The Last Man: Part One

The Last Man
A Novel
By
W.C. Turck
Copyright W.C. Turck 2009
Exclusively on Blogspot


PART ONE

The pale light bleeding in thin lines through the shades has the quality of warm malaise, the usual burden of fevered Arctic nights. Drawing them aside I can just make out glimpses of the polluted brown coast among the line of coastal towers. They are monstrosities, these towers, bordering on the ad hoc and haphazard. Almost organic, the towers have long ago shed the pretense of beauty as mere assemblages to hold the greatest quantity of humanity as close to their workstations as possible. They are unfinished thoughts of minds more concerned with utility than soul or passion or even basic functionality. Not that those aspects carry any weight anymore. Instead they are relics of a world gone by, just as I am.

Lest anyone fear that this is some sort of melancholic lament for the “good old days,” it is not. I won’t trouble these pages with self-serving laments over the ascension…no, the avalanche of history. Nor will I entertain those inclined to such thoughts, to some secretive sense that fate or the world or the tides are aligned against them, or is subverting their truer place in the world. Instead this is my testimony, a feeble attempt at remembrance, like a footprint at the shore.

Some would say this is my confession, and that may well be true. By the combined consequence of history, birth, the minutes of the day and failings’ at simple survival I am caste alternately as criminal and victim. Both are shades of the other.

This was once a frozen place, but that was in a world gone by, a place as distant and hazy as I feel at this moment. This is what becomes of the unheeded cries of a fevered world, whose sickness became culture until it was simpler to erase history than ascend to its warnings. And so history is erased, discarded as worthless, which may well prove true. And one day soon I will be gone as well, vaulted towards an inescapable fate, by the bureaucrats of Section Twenty-one, the proxies of the Corporation.

An innocuous glance continues my subversion. I know it is a futile act against Sentinel. Sentinel is everywhere. It sees everything, and even reads my thoughts, these thoughts. But the subversion is not in the thoughts so much as in their character. Certainly it is a risk to have any thoughts at all. Simply thinking is a violation of numerous Section Twenty-one statues, but then again I am a special case. Perhaps I am the most special case, but that remains to be seen.

My subversion is well worth the risk. It connects me more fully to them, to their humanness, which here, and in this place, and in this time is now considered a supreme act of terrorism. It is for them that I stand and live and defy. When my suffering is at its worst that is the time I feel closest to them.

A needle prick carries the well fever and epiphany of pain. Like me, it is a flaw in the perversion of modern genetics to manufacture and reconfigure humanity. Theirs is a revulsion of history and that which made men whole, despite their flaws. But history is betrayed in our bodies. It fled there long ago from the arrogance of purposeful evolution.

Oh, the world that resides with in that first wonderfully awakening instant of pain! At once curious and electric, but so terribly fleeting as it trails away from its cold eruption into something warm and remorseful, like the first breath of a beautiful word fading towards its demise. The pain clears my mind and diverts unguarded thoughts before they can betray me. This is how I have stymied them for so long!

A crimson drop grows at the tip of my finger. It reflects the acrid gloom of the city. I study the blood for a moment, as though it is some ancient relic of myself, of what I am and what I am not- which seems to threaten the very existence of society, according to the Corporation. Even the reddish smear it leaves across the wall is an element of the battle. For now it is fresh among dozens of others.

Section twenty-one regulates and controls the society. I should say here that they are not cruel or calculating by any standard, which is not to say that I fear what is written here will be read by Section Twenty-one. Society regulates itself well enough through the consequence of blind momentum. Section Twenty-one shepherds that momentum through the implication, through a culture of fear as subverted but as real as an extra helping of salt brings a certain bitterness to a stew.

That they are not overt in cultivating fear they view as benevolence and judiciousness. Section Twenty-one allows me the paper and pen to organize my defense. It is curious how they bend over backwards to create the illusion of fairness, as if the ultimate outcome was ever really in question. Instead my hand strains to write these words, a melancholic refrain to ancestors distant and long dead. That refrain is as much a part of my defense as I am. It is their defense as well, for it is their memory that has been erased from the world. That is until I came along.

And what do I expect from these selfish thoughts? Perhaps they will be a cornerstone to a revolution that reasserts the autonomous stature of each soul. I might hope that the spirit in every human being, all but extinguished by the Corporation, will re-ignite and run like wildfire around the planet and beyond. And if cities are razed and millions lost for the retrieval of our plundered liberties then so be it. What could prove a nobler cause?

Ha! It is a laughable thought. What absurdity to believe that the pallid assertions of pallid assertions of words swept into the dustbin of history, when my eyes no longer see and when my hands no longer write, and when the years have ground me to dust, that these words will do them any justice. But still I continue, playing the game, lifting my head each morning, while fantasizing about nothing short of revolution. It is as if there was some intransigent quality to the breath in my lungs, or the blood in my veins that compels me despite a tattered heart.

There is a world outside my window. It is a dull urban landscape: monstrous conglomerations of metal and glass and concrete. The city appears more as some odd crystalline growth, inhabited by mindless crustaceans or single celled organisms than by people. It is too much for the land, almost too much for the clouds drifting among them through jaundiced industrial haze. On twisted and overlapping expressways, far below, traffic lights appear as sluggish rivers of molten lava.

The sun lays low on the far horizon, hardly more than a pale disk through dust and sulfur smog. I pause from these words for a moment to ponder the city, I wonder about the people who go more quietly about their lives than I do. I would prefer to change places if only I did not hope that I served a greater purpose or that I wasn’t locked in a battle for my very survival. Would I relish their ignorance, or feel the fool in some errant awakening? In the umber shadow of sleep the faces of my ancestors visit me, and I know that I must see this through to the end.

Millions rush blind in their tasks, sending up choruses of breathless greetings and simple offenses forgotten almost before they are spoken. They are feverish, feverish in their work, feverish in their play and even in their sex. This is a new world, wholly different from the one mankind understood before. There is no war. Birth and life and death are mandated by the Corporation, administered by Section Twenty-one and monitored by Sentinel. Gone are distinctions of race. The blend is complete. Homogeneity is the new order. The dream of the futurists too afraid or hypocritical to ponder the ramifications has at last been achieved.

It heralded a new golden age, the extinction of animosities, inequality and war. There is no want and no poverty to speak of, none that is acknowledged anyway. Mankind is identical in every way and at every point on the planet. They are identical in the color of their hair and eyes. And their bodies are uniform, at least as uniform as the schemes and science of modern genetics will allow. None of them ever envisioned me.

And I among these uniform hordes, by quirk or fate, or by the mindless consequence of the Universe stand alone. I am a scar from an erased past, an anachronism, an aberration in a world in which the question of race is obsolete. I am a threat to man’s formulated illusions of himself. I am the unintentional heretic, an intrusion upon the unprepared modern conscience. Black as I am, I am a ghost. I am a tribe alone.

Almost funny, in a sad way, to think that futurists a thousand years ago could not see that mankind had rushed headlong to this world from the beginning of time. Almost funny, in a perverse way, that the differences of man were not a celebration, but was cause for hatred. By erasing our differences we committed the greatest injustice because it masked our greatest weaknesses and blamed our truest blessings. In our blindness to suppress those who hated on the basis of skin color we achieved their ultimate goal.

My room is as small and inviting as a tomb. That may sound melodramatic, but suppose a world without art, without culture and individual character. Suppose the final days of the species, and the reawakening of a new era, a changing consciousness that compels the hordes to act less as individuals and more as cells that combine to activate a body. Except this is not a supposition. All of society has been redrawn to annihilate the individual. It is nothing short of a purposeful exorcism of the blessed tumult of the human heart. Only by chance, by my difference and solitude and the prick of a finger has that tumult been reawakened.

The press of the pencil against my bloodied finger brings a sudden sting of sharp pain. Pushing aside the papers for a moment I pause to study the image of my father. I scratched it into the table with a thumbtack and colored the face to a warm brown with drops of my own blood. It is not my real father, of course. It is a fiction. But the fiction I choose to believe becomes my truth and my lie. My real parents were like all the rest. I can just imagine the horror on my mother’s expression when they pulled me from her belly. I can only imagine her shame, as if it was her fault and not the random lottery of DNA.

My boots stand beside the locked door. No worries, it is locked from the inside. I am free to go, just not free to be. On the wall above them a small blue light reminds me that Sentinel is watching. Sentinel is always watching, searching every thought, every movement in hopes of uprooting some suspicious intention or an indication that a body is no longer viable and must be removed from proper society. Sentinel spies. Section Twenty-one punishes. The Corporation decides.


Let me be clear. This is not a prison. Well, perhaps for the mind, since my body is free to come and go as it wishes. But I don’t go out, except to court. Where would I go? I am trapped, not by Sentinel or Section Twenty-one or even the Corporation, but because of this cursed flesh!

The Reclamation center is working overtime today. Two massive smokestacks rise from the center’s massive structure. Thick, boiling plumes of acrid smoke billow high into the atmosphere, where the trade winds thin and stretch them to the horizon. It looks like rain falling over the city, a brown and gray rain. Instead it is all that remains of fellow Associates, the grist ground by the Corporation’s relentless mortar and pestle.

Don’t misconstrue. This is not some sort of lament, nor an accusation. It is what it is. It is the reality of existence that we produce for the Corporation, and when our bodies are no longer useful in that regard then we are waste, burdened and shamed at falling behind, by not carrying our load, by becoming an impediment. Well, maybe them, but not I.

The haze clears enough that I can make out the ruins of the old city far out to sea. The ruins stab from the gray-green waters like rotted pilings or melting candle wax. Sentinel isn’t there, and the fires burning in windows cause me to wonder of the people there. I imagine that they are like me. I imagine that they, well, it is important not to get too far ahead of myself. To properly tell the story I must go back to a time before I was born, and so that is where I will begin.

Tick Tick Tick

That would be the clock. Actually, from here it sounds more like BANG! SLAM! CRASH!

Writing for the first posts is well under way, as of this past Saturday. The first chapter of the first book goes up this coming Saturday, September 12. the title is THE LAST MAN, a social science fiction piece I've been thinking about for some time. I won't give away much here, except to say that it is a very intimately personal story about freedom and the power of hope.

The first chapter of the second book will will be posted on Monday, the 15th, is titled IN THE LAND OF JUDAS, a sort of commentary on modern media and the importance of family. I am so pleased with the way each story is unfolding, and I think you'll be just as pleased to read them.

Figuring it should take right at about three to three and a half months to finish each round. After that, I'll be in therapy. For those voracious readers, please hang in there and remember...it's fresh and free!

Finsh these and I'll immediately start on the last two, and finish up next summer with the final piece. Two days to go before the first post!

Got to keep it quick. the stories are calling...

The Challenge...

Write five novels on line in one year. Five, count’ em, five full length novels in 365 days, or one book every two months. I will be writing all of them simultaneously. Crazy? It’s insane! A lot of folks don’t read five books in a year. The first part of each story will be posted on Saturday September 12, 2009 and run until September 12, 2010. Three hundred and sixty-five all too short days for a guy with a full time job. So why take on such a daunting, and risky challenge? Three reasons.

I’ve published two books, Broken: One Soldier’s Unexpected Journey Home, a novel of PTSD and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald set among Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, and Everything for Love: A Memoir of Love and War set amid the brutal siege of Sarajevo. Both have sold to international audiences, and I love every soul who bought and read those books. But the recession has challenged a good many hardworking people. Weighted under more pertinent burdens discretionary items like books are quite naturally pushed aside. My goal is to offer five good books to help those folks escape from their troubles for a time, or find community with characters in the stories who are struggling to overcome their own hardships.

Two. The process of publishing makes marketers and salespeople of authors. We’ve gotten away from the art of storytelling. That ancient craft has been forsaken to committees, endless focus groups, and homogenization. Lost is edginess, point of view, individuality and, yes, offensiveness. During the Living Fiction Project I won’t be writing to niche markets. I will be writing to the stories and the characters. Informed often by the news of the day, the characters may go off on diatribes. They may be affected by the news, respond to media, cultural quotes and events as a means to render their world and motivations better for the reader.

This was the way stories were once told. I will have one chance to tell the story and to tell it right the first time. There will be no rewrites, no drafts. The characters and stories will unfold simultaneously for the writer and reader alike.

The truth is, my writing has always been rather organic and natural. That is, I have a vision for a story. I have a beginning and a destination, but the characters are very much alive within that story. They possess their own intention and will. In the story I may wish them, indeed attempt to force them in one direction, only to have them tell me that they intend on an entirely different direction. Their thoughts and words will emerge without being reworked or annotated. No doubt they will reveal themselves in unforeseen ways as each of the stories unfolds. As my wife has observed on more than one occasion, “Bill is never alone. He has all his characters to keep him company!”

Finally, this is the perfect project for a writer with a sort of creative A.D.D. Rather than fending off or setting aside ideas and inspirations that come on something with the force of a sudden summer storm, I will indulge each of those stories. At the very least it will keep things interesting, and keep me guessing as much as you, the reader.

As for the stories, I won’t go into detail here. I have tried to pick stories that are very different from one another. They are stories that will challenge both writer and reader. Some will be quiet and introspective, following lives engaged in the quiet calamities we all struggle to survive and overcome. There is a futuristic piece. There is also a historical novel, telling a fictionalized version of a real event never before written about, but one so profound that it nearly changed the course of history.

I won’t attempt to predict where this road will lead. The first post of each of the five stories will start this Saturday, September 12. My only concern, aside from hoping that my marriage won’t suffer from the intense and awesome commitment and challenge presented in this project, is to tell heartfelt, thoughtful engaging and entertaining stories. The rest, my dear friends, I shall leave to you…

W.C. Turck