July 12, 2011

Here’s his prophetic speech: “Pieces of inspiration are like flies or maybe even like bees. They travel great distances to gather bits which, when put together, form an idea, a light bulb going off. When our bees gather enough bits and pieces, they land on us, their flowers, and deliver their honey on our lips.”

He is kind of right, isn’t he, I do deliver inspiration to him, although, due to the culture he grew up in, he thinks it comes from within him. I bring it to him gradually, I put the steps in an ascending order, so to him they seem like a string of associations, a perfectly logical thought process. I didn’t leave the smallest hint of my existence, but came up with the idea somehow. Not that he believes it, though.

He’s got one thing very, very wrong: he calls those things that bring him inspiration bees. This cunning metaphor made my entire body hurt with laughter! I don’t have wings, I’m not black and yellow, in fact, I look nothing like a bee! I don’t even like honey, but that’s because I’m a worm.

There are advantages to being a worm when your job and vocation are bringing inspiration to humans. One has no problem sneaking in rooms, and he has a great variety of routes he can take to get there. A classical one is through the narrow gap between the door and the floor, but that’s boring even for rookies. He can get in through small gaps between the tiles, through holes in the wall left by a nail, or through a badly shut window. I am ashamed to admit it, but on a few occasions, it so happened that I ran out of options, and I had to resort to the grossest of all: the pipes. They are moist and rusty and smell truly disgusting. Generally, humans consider us, worms, repelling, but that’s only due to the fact that our bodies move in a fashion so different from theirs. In reality, a worm’s body is about 3.2 times cleaner than a human’s mouth. Draw your conclusions.

My client (this is how we refer to the humans we deliver inspiration to, although technically we don’t get anything from them in return for the favor) is about to perform his bedtime procedure now, which means it’s time for me to leave. I know his home well, so I slide into a hole in the wall on the right of his desk and then down a metal rope reaching down to the ground. A full day’s work has tired me enough to drain my mind from thoughts while I leave his home and. It’s becoming obnoxious to visit the same apartment every evening and then leave. My client sits down to write more or less at the same time every day and puts in the same effort. This means that I do the same amount of work every day gathering him just the right amount of bits and pieces to serve as inspiration. In the evening, the page or two he produces are neither extraordinary, nor bad. It seems to me that in his opinion, all he needs to do to be a good writer is to sit down every evening and write a page or two, and somehow it will all work out. I am glad I got such a meticulous man for a client, many of my colleagues complain about the crazy schedules they have to keep up with. But too much predictability doesn’t serve one well either. I sometimes surprise my client at work or when he is driving home (which requires some planning on my side, as you can tell, because I can’t just jump in a moving car, I’m not too fond of the probability of being squished to death by car tires), I try to show him that inspiration sometimes cannot be held back or planned. When I told my boss about this, he kept his eyes on his screen and grunted something about no need to change our clients, just do as much as is required. I liked my client better when he was going out with this woman. For a month and a half, they spent together every Friday evening and the entire Sunday. I had to run around all day long to gather things, bring them to him, gather more things, and bring them again, because he was constantly thinking about her and through her about other things. I was angry that I had to do so much work, but now that it’s over, I miss it, and I’ve missed it for the two years that have passed since then. I still think it ended rather awkwardly. They rarely went to his or her apartment, and when they did, they drank tea and talked. But on the last Friday night they spent together, they came back to his apartment laughing and blushing, went in the bedroom, and did some things to each other naked in bed. At first, I was worried because the sounds they made, especially she, sounded as though they were in pain, but when they didn’t stop, I concluded it must be some painful ritual that was required when two humans lie in bed. A little later, they stopped shouting, and I dozed off. I woke up because the woman shouted at my client something about never wanting to see him again and left. I never saw her again, and nor did my client. It was all unclear to me, but it must be some human thing worms just can’t get. Maybe my client’s performance of the ritual didn’t please the woman, but is that a good enough reason to shout at him like that? I’m sure he felt quite bad. Anyway, I still don’t know what to make of that episode. All I knew afterwards was that for another month or so I kept on gathering grim pieces of inspiration for my client: he looked so pale that anything else would have been out of place. I thought that a month was enough suffering, so I made an effort and gradually started introducing positive ideas too. This might sound a little immodest, but I like to think that I helped him to get less pale again.