by William Routhier
One afternoon of no seeming importance I bought an ink stamp, without a hint, at the time, of the imprint this simple, seemingly innocuous device would put on my life. I had been lazily wandering down Charles Street in Boston, and stepped into at a quaint, odd, orderly shop there, called Black Ink. The shop sells various unusual, fanciful articles; frog coin banks, vintage style aluminum windup toys (a silvery Zeppelin on wheels and 'Atomic Robot Man'), Felix the Cat clocks, votive candles, as well as inks and pens, fine papers, ink pads and stamps. The stamps, of which there are hundreds, are cut, by some engraving process, into flat red rubber, then glued to wooden blocks of various holdable sizes, square and rectangular, the stamps themselves extremely intricate in rendered detail and numerous in variety; half-moon faces, anatomical skeletons, leaping kangaroos, fairies in flight, railroad engines, grinning cats, Victorian Englishmen, Buddha statues. None of the stamps are ordinary.
One can use a stamp in any way the imagination permits, but the most common usage is to affix the imprint on the bottom of a letter or as decoration on cards and envelopes. Being fond of putting such stamps at the bottom of my letters, I had gone in to see if I could find a new one to catch my fancy that day. I did, one I hadn't seen before, a hand holding a pen, the pen comprised of a plain round stick with a nib. The hand holding it had a cuff with a button and the beginning of a jacket arm, and that was where the drawing ended. The pen in the hand was held under the first finger, the thumb supporting it. It was a right hand, and for me, that was an incorrect detail, since I am left handed, but I bought it anyway.
Here is the stamp itself.
I used the stamp on several letters to friends who were also writers. It seemed a congenial thing to put at the bottom, an affirmation of our common work, the peculiar enterprise we shared. (I have heard no word from any of them of occurrences even slightly similar to the one I am about to describe.)
I decided one day to use the stamp on the outside of an envelope, a story I was sending to a magazine in hopes of it being published, but ultimately, as it turned out, the story was rejected by the magazine, though the editor did send a kind, handwritten letter in return, saying that although he liked and admired the story, (especially the lovely and poignant final image) it wasn't right for them.
At the post office, a pleasant, gray-haired woman working behind the counter, with whom I am on friendly terms, said she liked the stamp, which I had affixed to the bottom right corner of the large manila envelope holding the story. As she put the postage strip on the top right corner and stamped it with a red date circle, she said, "So when do you think it does its writing, when you're not looking?" I was startled by the cleverness and wit of the idea, and answered her with something not nearly as clever or witty, then left, with the image of the writing hand in my mind.
I dreamed that night of the writing hand, writing marvelous prose on a clean white page, and in my dream, the prose, which I read as the hand wrote it, entranced me with its beauty and dense clarity. I told myself in my dream that I must remember these perfect words when I woke in the morning, but of course, all I could remember on waking was the dream and the writing hand, but none of the prose itself.
The next night as I slept, the same dream came to me, with different and equally excellent prose, and again in the morning I had the frustration of not remembering anything of what the hand had written.
The night after that, on my writing desk, as I stopped the laborious work of re-writing my novel, finished for the evening, I placed, in front of my typewriter, a piece of paper with the stamped imprint of the writing hand in the upper left corner, in the spot where one would normally begin. (How I came to take such an odd leap of illogic, what drove me, a grown and reasonable man, to do this, I still don't know.) I placed both hands on the paper, closed my eyes for a moment and imagined the writing hand writing, opened my eyes, then went to bed, reading for a while from one of the technical whaling chapters of Moby Dick, which soon put me to sleep.
Again I dreamed of the writing hand writing its marvelous prose, unlike any I could ever construct. The dream was one of the most simultaneously exhilarating yet peaceful dreams I ever remember having. I woke refreshed yet oddly spent, and again remembered nothing of the actual words of the prose. I got up to have my coffee and then take a shower, and I subsequently walked around my apartment with a vague feeling of satisfaction, not unlike the kind one has some amount of time after a particularly delicious meal, when the memories of the tastes and flavors have disappeared, and what remains is a sweet feeling of sensual satisfaction.
I read a newspaper, planned the several errands I would have to do that day, then went to my writing desk to work on the next section of my novel, which had been very stubbornly blocking my progress.
I looked at the paper with the stamp on it, and was as if struck by electricity, every pore on my body erect, each hair straining to rise. The stamp, the night before on the upper left corner, was now at the bottom right. In a small, delicate and precise hand, was a block of text, thin-lined, obviously the product of a fine quill pen directed by a practiced hand. I read from the beginning to the end, and stumbled then backward, walked out of the room to my bedroom, lay spread on my back on the bed and fell into a shocked dreamsleep.
When I woke soon after, I rushed to the desk and read the passage again.
It was of my very first memory, of standing outside the hospital where my younger brother had just been born. I was with my father and older brother, by four years. I was two years old. My mother waved down from out the window at us, many floors above, and my father and brother waved happily back, yet I merely held my father's hand and gazed up at the window with the unformed and uninformed awe of a two-year-old, wondering at the strange mystery of a new person coming to our family, our home, to live and grow.
What was extraordinary about the passage was both the language and the precise detail with which the scene was rendered. My actual memory of this occurrence is slight and foggy at best, but in this prose the writing hand had captured all of the emotion a two year old might feel at the time, in what seemed to me to be an entirely new form of language, simple and profound and capturing the luminous, unquestioning associative thinking of a two year old, revealing a continuous string of sensory and mental perceptions and projections in startlingly beautiful poetic word-image, as if in that very mind-moment of time I had recorded, indelibly stored within my baby brain, the raw material for these exquisite remembrances, and the hand had somehow delved into my psyche and captured and imparted them in a complex yet clearly decipherable puzzle of words, marvelous code from a prodigious two year old. It rivaled, in my estimation, the beginning of Portrait of the Artist by Joyce; in fact, I believed it surpassed it.
I immediately recognized the implications of what the writing hand had done and might continue to do. I could not even think of writing for myself that day, and breaking the strict discipline I had kept for many years, did not go to my desk, but instead went for a long and profoundly thoughtful walk beside the Charles River, considering a thousand things.
That night I again put one page on the desk and affixed the imprint of the writing hand to the upper left corner of the top page. I again closed my eyes and held my hands to the papers, imagined the hand writing, and with some difficulty, restless with anticipation, fell asleep.
In the morning, immediately on waking, I went to my desk and found another page of the same, precise, startling prose, the hand resting in the bottom right corner.
It was again an episode from my earliest life, at five years old, a dinner of roast beef and gravy and vegetables and potatoes at my home, with roundtable family dialogue of ordinary yet complex implications, and it was recognizable even then the course my life would take. In the middle of the passage, an extraordinary thing occurred. The prose flashed forward to an episode in later life, to the smell of roast beef in a restaurant, there with my first wife and two children by that marriage, the smell connecting me in that moment to that memory of my childhood, and the swirl of recognition I had became a tying together of patterns, a Proustian moment, yes, but not in the slightest derivative, because, again, the strength of the language, the freshness of lyrical expression elevated it to a place of its own, its originality transcending comparison.
I read and reread the passage, in admiration of the detail of the memory, and at the same time with deep sadness at seeing my young family, who I was now largely estranged from, cast so poignantly in ink. However, that sadness was pushed aside by my growing awareness of the practical aspect - that the writing hand was poised to do something for me that I had not yet, in all my years of diligence and efforts, been able to come close to doing - create a masterwork. This night, as an experiment, I put two pages on the desk, completed my ritual and went to sleep. In the morning, I saw that the hand had left me two new pages.
It was an event from my life that I'd largely forgotten, a romance at the age of twelve, one that would only occasionally come wistfully to my mind, between me and pretty girl in my school at the time. She was a pianist, played for our eighth grade choir, and we somehow were paired and had danced once, very closely and passionately at a party, the type certain mothers of students put on in order to create such young pairings. Our dance aroused all the luxurious and confused emotions of first love, and though I felt I loved her afterward, and was haunted by the raw feeling of her against my body long afterward - I even called her name one night loudly in an empty field, hoping she would somehow intuit my cry, and hear - despite all of this, I lost her, let her go. She wasn't in my circle of friends, and was considered somewhat strange and bookish, and our burgeoning romance died, by awkwardness over my feelings and my eventual peer-pressured, feigned indifference to her. The passage the hand wrote brought back all of this story in an ache as real as if I had lived it yesterday, and I actually cried over the pages, for my loss and weakness.
I vowed to give up writing that day, turning it over to the writing hand, consigning myself to dreaming my dreams until it finished its task. That night I set down three pages. In the morning, however, I found just two of the three covered. The hand, it seemed, had its production limits, something which I understood. A thousand words a day was, after all, a respectable output for any writer.
My endeavors in this project, the hand's endeavors, lasted, strangely and poetically, two years, eight months and twenty five days - a thousand and one nights. It was as if the text of my life was written by a proxy Scheherazade, who in telling these tales would win me freedom from the prison of unrewarded toil and literary obscurity. I reluctantly now admit that, up to a certain point, I had come to consider the work to be in fact, if not in craft, my own - the stories were my life, my memories, after all, and I seemed to have learned, by no method I can guess, to carry the forward motion of the narrative from one night’s dream to the next, until the sequence was completed. I gradually grew comfortable with the notion that it was in essence my work, if not my writing, even to the degree where sometimes, when during the day I would read the previous night's production, I'd take extreme personal pleasure in it, inwardly congratulating myself on unique sentence structure or the complex, intertwining narrative lines, which had developed an increasing outward, social view, revealing wry and incisive commentary on the human condition. The personal themes were repeating ones - quest and vulnerability, passion and reserve, gain and loss - as they had appeared throughout my life, surfacing and disappearing in the text, often in rhyming images, mirrored over and again with deepening poignancy.
I actually believed in some part of me that I'd created it all, my self-satisfaction bordering, I realize, in retrospect, on insanity. My reasoning was this - I was the one actually thinking the remembrances, in my dreams, and my mind's recording of the original thoughts which were the basis for the prose that the hand wrote, therefore the writing had to ultimately be the work of inherent genius residing in my subconscious. I had observed and lived all of these events, with my own particular conclusions and observations, and if my mortal body and brain, with their corporeal weakness and imperfections, could not dredge up the poetry of my unbounded soul, this didn’t mean that I wasn't the rightful author of the ideas of that soul. The hand was but a conduit, a mechanism not unlike an actual pen, or language itself. It was fantastic to think of the hand doing it, yes, I'd stumbled on some new and superior thing to unearth innate genius, that much was true, but it was nothing more. Out of a dull-minded, mundane person's dreams, I imperiously reasoned, the hand would create plodding, sensationalist, sentimental or vulgar work. Or a combination of the above.
It was early into the third year of dreaming that I changed my mind about the hand's part in this, and at the same time stopped regularly reading the work the writing hand produced. The story had reached the point of my present life, and I began to wonder nervously if the hand would begin to tell the story of itself and its creation of my masterwork.
It didn't. In fact, though the hand wrote of my years of teaching English, (and seemed to particularly relish the telling of infidelities with a number of pretty young women students, a slant I didn't particularly object to) my writing life was curiously absent from the entire narrative, a large and important point I had somehow not realized before. All of the tales were of the people and events and relationships I have lived, yet my literary endeavors, which in time had affected many of those relationships, were not seen on stage. It was as if the hand considered them unimportant. The examination of my weakness and foibles, combined with a quixotic journey toward some kind of perfection, became the dominant theme, yet I didn't feel I was cast in bad light, merely a truthful, human one.
The new thing the hand began to write, however, were stories of my life, but those not yet lived. My future.
I read the beginning of the first entry of my future stories. (I am afraid I cannot repeat the story here, since it told of the near future, a time not yet come, and that time will have passed before this narrative is ready for publication, if it ever sees publication. So in confirming that the hand was indeed correct in its prognosis, (something I am not yet sure of) I might be accused of using literary trickery. As for the subsequent passages, as I've said, I never read them, for reasons obvious enough.) When I saw what it was telling, I stopped reading at the beginning of the second page, took the two pages and put them at the bottom of the ever-growing manuscript.
I continued, however, to dream and let the hand create this new work. The project had gone too far to stop it at some unresolved point. I reasoned, (if you could call it reason) that this was, after all, going to be presented as work of fiction, and since I was essentially a private man, no one knew all of the circumstances of my life. I would admit that yes, these volumes were largely biographical, but, as every writer does, I had combined or altered or exaggerated events to suit the telling, and imagined my future. I knew that at some point I would have to read the future pages, of course.
After the thousand and first night, as I said, the hand stopped. When on the next night, the thousand and second, there was nothing but blank pages, I felt a great sense of simultaneous relief and exhaustion. I had been haunted so long, before this had happened, by the belief in my innate genius, constantly imagining, in fever of anticipation, the kind of thing every writer imagines - my eventual place in literary history along with the greatest writers, my name cut in granite, the soon to come critical accolades - but this time, I believed it would indeed truly come. In the meantime I had had to wait for the story to finish, and dream every night for the hand, being careful not to interrupt the work, before beginning the long process of transcribing the manuscript for an editor. All of this had worn me to the bone, almost as if I had been toiling with the work all this time myself, in the actual writing of it.
I spent the next several weeks in a luxurious fog of uplift, intoxicated by the sense of completion. I relaxed, went for long walks, had leisurely dinners in expensive restaurants, drank wine in the evenings and gradually settled myself down, then began to take the next necessary steps to secure my future.
My plan was this—I would hire a secretary to retype the entire manuscript, at my home, never letting the original pages leave. There were 2,001 pages, (the missing one that would have made 2002 from the 1001 nights was from the first day, when the hand wrote one only page.) All were in a medium sized script, each around 30 lines, averaging 500 words per page. A million words.
I found an ad for a skilled typist at a reasonable rate, spoke to her over the phone and had her come to my home to look at the manuscript. She was a pretty young girl just out of college with excellent skills, named Aimee, and I told her I had been working on the manuscript over the last twenty years, and that with smaller works I had done the transcribing myself, but I was far too poor a typist to tackle such an overwhelming project as this. She was undaunted by the size of the manuscript and was comfortable reading the handwriting, and told me it would take between three and four months to finish if she worked five days a week. I said that that was fine, and gave her a small advance.
In the next two weeks, she’d said, she would be able to retype approximately 250 manuscript pages, according to her estimate, which would yield 500 pages of double spaced text. I would then find an appropriate spot for the tale to end, and within a months time be sending out the initial introductory volume of my masterwork.
I hand-wrote a confident but measured query letter, one which gave a brief outline of the story segment I would be sending, and explained the future scope of the work, mentioning that I had only finished the one volume so far, and listed my publishing credits, my one academic book - a critical analysis of Hawthorne - and my largely ignored collection of short stories, 'Soundings.' Then, dismissing them, I added that this current volume was the beginning of my true life's work, and I was confident, having shown the work to various author friends and other readers, who gave overwhelmingly positive responses, that it was a book that would add significant prestige to any publishing house. Therefore I was submitting it simultaneously to several of the best ones, like your own, and thanked them for their time and consideration.
I would have Aimee make a number of copies of the letter, addressed to different publishers. I could easily find, I reasoned, a good agent later. The story had all the best elements of both memoir and fiction, and I knew that any good editor would immeadiately recognize its simultaneous accessibility and genius. I laid the piece of paper on top of the first of the two large stacks of the manuscript, and went to bed with a sense of calm exultation.
Aimee came in the morning exactly on time. I let her in, showed her the typewriter and let her to begin the work. I went to the kitchen for toast and coffee, but within minutes she stood in the doorway with a puzzled expression.
"Mr. R______, I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Oh, the cover letter?" I said, "I'll give you the names of all the publishers later, don't worry about it right now. Just start right in with the text."
"But, that's what I mean," she said, her eyes narrowing suspiciously, "there's nothing there. The pages are all blank."
I dropped my coffee cup onto the kitchen floor, and ignoring the spill and broken shards, ran to the desk, hunched over the two stacks neatly positioned on the left corner, and began rifling through the pages of each pile—blank, blank, blank, all and every page of it, blank.
Aimee soon gathered her coat and bag, saying she had already spent the advance and muttered something indicating that she thought I must be crazy, and left.
I remember little from the next several days, thrown into a profound depression, the depths of which, though I had known writer's depression before, were blacker than any I could have imagined. I was unable to teach my one class at Emerson college. Over the period of the next two weeks, I came close to buying a handgun, then considered killing myself instead with drugs and alcohol. I drank heavily. I am in fact still in the depression, though I have given up any idea of suicide, and my depressed state is lessening.
That is all of the story there is to tell. Although everything I've said here is true, I know that most will find it all difficult to believe. I don't even know if what I am writing here will ever be printed.
(I must mention one last thing about the manuscript. I did read a single page from the future section—the final page. Dying, on an early summer night, sitting on the porch of my Vermont cottage, I gazed at fireflies, and in each flicker, saw, as if time was compressed - no, stopped - all of the events of the book, of my life, replayed in flashes, before my breath, heart and thoughts ceased. A plaintive final examination, yes, but I would be satisfied to die that way.)
After this, I will not write anymore. I have read the greatest prose I could ever hope to produce, yet it was prose I could never replicate. I hold a peculiar egocentric pleasure in knowing that I alone in the world had the privilege to read it. I recognize that I am a weak man. Yet still I take pride in the fact that the story came out of me, as I recognize that the hand took pride in its part, the writing, the rendering of my being, and therefore would not allow its work to be misrepresented.
My final view of these events is this—somewhere within me, as within all of us, is genius. I could not touch mine, but was able to glimpse it, and saw, however briefly, what I might have created myself. That it could only be revealed by a second hand, not my own, is the circumstance of my fate. But even to have seen it appear! The thrill of that is beyond me to explain.