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Chapter Nine
by Brechin Frost Chapter Nine I wrote “Chapter Nine” at the top of the page and looked down at the words in my neat, practiced handwriting. They were foreign to me and strange as though I hadn’t written them, as though they were a mysterious language I couldn’t comprehend. For a moment I lost all words and my pen left behind only a black liquid ink dot on the page. I took a deep breath and tried to remember English and as I began to understand “Chapter Nine” again, it remained distant as though I were looking at it through a haze. “Chapter Nine,” I said aloud. The words formed and came out of my mouth, in my voice, and yet I didn’t know them. I wrote the two words again and then again and then several times in a row, each time my handwriting becoming increasingly difficult to read. My mind went blank. I couldn’t think of anything. I could comprehend nothing and when I looked at the page filled with these two words, they were markings as meaningless as hieroglyphs in lost ruins of a forgotten civilization. A sense of panic permeated the emptiness of my mind. “What comes next?” I asked the air. Something needed to follow these two words, hundreds or thousands of words came after them but they were unclear, undecided, and unwritten. A vague sense of what they should be came to me and I saw for a moment the scene before my eyes and as it became vivid the words disappeared. I pulled the sheet from the notebook and crumbled it up, crushing all the chapter nines I had written, and then threw them in the trash. I picked up my pen once more. Set the sharp tip to the page and formed the letters that had come back to me. The shape of the letters were familiar to my hands again and so at the top of the page I wrote, “Chapter Nine,” and then stared at it. “Chapter Nine,” I said aloud once again as though it might set me in the right direction but it only sent me backwards and the scene disappeared. The longer I looked at the blue lines and the pink margin of the page, the further the scene drifted and soon the music and the colour vanished and the people, the people I had become acquainted with and then knew intimately within the span of months became strangers again and I couldn’t remember their names or faces. I forgot the way good words taste when you say them and the bitterness of poor words when you choose the wrong ones. Nothing remained but the page and the panic and the shame – the shame that comes when your dignity as a writer is lost. Staring at the blankness – the empty page, the author’s Alzheimer’s. All is lost. “Chapter Nine” on the top of the page, a chapter as vacant as the stare I gave it. I turned from the page and went to my bed, fell onto it, and pulled the covers over my head. I closed my eyes, fell asleep, and I dreamed. Wolf-toothed nines chased me across the thirty-two blue streets until I fell off the world and tumbled through the ghosts of chapters one through eight. The characters reached out to touch me, pulling at my clothes and begging me to resurrect them in the next chapter. “Save us,” they said. At the end of every chapter the characters cease to exist or exist only in the ether, a fog of the mind, the indeterminate timelessness between the end of one and the beginning of the next. I travelled like Dante through the Inferno of my scenes, the blood and tears splashing me and staining me. The violence, the sex, the language, the honesty and the lies confronted me and beat against me like pistons of a revving engine until I became the blood and tears I had created. I woke up inspired and went to my desk. I picked up my pen and struck a line beneath “Chapter Nine” and with rushed handwriting I wrote the words that were needed and breathed life into the chapter and the characters and the setting once more. My hand cramped but I continued and my writing took on a tired and shaking quality. I placed the last piece of punctuation on the page and took a breath. It felt like the first breath of air I had taken in hours. My back and head ached, sweat soaked through my clothes and my heart beat at a ferocious pace like I had finished a footrace. I gathered the pages, they felt heavy in my tired hands and I tapped them like playing cards against my desk until they all stood straight and in a neat stack. Then I placed the pages inside of a tan folder with the word “Novel” written across it in thick black permanent marker and looked away. With my pen in my hand once more, I set it to the page and I wrote at the top of it, “Chapter Ten” and then I stared at it. “Chapter Ten,” I said aloud. And my mind went blank. |
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