Every so often contracts arrived for him to sign, which had to do with the books he had already written. Renewals, new translations, adaptations for the theater. He left them on the table, and in the end it was clear to him that he would never sign them. With some distress he discovered that not only did he no longer want to write books but, in some way, he didn’t even want to have written them. That is, he had liked doing it but he didn’t want them to have survived his decision to stop, and in fact it bothered him that, with a force of their own, they went where he had promised himself never to set foot again. He began to throw away the contracts without even opening them. Every so often Tom passed on letters from admirers who politely thanked him for such and such a page, or a particular story. Even that made him nervous, and he noticed that none of them mentioned his silence—they didn’t seem to be informed about it. A couple of times he took the trouble to answer. He thanked them, in turn, with simple words. Then he added that he had stopped writing, and signed off.
He noted that no one answered those letters.
More and more often, however, that need to write returned, and he missed the daily care with which he put his thoughts in order, in the straight line of a sentence. Instinctively, then, he ended up compensating for that absence with a private liturgy, which did not seem to him without some beauty: he began to write mentally, while he was walking, or lying in bed with the light out, waiting for sleep. He chose words, he constructed sentences. He might follow an idea for days, writing in his head entire pages, which he then enjoyed repeating, sometimes aloud. He could, in the same way, have cracked his knuckles, or practiced athletic exercises, over and over again. It was a physical thing. He liked it.
Once he wrote, in that way, an entire poker game. One of the players was a child.
In particular he liked to write while he was waiting at the Laundromat, amid the spinning drums, to the rhythm of magazines leafed through distractedly on the crossed legs of women who did not seem to harbor any illusions that did not concern the slenderness of their ankles. One day he was writing in his mind a dialogue between two lovers in which the man was explaining that ever since he was a child he had had the curious faculty of dreaming about people only when he was sleeping with them, only while he was sleeping with them.
“You mean that you only dream about people who are in your bed?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
“What sort of nonsense is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“And if someone isn’t in your bed you don’t dream about her.”
“Never.”
At that point a fat, rather elegant girl came up to him, there in the Laundromat, and she handed him a cell phone.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Jasper Gwyn took the phone.