The Querent, chapter 1
a new experiment: fiction
As promised (threatened?) last time, I’m posting a snippet of fiction today. The project is something I find myself returning more than five years after an MFA program squeezed a (very) rough draft out of me. I tell myself it’s only a novella, but that’s probably just a cover story, a way to keep myself from getting too intimidated at the potential scale of the thing: I only have about 17,000 words as yet, but it shows few signs of being neatly contained. Pandora’s Box has been broached.
I plan to reserve the bulk of this material for paid subscribers as a thank you, but also because it feels differently vulnerable to share fiction compared to my usual scribblings. All to say, don’t be shocked if you hit a paywall.
But before we come to that: if you missed it last time, here’s my video interview with Netera Alchemy, now on YouTube.
When the going gets weird, you know what to do…
-Djed
from The Querent
With special thanks to the late Kevin ‘Mc’ McIlvoy, who with an extraordinarily generous spirit helped to midwife the earliest versions of what this is becoming. This an excerpt from early in the novel.
Phil ducked into the 14th Street station, taking a nip from his hip flask as he descended into the city’s bowels. The peated tang of Scotch whiskey couldn’t quite conceal a darker, funkier note: one of his more questionable experiments.
Soon the platform was filling with hurried New Yorkers, but Phil barely registered them, nor the odor of hotdog water wafting down from street level to mingle with the station’s stale urine perfume. He was hunched over a notepad, feet tucked up onto the grimy wooden bench seat like a child’s, drawing.
Starting at the center of the page, he sketched a simple heart shape. He flipped the pencil around and erased several breaches into its walls before brushing the page clear of dirty pink worms. From the heart’s valve openings the passages began winding their way out, soon branching into a tangle. It was the first maze he’d drawn in what, twenty-five years? Still, muscle memory took over as the corridors bifurcated, twisted back on themselves, filling the white space.
A train rattle-clang-roared into the station.
“Brooklyn-bound A, next stop Washington Square,” crackled the intercom voice. “Let ‘em out first!”
Phil stayed put on the bench as the tide of humanity flowed around him. After a moment the platform was quiet again but for the distant sound of Andean pan pipes over a canned backing track.
Besides the heart-shaped room in the center, he hid three chambers amid the maze’s corridors--whether traps or sites of needful encounter he wasn’t sure. Warmed and every so slightly twisted by the contents of the flask, he allowed himself an extravagance. In one chamber he sketched a big-headed monster with gnashing teeth; in another, a sword; and in the third, a key.
Another train had come and gone. Phil hardly noticed. When a third ‘A’ came, he got on, nabbing a seat next to a pair of pawing teens.
The ride was too rough for drawing, so Phil took in the scene. A vigorous mother shepherded three shaggy-haired little ones, conceivably triplets, towards empty seats in snatches of what sounded like Portuguese. A burly, bearded construction worker man-spread across four seats, drawing disapproving clucks from a Caribbean nun across the aisle. A salt-and-pepper haired gent in a brass-buttoned blazer stood at a pole, squinting at a paper through an honest-to-God monocle: Mark Twain on the A train. Above Twain’s grey head the ad for Empire Community College read ‘One Year to Mastery or Your Money Back.’ That was a good one. Phil was closer to ten years into his chosen craft and could make no such claims.
Mastery might be flighting, but marvel was freely available. Just consider: dozens of universes were converging for a fleeting moment here on the subway. A never-to-be-repeated, precious, mundane moment. Maybe even a fateful one. One of his fellow riders might be about to win the lottery. Another to be diagnosed with throat cancer. One could drop dead by the time they reached 14th Street. Someone might have two million followers and someone else was just trying to shake a stalker.
There was no one New York City, he mused, but thousands of cities superimposed, millions of stories kaleidoscoping together, each person at once a protagonist, supporting character, extra, and maybe director and audience, too…it was all too much to fathom, the sheer complexity, starting with the fact that anything existed at all from a big bang or the mind of God…
…with a slight twitch, Phil pulled himself back to himself. He had to watch out for rabbit holes.
