Matthew lackadaisically pushed yet another spoon of Rice Krispies into his barely open mouth, trying to make a show of his great lack of enthusiasm. “What have you got so far?” he finally put directly to John, seated across the church-door table buried in a newspaper and showing no signs of asking Matthew what’s wrong. A lump rose in Matthew’s throat and the corners of his mouth noticeably tugged down—that part was no show. There was no need to specify “for your novel” in his query, virtually every conversation in that distressed house the last 24 years was about the three men’s novels. Having spent the night after John’s Big Announcement staring at the ceiling, drawing up accounts of his progress the last 24 years, Matthew was having a real bummer of a day so far. But John didn’t seem to hear him. John was thinking, “To acknowledge him would be to encourage him, and it’s game time.”

Matthew was at once the most outwardly content and plainly happy of the three (that’s not saying much, but still), and yet, at the same time, he was the most inwardly hollowed out by this quartered-and-drawn experience of spending 24 years trying to write a novel, without success. Only occasionally did the wind-blown man of straw inside him scrape through the frost on the window of his happy exterior, where he would appear as terrorized as a passenger looking out the window of a crashing jet.

His problem was that he always came up with a new, better idea for a novel that was so totally different from the previous hot idea that he was starting completely from scratch on an almost weekly basis. If anyone were out there at the truck yard, they would see him making his rounds checking the seals on the back doors of the truck trailers parked in so many neat rows and columns throughout the sprawling truck yard, then stop, frozen as if hit by a paralyzing dart silently blown at his neck by a Bushman, before coming to and jogging back through the cold, still air to his shed, audibly voicing the opening sentence to a new novel, puffs of breath coming from his mouth like a steam train ploughing across the prairies.

And what about the previous hot novel, the one sitting in the guard shack awaiting his next installment of work? About a week earlier, that one woke him up as though by electrocution, sitting him bolt upright in bed. It displaced the previous one as completely as it had been displaced. But now, he reflected lying awake in his bed, his eyes scanning back and forth across the ceiling as though it had the answers, now there was no more time to jump to yet another hot idea. If he didn’t get a novel written this year, he faced the prospect of having to quit before ever having become a writer, and worse, to work in servitude to another—one of his other house-husbands—who would be lording if over him as a full-time writer the rest of his life. That ought to be enough motivation, you’d think.

Whatever hot new novel idea it was this week for Matthew, the week in which John dropped the big news on all their heads, would have to be the one he would have to run with to the end, he concluded.

“I’m pretty much done,” replied John, casually turning the page of his newspaper without looking up. “A bit of revision, really,” he sucked a deep breath up through his nose, lying. “I’m thinking of having Bishop Africus run into Omar Khayyam in a souk in Marakesh by accident instead of by plan, that sort of thing. Just filling in the details now, you know?”

How could Matthew know what it was like to be polishing the details? He barely had a concept. But at least he had a concept. That concept was inspired one night as he was deleting his spam email. He opened one by accident, one labelled, “Hey man, please your girl!”

Inside was nothing at all. Who would do this? he paused to think. Who would go to the trouble—admittedly not much trouble, spam is easy for anyone to spread—but still, who would send out spam that had nothing in it? What possible money is there in that, even if only one in a billion idiots might open it? It was, the thought flitted across his mind the way a cat crosses a street, like the boasting of five-year-olds in the playground, saying all sorts of crazy things and not expecting anyone to be listening, or to stop and say, “What was that?”

The thought then turned around and came back. Like five-year-olds, he thought again, the whole world of spam is like five-year-olds. It was, he began tossing paper and books around frantically looking for a pen, as though a baby were trying to communicate. They don’t really communicate, they haven’t got much to say, they just want to babble and see if there is a response. And the response, as parents know, can just as easily be babble too, it doesn’t matter, the connection is made, channels are opened, where is a damned pen?

And what happens (Matthew found a pen and jotted nearly illegible notes to himself too quickly), what happens when no one responds to a baby’s babbling? The baby tries other sounds, he tries to imitate what he hears, he repeats things, over and over and over again. What if, Matthew stopped making notes and stared out his window in the riser down at the sidewalk where a child stood rigid as a mannequin staring back up at him, before his mother dragged him away from the crazy house, what if spam was the Internet being a baby, what if a form of artificial intelligence had evolved inside the Internet, and it was at this stage a baby’s level of intelligence, and all it could do was what a baby does: hear sounds, repeat them, try other sounds, all to see what gets a response, all to see if someone is out there—like its mother, perhaps. Is spam (Matthew imagined the blurb on the cover jacket of his bestseller) the babblings of an infant artificial intelligence crying out for its mother?

Now you see why he was reading all sorts of books about motherhood and childbirth—and why he took to hanging out at that café on Commercial Drive populated by breast-feeders in mid-morning, whom he’d spy on over the rim of his mug. Matthew’s novel was going to be about the head of a government commission meant to investigate and destroy spam, who makes the astounding discovery that most spam originates from within the Internet apparently spontaneously, and then, with no one willing to listen to her anymore, makes the assertion that it is a new form of life. Fired for being crazy, she carries on her research at home, before finally taking the leap and whispering back to the baby she thinks is in there somewhere. And she is right: it gurgles back to her. The Internet has found its mommy.

Who would play the US President? Sandra Bullock would be good in the lead role. Would he insist on having final say in film rights negotiations? Matthew wondered. Would he attend the Oscars, or make a show of sending in a taped acceptance, too busy writing the next screenplay to attend to such trifle. They’d probably put a plaque on the security guard shack in the truck yard. He might keep working there, like Woody Allen playing clarinet in a small bistro in New York, or J D Salinger cutting his own grass with a push mower.

But for now he was stuck on the first sentence. There had been about 50 of them so far proposed, and about 50 so far rejected. He took to rummaging around the teen novel racks of the public library, looking at as many first sentences to novels he could, trying to get the sense of what they do, trying to see what works, trying to find one he could steal if he had to.

That’s what he spent the night doing, his eyes scanning back and forth across the ceiling of his room, trying to find his way out of being trapped in Zeno’s Writing Hole: How can he write a novel without a first chapter, how can he write a first chapter without a first sentence, how can he write a first sentence without a first word, then a first letter, then a first mark, and so on. The smaller the initial increment got, the bigger the implications of it grew, till he was at the point of thinking of how a one-dimensional point implies the entire known universe. He didn’t even have the first infinitesimally small one-dimensional point completed in his novel yet, by the time morning found him sitting across from John toying with his Rice Krispies. Even God began with something, a word, if His book is to be believed. What I’d give for a word at this point, Matthew thought. Luxury!

John seemed oblivious to his gut-wrenching torment. Does he even know I’m here at all, Matthew wanted to cry out . . . just like the Internet, it occurred to him.