The Literarian

“Please let me be a protagonist.”

Half mantra, half prayer, the six words echoed through Matt Thompson’s mind almost constantly. They were the reflection of his secret wish and the declaration of his greatest fear: that he was, in fact, nothing special, nothing more than a stock character in the Great Story. He existed to give the real protagonists tickets to see whatever movie they wanted. It was a job normally reserved for automated tellers and robots, a meaningless and hollow occupation for a human, performed instead by the army of automatons that had emerged out of necessity after the Infertility. Instead, Matt filled this intellectually, physically, and socially insignificant role as ticket salesmen, and every day, the gulf between what he wished for himself and what he believed grew wider.

The Regal Cineplex itself was a breath-taking homage to the golden age of film. Its façade had busts of great golden men towering over patrons of the establishment with the light of the world framing them from behind, rays reaching to the sky. Bright lights made the marquee glow with almost certainly the same kind of magic they had two hundred years ago. The handrails were crafted of polished brass to resemble a length of film leading customers into its magnificent lobby. The floor was a marble mosaic of comedy and tragedy masks resting on two film reels. Overhead was a large mural of classic actors, from Gable and Garbo to Ford and Fatel and everyone in between. The room was lit by the soft glow of the sconces. Most impressive of all, however, was the service. Every job at the theatre was performed by an honest-to-Author person. That was the key to the owner’s vision. “It doesn’t matter how elegant and classy a joint may be if you have to deal with a damn robot,” proprietor Xavier Wilcox used to say. “Nothing says luxury like being served by a human.”

He was right, of course. Vanity was humanity’s oldest and most socially acceptable vice. Anyone could go see a movie, but for a few credits more they could experience the smug satisfaction of knowing that at least they weren’t that guy, some poor stock working a job so menial that it was done almost exclusively by machines. At the Regal Cineplex, validation came free with each ticket purchase. Matt felt degraded, but bills were bills and a job was a job and he wasn’t very exceptional at anything anyway, so he was forced to take what he could get. Besides-

“Hey, stock!”

Matt felt his mind retched from the bleak corners of his thoughts back to the bleak reality of the box office. He put on his best customer service face despite the insult this “guest” just spat at him. Stock. How could anyone think that kind of talk was in any way acceptable? Matt bristled, but maintained his smile. “I’m sorry, sir. Thank you for choosing the Regal Cineplex. What can I do for you today?”

“Two for the sixteen thirty Fortress of Fear II.” The disdain in the customer’s voice was obvious already, but was underscored by the look of derision aimed at Matt, no doubt carefully constructed to make the stranger look to his date more important by comparison.

Despite the insult, Matt had to stifle an ironic chuckle as he slipped the man his tickets and invited him to enjoy his show. How could any self-respecting Literarian call someone stock and yet behave like such a walking cliché? No. There was no way that guy was really a Literarian. He’d never be caught dead seeing something with as little merit as Fortress of Fear II. Matt could see any movie he wanted for free and even he couldn’t be dragged into any auditorium showing that drivel. He felt like a sinner just selling tickets to the thing. He realized that it was ridiculous to feel guilty for selling tickets to bad movies. People were free to make up their own minds. Still, he felt he had a moral obligation to encourage people to seek out quality stories that would ultimately help others understand the Great Story and their roles within it. What could anyone possibly hope to learn about God’s plot for all of creation from Fortress of Fear II? That film seemed to violate the major pillar of the Literarian faith. God is the Author of the world and only by learning as much about literature as possible can we hope to understand the purpose of the Great Story. Fortress of Fear II could hardly be called literature, and yet this blasphemer was dragging some poor unwilling girl along on some vain attempt at enlightenment? It didn’t make sense. Or did it? The inconsistencies of the scene clicked into place. She’s the Literarian, Matt concluded, thinking to himself. The bastard must simply be trying to convince her to go to bed with him. It was a known fact that Literarians were five times more likely to carry a child to term. What better way to convince a woman you were fertile than to claim to be a Literarian?

The idea suddenly rankled him. Here was some stranger who probably wasn’t a Literarian offending him with one of the worst insults you can give a guy of that faith. Stock was so insulting, so demeaning, and this guy was throwing the word around like it was candy trying to impress some girl? Matt seethed. Calling someone a stock character was calling someone completely worthless. It meant he was a man without dreams, struggles, or purpose, without any defining characteristics that made him different and unique. Stock was a laconic way of calling someone a man who existed only to provide some insignificant task for people who mattered before being completely forgotten. Cashiers, phone operators, bank tellers. These are people who were given maybe a line of text in a story and then gone, their exits as quick and unmemorable as their entrances. He opened the book he’d brought with him to a dog-eared page and read a passage to himself that he’d highlighted long ago. Phyllis gave the clerk a twenty for the cigarettes and then left the store, fumbling at the cellophane wrapper. No more mention of the clerk for the rest of the book. The only evidence he ever existed lay in the tobacco resting in Phyllis’s mouth, slowly burning to the filter and then poof! A puff of cigarette smoke and he’s gone.

“When the tickets tear, I’m gone too,” Matt mumbled to the empty box office. For all of his anger over the slight, he couldn’t hide from the real underlying emotion to his rant: fear. What if he really was only a stock character? He wasn’t memorable. He was of average height and build. He was neither unattractive nor particularly handsome. He wasn’t clever, but he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t awkward, but he wasn’t friendly either, or at least no more so than most people. He came from a loving middle class family. He lived a comfortable life growing up. Happy childhood, caring parents, shelter, food. Nothing excessive. Nothing lavish. But nothing really lacking. He had nothing to set him apart. He had had no great difficulties in his life that he needed to overcome the way the protagonists in the books read at church did. He had no giants to face the way David did. He wasn’t stuck in a bureaucratic hell like Yossarian. No river to tame like Huck Finn. It was too late for him to experience any coming-of-age trials. He didn’t even have a wicked step-mother. He certainly didn’t have a job that meant anything or that challenged him as a person in any recognizable way. He was, upon reflection, wholly unexceptional. “Maybe I do belong in this job,” he thought. “Maybe I’m one of the last stock characters left in the world.”

That must be why so many jobs became automated in the early days of Literarianism. Sure, the decrease in pregnancies created the need for robots, but Literarian scientists were on the forefront of the push to automation. What kinder science could they pursue than to ensure no man had to suffer the indignity of being forced into a job reserved for stock characters. Who cared if the ATM was never mentioned again in a novel? Did that dismiss the machine or insult it in any way? Not at all. The ATM was designed to serve a single purpose and nothing else. It was a static device. Man was dynamic. Man was meant to learn, grow, and change the way protagonists did. The one thing stock characters never did was change. They were static. They were stagnant. They were nothing more than dead machines in people suits.

Perhaps that was what scared him most about being a stock character in the Great Story. That he would never change. That he would never escape this place and do something he valued. That the powerful play would go on and he would never, as the prophet Walt Whitman would say, “contribute a verse.” He would be lucky to contribute a word. He made a mental note to speak with his priest about it at church on Tuesday.

“Please don’t let me be stock,” he whispered as much to himself as to God.

He tried to reassure himself that he couldn’t possibly be a stock character. Didn’t Literarianism teach that there were no stock characters? Even so, if he were a protagonist, who could his antagonist possibly be? The hero of a story must have some challenge to overcome and he had nothing. For that matter, he was hardly heroic. No, he corrected himself. There’s a difference between a protagonist and a hero. He knew no one expected him to be a hero, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still be a protagonist, did it? He could find his antagonist and overcome him—or it—and grow as a person, as a character in God’s Great Story. He would find his antagonist and crush him or her or it or whatever it was into the ground. He would show the world what a great protagonist he was. Still, it was important to respect one’s antagonist, he reminded himself. Sure, they were meant to be overcome, but one ought to recognize that without their opposition, a protagonist could not move forward. He would become useless in the Great Story. A protagonist without an antagonist was just stock. Glorified stock, perhaps, but stock nonetheless. He reread the dog-eared passage though he had learned it by heart years ago. It always bugged him. What happened to the clerk when Phyllis left the store?

His theological musings were broken once more by another customer, this time a much friendlier looking man in his mid thirties. He even purchased a ticket to a movie that at least didn’t make Matt feel like a bad person for doing his job. Matt did his best to be memorable during the transaction. He chatted, he caught names, he offered reviews, and even cracked a joke or two. If this man, this Gerald Houtin could remember him later, if Matt could have an impact on his day somehow, then maybe he wasn’t stock after all. But their time together ended after what felt to the desperate box office attendant like too short a time for their interaction to be meaningful. “God loves a reader,” Gerald said, nodding to the book as he walked into the lobby.

“And a writer,” Matt replied by rote to the empty floor where Gerald once stood. He stared blankly into space. He’d completed that exchange so many times throughout the course of his life that it came without thought or consideration for what it meant. At the beginning and ending of service every week, the priest would deliver the line, “God loves a reader,” and the congregation would reply in unison, “and a writer.” At twenty-five years able to speak with fifty-two weeks a year plus random occasions such as just happened throughout the week… Matt did the math quickly in his head. He must have gone through that speak and response mini-ceremony at least three thousand times in his life. Even so, he learned the routine so young that it never really had any meaning to him. Sure, he knew the basis for the expression. He’d heard it as testament to the faith countless times growing up.

When the Infertility hit, it seemed avid readers were mostly unaffected, and not just the intellectuals and college literati, but any avid readers. Even the trashy romance junkies could reproduce without much difficulty. Science was baffled. Was it because readers usually stayed inside and thus avoided harmful radiation? No. There seemed to be no discernable difference in pre- and post-Infertility radiation levels. It had nothing to do with socio-economic status. The Infertility made barren the rich and poor alike. It wasn’t tied to food quality or exposure to chemicals, or at least not that anyone could determine. Without any scientific explanation, man had no alternative but to assume God favored readers. And why shouldn’t He? Wasn’t the Bible called the Good Book? And didn’t bible itself mean “many books?” Every religion had a holy book, it seemed. Mankind prospered when books became easy to produce and literacy flourished, and yet the Infertility hit relatively soon after television, movies, and video games took people away from their books and poems and plays. Clearly God loved readers. It was only natural that people would realize that God himself was the Author of Creation. The Church of the Author was founded only twelve years after the Infertility, becoming one of the fastest growing religions in the world. The faith didn’t suffer any from the fact that its members were substantially more likely to reproduce than non-members. Matt thought it only natural that a church recognizing God’s true purpose, the Great Story, would rise from the divine punishment on the unreading masses. He never could understand why it took twelve years for people to realize the truth, but then hindsight was 20/20 and it was much easier to see the causality once it had been pointed out.

As more people turned to reading, universities swelled, technology lurched forward, and the quality of life generally seemed to improve, despite the political accusations that anyone seeking more funding for education was overstepping the lines between church and state. According to the history books, the first few decades after the infertility were difficult, but the years that followed were a new renaissance. Widespread automation allowed men to devote more of their time to intellectual pursuits. There could be no other explanation for the way the world unfolded in those early decades. God loved readers.

Which meant he had to love writers. The subtle truths of the statement flooded his thoughts like cold water on a hot summer day, shocking his mind awake with a clarity that he had never experienced before. God had to love writers, yes, for they provided readers with things to read, with ways to show their devotion to understanding his plans and ways. Matt was an avid reader. He was never found without a book. Even so, he always felt that he wasn’t exactly God’s favorite character. “But if I were a writer…” thought Matt.

He didn’t even finish the sentence. Writers, good writers, created more readers. He would write. He would create a story that would inspire others to pursue the Words of the Author. Surely, God would have to love him then. God would love him, and he would lead Matt to his antagonist so that he might finally overcome adversity and come out new on the other side. He would at long last be a protagonist in the Great Story.

He pulled a decimeter of blank ticket stock from the printer and drew a pen from his khaki pockets. His mind raced in circles for something, anything to write about. Alcoholic fathers. Oppressed immigrants. A teenager struggling to find his place between child and adult. All of the classic devices. No sooner did he write down one brilliant idea for the greatest novel ever conceived, than he would come up with another more brilliant idea which inevitably resulted in the frantic scribbling out of the previous, “horribly cliché” idea prior. He paid almost no notice to the customers he hurried through to Fortress of Fear II. Good riddance. Buying tickets to bad movies was a surefire sign that someone wouldn’t be contributing to the gene pool anytime soon. Bad movies were the new natural selection. More room on the planet for the literate.

Matt paused. Slowly, he took the small piece of ticket stock which now looked more like a Jackson Pollock painting than a list of ideas and crushed it into a ball in his fist. His arm extended to the side, he let his fingers slip open, allowing the list to fall into the garbage can. Then, at the press of a button, the printer fed him a new slice of clean stock. Matt tore it loose and held his pen anxiously over the makeshift blank page. Inspiration laid siege to his consciousness in the form of seven words, seven words that refused to yield until he let them in to take over his thoughts. Bad movies were the new natural selection.

What if bad movies weren’t a sign that someone was infertile, but rather the cause? The idea was stunningly ridiculous, but it fit. Avid readers rarely went to the movies, so they would be unaffected. And who would think to check if watching movies were the cause of the Infertility anyway? Especially if good movies didn’t cause infertility. It would skew any attempt to draw a correlation between movie viewing and infertility and any other possible suspect. The differences in correlation between movies and infertility and, say, peanut butter sandwiches and infertility would be statistically insignificant.

The more he played with the idea, the more he knew he had to write the story. He had identified his cause, but the who, how, and why still eluded him. The how, he supposed, could be some frequency imbedded in the soundtrack. Something low enough to throw the reproductive system off balance, but not permanently. After all, infertile couples had normal sperm counts and egg health, and those who became devout Literarians were ultimately able to reproduce. No, the damage couldn’t be permanent, but even temporary effects could dramatically lower the rate of pregnancy. Perhaps there was a frequency whose vibrations made sperm swim erratically or kept fertilized eggs from bonding to the uterus. Couples who watched bad movies, movies like Fortress of Fear II for example, would be unable to get pregnant. The effect need not even be particularly long lasting. Prior to the Infertility, dinner and a movie was probably the most common date ever. The infertility frequency could almost instantly create a drop in the number of births globally, especially if the frequency were embedded in box office blockbusters.

History testified to the benefits of such a system already. The uneducated would lose the capacity to reproduce, meaning proportionately, more children would be born into homes that valued knowledge and education than before, especially considering the social pressures that would be put on readers to bear children, to pick up the reproductive slack as it were. True, initially there would be a number of jobs going unfilled, but the combined scientific know how of the world would soon create sufficient automation to perform most of these functions. If man wanted to continue, he would have to turn away from mindless television and pursue more scholarly and intellectually stimulating pursuits. Ultimately, society would experience an academic and cultural rebirth.

Matt had the idea. Now he needed to form it into a story. He began to scribble notes and outlines onto the cardstock that had waited so patiently for him to finish sorting out the details. A grizzled detective uncovers a criminal mastermind’s plot to… to what? It wasn’t murder to prevent life. And in the end, didn’t the result justify the cost? Matt’s pen flashed across the cardstock, back and forth, until the idea was gone. A messianic social scientist develops a plan to save mankind from itself by… depriving it of the ability to bear children. By forcing the intelligent to breed. Flash. Another idea gone.

No matter how Matt looked at the concept, no matter what angle he took, he couldn’t get comfortable with the story. For starters, he couldn’t find a protagonist, at least not one he felt comfortable dedicating his creativity to developing. One way or another, the protagonist was either committing some great evil with good intentions, or was some well meaning soul whose success could single-handedly thwart humanity’s latest golden age. Not to mention prevent the formation of his religion. Try as he might, he couldn’t find a way to justify Literarianism forming without the Infertility. The two were linked, and… He stopped himself. No, it was just a simple matter of cause and effect. There was no pre-existing connection between the two. After all, wouldn’t the Church of the Author have formed sooner if its founders knew the Infertility was coming? Frustration grew in Matt, knotting his mind and his muscles. He quickly crumbled the cardstock and threw it into the trash in a single motion. The whole idea was blasphemous and stupid and too over the top anyway. It was the stuff of dime store pulp comics. Besides, no one read science fiction anymore.

Matt stared sadly at the glass in front of him, all the passion that possessed him mere moments ago fled like refugees from a cataclysmic storm. Slowly, he slumped over in his chair and reached into the trash can, his hand searching blindly until it found a wadded ball of cardstock. He unraveled it and read what little he could still make out: boy…something… his alcoholic father, immigrant framed for… something, …parallel story… jaded druggie teen and… childhood. His eyes scanned the list over and over, his pen resting in his hand waiting for the return of the fervor that had given it so much use in minutes past. “Who am I kidding?” thought Matt. “I’m no writer. I’m not anything.”

Matt sighed, long and heavy. He let the pen slip from his fingers and onto the counter as he sank into his chair. Six familiar words tumbled from his mouth the way they had so many times before.

“Please let me be a protagonist.”