All week instead of drafting my screenplay I’ve been Netflix-surfing, lounging half-on, half-off the loveseat. My ‘day off’ has ballooned into a trance without time. At first I enjoyed this sitcom that’s playing. Now I’m enduring its final seasons like a dentist’s appointment, numbed and slumped, waiting to be freed.
So when Santosh suggests that a change will do me good, and asks me to drive her to the nail salon, I can’t refuse.
The preparatory scrubbing of my wife’s trimmed nails takes seventy minutes, an emery board, a chisel, a powderpuff, and other tools I can’t name. I feel sick to my stomach, then realise it’s because it smells like a dentist’s appointment, then realise why: calcium nebulised in the air. The nail technician begins finessing Santosh’s cuticles.
The décor is white and teal. Small bottles stand in military formation on shelftops and ledges. The technician is small, northeastern, and black-uniformed. A writer is never offduty, but there really is nothing else to observe.
I try playing songs in my head, but my internal playlist keeps looping “Kryptonite.” I vow to listen to a hundred new songs every night in my sleep, to proliferate my weapons against boredom. A bored writer is like a pervert priest: a disgrace to the profession.
The technician is scraping at Santosh’s nails again, her motions precise, her head bent. Did Michelangelo labour so over David? Does even a masterpiece merit this insane attention to detail? Maybe art does, art for the ages, but not nails.
I rouse myself and fish for topics of conversation. Santosh responds, but never looks up from the narrow teal cushion on which her hands rest. The heat on her hands from the glue-setting UV lamp seems to have bathed her brain, too, in bliss: immobilised it, as sunshine does a cat.
Under the table my knees quiver, then shake, then earthquake. I picture plucking my eyelashes out, lash by entangled lash, to distract myself from the bloodred murder of two hours of my life.
Back home I unplug the television, dustbin the remote control, and sit down at my laptop. ‘Now or never,’ I mutter. On the blank white face of my future, the cursor blinks and blinks, then freezes in a Mona Lisa smile.