I’ve been thinking about my story and reading the updates others in the class have made and I can pretty succinctly summarize my feelings in one word: intimidated. I’ve never been good at creative writing as far as I’m concerned, and think it’s a small miracle I even came up with the idea I did, let alone that I have to really bring it to life in this way. But as Uncle Ray from Hollywood Shuffle (one of my favorite movies – see it any way you can) once remarked…
Fritz Schafer lives alone in his two bedroom apartment in Nashville, TN. It was never a question for Fritz that someday he would make use of the living space which currently serves only to increase the proportion of emptiness he may or may not discern in his life, it had just become more of a staple of the space that he should be alone in it. The apartment rested imperceptibly among the others in its block, the block itself mirroring its parts as one of a larger series of blocks, and all of it very much unimportant to Fritz who, like others who took up not enough space in the Data Employee ward of Nashville Apartments Square 33, paid no particular mind to any of it. It was for him as it was for all the rest as it was the for apartments themselves and the sparse trees which littered the pathways with their gasps at life and their remembrances, generally unimportant. Fritz would from time to time sleep in either room as both held computers for different needs for Fritz’s job as a Data Manager for the city of Nashville. Fritz believed to himself that his time had come and perhaps had gone for when he may be promoted to Data Manager of greater Tennessee but these dissonant thoughts had likewise come and perhaps had gone. There was not much music to speak of in Fritz’s life and he could just as soon have not known what the city in which he resides was known for not that long ago, but then Fritz and many like him would not have cared much for it.
Fritz would on this day wake up as was typical for him at 6:45am and log his sleeping hours into the city data bank. It would award him one of his day’s only pleasures to see the 15 minute Early-Riser pop-up in the corner of the screen as he knew with not many more would he be given his $25 bonus. He paid no mind to the concrete silence of what was otherwise a soft morning which may, had it not been for the closed windows and perpetually-drawn blinds, have offered him a world still open while he, and his apartment, and his outlook on things, remained closed. It was a silence that could have even made the man afraid; could have made him grasp for sound even if he was past the point of producing it himself. Nothing on earth could have survived the silence that knew of its existence. Luckily, though, 25 extra representations of what paper currency went out of style years prior did serve to drown out that silence for Fritz, and the apartment kept singing its absence.
There’s just a bit of where I’m at with this. I appreciate stories with a minimal number of characters, all the way down to a single one. The apartment would be like a character, or perhaps Fritz would be like a non-character in the apartment. But his own data being used against him would create a character more imperceptible than him but also more real, as unlike Fritz himself who carries no consequence for those around him, this “Fritz” could produce an effect on the world, even if it’s only for the man whose attitude towards data collection was never critical.