Sixth Sentence, Part 1

Lena sipped her merlot and asked Bart, “So, what is it that you do?”

Bart glanced up from behind his maroon tonic, smirked. “Oh, I’m a Righter, and during the day, I work in the mailroom at the Chronicle.”

“Oh.” She swigged a mouthful from the glass, then for good measure, took another drink. “How long have you been doing it?”

He set down the wine, picked up his water glass. “Oh, couple of years now. I needed to pay the bills, a friend introduced me.”

“And how long have you been working at the Chronicle?”

He smiled. “It’s been my childhood dream. I’ve been Righting since before I can remember. My parents have pictures of me with crayons and construction paper, scrawling fat, backwards letters out, giant circles ending my sentences.” Bart took a long pull from the water.

“Well. Anything I’ve heard of?”

He swirled the wine, more to find his next word than to aerate it. “Probably not. I mostly Right small incidents. It usually doesn’t pay well, but each time, I get a little more noticed.” He shrugged, part apology, part devil-may-care. “Who knows? The other day, I Righted a cat in a tree. Someday, maybe I’ll make a living out of it.”

“Isn’t that mundane?” Lena drained the glass and reached for the bottle. Bart intercepted it first and filled her glass three-fourths filled.

“Righting?”

“No, cats in trees. Really, you could write about anything, couldn’t you?”

“Maybe, but how often do we get the chance to choose what we Right? You show up, something grabs your attention, you’re needed, you grab the opportunity, dash off a few sentences.”

Lena dipped half a breadstick in her merlot. “So, you freelance?”

“Sort of, yeah. I prefer to think of it as mercenary, except with less money. But enough about me, for now. What do you do?”

Marco appeared at their table, balancing a wide circular tray. “The filet mignon for madam, and the vegetarian paella for sir. Can I bring you anything else, some more merlot perhaps?”

Bart shook the bottle as Lena said “Yes.” She downed the remainder of her glass in a gulp. “Please.”

“Very well.” Marco bowed his head in the almost-so-subtle-as-to-be-unnoticed manner, then disappeared. The tray followed soon after.

“I see you like the wine.” Bart tilted the remainder into Lena’s glass, careful not to let the sediment tumble in. As if he’d practiced his whole life, the residue remained within the bottle.

“Takes a lot to get me drunk.” Lena shrugged, then drank. “Well, let’s eat.”

The next few minutes, they consumed their dishes, background static filling the space between them. Marco reappeared, replaced the empty bottle with a fresh victim, and poofed out of existence.

“So, I didn’t get an answer. What do you do?”

Lena sighed. “I work in Reality.” She bit her lip for a few seconds, then forked a bit of bacon perched atop a rare slice of steak into her mouth, chewed it like cud.

“You must be doing well, lots of the houses around here are going up. Seems like a seller’s market.” Bart poured himself a second glass of merlot, smacked his lips at the sweeter bouquet from this bottle.

“I work in corporate, mostly. Not too concerned with the lives of individuals. Small potatoes, really.”

“Really.” He stirred the rice, as if expecting to create a vortex to another dimension that would suck him through. “If it’s not a violation of confidentiality, could I ask what businesses you’ve worked with?”

“Biotech recently. GenForth, DNAtoZ, ChromeGenome.” She waved her hand, then looked down at her hip. “Excuse me.” She removed a hand-held device, started pecking away with her thumbs.

Bart took this opening to remove the notepad from his pocket. He flipped to the entry dated for today, read the two sentences he’d committed. “Lena accepted Bart’s dinner invitation with an open mind and a willing heart. The early part of the meal went swimmingly, filled with intriguing conversation and light flirting.” He looked at this frowning woman, still pecking away, oblivious to everything around her. With a graphite stub, Bart committed a third sentence: “Despite Lena’s initial reticence, Bart’s charm and personality won her over by the time dessert arrived at the table.” He thought a moment, then scratched out the words “at the table.”

He slipped the notepad back into his right pocket, and the pencil in the left, so as not to have it drop through the hole in the right pocket. Looked back at Lena, still thumbing away, though her pace slowed to half-jittery.

“That’s interesting, haven’t all those companies gone broke recently?”

She placed the hand-held on the table, squaring it alongside her knife. “And that’s why they needed to sell their buildings.”

“I had some stock in them, they seemed to be doing great for the long run.”

“That’s a shame, I hope you didn’t have too much.”

“Who wants to retire at 85 anyway?” He scooped some more brown rice into his mouth, scooping a grain away from the corner of his mouth.

They continued their monotonous chewing. Every time Bart tried to say something thereafter, an invisible needle sewed his lips shut, and he mouthed more paella in to keep from choking on the unsaid words. Meanwhile, Lena toyed with yet another glass of wine and her BlackBerry.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Bart started, but Lena was lost in the tiny screen. At the bar, he dashed off a quick sentence, spoke to a married couple, and got both their phone numbers. Clearly, it wasn’t his defect, so what was going wrong?

He splashed cold water in his face, then tried drying it off with multiple paper towels. Each one kept tearing. How was she counteracting his Righting? Yes, this wasn’t the most philanthropic purpose, but still, it should have had some effect on her. He took out the notepad. Two more sentences for the night. Mustard had him covered, so he could play around, but what to Right? He tapped the pencil against the sink, then against the mirror, then started with the following statement: “As if a sign from the heavens, the dessert tray hit her, breaking her BlackBerry, and leaving her vulnerable to Bart’s advances.” He suspected that device fouled up his Righting somehow. Halfway through the sentence, he cracked the pencil point, leaving an errant period right after the second “her.”

This happened a few times before, mostly with pens running out of ink or jamming. This was why he switched to wooden pencils, because mechanical pencil leads were too fragile. Would he have to start using charcoal? Bart ran the water and washed his hands over and over, waiting. More and more handsoap, more and more water. His hands started to chap, but still he rubbed and cleansed. The scream never came.

Bart nudged the bathroom door open, peered out, then stepped into the restaurant proper. Smartly dressed waiters bustled around the tables, popping in and out to leave food, only to disappear just as quickly. Lena pecked away at her BlackBerry, still seated at the table. Somehow, two dessert trays wandered through the room, but neither came near her, like electrons around a nucleus.

Bart went back to the bathroom and shook the notepad, as if something would tumble out. He blew through the pages to clear out dirt, then flipped through them as if something would reveal itself. What the hell was going on? And then it hit him, like a pie to the face. The sour face, the cryptic statements, the constant typing on the BlackBerry, as if she were issuing long-winded commands. They were Righting each other. They were wronging each other.

This had only happened a couple of times before. The stakes were higher then, but Bart shivered more now. It had been a long time since he’d interacted with someone without the Right. The person that he wanted to be, the person that he could be, existed only in the pad of paper. Six sentences a day, imbued with the weight of the world. Six sentences to reshape the world in his graven image. The power of a god in sixty words a day. And now, it was lost to an angry woman with a BlackBerry.

And then, he thought about it a little more. Running his hands beneath the water, blood ready to squeeze from his fingers, he thought about her statements, and the broken companies. She was about ready to leave, if she had not done so already. Bart felt safe in assuming she would not leave until he paid the bill. Peeking out again, sure enough, a black tray lay waiting on the table as Lena poked away.

He knew nothing about her power, but everything about her. At least, everything she was willing to reveal over this mockery of a date, or that Mustard did and did not tell him. Damn Mustard. The only thing he knew was that it didn’t work on her, directly or indirectly. What was this, another test? What was he doing that he needed her distracted, and didn’t want to tell him? So many questions for the mentor; they would have to be answered later. God damn his tests.


Could one sentence save a night? He was about to find out. Not that she would have noticed, but he couldn’t stay hidden inside the bathroom for much longer without drawing her attention. Bart rotated the pencil on his back molars, grinding out a graphite stub. The splinters lodged between his teeth and in his cheek, but he didn’t care. They would dissolve soon enough; they always did. He scrawled out the last sentence for the night, then checked his watch. Nine-thirty, wow. Only another one hundred and fifty minutes until the reset.

He smoothed out his greying hair, the water beading, dribbling down his forehead. No matter how much he tried to Right them away, the crow’s feet and forehead wrinkles continued creasing his visage. Patted down the suit, as if looking for contraband, then went back out to the table. Before sitting down, Bart patted the notepad in his pants pocket, as if for good luck, then sat back down.

***

Part 2 next week. Somewhat substandard, I think I wanted to start this as a short scene from a play, then lost my way for a bit. Dialogue needs work.