New Year’s Day 1998

New Year’s Day 1998 marks a sharp reversal for Michael Noonan: after sensing that he can write again, he sits down at his computer and is overcome by a crisis that makes him fear his career is finished. The day’s movement from possibility to physical incapacity and then grim reassessment makes the promise of a new year collide with the persistence of his writer’s block.

A New Beginning

The first day of the year dawns clear, cold, and still. At the bedroom window, drinking coffee, Michael suddenly realizes that he can write if he chooses. The change feels as undeniable as a basic fact of orientation; he describes it as though a weight has been lifted. For someone whose writing life has been stalled, the thought briefly opens a future that had seemed closed.

He goes directly to his study, sits at the computer, and opens Word Six. Before the program’s logo appears, his body seems calm: his heartbeat is normal, his forehead and neck are dry, and his hands are warm. The contrast makes what follows feel less like ordinary reluctance than a sudden interruption of the recovery he had just believed in.

The Attempt to Write

When the pen-and-parchment logo appears, Michael cannot breathe. He pushes away from the desk, struggles with his sweatshirt collar, and falls backward when the chair catches on a small rug that had been one of Jo’s finds in the last year of her life. The rug, a remnant of their shared domestic life, becomes caught up in the failed return to work. Falling means that he is no longer looking at the logo or the blank screen; he later believes this may have prevented him from choking to death.

After he regains his feet, breathing remains difficult, and he becomes sick in the bathroom. He falls again, striking his forehead on the basin and cutting it. The incident leaves visible marks, which he later conceals from people who ask by offering an invented explanation. His attempt to resume writing has therefore produced not a manuscript but a physical crisis and a small, deliberate act of concealment.

Reassessment and Significance

Once fully conscious, Michael disinfects the cut and sits with his head lowered until he feels steady enough to stand. During the roughly fifteen minutes he remains there, he decides that, absent a miracle, his career is over. He imagines the distress this would cause Harold Oblowski and Debra Weinstock, but neither their reaction nor any outside pressure seems capable of changing the problem. His conclusion is not that he has chosen another life; it is that he may no longer be able to write.

The day thus turns on a painful gap between renewed intention and practical possibility. Michael has recognized the desire and apparent capacity to begin again, yet the computer’s blank screen becomes the immediate setting for a collapse. He postpones thinking about what the next forty years might hold and concentrates instead on getting through the day. New Year’s Day 1998 is both the first sign that the block might lift and a fresh confirmation of how much remains unresolved.