophysics and the solution to cold fusion crumpled up in my pocket right now… how about you?’ ‘Oh, nothing really… just… APPLYING TO GRAD SCHOOL!!’”
Bree dipped back in her chair, pressing her forearm to her forehead in formidable dramatic form.
“And then they swoon, just like this, right?”
I ignored her, except I didn’t. I pretended to ignore her.
“What, my books don’t count?”
I didn’t do a very good job of pretending to ignore her, having responded directly to what she had just said. One more reason I wasn’t cut out for higher adventure.
“Sure they do-- or they would if you had the balls to let anyone else read them!”
“My balls are just fine, thank you very much!”
Now I was pretending to be annoyed, but I wasn’t really annoyed. I liked it when Bree talks about my balls. It’s not that I liked her or anything, mind you. But I liked the way she says the word “balls”, with its own self-contained exclamation point, as though she has just spotted land after months and months at sea and has forgotten the word for “land” (which was “land”) and instead gleefully shouts out the word for “balls” (which was “balls”). I liked that. I liked the idea that someone could say “balls” with such joy and be talking about my balls.
My balls were just fine, by the way. I wasn’t sitting on them, which I sometimes did-- but I wasn’t and that was a very good thing. I don’t know if you have balls, but I have balls (which were and are just fine) and…
Wait a minute.
Something was different.
The universe was different.
But how?
“Bree…”
“Yeah, I noticed it too”
“Noticed what?”
I hadn’t noticed it, but I had definitely noticed that there was something which needed noticing. Bree thoughtfully touches a fingertip to her tiny little nose.
“That you’re in past-tense now”
Was I?
“Am I?”
She nods.
“You sure are. I don’t seem to be, though… interesting”
I leaned back in the chair, a little worried, but also a little glad that we were talking about something besides the envelope which I definitely wasn’t going to open.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about that envelope, Todd”
Bree smirks at me. She doesn’t seem worried about the fact that her and I are/were now in different tenses.
“I know you just slipped a moment or two into the past to distract me, but it won’t work. You’re catching up to the present tense right now, and then we’re opening that mysterious sealed envelope”
“Okay, fine”
I was, am, will have been (oops, overshot), am back when I ought to be, and Bree is digging into her purse for something. A nail-file?
“Here, use this”
It’s a nail-file. She hands it to me with her hand-- the left one, to be exact, because her right hand is holding the purse open-- and I take it in my hand-- the right one, to be exact, because my left hand is holding the sealed envelope-- before handing it off to my other hand-- which places the envelope down on the table-- and picking up the envelope-- which I had just placed down on the table with my other hand-- with my first hand-- my right hand, to be exact, because I’m left-handed and would rather use my better hand for the purposes of stabby-cutty-letter-open-y activities.
I take a deep breath. Bree takes a deeper breath because she’s a singer and also a swimmer and also a long-distance runner and also great at saying the word “balls”.
“Here I go…”
“Here you go…”
“...”
“...”
“You aren’t doing anything”
“Yes I am”
“No you’re not”
“Yes I am. I’m breathing”
“Okay, yeah, so you’re breathing, but you’re not opening the letter”
“Right, but you said I wasn’t doing anything but I clearly am doing something so I think you owe me an apology”
“Open the letter, Todd”
“Fine”
I stabby-cutty-opened the letter. The nail file cut smoothly through the wax-- unless nail-files aren’t very good at cutting smoothly through wax in which case it struggled a bit before finally making it’s way through the wax, leaving a jagged, uneven trail behind it and a slight soreness in my fingers.
“You slipped back into past-tense for a moment there, didn’t you?”
“Sorry, I’m nervous”
The envelope is open. I put the sparkly blue nail-file down onto the table with my left hand-- the hand which had been holding it, of course-- and tug up that little triangle-flap-thingy on the backs of envelopes. Some envelopes have more of a rectangular flap-thingy, with a bit of paper you can peel off to get at the sticky bit, but this is not one of those envelopes. This is a triangle-flap envelope, and it doesn’t need a built-in sticky bit because it is-- was-- sealed with wax which I just now cut through.
“Well?”
Bree leans in again. Her breasts of previously-unmentioned-but-perfectly-reasonable-and-realistic size hang down over the table but I am not looking at them besides to point out how reasonable and realistic they are. I am looking at the envelope. The envelope is in my right hand. There is a piece of paper in the envelope. I reach into the envelope with my left hand and pull out the piece of paper which was in the envelope. The envelope no longer has a piece of paper in it. There is a piece of paper in my left hand. This is the same piece of paper which was in the envelope a moment ago, but is now no longer in the envelope because now it is in my left hand. There are words on the envelope.
No, there aren’t words on the envelope. There are letters on the envelope. There are words on the piece of paper. There are, I suppose, also letters on the piece of paper which, in their current state of assembly, form words. But there are no words on the envelope. I had thought for a moment that there were words on the envelope because I had forgotten-- for that same moment-- which hand was holding the envelope and which hand was holding the piece of paper and therefore mistook (as I and anyone else had a fifty-percent chance of doing) the words on the piece of paper for being on the envelope, which they weren’t and aren’t.
Also I am wearing glasses, but they are slightly askew so I can’t quite read the words on the piece of paper. I also cannot read the words on the envelope, partly because my glasses (which I am wearing) are slightly askew, but mostly because, as I’ve explained, there are no words on the envelope.
I straighten my glasses.
“Okay, ‘B.L.’, let’s see what you have to say”
Bree cocks an eyebrow, which sounds like an extremely specific sexual act-- one I would be willing to try if it is what I think it is, and completely unwilling to even consider if it is what I hope it isn’t.
“‘B.L.’? Who’s ‘B.L.’?”
“Uh… ‘B.L.’... the initials on the envelope”
Bree shakes her head, a less sexual-sounding act until you’ve seen her do it. Being a singer and also a swimmer and also a long-distance runner and also a great “ball”-sayer will do wonders for your volume and bounce.
“Those aren’t initials”
“Yes they are! They have the little dots and everything”
“No they don’t, actually, you just inserted that into your narration and perception to denote them as initials, but they aren’t actually there at all. See?”
She points at the envelope which is in my right hand and has no words on it. Sure enough, there are no little initial-dots.
“Oh”
“Yeah, no, those aren’t even letters. You were reading it upside-down?”
“Was I?”
“Yeah… I kind of wondered why you were doing that”
I placed the piece of paper-- which was in my left hand-- down on the table and placed my left hand-- which was no longer holding the piece of paper because it had been placed down on the table-- onto the left side of the open envelope-- which had been in my right hand but was now most accurately described as being in both hands.
“No, this is right-side-up, see?”
I flip the envelope over, switching back to present-tense before Bree gets the chance to scold me. Sure enough, there’s the triangle-flappy thing, right-side-up, open, empty. I flip the envelope again. Sure enough, there are the “initials”. “B.R.”. Right-side-up, with the little dots.
“Okay, give me that”
Bree sighs, and reaches across the table to take the envelope-- which had been in both hands but was now in neither.
“That’s not how you flip an envelope”
“Isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t. That’s how you flip a playing-card. This…”
She flips the envelope again-- side-to-side, like some sort of crazy person-- before hopping back onto her ellipses.
“...is how you flip an envelope”
The envelope is upside-down now.
“The envelope is upside-down now!”
“Well of course it is!”
Bree snorts.
“The envelope started out upside-down because you’ve been flipping it wrong! Watch!”
She twirls the envelope so that the triangle-flappy thing is right side up, and then she flips it side-to-side yet again. I can barely contain my bafflement.
“See?”
The letters in the initials “B.L.” come spinning around, except now the letters aren’t initials and also they aren’t letters and also the little dots are gone so the front of the envelope says “78”.
“Oh”
“Yeah”
“So this was sent by ‘78’?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it was sent to ‘78’”
“I’m ‘78’?”
“Maybe”
“I’m not ‘78’, though. I’m ‘22’”
“It probably isn’t your age. They guy mentioned you by name, right?”
“Yeah. ‘Todd Michael Ibitson’”
“So it’s probably almost definitely certainly meant for you, even if you aren’t 78 years old”
“Okay”
“I bet we’ll learn more if you read the letter”
“Which letter?”
Bree rolls her eyes.
“The one in your left hand!”
I shake my head, but it probably isn’t as nice-looking or sexual-sounding as when Bree does it because despite my best efforts I lack both volume and bounce.
“There isn’t a letter in my left hand. There’s a letter on the table”
Bree pressed her left palm against her forehead, and smacked her right palm down on the table-- not the same part of the table that the letter was on, but a different part. I cross my arms-- neither of which is holding a letter.
“See, now you’re in the past-tense”
She was. Then she isn’t.
“Shut up and put the letter in your left hand and read it and tell me what it says so we can get on with this damn adventure”
“Alright, alright”
I don’t really want to read the letter-- why are we assuming it’s a letter? It might just be a piece of paper with words on it-- but I don’t really want to upset Bree either and I want to not-upset her more than I want to not-read this maybe-letter. I pick up the letter with my left hand. I read it aloud to her, shocked that none of the several undescribed other people in this library have complained about the considerable amount of noise we are making. One man turns the pages of his newspaper in what looks for just a second like slow motion but it isn’t because he’s moving normally but also he normally moves really slowly so its all actually at regular speed.
“Dear Mr. Ibikson--”
“Your name is ‘Ibitson’”
“Maybe they misspelled it. Or maybe they didn’t want to bother scrolling back up the page to check so they just took a guess”
“Maybe. Go on”
“Dear Mr. Ibikson… Dock 52. 7:30 PM. Come alone. The answers will find you. Signed, 78”
“Ooo, cryptic”
“Kinda cliche, don’t you think?”
“Eh, a bit, but at least we know that he’s ‘78’ instead of you”
“Yeah. Where is ‘Dock 52’, anyways?”
“Beats me. There are like three-hundred different docks in this city”
“Which city is that?”
Bree stares into the distance, pulling syllables from her head like bits of taffy from a pair of very-stuck braces.
“Pil...fing...ton...mont”
“‘Pilfingtonmont’”
“Yeah, ‘Pilfingtonmont’. Come on, Todd, you’ve lived here your whole life!”
“No I haven’t. I was born in Maine, which is a different state than the state this city is in, which is New Jersey, and I moved here when I was six”
“Right, right”
“Huh…”
I glance at the clock on the wall above the man who is now turning his newspaper pages backwards in what still looks like slow-motion, much like the wheels of a car during a commercial when the framerate of the camera-- and with it the perceiver-- fails to capture the actual nature of the motion of the hubcap. The clock says six-thirty. It doesn’t specify “AM” or “PM” but I know that it is “PM” because “six-thirty AM” happened already today-- or at least I’m pretty sure it did. I wasn’t awake for it. I know “eight-thirty AM” happened already. I was awake for that. And I have a hard time imagining an “eight-thirty AM” without a “six-thirty AM” submerged somewhere in the thick mire of time below it.
“I wonder what will happen at ‘Dock 52’ at seven-thirty PM”
“I don’t wonder”
I glance at Bree. She is grinning.
“Why don’t you wonder? You’re the one who wanted me to open the letter so badly”
“I don’t wonder because I know I’m going to go find out”
“Okay, well first…”
I sit back in my chair-- unless I was already sitting back in my chair, in which case I sit even further back in my chair, tipping it slightly but not quite so far that it starts to fall and I have that little moment of primal panic and my hands, regardless of what they’re holding, go scrambling wildly about to catch me.
“...just because you’re going to go find something out doesn’t mean you can’t wonder about it. In fact, I would argue that you’re going to go find out about this mystery precisely because you wonder about it. Second…”
I sit back just a little more. If I had already been sitting back a little more after already having been sitting back in the first place, I would now be in the middle of that panicked “aaaaah I’m falling I’m falling I’m going to die” moment.
“...of all…”
Oops, weird ellipsis split.
“...good luck”
I hand her the envelope, which for some reason I assume she needs to remember the numbers “52”, “seven-thirty”, and “78”.
“Oh, no you don’t”
“No I don’t what?”
“You don’t stay here… you aren’t staying here”
“I’m not?”
“No way, Toddrick”
Bree calls me “Toddrick”, which “Todd” isn’t short for. She folds her arms across her chest, but it’s not across her chest actually, it’s across her stomach, right under her breasts of reasonable and realistic size, pushing up slightly kind-of so as to boost their apparent size just a bit further towards the unreasonable and unrealistic.
“You’re coming with me...”
If I try really hard, I can maybe reinflect and reinterpret this sentence to fall in line with the way Bree buoys her breasts and shakes her head, but that’s a bit of stretch and I have better things to not be doing. Like going to the docks.
“...or do you not have the balls?”
Nevermind.
A new voice approaches
“People are so volatile. Everyone is mad all the time-- mad, mad, mad-- but why are they mad? Are they mad at me? They certainly get mad at me when I ask them if they are mad at me... is this because they were already mad at me, or are they just mad about being mad? Nothing I’ve ever said makes it go away. Nothing I’ve ever done makes it go away.
It never goes away.
Unconditional anger is a scary world to live in.”
