Part 2: Three Lessons

By

Joseph Devon

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

(Please note: This story is a continuation of the tales begun in the previous section, “Probability Angels: Part 1,” and while it is designed to stand alone it does draw heavily on the foundation of characters and events that were created in “Probability Angels: Part 1.” Basically, I have to highly recommend that if you haven’t read “Probability Angels: Part 1,” you go do so now.

Or you can go here and buy the book or go here and view the book in its entirety.)

The wind blowing over the rocks kicked up a mist of white powdery snow that danced like liquid across the face of the mountain. At first there was nothing, then a form rippled and began to take shape. As it became more recognizable it began to fall, arms and legs firming up in the fragile light. The arms began flailing and the legs began kicking and the body fell in a drop so long it was possible to imagine that the body was flying. A leg caught an outcropping of rock and the body bounced before flipping over to land face first on a lower plateau. The force of impact caused the back to bend so much the heels of the man’s feet almost touched the back of his head. It slipped along a few more inches, the sound of cloth rustling against ice mixing with the wind, and then it finally came to a stop.

The body remained face down, the rise and fall of its back as it continued to breathe was the only sign of motion.

“Get up, Matthew,” Epp said.

Matthew closed his eyes tighter, rolled over, and curled up into a ball. He was dressed in a tuxedo and his dinner jacket was doing little to help against the cold.

“That was the worst try yet,” Epp said.

Matthew gathered himself together enough to lift his head. As he raised his eyes a few inches off the snow he saw, a foot or so in front of him, an immaculate pair of dress shoes with charcoal pants hanging above them, a perfect break just above the cuff. Matthew wiped some blood off of his upper lip with the back of his hand.

“Epp? How long have you been standing there?”

“Since you started falling.”

Matthew pulled himself up to a sitting position. He took off his glasses and examined them before resetting them on his round face. He drew his knees up, his stocky frame bundling up against itself. “So you knew I’d land here? You were able to tell that I would land exactly,” and he slapped the snow covered rock with the flat of his palm, “here?”

“Of course not,” Epp said. Matthew looked up at him. Epp’s face was stern and showed no signs of feeling the bits of snow and ice that the wind was whipping against his dark black skin. He was tall but muscular and his entire frame was draped in a charcoal-knit suit that was tailored so perfectly it almost seemed to be making love to him.

“If I had known exactly where you’d land,” Epp said, “I’d have been standing here.” And he took one step forward, covering the foot-wide gap so that the very tips of his shoes were touching the spot on the snow Matthew’s face had just occupied.

“It’s the same thing,” Matthew said, shaking his head and huddling his face in towards his knees.

“It is most certainly not,” Epp said in a voice that caused Matthew’s stomach to tense. “You have to learn, Matthew, that something being highly probable is very different from something having actualized into a definite occurrence. I didn’t know where you’d land until you had actually landed.”

“It’s the same thing,” Matthew repeated, managing to sound like Epp wasn’t there.

“Not even close,” Epp said, and there was a sudden savagery in his voice as he bent down and lifted Matthew up, gripping him by the front of his shirt and holding him up with one arm bent at the elbow.

“Oh come on, Epp,” Matthew said, not even trying to struggle, just trying to hold onto Epp’s fist and rearrange himself to be slightly more comfortable on his perch. “I’ve been up and down these mountains a thousand times. I can’t do this anymore.”

Epp drew his hand back as if to toss Matthew like a shot-put. “A thousand times,” Epp said, “and yet you still fail to grasp the very basics. You still think probability is actuality. You still bleed, failing to remember that you are pure energy. You still fall instead of fly unable to shake the belief that you have a body. A thousand times and that hasn’t sunk in yet.”

Epp flexed his knees slightly and as Matthew watched him aiming into the sky at some far off point he closed his eyes and braced himself. “You were a lot nicer to me three months ago,” Matthew said through his teeth.

“I had so much less to teach you then,” Epp said, never taking his gaze away from the distance. With a last tensing of his knees, Epp threw Matthew’s body, watching as Matthew flailed, his body hurtling off into the dark blue of the Himalayan sky.

—–

Ten year old Sophie Loughton ran up the three stone steps in front of her house and opened the outer door. She let the lower storm window rest against her hyper-colored backpack as she fished in her pocket for her key. Finding it she unlocked the inner door and ran inside, shedding her backpack and boots and jacket in a trail of outerwear as she tottered through the kitchen in her white cotton stockings. She stopped at the refrigerator and stared up at the various notes taped to it, scanning over black magic-marker wording on yellow sticky-sheets to see if any of them were for her. Satisfied that she had nothing pressing to do she grasped the handle of the refrigerator door and opened it, bottles of salad dressing clanking as it slipped out of her grasp, opened too quickly, and slammed against the counter. She withdrew a saran-wrapped plate and then shut the door and resumed her tottering run through the den and over to the stairs. Short legs pumping quick steps she climbed to the second floor, ran down the hallway to her room, and slammed the door. Only then did her motion stop as she backed up against the door to make sure it was shut properly, the plate resting on her forearms and palms, fingers gripping around the edge and already feeling slick due to condensation on the saran-wrap.

There was a trembling on her face, a flicker of emotion before it froze up again in determination. When this passed she seemed, only then, to notice where she was, as if the entire trip from school to this room had been performed by someone else. She looked down at the plate now, for the first time seeing the slightly browned apple slices and the cream-white cheese stick. She set the plate on the floor and ran over to her bed, a pink cloud of overflowing comforters and pillows in colorful cases. Diving face first into the softness she then turned over and picked up a stuffed horse, holding it at arms length she made it run along the edge of the bed, but something internal seemed to reject this attempt at play and she quickly grew bored and turned to stare out the window instead.

“Epp, where are we?” Matthew asked from the corner, having watched this entire scene play out. The girl showed no signs of having heard him.

“The bedroom of Sophie Loughton.” Epp answered. He was standing next to a little desk painted a dusty pale white.

“Why?” Matthew asked.

Epp turned a slow head, his perfectly at ease body allowing him to achieve a sense of absolute calm even as he gripped Matthew with his eyes. “Would you rather have been thrown past Everest again?”

“No,” Matthew said emphatically, stepping forward towards the bed, brushing snow off his shoulders as he walked. The white dust floated towards the floor and disappeared in a shimmering dance of light before it ever touched the ground.

“She looks sad,” Matthew said, leaning in to study Sophie’s face.

“Not quite yet,” Epp said. Matthew glanced back and saw that Epp was holding a clipboard in his hands. Running a thumb across his tongue Epp began to flip through the sheets.

“Probability photos?” Matthew asked.

Epp nodded.

“Can I see?” Matthew walked over towards Epp who was now engrossed in the contents of the clipboard. Epp would study a sheet, then flip through a few more, then glance around the room his eyes fixing on a specific object before returning to the clipboard. “Epp?” Matthew asked again, anxious about intruding. “May I see?”

Epp looked up and handed the clipboard to Matthew without a word, then walked over to the girl and began to examine her himself. Matthew looked down and glanced through some of the photos, each one depicting a different outcome, each one with a small graphed wave in the lower corner showing the probability of that outcome. He flipped through a couple of photos of Sophie before he stopped at a blurry picture of himself giving the camera a giant goofy thumbs-up.

“Epp?” Matthew asked. “Something’s not right here. I’m in these pictures.” Matthew glanced down at the corner of the photo of himself and saw that the curve was almost a straight line. “Epp?” Matthew looked up and saw, for the first time, how Epp was studying the little girl. Then Epp turned and a device appeared at the end of the bed that looked like a heart-monitor from a hospital.

“Epp, no. Absolutely not.”

Epp ignored him and continued to take readings, at one point retrieving the clipboard from Matthew’s hands before walking around the bed, glancing at almost everything in the room as he walked, the rustle of the papers on the clipboard the only thing to be heard. “Epp,” Matthew said with much more insistence in his voice. “I’m not doing this.”

“Yes you are,” Epp said calmly, glancing over one last thing before lowering the clipboard to his side and looking up at Matthew. “It’s been three months since you became a tester and we’ve been training you hard, but it’s time to leave the training grounds behind and actually engage.”

Matthew stood where he was, afraid that any motion on his part would acknowledge assent. He allowed himself to shake his head. “I can’t do this.”

“You’ll learn.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because two-thousand years ago I couldn’t do this either. Now step up and remember what we’ve gone over.”

“Come on, Epp, seriously. I haven’t even seen the top of Everest yet. I haven’t even come close. You can’t really think I’m ready, can you?”

Epp had wandered over to the monitoring device and was tuning some dials located on its front panel. “You were never going to make it to the top of Everest. Nobody ever does until their first push. That was just endurance training.”

“What.” Matthew said with no inflection in his voice, more as a robotic response to hearing something. “I fell past that thing I don’t even know how many times. Are you telling me that you had me do that for no reason?”

“Not no reason. To toughen you up. To get you striving further than you were comfortable with. Trust me, this is going to seem easy to you now.”

And in spite of the anger that was threatening to boil up as he remembered fall after face-first fall onto cold rock, Matthew stayed calm, too eager to believe that this was going to be easy. “Really? All of that is going to help make this easy?”

“Absolutely,” Epp said, turning away from the control panel. “Besides, I’ll be here monitoring your every second in case something goes wrong.”

“Like what?” Matthew asked.

A storm was gathering outside and the darkening light of the room, the little girl still playing quietly by herself as they talked, the stillness of the house, all of it compiled to make nervousness creep across his back. “And how wrong could things go?”

“Nothing can really go wrong for her,” Epp said, pointing at Sophie. “If she doesn’t push back than she’ll just return to her current state. It’s only if they engage and you begin to build off each other that the meat bag can get hurt. And that won’t be happening here. That sort of thing happens when someone pushes against a target for an extended period or multiple times. One push isn’t going to do anything negative to her.”

“And me?”

“You?” Epp paused where he was, the corners of his mouth rising. “You could be destroyed.”

Matthew couldn’t tell if Epp was joking.

Epp reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a thick roll of plastic tape that looked like the yellow tape police use to seal off crime scenes. “I’ll also be using this,” he said, waggling the tape. “With time slowed to a stop I’ll be able to step in if something really starts to go wrong.”

This made Matthew feel better and he felt himself able to breathe easier. There was also the joy of watching Epp use the time tape. With his usual slow, studious walk, Epp crossed over to one side of the room and, pulling a thumbtack from his suit pocket, pinned one end of the tape to the wall. He began to spool out the yellow band and Matthew watched as the area inside the boundary Epp was drawing began to warp and slow as space and time obeyed Epp’s wishes. Epp walked past Matthew, spooling the tape out, and Matthew couldn’t resist a light snort of wonder. “That is such a neat trick.”

Epp sighed as he walked past. “So I see I get to do this one more time before your first engagement.”

“Do wha-” Matthew started to say, then he started to yell the word “No” but before he could get anything out Epp had gripped his shoulder and pushed. Matthew flew back towards the wall by the door, the rush of speed making his clothes flap and his ears stand out and then he was a wavering shadow of himself and before he came into contact with the wall he disappeared.

There was a gap of a few seconds where Epp pinned another corner of tape up before Matthew came flying in backwards from the opposite wall. The heels of his shoes caught the rug and he fell onto his back, his legs straight out in front of him as he skipped backwards along the floor before crashing up against the wall. Immediately he jumped up and began swatting at himself, his hands flying all over his tuxedo, brushing against the fabric as roaches and spiders and tendrils of vine fell off of him. There were legs everywhere as they dropped onto the floor, some not even making it that far, before they began to disappear. Then Matthew was standing, his whole upper body tense, looking at the spot where the last cockroach had disappeared, his breath streaming in and out of his nose.

“If you continue to view these tools as tricks, Matthew, then you will never learn to use them yourself.” Epp finished closing off a square with the tape. Sophie Loughton was inside, frozen in place on her bed.

“I simply,” Matthew said, his voice containing abnormal volume and stresses as he struggled to get a hold of himself, “was saying how interesting I think the time-tape is. I have an awful lot to learn from you and some things are inherently going to be labeled in my mind as tricks, or magic, or voodoo until I get a firmer grasp on some of the more basic tools. So I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t give me a ride through the jungle underbrush every time I need to compartmentalize something away to be learned at a future point.”

Epp stared at him, his eyes bright against his dark skin. “That was very well put, Matthew,” he said, truth in his voice. “I’ll keep that in mind for the future. You have my word.”

“Thank you,” Matthew said, calming down and losing some of his tension. He walked over to Epp. “So…what’s going on here?”

“Little Sophie Loughton got dumped today.”

“She has a boyfriend?” Matthew looked past the tape and stared at Sophie. “She’s like two.”

“Ten. And her boyfriend, who used to follow her around like a puppy, decided that he would now go around with Romey Laufen.”

“That tramp.”

Epp glared at Matthew.

“Hey, I’m just saying. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free, right?”

“One would purchase the cow if the future value of all milk after deducting for risk was greater than the asking price plus the value of the amount of expected free milk, assuming a cow that provided no benefits other than milk,” Epp said, walking past Matthew and adjusting part of the tape.

“Man, you must get invited to all the best parties.”

Epp ducked under the tape and studied Sophie, his clipboard back in his hand. “That was my way of telling you that your joke didn’t make any sense and that being coy is not going to get you out of this. It is time to engage.”

Matthew ducked under the tape as well and stood next to Epp. He stared at the little girl on the bed. “You really think I can do this?”

“If you think you can, than you can,” Epp said. “What I know for sure is that it is time for you to try.”

“Seriously, how badly can this go? What’s the worst thing that can happen to me?”

Matthew expected a quick comment from Epp, or a long grave sermon, or even another trip through the jungle, but instead Epp avoided his eyes as if there was something about that question that he didn’t feel like contemplating. “You’re ready,” was all Epp said.

“And what…uh…I mean how do I…”

“To start with it’s the same drill as when you were a newbie. Once you engage you’ll notice the differences and you’ll understand what to do. You obviously won’t need to take form here; it’s all been set up. Sophie talked over her break-up with her best friend and is perfectly ready to toss her boyfriend aside in an All-Boys-Are-Stupid sort of manner. Your job is simply to make her take a second look. Your job is to rattle her enough so she has some self doubt. Make her question things a little deeper.”

“Come on, though, she’s ten. I feel weird pushing a ten year old girl.”

“Think of it as necessary surgery. If you don’t push her here, she’ll just continue through life as a meat bag.”

Matthew leaned back, ducking his head, taking a wider view of the bed and girl. “And you’ll be right here waiting?” he said.

“I’ll be right here. I have some people dropping by, but I’ll be right here.”

“People?”

“Former students. Stop stalling Matthew.”

“Yeah but if-”

“Now, Matthew.” Epp’s voice was warm, full of feeling, but commanding just the same.

Matthew glanced back at Epp and then took a few steps forward. He reached an arm out and halted, his hand poised in the air, his fingers in varying states of relaxed tension. “So it’s just like when I was a newbie?” Matthew waited for a response but nothing came. When he turned around Epp was still standing there but his face was impassive and Matthew realized that Epp wasn’t answering any more questions.

Matthew drew closer. Sophie was still holding her stuffed horse where she was frozen and as Matthew approached he felt the familiar ache in his heart begin to throb. His daughter and his wife, the two people he had loved enough to commit himself to an eternity without them, remained always in some deep pit in his chest. But now the pain of leaving them came upon him stronger than he had felt it in months. It was so deep and so internal it might as well have been physical pain and he grunted and faltered as tears welled up in his eyes and the ravenous loss of love clawed at his chest.

He passed his finger against Sophie’s hair, and then vapor-like through her head, at which point his body lurched forward. The pain of loss intensified to a degree he had never felt before, the longing to see his daughter ripping into him, and he engaged in his first test.

Epp watched as Matthew’s body spasmed then froze, Matthew’s connection with Sophie causing him to halt in time as well. Epp rifled through his clipboard, the rustling of paper loud in the still room. He checked the monitor then nodded and walked to the window, ducking under the tape as he went. He sat down against the sill and watched, glancing at the clipboard and monitor every few minutes.

There was a vibrating in his pocket and he withdrew a cell phone and flipped it open to read an incoming text message. He put the clipboard down and held the phone in both hands and the rattling of his thumbs across the keypad clacked in the air as he wrote back. A few seconds later the phone buzzed again, and again he wrote back. “Nobody talks on the phone anymore,” he muttered under his breath. Then, satisfied that the conversation was over he flipped the phone shut and returned it to his pocket.

Behind him on the road out past the front yard of Sophie’s house a car drove by playing its bass loud enough to hear, the deep beat warbling higher and lower as the car passed. This was followed by the soft patter of drops against leaves as the clouds outside finally began to rain.

Epp walked back over towards the bed and rotated between glancing through the clipboard, peering at Matthew, and tapping his fingers against the monitor.

“Hi, Epp,” a soft woman’s voice behind him said. Without taking his eyes from his clipboard Epp held up a hand with one finger raised requesting silence from the new person in the room. After a few seconds he rubbed a weary knuckle against one of his eyes and turned to greet the woman. “Hello, Mary.”

Mary was standing in the corner. She was short in stature but with a body like a coiled spring she seemed capable of commanding an entire room. Her hair was thick, spilling down her shoulders like gold-spun hay, while her hands rested gently on hips that could easily have been holstering twin pistols. She walked forward, exiting the corner meekly, her head leading the way as if she was unsure about intruding.

She stepped around Epp and took a good look at Matthew and, while his pain had been real enough when it was happening, his freezing in time had turned him into a comical statue causing Mary to burst out laughing. “Do we look that stupid when we test?”

“Most likely, yes. Pain doesn’t freeze well.”

“Boy, he looks like he’s going through quite a bit of pain. And it’s only a little girl. It hardly seems worth it.”

“It was a rookie’s first push that caused Miss Frank to start keeping a diary,” Epp said. “Don’t judge.”

The admonishment struck Mary completely, her role as student to his teacher instantly coming to the forefront as her shoulders shrank slightly. “I’m having problems, Epp.”

Outside there was a rumble. The room had grown quite dark with most of the late afternoon sunlight being filtered out by the clouds. This was contrasted by the square around Sophie’s bed, which still contained some pre-storm light.

“What problems?” Epp asked, and as another rumble of thunder distantly echoed outside he tilted his head and squinted as if trying to hear something unspoken in the sound.

“Well with my specialty for one. And also I seem to be at a point where I’ve grasped space-time and should be capable of using the tape but I keep thinking about what you’ve taught me and I just know I’m missing something. You always told me that I would know, I mean really know when I was ready and somehow I just don’t feel that yet. And-”

Epp raised his hand again and again his finger called for silence. “We’ll start with your specialty. What is your problem there?”

“Three hundred years ago I was a nun. A nun, Epp.”

The dark parts of the room flickered with light and a rumble of thunder, much closer now, seeped in through the window panes. Epp’s head cocked again and he listened to every last note of the thunder’s dying sound. “And I’m assuming that would be Bartleby.”

In the corner, next to the little desk, a figure began to form out of mist and nothing. Slowly a sound filled the room until it was distinguishable as a low yell, growing in volume. The figure solidified into a young man, fists clenched at his sides, head tilted back, screaming at the top of his lungs. The head lowered and the scream faded and pin-straight black hair bobbed around Bartleby’s head as he cackled into a loud joyous laugh and walked forward in a strut. “This is fucking amazing,” he shouted, his fists still clenched at his sides, his enthusiasm catching on enough to make Mary smile. “It was just like you said it would be, Epp. Just like you taught me. And I can feel it, man. I really can. You know? If I concentrate, and really, I mean really deep down at the base of my testicles concentrate, I can feel it. If I focus and concentrate on the separate particles of moisture that compose the storm cloud and notice, sort of out the corner of my eye like you said, the electric charge start to build then I can control it. Actually control it. But you really have to focus with your body. I mean really tense all your muscles.” And he tensed his whole body in demonstration, his face set in harsh angles of concentration before he seemed to build up something within himself and then release it at exactly the same moment a bolt of lightning struck outside.

“You aren’t using your body,” Epp said, facing the monitor once again, clipboard in his hand, his voice barely raised in volume when compared to Bartleby’s shouting. “You exist merely as the sum of all energy you have received from the universe in exchange for steering that energy along certain channels and while you are capable of forming that energy into a mass shaped in your once human form you do not have a body.”

“No, Epp. I really think I have to feel it all the way down my body. It doesn’t work if I don’t have every muscle-”

“Mary,” Epp said, and although he again had no extra volume in his voice he easily interrupted Bartleby. “Mary, please demonstrate a lighting strike for Bartleby.”

Mary turned to face Bartleby, her hands resting on her low slung waistline. Her whole body was casual, her hips tilted to one side, with no effort to speak of she reached an arm out and held her hand palm up. Her fingers curled and her thumb rested against the tip of her middle finger. Then she snapped, her fingers creating a beautiful sound as lightning struck outside.

“You don’t have a body, Bartleby,” Epp said, turning back around. “You do seem to have problems listening, however.”

“Who’s this?” Bartleby asked staring at Mary.

“This is Mary; she’s been having some problems with the time-tape as well as with her specialty.”

“What’s your specialty?”

“Sex,” Mary answered.

“Lady, from where I’m standing you don’t got no problems,” Bartleby said, walking past her and stopping at the strip of yellow tape. “And who’s that guy?”

“His name is Matthew. He’s a new student of mine.”

Bartleby grinned. “Been kicking his ass up and down the Himalayas?” Epp didn’t respond. “You know I’ve been meaning to ask you, Epp. I’ve been thinking over all that toughening up and all you like to do at the beginning, trying to force us to engage faster. Wouldn’t it just be easier to take us to a well populated graveyard? That would’ve gotten me motivated, I can tell you that.”

Mary walked forward quietly so she was standing next to Bartleby on the border of the tape. Lighting flashed outside and the dark areas of the room were illuminated, Mary and Bartleby’s figures coming into sharp relief while inside the tape, where the day’s light still existed, things remained the same.

“I don’t care to teach through fear,” Epp answered.

“Not teach through fear?” Bartleby said. “Fucking hell, Epp, you threw me off the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

“Necessity and fear are different,” Epp said, his back still turned. Mary had ducked under the tape while this conversation was taking place and she came around to Epp’s front only to have him turn away from her. “Had I shown you the consequences of what a fall from the Eiffel Tower might do to you that would have been fear. Throwing you off the top was merely condensing the amount of time you were allowed to figure things out. I never show new students a graveyard until they’ve engaged at least once.”

“I just find it amazing that with all you do you still find time to take on new students,” Mary said. There was a reaction in Epp as she said this, a barely perceptible sagging of his shoulders and Mary had the notion that she had said something wrong. She had the notion, in fact, that she and Bartleby had done nothing but say incorrect things since they had each first shown up.

Epp turned around to face them. His whole body looked weary. “When I was a slave,” he said, “I used to hang around the kitchen. I enjoyed learning new things and cooking always interested me. And one day I opted to cook for some of the other house slaves,” he paused. “I’m assuming that if I tell this story with dormice stuffed with rose petals as the finished dish I’ll only lose you further, so I’ll switch it over to something more accessible, like potatoes. So let’s say I opted to cook a potato dish for some of the other slaves, and one of them stayed in the kitchen with me the whole time. When I washed the potatoes he laughed this off, saying they were clean enough from the kitchen slaves and this wasn’t needed. When I chopped the potatoes I took the time to make sure they were all cut into as uniform a cube as I could make them so they would cook evenly. He laughed this off as not needed and too much attention to detail. When I soaked the potatoes in water to remove some of their starch, he told me this wasn’t needed and was a waste of time. When I parboiled them first he told me he never bothered to do that. When I tested the oil temperature, when I seasoned them on both sides while frying, when I drained them carefully after cooking, when I did all of these things he told me that he never bothered with such steps and that they weren’t needed. And then we ate. And he thought the potatoes were the best dish served that night. And do you know what he asked me? Honestly asked me?”

Epp looked at Mary and Bartleby each in turn, his eyes running over them carefully. “He said the potatoes were amazing and he asked me what my secret was.”

“I don’t get it,” Bartleby said.

“He means that taking care of rookies like this guy,” Mary pointed at Matthew, “is all part of it. He didn’t get to where he is and then start doing this stuff on top of all his work. This is his work.” Mary nervously slid her fingers along a golden ringlet of hair that was hanging off to the side of her face. “Is that right?”

At those words something inside of Epp seemed to unhinge, some set of internal wires and supports sagged at its foundation and he turned, once again to look at Matthew and Sophie. “If you have to ask if you’re right, Mary, then you’re not.”

“I get it,” Bartleby said, picking up Sophie’s stuffed horse. “So you’re saying I should take on a student? You really think I’m ready for that?”

“I don’t think you are anywhere close.”

“So what then? You just tell me what to do, Epp, and I’ll do it.”

“That is precisely the problem.” Epp was staring at Matthew now.

“Seriously, Epp,” Bartleby said, trying to catch Epp’s attention. “Just give me another challenge. Anything. Let me have it. Whatever you want.”

Epp froze, his charcoal suit highlighting his eyes squinted in thought. “I’ve failed you,” he said, dropping the statement like a weight into the conversation.

“What?!” Mary shouted. “Epp don’t say that.”

“Yeah, Epp. Do you know how much I’ve learned under you? How can you say you’ve failed us?”

“Because you are still under me. Because if you really wanted to make me proud as students you would seek to surpass me, but I’ve let you down. I’ve kept you too sheltered or led you too strictly. You’ve come to view learning the tricks I teach you as a replacement for actual experience, you’ve come to regard accomplishing what I set out for you as more important than the work.

“You,” he glanced at Mary, “you’re upset because your specialty doesn’t seem to fit you. Well that is how it goes. You are what you are and you don’t get to choose every step of your path. You’re not the first tester to find themselves blundering into a specialty that seems all wrong for them. It happens quite often. Poets find themselves pushing mathematicians, thieves pushing saints. Hell, Ricardo was pushed to his theory of comparative advantage by a lute player. You are here to learn, not to continue with the illusion of who you once were. You can’t move forward with your skills if you continue to fight them. You want to use the time tape? Then use it just as you are.

“And you,” he turned to Bartleby. “You are so caught up in whether you’re outperforming your contemporaries that you haven’t done an honest day’s work in centuries. The test is not the lesson, Bartleby.

“And you both seek to avoid the real challenges of the outside world by residing as my students forever. You aren’t making sure I approve of your steps because you need teaching; you’re doing it to avoid having to take steps of your own.

“I’ve let you down. Reality is far more rewarding than anything I can show you. And reality is far more dangerous than anything I can prepare you for. Reality will not pull its punches.”

He looked from Mary to Bartleby, his eyes scratching across their faces, before turning around and looking at Matthew. “School is out,” he said, and he reached a hand up and grabbed the yellow tape. With a tug he popped it loose from the wall and the square of light inside the room became a jumble of yells and shifting shades and lightning flashes. Epp ripped the tape off of all four corners and everything finally synched up to where it was in the present.

Matthew fell to the floor, screaming in pain as Sophie reappeared seated at her desk. She was frantically scribbling in a notebook, her mood matching Matthew’s yells although she showed no signs of hearing him.

Matthew’s screams turned into individual words: “Let me see my daughter!” Then he was on all fours, crying and begging, “Let me see my daughter,” over and over, “let me see my daughter.”

Epp walked over to Bartleby and gripped his shoulder. Without a word he shoved and Bartleby flew towards the window disappearing after a few feet.

Then Epp traced a loose rectangle in the air with his fingers and a few seconds later a door appeared out of a shimmering blend of colors. He opened it. “Through here. Both of you. Now.”

Mary knelt down to give Matthew a hand and half led half carried him through the door. Once they were through Epp slammed it shut, then walked over to Sophie’s desk. He reached a hand out and gripped the corner of the sheet she was writing on. Sophie’s hand continued on through his arm as she wrote. Epp waited a few more seconds then yanked at the corner, the sheet duplicating and splitting into two copies, one remaining exactly in place, the other forming in Epp’s hand. He folded the sheet and slipped it into his suit pocket. He walked through the door and slammed it shut behind him. In a blink it shrank into oblivion and nothing remained in the room but the sound of the rain outside and Sophie’s pen scratching across the page.

—–

Matthew sat up. After walking through the door he had lost track of things. The door had done something strange and he had separated from the woman who had helped him through. And he really was very tired. He realized the ground he was sitting on was muddy and the seat of his pants was soaking through. He started to scramble back to try and stop the seeping water from drenching his pants but he found himself lacking in energy and when his back came up against something solid he settled for leaning back against it in a sitting position. Everything smelled like rotting leaves.

It was dark but street lamps from somewhere close by made vision possible and he figured he was close by to where he had just been because the weather seemed to match. It wasn’t currently raining but a storm was moving through. He looked to the ground at his right and breathed in slowly. Then he groaned and leaned his head back, clunking it against his support a few times. “This just keeps getting better,” he said.

He looked back at the corpse lying on the ground at his right. “Hey,” he said, nudging it with one hand. This was a reflex; he did it without thinking, and even as he did it he knew it was a stupid gesture. The man’s clothes were soaked through and covered with moss, his skin was rotting away in parts and he was lying face down in the soft dirt deep enough to obstruct any breathing he might have been doing. He was dead. But, not knowing how to process anything that had happened to him in the last hour not to mention the last three months, Matthew adjusted the glasses on his face and once again nudged the corpse. “Come on,” he pleaded, “come on, wake up.”

When this again accomplished nothing Matthew leaned back against his support and closed his eyes. He felt the need to be alone with his exhaustion if only for a few seconds.

Rain started to fall.

He heard a rustling close by.

He opened his eyes.

“My god I’ve raised the dead,” he thought stupidly as he watched the corpse next to him begin to move. A shower of dirt dribbled across his leg as the corpse’s arm lifted and moved sluggishly toward his leg. The hand lowered onto his leg at the same instant that the head raised up and Matthew felt cold shock spread through him as he saw that the thing’s half-rotted face was staring at him; dead eyes glossy with rainwater were locked onto his face as a hungry grin spread across the thing’s yellowed teeth. He looked down at the hand clamped onto his knee and he saw the thing’s fingers, two of them nothing but bare bone, sink into his flesh. He felt his skin tearing, his muscles tensing and ripping, his body seizing with pain. His mouth was open to try and scream but nothing came out the pain was so intense and then he felt the bony fingertips scrape against the underside of his kneecap before giving a yank and he screamed. The thing was dragging itself closer to him and he could hear it breathing, a soft repetitive rasp almost like a laugh and the fingers squeezed harder and he heard his own bones breaking. One of his hands flailed up to push against the thing’s face but his fingers only slipped right through the soft waxy skin and into the thing’s mouth. He felt teeth on either side of his knuckles grinding through to his bones and all Matthew could do was try to wriggle away but every motion seemed to hurt and every movement he made only served to let the thing get more leverage against him and he realized that either he was losing strength or it was gaining strength or both and then he heard a woman’s voice shouting, “He’s over here,” and there was the sound of a struggle and then it was off of him and he was doubled over holding his bleeding hand against his stomach, his knee a faraway throb of pain.

When he looked up he saw the woman who had helped him through the doorway earlier standing next to Epp who seemed to have control of the thing in some sort of wrestling hold. Epp was staring at him, looking into his eyes. “Matthew, meet Mary,” Epp said. “Mary, meet Matthew.”

Epp was staring up at Mary now and there was something mean in his face. When Mary looked back down at him and Epp was sure he had her attention, he let go of his grip on the thing.

At first it flopped to the ground, its muscles in their current condition unable to support its frame. But then Epp had a hold of it again and instead of subduing it he was helping it turn around and face him. Then Epp took a hold of one of its arms by the wrist, got a good grip on it, and plunged the thing’s hand against his own chest.

The smile on the thing’s face was orgasmic. And it wasn’t the sight of blood on Epp’s chest that sent Matthew into a panic. It wasn’t the gluttonous smile of the thing feasting on Epp’s energy nor the sound of its hands, both of them now, clawing into Epp’s ribs. These things were too overwhelming, too far beyond Matthew’s realm of possibility to even register.

Instead it was the sight of Epp’s suit ripping, buttons popping off to fly in all directions as the thing’s two bony fingers raked down his shirt, it was the tearing sound of fabric that set Matthew off and he dove forward to try and help. Only when he tried to get a grip on one of the thing’s arms his own pain flared up again and he collapsed to the ground.

He felt paralyzed. Lying on his side he saw Epp on the ground, wounds all over his body, the thing straddling his stomach. It raised one hand high overhead. For a second the hand remained poised in the air, rainwater dripping off of the fingers and bones, and then it plunged down into Epp’s chest as the thing gave a shrieking porcine yell. The hand disappeared up to the forearm into Epp’s body as he spasmed, deep red blood spouting out of his mouth, and Matthew heard Mary screaming and his eyes lost focus and then it was over.

Matthew felt himself gaining strength, not quickly, but gaining strength instead of losing it and he was able to get into a sitting position. Mary was on her knees over Epp, sobbing uncontrollably, her hands at her face and then she was screaming at Epp, shrieking, calling him a bastard, throwing punches at him even as he sat up. Epp only sat there, a happy smile on his blood covered face.

“I told you that you could do it,” Epp said, looking over at the thing, now tied up and covered all over with yellow time-tape.

Mary was still sobbing, no effort at controlling herself apparent as she screamed right through her tears, “You bastard don’t you ever do something like that again.” She gave Epp’s arm another flurry of hits.

As Mary slowly calmed down, and her tears became less, and as the thing tied up in tape continued not to move, Matthew began to let himself register other things. Like how tired he was. And how the thing he had leaned back on for support upon first arriving was a gravestone. And how next to it was another gravestone. And how he was in a graveyard. “Epp? Where are we? And what is that?“

“It’s you,” Epp said. Matthew watched as Epp’s suit began to knit itself together, the red stains receding.

“He doesn’t look like me,” Matthew said.

“He was being figurative,” Mary said, the edge on her voice subsiding like the stains on Epp’s shirt.

“You wanted to see your daughter? This is how that path ends,” Epp said. “You see her once and then you want to see her twice. You see her twice and then you want to spend the day, then a month, then a year. And, well, where do you think she’ll end up?” Epp held his arms out indicating the graveyard all around them. “Those who try to avoid the work find themselves chasing their loved ones into the ground. They hover over their graves, their energy fading, slowly rotting and crumbling. Eventually they’re completely consumed by a desire to follow their second choice on the one hand and a constant hunger for juice on the other.”

“Epp,” Matthew pointed at the thing on the ground, “that is a fucking zombie.“

Epp nodded. “Yes. Yes it is. They pop skin every once and awhile, especially after they’ve fed on someone with decent juice. But it takes a lot to get them anywhere close to functional. Take a look around, most of them don’t go anywhere.”

Again Epp waved his arms and Matthew this time let his eyes follow, and he saw them. Twenty or thirty of them spread about the graveyard, clothes rotting and flesh sagging. Some of the closer ones were awkwardly trying to crawl their way over to where the three of them were grouped. There was one a few rows away who had managed to bury his head in the dirt at the foot of a gravestone.

Epp stretched his legs out gingerly then rested his head against the gravestone. The stains and tears in his clothes and skin continued to reform as a placid smile spread across his face.

“That was it, by the way,” he said to Mary. “I’m no longer your teacher. You are now the only one responsible for you.”

Mary only stared. “Epp, where is Bartleby?”

Epp didn’t answer.

“What did you do with him, Epp? Is he at the bottom of some sea somewhere? Or…buried in a pyramid? Where is he?”

“The far side of Mercury,” Epp said, his eyes shut.

“Mother of god,” Mary whispered.

“But he can get back, right?” Matthew asked.

“I think so,” Epp said, standing up slowly.

“You think so? You mean once he learns his lesson he’ll be able to get back, right? And these things,” Matthew pointed at the thing wrapped up in time tape, “you knew that these things couldn’t really hurt us right? And you knew Mary could definitely…do whatever it was that she did and you knew, right? There’s no real danger, here?”

“With hunger that strong,” Epp said, “there is always a chance of danger.” He looked down as the last ragged threads of his suit sewed themselves together. He began to walk. “But-”

Epp stumbled forward in quick stuttering steps, barely catching himself on another gravestone. He turned around to look at Matthew and Mary over his shoulder, disbelief on his face. Mary gasped and her hands went to her mouth. Matthew tried his hardest to understand.

Epp slowly let go of the gravestone and tried to walk back normally, but it was clear he had to favor one leg. “This,” he said, looking down at himself, “is certainly going to take some getting used to.” He tried hobbling forward again, then stopped. With a twirl of his fingers a handsome wooden cane appeared in one of his hands and he started walking again, using the cane for support. Mary, pity overcoming anger, stepped up and took Epp’s arm, trying to help him get a feel for the cane.

Matthew wanted to ask a number of questions but he was too tired. “Epp? I’m exhausted.”

“I know,” Epp said, shaking Mary off. “No more detours, you can lead us now.”

Matthew looked around dumbly. “Lead you?”

“We can’t lead, we have to follow you. We’re not the ones who pushed recently.”

“But where?” Matthew asked.

“You know where,” Epp said.

And to Matthew’s surprise, he did.

—–

The summit of Mount Everest had held a lot of different images in Matthew’s imagination. Most of them concerned wind battered people struggling to make the last few steps over a knife ridge of rock and snow. Danger was always involved and death was always a risk.

At no point in either of his lives had Matthew contemplated what the summit of Mount Everest might be like if death was not an option, gravity not a factor, and the weather obeyed your command.

He had closed his eyes while leaving the graveyard; the sensation of wind rippling across his skin as he traveled was still enjoyable to him. With his eyes closed he felt his feet touch ground but the wind was still blowing. He stood like this for a few moments, then opened his eyes to see a sky as blue as the color of his wife’s eyes framing an uneven triangle of rock. He turned around and saw the world spread out at his feet, wave after wave of mountain peak flowing out like a sea. He heard footsteps crunching over the snow and saw Mary walking up a slope with an impossibly steep angle. Epp followed behind her, still limping, but also doing his share of disobeying gravity.

And then Matthew realized that they weren’t alone. There were forms all around them, people all over lying down in various states of repose.

Mary stopped behind him, Epp behind her. Epp winced, putting too much weight on his bad leg to lean around and look at Matthew. “You have to lead,” he said. “We can only follow. This is all you.”

Matthew turned and started walking up the peak of Mount Everest. To his left was a woman lying on her back, her fingers laced behind her head, her feet were facing up towards the summit on a slope of at least eighty degrees. He passed a man on his right sitting with a smile on his face, leaning back against the rock face, supported by nothing.

He stopped at a young woman who was lying with her palms down, as if her hands were lovingly feeling the softest mattress in the world. Her entire body was suspended out over a drop of a thousand feet with only the heels of her shoes resting on rock.

“This is where they come who need rest,” Epp said behind him. “This is where those who have pushed the world further on come to regain their strength.”

Matthew continued walking, looking at the figures all around him, at the path in front, at the sky above that was so far off the earth it grew black overhead.

“How long have they been here?” Matthew asked, passing a man splayed out happily on a rock wearing a style of clothes that Matthew didn’t recognize.

“Depends on their push,” Mary answered from right behind him, her voice warm in his ear. “Anywhere from a few days to a few centuries.”

“And these are all here for one specific person?”

“It varies,” Mary said.

“It’s really more art than science,” Epp said from behind him. “Sometimes a tester will bind with a specific person throughout a lifetime, constantly pushing, drawing what they can out of that person.”

Mary pointed off to a ledge where an old woman sat. “Gandhi,” she said.

“Sometimes a person will burn through more than one tester in a lifetime so that specific testers only wind up bringing about specific parts of that persons work.”

Mary pointed to a young boy dreamily curled up on his side in the snow. “E = mc squared.”

“And sometimes a tester will find themselves able to push more than one person together into collaboration.”

Mary’s fingers brushed the hair of a bristly man sleeping deeply under an outcropping. “Abbey Road,” she said.

“Why here?”

“Not just here,” Epp said, “but most mountaintops.”

“Yeah but, why here?”

“That I can’t answer.”

“I always figured,” Mary said, “that if you were going to spend a century resting up in one spot, you might as well make it one with this view,” and she spread her arms out, her fingertips seeming to brush across the entire earth.

“That’s a better reason than most I’ve heard,” Epp said, looking around as well.

“Does it matter how high up the person is?”

“Altitude signifies nothing. You just fall where you will.”

“Now what?”

Epp poked at the ice and snow with his cane.

“I’m going to stick around for awhile,” Mary said. “Enjoy the view. See if anyone wakes up.”

“What do I do?” Matthew asked.

“You’ve got some reading ahead of you,” Epp said. He reached into his suit and handed Matthew a piece of paper folded into squares.

Matthew unfolded it and stared. Across the top of the sheet was printed: “From the desk of Sophie Loughton.” Matthew squinted. “She wrote a poem?” he asked.

“You both wrote a poem,” Mary said, but Matthew wasn’t listening.

With the paper unfolded in front of him he started walking forward as he read. “It’s not bad really,” he said, his feet carrying him further away.

Without taking his eyes from the page he reached his free hand out and felt out for a seat, his fingers finding a piece of rock. He began to sit down, changed his mind halfway through and stretched out instead, lying down with half his body dangling off of the edge of a precipice. He fidgeted just a little, crossing his ankles and wriggling his hips deeper into the snow for comfort, once and then twice. Then he became perfectly still, the poem in his hands, the Himalayan morning spread out behind him.

—–

Click here to purchase Probability Angels now!

Or click here to read Part 3.

My first draft for this week is done.  That is a very good feeling.  I haven’t been done with my story this early in awhile.  I think since the last time I visited with Matthew and Epp.

That being said there are any number of things that I’m not feeling so good about.  For starters I still don’t have a title.  If you’re reading this at a later date then I’ve already come up with a title and changed the category to follow suit, but right now the category is still labeled: “Untitled 6.”  And that’s kind of scary.  Now, normally it isn’t wildly scary not to have a title, you can always come up with something, it’s just that the title I thought I was going to use was pretty straightforward, and I can’t in good conscience use it because this story is still a little all over the place right now.  I was going to call it “Three Lessons.”  Not the sexiest of titles, but since this story comes after “Second Choice” I thought it fit nicely…fun with counting.  And the story was supposed to revolve around Epp teaching, you guessed it, three lessons to various people.  Only that simple structure sort of imploded and I don’t know what’s going on now. 

Basically I think something needs to be cut.  There’s too much going on and I think one of the story-lines has to go, only I can’t figure out which.  One is an obvious candidate, but the more I think about it the more it seems to me that nothing can be cut, not because I’m wildly in love with all of it, but because of logistics.  That is to say there sort of need to be a few people in each of these scenes or these conversations and actions wouldn’t really work out the way they do, they’d resolve a lot easier.  I don’t know.  Sometimes, when you see a movie or read a book, you wonder why a certain character had to be there in the first place, and it seems like it would have been super easy to just cut them out entirely.  What I’m here to say is that oftentimes what you’re missing is that it makes perfect sense to remove that character right up until you actually do, at which point you realize that things just don’t work without them.  They were sort of “load-bearing” characters. 

Rewrites should be fun.

Strange things are afoot here.  I’ve got the story all set.  I know I do.  I can see every last little part and I can see how it all fits together…but for some reason it isn’t all fitting together.  I don’t know if I’m missing something very integral or what.  Or sometimes it all seems to work out so well in your head, but then when you sit down and start typing the scenes don’t fit together.  They look nice when situated close to each other, but the transitions aren’t there.  And that can get tricky because you’ve got to build bridges of some sort to get you from A to B, only sometimes the bridge can be very stubborn and refuse to connect to B unless B changes in some little way. 

On the other hand I might just be full of that wonderful “doubt” stuff I’m always talking about.  This story covers a lot of ground.  Not that you should expect anything less when Matthew and Epp get together.  But there’s a genuine fear here that I’ve overstepped some sort of boundary and this is becoming rambling and nonsensical.  In other words, it might not be that I can’t fit the pieces together, it might be that there are too many pieces to begin with and I should trim some.  But I like all the pieces.  And they all seem necessary.  So…so it’s just back to work for me.  Hopefully answers will come from the story itself.  They always seem to.

Man.  I don’t know what I just did.  I was trying to put in a new plug-in so that the most popular posts would show up on the sidebar.  But something went a little wrong and then something else went a little wrong and before I knew it I was wading with reckless abandon into the inner-workings of this website.  It was probably stuff you learn in your second class of Website-Building 101, but I didn’t know what I was doing and at one point I finally drew back and discovered that I had completely destroyed everything.  Everything was gone.  Everything I had written was gone and the website was gone and going to this address just gave an error message. 

That’s where the title of this post comes from.  I said his name a lot.  Not in a very calm voice, either.  I probably sound at-ease talking about it now but another indication of how completely freaked out I was is that I went out and bought a pack of cigarettes.  I didn’t smoke one.  But I bought them. 

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details of my miraculous escape, but it looks like I got everything back and up and running so I’m going to wipe my hands of this and take away the valuable lesson that you should always back up your work…even if you don’t have the slightest idea how to back up a Squirrelly Data Board or whatever it was that Jesus and I did.  He’s a cagey one, that Jesus. 

And, of course, that killed quite a few hours that I was supposed to have spent writing this week’s story, which is moving along but I’d really be a  lot more comfortable with a few more scenes done by tonight.  And also there appear to be question marks EVERYwhere throughout the old posts.  I’m going to stop thinking about this and go into denial for a little while.

Yesterday I decided that this current story was going to bring back some characters from a previous story. I was excited. This was exciting. Now, about twenty-four hours later, I realize some of the negatives of this choice.

Pressure, for starters. Generally people seemed to ally like this story and I’ve decided to go back to the lives of these characters and muck about. For that matter I liked this story; I liked playing with these characters and cohabiting their world. There’s a lot of pressure here not to screw this up, not to go all Jar-Jar on this thing.

Doubt is another one. Am I really up for this? I took my time crafting that first story, am I only going back because I think it’ll be easy to mine more material or am I going back because I honestly think there’s more meat on that particular bone? Am I turning this into something akin to those horrible cinema pairings that were okay for the first match-up but then got worse and worse with each new movie?

Fear. What on earth did I agree to do here? Do I remember these two guys as well as I think I do? I know I created them and all but these character things can be awful slippery. They were just short-story characters before this, they had the benefit of not getting known, you know, too well by my readers. What if I flesh out more of them and they turn out to be losers? Boring losers? What if I get three paragraphs in and they’re doing nothing but sitting around, glancing awkwardly at each other, striving to make small talk about the weather?

How do I do this? Do I recap at the beginning of this new story? Do I go over somewhere in a paragraph or two everything that happened in “Second Choice”? That seems silly. Do I put it across in dialogue? Do I do anything?

Maybe I just shut up and write the story. With seven days left that course seems wisest.

You have to understand, I had very little planned as far as how this whole thing was going to go. I had those first two stories and, really, I didn’t think very far beyond that because if I had then I never would have started this project and that would have been a shame because frankly I think I needed a challenge. Or a push. Or a test.

I’ve also talked to the point of vomiting about how this all happens and how when the clock starts ticking loudly I sort of need to take whatever idea is largest and run with it. I still, technically, have time to kick this current idea and try to scratch out something else, but I don’t think I’m going to. I sort of like the idea of what’s happening. Which is that one of the previous stories spilled over while it was inside of my head and now parts of it are still sloshing around in the back of my head. Sometimes when that happens it’s no big deal. God knows how many bits and pieces of stories have come and gone in the holding area at the back of my head.

But sometimes, sometimes those pieces are awfully powerful. I had one back there about seven years ago. Occasionally I thought I’d shaken him but then he’d always pop up, more desperate to get out than ever. It was this heavily scarred guy named Remmy. I learned with him that if I don’t find a way to let the more powerful ones out they eventually just take matters into their own hands and scratch their way out of the back of my skull on their own. 400,000 words and I still have one more book to go before Remmy’s going to be happy. Or as happy as Remmy gets, anyway.

But that has nothing to do with anything. It’s just the long way around of saying that, barring something huge gelling in the next two days, Matthew and Epp are coming back for this week’s story. Like I ever had a chance of keeping them away. It’s hard to keep someone who can pull stacks of $5000 from thin air from taking over your imagination.

I don’t understand. I’ve had a couple of short stories accepted for publication. I have a nice little desk and my nice little story ideas. I’ve written three books and have plans for a few more. I have a job I like that leaves me time to pursue this writing thing. So how did I end up here?

It’s ten o’clock on a Tuesday night and all I want to do is go to sleep. Or watch TV. Or go have a beer or see a movie or sit in the park and stare at crazy people or do anything really other than write. I really just want the option to not have to write. But somehow I don’t have that. Myself from ten weeks ago decided that I would write a story every two weeks and somehow I’ve been managing that and it isn’t a complete and catastrophic failure so of course I’m going to keep doing it. And I’m really looking forward to when I get to publish that next story except that between then and now I have to do a whole bunch of this writing stuff. And the heat is back as well as the humidity and I go outside and my head instantly looks like a mop that was just used to clean up a vanilla milkshake and ITunes is on random and keeps cycling into Cars songs, and not good Cars songs but much much later Cars songs off of the tail end of their Greatest Hits. I’m not real sure why I leave songs I don’t like on my ITunes. In the back of my head I’m always worried that someday I’m suddenly going to absolutely need to hear a certain song that I’ve hated my entire life. But surely the entire Jimmy Buffet box set isn’t needed. I don’t think Jimmy Buffet even knows every song on the Jimmy Buffet box set.

The problem is if I get to a deadline and any one of these stories is something less than what I could have made it into considering the time it’ll eat at me like nothing you could possibly imagine. But everything is condensed into some strange Costanza-esque form of writing where you have to do the opposite of what you think is normal because normally I’d be tinkering around inside of the story by now but that was back when I had plenty of time to let it sit after I had put something down to see what else came along. Now I need to make sure I’ve got a nice hunk of story worked out before I dive in, I think, so I’m more inclined to stay away from the story for longer than I’d ever think possible and not write.

So why am I sitting at my desk?

It’s Monday again. I wish there was some way to see what part of what stories and books were written on Mondays. I’m sure you’d find that it’s all the annoying parts with no point…and The Matrix sequels.

Anyway, I’m at a familiar enough crossroads. I can’t tell whether it’s time to shut up and dive into the story itself or if I should continue writing journal entries and toying with thoughts without actually engaging. It’s tough because I’ve never written this many stories in a row before. And of course this ridiculous deadline doesn’t help things. I can’t tell what’s normal. With the first two stories I had given them plenty of thought before this project started. They were sort of rolling around in the hopper (what is a hopper anyway) for awhile before hand so they were more or less fleshed out. Then, with the third story, I know I hadn’t actually written anything for the story until maybe the Friday before. I have a distinct memory of being on the subway and having my ending just solidify without warning and I knew it was time to actually start writing.

There’s a big difference between playing around in your journals and actually entering into the story. It’s hard to explain but I guess it’s sort of like rehearsal versus being on stage…sort of. I don’t act so I’m not sure if that works but the point is nothing is set while you’re still in your journal. You sort of toy around with it and tease out details and anything can be scratched at any point if you don’t like it and there aren’t any real consequences. Once you’re inside the story, though, everything’s different. It’s for real. Things are actually happening if that makes any sense and to go back and change things somehow lessons the immediacy of everything around it. I mean, it’s possible to add a new character or something, but it requires a lot of work, a lot of smoothing things over and over and sometimes that can weaken the story as a whole. Basically I don’t do a lot of changes once I start the ball rolling which is why I like to have some sort of basic skeleton set in my mind (so many metephors). Not that I always stick to that skeleton but it’s nice to have one.

That being said this entire last story came about after I starting writing for real. I had no skeleton. I just had the voice of one character and I wrote maybe a page or two that I realized was unnecessary introduction which got cut and then the whole thing slammed together once I figured out it was a duet of sorts.

The problem, as I said, is that I have no idea what’s normal at this point and no idea what works best and no idea if I should write in my journal tonight or start actually writing story. Unfortunately I don’t think the answer is resting in this blog. Also I’m really getting sick of coming up with titles for these posts. Oh well.

So most of my day has been spent on my couch or sitting at my desk staring at the television. I have a book of crossword puzzles that I was working on as well. I’ve done about a million of them. When you get clues like “Beauty and ___ Beast” you know you’re not doing a very difficult crossword puzzle. This is all very lazy-Sunday stuff and it has come about partly because this is the first day of football season, partly because I’m a little beat up from last night, and partly because sitting and staring is a pretty important part of writing and when I get a chance to do a lot of it I try and take it. After all I’m supposed to pull a story out of thin air in the next eleven days. Granted, maybe I should have gone to the park with my journal and done some people watching, but, well, football.

Like I said, there’s a poetry in this stuff for me. Of course along with that poetry I am forced to once again watch network television ads. I have a DVR so I usually watched prerecorded stuff and, thus, can skip over the ads. Pre-recording sports isn’t quite the same so I try to watch them live which means I’ve watched more ads today than I’ve probably seen in a year. And almost all of them are awful. I feel stupider for having watched them. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good kick-to-the-crotch beer ad or artistically done shoe campaign, but after the first two commercial breaks you’re really left with nothing but crap. Repetitive crap. Over and over. I’d forgotten just how terrible that can be. Don’t get me started on the announcer’s banter.

So I’ll mute my TV and try to get some actual writing if there’s a blowout on or if it’s halftime. As I said, I was trying to write up an “About Me” page for most of today and I got very little done. Which is really what I came on here to write about but the lazy-Sunday atmosphere prompted a more free flowing post. My point about the “About Me” page, or lack thereof, is that it amazes me that I can sit down and basically write a 10,000 word long lie that I fully expect you to spend your hard earned free-time reading and that feels pretty normal to me. But if you ask me to write 300 words about myself, suddenly I’m stymied.

Thus goes the authors mind-set.

Look at it this way. When I get into it and am in my groove I, as I’ve mentioned time and again, am constantly making decisions and choices. That’s all this process really boils down to: making choices and then following those choices to their logical ends. If I decide someone is a computer programmer for a living and I have a scene where this character sits down to type, it follows that he should be a pretty fast typist. He might use two index fingers to “hunt and peck,” I’m not saying that he necessarily has to be fast and traditional, but based on the initial decision of his job other factors like his typing speed are bound to follow. If he isn’t isn’t fast at typing, then I need to figure out some reasons why this might be true (he was lying about his job; he’s not a very good computer programmer; he’s used to a Cyrillic keyboard) and then choose one. Choices and decisions abound.

Now let’s constrict this whole process to the very tail end of things, the rewriting. I should dismiss the idea right now that rewriting only involves correcting typos and grammar. It’s so much more than that. When I rewrite what I do is I sit down with a pen and a printed out version of my story and I read, and I mark the page up. Every mark I make is a decision to change something based on what it is that I want the writing to be doing at that point. This tends to mean clearing up any vague writing and finding ways to say things as directly as possible…but not always. Again, it depends what I want the writing to be doing at that point. Sometimes you want things vague, sometimes the meter of a sentence is more important than its point, adverbs are generally believed to weaken a sentence but sometimes when you find a perfect place for an adverb it makes things ten times stronger, and sometimes grammar goes right out the window.

Let’s take a closer look at that last example as it’s the easiest to illustrate. Pursuing proper grammar is not always the best way to pursue better writing. The clearest place I can point to this happening is in dialogue. Grammar has no place in dialogue. None. Take five minutes out of your day and listen to real people talking in real conversations. They’re all over the place. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that improper grammar is essential to writing good dialogue. And then you have variations on that, like when the writing begins to reflect a persons thoughts more than straight narration, or when you write in the first person. People tend to miss that one. When reading something written in the first person it’s always a good idea to keep in mind that the narrator is a character just like everyone else.

My point being that when I perform my rewrites I focus on the language. And what that means is focusing on every word. And, if you take an average word count of 5,000 per story, that means, even while isolating this very last step of this process, I face 5,000 separate choices with each rewrite. Every word matters. Every word gets thought about. Some, granted, more than others. “The” doesn’t really get a lot of thought devoted to it, but a lot of the other choices being dealt with are more shaded. It isn’t always a choice of “leave it in” versus “take it out.” If I come across the word, “cold,” I have the possibility of taking it out, leaving it in, or replacing it with brisk, chilly, frigid, freezing, cool, etc. And then you have punctuation to think about. Really the number 5,000 is arbitrary, what I’m trying to get across is the huge number of decisions that get made.

These decisions are why I have zero confidence when I post a new story. It’s difficult if not impossible to know for certain how all of these decisions are compiling. It’s not like one word choice is going to make or break things, but if you imagine a story as a marble statue and the rewrites as the final polishes and fine chipping done to this statue, then no one chip is going to make a difference, but the sum total of five thousand chips begins to add up. With a statue you can take a step back in physical space, view the statue as a whole, and get a sense of where you’re at. When writing a story, though, getting that sense of distance so you can see the whole is nearly impossible except with time. And even then I’m talking about years not days. And if we open this up to the whole process the number of decisions becomes staggering. We’re not talking about the final chips and polishes, we’re talking about stepping up to a block of stone and carving an entire statue without ever really being able to take a large step back to see the entire thing. You can train yourself to make these decisions well, you can do your best to make the right choices, you can hone your judgment so overall you have confidence that you are on the right track, but you can never know for certain that you’ve done well. Not until a reader comes along (we’ll get into the strange role you, the reader, plays in this whole thing at some later date). Before it gets read by you a story is nothing put potential; there are no definites.

Now on the whole, yes, if you all continue to like the stories I put out I should gain some self-confidence where this project is concerned. And, to be fair, I have. It’s getting easier and easier to tell people to come visit my website. But for each individual story? I’ll put it this way: if I ever say, “This story is great, I’m sure of it,” that’s a bad thing. It doesn’t mean the story is great (it might be, I might have gotten lucky). What it means is that I haven’t examined the language and the details enough for me to lose track of the whole. It means I haven’t put a lot of work into it. It means I haven’t fixed sloppy parts or tried to write clearer or given any thought to a character’s accent or the clothes they wear or what the weather is like or if “brisk” captures the temperature better than “cold.” It means I haven’t made a lot of choices. And that’s a bad thing.

Trust me. You want me full of doubt.