Tag Archives: psychological fiction

October 5, 2014 · 11:06 pm

Coup De Grace

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Having some difficulty with the novel, The Situation. Some of you are reading it, for which I am grateful, but some of you are not getting it, about which I am…hmm…chagrinned, to put it politely. I know. I’m a whining, narcissistic author, starved of understanding. I should accept the partial appreciations I am receiving, the enjoyment some are having, taking what they like, as they say in 12-step programs, and–and the corollary is huge–leaving the rest.

To hell with that.

I wrote both CFTH and The Situation, for various reasons: 1.) to express myself creatively, 2.) to entertain, and 3.) to teach something important as an adjunct to my psychotherapy practice, which happens privately, behind closed doors, thus generating a need to venture outwards. There are in my novels several themes of note, and as my own process is sometimes unconscious, I can’t account for them all. Not that I don’t try, so here’s a rough list of succinctly-termed ideas present in the text and subtext: addiction, trauma, the tyranny of workplaces, of secrets within closed systems, like workplaces and families; about the ubiquity of dissociation, of impotence, and indifference; about the distance of friends, the lingering power of the absent, and the tense battles between lovers, for each self to fit in.

I guess that should be enough, but especially for The Situation–the follow-up and coup de grace–there needed to be something special (not to mention positive), something to make sense of, tie together the story as a whole. Empathy. That was the quality–the redemptive, sobriety-supporting (as one reader puts it) quality–that came to mind, as the point. And so, the novel delivers a climax with empathy as its thematic core, and everyone, author, characters and readers alike, should get the point and transport said point, somehow, back to our (or their) daily lives. And they seem to, those supportive few. But there are clues along the way–words unfortunately skipped, I suspect–that are getting missed; and it’s important. Why? Because you might notice something in relationships as in art: you shouldn’t miss the details.

Anyway, much misunderstanding centers around a contentious section of Situation, entitled “Nightmare”. Bryan “Weed” Tecco, my cardboard villain from CFTH, referenced only in his absence in that novel, is thereafter my protagonist, and he’s alive, contrary to the suppositions of my other characters, and in all likelihood, readers of CFTH. Emerging not-quite drowned from a lagoon in West Marin, he holes up at an old friend’s house in villagy Bolinas, then hitchhikes back to suburbia, only to be picked up and later drugged by a man, Dan Pritchard, with a sadistic streak and an apparent diaper fetish. Apart from recalling Chris Leavitt’s wayward new diaper invention from the first novel, the notion here is to have my character make a psychic return to helplessness: to a time when all needs are taken care of (and Dan Pritchard does take care); to a time when the body is uninhibited; to a time when the mind is bewildered, and possibly terrified. Weed is humiliated by Dan Pritchard, and though he appears to escape uninjured, there lingers the suggestion that Weed has been violated, while asleep no less.

Attentive readers, those who stuck with the various backstories of CFTH, may think this just desserts, this victimization. After all, according to Chris Leavitt, Weed introduced friends like Chris to not only a drug using lifestyle, but also a milieu in which prostitutes, sex, and consent for sex, moves freely (from one POV), or inchoately, dissociatively (from another). Regardless, I had plans for Bryan “Weed” Tecco–plans to make him an unlikely hero, back from the dead, but more importantly, back from infamy and indifference. In the chapters that follow “Nightmare”, Weed resolves not to talk about his ordeal with Dan Pritchard, but as many in my practice have discovered, not talking about something far from means that one is un-impacted. However, time is short in drama, and therefore serendipity: Weed meets Jill Evans, a shared “friend” of Chris Leavitt, and as she accompanies Weed on his road-trip search for his friend, she lets slip the clumsy near-rape Chris had attempted in CFTH. For the determined separatist, Weed, this presents an opportunity for his own suffering to quickly metabolize so that he might support another.

And later, as he finally connects with Jules Grotius, the creator of the subversive online game, ‘The Situation’–the self-styled guru of a new medium through which conscientious activism can be achieved–he listens, half-percolating the needs of his re-emerging self, half-reconciling current events with past traumas, while absorbing the heroic purpose he has unwittingly lived over the previous several days. Weed the drug dealer may live on. Weed the woman-distrusting bully may even persist with old habits. But Weed the game-fixated, insular enigma has been dealt a death blow.

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September 28, 2014 · 7:07 am

Birthing Ideas

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For me, it starts with a thought that floats by when I can’t possibly write it down. I’ll be jogging, or driving, or more commonly, at a standstill but without a pen or my cell, much less a pad—the old fashioned method of capturing mental sperm and tethering them to an egg. Otherwise, I’ll be in company, obliged to listen, or at least balance the dialectic between mine and others’ minds. The few ideas that make it through this mesh and into print undergo a thin vetting, I’ll have to admit. They’ve worked hard to get there, I figure. Given the ongoing reaction (and sometimes lack of it) to my novels, Crystal From The Hills and The Situation, I glean that others’ filtering process might be more thorough. Or more drive-by. Take agents and publishers, for example: a cursory glance is surely all I’m getting from those deluged by submissions and supplications, waiting for that one idea, or that one expression of an idea, that will float their boat or stir visions of future dollar signs. Let me naively ask: are there agents out there struggling for work? I mean, struggling to find writers, or maybe just writers who will make them money, because maybe they don’t know what interests readers anymore than I do?

Among other things, my bi-novel opus concerns the matter of birthing ideas and then pitching them to an imagined, waiting audience. The characters’ process in bringing ideas to life is meant to parallel my own writing process as well as, uh, life, I guess. I’m serious, if diffidently so. I notice it works something like this: you get started, take in what you can, consciously and unconsciously, then later you turn it around and make sounds in the opposite direction. At some point, when ready, you let the world know what you got, hoping an unsuspecting public doesn’t gaze back, nonplussed and indifferent for a hot minute before turning away and moving on. Chris Leavitt, my first protagonist, took it in, all the data around him; in fact, he spent too much time taking it in. That is, he spent too much time in isolation, ruminating on things that didn’t make sense: the way people relate to one another, as in love, fight, and oppress one another in families, friendships, in workplace systems. By his mid-twenties he’d had enough of going forward, so quietly (as in secretly) he resolved to grow down and not up; to lie about his age, drop out of society in fits and starts. Despite himself, he still tries to live some semblance of an adult life: he gets a job, a fledgling career, even a girlfriend—sort of. He fucks it all up, of course, but he can’t stop the needs of his real self; the birthing of ideas.

In his mind, he births the idea of Shadows, his visions that foreshadow shadowy events, criminal happenings, and other important stuff. At least that idea isn’t rejected in so far as many others, including his friend Bryan “Weed” Tecco, share the fantasy, and it is a fantasy, albeit one that bonds many in collective alienation. On the other hand, Chris’ invention of a specialty diaper that purportedly detects urine versus feces, (a time and resource-saving notion for parents), is a non-starter, subject at best to the interest of a huckster lawyer, determined to steal Chris’ idea and sell it to more capable people. By the end of The Situation, the follow-up novel to CFTH, Chris’ invention, plus his whole not-so-fledgling career in medicine, seems dead in the water, recalled only in subtext, as an inside joke within a sinister kidnapping episode suffered by Weed. Chris buries his inspiration amid a swirl of insecurity and persecutory fear: will his inadequacies be exposed? Will malevolent forces, others more organized, confident, and skilled, seize upon his ideas and exploit them, and discard him?

Weed’s fragility is better defended. Introduced as a villain who has disappeared in CFTH, his image suffers in absentia. He is a slovenly rogue: a drug dealer, a vulgar egotist, and abuser of women; maybe a pimp. Who knows? He keeps to himself, mostly, fomenting these projections while thriving in the underground economy, relatively unconcerned by family or systems, a society whose rejection of him he grimly accepts. But he is not without ideas, and unlike Chris, he seems more fortunately endowed with talents: a “genius” at online video gaming; a suggestion of writing talent. Through his day job as a game tester for a corrupt telecommunications giant, Sahi corporation, he stumbles upon a game (dubbed ‘The Situation’) that utilizes the Shadows idea as shared by he and Chris, and—as it turns out—a secret society of Shadows seers, known as Cassandra’s Children. Foreseeing malfeasance within the corporate world, Weed becomes my serendipitous hero: a guy I’ve primed the reader to dislike, though he is poised for a redemptive mission. He steals the flash drives for the ‘The Situation’, makes a getaway with Chris and instructs his unwitting friend to stash his contraband. Then an accident occurs in which the friends’ getaway truck sinks into a lagoon, separating the two social misfits for most of the story. Anyway, this begins the action of both novels: the first, CFTH, a sprawling story of an itinerant and traumatized Chris Leavitt, follows his path back to reality and purpose. That’s Chris’ Leavitt’s drama, an unsexy allegory about living on the fringes. The second novel, The Situation, unfolds a more conventional tale of good, bad, winning and losing, yet it, too, pivots around the birthing of ideas.

Along his picaresque journey, Weed emerges (literally) from his disappearance and gradually reveals more of himself, largely by happenstance to Chris’ enmeshed girlfriend, Jill Evans, including ideas once captured in a video gaming book which—though completed and published—was badly edited and sold poorly. The backdrop of unrealized ambition becomes intertwined with the concurrent task, Weed’s seemingly vicarious goal of returning the ‘The Situation’ to its rightful owner and creator, a journalist/programmer named Jules Grotius, ala Julian Assange. Grotius is a man who births ideas but follows through: he is not fazed by inadequacy, or potential misunderstanding; the prospects of failure, or even persecution. The climax of The Situation, and thus of both novels, is the explication of a game containing an idea with—and I mean this—deep social implications. But to find out what that (my) idea is you’ll have to do more, much more than give this thing a cursory glance. I think you know what to do. I think you get the idea.

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July 14, 2014 · 6:06 am

Games

In Working Through Rehab, my non-fiction about kids and drug treatment, I feature a chapter entitled “Play Gone Wrong”, which draws attention to the corrupted pleasure-seeking that leads thousands, even millions of people into drug rehab programs each year. Life is full of games, games in which the rules break down and become bad games, play gone wrong. The phrase makes a cameo in The Situation, as the proposed and later rejected title of a book Bryan “Weed” Tecco has once written on the subject of role-playing video games: his area of expertise. Another cameo is that of an eight year boy, an abandoned child drifting in a hallway of an Oakland apartment building, playing old-fashioned games of cops and robbers, good guys and bad. In both The Situation and its predecessor, Crystal From The Hills, this child makes an appearance, calls for troubled adults to drop adult pretense and play his primitive games, on his terms and by his rules. But those games don’t last long. This kid is likely a future gamer; a drug user, or dealer, perhaps. Alone yet adult-seeking, he’s an attachment disorder in progress, a beta element in a bigger, darker game.
Halfway through The Situation, Weed takes a minute to describe his book, which he imagines—God bless him—that some will be moved to read. His literary polemic is a twenty-something’s take on a tired social commentary: that youth are becoming consumed by newfangled electronica, or worse, that a core of youth is desensitized by repeated exposure to violent themes in games like Grand Theft Auto, Call Of Duty, the Battlefield series, and so on. These games are becoming more popular than film or music, the previous major exponents of desensitization, the media reports. Violence continues to sell, but now it’s more interactive. The fourth wall is penetrated; the audience, once passive and merely ticket-purchasing, is seated at the console, in charge like it’s never been or felt before. Bryan Tecco is as skilled as anyone in this medium, and as such, has earned the right to say a few things, to disapprove from within the ranks. Well, within a speech aimed at Jill Evans, more or less the novel’s embodiment of feminine disapproval, he outlines the way things ought to be in the world of play: there ought to be more room for creativity, interaction…building things, performance. Killing is not where it’s at, where he’s at, he declares to her mild and pleasant surprise.
It’s a curious outcry from Weed, arriving as it does just before a watershed passage in which he pulls a firearm on one of his followers, and ultimately pistol whips him. Moments after, he’s performing donuts in a stolen vehicle, reveling in the kind of reckless driving that would belong in something like Grand Theft Auto. It’s the kind of hypocrisy that prevails when action films conclude with a hero’s plea for peace. For the record, I’d not grudge astute readers calling me out on the same duplicity. However, Weed, you might gather from the outset, has an edgy side to his character: not just pleasure seeking, not even profiteering, but something vengeful, something violent which subordinates a peaceful sensibility. In this way he still realizes his heroic potential, because the audience—his audience that is Jill or his peers, and perhaps you the reader—still like violence. Really. You don’t mind it, so long as it’s not entirely self-serving; as long as it stands up for something, for someone else, presumably someone weaker or less privileged, and doesn’t gratuitously inflate bank accounts. That’s how I cheated, in case you want to know. That’s how I wrote it, thinking you’d accept violence if you saw it in these terms, followed these rules. But please read until the end, because that’s where I change the rules
It also helps if my protagonist is an underdog, and a surprise underdog at that. Transcending his limitations—his un-athletic girth, his lack of Krav Maga knowledge, a reader’s prejudice borne of unflattering characterizations in CFTH—Weed shows that he is poised and capable in a fight; so much so that he inspires the supportive partnership of Jill who, despite her own nurturing front (she’s a nurse and habitual caretaker), activates her own aggressions (and she does know Krav Maga). That’s what circumstances often call for. That was the situation. That is the situation. But it’s not the way play ought to be.

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July 10, 2014 · 8:55 pm

Accidents

 

My twin novels, good friends Crystal From The Hills and The Situation (published 6/29) both begin with accidents—the same accident, but with different conclusions, different, uh, opinions as to what really happened on a last Wednesday in March. Someone died, says book number one, CFTH. Someone’s still alive, says the spoiling follow-up, bringing hope, or denial. Distortions. It’s a problem when two people experience the same event but come away with different ideas, different memories. What really happened? What really happens in drug treatment? In yet another book I claim to know the answer to that question. Who’s in charge? Who gets to decide the truth, the way things ought to be?

Accidents. They’re all accidents, the things that happen in life. They have to be, for to insist otherwise is to say that things are consciously determined: mapped out, overseen, foreseen, and taken care of. Are we being taken care of? When accidents happen, someone is meant to step in and mollify bad feelings, guilt and inadequacy—things we download somewhere between 2 and 5. Someone’s meant to step in and say everything’s okay when we break things or fall down. But what if they don’t? What if those grown ups are gone, or just preoccupied; depressed? We forget the early stuff, the wrongdoings of our bodies, the pre-sexual mistakes of bad touch, upsets in the crib; inexplicable, cosmic aloneness. Do we really want to grow up? Some, like my characters, don’t so they keep having accidents—violent, sexual, toilet-centered, water-based accidents—things that keep us young, hoping to be picked up and rubbed until feeling better. One protagonist’s parents gave him up early, passed him off to another couple, one that tried and still tries to love. The other one’s parents stuck around, but clearly had other things to do, and perhaps should have given him up, broken up with him like women tend to; let bossy yet formidable aunts take over; just disappear, maybe.

Give the kids a break. When they’re men, let them grow down and not up, just a little. “Gimme time,” says Chris Leavitt in hapless climax. It happens too fast, this life of responsibility and mission: like this opportunity that fell upon the lap of Bryan “Weed” Tecco at some point before the text of either novel. The flash drives, plural of drive, drove him to steal, and then head out on a doom-laden drive. Weed had a vision, just like Chris Leavitt, his friend, has visions, and the vision informed Weed that the video game he was expertly testing, “The Situation”, contained elements he recognized: these “Shadows” that the likes of he and Chris see on a regular basis, pointing out truths that no one is willing or able to speak of: about wrongdoings, what’s happening in the world; what ought to happen. Weed has a problem, a God-like problem. He foresees that fallout, the events that will unfold, subverting all that should happen. The problems start when Weed starts to plan: to steal the plans for “The Situation”; to lead his corporate security followers on a chase; to take his friend Chris with him for back up, as if that were something he needed. Maybe human beings should never try to plan things. You see, we don’t it well: planning. All things are just accidents…horrible, wonderful accidents.

 

 

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June 30, 2014 · 6:54 am

Crystal Surreal

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As my next novel, The Situation, becomes available today, I step back two years to reflect upon its predecessor, my much maligned Crystal From The Hills. You don’t have to read CFTH to get The Situation. It’s easy enough to follow the action, infer the major events of the previous novel, if not its subtext, and get involved in its story. What you might miss is the contrast between friends pictured above–the paths defined by different needs for both characters and readers: for mere consciousness on the one hand, for heroism on the other–for empathy above all. Who are you? Where are you in your life, and what do you want from drama? Here’s a few thoughts from November 12′:

I’m not sure what an example of surreal fiction is. When I think of surrealism, I think of painters like Salvador Dali, or filmmakers like Jean Cocteau, or Luis Bunuel. I’m told Jacques Lacan is the man for those following the unconscious. Not sure that’s true. The author Polizzoti writes that Freud and the surrealists were nonplussed by one another, especially Andre Breton, who reportedly met the Viennese physician and was underwhelmed. These writers were poets, stylists of the 20s and 30s, contemporaries of the absurdist Dada movement, and men who reported interest in the unconscious, and went about the task of creating images that simulated dreams. For what it’s worth, I’ve tried a modest and similar tact with Crystal From The Hills, having read some of Lacan and Breton, and then staring at that remarkable painting by Magritte: the one that frame a woman’s naked body within the contours of a feminine hairline. ‘Le Viol’ it’s called: the rape. Simplicity and genius. And horror.

Mine is a story that begins dreamily on the streets of Oakland, with an ambiguously aged man holding a sign that reads, “Hungry White Trash” as he panhandles by the side of a freeway. You might get the idea that it’s a joke, but not entirely. In fact, there’s a history to the joke, and horror: a serious underpinning. Chris Leavitt has suffered an accident. That’s the pitch, the beginning of the story and the forerunner to a back-story. There will be a few accidents depicted if you read on, as well as deliberate action, malevolent and kind. There is no hero per se (heroism comes later), just a hapless everyman riding a string of bad luck, making several wrong decisions, struggling to act like an adult. He’s playing with life. He has a girlfriend, sort of. It’s Jill Evans, ten years before her stints playing support character in Living Without Blood, and almost twelve years before she takes the lead in The Big No, my second novel. Jill gets around, and here she goes back in time, getting younger, lucky girl. I have a villain of sorts, a guy who’s not around, but who gets talked about a lot. He’s Weed, a drug dealer, video game star, con artist—a bad, absent, abandoning guy. His influence is balanced by Sweet, Chris’ other friend, who is even more childlike than Chris, yet affable and easy to have around. He sticks around. There’s an aged yet autocratic aunt—Chris’ only surviving relative, an endearingly caustic woman. Others in the story are lawyers, doctors, police, employers, street thugs, ghostly figures (dubbed “Shadows”) that hang around with hallucinatory menace: not all bad people; just people with seeming power and a willingness to use it.

            CFTH is a story that concerns itself with many ideas. It relies on continuity and the experience of ideas, fragments that have been indicated previously in the text. If you read a few pages then put it down for three weeks, then I’m sorry if I bored you. If that’s not the case and you’re just dilatory in your reading habits, then I’m afraid you may miss out. A good read is like good therapy. You don’t go once a month, like it’s a check up. You’re supposed to remember bits and pieces, like it’s embedded in your experience, and just know where you left off—no bookmarks are necessary if it works. There are associations to be made along the way. Don’t look for patterns, just experience the sense of revisiting as you note terms, phrases that appear to get repeated in the novel; themes that seem to link to one another. This is a story about accidents; personal, physical, even sexual, and habitual. It’s a story about rejection: also personal, and also institutional. There is trauma involved, and the problems related to poor memory and dissociation. You might feel what my characters don’t: that’s the point. Chris doesn’t remember much in the beginning, but builds his story along the way, and tells others, and you, what’s happening in his own time, on his own terms. His friend Sweet has an even worse memory than he does, but low and behold, it is he that becomes the chronicler of events in the end; the witness. Trauma victims need witnesses. That’s written somewhere. Above all there is a problem with reality, regressions in time, age. Characters aren’t sure what’s happening. They lack real perspectives, real goals. They don’t even use their real names. Despite all this, CFTH is actually not a confusing novel, in my opinion—not if you’re present, that is. It’s not all in Chris’ mind: things actually happen.

            Bad things happen. Evil lurks, as in any good action movie or pulp mystery novel. Darth Vader types hover, and towering infernos exist. Read the novel some of these cheeky references will make sense. Meanwhile, like the “Shadows” of Chris’ imagination or psychosis, the author and reader are witnesses to all that goes down. CFTH is a novel that may move you, or it may leave you cold, or I suppose—just to cover all bases—it may leave you feeling something (?) in between.

 

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August 7, 2013 · 6:54 am

A Disappearance

 

So, as some of you know, I’ve been presenting Crystal From The Hills, my psychological fiction, as a story about an accident, a disappearance, a trauma, and a mystery. On one level (perhaps the only important one), these descriptions refer to an incident in which Chris “Crystal” Leavitt inadvertently drives his truck into a lake; the result in which he emerges from the quietly lapping surf but his friend Weed doesn’t; the fall-out that is his dissociation, wandering avoidance of life, preoccupation with so-called shadows, and faultly memory of the event; finally, and plainly speaking, the mystery of what really happened with the accident at the lake, and why.

But, if you’ve been paying any attention at all to these pages, or if you’re one of the handful of people who have managed to sit through all ten or so minutes of my YouTube videos, you’d be gleaning that the accidents, disappearances, traumas, and mysteries of my novel are not only multiple in number, but multi-layered. The dissociated syndrome of Chris Leavitt unfolds over the course of the story, and his supporting cast–his friend Sweet, his girlfriend Jill, and the autocratic Aunt Jenny, are his would-be therapists, or life coaches, if you prefer that sort of thing. Meaning, they confront, encourage, advise, boss him around, and witness. But they don’t see him, not really. They miss his sensitivity to abandonment. Then there’s Costman, a wildcard character inserted about two-thirds into the action (or inaction, as Kirkus reviews would have readers believe). I haven’t written much about Costman prior to this point, haven’t said much. He is, as my drive-by readers might suppose, something of a random character whose meaning is elusive; possibly enigmatic, if one was feeling sympathetic. To review the plot point: Costman is a gardner who works for Aunt Jenny. He’s sort of a societal drop-out, kinda like Chris, or maybe like what Chris might become if he gets his drop-out act together. Thing is, he and Chris have known each other for several years, which is unusual for Chris, as most of his relationships have been short-term or peripheral. Costman is in the latter camp, but nonetheless knows stuff about Chris and his past–he knows enough, at least.

Chris figures he knows enough about Costman also. Like myself, he imagines the gardner is someone who can be taken for granted; can be overlooked and not spoken of, or written about. He further imagines that Costman is undisturbed by such things. Above all, Chris believes that Costman is no threat to him, that he is enviably disinvested in others’ lives. Costman won’t reveal any of Chris’ secrets, neither to Aunt Jenny, the police, or to anyone else who might be interested. He will listen to Chris’ soliloquys, his delusions about shadows, paranoia about authority, and respond with an indulgent chuckle. But ultimately, Costman, whose name is a play upon his one-time job in a money market, will offer little of substance in terms of advice, encouragement, or straightforward provocation. Surprisingly, however, Costman offers what few have given Chris so far in his life: at once a jolting yet mirroring experience, one that helps him feel not alone in feeling alone. How does this come about? Well, Costman, it seems, was once a most unlikely consumer of psychotherapy. Turns out he knows something about others’ disappearances. Read:

“Alright, so he wasn’t always professional. That part was bullshit. The last time we met—our last session—he fell asleep on me. Actually, I think he’d been holding back for some time, I’m not sure. For a while I thought he had this sleepy look in his eye—this lazy kinda drooping—in previous sessions. Then on our last meeting, I was talking, don’t remember about what—probably about my wife’s cheating—and I guess I didn’t look back at him for some time. In fact, it wasn’t even his eyes that gave him away, come to think of it. It was a snort—ya know, like a snore?” Costman let out his latest burst of laughter; a release following his punch-line, designed to preempt reaction. Unflinching, and without any pretense of matching the gardener’s effortful jubilation, Chris ventured another question:

“What happened after that?”

“Nothing really,” Costman replied, quieting his amusement. His tone and his body settled, like a raucous wave being gradually stilled. “I think I waited for a bit,” he said quietly, frowning. “Then I got up and left,” he then said chirpily.

“What? You just left without saying anything?” Chris intuited the latter piece, having pictured the scene.

“I didn’t wanna disturb him,” Costman offered, incredibly. Chris’ jaw dropped perceptibly, eliciting yet another round of laughter from the gardener. “I know,” he uttered amid chuckles, “I guess I should have said something, huh?” Before Chris could respond, Costman stretched out his arm in a gesture of self-defense: “But can you imagine the look on the guy’s face—what he must have been thinking—when he wakes up and sees that I’m gone? Can you picture the ‘Aw shit!’ expression on his face? I didn’t pay him for that session, either.” Costman lay back, continuing to douse the memory with comic emollient. Chris let his head drop.

 

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August 1, 2013 · 8:24 pm

Where there is hierarchy there is violence (part one)

 

A line from my novel, Crystal From The Hills: a section wherein Chris Leavitt is reflecting upon doomed relationships, including those with authority. Bosses tend not to like him, want him gone. Sometimes the exiles occur abruptly, yet directly. The separations are brutal yet honest. But mostly, Chris’ rejections have been subtle, protracted, and torturous, in work and play. His has ruffled the feathers of doctors at the hospital in which he works as a surgical assistant. Administration is biding its time, following procedure and deliberating on how best to let him go. Jill Evans, his girlfriend, has been inconvenienced, imposed upon, even clumsily assaulted by Chris, yet her most basic complaint about him touches on none of these crimes and misdemeanors. He has let her down, for sure, but mostly because he had once, quite simply, sold himself as being more winning than he really was. Read my novel and you might identify if you’ve ever felt yourself slide from a pedastel; the chill of being slowly pushed out an exit door.

Consider the assault passage between Chris and Jill, which has stirred controversial reactions from my few readers thus far. The reason: there is power involved. Hierarchy in sex: it’s a delicate area, and what I imply is that the lines of authority are unclear. Here are the passages in question:

**Anyway—that day in the supply room: It was a curious moment for her; a hijacking of good sense, with her split-off libido disguised by charitable aims. An unwise decision was made: namely, to sexualize the moment—just a moment—and then maternalize whatever followed. More thoughts followed, mostly containing the word bad. Bad girl: that’s what I’ll be, she resigned.

            As she pulled away from an initial kiss she regarded the aroused grimace that flushed his features, and

considered an abrupt escape. She was following an impulse that seemed real at the time, but pathetic soon thereafter. She kissed him again, thinking one more will placate, and one more will feel good. One more did feel good. Jill, staring past his ear toward the blur of a window behind them, felt the drop of his pants, the aura of his flesh radiating heat against her thigh. “Chris,” she tentatively whispered. His hands started to fumble about her waist. Too late. They were heading toward the string of her scrubs, pushing away her fingers as they tried to leverage their way in. Jill felt the pressure of the closing space; the impermeable softness of his hips as they formed a barrier against her.

She was transported to the night before, when he’d kissed her hard on the lips and then pushed her on to her bed, ultimately breaking a spring. His eyes, transformed in a flash from a light blue to charcoal emptiness, bore into her like the eyes of a black-eyed shark biting down. Jill anticipated the sharp pain of a bite and the tearing sensation of a terrible invasion. She wanted to stop. Jesus, she thought. She had to stop. It, the invasion, never really came, because within a minute Chris did. Time stopped, like it belonged to someone else, and now that someone was seizing control. Jill’s eyes let her down. She closed them as a pain began—the digging in of his fingers into her arms, like they were stakes being driven into the ground in order to fix a tent. He broke his grip just once. Reaching down with his right hand, he pulled from the underside of Jill’s buttock, attempting to leverage her into an inclined position. Jill found a wedge between her body and Chris’ ribs. She inched her way up his torso with her fingertips. Feeling the rub, Chris’ pressure relented as he assumed her cooperation—a dream come true—and so pressed himself against her. Next he felt a blockage and looked down into the thin, dark crevice that could be seen between them. An inexplicable obstacle was stalling penetration. He could barely make out the detail of a wrinkled skin wedged against an opening, looking vaguely like some creature desperately trying to squeeze in through a crack in a door. Though not optimally firm, he

nonetheless felt a gathering within his system. It felt thin, yet insistent, the incipient stream. An ambiguous pain, a drip sent along a catheter, passed through his shaft like a wayward satellite. No, he thought. He panicked.

Round tow: in the closet the next morning she called out, intruding upon his fast wetting reverie, this hasty attempt to wipe out the memory of the previous night.

“Chris!” Jill cried, this time with a contortion across her face. Startled, he opened his eyes and noticed with horror the tight grip he had upon her arms. Immediately he looked down and discovered her hands against his chest, now pushing him away; now working against him. Looking through her hands, he peered down into the chasm between their bodies, as though catching a visual reminder of the previous night’s ignominious effort. This is not how it happens in the movies, he thought briefly. Forgetting himself, he let out a snort of ironic laughter at which Jill growled. With her hand pinned against a shelf, she was by now working with a stubborn pain, and became enraged. She felt the throbbing pinch against her artery and reflected for a second that the self mutilators that fill the upstairs ER will know something of this feeling.

With a quick series of thrusts, Jill broke away and fell back against the aluminum stack of shelves. Though her arms fluttered and blocked him from getting closer, it was the strength of her legs that won the day. Pistoning against him, they ejected her backwards. She slid backwards with surprise, having expected the shelf to form a hard barrier and obstruct her from creating space. Instead the shelf gave way, and let her fall to the ground. Thanks for nothing, she thought of it. A crash of three stainless steel covers, tops to bottles containing needles, sounded out, punctuating the collision. Jill rebounded, and with an instinctive jerk, kicked out at Chris’groin, catching him hard upon his upper thigh. **

So, what’s happening here? It seems to bear explanation, I think because the average reader moves quickly, passing by the repeated signs, the beta elements to which I am continually drawing attention. Clearly, there are two scenes being reflected upon, both ostensibly consensual encouters, and the climax of the first is about premature ejaculation, not rape. The second scene, the incident in the hospital supply room that gets Chris in trouble, not only with Jill but also his employers, is the more ambigous happening–a clumsy grapple combining feelings of lust, anxiety, the influences of adrenaline, memories of past and lurking humiliations. Chris and Jill are kissing, but just as he had the night before, Chris loses himself, loses touch with his own feelings, and in turn, with Jill’s. This is what makes him dangerous–his disconnectedness–and so he hurts her. Fortunately, Jill can fight back with the spirit and athleticism foreshadowed by previous characterizations (not to mention reenactments, such as the street mugging she experiences), and so she can exact revenge, at least spontaneously. 

These passges, story elements, and characterizations are about the problem of conflict: how people contain or exhibit aggression; manage their hate alongside their love; how they navigate power within the confines of intimacy.

BTW, in keeping with my interest in Beta elements, there are some symbolic fragments either referenced in the above passage, or alluded to elsewhere. For example, a section of backstory earlier in the novel references the infamous Versailles Treaty of 1919, which illustrated humiliation between adversaries, and here used as foreshadowing of the humiliation between lovers. Meanwhile, the above passages refer to a broken spring of a therefore broken bed (i.e.: the broken, sexually dysfunctional relationship). Finally, the references to movies (one of several in the novel) are a shorthand characterization of Chris’ flights into fantasy. Image
 

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July 29, 2013 · 7:13 am

Memories of Near Death

 

Dr. Raymond Moody, in his book, Life After Life, explains that near-death experiences are a cross-cultural phenomenon depicted in Biblical passages, the writings of Plato, and the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. He writes that to talk of life after death seems atavistic; a superstitious impulse born of fear, estranged from a scientific present.

In my novel, Crystal From The Hills, I write about a character, Chris Leavitt (nicknamed Crystal), who indulges his own atavisms, struggling with various lives after deaths: most immediately, the death of his friend and doppelganger, Weed; the death of his father from lung cancer; the spiritual death of his mother, mired in grief following the death of her second husband in the 9/11 attacks. Above all, Chris struggles with his own deaths: the literal and the existential. He laments the loss of youth, and acts out a lie instead of dealing with the reality of being adult. He observes the loss of freedom in the workplace, and in the street, and so pounds the pavement of Oakland in defiance. He notes the loss of his sex drive, partly resulting from methamphetamine withdrawal; partly a product of shame–for Chris, sex has brought mostly pain. Meanwhile, he is AWOL from his job; disappeared, like Weed, from his home in Richmond, where he does not belong. He returns, prodigally, to where he once did belong–the hills–to hear strident counsel of his Aunt Jenny, a vital yet aging woman who is awaiting death herself, yet holding so as to live vicariously through youth. Chis is alive yet dead: such is the life of the traumatized, wading robotic through their days(ze), hanging on to the fabric of their lives, their relationships, hoping that something will come along to reinvigorate.

For Chris, as with many who dwell in trauma, memory may provide a portal to healing. The future is in the past and the end is in the beginning. And so my story begins with the words, “He’s dead”, delivered with minimal context and shorn of feeling. Later there is recollection, and with it, plenty of feeling: a blend of terror and hope. Read…

“Chris struggled to the surface amid the unspeakably cold water. The seeming attack of the seaweed had him flailing momentarily, and looking down to see what horror was beneath his feet. The vision was human—his own face staring back at him. For a suspended eternity, Chris left his body and felt enveloping warmth. Death? He wanted to shut his eyes and hasten the end, and yet he could not look away. Then as he blinked the cold returned, as did life. Someone, or thing, was giving him a second chance, he then realized. Problem is: now he’d have to do something with that. Now he’d have some kind of new responsibility. Looking down, he saw the likeness of Weed, gazing up with terror-stricken eyes” (from the novel, Crystal From The Hills)

Don’t want to read it yet? Well, for more, check out the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03SL0ZRPXgImage

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