|
· I was supposed to be reading
Death Comes for the Archbishop for a
class I'm taking at the community college, but I got sidetracked by this
absolutely ridiculous book my friend Jay slipped into my damn backpack without
me knowing about it. I had Death Comes
for the Archbishop and this book with me when I rode the bus to work every
morning, and Death Comes for the
Archbishop got ignored almost until it was too late. The concept of the book
I actually paid attention to is that there's an alternate history to Super Bowl
XXXVI, the one where the Rams lost the Patriots on that last-second field goal.
I've been bitter about that for four years now, so I took a look through the
book and started "playing" the game in it. The way it works is, it starts with
the opening kickoff and there's hundreds of elaborate play descriptions listed
one after the other, but you don't know as you read which ones are the ones
you're supposed to use and which ones you're supposed to ignore. It's determined
by a numeric code at the end of the description of each play, you
cross-reference it with a chart in the back and it tells you which play comes
next. So you have no idea when you look through the book what's going to happen.
All the plays are there, but the order is impossible to figure out by looking at
them and most of them aren't used anyway. I saw some plays in the book that
pretty much horrified me, like Kurt Warner throwing a ninety-nine yard
interception, so I was on pins and needles for a while over this stupid game.
Once I started the damn thing, of course I had to keep going and going, right
from the first quarter to the last. It should have only taken three hours but I
did it a half hour at a time on the bus and meanwhile Death Comes for the Archbishop just sat
there. I'm such an idiot. It's a wonder I got through that class. I can't
believe I wasted my time with that book. I'm sure people thought I was a moron
for sitting there going through it. If it wasn't for the chance that the Rams
would win the game, I would have stopped. The joke was on me anyway because they
LOST AGAIN. · I don't know, was it really
a love story, this book I read? Could you call it a love story? What does that mean? I guess you could call it
that, sure. Sumner is able to
do this in about two weeks, mostly over the Internet. He gets a good outline of
the story. The woman, it turns out, was married all along, and the man she
disappeared with was almost certainly her husband. She had been leading a total
double life, stringing Witt along easily. And one day the husband apparently
showed up at the restaurant to drag her back to him. Now she's living in
But the case
isn't closed, because Witt has a strange request. Even though he doesn't want to
see the woman again, he's willing to pay Sumner as much as he wants if he can
find out one thing for him: whether this woman ever really loved
him. Sumner is
baffled. The man seriously wants him to track down clues and go over all the
evidence of their relationship not to find out hard facts but to determine
whether the woman's feelings for him were a lie or not. Witt is just a
middle-aged accountant, he's not rich or anything and can't afford to be
throwing his money away on a lark, but he's absolutely haunted and he hasn't
been able to have a normal relationship with any woman since this one vanished
on him. If he can just be assured that she truly had some genuine feeling for
him, he can sleep at night and move on. Sumner takes the
case, but he can't promise anything, because who could promise results when the
job is to investigate emotions? It turns out one of the main reasons he takes
the case is that it gets him out of the house, where his own wife has become a
burden to him. She's suffering from some kind of chronic and very painful muscle
disease which isn't fatal but has made her life a total hell, and even though he
loves her and treats her as best as he can, he's starting to lose his mind and
their whole husband-wife relationship has almost been completely
destroyed. He starts to
tackle the case, really tackle it. He examines the love letters that the mystery
woman and Witt exchanged, he talks to people that she briefly came into contact
with during the relationship, he even tracks down someone who she might have
cheated with during that time. He goes through old photos of she and Witt
together, taking notes about the clothes she wore, what her moods seemed like,
what her little gifts to him may have symbolized, where she had to go to get
them. He tries to gauge what she was really feeling the day she vanished by
finding the waitress who served them and getting her to tell the story again. He
tries to find out if she ever swindled anyone else's heart and he finds himself
reading some love stories she wrote for her college magazine to figure out what
she really thought about the whole subject. He does his best to avoid actually
having to talk to her directly, since that's the last thing Witt wants him to
do. The things he finds out are contradictory. On the one hand, she seemed to be
really happy with Witt, but on the other hand, her disappearance was so swift
that it doesn't make sense that she could have loved him. She never even wrote
him a letter of explanation. Sumner finds out so much about her that he begins
to....you guessed it, fall in love with her. He can't quite seem to determine
once and for all whether she really loved Witt, but bit by bit he discovers she
is a fascinating, deep, beautiful, mysterious, baffling woman.
Now Sumner's
really confused, because even though he's really reluctant to meet her, he
thinks he has to, firstly because he can't come up with a worthy answer for his
client yet, and secondly, because he just has to know what she's really like.
Adding to this confusion is the fact that it seems like someone is following
him. He can't prove it, but it seems like information is a bit too easy to find
sometimes, there are no real dead ends, and he gets way too much information
from a total stranger working at a vineyard who has very detailed memories
of Witt's overnight trip with the
woman there a week before she vanished. He does more research to find out
precisely where he can confront the woman in relative privacy, and winds up
going to When he sees her,
he can't take his eyes off her. His first thought is that obviously she was just
using Witt for something, because there's just no way that a balding,
middle-aged accountant could have landed such a woman. Sumner starts talking to
her at the bar, pretending he's someone else, being very subtle, trying to get
in a roundabout way at her history, but she won't really give it to him. About
halfway through the conversation, he realizes that she knows exactly who she is
and why he's here. Instead of being mad, she tells him the entire story. At the
time she was with Witt, she was married to an American spy who was working in
Sumner is pretty
floored by this story, as you can imagine. The only mystery left to solve is his
sense that he has been followed, and she can confirm that it's true, that it was
her husband who was doing the following. He did it not to scare him away but to
actually draw Sumner directly to her. It had been her idea and he followed her
wishes. The reason for the charade was that she had never told her story to
anyone. Not even her husband had asked her to explain the whole truth about what
she had gone through, and she wanted to confess it all to someone, and Sumner
was the perfect candidate: someone who wanted to know the whole truth, who would
listen sympathetically, and who she would never see again. Now she had
closure. Sumner goes away
from the bar humbled and stunned, and the next day he goes to Witt, tells him
the whole story. And he's happy with it. He chooses to see the woman's love for
him as real rather than the symptom of some awful inner stress she was
suffering. He's alone, and probably will be for a long time still, but he's
incredibly happy with this white lie. It just goes to show you how desperate
some people are to believe something if it means that someone seems to care
about them. The book ends
with Sumner walking alongside his wife as they wheel her in for some
experimental surgical procedure to heal her muscle pains. It's sort of a last
ditch attempt to save her from more years of agony. The nurses leave them alone
for a minute and she's slowly falling asleep and he's holding her hand and
there's two pages of what's going on in Sumner's mind as he thinks about what
kind of miracle it would take for him to be able to re-invent himself for her,
the way the subject of his investigation did for Witt, and the way her husband
did for her, what kind of courage and dedication it would demand, and whether or
not he himself can ever even hope to be the kind of person who could accomplish
it. It's a sad ending, because he's not like these people, he just isn't, he's a
Witt and not much more. So instead of a love story, the book is more about what
it takes to become someone different than yourself, bigger than yourself. And it
makes it seem almost impossible, it really does, a one in a million shot, like
climbing · Mrs. DeLean gave me a book
to read because I finished My Side of the
Mountain before anybody else in class did, and she said I could do a report
on it for extra credit. The book was for sixth graders and above but I got
through it no problem. It was a very good book. It was about a man who came to a
little place in · I wish I understood modern
photography, I really do. There's a book on my shelf at home, I'm not even sure
how it got there. It's all these pictures of a guy in a suit wedged into places
people just don't normally get themselves wedged into. For instance, there's one
of him standing in his suit on the bathroom counter in a Holiday Inn, his face
and his torso and his knees pressed against the wall. There's one of him lying
perfectly flat and straight in between the rows of seats at a crowded baseball
game, again in a suit and with a look on his face like he just doesn't
particularly like it or dislike it, he's just there and not caring. I guess the
point is to show how much we're really just objects like anything else in the
world. I hope it was worth the thirty dollar cover price. All I know is that I'm
absolutely certain it wasn't me who paid for it. But who
did? · I read this book last month.
I'll tell you about it. It begins with a
twenty-two year old man riding in the back of a police car. He's been arrested
for some unspecified crime, and he's looking out the windows of the car as it
cruises through the slums late at night, and this man is thinking that he has
one last chance to change his life if he really wants to do it, he's at an
unpleasant crossroads, and if he keeps going like he's going, he'll eventually
be doomed to the kind of misery that he sees rolling past the windows of the
police car. and he'll never get out of it. It's come to him all at once, very
very clearly. His eyes have been opened. His name is
Cleve. His friend Trent comes and bails him out of jail at three in the morning,
and they go back to And it's true,
but this man Cleve's trouble is a different kind of trouble. The next day, just
as the sun's coming up, he's standing on a dock at the grungiest edge of the
city, watching a slow cargo trawler creep by. He's been watching it every day
for a week, and he knows it always floats past at the exact same time, and
always a certain short distance from the dock. He's been mentally measuring the
leap over the water onto the trawler and thinks he might just be able to make
it, although even if he does, he has no idea where the trawler is really going
or how long he can stay on it before someone spots him and boots him off or
calls the police. But it doesn't matter to him. He has to try the jump, he
absolutely has to, and he does. He runs down the dock and leaps off it and just
does make it, injuring his leg pretty badly in the process, barely avoiding
slamming into the side of the trawler and crashing down into the water. He's on
the trawler for two whole days, with no food and almost no water, without anyone
seeing him, and he finally jumps off a full state away. He hitchhikes back to
Cleve's problem
is a strange one. Even though he's very intelligent, he can't seem to live a
normal life, he absolutely has to keep challenging himself physically each and
every day, to have some experience that's new and different, to push himself, to
never repeat the actions of a single day. And so at twenty-two he's basically
homeless, living in the hills just beyond the campus he used to attend classes
on, spending his days foraging for food and showering on campus and working out
and walking vast distances to exhaust himself. And always he has to break into
people's houses but not rob them, scale cliffs, drink himself silly, train for
triathlons he has no intention of competing in, sleep on the roofs of buildings
he's scaled, do brutal day labor, jump on trains. He knows he isn't normal but
he can't bring himself to live any other way. What disturbs him so much is the
idea of time rolling away in front of him and at the same time gathering so much
weight behind him. He just wants there to be a now; his awareness of anything else, a
past or a future, suffocates him. Spending a single second thinking about either
the past or the future is death to him. It makes him physically feel his life
slipping away. There's no word for his disease. His latest
project begins the day he returns from his trawler adventure. He goes into the
nearby mountains and he bribes a park employee to take him to the spot where a
camper was recently mauled by a black bear, because he wants to stalk it,
empty-handed, limping because his knee is still banged up from the trawler
incident. He wants to somehow come face to face with the bear, just to see what
happens. The book's a love
story. On campus there's a girl. Her name's Helen.
She's about to graduate from school, and she's an activist in every sense of the
word. She's spent all her free time for the past two years organizing student
protests of a war currently going on in
Cleve spends five
days in the woods trying to track his bear, all the while getting farther and
farther away from humanity and eating almost nothing. At one point he's totally
lost in the mountains. Finally he
knows he's on the black bear's trail. He goes into a strange mental zone of
intense excitement, anticipation. In the middle of day six, he sees it. But
there's not going to be any confrontation because the bear is dying, it's lying
on its side in the middle of a clearing. Cleve walks right up to it and looks
into its eyes as it slowly dies, and then lies right beside it for two hours,
staring at it, touching its fur, trying to learn something, anything, and
thinking about his life but coming up with no solutions. Above everything, he's
terrified of becoming like that bear, a creature that used to be powerful and
awesome but which eventually became mundane and meaningless. Cleve refuses to
die that way. He wants to live with constant risk and constant exploration of
what he can get his body and his courage to achieve. He happens to
meet Helen a week later. She's off campus, working an information table at some
minor protest in the city, and Cleve sees her and recognizes her from the times
he used to notice her when he was still a student, before he dropped out. He
goes up to her and asks her questions about the war in
He finds himself
at loose ends for the umpteenth time, and he starts a new risk project at the
school, which is sneaking into the campus pool late at night and teaching
himself how to high dive. For three straight nights he crawls through the roof
of the place like a burglar, and in almost total darkness he hurls himself off
the diving board again and again into the water. It only comes out after a few
nights of this that he's learned, through One night Cleve
is going through his improvised routine on the high board when he slips off it.
He hits his head as he descends from the top of his dive, and when he enters the
water, he's holding on to only the barest thread of consciousness. But someone's
been watching him, and of course it's Helen. She's known about his break-ins and
dives almost from the beginning, and she's let herself in at odd moments during
the night just to see what he's doing. When Cleve doesn't come up from the
water, she dives in and rescues him, saving his life. She drags him out of the
water and when he becomes totally conscious again he just thanks her awkwardly
and refuses an ambulance and walks off.
He knows he was seconds away from death and he's rattled pretty badly by
it. Helen's totally baffled by him and just watches him go.
She knows he's
friends with Near the end of
part one, Cleve does something that requires more bravery of him than any little
stunt he's tried in a long time. He walks to Helen's apartment one rainy day and
knocks on her door, and when she opens it he says he has something he absolutely
has to tell her. When he hit his head on the diving board and fell into the pool
the week before, he felt his life slipping away, and it literally passed before
his eyes, just like it supposedly happens to people. He saw an image from his
childhood, an image of being disciplined by his father, who was a world-famous
economist who died the year before. He saw his mother, who died when he was
four, and his sister, who's lived in A few days later
she's getting ready to go to Part two starts two years
later.
When
The book follows
their lives, the three of them, back and forth for a while, none of them seeing
or contacting the others. Cleve abandons his crutches (before he's supposed to,
of course) and volunteers through some program to work in
Helen, meanwhile,
works day and night at Planned Parenthood and tries not to think about anything
else, but she meets a man she likes, who happens to be involved in the latest
war movement to hit
Thousands of
miles away, you see Cleve next in one of the worst places on Earth, literally.
He spends two months in a town called Dirkou, in
Back in
Cleve makes his
way back to Something happens
to Helen as Cleve gets ever closer to her. She's shocked to find herself being
physically abused by her activist boyfriend. It goes on for a full month, and
then when she looks in the mirror one morning she has a breakdown, totally
ashamed at what has happened. She gets in her car and drives to
Cleve finds out
where she is. To do this he has to meet the man who abused Helen, and he's able
to get out of him what happened. It's all Cleve can do not to destroy him. For
three more months, he resists every urge to contact Helen. Instead he throws
himself into fixing up a cabin in the woods which used to belong to his father.
He spends his days at his warehouse job and his nights making the cabin into
something not only livable but almost idyllic. He even decorates it with a few
of the paintings he was able to rescue from the hospital. When he's finished his
work, he goes to find Helen. When she sees how he looks, and hears about how
he's done with his old life, is in counseling, is working, and has created a
secluded spot for himself and her too if she wants to come back to him, she's
overwhelmed. She's been completely weakened to a shell by her experiences and
she falls back in love with Cleve within hours, and as he takes her to show her
the little world he's built for them where they can hide from everything,
they're both blissfully happy for a day, and temporarily afraid of nothing. And
as you read the book you think, finally, finally, maybe they've made it.
Okay, part
three. It starts with a
helicopter buzzing the treetops in the South Korean mountains at sunrise. Cleve
is in the helicopter, in military fatigues, looking down, holding an assault
rifle. We don't know exactly what year it is, or how much time has passed.
Another man in the chopper with Cleve is telling him not to look too close down
there, because somewhere in the forest there are almost a quarter of a million
North Korean soldiers hiding and waiting to fight. Cleve knows it. He's just
emerged from the deadliest battle of The helicopter
lands on the edge of a small, deserted shantytown somewhere in the mountains,
and Cleve gets off it all alone, and the helicopter takes off again, leaving him
there. Waiting in the clearing for him is They spend the
first night walking around the bombed shacks and telling each other stories of
where they've been in the past eight months. Cleve doesn't want to talk much
about the great battle, which He and Trent build a
fire and hunker down for the night, figuring they'll join up with a passing unit
in a couple of days, but there's almost no troop movement going on, since any
major repositioning of troops might threaten the delicate cease fire. The war
could end in two days or it could go on for two more years. It's all very
shaky. The next morning Cleve
wakes up to the sound of gunshots. He finds That afternoon,
just before dusk, something big happens. Cleve doesn't want to go to sleep and
so he's awake when he sees North Korean soldiers in the woods in the distance.
He wakes up Cleve calls in
what just happened to his command, and the reply he gets is chilling. There's
been definite intelligence that
thousands of North Korean ground troops have amassed in the forest right in
front of them, nothing but foot soldiers, and an attack is certain. The cease
fire is about to come crashing down, but American troops absolutely can't be
seen to have broken it, so they're trying to hang on by shoring up the defenses
of the Marine base to the west just in case the attack does come. Trent is told
to retreat to an area two miles west of the little town to be picked up by a
chopper and head to the base, but Cleve is given the option to stay where he is
and continue scouting, running for it at the first sign of any major troop
movement in the forest. He chooses to stay of course, and forces
He runs over to
Trent, who's been shot in the head. The sniper he couldn't find and kill has
gotten him. He's lying on the ground and screaming loud, and crying, he can
sense what's happened to him, and Cleve is trying to stop him from kicking and
thrashing around but Trent is obviously going to die, the blood is just pouring
out of his head, it's horribly graphic, and all he's screaming again and again
is, I shot that little girl, I shot that
little girl, and we have no idea what he means, but he's obviously
desperately sorry for something he did, and within a minute or so he goes still
in Cleve's arms, with this horribly sad look on his face, like he realized how
little his life amounted to in the end, how little he'd been able to do with it
after he'd been in such an enviable position to do whatever he wanted to.
You don't get
Cleve's reaction to this, at all. He just sits there, holding
After a while, he
hears something. It's movement in the forest, maybe a mile away, and obviously
the time has come, there's enemy movement out there. The sounds increase little
by little, but Cleve can't see anything. He hears the sound of an engine, and a
tree falling somewhere. Then it goes silent for a little bit. Cleve stands up,
but instead of running to the west, he turns and very slowly he walks out into
the middle of the field closest to the woods. On the way there, he takes off his
shirt despite the freezing cold. You can't tell what he's thinking. There's more
sounds from the forest, from far away still, then they go quiet once again, for
longer this time. Cleve walks to
the middle of the field, facing the woods. He sets his gun down at his feet, and
he looks up at the stars, and he breathes in and out, over and over again, and
he closes his eyes, and all he hears is the wind, and at that moment, he finally
has the one thing he's been searching for all his life, the one moment of
perfect awareness of the present, and the biggest shock to his system of all
time. His best friend is dead and he's standing in an open field, facing
thousands of an enemy he can't see, his gun at his feet, alone in the world
under the stars, and his emotions are going in a thousand different directions
at once, all of them in some strange perfect balance, and it's such an enormous
situation that he's become bigger than life, bigger than time. And only war
could bring this to him. Nothing else. War, the most shattering, the most
awe-inspiring experience a man can have. What it's like to be him just then is
described over the course of a good five pages, and finally Helen's name is in
there, and Cleve feels himself floating out of his body entirely and his spirit
floating into the woods in front of him, and watching he and Helen there walking
through the trees, just touching them in wonder. It's a good vision for a moment
but then in the vision all the soldiers who died in the battle that made Cleve
famous for his bravery are standing around them in a gigantic circle, watching
the two of them sadly. Then the vision ends and Cleve is fully conscious again,
and there's just silence from the forest. He gets down on his knees, and he just
waits. The book cuts to
the next morning. He's waking up in that field. He's still all alone. He gets to
his feet, and he walks into the forest. Just a few hundred yards into it, he
starts to find guns, hundreds of them, lying on the ground, and evidence that
last night, hundreds and maybe thousands of the enemy were right here, but now
they've disappeared entirely, leaving everything behind, a total mystery. What's
happened is that the cease fire not only held, but the war came to a sudden end
when America dropped a small nuclear bomb on a North Korean city, which happened
almost at the exact moment that Trent died in Cleve's arms, hundreds of miles
away. The North Koreans retreated everywhere, and they surrendered over the
course of just a few hours. Cleve came within a few hundred yards and an hour or
so of being overrun. The war is over. Cleve just stands in the woods for a long
time. He's the only living thing left for miles. Finally, after
two hundred pages of not knowing anything about Helen's fate, it's revealed that
this has all taken place almost three years after she and Cleve saw each other
last. There have been hints that it's been a long time, little hints once in a
while that make it seem longer and longer since they've seen each other, but
when you know it's been three years, it's kind of a jaw dropper. Their time in
the cabin together didn't last. Cleve and Trent were drafted to fight in
· I have the first three
volumes of Unfinished Cinema and I'm
waiting for a fourth one to come out. Each volume has three movie scripts in it,
but they're quite not formatted normally, they're more casual and less rigid
than that, and they're scripts for movies that were never made and never will be
made. You're supposed to kick back and read the scripts and direct them inside
your head. You come up with the shots and the cast and the cuts and the music,
all inside your own brain, and the movies belong to you forever. There's no
chance anyone will ever make them. It's kind of a nice
thought. · I got a very bad case of the
creeps reading a really cheesy book I found at my sister's house in the country.
I was staying there overnight, you know how it is out there, there's nothing to
do, so I went to bed early and picked a book off the shelf, some silly horror
thing, but it turned out to be the worst case scenario of what to read out in
the country. Even though it was completely ridiculous, it gave me the heebie
jeebies just because of where I was and how quiet it was in that damn house. It
was about a woman living in the middle of freaking nowhere, and she freaks out
one night because she thinks she sees something move out of the corner of her
eye, a HUGE black spider that shoots under the door and out of the room, and she
gets the shakes because it was so enormous and she can't get to sleep. Her
neighbor from down the road knocks on the door, he just happened to show up to
introduce herself, so she tells him the story and he says he'll look for the
spider, and he starts to prowl around the house for it, and he doesn't find it,
so he starts talking to her, and after about a half an hour she gets a feeling
that the guy is very very strange, and not who he says he is, and all of a
sudden he starts calling her Mildred when that's not her name, and what she
realizes is that Mildred is a ghost he keeps seeing. The woman gets so freaked
out that she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and she climbs out the
window and just starts to run, not knowing if the guy is a psycho but too afraid
to find out. She runs to the first safe house she knows about, which is almost a
half mile away. She runs up to the door and knocks on it and a guy lets her in.
She feels ridiculous but she very carefully explains what happened and wants to
know if she can call her sister in the city to come get her so she can spend the
night at her house. The problem is, the guy has no phone and no car. He just
farms all day and is totally cut off from the world. He knows of the man who
came over to her house, though, and he tells her he should explain what the
guy's deal is. So she agrees to sit down, he brings her tea, and he says that
after he explains what the Mildred guy's problem is, he'll walk her back to the
house. So he begins a long story about the guy and who Mildred was, except
there's some inconsistencies in his story which he denies, and he slowly starts
to accuse the woman of not being able to understand the way they live their
lives out here because she's a city type, and then he starts in a very subtle
way to accuse her of being Mildred's ghost! He's as crazy as the other guy! When
the woman begins to understand this, she makes a break for the door, and the guy
whips out a butcher knife and runs after her. She screams bloody murder and runs
out into the night, and he chases after her, but eventually she gets away, and
she tears through the woods and runs and runs, desperate to see any kind of
house, but there's nothing, and finally she comes out on a road but she's too
afraid to stop so she runs to a house on a hill beside it. She collapses in a
heap on the lawn and a guy comes out and takes her inside, and he calls the
police as she sobs and sobs, and he lets her lie on the sofa while he stands
guard at the door with his shotgun. She passes out from fear, and when she wakes
up the police still aren't there. She panics but the guy tells her she's only
been out three minutes or so, and the police station is almost five miles away,
and they should be there in a minute.
He picks up the phone after another three minutes and asks where the hell
the police are, and they tell the guy that he gave them the wrong address, and
now they'll have to backtrack, etcetera. When he hangs up, the woman gets really
quiet, because now she's imagining that every human being on the earth is out to
kill her, and she says absolutely nothing, she just listens for the sound of
sirens. But they don't come. The guy says to her, Listen, here, take the gun,
and what I'll do is sit outside in my car and I won't move, I'll just look out
the window to make sure the crazy guy isn't coming, so you can trust me. And he
sets the gun on the floor and backs away and opens the door and goes out to his
car. She watches him through the window. And he just sits there in his car.
She's borderline insane with fear now, so the silence starts working on her
imagination. The house creaks and she hears a door open. She gets up and she
walks real slow to the cellar door, which is open, and she looks down into it,
and she hears a shuffling from down there, like someone's feet moving. Her heart
is pumping and she doesn't know what to do. She creeps back to the front door
with the gun in her hand and she peers out toward the guy's car....and he's not
inside it anymore. At this point, I was ready to get up and go sit in the living
room and turn the TV up full blast, because I was wigging out. As badly as this
book was written, I was holding it with white knuckles. Anyway, to make a long
story short, the front door is suddenly kicked in and the owner of the house is
standing there with a dead woman in his arms. He looks at the woman holding the
gun with a completely crazy look in his eyes and he says, "Well, Mildred, I did
what you told me, now will you set me free?" And he starts to laugh like a
psycho. The woman pulls the trigger of the gun and there's no bullets in it, and
she turns and runs toward the back of the house, but the back door is locked,
and the guy grabs her from behind and she flees down the cellar steps into the
darkness, and at the top of the stairs the guy slams the door shut so she's left
with no light whatsoever. After a couple of minutes, she hears the same kind of
small skittering sound that the mysterious spider-thing made when she saw it
back in her house at the beginning of the night, and at that moment, as soon as she hears
that, her mind snaps completely. She goes utterly insane, so insane she
basically leaves her body. There's four full pages then of her imagining herself
on a sunny beach in Key West, sitting there and ordering a Tom Collins and
having it brought to her, and running her feet through the sand, and watching
the waves and all the people on the beach, and thinking how great it is to have
gotten away from her job and her irritating ex-husband. It goes on for so long
it just becomes funny. You know she's gone mad and her body is back in that
cellar and something unbelievably nasty is about to happen to her. It just never
does. The book ends with her on the beach, and a guy coming along and telling
her that if she wants to join the last parasailing group of the day, it'll cost
her seventy dollars and she should go to the other side of the beach now. She
sits there considering whether to do that or just keep sitting there and tanning
and drinking and maybe taking a nap....and that's it. End of story. I don't know
if that's the best ending for a horror story ever or the worst and most
insulting. I'm still standing here telling you about it, so I guess that's
something. I read the whole book lying there in the guest bed, starting at ten
and ending at two. I guess that's something too. · I got very, very paranoid
after reading a book about a group of terrorists planning for a major attack on
America, but they keep running into logistical problems and the plans keep
dissolving, until one of them comes up with a really simple plan to send out ten
men into ten forests in California with ten gallons of gasoline and ten matches
to start simultaneous forest fires. That's it, that's the entire plan. Perfect,
devastating. The fires wipe out millions of acres, it devastates the economy of
the state, it kills about four dozen people, it costs hundreds of millions of
dollars to fight them. And all it took was ten men with cans of gasoline.
Scary. · Nora down the street gave us
a children's book as a housewarming gift. This was before I realized that Nora
has a very strange sense of humor. We didn't even know her that well when she
gave it to us. It sat around for a few months and then one night I had nothing
to read to Daphne and I got the book down from the shelf and started reading it
aloud to her. It was about a big tomato who stood on street corners and urged
people who passed by to eat more tomatoes because they were healthy and
delicious and so forth. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, there was a big
carrot who stood on street corners asking people to eat carrots because they
were full of vitamins and good for your eyes and such. Then one day the carrot
gets a little too close to where the tomato is standing and the tomato tells him
to move on, and the carrot snaps back at him, and they get into a fight and both
of them are arrested. From then on, whenever they encounter each other on the
street, they exchange words and it always blows up into a major fistfight.
There's headlines in the newspaper every week: TOMATO AND CARROT CHARGED WITH
PUBLIC DISTURBANCE. Parents whose kids had begun to eat their vegetables because
the tomato and the carrot were so nice and funny and silly now start to complain
that the kids are actually a little scared of them now. On their own, they're
good-natured veggies instructing people about nutrition with a little song and
dance, but when they see each other, there's always a brawl. They're ordered by
the court to stay away from each other but two days later they tear up a record
store in a huge fight. The American Vegetable Concern sues them and in the end
the court says that they have to submit to being eaten. That's the children's
book Nora gave us. Things have changed since I was a kid. I thought it was
pretty inappropriate. Daphne just loved it. · There's a book called Off Topic that's just great, it's
interviews with celebrities, all the biggies are in it, but the concept of the
book is that there's absolutely no discussion about their careers or their
aspirations or their work or anything even remotely like that. No politics
either. They're asked questions about their favorite cereals, their memories of
riding the bus in junior high school, what they got their mothers for Christmas
last year, which stupid games they have on their computers, what kind of junk
mail they get....I mean, if you're not fascinated spending a half hour reading a
discussion with Cate Blanchett about what kind of rules she adds when she plays
Monopoly, or a debate with Clint Eastwood about how many sunny days in a row is
too many, then I just don't understand you. · What happens is that a
totally normal woman who doesn't get out much goes over to her cousin's house
for a fourth of July barbecue. She's there for a while, she has a couple of
beers, she eats, and everyone goes inside to be lazy and watch some TV, and it
gets a little late and everyone starts to watch one of those shows where they do
bad reenactments of crimes and tell people to be on the lookout for the people
who committed them. The woman gets in her car at around ten and heads a few
miles back home, and she pulls up at a stoplight, and instantly she gets a weird
feeling about the car in front of her. She recognizes it from somewhere, and
when the light goes green she realizes it's the car from one of the reenactments
she saw about an hour before. She can't believe it at first and she tries to
talk herself out of it, but she just saw the license plate number on the show,
and this is obviously the car connected to a couple of brutal murders that
happened just two months before in the adjacent state. The woman doesn't have
any time to think and no cell phone so she follows the car for a bit,
frantically trying to decide what to do, and then the car gets on a long country
road and she has no choice but to keep going. She's keeping an eye out for a
police car but there's none to be seen, so she has to keep tracking the car. It
makes a lot of turns and she takes every one, getting a little bit better at
keeping a safe distance as she goes along, and then suddenly the car gets on the
highway and she's committed to it. She's hoping that the car will go through a
toll or something so she can tell someone to call the police, but it just isn't
happening. Miles and miles go by and she starts to panic and finally the car
gets off the highway and starts cruising very slowly down a side road, and then
it pulls over completely. The woman goes ahead of it and stops on the shoulder.
She tries to keep an eye out behind her to see what the car's doing but the
lights are turned off, so she gets out of her car and runs to the nearest house.
There's nobody home. She jogs over to the next one, which actually has plenty of
lights on, but no one answers there either. Then she sees someone walking up the
shoulder towards her from that car. Just then, a police car cruises past, with
perfect timing, and she hollers bloody murder and the cop actually hears her and
stops....and it turns out that when the cop questions the man who got out of the
car, it's not the right one. The woman got the license plate wrong. The driver
has nothing to do with the crime she saw on TV. This happens
about seventy-five pages in. What happens after that is that the woman feels
like an idiot for a couple of days, but then she starts driving around at night,
just following people in their cars. The whole experience after the barbecue was
the most intense feeling of fear and excitement she'd ever had, and she finds
herself driving around from midnight till dawn, following cars just to see where
they're going, trying to have some kind of experience or insight or adventure,
which she's had absolutely none of in her life. Nothing happens at first, but
one night she follows someone driving a little strangely and witnesses a nasty
roadside fight between a man and a woman, and soon there's a night after that
when she follows a guy who realizes he's being followed and confronts her at a
gas station. They talk and he slowly seduces her, and she follows him back to
his house, and nearly has sex with him but in the end she climbs out the
bathroom window and gets back in her car and drives away, not knowing what's
becoming of her. She's dragging herself into work in the morning exhausted every
day but she can't kick this habit she's found. She almost stops it all when she
follows a very loud group of people in a car who run off the road and smash into
a tree, killing everyone. She's there alone with the wreckage for a good two
minutes before someone comes, and it makes her sick. She has a feeling that this
is all leading somewhere, though, and she can't stop until she has some kind of
closure. It's clear that absolutely nothing has ever happened to her in her
life, so she needs something big to come along. On the last night of her jaunts,
she drives around without finding any hint of anyone interesting to follow until
almost three in the morning, and then she spots a bookish-looking girl coming
out of a college parking lot and getting into a lousy little Jetta. So she
follows her. The girl drives and drives and the woman follows her every move,
and it slowly becomes obvious that she's picked this girl to follow because she
reminds her of herself, bookish and probably shy and inexperienced about almost
everything. Then, weirdly, the woman starts to tailgate this girl a little bit,
just slightly, really following her close, and making every turn she makes in
kind of an exaggerated way, not so much following her as stalking her. And it
starts to become clear that the girl in the Jetta is driving faster and making
more turns because she's afraid of this person behind her, thinks maybe she's
being stalked by a crazy person, and the woman senses this and grabs onto it,
this is what she wants. She wants to snap the girl ahead of her out of her
little world and give her a shock to her system, just like she herself needed
one except it came too late in life to do much with it. It becomes a cat and
mouse thing, a little dangerous, with her trying to subconsciously "rescue" the
girl in the Jetta with this chase, until the scared girl floors it on a country
road and so does the woman, and suddenly the Jetta girl screeches to a halt when
a police car comes over a hill, and the police car stops and the Jetta girl gets
out pointing and crying, and the cop steps out into the middle of the road to
flag the woman down. The woman slows down to a stop, then turns and peels out
and starts driving across a field beside the road, just recklessly flooring it,
and she approaches a line of trees and that's where I put the book down and my
wife took it back to the library the next day. And I just never got a chance to
go back and check it out again. Things just cropped up. Now I don't even know if
I can remember the title or the cover. · I think I understood the book I just read,
but I'm not sure. If I understood it,
then it was really interesting. If I'm wrong about it, well, then it kind of
sucked. It was extremely short, which is why I bought it. That and the cover—you
put a beach on the cover of a book, and put snow on that beach, and have the
book be about anything other than women finding themselves, and I can't resist
for some reason. In the book there are two men on the beach. One of them is a
writer and he's burned out and drinking too much and can't write anymore, and
the other is a guy with no job who for some reason is hassling him terribly to
keep writing. This goes back and forth for a hundred pages or so, with the
writer obviously getting sicker and sicker and the other guy having no sympathy
for him and needing him to write and somehow insisting that his own survival
depends on it. My guess after reading this was that the writer was really a
writer, but the other guy was actually supposed to be his creativity. He's
trying to give the writer ideas and he's trying to find a way off the snowy
beach onto a warmer one and sometimes he's really affectionate with the writer,
but then sometimes he disappears entirely or fills the writer with confusing
ideas or nonsensical rants. The writer eventually strangles the guy and goes to
sleep on the beach and freezes to death. Now if I'm not interpreting the book
correctly, all of this was utterly pointless. If I'm right, well, then, it's not
bad, not bad. · Read it. All I can say is: a
ninety page poem about the world of professional competitive eating. And it won
some big poetry prize. Really, read it. · My favorite book from last
year was Quincy Vorheusen's Movies in
Review, which is supposedly 'reconstructed' from a big box of index cards
found in the basement of a weird loner after his death. The guy allegedly wrote
reviews on index cards of every movie he ever saw and the editor of the book
claims to have compiled it using all the reviews. The joke is that Quincy
Vorheusen, who nobody knows anything about except that he worked in a video
store and irritated everybody, was secretly the worst film critic in the history
of man. Every single one of the reviews in the book is totally absurd,
wrong-headed, or just misses the point of the movie completely. So when he
reviews The Godfather, for example,
he calls Robert Duvall 'Robert Duvalier' and says the movie is stupid because
never once does anyone in the movie think to go to the police with all the
problems they're having. He has an unbelievable irrational hatred of Dustin
Hoffman, he loves every movie Sarah Michelle Gellar was ever in because
according to him she's "a work of art that Leonardo Da Vinci couldn't have
created in his wildest dreams," he completely confuses Wait Until Dark with Seven, and he thinks The French Connection was a documentary.
There are about seven hundred reviews in the book. The best one is his review of
Fitzcarraldo, but I won't ruin it for
you. · I have no idea what the
cover photo of eight or nine bolts of lightning over a field somewhere has to do
with the book I read, but it was a cool book. I really hated that cover. Bolts
of lightning—ooh, it must be dramatic, right? Lightning means excitement and
drama! What garbage. But it was a great suspense story. The FBI is called in to
investigate an unbelievably strange scene. There's a rented bus stopped on the
side of the road in the middle of the The FBI's lead
investigator on the case, whose name is Brand—no, Brandt, is of course totally fascinated
by all of this, never having seen anything like it. He and his team pore over
the evidence for months, amazed at how none of it seems to link to anything
relevant. It's nothing but dead ends. Of course this is totally unacceptable to
Brandt and the people above him in the FBI, and the CIA types who want to know
why their old employee was on this bus and whether he was the real target of the
murders, even though it just wouldn't make any sense to kill him since what he
used to do for them wasn't really a matter of life and death. Six months later,
there's dozens of leads going in every possible direction, a hundred different
theories as to what the sculpture of the hands meant, and you see Brandt
following every possible thread. Finally he catches onto one, there's a
little-known commune all the way across the country that sells the hand
sculptures to make money. It turns out they bought them from a crippled artist
who died eight years before, he made hundreds of them. By investigating the
commune, Brandt starts looking into the life of the man who set it up, who beat
a kidnapping charge a long time
ago. By looking into that case, he finds a family connection to one of the
people murdered on the bus. By probing that, he uncovers some kind of affair
that person had with someone connected to a ex-CIA spy who vanished. It all just
goes around and around and after a whole year, it winds up going nowhere but
back to the beginning, and Brandt becomes seriously depressed at the thought
this incredible case can't be solved. Ten whole years
go by. Brandt is still with the FBI, not as young and energetic, but more
intense and driven. No one's ever solved the case of the mysterious bus trip,
but one day he gets a call from an ex-agent who's been retired for five years
and says that he found something interesting at an estate sale where he lives in New Hampshire, a
crude diagram of what looks like the spot in the desert where the bus and the
bodies were found. The owner of the house where the diagram was sold in a box
with a bunch of junk is questioned and he reveals that it probably used to
belong to a man who used to rent out his basement. They track this guy down and
it turns out he's serving a life sentence for taking $5,000 from the Mafia to
murder a professional soccer player over a drug debt. When he's grilled about he
map, he tells Brandt that the map and some instructions were sent to him out of
nowhere two weeks before the murders, along with a note saying that if he
followed the instructions by hijacking the bus and killing everyone on it he
would be given $400,000 and could collect it from a post office box in Provo,
Utah. But he never went through with it, the situation was too strange for him.
He threw the map in a box and forgot about it and threw out the note and the
envelope it came in. While the FBI checks out his story they also go back
through a mountain of records to find out who might have rented a post office
box in The last part of
the book takes place fifteen years after that, with Brandt retired and living in
the Brandt's health
is getting very bad and his son is trying to get him into the hospital but now
he seizes on this information. Brandt collects a mountain of information about
the novelist and slowly connects him to the very bizarre possibility that he had
actually been on board that bus that had gone into the
When he comes to,
he's in the hospital, having caught pneumonia out in the park, and he can barely
move or speak. He was found in his apartment, passed out on the kitchen floor.
His son, who is his only living relative, comes to his side. As Brandt lies
there, he tries to form complete thoughts about his life and the whole sweep of
it, but all he can think of is the agony he feels that he can never know the
truth of what happened, and can't even know for sure if there even really was a
man in the park. The mystery of whether or not there's a God, or what the
meaning of life is, or why he essentially is going to die alone after trying to
be good all his life, all these things are only distantly sad to him compared to
the lack of a solution to case of the murdered people in the
desert. At the very end
of the book, Brandt has died and his son is going over the notes his father
wrote at the very end, things about the investigation, and he's thinking how
tragic it was that his father lost so many years of his life to it. The last
notes he took make no real sense and it's obvious that Brandt hallucinated some
things that he thought he knew about the Russian novelist, small things about his works
and what he truly wrote about and if he was even still alive. And his
description of the man in the park is bizarre and contradicts itself. Then the
son finds one small object his father placed into his notebook which is
definitely real and incontrovertible. It's something the mysterious man in the
park apparently slipped into Brandt's hand before he passed out. It's a
Polaroid, at least twenty years old, showing the artist who originally created
the clasped hands sculptures sitting on a sofa in what looks like a small dark
rec room. He has his eyes closed. Beside him on the couch, dressed only in jeans
and a T-shirt and looking very reluctant to be photographed, is the man who was
at the time the picture was taken president of the
The son takes the
photograph out to the woods and burns it. He never mentions it to anyone, and
promises himself he'll try not to lose one moment of his life in thinking about
the case ever again. A long time ago I had an
affair with a man a few years younger than me. It was selfish, stupid thing to
do and it ended badly, but there were some nice times. Once in a while we would
be in on a rainy or a snowy day, and he would read to me, just take a book down
from the shelf and read to me for an hour, two hours. It was wonderful.
Something strange
happened once when he read to me. I remember the exact day. It was in early
December and it was sleeting outside, and I had laid down on the sofa with some
tea and he was sitting on the edge of the ottoman. He had taken a novel from the
shelf, a love story, and he told me he would read until I dozed off, which was
nice. He had a nice voice. About five pages into the book, though, there was a
paragraph he read which seemed odd to me for some reason, and I couldn't quite
figure out why for a few minutes. Then I really couldn't keep listening, though
I didn't say anything. What happened was, the author accidentally shone through his own words too plainly. It
was something about his description of a woman, and it took me out of the story
completely, because I realized they weren't the words of some anonymous
professional storyteller but a real flesh and blood man who had just let too
much of his own life onto the page. I could clearly see him somewhere in a small
house, writing at a wooden desk with the sleet pouring outside, desperately
trying to convince some reader somewhere of his honesty and his intelligence
instead of his sad love for a woman he had fictionalized but who had obviously
broken his heart. I could see him laboring all day and into the night, doing the
only thing he really knew how to do, which must be one of the loneliest things
in the world, and I didn't think he could be all that happy. He had let himself
slip too much into his own book, just for a moment, but a moment was all it took
to ruin it. So I let Ward read on, but I drifted off, and I felt a little sad
for every writer who ever existed and stayed in their room and put everything
they had into words when they had no idea if anyone anywhere would understand
them. Most of them are normal enough I guess, judging from how their books are
written, but some of them seem totally lost, wouldn't you say?
Read me one more chapter, my
patient love, The universe is coming to an
end: The ocean must
roil, The hero must
rise, And then it's back to life
again. If I could stay inside this
tale To walk these vivid
lands, I'd choose a
page, Give a thief's
goodbye, And steal the dreaming from
your hands. —poem
written in the private journal of Helen Colgate, inspired
by a reading of her favorite book, A
Wizard of Earthsea,
and
dedicated to her lost love, the soldier and tortured dreamer Cleve
Murrow, during his first month of fighting in
Toward the Close of November
After withstanding his seventh no-fault heartbreak in seven years, Frederick left his job and sat down to watch television for a few days. He slept a great deal, lying there on his sofa, and often couldn’t remember what he’d watched just hours before. He saw all the new fall sitcoms and dramas, plus a lot of things on public television, mostly the kids’ shows that came on during the afternoon. Late at night was when things got fuzziest. After a while, Frederick’s body became overly accustomed to the sofa and didn’t want to let him get up. He tried to avoid watching the news, but on Thursday night something there caught his eye. A thirty-two year old woman—exactly Frederick’s age—had just lost her fiancée in a train wreck outside Leeds. It was the second fiancée she’d lost. Her first one had died of cancer five years earlier. Her face never appeared on the television screen. A friend of hers was quoted as saying that all the woman wanted now in the world was to go back home to her mother’s house, and stay there. Frederick watched two more days’ worth of television. The woman’s name stayed in his mind mostly because he made a conscious effort to keep it there. He went to the phone book on Saturday evening and found her address in Groville as well as her number, and he dialed it, and she answered on the third ring. He explained to the woman that he did not know her, but that he had seen her story on TV, and he was concerned about her. She thanked him, and told him she was all right. They got to talking about what they did for a living. She worked in the Groville Mall, in one of the offices upstairs that coordinated the mall events they put on from time to time. He told her he was thinking of going back to his old job as a proofreader for the circuit court, and that he had just withstood his seventh no-fault heartbreak in seven years, and that he was afraid it would kill him if he didn’t get off his sofa soon. They spoke for fifteen minutes or so, and then he asked about her plans to return to her mother’s house. "Where does she live?" he asked. "In Holcastle," she answered. "That’s about fifteen miles away," he said. "Yes," she replied, "fifteen or so." She began to cry, just a little. She might have already been crying; it was difficult to tell on the phone. There was some silence then. He could hear her holding the phone away from her mouth. "I’ll carry you there," he told her. "No, that’s all right, I’ll be fine," she said. He said again, "I want to carry you there." Her name was Lenore. The next morning Frederick drove to her house and knocked on her door. It was answered by a pretty woman in an oversized Disney sweatshirt and new blue jeans. Lenore’s hair was long and dark. "Are you ready?" he asked her. She nodded, said, "Okay." Lenore came out onto the porch and locked her door behind her. Frederick crouched a bit and secured his arms beneath her, lifting her with some effort. She was a little heavier than she looked. He hadn’t taken more than three steps with his burden when she closed her eyes and put her arms around his neck. The wind shifted her hair over her face, and she seemed not to mind this. Frederick began to walk down Old Blanchard Road carrying Lenore as best he could. The first half-mile was not so bad, but he began to fatigue quite suddenly after that, and had to set her down for a minute. He told her he would probably have to do quite a bit of that, and she understood. The occasional car passed them on Old Blanchard, cars heading toward the intersection of 3 and 319, and one out of every seven or eight cars would slow to a crawl beside Frederick as he walked, and a driver or passenger would ask if everything was all right. At first the concerned citizens were thanked with a quiet nod, but Frederick lost his thoughts at the one mile mark and before he knew what he was saying he had told a woman in a green Cadillac that they were mortally sick of all the heartache that had come for them, and they wanted to make it go away. The Cadillac woman drove on, and within the hour she had caused a reporter or two to head for the area. Frederick and Lenore didn’t talk as they went. He occasionally asked her if she was comfortable, and she would mostly reply by asking if his arms and his back felt okay. He found that by setting her down once in a while he was fine, though tomorrow he would probably have to stay in bed and take some pain pills. The only problem with taking too many breaks as they went down Old Blanchard Road was that each one afforded the growing number of onlookers and reporters the opportunity to ask too many questions. Frederick and Lenore refused politely to answer any of them. He lifted her at the end of each break, and they continued their walk to her mother’s house in Holcastle. The constant talking of the reporters got a little loud and obnoxious as Old Blanchard gave way to Valmouth Road, which was an unfortunately hilly thing but quite unavoidable. The people along the route who themselves had begun to sympathetically walk alongside Frederick (always at a respectful distance) were quieter. They did not ask constantly where this journey was headed or how his feet were holding up. By about the eight-mile mark, there were thirty or so of them. By dusk, toward the end of the trek, there were probably more like a hundred. No one carried anybody else, but they were fascinated all the same and kept pace admirably. The reporters and camera people filled in the missing bits of the story themselves, having found out who Lenore was very quickly, and perhaps not quite so easily able to find much of tragic interest in Frederick’s story. Someone went to talk to the woman who had left him one week before, and though she was reportedly close-lipped about him, that pretty much made the picture complete. Lenore twice whispered in Frederick’s ear that she could not let him go on, that he was obviously in a great deal of pain and she wanted to be let go, wanted to take a cab the rest of the way. He refused. To ease her mind that he was doing fine, he skipped a break or two and tried to walk faster. His right foot became a real problem due to substandard soles and he was not able to hide it. He was thankfully free of cramps, but increasingly the discomfort in his shoulders and his spine was working its way into his chest, and he felt his breaths becoming shorter between the breaks he did take. It was chilly and quite autumnal but he was sweating a great deal. Lenore did not want to get back into his arms just one mile from her mother’s house. He said nothing, just held them out before him and nodded. The effort it took to raise them that much caused his entire body to shake. She climbed back up onto him, and saw that his eyes were wet with effort and strain. Her sickly mother was deeply asleep inside the house and it seemed to be waiting for her empty. When Frederick took her up the porch steps and set her down, his mind in a fog of pain, a cheer erupted from the crowd and the reporters ventured closer than they ever had. Frederick turned away from them after Lenore released him from her long embrace, and he said he was sorry but he still didn’t feel much like talking, that maybe he would say something later. He got to the end of the driveway and collapsed. The paramedics were called and everyone swarmed around. Lenore broke through them and held Frederick as tight as she could, speaking his name again and again. He was worked on as he lay there for ten minutes, but there didn’t seem to be anything they could do. Lenore cradled his head in her arms and buried her face in his chest. She had no actual tears, probably because they had all been used up long before. It was strange how the people in the crowd came no closer, considering most of them had seen her on TV and knew she had experienced such loss. It was as if they were afraid to catch what she had. Or maybe it was the puzzled expression on Frederick’s face that kept them back. Death had left him with an open mouth and eyelids that were not quite shut. At any rate, no one came forward to comfort Lenore, and no one spoke a word. Something deep inside her told her to kiss him, once, before they made her come away from there, and this certainly seemed like the traditional poetic thing to do, so she did, once on the lips, as she had been too distraught to do for her first fiancée, and hadn’t been present to do for her second. Frederick came briefly alive again then, his shattered heart waking him at the feel of his burden’s lips, and the crowd was stunned and touched at how fitting that ending should be, how dramatic. But the four words he whispered in Lenore’s ear before he passed away for good, radiant words which managed to wholly renew her life, were heard by no one but the two of them. She went the rest of her days without revealing to anyone what they were, despite the hundreds of calls from people desperate to know, and despite the gentle, unspoken pleadings of the writer who created her. I sit with her some nights beside an imagined fire in a cabin that doesn’t exist, patiently coaxing her thoughts. If she would only confess those words, I could awaken someone of my own, or maybe even the entire world, a chorus of silhouettes I see outside in the freezing dark. I hold Lenore’s hand and I say Please, show me the place in my mind where I hold words like that, I’ve searched for so long, let me find them inside me, let it be my tired hand which writes them, but she is unwilling to forgive the deaths of her lovers to free a single snowbound broken heart.
|