John’s tall, bent frame sagged up Commercial Drive, past the morning newspaper readers at the sidewalk tables like he was dragging a bag of potatoes chained to each ankle. No one looked up. He liked making Matthew and Luke think he was prodigiously plugging away at the final touches to his novel, but the secret truth that weighed his head down was that he hadn’t gotten a single word of it written yet.

He certainly had character sketches, plot lines, story boards, imagined conversations he might have with his characters, “devices” left, right, and centre—every technique for wanna-be novel writers ever passed out at every writers’ workshop ever conducted at every high school on every evening of every weekday in the known universe. But for all that—for all the enormous newsprint sheets papering the walls in his room containing diagrams, brain webs in different colours, lists upon lists of attributes and “points to remember,” plus arrows madly racing around, intersecting with each other to point at circles galore, making like a huge plate of spaghetti and meat balls plastered all around him—he didn’t actually have down even the simplest “The” or “A.”

Whenever John entered his room and closed his door with that exaggerated grace of his and drew his dark fearful eyes up to cast around anew at the madness hung on the walls in there, this fact would start spreading through his veins like some exotic muscle-attacking disease that caused his body to twist and squirm and his face to silently stretch and contort with what would appear to an onlooker to be the limits of agony any human could endure. If someone were to spy, it would look as though he were some kind of conceptual modern dancer-slash-freak contortionist on some east side stage down in the basement of a restaurant where a hand-drummer might be pounding and pounding away in a frenzy matched by nothing you could find up river in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Especially when the pounding on the drum was actually Matthew tapping away on his keyboard in the room directly above John’s, where a novel was actually being written.

They crushed him physically, days like that. Sometimes he would come into his room and, from the door onward, wouldn’t be able to cross his floor, neither on hands and knees nor even in the manner of a snake. That dream we’ve all had of needing desperately to run but our legs wouldn’t go? That was John on many days alone in his room when his door closed behind him, maybe only moments after excusing himself from the table and looking for all the world to Matthew and Luke like a real writer calmly going about his business. But when the latch of the door snapped into place behind him, suddenly it was as though his ears were filled with the sound of a train in full brakes-locked-up mode, his eyes as though shut against a Nevada nuke test, his lungs as though filled with mustard gas, his skin as though consumed in fire, and his heart as though weighted with bricks of lead hung on wires, it was filled with so much dread.

Then a pain would grip his stomach like a rat got in there. Twenty five years! The life he might have had instead, the things he might have done, beers with his buddies, a girlfriend, maybe a son to fall asleep in his lap watching a late hockey game, all of that burned to the ground like a Doukhobor cleansing away all want in this world. Desire itself in all its totality—save the desire to write a novel—had been wrung from him like a wash cloth twisted between two counter-poised fists, or like his body right now on the floor. Look at him, pitiable, writhing in his silent envelope of pain like a gothic beast in the throes of death: it’s excruciating beyond words even just to watch. Of course it would have to be beyond words. It’s called writer’s block, isn’t it.

So he stayed out of his room and instead sagged as though under the weight of ten bags of potatoes up Commercial Drive, his mind rising and falling with myriad random thoughts, like what it would be like to be snatching the butts from ashtrays at the cafes for enough left-behind tobacco to make a cigarette from, if you don’t mind spit, finger grease, ash, and indignity, or how many mathematicians new to algebra it would take to recalibrate history to stretch a single century of events out to a thousand years.

What?

Oh yes, his novel, the one mapped out all over the walls in that torture chamber of a room at home. What was it about that novel that was proving so hard for him to write? Only the fact that, for a first novel, John had selected a theme that exceeded in complexity themes never contemplated by the greatest masters of novel writing in history. Instead of starting with a backyard shed, John was starting with a Great Pyramid of Giza.

He waited in line at his café. “A line up?!” he muttered loud enough for people in front to hear him, intentionally. He didn’t have to order here, the barristas all knew what he drank, always the same thing, tall Americano with a shot of steamed milk and a mound of sugar that he waited to break through the surface of foam before sliding a spoon in to stir. The island of sugar sinking like a ship below the froth on the sea of milk was always reminiscent of something for him. Like his life.

The idea for the novel struck him when he was reading about two Russian mathematicians who had, they claimed, discovered evidence that perhaps up to one thousand years of human history between the present and the middle of the Roman empire had been fabricated. Their suspicion, roundly criticized by every historian the press asked, was that the fabrication had occurred in small pieces, inadvertently, by less-than-meticulous historians of the past.

What had happened, the mathematicians posited, was that new kings who needed to substantiate their claims to the throne would hire scribes to write up a history of sorts that shows the king in the proper line to inherit the kingdom. When another scribe did the same thing for another king, the earlier version was not discredited because there was no scholarly tradition of history-writing yet that would have critically compared two stories and thrown one out. In the popular mind, the two stories both survived. The only way to make sense of all this history was to consider them in some complex and accidental way to be consecutive. When scholarly historians finally appeared on the scene in the later 19th century, they began with this much-expanded popular version of history, and the basic outline they emerged with, comprised of these simultaneous stories joined up as though they were consecutive, has never been critically examined or substantially changed since. John’s novel had a good twist on that supposition. He presumed that the invented millennium was intentional. It wasn’t the odd king here and there making up stories to substantiate their local claim, and adding a decade here and there to history, he surmised, but the whole edifice of royalty in Europe—the Holy Roman Empire—that had made up The One Big Story to substantiate its whole existence.

His novel went something like this (although it changes radically week to week depending on John’s latest research): When the Roman empire based in Italy entered collapse in the 5th century, the Holy Roman Empire, its European spin off, needed quickly and effectively to establish its credibility before any number of competing “pagan” political systems took root in the power vacuum. The method was the same as what a new king would do: write up a history that points to yourself as the right and proper location of all authority. But where a king might need to write up a few decades since the passing of his grandfather, maybe, a total governing system would need to invent considerably more time to establish its credentials—like about a thousand years, maybe. v Pure invention wouldn’t work, it would have to include known events. The trick was to take known and accepted history covering a hundred years and stretch it out somehow to plausibly cover ten times that length of time. No one in Europe would accept a theocracy based on a guy who was crucified just a few decades ago, and about whom there was only a small cult, not a religion. What the fixers needed was a full-blown religion, complete with all the credibility that comes from very long duration and very widespread belief. Only when villagers were told that the new authority they were just learning about was a thousand years old and subscribed to by everyone else in all of Europe would they accept it themselves. If they knew the truth—that it was an obscure cult only a few decades old—they would never sign on.

If we’re counting years from the time an obscure preacher lived in Galillee and was executed in Judea, we’re really at about year 1,000 by now. It takes algebra to figure out how to make 100 years of events represent 1,000 years of history, and algebra was invented in Timbuktu, the city that was a thousand years ago the epicentre of Muslim scholarship. It was also the richest city on Earth—rich in rooms of gold accumulated by publishing houses making all the books for the great libraries of Alexandria, Baghdad, Cairo, and Beirut.

What John’s book was going to begin with was what happened to Timbuktu after its mathematicians finished the job of calculating out 1,000 years of invented history for their crazy, uneducated, and very backward clients in Europe. Whatever it was that happened, the truth is Timbuktu went from being the New York City of its day to being the very word for “off the end of the Earth.”

“They knew too much, didn’t they,” John said out loud to the back of the head of the man in front of him at the café, who turned around and frowned at John’s knowing grin before huffing and shaking his head on the way out to a sidewalk table to read his newspaper. “Crazy people,” the stranger muttered, and John nodded, thinking the same thing.