Young Woman Reads Her Biography

It was as if shaken from an opioid dream, that Natalie Rieux realized that her beauty had begun to fade. She was met with a reflection, startling and immediate, finally retaining some of the weariness and uncertainty of her few moments alone. Her life, a tapestry of rich food in her mouth, rich men in her mouth, and intoxicants abound, had been one of gratuity. Smiles laced with allure had given her access to the grandeur of those living with power, money, beauty and fame, and she had found no reason to resist indulging. Even in the world of the tycoon and the celebrity, the titan and the aristocrat, a beautiful woman reigns. But, as the flower wanes, vibrancy becomes mortality, and we look away, on to the next.

Alone in a room lit only by the overcast day, Natalie shed a few tears of shock. Drawing into herself to protect from the confrontation, proliferation, isolation, of her internal monologue, a crack appeared in her mind. Clawing for something redeeming to sooth herself, there was naught but a void. It was as though she was fading along with her looks, a hollow china doll irreparably fracturing.

She went to bed defeated, cursing and dreading the rest of her life.

What it was that drew Natalie to the library the following day is now lost, probably a fact never even known. She was not a reader, writer, thinker, or dreamer, but she had begun to feel the plight of the misfit. Perhaps she saw something of herself in the tattered and prostituted books. Perhaps she was curious about whatever it was that these people, ignorant of glamour and spectacle, were so stubbornly chasing. Perhaps there was simply nothing else left to do. If she did not know, we may posit our own theories, free of guilt.

There was something counter-intuitive about the atmosphere inside the stout brick building. As the outside world careened through the universe, this small pocket was silent and still. These were the people who fell through cracks, sieved from society. Clothing was worn so that people would not see each other's breasts and genitals, and so as not to draw any attention from the authorities. Hair, alternately thinning, receding, matting and knotting, was fucked to no end. Everyone drank coffee, but there was no energy in the room, because the coffee was liquor. Her first time in a public library, 11 AM on a Wednesday morning in March, Natalie had never been less certain that she was living in a capitalist nation.

It was some type of fortification. Aggression and assertiveness had been long ago beaten out of them, replaced by tepidity; this was their sanctuary. An old long-haired drifter, the exact type you are imagining, muttered about a lost love from the Bayou. The avian clerk swept in, laconic as she shushed the scorned. These were wildlings grown lazy, because they were no longer needed, or had resigned their posts. Detritus with days to fill, clinging to curiosity as the path to a more gentle world. A world accepting to all, and graciously eternal. Wary of the attention growing around her, Natalie entered an aisle.

The collection was modest, but for an intellectual novice, the volumes loomed. Surrounded by titles in arcane scripts, she felt the ostracism of unknowing that had plagued her school years. In some moments alone, Natalie felt legitimate gratitude for her beauty. These moments were scarce, slipped in between ugly behaviour, mass adoration, and a resistance to solitude, but she didn't feel any guilt about relieving herself of most of the harshness of the world. Chance plays no favourites, but that does not mean that the favoured don't benefit. Intelligence seemed more a burden to her, an indictment to solve the problems of suffering fools, with hidden powers requiring rigour for revelation. Beauty was self-evident, and self-sufficient. In some semblance of these terms, Natalie understood this, and her gratitude stemmed from this understanding. Beauty had been her respite from the mental world, but this barrier was crumbling, and standing uncomfortably among roughly 300 botany books, it was time to face the melancholy of the enlightened ape.

She was quite staggered by the output of her fellow beings. Well, most were men, but she was sure the authors had thanked their mothers, wives, daughters and mistresses for their support. From her experience with successful, powerful men, Natalie had witnessed firsthand the lust for approval that drove men to do crazy things, like attempt to acquire a billion dollars, or write a book on botany. Men seemed far more obsessed with legacy than women were. They would commit their lives to creating some token to remain after they were gone, and would die without seeing Rome, or floating in the Dead Sea, or laying under the stars in the Gobi, content that their life's work would persist, having wasted their years sitting at desks. Natalie danced, kissed strange men, and satisfied her senses. Some deemed it empty, but she had been very happy basking in the possibilities. Now, surrounded by the bound epitaphs of strange men she was sure she wouldn't kiss, the world seemed destitute, like both the path of work and the path of pleasure were dead ends. Beauty would fade, and nobody gave a fuck about botany. She wandered on, reflecting.

Row upon row, lay dormant thoughts, waiting to be engaged so they may flourish in another age. Only as she paced them, each as its predecessor, did she wonder what she was doing. Was this behaviour an overreaction to a few creases and some sparse graying? Was her confidence really so brittle? Had she destined her self-worth to tragedy? Oh she felt changed.

As far as Natalie's memory stretched, people had remarked on her face, her smile, her body, her being. Males, children, adolescent, grown, married, had behaved like caffeinated imps in her company. It was a power she had never understood, but had learned to wield. Her effect had never been as egregious as in Helen or Penelope, but had done the same insidious damage.

Men had fallen. Men had been tamed. Men had changed their ways. Men had failed. She had played the muse. She had turned down propositions in the face of suicidal threats. She had rarely slept alone. She had cried too. Love and lust gave their lives meaning, but these fundamental human forces also stripped them down to raw cowering spirits, inhumane and pitiful. But it was an addiction like no other. Drugs have the decency to kill you. Love for the unloved is a cruel oasis, eternal and barren, yet lined with the seeds of hope. But god had the fucking been fun.

As she turned into the next aisle, two other patrons met her eyes like startled deer, and she was overcome by sheepishness at her loitering. There was a timelessness to the whole place, from the books to the people to the phenomenon of pacing identical aisles, and it was hypnotic. Whatever had drawn her in was once again materializing, like an itch in her mind. It was becoming clear that she should just read one of the books already, but the choice was overwhelming. For the first time, she was curious, but her curiosity was aimless, more emotional than intellectual. There were facts and ideas floating in some mysterious space, and they intrigued her. People spent their lives conquering everything from the origins of the universe to ideal dog diets, and all she had to do to absorb this was stare at these silly little symbols and think about their consequences in relation to an indubitable physical world. “Quite a wonder, this reading,” she thought, mind clear as the womb of a nun with body odour. So with the irrational conviction of someone wallowing in a fresh quanta of consciousness, she selected a thin volume from the shelf, found a chair in a corner, and sat.

The book began, “It was as if shaken from an opioid dream, that Natalie Rieux realized that her beauty had begun to fade.” Her name sat there, so casual as it struck awe. The odds of a coincidence seemed demonstrably greater than those of a conspiracy, but reading it over and over and over and over, then once more for the sake of rigour, it remained, definite as her burgeoning crow's feet.

She checked the book's title. Young Woman Reads Her Biography. She was the Second Coming of Christ, discovering the New Testament. Odysseus reading Homer. An amnesiac reading their journal. She examined it thoroughly for a name, but there wasn't one. Another incredibly pretentious author, who probably valued concepts over readers, and saw the art as far more important than those who consumed it. Whoever had written Young Woman Reads Her Biography, she thought, was undoubtedly an asshole.

Only several species can recognize themselves in mirrors. Ours is the only one attempting to communicate with written language. While illiteracy and insanity do indeed run rampant through our people, this was a case of neither. Brains that believe they are experiencing something they are not are roughly as common as those that cannot believe what they are experiencing. Natalie had run into a nasty case of cognitive dissonance, to the point where each thought seemed an unwanted man in her bed, or a finger in her sandwich. The world through this lens was chaotic and sinister, as she played victim to a universal prankster.

Reading on, the words continued their intrusion. She relived her gaze at the mirror, the tears and despair of the previous evening, the lonely sleep. The author had curiously excluded her morning thoughts that had led to her arrival at the library. With the intimate and precise description of her internal world of the night before, the exclusion of the early morning left the relevance of the events in question. What made something important, and who was the arbiter? Why did one event merit choice while others were forgotten? It was all so overwhelming, as the book raised more questions than it answered. She found herself once again arriving at the library, reveling at the damned botany books, thinking about love, work, and indulgence.

It was not without elegance, however. The way her life was described, invasive as it was, left her stunned at her own existence, and its beauty. Vividity soaked into each moment, picking out her precise feelings in ways she never could have. A line lay between Young Woman Reads Her Biography and Poor Actress Butchers Play, and she was coming to feel as though the days she had experienced could not do justice to the literature, whatever that meant at this point. Someone somewhere had wrung more from her than she possibly could have. Whoever it was, they must acquaint.

Natalie found the avian clerk wandering an aisle of books, straightening them. “This book is about me. Do you know who wrote it?”

“Please lower your voice, dear. People come here for peace, and to get away from that sort of narcissism.”

Natalie, hushed, said “No, but it's exactly about my past two days. It couldn't possibly have been published in the time.”

“A victim of metaphor or coincidence. You are not the first to have literature speak to them from outside of possibility.”

“Please, just tell me who wrote it.”

“What good will that do? You're the star anyways. Isn't that enough for you?”

“But perhaps they'll be able to tell me about myself. I've never considered my life in the way it's phrased here. It's so much more lively than the world normally seems.”

“That's their racket, these authors. They distill the world down into chunks of sense and ideas, all dressed up with a tidy vocabulary, and they tell you it's worthwhile because it's interesting. Charlatans, all of them.”

“How does this book know more about who I am than I do?”

“It doesn't. Please don't be ridiculous. It merely offers a ghost with a name, existing in the sense of a unicorn, that makes sense to you because you cannot figure out your identity. It's a science experiment in being human, not a real life.”

“You don't seem to be a very big fan of books, especially for a librarian.”

“Oh this is just a job. My relationship with books, writers, and stories is beyond any apparent value at this point. They are all necessary evils because, despite all of their flaws, deceptions, demagogy, superficiality, empty wit, libel, false hope, torn pages, suicides, tragedies and time waste, they are beautiful, and the only way I can cope.”

Natalie thumbed uncomfortably through her volume, as the avian clerk returned to her duty, eyes brimming with tears. As she walked away to her table, Natalie realized the real questions she needed answers to. What was next, and how did it all end? She sat, humbled and still.

These questions felt impossibly massive to her. And indeed they were. She had only read to the point where she had found the book. So in a way, it was as if whatever little control she had had had been ceded to the anonymous author. With this came great freedom from the responsibilities of the terrestrial world, but also an obedience to whatever had been penned, as if liberated to freely wander a prison. Her life had been compressed into a dense little ball, stripped of detail, left only with meaning and mortality. Whether she opened it or not, the narrative would be the same. Whether the events of her life directly coincided remained unanswered.

She continued to flip through the pages she had already read, when a funny thought struck her while on the botany book section. Those poor, slaving botanist authors had passed so much precious time typing away in solitude, only to leave their meek manifestos to bathe in the dust of time. Sweet little Natalie Rieux had inspired some tortured soul to tell her tale, pro bono and a propos of nothing, and she would live on, regardless of how gray and creased she became. There was soothing finality in that. And so she read, once more, to the fateful moment where she had read those strange words “It was as if shaken from an opioid dream, that Natalie Rieux realized that her beauty had begun to fade.”

It didn't matter if she read on, because all she would read is that she had done so. But what if she read something else? Maybe the author only knew so much of her, and it would be fitting that she should once again become a mystery at the exact moment she fought back against the book's tyranny. To be in the present, essential and mystical, forever locked between the monolith of the past and uncertainty of the future, was beyond writing, as the record keepers grasp for the ephemeral, and settle for the symbolic. Her fear receded. This was no soothsaying prophet she dealt with. Just a simple man. Only a man could delude himself into such a childish tale of the loss of beauty. And only an author would believe the promised land for the distraught woman would be in a book. Natalie closed her eyes. Reveling in the sweet calm, surrounded by others equally grateful and alone, she felt so very human. She then did what she knew was right.

Natalie Rieux, formerly of great beauty, presently of peace, flipped blindly to the final page of the work, covering the text with a piece of paper, to keep her final hours unknown, and revealed the final line. “and she lived happily ever after. And died.”