A Book Of Chances

By William A Kincaid III

A literary novel disguised as trashy Science Fiction; a two-fisted tale told by an unreliable narrator.

Kincaid Wakes Up when the End Time begins in the last year of the 20th Century. Among his many delusions is the universal language translating device implanted in his head by aliens at the age of three. He also believes that he travels through time/space over great distances instantaneously from time to time, though he has no control over it. Whether these notions are true or real or both, the narrator seems to think they may be. Kincaid spends time in the local mental hospital periodically while the shrinks try to rid him of these delusions. It is an exercise in futility. He writes down many of his strange ideas and experiences and publishes them as Science Fiction novels.

Kincaid knows he is Other because of his mixed-race origins, but he is not sure what kind. He searches for other Others in the cracked landscapes of Ash City, Michigan and the Republic of Fortuna, a kingdom on Paradise Island in the South Atlantic. His girlfriend Plasma, who may be an alien from another planet, and his best friend Lazurus, the oldest man in the world, provide support as Kincaid begins to Wake Up. He meets the Master Chance, a guru who may or may not be an alien from another planet, on Paradise Island and again in Ash City. Kincaid does not think both Chances are the same entity, though the narrator does.

Back on Paradise Island again in the second part of the book, Kincaid searches for the Second Chance. He meets several different aliens. He finally wakes up fully to discover he is his own second chance. He comes to know an Other, and the Other is himself. The End Time comes. Everything changes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William A Kincaid III
• Release date: Oct 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005869663

William A Kincaid III

William A Kincaid III claims to be the “writer” of two novels: A BOOK OF CHANCES, and THE ACID KINGS (and SHRINKS WITHOUT BORDERS). That claim has been challenged by Blank, a character in the novel/memoir THE ACID KINGS.Mr. Kincaid says he has a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a Master’s degree from Michigan State University. Mr. Blank states that he also has two degrees, a Bachelor’s from the University of Ash City and a Master’s from Southeastern University of Michigan.Mr. Kincaid claims that he won a Hopwood Award while a student at the University of Michigan for his play, “I Got Transference For You, Baby.” Mr. Blank alleges that Mr. Kincaid stole the play from him.Mr. Kincaid claims to have written a previous Other novel called A BOOK OF CHANCES (published on Smashwords.com). Mr. Blank alleges that Mr. Kincaid stole most of that Other novel from him in the first place and left a manuscript of the plagiarized work in Mr. Blank’s hotel room by mistake. Mr. Blank says he wrote THE ACID KINGS (and SHRINKS WITHOUT BORDERS as a memoir and a novel. and resents Mr. Kincaid's attempt to take credit for it.Mr. Kincaid lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mr. Blank lives in Ash City, Michigan, and doubts that Ann Arbor exists. They appear to inhabit two entirely different Other universes, or continua as Magdalene calls them. Mr Kincaid’s home is partly in the surreal and mostly in his head. Mr Blank’s home is usually in the real Real, even when a mile high.

Book preview

VOLUME I

SOMEDAY MY CHANCE WILL COME

One chance is all you need.

-Jesse Owens

PART ONE

THE TREE OF LIFE

How am I to get in? asked Alice again, in a louder tone.

Are you to get in at all? said the Footman. That's the first question, you know.

It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so.

It's really dreadful, she muttered to herself, the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy.

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 1—THE END TIME

Late in the 20th century, in 1999, Kincaid experienced full awakening to discover that his own Otherness was nothing compared to the Otherness of those around him. His awakening should have taken place gradually, but it burst upon him in a 48-hour span of frenzy and mayhem. Kincaid felt like he slept all his life until he woke up and entered fully into the lives of the Others around him. He thought he awoke many times before and it finally happened. Something happened, anyway.

In his sleep, Kincaid could not perceive who was Other and who was not. He couldn’t even distinguish non-aliens from aliens, whether space aliens or just foreigners. Sometimes in his slumber he thought we were all aliens, but he could not wake himself. He could not really understand the difference between waking and sleeping. Everybody was Other in his mind as he slept. Every story he told himself was Other.

Kincaid wanted to write a non-fiction book of chances and beliefs before the End Time came, but knew that he had nothing to write about because he knew nothing except the knowledge of his lack of knowledge. Like the rest of the characters in that book, or any book, he couldn't even determine how real or made-up he should be. Knowing nothing never helped him write, but it never hurt his writing either. Everything he made up seemed real to him.

William wasn't always Kincaid’s real name, but William's just as good as any other Western name he could have made up for himself.

When Kincaid finally started to wake up, he was exchanging currency at a bank in a foreign country. He wasn’t sure where he was, but that never bothered him before. He had gone to many strange places in his life without knowing anything more than the time of day. Sometimes he did not even know what time it was at the time. Time always seemed alien to him.

Kincaid was always more concerned with time than space.

Fortunately, the bank clerk spoke a variety of English and Kincaid was not about to question whether the clerk actually did speak English or whether it was the device implanted into his skull by the Aliens when he was three years old that did the translating. He spent a lot of time in the ACNI mental hospital being cured of such notions, although the device always seemed to work whether anybody believed it existed or not. Kincaid had a lot of experience believing in things that did not exist. And he always seemed to understand people who didn’t speak his language better than those who did.

Hob chola fortutu, said the clerk, (or something similar sounding) and Kincaid agreed that it was good to have money.

The blue-green currency had a picture of starfish on it. Kincaid didn't want to ask the clerk what country he was in, because demonstrating a lack of knowledge of what country or century one is in can lead to some sort of detention if one is not careful. The currency said People’s Republic of Fortuna on the starfish side in Roman script. The other side showed a picture of a tree inside an oval with wavy lines radiating away from it, like an island in the middle of a sea. It also had words written with a different alphabet, presumably Fortunese.

How long you been on the island, Kincaid asked, assuming they were on one.

Chat teso tesite tolo, said the clerk. He was a Black man with brown skin, about thirty years old. Both he and Kincaid were dressed in lime green suits and wore dark glasses.

Since you've been here so long, said Kincaid, perhaps you could tell me the best hotel on the island.

Ho melo MoJo, he said promptly, yam tomelo Paradis. The device didn't translate precisely enough for Kincaid to understand whether he meant that the MoJo Hotel was the best hotel on Paradise, or that it was the best paradise of a hotel. That is to say, his English wasn't good enough to make the distinction.

The bank clerk gave directions and Kincaid set off across the main thoroughfare of the island, which he later found out actually is called Paradise Island. Fortuna is just the name of the country and its largest city. The citizens of the country are called Fortunates. Naturally, they call the rest of the world Unfortunates.

It seemed like just last night he'd been back home in Michigan, where most of the people who knew him in the maze of Ash City's Hitchcock-eyed landscape were dangerously mutated pseudo-humanoid creatures who pretended they were still normal. Kincaid preferred to write about honestly strange and delightful people like Plasma, a willowy platinum blonde with cream-colored lips and pointed breasts who almost always dressed in bright colors to contrast with the extreme pale shade of her skin and eyes. Kincaid thought he might be in love with her, even though she seemed alien to him. Late last night, in the last year of the twentieth century, Plasma told him that what he didn't know was unimportant and it was why he didn't know it that mattered.

Kincaid was astonished on that starless May night, listening to Plasma in an ugly barroom on Strait Street in Ash City, Michigan, chain-smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes and coughing loudly enough to wake his friend Lazurus from his usual midnight stupor. Lazurus rested his head on the bar and every time Kincaid coughed or Plasma smacked her cute little fist down on the bar to emphasize a point, that head would come bobbing up like a marionette's or a crash-test dummy's.

Lazurus looked a little like a dummy, too. Except for his huge whistling nose, he reminded everybody of Howdy Doody in a blue seersucker suit —Lazurus almost always wore seersucker suits— although the wooden superstar puppet seemed a lot more down to earth than Lazurus ever did. His face was mottled with purple blotches, just like H.D., but his silvery hair looked distinguished when he remembered to comb it. Probably because he'd already died and been revived so many times, his brain cells had escaped into secondary levels of metaphysical existence, which left him looking like he floated halfway between the material and etheric zones of the standard cosmos.

It started when the foreigners came, Lazurus interrupted Plasma's philosophical discourse on not knowing.

This might be someone else talking through him. I think he's channeling, she whispered, winking her right eye to expose an exquisite miniature version of Dali's The Persistence of Memory painted on its lid.

Don't say anything, Will, and try not to laugh.

No, it was the space aliens said Lazurus. Then the foreigners

He sat up, knocking over his empty beer glass which fell to the floor unbroken and rolled the short length of the bar to lodge against Kincaid’s left foot. Kincaid could barely see the glass when he looked down between Plasma's purple trousers and his own blue-jean clad legs in the dim light that radiated from two lamps on either side of the mirror behind the bar.

Kincaid was thinking the bartender had been gone a long time and that his own glass needed filling when two white men walked in. He recognized them as fugitives from the mental ward. Wardman and Pilgrim pretended not to know him, and sat down at a table near the door.

Plasma, Kincaid said, I'd like you to meet the Psycho twins, John Wardman and Eldritch Pilgrim. These honkies work at the Ash City Neuropsychiatric Institute, but nobody has been able to figure out what their job is. Nobody has ever seen them work. Wardman is the muscular baldheaded guy and the stringy one with the hippie hair and mustache is Pilgrim. Don't let their obvious lack of intelligence fool you. They really do work at the nuthouse, instead of living there.

They never should have let you out, asshole, said Pilgrim. If there was justice, your stupid science fiction books would be burned.

Shut up, man. Don't talk to Kincaid, said Wardman. He lit some kind of menthol cigarette with a kitchen match.

Plasma whispered to Kincaid, I think Lazurus really is channeling and I think it has something to do with these two aliens.

These guys are no more alien than you are, Kincaid whispered back.

I told you we shouldn't have come here, said Pilgrim.

Don't worry about Kincaid, said Wardman. Leave Kincaid to his own confusion. Worry about the bartender.

The End Time, interrupted Lazurus in a stentorian voice, begins to end in a bar on Strait Street in Ash City at the moment when two lowly entities known as the Eldritch John and the Ward Pilgrim, who carry the keys for delivering the captives but refuse to use them…

Hold on, asshole, said Pilgrim.

Find their destiny in the great plan of the Master known as Chance, finished Lazurus.

What kind of fucking maniac you hanging out with now, Kincaid? said Wardman. Never mind. Where the hell's the bartender anyway?

Kincaid was beginning to get a little bit angry at these two clowns for coming into his favorite bar. Of course, the bartender was taking a long time. On the other hand, time was beginning to crawl into itself like an ouroboric worm and the mind of Kincaid screamed at him to seize it. This was one of those frozen moments when he couldn't resist the gift of an opportunity to verbally excoriate the two mental health workers. He could still remember the shit they'd heaped on him not so many months ago, and got so angry reliving those memories that he lost touch with everything, including the ouroboric flow of time.

Time started up again more or less normally when the short hairless Black bartender came rushing in, apologizing and breathing hard as though he'd been doing something he shouldn't. He poured drinks all around on the house. That wasn't as generous as it sounds; somehow Wardman, Pilgrim, and Lazurus managed to slip away while Kincaid was lost in the memory fog.

Kincaid didn't care about the free drink, because he was pissed to let those disorderly orderlies slip out of his hands. He knew that putting insults against them into a book was likely to be useless, because it was doubtful that they knew how to read and even more doubtful that they would buy one of his books even if they could somehow be taught the fine art of literacy. He should have been pissed at himself for losing the chance to insult them, but didn't want to spoil his night with Plasma at her apartment so he transferred his anger to the bartender instead.

Kincaid never understood what transference really means, although many different psychiatric health care workers tried to explain it to him. This nebulous concept was used by big-shot psychologists like his father to confuse their patients (and their sons). In fact, some of the anger transferred to the bartender was really long suppressed anger at his father that he could never express. This latter transference was made easier because the bartender looked a lot like his father. That's probably why he didn't express it to the bartender, either.

I can't understand how those two hospital morons knew that I was about to attack them with blistering invective, he said. Could they be secret telepaths?

They weren't reading minds, said Plasma. Lazurus was channeling an incredibly powerful entity. I could tell by the vibrations. That's what scared them off, Will. I think it must have been the Master Chance. Lazurus was channeling the Master Chance.

Is this Master Chance the same one that Lazurus mentioned before? Is he a friend of yours?

No, I don't know him that well. I don't follow him like a guru or anything. But I believe he's wise and he has power. Lazurus knows him, better than I do.

Kincaid put out the cigarette he was smoking, another link in the chain, and considered what he knew about his two best friends, Plasma and Lazurus, and decided it was damned little. They reminded him of a book he read a long time ago called The Wizards of Is and Is-not. Although which was Is and which Is-not, he couldn't tell.

He probably couldn’t tell even if he had telepathy or synchronicity. Telepathy was the one thing he feared more than anything else. He was always afraid that someone would hear him call them a fucking asshole in his mind, so to avoid the problem he was forced to call them a fucking asshole out loud.

On the other hand, Synchronicity was a mystical phenomenon which nobody could understand. Kincaid was perfectly willing not to understand, since he didn't see how anything in particular could have anything to do with anything else anyway. He always considered everything to be anomalous, but tried to keep an open mind. If two things were caused to be at the same time, but at different places, he couldn't help but think that they had different mothers, but who could say that they didn't have the same father?

CHAPTER 2—ALIENS

All of these thoughts and memories from what seemed like the night before were interesting, but none of them helped with Kincaid’s current problem of finding a hotel on a crowded tropical island. Walking across Paradise, he kept thinking that the Aliens could have given him something more useful than a built-in universal translator. He decided not to think for awhile and see what happened.

A riotous panoply of neon advertising signs covered every building with distorted light that barely cut through a purple haze of smoke, fog, and other strange gases pushing into everybody’s eyes on the street in Paradise. A din of car horns, whistles, bird calls, hoofbeats and various exotic musical expressions assaulted the ears. Kincaid’s nose, stunned by the sheer variety of odor, broke down completely and refused to smell anything but food. The sun stood at zenith over the main square of the city, but nobody paid any attention to it.

Small boys attempted to pick his pockets as Kincaid strolled the sidewalk, swatting the boys away with both hands and trying to find a taxi among the lines of jalopies, horse and donkey drawn carts, trucks, jeeps, busses, vans, rickshaws and bicycles moving along at a steady 5 to 10 miles per hour.

It was a street on which everything was going somewhere, but nothing got there with any speed. Even the pedestrian traffic was stalled, as street vendors hawked sweet-and-sour smelling wares with loud cries of Vushti (which the translator rendered in several contradictory translations), while the signs flashed and the radios blared and the uniformed men marched. The sun beat down and melted the landscape, which included Kincaid, when a woman who looked a lot like a dark version of Plasma walked out of a drugstore just ahead of him.

Walter, she said, and he was not about to deny it. Her face lit up like a campfire while he tried to think of something to say. She looked to be in her early thirties, (Kincaid found out later that she was 42), Black with dark chocolate-colored skin. Her body was slender, like Plasma's, almost as tall, and filled out in the breasts, buttocks and thighs to a more voluptuous degree. Her black hair hung in tight braided wavelets down the back of a dress almost as yellow as the center of the giant daisies that seemed to be growing in every window of every building on the main square of Fortuna City. She wore half-tinted sunglasses that made her eyes look as if they knew answers.

Walter James Kincaid, she said, have you already forgotten me? She looked at him with a sideways half-smile.

Kincaid was wondering not only where he was, but when he was and even who he was, when he realized she must be mistaking him for his missing half-brother, Walter.

Walter James Kincaid is, or was, a famous film director who disappeared two years earlier while making a movie about a Rastafarian in Michigan, loosely based on Stranger in a Strange Land. It did not do well at the box-office. Not even the publicity about Walter's disappearance could save it. He disappeared, or was disappeared, right after the shooting of the final scene on location inside a VW dealership in Ash City. Walter used this location primarily because of being married to the owner's sister, although she divorced him not long before he disappeared.

Walter’s large girth made his vanishing act all the more mysterious. The eyewitnesses told a bizarre story. He just went up in smoke, without the smoke. Now you see him, now you don’t.

Kincaid was ten years younger than Walter, but the extra weight he'd been putting on lately probably increased their resemblance to each other to the point where someone might be confused. Walter vanished sometime last spring or summer, about the time Kincaid got out of ACNI and met Plasma and Lazurus. Or did he meet Lazurus in ACNI? Or before ACNI? He couldn’t remember. He started going with them to the bar on Strait Street that kept changing its name every few months because nobody could make a go of it. Though come to think, there was no way for Kincaid to know how long ago that was now.

I'm William, he said to the woman. His brother. When'd you see him last?

I…I… she said, exposing perfect teeth, I do remember him saying something about brothers.

There's another one back in Ash City.

Yeah, Ash City. He talked about that all the time.

She started crying just like that and Kincaid got the feeling that anything he did or didn't do would make things worse, so he grabbed her in a hug and patted her back with one hand and fondled