Published Books
Dreaming Brooklyn
This is my second novel, and is scheduled for publication on November 15, 2007. A story about how reality and fantasy meet in the life of a 10-year-old adopted boy.
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: Uqbar Editions (exp. 11/2007)
Excerpt from Dreaming Brooklyn
What happens when you’re a stranger in your own home? If you are 10-years-old, and your house doesn’t quite feel like your home, sometimes inventing it can be the best strategy.
Randy--the warlock we call him--though no one knows how he got his name. Alseides meets me in the lobby, says Randy has invited us up to his apartment. Immediately my heart thuds. Instead of our speedy dash up the stone-slab staircase, we tread warily, wondering what Randy has in store. He’s a phantom in the neighborhood, and when he passes through the street, people stare--long legs striding like some awkward bird. His hair is a house of blonde curls atop his horse-shaped head. He has big brick teeth, and long fingers that express themselves like an orchestra conductor. We all know to stay clear, for a mere “hello” elicits a rant, and his eyes go wild like bats swarming out of caves on their nightly haunts. But he’s invited us and we obey: entranced like two horror movie zombies.
Randy greets us at the door, his lanky frame so high it hurts my head to look up at him. He closes the door. We know we’re trapped. He leads us into his bedroom, and there, beside his bed, a table set like a laboratory. I scan the walls for shadows of Frankenstein until my eyes alight on a chart. Randy calls it the periodic table and I ponder how it got to be so flat and what you do with it besides stare at its two-letter rune revelations: Na. Ag. Ca. Ba.
Randy paces wildly, caresses flasks, dares to touch liquids he calls acids and alkalines and explains the differences in wild and foreign terms neither I nor Alseides understand. He opens bottles and inhales gases. A look of delight and terror spreads across his face. He tells us how the fumes make him dream of precious stone and metal. As he speaks, I imagine caverns of sparkling emeralds and rubies.
He darts off and disappears like a badly spliced home movie, then reenters with a jar. His eyes dance like flies. He holds it up to the light to show us a pool of milky liquid.
“I will create life and become a God!” he says.
His teeth gleam. Eyes glare. Spooks us so we want to sneak out, but where our hands grope for a doorknob, all we feel is plaster against our palms. Randy suddenly pales—skin sickly white: A formless face, expansive, as wide as the corridors of our old brick tenement. We want to escape, dash down flights of stairs, jump landings, scoot round railings, but now Randy’s spirit blocks us on all sides. My heart beats hard. Alseides, besides me, looks with wide-eyed wonder, wishing I might have the secret to our escape, but I shake my head warily in bafflement and defeat. It’s as though Randy has thrown a spell into the air and we are hypnotically encased.
“Do you two want to be like all the rest of them?” he says, pointing out the window, sneering. “Those hordes! Or do you seek the truth?”
I can’t show my coward face.
“Truth” I meekly say, and Alseides nods to agree.
“Good, because….” Randy pauses and grins. There are devils in his eye. “The truth shall set you free.”
Randy puts a long strand of finger to his lips to hush us. He looks out the corners of each eye like a spy, and cautiously goes to a big door and opens to reveal a deep dark closet. It looks chaotic from constant ramsakling. He rummages, making noise like a clumsy dog searching for food, then takes out a flattened blue balloon, begins to blow it up, his mouth pressed against it as it swells like a blue-brown belly. The globe takes shape, a big round ball. Randy twists its metal belly button and seals it. He holds the orb in his hands, then stretches out his arms so we can have a closer look.
“Continental drift. Continental drift, you stupid tenement boys.” I look at the globe and the blue vinyl patches take on the dimension of vast oceans.
“See, there, around the West of Africa?” He traces with his fingertip the edge of the continent, works his way down the coast to the tip.
“Now, look here,” he gleams, and traces the Eastern edge of South America. “They fit like a jigsaw puzzle.”
He pauses to see if we see, and he sees that we see and are in awe and for the first time a look of satisfaction releases Randy’s pent-up face. But then as instantly his head seems to swell and to release its tension, words blurt forth.
“That’s because once they were united as one, but force, powerful forces beyond the scope of your little minds, shifted and tore them apart till the waters came between, and they drifted…drifted…lands so vast you couldn’t cover them in a million years.”
Randy grows wilder now. His hair seems to shoot from his head as we look in awe. His buck teeth look like they could gobble the world.
“It’s all in the plates. The Tectonic plates. Giant rocky slabs beneath the seas, far below where the fish with headlights float and swerve.”
He raises his hand above his head, wiggles his fingers. An incandescent eyeball seems to sprout from each fingertip. He stares at us, unconvinced that we understand.
“We were all once connected, you morons! The kangaroo and the squirrel. The platypus and the raccoon. All one giant mass before we were rent ASUNDER!”
He spreads his arms apart, twists them pretzel-like, makes cracking cackling sounds.
“One beautiful expanse. Nothing separating us. Paradise!”
Randy pauses, looks at us to see if we appreciate.
“Do you know what paradise is?” he shouts.
I see long winged birds of blue and green with bowed bills, fruits begging to be picked, streams of pure water, cool spray against my face.
“Then it happened. The tectonic plates.” He sees my confounded look.
“Not like you eat on, fools! Huge masses of rock, a universe of pressure causing them to rend. So titanic, compared to it, this city is tinier than the smallest seed. In fact it’s invisible!”
He places his ear against the sphere.
“If you listen, you can hear the crackling, you can hear the ripping, the ballast burst asunder for eternity. Oh, the pain of it all. Catastrophe. Families of animals shorn apart. Mama tigers taken from their cubs. They roar in tragic terror. Nothing they can do. Elephants see their loved ones float away. They screech and bellow. Their tusks jut into the air helplessly. Yes, even those giant powerful beasts at the mercy of the elements. The world is split and a profound sorrow comes over the animal world. Because they love, too. Just like us. They have feelings. Powerful feelings. Imagine the tears of a mammoth! Imagine the cry of a saber-tooth tiger in pitiful pain. Never to see their family again. Can’t you understand? Before one measly human form was on this earth, such sorrow and fear behind a billion animal eyes. All the animals were crying. On that day, they cried. They all cried.”
Randy flips, then flops on his bed and turns and twists. He cracks his knuckles, smacks his lips together, starts banging his head against the wall as if to hurl himself toward some relief. He tries to rise, gets to his feet, but quivers all over, then lurches forward like a giant tree toppling over from a lumberjack’s axe. His body now a frenzy. He quivers and shakes. His jaw vibrates like the chatter of joke store teeth. Alseides and I watch his raving with our naïve terror.
“Oh, humans you selfish beasts!” he screams. “All those millions of years of suffering. Animal years. Dinosaurs, fish, pterodactyls, wooly mammoths, rodents the size of antelopes. All helpless before the great calamity and we just walk about like IDIOTS, not giving it a second thought.”
Randy falls from the bed, smashes onto the floor. His whole body shakes like he’s been hit by lightning. Electricity crackles all around us. I hear the whisperings of the forces of doom.
“Run, Alseides,” I holler and the seams in the wall suddenly appear. We rush out into the hall. The building shakes at its foundation. We can barely stay upright; the stairs wobble and tilt beneath our feet. Randy is screaming about the end of the world. We lurch into the street, lungs aching, sweat streaming. But the rumbling hasn’t stopped. The street feels like jelly. Crackling and snapping all around us, like when we trample through rough brush in the park. The sidewalk is cracking; fissures are widening. We can barely run; our feet fail us because they’res no grip beneath the shifting concrete. We’re panicked now, fearing at any moment all the walls will crack; the building tumble. Randy’s shouts fill the block. Reverberate against a thousand panes of glass. Windows lift; heads stick out in terror.
Then sirens whine, whine louder, come closer. A big box of an ambulance screeches to the entrance way, and halts before our building. Two men in white jackets race into the building; one holds a stretcher. A police car arrives, pulls up. A couple of cops trot inside, palms hugging their holstered guns. I wonder what good they can do—the world is falling around us. Lightning-shaped cracks appear in the concrete blocks of gray sidewalk, ravines appear, trees moan.
I trip hard and smack my knee against a slab of street, fall to the ground and roll on my back. My brain filled with an ache that sharpens my vision the way binoculars do when you twist them into focus.
I call out for Alseides but he’s disappeared. I’m all alone in the night. People are gone; an odd silence. Even Randy’s wails have stopped. I feel my knee wet, my pants torn. My body is trickling. I pat the ripped part of my pants, and find blood on my palm. I must find momma and home. But as I lay there, I am possessed by the sky. The stars. Their twinkly stillness captivate me. Each sparkle, a nod of agreement. Suddenly invisible planets come into view and moons around planets too as though to reassure me that out there dinosaurs still do roam. But I look up in doubt.
My mind moves back millions of years. I feel the vast terrain in its unbroken perfection, then the horrific splitting. Randy is right. The universe is crying. I get up, limp, feel my soggy leg. I see Randy is borne out of the house, strapped down on the stretcher, a piece of wood between his teeth. The cops stand aside, watch as he is slid into the back of the van. One tilts his cap and wipes his brow, looks at his partner and lights a cigarette. It is a red dot, meager and small in the dark black night.