Mindwarp, a Novella: ...And Other Strange Tales

By Richard Hébert

MindWarp has been named to Kirkus Reviews' "Best of 2011" list. The Florida Writers Association also awarded the title novella its top prize for short fiction in the 2011 Royal Palm Literary Award competition.

In this award-winning collection of short fiction, a deranged author turns a barroom buddy into his fictional foil as he warps his own and the friends reality beyond recognitionan ageless man sits on a rock in the desert on Yom Kippur waiting for a goat to be brought to hima shanty-town child saves and befriends a crippled rabbit hit by a speeding car, only to face the impersonal cruelty of modern lifea woman rides a bus in silence to her family homestead once a year, concealing her personal mystery from the bus attendant, a neighbor who grew up in her sheltering shadowa shell-shocked war veteran waits beside railroad tracks each day for his tormentor to pass

Kirkus, which bills itself as "The World's Toughest Book Critic," describes the work as a scintillating collection(that) uses offbeat character studies to wrestle with snaky issues of identity and self-knowledge. Quirky, opaque figures abound. (T)he quality of (Hberts) prose, his deadpan realism, mordant wit and acute powers of description ground his flights of abstraction in the soil of experience. A beguiling blend of high-concept narrative and old-school literary chops.

The entire Kirkus review can be accessed at http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/indie/richard-hebert/mindwarp/.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456743871

Richard Hébert

Awards won by author and former investigative reporter Richard Hébert include the Royal Palm Literary Award (2011) and nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. Published works include both fiction and nonfiction, magazine features and documentary films. He currently writes about public affairs at jonettarosebarras.com from his home in St. Augustine, Florida.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

A Musing Conversation

MindWarp, A Novella

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Epilogue

The Road Taken

Preface

These stories were originally written during the 1970s, while traveling and living for stretches of time in Canada, Mexico, Mediterranean Europe and Morocco. Although they needed tinkering here and there in more recent times, don’t look in them for the accoutrements of today—laptops and Blackberrys, iPods and cell phones that play games and take pictures. No texting here. These tales are of another, simpler time and place.

They are about more permanent things than the toys we play with today. They are not about instant gratifications, twenty-four-hour news cycles, preemptive wars, or WMDs and IEDs or warfare by drones. They are about the old questions, the search for significance, for permanence.

Why they were never published at the time may be fodder for another story, as yet unwritten. Fate had a hand in it, neglect had a hand in it and the divertissements of our modern pacing of life had a large hand in it. Suffice to say it’s time to bring them out of the closet and let them breathe, absorb sunlight and attempt to live on their own. To kick them out of the nest, as it were.

I, for one, believe they have stood the test of time. Only time, of course, will tell.

Above all else, I wish to thank my traveling companion during those years, Ann Eyerman, who provided invaluable advice and support each step of the way. Those were wonderful, heady years.

A Musing Conversation

A committee of muses sits about the living room of my brain, discussing matters of no great import. A motley group they are, having just finished their pizzas—one pepperoni, one vegetarian, one combo, hold the anchovies.

Why in the world is he doing this? asks the chair-muse, finger-flicking crumbs from her robe.

The recording secretary checks her notes and offers: Says he wants to see more of the world.

But why?

Looking for adventure, maybe? This from the most junior muse present, acne tracks still vivid on her face. Get out on the highway … she hums.

Well, that too, of course, chimes in the muse of poetic license, wiping her glasses on the gathered hem of her robe and displaying a coquettish bit of calf in the process. Something to keep up the interest along the way, I suppose. Mere titillation. Adventure isn’t an end in itself, is it?

Looking for the truth, maybe? That from the starry-eyed one twirling a compass.

The secretary, having forgotten to bring along fresh paper, jots the minutes on a pizza box lid, muttering, Gimme a break.

Truth about what? wants to know the muse of history, searching her scrolls for answers.

Whatever it is about life that has him puzzled, one suggests.

Looking for the answer before he knows the question, offers the muse of tragedy. It’ll come to no good end.

Sooner or later someone’s going to tell him he ought to start that search in his own backyard, says an elder, who returns to munching her loose partial and trying to tease a bit of pizza from under it with her tongue.

Answers don’t grow in backyards. Dandelions do, harumphs the historian.

Surely there must be more to it, says the chair.

Wasn’t so long ago someone told him his horizons were too constricted, he needed to get out and see the rest of the world. ‘Provincial,’ I think he was called.

So he’s trying to de-provincialize?

And for that he has to travel everywhere from hither to yon, snooping under old rocks, no less? What does he think he is, a lizard? If there were a muse of cynics, this elder would be she.

The denture-wearer has taken out her partial and examines it. I say he has itchy feet. Why does he have to give himself a reason to go somewhere?

I don’t think so. There’s more going on here. It’s as though he’s looking for the Holy Grail. That from the licensed poet, her glasses finally wiped clean of every last speck and smear. She could, she might say, see clearly now.

Holy Grail, Holy Schmail, says the cynic. Everyone goes out looking for the Holy Grail as though it has all the answers, can solve all problems. Never has, never will.

Not the point, not the point, says a gentlewoman in the corner, silent until now as she has mulled all that she has heard. Isn’t the search for the Grail always the end in itself? It’s the search, not the finding, that matters. They never really find it, and if they do, they’re terribly disappointed. No, I’d say if he’s got a plan at all, it’s just that: to go looking. For what? Doesn’t really matter, does it? Call it the Grail if you want. The looking’s the thing.

Well, that seems vague enough, suggests the chair-muse. Can we agree on that much and move on to the rest of our agenda?

One by one the muses nod agreement, their nods duly recorded on the pizza box lid.

MindWarp, A Novella

(T)he first seconds of fall always seem like soar ….

—William Faulkner

Requiem for a Nun

Author’s disclosure: The following besotted tale was conceived in a bar in Montreal in 1973. It was first brought to trial in Morocco in 1975 and sentenced to death shortly thereafter, during a sojourn in Mexico where it had sought reprieve. A stay having been granted, it languished in isolation on death row in my filing cabinet for twenty years as appeals to higher courts and magistrates were exhausted. Having reached the age of maturity, it was then remanded to mental rehabilitation until it was deemed sufficiently sane to be released into the general public. It was so released by a divided court in 2011, having achieved adequate stability to be considered no longer capable of inflicting irreversible harm on an unsuspecting populace.

I   

I somersaulted into his rock-stable life, massaged him with words and waited for his jinn to blossom. From his point of view, I can see no logic why he shouldn’t have somersaulted me right back out on my butt—none, that is, unless opposites do attract, and I see no reason why they should unless they share a common appetite, a mutual love of blood-letting. However much that may touch on my own purposes, I don’t see that it illuminates Guy’s acceptance of the setup one ampere.

He may have wanted no more from me than the easy stimulus of conversation to help along the sluggish beer-drinking hours. If that’s the case, I’m sure he wasn’t satisfied. Not in the end, at least. It’s likely, I suppose, that I simply made a successful stab at his curiosity. I don’t know. I’m blind to his motives. Doesn’t matter how it’s viewed, this is all mere rearview conjecture. Let it be. I somersaulted in, and there, for an illogical while, I overstayed my welcome. I know that now. I didn’t then.

Guy was a Paleolithic dolmen, a gravestone left standing by some long-ago era, then smoothed by a million rainfalls. (Warning: I mix metaphors mercilessly. They’re the daubs of paint on my palette. Get used to it.) He sat facing a wall, his back to me. I watched from my front corner table.

Blarney Tavern had nothing in particular to recommend it: bare, scuffed wood flooring; tables and straight chairs scattered in no discernible pattern about an unadorned room, unless you count the Blarney Stone standing by the door to the men’s room, caressed to a high sheen, and air stale with smoke and draft beer spills. (I should note that the Blarney was grandfathered an exemption when the smoke-free laws were enacted, because it serves no food except roasted peanuts.) Mostly it was noisy with middle-aged mules nudging their way into the night until going-home time. I was there for something else, lying in ambush for material from society’s lower rungs, which I thought might ask less of me. Or maybe I just wanted a beer. I suspect there’s both honesty and deceit in every reason I can conjure for anything I do. Let it be. I was there, watching him.

From my distance, I held my mirror up to him and saw what I needed. He was grim and solid, fundamental, perpetual, a worn-down rock of our age and eminently alone.

I had passed through months of hunger, and on the shelf of my starvation had been born my idea. Now the idea was desperate for fruition. Its seed lay on arid ground. It wanted a vehicle, a fulcrum, a protagonist to pursue. My muse needed both manna and manure. I wanted to tear open the sky and yank a new god out of its bowels, an idol worthy of worship, at once ancient and newborn, a deity that could command all of jaded creation to its knees. My beer-addled brain chased air devils, tackled phantoms, tagged clouds.

How I wanted a hero for my idea. And more: I wanted the hero to be my idea. I’d come to the tavern to choose such a one. I’d determined to pluck a protagonist whole from the stuff of daily life, and there he sat, stoically alone, the stuff of daily life if I’d ever seen it. In a lurch of ignorance, I chose Guy from across the noise and smoke of a nondescript beer joint. I lunged to my feet and, with a frothy amber one in hand, stumbled among the tables and chairs, tripped over an exposed ankle, stubbed my toe viciously on the leg of someone’s chair and bumped magnanimously into his table, slopping beer from my glass.

He wasn’t amused.

I asked if I could join him and he nodded vaguely at the chair opposite. The chair put my back to his wall.

I steered a clumsy course through the preliminaries of introduction—writer, meet printer’s devil—galloped across social amenities and then aimed my salvo. I’ve come to transplant you into fiction.

I thought I saw an ember of interest glimmer in his blue eyes. It may have only been disdain.

I barged on. I’m not interested in you personally, you understand.

He nodded again as though he did.

You have something I need. I’ve been watching you. You’re perfect. You’re steady. There’s something solid in you, like a slab of unworked marble. It seems to protect your vitals.

I suppose I was describing the protagonist already swollen to story-size in my brain, a bubble bloated to bursting during all my evenings of brooding, more than the mere lump of unquarried manhood across the table from me. I need you for a theme, I said, saying too much to fill the silence he let spread between us. You’re a serious man in a frenzied age and I need to know why.

The soliloquy spent, I leaned back against the wall. Beer swilled up in my head and I had to prop myself on my knuckles again. Then my elbows slid out a little in my spilled beer. My erudition lay splattered in the mud of ashes and beer under the table.

Unwittingly, I’d put my thumb to his magic button. He did consider himself serious. I suppose most people still do, beneath the razzle-dazzle and despite all evidence to the contrary.

Guy bestowed a grave wisp of smile on me. You want something to write about? he asked.

I nodded between my supporting fists.

Write about failure.

He said write about failure as offhandedly as tossing a crust of bread to pigeons.

You’re serious.

Of course.

You think I haven’t already? What about that story I did about a fiesta in Spain? An utter disaster going nowhere! Or the one about the guy in midlife crisis whose teenage son drives the family van into the backyard swimming pool, and he runs off chasing his daughter’s lesbian girlfriend, looking for solace. Jeez, that one was so awful I couldn’t finish it.

I don’t know about those, he said.

No, of course not. You couldn’t. We just met.

We drank in silence. Four more filled glasses appeared on the table.

The last thing people want to read about is failure, I said. I’d have been more honest if I’d said it was the last thing I wanted to write about. I groped my way back through the litany that had gripped my brain during the desolation months. All they’ve got is failure. Their gods fail them, their government fails them, their politicians fail them, their scientists fail them, their spouses fail them, their kids fail them, their own damn ideals fail them, they even fail themselves. That’s the real story of the age we live in: failure. They don’t need me writing about it. They already know it, intimately.

He finished one beer and tilted the glass to watch the map of foam slide down inside it, then picked up the fresh beer. Give them heroic failure, he said. Tell them it’s okay to fail. Maybe they’ll feel better.

I couldn’t decide whether he was being serious or sarcastic.

Literature is one long panegyric of heroic failure, I argued. Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hemingway’s old men.

You miss my point.

Which is?

Their heroes wanted to succeed. Write about somebody who wants to fail.

Novel idea, I had to concede. Interesting, is what I said as if not much interested.

For the record (and I’ve promised to record both sides, the raw materials before they hit the warping of the mirror in my head as much as the images it reflects back), the conversation was far more rambling than what I’ve sketched. It didn’t have quite that crisp to-the-pointness, didn’t snap and crackle with quick pops and, as I recall, dwindled off to nowhere in particular, as most tavern conversations do. By the way, that toe-stubbing? That did happen.

Still, this is supposed to be mutation. All of us, after all, are mutants. We aren’t who or what I say we are, we didn’t do precisely what I say we did. I didn’t actually somersault into his life. I arrived with the gradual laying on of layers, like bricks slowly accumulating into a wall, the way men who drink and urinate in the same beer halls usually ebb and flow sewage-like together and apart.

I selected Guy not from across the room but from across the table, selected him out of a past of multiple desultory conversations. The decision to construct this castle of dreams came only after he snatched his suggestion out of the smoke-laden air to fill an uncomfortable moment’s lag in conversation, after he said, offhandedly, Write about failure.

I’d been complaining for days, if not weeks, about my fruitless search for a theme to suit my soaring need (one of my favorite monologues when fueled by beer), and his suggestion, falling as it did like a meteor, dug a mile-wide crater in the center of my complaint. Tired of listening to my gripe, he fired a nuclear-tipped missile to swat my mosquito.

Write about failure? How dare he? Hasn’t he been listening to me? I want to soar. I want to clutch this scatophagous populace by the scrotum and shake it out in a winter wind. I want to waken its racket-bludgeoned ears to a new song. I must be heard. I dare to be heard. But I have no song to sing. I want to shout across the universe, and all I have to shout is Hello, out there. Like some yodeler on an Alpine mountaintop. Like Mongol herdsmen singing the long lowing and whistling sounds of winds and wailing hillsides and mountaintops, marking their presence upon the world. Hello has been so used up it’s only a dry rasp now. It doesn’t ring anymore. When it does, no one answers.

Write about failure? I want to teach blind alleys to see. I want to put a searing brand to the hind cheek of the world. Is failure something to sing into the ear of a world deaf with failing? Give me something more worthy to pour into my voice. Can’t he see? I am the exercise of my larynx and nothing more? I refuse to be unheard. I will be heard, by God. Let me tear my hole in the sky!

And he says, write about failure.

I grope blindly for forever. I want the world to wake to a soft cry so despairing it is the cry of an infant’s hope. I want to teach all the pains and joys that will ever become, all the new demons and angels of the soul, all the new sounds and silences that will ever be. I’ll scratch the clouds raw for it. I’ll poke out the eyes of yet to be invented deities. I’ll number the motes in every as yet unstruck beam of sunlight. Just show me where to begin. Give me immortality or give me death. Save me from the weakling I am.

And he says, write about failure.

To which I say, have you not been listening to my songless voice?

If I had a woman to lie with, each night I’d speak to her of my need, crying out my hunger, and she would listen and understand and love my need as I love it. I’d tell her how, as a young boy, I climbed upon trash cans to the garage roof and from there crawled up the steeper slope of the house roof. I’d tell her how, trembling and dizzy, I’d stood looking down into what seemed a void. How, with a red bath towel tied around my neck for a cape, I jammed my eyes shut and leaped out to soar, to fly, to fall. I’d describe how the cape streamed behind me as I felt those seconds of soar, arms flung wide, the air rushing past my face, and then fell in a broken heap among the marigolds, my magic cape a tangled mess around my head.

And then I would tell her how I climbed back up