“I met with you for over two years! I told you all my secrets. I know that this is you!”
CLICK
The Nothing poured back over his winning blueprint strategy, the one he had never once departed from: a calculated risk, that was all—selling only pieces, and far enough from facts to be deniable (close enough to stay real).
As he replayed the message loop again, the same crackling words faded beneath fresh details from all those years ago.
Of course he hated it whenever old session moments would spark new, useless hindsight.
For such knowledge could never be kept clean of that most virulent of regrets.
It was his failings of long-missed and lost opportunities betrayed that The Nothing now wished more than anything not to be living so comfortably in spite of.
The unfairness underlying his boredom and contentment was inescapable.
Yet had each rule or story not been constructed entirely from details added after facts, and considerations reached at least a tad too late?
No.
Though different apprehensions brought of that same ambiguous error probably were what each persona had been most wrong about.
But how could she, former client (of the former Psychologist), have figured out who and where he was?
The Nothing shuddered to consider what seeds must have been left to be unearthed—hints of dark desires strained against so as not to let them punctuate every careful word, movement, glance, touch…
In his more recent life, her story had resurfaced the previous year, and then only by way of solitude and necessity, like the rest.
Hers had actually been The Author’s last to use.
Ironies not lost, he thought of Ray.
He smiled the smile of an old man remembering an immensely troubled youth with newfound fondness.
Could those final, frantic years of feeling stuck but sessions from a complete void of paying clients not have been . . . telling . . . had he known how to let himself pay the right sort of attention?
But then, regardless, the silly Psychologist had preemptively discarded it all anyway, forfeiting clients and Method . . . and thus himself (of course not really) . . . for good.
Or so had been The Author’s callous hope.
Yet could he have ever predicted how his choice(s) would one day render him The Nothing, lost for even stories left to borrow?
And where else might he find his stories?
The Nothing was mirrors smashed by smoke to end in this endless dead-end drift.
And trying had grown needless so was gone.
Love: what a crazy and elusive waste of time!
But the as yet unknown part—the one that could hold it all together still—was too good not to let him glimpse his self-directed lies.
Soon…
And it didn’t matter.
It never had.
It couldn’t.
An old voice seemed to want to offer expired encouragement.
Nothing, he felt, could be any more or less pointless and contrived.
And The Nothing couldn’t help but cautiously eye his iun where it lay, quiet again at his side on the other chair.
Should he check in to track the former Author’s sales?
Na.
Could he at least find some excitement in the novelty of watching both past selves be wrenched back up from each abyss, squared off, and nailed together for the very first time?
Not really.
Again, the money was a passive and automatic drain—a leech sent to empty all identities (particularly the current one) of cares gone by, faded in wine and nagging stability . . . the boring perpetual heat of a nifty-rimmed, astronaut-endorsed space thermos.
Perfect.
Easy.
Contained.
And so, so ironic.
But he missed Ray (that was true).
He missed Ray more than anything.
I don't know anything 