A blank notebook page stares
at me from atop a cheap wooden table—pressboard cloaked in wood wrapping
paper. The café is filled with uncomfortable
economy furniture, like the set of an old television show, or a terrarium.
The blank
page intimidates me like a gang of teenagers loitering on a street corner. I have to pass in order to reach my
destination. One step at
a time—begin with the title: The
Curmudgeon. After all, before
Tolstoy love and war was just a bunch
of words.
I put pen
to page, ready to scribble the first passage, but the woman sitting to my left
is staring at me. When I turn to catch
her she quickly looks away. She’s
trying to see what I’m writing. She must
be one of them—a tourist. New York City
is loaded with tourists. I’ll have to
keep my notebook covered so she can’t steal a look
at the beginning of greatness.
A voice
speaks to me. Greatness? All you have is a
pretentious title, it says.
It is
rather pretentious, isn’t it? Where did
I even hear the word curmudgeon? I once read that when you learn a new word
you’ll hear it three times that day. No, no, I won’t listen. I can use curmudgeon,
I’m allowed.
Moving on—the
first sentence. I have come to an intersection
that forks into a thousand roads, and only one of them is the right path. One
has to be very careful when starting a story—one has to be very careful, always.
A man at the counter looks to his
girlfriend and points at me. “See, there
he is,” he whispers to her. “This is how
he used to write—in a café just like normal people.”
These damn tourists—they make me so
angry. I can’t write with so many of
them gawking, examining me like I’m a zoo specimen. Tomorrow’s
paparazzi—don’t they know how dangerous it is to come here? They could change everything! They could damage my fate. I should scare them back to whenever they came from.
The man looks down at his watch,
which isn’t a normal watch. He’s checking to see how much time he has left here—how much he paid for—or
maybe he’s communicating with someone back home. I hope it’s worth jeopardizing my career,
fool.
Even if I had the ability to visit Mark Twain, I wouldn’t. If I wanted to learn about him I’d visit his
home in Hartford, Connecticut and pay for the damn tour like everybody
else. These people think their rich
blood is above the laws of physics.
Something is going to go irrevocably afoul and then we’ll see how much
longer they keep up these little historical vacations.
I ignore them—act like
I’m ignorant of what they’re really doing here, as they stupidly think I am—and
get back to my writing.
After
a lifetime of change, the curmudgeon, who was not always so miserly, came to
the realization that he hadn’t needed a whole lot of money or a true love to be
happy in life, rather he required a modest degree of comfort and a single intimate
relation to which he could express his emotions. Emotion being a mercurial energy, it was
necessary to have someone close to him so that he could exhaust it in the positive
form of affection, before it could transmute into negative forms such as anger,
despair, or fear. However, his best and only
friend had recently passed away, taking with him the curmudgeon’s only
emotional outlet. For several months he
had stayed cooped up in his stifling apartment, and the emotional alchemy was
already well underway.
I’m about to start the next
paragraph when the eyeballs of the woman sitting next to me fall out of her
head. They land on the table silent and
stiff, like two small bags of sand. I act as if I don’t notice. The
woman didn’t even flinch when it happened.
Maybe she has a prosthetic head. Perhaps
she was decapitated in her time by a flying car and, medicine and travel being
so advanced in the future, paramedics were able to arrive on the scene and save
her brain. Now she has a prosthetic head
in which her mind is cradled, controlling the rest of her body through transmitters
and microchips. It looks so real.
I look at the other patrons. No one else seems to notice. Maybe these kinds of prosthetics are common
in the future. What a wondrous world
these tourists come from! And yet with
so many advancements, my writing remains timeless to them.
Her eyes expand and then contract, slinking
across the table like quick, fat inchworms.
The sight of such grotesquery makes me gasp. I know what she’s up to. It isn’t enough to come back and treat the
past as if it were a two-bit museum, but to try to steal my work? I move the notebook to my right side.
Oh
no, I lost track of her crawling eyes!
As I turn from side to side trying
to see where the little buggers slid off to, the woman speaks to me.
“Are you alright?” She inquires, the center of her jaw rising
and falling like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
I’m hesitant to respond. Is this a trick? “Alright?”
Her eyes are back in their
sockets. Her prosthetic skull must house
small spring-wound spools wrapped with a fine wire invisible to the naked
eye. She must have pressed a button,
probably at the base of her head, snapping her slithering scouts back into
place like the ruler of a tape measure.
“You’ve been muttering to yourself
since you sat down. Do you need help?”
“I’m sure you’d like that,” I say
to her sarcastically. “Why don’t I just dictate
my story and you can write it down for me?”
She says nothing. She just stares at me, feigning
puzzlement.
“You wish, lady.”
She gives me that look and turns
back to whatever farce she was originally pretending to be consumed by. She’ll probably return to her own time now
that she knows I’ve figured her out, but someone else will come back in her
place. Someone always does.
Too many intrusions—I have to focus
on writing. This story will be my magnum
opus, I know it. My arm doesn’t feel right. The weight of it is straining my shoulder. I raise my hands and discover that my right arm is a shriveled mirror version of my left. How can I be expected to write when one arm is so much smaller than the other?
The brass bell on the door rings as
a young boy enters the café. He turns
his head to me and smiles broadly, elated at having found his mark. I bet his teacher is having him write a
research paper about me. He must be the
son of some rich politician—maybe 20th generation Vanderbilt—to have
the means to come back here to study my life for a measly homework
assignment.
A child shouldn’t be too hard to
evade, despite the fact that children from the future are much more cunning
than the children of today. Still, he is
just a child.
I press the ballpoint of my pen to
the page. I must finish the story if I’m
to be published.
The couple at the counter is
talking excitedly. The gesture of picking
up my pen having stirred them.
“Quiet,” I tell them, “or I’ll rip those things off your wrists and
send you tumbling through time like a sphere in a pinball machine.”
The couple feigns surprise. Everyone looks surprised. They never expect anyone to speak up to
them. Pompous future people—think they’re
so much smarter than us, the denizens of this hillbilly epoch. Now they see that we people of the past are
not so primitive and meek. Most of the
tourists look at me with disdain and then go back to half-ignoring me, as if I’m the one disrupting their lives.
Before they go back in time I bet
their travel agent makes them sign a contract stating that no matter what happens,
they mustn’t own up to the rouse, and they mustn’t bet on horses. Otherwise the past would be in serious
trouble. That’s why none of them have
ever admitted that they were time tourists before, no matter how persuasive I
was.
I need to go somewhere else to write. There are too many time tourists here. They may try to stop me if I attempt to leave. I scan the room, guaranteeing that everyone averts their eyes. When no one
is watching me, I hurl my coffee cup across the room. It shatters against the wall.
As everyone looks to the source of the noise I run out of the café,
knocking a chair over as I flee.
Around the corner I catch my
breath, my back against the brick wall. I wish I could go to the library to write, but I can’t after
what happened last time—probably not for at least a year or so. Hopefully by then they’ll have forgotten my
face. I would lock myself in my room,
but it’s too hard to write at home—too many knickknacks to distract—too many
arguments about doctors and pills. I’ll
have to settle for the park instead.
People in the park pass by and glance at me curiously. I ignore them and try to think of what the
curmudgeon should do next, but it’s so hard to write when one arm is so much smaller
than the other.
