Pseudonym

From His Books

Chapter 9: From His Books

I got to read his stories before they were published. I was, as he said, his number one fan. I would encourage him to keep writing, tell him if something he wrote did not seem to have the marks of his genius. I was his first editor and first avid reader.

He had many muses. He felt so much despite his 'numbness plan' and these emotions were the fuel for his writing. Sometimes I would stoop to flattery in order to keep him happy about himself and his writing. I don't know if it worked, though.

Why does it seem that I did not know enough about the boy who was my best male friend?

There was beauty in everything he wrote, even if what he wrote was dark and scary, emotional, unusual and bordering on blasphemy. One of the greatest stories he wrote (but never finished) in high school was entitled "The Satanist." It was about a teenage boy from a broken family whose father was actually an incarnation of Satan. It involved unrequited love, saving the beautiful damsel yet getting rejected, and a questionable quantity of demons and other underworldly things. Beautiful. I always berated him later on for not finishing it.

There were his poems, too. They were often about unrequited love during our first two years in high school, but later on they became more about the darkness of the world outside and the darkness within. I wonder if he ever showed them to anyone else. What would others think, I wonder, of such beautifully sad poems? Would they understand that the poet was not writing from imagination or for someone he knew, but was writing for himself, from his own battered heart?

In fourth year high school, Leon, my friend Valerie and a dozen other batchmates of ours set up something called the Writers' Club. It was a step up from one-on-one beta reading and editing. It was a chance for all of us to share ideas, not only with the writers each one knew, but with other writers of our age and our batch. Leon wasn't very active, though. Fourth year, after all, was when I barely got to contact him.

Surprisingly, he wrote about the Writers' Club later on. He wrote about our lives before the Club and what he heard of us after graduation. Reading that book was perhaps one of the few moments when I seriously thought that he cared for someone other than himself and his tight little circle of confidantes.

I had all of Leon's books—some hardbound, some paperback. I loved them, and Carlo liked them well enough. He and Leon had known each other for a while. They had once been neighbors, until Carlo's family moved to a new house. The two weren't close, but they knew each other pretty well.

I found out about Leon's past through Carlo. We talked about that friend of mine often, even while he was still alive.

It turns out that Leon's stock character, a teenage boy whose father had abandoned the family and whose mother was working day and night to make ends meet, was very much Leon himself. I had always suspected that he had a reason for writing about that character, but I never got the courage to ask him about things like that. I was from a whole, relatively happy family who were getting by in life. Leon and I had never touched the topic of family except to rant about annoying younger siblings, overbearing mothers and my strict father.

I think Leon wanted to live on in his books, somehow. Not just by getting famous for them, I mean. He wanted to be in them, in those printed pages. Where someone could perhaps learn to understand him.

Beautiful, I thought.