The Son’s Book

The son was writing a book. The son did not realize he was writing the book because most of the time while he was writing he was asleep or not paying attention or in the mindset of doing other things. Some nights the son would believe he was playing putt-putt in the backyard with the plastic golf set his father’d bought to try to get him interested in sports, but the son was actually writing the book. The son would think he was languid in front of the television watching some kind of program designed to ensnare young boys’ attention, but the son was actually writing the book. The son had also mistaken himself for eating dinner, painting pasta, laughing and brushing his teeth while he was actually sitting in his closet with the door shut and his fingers typing into a very small computer he didn’t know he had.

The computer’s keyboard did not have markings.

The son’s book contained all things. The son’s book enmeshed the threads of all things that had ever happened or would happen, or were happening right now.

The son’s book contained the sound of wing meat contained in birds once thought extinct, it contained the missing fourth album of the Clash’s Sandinista. It contained sonogram photography of the man who in coming years would invent the thing that ruined us all, it contained every word in Finnegans Wake and everything that author had said aloud while writing Finnegans Wake. It contained instructions on how to stand on the surface of the son, it contained a killer recipe for apple brown betty, it contained IM conversations between Richard Nixon and Aleister Crowley, it contained combinations to every locker in a high school buried underground in the mud of Lithuania, it contained an verbal adaptation of the sequel to Eraserhead, it contained the secret to unlocking the pattern in a mathematical symbol more fucked than pi not yet discovered, it contained the last words of every major-league baseball player ever, it contained directions on how to find your way into a room held offscreen in The Wizard of Oz, The Wizard, and The Wiz, it contained—

The son’s book was all one sentence.

The son’s book contained the son.

The son’s book would be line-edited by Pat Sajak and Gordon Lish.

The son’s book is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2108.