The Writer

It was over twenty years ago when I ran into a former student of mine, a very talented young writer who, when I had him in class, came in third place nationally in a writing competition run by a major publishing house. However, I found as the conversation progressed that he had given up writing. What a waste of talent, I thought. And I told him so. "OK." he said, "give me a topic and I will write about it."

"If you do that, so will I. We'll get together at the end of the holiday and compare our stories." He agreed.

I spent the rest of the holiday writing my story. I never saw him again.

This is the story I wrote.


THE WRITER
Christopher Bogart


The room was dark. The faint amber light of one small brass lamp, perched atop a round wooden table near the heavily draped window, was the only illumination in the room. As his eyes became accustomed to the room’s dim light, he could see its furnishings. Heavy cloth drapes tied back to the wooden window frame during the day, had been released, and had fallen closed to allow only the scantest light of the sunset to seep through. A remnant of that light now played on the hardwood floor at the edge of the worn, faded red Oriental rug. Somewhere in the room, an ancient clock chimed eight muffled chimes.

Ahead of him, opposite the window, he saw an enormous desk. Its advanced age was evident in the ornate carvings, most of which receded in the shadows cast by the inadequate light. Between him and this behemoth stood a chair. A chair, or more like a small throne. It too was ornately carved, its arms ending in scroll, its legs with paw-like clawed feet seemed almost to grip the carpet on which it rested.

“Sit!” said a voice coming from somewhere in the shadows behind the desk. The young man navigated around the ornate chair, finally placing himself on the well-worn velvet of its faded seat. “Why have you come?” questioned the voice. The young man stared into the shadows behind the desk, searching for the owner of the voice.

Its owner leaned forward, and as he did so, his face emerged from what was left of the light. It was an old face. A face that seemed to be more of parchment than of skin. Its lines and crevices had been etched by life and by learning, giving it a wise yet still active quality. This old man was not dead yet, the young man thought. His eagle-like eyes shone with a spark of flint and tinder, at once soft and kind, and yet sharp and almost predatory.

“Why have you come?” the voice repeated.

The young man’s mind groped for an answer. He must have known why he was here. He had not been invited, yet he hand felt as if he would be welcome. As his mind whirled around trying to find an adequate answer, a single simple sentence, as if with a mind of its own, escaped from his lips. “I have failed.” He blurted out. Then there was silence. He commanded all the courage he could muster, and looked into the old man’s eyes. Those eyes, probing his, were trying to find an explanation. The uneasy silence continued.

After what seemed an eternity, the young man broke the silence. “I am not a writer.” He looked up into those eyes again; and, in a gesture of despair, his words began to tumble out. “I was never a writer. I tried to write. I wanted to think I could write. Yes, once or twice, I got lucky and wrote a few things. Decent things. But not great things.” The old man’s eyes never moved. If only he would say something, the young man thought. But there was only the silence. Feeling spent and broken by the weight of his own grim evaluation, his eyes left those of the old man and fell on the floor.

“Who told you that you could not write?” questioned the voice, now tinted with anger.

“I did.” Said the young man, never removing his eyes from the floor.

“And what do you know?” the voice replied, more as a statement than as a question. They young man saw no need to respond.

“I was your teacher. You were my most talented and promising student. You had all the potential to be a good writer.” There was a pause. “No!” the old man’s voice boomed from the darkness, “a great writer!” The young man, his eyes now riveted to the threadbare Oriental rug, tried to speak, but he did not know what to say. Words tried to come up, but were choked off at his throat. The resulting sound resembled a muffled sob.

The young man felt the teacher’s eyes bore into the top of his head, which hung in the shame of failure. And yet, if he had only raised his head, he would have seen the compassion that had softened the gaze of the teacher. Since he did not, he became oblivious to everything in the room, except the ancient clock as it chimed nine muffled chimes.

“Don’t you want to write?” the teacher asked.

“I wanted to write.” Responded the young man. And, when there was no response, he repeated softly, “I wanted to write.”

“Then write!” the teacher’s voice shot back from the darkness.

“About what?” questioned the young man. “What in my small life is so important that the world would want to hear of it?”

“Every man’s life is important.” The teacher responded.

“Not mine.” The young man replied; and, with all the courage he could summon, he raised his head to meet his teacher’s glare.

As the young man’s eyes met his teacher’s, instead of anger, he saw the compassion that had been there unnoticed since the conversation had begun. He then noticed a large round glass paperweight in the teacher’s aged hand. It was the kind of paperweight that one expected to shake, and see synthetic snow falling on the plastic figure within. Only this glass paperweight had no figure or snow. It was empty.

“Look!” the teacher commanded.

“It’s empty.” Replied the young man.

“Look again!” And as the young man leaned closer to the glass globe in the teacher’s hand, a figure appeared. It was not made of plastic, but seemed to be suspended inside the globe. The figure was seated on sand. No. It wasn’t just sand. It was a whole beach. In front of the seated figure, the ocean’s waves lapped at the shoreline not far from his bare feet. Intrigued by the images he saw materialize before his eyes, the young man looked closer. He recognized the faded blue jeans and nylon parka on the figure in the globe as the same faded blue jeans and nylon parka that he was now wearing. The figure in the globe was he! And without moving any closer, visions began to appear in the spray of the waves.

Visions. And he saw them as if through the eyes of the young man on the beach that was he. Visions. Pictures of his life from his earliest past right up to his present state. And not just images of his past. Not just images at all. His feelings appeared. His hopes and his dreams. His most secret thoughts. His innermost yearnings. Al were there in what seemed to be an endless cavalcade of impressions, as multitudinous as the grains of sand he sat on, or the droplets of spray that misted the air before his eyes. And yet he saw each one in its fullness. One at a time.

The ancient clock chimed twelve muffled chimes. And, all of a sudden, as if in response to the chimes of the ancient clock, the waters in the globe began to recede. The beach faded into the mists. The figure faded. The globe was slowly returning to its original clear state. And, as it did, the young man’s awe turned to anger. “No!” the young man said in anguish. “Bring it back!”

“No!” responded the teacher in a soft but firm voice.

“Bring it back!” the young man demanded, reaching out greedily across the desk toward the globe in the teacher’s hand. But the teacher’s hand was quick; and the globe flew across the room, crashing against the windowsill near the round wooden table with the small brass lamp perched atop it. Thousands of tiny shards of glass sprayed from the windowsill; and, for a brief moment, twinkled in the dim light, until they fell to the hardwood floor below. There was the tinkling of shattered glass. Then there was a deafening silence.

The young man rose from the chair with an anger he could barely control. “Bring it back!” he shrieked, slamming his palms on the edge of the great oak desk, and glaring into the teacher’s passive eyes. “Bring it back!”

“I can’t.” responded the teacher calmly. “Why don’t you bring it back?”

“I can’t!” cried the young man.

“Yes you can.” The teacher responded in the same calm voice.

“How?” the young man pleaded. His hands lifted from the desk, falling uselessly at his sides. His dead fell with the great weight of bitter disappointment.

“Look!” the teacher said, pointing his finger past the young man to the far corner of the room.

The young man looked in the direction of the pointed finger. The corner of the room was glowing with a bright white light. As curiosity replaced bitterness, the young man approached the source of the light. There, in the corner on a small table sat a computer. A word processor, to be exact. He had never noticed it there before. As he thought harder, he couldn't’t remember how it could have escaped his notice when he first entered the room.

What an odd sight it was. A word processor in a room that seemed better suited to house an old Underwood. As he stood before it staring at the white glow of the monitor, he heard the teacher’s voice over his shoulder. “Now you bring it back!”

“How?” the confused young man asked, still staring at the monitor.

“Write!” was the teacher’s calm reply.

As if in a daze, the young man numbly pulled the chair away from the machine and sat down in front of it. He placed his fingers on the keyboard. All of a sudden, as if by magic, images entered his mind. Slowly, at first. But, as he thought more, he began to remember all the fears, hopes, dreams, innermost thoughts and secret yearnings that he saw in the mind of the figure in the globe. Like droplets of the ocean’s spray, they came. Like the grains of sand. One at a time. And, as he stared down at his hands, he realized that he was typing. Looking up at the monitor, he saw the typed words that represented all of those visions like so many grains of sand. Like so many droplets of the ocean’s spray. He remembered the fear of failure that he had always felt. A fear that had gnawed at his every achievement, paralyzing every effort he made. The same failure that he feared as he entered this very room so many hours ago. He remembered all the aching hopes he had of achieving something he could call his own. And his dreams. His many dreams. And the dreams of those around him. All the images of his life, and the lives of others he had observed as he lived his life each day. And slowly, as he glanced at that monitor, he realized that many of these images were images that he had not seen in the globe. They were images that were pouring forth from his own mind. They were his own visions! And he typed furiously, unaware of the passing of time.

All of these visions became stories. Each vision – a different story with thousands of details to describe. He could not begin to detail them all now. He could only record them. He would detail them later, he thought, as he had use for them. And in the fury of his typing, he came very slowly to a greater awareness – that he was writing! For he was a writer.

When the fury at last was spent, he slumped back in the chair, and raised his aching hands to his face to rub his burning eyes. Reaching out in front of him, he pressed the button on the keyboard, and the soft whirring sound began, as the computer’s printer saved his night’s work. He stood and turned to stretch his stiff limbs; and, as he did, he saw pale pink light playing on the old hardwood floor. The ancient clock chimed six muffled chimes.

“It is finished.” He said, as he turned and walked toward the source of the light. He drew back the heavy cloth drapes. Then he turned toward the ornately carved desk to face the eyes of his teacher. But the teacher was gone.


When the young man had gathered his papers together, he walked toward the door he had entered ten brief hours ago. He turned to take a final look at the room in which he had worked so hard and had learned so much, and at the now empty desk of his teacher. “It is finished.” The young man repeated to the empty room. But as he turned to go, he heard a soft, dry chuckle.

“No.” a voice whispered in the empty air. “It is only beginning.”