There should be a novel here.
Said novel would be just north of 60,000 words, in PDF format, complete with a title sheet and Creative Commons license, all nice and neat.
This novel would have been the culmination of thirty days of sweat-filled agony known around the world as National Novel Writing Month. I have participated in this program twice before. The first time, I got halfway through the story and got distracted by life. The second time, I didn’t even bother, for reasons that will be become all too clear..
But not this time, brother – I would finish this effort, no matter the cost. And I did.
So where is the story I wrote, this wonderful pulpy novel that I promised would adorn this page?
That, in and of itself, is a sad and funny story.
Over a year ago, I was doing my usual Saturday thing of cleaning and trying to avoid anything strenuous when a voice from the past called. Her name is Rebecca. I first met Rebecca when she was just a slip of a girl a decade before, which was also the last time I had heard from her, so I was surprised to hear from her at that moment. She was divorced with two children, a pair of rambunctious boys who were the light of her life.
We started chatting over the phone regularly and e-mailed each other pictures and letters, and one thing led to another, as these things were wont to do, and soon I was walking around in a daze like an addled schoolboy, which was a remarkable surprise to all who knew me, because, while I might be prone to saying and doing the odd crazy thing, I’d like to think that I am quite practical in most aspects of my life.
In short, we fell in love.
So I left California and made my way back to the Land of Enchantment last November. I met the girl of my dreams, and the ache of loneliness abated. And for a while, things were good.
But the relationship didn’t last. We finally broke up once and for all in May, and I haven’t heard from her since.
I did my best to put her out of my mind for a time. I found other interests and new things to attempt to fill the gaping hole in my life, but nothing seemed to hold my interest for very long.
And November came around again, and NaNoWriMo beckoned once more. And like a fool, I took up the challenge once again. I figured I would write a little throwaway adventure in short order and finally complete that which I could not in previous years.
I started to write the story, and immediately things went awry. The story became darker as I wrote. I threw away the first draft and started over. Same result. I started over three times before the reason why the story wasn’t working finally hit me.
I had never gotten over Rebecca.
All of that turmoil and anguish and pain was pouring out onto the page, and the result was not one that I wanted.
So I took a break for two weeks. In that time, I gave much thought to what I wanted to write.
And the next time I sat down at the keyboard, I wrote. I wrote about finding lost love and losing it all over again, about great beauty and hidden darkness, about sacrifice and hope and joy and pain. I integrated pieces of the story that had been Rebecca and me into the narrative in a way that was intensely personal, divulging thoughts and feelings that, to this day, no one has ever gotten me to say out loud. Things that I should have said and never should have said, small tender moments forever remembered, all woven around an old song about finding love in the clouds – all of these things were in my story.
I’d like to say that the resulting story was sweeping and epic, majestic and grand, which would bring me untold accolades and heaping praise and maybe even a second chance at love. Alas, it’s just a story, rather pulpy in style and not terribly readable. But it’s my story, and I’m proud to have written it.
Having said that, I resolved, at the very minute I finished it, that no one would ever see read this tale. This story was too personal, too close to my heart. I had never gotten over Rebecca, and the plain fact of the matter is that I probably never will.
And so, this humble little tale sits on a 3.5” floppy (yes, my computer is over six years old and still has a working floppy drive), encoded with a password I’ve never seen and nestled comfortably in a small box on the shelf in my closet. The story is my story, and thus no one will ever see it. The disk will just be one of those strange little pieces of bric-a-brac that I carry with me always, to remind me of what it was like to be in love.
Still, it’s not fair that no one will ever get a small taste of what was written. To that end, I have included here on this page three pieces of previously written short fiction that were included, with some minor alterations, into the story. They won’t give away everything that happened, but they do represent a tiny whisper of what never was.
Also, just for the sake of completeness, I have included the song – our song – here on this page. I can no longer listen to it without tearing up, but it’s still a very nice little song.
Maybe next year, I’ll finally do this NaNoWriMo thing right.
The frail old man in the straw hat cursed the heat of the day. Usually, he was chilled to the bone, but ever since he arrived in Cabo San Lucas, he had been sweating profusely. His threadbare shirt was soaked, and he cursed that, too, thinking of his deceased wife and how much she had loved when he wore one of his burgeoning collection of colorful Cuban-style shirts, especially the black ones. Today, though, the white shirt with floral patterns was marked with perspiration under his armpits and across his chest and back. He took another swig from the water bottle next to him, but the water had grown warm in the heat of the day, and he cursed that, too.
The old man hadn’t been happy about anything in quite some time, not since his dear Rebecca had died.
The old man sat on the bench outside the laundry service, in spite of the heat, and waited. Soon enough, a large white pick-up truck rumbled up to the curb nearby and discharged the family for whom he had been waiting.
The driver was an older man, bent from the pain in his back, but trying his best not to show it. He had a problem with a slipped disc or something like that. Still, the pain didn’t stop the other man from hoisting the large hamper from the bed of his truck and carrying it into the laundry. A short, stout woman, who walked with a slight limp and carried a small bag containing various laundry detergents and accessories, joined him in the laundry. The old man on the bench teared up a bit at the sight of the two of them, but said nothing to either of them.
The third passenger in the truck, though, was the one who got the old man’s attention. The soft young man ambled out of the truck, wearing a floppy straw hat, an old t-shirt that didn’t quiet fit him anymore, equally ill-fitting blue shorts and a very nice pair of battered leather sandals. He wore a frown, as one might expect from lifting heavy, smelly clothes hampers in the heat of a summer in southern Baja, but said little, preferring to listen to the CD player wedged into his pocket.
The old man regarded the young man for a while, wondering how one so young could wear such a frown at such a memorable time in his life. He shook his head and took another drink from the bottle. Then he felt for the envelope in his shirt pocket, as if to remind himself of his purpose there. He closed his eyes and sighed as he found the envelope, remembering better days.
The old man waited until the driver returned from inside the laundry and drove away, and then waited a bit longer until the soft young man walked out of the laundry and made his way down the street towards the internet café a few blocks away. Leaving his nearly empty bottle of water on the bench, the old man slowly dragged himself up and shuffled into the laundry.
No one paid any attention to him, as most of the ladies in the laundry were transfixed on the soap opera on the old black and white TV in the corner. He waited until the younger man entered the laundry, carrying a small book, and plopped himself into a chair near the door and began to lose himself in the novel. The frail old man sat down in the chair next to the younger man and said nothing for a while.
Finally, the old man said, “The movie that they’re going to make from that book won’t be so good.”
The young man looked up from his book and turned off his CD player. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
Grunting, the old man said, “No, just making conversation.”
Nodding, the young man went back to his novel, but kept his music off.
The old man waited for a while, and then closed his eyes and concentrated. Slowly, everything around him – the ladies folding clothes, the soap opera on the television, the birds flying outside, the sounds of traffic in the street – everything came to a grinding halt. Soon, everything stopped moving, even the dust motes in the air.
The old man drew his hand to his shirt pocket and withdrew a small ring capped with a single diamond. He brought the ring to his lips and kissed it gently. He was surprised to find that his face was wet with tears. Carefully placing the ring in the pocket of the young man, he leaned into the young man’s ear and said, “You’ll lose so much over the years. Try not to lose this, too. She’ll never forgive you if you do.”
With that, the old man stood upright, straighter than he had stood in a good many years, and walked out of the laundry. He looked up at the sun, the tears still streaking his face, and a small smile played across his features.
“I did it, sihaya,” he said to no one there.
The world around the laundry restarted its pace without ever noticing that there had been an old man standing there.
In the laundry, the young man began to help his mother fold the warm clothes. As he worked, he noticed something poking him in his thigh. Reaching into his pocket, he found a small ring, something that never had belonged to him.
“Mom, is this one of your rings?” he asked.
The woman looked at the ring and shook her head. “No, it’s not mine. Where did you find it?”
“The strangest thing – I found it in my pocket.”
With that, the young man gave the ring to his mother. She said, “We’ll put up a flyer to see if anyone lost a ring. Otherwise,” she said with a sly smile on her face, “we can save it for when you get married.”
Rolling his eyes, the young man complained, “Knock it off, Mom.” He went back to his folding, tired of the latest reminder of his marital status.
The woman took the ring and placed it in her purse. She didn’t think anyone would miss it, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask. If nothing else, it would make a suitable gift to give her future daughter-in-law.
One day, maybe.
The lights in the small corner store went out one row at a time as the dimunitive owner finally began to close up for the night. All but the dim lights from the coolers were extinguished and, with the same heavy sigh he gave every night, he padded over to the door, stepped outside and locked his shop door and pulled down the heavy metal gate.
Naturally, the store owner never saw me standing square in the middle of his shop, waiting for him to finally return to his little apartment above the store. Then again, no one ever did.
I started moving to the the cooler holding the coffee drinks, which were my favorites, I didn’t have long; at most, I would have only an hour to get what I needed, clear out and get to my favorite spot to enjoy the meal.
I concentrated as hard as I could, focusing on the drinks in front of me, on the door handle of the small cooler. Reaching out slowly, I opened the door, remembering how long it took me to relearn how to do even that small feat.
Soon, but not soon enough, my lunch was arrayed before me - chips, sandwich, cookies and drink; I gathered up my dinner in one of the plastic bags I found in the under the counter. I left enough money on the counter to cover the meal. Money was never a problem now.
I now faced the locked door. This was another thing I didn’t enjoy doing. I closed my eyes every time I had to do it. Here, too, I closed my eyes and took three steps forward before I repoened them.
And I found myself outside the store. The gate and the locked door looked as secure as they had ever been. All around me, the night moved on in a slight blur, like everything around me - the light coming from the street lamps, the bugs flitting around the lights, a stray dog passing by - was moving a few seconds faster than I was.
I sighed and, not for the first time, I wondered if I could ever again connect with the world around me.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I started walking towards the fountain in the park. What once proved to be only a five minute walk took the better part of forty minutes, but I soon found my favorite seat under the fading pale light of the moon. The cool stone of the park bench would have felt reassuring under normal circumstances, but I could not feel it. I could not feel much of anything anymore.
As quickly as I could - but not really quickly at all - I wolfed down the food I had liberated from the store. Like most things in my new life, this took concentration and precious time to effect, but I now had nothing but time. The sky, which had rapidly grown dark as the moon finished its journey across the sky, gradually began to brighten from the deep darkness of the early morning light.
I looked down at my watch as I finished the last of the cookie. Precisely one hour had passed. I was getting better at gauging the time differential. Looking up towards the east, I waited for a second.
As if right on cue, the sun began to peek over the horizon of dirty buildings and brown haze hovering just above the skyline. It wasn’t much of a sunrise, but it never failed to brighten my mood for just a moment. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I enjoyed it all the same.
And then the blur started.
People moved at amazing speeds around me, becoming little more than blurs of motion. Birds swooped overhead at impossible speeds, landing for little more than an instant before taking off faster than my eye could see. Cars zipped by on the street in a giant mesh of color and cacaphony. I could briefly hear the sounds of people laughing and talking and crying and screaming and playing and loving before all of the noise and color and motion became too much for me to bear.
I closed my eyes for just a few moments. When I opened them again, the sun was high above in the midday sky.
Sighly deeply, I got to my feet and began to walk, passing through the people and cars and everything else in between. They passed through easily, or I through they, as if either one really mattered anymore. And I guess it didn’t anymore, not since the accident. Not since the awful bright light and the enormous sound that seemed to grow from all places and from nowhere at all. Not since the day my life changed forever.
I walked, lonely as a cloud, through the world that neither knew me nor cared. I walked through the ghost time once more.
I was sitting on a beach in Mexico, thinking about my cheating ex-wife and trying to enjoy myself, when flashes in the distant sky told me that the world had come to an end.
Cierra and I had been married for almost two years when I came home early on a Tuesday and found her in bed with our best friend, the one who had introduced us to each other and had been her maid of honor at our wedding. I’d like to have thought that I could deal with the situation if she had just told me what was going on, but I had just had my manager at work give me a lecture about the importance of working all of the hours he required without suitable compensation and the reasons why the company had blocked access to all job-hunting websites and personal e-mail accounts at the company, so I probably was not in the best frame of mind to come home and find my wife and best friend experimenting with various rubber implements in our bed.
As it was, she became instantly defensive, telling me in no uncertain terms that the slow collapse of our marriage was mostly my fault, as I was too busy working to pay her the proper attention, which I had in fact been doing, mostly to pay off old debts and keep up the house we had just bought. I also had been extremely negligent in keeping her satisfied in the very location I now found her, apparently, because she started running down a mental list of people who were light-years ahead of me in technique and staying power. I noted, with no small amount of alarm, that she had been tabulating this list for quite some time before we met, and that the list included several of my friends and my manager at work.
Needless to say, her reaction to my discovery of her many infidelities was the clincher in helping me decide what to do next. I turned on my heel without saying a word, packed an old backpack I kept in the garage with some clothes, my phone and my moleskine, which contained every bit of personal paperwork I would need to start a new life, and left, heading straight to the bank.
I cleaned out and closed the savings account after transferring all but $1 from the checking account and made sure to let the bank know that I would very much like all credit cards in my name canceled as well. Flush with capital, I promptly booked a flight to San Diego, California, and caught a taxi to the airport.
While I was waiting in the terminal, I typed out a crude and slightly profane resignation letter to my manager, spelling out in no uncertain terms what I thought of his heavy-handed micromanagement and mentioned that I knew the account numbers and passwords of the secret slush funds he and several of the corporate officers maintained from years of skimming off the company’s pension fund, making sure to copy the message to all personnel in the company as well as several contacts in the SEC and the IRS who I knew would make his life hell. I tried not to laugh too loudly as I typed out the letter, as I had no way of knowing if the story I just invented was true, but I knew there would be a great deal of pain when he and the company found out that they were being investigated.
The plane ride to San Diego was uneventful, and on landing, I discovered that my corporate e-mail inbox was full of frantic and angry messages demanding that I get in touch with the sender. I tried not to laugh at loud at the replies, failing completely. I laughed even more as I deleted the e-mail account information from my phone, and then decided to erase all of the rest of the information off the phone as well, not bothering to even look at the many instant messages sent from my soon-to-be-ex-wife. As I left the airport, I opened the back of the phone, removed the sim card and threw it away, and gave the phone to a young kid on the way to the taxi stand. I really wasn’t going to miss that phone.
A taxi took me to the nearest used car dealer, where I purchased a used Jeep in cash. There was a Mexican insurance agent right next door, so I picked up a policy there as well. One quick stop at a gas station later, I was on the freeway heading south for the border. The border checkpoint was hardly worth a mention, and two hours later, I was driving south of Ensenada, headed for the southernmost point of Baja.
The flat expanses of the desert, marred only by the occasional unnecessary spray-painting of some random stupidity in Spanish on the boulders nearest the road, gave me lots of time to think about the direction my life. (What kind of damaged mindset made someone drive hours into the desert just to tag rocks, anyway?) Cierra and I had always seemed to be doing well enough as a couple before I discovered her career of indiscretion. As I drove along the highway euphemistically known as “The Devil’s Spine”, I tried to piece together all of the previously unnoticed hints and clues that she had been unhappy, only to discover that I could not recall any such moments. Oh, sure, I worked longer hours than I wanted to, but that bit of self-destruction was borne of a need to maintain our lifestyle. If she had dropped any hints, then she’d been subtle enough to mask her feelings from me.
Still, a part of me still loved her, inexplicably. I remembered the little things that made me love her: her smile, her laugh, the way she would do things for me before I would even ask for them, the way her hair smelled in the morning, the way she would shy away from kissing me on my way out the door in the morning until she brushed her teeth, the way she walked. In spite of everything that happened, I missed her, more than I wanted to admit to myself.
By the time I pulled into Cabo San Lucas a few days later, I was missing her terribly. I resolved to call her as soon as I found a motel with a hot shower. I found a nice enough place along the coast, took a long, hot shower, donned some shorts, a t-shirt, a straw hat and sandals, and found a nice spot on the beach to sit and think about what I wanted to say to her.
And that’s when the first flashes on the horizon started flaring far in the distance. I could have almost missed them, had the lights in the small bar under the palapa on the beach not gone out and the music coming from the small boombox under the bar cut out. I looked around for a bit, wondering if someone had tripped over a cable, and that’s when I noticed that all of the power up and down the beach had gone out. And the booms could be heard over the water, far off in the distance, but still audible enough over the booming waves of the sea.
The end had come, and I was in the one place on earth no one had thought to nuke, because there was nothing out in Baja except for sandy beaches and noisy tourists.
I watched, suspecting what was happening. All around me, people watched as the flashes along the leading edge of the horizon continued to flare. I didn’t bother to watch, though; I was already heading back to the Jeep.
No sleep for me tonight.
