As usual, he wasn’t paying attention, merely tapping the keys, simply following one thought with another, one word with another, when the ongoing complaint that was so very much not his life ended up on the page. It was neither an obvious condemnation nor an apology for his grief, but an understated, artfully subtle, declaration of immense sorrow buried within a stack of words, as deadly as ground glass in a sugar bowl. And with his name as the author, what else was he to do. He was not a sorrowful man. He had no choice but to dig in, sort through the words, rework the sentences, assess every phrase, weigh every implication, and hope to revise himself to meet the new standard. This had been done before, he knew, by other entities definitely not him, persons who -- in the service of literature -- had commandeered his name, assumed his day to day activities, slept and dreamed on his behalf, taken responsibility for his nightmares, and then gone on to become somebody else, someone far better. Now it was his turn to be constrained, his job to trace their path, stomp in their footsteps, and blur their collective impression until he made it appear as though some new creature -- not him, not them, but something far superior -- had marked a fresh trail.
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