In 12th grade, I had a strange dream of a woman on a rowboat amidst complete blackness. This image quickly led to the idea for my first novel, The Seasons of Night, which I'd write furiously in Physics class and at home. Drafts and drafts went by, and I deleted multiple pages weeks after I'd written them. And then I would stop writing for several months, return to my computer and hate everything I'd written before. At least six drafts later, I am still writing, but have thankfully found the voice and style of the novel I'd been experimenting to find. I have been writing for five years now with the hopes of finishing sometime this century. Throughout that time I've learned that writing is more solitary than I anticipated, and that finishing a novel is no easy task. Please take a moment to read several excerpts from my first novel and contact me if you are interested in a copy when it is finished. The release date is tentatively set for Winter 2009, and it is a date I can hold to with a fair amount of confidence. Hopefully life will be kind and give me the time to finally finish up this year.
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THE SEASONS OF NIGHT
Chapter 1
The Void
There was a little black box in the left corner of my closet. I put it there not six months ago, closed it tight, covered it up with a blanket, and kept the door shut. I couldn’t tell you what was inside, but you could venture to guess, and you’d probably be right. All I could say is that it had been a part of me for longer than I could remember, and that I had given it up for months at a time before I surrendered. I wanted it; I craved it, sometimes so terribly I’d wake up in a pool of sweat and have to wash the sheets the next morning. Sometimes I’d even open the closet door a crack and stare at it, like there was a monster I had to keep an eye on, lest he get brave, escape, and swallow me whole like a snake. Ironically enough it was a serpent, you could say, my tempter, my path to destruction and chaos. But as long as I kept my mind clear and the door shut, I would be safe.
There have been so many times I’ve wanted nothing more than to throw it away. I’d open the door, remove the blanket, open the box, and stand over the trash can. I’d even tilt it to a 45 degree angle and let it hang over, ready to drop off any instant. But every time I’d take it back, close it up, put the blanket over again, and shut the door, over and over again routinely like brushing my teeth or washing the dishes. It was like an inextricable knot binding me down, imprisoning me in an inferno of my own desire; I wanted to come back to it, and I waited for the moment I would no longer have the strength to keep the door shut.
I couldn’t explain it any better than that, and it must sound absurd, pitiful, even insane. Why not just rid myself of it? I’ve asked myself that very same question, and there is no logical response. If I asked you why people do evil when it only hurts themselves and others, you’d just shake your head, agree that it’s nonsense, and go about living your daily life. Well, that’s what I did. Each time I thought of the black box, each time I got the urge to change my circumstances, I’d just shake my head and agree with myself that it couldn’t be done.
That is my story, and I wanted you to know before I started into all the rest. I wanted you to know because one month from now I will wake up one morning in the street with a gun in my hand, one bullet missing from the chamber, and I believe the little black box has something to do with it.
I’m not sure myself exactly when this story started, or if there was a definite start, or if I went from point A to point B in some exact sequence of events, or even if there was a point A or B. All I know is that it started with a series of dreams, most of which were nothing but complete darkness, both literally and figuratively, dreams where both the sky and ground were absent, and I floated in a cloud of nonexistence. Several other dreams were premonitions, you could say, though mostly insignificant. But there was one dream in particular I had a month ago, another premonition so deeply mesmerizing and paradoxical that it took over my mind and distorted the reality I knew before I fell asleep. Colors seemed different upon waking, faces didn’t look the same, and my world shape-shifted into a dreary landslide of juxtaposing emotions, so much so that to even function normally was wishful thinking. You might think it unreasonable that a dream could have these effects, and you’d be right unless you’ve had this dream, or another like it. But let me start at the beginning.
The dream was of night, a night darker than any I’d known. I was with Julia then, a girl I recently had fallen in love with, but this dream was a month before now, and we hadn’t met yet. It might sound too fabricated that I could dream of a girl I hadn’t met, but I tell only the truth and exaggerate nothing with these matters. It was all too real, and the moment I met her in real life several weeks after this dream was surely as shocking as anything you could imagine. Yet I digress again.
Inside the dream we sat in the middle of a black sea on a tiny row boat that hardly contained us. The waters beneath were so black they couldn’t reflect the moon above, so black I couldn’t know them by sight, but only by their weight against my paddle as I rowed out into a quiet abyss. She was there on the other end of the boat, sitting still with her elbows on her knees, cheeks in hands.
“Julia?” I said, “You think things will be the same when we get back?”
“The same as when?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, staring over the side of the boat into oblivion. "Before everything that’s happened recently, I guess. There are too many things I . . .” I couldn’t finish. Looking down I saw the paddle disappear into darkness. I kept rowing, not knowing where the dock was, but trusting, trusting in something or someone that I would find it.
“It’s best not to think of that anymore,” she said. “You can move on. We can move on and start a new life, but in a different way, just as we are now.”
“But I want it the same way,” I said, changing my tone of voice to a desperate plea. “I want to hike up the fire road with you, to sit on that stone bench at Malaga Beach, to dip our toes into the waters at Luka Point. That way.”
She didn’t look at me yet, but only stared out past the boat, and I could sense the abyss inside her, becoming part of her person and overwhelming the child in her I knew but weeks ago. It was as if she didn’t exist at all, but only in the night, in the water I couldn’t see, in some grand illusion keeping me sedated in sleep.
“It can be any other way but that way,” she said. “Let it go. You still have me. At least here on this boat, you can sit and talk with me, and I’ll listen.”
There was a pause between us, and an emotional rift formed in the center of the boat that put us on two opposite sides of some artificial spectrum. We were in separate dimensions of mind connected only by conversation.
“Will you do more than that?” I asked. “Will you do those things with me again, come out and be together in all the same places?”
She turned to me. Her dark hair curled slightly around her neck and her brown eyes reflected the moonlight, but in a mystical sense that made me feel God was alive right here with us on this boat, and I was looking straight into his soul.
“If only I could recreate the past for you,” she said, and turned away.
Our boat bumped the dock. Feeling for some rope, I pulled a coil up and rested a moment. It was almost over now.
“Will I see you again when I wake up?” I asked.
“You will.”
“For how long?”
“I’m sorry, James. I can’t tell you that now.”
“But will I at least remember you like this?” I said despondently. “Will I remember the boat and the darkness, the solitude and the moon, just like it is now?”
“You will remember it if it is the only thing you remember in this life.”
I fastened the boat down, tying a double knot and taking a deep breath. When I turned around she had gone into the darkness. There was only me now and the length of rope I held in my hand. Fractions of light dissolved around me as if sucked into a black hole, and I was alone with the night. She could have been there covered in the dense fog, sitting just three feet from me on the other side of the boat, the other side of the spectrum, but I didn’t think to reach out. I knew she was gone. And wherever she was, she had taken reality with her in numerous ways I could not yet understand. I couldn’t explain to you the emptiness I felt, but only that it was a void of everything I once knew, a void that made me feel as if I did not exist, as if I too were absorbed into the darkness, becoming one with it in some parallel world of eternal purgatory.
That was the end of my dream, one far more real than the physical world. But it was over, and time had passed since then. Other dreams came and went, and were forgotten, but this one I took with me. I still carried that darkness. I carried the abyss, and there it must have began. With that dream my life would change in unprecedented ways. A month from now I’d find myself in a gutter in the town of Coral with a gun in my hand, and the past would be irrevocably taken from me.
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Chapter 3
The Pier at Midnight
The following day I was alone with my thoughts. I spent it with the lights out, the windows closed, the doors closed to the individual rooms in my apartment, one space being more isolated from the next, and I lay in bed and watched the ceiling fan run round and round in place until the sun went down in the evening. I crept out of bed and watched it hide behind the mountains, as if afraid of the darkness it would unleash upon the world.
The streets were barren except for a few in trench coats and hats who hurriedly made their way to wherever they were going; yellow street lights flickered and made buildings seem old and feeble like post-holocaust rubble, everything upheld by a few sturdy bricks.
Coral had always been this desolate for as long I’d been here, and I assumed it was the same before. It was the dark cove of the California coast that had gone neglected for nearly a century as the world built up around, stacking city upon city like layers on a cake, yet the outcome wasn’t so sweet. Coral was passed over by the booming coastal expansion, but it would be gobbled up some day by the private owners that bought the shores like items at a supermarket. People here kept to themselves, and at night they disappeared fast to their homes and beds and TVs, so much so you’d think the foggy darkness of the night swallowed them whole and regurgitated them in the morning. But the beach was here, and that’s where I was headed.
Down the esplanade about a mile stood Malaga Pier. It rested on large planks of dark wood over the blue-green water that foamed up at the shore with seaweed and bamboo. The pier was old and showed it, with the wooden rooftops of stores peeling up around the edges and the floorboards growing further and further apart until the whole thing would one day collapse in a giant splash. All the neon lights from the shops colored the people walking by - red and green faces, blue and white, like clowns and entertainers. I came upon a surfing store and a little hut where two old ladies sold caramel apples and cotton candy. I bought a pink one and continued on, thinking that if Andrew were here he’d get a good chuckle. I even thought of calling him just to say, “I chose pink,” but my phone was all the way in my pocket and I couldn’t spare the energy. Maybe another time.
I went to the beach that night because a similar darkness was there, a darkness that matched the nights of my dreams, if only to some miniscule degree. To experience it again might jar something in my memory, or get the creative juices flowing just enough to help me solve the puzzle, assuming there was a solution. If the dreams weren’t some post modern, abstract flow of random subconscious emotions, there had to be answer, a reason for the madness, and I had a feeling I’d find it in the dark.
Finishing my cotton candy, I left the pier in search of darker places. I traversed the shores and wandered down the esplanade like a ghost looking for place to call home. Yellow lights from scattered bathrooms cast shadows over everything, giving the beach a tone of loneliness that hovered in the air. When the false light wasn’t so bright, I ventured off into the sand again and sat near the water’s edge. It was quiet then except for the tide; no dogs, cyclists, lovers, or children, just that ebbing tide that rushed in with the wind and covered me with rejuvenating coolness.
What could this darkness be? For two years it permeated my dreams, causing me to wake up wondering who I was and where I was. After such deep trances, I’d wake up and wouldn’t remember ever existing. Were they a consequence of the little black box? It’s true the box had been part of my life for about two and half years, and it was around that time the dreams began. But why the people, why the strange woman? If what was inside that black box really was the cause of my troubles, surely that doesn’t account for the premonitions, no matter how insignificant they seemed.
A month later, at the end of this story, I realized what the dreams were trying to tell me, but that night at the beach I hadn’t a clue. I searched my brain over and over, breathing in the darkness of the midnight air, and I was as empty as the dreams themselves. Rather than disclose it all now, I feel it’s best for you to come to your own conclusions. After all, searching for the answers is half the journey, and to divulge everything in the beginning would devalue the journey itself, and the significance of the realizations that would inevitably materialize. So I’d ask you to share this darkness with me, to make it your own as you continue to follow me on this quest for reality, and hopefully you will experience these events in the same way I did; hopefully, you will experience the story truth, and nothing, as I know now, can be truer than this.
That night I didn’t leave the beach until 2:30am. I sat in the sand, stared blankly into the sky and let the cool air wash over me. Sometimes I pondered the dream of the woman, and other times I simply let myself exist. Vipassana, the Hindus called it, letting yourself be without motions or thoughts. Refreshing as it was, I came no closer to the answers, but much closer to the sensation of darkness that was invading all aspects of my life, attitude, perceptions, and actions. Everything was different than before, and I wouldn’t find out why soon enough. So I just kept existing, moving, thinking, and waiting for the answers to reach me.
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