Peter Stjernström - The Best Book in the World

After a couple of seconds the screen lights up and a text box appears:

Welcome Titus! For the time being you cannot access me. It is estimated that you will require eight hours to metabolise the alcohol in your blood. You are very welcome to return after 7 p.m. Have a nice day!

The screen goes blank.

He feels deeply offended. Degraded. At the same time, he feels a bit shaken. Sure, he has sometimes asked himself whether he has the wrong attitude to drugs and alcohol. It feels like he has overdone it thousands of times. But he loves partying. That’s almost the only thing he is good at nowadays.

Nobody has ever said that he is an alcoholic. At least, not to his face. Somebody might have said that he ‘should calm down a bit’ or ‘be a little kinder to yourself’ and that sort of thing. But from there to being accused of being an alcoholic is quite a big step. This doesn’t feel comfortable.

How many people have actually been going around thinking that Titus is an old drunk? To hear Astra it sounded as if the whole world thought it. At any rate, everybody at Winchester Publishing. Is that why people laugh at him when he does his improvised book readings? Is he just a pathetic pisshead who says funny things as soon as you fill him with spirits and drugs? How would he himself regard somebody like him – if he hadn’t been Titus Jensen himself, of course… completely ‘objectively’ that is…

The insight hits him like a baseball bat. He falls onto the sofa and remains seated a long while, with an absent stare.

He is a pisshead. Once he was an intellectual author who had something to say. Now he is a joke. A pathetic nutter of an author dressed in black who loves alcohol and drugs of every type. He stinks like a skunk. He looks like an old rag. When did it go wrong? When did the partying become more important than everything else?

Can he manoeuvre his hull back into the shipping lanes? He must. If he doesn’t succeed in writing The Best Book in the World, then he’s finished. This project is more important than anything else. It’s time to choose now, Titus Jensen. Are you a man or a mouse? An author or an alkie?

Yes, The Best Book in the World is his last chance. He can feel that with every nerve in his body. This is the turning point for which he has waited so long.

A sense of calm gradually takes over his brain. Lots of small doors of worry and desire are slammed shut. He is well aware that the only chance of keeping them shut is to let the energy from The Best Book in the World fill him. Every minute must be filled with energy. And when a new, completely empty minute approaches, he must take charge immediately. Get that minute to work. And the next minute, hour, day and week. Better to be obsessed than dependent, he thinks.

With the help of the cleaning book he starts to clear the mess in his flat in a wild frenzy. He fills binbag after binbag with the remnants of his old life. He vacuums, scrubs and sweeps. Runs back and forth to the laundry room in the cellar. Irons his shirts. Mangles sheets. He can do it! He wants to do it! His forehead drips with sweat and his skin steams with the poisons leaving his body.

Better to be obsessed than dependent, he repeats time after time to himself.

Better to be obsessed than dependent.

It’s evening. The flat smells clean. Titus has showered and made the bed with clean sheets. He is drunk and high. But not from the usual old drugs. This evening he is drunk on new promises and high on the desire to write.

Titus blows into the tube and peers at the screen. A pop-up box soon smirks at him:

Hi, Titus! Is it time to start working? You are welcome. After six hours I will shut down and save your work. If you want to continue after a two-hour break, you only have to blow into the tube and then you can go on writing. But remember this: if you don’t blowstart me for three days then all your files will be deleted and you will have to start from scratch. Good luck!

Bloody monster, Titus thinks. But he isn’t in the slightest bit angry. On the contrary. He realises that he has to surround himself with routines and ‘musts’ to bring this off.

First of all he must write down a checklist. He is going to jot down some fundamental human elements that he must learn more about.

LOVE. Everything about relationships, women, men, intimacy, sex and erotic life. From small talk and air kisses to conversations and fucking.

PSYCHOLOGY. Human driving forces, leadership and various forms of therapy in practice and theory. Gender theory and mental illnesses. Who wins, who disappears?

CRIME. Offender profiles, reckless violence, financial motives and other driving forces. Perhaps something about racial tensions and class struggle too. Court trials and sentencing practices.

FOOD. Nutrition, food history, tastes, cuisines, cooking and recipe techniques. How to slaughter and skin animals, and cut up into joints. And everything about herring! Herring is tasty!

He looks at what he has written in his list. He can’t think of anything else just now. Wasn’t there more to it than this? Is that all the knowledge he needs to acquire to write The Best Book in the World? Pah! A piece of cake.

Now all he needs is a method of working. The book must be ready in six months. It will take at least three months to put together a rough manuscript. But he can’t collect knowledge for three months and save all the writing to the end, that would be taking too much of a risk. No, he must stake out some guidelines first, so that he knows what to look for when he does his research.

Everything he writes must be kept brief. Every paragraph must be just as full of information as a DIY manual. Every page must have a life of its own. If he digresses even a little, he will be abusing the very soul of the book. The Best Book in the World should, quite simply, be filled to the brim with emotion, plot and facts. Yes, he’s got it there, that’s the heart of the matter, and in just three words! ‘EMOTION’, ‘PLOT’, ‘FACTS’, he writes under the list of everything he must learn more about. To achieve his goal, he must be prepared to slaughter sacred cows, to reduce explanations to a minimum and to cut out all the dead meat in the text. ‘SHORT AND CONCISE’, he writes last of all. He is going to cut it to a minimum; this is going to be trimmer than trim, he thinks, saving the document as ‘Manifesto for The Best Book in the World’.

He leans back and looks at the screen. A good and encouraging day’s work. He deserves a reward. Something really fancy and nice.

It is fairly late and he suddenly feels violently hungry, thirsty and in need of a cigarette all at once. Ah, how quickly the craving came back! Now it was a question of finding a formula to survive the evening. He must have food and water, otherwise he’ll die. But there would be no more cigarettes or alcohol. Because if he smokes then he’ll crave beer or wine. And if he starts drinking beer or wine – then there’ll be no stopping.

He realises that his heart is completely programmed according to old and far too generous reward systems. Tired or miserable? Have a glass! Really, you have done something good? Have a fag! Feeling down and misunderstood? Have a glass and a fag! A mistake? A success? Have two, they are so little!

No, if he is going to succeed, then he’ll have to re-program his brain. Program it back to how it was, so that it will work like it did when he was a child, before his brain had learnt that it was fun to smoke and drink. It is not about being brainwashed – quite the opposite. His skull has been brainwashed time and time again for far too long. Rinsed and soaked in alcohol and nicotine, his mind has become frayed and bleached. But now his brain will have to manage entirely without washing powder and become a self-supporting ecological system. Every time he feels the craving, he must focus on good thoughts instead of on spirits and ciggies. Good thoughts, good pictures. Models.