The Creative Life by Emily Pryor

The blueprints swam before Vic’s bleary eyes. Stacks of notebooks filled with notes and calculations, crumpled sketches, and coffee-stained napkin diagrams, covered his desk, topped by a sea of post-its that mocked him with their brightness. “Look at us!” they seemed to chirp. “We’re succeeding at our job!”

Vic slumped in his chair and gave in. The wave of despair that had been looming all week, all month, came crashing down over his undeniably balding head. It was time to accept the truth. He was a failure. He was a joke. He was everything his father had ever accused him of being, and worse, because he was fool enough to believe, to really believe, that he could be something more. And who was he, really, to even be attempting this work? Who did he, little Vicky Franklen, always picked last for every school team, think he was?

His chest tightened with humiliation as he thought of all his high-soaring dreams. At one time, he’d truly imagined himself a creative genius. Oh, the speeches he’d imagined! The fame, the adulation, the success he craved down to his bones– the shame crawled under his skin like a swarm of little insects.

In his mind, he heard the gentle voice of his mother, asking carefully if perhaps he wasn’t setting his sights a bit too high. Dr. Howsman, at their last session, had told him, “You expect too much of yourself, Vic! There’s nothing wrong with doing what you love as a hobby. Who says it has to be a career?”

Not even Joanne had ever really believed in him, not even when things were good. He could hear her now, saying, “Come back to bed, Vic. You can reinvent the wheel tomorrow.”

The echo of her smiling voice had Vic shoving his chair back from his desk so abruptly it toppled over. He had to get out. Out of this stale house, away from this desk cluttered by failure. He needed to walk.

Grabbing a coat and scarf from the hall closet downstairs, Vic hurried out the door and onto the street. The block was mostly empty now, vacant since the bubble burst and the neighbors moved to more affordable areas. It gave the street a peaceful eeriness that Vic found not at all unpleasant. It was inspiring, really. The quiet gave his mind room to wander, to invent. To create. A pang of misery hit him again, right below his empty stomach.

The winter air was bleak with cold. Already Vic could feel the tip of his nose going numb, and his bald patch sorely missed the hair he’d lost since last July. It seemed that when Joanne had left, everything good in his life had followed her out the door, one after another. First Joanne, then his hair, then his creative drive.

Or maybe it was only his illusions that had left him. After all, for all his education and sketches and bright ideas, had he ever invented something that worked? Really come to life, the way it was supposed to? No. The truth was, he wasn’t a great thinker. He was just a hack with big dreams, messing with things he had no right to aspire to.

Vic kicked a pebble down the sidewalk and buried his hands in his coat pockets. He had to get his mind off the problem. He noted the shade of the twilight sky–something akin to periwinkle, he thought, although Joanne had been the one with the eye for color–and concentrated on the breeze blowing across his face. He took in a deep breath of crisp air, and smelled something new. He stopped. He frowned, and sniffed again. It was familiar, yet out of place. A smell that took him back to a happier time.

A moment later, he was off down the sidewalk like a dog on a scent. The smell was coming from a house up the block— one that had, until recently, been vacant. Last week he had seen the moving trucks, but he hadn’t really thought about it. At the time, he had been immersed in the plans for a new electrical current delivery system, and all he had been able to see were charts. Well, charts and the admiring faces of the people applauding him as he accepted awards. Joanne would be in the first row, of course, eager to take him back now that she saw he wasn’t a failure. Stupid, he realized. But now, he found himself drawn to the house.

The lights were on in the living room. Vic crunched across the unraked lawn, driven by a curiosity that went beyond common courtesy. He crept up to the window and peered in.

There was a kid inside, maybe ten or eleven, kneeling beside the coffee table. Behind him, the TV flashed images of idiotic women competing for best bathing suit or tastiest cupcake or some nonsense. The kid was intent on his science project, though, undistracted by the busty idiots on screen.

In front of him, laid out in a row across the coffee table, were four preserved frogs. The boy was in the process of dissecting one of them, and two others were already neatly opened and pinned, their organs labeled with little paper flags. The familiar scent of formaldehyde wafted out of the open window, and Vic smiled faintly. The ache in his gut eased a little as happy memories flooded his mind. When he had first started on this path, he had never stopped to ask himself if he had any right to be pursuing it. He had simply followed what interested him. The boy in that living room wasn’t pausing to bemoan the wasted lives of the frogs he was inspecting; he was simply doing what was most natural in the world— pursuing what interested him. No self-doubt. No second guesses. Just moving forward. Victor’s smile widened.

Back at home, he opened the door to his old workshop, the one he hadn’t stepped foot in since he’d began having these infernal doubts— since before Joanne, he now realized. She had always subtly undercutted his work, with all her questions and cautions. She had never understood, he realized now. But he would show her. He lovingly touched the sketches on the wall as he made his way across the cluttered room. Oh, he would show them all. He passed the row of his failures, the lifeless forms suspended in cylindrical tanks. So long they had haunted him. He saw them in a new light, now— not as proof that he was not worthy to do this work, but learning experiences, rungs in the ladder to success.

Victor moved to the back wall and, one by one, flicked the switches. The overhead lights buzzed on, casting a cold blue light over the workspace. His tools, all sterile and laid out neatly, called to him. On the large work table in the center of the room, his latest failure taunted him. This one had come so close, and it had broken Victor’s heart to fail yet again. He touched the cold skin of his experiment and sighed, feeling that same self-doubt creep in again. But he thought of that innocent little boy, neatly pinning and labeling those frogs. He thought of a younger version of himself, dissecting and exploring cadavers with that same joy and the inexorable pull of curiosity. His back stiffened. His resolve steeled. Maybe he was only little Victor Franklen, but dammit, he had as much right to create as the next guy, didn’t he? Nobody could take that away from him. A swell of victory and peace washed through him, and he started to hum as he ran his hands over the wires stretching from the form on the table to the generators around it. He threw a breaker and electricity arced through the air with a crackle. Victor breathed in the familiar smell of excited ions and smiled. His last attempt had ended in misfortune, it was true, but he would keep trying until he got it right. Yes, he would keep trying. After all, wasn’t that what the act of creating was all about?