The.
He was slumped over the word 'the'. It lay before him, alone on the word-processor screen, just out of reach. His eyes darted in panic from silent keyboard to impassive screen, in an irregular rhythm, back and then forth. There was an insistent music. The more stale than exotic smell of soft drugs and cigarettes clouded with the boiling kettle. He remained there, unmoving, heavy with the music, the insistent music.
It was alright. He was charging his creative energies, lost in soundscape and dreamscape. Soon the music would stop, and the physicality and nearness of the cassette-recorder would jerk him alive with the loud and sudden click of the auto-stop mechanism. Perhaps there would be a small silence of recovery. If he turned the tape and settled back for the other side, it would be because he was not charged enough. It was alright. He would get round that 'the'.
With drumming and a facial coldness the deep and almost sinister semantic sense of the definite article crept silently into consciousness and hovered, shimmering, for a while. His mind contorted with the elusive pain of an argument that held without logic, reaching in frustration for words that would not come, for sentences that could never be formed. The drumming increased in intensity. He could feel his brain shrivelling, and reached for an escape concept.
It's all bollocks and I'm alright.
It's all bollocks and I'm alright.
He shifted his position and sat upright sharply. One. A deep, penetrating breath. Two. A pause. Three. The tape stopped. Four. It was the rhythm of it that left him blinking and gasping. His mouth was dry. A glass of water. That would involve standing up. Hassle. Do it, your tongue is actually cleaving to the roof of your mouth. Hassle. Jerk, one. Breath, two. Pause, three. Up, and to the sink, four. Water. More. Fill a glass to sit down with. Roll a cigarette. Turn the tape over. The.
He was slumped over a screenful of words - the beginning of a story called 'The.' The kettle boiled, and he became aware of the music. How many words had he written so far? Only three hundred and fifty-seven? What he needed was a cup of tea.
It took him a while to find the sugar, because first he found the newspaper, and remembered that he had not read it yet. What day was it, anyway? Friday, the 8th of July, 1994. Someone, and he suspected himself very strongly, had already done the crossword. The cartoons seemed familiar. Better tackle the news. First the sugar, but then the news.
He had been becoming increasingly aware of the power of photojournalism, and he gazed at the frozen figures of the leaders of the world, and of the ordinary people caught in sport, performance art or crisis. A few articles attracted his reading eye, but it was hard to concentrate, and he found that he could not read more than half of any given article without lapsing back to one of the pictures.
What would it actually be like to be someone in that position? Someone who most people knew of as nothing but an animation on a television screen, and a still in a newspaper.
They needn't even be real. He had never seen someone who was a world leader with his own eyes. How could one know, for example, that the President of France exists? How could one know, in fact, that any of the important political news in the paper, or on the television was real? One could not, and the force of this realisation thumped him suddenly into a warped but seemingly stable logic.
Perhaps, the news was real only every other day. Perhaps the days in between were a plausible fiction designed to expand on the real news, so that there would seem to be nothing strange going on. How could that be worked?
In the beginning, when the scheme had started, the news was all real, that is, on the first day. On the second day, while the real news was collected and written, fake news instead was put out. On the third day, real news was again collected, but what was put out was the second day's news. The fourth day's newspapers and news broadcasting contained nothing but lies, and the third day's news was not put out until the fifth day.
Gradually, the gap between the actual time and the time at which the news you received had happened would widen to a gulf measured in years. Half of what you read would be lies, and your false knowledge of a world that no longer surrounded you would disenfranchise you utterly from reality.
The sports pages and the arts pages could remain untampered with.
The business pages would have to be substantially rewritten in order to keep them in harmony with both the immediate economic realities and the alleged news. Then again, they never made a great deal of sense, anyway.
Commercial advertising, of course, would be unchanged.
In the news itself, anything untoward could be altered.
Only an elite, implacable and impenetrable, would know the truth. They would wield absolute control. Absolute control.
Ouch. He should write that down. He returned to the computer, and absently opened a new blank document. He typed a word, and decided that he should put some music on and roll another joint before he continued.
Later he sat slumped over the screen, looking at the word he had typed, the word 'the'. As the computer began to overload, for the more documents that were opened at once, the slower and more erratically it ran, so he began to grow sleepy.
He was dimly aware that he had opened at least seventeen documents containing nothing but the word 'the', but the knowledge failed to resolve itself into action.
The tape stopped. He stooped to turn it over, and stopped, unable to bring himself to listen to the other side again, no matter how good it was. He had to listen to something else. Perhaps the radio would have good music. An interesting talk show would do.
Sympathetic female voice: ...turn to our next guest, the novelist Ray Wysemen, whose first book, a post-modern paranoid fantasy, called 'The', has, he has just been telling me, been nominated for the new Derrida Prize.
Overconfident young male: That's right. I had thought that it was open to all self-referential writers but this one, [laughter], but...
No. That was unbearable. The silence was unbearable too. He had to find another tape, but the energy needed to do it would leave him going to bed. It felt late. In fact, it was getting light. Shit. There were things to do tomorrow. Another day jeopardised. Bed.