Falling Out of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

grow weary of his performance and turn to leave—
    CENTAUR: That’s how it is with me, clerko, that’s how I’m built. No getting around it. I can’t understand anything until I write it. Really understand, I mean.
Veritably!
What are you looking at? Again with that waif face? I’m talking about actually writing, not just regurgitating what a thousand people before me have chewed up and vomited, like you are so fond of doing, eh, keeper of the notebook? Snooping, snipping, jotting down every single fart with your precious handwriting, eh? Well then, write this, please, in big letters, giant ones:
I must re-create it in the form of a story!
Do you get that?
It
, you idiot! The thing that happened! What’s not to understand?
It!
The sonofabitch thing that happened to me and my boy. Yes—mix it into a story is what I need to do, have to do. And it must have plots! And imagination! And hallucinations and freedom and dreams! Fire! A bubbling cauldron!
    TOWN CHRONICLER: Large beads of sweat roll down the channels of his nose. His face is a crimson tempest. I feverishly write completely transfixed by him not looking at the page my hand rushing on its own
    CENTAUR: That’s the only way I can somehow get close to it, to that goddamn
it
, without it killing me, you know? I have to dance around in front of it, I have to move, not freeze like a mouse who sees a snake. I have to feel, even just for a minute, just half a second, the last free place I may still have inside me, the fraction of a spark that still somehow glows inside, which that lousy
it
couldn’t extinguish. Ugh! I have no other way. You have to get that:
I have no other way
. And maybe there
is
no other way, huh? I don’t know, and you wouldn’t understand, so at least write it down, quick: I want to knead it—yes,
it
, the thing that happened, the thing that struck like lightning and burned everything I had, including the words, goddamn it and its memory, the bastard burned the words that could have described it for me. And I have to mix it up with some part of me. I must, from deep inside me, and then exhale into it with my pathetic breath so I can try and make it a bit—how can I explain this to you—a bit mine, mine … Because a part of me, of mine, already belongs to it, deep inside it, in its damn prison, so there might be an opening, we might be able to haggle … What? Write it down, you criminal! Don’t stop writing. You stand there staring at me?Now that I’ve finally managed to get out a single word about it, and breathe … I have to create characters. That’s what I want, what I need. I must, it’s always like that with me. Characters that flow into the story, swarm it, that can maybe air out my cell a little and surprise it—and me. Yes, I want them to betray me, betray
it
, the motherfucker. I want them to jump it from this side and the other and from every direction and back to front and upside down, let them ram it up the ass for all I care, just as long as they make it budge even one millimeter, that’s enough, so that at least it moves a little on my page, so it twitches,
    and just makes it not
    so
    so impossible
    to
    anything.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: He stops. There is terror in his eyes, as though the ground is falling away beneath his feet and he is plunging down as I watch. He lifts one arm feebly, as if to grab me. Only now, Your Highness, do I begin to grasp what has been right in front of my eyes this wholetime: the notebook, the pens on the desk, the empty pages—
    I stare at the bulky, crude creature. This was not something I had ever imagined.
    CENTAUR: Now get out of here. I beg you, leave. But come back, yes? You’ll come back? When? Tomorrow?
    TOWN CHRONICLER: The next day, in a dusty drawer in the town archives, I locate his file. He was not lying: until a few years ago, he used to write stories. Poems, too, and ballads and one epic. I noticed that the experts generally wrinkled their noses, although he did garner the