I worked for RapidForm back when I was still living in the Bay Area. For now I'm in Fresno, but I am thinking about leaving California altogether. I grew up in this state and believed in its potential to be great, but the situation here has gone sour and I think it's only going to get worse. For now I work a couple of part-time jobs and save money when I can. I rent at a rooming house so I can keep my costs down. I would really like to get up north, to Portland or to Seattle. One day I just might make the move and see what happens.

RapidForm wasn't a bad company to work for, overall. I wrote teaching materials for the classes we held for people who wanted to learn our products, and the main problem was that we went through a lot of different managers, and each had a different vision as to how these materials were to be structured. This made for a lot of busy work and we went back and reformatted existing work over and over again. When the recession hit the company switched to an online learning-based system and laid off half of its writing staff, including myself.

There were rumours for month that the company was going to make this change, and I remember sitting in the break room with Keefe as he explained to me his own plans for when the company got rid of him, which he fully expected to happen. "I'm going to get to work on a writing project I've been planning for years, " he told me.

Keefe was a little older than me, and had been with RapidForm for a number of years. But he was pretty lousy at his job, and I didn't think much of his skills as a writer. "You shouldn't take too much time off, " I told him. "You'll have a hard time getting work later on."

"I'll never have to work again if I get this done, " he told me. "Not at a place like this, anyway."

"There are a lot of people who think they're going to become these rich and famous authors, " I told him. "You have to be lucky. You don't understand how the industry works. You have to know people. You need connections in the publishing industry."

"I'm going to publish it myself, " I said. "I have a friend who works at a place that can get me a huge discount. There's no overhead, then."

"I have to be honest with you, " I told Keefe. "I've never thought much of your work. I don't think that you're terribly talented as a writer."

"You don't pull any punches, do you?" Keefe said.

"I'm saying this in case we all do get fired tomorrow and you want to pursue this idea, " I told him. "I'm trying to help you out here."

"Listen, " Keefe said. "I know that my work here is bad. But you have to understand that I am actually a good writer. It's the environment here. How can anyone write well in this kind of a place? It kills a man. I'm dying. Aren't you?"

"I'm doing all right, I think, " I said.

"No you're not, " Keefe said. "Listen to yourself. You don't even make any sense. I don't understand you."

"I think I'm being quite clear, " I told him.

"I'm glad you told me what you thought about my writing, " Keefe said. "At least you were saying something genuine. Everything else that comes out of your mouth is trite and tired."

"I didn't realize that I had to be completely original, " I said.

"You're just soaking in your surroundings, " Keefe said. "That's the difference between you and me. I know my work is bad. But I fight against what this place is trying to turn me into. You just let it happen."

"I haven't turned into anything, " I told him. "I do my work well. Or maybe not well."

"Better than me, " Keefe said.

"You said it, not me, " I told him.

"I'm not arguing with you, " Keefe said.

"What's this project you want to get going on, anyway?" I asked him.

"It needs my full attention, " he told me. "I'll be working all day and into the night. Or maybe I'll work during the night. I might prefer that."

"It's the content I want to know about, not your schedule, " I said.

"There are going to be five stories, " he told me. "I suppose you could call them novellas. They'll be rather short, but each will be published as a separate book."

"Half the people here are writing novels right now, " I told him. "I can tell you that for a fact. And you say that I'm not original."

"You have to let me explain the whole thing, " he said. "Think of four of the stories sitting on a table, with one in each corner. And then the fifth is in the middle. Do you understand so far?"

"I guess so, " I told him.

"Now, draw lines from the stories in the corner to the one in the middle. The middle is the hub. It's like a network. The fifth story is the main one. You have to read that one first, but then when you get to the end of it you'll have no idea how anything ends. There will be strands of plot thrown in here and there. It will be a bit of a mishmash, really. There will be bits of dialogue that end suddenly, and places where you'll switch scenes and not understand why. The rest of the books will be more straightforward, but you'll only be able to understand them once you've absorbed the material from the fifth book. That is, there may be a key scene missing, but it will have appeared somewhere in the fifth story. So you'll have to keep going back to it. It will be a sort of reference book for the rest of them. That's the idea I'm playing with here. The fifth book will be something that you have to consult in order to get through the others."

I thought about Keefe's idea for a moment before speaking. "I didn't even know that you wanted to write fiction, " I said.

"You never asked, " Keefe said.

"It's not so easy, " I told him.

"Of course it's easy, " Keefe said. "It's easy if you're not dying while working for a place like this."

"It's not that bad here, " I said.

"We spent half our day going through stuff we wrote years ago, " he said.

"Things change quickly in this business, " I told him. "There are new teaching trends to follow. We have to make sure we keep up."

"The point is that I can do this, " Keefe said. "You tell me that writing is hard. I could start right now. I'll start with you. I can show you that I can do this."

"I have to get going, " I told Keefe.

"Give me a minute, " he said. "Let's invent a story for you. Let's say that you come from Fresno."

"I don't want come from Fresno, " I told him.

"This is my story, " Keefe said. "You grew up there and even went to Fresno State. You've been to Vegas maybe a couple of times. You took a trip to Arizona when you were a kid."

"I sound pretty pathetic, " I said.

"Hold on a minute, " Keefe said. "One morning in your senior year in college you woke up in the little apartment you were renting off-campus. You'd been living alone for the last two years and spent most of your time at home. The place had leaking pipes and insects crawling through the walls, but you still thought of it as home. Your parents wanted you to live with them still. They couldn't understand why you'd spend the money on such a horrible place. But you loved the place. That's something that you couldn't get them to understand."

"This is a character sketch, mostly, " I told him. "It's not a story."

"I'm getting there, " Keefe said. "So let's say you wake up one morning and it's still dark outside. You know, it's January of your senior year. You wake up and you can't get back to sleep. You switch on the little lamp on your desk, and the room is bathed in a thin orange light. You sit and the edge of your bed and you look out at the street outside. You know, you face right onto a rather busy road. But at this time of day there's next to no traffic. You'll hear a car off in the distance, and then you'll see it pass underneath you. You look at the stacks of binders and textbooks on your desks. You realize that you'll be graduating soon."

Keefe paused for a moment before continuing. "So let's say that you get dressed and you go outside. By now the sky is starting to lighten up a bit, and there's more traffic on the road. You head towards campus. The place is empty. Maybe you spot some cleaners in one of the buildings, but that's it. You walk from one building to the next. You think about the years you've spent there. Nearly four years of your life. And you feel alone. That's the strangest thing. You don't have a lot of friends, and you keep to yourself most of the time. But for the first time ever, maybe, you actually feel a sense of loneliness. And that sense of loneliness turns into panic. You have to sit down on a bench outside the main library. You have to catch your breath. And you manage to compose yourself, but you stay where you are. You stay in place so long that people start crowding around you. They're waiting for the library to open. You've been there for who knows how long. Finally the library people open their doors, and the crowd that's been building goes inside. So now you're more or less alone again. The campus is still rather empty."

Keefe stopped talking after that. I didn't know if he was finished. "That's it, " he said, finally.

"That's nowhere close to describing my real life, " I told him.

"I never said that I was going to do that, " Keefe said.

"That's the thing, though, " I told Keefe. You have to look at somebody and figure out what they're really like. That's the key to this thing. You have to have an image in your mind and then write a story that fits that image."

"This was just an exercise, " Keefe said. "I'm improvising here. I could refine the story if you wanted me to."

"We have to get back to work, " I told Keefe.

"But you see now that I can do this, " Keefe said.

"I'm not offering any opinion one way or the other, " I told him. "You can do whatever you want."