The One about the Sailor

There was a diligent writer who lived modestly in a single studio, in the heart of a great metropolis. For the better part of his career he subsisted on the humble royalties his collections of poetry and short fiction garnered him. He was scarcely known by any but the most devoted readers of the monthly literature rags that gathered dust in the top shelves of tobacco shops and libraries. He was an auteur, an artiste, and though he had no great opinion of his own talents, went to sleep nourished by the belief that he was living an authentic life. Many years had passed since the day he sacrificed a promising career in gardening for the torturous glamour of writing. His right thigh still bore the scar from where he had snapped his trowel in two.

But he was always hungry. It was a never-abating misery in the pit of his stomach that distracted him terribly from the pure joy of crafting words. One day, a week after his last royalty check had been spent on a few slices of paper and a bag of cheese rinds, he found himself staring listlessly out of his window, unable to write, unable even to think longer than a few moments about anything other than the gnawing acid in his belly. He stared for one tragic moment down into the bustling depths of his great city, and contemplated with total sincerity the fall that would put an end to his art – and his hunger too. Just as the writer began to pry open the window with his nails, fate chose then to intervene. His phone rang.

He did not answer it. Rather, he stood paralyzed with fear, and a cold sweat began to trickle down his back. Below, a hundred metre fall separated him from sweet annihilation; behind him, a phone – whose bill had not been paid for at least six months – rang without cease. He turned slowly, fearfully, and stared at it. Ring! Ring! Ring! Whoever it was, he thought, must be profoundly confused to be calling someone whose phone did not work. And were they ever persistent, too!

Then – suddenly – a knocking came at his door. Knock! Knock! Knock! This was far too much for one day! The writer went pale and curled into a whimpering ball. No one but the landlord ever visited him, and he had a key and thus no reason on earth to be knocking. He also recalled that landlords tended to be angry people who carried eviction notices and warrants and brought police officers and social workers, and so he concluded that whoever this was couldn’t really be that bad. “Who… is it?” he inquired gingerly, after a moment.

“Let us in!” came the muffled voice from behind the door, whose owner was busily rattling the door knob. The writer stood, reluctantly, and opened the door. Two men dressed in sharp and obscenely expensive suits greeted him, “We’ve got great news for you! You’re going to be a rich man!”

When the writer awoke several hours later, after having fainted, he was not staring up at the peeling paint of his ceiling. He was, rather, looking at the plush leather interior of a limousine. This really tipped him off that something was afoot. Limousines were not the sort of things people like him usually awoke in. In fact, he had always believed their existence to be a sort of ridiculous joke created by the wealthy to ridicule the poor, and would not have been surprised to discover their interiors consisted entirely of cardboard boxes. Nevertheless, he was now without a doubt resolutely sitting inside one. To make matters more disconcerting, there was seated across from him a gruff-looking man with a receding hairline and numerous gold chains around his neck that rested in a little mound on the plateau of his rounded belly. “Glad you’re awake!” he said, his voice several octaves higher and more than a few coats of honey sweeter than he had expected. The man, after all, had a moustache.

“You sir,” he continued, “are a genius!” He pulled out a crumpled manuscript that looked like it had been read far more than necessary, and waved it at him. “In all my twenty years as a publisher, I have never seen something quite as deliciously marketable as this! The One about the Sailor,” he said, reading the title with a wistful sigh. “Gold! Pure gold!”

As it turned out, the publisher, who employed a legion of agents to scour every inch of the printed world for the slightest hint of talent, had happened upon this one story about a sailor; it was a work of remarkable wit, prose that melted like truffles upon the tongue, and with a twist so clever and enigmatic, yet nevertheless so brilliantly apt and unexpected, that it inspired countless revisits. The little magazine’s editor was immediately contacted; and, he, with a nose quick to catch the unmistakable fragrance of profit, hastily furnished the publisher with the writer’s name.

No time was wasted in contacting the writer. His debts were quickly and painlessly annihilated, and the publisher began immediately thereafter arranging with him the mass publication of the work along with a collection of other stories. In a flurry of papers and signings, the writer relinquished the story’s film rights, the overwhelming majority of royalty payments, and a number of other ridiculously important privileges whose significance was utterly lost upon him.

The next month consisted of wild and unmitigated success. The story headlined in a brilliant anthology of new short fiction, entitled enigmatically The One about the Sailor…. He was not the only contributor, but his work received without question the greatest critical – and popular – acclaim. It was heralded as “a work of virtuosic mastery,” as “proof that the mysterious art of literary prestidigitation has not been lost,” and, “a glorious accomplishment of intricate self-reference that does not, for one instant, sacrifice the simple joy of a story told vigorously and well.”

The writer appeared on various talk shows, was profiled in several major glossy magazines, and was even allowed a cameo in the upcoming blockbuster film The Sailor. His mind was a flurry of success, and his belly never had a moment to pause and reflect upon its total and sudden absence of hunger. The extravagant soirees with celebrity writers, the press conferences, the gala dinners, and the numerous prize ceremonies for short fiction all seemed to require the consumption of delicious multi-course meals. The writer began to gain weight.

However, one night, after a particularly flattering book signing session – the line had wound itself completely around the block – the writer staggered home to his new and lavish apartment, exhausted, drunk, and a bit bewildered. With a bottle of whisky in one hand, he began tearing apart the old boxes that contained the many stories he’d written over the years. When he had opened them all and scattered their contents across the floor, he moved out onto his enormous balcony and stared for one tragic moment down into the bustling depths of the great metropolis. And in that moment he knew, despite all his frenzied years upon the earth, that he had never written a story about a sailor.