Acedia

By Abe Dawson

Highly original reliably intelligentsatisfying entertainment.
- Publishers Weekly

ACEDIA: a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with ones position or condition in the world...

Its 2018, and after serving three years in prison for digging up William Shakespeares grave, Travis Morrison is returning home to Alexandria, Virginia, confident that he can make a respectable living from the infamy of his crime. But the world has changed in three years, and Travis quickly discovers that he must rely on his reluctant ex-friend, Bob Green, to claim the rewards of notoriety Travis is convinced are his.

Presented through the wild and conflicting perspectives of Bob and Travis, Acedia delivers an ambitious storyline that deftly probes some key premises about Western civilizations past and future. A fun and fast tale of the unexpected, Acedia will appeal to readers who enjoy humorous, cerebral fi ction and exceptional writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450269360

Abe Dawson

ABE DAWSON was born in 1972 in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lives today. Acedia is his first novel. He is currently completing the sequel, to be released in 2012.

Book preview

Part 1

Bob Green

Chapter 1

I found out that Travis Morrison had been released from his three-year stint in Brixton Penitentiary (London) in mid-April 2018. The timing of the news was ominous. Mid-April had always been America’s Ides of March, days fraught with heartbreak and calamity. In the 1990s of my grade school and early teens, the middle half of April had seen Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Columbine shootings. More shocks to the national fiber had followed in the next decade of mid-Aprils, among them the disgraces of Abu Ghraib (2004), the Virginia Tech massacre (2007), and of course BP’s Great Spill (2010).

Even further back, mid-April had never been too healthy for America, routinely stained with bad news and ill portents. The Civil War started in mid-April 1861, and Lincoln was killed around the same time, four years later. Hitler was born in mid-April 1889. In fact, throughout world history, mid-April tended to be a time of bad moons, when madness and sadness joined forces to raise hell in some unsuspecting quarter of humanity.

William Shakespeare was born in the third week of April, in 1564. Or so they say. Nothing is truly known about Shakespeare, of course, a point that had once been the chief obsession of my life. Coming out of college, I’d been a devout believer in what was in academic circles called the Oxfordian theory, which claims that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford (1550–1604), was the true author of the Shakespeare canon.

I was a rabid advocate of Edward de Vere during those first years of my twenties. The Shakespeare controversy was all I really cared to discuss, and I was always primed to present the full, annotated case for de Vere at the slightest provocation. My purpose in life was clear and simple: rinse out the Shakespeare lie from mankind’s set of false presumptions, and lead Edward de Vere by his dead hand to his rightful place atop the English language. I was prepared to see the quest through, one convert and one argument at a time, if necessary.

But my passion and zeal for the Shakespeare question had never been contagious. Try as I might, I’d never possessed the charisma or the oratory to build a real grassroots following in opposition to William Shakespeare’s claim. I’d never been able to convey the importance of the question and properly explain what fools we all were to just accept that some bumpkin from the countryside was the sire of modern English. I lost some friends in the effort, and all I gained was a widespread reputation for being an odd and tiresome young kook around my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia.

After three solid years of full-time devotion to the Edward de Vere cause, I had to find a paying job, and gradually the iconoclastic hopes of my early twenties receded into cynicism. At thirty-three, all I had left was a crabby contempt for the Bard. And so, with a sense of petty vengeance, I grouped Shakespeare’s birthday in with all the great misfortunes that the middle of April had wrought upon the globe.

Chapter 2

I worked at a twice-weekly newspaper called the Fulcrum, where four days a week I did a passable job punching out upbeat and thoughtful obituaries about the latest stiffs of Alexandria. Located in historic Old Town, the Fulcrum was the oldest family-owned and continuously running local paper in America. It was established in 1791 by an early Alexandria scion and friend of George Washington, a planter named John Bixby. Eleven generations on, his descendants still owned the paper. John Bixby XII was listed as its current publisher, although the Johnny I knew wasn’t involved in daily operations and was rarely seen around the office.

Its long history was about the only thing the Fulcrum had going for it. The paper had been in the red since far back in the twentieth century, and the threat of liquidation always hovered over the Fulcrum office like an unsteady vat of acid, at least in the eight years I worked there. The Bixby family had been slow to adjust to the Information Age, and still did not have a website for the paper. They and those they charged with handling Fulcrum operations could not seem to acknowledge that the way people got their news had changed somewhat in the last three hundred years.

Of course, everyone concerned understood the Fulcrum was more of a Bixby family heirloom than a going concern, and that this had been the case for several generations. The family had shifted from tobacco farming in the early nineteenth century and multiplied its fortunes in whiskey, ammunition, and children’s toys. They had the generational wealth to keep the Fulcrum alive as a public reminder of their historic ties to Alexandria’s founding, written proof that they had been here each and every year from the start of this special place, and always would be. That seemed to be the Fulcrum’s primary purpose. No one who worked at the paper kidded himself or herself that he or she had anything resembling a devoted readership. The Bixby family kept the Fulcrum afloat but refused to infuse the paper with the cash, vision, and talent to make it a viable source of news.

The deaths, births, and marriages section was the only bright spot in the Fulcrum’s dim obsolescence, and it was the only department that managed to meet its advertising revenue goals every year. Department sounded grand, of course, but in fact it was just me, Bob Green, handling business from the basement office, three levels below the Fulcrum’s main floor, far away from the rest of the staff, in a dank office without sunlight or adequate heat in the winter. I’d protested the conditions at first, but once I discovered that I would be left alone and unsupervised at all times, I was all right with it. Working alone had come to suit me over the years, giving me plenty of time to read. I was also allowed to smoke at work, which I did, heavily.

I’d been given charge of the DB&M department not long after the start of my career at the Fulcrum, and was responsible for all writing, editing, layout, and advertising for the section. I had accepted the post in desperation, but I made the most of it, bringing to the job the tireless verve and dedication I’d honed in my years as an ardent champion of Edward de Vere’s claim. I quickly learned the written arts and turns of effective eulogy and, thanks to me, the DB&M brimmed over anew with ads from Alexandria’s morticians, florists, churches, and the other profit-seeking members of death’s procession.

I took great pride in my quick turnaround time, the speed with which I could pump out a good obituary, and I always tried to make sure that the article appeared within one week of the passing. This was a feat that the bigger papers in town, with all of their resources, could not match. The Washington Post often took six weeks to print an obituary, and other papers lagged longer. If nothing else, I made sure the Fulcrum was the promptest in its coverage of death. In terms of content, I was no slouch either, and had earned the Fulcrum a couple of awards through my writing over the years. Small regional ones, yes, but they were the only awards the Fulcrum had won for its news content in living memory.

I discovered early in my tenure as an obituary writer that I had a knack for inserting myself naturally into the provisional circle of the grieving. I brought a chaplain’s approach to the job, always calling and sometimes meeting personally with the families of the deceased. I could cull out the best in the worst people and immortalize their posthumous virtues in newsprint. As well as any member of the clergy, I’d brought closure to hundreds of Alexandria families, providing clear and loving instructions of what they should remember about dead relatives whom they may have in fact detested while alive.

On most Saturdays, I attended a funeral or two around town. Now and then I’d catch one on a weekday if I wanted to get out of the office or had received a special request to speak. I’d established a reputation as an old hand as a funeral attendee. It helped people to have someone with experience around, someone who’d seen death aplenty, a model for coping, even if they didn’t know me. Indeed, it was rare that I had known the deceased whose funerals I attended. Nevertheless, I was often asked, sometimes on the spot, to say a few words about strangers whom I had never known living. I substituted for a stage-frightened or speechless son or grandson or father, was the stand-in for a nephew who lived across the country and had not been able to attend, and served as surrogate pallbearer for a brother who couldn’t bear either the sorrow or the hypocrisy of sorrow.

Within the first year, like a successful psychic, I knew how to say just the right things at funerals. My eulogies were round and generous and full of platitudes, and for the old folks and women I even dabbled with Psalms and Proverbs a bit, and dashes of Shakespeare, of course. I was hugged and stroked and kissed by the grieving, a model mourner who ostensibly felt their loss as much, if not more, than they. I became so good and well-known that various ministers, priests, rabbis, and even a couple of mullahs, often felt second-fiddled when I showed up at a funeral. They never said anything, of course, but after the services they would give me severe looks and refuse to speak with me, the condoling usurper of their customary duties.

But try as I sometimes did, I never developed lasting acquaintances from my appearances at funerals. Sadly, I realized that those for whom my work had meaning were stalled in the muck of grief, detoured from the vibrant avenues of those living and achieving. They would return to those avenues, but I would not. Once they moved on from their mourning, I was someone to be avoided, a grim witness to their most vulnerable moments. But temporary power and acceptance were better than nothing at all, and so I continued to attend to my duties fully and faithfully, helping out all I could.

I also handled the birth and marriage announcements for the Fulcrum, but only as an afterthought. The social paybacks of that side of the job did not come as readily to me. I was never invited to weddings, of course. The young and healthy in life seemed repelled by the likes of me, and after a number of years of panting for their approval, I developed an equal dislike for them. Oh, I was polite enough when I needed to be, but beneath my congratulating gleam I resented these bubbly, cheerful newlyweds. I resented most of all that they had found some satisfactory answer to things, and that their search for identity and meaning was over, or at least underway, whereas my own search remained taped up and disassembled, still in the box, the instructions back at the factory, and the factory closed for business.

Most of the happy couples were my age or (increasingly) younger, and their sort of happiness remained foreign to me. Maybe I was a nihilist, or maybe I had an inferiority complex. Or maybe I had never been invited to a wedding. Whatever the causes, I developed a contempt for the institutions of marriage and family and decided to distance myself from the duties surrounding them as much as possible. At my own cost, I set up an answering machine with a recorded message, tersely instructing newlyweds and new parents where to fax or e-mail their notices, and that whatever they sent me would be printed as-is in the Fulcrum’s Friday edition. That was the extent of my contact with births and marriages.

I was putting in the requisite weekly hour on the BMs, as I referred to them, sorting and compiling them for the Fulcrum’s Friday edition, on the afternoon Roy Quentin called to tell me that our old friend Travis Morrison had come home.

Chapter 3

He’s back. Came by here early this morning, before dawn. Would like to see you, Roy said, skipping hellos. He and I hadn’t talked in six months, and our last get-together had ended sourly, as I recalled.

Roy was the third member of our long-defunct boyhood trio. I had known both Roy and Travis since before I could think, all of us growing up in the same cul-de-sac, Bubbling Brook Court, in the Braddock Heights neighborhood of Alexandria. We’d been inseparable as teenagers and for long intervals during our twenties. But my two old friends had significant issues now, and I’d made a conscientious effort to keep my distance from them and their affairs during these past few years.

Travis had been in prison on the other side of the sea so avoiding him hadn’t been hard. But Roy was my neighbor. We both still lived with our parents on Bubbling Brook, and the Quentin residence was just two houses down from mine. Dodging him might have been difficult but wasn’t actually, because Roy never left his bedroom anymore. After getting taken down in love a few years back, he’d decided to take up the life of a shut-in. Claiming some grave illness, but never providing much detail beyond that, all he did these days was sit in his room, watch TV, drink Cherry Fanta, smoke American Spirits, inhale bong hits, and eat all within his greedy reach. When I last saw Roy six months ago, he’d become this gelatinous mountain that I hardly recognized anymore.

That’s good, I answered, faking cheer. Glad he’s been released. You’re talking about Travis, right? I asked, just to confirm.

Yeah. Wants to tell you what he saw in the tomb, his side of the story. Wants to give you the exclusive. Been keeping it to himself this whole time.

Well, I don’t care so much about that. If he wants to have a beer and talk about old times, sure. But I’m not going to talk about what he did. Best to pretend all that just never happened.

Also, he wants to talk to you about some media coverage, thought you could help drum up publicity, Roy continued, ignoring my objection. He’s angry that there hasn’t been any press about him since being released. Feels betrayed and misunderstood. ‘Grossly overlooked’ was the phrase he kept using.

What did you say about my job? I asked with mild concern.

Roy paused, and then he answered defensively, "Nothing. He did all the talking. I guess he knows you are still at the Fulcrum, and he already knew that from before he went away. I didn’t say anything. All I did was grunt a couple times. He woke me up, early. It was more end of night than morning. Drunk, I think. He just talked straight through for a solid five minutes. You know how he does."

Yeah, I know how he does, I responded with some mistrust, some exasperation. But I don’t support what he did, or his reasons, whatever they were. I’m not rooting him on here. And as far as righting his image, we owe it to him as friends to let him know that the world doesn’t care what’s become of him. He needs to move on, start over. Get a job, like the rest of … like me, I mean. Too much time on his hands, that’s how all this started. I would think he’d want stability now, after all of this. I spoke in an inclusive tone, as if Roy and I might unite to guide Travis to reason.

Well, of course, I don’t care one way or the other, Roy answered, his tone a little agitated by my advice about employment, which I had veered his way on several occasions in recent years. Still, he’s a friend and you ought to see him. As far as a job, he’s a little worried that his prison time will make that difficult, he noted with advocacy still in his tone.

Is he planning on returning to England? I asked.

Didn’t mention that. I doubt it, Roy said.

Then he has nothing to worry about. It was a British crime, on British soil, and shouldn’t bar him from whatever he wants to do in the US. He can always get a legal name change.

Yeah, he actually mentioned that he thought of that. But he likes his name. And any value that his name may still have, you know, for what he did–the cash potential for notoriety. He doesn’t want to give that up. He’s proud of what he did. That was my read.

Oh, I see. And so he wants me to help him create publicity that would revive the whole thing? Even if I could, I wouldn’t. The world’s forgotten about it, and forgetting is forgiving in this case. It sounds like he just wants to find one more excuse not to work, if you ask me.

I can only tell you what he wanted me to say, and that it seems to me he’s coming to you for some help. I suppose he thinks you can sort out his next step for him. Roy spoke in dubious grunts, as if the clearest sign of the decline of Travis’s judgment was that he would look to me for guidance.

"Yes, well, even if I could help, getting his story in the Fulcrum isn’t exactly going to rally the masses. He’s better off pitching to the Thrifty Nickel," I said testily. It had been a difficult morning. I’d visited a seventy-seven-year-old widow who’d just lost her husband of fifty years. I found the poor woman literally floored by sorrow, unable to stand, tugging at my pants leg as I tried to leave, and shrieking that I (who had only just met her) was all she had left.

You can tell him that yourself, Roy said tiredly. You will see him, right?

Of course I’ll see him. Why wouldn’t I want to see him? He’s my oldest pal. I’m just saying I don’t think I’d be doing him much good helping him reminisce about his crime, so if he starts going down that road … I mean, it wrecked his life. Three years in prison. I just can’t believe he’s still going on about it, at long last.

Anyway, he wants you to come on Sunday. Wants to meet here around three.

All right.

Yeah, another thing I was thinking, we ought to do for Travis …

What’s that?

I seem to remember that he likes fried chicken and probably hasn’t had any the whole time he’s been in Brixton, Roy said thoughtfully. So when you come, pick up a bucket of chicken. Popeye’s should do. Twelve-piece. Make sure it’s spicy. I’ll chip in when you get here.

Fair enough. Will do. I hung up, breathing heavily. It was then that I remembered it was mid-April. But I recovered quickly from the superstition, tossed it aside, and resolved that everything would be fine. It would be good to see my old friend again. I’d simply crush any suggestion about writing a story for him in the Fulcrum with a firm chuckle and shrug of the shoulders, and that would be that.

The rest of the week passed quickly. Over the next two evenings, I mostly stuck to my routines, but kept close watch over the Morrison house (two houses beyond Roy’s), looking for movement and signs that Travis was back. I saw none. The window of his old bedroom remained dark and curtained, as it had been for the last three years. I didn’t bother knocking. Mr. and Mrs. Morrison blamed me for all the troubles they’d ever had with Travis, and I hadn’t been a welcome guest in their home since the age of eleven. Fine by me.

On Sunday afternoon, I rode my bike down to Popeye’s in Arlandria and bought a twelve-piece spicy family pack, secured it in my basket, and then pedaled back to Bubbling Brook, arriving at Roy’s at three sharp.

Chapter 4

You gonna save a couple pieces of that for Travis? I asked Roy. I thought it was supposed to be for him. I watched and winced as he plundered savagely through the Popeye’s container, which he’d absconded from me without a word the moment I’d walked into his bedroom six minutes before. As I watched him feed, hunched guardedly over the Popeye’s box like a dog over its chow bowl, I guessed Roy had tacked on another seventy-five, maybe one hundred pounds, since last I’d seen him.

But it had been this same vulgar and offending scene then, maybe six months ago. That hadn’t changed. The air in the room (and the hall leading to it) as choked and stifling as the surface of Saturn, flooded through with Roy’s odious gas, wafting oppressively over the belched undercurrents of digested meat and spilled bong water. In the corner of the room, draped by a soiled white slop cloth, was a thirty-gallon trash drum where empty fast-food bags, snack packs, candy wrappers, napkins, paper plates, and plastic cutlery rose in precipitous stacks, far above the drum’s brim. This filthy pile was the room’s center of gravity.

Save him a drumstick, I admonished. Guy’s probably been eating gruel for the past three years. Have a heart.

He’s late, Roy responded, as if punctuality was of importance, like he had a tight schedule to keep.

Not that late. It’s just seven after three, I said, but it was too late for the twelve-piece, all devoured now. No, there was one last piece: a tiny drumstick that still lay preserved beneath the picked-clean bones. Roy saw that I saw it and, relenting, he pulled it out and lay it to his left for safe keeping, napkinless and greasy, directly on the cushion of the maimed and stained futon that defied physics in keeping his heaping form off the floor.

Wow, I said.

What’s the problem now? he asked, annoyed and oblivious.

Just. Wow. You’re gonna just leave that sitting there? Why there? Why on the mattress you fester and fart on for twenty-three hours a day? Why would you not put it on that clean plate sitting on the table in front of you? How did that not occur to you?

Yeah, whatever, Bob, Roy answered, shrugging his jellied shoulders and leaving the drumstick there just to spite and repulse me, like I was being a nag.

Next he pushed aside the pillaged chicken bones. Turning his head ruthlessly toward the breakfast tray on his right, he scanned the fare his mother had brought in just as I’d arrived, For all of you boys to snack on, as she said. From left to right, there was a plate of sliced cantaloupe, a jumbo Snickers bar (frozen), and a pyramid of bread balls–Wonder Bread spread with butter and then lovingly molded into golf-ball-size spheres by his mother’s caring hands. Roy’s fat paw hovered in indecision like a fickle hog over its trough, and then settled on the Snickers bar with a quick and greedy snatch, as if a thousand hands competed for it.

He tore the wrapper off the bar with a swift, practiced motion of his right hand, and then lodged the jumbo bar of chocolate into his mouth, like a little brown creature meeting its doom. The frozen bar snapped like the Titanic in his mighty jowls and he began to chew away ferociously. Briefly, I wondered if he would choke himself. But he never lost his composure. He just swallowed naturally, a small and tidy snack for him. Roy knew the bounds of his digestive power, as limitless as it seemed. He would never die by choking.

Sated for the moment, Roy sighed heavily, yawned, and belched. He then reached behind the futon and pulled out a purple and thickly resined bong, packed it with weed, lit it, and inhaled, blowing out a stream of smoke high into the nets of cobwebs that hung like hammocks from the ceiling. He pointedly offered me none, and after putting the bong back in its hiding place, he lay back down on the bowed and creaking futon and closed his eyes. I shook my head as I saw the last remaining drumstick disappear, buried somewhere beneath billows of back fat.

Chapter 5

Roy’s shut-in period had been going on four years now, ever since Havelina left him. Havelina was a Russian waif who Roy had found living in an abandoned house off Janneys Lane while he was doing a property survey. He’d had his own appraisal business then and was becoming a real success. At twenty-nine, he was beginning to move in more exclusive circles and hardly had the time of day for Travis or me anymore.

But then Roy bought Havelina a sandwich, which marked the start of his textbook My Fair Lady approach that he pursued with her, trying to rescue her from a life of hardship, tame her wild ways, and clear her path to becoming a respectable all-American wife. Whether or not she wanted that was a question Roy had never asked. He just assumed it, treating the remote and solemn creature with every courtesy and extending her every privilege he possessed, every word and gesture gilded with the promise of citizenship. After three brief months, he asked her to marry him.

Havelina accepted Roy’s hand with the same show of inconsequence with which she had accepted that first sandwich, and then officially took up residence in Roy’s place. He had his own condo then, in the Carlyle quarter of Old Town. When she moved in, that’s when things really went to hell. She promptly started sleeping around, even taking lovers in Roy’s own bed when he was at work. He’d walked in on her in the act several times, and had once caught her in a threesome. Time after time, Roy blamed the guy (or guys), not Havelina, and once he sent a seducer to the hospital. Roy got charged with assault and battery for that episode.

Travis and I had been skeptical about Havelina from the start, but there’d been no reaching Roy on the matter. Even after the assault charge, Roy could forgive the girl any transgression. Where we saw a dull-eyed and manipulative whore, he beheld a precious flower that he must uphold and preserve from the world’s grubby corruptions. Against all counsel, Roy was determined to go through with the wedding, and had an unshakable faith that everything would work itself out once they made it past that. All will be well, he’d often say, randomly and loudly, as if to shout down the steep odds that shadowed all sides of the unfortunate match.

T-minus-two days before the scheduled trip to the courthouse to make it all official, Havelina cleaned out the joint bank account Roy had opened in a token of earnestness and ran off to Florida with one or more of her lovers. Roy, stunned and concerned for her safety, chased after her, drove to the Florida Panhandle and spent two weeks hitting the beach towns, trying to track the runaway down. When Roy returned empty-handed, he continued the search through a proxy, paying big bucks to a private investigator. The PI correctly smelled a Gulliver in Roy, and milked him for many thousands over several months. He gave Roy sporadic reports of Havelina sightings, spotting her at towns throughout the Southeast. Her last known location was at the Hooters in Charleston, South Carolina, in March 2015. By then Roy was tapped out, and Havelina’s trail went cold.

Flummoxed by bad love, Roy’s promising career and financial independence were quickly swallowed by his obsession. He was sued for breach of contract and his business shut down. His condo went down to foreclosure, and