Fifth Saturday Fiction

Portrait of the author
by Susan C. Price

Tristram Shandy’s Marvelous Moebius Band (a short story)

By W.M. Dean

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume – and no farther than to my first day’s life – ’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out…[A]t this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write – It must follow…that the more I write, the more I shall have to write....

–Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

With a whoop and a slap on his desktop, Hank Finn plucked the last page of his story from the palsied grip of his old Remington. Writing “The End” was one of the moments that made storytelling as intoxicating a high as any of those very highs Finn had experienced, including sex, listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, watching the birth of each of his two children by the woman he loved, and his mystical experience at the Los Angeles zoo, where, walking through the aviary, he had felt a surge of the infinite and had known immediately, without thought, that observing one animal was the same as observing one thousand. Each one was a full and valid, infinite experience, and he had known that the wretched little man with the bald head and the broken teeth who was talking to the macaw, indeed the macaw itself, and the radiant twenty-year-old girl whose unholstered breasts were creating neck strain among the men and jealousy among their wives – all of them, and every living creature, perhaps every living cell – contained the world within itself – was the world. Every human being filled the infinite space of the universe. Everyone’s point of view was absolute. Finn’s spine tingled as though he’d been lying on a slab of marble.
    Any moment now, he knew, the ideas would start coming for his next story. They always did. Sometimes they started coming even before he finished the one before. He’d jot them down on scraps of paper. He preferred the backs of junk mail, his children’s school papers, and computer printouts his next-door neighbor, the system analyst, brought home for him. Later he would type the ideas on new paper, adding any fresh thoughts he got as he went along. He had learned that he could get ideas simply by believing he could, by passionately desiring to get them, and then starting to write them down. His arm was a huge fountain pen – he had only to move it across a scrap of mail, and ideas flowed, line by electric line, through its sinews, tendons, and nerves onto the paper. He didn’t ask where they came from, but hurriedly took dictation in his scrawl as awkward as a doctor’s, which he could decipher accurately, if at all, only on the same day he scrawled it. If he waited longer, there were always holes – words he couldn’t read – which were the mouths of canals he would have to impregnate anew.
    Did Beethoven experience the same thing? His scores shimmered, evidence of a lightning intellect that strove to capture the music, music, music in a nervous, leaping notation.
    Finn’s first idea appeared, whap! It had a good feel to it. It was…dialogue. Perhaps a beginning?
    “Hi, Jane…May I come in?”
    “Oh, hi, Bill…What can I—?”
    “May I come in?”
    “Well…all right…Sorry to hesitate. It’s just that my husband’s not home…I’m here all alone and…it’s not very often…I mean, I’m not used to a man visiting me like this…Come on in, I guess…Aren’t you at work today?”
    “I was, Jane, but I came home early. I expected my wife to be home to let me in….”
    “Well, she didn’t come over here….”
    “I wasn’t expecting to find her here, Jane. I thought we could pass the time—”
    “Don’t you have your keys, Bill?”
    “No, I forgot them this morning.”
    Hmm, it had possibilities. The shape of the whole would come later.

Finn must have written about two hundred stories: “domestics” about relations among neighbors, murder mysteries, fantasies, humorous parodies, love stories, even a little pornography (under a pen name). How many story ideas had he had during the years he’d been writing? Probably five or six hundred. He would always get at least two, often three or four ideas for his next story while he was writing the present one or right after he finished it. But sometimes he wouldn’t even pick one of these ideas to develop next; he would return to one he had thought of earlier. He wondered whether he had ever gone on to write each of the two or three or four stories that occurred to him while he was writing a particular story. It was possible, but he didn’t keep such records.
    Anyway, it appeared that sometimes he didn’t get around to writing even one of them. If he’d had say five hundred ideas for stories, then with the two hundred he’d written, that was three hundred he hadn’t written. Hmm, a damned shame, he thought, but it couldn’t be helped and he wouldn’t be bothered by it. Finn was at home in the Platonic world. He saw that if having all these unused ideas for stories was a problem, it was an abstract problem – not a problem that anybody needed to do anything about, even if he could. As he had seen at the Los Angeles Zoo, writing one story was as valid as writing two. Anyway, believing this gave him peace of mind.
    But did he really believe it? He wondered.
    And what would become of Jane and Bill? Finn’s fingers itched to begin writing.
    Bill smiled at Jane, but he didn’t say anything.
    “Can I get you something?” she asked, and blushed. “I mean, would you like a cup of coffee…or a glass of water?”
    Jane, it seemed to Finn, was fantasizing madly about Bill’s unexpected visit. Unconsciously she invested it with a heavy cloak of sexuality. Finn wondered whether Bill had come with similar fantasies, or whether the story would exploit the ironic – and perhaps comic – divergence of their expectations….
    A neuron clicked inside Finn’s brain – another idea was emerging from one of the billions of the brain’s hiding places. He looked frantically about his cluttered desk for an envelope, a math assignment, anything. He pulled out a letter from a savings & loan company announcing that a check for $5,000 was waiting for him at their office, if he’d just come down to sign up for it. Must be a mistake, Finn thought.

There was something weird about the idea pecking at his skull. It might be a Ray Bradbury. He had a category of slightly weird story ideas he called “Ray Bradburies.” Like the one about an old man who takes a job in a bottling company. His job is to spot defective bottles on the conveyor belt before they’re filled with Coca-Cola. He can spot a crack, a chip, or a structural flaw in a bottle merely by being in the presence of the bottle, by intuition. He also has the ability to spot defects in human beings. The old man is working in a bottling company because he has spent three long years on street corners on the lookout for people who had been hurt or wounded. But because he had no power to heal or help them, he himself has suffered all he thinks he can. Bottles don’t require healing. The old man can simply toss defectives onto the scrap pile for recycling. Finn’s heart ached for the old man, who he could see had a long gray beard, so thick it seemed more like a theater prop than real. What would become of him? What was his story? Finn had never written it to find out – he’d written someone else’s story.
    In the scene now staged before his fancy’s eye, Finn saw a woman typing brilliantly fast…She looked killer-serious, murder in her gray eyes, mayhem in the taut musculature of her high cheeks. Her dark hair, lustrous as a madman’s moon, was pulled back into a perfect egg – not even any hair ends were visible. Finn felt a danger and a fascination about this character. She repelled him at the same time she drew him to her. He didn’t want to write about her, but he felt he must.
    He glanced over her shoulder, so to speak, intending to peek at the paper she was typing on, but first he noticed her typewriter – a bright red IBM Correcting Selectric, like Finn himself longed to purchase. Oh my— He now noticed two more Selectrics within the woman’s reach, one bright blue, the other bright green. Each machine held in its rolled fist a sheet of paper. One each sheet were short paragraphs of sentences in quotation marks – dialogue? “‘…,’ he said. ‘...,’ she said.” The sheet in the red Selectric announced the title of a story:

Bad for Your Body
by Rebecca Dodge

Was Rebecca Dodge a female Max Brand, who wrote several stories simultaneously?
    Several of Finn’s ideas for Ray Bradburies had been about writers, but he’d never written any of them. There’s the writer who purchases an ancient typewriter at a pawn shop. It’s a tall, black typewriter whose keys are circles ringed with metal and inlaid with mother-of-pearl – a magical typewriter, as the writer discovers when he strikes the keys. The story that the keys unfurl, word by word, is no story the writer has ever imagined.
    Another writer, who used to write only at night, after a day of delivering mail, changes to early morning writing because he fears he’s wasting his best energies at the post office. At five in the morning he can hardly operate his pencil, but he draws the words as well as he can, and when he reads the story inscribed on his yellow paper (he uses nothing but canary), he recognizes images from his dreams. In the following weeks he teaches himself to waken during his dreams and, without rising, speak them into a tape recorder so as not to disturb his recollections. He learns to re-dream failed stories, with plot or character snags corrected. In three months he quits the post office. By then he himself is posting several large manila envelopes a week.
    A third writer discovers he has a marvelous synesthetic sense – he has shown a story to friends and they report that the words he has written make them hear music, smell fragrances, taste flowers, feel textures. The National Science Foundation offers him a huge grant to write a book about the science of synesthetic writing. Hollywood moviemakers, already harried by television competition, plot to kidnap him before he can bring full-screen, cinemascopic writing to a generation of TV hypnotics and the few remaining moviegoers.
    Finn knew these writers were in his imagination, and yet…Was the world in front of the looking glass more real than the world through the looking glass? He shivered and turned to his old Remington. Rebecca Dodge’s story had to be told. The only question was: Would he tell it, or would she?

Rebecca Dodge typed to the bottom of the page in the red Selectric. In one motion she removed the sheet and fed in another, onto which she typed two lines, then turned off the machine.
    “Damn,” she said, slapping the lid with her open hand. She shoved her leather-upholstered swivel chair away from the typewriter, toward the window. A beam of early-morning sunlight glanced off the emerald on her finger. She had been in her study for almost three hours, since four, without breakfast, but she wasn’t hungry.
    She was too aggravated to be hungry. “Damn and double-damn! Why can’t they leave me alone till I’m finished?” She was only on the second page of “Bad for Your Body” – a psychological study of a minor executive in an international corporation who, in slipping into the clarity of madness (attending a board meeting in his bicycle-riding shorts, chiding the chairman for allowing smokers to light up in the boardroom – “It’s bad for your bodies, boys!”), comes to see the corporation as an insane asylum, where he has been truly crazy to stay for twenty-five years. She was only on page two, but already another seed was germinating in her fecund mind.
    A wizened, white-haired judge sat in his flowing black robes up, up behind his inaccessible oak bench. For three decades now he has tried smut cases, meting out the heaviest penalties allowed by law. He has pored over thousands of stained and moldy pornographic books (both hard and soft core and hard and soft cover), he’s watched hundreds of beaver flicks, blue movies, and sado-masochistic orgies, in all millimeters. He has been a porno witch-hunter from the earliest days of his career, when he already understood the effect of smut on the human mind. He had no doubt that a human mind taking a steady diet of the stuff would inexorably be transformed into a swollen, throbbing phallus or clitoris. Today, sitting high above, the judge is trying a civil case that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with smut…and this black archangel, with a field laborer’s leather glove for a face, is not following the proceedings, he’s not listening to the testimony, he is lost – engrossed – in the latest edition of Hustler magazine.
    Rebecca took all this in. A bit melodramatic, she thought, but perhaps the story could be realized through a Dr. Strangelove sort of black humor.
    “Judith Crist!” She struck her palm with her fist. Yes, of course there was some way to make a plausible story – at least an entertaining story – out of it. That was the trouble, because it was true of every crazy idea she got – no more true of those she made stories from than of those she didn’t. She was torn and taunted because she couldn’t discover a way to make stories from them all. All that possibility going to waste!
    If she could only just have the ideas and let them be, let it go at that. But for years she had struggled with this stupid desire to grasp the whole world, even spending several thousand dollars on useless psychotherapy: groups, depth analysis, primal scream. Still she was driven to find a way to use all the ideas she had, to develop them into stories, novels – even Reader’s Digest fillers!
    Her latest plan wasn’t working. She was writing three stories at the same time – the three stories she had thought of while writing her previous story, about a Lesbian threesome, in the form of a suicide note from one of the women to the second, her rival for possession of the third, whom she has poisoned and must now “rush to join in sleep, before this sleep ends and the next begins.” (Rebecca hoped the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine would snap it up.) In writing all the stories she thought of at the same time, Rebecca had hoped she might have discovered a way to use all of her ideas. She assumed she would think of no more new stories while writing three or four stories than she would have thought of while writing only one of them. But she had written barely five pages of these three stories (she estimated she had thirty or forty pages left to write), and the story of the zealous judge was the third new idea she’d thought of already.
    Maybe the plan would work after all, if she would give it a sporting chance. What if she started right now to write the judge story, and the other two stories…write six stories at the same time? Well, she certainly wasn’t going to buy three more Correcting Selectrics – she couldn’t afford that. She would have to use pencils or double up on the three machines she already had.
    Double up?
    Rebecca removed the sheet from the green machine and slid the paper edge guide all the way to the left. She had known there must be a good reason to pay a hundred dollars extra, or whatever the amount was, for wide carriages. She inserted the sheet behind the platen at the new left edge and laid a second sheet behind it, as far to the right as possible, then spun the platen knob to bring the sheets into typing position. She measured the overlap – about an inch and a half, only a quarter-inch more left margin than she now used….
    “What am I thinking of!” she scolded herself. “What am I thinking!” Rebecca closed her eyes and let her chin drop to her chest. It would never work, it would only get worse, like a cancer. It was like plugging the holes in a dike with her fingers. And what about her backlog?
    For not only was she consumed by the compulsion to use all her future ideas, she was haunted by what she thought of as her backlog – a carefully indexed compilation of about two hundred and fifty story ideas she had recorded since her seventeenth birthday. Fear for her backlog had led her to conceive the bold plan to form a corporation and set up an assembly line of writers to write the stories she described to them. She would have hired, oh, a half-dozen writers, trained them, and set them to work. But because this plan was complex and expensive, even at the cheap rate writers received, Rebecca had first enlisted a business consultant, Abe Heineman and Associates. Unfortunately, Abe found a fatal flaw in her plan. He asked Rebecca how she could communicate a story idea to a writer; she couldn’t just give the writer the title, or the theme, or the names of the murder victim and the suspects, or what magazine she thought would snap it up – wouldn’t she have to outline each story in some detail? Otherwise, even a highly trained writer would be unable to produce a story of the quality readers would expect of a corporation headed by Rebecca Dodge, etc.
    Abe (actually, he was the whole firm – “Associates” was for PR) had been very thorough. He devised a scenario in which Rebecca outlined a few stories, as though for her assembly line. By the time she finished outlining three stories she had thought of eleven more new story ideas. At this point, Rebecca wryly remembered, Abe rented computer time and hired a programmer to create a program to simulate the operation of her proposed corporation. The results were devastating. The program, conservatively assuming a ratio of three new story ideas per story outlined, concluded that, by the time a starting team of five writers had written only ten stories apiece, Rebecca would have had to hire – not to mention train – an additional 295,240 writers to write the new stories she had thought of. Abe told her she would have to forget the backlog.

Rebecca rose and turned to look out the window. It was well past seven o’clock now. She was tired and weak, but though her head was light from not eating, she still wasn’t hungry. Why couldn’t she think of a way to use all of her story ideas? She could think of the ideas – why couldn’t she solve the problem that was tormenting her?
    She left the study. She had to get away from these mocking machines, whose bright colors were becoming ridiculous to her. She had to relax, to brake the incestuous breeding of her imagination. Defiantly she went into her fantasy room, which was entirely paneled with mirrors – all four walls, ceiling, and floor. It was a kaleidoscope turned on itself, whose purpose was to jog her imagination. Perhaps now she could relax here; perhaps the fantasy room would suggest a solution to her problem. She lay down on the floor and turned her head slowly from side to side, looking at the walls on either side, at the ceiling, the floor within the ceiling, at the corners, where all six sides of the room converged and merged and re-emerged and space went on and on and—
    Rebecca tensed – true to their purpose, the self-reflecting reflections almost immediately suggested a story to her. She breathed deeply and tried to relax. She mustn’t fight it – let it come, get through it, entertain the idea (entertain yourself, she thought, and laughed), then get beyond it. Her idea was for a murder mystery in which the victim is one of those writers who shun traditional story values, particularly plot, and whose “stories” are about nothing so much as themselves. Such a writer would, for example, stop in the middle of an action and ask the reader how he or she liked the story. Rebecca’s idea was to write, on one level, a straight murder mystery (with numerous red herrings and at least four suspects – a story to please fans of the traditional detective story) exploiting the irony of a writer who wouldn’t go near a plot being found dead in one. And, on another level, it would be a parody of the victim’s penchant (when he was alive) for writing stories about himself. Rebecca might, she thought, have the first-person narrator (who would be the detective himself) speculate occasionally how the mystery would differ if he altered certain facts. Rebecca smiled. At any rate, she enjoyed the story. And now she did feel relaxed. She thought she might almost sleep. Not fighting it helped. Maybe fighting it had been part of her problem. She closed her eyes but still saw the mirrors. She concentrated on the area, many layers in, where the light gave out and the reflections faded – long, long before they approached infinity....

Rebecca awoke with a start and an ache in her back. The mirror she was looking at she had never seen with her eyes. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She had been looking for a solution outside the story, when it was inside the story all the time.
    She rose and returned to the study. She yanked the two flanking sheets from the green machine, reset the paper edge guide, and inserted a new sheet. The story she was about to write felt like a New Yorker. She took a deep breath, pressed the on/off control, and began to write:

August Möbius’s Strange Loop

The “Strange Loop” phenomenom occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

–Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach:
an Eternal Golden Braid

A seismic tremor of such power rattled the room that Hank Finn stopped typing and grabbed the edges of his chair....
_______________
Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean
The author typed this story almost 38 years ago. He thanks the friend whose copious comments she wrote in the margins of his typescript some year later.

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