Scraps and Leavings: What I’ve Been Working On

[Image: album cover for Night of the Living Dregs (1979), by the Dixie Dregs]

For some time, I haven’t talked much at all here — anywhere — about what sorts of things I might have been writing since I finished the putative final draft of Seems to Fit, now a couple of years ago. I haven’t talked about it because it’s hard to classify:

No books, certainly not completed ones [Update: see the note at the foot of this post] — although much of what I’ve been writing has (you might say) potential in a bookwards direction. Instead, I have been sort of puttering around with well over a dozen short projects. A handful of these are complete, more or less; most just stop — some in mid-page. I don’t even remember a few of them: the act of writing, or even where the story was headed. But every one of them contains something, some scrap of verbiage and/or some scene or scrap of dialogue, which I was happy to encounter today, as I set about revisiting (not revising) them.

Here are some samples.

—

From a short-short, “Momentum.” (The content of the story is an old-fashioned answering-machine message, several minutes long; the caller is the recipient’s — obviously somewhat elderly — father.)

So your sister drops by last night the way she does. Just checking on you she always says. Don’t misunderstand, I love Becky like I love you. But she’s never just checking, always a real agenda. Oh by the way she says, and it’s head for the hills, Becky’s here.

Least this time wasn’t like last month. The chimney. Creosote! she said then, before “fixing” it, goddammit and I’m sorry son, know you don’t like when I cuss but it still torques me, family room still smells like Vesuvius, last days of Pompeii, half expect petrified bodies curled up behind the goddam sofa. Sorry. Anyways, this time she seemed harmless. Wanted to count the china, she said. How many pieces and complete place settings, she said. Case one of you wanted it someday. Why didn’t I come sit at the table. We could talk, she said. While she counted.

So I sit there, and we talk or she does anyhow while she takes the china out of the sideboard. Piece. By. Piece. Got your mother’s eye for detail, I’ll say that. Takes out a little coffee cup, say, turns it over, checks the label, insignia, whatever, checks the handle, the rim, always holding it in both hands, holds it up to the light like she can see through it. “Talking” to me the whole time but not really talking like — well, someday you retire, you’ll get it.

—

From a story, “The Card”:

For decades, [Webster had] enmeshed himself in a network of worry, every what-if in one direction balanced with a then in another. If a god of mishap so much as sighed on the far side of town, the whole elaborate construction would vibrate, subtly, setting little warning bells a-jingle; alerted, Webster could bring everything back into nervous stasis (if not exactly harmony) by tugging slightly on this, that, and the other wire over here.

Or so he’d thought. But it wasn’t a network of wires. It was a garment of yarn. The whole structure didn’t suddenly spring apart, and it didn’t collapse in a discordant avalanche of bings and sprongs, like the sounding board of a piano hitting the sidewalk. No:

One tiny filament of attention, stretched one too many times, finally wore out — slackened just a bit. Elsewhere, a strand caught on something sharp and immovable.

It was just enough to tip the balance. Webster unraveled.

—

From an untitled story:

But no passengers emerged. The baggage handler, having waited a full two minutes, grew impatient — the suitcases and duffel bags were stacked along the walls — and he moved to the door of the plane to see if he could help move things along more quickly and efficiently. Just before he reached the door, the first passenger came through the door. He assumed it to be a passenger — there was no sign of a uniform or other official insigniae — but it was hard to tell for sure. The thick gauzy web in which the fellow was wrapped, head to toe, was just a little too thick and gauzy to reveal any clothing at all. He groaned, and fell over at the baggage handler’s feet.

—

From “Open and Shut,” a (long) science-fiction mystery, a la The Thin Man:

Missy meets us at the door to Shawn Dodd’s room. She’s wearing my favorite jumpsuit, the blue sleeveless one which looks like it unzips to here (but I know better — it actually unzips to here, hence my favorite), and around her waist is a sash with a little closed pouch at her waist. On another woman the pouch might contain cosmetics or something of even more mysterious purpose. On Missy, I suspect a flask occupies the pouch.

—

From a story, “The Lift”:

There were four [elevators], each a free-standing, forty-eight-story cylinder of brushed steel and glass, connected to the various floors by way of narrow catwalks suspended over the giant atrium. (Webster did the math: four elevators times forty-eight stories equaled one hundred ninety-two catwalks. Because each catwalk ran from the shaft to each of the forty-eight floors at a ninety-degree angle from the catwalks above and below it, the air over the atrium seemed to bristle with wires.)

Furthermore, when the brochures and travel guides used the word cylinder they meant exactly that, including the wall in which the doors were set; each pair of doors described not a flat plane but an arc, and at each destination floor they whispered into the surrounding walls by way of a cunning system of pulleys and wheeled tracks hidden in the ceiling and floor.

Worse, much worse in fact, not only the walls of the compartment but the doors themselves were made of high-tensile-strength glass — standing inside, you were surrounded by glass, in one smooth, transparent, three-hundred-sixty-degree circle of throbbing acrophobic potential. From the outside, above and below the passenger compartment, the elevators appeared to be steel or aluminum, but in fact this was a special effect, cleverly directed lighting on all sides and within the glass itself creating the illusion of reflective metal and hiding the ugly system of cables-and-pulleys which raised and lowered the things. At night, they dimmed all the lights in the atrium except the lights in the passenger compartments; when all four were running then, the atrium resembled a lava lamp of gold and silver, with four little delicate bubbles going uuuuup and doooown slowly, independently, in mid-air.

—

From a story, “The Stitch”:

Webster had backed a comfortable distance into his sixties before he ever even considered writing it all down. By “it,” he meant it: everything, all the shames and reluctances of his youth, the false starts of adulthood, the abortive enthusiams of advancing age, and his reflections on what — if indeed anything — it had all meant.

—

From “Gas Day,” a story which might possibly turn into a novel:

You heard it then too, I know. You heard it even if actually in the midst of it, even if powerfully distracted by your other senses (one in particular). You heard it if you were deaf as a brick, even if you had no ears at all, because anyone with a skeleton “heard” it in his or her bones. But here’s what the moment was like for me:

It began as a dull roar, apparently from the direction of the campus. (It took a few minutes to appreciate that it came from everywhere at once — that the sound from the buildings before us had just reached us before the sound from elsewhere.) I broke stride, and Mose plowed into me from behind because he too had heard it and forgotten to pay attention to where he was going. He didn’t apologize; I didn’t ask or expect him to. We were still listening to it. It: the rolling thunder of several thousand feet running in the same direction, across old wooden floors and newer tiled ones. Not all the feet were running, we later learned: some were hitting rooftops and the ground as their owners leapt from greater heights, and others b-b-b-bumping down stairways. As we listened, we heard smaller sonic punctuation marks, so to speak, bangs and pops which we would later understand as windows being flung open or smashed, doors banging into hallways, the pounding of restroom stalls as their occupants fell against the walls in their haste to exit, the frantic-rodent squeaking of wheelchairs.

—

From Ravel and Fray, apparently a science-fiction novel about which I remember pretty much nothing at all:

Young Master Ned Ravel first saw young Miss Vivian Fray across a ballroom, at the end of the week-long celebration of young Queen Victoria’s engagement to her young consort-to-be, Barid Scatterjee. And almost no one had heard of the Göteborg Breach, let alone ridden it to the stars.

—

From Harzbeest, a middle-grade fantasy:

“Do you have a crush on [our meteorology professor] Dr. Woodson?”

The pink-and-blonde-haired girl had, unbidden, plunked her dinner tray down on the cafeteria table across from Grey, interrupting his reading. He fixed her with a glare.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know let’s see: A, She’s very pretty. And B, you seem to hang around her a lot. And C, I saw you get all defensive when I asked her a question this afternoon.” She put a potato chip in her mouth, chewed in contemplation as she watched Grey’s face for a couple of seconds. “It was a test, see? Don’t worry. You passed. And I completely under—”

“That’s a very shrewd guess,” Grey said. “Very insightful. But totally wrong. She’s my aunt. I live with her and my uncle. Got any more theories or are you done for the day?”

—

From Beyond the Bridge, a, umm, I guess you could call it an urban fantasy/SF novel:

Overhead, at an angle and among a sky whose black near-emptiness made it impossible to ignore but easy to forget: a silver bite-line of moon. Good. A full moon or a new one would have obligated him to certain responsibilities of ritual, routine, nods and bowings to history and the culture — the cult — of community. Tonight he needed solitude. Tonight he needed a focus inward, not upon himself but upon negotiating the hard, gritty surface beneath the pads of his feet. The potential for traps. The sudden long low fast rumble which would tell him the night had betrayed him, double-crossed him, masked not just his own approach from one end but that of someone — something — from the other.

He paused, raised his head, sniffed at the breeze passing over him from the direction he faced. Cool air. A little damp, with a touch (distant, old) of fetor. Not a single molecule saying anything but: empty.

Good. Very good.

—

From Benny, a maybe-novel:

Anyone even remotely tuned into American popular culture back then [mid-twentieth-century America] remembers the Green Goliath craze. It began with the comic book adventures, of course — not improbably borrowing from other colossal-green-superhero story lines (and perhaps angling for an endorsement deal with a certain producer of canned and frozen vegetables). The twist: Green Goliath was a girl, the alter ego of a high-school cheerleader named Betty Ringer. (As brilliant as she was pretty and perky, Betty Ringer had suffered the side-effects of a science-fair project gone wrong; the whole “accident” had been engineered by her nemesis, Holly Simon, who— but you don’t need those details.) From the comic books, the Green Goliath phenomenon had spread to a Saturday-morning cartoon series, and products out in the real world: Halloween costumes, of course, but also toys (both Betty Ringer and Holly Simon dolls and Green Goliath action figures), a board game, an interesting sort of bubble gum which grew in volume and turned lurid green as you chewed it, even a Songs of the Green Goliath LP record album. Boys as well as girls hitched rides on the Green Goliath train. Politicians and parents pronounced Betty Ringer and the Green Goliath suitable role models for their children. The publisher of the Green Goliath stories subscribed to the Comics Code, but everyone agreed that in this case, the Code was superfluous. (Betty Ringer had a sort-of boyfriend — the nerdy, androgynous Mickey Wilson — but no one in his right mind ever imagined them kissing.)

—

I have no idea what to make of all this.

_____________________________

Addendum: In fairness to myself, when I say I haven’t been working on any complete books I mean any new complete books. I’ve continued to fiddle with Seems to Fit — especially the first chapter, especially the first couple of pages — and I’ve also re-opened Merry-Go-Round. (I’d dropped the latter in a spate of foolish optimism that the world was changing, rendering its premises irrelevant. Hahahaha: foolish insect.)