After Matthew finished with his offering about what his novel was about, it came to Luke to have his turn telling Melanie what his own novel was about. He described how his character, working alone, pulled off the whole 9/11 caper himself, how he planted different flight paths in four random airplane’s computers a year ahead of time while posing as an airplane cleaning crew, how he planted cell-phone-triggered explosives up and down the elevator shafts of the three destroyed buildings while posing as a WTC maintenance worker over a series of months long before the big day.
“Why? Asked Melanie, “why does the guy do it? Who is he?”
Luke just stared back in silence.
Then John got his turn. He began describing how it was Benedict X, listed as an anti-Pope who lasted all of 30 days in 1032, who had inadvertently stumbled upon the Vatican plot to hire the mathematicians of Timbuktu to apply algebra to stretch one hundred years of real history out to a thousand years of fabricated history, all for the purpose of propaganda: to sell a newly invented state-sanctioned religion to a reluctant and skeptical pagan Europe.
It was late and everyone was tired. It was the first details Melanie had heard about any of their novels and the three synopses were melding in her mind the way films at a film festival do.
The one novel was about a lone person who single-handedly uncovers a big secret about the Internet, the next novel was about a lone person who single-handedly pulls off 9/11, and the third novel is about a lone person who single-handedly uncovers the biggest secret of all, the falsified origins of Western civilization.
“A mother, a conspiracy nut, and the Pope walk into a bar together,” Melanie said. No laughter, nothing. “The Internet, an agent provocateur, and Christianity,” she said next. No reaction. Tough room, she thought.
“Do you guys not see the parallels, or is it just me?” she looked around the table at the three novelists in turn. She drew nothing but blanks.
“What does the Vatican have to do with the Internet?” John finally asked, seething with the word “Internet,” for which he had little respect.
“Don’t you see how similar all your stories are, how they’re all the same story really?” she pressed on.
Matthew dropped his jaw and looked to Luke and John and back to Luke again as if to say, “Can you believe this woman??” Still, he remained silent, as they all were: they didn’t dispute her claim. It was just too fabulous a notion to digest all at once.
“And there’s one more thing they’re all the same on,” she went on, emboldened. “Or rather, one more thing you’re all the same on.”
Luke now closed his eyes. He found analysis very uncomfortable at the best of times.
“None of you said why you’re writing these stories in particular,” she said. “None of you spoke about what your novels are really about, what they mean to you.”
“They mean a lifetime of being a novelist and having these two look after me,” Matthew snorted in reply.
“But even with that to look forward to, you still can’t write, none of you can, can you,” she pointed out.
It was true, these were all grand ideas and they had all been sufficiently sketched out to get a real novelist going, yet none of them had gotten anywhere, even under the pressure of The Deadline contest they had set for themselves, and what more motivation could there be than that?
“Did you really think,” she warmed up to her theme, “that writing a novel could really just be about escaping the demands of day-to-day life, that a payoff in terms of groceries and rent would be sufficient reason to achieve this act of creation?”
She worried she was too tired, they all were too tired, for this kind of talk now. But if not now, when? Twenty-four years had gone by, eight or nine thousand nights, and it seemed they had never asked the question, they had never once been confronted with what they really were doing.
John was dumb-struck by her use of the term “act of creation.” It had never occurred to him, he reflected, following the grain up the length of the church door table, that it was an act of creation, that storm in his room and in his head.
“The three of you, what is it you’re trying to say?” Melanie put it to them. “It’s very much the same thing whatever it is: a person working alone is heroic.” She paused. “But the three of you, each working alone, constrained to work alone because of that stupid contest, your stupid Deadline contest, are you heroic? Does it work, this working alone?” Of course no one could reply.
“And look what you gave yourselves as the prize for winning the contest: to work together, to help one another. Don’t any of you see how ironic this is?”
The kitchen looked like a display in Madame Toussaud's Wax Museum the way everyone was locked in place with distance gazes and mouths as though stuck in mid-word. The answer is no, none of them had seen how ironic the Deadline Contest was, not once in 24-plus years. It was like telling a dying hard-rock coal miner he had inherited a million bucks back when he was eighteen, if only anyone had told him: it was sitting there waiting for him the whole time.
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