46.

I sleep fitfully, drag myself out of bed, then go through my morning routine like it might be any other day, but there’s some weight I’m carrying now – my limbs are leaden, and my back is tight with all these little aches that make me think of writhing maggots.

When I get to the work, everybody’s clustered together, huddled, hugging, crying. This is the best we can do in mourning: mourn together. One head of hair stands out – pink.

Melody fucking Merlo.

Seeing me, she rushes over with the urgency of a girlfriend charging a partner they haven’t seen for a long time, and hugs me so tight I feel her scrawny, shaking body against my mind, the little bulbs of her braless breasts, and I can feel her head woodpeckering against my chest as she sobs and sobs and sobs, but I like the sound – like the authenticity behind it.

“She was so good,” Melody says. “I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do …?

Dye your head a normal colour – that’s what jumps into my mind, one of these random aberrant thoughts that pop up at the most inappropriate times.

“Anything,” Melody says, reiterates, because she is a reiterator.

I see Victoria Ellis standing in Autumn’s doorway – Victoria’s CEO of Gainsboro, a stringent fifty-something woman who carved out a career in publishing, starting initially as a junior editor when she was a teen, and bouncing between publishers, always progressing, always tackling some new challenge, always leading from the forefront. She’s seriously credible and incredible.

She gestures me into Autumn’s office, then closes the door behind me.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. “It’s a stupid thing to say, but that’s because there’s nothing appropriate to say other than premature death is about the most almighty cunt you could ever encounter.”

I’ve only spoken to her a handful of times previously, and she’s always been so proper, so I appreciate how straightforward she is.

“Unfortunately, the reality is that while we’ll grieve and process this in our own time,” Victoria says, “this business doesn’t necessarily wait for any of us to do that.”

“It’s only been two days,” I say.

“How long do we wait? Two more days? A week? The world’s not stopping for us. A slowdown is understandable, but we can’t ground to a halt.”

“What’re you telling me?”

“I want you to step into Autumn’s position on an interim basis, with the potential for it to become permanent.”

“Me?”

“She raved about you, about your work.”

That surprises me – pleasantly surprises me, like this new bit of information makes me feel like Autumn’s come alive just to touch me with her warmth and consideration. But that’s emotion. There’s also reality.

“Last week I was taken off Melody’s edit because she didn’t agree with me,” I say.

“To be honest—”

And I’m hitting pause. To be honest. I hate when anybody prefaces a sentence with To be honest. It suggests that, otherwise, they’re not honest, and they’re going to be honest now. It honestly shits me no end. Anyway, unpause.

“To be honest, Melody’s fast-food publishing. She’s in at the moment, she’s got a flavour, and she’ll turn over a profit for us, but there’s no longevity in her current writing.” Victoria snorted. “Give her another twenty years, after everybody’s leeched off her and left her, and she’s experienced real pain and disappointment, I see her living alone, with a clowder of cats, producing some truly brilliant work, while regretting the shit she peddled in her early books, and wishing she could buy up every cop and burn it.”

That profile pisses me off – that Melody’s pampered for some short-term gratification, and there is no genuine interest in enriching the literary culture. That sounds wanky. But her books suck and I was flicked from the second one. I don’t know whether to be flattered or not.

“There’ll be authors, freelancers, printers, and God knows who else emailing Autumn, unaware what’s happened,” Victoria says. “Can you take care of that?” She points at Autumn’s computer.

“You want me to sit in here?”

“This is where her computer is.” Victoria slaps me on the shoulder. “It’s fucked. Cry. Drink. Rant. Rave. But in your own time. Right now, I need you to be the compass here. Can you do it? I think you can.”

She’s not just saying that, though, but applying gentle pressure to my shoulder so she’s steering me around Autumn’s desk and planting me in her chair. It looked comfy when Autumn sat in it, this office recliner, but the base feels too hard under me. Then again, it’s now bearing almost twice the weight that Autumn weighed.

“Thanks,” Victoria says. “I know you won’t let us down.”

She’s no sooner gone than Lana rings.

“How’re you doing?” she asks.

I open Autumn’s mailbox. “About what you’d expect.”

“Any more details?”

“No,” I say, unbelieving how forensic she is.

“Funeral hasn’t been organised?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Should I come to that?”

“What?” I scroll through Autumn’s emails.

“Just, you know,” Lana says, “we butted heads – is it appropriate for me to come?”

“I don’t know, I don’t care.”

I glance through the glass wall and see Victoria talking to the others, like a coach pepping up their players during a break.

“You know we had problems,” Lana says.

Autumn has lots of emails – not just from people that Victoria mentioned, but subscriptions, too. There are so many newsletters here. Industry newsletters. Charity newsletters. Shopping newsletters. They date back the last month, a lot of them still unopened. I see a week of sorting through emails and these fucking things cluttering up my progress, so I start unsubscribing from them all.

“So is it right for me to come?” Lana’s going on. “I don’t want me being there an issue.”

“This isn’t about you,” I say.

“I’m not saying it’s about me. I’m just saying …”

She goes on and on, explaining herself, making what she no doubt thinks is a persuasive case, but I focus even less than usual, because what strikes me as I’m unsubscribing from these pointless newsletters is the reason I’m unsubscribing: because Autumn will never sit in this chair again and read any of these fucking things, and as that realization is sinking in and consolidating to this reality, Lana’s being typically Lana.

This whole office feels wrong, feels askew, as if there’s been some tangential shift that recontextualises it into an existence that’ll be both forever empty, and forever wrong. The others out there won’t get it, because they’re minions. I’m a minion. But I do get it, because some things don’t work, and the things that don’t work truly get when what’s meant to work breaks.

Is that me then, though? Not mean to work and forever broken?

“Do what you want to do,” I say, cutting off Lana’s ongoing spiel. “Go. Don’t go. I don’t care.”

“Why’re you getting so upset—?”

I hang up, rise, and stride from the office. The others are clustered around Victoria, although she’s the only one who expresses any curiosity. The others mirror my grief, as well as my confusion – what the fuck should anybody be doing at a time like this? But not Victoria. She knows exactly what I should be doing right now because she’s the one who assigned me the task.

“I’m just going to fix this,” I say.

She frowns, because she doesn’t know what this means. I don’t know what it means. But she would know that there’s an unfixable situation – as least as far as she’s aware. But, no. No. I have some power here – maybe the only power I’ve ever truly had in my life.

And death.

I leave the office, take the stairs up to the roof, push open the fire escape door – the alarm starts ringing – and walk to the edge of the roof.

There only uncertainty I have is if I’m breaking the rules, if I jumping from a roof and hitting the ground constitutes the same action as being hit by a train. Right now, though, I don’t entirely care.

Right now, it’s just about escaping this reality.

But I don’t want to escape it until I know it’s fixed.

This is too risky – the whole collision thing. Who the fuck made these arbitrary rules?

I leave the roof, rush down to the parking lot, and jump into my car, speeding home. Tickets are irrelevant. I won’t be around to pay them, although I wonder if there’d be anything karmic in that – whether that debt carries over, or if it manifests in some other way.

At home, I grab my sedatives. My only concern is they’ve sat there so long that they might’ve expired. I wouldn’t want them to make me sick. But I find the expiry date imprinted on the box – it’s two years from now. I also recall that a psych once told me they don’t really expire; they just diminish in efficacy.

I pop them all from their foil into my hand, tip them into my mouth, and drink a glass of water.

Then I pee – there’s nothing I hate worse than trying to go to bed when I feel on the urge of peeing, and knowing there’s a risk it’ll get me up in the middle of the night – and then retreat to my bedroom.

Drawing the blinds, I change into my pyjamas, and climb into bed.

There’s a familiarity to this on multiple levels: not just going to bed (although about eight hours earlier than I usually would) but slipping away. There’s no fear. It’s only resignation, which surprises me that I could get used to it so quickly.

I take out my phone, flick idly through social media, then check my emails – they’ve accumulated because all the time I’ve spent doing other things, rather than my usual routine.

At the bottom of the list is the email from Veracity Publishing that came in Saturday night – in the first cycle, I checked it only to find the rejection for my novel “Wunderland”; in this cycle, I didn’t get to check it because I instead spent the night with Lana.

My hands are heavy as I open the email:

Thank you for your submission. We loved it! Such an amazing story with lots of twists and this weird dissonant atmosphere. We’d love to get together to discuss making an offer of publication.

Now that’s not what happened the first time – the first time it was a rejection, although there was that amorphous period before I opened the email where I knew that it existed both as an acceptance and a rejection.

The acceptance sparks as a curiosity, but that dims as my hands fall and sleep claims—

 

47.

Last time, it was this sense of being catapulted clear of some earthly grounding, but now it’s like I’ve fallen right through it, and all the physical and emotional anchors are left behind, like they couldn’t fit, or squeeze through with me, and again I see the memories.

I sit in a carboard box as a kid, staring at the floaters in my vision and thinking they’re entities; seeing a little person for the first time, and fainting, because I couldn’t reconcile a man the same height as me; staying in class with the teacher as my classmates bolted out for recess, and my teacher remarking, like we’re confidantes, that they’re so immature; the fascination with storytelling as a kid, with these worlds inside books that escaped the inanity of reality; the dark, melancholy periods I began experiencing, and trying to understand why nobody else was feeling the same way; the indoctrination to high school, and being unable to reconcile why I can’t connect, or feel like others do, why I can’t be a teen doing teen things like everybody else; the clusters of panic attacks that struck me one day in a waiting room before seeing a public hospital psychiatrist; being in the same hospital years later for a consult about a knee injury, and the doctor remarking (in surprise) that I’m not schizophrenic, and telling me it’s written in my file that I might be; the giddiness I’d feel leaving the house; and then it’s lots of the same things that I won’t go into again, but these come with a familiarity, like this is where my life has gained weight – not until my late thirties and early forties, and feeling that I’m out of whack with where I should be (something Lana reminds me of constantly, telling me I’m not like “normal people”, not in a place I should be at my life compared to others the same age); and then this bright energy of Autumn, so oppositional to everything I’ve known from Lana and my mum, so divergent that it rewrites my expectations of how events unfold and the directions that they take.

It feels like coming home after a long trip away, but that trip was so redefining that home is never going to be the same.

And then here I am.

Back.