Dick is redundant

"It's not good enough Gilbert - just not good enough. It's what you do - you write - if you don't write what are you - what are you now - some pathetic character in someone else's detective story? What? You're an indolent bastard at the best of times - you always have been - but if you're not writing you're bloodily, insufferably idle. You have to write. I'm a farmer - I farm. You're a writer - so bloody well get on with it and write."

Gilbert looked genuinely chastened. He shot his eyes to his bare feet. "I know - you're right - I must - I will - I promise. You're so accurate - I am pathologically lazy - I'm just using this latest thing as an excuse - the Laz thing --- and the 7100 too I suppose - I do know it - I just keep denying it to myself. Lying. I'll get back to the writing today - I promise I will - tonight. I've a few ideas that I need to sketch out. I will - promise". At last he looked up. He looked her in the eye and refreshed his promise. She believed him.

She went to speak but he preempted her "I've worked out how to dispense with Dick. I did it last night. And it worked. I fathomed it over the past few days. This guy - the Laz - only writes at night - it's only when he's writing Dick that Dick can "visit" - and then only if he's writing both of us at the same time - but, and here's the interesting bit that I worked out yesterday, if he's writing me I can travel both his narrative and his narrator's position - I can look over his shoulder as it were while he's working. And I don't need Dick. Those nights free of Dick were days he wasn't writing at all - or wasn't writing both of us. All I did was to doze last night - to doze and to wait. His writing has an almost physical effect on me. If I'm just dozing it rouses me when he begins writing me. If I'm asleep he gets away scott free - but if I'm waiting for it I can follow his creative thread backwards. I can act in the narrative and I can get all the way back to him - where he's writing - when he's writing. It's amazing. It's just like a trip but ... But it's so real. It is real! And the fascinating thing is that he's got me back to when I first started thinking about the Stew - that's why I feel so young in the mornings after - he's taken me back. And that's why Dick is younger too."

Abby felt as though she had lost the power to speak: perhaps had lost the power even to think. It was all so far fetched. And yet it seemed to make sense in a very literary way. It had a certain post modern logic to it. Of a very sudden she recalled something else that threw everything into a peculiar, skewed, perspective. "I just remembered," she said haltingly, "that guy's sig. That Laz guy. It's too weird." "What what - what was it then? Tell me!". He was insistent and ----- and anxious, one might say.

"The solipsist on the web".

A silence so heavy, so profound that it was palpable, dropped like a gladiators net over them. And ran for several minutes while they digested this new morsel.

He broke it, "Schmidt! or was it Schmitz? Arno or Ettore?"

"I think," she broke in, "we are talking Nobodaddy and not Zeno. No paradoxes."

"By the way", he closed, "on the email thing. I suspect that someone is intercepting my mail".



(to be continued ... )