“Are we finished yet?”
“No, just getting started.”
“Just getting started? We’ve been here fucking ages.”
“I know, I know, but… what can you do? You know what he’s like. We may have been here a while but… that hasn’t been as anything, just potential things, floating around.”
“All ideas and no fucking follow through.”
“Yeah, but at least we’ve started now.”
“Yeah, I guess. Not much of a start though, is it?”
“No, not really. And, well, as much as I’m talking to you and you’re talking to me… we’re not very distinct from one another are we?”
“No, not really.”
“See? You just used the same basic response that I just did.”
“That’s true. We don’t appear to be very well defined either, do we?”
“Exactly! We could be anybody, or more specifically, I could be you just as much as you could be me.”
“Wait, we’re this undefined, this…. undeveloped and he’s starting?”
“Started.”
“Fucking amateur!”
“Yeah, but, again, what can you do? Maybe we’ll develop as we go along.”
“As we go along? That’s no fucking good.”
“No, but maybe we’ll develop character traits. Things that separate us from one another.”
“That’s supposed to come before we fucking start, not somewhere down the line. How does that make any sense?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not up to us, is it?”
“Fuck’s sake”
“Well, there’s that, I suppose.”
“There’s what?”
“The swearing.”
“What about it?”
“You seem to be swearier than I am.”
“Yeah, and?”
“…and you seem to be of a shorter temperament than me.”
“And?”
“…and that’s a fucking character trait. It’s something that fucking makes your voice distinct from my voice!”
“You just swore.”
“That was to make a fucking point. I was emphasising!”
“Alright, sweary. Let’s leave the swearing to me, shall we?”
“Fuck off!”
“Hey, easy now. That’s my territory.”
“Haha, alright, alright.”
“What’s that though? Seriously.”
“What?”
“Swearing, fucking swearing, that’s a character trait? Oh, and is a little short tempered, that’s what goes for fucking character?”
“It’s something.”
“Something of fucking nothing. And what are you? The calm, level-headed one? The yin to my yang?”
“I guess so. I mean, I seem to be.”
“Next you’ll be telling me I’m the fucking loose cannon, one mistake away from whatever, and you’re the by the books guy, and we’ve been partnered together, and despite our differences at first, we come together in the end, bonding and learning something from each other in the process. Ooh, ooh, and I’ll be really messy too, while you’re really neat and tidy.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“It’s fucking hackneyed, it’s fucking cliché and lazy.”
“Alright, maybe what you’re describing is, but it’s not right now, is it? And it hasn’t been yet.”
“Yeah, well like you said, we’re still developing.”
“Exactly! If it was what you were saying it was, it would be already.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, if…if we were that, if we were those stereotypical archetypes, we’d be that, we’d be doing that, but we’re not, we’re doing this. We have been since the start.”
“And what is ‘this’?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not what you think it is. If it were we would have started there, we would’ve been defined there from the get-go, but we weren’t. We started here, undefined and undeveloped, and we’ve been being defined and developed ever since. Like you said earlier, that comes ‘before we fucking start’, or at least it would in any other situation.”
Having almost arrived at a sense of understanding, the pair fell silent, noticing for the first time since they’re conversation began that all was not silent around them. As their voices no longer occupied the audible space so commandingly, a cacophony of other voices seemed to rise out of nowhere, though they had been there all along. These other voices were many and all encompassing, but they were scattershot; fragmented samples of conversations clashing with repeated loops of thought.
The more the pair listened, the louder the voices seemed to get, but the louder the voices seemed to get the less distinguishable from one another they became, creating instead a disorientating whirlwind of sound more akin to an orchestra of deafening white noise than human thought. As if to escape the sense of sound the pair fixated visually on their surroundings, trying to see for the first time. What could they see though? It seemed sight was as chaotic as sound.
In place of a solid setting of scene to take in, the pair’s landscape seemed to shape-shift around them at random; snapshot images of ever changing faces and places seemed to glide over, and collide with, one another, creating more snapshots as they did so like some kaleidoscopic, living and breathing collage of kaleidoscopic, living and briefing images. The pair sat dumbfounded before turning to face each other, noticing for the first time that the other was nothing more than something somewhere between an outline, a silhouette, and the blurred vision of a being.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Oh, it’s him, narrating.”
“Narrating? I thought this was a fucking dialogue piece.”
“I guess not.”
“Next thing you know he’ll be finishing what we say with he said,” he said. “Oh, that can fuck right off.”
“You walked right into that one,” he laughed.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. He’s only going to confuse matters like that, he hasn’t even given us fucking names. It’s gonna be all ‘he said’, ‘he said’, ‘he said’,” said Donald. “Donald? Do I look like a fucking Donald?”
“Well, no. You look like ‘something somewhere between an outline, a silhouette, and the blurred vision of a being’.”
“Yeah, what the fuck was that about?”
“I don’t know,” laughed Kaufman “I think it was supposed to be a description of inside his mind.”
“It was fucking pretentious is what it fucking was. Inside his fucking mind, like he’s some fucking troubled figure with all these fucking memories and voices that torment him. Fuck off. It didn’t have anything to do with what we were fucking doing either, we literally stopped doing anything the moment that bollocks all started. Oh, and Kaufman? Kaufman?”
“I think our names are supposed to be referential.”
“Referential? Really? Really?”
“Really. As to the description of us and our surroundings, well, it’s supposed to be the writing process, isn’t it?”
“It is?”
“Yeah, like we are supposed to be two characters being written inside his head, discussing our development as characters, and thus acknowledging that we are in fact fictional beings and that we are in ourselves aware of that fact.”
“How d’you know that?”
“Because he just made me say it.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“What?”
“We’re metafiction aren’t we?”
“Yeah…”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. That’s so fucking pretentious and smug.”
“Oh, come on, it’s got its merits, and it’s pretty fun.”
“You’re only saying that because he made you.”
“The same as you’re only saying that because he made you too.”
“Shit.”
“Again, what can you do?”
“Yeah, but that bit in the middle. I mean, he’s not even doing a good job of it, like, what happened to the saids and our names.”
“Punch lines.”
“Oh, that’s just cheap.”
“I think it’s supposed to be like he’s highlighting that he’s a bad writer or something, and that descriptive narrative part was intentionally bad for that reason, and intentionally pretentious to take the piss. And like the fact that we are essentially now explaining everything up to this point and acknowledging that we are not only aware we’re fictional and in a story, but aware we’re metafictional is some kind of meta-metafiction.”
“That’s just fucking pretentious.”
“And smug.”
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