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Gah.

Terrifying! Wordcount: 11539

Ever since I finished up with my Patients One-Two, it’s been harder to get words. But, I know I’ll start to roll with Zachary Graves again. Right? Right.

More serendipity — I sorta aptly chose a random designation for the virus. P53 is a tumor suppressor that when mutated, causes cancer. What if a cure for cancer caused a weirder mutation…or something? Eh, the science is there…. Somewhere.

While Westphail’s body — and I imagine he was still alive, or reanimated, or whatever you want to call it — was being poked, prodded, and subjected to whatever tests the FEMA guys could come up with, cases were beginning to pop up around the world. During the next week, there were 23 documented cases of what had been identified as H5N3P53, a grossly mutated version of the H1N1 (and H1N2, H3N1, H3N2, and H2N3) flu viruses. It was the addition of a mutated P53 protein, normally a tumor suppressor. P53 (and the TP53 gene) had been an essential part of the cancer cure, and when a mutated version of it showed up in scientists’ microscopes, there were a few who smirked and uttered a quiet, “I told you so,” and went back to their work.
I uttered a “I told you so” of my own, but to be honest, I hadn’t told anybody, and I was all by myself in my room. The presence of P53, I was certain, meant that in curing cancer, we (they? I had nothing to do with it, but it had, in the intervening years, become one of those so-called “l’accomplissement de la population”  — an “accomplishment of the people”) had unleashed something so much worse that we would have been better off just leaving well enough alone, quitting while we were ahead, or at the very least, not so very very far behind. I had been working on my theories, mostly in my head, sometimes in the bars when I found a couple coins to rub together. I tended to get drunk — very drunk — and espouse my ideas to whomever would listen. I received a lot of crazy looks, but I noticed that more and more, there were people who would quietly nod their heads, perhaps not ready to voice their agreement, but they were there and that was all I needed.

Southeast Texas

Zombie at work! Word count: 10,015

Moving on from the events in Botswana, I have to say I miss it! Realized last night why everything was sounding so academic: reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, which is just getting into this ridiculous description of a whole ton of insane events, but is calm as can be, very academic, etc. It’s coloring my descriptions, but also turned me into a third-person narrator instead of the memoir-style it started as. Nice thing about NaNo is you can just say, “Oh well, fuck it,” and keep going with whatever. There’s no time or place to be going back and changing things…. So I’m somehow going to make it work out for my own sake, and keep on motoring. Passed 10,000 today which means this thing has some amount of weight and I will (most likely) stick with it enough to finish. (Word 10,000: best).

Moving on to the virus victim whose name was given to it: Thomas Wayne Westphail — the name Westphail is, I realized, a subconscious bastardization of the name of someone I saw a few days before NaNo started. Hilarious! Threw Wayne in as his middle name since he is a convicted murderer and as Philip Wayne Martin knows, everyone with Wayne as their middle name ends up in jail for murder at some point. It’s just a matter of time, Phil.

Three days later, scientists finally had their chance to look at a live one. Thomas Wayne Westphail, a 32-year-old Texas man who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a 9-year-old girl and was sitting on death row, went through Stage IV. He’d complained of a severe flu and had been moved to the infirmary of the Allan B. Polunsky Unit Supermax prison in West Livingston, Texas. Westphail was an incorrigible and difficult prisoner, so he had been handcuffed to the bed in the medical unit, a precaution which proved incredibly useful to the scientists, and most likely saved the lives of several of the staff in the building.
Westphail passed through Stage IV in the middle of the night, much like Basadi. The infirmary was empty save for him, and there was just a skeleton crew on duty, none of whom noticed the once-dead-to-the-world Westphail suddenly straining against the locked bracelet on his wrist.
At 6:30 that morning, the prison staff was surprised by the arrival of a FEMA team, some SpecOps types, and a half dozen Men in Black types along with a National Guard unit who’d been roused and dispatched from their garrison in Galveston. This last group formed a cordon around the prison, blocking it off from the rest of the world. Tower guards were now faced with the perplexing image of being guarded themselves — men in camoflage with automatic weapons patrolled uneasily outside the walls. The FEMA team set up in a large RV-type vehicle directly outside the main entrance to the prison building. They were deadly efficient, getting their portable generator running, their quarantine space ready to receive, their MOPP suits on. The SpecOps made ready to storm the building, while the CIA spooks (for they were obviously CIA spooks) stood around and spoke into their cell phones and generally looked as if they were running the show but had nothing to do.

Botswana, continued

Ooooh. Scary Zombie (wearing NU hat)! Word count: 9023. Also: Northwestern 28 - Nebraska 25!

Good writing again today. Nice to get out of my narrator’s head, more or less, as he relates some of the story of the initial outbreak. Doesn’t make much sense as this is his personal memoir, so why would he basically be reciting, word for word, from some book that was well researched and well read? Well, don’t ask. Shut up….
Botswana was a (mostly) random choice of country for case number two, but it turns out to be a pretty good one as the traditional religion is Badimo which means, wait for it, “Walking dead.” Three cheers for serendipity!
2000+ words written while watching NU beat Nebraska 28-25. Wakka wakka!
The door to the morgue had been left open, and Basadi stumbled through it, and then proceeded to wander the basement of the hospital, walking the hallways throughout the night, circling the floor again and again. Fortunately for the rest of the patients and staff, the basement was vacant and Westphail doesn’t provide its victims with the wherewithal to contend with doors, nor a working knowledge of elevators. It wasn’t until 7 the next morning when the coroner, a middle-aged man named Baruti Melesi, arrived for work that anybody knew something was amiss.
Melesi later told news reporters that he first had an inkling that something was wrong, not when he saw that Basadi’s body was missing, but when he heard a low moan from the hallway some ten minutes after he sat at his desk adjacent to the morgue. He glanced up from his paperwork, a chill crawling down his spine and saw, through the window which, fortunately for him, was reinforced with a mesh of wire, Basadi, or Basadi’s body, or, as he put it, “a horrifying abomination which resembled Basadi, but whose face was twisted with evil.” Melesi, whose colorful descriptions of the encounter made for good reading in the days that followed, even as terror gripped the world, uttered one phrase as he scrambled from his chair and shrunk against the wall behind it: “Unatombwa na farsi!” which, roughly translated, means “Fuck a horse!”, an exclamation common amongst the Botswanan lower class. Melesi wasn’t often given to cursing, having been “brought up better than that” according to his mother (who was sufficiently scandalized by this revelation that she gave her son a sharp slap across the cheek before taking him into her arms and sobbing once they were reunited.) That he was shaken and disturbed enough  by Basadi’s appearance to issue such an utterance gives testimony to how hideous she must have looked. Her body was relatively intact, as she hadn’t been dead very long, and aside from her pale complexion and her left arm which hung limply at her side, on the surface, Basadi would have seemed more or less normal, save for the fact that when Melesi had left her the previous night, she had been, you know, dead. Plus, figure that Melesi was a coroner, a man who had seen some serious shit. He’d spent time in Angola, in Sudan, in Somalia. He was not unused to the dead. But when Basadi’s head turned, and he saw her face, well, that was enough to make a cultured, well-raised man swear.
There was no long, tense stand off between Basadi and Melesi, though to the coroner, it initially felt as if the two stared at each other for a matter of minutes before anything happened. In reality (he later admitted) less than a second passed between Basadi seeing him and her springing into action. Basadi leapt at the window, bouncing back from it, seemingly unharmed. As Melesi watched, horrified and shocked, he still felt some measure of clinical detachment which caused him to wonder about the woman’s dislocated shoulder which she now put into attempting to break the window. Again and again she smashed at it, and Melesi winced each time, thinking about how incredibly painful that must be, though Basadi did not seem to notice and no trace of pain crossed the woman’s face.
“Yeye anaonekana kama yeye alikuwa na njaa,” Meresi said. “She looked as if she were hungry.” When interviewed by James Thrace and William Kipnis for their book Path of a Virus: Mapping the Great Zombie Outbreak, this was the only description he could give of her countenance, other than that it seemed that the devil himself had taken possession of her soul, a statement that further shocked Melesi’s Badimo-practicing mother.
You can imagine, can’t you, what it might do to a people who had gone their whole lives, as those who practice Badimo do, that your ancestors are actually walking amongst you, to see someone, recently very very dead to be actually walking amongst them, and, that, at least in this instance, this was decidedly not a good thing. It would be a complete and total mindfuck, to say the very least. If it had been Melesi’s great-grandmother, one of his own relatives, out there in the hallway, it might well have been worse. According to Thrace and Kipnis, who had done extensive research on Melesi’s family and the Badimo religion in order to paint a fuller picture of the impact this event might have had, this was a woman who had told him endless stories of the old days. She had impressed upon him the fact that in those times it was not unusual for a young man to toil in the fields alongside the spirits of his ancestors. These stories had terrified the young Melesi, though he would never admit it, had kept him up at night, sweating in his bed, imagining hordes of undead roaming the Earth. Even if they were not malevolent creatures — as the one he currently saw certainly was, banging and thrashing against his office window — the idea was not a comfort to him. The very thought of confronting something so old, so ancient was a source of nightmares to the young boy. Even these sessions with his great-grandmother, who at 53 years old was by far the oldest woman in the small village in which Melesi was raised, made him uneasy. Her wrinkled face, her raspy voice, her weakened and brittle frame; Melesi wasn’t completely certain that the woman wasn’t dead already, leading him to ask his mother, quite often, “Unaweza kuona bibi pia, sahihi?” (“You see Great-grandmother too, right?”) which would often lead to a slap as well.

Patient One

Grrrr. Word Count: 7018

I had thought that writing about Patient Zero would be pretty fun, but it turns out that Patient One is much more interesting. Patient Zero came and went pretty quickly (bit someone at the Baker County Fair in Oregon, got shot up by some gun-toting fairgoers, and that’s all she wrote.) Patient One, however, well, it’s a bit of a sadder story (which I haven’t even finished yet!)

 

Surprisingly, it didn’t hit Oregon again for a while. You’d think that you’d be able to pull out a map of Baker County, plot all the outbreak locations and you’d see a huge mass of red dots reaching out from the fairgrounds as the virus spread. The next documented case was on the other side of the world, almost exactly: Ghanzi, Botswana. A 32-year-old woman named Mosetsanagape Basadi had been complaining of flu-like symptoms: aches, nausea, fever. The usual shit. Nobody thought anything of it. Turns out, that’s Stage I.
Stage II isn’t much more on the surface, really. It only differentiates itself from Stage I by the addition of a runny nose. Yeah, it’s a severely runny nose, one that doesn’t ever seem to stop, but a little Day-Quil and some tissue, and you’re still not all that concerned. It took a while before people realized this was something to get worried about. The scientists, they likened Stage II to the idea of rats streaming off a sinking ship. When your nose starts running and it just won’t stop? That’s the beginning of all your bodily fluids trying to get the fuck out. Westphail is so fucking scary even your snot doesn’t want to stick around. It was towards the end of her Stage II that Basadi decided it might be more than just a severe head cold that she was experiencing and headed down the A3 road towards the airport and spoke with a nurse at Ghanzi Primary Hospital. She was admitted, and cared for as if it was just a run-of-the-mill, albeit severe, flu. Three days later, when all the mucous had left her body, Basadi progressed to Stage III.
If you think seeing all the mucous go is scary, imagine when the blood starts following. It starts as a trickle: just a bloody nose to follow days of the worst runny nose on record. And then, man oh man, it just starts to flow. The doctors at Ghanzi Primary threw up their hands in defeat, loaded Basadi into the back of an ambulance and drove her 400 miles up the A2 to Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone. The docs there didn’t fare much better than they did down in Ghanzi. To be fair, nobody did very well with it at first, and the eight hours it took for Basadi to make the trip more or less was all it took for Stage III to turn into Stage IV.
At first, before the Gooseman-Keane act was passed, the end of Stage III was considered the end of life. Once all the blood is gone, yeah, people are pretty much dead. But that does discredit to Westphail’s Stage IV, the mack daddy stage of all viruses everywhere. Ebola can’t hold a candle to it. HIV trembles in fear at the mention of its name. During Stage IV, the virus, having evacuated all fluid from what is now little more than the husk of a former human being, having basically terraformed the body to suit its own dark little needs, Westphail invades the brain and, like Hitler did in Europe, Westphail takes the fuck over.
Now, like all good invasions, Westphail takes a minute or two to complete its occupation. When Basadi arrived at Princess Marina, she was pronounced DOA. Her mother, who had made the trip with her, wept and wrung her hands and made preparations to bring her daughter’s body back to Ghanzi for burial. It’s a lot easier to transport a dying person than a dead body in Botswana; the only viable option was to go by train to Lobatse where a cousin who had an old pickup truck would meet her to take her the rest of the way home. The arrangements took some time; the next train to Lobatse wasn’t for another two days. The staff at Princess Marina allowed Leonor Basadi to stay in an unused room in the hospital, the kindness of their hearts bolstered by a general fear of allowing this woman who may have been exposed to what they were calling “Sweggrootgriep” — which pretty much translates to “Big Bad Flu” — to leave the hospital and potentially infect the rest of the town.

Curing Cancer

Rawwwwr. Day 3. Word count: 5010

 

So the basic premise is that man cured cancer but the cure lead to an even more destructive and disturbing disease — H5N3P2…or something like that. “Westphail Virus” — named after Patient Zero. Probably this concept has been done before — I think I’ve read something along the lines in some zombie novel somewhere. Maybe it was the cure for the common cold? Anyhow…. Not much to speak of in terms of quality writing today, but an excerpt nonetheless.

Still, I had to know for myself. Not wanting to go outside, and not really believing that I’d find any answers out there anyway, I sat down hard on the bed, and turned on the radio.
“…this momentous occasion, its repercussions on science, medicine, the economy, human existence. Mankind is on the threshold of a golden age and we have slain the dragon that guarded the door.”
I recognized the last line as an allusion to a quote from Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher and logician who was referring to religion, not cancer — sure, it was easily reworked to be relevant, but…. These thoughts — my annoyance at the misappropriation — precluded all others, but it soon sunk in as I listened to report after report. Doctors at Johns Hopkins had performed treatments that had completely and safely eradicated a wide variety of cancer cells in human patients. Not only that, but they were on the brink of being able to prevent cancer from ever forming in the first place. Ever. They cured cancer.
My mouth hung open, I couldn’t think of a thing to do. It felt like the world was a brand new place. I looked out the window, saw the sun in the sky, shining brightly, and even though it was February, it felt like it was actually warm outside, like maybe they had, while they were at it, found a cure for Chicago winter. Maybe they’d cured AIDS and leprosy, and the hunger problem and the obesity problem, and fuck it, the economy too. And I sank back in my bed because I realized that there was hope out there in the universe. And I also knew I wasn’t going to do a damn thing with it.

Day 2

Texture Face! Zombie Wall!

The Day Two doldrums. The “This idea will not sustain itself over thirty days” moments. The “If I just sneak out the back door, will anybody notice I’ve stopped writing?” blahs.

Meant to write a short intro and then set up a series of flashbacks and whatnot but here I am just writing writing writing in the present, Zach rambling on about how much being a zombie sucks/is awesome.

Anyhow. Zach and a crew of 1500 zombies have stacked up outside Woodfield Mall….

You could tell there were people inside — hastily made signs, red paint smeared across sheets of plywood leaning up against the entrance announced a group of refugees hoping for government rescue. They’d taken to doing that, marking their hideouts on the off chance a National Guard regiment happened to be passing through and happened to feel like taking on a dozen or more hungry, whining mouths who were more likely to get the whole group killed than they were to be of any use to anybody down the road. The refugees — some even called themselves survivors; I always thought that was a bit like counting their chickens before they were hatched — didn’t know what I knew: Uncle Sam had stopped giving a shit about rescue missions a long time before. But, what the hell, right? Z can’t read, so what could it hurt? Except, you know, I can read. God, it was nasty, somehow worse than Milwaukee, which was just about the worst thing I’ve ever seen. And, I don’t know, I mean, the virus did a number on me too, nearly killed everything in me that was human, made me numb to that kind of stuff — like, I wouldn’t think twice about stepping on a kitten’s throat, you know? The word “cute” doesn’t have a place in my vocabulary anymore — but there was still that little thing, that little twinge, something sticking in the back of my throat, hiding behind that Explorer, waiting for my bros to do their thing. Something like, “Don’t you feel sorry for all those poor folks who are getting ripped to shreds right now? Don’t you remember when you used to be like them, afraid of the dark? Afraid of the unknown? Using every last resource at your disposal just to fight to live and breathe for one more day?” And I thought, Yeah, I remember. I remember how much it sucked. And you know how kick ass it is to be the dominant life force on the planet? And the voice, the sticking in my throat, the whatever, it was quiet, it was gone, because it knew I was right. We Zs might be a cancer on the face of the Earth, but, fuck, cancer was God’s equalizer, and when man finally figured out how to cure it, God was all, “Here’s something new, assholes.” Blam. Westphail. And every poor bastard who went Stage IV with it was now on the next step of the evolutionary ladder, kicking ass and not even bothering to take names, because why would a name matter to Z? That’s how badass Z is: he’s beyond the need for names.
It took all of three hours for my undead army to clear the mall. First the shooting stopped — a group of suburbanites is only going to have so much ammo, especially in the gun shy Chicago metropolitan area — and then the screaming stopped. A lone Z emerged from the shattered glass and wood of a formerly-boarded up Macy’s display window. He stumbled on a broken mannequin and took a tumble, tangled in broken plaster and lathe. I made my way across the parking lot and picked the poor guy up, put him back on his feet. He showed no gratitude — the bastard! — and kept shuffling off in the direction I’d pointed him.
“Hey, buddy!” I called after him, pointing over my shoulder at the mall. “Is it all good in there?”
He didn’t respond. Not even a moan. You’ve heard of feeling lonely in a crowd, right? Try being with 1500 of your brethren and they don’t even pay one bit of attention to you. That’s how you know you’re one of them, by the way — they don’t try to eat you. But anything they’re not trying to eat? They just ignore it. So here I am, hanging out with all these …things… and I still, I don’t know, I still feel that urge to have basic interactions, there’s still that thing inside me.
Look, in life, I wasn’t a very social person. I’d rather have stayed home on a Friday night, maybe watch a little TV, some football, whatever. I was cool with not seeing a single person all weekend long. If I ordered food? I’d do it online, as little interaction as possible. But here, now, without the option for any real human contact? It’s kind of a downer, really, rolling down the street with 1500 people, whatever, and nobody’s talking? Everybody’s focused on one thing, they’ve got their eyes on the prize, and that prize is more or less the total destruction of the human race. Yeah, it’s kinda a bummer. But, hell, at least they let me hang out with them. Smoothies don’t want me around anymore, and who can blame ‘em? I’m a constant reminder of everything bad in the world, and, to be honest, a constant threat. They don’t know when I might eat them.
So yeah, I’m the loneliest boy in the world, boo hoo.

Me Talk Zombie Someday

Zombie Picture Every Day #1

That’s the working title at the moment. What we have here is a tangent from last year’s NaNo that I got real excited about and wanted to write mid-November 2k10. Lacking a better idea for this year, I’ve decided to do it. An intelligent “zombie” writing his memoir, laying it out for all to see…. Who knows? Once again, I’ve got that “This thing is gonna suck” feeling which comes from lack of plot, lack of planning. I know I’m going to have some amazing idea either Nov 15 or Dec 1. Just wish I had it now.

Anyhow. Enough of that. Positive: Zachary P. Graves is fun to write. It’s all conversational. Lots of swearing! Much zombie humor. Here’s a bit written during last night’s Midnight Scramble….

My name is — was — Zachary P. Graves and I am — technically — dead. I say technically because, really, and I think you’ll agree, any man who can still scratch out his memoirs, any man who can do that still has some shot at life. Right? But, according to the Gooseman-Keane Act of 2015, any person who progressed through Stage IV of Westphail (the popular name for the H3N5P2 virus which did all this) is, for all practical and legal purposes, dead. Done. Extinct. Regardless if that person has been through DEI (Decapitation, Evisceration, Incineration) or is currently trying to break your door down so he can get inside and get a bite to eat, that person is dead. Once you hit Stage IV, your chances of going anywhere but a DEI Station are pretty slim especially now that every Tom, Dick & Harry, and their wives, mothers, kids and pets have been through Westphail Victim Pacification Training. In the beginning, it was easier. Nobody knew what to do with us.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.Yeah, I’m a fucking zombie, and yeah, I realize I’m just telling you a whole bunch of shit you already know. But, on the off chance that this document doesn’t get toasted the second I do, that someone bothers reading it, that all you skin-so-soft living motherfuckers actually survive Westphail, figure out a way to keep from catching it yourselves, maybe even eradicate the virus itself, maybe having a record of someone who’s been there, done that, and is currently wearing the t-shirt, maybe that would be helpful. To somebody.
And let’s just get something out of the way right off the bat: this isn’t going to have a happy ending. I keep thinking about the kid in I Am Legend — the one who’s got the future of mankind in his hand. I’m not that kid. I’m the only semi-intelligent Z around. I know this, because for fuck’s sake, I’ve tried talking to every single one of the brain-gobbling slow-walking pusballs that I’ve come across and you know what? They all say the same goddamn thing: “Garrr blurble skalkaska wurrrrtz.” Know what that means? Jack and shit. Nothing. They’re not talking. They’re not vocalizing. It’s just noise. Know what’s hilarious? Scientists trying to come up with a Z lexicon. As if they’re going to sit down to tea and have a conversation with them someday. Some pinhead in a lab coat is listening to tapes of Z noise saying, “Oh, this one here, he’s saying he’s lonely!” They’re not lonely. They’re not thinking. Everything you’ve read is true: the Zs have no more feelings. No more emotions. No more needs or desires. Everything has been burnt away by the virus. Written on top of all the things that made those people people is a burning impetus to feed. And you know what they eat. What we eat.
Shit. I guess I’m about to lose half my audience and the rest of you will no longer find me so sympathetic. Yeah. I’ve fed. In the early days, I broke through boarded up doors, dove through windows, tore screaming people apart. Ate their fucking brains. And you know what? I liked it. Hell, I loved it. And I’m sitting there, my new family numbering in the thousands, glassy-eyed, jaws working mechanically, I could see there was no joy, just that constant voice: eat eat eat eat eat. And I thought, You guys are fucking missing out. This is fun! But I don’t hang out with those dudes much anymore. Not if I can help it. The horde, yeah, it’s fun. It’s a constant party, and I mean constant. But it attracts too much attention, not so subtle at all. And all that moaning. Ugh. The first time I felt the wind of shotgun pellets zinging by my face, that’s when I thought, This might not be the thing for me anymore.

Flash from the Blast from the Past

Just received a 3 ring binder full of poems/stories/notes/crap dating from 1990 from Julie, a high school friend who was apparently the person upon whom I dumped every thought I ever had. Much of it is stuff I have come across in the intervening years but there are a few pieces which I don’t remember at all. Here is the best:

 

Instruh0mental

I was so drunk that I almost said: Hey Mikey!
Hey Mikey!

I was so angry that I lost my head: Hey Mikey!
Hey Mikey!

We danced upon the shore until we didn’t feel like dancing anymore
We laughed; we cried; tears ran until they dried
Hey Mikey!
Hey Mikey!

These days we travel to and fro back and forth Hey Mikey!
Trying to find out just how much we’re worth Hey Mikey!

Run to the store: buy a loaf of pita bread.
Run to the store: buy a loaf of minstrels.

Come back for more: make use of pita bread.
Come back for more: make use of minstrels.
Come back for more: Call his name Hey Mikey!
Come back for more: make use of minstrels.

Hoopty Hoopla

Playing Hoopla the other day and decided to turn it into a writing exercise — twice  picked out three cards (a who, a what and a where) and then spent 7 minutes writing a story based on the cards chosen.

I chose “cheerleader”, “funhouse”, and “Mardi Gras”

“This is a sick joke,” the cheerleader said. “Why did you bring me here?”

The fun house was silent. Outside the party raged on — New Orleans, Mardi Gras, it had all seemed like such a great idea, but it had gone sideways. The drinking; the drugs; the casual sex; the mysterious cloaked figure who stood behind her now. His hands were on her shoulders, placed there lightly, almost casually, but somehow menacing, reminding her that he was in control, that she could not go except by his leave.

He spoke, his voice like gravel; like sandpaper; like leaves in a graveyard, the farthest thing from the New Orleans jazz, which she’d discovered — but would never admit — that she couldn’t stand, but which she’d give anything to hear right now.

“You needed to see your true self,” he said. “Behold!”

With that, the lights came up and the cheerleader found herself standing before a row of mirrors, all designed to display grotesque, distorted images of whomever stood before them. She appeared disturbingly fat, obese, twisted, ugly.

So, I’m thinking about doing NaNoWriMo 2011 purely at the whim of the Hoopla deck. A drawing of 3 cards at midnight to start the story. Perhaps drawing a card a day after that? We shall see. Might be a fun experiment….

Happy Happy Finish Finish


30. A photo of you when you were happy. 11/30/2010 upon finishing NaNoWriMo 2010.

Another weird photo-a-day topic. “When you were happy.” Doesn’t that imply that I’m no longer happy? Well, dammit, I’m happy. So here’s a picture from right now. I don’t do fake-photo-smiles very well, so here’s a real creepy look at me.

Crossed the finish line a few moments ago. What joy! What yippy! This isn’t the closest-to-the-wire that I’ve gone, but it’s up there. Glad to have it done with. Now I wonder what it is I’ve done.

This story started in one place, with one idea, and thematically changed along the way more than anything else I’ve written. Here is what we’ve explored:

  • Responsibility
  • Living up to one’s potential
  • Zombies, both real and metaphoric
  • New Jersey
  • Storge
  • The beast within us all!
  • Other stuff. Yeah, that’s right. Other stuff.

Now is when I wind down, remember that the number of words I type no longer matters. Switch back from narrating things in my head. And let us lay Nano2010 to rest.

Many thanks to many people — the friends, family, and co-workers who let me sit in a corner and write and (mostly) didn’t bother me while I was doing it. All of you whose IP addresses show up daily (or thereabouts) here. It was great to know you all were there watching me write some absolutely ridiculous shit. And nobody told me to stop! Writing is a private, isolated task. It’s a lot more fun with friends.

Plus: Thanks, mom.

Word count: 50,125. Still could write a few more words to make the story connect to itself, but…. Maybe tomorrow.

And I suppose I promised another excerpt. Arthur’s having a rough time (again) and Paul is treating him as if he were his child — taking him upstairs and putting him to bed. I just reread this and out of context, that first paragraph sounds…well, whatever it sounds. What it is is what it is.

Paul led me into the bedroom, left the light off, sat me down on the bed, went and lowered the blinds and drew the curtains across the windows. The room went mostly dark, a sliver or two of afternoon sun slanting through. He turned back to me, found me still sitting upright, right where he’d left me, unmoving, unblinking, unmoved. He lowered my head to the pillow, lifted my legs, slid them onto the bed. His touch was so gentle, I remember that thought penetrating, that thought getting through, that feeling being felt. He patted my head. I could see a crooked half smile on his face in the dim room.

“Try to get some rest,” he said. “I know you just woke up. You slept all day yesterday too, huh? Maybe you just need some more. Just get some rest. Just lie here, Art, and maybe when you wake up you’ll feel a lot better. And I’ll try to figure it all out. Don’t worry.”

And he leaned down, with his hand on the top of my head, and he leaned down and he kissed my forehead, and I remember thinking how many times I had seen him do that to his kids, to his son and daughter, in a darkened room, a sick child in the bed, his hand on the top of his or her head, leaning down to kiss their forehead before leaving them to get their rest. He had told me before that he felt so helpless, so useless when his children were sick, that it was the most painful feeling in the world to know that his kid was suffering and there was nothing he could do about it but make them comfortable as possible and kiss their foreheads and hope they knew that he loved them. And something turned in me, something very slight, a slight twist, something, and I knew the love Paul had for me, the pity he felt for me, the protectiveness, that he would make everything alright, that it would all be okay, and for a second I could feel the comforting coolness of his hand on my forehead and it seemed to penetrate through everything, spread through my body, quelling the fire, bringing everything back into focus and I opened my mouth to tell him that everything was going to be alright, that I was going to be fine, that I loved him and trusted him and knew that he could fix anything, and then it was gone, his hand was gone, the words were gone, the feeling was gone, and Paul walked away from the bed.

“You wear the sins of yourself on the plastic sleeves of the hearts of your mind in these days this troubled times with happiness so near far so close but over there, the reasons never being what reasons shouldn’t be you wear the sins you were the sins, it’s never registered, it never registered that what you did is what you do is what you are is who you are is how you wear your hair is how you wear your face.” It came out in one unbroken stream, the words finding purchase on my tongue as easily as a mountain goat on a narrow ledge.