Progress Update: The Silent Scream

Finally, at almost 3:30 am, I can say that I have finished Chapter 3. It has just about killed me, considering I wrote it without much of a plan. It is about the conventions, which means that it required both research and coordination. There is very little back-and-forth dialogue, which is probably why it took six hours to write.There are, however, two 850+ word speeches. Those are damn near impossible to write. Anyhow, overall, this chapter is 4600 words and 14 full pages. I feel a need to sleep now.

Now it was Thursday, or Day Four of convention Hell, and it was his turn to make a few ill-received jokes. He was supposed to be getting ready, but he didn’t much feel like getting ready. Thus he sat in the rickety director-style chair in an undershirt and Johns Hopkins sweats, staring at his reflection in a well-lit mirror while the television humming in the background. He considered his reflection. He looked relatively good for a wartime President running for reelection with dismal approval ratings. He got four and a half hours of sleep, on average, and to be sure, there were bluish circles under his eyes. But they didn’t look as dark or deep as he would have thought. He was a little pale, but not alarmingly so. He still had some sense of youth about him. His fortieth birthday was in exactly two weeks, now that he thought about it. Everything seemed to be in order in this visual inventory—everything except his eyes. They were as black as always, and they sparkled a little in the blinding incandescence. Physically, they were fine. The problem lay in what he saw behind them. The pain and torment that he felt constantly burned brilliantly in the reflection. He saw the silhouette of his soul silently screaming like the famous Edvard Munch painting. Knowing the pain was there and feeling it was wholly different from seeing yourself tormented by it. In the depths of his eyes, he did not look healthy. He did not look like he got any sleep at all. He looked paler than the Grim Reaper and older than the country. And he knew, looking into his eyes, that the truth lay here, and not in the rest of his reflection. He was not healthy, not in the least. He was just Dorian Gray, putting up a youthful, cheerful façade for everyone in the world, even his wife. On the inside, he was just as haggard as Mark’s corpse was sure to be.
He forced his face into his hands and massaged it vigorously. He rubbed his eyelids with a passion, praying that he could rub away the truth he had just seen. It could not help him to keep the memory on the surface of his consciousness; nay, it could only detonate his self-destruct sequence a little sooner. And who could that possibly help? Not him. Not Jane. Not the country. Not Mark. No one.