Writer's Journal

(anyone understand the title, without Wikipedia or Google?)

Naomi Arnold was roughly midway through her life, when she realized that she was actually dead, simultaneously, she realized that she was not really a woman named “Naomi Watts.” This flash of insight came as she sat in the laundromat, and watched her whites swirl around inside the machine.

This moment of intuition revealed to her that she was actually a hallucination. The mind hallucinating Naomi Watts belonged to an elderly man named Phillip Colonomos, who, grieving over his wife’s death, had taken a fifth of bourbon and a bottle of sleeping pills. As Phillip lay on his bed, waiting for death to come, his eyes defocused, and he had visions of things that had been and things that might have been.

Naomi was also aware of one of the “had-beens” that Phillip discovered: In truth, he was a figment of a car crash victim, who lie mangled in the street. Her name was Mary Hansen, and she was barely twenty-five years old. She had left her car in the bar parking lot, and begun walking home. One of the less intelligent patrons hadn’t followed her example.

As Mary shuddered, cooling, she hallucinated Phillip into existence, but also became aware that she was in fact a—

The buzzer on the washing machine went off.

Naomi/Phillip/Mary stood up, emptied it out, and moved the contents to the drier before returning to her magazine.

(this one is almost three times longer than my normal length.  It’s something that I really needed to get out, and I hope you all don’t mind reading it.  In fact, as a writer, I want you to…if only because I’m a little ashamed of it, as a person.)

It is a half-hour after, and I’m walking around the block, with a length of canvass in my hands, like so many times before.

March twenty-fifth is bright and cold. It began rainy, but turned sunlit, later on. As I trace the familiar circuit of four blocks, my mind wanders.

—

It is a spring-like day in October, and Athena is coming to live with us. It has been almost five years since Buddy died—I remember crying my eyes out all day, after that—and this tiny black animal that one of my father’s coworkers found needs a home.

She isn’t “Athena,” yet. She’s just “the dog.” She’ll become Athena maybe three weeks later, on my sister’s insistence. For now, though, she’s my brother’s birthday present. But that doesn’t matter, I feel her to be my responsibility. This small thing that converts food and water into mess and noise.

She bites, and even when she’s affectionate, red welts appear where she licks my hand.  I suspect I’m allergic, but, soon enough, it doesn’t matter.

—

It is a dreary day in September, the day after my birthday, in my freshman year of high school. Athena ran away some time ago, and I feel like it’s my fault, somehow.

We’d always managed to catch her when she escaped before. This time, we didn’t.

I’m sitting in Spanish class, all of us—including Technico McElduff—are watching as the towers fall. When I get home that evening, there is no Athena, we have essentially become reconciled that she would never come home, and perhaps we were never meant to have a dog. I wait until my mother turns off the news, and put in the VHS tape of Neon Genesis Evangelion I received in the mail today from eBay.

They arrived achronologically, the tape holds the last two episodes. With no context, they make no sense. I had been hoping for an escape from reality, but I am left with a feeling that I have trouble articulating, at fifteen: that acute but vague sense of anxiety that comes from realizing that you don’t know anything.

My father finds Athena several weeks later. She had been hit by a car, and comes home three days later. She has a giant, conical collar on, and will always walk with a limp.

I’m incredibly happy, but don’t really know how to show it.

—

It’s a spring morning before school. My brother and I are eating breakfast, as we wait for our ride to high school, to grind through another day, to work our ways another day closer to the weekend, to the summer, to graduation.

Athena is scratching at the storm door, trying to get in and sit by us, in the hope that we will drop food to her.

We don’t open the door, and she continues pounding on it, headbutting and scratching.

Metal screeches, the door, which is meant to swing outward, folds inward, and she moves through the aluminum wreckage that had been the door.

My mother shrieks: “What? No! No! Stop it!”

For some reason, she thinks the dog speaks English, and will politely acquiesce to her demands.

Athena looks up at me, hopefully.

“Sit,” I command, in a forceful voice.

After a moment, I growl:

“Sit.”

Athena sits, and looks hopefully at the piece of crust I’m holding in my hand. Without thinking, I toss it to her.

In the first two years we had her, Athena grows a great deal, and makes many attempts to escape. All told, we install a little over sixty square feet of chicken wire over the back wall, five pitons to hold down the chain-length fence, a sheet of plywood covering a hole in the picket fence, and a short length of heavy wire through the latch on the gate, to keep her in our back yard.

—

It is summertime, and my father and I are taking Athena on a walk for the first time. Despite her injured leg, she is effectively stronger than either of us.

We loop a chain around her neck, and tie it around my midsection, so my hands don’t get torn up pulling on it, and my father holds the leash.

As she will many times in the future, Athena bites the leash, and drags him along, almost sawing me in half in the process.

We go around one block.

This process will be repeated several times, until she calms down enough for one of us to handle her.

Eventually, taking her for walks becomes one of the favored responsibilities for me and my father. We rarely do it together, but when we do, I learn the history of the neighborhood piecemeal, and he learns how school is going, and what is contained in higher-level English subjects.

“Do you know the story about this house?” he would ask me.

I shake my head.

“Well, Dave and Martha live there. He’s got a dog—Kiki—and there was also a cat. One day, the cat ran off, and Dave searched everywhere for it. Martha was so distraught. So, a week later, he sits down on their back porch with his dog, ready to give up. He turns to his dog and says ‘Kiki, we’ve got to find Martha’s cat.’”

My father is suppressing a smile.

“So Kiki walks out into the yard, and stands by a hole in the ground, barking. Dave goes and looks…and inside the hole are these two eyes looking up at him.”

He laughs, and looks down at Athena

“They know. They always know.”

—

It is august, and my father is working from home. My brother has gone off to school in Chicago, and I’m uncertain about my own future. He reports, upon my return from school, that he saw Athena leap into the air and catch a bird in mid-flight.

We don’t let her lick us for a while after that.

—

It is another august, and I moving into the dormitories at Rockhurst. I kissed the dog on the crown of her head, and left. She knew I was going, and barely barked at all, as she watched me leave.

I return on Fridays, and say goodbyes on Sundays.

“She really perks up when you’re around,” my father says.

But I can’t tell: obviously, I only see her when I’m around.

The Freshman year of college fills me with that same feeling I discovered that night back in high school.

I’m back over the summers, and I walk my dog.

Sophomore year. Normal. I visit my brother up in Chicago over spring break. I start writing a novel. I fall in love with a girl who didn’t seem to know that I existed (is that love? Most likely not.)

One night, when I’m at home, I kiss the dog on the crown of her skull, and she looks up at me and groans.

“You’re the only girl that loves me, aren’t you?”

She licks my face, leaving a red welt across my cheek.

—

That summer, I start to smoke. At first, she’s the only one that knows. I smoke in the kitchen, and scratch her behind the ears. And I smoke in the bathroom while bathing.

I start work, not a thousand feet from our front door. For the three years I work there, just about every time I go, Athena escorts me.

Late in the summer, I’m minding the house. I have friends over, and we drink and smoke cigarettes. After they leave, I get the leash, and I take Athena around the block. I’m drunk, and happy to have spent time with friends.

She wanted to go out, and we hadn’t been on a walk in a while.

Stumbling, I circled the block with her, and we paused as long as she wanted.

It took us an hour to get home.

—

It is two hours after, and I am eating lunch with Adam. We’re at an Indian restaurant, eating from a buffet, and asking the good-looking waitress to leave the pitcher of water for us.

He tells me that his dog is doing better:

“But it’s only a matter of time,” he notes, sadly.

We talk of other things.

“You’re going somewhere in a bit, right? Well, is there a record store around here?”

I walk with him over to Prospero’s. I have one of my last cigarettes, and we talk about a variety of things.

After browsing through records and books, we have one last smoke, and I go onward.

—

It is my Junior year. I move into a house just off campus with two other guys. We drink and smoke. We make poor decisions.

I don’t go home as often, but walk the dog when I can. Athena is my dog, after all. The result: I’m torn between two impulses, as I have been for a long time. Do I remain the dutiful family member? Do I take care of the dog, of my parents, of the home? Or do I become a new person? Do I accomplish things on my own?

Like an idiot, I try to strike a balance. Classic blunder, I choose not to choose, and have to live with the results.

I fall into I-think-I’m-in-love. The woman notices, and rebuffs me. Painful, but I get a chance to choose again.  I try to be my own person. By doing essentially nothing differently.

“You’re the only girl that loves me, aren’t you?”

Athena licks my face, leaving a red welt across my cheek.

That summer, I work constantly, throwing myself into the low-level job I’ve got. I become a manager, and that means I get nothing special, but get yelled at when others mess up. So it goes.

I ask other women out, but none of it works out, and Athena licks my face, leaving a red welt across my cheek.

Senior year of college. I try to keep up my job and get things done, but it drags. That feeling—vague but acute, anxious, but directionless—returns, and bears down on my harder than ever. It fills up my skull with static.

But I ignore it as best I can.

This is my work. I will finish it.

This is my dog. I will take care of her.

And when the time comes…

shut your mouth.

I look forward to graduate school, because I don’t think I ever really enjoy where I am.

But I am here, with Athena, and that is all I want. My father and I take her for walks.

“She talks to me, you know?” my father claims.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, incredulous, “I taught her left and right.”

“You did not.”

“Athena! Left Side!”

She trots over onto the left side of the sidewalk, glancing back at me.

We go on for a moment.

“Right side!”

She shifts over to the right, and I smirk at my father. He swats me on the shoulder. She never does it for him, because he never realizes I was tugging subtly on the leash.

—

It is thirty-five minutes after, and I look down at the limp length of canvas in my hand, with Athena’s dog tags hanging from them. Neither of them even have her name stamped into the metal, and they’re greasy from her fur.

I put a cigarette in my mouth, and light it.

“Sh—”

—

It is five hours after, and I’m drinking coffee with Sara.

We talk, and commiserate.

This year hasn’t been good for anyone.

“This is damn good coffee,” she notes.

I nod. I owed her that much, and she takes my mind off of what happened that morning.

I light my third-to-last cigarette.

“Fine weather, though.”

She arches an eyebrow, as the wind comes, and chills us. We both shiver, but I’m not sure she saw me.

Is there a way out? God, I hope so.

—

It is the day before, and I’m drinking coffee with Alex.

“2010 would have to work real fucking hard to be as shitty as 2009 or 2008,” he says.

—

I head off to graduate school after senior year. I’m surrounded by strangers, and the static in my skull grows louder. I watch dramas unfold in their lives, and I’m sympathetic, but I don’t really feel involved.

Is it strange that I felt uninvolved, but I felt bad about feeling that way? It seems like I could save a lot of headaches if I just cared more.

Before I left, I told Athena:

“You have to last until I move home. Or at least until summer. You’re not allowed to be sick. You have to stay well, okay, Athena-girl?”

She looked up at me, and wheezed.

—

It is two hours before. I’m about to go buy what I intend to be my last pack of cigarettes. My father is waiting in the living room, with a small ziggurat of cigarette butts in the ash tray before him. His eyes are ringed with dark circles.

“I’m doing it today,” he tells me.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Take your time.”

I leave, walk to the store, and try to decide whether to quit or not. I barely have time to focus, and I’m trying to adjust my diet in particular ways. Can I really give up all that unhealthy shit, and also the poison I put in my lungs on an hourly basis?

I decide to try.

I come back home, and smoke out front for a bit. I hadn’t been smoking inside, because of Athena’s condition.

My father opens the door, but stays inside.

For an hour, we mill around the living room. Neither of us goes into the kitchen to check on Athena.

We wait for the weather to improve. No one should have to die without sunlight.

—

It is the day after, and I am boarding the train to go down to New Mexico.

Back to studying, back to grading, back to politics, back to my monkish lifestyle. It’s not a bad place, but I never really enjoy where I am, I think.

I feel alone, and the static in my skull almost drowns out my parent’s goodbyes. I kissed both parents on the cheek, and gave them both a hug.

On the way down, I get behind a slow-moving group, and plod toward the train.

When I get inside, there are no outlets, and I have to share the seat.

Just a psychological paper cut, really.

I never really enjoy where I am.

—

I take her on my last walk with her in January. It’s warmed up, and I’m determined to take my dog for a walk at least once before heading back to New Mexico, before the daunting task that is teaching.

She wheezes, and I slip several times. We go around one block, and I leave a trail of cigarette butts.

The snow is difficult going, and she labors to get through. But she smiles the whole way.

—

We drive Athena to the vet, two blocks away. I try to maintain a stoic face, but I still cry. She can barely walk, and wheezes when she moves. I hole the leash.

When we lift her, we can feel the cancer under her skin. She leaks urine.

The nurses and vet are understanding, and they give me a box of tissues. I thank them.

They run us through the procedure, and I ignore them, trying to get Athena to sit on the rug they left out for her. I kneel down, then sit cross-legged, and she finally settles in front of me.

From this point forward, I’m scratching her behind her ears the whole time.

They give her the injection, and she settles down, lowering her head. She was ready, and the vet confirmed it.

Athena’s heart stopped almost immediately.

I take her tags, which don’t even have her name, and offer to drive home. My father insists on doing it.

I reset my watch, which had stopped running, to 11:30 AM, where it still remains.

—

It is forty minutes after, and I stop in front of the house where I grew up, and toss the cigarette butt into the street.

I’ll probably backslide. I don’t want to: we killed my dog by smoking around her. But the damage is done, and I have to live with the fact that I had a hand in her demise.

Taking a deep breath, I look to the west.

I remembered the Wasteland, which I had talked about in a hotel room not a week before. I remembered how it ended, the way a prayer ended, and I closed my eyes.

I fingered the dog tags, and spoke:

“Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.”

And for a moment, for a brief, brief moment, the static went away.

So, it’s been a week since Episode 2×04 went up, and I can barely remember anything about writing it, other than the fact that I did it all in one quick burn while riding the Amtrak up to Kansas City, so that I could go on to St. Louis for a few days.  Other than an hour in the hotel lobby at the Sigma Tau Delta convention, I haven’t had wireless, and had to physically carry my writing to the one computer in the house that could handle the task of uploading things onto the web.

What a week.  Real Life intervened, and it struck with a vengeance.  Many of my friends are struggling to figure out what to do with their lives, they get out of college, and maybe, just maybe, get into a profession similar to their desired one, only to find that it’s not what it’s cut out for, or the market isn’t good, or they’ve got to compete with others who have been at it for much longer, or maybe, they’re just not happy.

I’ve got an idea of what I’m doing, but it’s not easy.  Yesterday morning, we put my dog to sleep.  Not ashamed to admit that I cried like a child up until it was done, at which point the hollowness of true mourning sets in.  But the sun was shining, as it would the next day and the next, we knew the day would come, and I accepted that we had unwittingly hastened its arrival.  I had work to do, though.

This is what Cicatriz is about.  It’s all possibilities.  Pick up stakes, go on a goddamn adventure.  Go live on a mountain for a couple of years; figure out what you want to do, and go become the best you possibly can.  Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is an epistle addressed to you.  Take The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road as your Old and New Testament.  It’s dangerous, and it’s frightening, and the life you’re living is boring as hell–the worst part, though, is that you know it’s boring, yet you choose it anyway.

When’s the last time you put yourself in harm’s way on a hunch, or got out of your comfort zone, or even just did something because it was fun?

Allow me to soapbox for a moment–as if that isn’t what I’ve been doing the whole time–and give you an idea:  Every so often, we die.  Not Capital-D Die, with the pinebox and the weeping women in black, but the little everyday deaths, where you get poisoned by the toxic bullshit of your job, starved by the lack of real connection in your relationship, shattered by the pressures that you get put under.  So, that’s that:  you die. But this is a very special kind of death, this lowercase-d death.  It’s the medicine for what ails you, because when you die, you are reborn.  This isn’t just the rantings of a crazy man; this is a metaphor.  If you go through something difficult, a trying time, and don’t change, you’ve wasted all that hardship and pain, and just made the broken self that you had previously, just re-became that poor bastard that got you killed last time.

So let yourself die, and change:

“The passion of destruction is a creative joy.”

–Bakunin

This is Cicatriz:  the title refers to the scar left by surgery, the spot where you’re made whole again.  All death (lowercase-d) leads to rebirth, and each one is a step forward.
—

Trivia:  The epigraphs for Season 2 come from the poetry of Weldon Kees.  I don’t have the time to list all the titles, but I do recall that the previous one is “The Furies” (you all caught the reference in there to “The Wasteland,” I bet) and I think the one before that was “A Pastiche for Eve.”  He’s a good poet, and I’m not sure he’s that well known.  Like Ambrose Bierce (who provided the epigraphs for Season 1) he also disappeared without a trace.

(continuation of this)

 

     After leaving the city on the cliffs, with its incomprehensible inhabitants, I traveled down a path into the misted lands beyond.  The path, or stair, or ladder, as it came to be, was carved into the side of the cliff untold years ago.  At its narrowest, it was probably no more than eight inches, while at its widest, two tall men could lay down across it.

     There were hooks set into the stone, made of tarnished bronze.  I suppose that they were there to hold lanterns, back in days gone by when people used this stairway.  The reason soon became apparent to me: while I set out at nine in the morning, after managing to convince the innkeeper to give me coffee and a piece of fruit, it was now evening, and as I looked out from the stairwell, I could see the mist as a sort of carpet across an imagined vale.

     It was too cold to stop here, and I imagined myself too tired to climb up, not realizing that I hadn’t yet reached the halfway point.

     I settled on a particular wide step—I hesitate to call it a landing—and went through my bags by the light of my wireless phone, before finding first a flashlight, then my collapsible walking stick.  Hopefully, having both in-hand would prevent me from tumbling down the stairs.

     While passing through the mist, the flashlight was useless.  At a rate of about four steps a minute, it took me (I estimate) an hour to  get through the fog, and into the warmer air below.

     Though moonlight filtered into the vast valley below, it was too dim to see by, but my flashlight cut through the darkness, revealing the stair continuing.

     Near nine in the evening, the stair became a ladder again, and I was forced the shuffle through my gear for pitons and rope, but I managed to climb down, reaching a path-like section where I could amble along at a walk.

     Shortly after midnight, I reached the bottom of the path, and immediately found a spot under a tree.  I broke out my light sleeping bag and a small bit of camouflage netting to drape over my backpack and my sleeping form.

     I woke up shortly before noon, my limbs aching and my head throbbing.  The radical change in air pressure made me feel simultaneously drunk and hyper-alert.

     I was in a forested valley of immense size:  the world no longer had a horizon, there were simply massive, impassible walls cracked with the lines of stairs like I had just descended.

     An enclosed space of vast size, cut off from the world, roofed in mist, ringed by cliffs, floored in fertile ground.  I turned, and looked across the valley.  In the middle was a ruin built of glass, clear and black alike:

     A fallen dome of finest crystal, parts of it still held up by pillars of obsidian.

     I knew not where I had come, but knew that in that place, I would find something wonderful.

     The boatman came, and took away the rich, leaving us behind: the ashen-faced, the unwanted, the lost.

     There was a clink of coins, echoing in the enclosed space.  Silver flashed white in the black, from a hand still warm from deathbed comforts, into the chalky white grip of a man-thing that had never seen the sun.

     Like the others, I stumbled forward, reaching out to touch the boat, hoping that the boatman had learned mercy since he last came.

     But he turned to regard us: his face the fleshless skull of a dog, his eyes twin fireflies in the night.  His pole arced through the air, and struck at the closest shade.

     The gray-skinned man, naked but for his pleading expression, fell from the dock into the waters of the river.  The man sank slowly as the water leeched out his memories and moods.

     Something huge and nigh-unseen moved under the waters, a great shadow that rose until the finned hump of its gray-green back rose above the water, and it dove again.  With one tentacular arm, it seized the fallen shade and dragged him under the water.

     We didn’t know what it did with those it dragged under.  We muttered things as we waited for the boatman, in the hopes of clinging to the prow of his boat, and go across into the dark of the other shore:

     “It’s a kraken, it eats the souls that it catches.”

     “If it eats you, you go to neither heaven nor hell, but cease to be.”

     “It doesn’t eat anything.  It holds you under the water until the river washes away your memories, until you lose your skandhas, and cease.”

     “It carries you to paradise when it catches you.  The boatman takes you to hell.”

     “There is no swimmer.  Beneath a layer of water, that’s what the river is.”

     We have nothing to do but wait.  Our bellies are empty, our mouths are dry, our flesh is limp, our eyes are dim.

     But I’m tired of waiting.

     I go and stand at the dock, my arms limp at my sides, my head hanging, my knees bowed.

     Soon enough the boatman comes, and I rush at him.  Not at the boat, but at the boatman himself.  I aim low, for he is much taller than I.

     I seize at his cloak, and push.  It tears in my hands as he plunges into the river.  With a shriek, he is pulled under by the swimming thing, leaving me in the boat.

     The piece of cloth in my hand begins to grow and envelope me, encasing me in the cloak of the boatman, as I grow taller and grimmer.

     A light fills my mind, and I learn the truth:  I had to take those who paid, but I could choose to take or leave any who stayed on the shore.

     Immediately, I filled my boat with the nearest shades, and headed across the river.

     Poling across, we entered the mist in the middle of the river, and the opposite shore loomed larger and darker than ever before.  But there were lights on the shore, the red glare of furnaces and fire pits.

     A massive fortress loomed up before us, a great circular structure of black and white stone, with windows looking into the red-lit interior.

     Chains as thick as a man’s leg lead up from the fortress, toward the ceiling, to pulleys, and hung down, looking like nothing so much as cobwebs surrounding a box in the attic.

     As we approached, the sound of chains was audible over the noise of the river:  black, hooked chains reached down from the ceiling, and seized the occupants of the boat, lifting them up and swinging them toward machinery on the shore of the river.

     One by one, the shades were dropped in, and the machine made a terrible noise—the sound of grinding and tearing filled the air.

     The machine spat blackened water and ichor from the side, coursing down a channel into the river.

     I stood in shock, and immediately tried to throw myself overboard:  how could I do this to other people?  I’m not a bad man.

     But now it’s my job.  I’m allowed to speak…so, trust me.  You have a minute or two more. 

     Throw yourself overboard.

     It can’t be as bad.

In which things are revealed in a roundabout and ultimately unhelpful fashion.

Cicatriz Episode 2×04

(Two reasons this is short:  One, I need to finish packing for my trip, and second, the interface is screwing with me.  But, this one, I think, is good. It deserves its own short story. I’m putting down this scrap of it, though.)

I woke up with blood caking my left eye shut, and no memory of how it might have been injured. So I rolled out of bed, and looked in the mirror. The blood was not streaked, and was coming from the area of my eye. I can only assume that I cut myself shortly before bed and didn’t catch the bleeding.

There was no pain, though.

I went into the bathroom, and took a shower, carefully rinsing the left socket and picking gently at the dried blood. It wouldn’t do to go through the day with one eye welded shut, now would it?

So, it took me ten minutes of careful picking, but I got the eye open.

And I still couldn’t see.

Getting out of the shower, I scrubbed the fog from the mirror with a towel, and looked in.

My right eye was normal: brown, bored looking.

My left eye wasn’t: a featureless silver orb, reflecting the mirror, reflecting me, reflecting the mirror, reflecting me…

And I felt no pain. Touching the eye was more disturbing than anything else, and tapping on it only produced a faint ache.

I finished my shower, and contemplated what to do:

1. Call the hospital? Rational, but a little alarmist

2. Call the police? After all, the original eye was gone. But what if it turned out to be an accident, or something

3. Call into work sick? No, I’d used up all my sick leave, already this year.

Sighing, I got dressed, and headed downstairs.

I was getting home late. We’d had a late rush at work, and then the train was delayed. Now, I just wanted to head home and go to bed, if only to wake up early the next day and make the same journey in reverse.

The train was nearly empty, and the combination of the buzzing fluorescent lights and the clattering of the tracks was hypnotic. When we got to the changeover, I was the only one to leave, standing out in the dank by myself.

The stairway up led to another platform, well-lit and probably fresh-smelling.

There was also a stairway down, leading to a platform that they hadn’t completed, for a line that never took off. A low barricade prevented people from wandering down there, but from beyond it, I could see a faint, deep blue light.

A glance at my watch, and another at the schedule told me that the next train was almost twenty minutes away. An internal debate began, the two sides gaining the upper hand in turn, and then I decided to hop the barricade and look at whatever was causing the light.

There were no signs that any work was going on, and no sound of voices.

I vaulted the barrier, stumbled, caught myself, and crept downward, the further I went, the more this seemed like a bad idea. A low electronic hum drifted from below, and I edged along the wall, coming down to the landing and glancing around the corner.

A fairly empty, but active platform sat down there, with a train waiting. Pale, gray-skinned people filed into it, or down from above. When the train filled, the doors shut, and it sped off, down, down, away from the open air and the quick city above.

I stood and watched for a long moment. Three trains filled, the gray-skinned people coming down other stairwells, and boarding trains that always arrived empty, and always left full.

For a long moment, I watched, then turned and headed away. Something about the whole experience had shaken me, but it was getting late. My train was coming, my bed was calling, and I could always glance down in the morning.

Or at least I thought.

The next day, the down stairway was gone. There was nothing but a wall covered in peeling paint and fliers. A chill ran down my spine, and I wondered if I had dreamed of the trains and the gray-skinned passengers.

So, we’re going to be returning to the original topic of this thing and looking at the process behind writing Cicatriz. The reason for this is that writing the last installment was a strange and interesting experience that illustrates several strengths and weaknesses of my process.

This is because I had midterms last week—both giving and receiving midterms—and had less time than usual to work on it. On the other hand, I think it turned out rather well. There are several reason for that:

-First, the outline, which I believe I’ve mentioned several times previously. Having the basic plotline down allows me to pay more attention to the surface features. At the same time, it allows a mad dash to the finish line (though, of course, you need to edit when you’re done.) Moreover, the outline allows for piecework to be directed toward a common end without loosing the thread.

-Secondly, despite the final point made above, working on a piece of fiction is done in large chunks—you don’t have to do it all at once, but if you’re in a groove, you can’t ignore that.

-When working on something during a busy period, make sure you handle what’s urgent before you tackle anything else. Don’t use writing—or any art—as a way of procrastinating, and touch upon each topic at its appropriate time. Generally, your work will come out better, that way.

When I moved into my campus apartment in August, there were a number of problems with it—burners on the stove didn’t work properly, the fan in the bathroom didn’t work, and the storm window in my bedroom lacked a lower pane. They said that it would be handled soon.

So, I went to class. I wrote. Two more things broke in mid-September:the towel-rack in my bathroom and one of the banks of fluorescent burnt out. I contacted the apartment manager, and waited.

The fluorescent lights got fixed, and my stove came to life.

But it was getting colder, and it turns out that a great deal of insulation is provided by storm windows.

At some point, last year—either late October, or early November—I came down with a fever of 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Living in the mountains in late fall, with howling winds that can rip right through your coat, the last thing you need is a fever.

Calling the housing office got my sympathetic sounds, no progress on the repair, and an angry housing manager, who assumed I was trying to directly place a work order.

With a combination of whiskey, and tea, I managed to beat the fever, despite the fact that it sounded like a legion of the damned were shrieking outside my window. No repairs.

I tried going in and talking to them, but they were out to lunch, as everyone you need to talk to between 11 AM and 2 PM are.

Most of December and part of January were spent in Kansas City, but the window was waiting for me when I returned. Everything else faded into the background, leaving just that rectangular gap in my wall before my consciousness.

So, two weeks ago, my computer looked like it wasn’t starting up, preventing me from getting at my files for class. Needless to say, I panicked.

After a course of events in which the window didn’t get fixed, and an angry note (which denied that my storm window was broken) from my apartment manager appeared on my floor, my window was not fixed.

Around this time, I began to get angry. I realize that seven months living in what is essentially a meat locker seems like it would do that, already.

Here’s the thing, though: Grad School distracts you from everything.

In all honesty, I noticed the low temperature in three cases: when it caused me health problems, when it prevented me from doing my work, and when my power bill showed up.

So, Monday, I went to the housing office, and insisted that something be done about it. It took a while, but they checked the work order and reposted it.

I’m glad, because just about everything in my apartment’s been fixed, except the bathroom fan, and that just means that I need to scrub my bathroom again.

But what they said to me afterward had to be one of the most irritating things anyone has ever said:

“You really should have told us sooner.”