March 1997. Here’s Max at his desk. Except for the odd engagement or research [sic] trip, this is where he puts in ten hours a day, seven days a week. All those hours and no Page One? Life is hard but today Max has the feeling that there’s going to be a breakthrough. The wallpaper on his Fujitsu/Siemens screen is Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream. In it a black man leans on his elbow on the slanting deck of his dismasted and rudderless boat while sharks circle him. Maybe there’s been a hurricane. The sea is wild and there’s a waterspout in the distance. The boat can’t be much more than twenty feet. No visible damage to the hull. Will he make it? Sometimes Max thinks yes, sometimes no. Today he’s thinking yes.
‘OK,’ he says to the computer, ‘let’s do it. Going for Page One.’ Fujitsu/Siemens has heard this before but it puts up a blank page for Max as if it takes him seriously. Max has been giving this some thought and already he’s got a name for his protagonist: Morris Levy. ‘We’ll call him Moe,’ he says. MOE LEVY’S BURDEN will be the first chapter if Max gets lucky. Having typed that heading he sighs and sits back, hoping that nothing bad is looking over his shoulder. He’s in his normal working panic. This is still 1997 and there’s nothing threatening him except the blank page. He’s afraid of what might appear on it as he types.
He gets Moe out of bed and out of the house. So far, so good. Moe’s going to meet his friend Fergal Hagerty for lunch at II Fornello, so he takes the District Line to Earls Court, then changes to the Piccadilly for Russell Square. Coming out of the tube station Moe makes his way past the newsagent and the luggage stall. His head feels strange and for a moment the world stops being there. Then it comes back with a little jolt and he’s aware of a terrible stench. It’s like the smell of a backed-up toilet in an empty house with broken windows. Out of the corner of his eye Moe sees something following him. Is it a dog? A cat? It’s a little man, black as ebony, long body, very short arms and legs, large head, big ugly baby-face. He’s inching along on his belly and writhing like a dog that’s been run over. Moe looks around. Lots of foot traffic but nobody is stepping on the dwarf. Nobody is taking any notice at all. The smell is almost making Moe throw up but he wants to do the decent thing. He says to the dwarf, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Closer,’ says the dwarf. His voice is like dead leaves skittering on the floor of that empty house with the backed-up toilet.
‘Not sure this is a good idea,’ says Moe’s mind.
Moe comes closer. Like a jumping spider the dwarf springs off the pavement and there he is in Moe’s arms. ‘Hold me,’ he says, sobbing a little. This is a very heavy dwarf and Moe tries to put him down but his arms and hands have lost the ability to let go.
‘Shit,’ says Max, as he reads what he’s typed. ‘Where’s this coming from?’ He remembers thinking about using Apasmara Purusha but what he’s written is a little too real, like something that’s already happened. Or is going to.
On the Fujitsu/Siemens screen the cursor is beating like a heart at the place where the next line should start. Nothing happens. Behind the cursor Moe gets tired of waiting in the dark. ‘What now?’ he says to Max. ‘I’m standing here holding this heavy stinking dwarf and I’m waiting for my next thing to do.’
‘You’re stuck there,’ says Max. ‘All of a sudden your memory is gone. Apasmara made you forget everything.’
‘Why?’
‘He was sent to do that.’
‘Who sent him?’
‘A woman you can’t remember. She sent Apasmara to take away all memory of her.’
‘Why? What would make her do that?’
‘What you did.’
‘What did I do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What came before what I did?’
‘You loved each other.’
‘OK, we loved each other. What then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Think! Explore your material. What did I do?’
‘I’m telling you, I don’t know.’
‘That’s great. You’ve got me holding this lousy dwarf and you don’t know why and you don’t know what’s coming next.’
‘Moe, I’m sorry to leave you holding the dwarf, I really am.’
‘You could delete that part and back up to where we were before he jumped into my arms. Come on, you can at least do that much for me.’
‘I’m sorry, Moe, that might stop the next thing from coming to me and I daren’t risk it. Besides, Apasmara’s not real, he’s only a hallucination. The weight and the smell are all in your mind.’
‘Wonderful. Thanks a lot. I’ll see you around.’
Max quits the word processor programme and goes back to the Winslow Homer painting that is his screen wallpaper. But instead of that boat in the Gulf Stream he sees Noah’s Ark stranded on the mountains of Ararat. The raven flies out, loops the loop once and The Gulf Stream returns. ‘Sorry,’ says Max’s mind.
‘No problem,’ says Max.