The Writers Afterlife. Richard Vetere

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      CHAPTER 5

      “Who is that?” I asked as Joe and I walked along the sidewalk of a big city somewhere in the twentieth century. I’d just noticed a middle-aged man sitting alone in a park.

      Naturally the city was deserted and only an illusion, as was all that existed in the Writers Afterlife. Joe nodded. “Sad story, his,” he replied. “He had five best sellers in America in the early twentieth century. He was the first person to ever make a million dollars for writing fiction. He was very wealthy and very, very popular. Only Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott have had more best sellers in the English language before him.”

      “Who is he?”

      “You wouldn’t even recognized his name if I told you.”

      “Really?”

      “Fifteen movies were based on his stories. Gary Cooper and John Wayne starred in two of them. He wrote plays and published nineteen novels. Hardly anyone reads his work anymore.”

      “Please tell me who he is.”

      “Harold Bell Wright,” Joe told me.

      “Who?”

      “Exactly.”

      I was wobbly with all the information.

      As we walked by I noticed the man look up at us. He spoke up, and his voice still echoes in my head. “Do you read me?” he asked.

      Joe hurried me along. “Don’t respond. Whatever you say will be the wrong answer.”

      Suddenly we were in another city, and another man was at a table alone sipping champagne with music from the Roaring Twenties floating through the air. A yellow Rolls-Royce was parked beside his table and he was eating caviar. The scene struck me as odd, as the man was alone yet trying to act as if he were surrounded by friends and adoring fans.

      “Do you see that man there?”

      I could very clearly see the slender man with thick hair, thick eyebrows, and a bushy mustache dressed impeccably in a grandiose suit and tie, doing all he could to make it obvious to anyone looking that he was enjoying himself.

      “Who is he?” I asked, looking closely.

      “He had a best seller the year The Great Gatsby was published. Every high school student knows that novel; hardly anyone alive remembers his,” Joe told me.

      “What was it titled?”

      “The Green Hat. It was about the same world of the Roaring Twenties as Gatsby but it lacked the style, execution, language, and perhaps the great storytelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But that author, he was on the cover of Time magazine!”

      “The cover of Time magazine?” I repeated. “But I don’t know him,” I said. I said it too loudly, and the man looked at me with a deep sadness in his big, dark eyes, then looked away from us both.

      “Michael Arlen,” Joe whispered his name. “The last ten years of his life he suffered from writers block and didn’t write a word. A few years after he died, he was nearly forgotten.”

      I shrugged my shoulders. I remembered a saying I knew back when I was alive: “A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.” I turned to Joe. “So are we saying that the mediocre talents who are famous when alive fade into obscurity once time catches up with them?”

      Joe shrugged. “Not entirely true but there’s a better chance of that happening than someone living in obscurity and being discovered later on.”

      As we left the city I looked over my shoulder and there he sat on the park bench, the only man in the entire metropolis. He sat there for all eternity with the tall buildings as a backdrop. In a city of thousands, no one knew him. Though he felt no hunger, no lust, no need for sleep, and no СКАЧАТЬ