On what ought to be a resounding wake-up call to American Catholics (and Christians of all stripes)

Despite all that lip service (read: BS) about “reducing abortions” and “women’s health,” current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it blatantly clear yesterday in a nationally-televised interview why the pro-abortion lobby is so important to her party… it’s the economy, stupid!!

From ABC NEWS’ THIS WEEK:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

“Fix the economy by increasing the amount of pregnancies we terminate”… that’s a great idea. That’s forward-thinking. That’s “change we can believe in.” Did you know that $65-70 million of the President’s proposed “stimulus package” would go straight into Planned Parenthood’s coffers? What a surprise, huh? (Obama is, and always had been, PP’s “dream” candidate. I think nowhere near enough people have really thought about that. One wonders what PP’’s founder, a white woman and an infamous racist, would’ve made of that one…)

Don’t tell me it ain’t about convenience and money… don’t talk to me about “only in cases where the life of the mother is at risk”… after all, we've got an economy to jump-start here! It’s an industry we’re talking about here, it’s big business… might as well make money off of it!! Why not pass out coupons in public schools, Nancy?? (Actually, they probably already do that… or close to it.)

Anyone ever read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World??

Does anyone else see something troubling in this logic, or am I just a hopelessly right-wing fanatic??

Not condemning any person here… I know I’m in no position to… just the mindset.

Look, there’s no doubt this is a very complex issue. I acknowledge that. But even putting all spiritual/theological discussions aside: to actually encourage this as a money-making operation, as an industry – to me that is incredibly problematic. Where are the sweet-smelling Clintonian reassurances along the lines of “safe, legal and rare”? Doesn’t such a promise run contra to the instincts of the entrepreneur, or the businessman/woman?

Just as the government wants to help the Big Three make and sell cars, they also apparently want to help Planned Parenthood succeed as well… oh, for the greater good, of course (whose, is open to question). But you know what? - we could save a LOT of money and funnel it back into the economy by getting rid of all our elderly on life support, too… hmm… somebody call up Peter Singer at Princeton! (Don’t laugh - they actually do this stuff in the Netherlands!!)

Remember the whole “Quietus”** concept in Children of Men? This ain’t very far from that, when you think about it… encouraging the elimination of the inconvenient, so that the rest of us lucky enough to have been born already (and good thing we weren’t born during a similar economic crisis, under an administration like this one! *whew!!*) can thrive again, upgrade our house and buy a Wii for the kids! Whoo-hoo!!

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I don’t want some of that stuff, for my own family… I'm not putting myself on some holier-than-thou pedestal here... but at this cost?? NO THANKS.

** from the Wikipedia plot summary of P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men: “Older/infirm citizens have become a burden… they can either (a) die helpless and unassisted in their homes; (b) commit suicide or (c) take part in a so-called Quietus (government-sanctioned mass drownings).”

Oil Men

Below is a brief excerpt from Chapter VI of my novel in progress, Only the Dying. In this segment, two men from the Standard Oil Company of Indiana have shown up in Bentonville, Indiana, unannounced, looking for Walter Brogan, my protagonist. When they find him, they invite him along on a walking tour of a possible building site for a new bulk plant facility for the storage of fuel oil. The site is alongside the B&O rail line on the outskirts of town where a decrepit ruin of an old factory now stands. Brogan understands that the invitation amounts to a job interview. The time is early September, 1930.


‘Al McCready is dead,’ the older man said when Brogan had stopped talking.

This was not what Brogan had been expecting to hear, of all intelligence that the men from Standard Oil of Indiana might have been there to impart. He was dumbstruck, and slowed his progress through the grass to nearly a stagger. Al McCready, dead? He had never known the man to seem robust, but passage from this world was not something that had struck him as being imminent. Although it was true that Brogan hadn’t exactly counted McCready among his close friends, he had been an associate, and for a few years running was his sole connection to the possible change in profession that the three men now seemed to be on the way to discussing. In short, the news came as a shock.

‘Had he been ill?’ Brogan asked.

Spenlow looked at his red-haired colleague, who exchanged a silent glance with him.

‘We were thinking you might be able to tell us,’ said Spenlow.

‘Me?’ asked Brogan. ‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t know the man well enough to know that. Sure, we spoke a lot, but we never got into that kind of thing. McCready is – or, was – he was a bit rough around the edges. Smoked a lot. But if he was sick or not, I never knew.’

‘In that case, I’m sorry to have to tell you. It was a surprise to us too, as you can imagine.’

‘Any news about what happened?’ Brogan wanted to know. By the time they had reached the old building and were standing adjacent to its flaking southern end.

‘He was found in his home, in the bathroom. Looks like an accidental death. That’s all I really know, and couldn’t tell you much more than that in any case, on account of the inquest that is just underway,’ Spenlow related.

‘Sorry state of affairs,’ commented Doyle abruptly, and Brogan was about to agree, but then saw that the other man wasn’t even talking about McCready. He was peering into a shattered window close to where they stood, into the darkened interior of the old factory. ‘We’d need to come in here and level all of this right quick.’ This last comment was directed to Spenlow, almost as if the preceding conversation had never taken place.

Insensitive son of a gun, thought Brogan. McCready put in over a quarter century of service to this crackerjack’s outfit. But he said nothing.

‘You said he was found in his bathroom?’ Brogan asked. His thoughts had immediately flown to Ilse Heinricks and her tragic death two years before.

‘That’s right. Damned tragic,’ replied Spenlow. He shook his head. ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to mention that while you were eating with your whole family. But it was one of those things that got us out here now. McCready’s untimely death accelerates the process. We’ve got Fred Means in there temporarily, but he won’t be delivering to this area. We need a new facility.’

With that, he began looking over the decrepit building. He walked around the corner to the west side. The breeze tousled the grass. A wasp buzzed near Brogan’s head. He waved at it impatiently, not knowing quite what to say next. He was still a bit flummoxed by the news about McCready, but didn’t want to ask more questions on the matter. Something made him feel that Spenlow, representing Standard, knew more than what he had indicated about the death, but there was no legitimate basis for this feeling. Only the inclination of his own gut.

Spenlow had opened a small distance between himself and Brogan. He gestured to Doyle to join him, and for a few moments the two of them spoke in inaudible tones. Doyle made broad sweeping motions with his arms, and pointed in particular directions. Brogan, standing off to one side, realized the younger man was describing a potential layout of the site. Spenlow nodded here and there. It began to occur to Brogan that Spenlow was doing more of the talking because he was the officer type, a man who made decisions. Doyle was the foot soldier, as it were; the man with the trade knowledge. Although he seemed rather young to have expertise, he clearly was directing the thought process.

Brogan stood off to one side and remained quiet. He didn’t want to seem impatient. But the truth was he had left Benson on his own at the station, and, more to the point, he still didn’t know what the precise purpose was for these men to bring him out here with them. He had an idea, of course, that they were interested in recruiting him, but they had yet to make mention of this. They must have picked up something in Brogan’s demeanor, however, for Spenlow broke away from Doyle again and wandered across the grass towards him once again.

‘Sorry, Brogan. We were thinking things over.’

‘What are you thinking about?’ Brogan asked. He thought it wasn’t out of line to ask, since they had brought him out this way after all.

Spenlow pulled a white handkerchief out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He removed his barbershop hat with one hand and mopped his brow with the other.

‘Well, if we’re going to put a bulk facility in here, we’ll need a man to run it. You know that. The fact is, we’ve got a job to fill. McCready recommended you to us. In fact, he brought your name up some time ago. That doesn’t surprise you, I take it.’

‘No sir. We spoke about it. He told me months ago he would mention my name. I’ll be up front about that.’

‘Hopefully you’ll be up front about everything, Brogan. That’s the sort of man we’re looking for.’ Spenlow now regarded him with great scrutiny and a stone face. Doyle had his back to them, still looking back and forth over the land.

‘Of course, Mr. Spenlow. I didn’t mean otherwise,’ said Brogan, rubbing his hands together.

‘I’m sure you didn’t, sir. And while we’re talking straight, I’ll tell you this. We’re here because of McCready’s, let’s say, “enthusiasm” about you as a good candidate. But we’ve got questions, too. A couple concerns. I don’t mind telling you about them. I’d like to know what your answers would be to those concerns.’

‘Then go ahead, Mr. Spenlow.’

The older man smiled. ‘Brogan, I consider myself a reasonably good judge of a man’s character. I think that’s part of what got me to where I am right now. And you strike me as a decent fellow. You’ve got some backbone. And you seem to work pretty hard. Standard of Indiana can appreciate those qualities.’

‘I suppose I have some pretty good reasons to work hard,’ Brogan said, shrugging. ‘More reasons every day, I’d say, if you read the papers.’

‘I assure you, sir, that I do. Good jobs aren’t exactly easy to come by nowadays. Which is why we feel we need to select our man wisely. To tell you the truth, Mr. Doyle here is of the opinion that you might not have the experience required to do this job. We know you haven’t been in the business for long. What would you say that?’

Brogan eyed the redheaded man. He still didn’t turn towards the two of them, even though he was certainly within earshot. This Brogan found irritating.

‘I’d say if he has questions about what I can or can’t do, maybe he ought to ask me about them himself.’

Now the younger man did turn around. Quickly. His eyes blazed, but he did not advance towards Brogan.

‘Now listen here—’ Doyle began.

Spenlow held up one hand. His eyes remained on Brogan. He waited a moment before speaking. Brogan stood his ground and looked at Doyle straight on.

‘Look, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘This isn’t personal. I appreciate that you have self-confidence. But the fact is that Doyle’s correct. You do lack experience. You’d have to hit the ground and learn the distribution aspects of this business in short order. Pumping fuel is one thing, sir; handling it on a regular basis is quite another. I need not tell you that aside from all business issues, there are also safety concerns that we would need to have assurance that you would be able to understand and address.’

Brogan took his eyes away from Doyle and paid Spenlow his direct attention. He still didn’t like, or much respect, what he could ascertain of the younger man’s character. But he knew that Spenlow’s points were valid, and he could sense that his opportunity was on the line. There would not be a whole lot of other chances to land a more suitable position, he thought.

He realized that Spenlow was giving him the chance to speak. So he decided to make his own thoughts clear.

‘Mr. Spenlow, I understand that you’re concerned about my experience. It makes sense that you would be. But if you don’t mind my pointing this out, it doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem, or your employer probably wouldn’t have sent you out here to find me. I’m sure you men, and Standard Oil, aren’t interested in wasting time.’

‘You got that right, Brogan,’ said Doyle, still looking him over.

Brogan ignored the interjection. He continued: ‘I’ll tell you this much. I think I can handle the job. I’m strong, I work hard, and I’m local. And I’m looking for a more promising situation in order to better protect my family. There’s no shame in saying that. Now, I don’t know if you folks teach your employees or if I need to go out and spend some time up in Gary or Calumet talking to other men that handle fuel or what. I do know I spent a lot of time talking about the way it works with Mr. McCready.

‘I’ll learn the job. You can bet on that. If you’re looking for a man that’s serious, who will make you feel right about your choices, Mr. Spenlow, I am that man.’

At that moment, as Brogan finished speaking, what might have been a lingering moment of silence suspended between the three men in the grass was splintered by the long, low rumble of a freight train’s whistle. The approach of a trainful of supplies seemed to Brogan to lend the whole situation a good feeling, a kind of unspoken confirmation that the location was appropriate, and the need to find the right man for the job was, for all practical purposes, the last piece of the puzzle.

‘That’s good to hear, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘Very good. Now, let’s take a few more minutes before we get you back to the station to talk about what a bulk plant down here might look like. Come with me.’

He walked around the edge of the building, clapping Doyle once on the shoulder as he did so. Brogan followed after them.

Mutt Ploughman’s Annual Non-Scholarly Charles Dickens Essay

*The Posting of Which Officially Concludes Dickensfest VII*

My business here is to offer some thoughts on this year’s Dickensfest selection, which happens to be the 1850 novel David Copperfield.

Even among the multitude of famous novels written by Dickens, David Copperfield stands apart for a number of reasons. First, it represents the midway point in Dickens’ career as a novelist – there were seven major novels that came before it, and seven more followed. Second, it is the first of his novels that Dickens wrote exlusively in the first person, losing himself in the voice of the young Copperfield of Blunderstone Rookery. Thirdly, it has the following distinction, which I will articulate using Dickens’ own words from his preface to the ‘Charles Dickens Edition’, published in 1867: ‘Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.’

When you read Dickens, you’re taking on a lot, and commiting a hefty block of your own time. As well you should. There aren’t many other writers whose novels take such a commitment with every outing, which is why their legends don’t endure. Unlike most writers’ work, when you decide to read Charles Dickens, you’re not just experiencing a story – you’re entering a whole world. It’s like traveling to 19th century England for an extended stay every time you open one of his books. You’re going to get the sights, the smells, the noises, and above all else, you’ll get an entire peanut gallery of personalities – not just one or two characters. You’ll enter Victorian chambers for tea with the very rich, gossiping amongst themselves about this scandal or that; but you’ll also take to the cold streets, and experience the poverty and peril of the underworld.

One of the reasons Dickens was so adept at portraying many different aspects of British life was his own experience early on as a court stenographer, where he was exposed to a wide variety of real-life characters ensnarled in an unmitigated maelstrom of legal and moral predicaments. In fact, one aspect of the character of David Copperfield’s life that parallels Dickens’ own is revealed when, late in the novel, Copperfield also becomes a court stenographer, allowing Dickens to deliver this revealing observation: ‘Brittania, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl, skewered through-and-through with office pens, and bound hand-and-foot with red tape.’

However Dickens’ talents may have come about, it is because of his astonishing range of vision – his close attention to all levels of human society, not just the elevated ones – and the author’s singular gift of imagining and giving voice to so many different characters that his works have become immortal in the annals of world literature. Almost no iteration of the modern novel can be imagined were it not for the influence of his stories.

Hallmarks of that influence can still be seen clearly in much of today’s literature and film; it is something I perceive acutely every time I take on one of these annual adventures. Just as I have been reading David Copperfield, I saw two films that bear his influence: Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story (itself a genre which Dickens has also greatly influenced) which depicts disadvantaged, orphaned children banding together to avenge the murder of one of their own; and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which features a long, complicated plot filled with coincidental collisions that are as unpredictable as they are improbable, and also pays particular attention to the sights, colors and sounds of the world of the poor. Mr. del Toro, the Mexican director who is responsible for such visionary works as Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth, frequently acknowledges Dickens’ influence on his films and screenplays; in Pan’s Labyrinth, for example, the young female protagonist’s offering of her left hand in introducing herself to a man who will become her abusive stepfather is unabashedly lifted from Chapter II of David Copperfield, where David does the same thing to a figure who will play a similar role in his existence.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire phenomenon of Harry Potter would be utterly nonexistent without the long reach of Charles Dickens. J.K. Rowling’s complex plots betray an indisputable debt to the Dickens canon, and her very memorable wizarding world includes dozens of characters of all shapes, sizes and colors (not to mention species). The bumbling elf-like character of Dobby, for example, who is introduced in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is so comically Dickensian in his mannerisms and frequent lamentations that it feels like he was lifted right out of one of his novels, except for the fact that he is not human! Not to mention the central notion of the boy hero who rises from humble circumstances, which can be traced straight back to Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the first major novel in the English language to feature a child as its protagonist.

In David Copperfield there is little question that we encounter Dickens the novelist at the zenith of his considerable powers. But rather than to try to describe in hyper-literary terms exactly why that is the case, I think what I will do instead, for the duration of this commentary, is attempt to describe some of the things that I have most enjoyed about this particular Dickens novel, and let whatever conclusions or observations that are scattered in the process sprout where they have fallen.

Within our own family, Duke and I are somewhat reputed for our tendency towards hyperbole – and few among us, if I may be so bold, can do it like we can. But NOBODY exaggerates like Dickens does, and when he chooses to lay something on thickly, he doesn’t just cover the subject, he smothers it. His descriptions of David Copperfield falling immediately in love with the childish Dora Spenlow are so over the top, I found myself howling. Probably a lot of critics throughout the different eras since his books appeared have crushed him for this, and there’s no doubt that he can overdo it on certain subjects just like he can overdo it in general (note the size of his novels!). But that’s the nature of the beast when it comes to Dickens, and I suppose if you’re going to wax at length about any particular subject, you can do worse than extolling the virtues and sublime qualities of the person you love.

Dickens’ portrayals of the lives and struggles of the underclass and the poor are always interesting to read, and his sympathy towards their plight resonates profoundly, which can be comforting if one is reading during tough economic times themselves, and is all the more laudable given that shortly after his first novel appeared on the scene, Dickens himself had absolutely zero financial worries of his own. He was the J.K. Rowling of his own time. But his memory was long and sharp, and he never strayed too far away in his own mind from his father’s humiliation by being thrown into debtor’s prison (which is where I probably would find msyelf right now if I lived in those times) or his own personal baptism into the life of the working class via a stint in a blacking factory as a young boy. In this novel, as in most, there are a number of characters who are involved in a mighty struggle to stave off insolvency, David Copperfield himself being not the least among these; but the spirit with which he carries himself in this struggle is laudable and worthy of the reader’s appreciation. He won’t give in. He makes something of himself against all odds. I can relate to that idea.

I also find it interesting to note, which may not be much of a surprise, that David Copperfield himself becomes a writer, and begins to publish stories and such in various magazines. Later, he publishes a novel. It was with a wry turn of the lip, I admit, that I discovered that David Copperfield’s transition from aspiring writer to ‘authorship’, to use his own word, occurs over the course of exactly one brief retrospective sentence in the novel, whereas my journey towards being a published fiction writer began somewhere around 1994, and has yet to find its way to a legitimate conclusion. However, my lack of success is no fault of the fictional Copperfield. Furthermore, I can always reiterate the words that close the previous paragraph here with regard to my own situation: he won’t give in. He makes something of himself against all odds.

Lastly, it’s also interesting that although Copperfield touches on his literary success in the book, he reflects upon it with humility. Dickens doesn’t have him fixate on his own stories or novels: ‘I do not enter on the aspirations, the delights, anxieties, and triumphs of my art,’ he writes, in Copperfield’s voice. ‘That I devoted myself to it with my strongest earnestness, and bestowed upon it every energy of my soul, I have already said. If the books I have written be of any worth, they will supply the rest.’

One of the funniest characters in the book to me was a man called Wilkins Micawber, a side character with whom David works for a period early in his career. Micawber is one of those Dickens characters that is comically dramatic, waxing at length about the plight of his existence and the various challenges he faces. In this case, Micawber is constantly fighting to overcome debt, a struggle for more than one character as I alluded to earlier. He even spends some time in debtor’s prison. This character is based on Charles Dickens’ father, John. Micawber’s circumstances are difficult throughout most of the story, although he eventually finds a way to deal with his problems, thanks to the help of many generous friends. But what makes him funny to me is the numerous letters he writes in the book and the off-the-cuff speeches he gives regularly about his struggles to defeat his creditors. These are filled with flourishes of highly exaggerated language that amply demonstrate both Dickens’ unique flair for drama and his exuberant prose style.

To conclude I would remark that the key to appreciating Dickens’ work, to me, is to simply allow yourself to enter fully into his stories and become swallowed up in them. I believe that this is the way Dickens meant his fiction to be experienced. His efforts seemed to lean towards creating a panoramic reflection of human experience, an invitation to readers from all walks of life to come inside and be entertained and perhaps to learn or re-learn some of the things about ourselves that are worth remembering. For you can say what you want about how his novels are filled with melodrama or unrealistic twists and turns or just too many words, but the fact is that very few novelists across the centuries, in all the history of English literature, had compassion, generosity, and warm-hearted enthusiasm for their fellow man on the same scale as Charles Dickens.

If you, in a dark moment, seek to cut yourself off from mankind and cower in the mirthless, painful corners of our existence – and I admit, sometimes I do myself – then you might do better to curl up with some Hemingway or Nietschze. But if you pine for some instruction from literature on how to be alive and to accept and even embrace your brother, while being simultaneously and copiously entertained, Charles Dickens is still your man. David Copperfield stands forever as one of the greatest examples of what he accomplished.

Journal of a 'Novel'-MILESTONE 50th ENTRY!

Mark it: November 7, 2010

I know many of you have been anxiously awaiting the miletone 50th entry to my Journal of a ‘Novel’ series of posts. If you are in this large group, you have been waiting for a whopping eight weeks, but your wait is over. This one is for you!! (????)

And in the spirit of this post and of my literary work for the year ahead, let’s get to work. The date above is my 40th birthday. It also represents a new goal for me with regard to my fledgling, but slowly coming awake again, novel-in-progress, with the working title of Only the Dying. Actually, this goal is not really new. When I first started writing on this story, way back in March 2006 (the research began in 2005), I always thought, and I even told the few people that knew I was starting on this, that my loose goal was to have the novel completed by my 40th birthday. That never meant published, for who knows if this novel will ever be published. It faces monumental odds. Rather, it meant that I would have finished writing the book by the time I turned 40 years old.

At the time I was 35, and that seemed like giving myself a reasonable space to get the book finished. Five years seems like a long time, but I was trying to be realistic. It was to be an ambitious project, and I had (have) never written a novel before. I also had two children at the time I started it, and have since added a third; I am the sole bread-winner for my family, etc. There’s not much time in an existence like that to work on a novel, especially if you have financial pressures of the sort I (and many others) face every day.

But the truth is, I never really held myself mentally to that, and always thought of it as a “loose” goal. It didn’t matter to me so much if I finished it by then, as long as I got it done “someday”. With this 50th journal post (the fact that there are 50 posts and I’m not even halfway done with the novel tells you there’s a disciplinary problem here), however, I announce the change: now, my 40th birthday IS the official goal, and I pledge to do everything I can to meet it. The problem is, I am a lot closer to being 40 than I was when the goal was originally floated! It’s less than 2 years away now. But no matter: I understand now that I have lacked the discipline so far that is required to see this novel through. And setting a tighter deadline will hopefully help me develop the discplinary fortitude to get the book done.

But this is no self-flagellation. I now take the time to appreciate, hopefully without aggrandizement, what I have accomplished so far. For while I have not done a great job over three years’ time setting myself to hard work on the book, I have done a reasonable job. I have hand-written over 270 manuscript pages, and have drafts of a Prologue and five full chapters completed. I researched for three and half months about the Great Depression, the Roaring 20s, and the oil industry in late 2005 and early 2006, and learned a lot there. I have continued to research such topics as Indiana history, the oil boom in Texas in the early 1930s, early pro football teams, Prohibition, township governance and by-laws in the state of Indiana, New Deal politics, and, most recently, the smuggling of contraband or “hot” oil across state lines that led to the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935, all while continuing to write the novel. I think these are all legitimate accomplishments, and worth being proud of, but all the same, the novel is still not making very rapid progress, and unfortunately it hit a LONG snag towards the end of 2008 for at least a couple of months. I might have had a sixth chapter completed by now had I not hit a rut, but lamenting that reality is not a very good use of time either.

And at the very least I can be happy that I used that time to write two or three nonfiction pieces and one short story, all of which I am pleased to have written, even if none of them have yet to find a home in print. But those pieces have been written about elsewhere on this blog and are not my focus here.

The simple fact is that for all I have done so far, more effort is required if the dream of writing a novel is ever to be realized. The question for me is how to work in the effort that it will obviously require. My life is no less busy with three children than it was with two, when I started the book, as one can easily imagine. My time only grows shorter as life moves ever-forward. It may seem bleak but it’s true. How long does one allow oneself to take an honest shot at one’s life dream? When is it too late? How long can one justify taking the time to write a novel when I could use the time for an infinite variety of other pressing needs and matters, and in light of the chances of success a novel might have to be published, let alone read? Why does one even attempt to labor against such odds in the first place? If I, at 38 years old, can still walk around saying that I feel like I was ‘called’ or ‘born’ to write novels, when most people who are called to do so have certainly produced something worth mentioning well before my age, at what point does that become kind of a sad joke, or worse, a form of self-delusion?

Needless to say these questions haunt me all the time and I do not have, or I do not want to have, their answers. But I know that my time is not unlimited. And I have strong suspicions that so far I have not lived up to my full potential on this earth. I don’t know if I am kidding myself or not at this stage. What I do know is that I have a very powerful urge to write, and I want to use that urge to produce writing I can be proud of. And I also know that a long time ago, many years ago, I set a goal for myself that I would someday write a novel. As early as 1999, the subject for my novel began to take shape in my mind. And to this day that novel remains unwritten. It’s in progress, but it’s still unwritten. I am the only one who can write it. So I am giving myself a deadline to finish the book. The deadline is November 7, 2010.

What does that mean? It means I have to write a lot more than I have in a smaller amount of time. If I have been writing the book for almost three years, and have produced what I believe is a bit less than half of the story, what it means is that I have to write over one half of the novel in less than two years. So it’s obvious that the output will have to be more prodigious with less time. How can I expect to achieve this? The only answer is to cut other things out. For example, I almost always devote some time in the early morning to reading. Much of that is going to have to be temporarily suspended, as much as it pains me. Reading for pleasure is going to have be fit in only when more pressing matters have already been addressed in a given day.

Furthermore, I am going to have to write more, and more often. For me to achieve this new goal, it seems reasonable to expect that I will need to write once a day at least for 5-6 days per week. And it may require even more than that. I remember when I was trying to get Chapter 1 of the novel off the ground, back in 2006, I was trying to fit in what I called at the time “two-a-days”, where I would write as much as I could fit in in the mornings, and then take the manuscript with me to work, drive to a library on my lunch hour, and try to put in some more time on it at lunch. I may have to adapt a similar strategy now. How else can I expect to make the progress I need to? It will take a lot of persistence and effort when there will be many, many days where I don’t want to do it. But it’s becoming clear that it won’t get done otherwise, and who knows, I may run out of time in one capacity or another.

Can I do it? I think I can. I can recall another time in my life when I set a milestone birthday as a goal to achieve something, and I manged to achieve it. When I was serving in the Army in my 20s, I told myself that I would obtain an advanced degree before I was 30 years old. At the time this goal involved taking the GRE test to even be qualified for graduate school, researching and applying to schools, then entering a program and completing the course work for a Master’s degree AND a thesis. It’s true that I was single then and had no family and nowhere near the same financial constraints that I have now, but that’s no excuse for not achieving other goals later in life. If I did it before, I can do the same thing now. Getting a Master’s degree required a lot of work, and I accomplished that, so I can move on to the next goal and get that done too. If I am fixated on the idea that the day will arrive when it’s too late, then I suppose I have no business trying to get something done in the first place.

Today I went down into my basement work area, where I have not written a word in several months. In some places there were literally cobwebs to be brushed away. I cleared off my writing desk, a dark wood piece of furniture that my wife gave me when we got married, because she believes in my writing abilities. Then I set to work, climbing back up the side of the mountain, scratching out only a few new paragraphs to a draft I have had going of Chapter VI of the novel, that had been laying stagnant for many months. I am working on a scene in which Walter and Greta Brogan, married characters from the novel, are in a restaurant discussing the downturn in the economy. The year in the novel is 1930, but I hardly need point out the parallels to the present day. ‘The question is,’ Walter Brogan says, ‘how bad are things going to get.’ As we all know, things from that point in history only got far worse before they got better. But they eventually did get better.

What I want the character in my novel to do is press through, and he will – he will keep working as hard as he can to provide for his family, come what may. He may not emerge victorious, but his spirit will live on, just as his real-life inspiration, my grandfather, has lived on and is living on in spirit as I write this book which is partly based on his life story.

Reader, your humble(d) scribe has no choice but to do the same thing. He has a job before him. Times are tough. He is under strain. There are many things demanding his attention. He has not achieved everything he has set out to do. He must have faith, stay strong, get serious and stay serious. His family is counting on him to become what he believes he can become. The work awaits: it must be seen as his job: it is his job. Time for him to set to it.

"Take up and read" - again

It will come to know surprise to anyone familiar with me that C. S. Lewis is one of the guiding lights – “patron saints,” if you will – of this blog. The very name of the blog itself is a direct reference to something the world famous Oxford (and Cambridge) don wrote in his essential book The Problem of Pain.

Anyway, this post also takes its inspiration from something Lewis once wrote, which is (paraphrasing a little here) that no one can say they “know” a book having only read it once. I heartily agree – the first reading of a great book is something like your first introduction to a memorable person. Or any person, for that matter… who would say they truly know a person after just one meeting? Chances are, you've only just begun to scratch the surface.

In the spirit of this wise dictum, then, I present a short list of books that I am aiming to re-read in the year 2009. I’ll say right off the bat that it’s unlikely I will get to all of these, especially since there are so many new books I want to get to… but these are some of the books I consider to be truly great and worth investing a lot more time into. There are depths to these books I have only barely begun to plumb, and I look forward to discovering what a second trip through these pages may have to teach me.

In 2008 I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus Blood Meridian and got a lot more out of it than I did the first time (which is not to say I understand the book now!). Who’s to say the same won’t be true for some of these classics?

Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
I resolved a while ago to re-read at least one part of the short but essential O’Connor canon every year.

Silence, Shusaku Endo

The Creators, Daniel Boorstin

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson

Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) and Salvifici Doloris (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering), Pope John Paul II

Mutt's Top Ten Film Conclusions

For a bookend piece, see my June 20, 2008 post, "Mutt's Top Ten Film Openings".


In discussing films as we often do, Duke and I sometimes talk about those rare movies that have a striking conclusion, the kind that makes you shake your head in wonder, cementing the fact in your mind that you have just seen a superior film. For me, as in great books, there is nothing quite as exhilirating as an excellent ending to a film or novel, especially when the whole rest of the story preceding it has been executed just as well. One gets the feeling that the director, in the case of films, has successfully carried their vision through all the way to the end, and completed their work in the most convincing and satisfying manner. There aren’t very many films that have given me this sensation, the thrill of having seen a genuine work of art, but the ones that do have always stayed with me. And so, in this season of lists, I present the selections for my own Top Ten Film Conclusions. Feel free to join the debate or add your own choices for consideration….


Pan’s Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro, one of the most interesting and imaginative creative minds working in film today, begins the conclusion to his triumphant 2006 film with the murder of an innocent child. This dreadful event is followed soon thereafter by an absolutely gorgeous, color-infused scene unlike any other in the film, in which the young female protagonist, clad in a stunning red satin gown, appears in a cathedral-like hall in front of a trinity of huge thrones and the figure of the immortal ‘faun’ from the film walking among them – a kind of visual passage into the afterlife, and an incredible sensory flourish worthy of the rest of this great film. Then, in the final shots, a stirring voice-over informs the viewer that the story has come to a conclusion, but that one can still find traces of the young girl’s incredible journey in our world ‘if you know where to look’, spoken over a succession of lovely shots of certain backdrops from the film, and concluding finally with a small scrap of a girl’s dress caught on a branch, fluttering in the breeze, deep in a thick forest.


Dreams, director Akira Kurosawa
The legendary Japanese film director’s utterly unique Dreams is unlike almost any other film you can imagine – a kind of visual short-story collection, consisting of ten small films based on dream fragments from the director’s own subconscious. The dreams all vary in style and substance, but each one is almost more visually stunning than the previous; also, they grow more and more ominous and apocalyptic as they progress. That is, until the beautiful and moving final ‘dream’, which is totally opposite in tone and setting. Titled “Village of the Watermills”, the final sequence depicts small, quiet moments that contrast sharply with the harrowing images from the dreams before it. The dream as well as the film ends with a long, silent shot of thin, slender blades of grass billowing just under the glimmering surface of a gently rolling stream awash in blazing sunlight. All one can hear is rolling water. There are no words, no other sounds. One of my favorite things about this lovely and moving final shot is how it holds for an unusually long time before the end credits roll, deliberately lingering over the beautiful simplicity of natural life. (Incidentally, Dreams is the only film to make BOTH my Film Openings and Film Conclusions list.)


O Brother, Where Art Thou?, director Joel Coen
In my opinion the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are unmatched among filmmakers working today. (That is why they appear more than once on this list.) They are outstanding writers, editors, and directors, and they never do the same thing twice, nor do they pay much heed to the audience’s expectations. This brilliant and hilarious re-telling of Homer’s The Odyssey in the Depression-era South is one of their crown jewels, and I enjoyed it from beginning to end. For me, the final shot of this film is best appreciated in context, as a lovely capper to all that has come before it. In the scene, Holly Hunter and George Clooney, in character, are discussing their recently renewed plans to get married as they walk along towards a set of railroad tracks while Clooney’s co-horts in all the madcap action from the preceding story lag behind. The camera follows the group from the side as they approach the tracks, then begins to ascend slowly into the sky as they cross over the tracks. On the railroad tracks, an old black man can be seen inching forward towards the horizon on a hand-pumped rail car; the same man appears at the very beginning of the film as a kind of soothsayer. He heads off towards a brilliant gold-colored horizon as the camera lofts ever higher and the screen fades. The combination of the extraordinary photographer Roger Deakins’ beautiful, valedictory shot and the beautiful colors and various small-town sounds makes this final image a stunning conclusion to a great film.


Millions, director Danny Boyle
This excellent film about a young child in Ireland who comes upon a misplaced stash of criminal money, and his adventures with his brother to prevent people from finding out about it, is a funny, endearing and sometimes sad story that earns a genuine emotional response. The key to the movie is that it is told from a child’s point of view, and contains many imaginative scenes where we see things that children might see in their own imaginations, but that adults often miss. Nowhere is this more effective than the final sequence, in which the young boy narrating the film says that while others might end the story sooner, it’s his story, and what we assume is the end of the film is not the way he wants it to end. From there, the action transports, quite magically, to a village in Africa, where the boy and his family assist a group of poverty-stricken children in setting up a pump for clean water, which begins to spring forth. The installation of this life-giving spring represents a salvific, cleansing miracle for the villagers, and makes for a very touching and beautiful conclusion to a lovely, family-friendly, inspiring film. Note the gorgeous, celebratory African music that accompanies the scene.


8 Mile, director Curtis Hanson
This may seem like an odd choice, because the rest of the film is nowhere near the other films on this list in terms of overall quality, but for me the conclusion expresses the timeworn theme of striking out for oneself against all imaginable odds in a stirring and fresh manner. The proverbial tale about the kid from the rough part of town that rises above his origins, as depicted endlessly in other films such as Rocky, etc., is here given a beat-saturated urban spin. The film stars the famed white rapper Eminem as “B Rabbit”, in a role that has many autobiographical similarities to his own life, and although it’s not clear that Eminem will ever be a great actor, here he channels his well-known verbal energy and pent-up angst to enormous effect, pounding against any instinct the viewer may have to dislike him. The last twenty minutes of the film present B Rabbit’s triumphant victory in three successive freestyle rap contests against successive black male rappers, all of whom have been ‘dissing’ him and his friends in increasingly hostile ways throughout the narrative. Physically beaten, financially destitute, and having been betrayed by his girlfriend, B Rabbit stands up for himself in a fury of funny and stunningly inventive verbal bursts, positively bristling with angst and rage, and emerges victorious. He then walks quietly through the Detroit urban landscape to complete his overnight shift at a metal factory. No matter what you think of rap music, Eminem’s fierce performance here is inspiring. Notably, he also won an Academy Award for the song “Lose Yourself” from the film’s soundtrack.


Fargo, director Joel Coen
The Coen’s darkly hilarious film about a desperate man’s ill-considered plot to have his wife kidnapped so he can collect the ransom money is well-known and often quoted. Most people know about the climactic scene that involves Frances McDormand (in an Oscar-winning performance), a criminal, and a wood-chipper – one of the most memorable sequences in modern film history. This is followed by a wonderful monologue in a police cruiser, in which the simple, good-hearted, and very pregnant police chief, played by McDormand, lectures a hardened murderer on his seemingly random acts of violence and wonders aloud why anyone would behave this way. Both of these sequences are beautifully acted and memorable, and most filmmakers, having inserted those lines into their characters’ mouth in the police car, would end the picture there. But the Coens, as I alluded to previously, like debunking expectations, so their film ends with the police chief in bed with her husband at night, praising him for his accomplishment of having one of his watercolor paintings accepted for use on a 3-cent stamp. And in a lovely reflective moment, the woman says, “You know, we’re doing pretty good”, and they switch off the light and go to sleep, awaiting the moment when they become a family.


Blood Simple, director Joel Coen
The third Coen film to make this list has probably one of my favorite concluding lines of any film script I’ve come across. Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first feature, was a noir-ish tale set in rural Texas in which a honky-tonk owner named Marty, realizing his wife is having an affair, hires a hitman to kill them both. The film is filled with wonderful performances and skilfully crafted moments of tension, as well as a deep vein of black humor running throughout. All of these things come together in the highly memorable final sequence in which the wife, played again by Frances McDormand (a.k.a. Mrs. Joel Coen), defends herself against the hitman – while separated from him by walls. As the hitman draws closer, McDormand’s character, who is convinced it’s Marty stalking her, and doesn’t know there is any hitman involved, fatally shoots him through a doorway. She then says, “I’m not afraid of you, Marty” and the hitman, bleeding on the floor, manages a laugh and says, “Well, ma’am, if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.” End of film.


The Blair Witch Project, directors Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez
Perhaps this film didn’t age entirely gracefully, but many will remember that at the time it came out in 1999, it was a phenomenon, and scared many viewers silly, including yours truly. The film was shot over 8 days for $22,000 and ended up making over $250 million worldwide. Blair Witch was an entertaining and inventive horror story about a group of college kids, two guys and a girl, who go into the woods together to hunt out the truth about a local legend about people being murdered in the Maryland forest by a “witch”. They go to the woods with hand-held cameras and a brazen attitude and are never seen again – the only thing that is recovered are their cameras with documentary-style footage, and this makes up the film itself. During the film, a legend is related about how when the “witch” takes its victims, it makes them stand in the corner with their back turned before it kills them. As the film progresses, the kids are spooked in increasingly portentuous ways by unexplained sounds, voices, and strange stick figures in the woods. When one of their group disappears without a trace overnight, the other two set out to find him. Eventually they follow his screams to an abandoned ruin of a house. Once inside, they become confused and disoriented. One of them screams and drops his camera, and when the other runs into the room with her camera, she finds him standing in the corner, and screams herself. Then her camera is knocked down, and everything goes black. When I saw this in the movie theater in 1999, knowing nothing about the story, it scared the living daylights out of me.


Casino Royale, director Martin Campbell
At the time when this film was released in 2006, I and possibly many other people could have cared less about the James Bond film franchise. These films had been around forever and had become increasingly tired, and in the age of Jason Bourne and other action movies of this millennium, they seemed outdated and trivial. But this tremendously entertaining film completely defied expectations, and is probably the best Bond film of all of them. It began with the gutsy casting of the little-known Daniel Craig in the lead role, replacing a suave but rather blasé Pierce Brosnan. Craig brought a whole new element of pathos and physicality to the role, and his fierce, explosive performance carried the film. Since the film’s conceit was to go back to the beginning and tell the story of Bond’s first mission as a “007” agent in the British Secret Service, in keeping with the fact that Casino Royale was the first Bond novel Sir Ian Fleming ever wrote, Craig was able to bring a youthful recklessness to the role, something he does in brilliant fashion. The entire film is fast-paced, well-acted, and thrilling, but the ingeniuous idea of concluding the film with Bond’s most famous line was the kicker. At the very end, Bond arranges to meet a man who represents his enemies, and when the man shows up aside a coastal hotel in Europe, he steps out of his car into brilliant sunlight – and is immediately shot in the leg. As he gropes towards cover, Bond’s foot is seen stepping up beside him. ‘Who….are…you?’ the man asks. The camera shows Bond as seen from the man’s point of view below, and Craig says, ‘Bond. James Bond.’ The movie ends.


The Grapes of Wrath, director John Ford
John Steinbeck’s classic novel is famously brought to the screen in director John Ford’s Oscar-winning 1940 film. This film is famous for many reasons, including the legendary Ford’s direction, Henry Fonda’s brilliant performance as Tom Joad, and the famous speech in which Tom Joad, leaving his family forever, tells his mother in response to her asking how she will know if he’s all right, “I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.” But the singular moment from the film as opposed to the book may be the concluding speech, delivered by the actress Jane Darwell, who portrayed Ma Joad, at the very end of the film. This speech, which wasn’t even in the novel, earned Darwell a Supporting Actress Oscar. As the Joad family drives away at the end of the film, without their eldest son, to find work and simply survive, Ma Joad says, “Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people.”

DUKE ALTUM'S NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2008

2008 is hurtling rapidly towards the finish line, and so it's time once again to look back on the year of reading that was and select ten books that had the most impact on me over that time.

As the subtle variation in the names of our posts implies ("10 best" vs. "notable books"), my list is a little bit different than Mutt's, in that I don't attempt to put them in any kind of order... although if I did, I will say right now that there would be a tie for the top slot: between Denis Johnson's short story collection Jesus' Son, and Flann O'Brien's speculative mind-bender novel The Third Policeman. See below for more on both.

It's a strange coincidence that both Mutt and I would single out a book from the same author - a first as far as I know, in about 5 years of trading lists like this - but it certainly seems appropriate in both of our cases.

Anyway, no more preamble... here's my list for the year. And stay tuned to this channel for my bonus list, Noteworthy Films I Saw in 2008, coming soon...

*******

Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson – This is not only the best story collection I read in 2008, it’s one of the best I’ve ever read. These interconnected stories featuring a drug-addled lost soul wandering from calamity to calamity across America’s bleak, modern landscape reminded me of the great Flannery O’Connor in the way they evoke a profound spiritual yearning within a context of violence, confusion and mystery. The great alchemy of Johnson’s prose is that he is able to create a unique, lyrical language out of material that is as painful as it is profane.

The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett – My first exposure to this pioneer writer of so-called noir fiction was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of the year. The tight plotting, double-crossing and mysterious women are all there, but it’s Hammett’s lightning-fast, darkly humorous, intelligent dialogue that makes him required reading. An undeniable influence on the Coen Brothers!

The Reason for God, Timothy Keller – Keller’s attempt at a modern-day Mere Christianity succeeds for the most part, and is a valuable resource in terms of presenting clear-headed, insightful arguments for the existence of God. A solid answer to the recent spate of bestselling rants against religion and an engaging read as well, The Reason for God ought to be read widely by Christians as well as skeptics who are open to considering a sensible argument for belief.

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy O’Toole – Click here to read my thoughts on this great comic novel, posted earlier this year on The Secret Thread.

A New Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell – I like to try and include at least one poet on my list each year, and no other collection I’ve read in 2008 (excluding those I read from perennially, such as those from R. S. Thomas, Charles Simic and Walt Whitman) gave me as much pleasure and insight as Kinnell’s. His poems tend to focus on those places where the miraculous, mysterious and mundane intersect: the family, the natural world and the treasure vault of memory. For samples of the great stuff included in this collection, check out this earlier “Poem of the Week” post.

The Family of Pascual Duarte, Camilo Jose Cela – Like Camus’ The Stranger and Hugo’s novella The Last Day of a Condemned Man, this neglected classic by the Nobel Prize winning Spanish novelist features a man on death row looking back on the events of his life that brought him to the brink of execution. This novel is a gripping examination of evil, and whether a man can be saved (or not) from his own darkest impulses. It is also noteworthy (in my mind anyway) for how seriously it deals with questions of faith, God, sin and free will.

The Known World, Edward P. Jones – This novel took a long time to grow on me, but the farther along I read in it the more I appreciated its originality and imagination – and it’s lingered in my mind for a long time after I finished it. Jones’ extraordinary examination of a reality more or less obscured by history – the keeping of slaves by black landowners in 19th century Virginia – is in fact a profound and moving meditation on the promise, and problems, of African-American community life.

The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien – Whoo boy... where to begin? This was by far the strangest, and most memorable, novel I read this year. In fact, I’ve never read anything quite like it. A brilliant hybrid of speculative science fiction and nightmarish vision of the afterlife, all set in rural Ireland (where else?!?)… Who is the mysterious “third policeman”? Why are most of the characters obsessed with bicycles? What exactly is happening within that underground chamber, and what the hell is this magical material called omnium? And why does the whole story seem to be set on an infinite loop? Naturally I can’t shed light on ANY of these questions, even after having read it – but trust me, this book is one weird and wild ride.

The Histories, Herodotus – Who says ancient history is boring?? If you’ve ever had any interest in travel narratives, Herodotus’ Histories is both the Granddaddy and the Holy Grail of the genre. I fully admit that I only read half of this weighty tome this year (which makes it a bit of a cheat, but I include it anyway because it was so unlike anything else I read), but that half was crammed with so many fascinating details about the cultures, religions, wars, politics and technologies of the ancient world that I felt it was well worth the careful attention it required.

Night Flight, Antoine de Saint Exupery – For sheer originality in subject matter, nothing (other than The Third Policeman) I read this year beat this beautifully written novella from the world-famous author of the classic children’s fable The Little Prince. This fictional chronicle of the pilots and mechanics who delivered air mail to and from South America in the early days of aviation (around 1920!) is both a gripping adventure yarn, and a fascinating philosophical/spiritual meditation on the human spirit. Saint Exupery’s descriptions of flying in the middle of snowstorms over the Andes were some of the most stunning passages I read in 2008.

Honorable mentions: The Collected Plays of Karol Wojtyla; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, William Faulkner; My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, Samuel Chamberlain; Blood Meridian (re-read), Cormac McCarthy; The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders.

Mutt Ploughman's Best Books of 2008

'Tis the season for annual Top Ten lists of the best books of the year, and here at The Secret Thread this is also our tradition. (Duke's list will follow later, stay tuned.) I read a ton of great books this year, but these were the ones that impacted me the most. Without much more introduction, I present them here, in order of merit, and with a one-sentence commentary for the second year running. (Be glad, my lists before then ran much longer!!)

Note: I'd like to give a shout out to my big sister, Maria Therese Hey, who gave me not one but TWO books featured on this list as gifts. Does she know her brother or what?? These books, should anyone care, are marked with an asterisk*.


10. Night Shift, Stephen King. This collection of early Stephen King stories contains some real howlers, but it is still a rollicking entertainment and a bravura creative display that demonstrates the power of a fearless imagination.

9. Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, V.S. Pritchett. An elegant, efficient biography of the master of the modern short story by the great Pritchett, himself a towering figure in 20th century English letters, who possessed the skills and experience to do this great subject justice.

8. The Keep, Jennifer Egan. A fresh voice for me, Egan’s absorbing and intelligently structured novel is part homage to the great Gothic tradition, part compelling commentary on the alienation of modern man by technology, and part post-modernist exhibition of stories-within-stories – an elaborate creation, skillfully executed.

7. Exiles, Ron Hansen. The spiritual struggles of the under-lauded but influential poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the harrowing sea tragedy that inspired his masterpiece are here dramatized in a graceful, moving novel that only Ron Hansen could have written.

6. Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI.* This mature, illuminating study by the current Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church is filled with the insights and wisdom of a serious religious thinker’s lifelong pursuit of the meaning of the Incarnation, without a trace of condescension or scholarly bluster.

5. On Beauty, Zadie Smith.* The only novelist to make my list two years running, Smith’s fascinating and funny third novel, widely praised by critics, dares to re-imagine Forster’s Howard’s End through two modern families and their inter-connecting stories in a New England college community.

4. Man in the Dark, Paul Auster. With trademark precision and grace, this dark, stirring fable concerning a damaged old man and the youthful assassin he conjures up in his troubled imagination is a striking performance even by Paul Auster’s lofty standards, and is one of the best novels in his long and satisfying career.

3. Say You’re One of Them, Uwem Akpan, S.J. Not for the faint of heart, this collection of stories about modern Africa by Akpan, a Nigerian and a Jesuit priest, is filled with startling violence and tragedy, almost unbearably depicted with efficient prose and vivid dialogue – and made all the more harrowing by the fact that the stories’ narrators are young children.

2. An Imaginary Life, David Malouf. One of the most beautifully written novels I’ve read in years, this utterly original tale is based on the few known facts about the ancient Roman poet Ovid, exiled to a small island by the emperor, where he befriends a child raised by animals and attempts to take him on as his own.

1. Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson. Here is a novel I am not even sure I fully understood, yet cannot forget – a massive, fascinating, heartbreaking epic set primarily in Vietnam between 1963 and 1983; a story that attempts to contain and illuminate the great tragedy of that war within the context of an unsettling portrayal of United States intelligence operatives; a brave, unbearably sad discourse on American power and the consequences of its flagrant abuse; and a moving, passionate commentary on modern man’s search for meaning and truth.


2007 List:
10. The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan.
9. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, Meg Meeker, M.D.
8. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar.
7. The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric.
6. White Teeth, Zadie Smith.
5. Freddy’s Book, John Gardner.
4. Forty Stories, Anton Chekhov.
3. Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard.
2. What is the Point of Being a Christian?, Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.
1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert.

'Suicide Station', Conclusion

[To read Part 1, "The Dead Ravine," go here.]

[To read Part 2, "Helen," go here.]

[To read Part 3, "Bad gods," go here.]

4. Lazarus
When I woke up things were different. Helen was different, to put it more accurately.

You’re awake. Good. Time to go, she said. But her voice sounded much colder, more distant.

I struggled to sit up. Did I sleep too long? I’m sorry. I—

No. But still, it’s time to go, she said. I realized she was literally standing over me. I looked up towards her but it was still dark. Very dark, in fact. She carried the portfolio. It was obvious she wanted to move.

What about you? Don’t you need rest?

It doesn’t matter now. We have to get going. Up the tower, she answered.

Something about her tone seemed to eliminate any possibility of an argument, so I struggled painfully to my feet. My back hurt; my knees cracked so loudly I thought they were breaking. The report almost sounded like gunshots. The wind was blowing very coldly again; I shivered violently. I bent over and plucked my wallet from the ground. Helen eyed me in silence.

Are you all right? Did something happen? I tried.

The gods are closer. It’s best if we climb the tower. Now.

But I didn’t hear any gods. And the storm? I asked.

It’s coming, she said. She was looking at me, but I couldn’t see her face.

Helen, I .. I didn’t mean to … you should have woken me up.

That’s not it, she said. She turned and started up the stairs.

The ascent was treacherous and cold. My legs hurt, I was almost freezing, and the increasing height and narrow steps were giving me a kind of vertigo. Helen took the stairs step by step, tirelessly, automatically. She didn’t say a single word as we went up. Nor did I. The climb didn’t lend itself to conversation, since we were filing up one in front of another. But I couldn’t help but think that even if we were side by side, she would still be silent. She had seemed much more amiable before I slept, and I took that to mean she was excited to cross over and go find her son. But that was assuming she even knew how to cross us over. Maybe she was having doubts about how to do it. Maybe she couldn’t remember. Maybe she was finally just worn out and beaten. Or, perhaps, maybe she was thinking about what sort of toll it could take on her to reunite with her only son in the Construct and then have the hurricane hit. She might be wondering now if it was better not to find him again.

I had no idea, really, but between her and my own addled state of fatigue and discomfort, I really didn’t know what to think. I felt pretty miserable. How the hell did I get here, into this totally bizarre conundrum to begin with? For this, it seemed to me there would never be an answer.

We continued our ascent. I was wondering about how much time might have passed while I slept, and what could have happened to change Helen’s demeanor, if not an attack or the signs of the hurricane. But all I could come up with was what I had thought of before – maybe she had just had time to think about things and realized there would be no favorable outcome. I didn’t know. On the subject of passed time, I discovered that there was a line of gray light on the far horizon – to the east? – and that it was dawn again. This meant one of two things: the nights here were very short, or Helen had had the watch for a long time. I felt guilty. But up we went.

It was a frightening climb, especially towards the end. I don’t know how long it took. Perhaps a half hour, maybe longer. A few times I got very dizzy and almost toppled off. Helen continued to drag herself up. It wasn’t hard to understand why she might have wanted to get up quickly, however – assuming she still desired to cross over. I did my best to keep up, but it wasn’t easy.

By the time we reached the top of the tower, a weird, silvery gray light was spreading out all across the earth, or the surface, or whatever you might call this misbegotten place. There was even a kind of metallic taste to the air up there. It seemed both odd and ominous, and by some deeply laid instinct, I took this as a pre-cursor to the storm.

At the top there was not much to see, save for an elevated platform, I guess you might call it, in the center of the apex, and a broad view of the nothingness in all directions. The platform structure sat at about shoulder height and was set back from the edge of the tower at perhaps ten feet on all sides. If you wanted to you could have climbed on top of it, but I don’t know what the point of that would have been. Unless it had something to do with the function of the waystation – maybe it was from atop this supplementary apex that one actually crossed.

Speaking of crossing, I figured Helen would want to get started. She had wandered off ahead of me, the fingertips of her left hand brushing lightly against the stone wall of the platform, her eyes turned towards the far horizon from which the light bled forth like something spilled in the sky.

Then, abruptly, she turned to me. Will you hold this, please, said Helen, like a statement. She extended the portfolio.

Sure, I said. I took it.

Without another word, and with no other gesture whatsoever, Helen turned away from me, strode to the edge of the tower, and stepped off.

I almost passed out from shock. I choked on the metal blades in the air. Suddenly I was stumbling forward. Over the edge of the tower I could see her falling, her dress flapping behind her like some singular white wing on a mutated angel. Her form blew or was carried forward a short distance, as though she was indeed flying. I fell to my knees, averted my eyes, and managed to avoid seeing her slam into the dead ground.

The next thing I remember is being there on the lip of the tower, coughing and drooling. Below, Helen lay face down on the shattered floor. It looked almost as if it had been an earth-colored pane of glass, and the impact of Helen had smashed it into pieces. She was small from where I was positioned, but I could still observe something else, something that seemed wrong. A kind of pale white tube led from beneath her corpse and trailed away from her body for several feet. Her flesh had burst. The tail end of the strand fluttered loosely in the gale.

I bellowed into the wind. Over and over again. The wind treated my cries the same way it did those of the bad gods. It ushered them off hungrily into the void.



That was some time ago. An hour. Two hours. I don’t know. I am now sitting again at the base of the tower. Why I came back down I am not sure. For I know now that I will have to climb this hellish station once again.

The greatest shock I have ever known did not destroy me. It felt like it surely would, but it didn’t. I am not speaking of Helen’s suicide. I am speaking of the discovery I made when I got back down here.

While I write these words, a very odd thought occurs to me. You must forgive me, for my mind is no longer stable. But it seems to me that the notion of suicide shares an affinity with the notion of God, in the following sense. In the case of both suicide and God, once you determine that either of them is possible, they are in one sense actual. They say that if you decide to search for God, you’ve found him already. In the same way, strangely, once you decide suicide is on the table, you have probably already committed it with the most vital part of yourself.

I got down here somehow, and when I did, not knowing what else to do, I opened up the portfolio, with the idea of putting down these words. And it was there, on the first page, that I saw this.


Now I understand who you are.

The thought hadn’t occurred to me until the moment you said my discovery of this folder was funny. It was the way you said it. I once knew another man who also had an ironic sense of humor. You and I even shared a few moments of irony ourselves in the small time we were together. That is something, I suppose.

If you haven’t guessed who I am, and it doesn’t strike me that you had, see the photograph tucked behind the brass plate. While you were sleeping I took the liberty of looking in your wallet, just to confirm things. But by then I knew. It is just one of life’s coincidences that I found the identifying object that I did in your possession, even here.

Isn’t it odd that I never asked you what your name was and you never offered it? If you’re wondering what your real name is, it is Lazarus. More irony. Your father and I somehow thought we might deliver you from early death. We were young ourselves.

One more thing. If it strikes you as terrible that I have done what I am about to do, this soon after we have found one another, that’s because it is. It is not just terrible, it is selfish. I don’t deny this. I do love you – I loved you enough to stay alive until this final sorrow. But, you see, you are not from the Construct. Believe me, I know. Therefore we are – you are – stuck here. We cannot cross over. And I can’t go through another moment here. Even with you, I can’t. If that means my fear of what will happen very soon overpowers my love for you, so be it. I am, in the end, weak.

That storm will literally rend you head to toe, Lazarus. Make no mistake. Your suffering will be unimaginable. I am sorry to write this down, but I don’t like to tell lies. Do what you must.

Farewell.

P.S. Of course, it was I who summoned you. I just didn’t know it. The Summons Ritual is very old, and few people are left here who can still speak of it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just make a person appear before you. Once summoned, you have to find them. I tried it several times, not knowing what I was doing. But it explains why we ran into each other at such long odds. I should have recognized you, but I didn’t – it has been decades, and if you want the truth I can hardly remember your father’s face.


So here I am. I didn’t really have to see the photograph, but of course, I looked. It was a small square with a white border. The border was printed on all four sides with the words MAY 1971. It was a short, brown-haired woman seated on a sofa, wearing a white blouse with a gaudy bow at the neck and a dark green skirt. She had on a gold necklace, and her hair was pulled back with a headband. She held a glass of wine in one hand, and there, sitting at her feet, was part of a chubby baby in short pants, cut off by the frame. The woman was Helen.

I had never seen her again after she went away. Someone might have just told my father a terrible lie. Perhaps there was no taxi accident. Who knows what really happened? I was less than a year old.

It has taken some time to write all of this down. The day seems to be concluding once again. I am tired, so very tired. I feel nothing but a dull heavy pressure in my head and a cramping in my hand. I wonder if my own soul still exists. Whether or not it does, I will now leave this portfolio, right here, at the base of the station. Who knows if it will ever be found or seen? But it matters little. Once you write down your story, you have done your job, independently of readers. I’ve always understood this.

I just looked up to the horizon, far past that unknowable, stiffening corpse. Even now I begin to see a thick, penetrating blackness blossoming out from behind the distant rocks like a Lotus. I stand now to climb the tower again. For I must re-join my mother, in a very different journey, inside yet another unknown.


*end*

'Suicide Station', Part 3.

[To read Part 1, "The Dead Ravine," go here.]

[To read Part 2, "Helen," go here.]

3. Bad gods
We were moving at a steady pace towards the obelisk, which seemed further away than it had before, now that I knew I actually had to reach the place. Helen, setting the pace, didn’t seem to feel nearly as creaky as she had appeared earlier. She moved along quite briskly now, arms swinging the folder as she occasionally gestured, speaking rapidly, and without any indication of the fatigue that I was feeling acutely. Somehow my appearance had supplied her with new energy.

They’re not really gods, as it were, she was saying. That’s just what we’ve always called them, from the beginning, but it really stuck when they turned on their creators and broke free.

But who created them? Are they people? Where do they come from?

The answer to the last question will enlighten you on the other two, said Helen. They come from laboratories in California. It all began with human cloning. I don’t know if it’s come to that yet in the Construct.

The desert wind was between gusts, and the cries now seemed remote once again. Perhaps their search was guiding them in a different direction. But could they not see the station? Wouldn’t they move towards it, if it seemed likely that human beings would try to reach it?

We’re cloning animals, I said, and debating whether cloning human beings is a good idea.

Helen smiled again. Aah, the Construct. Where everyone is so naïve. Well, I suppose that’s why it was cooked up in the first place. But if they’re knocking on the door of creating the clones there, clearly the Construct is getting pretty fragile too. You’re about ready to catch up with us here … Her voice faded.

So the gods are clones?

Yes. The kinds you hear were the newest models, Super-clones, sort of. See, we weren’t satisfied with just recreating ourselves. We had to create people that would last longer. And the technology was advancing so rapidly, mankind kept producing increasingly questionable innovations without holding our impulses in check. Because of all the new discoveries in micro-technology, as well as in plastics and other synthetics, we were soon able to not only clone the person, but to create new, artificial organs to put inside the doppelganger. And these organs functioned as well as the natural ones, but with far superior durability. It started to seem possible that we could clone people and dramatically extend their life expectancy. Hence the term gods, because the life span would fall between a human’s and God’s. At this time we still had states, and leave it to the old California, who became the first state to make it legal to start cranking out these cloned human beings. When they came of age, they were surgically implanted with synthetic organs, even artificial blood vessels for a partly synthetic circulatory system.

Holy crap, I said, genuinely astonished.

Are you really surprised? Helen asked.

What really set it off was this lunatic scientist named Rickman, Jon Rickman. He’s the guy that came up with the first prototype of the synthetic brain. A real whiz-kid all right, but not much foresight. Developed an astounding micro-biological network of silicone chips and fibers to replicate the core of the central nervous system. Once he figured out how to simulate the right electrical impulses and transmit them through fabricated synapses, he was over the hump. All he had to do was mold it into a lab-created gelatinous glob and insert it surgically into a cloned human being’s brain pan. Voila! A brain that wouldn’t quit.

I exhaled. Well, the Scarecrow would have loved that.

Who? said Helen.

Never mind, I replied, so confounded that I couldn’t even enjoy my own ridiculous joke. I had so many other questions, but this idea of the ‘bad gods’ roaming around with murderous intentions seemed the most urgent. Unless you considered the hurricane that was supposedly God on the march, that is. But every once in a while I could hear the distant cries again, and I was terrified at the notion of them drawing closer.

What went wrong, Helen? I asked, laboring to keep pace. It kept me warmer to do so anyway. You said they turned?

They sure did, my companion said. It led to all of this that you’re seeing before you. Mass destruction. I can tell you exactly what happened. The failure on the part of mankind was twofold. One was simply scientific, a failure of creativity and invention. It turned out that there was one organ that the labs simply couldn’t replicate effectively. No matter what they came up with, it would either rip apart or was too inflexible.

The heart? I guessed.

No. The epidermis. Skin. The exterior wrapper. They were determined to invent a workable duplicate, and they ran thousands of experiments. The number of clones in the facilities came close to a hundred thousand. They removed great swaths of the skin on nearly all of them and replaced them with their prototypes. Why they did not select a control group first is baffling. Some kind of catastrophic hubris. There’s a lot of debate over it. But anyway, every one of these experiments was an abject failure. The effect was disastrous. Within months you had almost a hundred thousand clones in labs with tattered skin, falling off of them, and it generated an enormous amount of anger and resentment that grew and grew.

In the science community?

No! In the clones! They looked like monsters. Hideous.

But if their brains were artificial, why would they care? How would they care?

No one has been able to answer that, nor did anyone anticipate it. Perhaps the brains were made too effectively.

That is just … well, they couldn’t ever fix the problem or at least rig something up? Skin grafts or something…

They were working on it. Frantically. But that’s when the second disaster hit – a failure a five-year-old child in a Sunday school class could have seen coming. In fact, most of the children did. They just didn’t have anyone’s ear.

Incredibly, Helen had to stop here, for her eyes had welled up with tears. I waited. Perhaps if I could have perceived this world the way it was before all of this, I would have had a similar response to the totality of the annihilation. Obviously Helen had borne witness to a tremendous amount of loss.

What was the second failure, Helen? I asked in a subdued voice.

You haven’t guessed? The question of the soul, of course. It had to flare up sooner or later. When it did, it created an absolute inferno. The clones lacked souls. By definition, it is impossible for clones to have them. They determined collectively that the crime this amounted to – the magnitude of what had been denied them – was not just irreversible; it was unconscionable, unforgivable. The verdict was immediate: death for the entire human race, wholesale. After that, they didn’t just look like monsters. They were monsters, and how they knew it! They broke from their bonds en masse, unleashed every form of violence and mayhem they could apprehend – weapons, diseases, famines, wild animals, everything – and here we are.

Sweet Jesus, I said, my eyes cabled to the ground.

Indeed, she said. She lifted her hand and again clapped it on my shoulder as we walked. Then she quickly let it drop. That’s why we’re getting out of here. I looked up at her, and when she caught my eyes, she nodded her head towards the obelisk.

That thing is gonna get us out of here? I asked incredulously.

It better. It’s a waystation. That’s what it’s there for. That’s what it’s always been there for.

I fell silent for a stretch. What she had been telling me was so overwhelming that I needed to contemplate it all. Somewhere along the line I had accepted the idea that I was no longer in a dream. This was too visceral, too immediate; and my gut was telling me I was here for the long haul, unless we were actually able to make it out.

I stared ahead at the obelisk. It was drawing closer, but it also seemed to have been farther away than I originally thought. But some features of the tower, if it could be said to have them, were starting to become clearer. It was square, and looked to be made of black stone, almost like coal. You could determine even from the remaining distance that the surfaces, the four sides, were not smooth. They were rough hewn. The whole structure must have been erected somehow, yet it looked like one massive block. I also was beginning to see what looked like a kind of line or railing wrapped diagonally around the tower, spiraling upward. It took another interlude of time, maybe thirty more minutes, before it was finally clear what these lines were. They were stairs. You could ascend the tower by spiraling around that stair case all the way to the top. A shudder coursed through me as I realized that I would be called to climb those stairs….

To do what, though? How did we get out of here by climbing that thing? I worked hard for a while to recall what I wanted to return to, but it remained hazy. I didn’t belong here, though. My life was elsewhere. But what about Helen? Didn’t she had a life here, however perilous it had been? Maybe no one was left. Yet earlier she had mentioned a son. I needed to understand her real motive to get out, and why she needed me.

Helen, there’s something I’m still trying to understand, I croaked, my throat catching fire like kindling. I tried to clear it a few times, with nominal results and more hacking. Sorry. My throat is hurting. If we don’t make it out of here we’ll die of sickness anyway.

Not quickly enough, Helen said ominously. I’d share provisions, but I have none left. The tower approaches, however. We’ll make it.

You said that God – Hurricane Deus, that is – is fast approaching. Correct?

There’s no question about it.

And we don’t want to be here when it hits. I take it that means it is destroying everything that’s still left. It’s only one of the ways we’ll die badly, I believe you said, if we stay around.

That’s right.

But you also said the place I come from, the Construct, is an illusion, a figment of some kind of collective imagination, conceived in this place.

Yes. That’s putting it in simple terms, but it’s about right.

Then doesn’t it follow, Helen, that if this world is about to go down to the reaper’s blade, so to speak, the illusion will follow? Surely you can’t destroy the original and have the facsimile remain behind. So that means the other world, where I come from, will be flattened too.

Helen was nodding. She could see where I was going with the thought. She placed her hand on my shoulder a third time, close to the neck. This seemed a confirmation. I don’t know why, but this time I reacted sharply to her touch. I almost jumped away, and surprised myself by nearly shouting at her.

Why do you keep doing that? Who ARE you? I don’t know you! I don’t need your consolation! I need you get me the hell out of here! But you’re sitting here telling me that you need me to get YOU out. Why? HOW? It’s all going down anyway. What’s the difference?

Helen stopped walking. She stared at me. Her dark eyes, which I guess were brown but looked almost black at that moment, bored into me. For some reason her gaze was deeply unsettling. I wanted her to look elsewhere, but she wouldn’t.

You’re not used to these shocks, she said. That’s why I tried to console you. You’re from the Construct. You have no idea what hell this world has become. You have NO IDEA what we here have been put through. If you did you would understand why I was doing that. You would know that acting like human beings towards one another is one of the only things we have left. So I won’t begrudge you your cold response. But I would suggest you not reject it out of hand like that.

I felt chastened, and fell silent. The dark streaks on her threadbare dress and the scratch on her face suddenly stood out as if they were neon. I started to imagine the scenario under which they had appeared, involuntarily, yet without much success.

Now. The answer to your question is: most likely. It seems to make sense that if this world, which spawned the Construct you live in, goes down, as you put it, the Construct will follow. But nobody knows that for certain. Only God does. If he wants to take this world and leave yours in its place, he could do that. At least in theory. But from what I’ve heard the Construct is not necessarily worth preserving either.

Do you really believe that God would keep one and not the other? Or do you just long to experience the Construct so much you’ll try anything?

Helen made a kind of shrug, but her head was shaking as I spoke.

Neither. Probably both are doomed. But I’d much prefer to live out what I can inside the illusion, as it were, than here in the reality. I think you would agree if you knew what was coming.

If the storm is God, why isn’t it here yet? After all, he tramples through the vintage with a terrible, swift sword.

Helen glanced at me as though I had just changed languages. Excuse me?

Sorry. Forget it. But surely he could do in this whole expanse in one fell swoop. Why hasn’t he?

You’re asking me? You’d do better not to. Perhaps he’s moving at his own pace. Why not drag it out?

The cynicism – or maybe the lack of it – with which she made this off-handed comment about God deliberately dragging out destruction rattled me further. It made me speculate on the nature of her relationship to God, or of God’s to the inhabitants of this world. Maybe this relationship was far different, much more distant, much less dependent on intimacy. It was a dangerous line of thinking, for it led straight to the consideration that the comfort and security many of us took from a relationship with God in the Construct could be illusory as well. If the entire world I knew was false, what could one make of its conceits and assumptions?

The real reason that I want to get out is not so much about the storm or the destruction. It has to do with something I mentioned to you earlier, said Helen, and now the tone of her voice was in transition. Her face, turned towards me, softened.

Your son …..

Exactly.

Tell me about it, I said.

With that, we occupied much of the remaining gap between ourselves and the tower with Helen explaining about her baby boy and how she had made the agonizing decision to send him through to the Construct. Three or four decades ago, she said, when the cloning was at its peak and they were secretly building up the hundred thousand in their facilities, there were some people who saw what was coming. She and her baby’s father, a military man, were two of this group. They had just had their one and only son when the gods broke out of their bondage and the carnage began that had not yet reached an end. The two of them made their terrible decision, hoping to preserve the boy’s life and give him happiness, but vowing to one day recover him. But not long after that the baby’s father was sent forward to the first engagement with the lunatic clones, when they seized Fort Irwin and Edwards Air Force Base. She never saw him again. The clones destroyed an entire Army division in less than a day, then turned as many weapons and aircraft as they could on New Los Angeles, San Diablo, and NORAD. And from there, all hell, as they say, broke loose on the Earth.

I honestly did not understand much of this, let alone knowing what to make of it. There were so many questions that her story begged to have answered that it didn’t seem possible to begin. But also, curiously, I was gripped by an increasing sensation that none of it really mattered, and that what made sense, in some odd and disconcerting way, no longer needed to. It was almost as if my very understanding of coherence was becoming incoherent.

At the same time, over the course of this story and others, the tower finally drew near. Its sheer massiveness was stunning. If I had to approximate the height of the monolith, I would put it somewhere around 500 feet. I could see now at only a few hundred yards away that it did indeed seem to be made out of a gargantuan single block of black stone. The stairs surrounding the exterior sides of the four-sided column were made of the same material, as though they had been scaled out of a larger piece. They were narrow and slightly uneven; making for what I anticipated would be a harrowing ascent. There was no railing upon which one could reclaim their balance; if you slipped on one of the stairs, you would more than likely tumble over the side.

At no point, either once we got to the tower or anywhere along the way, did I ever see any other human being. The only indication that there was anything else even present in this world, aside from Helen’s word, was the tortured voices of the bad gods, whose inhuman caterwauling continued to assault my ears at varying intervals. Yet they never came into view. They operate better at night for some reason, was all that Helen would say about whether or not they would ever show up.

There were many indications, however, that others had visited the tower at some time before. The thin, scratched-out-trails leading across the cracked desert that I had first seen at a distance, for one. Scuff marks and small piles of ash and stone were in evidence everywhere else as well, as if people had walked around or even camped adjacent to the tower. God knew how many people in some distant or very recent past had come here and ascended, looking to cross over. But it seemed as though they were all gone – departed, or dead, or maybe even worse than that.

Thinking about all those faceless people, coming here out of a desire to escape something so overwhelming that it would allow one to happily embrace what they knew to be illusory, made me wonder about something else. As we approached the tower, I turned to Helen again.

So, to cross over, Helen, I suppose we have to climb this thing.

Yes, she said. If you could do it from the ground I guess we wouldn’t need a tower.

Fair point. But you said you needed me to get there. To where your son is.

I do. You must have someone from the Construct with you to be able to cross. Only they can make it happen.

But I have no inkling of how that is done. I don’t even know how I got here.

You were summoned. Somehow, someone summoned you here. It could have been anybody.

But I don’t see anyone anywhere.

That doesn’t mean they are not here. There are several bands of survivors in the cities. Many of them are underground.

The bands, or the cities?

The bands and the cities.

I shook my head. Underground cities?

Nuclear fallout will incline you to seek permanent shelter, she added.

But like I said, Helen, I don’t know how—

Yes you do. There is a way. Leave it to me. As long as you are from the Construct – I believe it was the old Pittsburgh, you said – you can get us back. I’ll show you how. This is why I was so excited to see you. You’re the only way I can get across. You’re the only way I can finally locate my son. I’ve been waiting for this for many, many years. And I’ve been wandering around up here for months on end.

I felt a jolt of sympathy and pure melancholy. The suffering she must have endured. The fatigue. The hunger!

Why are you alone if there are others around? I asked her.

No one would come with me. They said none of you could be found.

What if they had been right?

I was prepared to die trying. I didn’t have much left to lose. But having found you, I now have a great deal to gain. If only for a brief moment. It gives me a reason to live. She smiled at me. Her smile seemed so genuine, so hopeful, that I couldn’t help but return it. In spite of the circumstances, we walked along harmoniously, communicating something between ourselves.

Ten minutes later, we stood at the base of the tower, next to the first stair of hundreds. The massive object stupefied me, as though crushing any further capacity for comment. The tower cast no shadow, for the sky was one solid sheet of gunmetal – and now that I peered up the side of the black column to observe it hovering over everything, I noticed that the firmament seemed to be darkening. Was this the approach of night already? I had no sense of how much time had flown underneath our travels, our conversations. The prospect, however, filled me with a fresh, vigorous terror.

They operate better at night, she had said.

Suddenly, Helen seemed to finally feel the weight of her exhaustion. She abruptly plopped down into a sitting position at the base of the tower, and leaned her back against it. I stood there in front of the first stair, staring at her.

Sit down, she said, and gestured to the fractured ground.

We’re not going up? I asked, flummoxed.

She chuckled. Yes we are. But it might be better to get some rest first.

Is it getting darker though?

Yep, she said, stretching her legs out before her. She uttered a long sigh. What I could see of her legs was riddled with bruises and scrapes. Obviously she did need a break.

Man. This is place is one big contradiction. Did you not say before that they operate better at night? And then there’s the small matter of the approaching God-storm. I don’t understand any of this.

Yes, I know about all that. The dangers are real. But at the moment they seem to be at some distance. Ours not to question why. Rather, we should alternate taking the watch. I’ll go first. I suggest you try to sleep. More than I, you will need energy to help us cross over.

It was really only one more oddity in what had been a non-stop succession, so I found myself not as surprised as I might have been to have my expectations debunked. Besides, now that she had mentioned it, she seemed correct: all was quiet. I could not hear any of the voices at that moment. Sitting right underneath the tower, it seemed the wind had died down. I scanned each horizon in the now-fading light for as far as my eyes could reach, but all I saw was gently rolling plains of wasted, cracked earth. No storms came. My throat still hurt, and was so dry I was surprised I could even speak. If for no other reason, I hoped that she was correct that we could soon cross over into the Construct so we could find ourselves some food and water.

Okay, Helen. If you think we ought to rest, I won’t argue. But shouldn’t it be you that rests first? You’ve been through more than I have.

You go ahead. I’m used to it. Things have been bad for a long time. And I’ve been toughing it out up here for months as I said. You still don’t seem to know what hit you. I’ll be all right.

Can’t blame me for not knowing what hit me, I thought, but said nothing. Instead, I just nodded, and sat down on the hard earth near her feet. I pulled my wallet out and set it on the desert surface close by. I didn’t want to try to sleep with something bulky in my back pocket. Helen just watched me numbly. She seemed pretty tired herself, but at this point I was just doing what she said. She clearly had a better idea of what to do around here than I did. She set the black leather portfolio that she had been carrying all along on the ground.

What is that thing? I asked as I let myself down into a supine position right there in the dust. I was tired.

Helen pointed to the folder. This?

Yeah. You keep it close to you, but you never open it. What is it?

She chuckled. I guess it’s a kind of souvenir. A keepsake, you might say. I’m holding on to it for no real reason. I found it in the ruins of the laboratories.

She picked up the folder and opened it. Indeed, it was nothing more than one of those business folders I had pictured before, including the yellow pad. In a little loop in the middle of the case there was what looked like a standard Bic ball point pen. It was the sort of thing you could find in any office store in the Construct. On the lower left hand side, however, there was a small brass plate with something engraved on it. I picked my head up and squinted, then gasped. The engraving read JON RICKMAN, P.h.D.

Whoa, I said. Now THAT is funny.

Helen stared at me for almost a full minute. Had she heard me?

Ironic, really, she said, in a kind of waifish tone. She closed it up and set it back down. I keep thinking I am going to take some notes, record some of the things I’ve seen. But for whatever reason I haven’t done so.

Maybe you can do it now, I said, half-interested. I was very tired, more so than I realized. I laid down completely on my back, hands folded over my belly, head down on the hard surface. Despite the uncomfortable accommodations, I found myself nearly asleep.

Maybe, I heard Helen say, and that is all I remember.