Between the Shadow and the Soul

By Dennis Vickers

Literary Smut or Smutty Literature?
Devin Post, principle character and narrator, is a twenty-something graduate student studying creative writing. As his story unfolds, suddenly, unexpectedly, up pops a steaming erotic episode with a Teutonic dominatrix who enjoys using her riding crop while...you get the idea. This happens not once, but a number of times (five, all with different women, but who’s counting?). Are these simply a young man’s erotic fantasies? Are they part of the overall narrative, but clipped from their place in time? You’ll find out in the end. If you think you’ll enjoy a rollicking adventure set in Chiapas, Mexico, spiced with an occasional hot tamale, this book’s for you

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dennis Vickers
• Release date: Jun 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310444906

Dennis Vickers

Surprisingly, truth is best told through fiction. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Also, lies are best told through nonfiction, but I don't do that. With fiction, the story can be about anything so long as it has the stuff of life in it. The stuff of life -- aye, there's the rub. Like bears and Sasquatch, Dennis Vickers lives in the north woods. Sometimes he teaches philosophy and creative writing at a tribal college; other times he holds up in a river cottage and writes this stuff. As the previous sentence proves, he knows how to work semicolons and isn't afraid to use them. Book-length fiction: Witless: Rural communities clash in 18th Century Wisconsin. Bluehart: Life story of fictional blues accordion player. Second Virtue: Courage -- where it comes from and where it goes. Adam's Apple: Life story of congressman who f**ks his mother. You thought they all did? Passing through Paradise: Narrative collage mixes quest story, love story, satyr play. Between the Shadow and the Soul: Love and lust, or maybe the other way. Mikawadizi Storms: Open pit mine vs. pristine forest. You decide. Double Exposures: Collection of short stories, some realism, all magical. Only Breath: Ghost story wrapped in mystery wrapped in waxed paper.

Book preview

When I Am Pinned and Wriggling on the Wall

I was on my way to take the exam that would propel me into the third year, thesis-writing segment of my degree program when my difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy developed from pupa to butterfly. It was a sparkling spring morning on the main campus of Perrot College, about 7:45 AM. The bright, dew-damp air whispered in my ears as I strode resolutely forward. The exam was to begin at 8:00 AM and wrap up at noon. It consisted of a literature segment with questions about authors and works in the Western canon (two hours) and a writing segment where I would compose a descriptive piece from the following prompt: Portray an event or situation from a single point of view, as something you witnessed, taking care to develop characters, setting, conflict, plot, and theme. You may take up to two hours.

I was anxious about the exam. I studied for the literature segment through most of the spring semester and worried if I sneezed, writers’ vitals would spew out my nose like bats from a cave mouth, fiery balls from a roman candle, water from an open fire hydrant. I didn’t know what the prompt for the writing segment would be, but studied for that too by maintaining my personal journal obsessively. There I recorded intimate details of my day-to-day life, some drawn from real experiences, some from imagined ones, using the same pen for both. In the first journal entry, I recorded my intention to write down exactly what was in my head, with precision and without obfuscation, whatever the source, real or imagined. These pages will contain only exact accounts of the thoughts in my head: my truths, truly told.

Everyone fantasizes, of course, and everyone’s fantasies present with varying intensities. Some of us live near the low end of this continuum and others near the high. My test anxieties and preparations for the upcoming high-stakes exam nudged me up this road, but not past the wide spot called Normal. That came about another way.

As I walked by Tarragon Hall, a soccer game was underway on the roof, six stories up, pitting the boys of the sixth floor against those of the fifth. Rooftop soccer was forbidden, for reasons that will soon be obvious, but the rule wasn’t strictly enforced. I walked by below, unsuspecting, squinting through the glare the morning sun put into my glasses, round-lens throwbacks that made me look like John Lennon about the time he published A Spaniard in the Works. My slender frame and brown hair pulled back into a stubby ponytail contributed to this resemblance.

Mitt Dillinger, forward on Tarragon’s sixth-floor team, charged the goal with a mind to tie the game two-to-two. Ernie Winston, goalie for the fifth floor, positioned himself to block the shot. Mitt planned to drive the ball over Ernie’s block and just under the goal’s top, a cord stretched between two cooling towers. Instead, his shot hit the cord, deflected up and over the wall enclosing the rooftop, and hung in the air like fart gas in an elevator, insecurity in a prom ballroom, guilt around a police lineup.

Mitt, Ernie, and their teammates bolted for the stairs.

In the next moments, gravity overcame the ball’s Galilean inertia and dropped it directly onto my head. I looked up, just as the ball closed in, to see a full moon, dazing white in the robin’s egg sky, with seams on its surface forming hexagons where craters and maria should be.

Why did I look up just then? Perhaps I have precognition. My mother, Larraine, claimed she knew years before the incident, that my father, Eliot, at forty-five, would develop raging infatuation for a red-haired Parisian actress one-third his age, leading to misbehaviors that shocked even the broad-minded French, resulting in his arrest and public humiliation.

The ballooning moon became enormous, filling the sky.

On the other hand, perhaps I have extra-sensory perception. Mother claimed she saw flashes of Father’s indiscretions long before they were documented photographically in Paris-Match, the celebrity news weekly magazine.

On the other, other hand, perhaps I caught a glimpse of the looming soccer ball in my peripheral vision, or a flicker reflected from my glasses. Whatever the mechanism, I began to look up as the ball closed, so it hit on the front-top of my head, at my hairline, the section of the scull covering the prefrontal cortex, where personality expression, decision making, and moderating social behavior reside. I fell to the ground, dazed, sprawled for a moment on the new mown grass, and enjoyed a memory of playing football with Father. Ordinarily Eliot was distant, unfeeling, but on this occasion he called the four-year-old Devin into wrestling, running, tossing, catching his toy ball on the newly mown back-yard grass, slippery with clipped blade tops and redolent with that signature aroma. My child’s brain forever linked grass smell with happy time. This was long before the incident in Paris, of course.

My senses returned to the present as the soccer ball crested in its rebound and began to fall again. I jumped to my feet and stepped out of the way, leaving the landing pad clear for the ball’s recurring reciprocations. I walked on feeling vaguely happy without knowing why.

Why mention the prefrontal cortex and its cognitive functions? I showed no ill effects immediately, in fact felt more clear-headed than I had in weeks, as if the soccer ball knocked some lucidity into a brain cluttered with Geoffrey Chaucer, 1343-1400; Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593; Post-structuralism holds that there are many truths, and that structures always become unstable or decentered; and so on.

Yet there were effects.

Comprehensive exams for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Perrot are administered in room 201B of Chaucer Hall, a run-of-the-mill classroom that provides twenty student stations (strait-backed chairs, each with a single arm flattened into a beaver-tail writing surface), windows looking onto meadow-like Chaucer Green, and a large desk in the front where a proctor might lounge comfortably the four hours required for the exam.

The room reeks of floor wax, exam anxiety, and echoes with the words of long-dead poets. Whan that aprill, with his shoures soote, the droghte of march hath perced to the roote, Chaucer sings from a back corner. Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me, Emily Dickenson ballad-meters back from the opposite corner. Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble," William Shakespeare cackles from somewhere near the ceiling. As classrooms at Perrot go, 201B is exceptionally quiet, because of its location in the back of Chaucer Hall, and dimly lit, because all the light bulbs were replaced with energy efficient equivalents under a project conducted by the Ecology Club.

I selected a desk near the back of the room and slid into it. Despite my recent head thump, my eyes were clear. I readied a half-dozen pencils sharpened to such exquisite points it seemed impossible they could write erroneously. My head was a beehive ready to ooze truth, cow’s udder bloated to spray certainty, rose blossom pollinated with literary trivia. My hands twitched slightly.

Proctor for the exam was Associate Professor Mikhail Standoff, youngest and newest member of Perrot’s English Department faculty. He was single, nerdy as a narrow tie, thirty years old, and at the bottom of the faculty totem. His thin face, ruddy complexion, and brush of thick red-orange hair rendered him unappealing to women except those inclined to rescue dogs and used Volvos.

Standoff looked over the assembling students with an interest beyond the pedagogical. Two of them, Monica Emeralds and Charlotte Dubois, attracted his attention all year. Monica, who wore skirts so short they hung from her ass like loincloths, never touching the backs of her legs, and Charlotte, who was blessed with blimp-like breasts, made uber-prominent by push-up bras and plunging-neck sweaters, haunted his dreams. Perot College policy forbade Faculty members fraternizing with students, but one can fantasize, can’t one? Altogether a dozen students assembled to take the exam, but Standoff had eyes only for Monica and Charlotte, more specifically Monica’s ass and Charlotte’s tits.

The literature segment of the exam included fifty true/false questions (e.g. T or F: William Shakespeare invented the words ‘puke’ and ‘eyeball’), fifty multiple-choices questions (e.g. Ezra Pound gave T.S. Eliot the nickname: (a) Spanky, (b) Dickhead, (c) Old Possum, (d) Britheart), and fifty fill-in-the-blank questions (e.g. Whose aphorism is, Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate?). After two hours, Standoff collected the test sheets and wrote the writing prompt on the board. A few students stepped into the hall for a short break, some all the way to the side door for a smoke.

Portray an event or situation from a single point of view, as something you witnessed, taking care to develop characters, setting, conflict, plot, and theme, Standoff wrote on the board. You may take up to two hours, he said, wrote the time on the board, and settled back behind his desk to contemplate further the tits and ass fate brought under his grateful scrutiny.

The writing segment of the exam was where my fiction/non-fiction dilemma, iceberg broken free by a sharp blow to my prefrontal cortex, transmogrified.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed, the pale ghost of Ernest Hemingway, who lingered despondently near my desk, whispered in my ear.

I tapped my pencil on the still blank paper in front of me. Bleed? my inner monologue asked.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know, Hemingway continued.

You mean describe something exactly as it is?

Is that the truest thing you know?

That’s what truth is, isn’t it?

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

I drew in a deep, wavering breath. Which truth should I write?

You can make something through your invention that is truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

How?

Bleed!

I looked around the room. The other students were writing fervently.

Write what’s under your nose, if that’s all you got. Ghost Papa sighed.

*****

Several hours after we completed the exam and disbursed into the campus to fret about our performances, I relaxed in the late afternoon sun on Chaucer Green. Literature facts fluttered from my brain; I could practically see them disappear into the sun-bleached sky. Goodbye, Geoffrey Chaucer born 1343, I whispered.

My phone rang. I need to see you now, Professor Standoff barked. Come to my office immediately. Standoff sounded pissed off but, testament to the brain’s ability to skew perception to boost self-image, I was certain he wanted to congratulate me on my exam performance. Best master’s comprehensive ever, I whispered as I answered Standoff’s summons. We’ll use your exam as a model to show the other students what an excellent exam looks like. I found Standoff at his desk in his tiny office behind a stack of blue exam books. Mine was open. What the hell is this? Standoff demanded.

What is what? I asked. The ultra-dry air in the English department’s faculty office wing was beginning to make my eyes water and my nose tickle.

Standoff coughed into his closed fist and read aloud in a voice brimming with indignant vowels and consonants spat out like watermelon seeds. Standoff’s face grew red as the rosy dawn as blood surged though his veins. He rubbed his crotch deliberately under the desk, taking care to minimize shoulder and arm motion, concealing his masturbating from the assembled students. He restricted his breathing to slow, deep inhalations except twice during the course of the exam, when frenzied gasps erupted from his nostrils like grouse from a thicket, schoolboys onto a recess yard, grease spatters from frying bacon. "What the hell is this?" he asked again.

Development of characters, setting, conflict, plot, and theme, I said. I sat in the single straight-back chair across the desk from Standoff and blinked furiously.

Why would you attack me like this? Standoff blubbered. His eyes were beginning to tear up.

It’s not an attack; it’s the truth that was under my nose.

"This is not true!" he bellowed.

Yes it is, I said, leaning forward, hands clasped together earnestly. You whacked away under the desk like hail on a barn roof.

You completely misrepresent what–

Basketball dribbled on the fast break.

– was going on.

Flat tire flopping.

Needless to say, this won’t go any further, Standoff concluded. I’m putting you down as a no-show for the exam. Congratulations, Asshole, you’re out of the program.

Months later, I finally consulted a professional about my condition. Saying exactly what you think with indifference to the effect on others appears in several social disorders, but generally associated with other symptoms, like obsession with a single object or topic, Psychologist Günter Krueger said. He stared intently at the clipboard in his hand. Often symptoms like these associate with genetically transferred disorders, like Asperger’s, but in your case I suspect Creutzman Belling Syndrome, because the onset appears to closely follow trauma to the frontal lobe of the brain.

Likely, you never heard of Creutzman Belling Syndrome, or its namesake. It’s an extremely rare condition of more use to mystery writers than psychiatrists. In fact, Günter may have overestimated the connection between my affliction and my head injury. As you saw, there were no symptoms from the injury except euphoria, clear-headedness, and perhaps a predisposition to drink down Hemingway’s two-fisted advice, what some would call gullibility. Moreover, my dangerous fixation on ‘telling it like it is’ may well have come from my yearlong concentration on making my journal writing compelling, or my earlier unhealthy obsession with the differences between fiction and nonfiction. Already I was thinking a good writer must commit not only his writing, but also his entire worldview, unblinking, to what is in his head, and maintain an indefatigable connection to the truth that resides in there. This insight was struck home, perhaps, by the unlucky blow from the soccer ball, or by Hemingway’s brooding advice. Who knows?

Whatever the cause, I was left with a mind divided like boys and girls at a summer camp, egg whites and yolks in grandma’s lemon-meringue-pie recipe, dogs and cats in pet heaven, between the part that fantasizes and the part that doesn’t. And, the conscious Devin was stuck unhealthily in one cell or the other, depending on when you looked.

Interestingly, Creutzman Belling Syndrome is the only mental disorder it’s impossible to lie about not having. If someone tells you he doesn’t have it, clearly he doesn’t have it. If someone tells you he might have it, well, that’s another matter. Looking at your clipboard while you talk like that makes it appear you lack confidence in your diagnosis, I ended the conversation with Günter. You seem embarrassed, guilty, or deceptive.

I Lost a World the Other Day

My engagement to Caryn Shultz went south in a heartbeat. My parents are professors! Caryn cried. I’ll be a professor one day! I can’t be with someone who isn’t like us! She threw her head to one side and tossed her hair (straight, long, red, course as horsehair, carpet thread, brush bristles) over her shoulder. A professor, I mean. She squeezed her plump, ruby lips together and swept her arm in a wide arc. An appropriate class, I mean. You know, level...?

Caryn’s mother and father taught sociology and psychology respectively at Lafayette University in Kansas. Caryn was two years into Perrot’s four-year doctorate program in social psychology. She had always been a good student because she understood student tasks the way professional chefs understand how to flip an omelet or dice an onion. She whipped together term papers with appropriate literature reviews, citations pages, introduction-body-conclusion format, as Rachael Ray might whip up a batch of chili. Her instructors gazed into that foggy cerebral space from where assessments of student work come and pulled out competent though not insightful, sometimes thorough, or often, good structure and style. In short, she produced solid A-minus work with the minus representing that shimmer of creativity that might come with more experience but probably never would. She spent her free time watching the cooking channel.

I looked around the tavern to see who noticed Caryn’s outburst. Other clientele, mainly students, continued chitchatting, attention confined to their tables and factions. What’s worse than turning relationship difficulties into melodrama performed for strangers on a real-world stage, I wondered. Who barks out intimate thoughts into a gossipy gin mill? What sort of person exposes her emotions like butt cheeks at a strip club; chicken breasts, fleshy and sallow in the butcher’s case; tequila bottle soldiers lined up across the bar’s back wall? Echelon? I suggested.

It’s not I don’t love you, she continued, Not at all.

I understand, I said.

Caryn pulled her stomach in, hooked the heels of her pumps over her chair’s spindles, lifted her thighs so they wouldn’t spread out on the seat like water balloons, frying eggs, spilled syrup. She glared at the ceiling with bulging eyes. How could she explain the tragedy? She had saved certain intimacies for our relationship, only performing them once she was certain Caryn and Devin were destined to meet at the altar. She considered me her sole partner for the cum-swallowing blowjob, and anal penetration, both finger and dinger. In truth, she had tried anal penetration earlier, in a frenzy of experimentation one spring break, but it didn’t count because she couldn’t remember a thing, only awoke with a sore butthole. She had shared secrets with me no one but her life companion should know, specifically the lesbian experiment with a college roommate that petered out once she understood what women did with other women. Now these dowry pearls were spent, how could she make her next relationship special?

I took a long pull on my beer.

It’s a question of compatibility.

I nodded glumly. I was less upset than Caryn about this breakup because I invested in the relationship the way a poker player puts money into the pot behind two pairs, knowing it was unlikely his hand would prevail, but with no particular propriety prescribing pulling out.

Maybe we never fit together as well as we thought. Caryn’s round nostrils flared as they did during our first date, a sign I understood (correctly) to mean her libido was aroused. Her nostrils hadn’t done that in a long time and now the arousal they insinuated was exasperation, not horniness.

I looked past her head to the table against the wall. Three young women, one of them pretty, were now taking notice of the mini-drama unfolding next door.

If only you studied harder. You could do this. You’re smart.

I can apply for readmission in a year.

You don’t care enough; that’s the problem.

Maybe audit some classes to stay in the game.

When you work hard, you succeed. Her eyes shimmered in a glaze of tears. That’s how things are supposed to work.

I studied all year and wrote in my journal like a nun works a Rosary, dog with a new bone, bee in his hive’s back room.

Caryn’s lips curled down. She pushed her beer away and spoke bitterly to the irksome glass. I don’t want to see you again. Don’t call. Don’t come to my place. Stay away from here (meaning the Bull Moose, where this conversation took place), Starbucks, campus altogether.

Of course.

Don’t talk to Sherry or Barbara or Karen and Carl.

Background noise waned as nearby tables listened in. This was getting interesting.

Fine.

Caryn got up. Other patrons, especially those clustered on their feet around the bar held their collective breath, watched from their eye corners, raised their eyebrows.

That’s it, then? I asked. I drained the last of my beer.

Done, fini, washed-out like last year’s swimsuit. She twisted the modest ring I gave her from her finger – tight because her finger had grown plumper from the moment the ring slipped on. To tell the truth, I was already having misgivings about you.

I considered if I should stand up, decided no. Occasion like this, end of a relationship, major life shift, seems there’d be more to say, I said to my empty glass.

Caryn waited.

I looked up, drew a brain-clearing breath, affirmed my newfound, Hemingway-inspired commitment to the truest thing I knew, and rose to the occasion. I detested when you yelled, ‘Faster! Faster! Faster!’ when we fucked, I said, like you couldn’t wait to get back to your cooking show.

The room fell silent except for the hum of the ceiling fans.

Like a manic cheerleader heaping encouragement on her high school’s punt returner as he breaks through the first wall of blocks.

Caryn’s eyes grew round as billiard balls.

Home-stretching jockey, slapping his horse’s rump down the home stretch.

Her eyes grew larger.

Frenzied NASCAR fan howling while his favorite driver inches ahead of his rivals.

Caryn crossed her arms, and glared into my eyes. Horse’s rump? What’s that supposed to mean?

Had to tune you out or lose my boner.

She leaned forward and huffed air out her nose. Her breath came fast and heavy.

Also, since we’re being honest: I always thought you had a kinky smell down there, like rotting fruit.

Caryn glanced around the room to see who was listening. Everyone. She flushed red, pushed her lower lip out, and pulled at the hem of her skirt to stretch it down a half inch.

Vinegar.

She jammed her fists into her hips. So this is how we end the beautiful relationship we once had? Saying cruel things to each other?

Salad left out of the refrigerator overnight.

Sometimes I had to look to see if you were in! she shouted into my face, her freckly, pug nose inches from mine. Her eyes brimmed.

Pickle jar forgotten –

Enough! she stomped away, satisfied she had responded truth for truth, tit for tat, eye for eye.

Your ass is big as a retired Clydesdale’s! I called after her retreating backside. The room held silent, waiting.

Defensive tackle in padded pants.

The audience leaned in closer.

Sports bar TV.

Applause erupted.

The Road Less Traveled By

Ejection from Perrot created a number of complications in my life. My employment as a teaching assistant vanished like inhibitions at a bachelorette party. In addition, I was suddenly no longer eligible for student loans, and thus completely without income. Finally, the regimen of reading and writing I kept up the previous year was no longer necessary. Who cared that Christopher Marlowe got his eye stabbed out in a bar fight, Charlotte Bronte vomited whenever she smelled food and died of malnourishment and dehydration, and O. Henry served time in prison for embezzlement? These canonical observations were no longer useful. I was unemployed, destitute, and idled.

Monday morning I took steps to bolster my flagging spirit. I treated myself to a grande, hazelnut-flavored cappuccino, and took a slow, thoughtful stroll through Perrot’s art museum, a facility maintained by donations from the alumni association. That month, the museum