Good Machine

by Sheila Heti

Written for The Writing Life, published by McClelland & Stewart. An anthology about the writing life, whose proceeds went to PEN Canada, 2006

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There are many machines in the world, so now we know something about machines.

They are what we like best until they fail us, and until we can figure out why they have failed us, there is nothing more frustrating than a machine. It is not that the power cord is unplugged. It is not that we have spilled Gatorade all over it.

Everything in a machine must be doing its little, private job, if the whole machine is to be doing its single job, which is perhaps to turn out a bottle of Coke, or perhaps to let us send and receive email, or perhaps to suck up dust and condoms from the carpet, or to turn out ten-dollar bills.

A person who works at an office is like one part of the vacuum cleaner, or one part of the machine that turns out six thousand bottles of Coke a minute, and so it is important that each part works. But when what needs to be made is a story, then the machine is one person, and if the hands are able, and if the brain is not asleep, and there is no writing coming out, then one must detect what is wrong.

One thought is that we were wrong about this machine; we thought it was supposed to make books, but that was just vanity. It was to make children, or a fool of itself, or nothing at all, just to lie down on the sidewalk and die.

I have gone into myself tinkering and come out with nothing, no answers. I have not been able to find the element that is off, but to spend so long aware that every part must be working properly, and to not know what the parts are, or what is ‘properly,’ this is a strange maintenance job.

Motto: To work awkwardly, then. To spit dust onto the carpet. To produce cars with three wheels. For the Coke to be on the outside, and the bottle on the inside.

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