Excerpt V “The Pacific”

Three hundred years before the boy is swallowed by the ocean, this happens:

The date is January 26th 1700.  In Northern California, on the same beach where the boy will die, the coastal cliffs are sliced and toppled by vibrations. Out in the Pacific, there is an earthquake big enough to crack the ocean floor and drop the nearby coastline more than 100 feet. The quake’s epicenter is along a fault-line at the base of an underwater valley. The edge of one plate slips itself under another, displacing masses of rock and debris, shaking the sea and its contents, and moving the land irreparably. The bluff that remains looks like it has been bitten, and the trees from the top of the cliff lie on the beach like cracked toothpicks. The nearby lagoon rumbles, its black surface scarred with concentric circles from reverberation.
In an earthquake, thirty seconds feels like an eternity. In this event the earth quivers violently for four minutes, causing devastating landslides from the Cape of Medocino, to the Canadian border and Vancouver. When the earth stills itself, the ocean grows in agitation. Angry surges of water are sent from the epicenter in all directions. The sea is preparing itself and soon it will pulverize the land as a tsunami wave. First, the water becomes a powerful undercurrent that raises the swell of the sea, and pushes it toward land. This unformed mass of water moves faster than a jet.
Where the water becomes shallow, the unformed mass slows down. The ocean is ripped from its mould by the force of the tsunami, revealing the guts of the ocean. The fish that have not been sucked back with the water flip-flop on the murky sand. Sea anemones retract their tentacles, closing their bodies to the outside air. They look like shut eyes. For the first time, the spikes of urchins and the slimy skin of eels feel the sea breeze. Clams snap shut. Barnacled rocks stick out like holey bones. Everything drips with seaweed and the new sand bar glints like a treasure chest.
This beach does not last long. When all the coastal water has been eaten, the tsunami readies itself. It grows into a churning wall of water hundreds of feet tall spanning hundreds of miles of coastline. As a mass of froth and debris, the ocean attacks the shore. Bark is stripped from trees. The rusty cliffs are melted down and are rounded and smoothed like a well-licked ice cream cone. The bore of the tsunami consumes the toppled village of the Yurok and eats its way inland, plowing ancient redwoods into the ground like sheaves of wheat.

Exerpt IV “The Pacific”

As I got to cleaning up, I thought about the whale. I’d seen live ones spout near the crabbing boats. They’d appear out of nowhere, surfacing like rocks in the tide, their barnacled sides sinking and rising against the swell of the sea. I’ll admit they were fearful to me; their eyes were unfathomable. Dead, they held no draw and I wondered why Mahak gave a damn. I picked up cans, the stale smell of beer drifting up from the tops, and I put them in a trash bag.
After a while Detour slunk under my bed. Just then I could see his black paws resting on my dusty area rug. Last night, he’d been scared shitless, each heavy gust had pushed him further out of sight, and he whimpered the entire night. He was a coward of a dog and to say it got on my nerves was an understatement. He was scared of frogs. He found a mouse once and snatched it up in his mouth only to frantically chuck it outside and run back in. I attributed his strange behavior to being separated from his mother too early. Detour came back out when I’d finished. He sniffed me and sniffed the newly emptied spaces around the floor, trying to piece some dog ideas together. Then he flopped outside and lay in the grass, his paws crossed beneath his chin.
The storm was heavy again that night. At dusk the wind blew through the trees, the pine needles scintillating, the bows blown upward in resignation. It wasn’t long before this wind turned into a heavier bluster, and the branches of pines and alders bowed and cracked. Then a slanting rain began. Hail pounded the roof of my trailer. Overhanging tree branches scrapped the metal siding. The power went out and a cacophony followed. Flurries of whorled up pine needles and other detritus hit my trailer, leaves rustled, and widow makers creaked toward nearby trees. Finally, there was the ghost whistle of neighboring wind chimes, hit so violently by the wind that they made no tunes.
In the morning the tarp on my firewood pile had come loose and half of the pallet was soaked through. Worse, the bag of cans I’d so carefully packed in the truck were now strewn across the yard. I didn’t pick them up. The whale had already disappeared from the pages of the paper. I drank scorched coffee and read about some fuck who always swims in the lagoon.

Excerpt III “The Pacific”

The child’s struggle was a small event; in the throbbing, mashing sea, the kid was almost nothing. For a second Donal just watched the struggle through the lenses. Barely keeping them still, he watched as the kid thrashed about in an effort to hold his chin above the waves. He pressed the rubber suctions deeper into his eyes and watched the kid’s face closely. His little cheeks had gone pale and water sputtered in and out of his mouth. Intermittently, the kid’s mouth gaped and he looked skyward. If something wasn’t done the kid would drown.
His moment of hesitation over, Donal dropped the binoculars and ran. In a split second he was off the cliff. Pins and needles ran up his legs from the shock of the jump but he struggled free from the sand, kicked off his shoes and continued running. The beach rasped at his heels and the binoculars swung hard into his chest, thumping onto his breast bone with a loud thud. He threw his left arm across his chest and continued toward the surf. He was almost tripping now, his feet moving without him. As he moved closer, the boys features came into focus. Finally reaching wet sand, he leapt toward the water. But as his feet touched the surf he stopped.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d stuck his feet in the ocean. It was bitterly cold. Regardless of the season, the ocean was cold enough to trigger hypothermia in under 30 minutes. His feet stung and his chest heaved and pounded. He could feel the blood in his ears; it was louder than the waves that crashed with alarming closeness. He could not dive in.
This ocean was cold with horror. If he went in, he might not survive. He and the kid could both die. Or just the boy might live. There were too many possibilities; the waves were a lottery, a menacing bingo wheel.
Cold and sullen, the boy’s small arms flailed in the water. Donal lifted his binoculars compulsively and examined the kid’s face. Fear moved in him again. He’d been let loose into life, let loose into something happening. Donal dropped the binoculars and starred at the real drowning boy.
Standing in the flattening blanket of the waves, Donal felt the bubbling water soak through his socks. The bore of a new wave came down into the sand and bounced; he was forced back by the spray. Another wave crested at the height of Donal’s neck. His fear lost reason and choked in his throat. Moving back a little further, he scanned the beach and found it was now empty. When his gaze returned to the waves, the boy was gone.
Donal gasped, he was hyperventilating. He spit into the sand to try and get the feeling out, to try and get something out but the feeling was his now and it would stay inside. He stared for some time, expecting the boy to reappear but the waves held nothing. A calm that was more like numbness passed over him and he stood still. Birds still swam above he waves.

Excerpt II “The Pacific”

The trailer park contained no less than fifteen homes, fanned out like a hand of cards around a bumpy paved cul-de-sac. You could only enter and exit the park on one side; the far side of the cul-de-sac being blocked from the road by a thicket of blackberry bushes and a burnt out stump of an old-growth redwood. The mobile homes were occupied by retired couples and poor families. These two groups did not mingle. Fog perpetually drifted into the park from the ocean just across the road and at all times, the ocean could be heard in the distance as a sucking noise. From the trailer park, it was an innocuous, white noise and most of the residents didn’t notice it. In the evenings, as the sun’s light diminished, the sky turned gold and then blood red. The pines that circled the trailer park held onto the sun’s light longest. Despite the dramatic ocean sunsets, the residence of the trailer park rarely watched the sun plunge into the ocean. The ocean’s closeness, and their familiarity with it, made its presence something so ordinary it was scarcely worth paying attention to.

Last night, Winny watched an unremarkable sunset and this morning she stripped the bed. She hadn’t slept well; too many nights of Bill’s mechanic hands made for greasy sheets. It seemed that no matter how well he showered, his pillowcase blackened, and his side of the bed turned grey with oil from his hands. On her request, he’d long since stopped touching her while they made love; she hated the gritty feel of his hands on her skin. He worked at the mill in Arcata, fixing machinery. His job was dangerous, but not as dangerous as the boys who went out and cut the trees themselves. Those were the guys that ended up with cracked skulls and brain damage.
Today was Saturday and Bill was working a double. Brad and his friend were sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard, drinking beers they’d stolen from Bill. She didn’t have the energy to stop them. The church potluck was coming up in a few hours and Winny hadn’t started cooking yet. She’d spent the morning doing laundry and most of the day at the typewriter Bill had given to her for Christmas. It was an electric typewriter with a little glowing green screen. The words she typed appeared on the screen first and when she pressed enter, they would punch themselves onto the smooth paper wrapped around the machine’s spool. She had nothing to write, really, but some days she’d try and squeeze something out. In an hour or so she’d written 10 sentences but had only kept half of them. She cut the unremarkable and allowed the rest to be printed onto paper. She was angry in a way, that Bill had not bought her a computer. It showed her how little he knew of the times, but it was also a sign of how cheap he was.
Now, she sat staring into the china cabinet across from the typewriter, projecting the day’s mundane events onto the various pieces of porcelain inside it. She pulled the page from the spool, stuck it in a folder full of similar pages, left the machine on, and headed for the kitchen. Her mobile home was arranged so that you looked into the living room from the breakfast bar in the kitchen. This made the whole place feel bigger; half of the house was basically one big room. The dining room – where she kept the typewriter – was only separated from the living room and the kitchen by a drywall archway. At either side of the house were two bedrooms and the bathroom was down near Brad’s room. All the windows were hung with lace curtains.

Excerpt I from “The Pacific”

She headed up to the master bedroom and got on her treadmill. It used to face the bay windows so she could see the ocean but now it faced the T.V. She switched on CNN and listened to the news. There were more bombings. She changed the channel to find something more innocuous and eventually settled on Wheel of Fortune. Like always, she gradually increased the speed of the tread belt until she was moving along in a light jog. She could hear the boys downstairs in the kitchen cracking cans of coke and rattling the wrapper of something.
As her heart rate climbed she remembered that Peter wouldn’t be back tonight. Since getting his promotion, he stayed down in San Francisco most nights. For a while he had been good. He had called every night to speak to her and to say goodnight to the boys. Now he never called. It wasn’t just Cameron that made him distant. Ultimately, he was not a family man. He had never wanted kids and only assented under her extreme pressure. And then he didn’t think she was a good mother, and Cameron’s loss cemented this. He would never forgive her.
Diane did her usual hour-long work out with a 15 minute cool-down and then she vacuumed. After dinner the kids watched T.V. and she went upstairs to collect herself. She opened the back window and lit a cigarette. A small pile of butts were collecting on the porch roof below. When she had finished smoking she stood at the open window for a long time, watching the dark waves shift along the sand. She could only just make out the roll of the white froth. The cruel vastness of the ocean was a big black canvas, unmoving. The air began to chill and she closed the window. She shut out the sound of the night and the windows filled with lamplight, obscuring the darkness outside.
Back downstairs she set the alarm. She checked that the motion sensor lights were working and put the dog in the garage. In the living room the TV was blaring, the kids were dazed.
“Go to bed,” she said and then, “I love you.”
They got up silently, slumped and tired from a day’s worth of play and moved down the hall toward their rooms.
She woke to a loud slamming noise. The wind had picked up since she first fell asleep and she could hear it whistling through the trees in the gully. She waited for the noise to repeat, but only heard the wind. In the darkness she found her cigarettes and lit one.  Since Peter never came home, she could smoke like this, in bed with the window shut. She wondered when he would ask for a divorce.
It was a noisy night. Under and sometimes over the wind, she could hear the waves blasting, making the cliffs reverberate. She moved toward the window that faced the ocean and opened it. The motion sensor light flicked to outside and she decided to go down. She pushed the stub of her cigarette outside.
On her way to check the alarm she passed the boys room. Their breath was shallow and wispy. Only children breathed that way.
In the dining room she opened the curtain and looked out onto the back porch. Just as she had thought: A wide-eyed raccoon and its litter, four of them altogether. They had knocked the garbage can over.
She couldn’t explain why, but she walked through the house, opened the front door and went out. The raccoons glared at her and scurried off the porch toward the gully. Outside the air was mild, surprising considering the wind. She headed north down the broken road. The houses of her neighbors were completely dark.
At the lowest point of the cliff, she jumped down. The tide was high now; there were only several meters of beach between her and the Pacific. She walked south along the beach, to the point where she had found Cameron’s body. It had been so bloated that she hadn’t even realized it had been him at first.
She brushed her hand across the cliff, picking up debris between her fingertips. Above eye-level lovers had scrolled messages into the soft sediment. She could see the deep cuts above her, but couldn’t make out words in the darkness. The cliff was scored with cracks and wrinkles making an intricate patchwork.

Discrete Statistics are not Raymond Carver

I just started reading “Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life” by Carol Sklenicka and a few things have already struck me as amiss. First of all, it is clear that the author is not particularly interpretive nor creative. The opening line: “Raymond Clevie Carver was born May 25 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon. His parents….” Does this strike anyone else as the opening to a 5th grade book report? Or at its best, a Dickensian format, one with chronological exactitude? I think it’s a boring way to begin. Why not paint a picture of Clatskanie, locate Raymond in a place with a mood?

One would expect her to envoke something of the writing style or tone of Carver’s short stories within her own work. Rather she incessantly dictates useless facts, no doubt under the pretense of “truth”. If there is one thing the modern biographer should know about their format, it’s that the truth does not exist. People read biography for an authentic character, and such a character is created by a reasonable interpretation of a life’s history. Sklenicka tells me, ” Third grade finds Raymond at Jefferson ( now Martin Luther King Jr.) School, five inches taller and fifteen pounds heavier. With occassional lapses in music and public speaking, he’s still making academic progress, but teacher Hazel Sandberg has a few complaints about his behavior.” But what I want to know is how school made Raymond feel. Why can’t she interpret this to mean he found school boring or, he didn’t take it seriously or some other character development she could put together based on the facts of his life. All she has done is prove she did research.  I don’t care how much their house cost and what the mortgage was. I care about the house. I don’t care about the price of the hospital bill on Raymonds delivery either and I don’t see why anyone else would, or why they would think these were facts that painted the picture of a life. I just want to know about the making of a genius here lady! I don’t expect truth, and anyone who does is naive. I expect an authentic fictional account. I can only conclude that the woman doesn’t “know” Carver and furthermore, never really got his books. Her first reference to Carver’s writing describes one of his stories as being about, ” silent, uneasy accomodations to bad situations.” Right. “Bad situations” is a really searing and provocative description…..

More to follow once I’ve read the whole book….

Ahhh New England: The Run-in with Jr. Officer McKlusky

Seamus picked me up from Nanny Job #2 at a little after midnight and we drove through the dirty snow toward home. Heading down main street we got tailed by one of Amesbury’s finest. These are some bored cops with (you can tell my partner is a designer when I say this) a really poor choice of font for their squad cars. He followed us up the hill, obviously looking for some reason to pull us over, and, just as we turned onto our street, flipped on his god damn blue lights and pulled us over. Yeah, it was late and he was probably hoping for a DUI, yeah we were driving in a old pick-up truck with out-of-state plates and yeah, Seamus has a giant beard. I guess we looked suspicious. But we were sober and incidentally this was the second time we’d been pulled over since moving here. Jr. officer McKlusky, (not his real name but it should be, I actually have no idea what his name was) pulled us over because, as he bumbled out, we “have a license plate light out”. Not a headlight. Not a tail light. A license plate light. After disappearing with our registration etc. he returned and pulled the ol’, “I’m going to treat you like a real piece of shit but tell you I’m being nice”.

“Here’s the deal Seamus.” he shifted his tubby body for emphasis,” I could have you arrested right now for illegal operation of a vehicle.” he proceeded, his cabbage patch doll features glinting in his flashlight,”Massachusetts law states that you need to register your vehicle within thirty days of moving here so technically you are driving illegally. You are looking at 500 dollars in fines, but I am going to let you off this time. Think of it as your ‘get out of jail free card’ ” I don’t think Jr. officer McKlusky realized the irony of this statement.

He then informed us that he knew where we lived and that he’d be checking on us in a week.

Jr. Officer McKlusky sauntered over to his car and drove off, his own nanny job complete. I like to think he took his Jr. Officer ass off to Dunkin Donuts, shoved a stale-ish old-fashioned into his baby face, swallowed some pig schwill coffee and patted himself on the back for some nannying well done.

Olive Kitteridge: A Book About Mean Married People

Look Oprah book club readers! Its another Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a small town in Maine with big troubles! The difference between the two novels fitting this description, of course, is that the former (Empire Falls) was actually original and interesting.

There is no denying that Elizabeth Stout has a talent with the written word. That said, this poorly linked short story collection masquerading as a novel is just plan boring. And its not that the book needs more action, it just needs something to distinguish it from the eight bajillion books just like it that I have already read. Sometimes, the lines were so familiar, I actually wondered if I had already read the book.

The major conceit of this book is that all the woman are trapped, predominantly by men. This can only be interesting in this age if you tell us something we didn’t figure out about relationships in well, the 1960s. And Strout doesn’t do this. Olive’s problems with her husband are trite and familiar, while the various problems of the townspeople follow similarly predictable paths. Any weight Olive’s character is given is lost to the choppy style and incongruousness of unrelated stories. She is essentially a mean person that we are supposed to feel sorry for. She is mean to everybody. She is just one mean married lady.

Tangentially, if I have to read one more description of a woman “economically” described by her small breasts….

To add insult to injury, Strout fails to create any setting whatsoever. This small Maine town is by a harbor and the seasons change from time to time, but that is most of what I could glean from the locale. And to be honest, that would have suited me fine if it weren’t for the excessive amount of emphasis placed on the setting and its (un)apparent idiosyncrasies. The “show don’t tell” rule of writing doesn’t seem to have sunk in for Strout. It really says something about the sentiments of the literary world when a book this obvious wins a major award.

And the Results are in…..

I swear to you, test centers want you to be dehydrated. Not only were we allowed no water in the test room, but the air in there was stiflingly dry. There were five other GRE testers in there and one guy who was taking some test I’d never heard of, for which he had to be fingerprinted.

I had to sign a non-disclaimer form so I wont go into the “details” of the test. I got an above average mark in both sections and I will never, ever have to do it again (well, unless I don’t get into a grad school in the next five years at which point my score becomes null and void).

 

GRE VOCAB FINALE: Goin’ for broke.

Tomorrow is the big day and I guess I am getting pretty nervous. Despite my ACCRETION of arcane words, the EXIGENCY is making me CRAVEN. Its been a long time coming for this test and I have run the GAMUT of emotions; bitterness at fear of failure all the way up to a certainty that I will ace it. I was ASSIDUOUS enough to re-teach myself algebra, only to discover I’d forgotten it again before I could apply it to practice tests.

This test is a total racket; ETS is trying to COZEN us all. The whole test is CHICANERY, and GERMANE to this is the fact that so many of my words are defined as “to lie”, “to be dishonest”, ” to trick or hoodwink” to be “habitually dishonest”, to be “fluent in an insincere manner” a “sin or evil act”, of “questionable authority and authenticity” …. I spent an immense amount of time learning all the tricks and techniques and I can tell you: this test makes the SAT look PUERILE.

But it is too soon for ANATHEMA. I’ve been APPRISED of their rules and I am prepared to PROPITIATE them ( this word, which means appease, has been really hard for me to remember for some reason). If I get negative now, I will never make it through the four hours it will take me to complete this damn test. I must be ARTLESS and SAGACIOUS in the test, complete it with ALACRITY and save the ASPERITY for afterward. When it is all over I will drop my VITRIOLIC attitude and be QUIESCENT once again.

You can’t BILK me out of a good score now Mr. GRE.

And for this site? Back to bitter book reviews and flash fiction.