There was some interest, so here you go. This is the first page of my final draft of my book. I'll spoiler it.
I used to think I was good.
Not just competent—good the kind of good that rewrote the rules. I bled onto every page like it meant something. My books weren’t the pastel-covered slop they stack beside the Hudson News register for divorcées on layovers. They were manifestos disguised as entertainment, and for a little while the world agreed with me.
The first Raul Arroyo trilogy started as a lark: a working-class revolutionary on a rust-red mining planet who accidentally starts a war that eats three star systems. I wrote it angry, hungover, twenty-eight years old, convinced I was the first person to ever notice capitalism was ugly. The book sold a million copies in hardback. People got Raul’s face tattooed on their forearms. Someone sent me a photo of a newborn named Raul Arroyo Novak. Hollywood called. I bought a penthouse in Soho with cash and told interviewers I’d never sell out.
Then came book two, bigger, louder, dumber in all the ways the market loves. Raul Halloween costumes appeared next to Sexy Nurse and Inflatable Dinosaur. I did the late-night circuit in a thrift-store leather jacket, pretending I still took the train. The money got cartoonish. I stopped counting.
Book three was supposed to be the masterpiece. Instead it was the suicide note.
I don’t remember writing most of it. I remember deadlines, and the way the city lights at 4 a.m. looked like circuitry, and the sweet chalky kiss of oxycodone melting under my tongue. I turned it in six months late, 220,000 words of pretentious fever dream. Critics used phrases like “self-parody” and “hostage video.” My editor sent flowers with the card, “We’ll fix it in paperback.” There was no paperback.
The morning the reviews dropped, I sat on the floor of my living room swallowing whatever pills were closest and watching my name trend next to the word “fraud. My mother’s photograph watched from the mantel—sepia, unsmiling, the same expression she wore the day she told me art was a hobby for people with trust funds. I stared at her until the frame seemed to ripple. Until her mouth moved.
“You were always mediocre, Jonathan,” she said, crisp as gin. “You just had good marketing.”
I punched the glass. The frame exploded; shards rained like brittle confetti. My knuckles opened in neat red smiles. I kept going—mirrors, television, the signed first editions I’d once framed like holy relics. I was systematic, almost tender, the way a surgeon is tender. When the rage ran out of objects it turned inward and found nothing worth keeping.
Eventually I stepped onto the balcony, dawn bleeding pink across the rooftops. Thirty-seven floors down, taxis crawled like yellow ants. The city hummed its indifferent hymn. I lit a cigarette with bloody fingers and felt, for one crystalline minute, believed I had transcended. I was pure perspective, a golden eye floating above the meat grinder. I would stay here, enlightened and untouchable, pissing wisdom down on the ants until they evolved or died.
