Friday Fiction: Unbelievable

 

UNBELIEVABLE

 

     "Well, does anybody have something new to read?" asked Mr. Fleming, his fierce blue eyes flashing in challenge behind his metal-framed glasses.

     The half-dozen or so students gathered in the school library looked around at each other timidly. Even Mike, the star of the Writer's Roundtable, seemed ashamed to be caught short. He did have a story, but he was only halfway through it. It was in no fit state to read. He glanced around, arms crossed, brows drawn, using his disdain of the others to cover his own embarrassment.

     "If nobody has anything, I'll have to read my own stuff," the teacher threatened smugly. "Aren't you kids tired of that by now?"

     The girls in the circle laughed, Julie trilling sycophantically and Mary in what she imagined was wry, world-weary agreement. Phil, leaning back in his uncomfortable library chair, legs stretched out, tossed his overgrown flop of bangs in annoyance. The others stared down at their shoes.

     "Last chance," Fleming said, looking around and drawing the familiar fat manila folder out of his worn leather briefcase. The late afternoon sun seemed to thicken in the somnolent air, dust dancing in the long October beams. Fleming flipped open the folder. Everyone sat back, as if the Angel of Death had passed them by.

     There was the sudden shy cough of a throat being cleared.

     Fleming's head snapped up. The others turned in unbelief. It was Bryan, looking guilty, huddled inside his white plastic coat, shrunk like a turtle in its shell. In his hands he clutched a red spiral notebook.

     "I have a story," he said apologetically, his pale, pimply face blushing under the unfamiliar attention.

     "Well, that's fine, son," said Fleming jovially, closing his folder in deliberation. He seemed to be slowly adjusting to the idea of the quiet young teen actually participating with some writing after all these weeks. Even getting a comment out of him had been like drawing hen's teeth. "It's about time you joined the party. Read us what you got."

     The other students watched Bryan with reserve as he opened the notebook, wondering what sort of writing the introverted weirdo might have produced. Mike especially was irritated. He wished his tag-along younger brother had at least run what he had by him, to avoid throwing shade on his own reputation. He scowled as Bryan turned a few pages, found his place, and began.

     "'Williams' First Mission,'" he announced. He cleared his throat again, and read a little louder. "'Samuel Frobisher looked at the document before him and frowned. His chin sank deeper and deeper into the folds of his wattles, until he looked like a tortoise being offered a dubious piece of lettuce.'"

     The group listened, judgmentally at first, then with growing interest, and at last in enjoyment. Most of what the high schoolers wrote was thinly veiled autobiography, explanations of how their stand-in characters were tragically misjudged or had their unlikely triumph. This was just a story, an out-and-out fantastical adventure, made to amuse, not justify. As a result they were lightly engrossed in the unrolling of the short tale, and came down with a surprised bump as Bryan read the last words.

     "'Frobisher laughed silently to himself and drained off the last drops of his drink. He flipped through the pages of the report, labeled a new folder, tucked it inside and stuck it away in the back of a drawer. It traveled through the system, shuffled and misfiled and unregarded, for the next two hundred years.'" He closed the notebook and looked around the ring nervously.

     There was silence for a tenuous instant, then Phil, of all people, started clapping. Not his usual slow sarcastic clap, either. It was just fast enough to show genuine, if qualified, enthusiasm.

     "Way to go, you nutty old Ber-man," he said approvingly.

     The others joined in with scattered applause, murmuring their appreciation. Even Mr. Fleming, while trying to keep up a judicious mentor's façade, was obviously pleased.

     "Well, that was pretty good," he said, "I have a few notes for you, but on the whole it was a fine first effort. On the next draft, though, I want you to pay more attention to..."

     He went on, giving his recommendations, with Bryan making an attempt to listen earnestly and take notes, but in a plainly pleased daze. Only Mike, who had joined in the applause a fraction after all the rest, scrutinized him with dubious, withholding eyes.

     After the Roundtable session had broken up, the brothers headed out for the parking lot. Mike simmered in silence for a while, but as they skimmed around the bushes by the Drama building, his questions finally boiled out.

     "When did you write that?" he asked quietly. There was accusation in his tone.

     Bryan flinched a little under the sudden attack, glancing at Mike in alarm, then turned away and answered, defensively defiant.

     "I did it last night."

     "In one night?" Mike scoffed. "I saw your notebook from the side. There wasn't a correction or even a scratch-out in the whole thing! Did you copy it from one of your stupid fantasy books?"

     "No!" Bryan quickened his pace and tightened the clutch he had on the sliding pyramid of textbooks that he always carried with him. "I mean, I got the basic idea, I guess, out of that UFO magazine you have, and I suppose the atmosphere is a little Rip Van Winkley, but when I sat down to write something, the story just came to me."

     "Just like that?" Mike asked, skeptically.

     "Just like that. I wanted to show you and ask your opinion, but there wasn't time."

     The gravel crunched quietly under their feet. In the parking lot they reached Mike's blue Chevy Impala. He opened the driver's side and flipped the unlock button. He stopped Bryan before he could get in.

     "You were lucky, Pigeon-pop. That could have been very embarrassing. Next time, you show me first." They slid into the car. He added, almost to himself, as he started the engine, "It was probably a freak, anyway. Good stories don't fall out of the sky like that."

     "Yes, Mike," Bryan said meekly, sullenly. They drove in silence the rest of the way home, the gawky teen's nose in a book, his brother's eyes angrily on the road ahead.

 

     The next week, however, saw another tale from the red spiral notebook. It was slightly longer, and featured a family of witches and serial killers, entitled "Edgar". This time the story was passed under Mike's editorial eye. He tried to tone down some of the Charles Addams' baroque excesses and flatten out the colorful period adjectives that bloomed throughout like lilies. Despite his efforts, he found that, except for some polishing in the dialogue, very few of his suggestions made it through the reading.

     " '... Before us the endless highway stretched into darkness. We were on the road again, in search of fresh fields and pastures new.'" Bryan concluded the story and looked up, flushed, at his audience.

     There was almost instant applause, and some laughter. Most had recognized their smarmy classmate Chad in the character of the hapless victim Chaz.

     "Pretty Gothic," Fleming commented, with a hint of a smile. "Lot of Poe in there, Bryan."

     "It's almost a pastiche," Mike said, shifting in his chair. He tried to sound objective, but there was a flat tightness in his voice that hinted at a deeper disapproval. "Too many clichés, Brer. I warned you."

     "Oh, I don't know about pastiche," said Fleming indulgently, swatting the objection aside. "Parody, maybe, at the most. Good-hearted parody, at that. Cares for the genre, but sees its foibles."

     "I was thinking of it as a kind of experiment in nostalgic updating," Bryan said, almost inaudible, swallowing his words. When he was reading, his voice had been clear and precise. "See if all that Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft stuff could still fly today."

     "I liked it," Mary said. Her waif-like, plain features smiled happily. "It was a lot of fun. I think you might be able to get it published, just as it stands."

     "Thanks." Bryan smiled shyly at her. Mike looked back and forth at the two of them, puzzled and wary.

     "What about you?" Mr. Fleming broke in. Mike started a bit and looked up at the teacher. "Have you got that story you were working on ready yet?"

     "Yeah," Mike grimaced. He tried to make his voice as flat and serious as Hemingway's prose. He pulled out his yellow legal pad. The writing was patchy with furious cancellations and looped insertions indicated by pointing arrows. "It's not a lot of kid's stuff, but here it is." He settled back and hooded his eyes. "'The Calf'," he announced, and started to read.

Notes:

The picture is the 1980 Arena staff, in charge of the school publication of poetry and prose. Most of the people mentioned in the story are there. I'm the dybbuk with the wry mustache grinning in the left-side back row.

The major exercise was to consider what it might have been like if I had started writing my stories back in high school; an impossible supposition, of course, as I had not had the experiences that led me to write them. Quite unbelievable. So they just magically drop out of my brain to my own astonishment. Much of it is told from the point of view of my brother Mike, who, as usual, I always imagine as being angry, which is surely unjust. But that's how it came.

The minor exercise was to as close as possible recreate the time and atmosphere. My plastic jacket, Mike's Impala, the people we knew, the library circle. When we were all young and alive. Just a kind of hint about Mary McCarthy. I always rather thought of her as ... possible. 

I never did reach any conclusion or denouement or climax. But there it is.