Tom Ritchford's attempt to write a novel entirely in the month of November for National Novel Writing Month.

If you wish to be included in this novel, please drop me a line describing your character and your preferred mode of death (death not guaranteed).

 
She agreed, silently, and pressed up against him dark and
deep for a long long time, the man on the bed breathing shallowly and
quietly while the light of the moon slowly moved across the room
and all of them.

posted by Tom Ritchford at 9:23 PM

 

Chapter 2

He woke, refreshed, into a relaxed alertness and a readiness to act.
He still had very little, two words and a conviction that there was something
very very important that had to be done but he wasn't the discarded broken
doll of a few days ago and he understood that he needed to learn, to find
out what "Stop" and "OK" meant, what real live girls were like, he needed
to learn how to learn so he could do whatever it was that had to be done.

He knew somehow that he was the only one that could do it, he knew
that he would achieve it if anyone could, and that he would try to achieve
it with the last breath in his body. He relaxed and started gathering
information, vacuuming it in, dragging the room, the sheets, the bed itself,
the tantalizingly obscure window, all of it, into his eyes and ears and nose
and mouth and skin like a glutton pushes food into his mouth.

Far too many unknowns, he stopped and concentrated on one thing at a time.
He looked at the sheets enclosing him, he remembered getting caught by them
before, but wait, these were not the same things but similar items!
previously they had been thicker with a different pattern! (he was unaware that he
had soiled several sets of sheets since his first waking)

He felt a glow of pleasure. They hadn't got him yet! He would keep track
of these things. They wouldn't sneak anything past him. They might change
things but he'd watch them. They could bring new sheets every time and he'd
learn each one and know if they brought old ones back too.

He controlled himself. Each bit of progress was important but he had
something to accomplish. More information. He looked around the
room and spotted a tapestry. Amazing. Like the sheets, but different
in so many ways. Not touching him -- it staggered him for a second, there
was an object and it was NOT touching him! Yet, there it was. And clearly
the same sort of thing as the sheet. Of course the sheet was covering him
and the tapestry was not. And... he unconsciously leaned a little closer
and his eyes shot open.

The bottom of the tapestry was moving! True, it was only a very small
portion of it, moving backwards and forwards in a rough listless sort
of periodicity, but he was amused and amazed.

Motion! How could this happen? He concentrated all
his forces on the problem. There seemed to be nothing
near the tapestry. Perhaps these things just did that?
Or perhaps there was a small invisible pushing on
the bottom somehow? But didn't that seem silly?
How could one find out?

He was still staring at the bottom of the tapestry when
the door to the room opened and closed. The wind
from the door caught the bottom of the tapestry and blew
it up a few inches; an instant later he felt the breath of
it on his cheek.

Confirmation! There WAS an invisible force -- he had
seem the tapestry move and then he had felt the force
himself!

He felt this was a breakthrough and was just about
to settle down to a long series of mental manipulations
of invisible forces, sheets, tapestries, and himself
(the only things he felt he really understood to this point)
but an instant later the tapestries were flipped aside
(giving him a vast amount of information about the
behavior of tapestries that was instantly stored for
later use) and two walked in.

He felt an almost literal grinding in his head, a complete
inability to process the unbelievably rich and seemingly
important lode of information that had just walked into
his perception.

Here were two other things, things like him! But they
could generate invisible forces! They moved
from place to place!

He suppressed the torrent of emotions. They were things
just like he was, and their tricks were just tricks. He'd learn how
they did their tricks and he'd use those tricks and other tricks
and anything else he could learn to accomplish what he needed
to do.
posted by Tom Ritchford at 9:42 PM

 
The day slid slowly into evening and night and still she sat still,
dozing sometimes, alert to small changes in the breathing,
waiting. The shadows in the room lengthened
and slid away into darkness and the quiet gave way to a
few creaks from the house and then absolute
silence, not even wind to keep the ear from
the stillness that enveloped everything like
drowsy cotton wool.

Finally, a faint noise from a long way off in the darkness below,
steps approaching, the tapestries stirred and brought forth
a shadow against the hanging shadows. The shadow and
hers merged into one with a squeeze. Several moments and two
exhalations passed. His shadow looked up into her face
and the face said, "Yes, he's OK," and, "Yes, I took care of him," and
"Yes, I did fall in love with him, what do I do now?" and even,
"Yes, you are more important to me than all other things."

The shadow blinked, twice and then the eyes closed in thought.
This was one of the anticipated outcomes. He had thought of
this possible path before he took a single step but he was a
gambling man -- more important, life, fortune and sacred honor
were dross and chaff compared to the promise hidden locked
deep inside the sleeping figure under the sheets. But it was still
a shock, like seeing a spray of water caught in strobes
a last instant before it hits you and leaves you laughing, with
your breath quick in your chest.

"Nikuko. Thank you."

She inclined her head, just a little, but more than she would
ever do for any other creature. "Glad you're back, Hank.
What ever shall we do?"

It was one of her catch phrases and she delivered it almost just right.
They both tried to smile and both tried to relax.

"This house is still safe -- as long as I have anything to do with it."

"And I," she thought, but didn't say. Better that he not be aware
of her full extent. Better he not know about the safety net.

Aloud, "He's like a child. He can't seem to speak properly.
He's frightened. He frightens me, too. Something really
scared him, and it scares me, and so does he, there's something
strong and whole and unbroken deep deep deep inside that
strange shell of a person and I don't know if I want to be there
when it works out what it wants and how to get it. He's like a
child, father to a man and that man frightens me and he should
frighten you too."

"I am beyond fear and sometimes I fear I am beyond
joy and redemption too. I have nothing left to lose,
we have nothing left, you and I."

"Dear liar," she thought.

"This man-child is it, he is all we have to lose. Did you know
that our value is up again today while total value is down?
A few more months of this and we'll be in the peculiar position
of owning absolutely all of absolutely nothing, the biggest and the
only fish in absolutely no pond at all."

He showed his teeth again. Nothing about the new world they
were in seemed to really worry him and she wondered sometimes
if he was mad: all her nerves jangled all the time in self-preservation
and she didn't understand how he managed to detach himself
from the constant crisis while still responding instantly and accurately
to each new stimulus. Perhaps it was the various little pills of all
sorts of shapes and sizes that he took constantly, apparently at
random, but they had never worked for her... the uppers didn't
up, the downers didn't out and all she wanted was to go sidewise
and over and away to a place where no drug was ever going
to take her.

For that matter, they didn't seem to work for him either.
These were the best pills she could get --
she was in charge of bargaining for supplies and she was
her usual hypercompetent and obsessive self, testing the product,
playing one supplier against the other.
They should make you sleep, or not sleep, for a week.
He took them at random with no rhyme nor reason and
to no apparent effect. She'd asked him once why
he did it. "To thicken the plot," he'd replied and that
was the end of it.

But he was still talking. "We're fucked, here, now,
and there's no way out of it, but we still have a chance
to unfuck others and to keep them unfucked. The slightest
chance is worth anything. We can't just flush it all.

"It isn't for us. No one will remember us. It will be like
we never existed and that's a frightening thought but
it's probably better this way. No, it's just so we can hope
that something sometime will mean something to someone
because otherwise it would have been better if this
whole shithouse had never been built in the first place."

He walked over to the bed, the moonlight scattered
all crazy through the shattered windows onto his
proud face. In his time, he'd gone from being a
mulatto to a person of color, later to be boxed into
nigger when people stopped looking at other people
as anything other than an enemy, and finally becoming
a unique item, Henrey Lee Lucatis, the one to beat,
the big man, the fixer, the only one who might be able
to get you what you wanted and change you what
you could afford, the gambler who was himself a sure
thing.
posted by Tom Ritchford at 9:14 PM

 
The moment broke and she detached, walking over,
standing over. Systematically he probed the tangled knot
of restraining sheets, running his hands over it in an unselfconsciously
sensual manner, then with a neatly clever gesture untwisted and released
himself. He looked up at her without emotion, the sheets
still clutched in hand.

She flashed him an instant of her sweetest smile, tempered
with just the faintest hint of spank. "That's better. You look
much better. You were in such bad shape when we brought you
in. You look so much better now. You were in terrible
shape. You're very lucky we brought you in here. Are you OK?"

She stopped and looked at him more closely. There was
no sign of comprehension in his eyes: a native intelligence
certainly, active awareness but no understanding at all.

"OK!" he said and put his hand to his head again. She felt
sick just to look at him, all fear, worry, confusion, incomprehension,
disorientation, and he had no more control of his face than a
man blind from birth, it was like stirring an anthill with a stick.
"OK! OK!" His distress was painful, and he tried to push himself
up again and failed and slid under the covers and covered his
face and tried to cry and sobbed, great racking huge sobs that
made his whole body shake and no tears but a great explosion
of sorrow and worry and regret to large for a human frame to bear.

With greatest trepidation she put an oh-so-tentative hand on his shoulder.
To her greatest relief, he immediately started to relax, tension rushing out
of him as he curled up on his side like a clumsy foetus and started snoring,
thumb in mouth, other arm curved protectively over his body.

She waited for several minutes, the sweat growing dry on him and
the snores growing softer and more regular, the not-entirely-unpleasant
sweet smell of his unwashed body permeating the room.

"Why does he bring in these stray cats?" she thought to herself and
laughed. She'd been one, herself, and never forgot it. She'd acquired
the veneer of civilization but the street was not far beneath her skin and
there were times when it would suddenly poke out like a bone from a
compound fracture, and at the worst times, hissing at the society ladies
at a chi-chi restaurant, arching her back at a passing cop, turning her
nose towards garbage cans and the smelly safety of a back alley
trash heap. He'd taught her and smoothed off the roughest spots
and she loved him for it and tried to make sure that he never guessed
that it was all a pretence, a play for his affections, humoring him or
at least playing along with him, though sometimes in her darkest
sleepless nights she admitted to herself that he probably knew all
about it and loved it in the same unquestioning way that he loved her,
something she never would understand and knew better than
to ever take for granted.

She settled herself in for a long shift. If the man was important to his
plans, then she had to take care of the man. Sometimes his plans
were obscure, sometimes they never seemed to go anywhere, but
the last two years had taught her that there was more method to his
madness than just madness. He had big plans. She knew this.
She resonated to it. It was what had drawn him to her. It was
what kept her there. She didn't know the details; he kept them from
her. And the great plan was too large to see from close up.
She had only one tree's worth of perspective on the entire wood.

But it was all she had. Everything else was shit. Everyone else
was dung beetles, scarab shit eaters dragging each other down into
the great cesspool that was all that remained of the great city,
desperately trying to stand on each others' shoulders and pushing
each others' faces into offal but never able to get the stench of
the great grave that everything had fallen into out of their nostrils.
He was the one. He was the only one, the only one at all who had
any hope to spare, and even if, as she sometimes feared so profoundly
that she couldn't even bring herself to think it, it was all a fake,
it was a good fake, it was the best fake she had, it was the
only good fake left, and even the illusion of something was better
than the life in death that was all that was left of the rest of
absolutely everything.
posted by Tom Ritchford at 8:47 PM

 

End over End

And then he fell, tumbling, his limbs spread pinwheel and lifelessly as he dropped for a very
long timeless and then, squelch! even more blackness, if that was even possible, but stench
and nothingness and death and it was the end.

But there were dreams.

For once, he was warm. He couldn't remember warm before and he needed no word
for warm to understand that this was what he'd always wanted, that cold wasn't a constant
companion as gnawing as the emptiness in his swollen belly but an absence of this
new ineffable but infinitely welcome friend.

The hunger troubled him. For a long time he drifted between the moon and death
but promises forgotten impelled something dreadful.

He dreamed of life. And food. Dreams of satiety: satiety, another new friend without a name.

And in sated warmth he slept and slept and slept again and didn't wake
until he found himself awake in the cool bed, a friendly form pricking
at his peripheral vision and a sudden and profound recognition of
loss, of important tasks forgotten and perhaps never to be accomplished
and overall a sense of urgency, hurry, hurry, a little voice in his ear.

He tried to swing himself up and all dissolved into blackness just
a little less black than the pit with only a trickle of silver anxiousness
to keep the thread.

Much time had passed and he was awake and suddenly aware
of the small room, the bright colors of the cheap sheets unable
to disguise their threadbare state and a wisp of a breeze with
just a hint of smoke and meat that snuck through the windows,
so lovingly repaired and re-repaired that less than half the original
glass remained and the rest was grout and mud and trash and
nothing at all.

Immediately he touched his face, hands to his cheeks.
He felt himself all over. Nothing. What had he expected
to find? He didn't know. He didn't know. He realized suddenly
he didn't know anything. He had nothing. He remembered nothing.
He didn't even know what he had lost. He didn't even have words
to express what he had lost. He didn't know where he was, he
didn't know where anything was, he didn't even know any thing that
might be somewhere or any wheres that might have things. He was lost
so far that he could only sit there and gape and stare and hold his
temples and his jaw dropped further and he started to scream.

A door closed far in the distance and running footsteps produced,
astonishingly, a real live human girl from between the hanging tapestries that
were a mile away past the foot of the bed. To the best of his knowledge,
this was the first time he'd seen one, but, like food and warm,
he responded to instinctively and subverbally and approvingly.

The screaming stopped. The girl nodded.

The real live girl wasn't really a girl any more. Her face was set on her
in a sadly old way for someone so young; her motions were fast,
relaxed, with an understated contempt for the opinion of the rest
of the world. Her clothing was glad rags that had seen better years,
the colors all faded, tattered and torn and many layers, little bits of
underwear supporting and hiding bits of shorts and an oversided,
swallow-tailed shirt rent up and down the side.

She knew was a magnet. You could see it in her walk, in her eyes,
it almost reached out and grabbed him by the cock, she was sex,
she knew it, a Dionysian fascination with the act itself, complete
voracious erotic depravity topped with an icy forebrain that could
never relinquish ultimate control.

"Stop that."

He stared at her. The words had some meaning. Something meant something.
He felt it, a small click, the first two matching pieces of a great puzzle. A wave
of elation spread over him -- perhaps he could win, perhaps defeat was not
inevitable, all might yet be well.

And then it broke apart. Stop what? He wasn't screaming any more.
He wasn't doing anything. He was supposed to be doing something.
He was supposed to be doing something! He tried to get out of bed,
tangled in the sheets, fell onto one knee, "Stop!" he said, and, "Stop!"
again and tried to get his leg out of the sheet and felt dizzy and stopped
and looked at the girl and tried to get his leg out of the sheet and felt
dizzy and fell back onto the bed and looked at the girl. "Stop," he said.

She looked at him and laughed. She hadn't laughed in a very long
time, longer than she really cared to remember, and it felt good, it
ached and there were muscles that had been long tensed up and
held and set in one position that groaned, but still she felt alive and
despite herself and everything she laughed again, at his odd,
silly, puzzled expression, at his feet all knotted in the bedsheets,
and at the strangeness of it all, a distant memory of
a stray cat adopted and lost ringing against an image of a childhood
friendly face held close, "He has their eyes," she decided in a
moment and then blushed to understand where it was leading
and how it had to end.
posted by Tom Ritchford at 6:37 PM

 
Several people have already sent me their characters for the story,
Alan Sondheim, John Gallagher and Virginia Vitzthum.

At this rate it's going to write itself!
posted by Tom Ritchford at 10:03 PM

 
"That's not writing, it's typing."
Truman Capote on the three weeks it took Kerouac to write "On the Road".

I'm going to write a novel in November as part of National Novel Writing Month.

The rules are that the novel has to be at least 50,000 words,
you have to start it on or after November 1, 2001
and you have to end it on or before November 30, 2001.

So I need to average at least 2,000 words a day.
I only have the vaguest of ideas of what I'm going to write.
Probably just as well.

Excelsior!
posted by Tom Ritchford at 5:50 PM