what's that you say?

I'm a pretty simple-minded guy. I'm not all that complicated. I have things I want and I try to get them. I have things I don't want and I try to get rid of them. If there's more to life than that, I've never figured out what.

I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to live. I'm about as self-aware as the next guy, I suppose, maybe even a little bit more. Sometimes that's an advantage and sometimes it isn't. And sometimes it's a big trap, when I think I know something about myself only to find out that what I think I know appears entirely different from the outside looking in. Since the outside is where most of the people are, it's actually rather important to get the view from outside once in a while.

I spent a lot of my life getting to the point where "I don't care what other people think of me" only to shortly thereafter arrive at the realization that more often than not, it's better to find what others think of me than to admire my own self-image. More wasted time. That's life, is it not?

Image, though, is not a continuous thing. People have lives stretching back for decades, but lives intersect at different points. Victor's known me most of my life and has a long perspective. Egan's known me only a year and has far less perspective. Thus Victor's mind-image of me is quite different than Egan's mind-image of me, in the same way that Victor, having watched Star Wars Episode III from the beginning through to the execrable conclusion has quite a different view of the film than Egan, who suffered through only the final 10 minutes.

Which is to say, Victor knows about The Stretch and Egan does not. Margie has heard of it but she didn't experience it, and she's not quite sure what to make of it. Which, again, is to say that Egan (and Margie, though I've told her otherwise) may have the idea that I've always been this way. I have not.

I live in the past, sometimes. I obsess about The Stretch. It's hard not to -- it was a defining period of my life. That's another thing I do: think of my life in very dramatic terms. It's not as if I'm Hamlet or Indiana Jones. No, I'm just a regular, boring average guy, but I still think of my life as if it were Shakespeare. If I didn't think of me in these terms, I'm afraid I'd simply go a little bit nuts with boredom. Who's to say I haven't already? I thought up a story during The Stretch but I never got around to writing it. I thought about a lot of stories, and I did get around to writing a couple of them, but they didn't come out on paper the way I saw them in my mind. They were a little disappointing, and, well, that's a disappointment. So I hesitate now when I go to write because there's no way to be disappointed in the written word that never makes it to paper.

The story was about a guy who decides to deliberately split his personality. In the story, the guy's living a life that's boring him to tears, and he's got self-esteem problems (that is, he doesn't like himself much and doesn't know how to change himself) and instead of addressing the problem like everyone else does, this guy designs a new personality for himself. He writes about the new personality, as an author might. The new personality is, of course, as written, outgoing, attractive, confident, and a total hit with the ladies. Soon enough, the writer assumes the characteristics of his character and begins to become more confident, attractive, desirable, and so forth. Unfortunately, the character has a bit of a nasty side and begins to commit all sorts of crimes which land, or at least nearly land, the guy in trouble. The guy decides to end the experiment and stop acting out his character's life. The character gets wind of this and kills the guy to preserve himself.

Only after I'd emerged from The Stretch did I discover that someone had gone and made a Brad Pitt movie along similar lines. So much for that.

I mentioned this story to Victor the other day. As usual, he had comments.

"So that's what you did, huh?" said Victor.

"What?" I asked.

"That's what you did after The Stretch. You spun yourself off into a new character."

"No, Victor, what I just told you is fiction."

"It doesn't sound like it. It sounds almost exactly like how you re-invented yourself after The Stretch. Even down to your little 'twist ending' -- you killed off your old personality just like the guy in your supposed fictional story."

I had to think about that one, a little. Writing, sometimes, is a trap. I write with a voice of authority, revealing from on high my mighty opinions and theories, and it sounds to the unwary reader as if I believe these things. It sounds like I mean them with the full force of my intellect, however unforceful that may be. Well, I suppose I do mean what I say but I reserve the right to change my mind. The only problem is that when writing, I -- and writers in general, I'd say -- tend to re-inforce what I've said and dig myself into a rut. I start believing in the authority in what is essentially tone -- part of my style. Writing is a fantastic means to find out how I currently feel about something, but nothing beats good old Socratic conversation for finding out what I really ought to feel about something.

Victor may have had a point. Did I invent a story about a guy who creates a "better" version of himself and then becomes that "better" version in order that I could inhabit my character in exactly the same way that my character inhabited his character? Was the story really a meta-story about me creating the story itself, and then living it? How deliciously recursive that notion was! I decided to concede the point simply because it was such a brain twister.

"You could be right," I said. "I'd never really thought of it that way before."

"Damn right," said Victor.

"But you really think that I've killed off, well, for lack of a better term, the 'old me'?" I said.

"You've said it yourself," said Victor. "You say that you're 'never going back to the way you were during The Stretch.' You've even said that the person you were during The Stretch is 'dead'. If that's true, who killed him?"

After The Stretch, when I climbed out of that tank, I was a changed man, as much as that's possible. It wasn't the tank that changed me, it was The Stretch itself. In that interminable lifetime I lived out the stagnant portion of my life. All at once. I got it out of the way and vowed never to go back. But I never killed the guy I was in The Stretch. On the contrary, were he dead and buried I might be tempted to go in search of him again. He's very much alive and he's enjoying the character he created for us while we languished in the tank. He's handed over the reigns to me. He has no reason to fear me.

Margie was there in the tank with me. I could feel her: shaping me, guiding me, laying out my path. She didn't know it, of course: she was on her own path at the time. But she was with me nonetheless, the idea of her. The Stretch was my tunnel and she was the light at the end of it. I didn't know it at the time, and when I got out, I didn't recognize her when I met her. We had to be introduced. It wasn't until much later that I remembered her.

"Did he protest?" asked Victor, bringing me out of my contemplation.

"I think I have to retract my earlier comment," I said. "I never killed him. That's the difference between fiction and reality, Victor old pal. In my story, the character kills the writer. But in real life, in this strange life we're living here, the writer creates the character and the character dies with the writer. At least, he does if he hasn't been written down. I was created when I emerged from The Stretch but the creator never died, or I'd also cease to be."

"Uh huh," said Victor.

While I was in the tank, Victor went about his life as usual. He visited me, occasionally, and occasionally I visited him. One night, I came to him in a dream, and he had questions for me. He asked them in a rapid-fire stream, without pausing for me to answer.

"Can a word be a sword and a song? Can a tree be in an apple? Can there be two in one? Can a table be in a bird? Can the night be the day and the day be the night? Is the butterfly in the worm? Who is in the vulture?"

When he finished, he stared at me and waited for my reply. I told him that a one uninhabited by a two is a sad one indeed, and that both spring and winter are in the vulture. The others, I left for him to wrestle, and without further discourse I departed for the evening.

"There was nothing to protest," I told Victor, "even if I did kill him. In the story -- you know, the fiction? -- the guy is killed by the character, but that's only because the guy is unhappy with the crimes committed by the character. The character realizes that the guy will eventually kill him off, as writers are wont to do, so out of self-preservation he kills the guy."

"Which is obviously impossible in the real world," said Victor.

"Obviously. Although it could be interpreted as suicide, but in the story, the character goes on living. So it couldn't be an actual suicide. But also in the story, the character sees the physical corpse of the guy, so... I dunno. So something. The story was intended to be a little weird."

"Like you," said Victor.

"Like me and you," I said.

When I was in the tank, they didn't let any light in. I had to radiate my own or I wouldn't have had anything to read by.

"Can a word be a sword and a song?" asked Victor.

"Any word worth using, old friend," I said.