The Third Person

At around two in the afternoon, on Christmas Eve, it began to rain, and he decided the Christmas rush had ended.

He didn’t so much close the store as abandon it – half the lighbulbs blown, boxes of empty and half-empty books everywhere, a back room full of boxes of catalogued books that he had no empty shelves for. The shelves in the store a mess, the mythology section ransacked, gone. He checked the garbage bin to make sure there was nothing in it that would rot while he was away, and for the first time in over two years he shut the store down. He put a sign in the window saying the store would be closed until the new year, got in his car, and drove to his home town.

There was a hand addressed envelope waiting for him when he got there, addressed to Newt Magazine. He hadn’t done Newt, his zine, for six years, and hadn’t received mail about it in three. When he had been making it he’d represented it as a magazine to lists of literary journals, book publishing houses, and the like, and so for a while, even after he stopped making it, he would still receive books for review – never anything he’d wanted to read – but eventually even that had stopped.

It was an application from a girl in South Australia, eighteen, for an internship at the exciting Newt offices. “I’m fully aware that you would receive an extensive amount of letters, emails and phone calls, hopeful to acquire that one chance to earn a place at your fine organisation.” She seemed a preppy, go-getter type, who knew what she wanted. She was even willing to “be ridiculed for not aligning the pens on your desk correctly”.

One sentence stood out. “There are many young determined individuals out there who strive to attain a life such as the one you possess.” He pondered that thought for a while. Attached was an example of her writing, a Cosmo-esque article – with Sex and the City references – on the subject of why girls go for players. Hoping that it would provide some insight into a question that puzzled him, he read it, but it offered nothing.

Later that night he went looking through the drawers of his childhood desk for some squares of origami paper. He’d received the origami paper when he was four or five, accompanied by a book showing how to make origami tables and Sadako’s paper crane. But he hadn’t been any good at it, and the origami squares were too nice for his feeble efforts, so he put them away in a drawer against the day he was good enough to use them. Except he never got good enough to use them, and they sat there for years. Eventually the origami book disapeared, but the origami squares remained, and purely by surviving through various cleanouts they began to acquire a talismanic status, became important, something that he had had for too long to ever throw away. He hadn’t thought of the origami squares in years, but he had remembered them a few nights ago, and wanted to know if they were still there.

He couldn’t find them. He didn't know what had happened – perhaps somebody else threw them out, he knew he never would have – perhaps he moved them somewhere, and they will turn up in a box or trunk in five or ten years time.

Instead, he found a cache of letters people had written to him when he was doing Newt, letters he had little memory of receiving, no memory of stashing away in this drawer. There were letters from people who became close friends, a cache of letters from somebody with whom he got on just fine in correspondence, but terribly in person. And a letter he had no memory of at all – one he didn’t know if he ever replied to, although he thought he probably would have – written in texta slanted across a page, a slightly sad, angsty letter from a girl. He was pretty sure that if he wrote back, she never responded to his letter. And maybe he was cautious, and arrogant then – maybe he would have been nicer to her now.

Most important things to me seem all so far away now ... You know, I really wish that I was Bob Dylan ... I s’pose you don’t know me and I don’t know you so I must sincerely apologise for my rather brash beginnings. I was just thinking that you seem like someone of noble ambition ... in my search for the meaning of life I thought that perhaps you could offer some suggestions? Forgive my horrific spelling. Last night I dreamt that the sky was falling. Can you tell me if it is or not? ... I am but a lonely traveller searching for someone familiar to hold on to. Before you throw this aside, if you do, rememember to NEVER underestimate your own abilities. You will do great things...

Such a sad and poignant letter. He wondered where the girl was now, and if she was OK.

The letters made him think about how there was this other person out there: a version of himself as it existed in the minds of people who knew him only through things he had written, and how that person resembled the person he had always wanted to be, yet seemed very different to how he lived on a day-to-day basis and how he saw himself. It reminded him of a novel he liked by William Goldman, the guy who wrote The Princess Bride, called The Color of Light. He’d read this book a number of times. It is about a guy who wants to be a writer, and who becomes a writer, gets a novel published, moves to New York. Then things happen in his life, mostly not good: he gets depressed and isolated, lives alone, tries to write. Towards the end of the book he discovers that for the past five years, while he has been fighting his own private battles, there has been somebody going around pretending to be him. Posing as him in bars, living the life of a glamorous writer, scoring with beautiful women who are into guys with words. He identified with that book, and thinking about this other person, this projection of himself, he decided that he would blog in the third person for a while – partly as an exercise, because it makes him write things differently – partly to acknowledge his disconnect from this projection, this other person that is nonetheless, in some way, him.

On Christmas Day he is driving along Appin Road, his father in the passenger seat, heading for the mountains to see his grandmother. It has been many years since he has been on this road, yet it was one he had been along often as a child, and he never liked it. It’s a spooky, ghostly road: two lanes of traffic, surrounded on both sides by a strange wood of dense, straight, paperbarks that loom over the road, woods that as a kid reminded him of the illustration on the front of Katherine Patterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. Every hundred metres or so one of these trees has a wreath on it in memory of somebody who has died in an accident along this road.

He becomes caught in a convoy of cars. The speed limit is eighty, but somebody up ahead is driving at seventy, and everybody starts to bunch up, frustrated. He is talking to his father. There is a roundabout ahead. Somebody – perhaps the one who has been holding everybody behind up – begins to go through the roundabout, then notices a car coming from the right. They brake hard. The first person behind them hits the brakes as well, and comes to a stop. The second person does the same, human reaction times multiplying. The third person – him – hits the brakes as hard as he can. He doesn’t believe he reacts late, but perhaps he does. The other cars are new, they brake well. His tires screech for what seems like three seconds – the rear of the car in front comes closer, and he knows that even with his foot pressed down as hard as he can, he is not going to stop in time.

The front of his car goes into the rear of the one in front, sending this car into the one in front of them. The incompetent driver at the front of all this continues on his way. All three cars pull to the side of the road. A woman leaps from the passenger seat of the car in front of his, pulls open the rear door, and pulls from the back seat a screaming baby, and he feels sick.

What happened? he asks his father. Or maybe, What did I do? He has been driving for thirteen years and has often proudly and truthfully said that he has never been at fault in an accident. In accidents like this, though, the driver at the rear is always at fault, and he cannot really dispute this in his own head – he drove into somebody else, nobody drove into him.

He feels embarassed and ashamed. Everybody climbs out of their cars and inspects the damage in the way people do, as if they have the slightest idea what they’re looking at. Nobody is hurt – the baby is just shook up – and the damage is relatively minor, and mostly to his own piece of shit car. His grille is gone, the sound of it being popped and cracked to powder by passing traffic can be heard. The people in the other cars are remarkably nice about the whole thing – nobody calls him an idiot, and the two people in front both say that it was only their new brakes that stopped them from rear-ending the cars in front of them. Everybody exchanges details, and – remarkably, he thinks – they all wish him a merry Christmas, before heading on their way. They did make sure he was insured, though. He is insured, third party property, and their cars will be fine. He’s not sure how he’s going to fix his own, though, and wonders whether it was a good idea to take the week off.

Today he thinks happy birthday, my friend, i hope you’re ok. He tries to think the thought so hard that it crosses oceans. He believes he could once do this, but is no longer sure he remembers how.

posted by Nicholas @ 7:47 PM