The Author is Dead continued


        The next day, the author puts the young nurse character into his story, making her the person who views his death on the slab, though in his dream of the previous night he wasn't actually allowed the satisfaction of dying; he woke up before the gunshot shattered his dream-world skull (he always wakes up).  The dream was a recurring dream, though each time he viewed it the details changed.  On some nights the doctor was female and the nurse was male; on other nights, the music which came out of the vents in the dream-ceiling was by some other group or artist - the theme song to "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" was often replayed - or it wasn't a gun that (would have) killed him (had he slept), but another sort of instrument:  an axe, a saw, a cinched noose…

        He is sitting at his desk, writing the second chapter of his fictitious death story, which he's given the working title, "The Death of a Writer."  There is a knock at the door.  Who could be visiting at this hour?  He doesn't have any friends; he's a miserable, depressed writer, after all!  The only time he leaves his apartment is to go teach his obligatory classes, or to shop for bottled water and yogurt (the latter for his sensitive digestive tract).  There's that damned knocking again - someone is at the door for sure.  What a nuisance!  He isn't expecting any books from Amazon, or Chinese herbal supplements, or…He shuts his laptop, and then hobbles to the entranceway.
        "Who's there?" the grumpy author says.  "Go away, I'm writing my death."
        "Special delivery for a 'Morris N. Steine.'"
        "Really?  Who's it from?"
        "It doesn't have any return address on it, sir."

        He hesitantly cracks the door open to have a peek.  Something tells him he shouldn't trust his uninvited visitor, but it is already too late: the man with the fake package kicks open the door and shoves a revolver in his face.  It is the doctor again, disguised as a mustachioed postal worker.

        "Now, you die for real," the fake postal worker says.  "You are so indecisive, Steine.  No wonder none of your books sell.  You keep delaying the climax, over and over, and by the time anything happens you've already put the reader to sleep."
        "Have you actually read any of my books?" our anti-hero (the living, breathing author) asks.
        "Of course not.  You haven't yet published any, have you?"
        "Um, I think you've just contradicted yourself…"

        Ignoring the grumpy author, the postal worker/doctor laughs a self-satisfied, obnoxious laugh (more a guffaw, really) and shoves the shaft of the gun into the author's right nostril.  The author smiles weakly, anticipating his own death-his life flashes before his eyes:  his painful childhood growing up in suburbia; his father sitting and drinking beer in front of the "boob tube"; his childish crush on that Reborn Christian girl (her name was Mary, of course); his attempt at strangling himself with a piece of kite rope in the second grade (on account of said Reborn Christian girl); his writing depressing (and depressingly) hackneyed poetry in high school; his first, mind-blowing encounters with the work of Beckett, Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Sartre (though not necessarily in that order); his first real date as a freshman in college (an unmitigated disaster); his first sexual experience in the parking lot of a strip mall…But before he can relive all of the memories, he is transported back to the glaring white page on his screen and its incessant, blinking cursor (it is called a cursor because all it ever does is curse at writers! he thinks to himself with contempt).  This dying on paper business isn't as easy as he thought it would be.  He'll have to start all over again …

        And so, once again, he begins to write.  This time, however, he will make sure that he dies a horrible, irreversible death, one the reader will never be able to erase from his or her memory…Teach you to call me indecisive, you good for nothing bag of slime!  Where would you be without my imagination anyway, eh?  Tell me now, Doc…

III.