The Editor

You wake up to find a mysterious black notebook on your nightstand. The moment you touch it you hear the voice of the narrator. This voice, saying exactly what this voice is saying right now. The narrator says that it is the narrator and that you are the author of the world of your experience and the great editor of existence. That you now have power over life and death. Simply inscribe a name in this little black book and that person will die within 24 hours. Once the name is written you cannot remove it. It will erase on its own the moment the person is no more.

“What about if more than one person has that same name?” you ask. “Or what if I misremember or misspell a person’s name?”

The narrator does not answer you. It is a storyteller, not your spirit guide. Instead the voice continues to narrate what you are doing or, more precisely, to narrate itself narrating what you are doing. As you put on your sweatshirt, it says that you put on your sweatshirt. It says that you leave your bedroom and go to the bathroom, black book in hand. It describes you putting down the book: gingerly, as if it is fragile, on the porcelain lid of the toilet tank.

Only once you pick it back up does the narration continue, explaining that you will only hear it when you are carrying the book. You test the parameters of the word ‘carrying’ by putting the book in the pocket of your hoodie. It explains that by ‘carrying’ it means to have on your person, not to have in your hand. It does so while you walk down the hall and into the kitchen, pouring yourself a coffee and sitting down at the table.

You take out the black book of death and place it in front of you, staring at it. You don’t know what to make of this entire unsettling experience. You don’t know if you should do it, but you know what name you want to write in the book. With gravity, but nevertheless smirking, you imagine having the power that the narrator claims that the book offers. Simply write that name and see. ‘What’s the harm?’ you think, and you grab a pencil from the drawer.

You take your time on the first letter, slowly and carefully shaping the capitol ‘D.’ But once it is down you rush through the rest, fearing perhaps that someone, somewhere, is called simply ‘D’ and that delaying would inadvertently lead to that person’s demise. So you hurriedly scroll the whole name on the page, the name that you associate with what is perhaps the most dangerous person currently inhabiting the planet.

Having written the name, you are overwhelmed by simultaneous waves of conflicting emotions. You push the book forward, trying to push the emotional overload away along with it.

You return from work to find the book where you left it and, as you touch it, the narration begins again. You sit still, wondering whether, by not doing anything, the narrator will take the opportunity to backtrack in the story as many books do. You want to know whether the narrator knows what you are doing when you do not have the book. The voice describes the anxiety that followed you through your day, distracting you from your various tasks and occasioning a number of failures and gaffs. The missed meeting, the forgotten elevator button, the microwaved spoon, the untied shoe. The narrator knows all about them.

That doesn’t rule out the possibility that the voice of the narrator is just a voice in your head and that you have had a psychotic break. After all, you know about your mistakes too. It is not the narrator’s job to tell you that you’re not crazy, the narrator says, only to narrate what you are doing. So, seeking other confirmation, you turn on the radio news.

There doesn’t seem to be anything unusual in the reporting. You are at first relieved, then terror-struck as it dawns on you that you have indeed gone insane. Just as you’re figuring out what one is supposed to do when one realizes one is crazy, the news announces an interruption for ‘breaking news.’

The narrator goes silent so that you can listen.

“Oh my God, he’s actually dead,” you think, trying but failing to entertain the possibility that it is all a coincidence. That means that you aren’t crazy. But that also means that the situation you find yourself in is. You control who lives and who dies by the stroke of your pen. The fate of the world is in your hands.

You sit back down at the table and check the book. The pages are empty, the name is gone. You decide to make a list of people that you are pretty sure the world would be better off without. You almost start to write the list in the book, but realize your error and take an envelope from your piled up mail.

You pause, wondering about guilt and the ramifications of all this for your ‘soul’, whether existential, psychological, or metaphysical. After all, if a book like this is possible, all bets are off concerning our knowledge of the way things work. You try to bargain with the narrator and the book, asking if you can assign some consequence other than death to the names you write and the people who go by them. Of course, neither the narrator nor the book are willing to participate in your little negotiation and you are left with the same anxiety that prompted your proposal in the first place.

You decide to wait a few days. You will write the next, and all subsequent names, in irregular intervals so as to avoid too much suspicion. Not that you can imagine any way that any such suspicion could be directed at you. But what do you know? Until this morning you thought you had a pretty good grasp on the nature of reality, a reality that didn’t include anything like this book. Who knows what else lurks out there, what other people know about it?

You take the book back to your room and open your underwear drawer. You part the contents like Moses and slip the book into the space.

Three days later, you retrieve the book and the narrator’s voice returns, remarking that it is three days later. You don’t even carry the book into another room, just place it on the dresser, inscribe a second name, and shove it back into the drawer.

Two days later, you return once more. You’ve done some research and are confident the name you are going to write is the most urgent one to add to your ledger. You have also tried to figure out how to do some good in between by finding some less high profile targets. But you don’t want to use the book for revenge, only for future good. No reason to write the names of already punished murders, etc. You need the unidentified ones. But obviously you don’t know their names. You write the third name and return the book to the drawer.

You hold the book in your hand again. You should have seen it coming. The rightful scorn replaced by lip-service sadness. The monster transformed into martyr. The conspiracies, cults, and canonization. You’ve taken out the book again to try to stop what you’ve started, the succession and the success of the successor. You did this. But does that mean you have to step in again to arrest it, or should you learn your lesson, that meddling might make things worse. You chew on the pen. You twirl it between your fingers. You tap it on the table. You do everything with it except write. You bury the book in your drawers, trying to bury your shame and responsibility.

It’s late. You’re drunk. You have drawn the book from the drawer again, littered your bedroom with underwear flung in your dramatic state. You stare, blurry-eyed, at the blank page before you. You realize that, had it been a year, you would have been fine tonight and this wouldn’t have ever crossed your mind. But it hasn’t even been two months and it just hurts too much. There’s no other way to avoid it happening again, not that you can think of. Your ex doesn’t seem to want to spare you the pain, maybe even wants to inflict it a little. ‘At some point haven’t we all kind of wished that our exes didn’t exist?’ you think. You blow out your lips. “Fuck it,” you say as your scrawl your ex’s name in drunken script.

It was the guilt, the regret, that drove you to the drawer this morning. You pulled out the book and now you are flipping through the pages, looking for the name. Did you really write it last night? Is it still there? It is. Written in a messy hand, scrunched together at the end to fit on the page: your ex’s name.

“What have I done?” you scream, like some sort of stage performer in a period piece. Is it for the narrator’s benefit, this melodrama? Because the narrator doesn’t need your overwrought performances. The better question is, what should you do now? Should you try to stop it? To warn your ex? To change the name? Is there some sort of loophole you can find? Some sort of do-over for drunkenness?

The narrator has nothing to offer you but the following cliche: ‘actions have consequences.’ “But,” you say to an empty room, “writing is not an action, not really. And shouldn’t consequences be proportional with the action? One tiny little action, enormous consequences? That’s not right.”

Should? Right? This is not a morality tale, some cathartic comedy. This is life...and death.

You watch as the name disappears from the page, your ex disappears from existence. You throw the book.

You pick up the book weeks later, disheveled and wild-eyed. You have received an email. Your ex’s will was not revised after your split. You are a partial beneficiary of a small life insurance policy and thus stand to receive $20,000. For you, for some reason, this is the last straw. You write your own name in the book, pause, then print, in large capital letters, ‘THE NARRATOR.’ As soon as you finish the last ‘R’ the word erases and the voice goes silent.