Novel: A Section

I’ve written 33,000 words so far! I need another 20,000, but things are going o-kay as long as I pretend the deadline of the end of the year for the completion of my first draft isn’t rushing upward to smack me in the face. It’s hard for me to choose something to excerpt because I’m at the point in the novel where everything is tied to everything else, and pulling a piece out is like ripping out someone’s intestines and then hoping to order it in some sort of display of coherent beauty on a chopping board or bedspread. But here’s something I’ve written. Please remember these innards are still bleeding softly, and they are baby intestines, fetal intestines, not fully formed; so don’t be too harsh in your judgements as you pick through them and notice all the shit that is inevitably spilling out.

We spent the evening generally avoiding one another. Cam was drunk and he and Josh were sloppily making out in a Muskoka chair while the mosquitos flung themselves against the moths in the porch light. There were beer bottles like bowling pins along the patio ledge. Ainsley was reading more fashion magazines and taking pictures of dresses with her phone while Joel mussed her hair. He clacked through the satellite channels on the TV. Richard’s room was the only one on the second floor, and I could hear him flicking lights on and off and, occasionally, the gunshot creak of his bed as he sat on it. I smoked the roach that someone had left in an ashtray, and passing by Cam and Josh, wandered down to the lake. It was calm and still, the lake surface, like velour out to its other side where someone from that enormous mansion had spilled its baseball-stadium white krieg lights on it. Where the water touched the beach, I could see – in the weak reach of our porchlight - the tiny quivering of its surface as water dippers barely disturbed it by running across and the occasional burp of oxygen from the tadpoles sleeping among the weeds.

There was another Muskoka chair on the dock – it shouldn’t have been left there – and the canoe was jostling against the deck as I sat down in it. The stars were above, doing their insane speckled stars thing, and I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out my iPod and chose something to listen to. Something deep and liquid, a remix of a remix of a remix, something anonymous and ecstatic. As I pressed play, I looked up at the sky and I felt like its entire crsytallized weight was dragging me upward with the synthetic glowing sounds from the track, exploding and expanding my brain. The water around me looked wild and frightful, meters of black, breathless death, cozying up to our shore. And what was I looking at between the stars?

I stood up, my mind whirling out of sync with itself, but my body making the small necessary steps to get back to the house. When I got to the bottom of the deck stairs, the porchlight turned off. I fumbled up them and tripped on the last one and actually crawled to the porch door. I saw the TV turn off, and Ainsely and Joel head down the short hall to their room. It seemed like everything was receeding out of my control. I got up and stepped into the living room. It was dark. All I could see was the clock set to the wrong time, 7:21 am, and the light above the stove showing the grease stains from our pancakes, and the light leaking downstairs from Richard’s room. In my ears, the music had reached a hymn-like crescendo of machine noises.

I climbed the stairs, looking for some additional chapter, some way to end this night that seemed satisfying. I got up to the room and the light was coming from a bedside table. Richard was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling with a library book scrunched open his chest. He turned his head toward me. The book was Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. He mouthed something, but I couldn’t hear it because of the kaleidoscopic shimmering in my ears. I pulled my earphones out.

“What?” I said.