Return Trip (The Approximate Distance To Limbo, Act 2)

By Lee Edward McIlmoyle

Richard Burley is dead. Long Live Richard Burley.

This isn't the sort of supernatural story you might suspect it is. It's really an examination of the possibilities of what it is to be Richard Burley, which in a real sense is an examination of what it means to be YOU. For Richard isn't just my alter ego; he's yours, too. He's a little like everyone, and a lot like no one you know.

In essence, this is the story of some of the many alternate realities that are somehow affected by Richard's untimely death, and his efforts to help them recover, so that he can move on, or come back, or do whatever it is he's going to do by the end of the book. Read it yourself and find out.

Incidentally, for those wondering, there are at least two stories in this collection that are basically rock and roll fanfic, including a rather lovely story featuring someone not entirely unlike the late, great Chris Squire of Yes fame, and a short piece about an aging rock star who isn't entirely unlike Roger Hodgson, formerly of Supertramp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee Edward McIlmoyle
• Release date: Jan 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310410291

Lee Edward McIlmoyle

Writer/Artist/Musician/Cartoonist/activist.Canadian.Married to NYC book reviewer who won't review my books.Two cats, both insane.Help.

Book preview

THE APPROXIMATE DISTANCE TO LIMBO

ACT TWO:

RETURN TRIP

A RICHARD BURLEY NOVEL

BY LEE EDWARD MCILMOYLE

© 2015 Lee Edward McIlmoyle

Published by Lee Edward McIlmoyle Publishing

through Createspace and Smashwords

All Rights Reserved.

I also reserve the right to get cantankerous and obstreperous if I find out you didn’t go out and buy your own copy. I reserve the right to kick your dog if you nick one of my ideas or ‘borrow’ one of my characters… and wrap him in cling film. That’s icky. I reserve the right to be notified if you say or do something involving my toys. I won’t steal your idea. I’ve got too many of my own. Trust me. I reserve the right to demand dinner if you want to interview me or quote me for your articles or reviews. Don’t just copy/paste whole sections or chapters. Short pull quotes are good. I reserve the right to demand hugs at conventions and book signings. Hey, it’s my book. I can be demanding if I want to.

Book Design and Cover Art by CLEARvision Studios

Smashwords Edition

ISBN:

ISBN-13: 9781310410291

DEDICATION

This book goes out to all of the people who read or bought copies of TERMINAL MONDAY, and also and especially to my lovely wife, Dawn Marie Iwanowski (McIlmoyle), who isn’t really in this book either, despite how it might look from the sidelines. I still don’t expect her to read it, but I’d like to think she’d enjoy it, if it were written by somebody else.

And also to anyone who read SUDDEN DEPARTURES and thought it needed more Richard Burley and less of the supporting cast, well here you go.

Again, I say unto you, be careful what you wish for.

BLURB

Richard Burley is dead. Long Live Richard Burley.

When is Death not an ending, but a beginning? Perhaps it's when your spirit crosses over to the Afterworld, or maybe your atoms scatter across the cosmos and add to the total collective consciousness of the universe. Or could it be that the myriad forces and energies that intersected at the nexus of reality that is you will simply divvy up your total potential energy amongst your alternate selves? Whatever the ultimate answer you choose to believe in, it comes down to the same basic premise: that your essence is eternal, and thus, death is, as the poets say, just a door to another level of perception.

When Richard Burley lay dead on the hospital floor, perhaps some of his friends were convinced that that would be the last chapter in his story. A few suspected otherwise, and his handicapped brother spent many months trying to convince anyone who would listen that he had simply stepped across the threshold of the world and into a mirror reality, where he could watch over them from afar.

But what is Richard's ultimate fate? Will he go to Heaven or Hell? Will he transcend reality for a higher plane of consciousness? Will he dissipate and leave his friends lost and wondering if they can carry on without him? And, knowing what we do about Richard's mental health, how can we be sure that his death isn't just other another psychotic fantasy?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

16 New Beginnings

17 Thirty-Third Time’s the Charm

18 Can You Believe It?

19 Sky Writing By High Wire

20 Make-Up Sects

Author’s Note #3: Throw Your Foot Away

21 Another Door Opens

22 Raucous Caucus

23 Vamping On A Theme

24 Give It Time

25 The Past Participant’s Dilemma

26 Play The Song

Author’s Note #4: J’ai Une Idée

27 Late Last Night

28 Were We Ever Colder

29 Athena’s Pause

30 Willow the Whisper

31 Here Is Here

32 Denouement

Author’s Note #5: Exit Poll

33 Happier Endings

AFTERWORD

OTHER TITLES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has had no professional agents or editors, and although I have managed to find a friend willing to proofread the completed manuscript, nevertheless, there may still be a number of niggling errors that I somehow missed.

I acknowledge that it’s not fair to publish something that I can’t guarantee is 100% flawless, but then, these days, even some professionally-edited books are getting a bit questionable. Suffice to say, I revised this book several times, so if anything crept in there during the final edit, then it is entirely my fault, and I humbly apologize.

~Lee Edward McIlmoyle

FOREWORD

A brief note for those who have read Sudden Departures and are looking for some resolution to the events of act 1; this act does a lot of things, but it doesn’t precisely offer answers or closure. I tried to provide that at the end of act 1, so if you’re still not satisfied, I am deeply sad, for both of us.

See, the thing is, I really didn’t know if the answer following the events of Parenthetical Guidance (FYI: the last chapter of Sudden Departures) would make for a good or bad ending to the first act. I thought about it, and just came to the conclusion that what needed to happen was that we, like Colin, needed to learn to move beyond the Richard Burley we had been reading about, to accept whatever message this book has to impart. No idea if I’ve successfully managed that. It IS a bit of an unorthodox way of telling stories, on the whole.

Anyway, I will be returning to tell the story of Richard Burley, as introduced to us in Terminal Monday. That book will be called Perpetual Tuesday. PT won’t be precisely a sequential sequel, thought it does basically pick up where TM left off; it’s just that it takes place in another reality, where the details aren’t all the same. For one thing, Kara and Andy have different roles to play in PT. I’m still trying to figure out what those roles are. I keep getting them confused with the roles I have in mind for a book called Interminable Wednesday… so you see, it’s getting complicated.

Try to think of this volume as a palette cleanser before the third act, which is more or less intended to be the main course. There are a lot of important stories in this, the second act, but you might get more out of it if you don’t bring a lot of preconceived notions about what you expect from this volume.

And as always, enjoy.

Lee Edward McIlmoyle,

Drinking some hot coffee, and listening to A Flock of Seagulls sing Wishing (If I Had A Photograph of You),

Somewhere in Limbo (in the hamlet of Hamilton),

Monday, August 4th, 2014

CHAPTER 16: NEW BEGINNINGS

GO WHERE YOUR HEART IS

Rick N. Backer, lead yodeler of Distance, who had been born Richard Burney, was listening to the new track again, trying to hear it the way a non-musician might. First came the synth pad; then the bodhran; followed by the 12-strings. About five tracks of them. And each 12-string track was ever-so-slightly wrong. Either the timing wasn’t quite right in certain places because the original keys weren’t tracked to a click for the guitars to follow, or there was a bum note every now and then on each one of the tracks, ruining otherwise very interesting performances. After about a minute and thirty-six seconds, he stopped the playback. It just wasn’t good enough. It had a certain naive charm, he could admit to himself, but he knew that the painful truth was blaring right in his ears; his playing was atrocious, and it was seriously hurting the recording.

GOING THE DISTANCE

He thought back on how he’d gotten to this point. His efforts to bring back his old band, Long Distance Roundabout, had met with failure. Dirk just didn’t think he could play like he used to, and Gray was just too busy with his family issues and his insane parcel post job. In the end, neither of them had the time necessary to invest in rebuilding the band. Rick had needed to accept that it wasn’t going to happen the way he’d hoped. He’d supposed that his own rusty playing would be the greatest setback for the band, and it was a problem, to be sure, but the truth was, he’d overestimated the band’s enthusiasm for reuniting.

Rick had this theory. He figured that, once you started down the path toward becoming a musician, your thoughts turned to musical mechanics and process often enough that, even if you didn’t play much in the intervening time, you still mentally progressed to some extent, such that, when you picked up your instrument again, you found that, with a bit of practice to get your chops back in order, your actual playing ability had improved. He’d always found it true for himself, and though he knew it was no substitute for actual practice, nevertheless, his playing had improved greatly from the time when he had first fashioned himself a serious young songwriter, just starting out.

But that hadn’t been the case for the band. Sure, they’d matured and weren’t as stubborn in their refusal to play what they didn’t feel comfortable with, but the problem became, they weren’t as quick to pick up what they hadn’t practiced playing in the intervening years. That damned hiatus in 1998 kept coming back to haunt them. Dirk had been right all along.

Even though it might have been possible to carry on without Dane, they gave in to his subtle demand to fold the band so he could leave without losing face with Dirk. It had been a mistake. They should have continued as a three piece, recruiting Dirk’s friend Stan to take over on bass while Rick continued to get to grips with Gray’s guitar parts, since Gray had informally left the band earlier that year.

If they’d done as Dirk wished, they could have kept up the progress and eventually gotten the first album recorded properly, instead of the piecemeal demo cassette Rick put together months later and gave away to everyone on the Christmas after the band had dissolved.

It’s not exactly true that it had been a complete mistake to stop when they had. Rick had been exhausted and wrung out from trying to get the band up and running in the five years before Dane made good on his promise to quit. Rick had gone back to playing guitar for the album, to make up for the loss of Gray, but it hadn’t been enough to keep Dane onboard. And when Rick considered the prospect of teaching all those bass parts to a new musician and getting him into harness, as well as the prospect of doing without Dane’s innate sense of countermelody, the exhaustion and frustration had overtaken him.

Rick had also suffered a serious personal setback, with the break-in of his apartment that cost him two keyboards and his beloved Alesis SR-16 drum machine. It had effectively crippled him, musically, and he wouldn’t actually be able to replace that gear until around 2006, when Gray decided he wanted to reconvene the band without Dane. At that time, Rick had gone deep into credit debt to buy a new Yamaha keyboard and a Zoom digital multi-track with drum machine and sequencing brain built in. It took him some time to get comfortable with that gear, but by 2010, he was recording the first new Long Distance Roundabout music in over twelve years.

By that point they were just called The Distance, but even that was a bit of a farce, because Rick had ended up playing most of the parts on the first half of the album himself, since Gray was in and out of the hospital for hernia operations during that and the following year, and Dirk was out of practice, overworked, incapable of affording either practice space or a kit he could play in his apartment, refused to do programming or hand percussion, and even swore he couldn’t sing on the album either.

When Rick was finally ready to start recording the second half of the album in early 2012, he realized he was pretty much on his own. Dirk was practically an invalid with a bad back and sore knees, and Gray was one bad night away from invaliding himself at work. The thought of ever taking Distance on the road was laughable.

And yet Rick persisted to call it a Distance album, out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to his band mates. The album was recorded, loaded online and was selling in extremely modest numbers. He couldn’t listen to the album anymore, despite his pride in it, because he knew it was an extremely flawed creation, and he just couldn’t bear to hear the mistakes anymore. He’d just run out of free time to keep tweaking and fixing parts, and couldn’t justify rerecording so many of the tracks, in part because his wife was waiting for him to stop recording and get back to doing things that actually paid the bills, but mostly because he was once again exhausted.

Rick regarded the new music he was making as a mere side project to keep him busy while he waited for Dirk and Gray to rehabilitate themselves and get back to work. But the notion that had insinuated itself into his thoughts these days was that, perhaps, just perhaps, it was time to quit fooling himself. He didn’t have any illusions about how long he’d survive if he couldn’t make music; he was just losing hope that he’d ever amount to anything as a song writer if he couldn’t get at least one ‘good’ album and a reasonable facsimile of a tour under his belt. When he had been making it, he had thought The Whole Enchilada had been that album, but now he wished for nothing so much as that he had decided to wait another year to put it out, so he could be absolutely certain it wasn’t the monumental turd it had become.

Rick looked at the clock, noted how much dithering he was doing, and took a deep swig of his coffee. Then he went back to the window with his 12-string piece, entitled ‘Wind and Willow’, pressed the playback button in Adobe Audition again, and got back to work.

SAVE ME SANDUSKY

After another hour or so of tweaking whilst ruminating over the error of his ways, Rick had had quite enough. His fingers were sore from trying to replay the parts he’d wrestled with the first time, and while he was occasionally perfecting certain bum notes, he was only swapping them for other bum notes elsewhere. His calluses were marshmallows, and tiny bones in his left palm that he’d once injured at work were giving him grief. Time to think about taking a break and getting some food.

He took the earphones off, unplugged them from his computer, and cleared the music selection from his WinAmp song list. Then he went spelunking through his hard drive for something to suit his mood, and stumbled across his collection of Train albums. For a prog rocker, Train was rarely the answer, and yet, thanks to his early indoctrination into the Cult of the Beatles, he still had a great and abiding love of truly intelligent pop music. And besides, there was something to be said for a rock band that had the stones to write a hit song on ukulele. His favourite album was For Me It’s You, but this time around, he opted for the new album, which he hadn’t really listened to very much. It had another, less catchy ukulele song on it, but mainly, it was just a nice album to listen to, even if none of the songs stuck in his head the way Cab, Hey Soul Sister and Drops of Jupiter had.

Cab was a funny tune. A West Coast band writes a flawless ode to New York City, to the extent that even Rick’s wife, Kayla, born and bred in NYC, loved it. It also worked for Rick, because it was a winter song, and Rick had a strong affinity to snow. The previous winter had been nearly snowless, and he felt like he’d been running on the same batteries since the winter of 2010. He was looking forward to seeing enough snow this year that the whole world had to stop moving and let him get some much-needed rest.

Ten minutes into the album, he stopped the track and cleared the playlist, putting Cab on instead. It was one of those days.

Last night, the snow had fallen. It had been a light snow, and on a wet day, so the snow had mostly melted, but it was a good sign. Snow in November meant snow in December would be plausible, with perhaps a White Christmas and lots of walking in a winter wonderland to settle his nerves and remind him of the snows of his youth.

Rick had plenty of sentimental memories of spring, summer and autumn to look back on, but somehow, it was winter that commanded his heart the most. Strange, that. He didn’t actually like it when it got too cold. The blisteringly bitter cold winds of January and early February in Head-of-the-Lake were not part of his romantic association with Winter; more like the moody, self-involved ‘Bestie’ of Winter, who always insisted on calling when they were at dinner together, or were making plans for the weekend. It seemed like Rick and his beloved winter would be just getting used to each other again when along came Bitter Frost and the black ice and bad walking conditions that threatened his wife’s trips to the grocery store or the gym would become de rigueur. It took much of the romance out of the season for him, but still, absence of almost two years had made him yearn for winter once more.

WILL ‘O’ THE WHIM

He headed to the kitchen to make coffee and bacon. He hadn’t really accomplished what he’d set out to yet, but the day was still young. Plenty of time to get those damned guitars sounding right, even if he had to go in and manually alter the pitch of the bad notes in the computer, to spare his fingers from another bad take.

The solution seemed obvious to him, really: he needed to rerecord the track from scratch, with a demo click track to keep everything in time. The problem with that, as with most things, was twofold: first, he didn’t have the correct synth patch to play the sound as Tina had recorded it; and second, he didn’t want to step on her toes. She was a young musician, and needed nurturing to get the best work out of her.

As well, Rick wasn’t sure how Tina’s drummer friend, Tim, would take to having a drum rhythm assigned to him, even if he were told to play his own variation. The problem with drum programming was, Rick generally disliked doing it. The only way to maintain his interest was to program really clever drum patterns, which often had a permanent effect on the piece, and hampered a drummer’s ability to inject their own spin on things.

Rick figured he was meant to wait until Tim came up with his drum part, so that he and Tina could rerecord their parts to suit. However, it seemed that Tim was waiting for something more complete to work against. Rick was starting to think he was going to have to get some more ideas from Tina, and then do an end zone run and write an entire composition from the parts they had, so Tim would have a full piece to work with.

To Rick’s mind, this meant drum programming an entire sequence for the song, so he’d have the right dynamics to play against when he recorded his parts properly. He didn’t really know a simpler way to do it. A clean click track merely counting off time would inhibit his ability to get the performances he wanted, because he wouldn’t hear the drums properly. It meant sending a naked drum track to Tina and Tim, and hoping they would produce parts that he could record accurately over.

He was going to have to assert some control over the project to get it working at his speed, while he was still in the right frame of mind to make music. He knew this was a dangerous proposition, because neither Tina nor Tim had reached the point of giving him permission to take the reins. And yet, that’s what