“We accept reality so readily—perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
1.
The writer started screaming next to the highways to see if the midnight traffic could match his screams. His currency in this world was toilet paper, the only medium that could contain all his thoughts in one unbroken scroll.
He wandered the world, finding himself in the slums of Kathmandu, where cows lumbered through the streets eating loose articles of garbage; down Tamil Road, where nightly blackouts sent dogs into a frenzy; up the Himalayan mountains, in the rawest sunshine he had ever known, drinking in swirls of oxygen and vistas of the villages below.
What would he do now, when there was no other peak to surmount?
He jumped from the mountain, only to feel the stillness of his creative tap—the slow drip of narcotics.
“This is what peace must be. To be free from thoughts, from words,” he later wrote.
And then, all of a sudden, he awoke, remembering—accepting—that he was not yet finished. There was still the original scroll, the blind writing that had kept him mad, the composition crumpled into a hopelessly complex ball.
That time of madness: Samsara and déjà vu, passionate caresses and cigarettes afterward. He feared the words themselves—feared that once they were known, they would lead to his demise. What megalomaniac dribbling, they would call it. And yet, if it were only a vessel—if his words could save one life, or even the world.
Loose pages in a whirlwind. A deluge of text, a storm of nouns, adjectives, and verbs—billions of forms circling a rolled-up ball, a symbol of shame, serifed and searching for an egg, rather than being flushed away after ecstasy.
2.
He scribbled in the basement, surrounded by gangster moths and mafioso centipedes. The fluorescent light flickered. The stove glowed pale blue, knives burning in methane flame. It was a world of poverty, a private theater of invention, decorated with plastic flowers and dark-leafed plants—the kind that grow at the bottom of a rainforest and flourish in the dark.
He hitchhiked to Hollywood, waited tables at trendy bistros, went to the right parties, played at beauty, disguising his destitution as a fashionable choice. The next idea came after reading an abandoned manuscript on a New York City subway—defeated, used, and worst of all, undesired.
He read the jagged letters and was struck by awe and shame—even envy—though the journal was clearly incoherent. He went home and began writing, absorbed by the abandon that the other writer must have felt, a liberty that comes only when a writer writes for no one—not even himself.
The scrawl was schizophrenic. Words—holy and daring—challenged anyone to contest their value.
A ragged manifesto, left behind by some prophet, another soul lost to the Fentanyl Wars.
Forget plot. Forget action. Forget character.
Words are cages. They are also keys.
Cloudy Arizona. The Sonoran Desert in rainfall—flowers blooming, the oasis returning, rainbows breaking open the sky.
Peyote and tacos. The eternal cartoon. The ego melting away. He finally let go.
He embraced the new freedom—running through the desert naked, a muddy script wrinkled from the rain, a portable typewriter on a desk beneath flickering moths and bare bulbs, trying to force out short verses and dialogue.
Kimonoed girls walked in the distance, holding Japanese umbrellas under the sun.
But that was only a tattoo.
3.
Time gently lapped at the edges of the sidewalk.
A twisting path led to the edge of the woods.
Nimbus clouds.
Infinite streetlights.
A road to the city that divided the rich and the poor, with water as its only boundary.
The city was impregnated with exploding nebulae from the skies.
Neon lights—twinkling hieroglyphics. Dusky temple rooms, gleaming, then robbed.