Chapter One: In Which I Attempt to Fill As Much Space As Possible
Pinckney Quisling plucked his head from the lagoon of nightdrool that had formed beneath him on his writing desk. "Guh - ?" he inquired. A reasonable question, with no answer forthcoming. The morning sunlight streamed in as much as possible through the taped-up Saran Wrap (a euphemism - he could hardly afford anything better than the generic local brand) that constituted the better part of the window into the palatial walk-in-closet (with otherwise unknown breeds of rodent subletting) that constituted his temporary - oh, lord, please let these be merely temporary - digs. He allowed the requisite moment or two or fourteen hundred to reacclimate himself to his surroundings, remember where he was, puzzle anew over why in the infernal living neck-wound-fuck he came back there.
Here.
Port Winestain.
One of his six or seven hometowns (Pinckney having been shunted from place to nondescript place repeatedly throughout his childhood as a charter member of the Petulant Little Bastard Relocation Program). A place with a memorably unmemorable history, dating back to the early 19th Century, when unheralded pioneers Leopold Nutley and Gippo J.M. Derwoodie founded this Northwest town with the famous words (now immortalized as the town motto), "I guess this place will do." The last place on the Western seaboard to abolish slavery, about eighteen months ago. Washington State's leading producer of mail fraudsters. The childhood home of the man who invented, but failed to patent, Turtle Wax. This, sadly, was home. Had been before, has-been now. And what had Pinckney Quisling been? Well, married for one. His six-year relationship had recently collapsed - no, no, "collapsed" is far too pale a word for what happened. Take the Hindenburg. Add the Andrea Doria. Multiply it by the Edmund Fitzgerald. And cube it by Heaven's Gate (the film and the cult). You'd be somewhere in the vicinity of the ballpark wherein the disaster that was his domestic situation. Nothing he could think about much at the moment, you understand. Or any moment since the moment three months ago when the whole thing split right down the goddamned middle with a nauseating, liquid craaaaack. It isn't denial that he's dwelling in, understand - he isn't persisting in any delusion that things are bright, beautiful and effulgent in their sheer wonderferishicality. He knows that everything worthwhile and valuable in his life had recently gone straight to the Ninth Circle and had stiffed the driver. It's just that he can do little more than peer over the very periphery of the particular abyss that he'd dug for himself, just to get a vague idea of the drop. If he had a penny to his name, he'd toss it in and figure it out by the volume of the scream of whoever's head it landed on when it reached bottom. You could call it an I-Wouldn't-Wish-This-on-Anyone Well. But I'd advise against it. Too many hyphens. Omniscient narrators know these things. You can trust us. Unless we happened to be unreliable narrators. Which would suck for you, the reader, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would. Take my word for it.
Quisling groaned, his only known virtuoso talent. Through the vermillion haze inspired by the previous evening's misadventures with his boon companion Captain Morgan and the lowing hisses and sustained, low-level shrieks that made it seem as if an agonized but frankly somewhat bored torture victim was shackled inside each of his ear canals, he could make out the vaguest vestiges of what, if he thought he could so much as chuckle inwardly without reducing his brainpan to carbon dust, he could laughably term consciousness. And with that an even vaguer, yet oddly determined sense of purpose. He had come back here, to that place he swore on the day he left under the watchful eye of both state and local authorities some seventeen years before he would never set eye one on again, for some very good, very pressing reason, some overriding need for completion or fulfillment or the sixteen dollars Jonny Dikkers had borrowed from him to buy the then-new Slashed Eric cassette a fortnight before his forced departure from these aptly-named city limits. He didn't, of course, have the slightest idea of what that might be, and that wasn't the dehydration talking. No, the knowledge that he was quite deliberately subjecting himself to regularly-scheduled if incremental liver, brain and soul damage in order to blot out the true delineations of his quest, and that included the utterly hackneyed notion that he was, indeed, on a quest and all that accompanied it, including the very notion of the use of the word "quest" - that was the thing that was being communicated throughout the brittle wires of his system with every head-throb and vein-complaint that arrhythmically visited him each morning, or early afternoon, or mid-evening, or whatever time of day he gave up the ghost of his wonderfully troubled and abstract slumber and submitted to the screeching banalities of the everyday (which, it should be said, did not necessarily take place every day - in fact, there were entire weeks that were lost to blackout, whiteout and flameout, and, although he could recall neither jot nor tittle of any of them, these were surely the happiest times of his life). The fact that he didn't know what it was he was doing back here in Port Winestain, Washington was overshadowed by his suspicion that, on the contrary, he knew exactly what he was doing back here in Port Winestain, Washington, but was deliberately withholding that intelligence from himself in order to spare him any more pain than he was inflicting upon himself by placing himself, for whatever reason, back here in Port Winestain, Washington.
"Time, I think, for a drink," he said. This constituted a decisiveness that usually comes about only after several drinks. Already, you can agree, we're witnessing progress in our subject. Time to wash away the outlines of the previous day's contempt, contretemps and contemplations. Perhaps this will be the day I, Pinckney Quisling - this is him thinking, incidentally; I'm trying to ease up on italics, even as a way to differentiate the inner thoughts of my protagonist from the detached voice of the God-like narrator, but the last thing I want you to think is that I'm to be mistaken for this sad, distended stick-figure of a man who, even now, twenty minutes and over a thousand words into his day, has yet to rouse himself from the stiff-backed chair that's served as his mattress every one of the three nights he's been in this town without pity for anything but itself. I mean, lord, how disgusting would that be, to pull such a cheap, metafictional trick so early on in the narrative, even if it were true, which it most certainly is not, being, you know, fiction and all, now where was I before that em dash? Oh, yes - actually leaves this room to discover my destiny. Wait. Discover my fucking destiny? (There's real disgust at work here - therefore, the italics are justified.) It's definitely time for a drink.
(I shall now spare you the ensuing hour or six of miserable, self-loathing, failed-masturbating, dry-Ramen-noodle-eating drunkenness. In fact, perhaps it's best to fast-forward to the next possible moment of relative lucidity.)
Four days later, Pinckney Quisling - the freshly-shaven, newly-showered, bile-unbesmirched-jeans-wearing Pinckney Quisling - stepped boldly from his kitchenette-equipped cocoon in Room 7 6 (the middle number assumed to be either 1 or 2, though neither his door nor his key will give up any clues to that effect) of the Port Winestain Armada Inn, strode manfully through the gravelled, vintage-1970s-pop-topped-and-bottle-capped, even-sporadically-bicuspided parking lot and onto what he thought of as both the ironically- and oh-how-appropriately-named main drag of his fourth or fifth hometown. To his utter absence of surprise, he found that it had changed hardly half a whit since he left. Every dilapidated tourist trap looked precisely as pitifully baited, every pitiable double-wide and immoble motor home frozen exactly in the same point in its pre-plotted decline into uninhabitability, even every junkyard-reject dog (though they had to be the sons of those archaic bitches) sat in precisely the same place at the frayed end of their ropy tethers on each burnt-sienna'd lawn. Every single element of Port Winestain appeared to be in the same out-of-place place that they had been in Quisling's memorious map of the town, anno domani 1988.
Here.
Port Winestain.
One of his six or seven hometowns (Pinckney having been shunted from place to nondescript place repeatedly throughout his childhood as a charter member of the Petulant Little Bastard Relocation Program). A place with a memorably unmemorable history, dating back to the early 19th Century, when unheralded pioneers Leopold Nutley and Gippo J.M. Derwoodie founded this Northwest town with the famous words (now immortalized as the town motto), "I guess this place will do." The last place on the Western seaboard to abolish slavery, about eighteen months ago. Washington State's leading producer of mail fraudsters. The childhood home of the man who invented, but failed to patent, Turtle Wax. This, sadly, was home. Had been before, has-been now. And what had Pinckney Quisling been? Well, married for one. His six-year relationship had recently collapsed - no, no, "collapsed" is far too pale a word for what happened. Take the Hindenburg. Add the Andrea Doria. Multiply it by the Edmund Fitzgerald. And cube it by Heaven's Gate (the film and the cult). You'd be somewhere in the vicinity of the ballpark wherein the disaster that was his domestic situation. Nothing he could think about much at the moment, you understand. Or any moment since the moment three months ago when the whole thing split right down the goddamned middle with a nauseating, liquid craaaaack. It isn't denial that he's dwelling in, understand - he isn't persisting in any delusion that things are bright, beautiful and effulgent in their sheer wonderferishicality. He knows that everything worthwhile and valuable in his life had recently gone straight to the Ninth Circle and had stiffed the driver. It's just that he can do little more than peer over the very periphery of the particular abyss that he'd dug for himself, just to get a vague idea of the drop. If he had a penny to his name, he'd toss it in and figure it out by the volume of the scream of whoever's head it landed on when it reached bottom. You could call it an I-Wouldn't-Wish-This-on-Anyone Well. But I'd advise against it. Too many hyphens. Omniscient narrators know these things. You can trust us. Unless we happened to be unreliable narrators. Which would suck for you, the reader, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would. Take my word for it.
Quisling groaned, his only known virtuoso talent. Through the vermillion haze inspired by the previous evening's misadventures with his boon companion Captain Morgan and the lowing hisses and sustained, low-level shrieks that made it seem as if an agonized but frankly somewhat bored torture victim was shackled inside each of his ear canals, he could make out the vaguest vestiges of what, if he thought he could so much as chuckle inwardly without reducing his brainpan to carbon dust, he could laughably term consciousness. And with that an even vaguer, yet oddly determined sense of purpose. He had come back here, to that place he swore on the day he left under the watchful eye of both state and local authorities some seventeen years before he would never set eye one on again, for some very good, very pressing reason, some overriding need for completion or fulfillment or the sixteen dollars Jonny Dikkers had borrowed from him to buy the then-new Slashed Eric cassette a fortnight before his forced departure from these aptly-named city limits. He didn't, of course, have the slightest idea of what that might be, and that wasn't the dehydration talking. No, the knowledge that he was quite deliberately subjecting himself to regularly-scheduled if incremental liver, brain and soul damage in order to blot out the true delineations of his quest, and that included the utterly hackneyed notion that he was, indeed, on a quest and all that accompanied it, including the very notion of the use of the word "quest" - that was the thing that was being communicated throughout the brittle wires of his system with every head-throb and vein-complaint that arrhythmically visited him each morning, or early afternoon, or mid-evening, or whatever time of day he gave up the ghost of his wonderfully troubled and abstract slumber and submitted to the screeching banalities of the everyday (which, it should be said, did not necessarily take place every day - in fact, there were entire weeks that were lost to blackout, whiteout and flameout, and, although he could recall neither jot nor tittle of any of them, these were surely the happiest times of his life). The fact that he didn't know what it was he was doing back here in Port Winestain, Washington was overshadowed by his suspicion that, on the contrary, he knew exactly what he was doing back here in Port Winestain, Washington, but was deliberately withholding that intelligence from himself in order to spare him any more pain than he was inflicting upon himself by placing himself, for whatever reason, back here in Port Winestain, Washington.
"Time, I think, for a drink," he said. This constituted a decisiveness that usually comes about only after several drinks. Already, you can agree, we're witnessing progress in our subject. Time to wash away the outlines of the previous day's contempt, contretemps and contemplations. Perhaps this will be the day I, Pinckney Quisling - this is him thinking, incidentally; I'm trying to ease up on italics, even as a way to differentiate the inner thoughts of my protagonist from the detached voice of the God-like narrator, but the last thing I want you to think is that I'm to be mistaken for this sad, distended stick-figure of a man who, even now, twenty minutes and over a thousand words into his day, has yet to rouse himself from the stiff-backed chair that's served as his mattress every one of the three nights he's been in this town without pity for anything but itself. I mean, lord, how disgusting would that be, to pull such a cheap, metafictional trick so early on in the narrative, even if it were true, which it most certainly is not, being, you know, fiction and all, now where was I before that em dash? Oh, yes - actually leaves this room to discover my destiny. Wait. Discover my fucking destiny? (There's real disgust at work here - therefore, the italics are justified.) It's definitely time for a drink.
(I shall now spare you the ensuing hour or six of miserable, self-loathing, failed-masturbating, dry-Ramen-noodle-eating drunkenness. In fact, perhaps it's best to fast-forward to the next possible moment of relative lucidity.)
Four days later, Pinckney Quisling - the freshly-shaven, newly-showered, bile-unbesmirched-jeans-wearing Pinckney Quisling - stepped boldly from his kitchenette-equipped cocoon in Room 7 6 (the middle number assumed to be either 1 or 2, though neither his door nor his key will give up any clues to that effect) of the Port Winestain Armada Inn, strode manfully through the gravelled, vintage-1970s-pop-topped-and-bottle-capped, even-sporadically-bicuspided parking lot and onto what he thought of as both the ironically- and oh-how-appropriately-named main drag of his fourth or fifth hometown. To his utter absence of surprise, he found that it had changed hardly half a whit since he left. Every dilapidated tourist trap looked precisely as pitifully baited, every pitiable double-wide and immoble motor home frozen exactly in the same point in its pre-plotted decline into uninhabitability, even every junkyard-reject dog (though they had to be the sons of those archaic bitches) sat in precisely the same place at the frayed end of their ropy tethers on each burnt-sienna'd lawn. Every single element of Port Winestain appeared to be in the same out-of-place place that they had been in Quisling's memorious map of the town, anno domani 1988.
posted by William Ham at 7:59 AM
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