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It wouldn’t be easy to pin down either the matter or the style of all my novels.
The matter is in each one different. One might say that some of it is autobiographical, but that holds only for Crazy Were We in the Head, and even there, few of my characters are based on real persons: the descriptions of Onkel Abe Hamm, for example, are clearly of my father’s eccentric uncle. One might say that much of my writing concerns matters religious, and here I would plead guilty. Everything from Crazy to Just Another Dead White Male to The Church of the Comic Spirit to Pope Dun the Incredible to Sacred Books & Sky Hooks shows the influence of my days as a professor of comparative religion. Dancing Over the Rays of Light is something of an exception, though the main character’s search for his true self could be said to be a pilgrimage.
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Outside the tent. Abraham, still ninety-nine, sits in the shade. A one-humped camel is tethered nearby.
Narrator’s Voice:Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. And Abraham sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. Abraham closes his eyes and begins to snooze. And dream. A desert well. Abraham and his thirteen-year-old son sit in a pair of lounge chairs beside a well, fishing. The son feels a tug on his pole. He yanks and is soon fighting the fish he has just hooked. He slowly reels it in, while Abraham prepares a net to retrieve it. They finally land an octopus. A baseball diamond in a desert pasture. Abraham sits behind the home dugout with a camcorder, pointing it at the action on the field. Abraham’s son, dressed in a Camel League uniform with the nickname “He-Asses,” is at the plate, pointing with his bat, like Babe Ruth, at a distant target. The pitcher, wearing a uniform bearing the nickname “Librarians,” pitches; the son hits the ball four hundred feet, scattering a herd of sheep. Abraham bounds onto the field and records his son rounding the bases. The saloon. Evening. Abraham’s young son and a thirteen-year-old girl sit at a table, drinking goat milk. The two gaze intently at each other. They stand. They walk upstairs, his arm around her. They disappear into an upstairs bedroom. A moment later, a cap gun rings out. I had been brought up not to believe in ghosts. Uncle Edgar made himself very clear on that point. You couldn’t be a Bible-believing Christian and still believe in ghosts, he said, with of course the one exception, the Holy Ghost, who was in a class by Himself.
But when it came to a choice between the theories of Uncle Edgar or Snake, I always tended to go with Snake. Sitting there on the motel bed sifting through those old books and pictures and the family history, I became more and more convinced of the existence of ghosts. In fact by ten o’clock I had come to the conclusion that a world without ghosts wouldn’t be much of a world. Without ghosts you wouldn’t have a past, and without a past, what would be the point of going forward? Another thing I’d been informed on good authority was that God has a plan for the world; otherwise, why would He have bothered to create it? And why would He have bothered to create us if He didn’t have a plan for each and every person? So isn’t our own purpose in life to discover His individually-tailored plan for us and then get to work on implementing it? “QED!” said Uncle Edgar triumphantly when he had finished this line of thought, “QED!” Just after I finished Brodie’s chapter on Joseph’s final departure from Kirtland, my cell belted out the first bar of the National Anthem. Hoping but no longer expecting it would be Alcina, I answered.
“Tonight. Same place. Eight,” a female voice said softly and hung up. That night at eight I was sitting at my small table in the Heretic Lounge when Alcina entered, wearing a dark brown wig and dark glasses and carrying a posh purse instead of her laptop. Looking around furtively, she slithered into the seat across from me and admonished me for looking at her “like that.” “It’s me,” she said in a low voice. “Let’s keep it quiet.” Just as I was preparing to insert a quip into the conversation, the barmaid appeared and tapped a pencil on my ready tab. “Two Latter Days,” I ordered. “That’s all?” the lady wanted to know. “That’s it,” I said and, as she left, turned to Alcina. “Maybe we should go over to my place.” Before she could answer, I wrote down my address, slipped it to her across the table under a napkin, got up, and left for home. The first obstacle to a successful fulfillment of my calling is as simple to state as it is difficult to surmount: I have no long-term memory. How can an aspiring novelist hope to perform his lofty duty if his experience is limited to a single week? Does he not need what the incomparable Marcel Proust, by all accounts one of the main practitioners of the modern novel, has called “the vast structure of recollection” on which to draw?
Do not suppose that my thoughts on this conundrum led me into the pit of dejection. On the contrary: they aroused in me a sense of the absurdity of my circumstance, a sense that expressed itself in the slight, self-deprecating chuckle I had come to regard as my most endearing trait. They also rekindled a memory of my all-too-brief relationship with a young but kindred spirit. I speak, naturally, of Professor Chlöe Calloway. “I thought Winnebago engines lasted forever?”
He was standing at the bow of his stranded bark, at the mercy of ancient Milo. Mildred, after locating Milo, had gone on home in her own cloud of smoke. “Oh they do,” came Milo’s drawl from under the hood. “Problem is, this ain’t no Winnebago engine. Looks like they took out the original and put a replacement in. This here looks somethin’ like one a’ them Phantom engines.” “Phantom engines?” “The kind they used to put in lawn mowers.” “Lawn mowers?” “Ridin’ lawn mowers,” explained Milo, coming up for air. “Ain’t as bad as it sounds.” There was a long silence. Ed finally asked, “So, where do we go from here?” “My advice to ya would be, take it back to town an’ try ’n’ getcher money back.” “It’ll make it back to Kirkland okay?” “That’d be my guess.” “Think it’d make it to the West Coast?” he ventured. “Lemme put it to ya this way, Mr. B,” said Milo, wiping the grease off his face with a red handkerchief. “Ya gotta helluva lot better chance a’ gettin’ to the West Coast by pushin’ it than by countin’ on this here piece a’ crap.” Abram: Come right in, sir, come right on in.
God comes in and sits down at the table. Abram: Getcha a glass of Mogen David, sir? . . . Oh I forgot, you don’t drink. God: Now that you mention it, I think I will have an earthen pot of the stuff . . . just to celebrate the deal. Abram retrieves a bottle and mugs. The bottle reads “Christian Brothers.” He pours two drinks and hands one to God. Abram: Here you go, sir. He joins God at the table. God: (Sniffing) Hey, this smells like Christian Brothers! Abram: (To himself) Ohmigod, wrong bottle. (To God) You must have a cold, sir. (Sniffing) It smells okay to me. God: Hmmm. I could have sworn . . . Abram: (Laughing nervously) I mean, what would I be doing with a bottle of Christian Brothers? God: (Chuckling) Yeah, I guess the old nose just ain’t what it used to be . . . Well, here’s to our covenant. (Offering a toast) Cheers. Abram: (Clinking God’s mug) Cheers. God takes a sip. God: Funny, but it tastes like Christian Brothers. Abram: I wouldn’t know. Never tried the stuff. God: Of course I’m just going by hearsay. Abram: Of course. I awoke to find myself spread-eagled on a floor.
I looked up and saw a set of stairs leading to an open trap door. I could see the outline of what appeared to be an attic.After giving the matter some heavy thought, I concluded that I must have fallen out of it. My mind went back to the old Hamm attic . . . the ghosts . . . Snake. Snake! I felt a football-sized grin expanding across my face.This sug- gested to me that I must be okay.To check this hypothesis, I took an inventory of my body parts. Everything appeared to be in working order. I gave myself a short quiz—name, address, Social Security number, occupation, present location—which I passed with distinction, the only sticking point being my present location. I sat up and looked around. I was in a room with a few pieces of trashy furniture . . . drug paraphernalia . . . decadent magazines.There was a dent in the wall.This all looked dimly familiar. And nearby,like an island in the sea of dross and dreck, there was a scattering of reading material and photos. Oh yes, I finally remembered: the box and its long-forgotten treasures—a couple of books, lots of pictures, several empty beer bottles, and there, at my feet, a copy of the family history.The only things left of Inverness of yore.The ghosts of my past. But everything was a jumbled mess. I couldn’t help thinking: This is like life. Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844), a treasure hunter reputed to have had visions, or “revelations,” founded the Latter-day Saints movement in Western New York after claiming to have been led by an angel introducing himself as Moroni to some gold plates in the Hill Cumorah and translating them into what he called the Book of Mormon. This sacred book contains the story of how members of the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel had sailed across the Pacific to ancient America and had become the New World’s aboriginal Indians; after Jesus was resurrected, he had revealed himself to some of them. Using the Book of Mormon as a work that both embraced and superseded the Christian Bible, Smith had established the Church of Christ, which was later renamed several times until it eventually became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had moved this church from place to place during his lifetime—Ohio, Missouri, and finally Illinois—creating small cities and large temples during his wanderings. Along the way Smith had a revelation that instructed him to introduce the practice of polygamy into the church; he himself married more than eighty women. Rumors of this practice among the Gentiles increased an already strong animosity, which led to the persecution of Joseph and his followers. He and his brother, Hyrum, were finally assassinated in the Carthage, Illinois jail, near Nauvoo, the last city Joseph ever built.
As for the primary details regarding my self, the facts are these: that I am an inmate of one Heartland Retirement Center; that I have a real past, as is evidenced by the fact that I have encountered people who appear to know me; that my name is Barney; that I am enrolled in a short course on yoga, taught by Professor Chlöe Calloway, a lecturer at Heartland College and with whom I may once have had an af____; and that yoga promises to be the vehicle for healing my amnesia and discovering my Real Self.
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PaulPaul Enns Wiebe perpetually asks himself, "What do I want to write when I grow up?" Archives
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