[Last day of Fiction Week! Here is the Forward and first chapter of a work-in-progress novel, titled "Boomtime." Any suggestions of author surrogacy will be vigorously resisted with sticks and knives.]
Forward
Apparently it is customary, or usual, for the narrator to be identified. Failing that, so conventional literary wisdom goes, the narrator ought to be somewhat familiar, if only slightly, so thaMt even if the reader has no specific image to go with the narrative voice, he or she may at least be able to recognize it, and the story may then proceed apace with a bare modicum of familiarity.
That, unfortunately, will not be the case here. Supposedly, a lack of empathy between the reader and the narrator—when a story uses such a device—will result in a lack of interest and engagement. Furthermore, such a divide will result in the manuscript being rejected for publication, as both interest and engagement on the part of the reader are deemed necessary prerequisites for eventual sale to the reading public. However, that is not really relevant here, because in this instance the narrator has control over all of time and space and the individual preferences of an editor are immaterial at best.
That being said, it's probably best to get any preconceptions that you as the reader may have out of the way now. This way, any discomfort or disengagement you may experience due to the unfamiliarity of the narrator and of the narrative itself may be alleviated.
First: the fact that you may completely and utterly disbelieve everything written here is of absolutely no consequence whatsoever, any more than a hypothetical belief in the sponginess of red bricks would prevent your skull from getting cracked open were someone to lob one at your head.
Second: if you have any notions about the structure of reality as it relates to the human soul and its eventual disposition, please dispose of them now. Plato has come closer than anyone else in this particular bubble of reality to properly outlining the whole thing—read the Phaedrus—but even that account was marred by an appalling lack of clarity, most of which he eventually rectified after his reincarnation in 3063. One can't blame him for his dismal perception, really; it's quite difficult to interpret the nature of space and time when one is so inextricably bound up in it.
Third: while everything written here is true, it probably hasn't happened.
1. Quit Your Whining
Sean was desperately dissatisfied. The adverb is intended to represent the uniquely Sean-like quality of his unhappiness. Any old soul can be merely discontented, or reasonably unhappy. However, this particular collection of autonomous behaviors, this unique crystalline tower of quantum consciousness, excellently produced the depth of despair more often found in those with serious intellectual, artistic, or literary pretensions. Unfortunately for Sean, his latest incarnation, toddling about there in the last bit of the twentieth century, lacked the ego-drive of his previous seventeenth-century manifestation as Lord Herbert of Chibury. Lord Herbert pretended to fashionable melancholy for his portraits but was actually quite a lively fellow. The difference is that the unfashionable sort of despair—the sort that manifests when one is not sitting for portraits—can be mitigated by channeling it into creative work of some kind, such as Lord Herbert's philosophical treatises. Unvented, this despair makes one fat and soft and generally unpleasant to be around, and eventually results in a kind of extremis. There is no more bitter emotion than the sinking, seemingly sourceless anxiety of uniform dissatisfaction, stemming as it does from the thwarting consciousness' most essential purpose. It is the very nature of consciousness to reorganize the matter-stuff around it in some way…to render into permanence its fleeting fruit, the idea. Failure to satisfy this need in results in a dissatisfaction so profound that it does not easily lend itself to rapid analysis or to simple resolution, particularly by those who suffer from it. They tend to look elsewhere, to the outside world of the sensible, rather than inward to the sensing. Most often they get it exactly backwards and delve into the sensualities of drugs like alcohol, cannabis or Zoloft, thus wreaking change upon their perceptions instead of the world around them. Only by affecting change can such personalities be content.
The whole process is somewhat tedious, actually, especially when seen from an…outside perspective. All of that bumbling about, poking at the limits of perception to find out what's on the other side. Rather like watching the blind waltz: all that finery, crashing into the sideboard and upsetting the felines. But you spatio-temporally-constrained sorts aren't really to blame. If you could easily see your way out of the whole mess, there wouldn't be much point, would there?
Sean—the subject at hand—hadn't the slightest idea about the true source of his desperation, because he was trapped within his behavioral cycle, jitterbugging with three left feet, and couldn't see his way out if it. The conflict played itself out as anxiety and depression, or binge sensuality: eating, drinking, drugs occasionally, and a bored sort of onanism that bordered on the pathological. But these were all symptoms, and their cause lay deeper. It infused his blood with a tremulous, keening knowledge: things ought to be better than they are…my purpose is not being fulfilled…I should use this coupon for another box of Ho-hos because it would be wasting money if I didn't.
He spent his working days within the confines of a fluorescently lit office cubicle. On this particular day—the one that we're going to visit now, plucking the glass bauble out of time's tapestry—he was wrestling with the fact that while everyone in the company seemed to want documentation, no one seemed to know what “documentation” was, including himself. When he had started this particular contract two years previously, he had known what documentation was. He spent a year generating 15 linear feet of hard copy documentation, all of which could be summed up in a single phrase:
Here is proof that we have spent all the money required to demonstrate that we are not liable if the world is destroyed as the result of a Y2K Bug in one of our systems.
It was all a very complicated, intricately worded incantation made up of signatures, statements, proofs, standards, diagrams, charts, and graphs. It took up 122 white three-ring binders and 60,000 pages. Late in January of 2000, they packed the binders into cardboard boxes. Then they put the boxes in storage in Iowa. And that was how the Millennium Bug was defeated.
The company had extended his contract, and now Sean wrote policies and procedures for the Information Systems department. Sean considered his work to be rather odd. Essentially, his job was to take knowledge from the mind of each important worker in the department, and put it into the more permanent form of the corporate intranet. Each procedure, each policy, was to be set down in shifting pixels, for ready access. He was the tribal scribe, and his charge was to commit the knowledge base to the ages. For he knew the magic of the making of the paint, and could use HTML.
This mythologizing did not help him, however. His problem wasn't the writing of the content, or the forming of the page—it was the interaction required to get the information out of the heads of the knowledge-holders. Just this morning, he had spent an hour with a Mr. John Fitzgerald, the Information Systems consultant whose head contained the sole record of many things, including certain important procedures regarding the movement of files among the various servers on the company network. Sean had listened intently, had written some notes, and asked some questions. Now, looking at his yellow pad, covered with his 4th-grade scrawl, he realized that he had not asked the right questions, or perhaps not enough of them. His information-gathering strategy had failed, which meant more interaction was required. He frowned.
At this point in his life, Sean was unaware of the extent to which his early exposure to a pair of chemicals—dextroamphetamine sulfate and methylphenidate hydrochloride—had impaired the development of his spatiotemporal consciousness in that particular incarnation. Ostensibly designed as an attempt to control the behavior of young children—mostly males—whose behavioral patterns were deemed detrimental to their development, these chemicals and others were used within the last part of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first as a means of social engineering. Unfortunately, it took a generation before the full dissociative effects of the use of such compounds began to become evident. All Sean knew was that when interacting with others, they often felt somewhat like simulacrums to him…he had a strange difficulty conceptualizing others as independent beings. Even people Sean didn't know felt oddly like imposters: he would see a stranger on the street, and would have the distinct impression that the stranger wasn't who he appeared to be at all. That the stranger was not, in fact, conscious, as Sean knew himself to be. It was a strange and curious way to live. The profound isolation of his developing childhood consciousness, caused by the repeated administration of the chemicals had in time led to subtle changes within the limbic systems of his developing brain. Pathos became difficult to experience. Sympathy and empathy felt odd and unreal, or forced. But these are not required when one is alone, so Sean often found his comfort in isolation, and dipped frequently into the warm waters of alcohol or other drugs. The isolation kept him safe, at a deep, neurological level.
Forced interaction, such as that required by his current employment, produced odd sensations and experiences. Most people in the department, he thought, somehow expected him to know more than he actually did. They failed to understand that his expertise was not in the management of the company's network, but in the ability to organize information. He often wished that he could pluck it out of their heads, just open their brains up and pop the ideas out like pomegranate seeds. This morning, while he talked to Mr. Fitgerald, the man “flattened-out,” as Sean thought of it. He became merely an organization of information, or perhaps a projection of ideas. The subtle sense of “depth” that other individuals are supposed to have vanished, and Sean felt oddly exposed—as though he were the only conscious entity in the room, or maybe even the world. Sean's note-taking deteriorated after that, and he spent the last twenty minutes of the meeting letting his body run the show, nodding, hmm-ing, and scribbling note-type scribblings, while his mind pondered the phenomenon.
His mind was still pondering the phenomenon as he picked up the black AT&T corporate phone and dialed Mr. Fitzgerald's extension. Getting voicemail, Sean vibrated a column of air in his esophagus and manipulated it with the intricate muscles of his larynx, face and jaw. He made a sound like this:
Hi there John, this is Sean Holz. I ah, would like to schedule some more time with you to, ah, get some more details down, here, so, if you could please give me a call at 5194 I'd, ah, appreciate it. Thanks. Buh-Bye.
The vibration of his vocal cords transduced into the air around him, setting up a series of waves through it. These waves impacted upon a thin film of piezoelectric material within the handset of the phone, causing it to vibrate. Its vibrations in turn were transduced into an electric current.
Then he ignored the rest of the work he could have started, and spent the afternoon reading the online content that flowed from the computer monitor and into his brain. Mr. Fitzgerald never returned his call. At four PM Sean decided that enough was enough, and headed out into the New York afternoon for 40 minutes' worth of public transportation. On the subway, if he listened in just the right way, he could hear dolphins, somewhere in the rushing clatter and boom of the speeding cars.
Once in his apartment, Sean transformed into a sloucher. He would do this frequently, slouching in his recliner, clutching fitfully at tumblers of hard cider or goblets of wine, depending on the severity of his need for isolation. Spent six-pack cider cartons still in their plastic grocery-store bags littered the tiny kitchen, grease-spotted pizza boxes mountained in the sink. Sean had recently put on forty pounds in two months, with no end in sight. Bob—a flighty, slightly runted calico cat—grew fat along with him.
Sean recognized that he cut a pathetic figure. At the very least, a self-indulgent figure, someone mired in self-pity and wallowing languidly in the muddiness of emotional irresponsibility. Sean's standards for himself were actually quite high—a vestigial memory, perhaps, of Lord Herbert's accomplishments as Knight, soldier of fortune, peer and philosopher. Unable to rise to similar heights, these standards made him all the more miserable when he fell so far short of them. If not for Bob's company he would be completely alone in the city, having broken off his tenuous romance with a woman named Linda—herself of several noble lives—some two months previous. Knowing that there were millions of people surrounding him and going about their own lives only served to increase his isolation. Sean wondered if anyone, anywhere, could possibly be happy—it seemed unreal to him, that state, and he felt that anyone who professed it was deluded, or lying.
The genesis of his misery was uncertain, not because Sean could not put a moment to it, but because each such moment inevitably seemed the result of a profusion of other moments. The most recent collection of moments—the particularly dramatic telephone call that had marked the end of his romance with Linda—seemed to Sean the inevitable convergence of effects of hundreds of prior such moments. He saw that each action was entirely appropriate in its own way and within its own context, but—because each action was somehow temporally isolated from the others—the overall cumulative pattern could not be seen except in retrospect, when it was locked firmly in the past, a lattice in amber. Viewed through a rearward lens, the simplicity of the congruent influences was almost striking in its perfection. Sean tried, with little success, to avoid the idea that such simple perfection was not evidence of malevolent intent, either on the part of his own subconscious, or perhaps on some god's somewhere.
Sean was perceptive enough to realize that there were two forces at work in his life. The first was falsely vivid: the representation that he made to himself of the events in his life. This was the loud and flashy picture show, the chemical soup between his ears that colored his experience of the second force, which was hidden. The second force was reality itself—whatever that was, hidden behind the thick veil of his experience of it from within his body. By regarding this as a sort of tautology, Sean had answered to his own satisfaction the age-old query of the falling tree in the forest. “Yes,” he declared. “It makes a big goddamn noise.” He thought it arrogant to presume that reality would suffer itself to be confined by the bounds of human perception. As if, he scoffed, in the absence of a perceptive mechanism reality does a funny dance and thumbs its nose at us.
Generally, Sean had to be really drunk to start thinking about things like that, or—more rarely—stoned and sitting in the bathtub while the hot shower splashed across his back. This was one of the primary reasons that his despair welled within him…whatever creative energy might have been applied towards the writing down of his musings was mostly used up by his liver. At moments like those, when the alcohol or the smoke had thoroughly entered his physiology, he would trace the causal roots of his despair. Taking cues from the recent breakup, he reconstructed a certain kind of gut-level skepticism. He felt, he had once told Linda, as though he had been robbed of his ability to make leaps of faith. Even the faith that yes, there is another consciousness behind someone else's eyes, was difficult for him.
Sean had the vague notion that his lack of faith was the result of a netlike web of influences that converged around childhood, when his developing memories were partially obscured by the two chemicals. There were other threads within the web, equally thick and ropy—obvious, really, given Sean's late twentieth-century societal context. Lack of an authoritative male figure. A depressive single mother, coming unhinged at certain crucial developmental stages. That sort of thing. And there were other threads, even thicker, yet not so obvious to Sean. The shock of circumcision, that ritual hack designed to appease a God who, actually, has never had very much interest in the human penis. His Caesarian birth, another rude surgical invention, depriving its subjects of what was intended to be a universal human experience of challenge and trauma, a primordial memory laid down deep within the core of natal brain tissue and upon which a common consciousness could eventually be built. Before that, his mother's poor nutrition, which adversely affected his pre-natal development. Then: conception, the union of a handful of long-monikered chemicals that—pop!—sparked his incarnation, drawing his soul from across the great river and down into the muck with all the rest of you smart monkeys. And before that, the lives of the various atoms that made up those chemicals, as a breath of oxygen inhaled by Christ, as bits of comets, or scraps of Jurassic chlorophyll. An undying spiral that Sean could not resolve into any specific significance. His scant perception of that spiral—as a kind of ghostly overarching principle, governing all—helped him not a bit, and created more blackness. Have another draught of cider and a slice of pepperoni pizza, he would tell himself, and lighten up. In his delicate state, staring into the infinite was unsettling.
Sean was also aware that there was definitely too much masturbation and pornography in his life now. The brief burp of endorphins into his brain following a frantic tugging further isolated him from the rest of the world. The most intimate of human interactions had become flickering video, endless scenes of sad women and callous men and spurts of fetishised semen. Really disgraceful, he thought. But he continued to sink into his self-defined depravity with the same lazy resignation he felt when settling into his battered recliner. He spent thirty-five dollars a week on hard cider, twenty-four dollars a week on videos from Blockbuster, and nine dollars a week on pornography from Leisure Video. That meant that he spent two hundred and seventy-two dollars a month on his continued disintegration. He could afford this. His wages were high enough.
And so, Sean's life had become a series of compulsive acts.
On the outside, looking in at Sean and his small, sad world, it would be easy to dismiss him as he sometimes—in his weaker, darker moments—dismissed himself: another victim, a casualty of a schizoid culture that demands happy conformity under the guise of cherishing individualism. Simpler to think that, like so many others in his culture, he had opted to find relief from the cumulative effects of this cognitive dissonance in alcohol instead of certain brand-name selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But Sean himself hated victims. Too often he thought that they were simply misplacing blame: the chip-shouldered Negro who could have had a minority scholarship to any one of a dozen colleges if he had just managed to maintain a B average in high school but who blamed the So-Called White Man for his failings; the Angry Feminist who didn't realize that the cage door had been opened while she remained inside, Oppressed and complaining; the whining Gay Man whose pathological need to be his Sexuality brought him no end of trouble. All sorts of Identities crashing and thrashing within the collective culture of the nation. It wasn't that Sean didn't respect the legitimate suffering that could be found in many cases, it was that most people failed to realize that no one else could truly help them in any sense that mattered, and, further, that the expectation of that help was actually robbing them of the self-determination their reason allowed them. A feeling of entitlement was bound to result in disappointment. Waiting to be given power and individuality was a fool's game. Such things must be self-created, taken by force. Sean reserved particular loathing for those whose misery was predicated on the continual failure of others to meet their expectations. What easier way is there to become powerless, he thought, than to rely on the attitudes and actions of others! And how convenient to then blame those others for one's own feelings of smallness and inadequacy.
With that in mind Sean was fully aware that his own dissatisfaction was no one's fault but his own. He didn't blame Linda, or his mother, or any of the countless, irritating people he met during the course of his daily life. To do so would be hypocrisy of the highest order…although he did occasionally allow himself the luxury of anger towards Linda, simply because that particular psychodrama was the freshest and most piquant. Given his peculiar affect, he took a sort of perverse enjoyment when dipping into strong emotion…sometimes, it was the only way he could empathize with the rest of humanity, thinking that perhaps other people had felt this way. But there was not so much anger towards his mother, anymore, or towards the pharmaceutical-industrial complex that had made the drugging of small children with amphetamine-related compounds an acceptable parenting option. That had been a long time ago, and although the repercussions of his speed-hazed childhood were still with him, he knew that there was nothing that could be done about that now.
Sean had come to realize that the easy and convenient thing to do would be to blame it all on everything else—on his circumstances, his ex-lover, his mother, drug companies, society, Christianity, bums, commuters, poor people, and Bill Gates. It was certainly tempting. But he couldn't do it. Every crack! and hiss! of an opening cider bottle was the result of his action, every stuffed mouthful of extra-cheese and pepperoni pizza was taken to satisfy his emotional hunger, each spurted climax was achieved to distract him from his loneliness. He, Sean Holz, took these actions and owned their emotional precursors. No one else.
And so, on this particular Sunday night, as
Chris Carter
flashed across the darkened television screen and Sean's stomach rumbled, full of grease and dough and six bottles of hard cider, he decided that it was time to get back in the groove, the groove of Sean's Life As Sean Sees It. This sourceless, paralyzing dissatisfaction could be resolved with an act of will, he knew. He would haul himself up and out of this deep rut, without the benefit of any happy-pill pharmaceuticals. He needed to stop drinking, that was first. Twenty of his forty extra pounds were from cider alone, he knew. Then he needed to rein in his burgeoning appetite, to take care of those other twenty. Those two steps were crucial, and from them all else would follow.
He took in his surroundings, trying to see them properly: the cheap imitation oriental carpet, embedded with crumbs; the pile of dishes on the coffee table, crusted; the empty liquor store bags, cat-shredded; the piles of unopened junk mail and other sundry items covering the places on the sectional sofa where he never sat. Glasses, most with sticky amber-colored stains of dried cider at their bottoms, hid in the corners. Bottles perched everywhere. Bob crouched in one corner, her eyes wide and manic, her tail twitching—it was that time of night, when an apartment-cat's brain tries to tell it that it ought to be out hunting small forest creatures. “Bob,” Sean told her, “this has got to stop.” She burbled curiously. “I mean it. I'll do it.”
And he probably would have. But the next morning on the way to work, a taxicab driven by a drunken Muslim hopped a curb and plowed into him at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, right in front of brown-stoned Trinity Church. He was tossed headfirst into the high, wrought iron fence that surrounds the seventeenth-century graveyard, and split his skull open from just above his left eye to just below his right ear.
Which, if you can picture it, is not the sort of thing you just get over.
