The Mentality of a Notebook

A story written for a contest prompt about what would happen if eveyrone in the world had to write thier every thought down in a diary/notebook for a day. I've made many improvements on it, like giving it a clear ending.

 

It was Thursday when I saw the end of the world.

The sun shone with glaring intensity, reflecting off the mirrored buildings in flashing bands of brilliant light. The sky was cloudless and azure. The trees sitting in their little cubicles of soil near the curb and the weeds poking out of the sidewalk were a lovely shade of healthy green. It seemed typical enough for a weekday in New York. But it wasn’t- not quite.

Only two months prior to that Thursday, American President Harry Bush, backed by the two infamous International Board of Peace members Seymour Privates and Noah Ho, created a bill stating that every person on Earth that could write had to put their every thought down in some type of book, preferably a notebook. This bill somehow evaded being vetoed by the other members of the Board, which was likely bribery’s finest moment. The penalty for everyone who didn’t turn a log into an official by dawn tomorrow was life in prison or death, depending on the country you lived in (it was considered treason, which was an inarguable load of crap). A lot of people said that an act of God- a sign that he wanted peace. My reply to that was that God must be a moron. There was no way that the Scribe’s Bill could bring world peace. Hell, it didn’t even relate to world peace. But a date was set, and, unbeknownst to humanity, the end of the world was plotted.

Thursdays suck.

Even as I thought this, I wrote it down in my notebook, skillfully writing around my abstract doodle of my pet goldfish that I had created that morning. The eyes took up almost the entire head (I was trying to emphasize their “bigness”- I succeeded), but otherwise it was pretty good, considering I have all the artistic skill of a drunken chimpanzee. My aging Hispanic taxi driver, who spoke enough Spanglish to stumble through the price of the drive in dólares, was likewise scribbling his thoughts down in his own notebook. The taxi swung precariously from one side of the lane to the other, but he was keeping it on the street, at least. I couldn’t say as much for many of the other drivers on that particular Thursday; we had passed at least six or seven smoking pileups of cars in scattered locations on the street, and several more on the sidewalks. The various drivers of the vehicles were yelling at each other from several scattered places while simultaneously writing every word and thought down in their own little personal notebooks.

Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that some of these notebooks were probably quite amusing, if vulgar. I wrote that down, sighing in annoyance as the taxi made a sharp curve to the left to dodge a pedestrian, which caused me to create a large, unnecessary line across the dead center of my paper. Damn those idiots in the International Board.

My taxi, not coming out of the turn, lurched off onto a sidewalk with a jarring bump and an odd thumping noise, sending pedestrians scattering away from us and synchronically flipping my driver the bird.  When the car finally grazed one of the shops and came to a sparking, screeching halt, I moved to open my door. However, my door was pushed up against the brick wall of the shop and therefore impossible to open. Glancing up from my furious scribbling, which was mostly curses at my driver, I quickly pressed the red release button for my seatbelt and slid across the seat so I could get out on the other side. My driver, who had recovered himself, suddenly whirled around in his seat and glared at me, pressing the ‘lock doors’ too late as the door swung open to reveal the ugly black streaks the tires left on the cement of the curb. For all purposes, I shot him my most vicious look and stepped out of the cab.

“Mi dólares, mi dólares!” the senile driver shouted at me, his shoulder twitching a little as he wrote it down blindly. I quirked my eyebrow ever so slightly, to achieve that perfect “are you kidding me?” look.

“Yeah, right. Go to hell,” I said just before slamming the door. I could still hear his muffled shouting as he scrambled to unbuckle his seat belt so he could get out and confront me. Writing my conclusions about that driver and his taxi in my notebook, I skipped a space to begin my next section and started walking down the street, hitting someone every few feet or so. Once my shoulders started to ache from the collisions, I ducked into a random store, partially to escape from the inattentive passersby but also to hide from the taxi driver, who was still following me to get his money for the ride. A deafening, screeching whine began as I stumbled inside. I tripped an alarm.

That was Einsteinian.

Before I could look up from my writing to see exactly where, or what, I had just bungled into, someone grabbed my arm with a painfully hard grip and spun me around. Suddenly, I was face to face with possibly the most ugly man I had ever seen in my life. His jaw was very rigid and square, coming to a chin so sharp it could have sunk the Titanic. His cheekbones were very broad, making his head seem elongated and  rather comparative to that of a horse. His brow jutted out in much of a Neanderthal fashion, and his eyebrows were thick and bushy to match. His eyes were small and beady but very bright, reflecting an intelligence his other external features obviously did not possess. I stared, amazed at his ugliness and absolutely terrified at the same time.

My notebook and pencil dropped from my surprised fingers, sliding to the floor with a dry rustle and a light clatter. The guy, startled by the sudden noise, jumped back from me and for the first time I noticed his clothes. I struggled to restrain from either laughing or vomiting. His clothes aren’t really worth describing; apparently this man had taste in clothes that were as ugly as he was. He managed to mix absolutely heinous colors in coordination with spots, stripes, and plaid- use your imagination.

The man stared at me angrily as I, shaking, reached down to grab my notebook with numb fingers. My mouth opened and closed a couple times, soundlessly before I finally managed to shout out “I’ll just be going now. Sorry about the alarm,” audibly over the noise. As I flipped through my notebook to find my page and scribble all this down, he stepped in front of the door, and hit a switch that brought sudden and utter silence with the exception of a dull ringing in my ears. It had been a loud alarm. He also continued to stare at me. I looked up at him as I was writing, causing me to take the sentence off of it line and in a diagonal path across the page.

“What? Do you want me to pay you for the trouble, or something?” I asked, fully willing to do so if this guy would just get out of my way. I had a lot to write, and he was giving off kind of a murderer vibe that was giving me one of those oh-s**t-what-did-I-just-walk-into feelings.

“Do you agree with this law?” he replied, gesturing toward my notebook. His voice was deep, almost hollow, and kind of weird to hear. I looked down to avoid looking at him (I was afraid my gaze we be drawn to his clothes, and I had been given a glimpse of them to last me until well after death), saw my crooked writing path, and nervously started to erase it.

 

 

“No. It’s the most jackass thing I’ve ever heard of. Why?” I asked as I stopped erasing and brushed the pink shavings off my paper. They fell to the floor, disappearing. The nervous thought crossed my very confused and terrified brain that I might disappear, if I don’t get out of here soon. Maybe I shouldn’t have replied. Slowly, I wrote it down, knowing full well that it could possibly be the last thing I write. Great last words.

Suddenly annoyed at my writing, the man grabbed my notebook and tore it out of my hand. Bipolar, are we? I wondered silently as he skimmed over my random thoughts. Terrific. Good thing I saved his appearance for later. He glanced up, tossing the notebook back at me. He gave it a Frisbee-like spin with his wrist, and me, butterfingers that I am, dropped it. He snorted in amusement as I scrambled to pick it up yet again.

“Don’t write anything,” he warned. I took his advice, and kept my hand at my side. But it felt awkward to not be doing anything, so I put it in my pocket.

“You never-” I started, but had to stop and clear my throat when my voice broke. He arched an eyebrow at me. “You never answered my question. Why do you care if I like this law or not?” I said in a rush. What the hell is the matter with me? I thought. What would possess me to bring that up again?

 

“Because,” he answered, “I needed to know.” Okay. Good enough for me. I made a move to leave, but he shook his head. “Follow me. Now.” For some inexplicable and brainless reason, I followed, clutching my notebook close and gripping my pencil so tightly it hurt. I’m going to die. He’s going to kill me. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m an idiot. I’m going to die.

 

When I hesitated, for a brief moment, he grabbed my arm again and pulled me along. I felt like a little kid being led across the street as he led me into the back room, which was more clearly illuminated- the windows weren’t shaded. Actually, we didn’t stop there. We went through the back, out an emergency exit (the sign of which was bright and glaring. And yet, I still hadn’t noticed it), and down a winding fire escape into an alley, before finally stopping next to a debilitated blue VW Bug.

I looked skeptically at the man, wondering if he was seriously expecting me to willingly get into the car with him, a total stranger that would, given the chance, happily shoot me. By his expression, he was. Reluctantly, I started to get. Eventually, he sighed in irritation and just shoved me in and slammed the door. Well, that worked too. I anxiously sat on the peeling cover of the passenger seat as he walked around the front of the car, watching me from the other side of the windshield, and got in through the driver’s side door. He locked my door as he sat down.

He pulled a key out of his shirt pocket and plugged it into the ignitions, twisting once it was firmly in place. The car roared to life with all the ferocity of a cupcake, occasionally making an odd rumbling noise that sounded reminiscent of Sean Connery muttering in an irritated way. The seat creaked loudly whenever I moved, a spring was poking me in the side of my thigh, and the car smelled like old socks left in a duffel bag for eight months. Instantly I thought of the song “Piece of S**t Car” by Adam Sandler. I tried to buckle me seat belt, but I couldn’t pull it down past my shoulder. I gave up, letting it slide back to the base with a hiss.

The man looked over at me as he pulled out of the alley, then several more times as we drove to God-knows-where, catching glances between swerves as he dodged other cars and a few bicyclers, who were having a hard time trying to hold the handlebars and write at the same time.

I tried to ignore him at first, but he kept doing it and it started to annoy me. Unwilling to say anything to him, I flipped open my notebook and put my pencil to the paper, about to write my curiosity about why he wasn’t writing this down. Can’t he write? Why was he kidnapping me?

He caught me, and slammed on the brakes with a force that sent me into the dashboard and sent my notebook into the windshield, then into a sliding path to my feet.

“What the hell is your problem?” I screamed at him, rubbing the rising bump on my forehead. He glared at me. “What, kidnapping a totally random person isn’t enough? You have to give them a concussion too?”

“You said you thought this law was stupid.” He shot back. I looked at him incredulously.

“I still have to write! That’s why it’s called a law.” I drew out the word law, slowly, like you would for a little kid. He glared at me. My anger curdled under his acidic gaze and quickly became fear.

There was a long, uncomfortable pause before someone almost wrecked into us from behind. The car went back into motion with a jerk. He stared at the road for a long time before finally speaking.

“This is impossible.” I looked at him, wondering if he was talking to himself or me. He glanced at me, giving me an answer. He waited for a response, and I wondered if this guy was more of a psycho than I thought before.

“What is? The Scribe’s Bill? It seems pretty possible, if you look around.” I looked out my window, in time to see some pedestrian, looking down at their notebook while writing, walk right into a wall. I choked back laughter. He looked at me and followed my gaze out my window, in time to see the woman pick herself up off the ground.

“That’s why it isn’t. If you look around, there’s nothing but chaos. How do you think this will turn out? It will be the end of the world.”

“What?” For the first time that day, my mind was totally blank. I had no idea how to respond to that.

 “Think about it. You can’t make the entire world write their every thought down. People are careless. They get frustrated. They get angry. They lash out at each other. Look at those drivers, the ones from the accident.” I looked. A few had gotten into a fight and were swinging clumsy punches at one another, swearing and shouting, their diaries forgotten and lying on the ground. One was torn up, the pages lying all over the sidewalk and the street. That’s probably what the fight started over. 

“People are fickle. We need certain things, things that aren’t necessary so much physically as psychologically or emotionally. Comfort, even if it’s from an inanimate object, is one of these things. That’s why people own pet rocks. Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks? Ever seen it?” I nodded. Despite some of the reviews, I had liked the movie. “He had ‘Winston,’ that volleyball. Contact is another thing we need. Hermits, people that live alone, die bitter, miserable, and forgotten. They regret their isolation. Even homeless people, people you see alone every day trying to leech money, have contact with other people. They usually live in groups, under a bridge or wherever they sleep. Do you understand? We need these things.”

I just stared at him. I started to comprehend.

“Privacy.” I stated simply. He looked at me and nodded. “Privacy is one of them. We have to have things that are our own, including our thoughts. This law makes it so that we can’t. People can read your every thought about them and about the world. You have no privacy.”

“Exactly.” The car stopped with an uncomfortable screech, thump noise. “ I wanted someone to know, and you just happened to come along.” I glanced at him, wary but my interest piqued. “I lived in that building all my life. I doubt you saw it, but there was a television near the door. I turned it off right before you came in. I had been watching the news.”

He paused, so I thought he was done. “That’s fascinating,” I snapped, disappointed. I thought there was more he wanted me to know than ‘he watched the news,’ if he abducted me just to tell me something.

“And on the news,” he continued, with an edge in his voice that was like duct tape being slapped across my mouth, “they announced that a military officer lost it, he was so frustrated with this law. Some general at a missile facility. I doubt anyone saw the report, everyone was so damn busy writing their minds down.” It started to dawn on me what the report said, and I gasped.

He nodded. “It’s every major city, not just us. San Francisco, Chicago, Pittsburgh, all of them. But we’re the primary target. No one realized what he had done at first, but they said the military guesses we have about thirty minutes.  They can’t disable them. He put some kind of weird safety lock on them so they’re guaranteed to hit their targets.”

“They announced at the time you saw the report we have twenty minutes?” I asked. He said nothing, just looked out his window. Finally, he nodded.

It hadn’t been a long car ride, only about fifteen minutes. But it was long enough.

I heard the rippling click as the doors unlocked. The sun was beginning to dip behind the tallest buildings, sending shadows across the street and over the rooftops. We were next to a boarded-up house, the neon yellow “For Sale” sign out on the front rusted. The whitewashed brick walls were spray-painted with a variety of tags, some of them quite colorful. Several of the windows were broken from thrown rocks. I stared at it, wondering if this was the place where I was going to die. For some reason, I started to doubt if I was going to die at all. At least, by the Neanderthal man’s hand. He pulled the key out of the ignition and got out of the car. I followed suit, careful not to touch the discolored glass of the window. I was worried that there was some kind of disease on it.

“I just wanted someone else to know. I’m sorry.”

He started to walk across the street, toward a bar. Leaving my door open, I started to follow him, stopped. He kept walking until he entered the bar, and he let the door shut behind him. He didn’t look back, not once.

I turned, and went back to the car. Grabbing my notebook and pencil off the floor in front of the passenger seat, I stood up and shut the door. Walking to the curb, I sat down in front of the decaying little house. Breathing in a lungful of stale city air, my life for longer than I could remember, I sighed.

Quietly, I flipped open my notebook to the last page, and started to write.

Author's Note

This has a lot of paragraph indentation/spacing mistakes, I know. I'm trying my best to fix them, but even though they're done correctly on Word the site won't let me paste them correctly, or fix them after i've pasted. God, it's frustrating.

Reviews

[Emily B]

Oh, my! A creative and stunning answer to the prompt. I was spellbound at the mixture between real life and science fiction.

[Dj Golden]

A very open ending, which I like, and a very unique idea. I like that your main character doesn't just throw away the notebook, because this man talked to him about it, but instead has already made a habit of it. Good one.

You need to go through and correct some grammatical stuff, and I think you need to flush it out a little. Try adding some paragraphs about those that are for the law and those that aren't so that the reader gets a better feel for what's going on and can side with which ever side they want. Also try adding a little bit more about why your main character followed the man. Most people when they feel threatened instantly run away rather they can actually get away or not, unless their abductor threatens them. So make your "villain" a little more forceful and threatening. You could also use some more dialog in the car ride, have the "villain" try to convince your main character of why he should quit doing the notebook and try to get your main character to defend it, even if he can't defend it at all.

If you do all that you'll have a pretty good, if not novella length, story and the ending will really hit home. At least I think so.

[B & M Publications]

This is an incredibly intresting plot. While I was digusted with teh idea of having to write every thought in a notebook, I laughed at the other everday consequences that occured. While you do have a decent voice, if you worked on your style you could go much farther with this plot. Talk to me if you do.

[Robin Ann]

hey i remember this... its really developed amazingly since way back when *and no i don't know when school starts*

Please keep going with this story I just really want to know what happens next.. I remember this feeling when I read the first part of it. ahh you drive me nuts sometimes making me antsy. ITS NOT FAIR!!!

PS comment more of my stuff. ;-)

[John Tom]

i remember this! omg, i voted for it in a contest but i never commented. it was YOU? *dies* this is awesome =)

[T. Jones]

I love this story! What an interesting concept: being forced to divulge every private thought that you ever have. It's a different kind of repression by the government. They don't have to tell you what to think anymore. They can just make you tell them exactly what you are thinking. Very interesting.

I like the political message that you have here: some laws are so stupid that they interrupt the natural order of things. Like...speeding limits. Are they really necessary? We go as fast as we want anyway...I don't know. This story really got my mind clicking.

I did make notes on the story as I was reading it. Do not be alarmed by the length of this review! I enjoyed reading it, and figured that the least that I could do was leave you something that might really help you.
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"Suddenly, I was face to face with possibly the most ugly man I had ever seen in my life. His jaw was very rigid and square, coming to a chin so sharp it could have sunk the Titanic. His cheekbones were very broad, making his head seem elongated and rather comparative to that of a horse. His brow jutted out in much of a Neanderthal fashion, and his eyebrows were thick and bushy to match. His eyes were small and beady but very bright, reflecting an intelligence his other external features obviously did not possess."

I love that character description. You really went into detail, and didn't leave a doubt in my mind as to what the man looked like.

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"I couldn�t say as much for many of the other drivers on that particular Thursday; we had passed at least six or seven smoking pileups of cars in scattered locations on the street, several of which actually on a sidewalk."

Maybe you could think of a way to rewrite this sentence? The end of it is a little confusing to me...
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"My mouth opened and closed a couple times, soundlessly (my eyes were so wide I probably resembled my drawing of my goldfish)"

This part was a little weird to me. If this is being told in First Person POV, she wouldn't have been able to see the expression on her face. I don't know. Maybe I'm just being nit picky.
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"I looked up at him as I was writing, causing me to take the sentence off of it line and in a diagonal path across the page."

I think that you meant 'its line'.
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"(I was afraid my gaze we be drawn to his clothes, and I had been given a glimpse of them to last me until well after death),"

I think that you meant "would be".
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" I tried to buckle me seat belt, but I couldn�t pull it down past my shoulder."

The 'me' should be replaced with 'my'.
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Overall, I enjoyed reading this story. It's a really fresh idea, and I think that with some work you could really take this story somewhere.

Tell me if you decide to write some more...