Chapter 1, the Book of Borriss: Borriss and THE MESS
In the mail that morning, Joe got a freshly clipped-off toe, express delivery. It had been squinched on its journey, but it obviously belonged to one of his manuscripts: he recognized the custom toenail polish. A tag with two letters was stapled to the flesh: RF.
Shit, that nail polish color doesn’t look as good as I thought, Joe noted dourly. I thought we were getting to the bottom of the barrel? No, there’s always more. The stunning variety of bullshit and evil. And now we have to pay a little guessing game. RF. Very clever. I just shat my pants laughing. Ha. I hope they at least spelled it right….
His tired rage was interrupted by the genius shrieking of Borriss the Spider (copyright untarnished!), who was hanging near Joe’s ear from a thread fixed somewhere on the obscured ceiling.
Borriss’s annoying peep seemed to come from the spot just between Joe’s peripheral vision and the sensory void:
“Revise Faster!” it said. “You fucking moron, it means revise faster! Otherwise all of your nice manuscripts will be found elsewhere, chopped into bits, and marked with some other dog’s piss.”
“Piss?”
“It’s a technical word for byline, cretin.”
“NO ONE USES THAT WORD ANYMORE!” howled The Hopelessly Expensive Mammalian Eating-Shitting-Scaryprison.
Joe called this second companion THEMESS for short. He had to live in it, so he could at least call it a shorter name, couldn’t he? But even this caused it to sulk.
“Cretin?” said Borriss. “I do so use that word. Particularly at you. Cretin cretin cretin cretin cretin.” He was addressing THEMESS rather than Joe; more often than not, the two of them talked over Joe’s head like he wasn’t there. It was one of the many reasons he had to hate them. It sickened him to even open the list.
“No, I meant byline,” THEMESS was saying. “And you know I meant it!”
“Oh, fuck off,” said Borriss elegantly.
“Fuck the nice manuscripts, we need money now!” THEMESS replied.
“That is way too many letters to be RF,” Borriss replied.
“NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNWOWNWOWNWOWNWOW!” (Their penchant for arguing in non sequiturs was around the middle of the list.)
Indeed, when the mail came, Joe had been furiously earning ten cents a word by writing down his own early work history as a garbageman. He was selling it to a manufacturer of electrical transmitters, who would use it as his own inspiring personal origin myth. The manufacturer had inherited the company, and hired someone else to run it; in the real world, the sum total of his labor had consisted of signing checks. But ten cents was a lot per word now. So Joe, feeling queasy, had signed the deal, and the manufacturer came to believe that the story was truly his own life story with disturbing speed. If the two of them stood in court, Joe suspected, the manufacturer would confidently claim it was he who had spent seven years cleaning up other people’s detritus; he likely would have passed a lie detector test. Joe might not. When a man gives away his life word by word, it becomes ever more difficult to claim what is real.
Twenty years earlier, ten cents per word had been an average rate for writing. Now it was a real find. Funny, since money was worth less now than it was then.
But then twenty years ago, things were sometimes difficult in that analog world, but often the hard came out as beautiful, there was a poignant something-or-other that they didn’t have time for now unless some elf or a dragon queen was looking sad, and now they were digitalized and… oh dear, Joe thought, now I can’t use that toe. Well, I can, but it will look like I’m the one who’s Copy McCatterson. Someone with money will always use my work as his own.
He turned back to his garbage tale and sighed. Although it was not one of his nice manuscripts, the subject matter was drawn from a particularly harrowing period of his life. It would have made a juicy autobiography, particularly since it had actually happened.
However, THEMESS had, as usual, incinerated $100 worth of food (very reasonably priced, and not gourmet or wasteful, thank you very much; not that it’s any of your business) in half the time it took to draw the most remotely passable false $100 bill (at one of the rare social dinners to which he was invited, Joe had once shared this fact before realizing his listeners would probably wonder how he knew that much about faking bills; he had not been invited to see any of them since). It was up to Joe to keep the macronutrients sliding into the mammal thing he rode around in. Keep the shit and the tasks coming. The question “why bother?” was so obvious it faded into the background. For a moment, he smelled something that reminded him of an old dead friend and he had to close his eyes So there he sat, giving away his garbage.
“Can we please do the nice manuscripts soon?” he finally said to THEMESS. “They’re the reason I’m not doing something that will get you even more food, you know. Maybe even a house that isn’t dirty.”
“Fuck your nice manuscripts,” THEMESS repeated, even though it had already won. THEMESS had mastered the art of whining while still being smug. They didn’t call it the scaryprison for nothing; it knew it would always win at the end. And most of the time along the way, too.
But Borriss had his own special skills. Now he indulged in a favorite: he scuttled round the ceiling at random in near-total silence. Then, at irregular intervals, he would scream. Joe knew that Borriss would be shrieking any time now, but he still flinched at each occurrence. Borris had learned to sense how long to stay quiet each time so that Joe would begin to relax a bit.
After a particularly skillful round of this game, THEMESS forced Joe to pause to vomit for a while. The garbage tale was already hours behind schedule.
“Revise faster,” Borriss said spitefully. He had his own way of being smug. “Only 22 hours till the mail comes again.”
“I think RF means Re-Food,” said THEMESS.
Borriss rolled all of his eyes and addressed Joe for once: “You could at least wipe the vomit faster.”
“If you don’t stop talking,” Joe said weakly, “THEMESS is going to vomit some more. And you know it,.”
“Ho ho ho, we all know each other pretty well, don’t we?” Borriss said. His self-satisfaction reminded Joe of why he hated his ex-girlfriend.
TO BE CONTINUED?
