Lemmings, the Cliff and the Shining Sea
The writer guy wakes up one morning miraculously inspired to work again. Mind you, he has had no contact with anyone from the outside in decades, except for the troll-like personage who brings him food twice per day through a little slot in the door, but with whom writer guy never exchanges anything but the most insubstantial dialogue (in the form of low harrumphs and taps of the foot). So writer guy has completely forgotten how to have a conversation with a normal human being… He has lost the capacity for live give-and-take. The idea that’s in his head for his next book is, therefore and accordingly, more than a little bit fukhakhde.
The gist of the plot of the book is this:
A man who’s been living for decades with no human contact decides to write a book. He has decided that he will write but one word per day. After working on the novel for several years, he dies suddenly and the body is not discovered until the next Ice Age by some alien archeologists exploring the Dead Earth (yeah, just like AI). The head alien archeologist takes the incomplete novel back to the Home Planet. The book contains 612 words, comprising 4 paragraphs. To read the 612 words straight through, as if they were just plain English… Well, fuck it… I’ll just show ya the 612 words:
Imagine a train, making its way around a circular track, and on the train, a sleeping passenger, sitting with his newspaper folded on his lap (ready to slide to the floor), who startles awake suddenly on account of some fleeting dream trauma. The passenger, who is perfectly alone on the train, awakens just in time to see the train pull into a certain station, that he instantly recognizes as the station where he should get off, although the name of the station according to the numerous signs is entirely unfamiliar to him, as is the woman who is standing on the platform waving her arms in frantic joy trying to get his attention. Just as the beauty of the woman begins to insist itself on his senses, and he even begins to fabricate in his mind recollections of having loved her deeply some long lost lifetime before, he arrives into her arms and meets her kiss, still with a measure of confusion…more