A Bunch of Fives - Stories by James Roderick Burns (54)

The Notebook

THE NOTEBOOK

THE YOUNG MAN smiled awkwardly as his professor told a joke about a man called Bloom. He was new to the class, and could not help but feel the joke was aimed at him. At the end he waited a beat then laughed, and so the class began.

He had been reading a volume of Kafka at his previous college and brought it with him, unfinished, to this. Over thickly-buttered toast he had got half way through the tale of the hunger artist. Now a great sense of vocation overtook him as he listened to the professor’s rich, booming voice. He liked the man, very much as it happened. There was no disrespect in his dreaming of something else while the professor talked. But as the student sat with a cheap spiral-bound notebook open in front of him, Bic laid neatly against the wire, there came to his mind whole and incorruptible a story so beautiful he felt he must stop and attend to it, or his life would simply end.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I need to go,’ he said. ‘I have to leave but I’ll be back.’ He pushed his chair out noisily and sped from the room.

In a half-panic he lunged about for the proper place to write. His room was impossible, the library too; both carried lingering traces of an unhappiness he knew would ruin the story. In desperation he walked the campus till he passed an empty spot beneath a tree on the far side of the farthest parking lot. It appeared to have had a road-gritting bin sitting on it for a long time – the fringe of grass was dead and brown, and surrounded a patch of soil singed like a chemical burn – but sometime since summer started the custodians must have found a new home for it, as the spot was empty and dry. He shrugged off his backpack and sat down.

In the story, a young man in a frock coat is walking briskly towards the station. His head is in the clouds because he has had the idea of a lifetime – a notion so brief, so elegant and yet so powerful it will allow his firm to revolutionise the way stock moves from warehouse to store, is counted, and then re-ordered when it arrives – and he is impatient for a bench and table to set it down in his notebook.

When he arrives at the station he falls into the nearest seat and reaches for the notebook. His fingers, ordinarily nimble, clutch at nothing in his breast pocket. Strange. He gropes further, but they are still unsuccessful. At this moment a tiny seed of panic drops from his mind and takes root in his chest. Where is it? Though his idea is enormous, breath-taking in its audacity, it is not the only brain-child he has conceived. The notebook is full of ideas and proposals, equations, disputes with himself that nonetheless deliver greater clarity when he has concluded them, and it is extremely important to him. He jumps from the seat and tears frantically at each pocket in turn. Nothing comes of it. Now the seed is a shoot, and his chest prickles with tendrils of acid terror.

The young man runs from the station and at great peril to himself, as well as the staid citizens of the town, hurtles back along his route, eyes stuck to the pavement. They do not register any notebook. He arrives at his rooming house and thunders up the stairs like a troop of imperial guards. In his neatly-kept room, he rips apart each stitch and joint of the place. There is no notebook, and he is on the verge of throwing himself from the window when a last idea occurs to him, and he rushes to the communal chamber. Here he finds the book, wrapped in seal-skin and tacked up behind the cistern.

The young man returns to his room, breathing heavily and peeling off the damp cover as he goes. He sits on the edge of the bed and taking out his pen, hurriedly dips the nib in a nearby pot of ink, opening the notebook with his other hand. The idea, like a fat balloon swollen with water, is ready to disgorge its contents. The notebook lies open on his lap, but every page is blank as the light falling through the window.

With backpack in hand, the student sat unmoving, thinking of his story. Alongside him faculty members came and went, some with downcast eyes carrying heavy satchels, others whistling after a particularly good class. Now and again a graduate student shuffled by. After a minute or two, the gum tree above his head shook in a slight breeze, dropping its leaves. The young man unpacked his notebook, uncapping his pen, but it occurred to him as he did so that there was something disappointing about a blank notebook, after all. He was no Kafka – there was no hidden meaning in absence, and anyway he knew he wouldn’t be able to set down the story as it had appeared to him before, whole and magnificent in the bowl of his mind as a perfect flower.

He repacked the bag and stood up, deciding to return, perhaps to pick up a cup of coffee on his way back to the classroom.

He wrote nothing that day.

First published in Flash Fiction Magazine (February 2015)

Next: Life of Issa