….The building’s exterior was an urban collage
of brightly colored but illegible tag art, and glass and metal mesh. The floors
inside were made of wood that might have been painted gray at sometime or other,
but had probably not been replaced since the place had been a warehouse, as
had been most of the buildings on Arthur’s block, not that Arthur paid
much attention. He seldom left his apartment and knew nothing of his neighborhood
or his neighbors in the building.
~Along the hall to his apartment the walls were all new, unpainted drywall,
because his wing had just been remodeled. Bare bulbs that hung from cords in
the ceiling only worked intermittently, and cast long shifting shadows around
Arthur F. Ward as he transferred a smoking cigarette to his lips, and a six-pack
of beer to his left arm in order to dig the keys out of his pocket. His lock
always took several tries before it would open.
~The echoed clip-clop of hard-soled shoes on hardwood announced the approach
of a non-descript girl of around eleven or twelve, in a plain brown dress, with
the kind of dirty-blonde hair that was only a couple of years from turning completely
brown. By the swaying lights her dancing shadow stretched towards him and retracted
in turns as she skipped down the hall in his direction, singing to herself in
a barely audible whisper, ashes, ashes, they all fall down. Finally his key
turned in the lock.
~He sighed with relief upon re-entering his apartment. As he became settled
into this life of monastic devotion to his own ability to turn a phrase, he
found he liked leaving his apartment less and less. Within the confines of his
limited domain, Arthur F. Ward ruled with the whimsical autonomy of universally
acknowledged creator. Whenever he ventured beyond outside those confines he
grew frustrated with his own creator’s failure to meet Arthur’s
perfectionist expectations of plot-driven propriety. “God,” he once
said during an interview on NPR, “is a hack. Artists are the copy editors
who painstakingly revise his work for suitable presentation.”
~The rigor and discipline of his craft were big things with him, in his work,
essays about his and other peoples’ work, scant conversations, and cover-letters.
As an artist he was obliged to make concessions to the more contemplative, and
therefore in his eyes idle, aspects of his craft, but he kept such indulgence
to an impoverished minimum. When he sat down to begin writing, he never allowed
himself to stare off into nothing for more than a minute: always in the same
position, painfully upright posture with his fingers held suspended over the
keys, always the same expression, eyes rolled back and probing as though the
next line was scratched on the inside of his skull behind his left temple. He
never allowed himself to smoke until he had written a paragraph, never got out
of his chair until he finished a page, when he peed and put on coffee. Arthur
F. Ward never paced.
~That is why he was so surprised when the repetitious squeaking of his floor
boards drew him out of a trance to realize, without remembering when he had
started, he was pacing and smoking. Beside him on the sink-counter his percolator
coughed at him urgently. He had a vague memory of attempting to make coffee
but apparently he forgot to put water in the coffee-maker. Meanwhile, all the
way across the one room flat a cursor blinked expectantly in the upper left
corner of a perfectly blank white screen which stared at him with unwavering
faith. Upon further assessment, his impatience with this lapse in self-possession
grew hostile as he dimly recalled that he had been singing Ring Around the motherfuckin’
Rosy to himself while all of this was permitted to transpire.
~He shut off the percolator and stubbed out his cigarette. With furious determination
he crossed to his desk and, assuming an absurdly rigid pose in his kneeling
chair, he masochistically plodded through four query letters back to back without
pausing in-between. This particular self-punishment annoyed his agent who usually
wrote these, and often had to replace letters he had already written with Mr.
Ward’s far less diplomatic ones.
©DCSmith 2004