Day 2

I was going to be a novelist. That’s what I told myself then. That’s how I justified working at a university bookstore a full two years after I’d graduated from the same university. I told myself that when the time was right, when it was meant to be, I’d write my novel. And then, I’d sell it. I’d live off the royalties for the rest of my life, doing whatever I felt like. Heck, maybe I’d even write another one if I got bored of that.

I was a stupid kid. I spent all this money on writing books, magazines, and every piece of software that came out promising to help me write the thing, or to effectively write it without my having to do any real work. I told myself I was going to be a novelist. And I believed it. That’s why, the summer before Owen Sinclair and I got an apartment together, I told him my plan.

It was a party he didn’t belong at. Heck, I don’t know if I belonged there, but I was closer to the type who did. It was a forty-hands night, the type of thing that had everyone in attendance floundering up and down stairs and through hallways, giant brown bottles duct-taped to each hand. The rule was you couldn’t pee or free your hands until you finished both, and you couldn’t do that too fast unless you wanted to puke. The purpose of the party, apropo of nothing, was to drink.

I was halfway through my second forty, sitting in the basement near a girl I was trying to impress - she wasn’t interested, but I didn’t care. “I write books. I’m going to be famous.” The truth was apparent - I was drunk and would do no writing, and would do no being famous either. She knew it, and I think when she got up to leave I knew it too. Plans don’t matter to anyone until they’re no longer plans.

I stared at the ends of my arms for a few minutes, at the two glass apertures that had replaced my hands. I took a long drink of the second bottle, and belched. When I looked up again there was a boy sitting where the girl had been.

“I’m Owen Sinclair.” I stared. His bottles were, from where I sat, full.

”I was sitting over there listening to you talk to that girl. Are you really writing a novel?”

My mouth was dry, my tongue was numb. I squeezed my bottles with every bit of strength in my fingers.

”I’m writing the best novel anyone will have ever read.”

He clicked his bottle tops together and leaned forward, interested.

”Really?”

“Sure, why not? Why the hell do you care?”

“Let’s say I help you do it.”

”You? What can you do? Babysit me? Tell me everything I’m writing needs to be rewritten? Jesus, man. No one can write it but me.”

The alcohol was beginning to take hold. His shoes were extremely large. Velcro shoes - I hadn’t seen those since middle school.

“Listen, man. It’s all real simple. You see, a hundred million books have been written so far by humanity, maybe ten or twenty thousand of those were any good. Now, what if I could...”

That was the first night I heard it. Owen’s idea. And it might not have made much sense then, seeing how I was. But after hearing it again, and again (the idea was always the topic of our conversations after that, after I remembered I’d seen Owen Sinclair in the newspaper for doing some really groundbreaking work with computers) it began to make a majestic sort of sense. Whatever he’d done before, whatever computer thing he’d done had apparently been big; big enough for the university to award him a five-hundred-thousand dollar grant to work on his next project.

And his next project was Sally.

Sally lived in the basement.