Words of Danny O'Bigbelly My idea of a good time

Saturday, 2:15pm

It was policy to always have someone in the office, watching over the incoming messages, and ready to react to any developments. Special Agent Artemus Knox didn’t mind working the Saturday shift. There was no telling when some vital information might arrive, and the relative quiet of the weekend gave him time to think and piece together patterns that he might otherwise have missed.

The New York City dispatchers knew Knox, and knew that always wanted to hear the strange calls, and they knew to contact him whenever something odd came in.

Knox was sitting at his desk in lower Manhattan when his cell phone buzzed. He clicked the earpiece he habitually wore.

“Yes?”

“Artie? Got a 9-1-1 for you. It came in about five minutes ago. There’s something odd about this one. A few things, really. Here’s the audio… hang on for a second.”

While the caller set up the playback, Knox fished out the small pad and pen from his pocket he habitually carried in his back pocket and prepared to take notes.

“9-1-1 emergency dispatch. This line is recorded. What is your location and emergency?”

“What? Hello? Hello? I’m losing the signal. Hello?”

The call ended.

“And that’s all. He never called back.”

“Traced the call?” Artemus asked.

“Yes, back to Long Island, a cell tower near Eatons Neck. The service code does belong to a crew member there; Charles Jones. But it didn’t change towers during the call. If the helicopter was moving quickly, it probably would have, but maybe not. Doesn’t mean much, probably. Tried to call back; no answer.”

“Sound quality was awfully good.”

“The new 9-1-1 systems; they’re really something. Cuts down on lawsuits if the jury doesn’t have to argue about what they’re hearing, you know.”

“I mean, it was awfully good quality for a cell phone call from a helicopter. Aren’t helicopters noisy? Come to think of it, I didn’t hear anything in the background at all.”

“Yeah, I told you it was a funny one. I’ve got the number, if you want it.”

Knox took down the number, thanked the caller, hung up, and scribbled down a few notes on his small pocket notebook. Then he slouched back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling for ten seconds.

Knox reflected that this one was strange. A cell phone call from a coast guard helo crew member with a broken radio, bringing in an injured girl. That was somewhat out of the ordinary, but the fact that the caller had requested a specific doctor and planned to land at an unusual hospital–there were several closer emergency rooms with helo pads–was very strange. Perhaps it was a prank?

Knox turned and idly typed the service code from the call into his terminal. It was a valid code, but it didn’t belong to a helo crew member. It belonged to Charlie Jones, an engineer on a Coast Guard utility boat, currently assigned to Station Eatons Neck. At least that part made sense, even if nothing else did.

If this was a prank, someone was going to be in very hot water about misusing their service code. The station was correct, but something didn’t feel right. He felt sure that there was something he was overlooking.

Knox brought up a satellite image of the Coast Guard station. He zoomed in until he could easily make out the individual buildings and short docks, but he couldn’t see a helo pad.

Thirty seconds later, Knox punched the number for the switchboard at Station Easton Neck into his cell phone. After a long wait for someone to answer, Knox had a brief conversation with the incredulous crew chief, who clearly expressed his opinion that Knox was pulling his leg. No, they didn’t have a helicopter; they weren’t in the middle of rescuing anyone; everyone on the crew, including Charlie, had been at the station all day.

Knox thanked the chief and hung up. Perhaps it was a prank, but something still felt wrong.

Knox remembered a briefing he’d attended, a few years earlier, on likely terrorist attack scenarios in the wake of 9-11. The presenter had highlighted FDR drive on the lower east side. At first Knox thought he was going to talk about the United Nations Plaza, but he had been mistaken.

“If you want to hurt a city, not just hurt it but inflict lasting pain,” the speaker said, “One way to increase the suffering is to disrupt the support system for the first responders. The first responders themselves are usually dispersed throughout the city, so they can be near their areas of responsibility, which makes them easy to target individually, but hard to target as a group or as a capability. Many of the support systems, in contrast, are highly centralized. For example,” the speaker went on, highlighting the East Side with his laser pointer, “here we have a high percentage of the emergency rooms, operating rooms, and critical care facilities in the city, all within a few blocks of each other, centered around the NYU medical campus. And this is an easy target, for a serious attacker, because, most of these buildings have easy access and a clear field of fire from the East River.”

Knox wondered how many unaccounted-for large helicopters there might be in the world. It would certainly be easy to load one on a container ship, and then launch it from the deck from just offshore. It could reach anywhere in the triboro area in a few minutes. Paint it orange and white, and it could get even closer to any target before anyone thought twice about it.

Knox next throughts were about how much static weight a Sea King helicopter could carry. Four tons at least, he thought; perhaps more in an emergency–or if the helicopter was stripped, or if it was a one way trip.

How much of Bellevue would be destroyed by four tons of Semtex or C4? Knox was certain that he didn’t want to find out.

A minute later, Knox was running for the elevator. He didn’t have a clear plan, but he had already decided that he was going to be at East 34th Street in fifteen minutes. There was something oddly compelling about the record 9-1-1 call he’d heard; even though he couldn’t understand exactly why, he wanted to be there when the helicopter arrived.

His cell phone didn’t work in the elevator. Knox waited for the doors to open again, with his finger over the call button, poised to call the Westbury TRACON. As he waited, he had a moment to think.

If it’s a terrorist attack, he wondered, why did they call to say that they were coming? It wasn’t really tip-off; it was too vague for that. There were other channels for such things. And why did this attack differ so much from the usual profile: afternoon instead of morning, weekend instead of weekday? This wasn’t the best time to catch a lot of doctors and nurses at the hospitals–a weekday morning would have been much more effective… unless, of course, the whole point was to be unpredictable.

But the most unusual detail puzzled Knox more than the rest, and he suspected that it was the key to the entire mystery–or prank. Why did the caller ask for a specific doctor? Who is Dedi Perlman?

Knox debated with himself about whether to call Bellevue or Westbury until the elevator door opened again. As he rushed across the lobby and into the waiting car at the curb, his phone dialed Westbury.

Hi, it’s me again; the author.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the story up to this point. What you’ve read up until this point follows the storyline as I originally wrote it, many years ago. The original story ended shortly after this (well, about eight pages after this, and about twenty minutes later in terms of the time that elapsed in the story).

But the story didn’t age well.

The problem with the story is that it takes place in the present (well, plus or minus a few months, so it can take place in the summer). The present has changed. If I wanted to keep to the original storyline, it would have to take place in the past–before September 11, 2001.

When I picked up the story again in 2002, I realized that it was no longer plausible. The events couldn’t unfold in the way they do in the original story in the post-9/11, DHS, USPATRIOT Act world. I had to take that into account, because otherwise the story wouldn’t make any sense.

For example, in 1998 I could write a story about a dark-skinned, bearded young man traveling from Sudan on a plane destined to La Guardia, who is having trouble adjusting the inserts he wears in his shoes to make in look taller, because he’s heard that Americans are all tall and he wants to fit in with his new classmates at NYU. I can’t write that story now. It would end with the man in Guantanamo, instead of ending happily with a parable about diversity.

Of course, being a work of fantasy, these events probably couldn’t unfold anywhere anyway, but if they did unfold in this way, then people would react to them differently, and their different reaction would make the story go off in a different direction. Because the story after this point is all about the way people react to unexpected and stressful situations, I had to go back and fix it.

And so I did.

And so you can add to the list of things that 9/11 made worse this story, which, I will admit once again, was never particularly good anyway.

If you want to imagine what the original story was like, skip over all of the rest of the story until you get to the story that Sally tells Knox, and then imagine that she isn’t telling it to Special Agent Knox, because Knox wasn’t in the original story. The original story did not require the involvement of the FBI. Stories with happy endings rarely do.

Saturday, 2:05pm

Charlie Jones didn’t really enjoy playing bridge. Hearts was his game. He liked poker, but knew he wasn’t very good at it, and he couldn’t afford to lose. Variety is the spice of life, or so he’d heard, and the guys wanted to play bridge, so bridge it was.

The crew at the Eatons Neck Coast Guard Station didn’t have much to do this afternoon. Charlie and the crew would take the boat out for a patrol down the Sound in an hour or so, but until then there was nothing on the schedule except cards. Morning maintenance was finished, and the boats and the stations were spotless. A few mild rainshowers that morning and a forecast of more on the way had convinced most of the day sailers to stay home today, even though the forecasts had been proven wrong. The clouds were unthreatening, and the sun frequently broke through. The wind was steady from the west, and it was clear enough that Charlie could see all the way across Long Island Sound to Cove Harbor, but he could only see a handful of boats under way.

Charlie fanned his hand again, scratched his head, and considered his bid.

“Pass,” he declared, and watched as heads nodded in response around the table. “Well, I’m the dummy. Again. Don’t believe me? Well, take a look for yourself.” He laid down his cards.

“I’m gonna get a pop from the fridge. Anyone want anything?” Charlie asked. His chair creaked as he pushed away from the table and his crewmates shook their heads without looking up from their cards. Charlie pushed back from the table and walked to the kitchen.

As he entered the kitchen, Charlie took a moment to enjoy the view. The station was perched on the top of a dune that sloped down to the beach, and the kitchen, on the northern side of the station, was equiped with large windows. Standing at the kitchen counter, Charlie had a panoramic view of the dunes, the beach, and Long Island Sound.

The beach was empty, as it almost always was. It was well over a mile to the nearest public parking, Asharoken Beach, and there wasn’t much reason to walk this far. In the morning, and sometimes in the late afternoon, there were joggers who ran the beach, but in the middle of the day it was unusual to see anyone on the beach. It was empty now.

As he opened the refrigerator, Charlie’s cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the incoming number, and the area code was unfamiliar. He pulled a bottle of rootbeer out of the fridge before answering, and let out a small sigh of exasperation as he considered his options. He thought it was probably a telemarketer, maybe from an offshore boilerroom company, but he knew that if he didn’t answer it and tell them to buzz off, then they’d only call back again, and probably at a less convenient time. Charlie realized that he didn’t really have anything better to do than to answer the call.

Charlie closed the fridge, turned again toward the window, flipped open the phone, raised it to his head, and answered “Yeah”.

There was a woman on the beach, no more than thirty yards from the window, almost at the top of the dune. She was facing Charlie. He was certain that she hadn’t been there a moment before. Charlie had the eerie feeling that she was the person who had called him, although she didn’t appear to be holding a phone.

Charlie felt the small hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“Please don’t hang up,” the caller asked. It was a woman’s voice. “I need your help.” There was sound in the background, behind her voice. It was a sound that Charlie recognized–the sound of a cellphone being used on a windy beach.

Charlie tried to take a step toward the window, but he couldn’t move his feet. He tried to speak, but found that his tongue was frozen as well. All he could do was stare at the woman.

She had a slender build, and was average height. She was not dressed for the beach or the weather; she wore a long grey wool skirt and jacket over a pale blue blouse. Her hair was long and pale, and moved in the breeze much more than Charlie expected. Her eyes were pure black, and her lips were thin and nearly colorless. Her skin was very pale and her face, from what he could tell from that distance, had a vaguely Eastern-European look. Charlie would have guessed her age at between forty and fifty.

“I need help placing a telephone call. It’s very important,” the voice continued.

Something about the voice mesmerized Charlie. He stood motionless, watching the woman. He only wanted to hear what she had to say next.

“I understand that what I’m asking might cause you some inconvenience,” the voice continued, “But it will help someone very important to me, a young girl in great danger. She will die if we don’t help her. Will you help?”

Charlie desperately wanted to answer yes, but his voice seemed frozen and he could only manage the slightest grunt.

“Good,” the voice responded. “I’m very happy that you will help.”

The woman on the dune smiled. It was a warm and pleasant smile. Charlie felt certain that he had made the right decision.

“Thank you. I promise that I will not forget this favor,” the voice said.

“Who…” Charlie managed to croak, trying to ask the woman her name.

“You can call me Adrianna.”

Charlie felt a moment of vertigo and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the woman was still there, still looking through the window at him. She was smiling again, but it was a troubled smile. As he watched, the woman on the dune began to turn away.

Charlie tried to speak, but still could not. His mind raced with questions he wanted to ask the woman on the phone, but he was unable to ask them. He wanted to know if she was the woman on the dune. He wanted to know her name, how she had come here, why she had called him on the phone instead of simply calling through the window, how she had gotten his number.

Charlie realized that the phone in his hand was silent. She had hung up.

He found himself free to move again, and pressed the redial button, but nothing happened. Charlie checked his phone and found that the call history had been deleted. He didn’t have her number.

When Charlie looked up again, she was gone. He rushed to the window, but there was no sign of her on the beach, and nowhere she could have possibly gone.

There were no footprints in the sand on the dune.

Charlie realized that his hands were shaking. He wondered whether he’d had some sort of hallucination, and what it might imply about his mental and physical health. An hallucination couldn’t have deleted his phone history, however, so maybe it was something more serious.

But he found that he couldn’t make himself worry about it.

He walked back to the card game and sat down.

“Who were you talking to in there?” asked his bridge partner, without looking up.

Charlie shrugged. “I dunno…” he began and then trailed off. Charlie couldn’t remember saying anything. He’d only remembered hearing the woman’s voice through the phone.

“And you were gone for a while…”

“I was?” answered Charlie, surprised.

His partner looked up, saw Charlies face, and was immediately concerned.

“Damn, Charlie; you feeling OK?”

“What do mean?” Charlie answered.

“You’re as white as a sheet. You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”

Charlie shook his head. “No, I’m OK.”

Last week was the start of the Big Test of our system by the Customer. Our project group had been preparing for it for months. It was a difficult system to build, with many technical challenges. In some areas, I believe that we can claim that we moved the state of the art forward. We worked long hours, turning ideas into a working artifact.

The Big Test was scheduled to last for ten days. The Customer had asked for something ambitious, and we believe that they expected our system to fail some or perhaps many of the tests. If it failed a test, they’d tell us, and then they’d give us an opportunity to try to fix it, and then they’d try the test again, and perhaps it would fail again, and we’d tweak it again, and then finally it would get through that test, and this would continue through ten long and potentially sleepless days. At the end, they’d count up the number of tests we passed and the number of tests that we’d failed, and give us a little time to write a report about what we thought we might be able to do about the failures if they gave us more time.

I wondered whether I’d spend Thanksgiving doing a postmortem on the parts of the system that were my responsibility.

That’s not what happened.

The Big Test was over in three days. The Customer tried their tests, and they all worked on the first attempt, except for two that had a small problem. The team in charge of that area quickly found the problem and addressed it; the Customer has promised to look at the changes, but they do not seem to be in any particular hurry. The Customer has told us that they believe that the system is fundamentally sound and that the problems they uncovered are of only minor significance.

The rest of the week was relaxed. We spent it addressing some issues that we think the Customer will want to see soon, or that we were surprised that they didn’t test–they might change their mind. Technically, the test period is not over, and the Customer is within their rights to invent and run new tests, although nobody really believes that will happen.

This morning–Saturday morning–I awoke early. My mind was filled with ideas for new tests, new improvements, enhancements to the existing system. The documentation is not good; I could rewrite it. One of the control dialogs has a different dialog model than the others; I could fix that so that users wouldn’t see that rough edge.

The Customer is happy with the system, but I know that it’s not perfect. And so I wake up early on a Saturday and consider going into work. Not because I think I can make the system perfect–I know better than that–but because I believe that I can make it better.

But this story isn’t about me. I am only one member of the team that built this system, and I’m not the smartest, nor the hardest-working, nor the most important. I don’t have any irreplaceable skills. My main qualification for being on the team is that I want the system to be something worthy of pride, but the team isn’t successful simply because I have a mild obsession for working past Good Enough.

It’s successful because we all do.

Saturday, 12:55pm

Sally had already parked her Jeep in front of the cabin by the time Victor pulled his car off of the sandy, bumpy road onto the even bumpier driveway. The dusty haze her car’s passage had raised was still settling when Victor parked behind her. He could see that she was still sitting at the wheel, with Judy behind her in the back seat, also motionless.

Victor shut off his engine, and unclipped his seatbelt. He expected to hear his passenger immediately unfasten her seatbelt as soon as he unclicked his own, but there was nothing but silence from the passenger beside him. He turned his head and saw that seemed to have fallen asleep–but Victor was certain that she was only pretending. As he watched, her lips curled slightly in a sly but unintended smile.

Victor briefly considered tickling her with a quick poke to her stomach, but decided that she was getting too old to find that amusing. There must be some age, Victor thought, at which it is no longer appropriate to tickle your daughter when she asleep, and Victor guess that Magda might be past that age. She wasn’t a little girl any more.

In any case, there was no need to disturb her; there was no hurry. They were on vacation, and had no plans for the rest of the day beyond a vague notion that at some point in time they might get some dinner.

Victor opened his door, climbed out of the car, stretched his back for a moment, and then walked towards Sally’s jeep. Sally and Judy still hadn’t moved. As he reached them, he noticed that their eyes were closed, and Sally’s hands were still on the wheel.

“Is everything OK?” Victor asked.

Sally opened her eyes and smiled at Victor. “Everything is fine,” she answered.

“When you didn’t get out of the car, I was a little surprised. Are you waiting for something?”

“Oh, that. It’s… Well, it’s so quiet here that Judy and I started a tradition last year of just sitting in the car for a moment until we get used to it. When we’re driving along the road, it seems noisy, with all the gravel and bumps and everything, but when we turn off the engine, it’s suddenly so peaceful. We like to savour it.”

“It’s savoury,” added Judy, solemnly.

“Then I’m sorry I spoiled it by driving up behind you, and then interrupting your savoring.”

Sally smiled again. “Don’t be.”

The wind rustled softly the scrub pine forest that surrounded the house. Victor could hear the faint drone of an unseen fishing boat slowly traversing the channel out of Wellfleet Harbor, at least a mile away.

“It is very peaceful here,” Victor said. “Very peaceful. I’d like to thank you once again for inviting me and Magda to the Cape, or ‘Down the Cape’ as you called it, for the weekend. We’ve been having a wonderful time.”

“It’s our pleasure. We’re glad you could come, but sorry that Adrianna couldn’t make it,” Sally answered.

Victor shrugged. “I’m sure that she would have enjoyed it, but when she’s on travel…”

Magda still in the car?”, Sally asked, after a long moment.

“Yes; I think she’s pretending to be asleep. I wouldn’t mind a nap myself, honestly. I think I am going to sleep very well tonight. If I make it until then!” Victor answered, with a laugh.

Sally turned her head and looked at Victor’s car. It was a large but low-slung four-door coupe. The door sills were wet and there were splashes up almost as far as the windows.

“I’m sorry you car getting wet like that,” said Sally. “I lost track of the time, and we’re lucky we got across the causeway. I don’t think about it too much in the jeep, but I should have been thinking about your car.”

Victor shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. There’s not much that can be done about it now. There probably isn’t more salt in that water than what I get off the street in Cambridge in the Winter.”

Sally swung open her door and climbed down. “We’ll be stuck here on the island for at least a few hours now. In an hour or so, when the tide comes over the whole causeway, I wouldn’t even try to take the jeep across.”

“Then I guess we won’t be seeing Brad for a while?”

“Not unless he decides to sail up to the beach. But don’t worry; he doesn’t mind. He never gets tired of sailing.”

Sally looked again at Victor’s car, thinking that her husband would have been much more worried about his car getting wet than Victor was. She looked again at the logo on Victor’s car, trying to remember where she had seen it before.

Cars had never held much interest for Sally, so she was neither particularly surprised nor curious about not recognizing it the first few times she had seen it. If asked, Sally would have said that she thought that it looked very tasteful, perhaps even beautiful, and like a car that would comfortable to ride in, but without being gaudy, flashy, or noisy. Beyond that, she hadn’t given it a second thought until earlier this afternoon.

After Victor had parked his car in front of the restaurant where they had eaten lunch, Sally had noticed that some people–mostly men or older boys–turned their heads to look at it as they walked past. More than a few stopped and looked at for a few minutes, as though mesmerized, before continuing on their way. Several took photographs. Victor’s car clearly aroused their curiosity, and that, in turn, aroused hers, so she had begun to pay more attention to the people who paid attention to the car.

Through the open window of the restaurant, she had heard two teenagers discussing it; one opined that it was an old Maserati, and therefore a maintenance nightmare disguised behind very nice sheet metal, while the other believed that it was a Bugatti or possibly a very rare Aston-Martin, and in either case extremely rare and expensive. She also heard one man say to his partner as they walked past that he thought it was a Maybach, which meant nothing at all to Sally. She thought it probably wasn’t any of those, but she didn’t know why she thought that. The car looked somewhat out of place here, covered in dust splashed with water, at the end of a sandy driveway, but Sally had seen odd or unusual cars her before.

As Sally looked again at Victor’s car, Magda’s door opened with a creak and a long bare leg emerged and toed at the sand in the driveway for a moment. After a moment the rest of Magda followed. She blinked for a moment in the sunlight and then, in a stylized and well-rehearsed movement, pulled her long black hair back into a ponytail with her left hand and fastened it in place with a scrunchy in her right.

“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that many clams before in my life”, Magda groaned. “I think I’m done for the afternoon. I just want to take a nap.”

“I don’t think you’ve even seen that many clams before in one place”, answered Victor. “But I’m afraid your commitments for the afternoon are only beginning. You promised that you would play with Judy. If memory serves, she has some hermit crabs that she would like you to meet.”

With a giggle, Judy bounced down from her perch in the jeep, grasped Magda’s arm, and led her off toward the house.

“It’s very sporting of her to play with Judy like that,” remarked Sally.

“Don’t let her teen-age attitude fool you. It’s just an act. Magda adores Judy. I think she secretly wishes she was seven again, instead of fourteen.”

“And you probably wish the same thing.”

“You know what they say: raising a girl is a lot easier than raising a boy, but raising a young man is easier than raising a young woman.

There was a long shriek from the direction of the path that wound through the dunes and down to the beach. Victor looked alarmed for a moment, but as the shriek degenerated into giggles the tension eased away from his body.

“I suppose it was only matter of time before Judy discovered that Magda is ticklish. Or perhaps she has discovered Magda’s true feelings about hermit crabs.”

“These things are very important to a seven-year-old.”

“I’ll ask her later if you’re ticklish anywhere accessible.”

Sally blushed slightly, and Victor continued on.

“But in the meanwhile, Sally, I ask you to consider the possibilities provided by our situation. Your husband will not be back for hours. My wife is out of town. Our children have run off and might not return for hours. It is too soon to begin thinking about dinner, except in the most abstract terms.” Victor smiled widely. “How shall we pass the time?”

Sally smiled demurely in return, but there was a sparkle in her eye.

“It seems wrong… but I know what you want, and you know that I can’t say no. Brad wouldn’t mind. He wouldn’t leave us alone together, if was concerned. He knows about our history.”

Victor raised an eyebrow.

“And he knows that we… He knows that I have needs. He tries to fulfill them, and I love him for it, but I know he doesn’t enjoy it. He’s not like you. So I think he’s giving me tacit permission. Encouragement, even. After all, he can’t actually enjoy just sitting there on a wet piece of fiberglass, wrestling with a rudder or a sheet, or whatever it’s called, all day, can he? I believe that he’s staying away–sacrificing himself–to create this opportunity.”

“Maybe he’s just testing you.”

“You don’t know Brad. He doesn’t feel threatened by you.” Sally paused. “Well, maybe by your car,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

Victor raised his eyebrows.

“I never really put this together before, but when Brad meets another man, the topic of cars always seems to come up. Always. I think it’s so Brad can mention the ’68 Stingray he’s restoring. But Brad has never mentioned his Stingray or talked about cars with you, at least not when I’ve been there. Your car must be something special.”

Victor gave a short laugh. “My car? This thing? It’s a reliable and practical transportation; some style, a little comfort, but nothing exciting.” He shook his head. “Now, a Stingray–that’s a fun car. A very nice toy. I’ll have to ask him about it.”

Victor gave another short laugh, and then continued, with a wistful tone. “When Magda came, I knew I needed something suitable. A family car.” Victor looked wistful for a moment. “You should have seen the vehicle I had when I was single. That car would have made Brad’s eyes pop out. And the way I used to drive–a little reckless, I confess. He’d never leave you alone with me if he’d seen me driving that car.”

Victor laughed again and shook his head.

Sally ignored the digression. She was not interested in cars right now. “But if you and I start again… Will we be able to stop? Or are we stepping onto a slippery slope here?”

“One way or the other, I’m heading back to Boston tomorrow morning,” Victor answered.

“Yes, and then I’ll see you at the office on Monday! And I don’t want to end up sneaking off at lunch with you once or twice a week, like the old days.”

Victor nodded solemnly. “It would be a scandal, if word got out. People say the most outrageous things.”

Sally shook her head, indicating that her point had been missed. “Would that really be the worst thing that could happen?” she asked.

Victor shrugged. “Adrianna? Sally, you don’t know my wife very well. She has very traditional values on many matters, but she has never asked for exclusivity. She would be more threatened if you and I had some sort of, well, let us say, intimate emotional commitment.”

Victor paused. “I am more concerned about the children. I would not want to lose Magda’s respect. What if they catch us in the act?”

“I think they already suspect. And who knows, maybe they’ll learn something,” Sally said with a wink. “I can’t keep Judy in the dark about these things.”

“I surrender! You know that I can’t say no to you. I never could. I’ll get the Scrabble board.”

Continued in part 3! When I get around to it!

A few nights ago, after an extremely long day at the office (crucial deadlines looming) and a late dinner followed immediately by trying to get some sleep, I had what I term, in my loose use of the terminology, a weird dream.

I sometimes wonder about what other people dream about, or what their dreams are like. I don’t usually don’t remember my own dreams, and when I do it’s not in much detail. It doesn’t resemble dream sequences from shows that I see television, and in no way whatsoever resembles any part of the movie ‘Inception’. My assumption is that other people don’t talk about their dreams because their dreams are also, like mine, remembered poorly (if at all) and generally not interesting to a wide audience. On the other hand, my assumptions must be tempered with the unequivocal fact that I have a long and colorful history of equivocal and wildly incorrect assumptions.

In my dream, I am riding in the front seat of a Nice Car. Sitting next to me is a Woman who is not my wife. She is sort of leaning up against me, in the manner that one stereotypically sees in the front seat of pickup trucks with bench seats; boyfriend driving, girlfriend with her head on his shoulder.

To make matters interesting, I’m in the passenger seat, and the woman is supposed to be driving, but she’s not. She’s practically sitting on my lap. I look over to the driver’s seat; nobody is driving. The car is moving, in traffic. I see other cars passing in the opposite direction. We are on a highway. The car begins to drift into the oncoming lane, and then drift back toward the shoulder. I wonder whether I can snake my foot over to press the brake, or maybe get my hand on the wheel, but they seem too far away. I believe that this is a matter of increasing urgency, and I am about to bring this to the attention of my traveling companion, when the dream shifts to a new location.

My dreams don’t have a lot of continuity. They tend to jump from place to place. You might have inferred that aspect of my personality from reading my blog.

I am walking into the lobby of a Fine Hotel, carrying a guitar case in each arm. The revolving door presents a momentary challenge, but I know what to do. I am slightly baffled by the situation, since I do not play guitar–although I once put in a great deal of earnest effort practicing, the simple truth is that I have no knack for guitar whatsoever. But I let the dream run its course.

In the lobby, I run into an Old Friend. He is also carrying two guitar cases. This is not completely surprising, because he actually owns several guitars, and plays guitar well, and is serious about it.

We ascend an escalator.

“Are you here for Bring Your Own Axe Night?” he asks.

I shake my head. I don’t really have any idea yet why I’m here, but that certainly isn’t it. I was unaware of this event until he mentioned it.

When we reach the top of the escalator, I notice many musicians wandering around with their instruments, warming up. Chairs have been arranged around a podium for the players, but not many are seated yet. More are arriving by the moment.

“It’s a lot of fun,” my Old Friend remarks. “You should come.”

“I don’t really know how to play guitar,” I respond, hoping that my friend will not ask why I am carrying them. “I’m only really good at saxophone. I have an alto I could bring.”

“Well, let’s ask the Maestro whether we need another alto,” he answers.

The Maestro appears. He clucks his tongue. “No, we have plenty of altos,” he says in a disappointed voice, waving his hand in the direction of a row of saxophonists who are arranging themselves in one of the rows.

I am tempted to point out that telling someone that they can’t participate for such a reason is contrary to fundamental premise of Bring Your Own Axe night, but I do not. I am on unfamiliar ground here. Perhaps my Old Friend was just joking when he said that it was a Bring Your Own Axe event. Maybe this is a Serious Group With Actual Standards.

“That’s too bad,” I say. “However, I also play tenor.”

This is technically true. I do play tenor, and baritone, although I possess neither and usually deny that I can play baritone for the simple reason that I believe that the expression “having a millstone around my neck” is a thinly veiled euphemism for playing bari in a marching band. Tenor, however, is a pleasant instrument; it sounds good, and the parts most arrangers assign to tenors are usually very easy.

“No; I’m sorry,” answers the Maestro. “We already have a tenor,” he says, gesturing toward a man who is assembling his instrument nearby.

I sigh in resignation and turn away. It is clear that I am not welcome here, for some unspoken reason. To turn away a notable alto player from Bring Your Own Axe night on the flimsy pretext that there are already too many altos was a strong hint, but this is even stronger. The idea that a group could possibly have too many tenors is bizarre and borders on the offensive, but I’m prepared to let that slide on the basis that many Maestros are bizarre and border on the offensive anyway, so that’s not what makes me turn away. What makes me turn away is that the man is assembling a baritone clarinet.

When I awake, I tell my wife my dream and that I wonder what it might signify.

“It’s obvious,” she says. “You want to leave me, and then go and have make-out sessions in a car with another woman, and join a band and travel the world collecting groupies with Old Friend. It’s the usual midlife crisis bullshit.”

If she is correct, then I must confess that I am very disappointed in myself. Certainly I can imagine a better, more fulfilling fantasy than running away with a woman who is such a poor driver, or joining a band whose leader cannot tell the difference between a baritone clarinet and a tenor saxophone.

“By the way,” my wife continues, “You never did tell me what you want for your birthday or Christmas. If you don’t give me a list, you’ll just get socks or something like that.”

“A tenor saxophone would be nice,” I answer.

Whenever I give an interview, there are one or two questions that nearly always come up, and that I always avoid answering in any direct manner. It has become almost a running joke. They’re not deep, important, or even particularly interesting questions–just the sort of ordinary, obvious question that an interviewer might use to break the ice, to establish some sort of context, before diving into deeper topics. If I’d answered these questions the first time they’d been raised, then I’m fairly sure that nobody would have asked me them again–at least, nobody who had done their homework and read my earlier interviews before picking out their own questions.

Perhaps because of my initial evasion, however, the opposite has happened. I may be imagining things–I often am–but I think that it’s plausible, from the evidence on hand, that everyone who does do their homework and reads my earlier interviews sees that I’ve dodged these questions, and therefore tries, each in his or her own way, to get the answer that I have denied to their colleagues. Perhaps they suspect that there’s something interesting behind my evasiveness, or perhaps their interest is not about me at all, but instead is a sort of friendly rivalry among themselves to see who will get me to spill the beans, even though my beans tend to be more interesting un-spilled.

It’s gotten to the point where it’s become a bit silly. I don’t generally mind a little silliness, but in this case it’s drawing attention away from what I really want to discuss during my interviews, which is, as I have asserted on several occasions, usually whatever pops into my mind that day. Trying to steer the conversation toward something that I don’t really find interesting or worthy of discussion is a distraction that takes time and energy away from topics that I believe, if only perhaps for a fleeting moment, to be more interesting and worthy of discussion. Therefore, I’ve decided to attempt to lay the matter to rest once and for all, and do so here, in my blog, to be fair and not show preference to one interviewer, critique, or host over another.

Before doing so, however, I feel obligated to layer yet another level of parentheticalness to this essay: if you have no idea what I am talking about, and have never read any of my interviews, or heard me ramble on in my dull monotone for my seven minutes on some quickly forgotten radio talk show whose tape was recycled the next day after it aired, you haven’t missed anything. Nothing. You were wise to have spent the time doing whatever it was you were doing instead of becoming sucked in to my personal zeitgeist. Having no foundation in this subject is a positive symptom of living a good, productive life. Whatever discomfort you might be experiencing from temporary confusion will end abruptly before the end of the next paragraph.

The question (or questions, depending on how they are phrased) is how I came up with the characters of Victor and Adrianna, protagonists of my “Lonely Peony” novels, and Artemus Knox, a recurring and unexpectedly popular character in the “The Poodle Millennium” stories.

If you haven’t read any of these, don’t worry; they are not required reading. If you have no idea who these characters why these characters might be interesting, don’t worry; they’re not. Their only significance comes from my reticence to reveal their origins.

I hope this won’t be disappointing, but there’s not much to reveal. I don’t know where I get the ideas for my characters, except from the ones that are shallow caricatures of people I actually know, or characters I steal from the legions of better authors but less popular authors, and these are not either. Not consciously, anyway.

Here’s what I can explain in a way that isn’t a complete fabrication.

For many years, my wife and I used to rent a house on Lieutenants Island in the town of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, for our summer vacation. It’s a very pretty area–like many of the surrounding areas–but it has one characteristic that is a bit unusual. As the name implies, it really is an island, and is connected to the rest of the Cape by a low, straight causeway across a salt marsh. When the tide comes in, the road is submerged, and the island is cut off to traffic. There’s a nice photo of the causeway here. Depending on the phase of the moon, and the wind, and whatnot, the road can be impassable for as long as two hours before and after high tide.

When it was just the two of us, being cut off from civilization for a few hours every day was not a problem. In fact, it was a bit of fun, sometimes, because groups of people stranded at either end of the causeway were known to throw impromptu parties to pass the time. It was considered a minor social obligation to have something in the trunk of your car to contribute to such an event–a few plastic cups and a bottle of bourbon, or something similarly festive and non-perishable.

Once we had kids, however, our view of the world changed. I became nervous about being trapped on the island with a child who urgently needed something not available on the island–with the most obvious and urgent need being medical attention.

As an aside, this phobia was even more extreme with respect to our favorite winter vacation spot–a tiny island in the Caribbean that was, in good weather, hours by boat away from the nearest thing that had an even passing resemblance to an emergency room. Before we visited for the first time, I didn’t know how remote it was, but by the time we were docking at the island (and I’d been feeling that we were getting farther and farther off the map with each passing hour) I was more than a little bit worried. “What if one of us steps on a scorpionfish? What’ll we do then?” I asked my wife. “Don’t worry; they’re rare, and shy. The odds of even seeing one are negligible.” I put it out of my mind, and ten minutes after we arrived, I was wading in the water off the beach, fiddling with my snorkel gear. I put the mask on my face, and bent down so that it was in the water. The water was perfectly clear, and I could see a huge school of brightly-colored fish swimming around me. They were so beautiful and mesmerizing that it took at least a minute before I noticed the scorpionfish six inches from my left foot. We have no immediate plans to vacation there with our children.

So, the genesis of these characters is the story that follows below; a daydream that sprang from my phobia of what might happen if one of my children was in desperate, unanticipated need of medical care, coupled with a huge amount of wishful thinking and reading far too many science fiction novels as a kid.

Not very exciting, I’m afraid, and the story is sort of a clunker, but hey, this is my blog. I don’t have to convince a publisher that people will pay to read it, or even that’s it’s a good story.

Nevertheless, I hope you’ll enjoy it, as I slowly cut and paste it here, after making an editing pass or two over it.

Here’s the latest one of the quiz virus things to hit my mailbox. It’s a nice cop-out from having to think up an original topic; I can just answer the questions and call it a blog entry. I especially enjoy that the instructions set a concrete time limit and specifically discourage any deep thought. I promise to obey both the letter and spirit of these instructions.

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1. JRR Tolkien.
   If I have to explain…
2. Richard Halliburton.
   A real-life adventurer. Everyone should read his ‘Book of Marvels‘ at the proper age. At least, that’s what I keep telling my kids…
3. Fritz Leiber.
   Trashy fantasy pulp fiction that I couldn’t get enough of as a twelve-year-old.
4. Whoever wrote all those Tom Swift books.
   I don’t know why this popped into my head, and I guess I’m not allowed to think about it too long. I didn’t read many of these, but they set the standard for hard-core bullshit science fiction for years to come.
5. Thomas Pynchon.
   Of course.
6. Richard Brautigan.
   I don’t have time to explain how awesomely awesome his awesome writing is. He writes like Pynchon with a page budget.
7. Ursula K. Le Guin.
   I liked the EarthSea concept very, very much. Except for the last two books, especially the last one, which is remarkably horrible and undermines everything that came before. Still, it was a good twenty-year run.
8. P.G. Wodehouse.
   This requires no explanation.
9. Neal Stephenson.
   ‘Snowcrash‘ and, to a slightly lesser extent ‘A young lady’s illustrated primer‘ are masterpieces. You should go read them right now. I’ll wait.
10. Anthony Trollope.
    Someone told me I should like his writings, and perhaps that why I did. I was impressionable for a few moments, during sophomore year in high school.
11. Jack Kerouac.
    Let’s have some fun here, shall we?
12. T.S. Eliot.
    I kinda liked some of his poems.
13. Stephen King.
    I read the first part of ‘The Dark Tower‘ when it was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction back in 1978, or some such, and thought it was great and wanted more. Unfortunately, I didn’t make note of the author, and therefore it took about twenty years for me to figure out that there were more books. It took King almost twenty years to finish the story, however, so it all worked out nicely. Unfortunately, the final book should never have been written. (Stephen, you might want to have a chat with Ursula about the temptation to try to wrap everything up nicely with a bow on it–it’s seems to be a really bad idea.)

Well, I’m out of time and ideas.

A few careers ago, an author named Geoffrey Moore wrote a book named “Crossing the Chasm”. The topic is market penetration of products of a new or somewhat revolutionary nature. At first, it seems, there are people–the so-called “early adopters”–who will try and sometimes even buy a product just because it is new and novel. They like things that are new and novel, even if that’s all they are, because they are risk-takers and want to be ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, there aren’t all that many of them, and they don’t have a lot of money, and they don’t like to spend it. Selling to them is a terrible business model.

A mature and well-positioned product, on the other hand, can be effectively marketed to the masses. It is not frightening or risky. It might seem flashy or cutting edge, but only in a superficial way. It’s a safe bet, because its utility is easy to describe and understand.

A great example of this is the iPod. The iPod was not the first portable digital music player–not by years. At no clear point in time has it the best in terms of sound quality, nor has it been the least expensive, when compared to its ever-dwindling cohort. What it has always been, however, is the safe bet. Using earlier MP3 players felt almost like a shady, illicit activity. Music was typically acquired and downloaded into them via processes that might even have been illegal, at least according to the RIAA. But Apple made it all legit, by providing all of the software, in a branded package, to rip CDs and/or buy music directly over the web for the sole purpose of loading onto an iPod. There were no hand-written instructions cribbed from back-alley chat rooms to follow, no additional software that needed to be acquired from strange ‘open source’ bazaars. Just push your favorite CD into the slot of your mac, and before you know it, the music is magically installed in your iPod.

The trick of high-tech marketing, or at least the trick espoused in “Crossing the Chasm” is to leverage the funding and feedback available from the risk-taking early adopters to get your little start-up (or your product, or what have you) across the chasm that separates the early-adopters from the plump, profit-laden mass market that lags behind, eschewing anything risky or unfamiliar.

At least, that’s what I think it’s about. I vaguely remember a very expensive consultant lecturing about it to the staff of the small startup at which I worked in the early 1990’s. We didn’t make it across the chasm. I believe that one of the reasons that we didn’t was because of the large amount of money that we spent on very expensive executive training taught by very expensive consultants who all were old, dear friends of our CEO, who knew nothing about our product but was brought in by the board to lead us because of her incredible marketing savvy, even though it turned out that what she was best at marketing was herself.

But I’ve never had a head for business.

I saw most of a movie last night on the telly. The name of the movie is “The invention of lying” (if I remember correctly, which is always a bit of an issue). After I was able to get past the confusing question about why the main character has a different (English?) accent than the rest of his friends, neighbors, and most of his family, and why none of them at all seem to have a Lowell accent (which, since it is near my home, I immediately recognized as the locale where the movie was shot), I found the movie mildly amusing.

The plot of this movie is simple: it takes place in a world which is notable in that its inhabitants (in addition to possessing wildly inconsistent accents and speech patterns) cannot say anything other than the truth. Anything anyone says is taken as absolute truth, because nobody can say anything that is not.

The protagonist discovers, under a great deal of duress, that he has a unique gift: he can say things that are not true. In fact, he can say anything at all, no matter how ridiculous, and everyone will believe him, because everyone else in the world takes everything at face value.

That would be an interesting premise for a comedy, but this movie is not so simple. There’s another aspect to this world, which is even more important: not only does everyone speak the truth, but they do so without any apparent consideration for the consequences of their utterances. They do not have unexpressed thoughts. The simple kindness of not telling someone the truth about how ghastly their outfit is, or that their parents are old and about to die, or that they don’t like working with you, is impossible. They say whatever is on their mind–no matter how cruel, nasty, or inappropriate. For example, when the protagonist thanks a woman he has invited to dinner for joining him, she says, with a smile on her face, that he is unattractive (both physically, financially, and emotionally), she is out of his league, extremely unlikely to ever talk to him again, and he will probably not get even so much as a goodnight handshake from her–and he accepts this as a fact, although it hurts him to hear it.

This movie is about more than the invention of simple deceit. It is about the invention of white lies; the invention of sensitivity and the art of choosing ones words for the benefit of both the speaker and the listener–an art that we seem to be losing.

Faithful readers of my blog, and unfaithful readers who I have forced to endure my long-winded ramblings, know that I’ve been working on a “novel” for nearly a year. I put a big chunk of it up on a web site populated by aspiring authors (and, it appears, their many ghost accounts), and received some interesting feedback about the narrative structure. The narrative structure is a bunch of memories, in a seemingly arbitrary order, strung together by a larger and roughly linear series of framing events. People did not like this, because they wanted things to happen in order. Chapter three should happen after chapter two, and that sort of thing.

Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps if I explain what this book is really about–or at least what I intended it to be about–it will help. Perhaps I can accomplish in a brief blog post what I couldn’t accomplish in a novel.

I forget things; everyone does. At this point in my life, I’ve forgotten much more than I remember. What’s interesting to me is what I do remember–what makes a particular memory persistent, while other memories are gone in a few days. Sometimes the difference is baffling: memories of dramatic, important events disappear while memories of events that seem to have little significance linger and last. And then there are secrets, which seem to be remembered even longer; perhaps they are precious because we know that when they are forgotten, nobody else will remember them and they will truly be gone.

I decided to structure the book around the process of forgetting. It starts with the things that will be forgotten first–even though they might seem memorable–and ends with the last things remembered. It begins with the ephemera and ends with the indelible.

But I’m thinking of switching it around again, to get more readers.