The Ordinary Haunting II

22. The Death Wish - Part 1

The spring sunshine shimmered yellow, green and pink across the windshield, the day as cheerful as tomatoes in salad (for those who like them), a ladybug on a rooftop (most of them), and that one song everyone knows by Galileo Galiliei (the band, not the astronomer... I don't think he ever wrote a song, and I can't speak for how cheerful he might have been).

"That's why I'm asking," I sighed as we pulled up at a man standing in the middle of our lane dressed in a yellow safety jacket and holding a stop sign. Craning my neck, I could just spot a small truck trundling up the road ahead, more men in yellow hanging out the back with whipper snippers held to the overgrown foliage of the hillside.

New dropped his arm through his open window and the thin hairs above his elbow glowed white in the sun. "I'm really not qualified to answer that," he replied gruffly. "And you're even less qualified to ask it."

"I've absorbed enough of the discourse to know that it's a legitimate concern."

"For fans. Why are you absorbing a discourse you aren't even a part of?"

"I'm just interested. Am I not allowed to be interested?"

"If you were really interested, wouldn't you actually watch the show or read the books instead of just collecting 'popular and unpopular opinions' off Twitter?"

"I'm being a bit more picky about how I spend my time now–" I pushed my prescription sunglasses back up my nose, "–so I want to make sure it's worth it."

New reached over to change the song playing on my phone and I stuffed it under my seat where he couldn't get to it. He settled for pinching me on the knee. "Well once you've spoiled all the major plot points for yourself, it won't be."

"I dunno, I don't mind knowing how everything works out. I'll be able to look for all the little hints and clues that everyone would have missed the first time they watched it not knowing anything."

"And that will be fun for you?"

"As an editor, of course."

The road worker in front of us flipped his sign around to show 'SLOW', and New drove carefully past him, switching into the opposite lane. "Did you read your books in high school and university like that?" he asked.

"No, I didn't have such innovative ideas back then. I've really matured."

"Said no mature person ever."

"I mean, I never said I was mature," I laughed. "I just said I've matured compared to when I was eighteen. I had a long way to go, it turns out. But back to my original question–"

"Nah, we're good–"

"Okay, how about this: If old George really does die before finishing A Song of Ice and Fire, do you think the chances of him getting tethered here are 11 in 10, or 100 in 10?"

New rubbed his chin. "Oh, yeah the dude's 100 per cent going to come back stuck to an antique typewriter or something. When someone figures it out, the media will stampede wherever he is and every line he writes will be televised live. It'll become some kind of post-life art piece being completed real-time."

"That's way too much pressure. He won't be able to write one sentence without wanting it to be perfect. His editors, certainly, will be out of a job, if everyone's going to be consuming it a sentence at a time instead of as one complete story. He'd be better off just leaving it behind him, passing on to the afterlife to narrate it orally like the old folk tales, and down here we'll make do with a ghost writer. Ha! Get it?"