Kip Manley's Blog, page 6

Frail (Act IV)

“Leo, dammit,” says Jessie, hands up, blocking his way, and “Oh for pity’s sake,” he says, “it’s my fucking office.” In his blue and brown striped pants and a shirt of creamy gold, open at the throat, a very pointed pair of Persian slippers on his feet.

“She isn’t done,” says Jessie. The room behind her empty but for a big flat wooden desk on four stout legs and a shoulder-high rack on casters hung with dresses in colors that come from flames and dawns, sunstruck bricks, and leaves, just before they fall. A song is playing softly, guitar and piano and a big rubbery bass, on the black Fellini sails, tattered rags that hangs on nails reminds me. A woman in a navy pantsuit’s bent over at an awkward angle, tugging at a zipper in the back of a severely simple gown the color of old bone. Jo’s wriggling her shoulders from the straps, letting the front of it peel away from her chest. “What’s to do?” says the Duke. “That looks fantastic. Like whatshername. With the hair.” He diddles his fingers in front of his face. Jo shoots a look at the Duke, an arm across her breasts. The song’s soaring into a chorus, she had one long pair of eyes, she had one long pair of eyes between her. “Real nineteen-thirties Hollywood glamor thing,” the Duke’s saying.

“There’s a jacket, a bolero jacket with that one,” says the woman in the pantsuit, tugging the gown over Jo’s hips.

“So why are we still talking about this?” says the Duke. “Karen, thanks, I’ll have Sweetloaf run the rest back in a bit, now, if you don’t mind? I need to talk to Jo here, alone.”

Newport News

Work proceeds apace: I have reached the part of the draft of the 46th novelette where I can loop back to finish the unfinished draft of the 45th novelette, and when that’s done I can skip ahead to what of the 46th novelette follows immediately thereafter to write that down and then, finally, settle back to finish what’s left of them both. And then? Revision, and polish, and cut to fit, and to press; and then, the third season will finally have begun.

Meanwhile: might I draw your attention to an avenue of support, for the city? There’s Patreon, for those who favor the tried and true, more commercial end of the market, but also Comradery, for the scrappy upstart end—

Frail (Act III)

“Gentlemen!” bellows the Duke, and he pounds the hood of the car. The muted conversations, the laughter from the big man in the bulky sweater, all of it rumbles away to stillness. “Thanks,” he says. Maybe ten of them in the little parking lot to the side of the big brick temple, steaming cups in their hands, here and there foil-wrapped burritos, a paper boat loaded with quesadilla. Paper bags, ripped sauce packets, shreds of foil scattered over the hood of the reddish-brown car. “You all know Jo Maguire.” The Duke in his camelhair coat and a snap brim tan fedora, Jo beside him in her black leather reefer jacket, her wine-red hair bright in the thin-stretched morning light, a cigarette smoking wanly in her hand. “Jo, here’s, well, some of the boys. Anybody know where’s the Shrieve?”

“Milwaukie,” says the one in the peach and blue check jacket. The one in the long black coat says, “The Couve.” The Duke shrugs. “Busy man. The Cater,” pointing to the check jacket, “the Mason,” the big man in the sweater beside him. “Stirrup,” is the man in the brick-colored car coat, “the Kern,” a man in a black jumpsuit a-dangle with pouches and loops, “the Harper,” a big blond beard and a sheepskin jacket, “the Shootist,” the man in the long black coat, who tips his pale grey hat and says, “Pleasure to see you up and about, miss.” The Duke’s moved on to a man in a dark green work jacket. “The Axle,” he says, “and that’s the Spadone,” a man in a brown and black ski jacket, a grimy white apron stretched over his belly. “Don’t listen to a word he says–”

“Yeah, boss, fuck you too,” says the Spadone.

Frail (Act II)

A seamless sky grey-white floats over an ocean milky green like well-worn jade, the yellow white sand rippled, wind-swept, empty. The big picture window specked with dead raindrops. She sits in a recliner angled back, staring out at it all, legs wrapped in a rug made from rags in colors from old magazines. A cardigan buttoned up to her chin, her head leaned against the heavy shawl collar. Every now and then she closes her eyes as if she has finally fallen asleep, but sooner, later, they blink open again, she shifts a little in the recliner, folds her arms about herself more tightly, tucks her hands back under her elbows, or under the rug, stares out at the ocean through mud-colored eyes.

A huge figure of a man comes into the airy little room, soft blue denim shirt and a moleskin vest, his face a couple of dark eyes, a daub of forehead in an explosion of wiry hair all grey and peppery black and coiling sprigs and shoots of white. In one hand a thick yellow mug that he sets steaming on the tray table by the recliner. His other’s not a hand but a hand-shape, cast in bronze and beaten with whorls of puckered dots. Standing there a moment he watches her as she does not lift a hand for the tea, and then with something like a shrug he turns to walk away.

“Wish we could open the window,” she says.

He stops there by the low shelf buried under a great bouquet of chrysanthemums, heavy heads of yellow and gold and bronzey orange. “Yis builden,” he says, a roughly woven voice, “it’d fall. Yon light’s’ll can be mannered.”

Frail (Act I)

One eye brown as a forest floor, one eye piercing cloudless blue, both blinking thickly, heavy-lidded. Pinkish orange hair crisply stiff crackles against the pillow as he looks to one side, then the other. Bars, a rack of equipment, digital numbers brightly fuzzy in the dim light. Tubing. A yellow catheter taped to the back his hand. More tubing up along his neck, his cheek, feeding into his nostrils. Beige sheets, a fuzzy blue blanket rumpled about his hips. “Hey,” says somebody, off over that way. “Limeade. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“What,” he says in a voice scratched thin. “Did you call me.” Smacking chapped lips, licking them.

“Oh, hey,” says a skinny man in pale pink scrubs, his hair a fuzzy bush of tightly kinked black curls. “Nickname. Wasn’t thinking.” Peering at the rack of equipment, checking the yellow catheter with sure and careful hands. Shaking out the blankets. “But what did you call me,” says the man in the bed.

“They brought you over from Hooper a bit ago. Said you were ranting and raving before you passed out, lime to the lemon, lemon to the lime, lime soda. You remember any of that?”

“Limeade,” says the man in the bed.

“Nickname,” says the nurse. “Like I say. Had to have something to call you.”

Frail (Opening)

Standing there in the middle of the intersection a white paper sack in one hand his other shoving long dark hair a thin curtain from before his eyes frowning “Hey?” he says, soft and deep. A growl of engine an orange car lurid in the dim light swerves around him but he doesn’t look away after it. He doesn’t look up the street where it came from at the big man in a black suit walking at a fast clip up to the corner and around it. He’s looking along the other street, at the man in the long dark skirt, at the long straight sword in his hand, at the woman in the short white parka he’s pushing ahead of him. At the body they’ve left crumpled on the pavement. “Hey?” he says again. The man in the skirt, the woman in the parka, neither of them stopping or turning or noticing at all as grunting, sobbing, they make their way to the corner and around it and they’re gone.

“Jo?” says the man still standing there in the middle of the intersection. He’s wearing a black down vest over a black T-shirt. His arms are bare. The T-shirt says Ted Kord & Maude in white letters. The body crumpled on the pavement one leg kicked to one side asprawl the other folded up under one arm jackknifed to the side hand over belly fingers adangle the other upflung beside the canted head one eye staring whitely up at nothing. He steps closer, closer still, and a siren somewhere blocks away whoops up into stuttering bleeps and stops with a strangled blurt. The stoplight in the intersection behind him clicking and all the blood about the body’s lit up yellow and orange, gold. He stops short. “Jo?” he says, again. The stoplight clicks, clacks, the blood lost again in all the red and black.

Things to keep in mind (The secret of point of view)

This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.

Mayhem (Closing)

The sound of bottles clinking in the distance. Ysabel tips back her head the hood of her parka slumping. She doesn’t so much blow the smoke from her mouth as let it drift, tugged back as she walks on down the sidewalk. A little parking lot beside them before a pale building that says West Bearing & Parts over dark awnings. She hands the glowing cigarette to Jo, who says, “Feeling better?”

Ysabel shrugs, nods, blows the last of the smoke from her mouth. “How do you feel? Besting the Chariot, two for two?”

Looking down the empty street Jo takes a drag and shrugs. “Does that one even count?” she says, and they cross, against the light.

“You touched steel, this time,” says Ysabel. The corner before them blocked with flimsy orange fencing and a sign that says Construction Sidewalk Closed by City Permit, and up and up behind the fence a thicket of naked girders and beams. They jog across to the opposite corner as a red hand flashes, stop, stop, stop. Jo says, “Do you think he’s right, about the Duke?”

“Do you think he’s right about me?” says Ysabel. A sleekly low-slung chair isolated under a spotlight in the store window behind her.

“I don’t know,” says Jo. “What’s with the cramps?”

“I just needed fresh air, and a walk. I told you. I feel so much better now.” As Jo glaring turns to walk on, Ysabel grabs her arm, pulls her back. “I did, I really did see what will be, Jo. I saw myself as Queen. I saw you and your sword at my side.”

Mayhem (Act IV)

A long and narrow flight of stairs angles down from the grey pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks. A wide path heads off away along the riverbank, a branch of it there floating on pontoons, the snarling lanes of stalled traffic on the freeway overpass alongside it and above. Another path heads down to the dark bulk of the bridge, the bottom deck of it low over the water, railroad tracks and a footpath under an upper deck busy with cars, busses, a truck, a MAX train rumbling away toward the towers of downtown, lit up against the red-black sky. “Where do we,” says Ysabel, “Jo, how do we,” as they turn about at the base of those stairs. “How are we going to lose him?”

“I don’t know?” says Jo, shrugging the duffel back up on her shoulder. “I thought there’d be more people. There’s usually more people. If we,” pointing, “just head over the bridge–”

“He’d see us,” says Ysabel wincing, an arm about her belly. “All the way across he could see–”

“Are you okay?” says Jo, and Ysabel shakes her head quickly, and “What is it?” says Jo, and Ysabel shakes her head again. Jo takes her free hand. “It’s the most direct way home. You want to go back up and catch a bus or a train? It’d be no better,” pointing down the riverbank, “he could see us all the way along there, too, unless you want to squat under those bushes and hope he doesn’t come down looking. Hell, maybe he’s just on his way to Mississippi or something–”

“Princess!” cries Roland at the top of that flight of stairs, silver piping shining in the dusky streetlight.

Mayhem (Act III)

An apple peeled and cored and split into wedges on a plain white paper plate, the peel of it in one long ragged strand looped on the rug. A fat red candle slumped in on itself on another paper plate, guttering in a pool of melted wax. A black and silver matchbox that says Boxxes in angular slashes of letters about a stylized eye. Olive pits with bits of flesh still clinging, two cheese rinds black and pale red wax, a torn heel of crusty bread. Dregs of dark red wine in a couple of juice glasses, one printed with a cartoon bear in a spacesuit, one a frog in Lincoln scarlet, holding a bow. Over the scratchy hiss of needle on vinyl from some hidden corner a chorus of woodwinds lofts hauntingly simple notes atop gently giguing strings. By the candle a threadbare little rabbit on a leash of string noses a couple of empty yellowed gel caps. “An O?” says the woman sitting on the rug. She scoops the rabbit into her crazy-quilted lap, skirts lapping skirts in wool and watered silk and taffeta and corduroy, her legs in mismatched socks splayed among the paper plates and crumbs. “None for you, Jasper,” she says. Sitting back against a baroquely plump sofa, her hair rustling, her hair loose about her shoulders, tumbling in coils and curls down over her grubby orange rain shell, her hair pooling in slippery hanks along the rug and the bare floor. The woman curled in a corner of the sofa behind her says, “Q,” as she takes up handfuls of that hair in rhythmic, rolling strokes, and little puffs of light spark and eddy to settle again. She wears a baggy sweater the color of flour, and on the sofa beside her a floppy black hat beside a confetti-colored patchwork cap.

“Q?” The woman on the floor leans forward, tugging her hair free in a tumble of light. “There’s no little thingie.” Peering at the loop of apple peel. “Is that a descender? The little thingie?”