The Guy Who Writes Faster than Me
by Matt Marinovich
I can understand the fact he’s inspired and even forgive him for wearing a culturally significant scarf as he types on his silvery Apple laptop in the public library, but it’s the pause between the clacking, the soft chuckling, as if he knows he’s really nailed it this time. He’s thrown me off my rhythm. A centimeter of blinking cursor is giving me the finger. He must be writing a novel, an effortless first novel, dark and humorous and touching, that will make him shyly famous. The inside of his refrigerator will be photographed and he will wittily discuss its contents before talking about the advance praise for his second novel.
I will probably be working at the wine shop by then.
I stab a “T” on my laptop’s keyboard, just to see where it might take me.
It doesn’t take my anywhere.
So I erase it, as if I were a bored housekeeper dusting a hair off the edge of a tabletop and glare at him. He’s looking back at me. Maybe something about my greasily parted hair, my plugged up pores has momentarily distracted him. He nods, almost thankfully, and dives back in with one hand, then two, the back of his laptop quivering with each creative jolt. The whole table is shaking now. There’s only one thing to do. I start typing too. Slowly at first. Pausing. Looking concerned. Then not quite as hopeless, and now I’m typing faster, as if something gigantic had just occurred to me: Slfwereow wreorwoufu wofweyer werewe swoure werwre werouwerworuj ffswifwofmf wlfewjrew werwre wrweoueihg wehslfsjsurwl swerwe
My words have become schools of indecipherable fish, but I’m elated. I pause again, and look up, smiling sympathetically at his sullen face as he stares at me, his fingers curled in thin dead air, twitching slightly.
Matt Marinovich is a writer who lives in New York, where there are few writers. His work has been published in Open City, Salon.com, McSweeney's Internet Tendencies, Esquire.com, Mississippi Review, and other magazines. He is the author of a novel, Strange Skies.