What is an author?

I used to think a writer and an author were the same person. Then I read a Frenchman’s question, and the months of research for my manuscript suddenly took on a different meaning: biopolitics and military doctrine were playing tag around me. Already dizzy, they still couldn’t seem to stop.

These readings always compel me to take notes by hand. As if my brain cannot make sense of what I’m reading, cannot grasp its essence, unless the letters actually touch the paper.

Curiously enough, when I write, I prefer my laptop. Make the words flow. Spelling, punctuation, page layout—none of it matters. Just capture the world my character inhabits, the sharp edges that scratch her skin, the phosphorescent cockroaches as big as New York rats—every last tiny detail.

What a burden for my hands—I keep putting off the surgery. Carpal tunnel—not yet. My fingers race across the keyboard, trying to keep up with his shadow as it slips into the room ahead of him. Seconds later, I hear the door close, and I don’t even need to look up. I know it’s him. She doesn’t turn around either—but for different reasons.

I reread the page and realize she’s been staring at nothing, looking past me—and past him, always leaning over my shoulder, eager to be the first to see what happens next. She’s bewildered by an emptiness she cannot explain.

I hesitate over a comma. I want her to see him, to know that all she has to do is blink to stop believing she’s alone. He’s right beside her, on the very same line.

I pick up the comma, move it. Then put it back where it was. She needs this pause. He can give me all the orders he wants; his decision loop doesn’t work when the author is writing.

“Without OODA, you’re going to lose her,” I find myself telling him, but he cuts me off. “Who are you to give orders around here?”

Such a small difference.

The writer writes, and the characters are separated by only a few words. As my fingers keep moving across the keyboard, the author takes the distance between them and begins to write it down, shaping every word, playing chess with all the punctuation marks on the page. Six hours for five hundred and twenty-four words, and even those aren’t all quite right.

It’s almost morning, and it’s started raining again. The third day of rain and gray light. I wonder how many more hours I’ll spend with her before she can emerge from her numbness, tuck her hair behind her ear, as she usually does, and finally turn toward us, to notice him right next to me—waiting.

There’s no point in going back to bed, I think. I have to be at the office by nine. The bedroom door opens, and the smell of coffee enters first, just as his shadow did earlier. I take the tin mug he holds out to me. It burns. Ah! How numb my fingers are.

He pulls the window open, and cold, damp air fills the room. The bed dips beneath his weight as he sits down to read my six hours of barely a page. I’d better close the laptop and distract him.

“Hey, John! What am I to you?”

“Poetry.”

My God!

The three of us spent the night staring at the screen, and for John, it’s just another Tuesday. Not even six in the morning.

What is an author?