Eulogies and Epitaphs
Here is a story I submitted to my professor at the community college I attended. He taught a writing class and had tenured at Stanford University, so I felt he knew quite a bit about writing. When he returned my story marked up just a bit in red ink, he wrote:
“This is the best short story I’ve read from a student in thirty years. Scratch that! This is the best short story I’ve read in thirty years.” (Paraphrased)
Well, I just KNEW I was going to get it published and some big magazine, right?
Wrong.
Led me to believe that he was either mistaken, or you have to know people to get into any professional magazine—or both. Either way, here it is:
Note: I apologize for the few swear words. I hadn’t read the story in over a decade and had forgotten they were there.
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Eulogies and Epitaphs
Some things are sweeter than honey, more luscious than life, and they come in the form of dreams. At any moment someone might walk through the door and enter your life, someone that doesn’t even exist but on paper, and that someone has the power to change your life.
Such was the case when Fred entered the diner at exactly six o’clock on a Wednesday morning. He didn’t exist except on paper, from a story I’d written for class. The instructor had us set a fictional scene in which we’d meet our character at a diner, talk things over with him and then write it. The thing was this was a dream, the kind of dream in which the things that make absolutely no sense in reality make perfect sense in the dream, like dancing rainbows or flying pigs. Sometimes life’s best lessons come in unconscious absurdity, because that is the only time we let our guard down long enough to swallow truth’s jagged little pill.
I knew who he was immediately from the lines on his face. Each wrinkle told a morose story, a sad tale of never having belonged anywhere. I’d created him, but while sitting at the booth near the window, I felt that I had it all wrong; maybe in some measure he had created me. And then I had to ask myself, do we create our fictional characters or do they create us? Does reality pour forth from books and novels, or do we pump emotional truth into our fiction? And does the best fiction have some effect on reality, such as the internet and cell phones having first existed in the form of the written word.
Our eyes met and he knew exactly who I was. I could tell by the slight smile, the illumination filling his rheumy eyes. He ambled precariously over to my table, and he waved me back down when I tried to stand. I was uncomfortable because I’d never met one of my fictional characters before. What was I supposed to say? Thanks for agreeing to this interview? How the hell would we pull this off?
He sat down and the waitress appeared, like one of those actresses off that seventies television program. Flo was her name. Her yellow uniform contrasted against the beige walls, and she held a green pad of paper.
“Coffee,” Fred said. “Black.”
“Just the way I like it, too,” I said.
Fred smiled as if he knew a secret, and maybe he did. The unease I felt increased, as if something were sliding up the back of my spine, a chill or slithering shadows. I looked behind me but only saw the backside of the waitress as she walked back to the kitchen with our order.
This interview was happening too fast. It was too life-like, less of a dream, which made it disconcerting. If this was a dream, then why did Fred already have a cup of coffee before him? Why was the spoon he was using to swirl ice around in his coffee clang loud like the tines of bells?
“The ice cools it down enough—”
“—I know,” I interrupted. “You can’t drink it when it’s hot.”
Like me, I thought, as I realized a cup of coffee was before me and I was doing the same cooling measure Fred was, stirring cubes of ice from my water glass into the thick liquid. The scent of caffeine filled the air, mingling with the clank of sterling silver on ceramic glass. The waitress’s perfume lingered like the seventies TV show, almost forgotten but still there just the same. The entire setting seemed dated, running backwards in time.
“Perfect place for an interview,” Fred said.
“Yeah,” I said, without conviction. “Nice… décor.”
Fred chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“The fact that you killed me in your story, yet here I am. Here we are.”
The waitress took our coffee cups away, and I realized that she was part of the dream, like a looping event, constantly refilling our cups and taking them away, and us barely getting to sip the hot liquid before she took it away or brought fresh coffee.
A bit weird, but I could get used to that, because this was one of those dreams that occurred halfway between sleep and consciousness. I felt the pressure of the pillow behind my head, heard my wife snoring next to me, so I knew I was asleep. But a part of me was awake, in this semi-liquid state of quasi-consciousness, locked partway between being fully awake and completely asleep, a realm of dreams in which anything could happen, where just enough reality poured in like cement, until sounds and colors hardened with a vividness that life never possessed.
I ignored my wife’s snores and they dissipated into the sound of a large semi tractor trailer rumbling down the road… going… going, gone—and all that was left now was Fred sitting across from me, trying to take a sip of his coffee before the waitress returned in this dream that was not a dream.
“Here she comes now,” I said.
“Better hurry up and take a sip,” Fred said.
“Why can’t she just leave us alone?”
“It’s part of the reason we’re here, son.”
I raised my eyebrows and almost laughed at my quizzical reflection in the window’s reflection beside Fred’s head. Fred grinned as if he understood exactly where I was coming from. He reached for his coffee mug but the waitress removed it before contact.
“Damn it all to hell,” he said. “Just like life. You think you’re going to get a little moment of peace and rest, then here comes life.”
“Here comes life,” I repeated, writing it down, wondering where the notebook and pen had come from. “So… the waitress represents life like a metaphor—”
“It’s best if you don’t try to understand it right now, son.” Fred took a sip of the coffee the waitress had just set down, enjoying it immensely from the expression on his face. “Just write it all out, let it flow… like a story or the drip, drip, drip of percolating coffee.”
He laughed at his own joke. Or was his humor a metaphor, too?
I was beginning to understand that this was as much an interview with myself as it was with my character. In that semi-conscious state I wondered what time it was, realizing I had to get up and off to school by a certain time—and had I set my clock the night before?—and I began to worry.
When I looked at the wall clock it read six o’clock. “That’s impossible.”
“What is?” Fred followed my gaze and read the clock. “I stopped it.”
“What?” I laughed, nervous. “You stopped the clock? Or you stopped time?”
Suddenly the noises in the diner intensified: the clanging of Fred’s spoon on the side of the ceramic cup, the same beige as the drab walls; the conversations of other patrons filling the room; the sizzle of eggs and bacon from the open window revealing the kitchen. And such wonderful scents! I became hungry, my stomach growling as I thought of hot buttered rolls and thick, rich coffee. The tempting goodness of syrup licked the air, contrasting with the bitter twang of coffee Flo had just set down before me.
“Such is life,” I said, feeling my rumbling belly and realizing that no matter how much I ate or drank, I would never be satisfied, not for long.
“You’re catching on, son.”
“In my story you never fit in, never belonged to anyone or anywhere,” I cut in, intending to take control of the interview. That was the number one rule: never let the interviewee control the interview.
“How do you know it’s your story?” Fred asked.
“What?” I was about to say something that was on the tip of my tongue, like peripheral memory, almost a tangible thought, an almost-question. “What are you talking about, Fred?”
“Don’t you think it’s my story?” Fred asked. “After all, you’re not in the story. You don’t appear once. But I do.” Fred brushed aside a wisp of gray hair that had fallen down his brow. “So shouldn’t we say it’s my story?”
“Okay, YOUR story.” My words came fast and clipped, angry because already I was losing control of the interview with a person that didn’t exist. “Whatever.”
I looked at the clock and it read a quarter after six. But as I watched, the minute hand slid backwards until it rested on the twelve. I was locked between wakefulness and sleep, where anything could happen and often did. Flo came back with another round of coffee. This time I was ready, having gotten used to my strange surroundings, and I drank as I could before she took it away again.
“Now you’re learning. You’ve got to breathe it in when it’s there, and be content when it’s not.”
“About your story…” I said, trying to take control again. “You never fit in anywhere in your story.”
“I didn’t write that,” Fred said. “You did.”
“But it’s your story.”
“How do you know it’s not your story, son?”
“Because I’m not in it. That’s what you said, remember?”
“Doesn’t matter what I say; I’m just a fictional character.”
“Damn it!” I pushed my coffee away. “Why doesn’t anything work out the way I plan? I’m just trying to get this assignment done for class, and you want to go all Socrates on me with philosophy.”
“Maybe that’s what makes for a good story, son. Asking questions that others want to know.”
“Do readers want questions?” I wondered aloud.
“Do they want them answered?” Fred offered.
The interview was turning back onto myself again, and I realized I’d already lost control a long time ago, and not just the interview; I’d lost control of life and love and all my hopes and dreams; I’d let hope slip away for the sake of beautiful women with blond hair, sacrificing my desires and offering my power to others who, eventually, deserted me. Wasn’t my life the exact replication of what was happening in the diner, with Flo giving us what we desired then removing it before we were satisfied?
Something was wrong. Suddenly I wanted to wake up, to run out of the diner as fast as I could and head back to reality where I convinced myself that I was in control. I strained to hear my wife’s snoring—she always snored—and soon the rumble of a diesel engine grumbled outside the diner. I was going to wake up and write this assignment, put thought to paper and be done with it—damn it!
“Not so fast,” Fred said, and the rumble dissipated like fading dreams once remembered but quickly forgotten. “We’re not done here.”
An icy hand touched my shoulder and I remembered Edna from my story, Fred’s wife who, although deceased, still spoke to him. You need to listen to Fred, dear, her words slithered into my mind, and I realized that in this half-dream and half-wakefulness anything could happen, that ghosts could manifest, could whisper things into my mind exactly as I had Edna whisper dark things into Fred’s mind while writing my story—HIS story.
I jumped up, but immediately I was sitting again as if I hadn’t moved, and here came Flo with another round of black ichor, the remnants swishing around and slithering up the sides of the ceramic cups she set on the table. The coffee had changed, had become like life at the end: old age and withered skin and aching joints; rheumy eyes and failing health; funeral plans and coffins and, at the very last, the embalmer filling our veins with eternal illusion.
“Make it stop,” I whispered. “Please.” I wasn’t in control anymore—not that I ever was—but this made it worse, this dream that wasn’t a dream. “Make this dream or story—or whatever it was—stop.”
“It’s not my story, son. It’s not yours, either. It’s our story; we tell it together. That’s why you can’t wake until we both get to the end.”
“But this is an interview, not a story.”
That’s what you think, Edna whispered behind me.
I turned around but saw only Flo’s hips sashaying back and forth as she carried our coffee back into the kitchen. I wondered what went on in there, where all those luscious scents and sizzling sounds emanated from, but the rumble of a diesel engine grew louder, and I felt myself beginning to wake.
“We don’t have much time, son.”
Why did he always have to call me son? Did he feel a need to rub in the fact that he was older and presumably wiser?
“Much time for what, pops?” I countered, trying to take another stab at control.
Immediately I felt bad for saying pops. Fred had never fit in anywhere in his life, and here I was ostracizing him by calling him pops, by exposing his weakness.
“Or is it YOUR character weakness?” Fred asked. “Maybe you took your weaknesses and filled me with them.”
Was he reading my mind? And why not? After all, he had crawled from my subconscious where I was conscious of nothing, had slithered like primordial ooze through my typing fingers onto the computer screen when I’d created him. Fred knew more about me than I knew about myself. And now he was asking whether I injected him with my own weakness. How dare he!
“I thought this was your story, Fred. So it has to be your weakness.”
“Our story, son. Our weakness.”
“Whatever.”
Mine, too, Edna whispered, her voice growing fainter. It’s my story, too.
Maybe it was all of our stories: Fred and Edna and me. Maybe we all got involved and took control, writing the story to let our emotional truths out, exposing our shortcomings and flaws, revealing our fears and longings and—
Edna sat beside me, solidifying her substance into an ethereal bag of flesh and blood. She smiled and the chill of the grave wafted out like breath, slapping my face. Fred grinned at the waitress who asked, “Will there be anything else?” Before I could respond, the waitress took the tip that I couldn’t remember laying down.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I said, indicating the interview and life and death and everything in-between. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all.”
Edna laughed and the chill of the grave intensified. I felt earthworms moving in the ground around her coffin, wherever her body rested. The chill of dank earth and the scent of soil filled my nostrils.
“Make it stop,” I whispered, but like life and death the dream never stopped, because we never had any control anyway. We only told ourselves we did.
Flo brought us more coffee and the rumbling diesel engine grew louder. Fred mentioned something about not having much time again, and Edna’s form thickened and congealed like the fear growing in the pit of my stomach.
I had to get out, had to move fast. I stood but Flo blocked my exit from the booth. I shoved her and immediately found myself sitting back in the booth again, with Flo setting down a cup of coffee and Fred shaking his head with a forlorn expression as if I had just betrayed him.
“What is it that you want?” I shouted at Fred, I shouted at all of them. The patrons looked at me as I stood, and Fred and Edna and Flo just laughed. “Just what the hell do you want?”
“What is it that YOU want, son?” Fred asked. “When you’re writing stories and ruining the lives of your characters and hurting them like you hurt Edna and me, what the hell is it you really want?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Just tell us what it is you really want, dear,” Edna said, her voice loud and her body fully tangible.
“To write… simply to write,” I said. “What else is there?”
“To live on through your fiction,” Fred said.
“To live and never die in the minds of others,” Edna offered.
“Each character in your fiction,” Fred said, “each minor person who dies, lives on in the minds of the readers, and thus they never die.”
“None of us do,” Edna said with a smile.
“Except for you,” Fred said. “You’re going to die, John.”
The rumbling of the engine grew louder, shook the window beside the booth. The table vibrated and spoons wiggled. Ripples circled inside the coffee mugs, rippled outward from the coffee and spread throughout reality, spiraling outward with truth. And the truth was that my characters might possibly never die, not if they lived on in the minds of others.
But me?
I was going to die. The finality of the situation grew louder, like the rumbling of the diesel looming closer. The spoons bounced on the table and the window cracked. The minute hand on the clock spun around faster and faster as life slipped away like seconds and minutes and hours bleeding into eternity. Time was slipping away with each story I wrote, with each day lived.
I was going to die.
It was through my characters that I wanted to live on and be remembered. It was through the death of Fred and Edna that I hoped I would continue to exist in the minds of others.
How ironic to use death in order to live, to use fiction for truth, and to write words in order to replace reality’s illusion. Or was that merely wishful thinking, too?
Suddenly the rumbling grew louder and I was awake. My wife’s snores filled the bedroom, the smell of sleep saturating the air. The warmth of coziness licked my body, but I forced myself up into the darkness with a gasp. It was a half hour before the alarm was set to go off at six o’clock. Gradually, I calmed down. All a dream… that’s all. My breathing returned to normal and I wiped sweat from my brow.
The scent of coffee lured me toward the kitchen. My wife mumbled something in her sleep, the diesel engine almost forgotten.
I sat at the kitchen table, a ceramic mug of steaming coffee in hand, voraciously hungry. But hungry for breakfast or hungry for life? I heard the alarm go off and then it died.
A few minutes later my wife moved into the kitchen past Fred who sat across from me. She didn’t see him, but that was okay because he existed only for me, a fantasy come to life, a character I had breathed life into. He had been created piecemeal from pieces of myself and others, cemented together by my own emotional truth. Fred existed only for me and no one else, unless they let Fred into their minds via the reading of my fiction.
Did you enjoy the interview? Fred asked.
I grinned. My wife asked what I was grinning at and I cleared my throat.
“Just waking up, honey.”
She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down in the same exact spot that Edna was sitting; Edna and my wife occupied the same space. When did the dream end and reality begin?
“I understand,” I told them all, but my wife only knew I spoke to her.
“Understand what, honey?” she said.
Edna and Fred reached across the table and held hands. I did the same with my wife. Arms crossing dimensions, hands from different worlds, clasped on one table in one time and space; the dream bled into reality, or maybe reality bled into the fantasy. Regardless, we were all there, in one place and under one roof. Together.
“My stories aren’t just expressions of who I am,” I answered my wife. “They’re eulogies.”
“What does that mean?”
I shook my head. “Never mind.”
Some things were best left unexplained. How could I explain that Fred and Edna were with us? How could I tell her that each story I penned was nothing more than a tombstone, the words nothing more than epitaphs etched in the mind of others. But only if I sold those stories, only if others actually read them.
An image of a solitary tombstone came to mind. It rested on a grassy hill, and no one knew it was there, no one ever read its words or knew who was buried there. When I looked around the table, Fred and Edna were gone, and only my wife remained.
I squeezed her hand tighter.