Becoming the Story (6 page)

He had just gotten a raise and he took her
by the hand and danced with her as she giggled. He had twirled her
around and lifted her high and asked her what she wanted most in
the world, anything – A boat? A mansion – he could afford it
now.

But she did not answer, because at that
moment she had everything she wanted: a dad who loved her.
Unfortunately, he had lost his job soon afterward and strife had
commenced. But now, sitting next to her father on the bedside, she
could see what she had missed before.

He was not a fiend, just a broken man full
of disappointments who had never gotten the success he wanted and
who had lost his wife and drank himself into a coma.

She did not believe him anymore about the
puppy. She could remember the light in his eyes that day when he
had presented it to her. At that moment, at least, he had loved
her. And now, beside him, she squeezed his hand and touched it to
her cheek. His hand was cold. And she had a thought: I love you
anyway.

She had lived her life in fear of being
rejected by him, by anyone. And now none of it seemed to matter.
She loved him. That was enough.

It was months before she continued her story
about Margie. After the funeral it was hard to think of much else.
But the urge to write never left her for long. Her dream of writing
for a living still burned bright in the darkness.

She asked herself again: What does it look
like on the other side of fear? Was it a place free of pain? Then
it would have to be a place of death. Was it a place of relaxation?
Then no courage was required. What did it look like? Her story
alter ego, Margie, had to know.

Maggie set aside all the character sketches
and plot outlines and simply began to write. She picked up where
her story left off, with Margie being afraid of being rejected by
publisher after publisher.

But Margie, the alter ego, did something
that surprised Maggie. She wrote a story of her own. Margie wrote a
story about a girl who had been rejected, and dealt with the pain
by writing.

Like Maggie, Margie had gotten blocked and
was separated from doing the thing she most loved in the world. And
that word “love” was key. Because Margie loved writing, she could
not write for publishers or squeeze herself into a narrow mold of
their choosing.

Whether she ever got published or not, she
would write for herself. Writing was a power too priceless for
Margie to let anyone take it from her. Writing was how she dealt
with life; it was her context; it was her story.

Margie continued to send her work to
publishers and risk rejection, but she refused to compromise her
own style and vision. Margie knew that as a result, she would get
rejected over and over but in the end Margie wanted more than
anything to master writing. And writing well what she wanted to
write was how she would succeed, and the
only
way she would
accept.

Maggie now thought she knew what the other
side of fear was. The other side of fear was love: love for
writing, love for her father, love for anyone. Love was essential
to true courage; maybe love
was
courage.

Maggie set down her pen, feeling satisfied.
She was
Margie
. She knew what Margie knew. And like Margie,
Maggie would ultimately succeed.

There would be many trials ahead, many
mistakes, many faltering detours, but when in doubt, she would
always return to her love for writing and the power it had given
her from the early years of her life.

All her life she had heard stories. All her
life, she had
loved
stories. Had written them and read them
and lived them, until finally she had
become
a story.

She had finally become what she loved.

For most of my life, especially since
college, I have kept journals. Most of my major life events since
then have found their way into notebooks.

But I will have to omit the most major life
event of all: death. This is unfair. I think I should be able to
write a journal entry afterward saying what it is like and what I
think of it, and if I learned anything. For obvious reasons, that
is impossible. But there is nothing to stop me from writing it
early. I have made some creative “predictions” in this piece, some
of which I hope do not occur. But it is all in fun.

Let me be absolutely clear: I love life and
I have every intention of living until I am 120, and even longer if
I can. But whether my death happens tomorrow or 1000 years from
now, I want to make sure than I, and not it, have the final word.
This is it.

From the Journal of L.E. Henderson; final
page:

Damn. I knew this was going to happen. But
not today. Not now. I had plans.

I have half a box of chocolates left over
from Christmas, and I still want that other half. Two of them are
maple creams. They are my favorites so I was saving them for last.
Bad
idea.

Besides I was working on a story that was
sure to be my magnum opus, an opus to end all opuses, a
scintillating story about a sentient banana who goes to the zoo and
gets chased by escaped monkeys.

But this gets in the way of everything.
Okay, I get it, everyone dies. Someone first told me that when I
was around four or five. I did not believe them, not at first. How
could there be no me?

But I should have had more warning. I like
to sip coffee in the mornings with my cat in my lap and read before
I write. I want my coffee and I want my cat. Everything I had
planned, my entire routine is capsized by my inability to, well,
move.

I still cannot get over it. This really
happened. I had kind of thought the singularity might happen and
would save me. Ray Kurzweil said as much. The singularity was going
to be a point where humans united with computers and achieved
immortality. Some even suggested that humans could download their
minds into computers and live out beautiful cybernetic lives
forever after, in a digital fairy tale happy ending.

Okay, maybe it was a long shot, but it gave
me hope. And it was inspiring. Throughout history, there was a lot
of talk about immortality. Religions promised it. Horror writers
created fantasies of immortality experiments gone awry, featuring
Frankenstein monstrosities and demonic pets.

In literature it seemed like immortality
always came with a terrible price. It offended the gods or set off
disorder in the spiritual world. It required unthinkable acts of
evil or the sacrifice of souls.

How many millennia did it take for someone
to have the guts to say, “Who cares what the gods think? Dying is a
bad idea. Maybe we should stop doing it. Maybe we should figure out
how to live forever.”

I admire Ray Kurzweil for saying that and
trying so hard to figure it out, even though he died before the
singularity ever happened, despite taking 150 vitamins a day in
order to stay alive for long enough to experience it. Ray Kurzweil,
sorry it did not work out. Maybe the singularity was just around
the bend. Could you not have taken one more pill?

A lot of people think God grants immortality
to those who believe in him, and maybe that is why none of the
greatest minds such as Tesla or Sir Isaac Newton never turned their
attention to living forever.

By the way I am currently searching for the
bright lights I have been told to expect and, so far, nothing. God,
if you exist, now would be the time to appear, you coy bastard.
Where are you?

I cannot even see my grandmother. She was
supposed to be waiting for me under a rainbow or something, with a
beatific smile on her face and a retinue of winged seraphim. And
unicorns. Okay, I never heard there would be unicorns, but if I am
going to go to the trouble of dying, there should be unicorns.

Hell. This is boring. I want to finish my
story about the banana,
not
not be.

Oh no! That did not just happen. I am going
to try to pretend that someone did not just put me in a box. I am a
person, not a pair of shoes. And why are they nailing it? Do I look
like I am about to escape?

Granted, I would if I could. It might even
be kind of fun to go lumbering around, arms outstretched, saying
“Rroww” or “Arggh.” I have the best Halloween costume ever now,
because it is authentic. Unfortunately, I do not feel scary, just
kind of helpless. The living scare me to be honest.

Who puts someone into a box?

Well, I do have one consolation: all the
writing I did. Maybe a part of me lives on inside the printed
ramblings I produced over the course of my lifetime. Maybe some
vestige of me remains inside them where they can still affect
people.

Okay, so I never got rich for my writing,
but I am confident that one day someone, maybe hundreds of years
from now, is going to wonder: “Who was this fascinating person who
wrote these awesome stories? How unfortunate that she never
finished the one about the banana! Perhaps our renowned literary
experts will piece together what she was trying to say by
extrapolating her point of view from her copious journal
entries.”

About the journal entries: I produced a ton
of them during my lifetime. And I was conscientious. To make it
easier for my biographers, I have labeled my journals by the year
on the bindings. That way they will be easier to reference in
academic literary journals. It was a trial to be so far ahead of my
time, of course, but posthumous glory is nothing to sneeze at. A
girl takes what she can get.

If I had known what was going to happen
today, I would have typed them up for clarity and legibility.
Otherwise, I might end up being egregiously misquoted.

I guess it is pointless to regret things. I
made plenty of mistakes but, for the most part, I did the best I
could.

There are some people who say you should
live every day as if it were your last. Bullshit! If I had done
that, I never would have finished college. Why study? I would never
have finished writing a single novel. I probably would have annoyed
the hell out of everyone saying things like, “Please, do not mourn
for me when I am gone. I want my funeral to be a happy funeral,
with clowns and mariachi bands and puppies with little party hats.
And of course, it would all be lies. If I am going to go to the
trouble of dying, somebody had better cry about it. In fact,
wailing and the rending of sack-cloth clothing would not be
excessive. And yes, you heard me right.
Sack
cloth.

I hate good-byes anyway. I even hated it
when my college classes would end, because I would get attached to
my professors and their weird sense of humor or their bad
comb-overs or how they would start talking about their vacations to
Europe instead of the DNA double helix or the Emancipation
Proclamation.

All endings suck, except the ones that end
pain, and even those are not ideal. Like with me now. No more
toothaches. No more worrying about what anyone thinks. No more gum
on the bottom of my shoes, no more waiting in longs lines or
cleaning up hairballs left by my cat.

But here I am. And I still want to finish my
banana story.

This may sound weird, but I used to mourn my
own death sometimes, at night. I would think about how sad it would
be for people to lose me or for me to lose myself, and tears would
spring to my eyes.

So for to any of you who are mourning me, I
am kind of mourning with you now. Like I said, I hate endings. But
I am still glad I got to be alive, even for a little while. I am
glad I got to eat ice cream and pet my cat and fall insanely in
love and watch bad movies and swim in the Gulf of Mexico.

But to do all that, I had to be bound up
with this rattly caged wagon called “time.” I spent too much of my
life grappling with the uncomfortable knowledge that life was
always in motion and looking for something that does not really
exist called “stability.”

Finally, I am free of time. At least, my
psyche is. And I think that was true before I was born, for the
billions of years following the Big Bang when there was no me. In
fact, the universe did not seem to be in any big hurry for me to be
born; I am a little insulted, to tell the truth.

So maybe I am not so much leaving as going
back, reuniting with the cosmos. Fortunately, I am a fan of the
cosmos. I think the cosmos is kind of like this toy I had when I
was a little kid called a “Lite Brite.”

It was a light box that had a flat black
surface with holes in it and it came with these little colorful
beads. Actually they were called pegs but I always thought of them
as beads, and I am the dead one here, so I get to choose what to
call them.

Anyway when you put the beads on the surface
and plugged in the screen, the beads would light up. You could make
patterns or images with the beads, and there was no limit to the
designs you could make.

I was never any good at making the
impressive images on the box like bunnies and castles. But I think
that maybe the cosmos is like that: kind of like a Lite Brite
trying to discover itself.

The patterns it makes might be pretty, but
if it wants to make new ones, it has to break the old ones down and
start again. But the beads are the same beads; in that sense,
nothing ever really goes away.

I admit, it is not much consolation. I was
always so upset when in kindergarten another kid would knock down
my “palace” of wooden blocks. If someone had told me “Stop crying!
The blocks are still there,” I would still have cried.

But back to the Lite Brite: I like to
imagine that one day, after an infinity of infinities have passed,
maybe the universe or multi-verse will want to try my pattern
again. It will say, “That was a weird experiment but kind of
interesting. Maybe I should give it one more try.” And I will find
myself alive again and eating chocolate and reading Ray
Bradbury.