Preemptive Day 39 plus Day 1 of No more Facebook

For future reference it's (39)(1)

"Think of it this way, Tengo.  Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of times, right?  But I doubt they've seen a sky with two moons in it side by side.  When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precise detail as possible."

My problem with reading fiction is that it's a personal experience.  Even if you talk to someone who read the same book as you, they have different impressions and interpretations of the exact same words.  After reading nonfiction I have all of these facts to bombard uninterested people with.  Anyway let's see how day 3 of novel writing month (39)(1) goes.

When my computer spits out CDs now it's like it's coughing up something lodged in its throat.  I feel like I'm torturing a dying animal. 

          Before he started driving but after he put on his seat belt Charles made a point of introducing himself.  “I’m Charles”, he said with a duplicitous smile, feeling more like he was at work than ever.  He reached a hand out over the manual transmission for shaking.

“Anne,”  Anne said, leaving him hanging.  She retrieved a Winston Light from her purse and lit it, rolling the window down a crack.  The freeway air gushed through like a vacuum and drowned out anything Charles would attempt to say.

            Charles knew the general direction of where he was driving but was less than skilled about finding things downtown.  The car passed exit upon exit of population numbers, convoluted street names, lucky for him it ensured he wouldn’t have to make any smalltalk  The air conditioner acted up and he couldn’t get the girl to stop screwing with the random assortment of dials on the dashboard.

            The orange sky dressed up the urban island effect to look equatorial.  The Aztec skeleton mariachi cowboy hat bobble head figurine bobbled its head next to a pair of sunglasses.  He couldn’t think of how to tell her he didn’t like smokers in his car without seeming like a douche bag.  A red limo flew by, swerving in and out of highway traffic. Charles hit the center of the steering wheel and the car bellowed out with a gentle tootle.

            “This is it!”  Anne called out suddenly as the car flew past an off ramp.  The freeway rose above the city and casually bent to the north.  Charles’s glasses fell onto his lap and he nearly had a heartattack when Anne retrieved them and handed them back to him.  She showed great concern about dying, Charles mistook it for helpfullness.

            The car drifted in a big semicircle took the next exit, U-turned and got on the ramp going in the opposite direction. 

            Anne rested her elbow outside the window as the car pulled up in front of the giant monolith of a building.  Men filling black suits wearing black sunglasses with black hair asked for a security clearance, then insisted they could not park in front where there were signs warning of towing and big tickets.

            Charles insisted that Mr. Pulp had sent them, but the guards representative insisted that no one had seen the distinguished director of the organization in years and that he would not take care of such business by sending a worker who was on his second day of training on a wild goose chase.  He said if they really needed to get in the building, they would have to find parking in a nearby district and walk the whole way there.  Anne was of little help, putting her headphones back on and hood up, and releasing her bangs to cover her eyes.

            Charles parked at a meter but only had 40 cents to pay it with.  He pushed pennies in but it insisted they had no monetary value.  They were singular objects which did not add up once collected, although they collected in abundance in the coin return of the parking meter.  Everyone looked busy in this district, people flooded the streets, emerging and exiting buildings like a grand scale Scooby Doo door gag. 

            “I’ll wait in the car.”  Anne said lethargically.  Charles had the vacuous apprehensive look of a tourist whitewashed onto his face, and at this point felt like a needle in a haystack or a fish trying to swim up sea.  He gathered his security clearance card and manilla dossier file from the backseat without considering the fact that he had not remembered receiving such items.

            He thought about his generation and that he had deserved and earned this job through his eight years of study, although he was completely oblivious to what he was supposed to do.  He refused to think of himself as a messenger, rather as an assistant, but worried secretly if this was the last task he would be issued by Mr. Pulp.  A woman with a tiny dog passed him on the street, and he let out a shrill little hey that only the dog could hear. 

            He deserved this job, he thought, closing the distance between himself and the door of the monolithic obelisk.  The surrounding commercial industry was made up of quaint, short ceiling mom and pops stores, all which might as well have been operating as gift stores for this marvel of industry.  It was strange that he had never seen this building before, even in his nightmares.  The doors were Shaquille O’Neal sized, a bright red hue in the distance at the end of a row of mammoth slabs which served as stairs.  Charles questioned whether or not this place had been built, or if it had always been there.

            The black suited secret service gentlemen descended on Charles before he even approached the stairway.  They let him know what they thought of him going into the building, repeatedly asking him “What did I just say?” like a mother scolding a child.  They arranged in a circle around him, more like a gangland hazing than a formation. 

A receptionist from the desk had the eagles eye view of everything going on down the stairs.  He held opera glasses up to his face and dipped his shortbread cookies in his coffee.  He was overjoyed with the position, it paid well and gave him a great view of the city.  He pressed a button on the desk and the men ceased, Charles breathing a gush of relief followed by a gulp of anxiety.

Each stair had to be climbed one foot at a time.  Charles found himself catching himself with his hands on each new incline.  He stared behind him, the guards watched like dogs on leashes, he could imagine them growling one after another in a bassy purr.  They looked like ants from this distance, though, and he felt like a little kid.  He was glad that he left Anne in the car, he had never met a person as openly negative to someone they just met. 

He wondered how she got the job in the first place, and cynically assumed she must have been related to someone in the business.  Then it hit him.  He was a paid babysitter.  His self loathing kicked in and he felt like he bit into something sour, but he reassured himself that this simply improved his job security. 

A miniature replica of the giant stairs sat on top of the stairs, carved in dark black rock.  Miniature mountain climbers decked out in fluffy coats and hats fought the wind to make it to the top.  A red carpet lined the stairs up to a revolving door, and other than the extremely observant secretary who was staring fixedly at him there was no sign of life.  The air was stale and a faint odor of clay added a dense weight to each step.

The revolving door looked like five connected red phone booths.  The windows on each side of it looked like the eyes of giants, deluded and omniscient.  When he pushed the revolving door, he heard a rustle like newspapers being ripped and craned his neck directly upwards to see a spider building a web.  The finely textured nest looked like a sticky white birds nest, and lucky for him there was no spider present.  He had to put his entire body into the doors to get them to budge, and was careful to jump out as soon as he saw the hall lest he be crushed.

The hallway seemed to have extended once again after he entered it.  The walls were lined with paintings of bureaucrats.  He thought of old monster movies where the eyes behind these things would move, and eyed each cautiously as he stepped onto an ancient tapestry of a rug.

“Do not step on the rug!”  The man at the desk called over an overhead speaker system.  It echoed off of the walls as well as the inside of Charles head like a sonic attack.  He walked around the outside wall to the desk.

“I’m here to pick up a package,”  Charles said.  The secretary motioned for his dossier, which he handed over immediately.  The sentinel looked at the papers, then back at Charles, then back at the papers, and sighed in disgust.  Rising from his seat, he motioned for Charles to follow him.

They passed rooms where the muffled moans of unworldly creatures could be heard inside.  Charles was hushed immediately each time he opened his mouth, and the secretary surveyed the hall with ostensible confidence. 

“This way,”  He said after a moment of silent deliberation.  Each office looked the same, each door uniformly closed, inhuman voices pattering within.  Charles felt himself getting smaller each step he took.

The secretary pressed an elevator button in and motioned for Charles to follow.   He had a sudden dejavu as the doors closed, which was immediately erased by the hotheadedness caused when the elevator shot upwards like a squirrel up a tree.

They reached a door marked “25-B”.  There was a big lion headed knocker on the outside, with a hole in the center of its eye a viewfinder.  The secretary inserted a long hook-shaped key which caught onto something on the other end, and after a loud pop sound the door cracked open.  He gestured for Charles to stay, and slid behind between the narrowly opened door.

Charles checked his watch.  Only 20 minutes had past since he left the car.  He checked his watch again for lack of anything better to do as he waited.  He put an ear to the door, there was eminent silence on the other end.  He felt the silence rearranging his brain, probing the outgoing waves and bouncing them back reformed and redesigned.  He stood up from the door, smacking his ear to remove the sensation that he had water in it.  There was a sign plastered next to the elevator that said “Vending”, with a long overarching arrow which, if followed, would lead him through the floor.  He stood still with his hands on his knees and waited.

The elevator doors buzzed and he instinctively backed into the wall behind him.  A man with a deerstalker hat emerged sucking on a chicken bone and following the path of his feet with his eyes.  The secretary emerged moments later, forced the deerstalker hatted man back into the elevator, and then returned to his conference call.

Ten minutes later, the secretary emerged again.  He showed no concern for having wasted Charles’s time.  “What are you still doing here?”  He asked with genuine curiosity. 

 

Hope someone suffered through that.  I bet someone did.