The Watch by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

So Robby remained hornate. No nooky for him, not till he becomes an accomplished writer: that’s his unspoken vow, we can tell. He’s friendly enough around us, he snatches up our b.s. about writers and writing like a man starved for the Secret, and he is all nose-to-the-grindstone and give-’em-hell damn-the-torpedoes when he sets about trying to write some more of his good sentences, but sometimes Slater and I have seen him alone on campus, walking, carrying his writing notebook in his arms, looking down at his feet as he walks, and he’ll not know we’re watching him, won’t be aware anyone is watching him. He’ll have this unGodly fierce scowl on his face—we’re sure he doesn’t realize it, he’s not a mean student—and we’ll know what he’s thinking about, and we’ll know how his stomach is turning around inside and how he just wants to slam his books down on the sidewalk and thrust his arms up in the air and roar at the heavens till the clouds shatter and fall submissively in broken tinkling jigsaw pieces to the ground.

Like I said, Slater does it every night, in his sleep.

It’s like there’s this shell over Robby, this confining, restricting, elastic-like bubble; it’s like he’s got to write his way out of it.

Robby backs up, writes a sentence, writes two good sentences, hurls himself at the bubble, but the sentences aren’t good enough, he bounces back, maybe lands on his butt. He gets up, dusts himself off, picks up his books, writes another sentence, hurls himself, bounces back, falls again. . . .

It’s frustrating as hell, I’ll tell you; at Robby’s age, and with his talent and potential, it’s pure hell.

Most of us get used to the bubble finally, just ignore it, and quit bouncing against it, cease to hurl ourselves recklessly against the thing, and settle for moving around cautiously within its limits as best we can.

Only at night, asleep, or sometimes when we have been drinking too much, do we ever dream about how clean and crisp the air tastes on the outside of that bubble, and how for many years we labored to taste that air; only in our dreams do we ever reach for it now: asleep, or drunk.

But Robby’s still young: he’s imagining that he’s suffocating. He thinks he’s got to get into that air outside the bubble or die. He thinks it’s like a curse.

He’s right, in a way, but the curse of it is this: it’s not death that will come if he is unable to break out of the bubble, but something worse. He will continue to live.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.