1. I am aiming this novel at a young adult audience. It was not written that way to begin with but the market for young adult novels is the only growth sector in print books.
2. To express more clearly the forlorn love of a young woman that shaped much of my life. A love that is finally far enough in my past that I have a bit of perspective on it.
So these are the changes I'm working on what follows is an amalgamation of the changes I have and have not made.
Waterboy -
Alright, look, I am not crazy. I’m not a stalker. And I’ve never been a freak. But then again, that’s not what you think I am, is it? You think I am a hero. You think I am something special. It’s not your fault you think all these false things about me - heroic...ha, I’m a coward in chicken’s clothing. But you would not know that, would you? Because you’ve never heard the whole story. Well, now you will.
An, unlike my mother taught me, I’m going to start out on the wrong foot:
Sometimes I find myself getting arrogant and believing its because I’m smarter than everyone around. Other times, when I’m feeling down, I think I’m just wired different and will never fit in, or have any friends. It’s that down angle the doctors like to harp on. They tell me I’m manic depressive and they want to rewire me with their medication. Or they tell me I’m schizophrenic. I can tell that manic depressive, which the younger doctors call bi-polar isn’t as bad. It’s pretty obvious from the way they talk about it. They don’t look as sad when they say bi-polar, as they do when they say schizophrenic. Schizophrenic always comes with the addition of, ‘maybe, possibly’ or some other loop hole for me to get out of. It’s like, if I just do the right thing, speak the right way, so long as it’s different from what I’ve been doing, maybe the life ending label of schizophrenic won’t be applied to me.
A long time ago it was just called crazy. Back then they’d lock the patients up in a looney bin. I guess it was sort of like how the term shell shock used to be how they described how army guys felt after they got back from war. Now they use post-traumatic stress syndrome. I can see what total bullshit it is, all those labels, all that bullshit about my brain being wired wrong. How if they can just get this or that chemical in my brain balanced everything will be as peachy as apple pie.
You want to know what I think is so funny about it all? That no one ever seems to ask what’s wrong.
Well, that’s a little bit of a lie. Sometimes people ask what’s wrong. But there’s something fake about the way they ask. It’s like all they really want to hear is that everything is honky-dory, or some other happy-crappy. But it’s all bullshit, the way those doctors listen. It’s like they can wait, but won’t listen. I read this letter an old indian chief wrote to the president. The chief was Chief Seattle and he was asking the president to respect his land. You could tell by the way he wrote the thing that that Chief really knew how to listen. He could listen to the trees and the brooks and the sort of stuff that gets drowned out in the hustle of the bustle. I knew when I read about him that, if I could learn to talk to him, earn the respect of him, I’d be alright. And all the labels the doctors could ever think up to put on me wouldn’t matter, not even a little bit.
That was the first time I ever got put in a mental institute. A looney bin. When I ran away to go find Chief Seattle. I was thirteen years old and I made it from Orange County California where my family and I lived up to Oregon. I even made it to the reservation. When I got there I thought, ‘this is it, I’ve found what I was looking for.’ There was this big show with all these Indian’s dressed up doing their dance and banging their drums. The bang, bang, boom of the drums hit something down deep in me. But when I went to talk to the Indian’s they didn’t listen at all. They took me to see some soft skinned man in an office. I told him I was looking for someone like Chief Seattle. But instead of listening this man in a suit just asked questions. Where was I from? Where were my parents? A bunch of crap. Soon enough my parents had flown up to take me back home. That soft skinned man in the suit, he was chief. I googled him later, he’s an Indian alright. He runs a casino.
After I got out of the mental institute my parents moved us to Florida. They said it was going to be better for me down there. I wouldn’t have to explain why I’d been in a mental institute to anyone. I knew the real reason though. My Dad got fired from his job.
I guess all that doesn’t really matter now. It was before the flood. Before the infra-structure collapsed. Back before life got interesting again.
Don’t give me that red, white, and blue crap that life was plenty interesting here in the States before The Flood. I was about to start my freshman year of high school before everything went down. And instead of having freshman year with all my old friends back home. I was in the lowest state in America. By lowest, of course, I mean...
-
Elevation
I know how to interact with people. I laugh at all the right places. Smile when it is necessary, frown if I find something offensive. But trust, for me, is not something that can be talked out. There is no sales pitch I’ll ever trust. What I do trust, in so far as I can trust anything, are my five senses. I trust what I’ve learned through experience. And until I’ve known someone long enough to have developed a faith in them and their decision making - I’m not asking that someone put me at the center of their decision making, only that they have a personal philosophy that includes the wellbeing of all people they come into contact with - I cannot be fully at ease with them.
That’s the much shorter, yet more long winded version of this:
“I could use some help with Biology.” Melindasaid. You see how I do that? I introduce her with something as simple as a single sentence now I’m going to twist it around. Now I’m going to paint her picture. Now I’m going to tell you who she is.
She is sex.
Take a deep breath. Slow down that throbbing heart. I know that if you had your way you’d shut down every piece of your mind and just follow that divining rod in your pants into whatever moist place you can find. But for now, take a deep breath because she is sex. You know those early notions of sex? Black stockings with a line down the back. High heeled shoes with a short skirt, a little fray at the edge of the skirt that sways when she walks. Take a deep breath, I know you’re getting riled up but it’s not over yet. She’s French. What is it about the French? Somehow I’m convinced that bestial passion is encoded in their Gallic DNA. Yet that passion has been channeled by romance-language cultures for a thousand years culminating in the grand spectacle of smoke rolling off her lips, cigarette held, not by the strength of her fingers because her fingers are nearly limp, but by some unknowable alchemy the cigarette holds its place. I don’t even like smokers - but when she does it...Maybe I’m just as blind as the last man she dated. He was a married man who left his wife and two kids for her. She got bored with him. So he killed himself.
Somehow when I got to Florida I had become a nerd. My nerdification happened somewhere in between not having any friends and finding my only entertainment in books and Florida’s ass-backwards educational system that left an average California student about a year and a half ahead of an advanced Floridian. It also became the reason Melindapaid any attention to me.
And now, somehow, because I’ve gotten a few grades people think I’m smart. And sex...I mean Melinda, has asked for help with Biology.
“I just don’t get it.” She says. “I’ve got to take this class to graduate but I just don’t see why I should care. I mean what will I ever need to know about biology.”
“It’s the study of life.” I say, disbelieving anyone could think that something as basic as biology could not be important underlying that though was a desire to tell Melindaanything she might want to hear - so long as she liked me.
“Why should I care about cells though? I don’t want to be a doctor.”
I smiled and realized that the same thing that keeps the beer industry plugging away was going to keep this conversation between her and I alive. “Biology isn’t about cells. And it’s not about being a doctor either. Do you want to know what Biology is really about?”
A small intimate bubble had grown around us, outside the table, booth, and books was another world. Or maybe I was just imagining it, after all she had me thinking about...
“Biology is sex. Everything about Biology boils down to that one primary element. Without sex none of it matters. I mean think about it, life started on the planet - at a best guess - something like four billion years ago. Sexual reproduction didn’t start until about 1.2 billion years ago. In almost three billion years the biggest evolutionary success was developing something called ATP, do you know what ATP is?”
Melindanodded. I new this would be the perfect spot to try innuendo. But what do I know about innuendo? Innuendo takes finesse. Finesse takes practice and practice I do not have. Worse yet? I’d have to try and mix funny in, there is no comfortable way to inject humor into something you’re not comfortable with. It comes off stilted and awkward. And like I said, I had no practice, so of course it all felt awkward.
I realized I’d lost myself in my own thoughts for a few moments too long and was losing Melinda’sattention. I shook my head to knock the internal dialogue out of it.
“So three billion years it took evolution to come with ATP, without sex. Every cell in your body uses ATP to generate its energy. But in the last billion years every life form you’ve ever heard of has evolved from a bunch of single celled life. All the dinosaurs you’ve ever heard of, the weirdest glowing headed creature at the bottom of the ocean, lions, tigers, and bears...all of them have popped up relatively quickly all because of sex. Biology is just the study of how all those pairings led to what we see around us now.”
“I don’t know it just doesn’t seem that important.”
“But we’ll figure it out?” I asked encouragingly.
“Yeah we’ll figure it out.” A wane little smile spread across her lips and her shoulders slumped just a little. Maybe I should have been annoyed at her. After all what use is a person who can’t even see fit to educate themselves? But I wasn’t annoyed. Not like the silent annoyance my Dad expressed when I was slow to pick something up he thought was easy. But he was a scientist, a graduate of MIT one of the finest engineering schools in the world. Me I was just dumb, horny and male enough to stubbornly refuse to give up on Melinda.
-
Late at night the monsters creep out from under my bed. All day long I know my bed is there, waiting - Brillo-haired devils laying beneath - for my return. Patience is their motto.
“He always has to come back to us.” They say.
They never bite. They never scream, they never pounce or...prey - that is what they do. These devils prey. They whisper little preys up to my ears. Words like prayers, but without a prayers bequest. Paranoia, horror, mistrust: all the sane rational bits of risk management a person must wade through to deal with a hostile world. Not me, they whisper. ‘No, not I,’ I whisper back.
Nothing I think is assuredly sane. And there the devil has me.
-
‘I hate you.’ I typed. I didn’t know if anyone was paying attention or not. I wrote the words anyway. I could hear them thinking. Like the soft tick, tick, tick of a mechanical network. They were out there. And no, maybe I couldn’t really hear their thoughts. I just knew They were out there thinking, all I had to do was re-imagine the chatter.
Twice. Not once, but twice we’ve saved his life. We kept Bernie from burning himself alive, we kept him from drowning too. That little bastard should be grateful.
But I wasn’t grateful. That’s not what I felt at all. What I felt was, “I hate you, fuck you, LEAVE ME ALONE.”
Emotions aren’t a one way street. Hell they aren’t even a street, sure we label certain emotions with street signs but they’ve got no direction, they don’t follow any tidal flows. And so my hate was mixed with doubt. Because why wouldn’t I doubt my hate. It wasn’t like I could explain my hate. How the hell could I explain this? “oh by the way there’s this piece of me, this really big piece actually, because I know deep down in the dark little heart of you, you don’t give a shit about me. If you gave a shit about me then you’d do something to help alleviate this madness that consumes me. You’d take a stand with me against Network, if you weren’t such a selfish piece of shit that is.
No, somehow I don’t think those words would win me many friends out there in Watcherland.
-
“Jesus, what happened to your hand?”
“Nothing.” I said a little too sharply. “I slammed it in a door. Just an accident.”
“Are you going to be okay to study?” Melindaasked.
My heart and mind were in a jumble. Network, that demon in my heart had been tightening his grip on me lately. That was why I’d taken my fist and pound it like a piston into a cinderblock wall. That is why my hand was swollen and mangled. Every time I thought I was free of Him, He found a way to fold me back in. But Melindawas being kind to me, even if she was playing along with Network, pretending she didn’t already know. And she was beautiful. Beauty always helped. Something about it precludes forgiveness, a forgiveness I had to grow into with everyone. Everyone but Melinda.
“It was just a little accident. I mean it hurts, but I’ll be fine.” The left side of my lips turned up in a smile. And I put on an aw-shucks tone of voice I hoped would express embarrassment over my clumsiness, and my desire to drop the subject. Which had little to do with how I really felt, but I still believed in Network - and even if I didn’t believe to speak of Him was to hand my freedom back over to the mental institutes.
Melindashrugged. “Okay.”
We studied. She’d gotten a C+ on her last test, a B and an A on her most recent homework assignments. Studying with her was the only time I got out of the house. All my other time was spent thinking, imaging...wondering if the doctors had maybe been right.
Schizophrenic.
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