Appearing Live at the Final Test

By John Teton

APPEARING LIVE AT THE FINAL TEST is an intense hybrid of contemporary real-world drama and mythic science fiction about a black newsstand operator, his wife and three neighbors in a Brooklyn-like neighborhood, whose lives take a cosmic punch from a nuclear bomb threat that launches them on an eerie and spellbinding journey.


"APPEARING LIVE AT THE FINAL TEST is an extremely well-written novel--a pleasure to read, a wild ride of depression at some points, exhilaration at others. John Teton has raised some serious concerns regarding the fate of civilizations, and our consciousness is raised with this thought-provoking work."
Eric Chaisson, Author, COSMIC EVOLUTION
Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Tufts University
Director, Wright Center for Science Education


"APPEARING LIVE AT THE FINAL TEST is a genre-breaking story unlike any other. Its scenes range from a scarily realistic depiction of an urban nuclear event to mind-stretching intergalactic travel,;all related in the author's savvy, wisecracking, original and sometimes hilarious hyperbolic voice."
Craig A. Lambert, Ph.D.;
Deputy Editor, HARVARD MAGAZINE


Mr. Teton gives fictionalized treatment to "cosmic evolution," a complex and controversial theory which holds that evolution affects not just life on Earth, but extends back to the birth of the universe and continues to include changes in human civilization, culture, technology and beyond. The story benefits from a grounding in everyday human fears and troubles, along with mind-blowing scenes which venture into questions about creation and the role of human beings in it. The novel is chock-full of information about stars and the planets, and yet he clearly knows a thing or two about teenagers, old folks, sailing, marine biology, marriage, love, pop culture, terrorism, religious extremists and the media.
Rhonda Parks Manville, SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 6, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469744902

John Teton

John Teton, writer, film/video producer, and director of the International Food Security Treaty Campaign, was born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard, and studied filmmaking at New York University and the San Francisco Art Institute. His fiction includes APPEARING LIVE AT THE FINAL TEST and the related novel UPSURGE. He directs the campaign for the International Food Security Treaty (www.treaty.org) which arose from the notes for UPSURGE. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children and live in Oregon.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

C H A P T E R 1

C H A P T E R 2

C H A P T E R 3

C H A P T E R 4

C H A P T E R 5

C H A P T E R 6

C H A P T E R 7

C H A P T E R 8

C H A P T E R 9

About the Author

Acknowledgments

The cover of this book was created with invaluable graphic design assistance from Michael Ray Allison and photography from NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Thanks are due also to Nancy Teton Gordon for copyediting and to Eric Chaisson, Craig Lambert, and Rhonda Parks Manville for their comments on the story. I am grateful to Olaf Stapledon for his inspiring expansion of the fiction and philosophy of intelligent life throughout the universe in his 1937 work Star Maker. My appreciation for certain blessings, especially my friends, my family, and my wife, Jennifer Scott Teton, cannot be adequately described.

John Teton

March, 2003

for

Ben, Sage, and Zoe Joseph and Shirley

and

Jennifer

Perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis.

—OLAF STAPLEDON

from the Preface to Star Maker

(published by Methuen in 1937 and Penguin Books in 1972)

C H A P T E R 1

Hey, Baby…now don’t stir, just keep right on with whatever you’re dreaming, good or bad. What’s it like? Are you gliding a sweet breeze with incandescent green-violet luna moth wings, under sea horses, over stars? Or are you trapped or running wild, in terror or in love? Scanning weird skies, explosions, kaleidoscopic confusions of a most strange night? I’d not be surprised if your moment’s rest has been assailed, given all that’s going on—and by the time I’m done there’ll be a whole lot more—but you’ll come to understand it better, and get a bead on what to do when you awaken. For now, just make a hatchway and let all that slide away, so I can let you in on something else first.

Oh, I know you’ve already learned all sorts of things, but this piece of the puzzle’s been held back for last. Don’t ask why—that’ll come clear in time, and don’t bother about me either, whether I’m real or an imagination figment, even who I am—I know you don’t even know who you are at the moment, but that’s cool. You’re better off hearing this without all those tangling identity trappings dragging on you. You’ve got the rest of your life to deal with that—this is a one-shot deal you mustn’t be distracted from. It’s the dreaming float state we’re after, and you can get there without name badges and resumes. A pristine mind’s what you’ll need for this night and the next few to come.

What we’ll do is, each time I’ll take you through part of the story and then slip away for a while, till we get through it all. You’ll be left hanging from time to time, but we’ve both got other things to think about the next few days, so a break here and there will be useful. You might wonder how you’re gonna handle another story on top of the one you’re living, but sometimes a story can be good medicine, whether it’s fantasy you wish were reality or the other way around. If somebody wants to listen in or write down what they hear, that’s up to them—you and I’ve got to stay focused, which for you means keeping an ear open through the winds and voices and lapping waves for a tale whose echoes might prove valuable in your future. You’re going to discover how much can happen in one night.

We’ve met before, you and I, quite a ways back. I was the big fella selling newspapers across from the harbor in Bridge Shadow, name of Msongo. I knew everybody in the neighborhood, a good chunk of the world going to and coming from the ferry and the subways. That setup suited me fine. Two of my favorite things in life were good reading and good music, and there at the newsstand I could keep them going all day, till I got home to Wanda, my ever-patient wife of twenty-nine years, who’d take care of the rest.

A fun time, those days, before the talk of catastrophe started making people top-heavy. I earned a living talking to people, like a bartender serving up news as surrogate booze. A lot of my customers came by mainly to gab. I could talk the ears off an elephant and enjoy listening while he talked off mine. As for reading, a newsstand beats all, including the library and your self-molded easy chair at home. An idea or peculiar fact that hasn’t been bounced off a few commuters and shoppers is like an unhatched egg. Folks counted on me—they’d get the news from the headlines and then commentary from me plus the chance to answer back at no extra charge. A perfect morning wake-up for their brains was coffee, a sweet roll, and Msongo’s Discovery of the Day. ’Course everybody knew my wisdom pearls weren’t any more genuine than the next fool’s, but the Discovery of the Day helped poke them awake on their way down the subway stairs. Looking good, Ms. Ferrence! We’d better stock up on bat’s ear powder—the thirteen-year-old cellist playing at Symphony Hall tonight says she’s eaten it every day of her life. Howdy, Francis—didja hear what the Roglavian Secret Service is offering Chesnians suspected of hiding war criminals from the tribunal? Turn in your devil friends and we’ll get you entree to overseas drug kingpins in exchange. Works like a charm.

Talk was my game. Lawyers, four or five a day, would come by the stand to try their wits against me. I gave ’em a good run for their eighty-five cents. And why not? I probably outread ’em seven to one, not counting their leaden legalese. Don’t underestimate your news vendor—might be something as big as the theory of relativity the guy’s scratching out on his smudgy memo pad while champing on a cigar and making change for a dollar on a sale of a morning tabloid. Me, I had an A-average at City College while I was part-timing there, till I dropped out in my second year to help my mama raise my three little siblings. I’m not whining here—believe me, I could have yakked my way into law school, if I’d wanted to. And I’d have kept on blabbing in court till I’d made enough dough to take my band to Europe—that’s my jazz/blues group, the Holy Chills, out of the church on Kings Boulevard, where Reverend Brown used to let us get the place hopping when he wasn’t roaring and blasting his way through a sermon. I wouldn’t have minded getting up at six in the morning and donning a three-piece suit to do a little grandstanding in court—I got up at five as it was to catch the morning commuters. What I wouldn’t do was sacrifice the freedom to take my afternoon siesta. When I was thirty-three, my brother and sisters, who’d all made pretty good on the necktie route, got together and offered to send me back to college. I was tempted. I was always glad I’d taken that dip in the college pool years before. It had made me multidialect, able to talk street or fancy as need be. Some quick redesigning of your mouth motor gives an edge in dealing with different people. You’ll see—just talking to you, I might slip styles without thinking about it, depending on the mood. That’s a common trait among us crossover folks, who’ve lived amongst both the natives and the self-styled cosmopolitans. We can’t help it. And who’d want to? If you’re good at both the harmonica and the harpsichord—jam, sir, jam away. Anyway, I no-thanked my sibs on the back-to-school deal ’cause at that point I was happy as a scholarly pig in Alexandrian mud just running the scene down at the corner of Oceanside and Bridge.

Part of the reason I never burned out at the stand was my religious adherence to afternoon hooky. Come one o’clock every day, I’d cut out of the stand and leave it all in the hands of Vincenzo, the night-schooling college boy and aspiring pasta mogul I hired to help daytimes. Vincenzo was one of those eager beavers who doesn’t mind getting up before dawn’s even dreamt of cracking, the old newspaper delivery boy bit, except now that his bones were a creaking twenty years old, he delivered the papers from an old barstool on the corner. The customers considered him the stand mascot. We were like a one-minute, two-ring circus. Early afternoons, he’d take over completely for a few hours during my daily sabbath and shelve the afternoon editions while digging away at leftover lasagna he’d made off his mama’s recipe the night before. Even cold, it looked so good the customers badgered him to give him the recipe, but he wasn’t going for that. He’d say Hey, I give you the secret to my lasagna, how’m I gonna become the Lasagna Don when I have my own restaurant? Signor Msongo’s the King of Rags, and I’m gonna be the King of Lasagna. Everybody’s gotta to be king of somethin’.

Vincenzo freed me up to take care of inventory and orders for the more exotic items in my selection, in my crusade to offer my customers choice reading they’d never find in our Two Million Volume City Library—intellectual delicacies like Jai Lai Highlights, Backwoods Cooking Quarterly, Indian Jurisprudence, and Amateur Lepidopterist. When I expanded to forty-three sidewalk feet, I put up a sign outside like a burger chain, boasting how many different papers and magazines I had going. When I broke four hundred, one of the carpools chipped in and bought me a coffee mug with a crown emblazoned on it, saying Msongo−King of Rags and there was a little picture of me with a crown sitting on top of a castle made out of newspapers.

After five, six hours of that, I’d be ready to stop home for lunch or go hang out at Merlin’s Diner or duck into the Forgotten Way for a cola (with or without the rum, depending on the state of the world), shoot the breeze with either the yachters loading up in their clean-pressed clothes or the crab-trappers coming in red faced and winded, or I’d just settle in at the beach and watch the yokels screaming down the roller coaster. For three hours, do whatever the hell I wanted. Come four o’clock, I’d bound back to the stand, liberate Vincenzo, and take on the evening shift. By eight it was all over. I’d either head back for a quiet evening at home, or once a week, assuming the good wife didn’t have too serious an objection, it would be time to haul out my bass and jam with the Chills boys.

Well, the main story here ain’t really about the good old days, nor about me and the stand. I just got off on that because the stand’s where I was the big day Lyon MacAuliffe met my neighbors Nopali and Arielle.

Lyon was a regular customer of mine and an old younger friend. I didn’t see him all that often outside of his picking up the Times, but it was always good when I did, like when he’d drop in on me and the band playing at my place Friday nights, him with his tape machine and fancy microphones to record our jam session for posterity. He’d rib us about his tapes of us being treated like the Dead Sea Cassettes someday when they’d be dug up in the Sixty-First Century.

Lyon was an ocean guy. I figured he must have been a whale in a previous life. His habitat was a converted live-aboard crab boat anchored in the marina, near the wooden storefront he worked out of, between the bait shop and the Coast Guard gym. He trained his natural fixit chops on marine radio systems as a way to wangle as much sea time as he could. Had dark-brown hair and eyes, strong enough, without much extra waistage considering his godawful donuts and beer habit. He liked to dip donuts in his beer, even bring them into the bar. Made us want to retch, messing up good beer like that, but he didn’t give a flier what anybody said. He bragged he’d start a chain of donut brew-dip boutiques in midtown and get so rich we’d have go through three levels of secretaries to schedule a poker game with him.

Lyon was one of those rare animals who busts through the usual categories when it came to socializing. You’d be just as likely to see him with us running his tape recorder one night as hanging out on a front porch a few blocks away in Little San Juan or playing pool at the Irish bar across from the fairway. And when yachters would come into his shop to order some high-end upgrade on their electronics, he’d be so smooth they’d wonder if he was one of theirs in the rough. About once a year he’d take flight on his boat like a migrating arctic tern, and it would be a long time before anyone would see him at all.

My blues buddies and I used to jive him when he’d join us with his tape deck, say he was white, but not too white. We tried to tell him he didn’t need recording equipment as the price of admission—hell, he oughta’ve been paid for suffering through my subbing on vocals when our main crooner couldn’t make it. He knew the blues greats as well as any of us, but his knowledge made him overmodest about his own musicianship, which he confined to fiddling around with a sax once in a while out at sea (though not at night or in the fog, he told us, to avoid disturbing any fishing neighbors he couldn’t see). We invited him to blow his horn with us, but he felt more comfortable on the sidelines of my living room arena than on the main stage. He just busied himself with the tapes, claiming he could make a million off them when we struck it big. Of course, he knew there was no way we’d take it that far—we were duffers, really. He was just doing it as a favor, making copies for everyone in the group and because he liked the music and hanging out with folks he considered real musicians.

Seeing as how he must have come by our sessions a dozen times, it’s surprising he hadn’t run into Nopali before, since by then she’d joined in with us a bunch of times herself, singing scat. No matter—things generally happen how and when they’re meant to happen. This one started happening about a quarter past seven one fall morning, a long while back.

I was expecting a news pit stop from Lyon, it being a bit past sunup on a Saturday, a time he could usually be counted on to haul in at the marina after a night out at sea checking out the stars, horseshoe crabs, and the sounds of faraway lands on the shortwave. About five minutes before he showed up, who should delight my eyes but me and my wife Wanda’s favorite neighbor, Nopali Arendal, with her new young friend Arielle Topaz in tow.

Nopali’d been living down the block from us for the past few years, on the occasional nights she wasn’t down in the tropics somewhere, courtesy of Carib Air, which she stewardessed for. She was a few years younger than Lyon, about twenty-eight, and without a doubt just what my wife referred to her as—a gorgeous creature. Being an ethnic cross-breed doesn’t always strengthen your hand, but it sure did for this girl. She was a wild mix of Polynesian and Scandinavian with black hair, shining oceanic dark-brown eyes, skin soft and lively as a peach dolphin’s, and a dancer’s body that hit all the right grace notes. Nopali had a smile you could see blow people off their feet, led by full, ripe cheekbones, a sumptuous mouth with white laughing teeth, the whole chord always in sync with her eyes, not getting the jump on them or lagging behind like people who’re juggling too many thoughts to talk with their heart and their mouth at the same time. It was impossible not to smile back when you saw it. It was like a Smile Deity had come upon her face in infancy, whooped, I’m home! and took up residence to greet the fortunate spirits who’d happen to pass by. She knew not everyone could be trusted—the number of male sleazoids in our fair city, the Advertising Capital of the World, who’d tried to hustle her into supposed modeling opportunities made that real clear—but the reflex of her soul was to grant people the presumption of her own native goodness until they proved themselves unworthy of it.

Opportunity was on her mind, though. She’d been plugging away off-hours at a singing career, trying to make it with a mixed band doing a sort of progressive, trippy fusion sound, which could stone the unstoned and make the stoned feel like they’d come to the right place. They named themselves after some island volcano goddess. They’d put together the bread for a record once, some years before, actually sold a couple thousand copies. I went to one of their gigs, a rowdy affair at a club downtown. They brought in jungle sounds and jazz and various crosses of reggae, blues, pop, and weird space music, like it was their mission to keep you surprised. Her voice was gentle and silky smooth, a kind that couldn’t have shown off its true colors without a microphone, but so unerring in finding its melodies and so sweet in its harmonic play you could just melt. After the set, I told her it was a pleasure to be part of her audience at last, and she said it was a pleasure to be part of my audience every time she stopped by for the paper.

That’s the kind of girl Nopali was. Lucky woman, you’d think, too good, too beautiful, too talented, and too desirous of making it not to make it—but things ain’t always so simple. She hadn’t yet proven quite lucky or well-connected enough to get there. Lucky for sure, though, any guy that could get that smile flashed in his soul on a regular basis (not to mention the glorious trimmings).

Anyway, that Saturday morning, Nopali’s guided morning meanderings with her quiet firebrand companion Arielle led them to the newsstand. I’d seen the two of them together several times over the previous month. Arielle was eighteen, the kind of girl who could wake up a bleary-eyed newsstand customer (or proprietor) no matter what time of the morning—not with beauty, exactly, though I’d say she had that going for her, but more with intensity. Her eyes were hypnotism-strength green with dramatic sprays of brown. They peered out from under auburn bangs, prematurely weary from seeing through too many people in too short a time, on a permanent alert for trouble.

Arielle was one of those semi-alienated waifs with a high-pitched artistic brain who barely make it through high school using about three percent of their brain power. She’d told her parents every semester she’d drop out of school, and she actually did it once, though she went back after three weeks. She’d flowed through the system in the ample space between the radar beams they install for troublemakers, star athletes, and the kids officially stamped gifted. Somehow she’d limped three-quarters of the way to the graduation finish line (certain that no one on the faculty other than her photography teacher would know she’d ever been there) before cobbling together enough credits at City College to test out of the system with an Official Equivalency Certificate, which went on to a tour of duty framed near the toilet-paper dispenser in her bathroom.

By the time Arielle and her parents moved into the fourth-floor apartment next to Nopali’s, she’d been out of high school a few months, feeding her growing photo habit by grace of a class she loved up at the college and waitressing nights at a pizzeria. She feared to calculate how many pizzas she had to carry to cover all the film, chemicals, and framing for the pictures piling up along her bedroom walls, awaiting their future exhibitions in world-class museums, once someone showed up to tell her how to go about it. Good luck, kid, I thought. I wish ya all the best, but don’t bet your life that you’ll never run a newsstand for a living.

Of course I wouldn’t have told her that. Besides, she could have been on her way to photo-pantheon status, for all I knew. She wasn’t there yet, though, and you could see why she stuck to Nopali like a rookie cop out cruising with her partner for the first time. Nopali might not have been rich and famous, but she and her band were known a little on the downtown club circuit, and that was all Arielle needed to vindicate her in the civil war waging at home about what was and wasn’t a worthwhile way to spend your life.

Nopali’d noticed Arielle the day her family moved in, which apparently wasn’t too hard since hassling with her parents (apostate hippies) was a constant state of affairs. Nopali was spending more time than usual at home alone, having recently broken up with a boyfriend, a slicko young writer for Scene magazine she’d had the good sense to dump, once she realized his coke dabbling was less occasional than he’d confessed. She was taking advantage of the extra solitude by spending early evenings out on her balcony trying to nail some lyrics for a song she and her band were trying to work up for a gig at Adam’s Apple, one of the hotter places to be seen at that time. Then one night, all of a sudden, there was this woman-girl out there on the balcony, just beyond the divide, staring out at the city in a coal burn, bugged that there was a stranger watching her. They exchanged some small talk, but that was it. Nopali judged it best to just stick with what she was doing, and not risk upsetting a delicate equilibrium by either getting involved or quitting her own eyrie.

This went on with a few variations over the next week, during which Nopali’d figured out that Arielle had pegged her for being too straight, based on age (Nopali being about a decade older put her within one thin decade of her parents) plus her going off in respectable shoes and an airline uniform four times a week. Then one night when Nopali was out there, again reconciling herself to not getting her verse done in the