Michael's New Year's Day attempt to resume writing

Michael's New Year's Day attempt to resume writing is a sharp reversal: after believing that his writer's block has broken, he approaches his computer and finds himself unable to continue. The episode ends not with a manuscript but with the machine switched off, and with his career newly seeming beyond recovery.

A New Year's Promise

On the first day of 1998, after a Christmas holiday that had left him feeling refreshed, Michael wakes to a clear, cold, still morning. At the bedroom window, coffee in hand, he suddenly feels certain that he can write again. The change seems as immediate and self-evident as a basic fact of orientation: the rock, in his image, has rolled away.

The moment matters because it briefly makes writing appear available without struggle. Michael has not yet tested the belief; he has only recognized it. He goes to his study and turns on the computer, expecting to act on that new confidence.

The Computer and the Crisis

Michael's body initially seems to confirm his hope. His heart beats normally, his forehead and neck are dry, and his hands are warm as he opens the main menu and selects Word Six. But the program's pen-and-parchment logo becomes the point at which intention gives way to crisis. He suddenly cannot breathe and pushes back from the desk, unable to remain before the screen.

His office-chair wheels catch on a small rug Jo had found during the last year of her life, and he falls backward. The fall interrupts his view of the logo and blank screen; in retrospect, Michael believes that remaining upright and looking at them might have caused him to choke. His attempt to restart work has thus turned on a small, accidental obstruction: the rug both belongs to his life with Jo and helps break the encounter with the screen.

Aftermath and the Prospect of an Ending

After getting up, Michael can breathe, though his throat feels constricted and each breath is difficult. He goes to the bathroom and becomes ill, then loses consciousness again. Once fully alert, he cleans a cut on his forehead and waits seated by the bathtub until he feels able to stand. The incident leaves him shaken, and he later gives people who ask about the mark an untrue, ordinary explanation: that he ran into the bathroom door at night.

During the wait, Michael decides that, barring a miraculous recovery, his career is over. He imagines the distress this would cause Harold Oblowski and Debra Weinstock, but sees no practical intervention that could restore his ability to write. His conclusion is not a proven final outcome; it is the judgment he reaches while recovering from the episode.

That judgment opens into a larger question about how to spend the decades ahead. Michael considers the possibility of forty years filled with Scrabble, crossword cruises, and whiskey, then asks himself what else he could put into the remainder of his life. He does not resolve the question. For the moment, getting through New Year's Day is enough.

Retreat and Narrative Significance

Once he feels in control, Michael returns to the study with his eyes fixed on the floor. He feels for the right button and switches the computer off without properly closing the program, reasoning that possible damage to it hardly matters under the circumstances. This is the episode's decisive practical outcome: rather than begin a new work, he deliberately ends the encounter with the machine.

The sequence contrasts an apparent threshold of recovery with a rapid return to incapacity. The belief that the rock has rolled away is followed almost immediately by the sight of a writing program that he cannot bear to face. The failed attempt therefore exposes the distance between wanting to write and being able to do so, while leaving open whether the blockage is permanent. That night, his recurring dream of walking along Lane Forty-two toward Sara Laughs returns, bringing the sense of something following him in the woods; the renewed hope of the morning has not ended the darker pattern surrounding his life.