Edmund looked out across a sea of faces whose expressions ranged from admiration to adoration, the soft murmur of anticipation keen in the air, the spotlight hot on his bare head.
He had nothing.
He never did, and it never mattered. He had spent much of the previous night telling the crowd as much, only to be lauded by critic and customer alike for his refreshing honesty or incredible humility or some similar such plauditory nonsense. Seventeen nights he had stood on the hardwood stage of that auditorium, speaking to seventeen full houses who delivered seventeen standing ovations. At least this was the last show of his run.
Where did it all go right? his agents had named the show. And the podcast. And the autobiography. A tongue-in-cheek bit of self-deprecation at first, now a living thing in the pit of his stomach. And—yes—he had agents. Plural. Three of them, each wealthier than the last off the back of his success, and not one of them sated. He didn’t begrudge them; he just didn’t understand.
His fame had come about quite by accident. He had developed a new spell, the first any wizard had come up with for centuries, and at a time when wizards had become the object of some derision, backwards recluses who spent their days poring over ancient tomes or scrawling gibberish on parchment in a desperate attempt to relive the glory years. Generations had tried and failed to rediscover the gift of their predecessors, to uncover the tricks of the trade lost to time. In the end, the trick had been that there wasn’t one. Edmund just sat down, wrote stuff on a scroll, and waited to see if it worked. Sure, there might have been a decade or three of study along the way, but that was the general gist. Nobody really knew what they were doing, Edmund least of all.
Yet somehow, in an afternoon full of wine and bloviation—the writing itself decidedly sparse—he had misspelled the word daffodil and, in doing so, created a new spell for the first time in over two centuries. To the best of his recollection, the spell granted legumes the ability to feel pain, but its function wasn’t important, the mere fact of its existence was more than enough. He was lauded for his discovery, first by his peers in the wizarding community but soon enough his exploits had caught the attention of the wider world. It took him nearly a year to realise how hollow it all was, and he had spent every year since attempting to communicate that emptiness to anyone who’d listen. Few did.
His mind returned to the auditorium, to the thousands that looked up at him, delighted simply to be there, united in their certainty as to his genius. He managed a half-hearted smile as he adjusted the height of the microphone, his hands chafing slightly against the worn metal of the stand. Once, at the beginning, his hands would have been moist with nervous anticipation, but even that sensation had long been denied him. What remained was a numbness only partly attributable to his self-medication. He pictured the bottle in his dressing room, what little remained of its contents, but that only reminded him of the empty scrolls that lay beside it. No amount of whiskey had helped him repeat the trick. He was a one-hit wonder, his only success a complete fluke.
He exhaled deeply into the mic and the crowd roared their approval. On with the show.
He had just enough time after the show to shower and finish what little remained of the whiskey before his driver arrived to take him to the airport. He had given up asking where they were going, mostly because the answers were always ambiguous at best and involved more locations than seemed reasonable. The man escorted him wordlessly to the private carpark, depositing Edmund in the back of the limousine the theatre insisted on providing him. He had still not come to terms with leather seats. They were always either too cold or too warm. He flinched at the chill as he sat, though he accepted the glass of champagne the driver proffered all the same. By the time they had taken off, Edmund was already dozing.
His next gig was with a large tech company, from whom he received a frankly outrageous fee in return for a one-hour leadership address on something called transformational change. He told them earnestly that he was more used to working with quill and scroll, that the only transformational change he could reasonably speak to involved a prince and a frog and a particularly bad joke at wizard camp, to which they laughed amiably and remarked on how terribly modest he was. The next day he visited the campus of a particularly haughty, self-proclaimed elite school, whose headmaster introduced Edmund as a thought leader on ideation. Of all the vapid engagements he had been tasked with, that one stood apart. When he pointed out the meaninglessness of the title, people laughed almost as readily as they missed the point.
He spent an hour telling the students about life in a wizard’s commune, sparing them no level of mundanity, from which they inexplicably generated twenty questions.
The students weren’t so bad, though. He could forgive them. But then came the podcast. As ever, he had not been prepared. He had simply allowed the drivers and pilots to take him where they would. If only he had read up on it, if only he had carried out even the most perfunctory research into what awaited him… The title alone was enough—From Averages to Have Riches—a show where the guests spoke about waking at three in the morning to get in four hours of meditation before they started their day, or devoting a full seven minutes of their Saturday to family time, bookended by things like meal prep and glute work and other synonyms for self-absorption.
The show purported to offer an insight into the world’s sharpest minds, an opportunity for regular folk to turn their lives into something more meaningful than the slog of working for someone else. As he sat listening to the dronings on of people he knew with absolute certainty—call it wizardly intuition—to be the farthest thing possible from role models for the everyman, his anger built. When the host asked Edmund what set people like them apart, he found that the paralytic apathy that so riddled most of his performances was suddenly quite absent.
He threw his arms up in a sincere gesture of exasperation. ‘You cannot believe this, surely?’
‘Oh, come on, now. You’re the magic man,’ the host replied. As though that explained everything. ‘We do this thing because we’re trying to help the generation that comes after us. Surely you have something to say to them? Help them follow in your footsteps.’
Leaving aside the fact that everyone in the tiny studio bar, Edmund was already part of the generations that came after him. He wasn’t certain he did have anything to offer. But he found that he did want to pass on some wisdom. Or at least try. ‘My message to the future generation is that I am not special. I have done nothing special. This is not false modesty, I’m not being coy or fishing for praise. I mean it sincerely. My success is akin to a blind man landing a dart on a bullseye, except it required even less skill. We chide the young for crossing a street without looking, we don’t congratulate them for arriving safely on the other side. Yet, somewhere along the way, we willingly discard critical thought for purely outcome-based analysis. If I hadn’t written that damned spell, would I ever have been a guest on your show?’
‘But you did write the spell, Edmund. That’s the point,’ replied the host, grinning broadly.
‘No, that’s my point. Tell me, if someone came into this studio right now screaming and shouting and waving a gun around, and proceeded to shoot all but the producer before he ran out of bullets, would you interview the producer about his survival tactics?’
The man in question started, then puffed out his chest a fraction. ‘That is a quite preposterous comparison. I mean, it would depend entirely on—’
‘The answer is no.’
‘You don’t even know what I would’ve done yet.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It would have been sheer luck. Good fortune, no more and no less. Nothing wrong with it, but also nothing to be admired. Certainly not an example to hold up to others.’
‘What’s your point?’ asked the host. His tone indicated impatience, but Edmund saw the man’s hunger plain in his eyes. This would make for excellent content.
‘I am not special. I was lucky.’ He spread his arms out wide at his sides. ‘Yet here I am.’
‘Can I ask you to elaborate on that for us, Edmund?’ asked the host, caramel laced through every syllable. ‘If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying you don’t feel that you deserve recognition. Why is that?’
‘Look at your other guests.’ He gestured at the three men seated beside him in the studio. ‘They’ve been successful. They deserve commendation. But they are not examples to follow.’
‘Is that for you to say, though?’
‘It should be what everyone says! Except everyone needs to be wise after the fact. People are so caught up in assigning retroactive meaning to things that they forget to judge the things themselves on their merits. We’ve lost that skill as a species. It’s maddening.’
The mood of his fellow guests had begun to shift from amused disinterest to outright hostility, either because of what he was saying or, more likely, due to being cut from the conversation. But the host knew a good thing when he saw one, and had eyes only for Edmund. ‘How so?’
Edmund had found his flow. ‘Go to a casino in Vegas. Round up ten people who gambled all their money on a single number in roulette and won. Ask them their secret. I’m serious, go on. Film it. You’ll get all kinds of stuff you can use. One’ll be vegan, one will be the son of a lifelong gambler. You’ll get someone who works changing tires all day, convinced that his time working with objects of a similar shape to the roulette wheel has allowed him to transcend basic probability. That’s a couple of book deals and a movie, I reckon. Maybe a mini-series. Just like that. And if you think any of this fanciful, tell me, what are your aims for this podcast? What are its stated outcomes—its impact on society? Better yet, how many business ventures fail every year? Can someone get the numbers for us? Shouldn’t be too hard. Has the advent of the business influencer actually changed anything for the budding entrepreneur? I’d wager not. I’d wager we get a lot more people trying, sure, but as many or more fail as before. Which is itself fine. Be ambitious. Shoot for the stars. Dream big. Nothing wrong with it. In fact, it can be glorious. You could say it is a distinctly human thing. Just don’t tell people they need to sacrifice sleep and family life and ultimately their happiness to be successful. Don’t highlight the tiny percentage that succeed and ignore all the others who did everything the same and risked it all and failed anyway. It’s not helpful. It’s dangerous. And it’s a load of horseshit besides.’
They stopped recording after that. The host thanked them for their time, assuring them the producer had more than enough to pull together a full episode. Edmund got straight on the phone to the first of his agents he could find in his recent call list and cancelled all future engagements with immediate effect and decidedly without apology. He’d had enough.
He spent a few glorious weeks doing nothing. He’d even begun working at his scolls again, this time without the burden of expectation hanging over him. But, as the podcast’s release to the public grew closer, and as the social media teasers were doing the rounds and the rumours of his impending retirement were leaked online, Edmund was surprised at the feeling of loss that built within him. Suddenly, he became very aware of what the outburst might cost him. The appearances were a pain, certainly, but they afforded him a certain freedom he would otherwise struggle to obtain. Besides, it wasn’t like he could return to the commune. He’d grown accustomed to a thread-count they couldn’t provide.
He tried to reschedule some of the events and appearances he had so hastily cancelled, but people were reluctant to engage before hearing the podcast. His agents, when he eventually got through to them, held similar concerns. Quite suddenly, Edmund had been thrust back into the insignificance of his former life, finding it even less palatable the second time around. Then, the night before the full episode went out, the podcast host posted a thirty second clip of Edmund’s meltdown online. It garnered twenty-six million views in an hour.
He need not have worried.
He was bigger than ever.
Edmund’s second autobiography, Alakazambivalence: The Mentality That Made Me A Star, is out next year.
About the Author
Ciarán was born in Dublin, Ireland, where he currently resides. He is an avid reader, occasional writer, and thoroughly exhausted. This is his first publication.
