I can never write like he does. He doesn’t even come into the office that often. His official working status involves words like “freelance” and “homebased,” and he claims he gets most of his work from the Internet, and that it keeps him busy. But he’s almost never on chat and he almost never answers emails, and when you call his house he’s almost always “out” – if his housekeeper or one of his two children can be believed.
Then, all of a sudden, we need a contract drafted up. We need several abstracts delivered. We need a full site FAQ outlined and delivered in two days. We leave him frantic messages on his landline phone, his email, his permanently inactive chat window – and less than eight hours later, he’s standing right in front of us. Like some tall, lanky, lethargic last-minute savior made up of the smell of coffee and smoke and hair that hasn’t been washed in a week.
He sits down at one of our terminals. He puts on the gigantic earphones we’d set aside especially for him. Five minutes or so into his playlist, he starts to write. A sheen comes over his eyes and then it’s impossible to talk to him. One wonders if he’s even alive while he writes, or if it’s in fact the only time when his heart is actually beating.
He writes with a fury that destroys keyboards, so that on the rare occasions that he visits, we write “keyboard replacement” into our emergency expenses even before he leaves. We also write “coffee, cigarettes” without his name in there, knowing full well it’s all just for him.
It’s almost a sin to watch him. He writes like an avenging angel, pausing briefly at strange intervals and causing a tortured silence to overwhelm the entire room. One does not know silence until one has heard his keyboard fall still.
He never notices. He sits there guzzling his coffee and going through cigarettes at a manic pace, cup after cup and pack after pack even as one hand is typing and his bright inhuman eyes are glued to the screen. When his cup is empty he simply mumbles “Refill, please” and somehow, the person nearest the coffeemaker never fails to hear and oblige. His lighter always tumbles off the edge of his desk and somehow, someone else is always there to pick it up for him. He never picks it up himself.
Two or four or six hours later, he is done. He takes off his earphones and sits for around ten minutes, ignoring everyone, looking like he’s recovering from a life-threatening illness. Then he opens his eyes, and then meekly, pleasantly, strikes up a conversation with us.
One time I asked him if it ever hurt, writing like that. He replied that he earned his bread and butter with that rush – that people called him because he could turn out any document in a split second, no matter how detailed and how sensitive, and then it would only need minimal corrections – if any – when he was done. He was damage control. He was a caffeine-and-nicotine powered ambulance.
The only thing he would never write for a fee was poetry, or fiction. Then again, he joked, nobody had ever approached him with the right offer.
“It’s a lot like writing at gunpoint,” he said, more seriously this time. “It sucks the life out of you and in the end, all you get is that you’re still not dead.”