Le Chef d'Oeuvre - Rene Magritte, c.1955
This is potentially the last update of this story as I only planned to put up the first chapter, which is now complete. I hope you enjoy these updates, and strongly request you read these previous parts first, else this part will make no sense:
"
It is said that man's greatest fear is his own mortality, but once this slight inconvenient blip has passed it simply becomes a matter of what he's going to do to pass the time.
And as I sat and watched with watering eyes the fine crumbs of burnt bread break off beneath my clenching fingers, I was not, except by extension, in fear of my approaching death. Though if I'd have known how quickly is was travelling it might have merited more forethought.
For I had already discovered a fear that could make a man flee the gates of Eden, eschew the warmth of love, and shun the comfort of life. It was a fear that had been on my lips as soon as I had awoken this morning, but that had been for some time slowly rising and frothing through my subconscious until my tongue could taste its scum. It was, put simply, the nerve shattering, debilitating, soul destroying realisation, that if I planned to continue living as I did, I would need to find a proper job.
*
"I'm sorry sir, but I don't think I quite understood what you just said." It was two hours later, and I was in a library. This is confusing, and I would imagine the majority of readers would have some form of problem with my sudden appearance in such a place, but so did the people in the library, and I shall simply say to you what I said to them. Which is that life is full of unexpected intrusions, and that if you're going to sit around all day and draw your vicarious pleasure mainly through reading about other peoples' lives, you can't complain too much when life comes along out of the blue and shouts at you.
"It's fairly quite simple." Said I. "I need a job because I've run out of toast, and I need to work here because of utmost importance."
I looked down at the timid girl behind the reception desk with slightly reeling, obstinate eyes, and attempted with a slight casual smirk and downward gesture of my head to make her laugh so as to show my joviality. However it appeared to make her quiver slightly and I decided somewhere in the back of my mind that dutch courage had probably been more detrimental than one would have originally hoped, and quickly recalled the gesture, hoping my bemusement and slight irritation didn't show through in its stead.
"I'm sorry sir, I just don't really understand why you keep saying that you need to work here."
"Because I don't like people, and if I have to work with them, I want to work somewhere where they're at least not allowed to talk." At this I slammed my fist, perhaps overly hard, down on the table and the girl gave a sudden jerk, snapping the pencil with which she had been toying nervously below the desk cleanly in two. By now I was beginning to get serious looks of mutiny from several passing browsers, and I began to wonder nervously if this was already a lost cause.
"Listen, Um…" glancing quickly down at the girl's breast I noticed the absence of a name badge, and this annoyed me greatly as I had always wanted to use that line. "… I know you're busy, and I don't want to keep you long from whatever it is you're doing on that computer, so I shall state my case boldly, and as simply as an honest man knows how.
"I really need a job, and that is making me very depressed. What I essentially need is to be able to sit in a library all day long and read, and occasionally, as way of compensation, talk to customers, and stamp things out. I believe you, or somebody else here could just give me this job, because libraries are homely, and don't require all the rigorous interviewing and criminal record checking that other places, like banks, might."
At this point I paused for dramatic effect and drew myself up to my full height of 5"10 and a half before delivering my final flourish. "On top of this I am of course a writer, which means that I may even one day build on your very own market, and you can put a blue plague right over your very own chair to show where I wrote some of my most very best work. So all in all I think that's all fine and I shall start tomorrow if that's when you need me."
I always feel it important when recounting my last few hours to do so honestly, and I make no apologies for illogical arguments, poor use of language, or a tragic sense of waste. Because that is how I remember them. However, I am compelled to express to you that how I interact with other people is not generally how I actually am, or more aptly, how I wish to see myself as being. One of the major problems I have always faced as a person is the conveyance to other people of genuine sincerity in my character, and I have often found myself playing up, either to peoples' ill-informed perceptions of me, or my own ill-judged notions of what I perceive they expect me to be. Often I appear more abrasive, more divertingly indignant, more arrogantly assured than in actuality I am, and whilst in its extremes it is largely due to drunken ornateness, I do sometimes wonder, when by myself , alone in a dead man's spare room, if there is an element of subconscious projection involved. As though I am a clown, painting a thin facade of a character over my own distinguishable features, so that when people laugh I can feel they laugh at the character I have created, as opposed to the tragic figure I embody beneath it.
Needless to say none of the bathetic pathos of my tragically anti-climatic life helped convince a girl from the local sixth form doing work experience in a small library that she should lead a coup to seize, and then unwisely use, the power to employ members of the public, in a form of communist satire. And I would be lying if I said that I didn't secretly know, ten minutes later as I stumbled through the revolving doors and out onto the pavement of the street outside, that that approach was never going to work. I believe that somewhere hidden deep inside my mind I had the notion that if I got myself systematically rejected from all the jobs suitable for me, I could still convince myself that I had gallantly tried, and that it was other people, in this instance, who were to blame.
All the same, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself as I turned from the entrance of the library and, wrapping my shabby overcoat tight around me, for it was bitingly cold, even though it was the middle of May, began to walk purposefully, but without particular reason, down the road.
I wandered aimlessly up and down the high street for a further few hours, trying to sum up the courage to apply for a job in various shops that seemed quite, and dusty, but all this proved fruitless. I stopped at a coffee shop with outdoor seating, went in and bought a strong black coffee, found a seat outside on the pavement, and lit up a cigarette. I watched the steam and smoke entwine and dance in the cold but gentle breeze for a while, rising and falling like two graceful dancers in the mid noon sun, before I began feeling listless and decided to start heading back to the house. My thoughts now anchored by the weight of the coffee from the tumult of a drunken sea, I began to think a little about the novel I planned to write that would bring me notoriety in high literary circles. I had little idea what it would be about as of yet, but I was fairly sure that the protagonist would be a disconnected, young, but dissatisfied writer, trying to give coherent form to his work through themes that permeated and troubled his own life, but being impeded by his inability to find articulation for vague notions that swam through the murky waters of his consciousness. As I rounded the corner onto my road, and saw the house looming ominously in the distance, I had decided that, dissatisfied with his job and his insipid relationships with women, my character would embark on a journey through the streets of London, experiencing and being exposed to the extremities of drunkenness, violence, sex, and perverted debauchery in all of it's rawest forms. And by the time I was entering in at the garden gate I was debating whether this exposure to such events would beget articulation or lead to his self destruction through physical temptation. By the time I was pushing the front door open, I was so engrossed in the finer details of the plot and themes that I didn't even notice I had apparently forgotten to lock it. And, as I entered the kitchen to fling my coat over the back of a chair and make more coffee, I had so nearly woven the interlinking subtexts into such a perfect tapestry of literary wealth, that I did not at all notice the stunningly beautiful black haired girl sat, cross-legged, pale faced, and red lipped, on the chair across from the door. But I caught a fragment of something intoxicating floating the normally musty air, something delicate yet dominating, that ensnared the senses and made them want to fall willingly to their knees. I was so startled by the apparent apparition of a girl in my kitchen that I dropped the coffee cup I had managed to get all the way out of the cupboard in alarm and spun round as she rose to meet me.
"Derek Green?" She asked, her voice penetrating yet soft.
"No." I responded in alarm.
"I'm sorry." She said, as from the folds of her hands I saw a flash of something silver and sharp. But her voice was distant now, detached, yet full of something else, something undefinable. And then something rather unexpected happened. I died. Rather slowly, and very horribly."
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