American Triptych

By R. N. Wright

Three "modern gothic" works: a short story, a play, and a novel, all written in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The Position (short story): a group of young men compete for a job under mysterious circumstances.

"Incredible, Lorin thought. Incredible that we should all be here. Incredible that we should have to be here. Why did they let things like this come to be? Who ARE 'they?'
He thought of his railroad trip to this processing center: the mountains; the forests; the wasted countryside along the Barrens Route; the hollow rotting hulls of small towns, long deserted, which bore mute testimony to the death of a once energetic, proud, and independent people; and the Pit in the mountainside. This rail route swung around a bend near MacKenzie Mountain and overlooked the Pit. Pit #19, it said on the map. He remembered seeing the rails down below leading into it, the gray shacks, clotheslines, and lodge house units that clustered around it, the hellish brown smoke that flowed from the opening. Everyone in the seats ahead of him had stared out their windows in morbid fascination at the panorama below, much as they might at a dead man, recently fallen from a twelfth story window."

Talking heads (one-act play): a political prisoner in a mental hospital meets with a therapist late at night with unexpected consequences for both.

ELISE
No! It's never too late. The director, Doctor Cunningham, will listen to me. I'll write a report telling what I've learned about you. I'll draw up a schedule of activities.

MICHAEL
They've already written your report, Elise.

ELISE
No, Michael.

MICHAEL
They've written your report and tomorrow they shove the electric needles under my eyeballs into the brain, turn on the juice, and fry my frontals. This whole thing is a sham and you're the last one to know it.

In No Wise (novel): Coming of Age meets the Bureaucracy from Hell in an academic setting.

"The door to the Carbon Hardness Testing Building flew open suddenly, knocking a hapless student into the shrubbery, and out strode Zack Zatwright. Charging down the steps and heedless of the path, Zatwright broke through a picket fence, trod over a flower garden, sent two cats scurrying, and stepped into a plastic kiddie pool before he realized that he was going the wrong way. He was on his way to teach his one class, and ordinarily his one-track mind allowed nothing to stop him: not people, not dogs, hedgerows, or even electric power substations.
But his vaunted concentration had gone awry today.
Something was interfering. His mind was straying from the task.
That Newman fellow, he thought, what's he up to? What is all this talk about students? Why does he spend so much of our precious committee time with schemes about helping them to learn? Helping them learn! Learning is no piece of cake. Learning is painful and the sooner they realize it the better off they'll be. Why, when I was a student did anyone spare me in the Dash Drills? I had my struggles but I learned to fill up a whole test booklet in less than two hours. Sure, it was gibberish, but --
He rounded a corner and smacked into a slender coed sending her and her books sprawling. 'Excuse me,' he murmured."

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. N. Wright
• Release date: Jul 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491223970

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AmtriptKDPCover

Copyright 2013 by R. N. Wright

All rights reserved

Table of Contents

Preface

The Position (Short Story)

Talking Heads, a Play in One Scene

In No Wise (Novel)

Preface

Here are three written works from another time – and this time. Alternately, they are dystopias, overrun by history. Futuristic gothic tales which have come to feel like Thursday.

Written twenty-five to forty years ago, they evoke a time when economic decline for those who actually make and do things began as an ominous whisper and gradually increased to the now-familiar dull roar. They are the products of a society in chronic distress as experienced by one who couldn't buy his way out of participating in it.

The collection might be summed up as Maupassant and Kafka go looking for the cask of Amontillado. The individual works:

The Position: the right man for the right job.

Talking Heads: out of the frying pan ….

In No Wise: Coming of Age meets the Bureaucracy from Hell.

The scariest spots include some chemical equations which you need not know anything about and one mathematical expression lying about in two pieces.   Once you encounter the latter think of the first part as a scaffolding to hold the numbers generated by the second. These are the numbers of Pascal's Triangle. No knowledge is required. Enjoy.

Oh, and there is some fun with Gray's Anatomy – the reference book, not the television show.

Dedication

For the ladies who first saw each work in its time: Cathy, Paula, and Bené.

For Diann who is seeing them for the first time.

And for M'Mah who once told me to save what I wrote even if I thought no one would ever see any of it.

The Position

A Short Story

(1974)

They entered a room illuminated only by the light from the hallway they had just left. A lamp in the corner came on by itself and Lorin found himself in a roughly rectangular room barely large enough to hold him and the other men comfortably. The door swung shut. The room had one straight wall and three walls with odd little crooks and corners, as though the room were a leftover space and not really a room. With Lorin were four other men, all of origins as mysterious to him as they must have been to each other. No one spoke as they waited, and the only sounds one could hear were their breathing and the intermittent creaks of the brace on Lorin's left leg. From off in the distance came sounds of the bumpings and scrapings of the preparations being made for them. A long, indeterminate time plodded past.

An officious voice from the loudspeaker in the hall addressed them:

Gentlemen. We are ready to begin. Please leave the room you are in, turn left, and go to room 401. You all know the rules. Good luck.

They left the room in single file and walked stiffly down the narrow, carpeted, dusty-smelling corridor, noting the room numbers as they went:  407 ... 406 ... 405 ... 404, and so on until the man at the head of the line stopped before room 401. It was the last room on this side of the hall. A voice inside the room broke the silence: Gentlemen, proceed.

The first man pushed the knobless door open and the group filed into the darkness beyond. As soon as the door creaked shut again, a dim lamp next to the wall on their right flicked on. This room was much larger than the previous one, so large that the small shaded light could illuminate only a part of it. The floor was bare and there was no furniture.

Near the light, against the wall, Lorin saw a large object with a tray jutting from it. Not a tray, it was rather a keyboard. A keyboard not attached to anything resembling a piano. The keyboard was affixed to a metal box which stood about four and a half feet high. There was no evidence of wires, but the box stood squarely against the wall, possibly hiding the controls. On the box above the keyboard was a thin tray, perhaps for holding music, and above that, a very narrow slit. Another lamp perched atop everything and a stool awaited before the device.

Mr. Carriger. The voice came from behind them. Lorin peered into the shadow, his eyes more accustomed to the dark, and could make out the form of a speaker and something else. Yes, there was a door next to it.

Please position yourself before the instrument.

Obediently, the lanky dark-haired member of the group walked over and slumped on the stool. He waited with his bony hands clasped together in his lap.

The first test will draw on your musical achievements. Each of you will be given a short piece to play on the instrument. No more than ten mistaken notes will be allowed. The number at the top left hand corner designates the number of seconds you will have to play the piece. You will have one minute to inspect the piece before you play. Good luck.

Silence.

After a minute or two Lorin heard a scratching sound coming from the box. A long white sheet of paper slowly disgorged itself from the slit above the tray. Carriger took it, opened it up, and set it on the tray. He then turned on the light atop the box and looked at the score. Lorin thought he saw a faint, pleased smile of recognition. Carriger began to play, and it was immediately obvious to all that he had complete control of the instrument and the piece, a Chopin Etude. His right hand was precise, to the point, and his left hand rolled and flitted through the frantic filigree. The tone of the instrument was not that of a piano — it was more like a harpsichord — and there was no pedal. But even without a pedal it sounded proper to Lorin. Carriger finished, waited a moment, and then rose from the stool with an air of satisfaction, as though to greet applause.

Mr. Edwards, please.

Edwards was the redhead of about average height, average weight, average everything but his hair. He gracelessly took his place and waited, expressing no emotion on his face, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the others. He took longer to look over his score than Carriger and began playing more cautiously than his predecessor. He was in no way Carrigers's equal; his rhythms were rigid, his phrases disjunct, and naturally he did not attempt an interpretation. But he played the right notes.

Mr. Fuller.

Fuller, another tall but more heavily built dark-headed man, held his score rigidly. He put it on the tray and paused for a long while. Lorin sensed a quiet crisis.

You must begin, Mr. Fuller.

He began haltingly. It was a Debussy piece, one quite familiar to Lorin, but obviously unknown to Fuller. He played and stopped, started again and stopped again, becoming more frantic with each pause. The little man with the leg brace found himself cheering the unfortunate man on.

Desperate passages now. A mistake. Another. A phrase executed without regard to note values. Anoth --

A loud crack split their eardrums and Fuller flopped over, taking the stool with him, hitting the floor like a sack of potatoes.

It took a moment before Lorin's brain could comprehend. He stared at Fuller’s quivering body and noticed a small hole in the side of his head from which blood began to flow.

The living in the room were frozen in their postures. No one spoke. There was no sound for a moment.

Mr. Carriger, Mr. Edwards. Would you please remove Mr. Fuller's body from the immediate testing area? The Voice again.

The two moved slowly toward the lifeless form. Lorin looked around for the source of the bullet or dart but saw only darkness. Notes, notes, notes, he thought. Get the notes. Ignore dynamics. No pedal. Forget rhythms if you have to. Forget phrasing. Just notes.

Mr. Lorin.

Lorin set the stool upright again and sat down.

This will take a few minutes, Mr. Lorin.

Lorin waited. He could feel his arms, legs and torso dampening from his sweat. His bowels were liquid and his heart was battering against his ribcage. He loosened his tie. His neck was wet.

We are ready, Mr. Lorin.

The score appeared from the slit and Lorin pulled it out.

Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 8, opus 13, first movement. The Pathetique. His old enemy. They had spent only a few weeks or so on this piece in Mass Drill back in his school days, and he had felt left without a good grasp of it.

Seizing the advantage, Lorin began, rushing through the ordinarily slow opening bars in the Grave introduction. He was more careful with the agitated Allegro. The familiar Tempo I section he had practiced so much flew under his fingers. Back to Allegro.

He finished the last line of the music slowly and deliberately. The oceans that had filled him rolled away, and he was left with a benign exhaustion. He had made it.

The last man, Seavey, the man who had led them into this room, had asian features and wore heavy-framed glasses. He was approximately Lorin's height but somewhat heavier. His handling of his score drew Lorin's attention. The hands — they had short powerful fingers which showed surprising nimbleness in pulling out and opening the score. Seavey followed the precedent set by Edwards and Lorin, hitting notes with little regard for anything else. But he had such control of his fingers. He finished and paused, as if awaiting the judges' decision; and, when he was convinced he was home free, he allowed himself a deep breath. He rose and left the stool.

Like convicts doomed to die they stood mute, waiting for their next orders. Lorin looked at the red-headed Edwards and received in turn an impenetrable stare from his cow-like brown eyes. He looked to his left and beheld a different scene from Carriger; the lanky man was breathing in quick, shallow chest movements and his stare was fixed on the floor. His face looked pale in the dim lamplight. Lorin blinked and wiped the sweat from his face with both hands. His arms felt heavy and he trembled slightly.

Gentlemen, said the voice from the speaker, please proceed through the door next to this loudspeaker.

Carriger slowly turned without modifying his gaze and went to the door and pushed it open. It made no sound, no squeak. Edwards followed and Lorin limped behind Edwards. Seavey quietly brought up the rear. In the corner opposite from the door lay Fuller's body, the head draining on the floor.

This new room was already lit much the same as the previous room and by a similar lamp. Again the walls, as much as Lorin could discern, were bare. The floor was of bare tile, and sitting near the lamp was an imposing structure.

It was another metal box, similar to the first one, but larger and longer with what looked like an instrument panel built into the front of it. Five stools stood in readiness lined up along the panel with some leftover space at the end. Lorin could see eight projections on the panel — handles of some sort.

Gentlemen, you will now have ten minutes to relax before the next —

The word relax sounded comical.

— and you may sit or smoke as you like.

Lorin walked over to the wall next to the door to his right, leaned against it and slid down. Seavey took the wall next to Edwards, the wall the testing machine stood against