THE THINGS THAT HE HAD SAVED TO WRITE
Babcia slept beneath no less than three layers of blankets at any time. In the winter there were many, many more. The afghan on the top used to belong to Charlie, but what did he need with an afghan? "Where have you been?" she asked when he entered the room.
"Sorry," Charlie would always say. He wasn't. What did he have to be sorry about? It was just an easy thing for him to say. Today he wasn't sorry that Babcia was missing The Price is Right. He found the remote where he had left it, sitting by her bedside. She never touched the thing. There was no need. Charlie was her remote. This was how most mornings began for Charlie, but on this particular morning he was running late.
"Turn it on," she urged.
Charlie turned it on. Drew Carey was hugging an enthusiastic contestant. She was young and pretty. The back of her t-shirt read "STAY CALM AND COME ON DOWN." Charlie guessed she was a grad student at Boulder, Colorado although she claimed to live in Miami. Her price tag read Margie. "I can't watch today, Babcia," Charlie explained. "I've got a deadline Friday, and my publisher is going to want to see something this time."
"That's nice. Can you turn it up a little?"
Charlie turned it up. "What about breakfast?" He asked.
"Nothing for me dear—why don't you sit down? You're blocking the TV."
Charlie stepped aside as one of Barker's former beauties pointed to things. "You have to eat something," he said.
"I'm not hungry," she replied.
"How about some juice?" Charlie asked.
Babcia considered this a moment. "Some juice would be nice," she said.
Juice was a good compromise, and Charlie was happy to escape his Babcia's sickeningly hot room. While downstairs, he grabbed a coffee mug from beside an idle laptop on the kitchen table and filled it. The Price is Right was on downstairs too and contestants' row was bidding on a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica while Charlie played from home. He had consumed libraries. Every room in the house was a testament to his scholarly appetites—books on shelves, books in cases, books stacked on the floor. His guess was over. He sipped cautiously from his mug and woke the laptop. It hadn't written anything while he was gone. This shouldn't be so hard. Why was everything always so hard for him? Sometimes he looked around and wondered how hard he was really trying. After all, this place wasn't exactly a wealth of inspiration. It was no wonder words were so hard to come by. He poured some cranberry juice into a cup and walked it back up the stairs to Babcia.
When Babcia had her juice, Charlie began a search of her bookshelves. He had a thought. "What are you doing back there?" Babcia asked.
"I'm looking for a book," he told her.
"You're missing Plinko," she observed.
That wasn't all he was missing. The thought he was having downstairs and the solution to all his problems was a hypothetical syllogism where B was a book, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. He found it on a shelf between the Danielle Steel. Charlie used to read to his Babcia before they discovered The Price is Right and Babcia was crazy for romance novels. Charlie rescued Hemingway from the shelf, flipped through its pages and read: "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."
"Did you say something dear?" Babcia asked.
He had been searching for the right words for weeks, but Hemingway had beaten him to it already. "Are you drinking your juice?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Good. I've got to get back to work," he said. "You're having visitors at twelve-thirty. I'll check in on you again before then."
"You aren't going to watch the Showcase Showdown?" she asked.
Charlie shook his head. "I'll check back in on you in a little while," he said and left the door open behind him.
Charlie took the book downstairs to the kitchen table and read it again. After awhile, he woke up his laptop. He typed a few words and then deleted them. Sometimes he would just type. He wondered if his neighbors were listening through the walls. If they were, he wanted them to think he was getting words down. He began to type again:
In a small town, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived one of those particular old gentlemen that kept pen and paper by his armrest in case he ever thought of something worth writing down. He was old enough now to wonder if he would ever write the things that he had intended to write. He doubted it.
Charlie read it aloud once more, to be sure, and deleted it. He hated to waste words but these weren't his. They belonged to Hemingway or someone else before him, but certainly not to Charlie. What did he know about it? He knew then that he would never be ready for his meeting on Friday.
The more he thought about it the less he wrote and the less he wrote the more he wondered whether he was cut out for this line of work. When Babcia was still working she had worked for the IRS— twenty-four years of her life —and she never said a word about it. She would talk, when sufficiently stimulated, about the places she had been and the people she had been there with, but never a word about the IRS. Charlie got the impression that she was ashamed of it somehow, but he never understood why. Why should anyone apologize for how they lived their life? What was the point in that? He shook his head and began to type again:
In a small town, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived one of those particular old gentlemen that kept pen and paper by his armrest in case he ever thought of something worth writing down. One particular morning, not unlike today, the particular old gentleman took up his pen and paper and began to write. The words that followed were imperfect and many were untrue, but it unburdened him to write them down all the same.
Charlie stopped typing and read it over, and when he was quite sure that he had missed the mark once again, he deleted them. He sat at the kitchen table, sipping his coffee and wondered how he would explain this failure to his publisher on Friday.
When Charlie clambered back up the stairs at quarter to eleven, he noticed that the hallway light was out again. He tapped at it speculatively, momentarily rousing it back to life, but this state was only temporary. It fizzled and flickered and then went out again. It had come to the end of its life and the only prescription now was replacement. Charlie made a mental note to himself and resolved to get around to it whenever convenient. "The nurse will be here any minute," he warned through the open door of Babcia's bedroom, but his Babcia never answered and there was a curious moment before understanding set it. Later on, Charlie wished he was paying closer attention when it happened. Babcia had been alive, if only in his mind, and in the span of that singular moment she wasn't. He touched her body. It was still warm, the only sign that life had ever engaged this old withered husk.
Conor O’Brien is an English major with a concentration in Literature. He’s a pretty good dude once you get to know him. He likes the things you like, and the very same things that bother you bother him too. He reads, and writes and contemplates complex questions. Ask him about it sometime.
