Category: writing

Excerpt from The Novel Paradox, author unnamed

It all started with the notes. Everything starts with notes. In the early days he was swept up so briskly by the preliminary ideas that it was almost like possession, as if he suddenly belonged to someone or something else. He was no longer an autonomous creature but forever subservient to the novel, that nefarious plaything between his ears. But even then it took him three months to fill an entire notebook with his first sketches of The Nerve of Time, the characters and their illustrations, the storylines, outlines of intersection, flow charts of time travel and its implications upon the narrative. He wrote as he’d never written before, in a frenzy of words and different inks, a pain in his hand and wrist that, when he wasn’t writing, he was rubbing.

And now at the very end he writes through the pain, he sweats and grinds his teeth, he mumbles in tongues, and the pain rushes from his hand to his head in a zip line of white fire but he keeps writing, his little room stacked with notebooks, all used, the order of them long lost, with new words flooding new blank lined pages by the hundreds. Now he fills at least one of those notebooks each day, his handwriting coarse and illegible, his face a mask of terror.

November 11, 2015
The elusive poem

I-80 was a graveyard. Or it was me that died. Not until I reached Nevada did I pull free of my descent into nothingness to realize I hadn’t turned on the radio all day. The intent was to drive all the way into Reno but I was exhausted, I felt lost. I decided to take the Elko exit and rest for the night.

*

I set my bag on the floor of the room and washed my face, studying my reflection in the glass. I looked like someone else. Harvey came in to sniff around. The bed seemed clean and I sat on the edge of it, listening. I got up and looked in the bathroom and underneath the bed. I looked in the closet. I closed the shades on the window and played with the air conditioning. I was certain I was being watched, there was a camera hidden somewhere in the walls, the dusty bureau, the digital clock on the nightstand showing the wrong time in garish red.

*

I left the room and walked toward the nearest casino’s faded neon through the parking lot and down a shadowed back street, feeling pairs of eyes crawling all over me. I shouldn’t have come this way, I whispered, and I could smell the desert out there in the dark, endless and spectral. There was no moon. An older model sedan pulled slowly out of the motel lot behind me with its lights off and crawled up the road like a wounded animal. Shit, I said, quickening my pace. No one will ever find me out here in the desert. No one will know where to look.

The sedan crept closer until it was right beside me. I took one step away from the road and stopped, turning to see the face of my executioner through the windshield, but all the windows were tinted black and the sedan crept past me toward the frontage road where it turned right and sped out of sight with its lights on.

*

At the casino I ordered the buffet special and everything tasted like wood. I went to the bar and ordered a soda and watched a soccer game when a stranger walked up and sat at the stool next to me and said, You’re staying at the Ruby Inn, right?

He had a faded Red Sox cap on and he was dressed in all denim—a blue denim jacket faded and worn, matching blue jeans, white denim Converse shoes, and I said: What was that?

The motel down the street, he said. You’re staying there tonight, aren’t you?

I wanted to say, Leave me alone, please, I’m not in the mood, I don’t want to talk to you or anyone else, I don’t want to hear about your travels, your life, your troubles, I don’t want any unexpected gifts, not tonight, but instead I just said: Yeah, that’s right.

Name’s Dan, he said, and gave me his hand to shake. I looked at it and thought about it before shaking it. It was warm and moist.

Look, man, I said. I don’t mean any disrespect or anything. But I kind of just want to be left alone.

It’s cool, he said. It’s cool. I’m sorry to have bothered you. He stood to leave and then said, I just wanted to tell you that little lady over there wants to buy you a drink.

He pointed to a tall blonde standing between two rows of electric slot machines. Dan walked away and I looked at the woman and half smiled. She walked up and sat next to me at the bar, wearing jeans and heels and a silky looking black tank.

Hi, she said. Sorry about that. I’m Jade.

The bartender came over to us, as if on cue.

The lighting was good on her. She may have been a bit older, but you had to try and find it. She smelled like baby powder and perfumed lotion and I wanted to rub my head all over her. She reminded me of Gloria, only this woman was far less appealing. For some reason a pang of sadness slid through me like a blade.

I’ll take a red beer, and whatever she’s having, I said to the bartender.

My mother used to drink those, Jade said. She had one with her toast every morning.

Sounds like a decent lady, I said. I was suddenly very tired.

The bartender poured our drinks and returned to his corner, eyeing me. Jade looked up at the TV and so did I and both of us tapped a finger on the bar and sipped our drinks and then looked at each other, smiling awkwardly.

Hot night, she said.

Yeah, I said. Electronic gambling machines beeped and buzzed everywhere and from a speaker somewhere in the room a Johnny Cash song played quietly, listless, as if he had written and performed it in his sleep.

Listen, she said, leaning toward my face, her lips at my ear. You want some pussy tonight or what?

I coughed. I spilled a bit of my drink and tried to wipe it up. I’m sorry, I said.

Jade smiled.

I’m sorry.

Okay, she said. It’s okay.

The bartender stayed in his corner, watching.

You know, you’re a very attractive woman and everything, I said. But I just want to be alone tonight. I’m sorry.

It’s okay, she said, smiling. Suit yourself, cowboy. But I was gonna give you the pretty boy discount. She got up from her stool and walked away, and it wasn’t until I saw her in motion from behind that I began to regret my decision. Again I thought of Gloria. I ordered a cheeseburger to go for Harvey and finished my beer, walking the long way back to my room and thinking that Elko, Nevada, was the type of place where nothing good ever happens, where beasts feed upon other beasts, gristle flapping in their gums. It’s the type of place where a man could lose his mind and his money and then find himself in a shallow grave outside of town.

*

The television casts a pale blue glow about the dark room. A young black man sits in front of a window, an image of sun and clouds. The video camera holds him from the middle of his chest upward.

I always saw myself dying at a young age, says the man on camera. I dreamed about it. I knew I’d die violently one day.

He has green eyes and black hair, cut very short. He could be anyone, your neighbor, your pastor, your assistant professor, your cousin in Michigan. Everyone has a cousin in Michigan.

Let me ask you something everyone wants to know, a woman’s voice says from off camera. The producer cuts to her. She’s facing the man. Even though the picture doesn’t show it, you can tell she’s a reporter, sitting cross-legged, a lap full of notes, a ballpoint nestled in her hand. She’s Asian-American, young, pretty. She wears a serious expression. This is her moment.

Do you feel remorse? she says.

The camera cuts back to the man. He casts his eyes downward in contemplation. The lens zooms slowly toward his face. There are scars, wrinkles. His skin is dark, in contrast with the white wall behind.

Twenty-one people, the reporter says, off camera. That’s twenty-one families without a loved one. Twenty-one communities forever changed.

The man looks up to the reporter seated across from him, his eyes distant, as if he’s trying to remember something. He clenches his jaw.

I feel nothing, he says, and looks into the camera. I turn the TV off.

*

I didn’t sleep well and walked outside at dawn to sit on the sidewalk with Harvey. A carful of kids sped into the lot and parked in front of a room a few doors down. A young woman drove and she got out of the car, a tiny dog trembling in her arms. The other doors of the car opened and three young men stumbled out, howling drunk. They laughed and pushed each other onto the ground rolled around while the girl smiled at them, shaking her head. She smoked a thin cigarette and looked like a stripper recently off stage, now wearing sandals and shorts and a pink tank. She was dead sober. One of the young men saw me and said, Hey man.

I waved.

Nice dog, he said, looking at Harvey. The tallest of the men finally got the key in the lock and held open the door for his buddies and then the girl. This is it, the tall young man said to her, and she walked in. He walked in right behind her, thrusting his hips and smiling at me.

*

Soon I was back in the desert driving through that barren land of god with my mind striding varied paths without restraint. I thought about those young guys back at the motel in Elko and how they were probably going to wake up with the worst headaches of their lives and their wallets missing. I couldn’t pick up anything on the radio, so I put in a Chet Baker disc and let it play for a minute and then I took it out and slid in Coltrane’s Interstellar Space and turned it up to maximum volume, the speakers barely able to contain the sound, and what a metaphor for life, I thought, not just my own life but everyone’s, from the people trapped in the ghettoes of Chicago to the wife-killing bourgeoisie in Connecticut, and perhaps it was due to my unexpected close contact with Jade or my fogged and bittersweet memories of Gloria, perhaps it was the fact that it had been such a terribly long time since I’d been with a woman, for my mind retreated again to my wife, just as it had the previous night while lying in bed with my eyes open and cast upward with a crushing and sustained longing bracing me and breaking me down into molecules. The Jeep sped through reinforced gales and winding rock canyons, and with the sun and clouds high in the pale blue I felt like an insect between two worlds, on my back, legs kicking and flailing. I tried to remember a poem I read once about time travel, I think it was Neruda, and how the poem made me feel sick because it was so visceral, reading it was like traveling through time (or the bowels of a demon, which is the same thing). I think it was Neruda but it could have been someone else, maybe Rimbaud. If only I could remember the poet who wrote it, I thought, and forget all those other things. If only I could lose myself in a poem right now, lose myself in this rocky desert with its small towns the size of city blocks, their names a sick communion of native reverence and white investment, and if only I could remember the name of that poem or what year it was published, maybe it was William Carlos Williams, though that seems improbable, If only I could remember the period in which it was written I’d feel better, this aimless sauntering through our desolate homeland, and the next time I have an instinct about a town like Elko I’m going to heed the advice of my instinct, it’s not done me wrong in the past, and then suddenly the image of my father’s naked body ramming my wife from behind surfaces in my mind and I grit my teeth, I push the accelerator into the floor, forcing the new machine to pull even harder, coursing its limits out here in the desert where not even ghosts loiter to see what happens next. I’ve forgotten what it’s like, how anger can propel a person’s spirit into something like ecstasy, guide them magnetically back toward their most primal impulses and reactions. I look into the rearview and Harvey’s back there panting, panting. What he must feel like out here on these open roads, all these unfamiliar fragrances. It must be something like heaven, I thought. The CD finishes and I restart it and turn it up louder, totally distort the sound, slashing through graveyard cone zones at ninety miles an hour. I dreamed of this place once, I say aloud, and it’s true. This road, the way it dogs left onto a low bridge over the thin vein of black water, I’ve been here and seen this, under this very light. And where does this feeling come from, what is the nature of déjà vu? We have to figure this out, as a culture, this should be one of our top scientific priorities because the speculation and conjecture are killing me. If only I could be certain the poem was written by Lowell and not, say, Kerouac, or maybe Creeley or Richard Hugo, and goddammit I should read more books: I must be American.

Down into immense sun bleached valleys like the landscape of other planet I wish I could remember just one line from that poem, just to resurrect the dead feeling, and then I think of feelings and with a sudden clarity I understand that all feelings are dead once we cease to feel them and begin to contemplate their effect upon us, fucking poets, and I turn down the speakers to hear the Jeep’s engine tug at the concrete, tug at the past, and where are all the cops? I’ve been driving over a hundred miles an hour for at least twenty miles and nothing, no cops on the shoulder with their miscalibrated radar guns and questionable ethics, and I can see no reason to decelerate until I arrive in Sparks. I have a sudden urge for ice cream and poetry and I want to know what was the purpose my wife could have had to tear down everything we’d built together. I was out of water to drink and I scolded myself for not sleeping with that prostitute back there, I should have done it, I should have slept with her, I should have undressed her quickly and fucked her without delay, I should have done it ruthlessly, cathartically, repeatedly through the night, paying whatever I needed to pay, money or spirit, spirit or money. I should have made her in every way possible and left her sweating and trembling, unable to speak or move, and I should have walked out of that motel room straight into the bare desert but I never do the things I should do. If only I could remember one word from that mysterious poem, just one word.

I reach back to the camera case behind my seat and after a few clumsy moments I’m able to extract the hardware and I start filming as I drive. I film the endless desert on my right with the wind roaring in my ears and I film the desert to the left rimmed in the distance by low dark hills. I film the road as it unfolds before me at ninety, at eighty, at seventy miles an hour, I film Harvey asleep in the back with the wind congealing patches of his fur, I film myself, smiling, consternate, aloof, and I feel rejuvenated, as if closing in on a city in the desert is like departing the desert altogether. The air is charged with anticipation as I approach Reno, a metaphysical preoccupation, it smells sweeter and somehow used. An increased volume of vehicles on the road forces me to slow the Jeep down. I’ve never been so happy to see a billboard: EAT WITH YOUR HANDS (AND MOUTH) AT EARL’S, EXIT 224. The desert recedes gradually, or it appears so, replaced by shacks and nondescript two-story buildings, frontage roads and traffic lights blinking yellow, railroad tracks with strings of railcars on them, silent, immobile. SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL CHAPTER OF KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS. There’s cloud cover over the city, as if humans have dictated the troposphere and created our own weather systems. REST YOUR HEAD ON OUR EGYPTIAN COTTON PILLOWS, EXIT 227. The gas tank is nearly empty and I consider stopping to refill but decide to push on to Reno, TREE GIRL LIVES, it’s only a few more miles down this long and winding road, and I tell myself the first thing I’m going to do after I park and refill and let Harvey out to piss, the first thing I’m going to do after I stretch and drain a bottle of ice water, ENSANADA CASINO—BEST LITTLE JOYRIDE IN AMERICA, EXIT 227, the first thing I’m going to do after I prove to myself that I’m alive and the past four hours on this road haven’t been some drawn-out nightmare journey down a dehydrated road to spiritual entropy, the first thing I’m going to do is pretend that none of it ever happened.

October 23, 2015
Deconstructionist, pt. IV

Sunlight at my window wakes me. I sit then stand, feeling the blood bound through my body, familiar aches at my back, my shoulder. The floor is cold beneath me. I reach for a glass of water and see the notebook stark atop the white wood of the nightstand. I wonder why I remember the notebook but can’t remember my name.

Writing began as an exercise last winter but quickly developed into something much different, the nature of which eludes me still. I never wrote much of anything up to that day in January when I happened on an empty notebook in my library and began, at a colleague’s recommendation, to write down my fondest memory. Thus what I remembered of the Trankworth’s unveiling in L.A. unfurled from my consciousness with immediacy, as if water poured from a bucket, and my memories, granular in detail, inundated the pages of the notebook.

I wrote as I remembered, adding and supplanting for clarity, precise and meticulous with details so as to insure them, immortalize them, never again worry about chasing them through the narrowing corridors of memory.

Next I turned my attention to other memories and attacked them with equal zeal and attention, starting with the most powerful and lucid, using the notebook as collector, curator, friend. I cursed myself for not having thought to catalog my memories earlier. Emotions overwhelmed me. Details obsessed me. My attention gradually shifted to language as I beheld a newfound appreciation for and devotion to its nuances, its capabilities. I broke it down to fragments to better understand and utilize it for my memories, my notebook.

The project inspired in me a renewed sense of purpose after all had once seemed lost. I wrote with energy, violent when necessary, using the pages as scratchboard, bandage. Never before had I known the intimacy possible between man and page.

In the kitchen I forget how I like my coffee and drink it black, writing about a dream from last night: I’d been commissioned as a young man to design and build a clock tower in Sweden in collaboration with a pair of renowned Swedes hired to build the clock. Men were contracted and materials were purchased and the project proceeded on time and budget until the Swedes abruptly bailed near completion, leaving me to either complete the tower without the clock or try and build the clock myself.

Rather than proceed sensibly I chose instead to try building the clock, attacking it with more passion than I placed in the tower, working all day and deep into nights with the gears and levers of the clock until a system emerged. The tower’s public unveiling approached and I wasn’t near completion, insisting the tower be opened without fanfare or celebration while I continued to solve the riddle of the clock. At dream’s end I’d become an old man still living on a small mattress in the top of the tower, working tirelessly at his obsession, and later, just a rumor or vapor on the neck of someone tasked with cleaning out the abandoned tower where that sad man once lived.

Sunlight fades at the kitchen window and I rub the pain from my hand, scanning my mind for memories to transcribe. I contemplate everything I’ve forgotten and finish the coffee, ready to begin the day. In the library a meager wooden shelf supports the notebooks. I think of all the duplicated memories written inside them, wondering if it’s just the same few repeated over and over. Why continue this kaleidoscopic mockery of the past if not to lose myself deeper in the labyrinth?

Days are casual. Dusk signals pensive marathons by candlelight. Time is the anti-rhythm of scratching on pages as if scratching at the earth, but to uncover what?

August 22, 2015
Convalescence

If you’re reading this, it’s February third, or at least the nurse told me it’s February third, and since I’ve got no other choice than to believe her, it must indeed be February third. I’ve been in a clinic for the past several hours, lying supine in an uncomfortable bed with fluorescent lights stitching the ceiling, casting the room in violent unnatural white. An electric glow washes over everything, casting out all darkness. They’ve removed a bullet from my right shoulder, or fragments of a bullet. I am not hurt badly. According to the nurse I am lucky to be alive, and perhaps she wasn’t speaking about the bullet but more or less life in a broader sense. You’re lucky to be alive, she said, but then again that’s a relative statement, something a person would say when they don’t know you. If I am lucky to be alive, then what does that say about luck?

I’m leaving the clinic in two days, they say, which will make it February fifth. If you’re reading this. I feel fine, if a bit sore. Please don’t worry about me, I’ll recover and will be on the road again soon, delivering parcels and scratching in this notebook. The pain medication has me drowsy. I’m getting older, Jennifer. But then so are you. But you’re not reading this.

*

Through the battered rectangular doorway three security police walk the hall of the clinic with their authority on display. Hush precedes and lags behind them. The uniformed men have sidearms looped in their belts, standard-issue black hats snug atop heads shielding eyes that scan the halls and peer suspiciously into rooms. They’re looking for someone. The clinic seems at capacity. I lie watching and wonder what they know about me, if anything, what they’ve heard through the wire, because we’ve all had our name sung upon that current at one point or another. We have all been targeted at least once.

I need to get back on the road. One of the bullet parts embedded an inch into my deltoid muscle. A deep, dull pain pulses through my right side as I move the pen across the page. The nurse has stated her displeasure at my insistence to write. I’m going to need to rebuild my strength, one word, one line at a time.

July 10, 2015
Daily affirmation

Hush blankets the world after the storm, it conceals the chaos and the strain, the turmoil and the truth of the world. Everything sets in the silence to renew again. What few leaves remain on branches bob in the breeze. The sun shines slanting downward in the late afternoon and colors explode everywhere, softly, in delighted whisper. There is only calm and reflection, controlled anticipation as white and lucid as the environment itself. Even the insects take respite. Without moments like this, life on Earth might be unbearable, oppressive. We heal after digging free of the storm, we move forward, ready for anything.

I wear a light jacket and walk through the morning glow gathering wood as if I belonged here. Nothing belongs. We’re all itinerants. Man can make no claim here. The only moral obligation is survival. Voices up the hill weave through days intermittently and I spy them over the rifle barrel. In spring I collect roses and wildflowers and put them in glass jars of water because it makes me feel normal.

There are no hobbies. Every moment of the day is spent doing what must be done. If there’s any time to spare beyond that, I’m doing something wrong. Laundry, hunting, water from the well. Cleaning, cooking. I find peace in the daily routine of necessary tasks. Every now and then a quiet cup of coffee at the window. Clean the guns and grease them up. Walk the grounds, check the traps. Sweep the floor. I trick myself into thinking I hear voices and I investigate. The air is cold, it sharpens the mind.

The baby cries in the night and the woman rouses me. She’s tired of seeing to the child. I can’t blame her. I put on my robe and the woman’s red hair spreads over her pillow like tapestry. In the sitting room the baby shouts for something, for someone. I pick the baby girl up out of her crib and hold her, telling her everything’s okay, hush, everything’s going to be okay.

January 29, 2015
Letter to a (non) reader

Dear Jennifer, I know you won’t read this, wherever you are, stuck in the muddy waters of your consciousness, if you’re alive at all. I dream of you often, I dream that you have wrinkles in your face and that you’re still in the village. I imagine you’re married, maybe for the second time. You’ve got three grown children and four grandchildren and you’re happy or at peace despite the frailty in the world around you. I imagine we converse, we’re seated in your sitting room across from one another after all these years, each of us hardly recognizable to the other. The floor is bare wood and the walls of the room are decorated with framed photos, and I say, You’ve changed.

As have you.

You haven’t strayed from the village.

No, I haven’t.

Have you thought of me?

Every now and then.

Do you remember our times together?

I have a hard time.

It was a long time ago.

Yes it was.

—and it would continue like that for hours, tentatively at first and then even slower, for we who no longer recognize whom we have loved quickly run out of things to say. But I know you’re not reading this, Jennifer, your eyes will not ever scan these lines. No one will read these words and that is as it should be. Perhaps Jorge will stumble upon them by accident one day or night and the idea of that is torture enough for me. Much of what’s in these notebooks is nonsense, meaninglessness, without value, word games and random emotion, detailed illustrations of the curse upon the infinitude of the private man. The more frivolous the words and ideas, the closer they originate in the most interior part of the self, the most private, intimate, secret room in the mind. Every writer has these notebooks or heaps of scraps that expose his many weaknesses as an artist but also as a man. The notebooks become a worthless catalog of futility that upon completion he avoids and wishes to destroy. He regards his notebooks with embarrassment. All of his pages and papers are full of affirmations and doubts and worthless blood oaths of nothing and everything that enter (exit) the mind of a person who writes to validate his life.

It is a privilege to converse with you in your sitting room near your fireplace with photos of your family framed on the wall. It’s cozy here. Everyone in your family has your eyes, except your husband, of course, and maybe there’s a photo of you as a girl, the Jennifer I remember, freckles and dresses, dirty feet, the youth stripped away bare by consequences we inherited, and you’ll look at all the scars on my body and know exactly how I got them. The scar beneath the left eye now browned and hardened with age, you’d know it was a fight I had with a landlord in the Appalachians. You’d know it because I wrote it in a notebook and sent it to you. You’d know about the scar up the inside of my right forearm and the whore in Denver who cut me when I grabbed her. You’d know because I wrote and confessed. I wrote it just as it happened. But what you wouldn’t know, Jennifer, is that I cried as I wrote you—

It’s okay.

No, it was wrong of me. I am a bad person. I have done terrible things. I have killed and harmed and still I write with you in mind if only from a smoky vantage. Though you’ll never read the words. Of course you have a husband, your second, and he constructs things, he’s a carpenter or an architect, a practical man who knows the world needs more builders. You try to help your community through its unbearable winters and flawless crepuscular moments and you worship in some crystallized place of quietude. It seems so foreign and forgotten to me. You and I sit across from one another in your sitting room with coffee cooling in mugs in our hands and we talk about the affairs of the world or maybe we don’t. We realize almost immediately how far apart we have grown, how different we are. It seems we never knew each other. I am suddenly incredulous, stupefied. My memory is fractured and incomplete and I might not have known you at all but invented you through the years as a way to protect myself, to dissociate from the danger and chaos around me. I invented the village in the Tetons, I invented my adoptive parents, I fabricated those discussions with you on the hill at sunset. All of it, a dream, a lie to myself. I cannot distinguish real memories from those I’ve invented, so elusive my past and identity are. Maybe Jorge is the true Jennifer, he’s the real intended recipient of these notebooks, and even he just a complex invention or delusion.

I won’t offend your sense of decorum, Jennifer, I won’t mention the brutality I’ve witnessed, the catalogue of failed moral judgments, because I am not a perfect man. You’d know this because I wrote to you, I wrote it all down for you with blood and dirt in the cracks of my hands. I told you everything; I held nothing back. In this sense you know me better than I know myself, you know my secrets and delusions and I know nothing about you. I am wide open beneath the cold blade of your scrutiny, sentenced to a panopticon of my own design.

Maybe you should leave.

Of course.

Please.

Is it because I stopped writing to you? Because I stopped sending the notebooks?

I’ll scream.

—and I deserve your screams, Jennifer. Howl and scream and remind me that you’re alive, that I’m not inventing this. I should not have stopped sending my notebooks. I should have always kept you close, always just a pen stroke away. I can reach out across the light and touch you. You’re so cold. What happens when we go, Jennifer? What happens when the eyes cease to glitter and our minds race dreamless into oblivion? What happens when there are none of us left to roam this place and drain its resources? What happens when our languages hush with us? Thunder echoes in fragmented mosaic and the human cadence is weak in response. Could our direct forebears have known they were living in the penultimate age?

Some of us are so convinced of our fate. What happens when our wells dry up, when the world is finally free of the human stain? We can’t all of us be certain of the fate of the human species, Jennifer. Or better — we can’t all of us live to see the truth (or untruth) of our respective beliefs. What happens to the planet then? There will be wind and seasons and there will be the Earth’s only true enlightened creature, the sea, for the sea is not ever surprised despite its eternal metamorphosis. The sea, though it always changes, remains forever unchanged—

December 26, 2014
Letter to a reader

Today I received a letter from a reader in Canada, asking if I’d ever read The Book of God. My news stories were lopsided, the reader wrote, and it seemed as if I’d never actually read the sacred text. I was a traditionalist sympathizer, or worse, a secret secularist, working for the other side.

My intent has always been to make it clear that I work for no side. Yes, I am employed by the New Collective, which maintains unique autonomy in the global environment of information control. They offer meager pay but protection and the freedom to write as I wish. The words that readers see in the New Collective have been reviewed and reshaped (and often heavily chopped) by gatekeepers and editors who fashion the original message into something new, approved for readers, aligned with the New Collective’s editorial mission.

I usually ignore the few letters I receive from readers and discard them without a thought. But when I do occasionally read one I’m not pleased with what I’ve read and it’s ultimately a waste of time because most readers have no energy or passion in their thoughts, there is no love or power or presence. I’m not upset when readers are critical of my work; I will always defend healthy criticism and discussion. The problem is that the letters are sabotaged by poor organization, sluggish prose, wildly inconsistent grammar, and puerile use of language in what basically amounts to a list of avid personal attacks. Most messages are critical in all the wrong ways, ultimately empty, useless, a waste of time.

But as this particular letter arrived from Canada, a home of mine for many years after having fled my childhood village, I read it and chose to respond. This is what I answered privately:

Dear reader, the first time I read The Book of God I didn’t understand it. I tried. It took two days of reading and rereading, and my first reaction was that it was incomplete. An adaptation of god’s words spoken through man, or so they say, the chosen son: an unknown and unauthenticated person of male or female gender writing from somewhere inside former Argentina. Sexless, they say. I read it after leaving the courier’s guild of North America to begin working for the New Collective. I remember hearing the story about this sexless child who could heal the sick and summon rain during drought. A demigod who could redirect streams of water to where it was needed and sate the hunger of its admirers when resources were hopelessly low. All of this according to legend, and all unauthenticated. Of course I never had the fortune of meeting this person (to date no one claiming to have met the child has been validated), but the stories I encountered pushed me toward the child so that I found myself at the New Collective, chasing leads across the world, a mercenary in the dialogue of ideas. If you’re still reading this.

I am no religious scholar and do not pretend to be. The first time I read The Book of God it seemed to me like any other holy text, though, as I wrote — incomplete. All the traditional elements were in place: stern and merciless (but absent) authority, promises of redemption or punishment, engaging narrative, eschaton. I’ve read it three times, and don’t believe there will be a fourth. My current critical opinion of the text mostly mimics my first impressions of it. Perhaps if more of the text survived, a meaning would emerge for me (for you know as well as I that the “book” is incomplete).

I can understand how some interpret the text as a salvo to rejuvenate a spiritually complacent human race. Perhaps there’s something to that. Religion has failed, they say. Man’s spiritual role in the universe has evolved. For that reason alone I gave your holy text a chance, dear reader. I read it carefully, three times, and it is only after careful thought that I believe the book to be an interesting historical artifact but logically unsound. I also believe the text to have been grossly misinterpreted by those who espouse it.

The world has changed as it always changes. The human experience is a unique emotional phenomenon and people create a framework (or multiple, overlapping frameworks) in which to best interpret and understand it. The Book of God is one of those frameworks. Another is the anonymously penned The Enlightenment Project, the champion of man as the ideal spiritual guide. Or so they say. As I stated before, I am no religious scholar, but isn’t The Enlightenment Project critical of religion, and don’t those who use the Project as a social tool understand the terrible irony in their abuses against worshippers? These questions are further reasons why I believe The Enlightenment Project to have also been dreadfully misinterpreted.

Unfortunately the authors in question are not present in the public forum to comment on the interpretations of their respective works. And so the readers and interpreters interpret and read at will, which is perhaps as it should be.

I signed the letter and delivered it to a courier from the European guild. Then I left to investigate and write another assignment.

December 17, 2014
Excerpt: time machine

In the dream I leaned over a workspace surrounded by bolts and plastic casings and wires, writing and rewriting the user manual for the time machine as I built it. Every part or piece of the machine had a precise function and I used common household items like cloth and a plunger, I whittled hundreds of tiny working gears out of wood and I didn’t sleep for five days. When I was finished the machine stood just over three feet tall and four feet wide and I stood there in my workspace, staring at it. There were parts and wires and fragments of my life strewn everywhere and I pressed a button to set the machine into motion. It vibrated to life in cascades of light and sound and the scent of almonds and I knew it would work, it was inevitable. Then I took a sledgehammer and smashed the machine to pieces.

In the dream I fell asleep upon the broken machine and dreamed again of time travel. In the dream’s dream I fashioned a drug rather than a machine for traveling forward and backward through time, a chemical compound of basic household ingredients in precise measurements, a subatomic cocktail in one compressed pill, and all one had to do to visit the Sixth Dynasty in Egypt was swallow that pill, all one had to do to help fight the imperialist invaders in the great galactic war of 3016 was snort a quick line, and when I woke from both dreams in simultaneity it was dark in my apartment and I didn’t know where I was until I looked out the window to the familiar lights of New York City across the bridge.

November 29, 2014