He made his money by creating, just for the hell of it, an online game in which Croats battled Serbs in a medieval setting. Within a year, some thirty thousand gamers were playing it. He advertised on social media and on websites for Croatian and Serbian émigrés. At Matija’s suggestion, the game included diplomacy, the option of enemy takeover of resources via the stock market, espionage, the ability to develop weapons, and powerful unnamed allies, so the game took off and people were hooked. Although they had very different jobs, Miljac and Matija always enjoyed each other’s company. They gave each other perspective.
“If it hadn’t been yours, I’d have stopped reading after twenty pages. It didn’t move me,” Miljac told him, shutting the fridge with his foot, carrying a bottle of beer in each hand. “Your first two books were… wild. I still remember whole passages. But this, I couldn’t tell where you were going with the story. But hey, I don’t know, maybe I just don’t get that kind of thing.”
No, Miljac, I think you get it all too well, thought Matija.
There was a slim chance they were all wrong. Neither Matija, who’d written the 350 torturous pages in agony, nor Korina and Miljac—who tried to spot some aspect of themselves they’d never seen articulated before in his story—had been able to make sense of this new novel. Surely Gita would know how to appreciate it, he thought.
She was no literary critic, but for twenty years she’d worked as a journalist on a cultural program that aired on Croatian national TV. He knew she wouldn’t beat around the bush, and she had an unerring instinct for how the most relevant critics would read a text. They’d met through his sister, a doctor, five years earlier, right after Matija published his first book. She’d diagnosed Gita with gout (yes, Matija constantly felt the need to show everyone just how funny he was, so he called her Gouta a few times as a joke, but Gita wasn’t thrilled about it).
Gita was wearing a pair of platform sneakers that cutting-edge independent research had shown could burn body fat and help people with back problems who wanted, like Jesus, to walk on water. Clearly, she wasn’t satisfied to let the sneakers be the only statement of her celibacy, so she’d put on a velour sweatshirt with a tacky pattern of pink, brown, and dark green. It made Matija uncomfortable. Being seen with someone who dressed so badly would make it difficult to be perceived as cool by Croatian literati. In a perfect world, in which contemporary literature had a vital role to play in Croatian society, in which there was the literary version of showbiz that Matija could summon with pagan invocations, they’d be photographed by paparazzi, and what would people see? A literary gigolo, and on his arm a garment worker from the Kamensko ready-to-wear factory, sporting their god-awful tracksuit fashions.
“This thing you’ve written… it isn’t much, really. Too many clichés, man. It’s not that the plot is predictable, but there’s no way to tell where you’re going with it. You depict the Romas as if they’re unwashed oafs, Neanderthals with this mystical cultural legacy thanks to which they survive, and you give us arrogant roughnecks for Croats… And the policeman, he’s got his head up his ass… Besides, instead of telling a story, you’re preaching. It sounds like you started by coming up with a handful of cute sentences and then built the story around them.”
Matija agreed with everything Gita said. He’d introduced a butch policewoman, a cussing spitfire, to the plot only because he couldn’t resist having the woman say, on her way to the ladies’ room, “Off to squeeze the moss.”
“Don’t submit this. Maybe they’d publish it, there’s potential for scandal, but… I can already see them saying no one should buy this book, because they’re just as likely to find a copy in the trash on a beach. Look, this isn’t the end of the world. After two really good books, you wrote something bad. If you ask me, that’s better than not writing anything after…”
“After what?”
“After the breakup.”
“We didn’t break up, she walked out on me.”
“But why even say that? So you’ll feel better, now that you’re all fucked up? To justify yourself? What a character you are. I don’t know anyone so cruel to himself yet so fond of self-pity…”
“…”
“Are you and she talking?”
“No. I ran into her a month ago, before Christmas. She was with this guy who was, like, forty-five. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and piercings. I think he paints people turning into furniture, or something. We had a nice chat. As I recall, we debated the difference between LCD and plasma screens for three minutes.”
“You’ve never told me what happened between the two of you.”
“Hell if I know.”
They were on their way to the parking garage, and Matija, as he walked, felt like his shadow: short and formless in some places, long and frangible in others, but mainly reticent and ashamed. He was so empty that all those things could come creeping into him, things other people—who had some source of joy to protect them—were able to keep at bay.
Matija despised the world that day, himself included. He’d written well before, he knew he had, while he still loved people and saw in them a nobility that made the world livable. That was a time when he was both in love up to his ears and at odds with everyone around him. Now things were different. He’d had no trouble spending a thousand and a half hours writing and hundreds of hours awake when he should have been sleeping. Ever since Dina Gajski left him two years earlier, his damned writing had been the only thing motivating Matija Dolenčec to be human. After Dina, he moved writing to the very center of his being and then lost touch with it—maybe forever. In his search for a good story, there was almost nothing he hadn’t tried. He read and wrote, his gaze fixed on the future; he spent days copying passages from classics just to learn an author’s voice; he tirelessly jotted down quotes to avoid writing about what was really happening in his story. He tried working early in the morning, then late at night. He skipped meals, fabricated ingenious reviews of his yet-to-be-written book, sniffed glue, found little comfort in porn and clothes shopping, talked on and on about how one should and shouldn’t write, wrote barefoot, and developed a urinary tract infection. In short, he assembled a vast opus of untold stories and a stable of characters with no goals or interests. And all that came of this was the occasional sad, incomplete thought and the reek of trash and rot.
While unloading large shopping bags from his trunk at Gita’s apartment, his chest tightened because he knew he’d be going back to his apartment and thought he would never again write anything worthwhile. He felt that dread that had been shivering in his gut since Dina came into his life, the dread that there was something sickening deep inside him that was about to burst into the light of day. He could go home and pull at least something worthwhile from the manuscript—the occasional decent passage, the outline for a story—and then erase the rest, but he knew that every new reading of the text would be a fresh humiliation. He had just spent a year as a person who writes. Now he saw himself in the rearview mirror not as a hero in his own story but as a caricature in someone else’s.
If there were just one more good book in me, he thought. Nothing else would matter. I’d never write a word again. Just one more…