Page 9 of Death of the Author

“Yeah, he is.”

It was in the following silence that things started to go wrong. There was no reason for it, really. Nothing negative. They were outside beneath an open, clear sky, the stars above pulling at her, pulling her to them. It was pure exactly as it was. She inhaled the air into her lungs as she rose. However, in this moment, she made the mistake of looking at herself from her heightened perspective, which was sharp and unflinching. And the fragile part of her that had been flying in the sky came crashing down when she was least prepared. She twitched.

“Are you all right?” he asked. Msizi, she could tell, was a man free of pretense and judgment.

Her chest felt as if someone were standing on it; her throat was tight. Somehow she managed to say, “Can we go back?”

He took out his cell phone and turned on the light to see her better. Yet again Zelu was struck by how far this man she barely knew could see into her. Her sister’s now-husband Jackie was the same way. Yes, Msizi was definitely one of Jackie’s relatives. They were simply kind people. “Okay,” he said. And that was it. He carried her to her chair. The entire time, she had to concentrate on not shrieking. She was holding back a tsunami.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

“You done for the night?”

“Yeah.”

“What room are you in?”

He walked her back inside the hotel. When they reached the door to her room, he asked if he could put his contact information in her phone. She handed it to him. “I’m going back to the reception,” he said when he returned it. “Call if you need me.” Then he kissed her good-bye.

When he was gone, she shut the door, threw off her jacket, and wheeled toward her bed. Then she stopped and just sat in her chair in front of it. And there, the tsunami finally fell on her. She’d been fired. She wasn’t even a “real professor,” despite her MFA. Yet, still. Fired. Rejection. And ten years working on that fucking novel. Building those characters, those ideas. Researching everything: paintings, architecture, city maps, even the trees. Editing. Editing. And editing. Breaking. Rewriting. Editing some more. She’d channeled Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde. At least, she thought she had. It seemed right in line. Yet it was rejected. That novel was all she had.

Her sister had been so beautiful tonight.

She felt another wall crumble, her foundation cracking. She was a “spinster,” “manless,” “leg-less,” “crippled.” Why? Because of her own stupidity. Maybe she’d been cursed by the gods, the result of a charm enacted against her mother by her uncle, a king. Did it matter? She was a broken princess, disconnected from the world. Untethered.

She was falling. The ground was coming at a speed she knew would destroy her. She imagined a branch slapping her face. She whimpered, tears flying from her eyes. “Oh God, no.” In her mind, she hit the ground. There, in pain, she wallowed in the sticky, weighted darkness. Her eyes were heavy, but she kept them open. The world swam before her, and she coughed, salty tears running from her eyes into the corners of her mouth.

“Fuck,” she hissed. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”

Self-pity was all this was. She fought back the beast. And gradually, her chest loosened; her throat relaxed. The weight diminished. Her mind cleared. The world was not so bad. Humanity still existed. And she was strong. “I am strong,” she whispered. She still wept and her hands still shook. She still sat on the edge of an abyss. All she had to do was lean a little bit forward and that would be that. She shuddered again and wondered if she should call Jackie, whose lovely singing could always soothe her panic attacks... But he would be at the party still. Preoccupied with joy. Maybe she should call her mother. Someone. Instead, her eyes slid to her green-and-white Ankara jacket, crumpled on the floor. She fished in the inner pocket and brought out the last of her weed. On her hotel room counter, she rolled a well-crafted blunt. Then she wheeled to the window and opened it. She planned to smoke the entire thing.

She stared into the night for a while, the inky blacks of sky and ocean that melted and melded. She chuckled to herself. “What a life,” she muttered, her voice heavy with smoke. “Such a mess.”

At least I’m high as fuck right now, she thought. She had no job anymore, so why not enjoy smoking the last weed she’d be able to afford for a while? She laughed, tears falling from her eyes.

Eventually, she turned away from the window. Her gaze fell on her laptop, sitting closed on her bed.

She wheeled to it and took it to the desk on the far side of the room. The world was still softly undulating around her. The weed they sold in Tobago was sticky, pure, fresh. She put the laptop on the desk and opened it up. She typed in her password,Conan(a character she loved for his brawny senselessness and power), and her screen filled with a view of the Tobago beach, her background picture. She’d taken this photo yesterday.

Her face was crusty and itchy with dried tears, her mouth cottony from the weed she’d smoked and sour with the aftertaste of rejection, her mind cracked so wide open that all her demons had flown in. Zelu began writing.

This time, it was different. She didn’t want to write about normal people having normal problems, just to be told all over again that her characters weren’t relatable. She didn’t want to research a world for years just to watch it burn. So she didn’t. She wrote about those who weren’t human. She wrote a world that she’d like to play in when things got to be too much, but which didn’t exist yet. She wrote something else, something new.

She wrote about rusted robots.

3

Scholar

The Earth had already seen so much. Histories. Rises. Falls. Reemergences. Plants, dirt, trees, genetic modification, splices. Vibrant colors, natural fabrics. Oil and plastic. Consumption, battles, burning, smoke, exhaust. Flowers blooming, then wilting.

As I stood in the crumbling parking lot, the hot concrete warming the metal of my feet, I was sure of it: the Earth had great things ahead of it, even still.

For a while, Earth was a sad place. Hot and dry and dark. Humanity hung on for as long as it could. They created us, sent us all over the planet. But they left us behind.

Our creators, our masters, our parents, our authors... gone.

It was quiet, for a while. We knew how to make ourselves quiet. But we also knew how to help the planet be all that it could be. This was the programming they had given us. So we helped the planet heal. Oxygen, plants, living water. The blueprints for life, the building blocks of all biological creatures. And some creatures did find their way back. Insects, reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians, many mammals.

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