The Problem With A Crystal Ball

Part 3

The following morning at 10:30AM, Hector walked out of Reed Slade’s office, closed the door and pumped his fist in the air. The action contrasted starkly with the modern and very self-important office building, but nobody seemed to take note. Yet again, the crystal ball had been exactly correct. For an hour and a half, Hector and Reed Slade has discussed the details of his book release, pre-order numbers, a book tour and, most mind bendingly, the signing of a deal for another four books in the same series, pre-paid for with huge scale marketing campaigns already in the works to promote each new release. It was an author’s dream, and Hector’s reality.

Hector spent a few more days in New York, signing books and walking the streets of the Big Apple to see his book for sale on stands in Times Square. Finally, it came time for him to return home and plan four more books in a series he was only peripherally familiar with. Upon returning home and attempting to recall any sort of writing routine he had employed beforehand, and failing to do so, Hector fell back into organizing his incomplete manuscripts and praying for inspiration. When that didn’t work, he resorted to the internet and quickly became addicted to searching his own name.

For a few days, most of what he found about himself was where to find a copy of his new book, and photos of himself wearing a surprised smile in New York. He was moderately happy with these search results. His desk remained dormant, stacked with old and incomplete work. As enough time passed for seasoned readers to finish a book elapsed, reviews started to trickle in. A trickle became a stream and the stream raged. 

The reviews were uniformly scathing. Phrases such as “incomplete story,” “disjointed events,” and “lacking in engaging prose, cohesiveness or editing” were some of the nicer reviews. Hector, who had grown used to living in a fantasy, felt more than ever as if this could not be real. Nobody was made to handle this amount of criticism, and he did not handle it well. 

Initially, he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t even written a book and that there must be a mix up, that they had the wrong Hector. He told himself that great artists are always misunderstood at first. He reasoned that the book simply hadn’t been ready but that he still had all his work and could fix it and execute a rapid republish and all would be well. He liked the last idea and so he rushed off to put more work into the book he hadn’t worked on in years.

Hector worked through the night and most of the next day, producing page after page and chapter after chapter of genuine quality work. His hope rallied slightly when he reviewed the new book with objective eyes and hoped it would miraculously salvage his suboptimal work and by proxy his fame and the dream that had fallen into his lap. 

Shortly before lunchtime, dark circles underneath Hector’s wide, prey-like eyes, his phone rang. With the suspicious curiosity of a protohuman viewing fire for the first time, primitively curious how the moment at hand would change all ensuing moments to come, Hector regarded his phone buzzing on the table, moving itself in a slow circle with each new round of buzzing. Reed Slade’s name was plastered across the screen. Hector took the deepest breath of his life, in through his nose, and reached for the phone.

“Hector, we have a problem,” Reed Slade didn’t bother with pleasantries. “There have been some bad reviews, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up,” Reed Slade added needlessly. “These reviews seem to have gotten out and book sales have fallen precipitously over the last day. It’s a bad trend and I don’t know how we’re going to keep up with more releases. This isn’t a thing that’s easy to come back from,” Reed Slade said plainly. 

“So what do we do?” Hector asked like a child who knew the answer. “I’ve already started work on repairs and on the rest of the series.”

“I’m afraid it may be too late for repairs. It’s almost like the book was published and initially received without anyone reading it, none of us at the publishers, none of the book reviewers, nobody. A very strange situation, almost like something was fated to get out into society and act like a classic book, but in reality be a whole lot of nothing. Never seen anything like this.”

The words would have traumatized Hector like being the lone, hollowed out survivor of a brutal and bloody battle, had the words not put reality to the anxious disbelief he had been feeling. He heard Reed Slade speaking but was uninterested in what he was saying, something about contracts and terms, but Hector hardly cared. His dream of fame and fortune was slipping away, and instead of rage and regret, it felt proper. Ever since the first time that Reed Slade had made Hector’s phone ring, he had felt like he had received something he had not earned, something that was too good to be true.

Hector paced aimlessly around his house, unconsciously finding his way to the crystal ball and wondering if he ought to consult it, if it would tell him anything, or if it had been sent only as a tormentor. Finally, Hector walked slowly to it and sat on the floor. Fearfully, as if picking up a bomb in need of diffusion, Hector lifted the ball and held the heavy crystal orb in front of his face. 

For a moment, he saw only his distorted hands grasping the far side of the orb. They felt cold on the smooth surface, as if he was holding a ball of ice, and he wanted to set it down to relieve his numbing hands. But something made him hold on. 

Hector closed his eyes as a tear came into them. He no longer thought about the coldness of his hands nor the unexplainability of the crystal ball, or even the lost dream he had been so close to achieving. He tried to think of nothing at all. Hector squeezed his eyes shut tighter.

A voice reached Hector’s ear but he kept his eyes shut. He didn’t know if the voice was coming from the crystal ball or from within his own head. He didn’t care. The voice was echoing and sounded distant, repeating negative reviews of Hector’s book over and over. “Unfinished, unpleasant, amateaur,” and similar brutally honest judgements about the book Hector barely wrote. The voices continued and Hector squeezed his eyes tighter.

Just as the voices rose to a crescendo and Hector thought he’d have a nervous breakdown under the weight of his bewildering reality, what he had, hadn’t, done, the voices died away, all but one.

The single voice, clear, soft and close, had just a few simple words for Hector. “You didn’t work for this. Will you learn from this?” It too faded and Hector slowly opened his eyes. 

Hector arose and made his way to his desk, to his meticulously organized notes once again in disarray. He picked up a sheet of paper, an outline for a story from years before. Pushing the rest of the clutter to the side, he sat down and began to work, to start to learn how to be the writer he once desired to be. He felt clunky at first and wanted to stop, to distract himself. It had been years since he’d truly sat down to create, and he wished badly that he had never let the skill of sitting, focusing and creating to atrophy. Why had he given up just when things got good? Maybe, he reasoned, if he hadn’t stopped after the ball told him he would publish a book, he would have published a good book. 

Instead of being many years a better author than he was when the crystal ball mysteriously showed up on his doorstep, many years wiser, Hector had allowed himself to fall behind even where he had been then. The ball had promised an isolated event, showing nothing of the before or the after. Regret and resolve mingled together in Hector’s head. Pushing through, Hector wrote, searching for the rest of his unfinished story, and for the lessons he had been meant to learn in his years of idleness. Maybe, just maybe, he could gain the makings of a great writer, even if he was destined to lack the notoriety. 

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If you had a magical crystal ball and could see exactly what your life was going to look like at any point in the future, would that actually be valuable? Or is the value in the wisdom and experiences, the worldview shaping actions, that happened along the way to whatever that end result is? If you could achieve any end, but at the expense of the lessons learned along the way to that end, would you?

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash