Chapter 6

Many times I have asked myself why things have to end. I guess it's because we change, and nothing else changes the same way each one of us do. Or perhaps it's just the way we are made, our brain getting tired of the sameness. Many things end because we let them: lunch with someone we like, because we have to work; a week-end away, in a small and cozy place, for the same reason. We leave people we love and we're not exactly sure why. We refuse eating a second ice-cream cone for fear of getting fat—often, even the first cone—, and we spend our money in needs which we only think we have, instead of spending in things which actually give us pleasure. We just don't let things be.

"To everything there is an end."

My grandmother often said that. I can hear her voice, as if she were here, as I write these words. "No, there's no end to numbers," I argued with her when I first learned that numbers are infinite.

"Yes, there is. Because you can't live forever to count them all."

"Would you want to live forever?" Athena asked me once.

"Only in a world without assholes," I answered.

"Only pussies?"

I laughed.

"Yes, and writers and words."

"As if you were any better than them, Marquis."

Yes, as if I, or her, or anyone walking down the street were any better.

As I said, we talked much about writing, and it wasn't only once that we discussed endings. "I hate stories which are left open. Kill the main character! It's better than not having him say yes or no."

One of the last conversations I had with her was about writing.

"I think I'll stop writing, Athena."

She turned to me, surprised. "But why?"

"I don't like the things I've been writing, lately."

"Trust me, they are good. I wouldn't lie."

I grinned very lightly.

"I haven't sent them to you. But it's not whether they're good or bad."

"Then, why?" I like Athena's voice. It's soft, feminine, it caresses you like a soft hand.

"They are too sad. Too real."

"Like in ... bondage?"

I couldn't help but laugh. She was puzzled.

"No. Like in life. Memories. The present, the future. Even fictional stories. They are killing me. I'm spending nights up, writing things so sad that I sometimes cry, and then I look out and it's morning, the sun is rising, and I have to go to work. I work like a zombie. I fall asleep in my office, and only notice because the phone rings, someone enters, the computer makes a noise every now and them because I set it to. But I'm writing. All this time, when I'm talking to people, when I'm at one of those endless boring meetings that seem to be all I do, when I'm riding the elevator up and down, when I commute to work and back home, I'm writing, storing everything on my head to type it down later. I'm either asleep or writing. The only peace I have is when I'm with you, when the sex makes me forget the world, when I see you on top of me with that delightful smile you have, your breasts rocking up and down, hypnotically, your hands against my chest, your pretty hair, the noises you make, those lovely moans and the heaving, and the flesh to flesh sounds, this is what frees me for a few minutes and gives me strength to keep going. But after I leave that door, dead tired from the sex, the insomnia and the job I hate, it's like I'm Atlas again, and I'm writing in my mind, more stories, my biography, past and future, and so much ... I feel I'm spinning faster and faster, and that at some point I'll snap."

I paused, thinking for a long moment before continuing

"And the more I write, the less I seem to find anything in it. The readers become rare and gone, my stories get more and more different, standing from the crowd just for being unlike the others. Maybe there's a reader enjoying them, and I always think of this guy. I picture him, reading alone in a dark Saturday afternoon, enjoying the quietness of his home. But what's the point? The sequence of stories? I can invent hundreds of them, different plots, different characters, but they all seem the same to me. Rip the pages of a book and throw them into the air, they'll fall onto the floor, all unique, but all just the same for anyone looking at the scene.

"I'm making both life and writing one and the same, and they're both going in the wrong direction."

That day Athena tried to console me, but I don't remember what she said. I wasn't listening. I left the Place and didn't go back to work.

I started this story talking about photography. Pictures save forever that unique moment which will never come back. We hold them in our hands and see people who are gone, still young and ignorant of the things to come. All the possibilities still open, and yet not knowing the tragedies that would befall upon them days later, months later.

Despite what Athena said about my non-linear writing, there is a system to it. I join the pieces not ordered by color, but trying to form a mosaic that is only seen as you move away.

It was a cloudy day, and we were at the Place, looking through the window. It wasn't much after I told her I wasn't going to write anymore, perhaps a couple weeks, or less. Athena was behind me, still in bed.

"What are you thinking about?"

"Outside," I answered. "It's a sad place to live."

"Life can't be like this."

"What we have? Good?"

"No, I didn't mean that," she said, coming to the window. "Just ... we have things to do. This is ... a fantasy."

"A fantasy," I repeated.

"Yes. You ask too many questions," she said. "You are always looking for a meaning, for a solution."

"And nobody else is."

"I guess not."

"We're both wrong," I said.

"There's no right and wrong in this."

"You know those insipid stroke stories?" I asked, and she nodded. "That's asking no questions. This, what we have here, this is asking questions."