Return to the Scene of the Crime - Fiction Friday Challenge #199

*The Fiction Friday prompt was "The one thing your character regrets learning the most is……" and while this story is about both learning and regret, it doesn't follow the prompt to the letter, so I hope you're okay with that.

“I don’t remember you,” the wizened old professor said to her.

Why would he? She wasn’t surprised. She had dropped out of the fiction writing program after one and a half less than illustrious semesters, her inner muse having succumbed to a fatal case of writer’s block. But that was a decade ago. In the ten years that had passed between then and now, the fiction department sent her invitations to their annual festival of creative writing. Every year she declined.

It was hard enough still living in the same city as the school she dropped out of. She never knew when she’d see a news item about it, or discover that some once-vacant building in its vicinity had been taken over by the school and was now full of students working on something edgy and avant garde. Now that it no longer mattered, she had a firm grasp of the bus and train schedules that could get her to campus on time. Now that it no longer mattered, she had a thick enough skin to take constructive criticism. Now that it no longer mattered, she had enough life experiences to write the novel that would have been her thesis project.

It was quite possible that ten years ago today she was sitting in the very same classroom she sat in now, anticipating the beginning of the 2 hour writing workshop the old professor would be teaching. More students filed in. Their faces were unfamiliar to her, and too old to have been the faces of any of her former classmates. She had enrolled, under duress and pain of parental cajolement, right after completing her Bachelor’s in a torturously rigorous program. All she had wanted was a year off to rest her brain from the strain it had endured. But she ignored her own instincts, followed orders like a dutiful daughter, and enrolled here at 22. Most of her classmates were about her age, though most of them were undergraduates. Which posed a problem, since they were her peers and yet not her peers at the same time. What separated them was that she had a degree they were still working on. She often forgot that she was being held to a higher standard than they were. There were older graduate students in the program, of course, but she hardly saw them because most of them took the evening classes while she preferred attending during the day. So perhaps that was who she was surrounded by today, the older students she had not met before.

Today there would be no grades or standards to worry about. The professor had the group arrange their chairs in a circle. She remembered sitting in circles like these. Unlike the other writing courses she took, the ones here required that she and her classmates exchange stories and read them aloud. So someone else was always reading her writing back to her. Hearing it come from someone else’s mouth, cringing at the typos Microsoft Word somehow let slip through spell check, she wished she was not sitting in a circle so she could bury her head in her desk. Something about the setup made her feel small somehow. But she was going to confront her past today.

“Take a sound.” The professor said. “Listen for it. It could be a sound here in the room, or a sound outside the room.”

Ah, yes, this dumb writing exercise. She remembered now. This was the type of thing they did in Fiction I to spark some sort of inspiration. But the inspiration never came for her then, not this way. Nor was it coming now. None of the sounds inspired her to see an unrelated image in her mind’s eye, create a gesture for that image, then a story to go with the gesture. This was not working for her.

Next they took turns reading aloud from Proust. At least it wasn’t “Bartelby the Scrivener” again, or some dreadful Kafka story. If she had to read about Gregor Samsa one more time, she’d send the Orkin man after him. After they’d read for a while, the professor asked them to share what images they remembered from the story. Then there was another story to read aloud, a surreal piece by a professor whose name sounded vaguely familiar. Could she have been one of the instructors teaching a class she dropped out of halfway through the semester? Perhaps.

At last, with only 30 minutes remaining, it was time for the writers to write. She hadn’t thought of herself as a writer for a very long time. But that’s who they were in this room now, writers, all of them.

“Take a place,” the professor said, “a space, a room. Picture this place, this room. What’s in this room?”

Her mind again went blank for a while, until an image came to her, something that held the clue to one of her deepest secrets. Oh, that secret just begged to be made into a novel or screenplay, if she only had the nerve to disclose so much about herself. Of course, she could always use a pen name. Not that it mattered now. These people didn’t know her. She never saw them before and probably wouldn’t see them again. She told them what the item was when she was called upon. There were a few blank stares, but a few more writers leaning forward with interest. And instantly she recalled how she’d felt ten years before, when her roman à clef was being read aloud in class, typos and all. Her field of vision throbbed in time with her pounding heart, and she knew she wasn’t ready to share the story yet. Not with them, not this way. Her fear of exposing so much personal detail about herself was another contributing factor to the death of her muse. How relieved she felt when, at last, she no longer had to sit in classrooms encircled by strangers who knew her fictionalized secrets. Now was not the time for this, she decided. Now was the time for pure fiction. Now was the time to write a scene for the story she abandoned.

He was determined to go through life as though his frailties did not exist. No one had asked, so he could write his own story. He could be the hero instead of the victim. He could be the doctor now and not the patient.

When she read it, the professor nodded kindly and said it was a good start. She could sit a little straighter in her chair now, and hear the words of the other writers better. She could tell now what was truly a first draft and what was most likely prepared ahead of time. She would not be fooled this time as she had been before. She did not compare herself to anyone this time. She had her story, they had theirs.

Again the professor asked them to recall the images they remembered most. No one remembered anything she’d written. When that had happened before, back in the fiction program, she had been mortified. If no one remembered what she had written, did it mean she was an unmemorable writer? If it had been based on her real life, as was the premise of the Story and Journal class, did it mean that she lived an unmemorable life? If no one remarked on her writing, did it mean that she herself was unremarkable? These were the fatal blows her muse was dealt. Or perhaps they were near-fatal wounds. Her muse was not dead. Simply comatose. A crime had been committed here, a crime against herself. She was the perpetrator, her inner critic the accessory to it, her own words her weapons. She was the one who had subsequently forbidden herself to write, told herself nothing she had to say was interesting enough or good enough, seen her life as a forgettable bit part in the theater of the mundane.

This time, as before, she did not leave the class having made any new friends. But this time, unlike before, she realized that she wasn’t a bad writer at a good MFA program, but a good writer at a good MFA program that just hadn’t been right for her. So many times she had blamed herself for not having more exciting experiences to write about. She had actually envied the intrepid classmate who ventured to New York in October 2001 to see Ground Zero with his own eyes. Once she dropped out, she took a series of retail jobs and got all kinds of stories from neurotic shopping women who seemed to frequent high end department stores in lieu of psychotherapy. Besides the vicarious dramas, she’d experienced many of her own in the ten years that she’d left. But now she saw that her lack of life experience had never been the problem. Instead it was her lack of faith. The comatose writer inside of her was awakening, and she could feel its presence in its insistent narration of the story of her life as it happened to her, here, now, in this room.

[Fiction] Friday Challenge for May 1, 2009

SPOILER ALERT: If you plan to read my novel, A Bitter Pill to Swallow, don't read this story yet. Wait until you have finished it.


He was going to tell everyone who asked that his name was Arthur. He stood on the side of the road, hoping another car would pass by soon. An Edsel had sputtered past, but the little old lady driving it eyed him suspiciously without so much as slowing down. Could she tell he was from the school? He’d hoped he had put enough distance between himself and the place so that no one would figure out who he was, or who he had been. He hoped the old leather jacket and blue jeans Paul had given him would be an adequate disguise. Paul, his only friend in that strange and terrible place, had given him normal clothes to wear so he’d look like any other 17 year old boy, and his brand new copy of On The Road.

“You should come too!”

“Nah. I’ll be alright. I’m better off here. This place has kept me off the pills, at least.”

Yes, only by substituting them with stronger medicine. All of it made him feel absolutely lousy. Lousy and drowsy. He spent the last couple days only pretending to take his medication, hiding pills under his tongue or between cheek and molar. He secreted them away in his sock drawer. Paul said he could sell them if he wanted. He knew a guy just outside Portland who’d buy them from him. Why anyone would be stupid or desperate enough to buy a pill that had once been inside anyone else’s mouth was completely beyond him. But then again, a lot of things were. And that was why when he was just 8 years old, his parents had sent him away to this school among the pines and the redwoods that stood beneath perpetual rain clouds.

“He’s the cutest little boy. Makes it that much sadder, doesn’t it?” He overheard a relative say of him when they learned of his fate. They had come to say goodbye. It was no ordinary Sunday dinner. They did not know if he would ever come back.

He could overhear them talking late into the night that last time he slept in his own bed. Some said he was too bright. They said that genius could lead to madness. Others said he was too dull. And what kind of a boy still lived in such a fantasy world at his age? He was too big for this, or too little for that, and what would ever become of him? What kind of man would he become? Finally, to shut them out, he shut his eyes and envisioned Camelot. He imagined that he was the boy who could remove the sword from the stone.

The place he went the next morning was not like his school at all. There were so many rules, and punishments far worse than detention or demerits. And he was not allowed to bring his toy soldiers, or his cars, or most of the other treasures of his lonely childhood. So all he had was Camelot. He talked to his doctors, stern-looking men who smoked pipes and wore horn-rimmed glasses, and they looked at him disapprovingly. They were always telling him to stop thinking about knights and castles and being the boy who could remove the sword from the stone. They wanted him to leave the one place that made sense to him, the only place where he felt safe, only to join them in their world of rules and regimens and tapioca pudding. They did their best to pry him away from his world. They used ice water baths and cold sheet packs, insulin shock and electroshock. Each time, he just went further and further into the back alleys of Camelot, hiding behind stables, finding secret passageways, even taking on disguises so that no one would know his true identity.

He wanted to be good, to get better, to make progress. He did what was asked of him. He even kept taking the medication after he realized it was causing him to gain weight at an alarming rate, even though there were no longer clothes that fit him when he finally went home for a weekend when he was twelve and that pretty girl across the street laughed at him when his pants split as he was picking up the morning paper for his father.

“Did you just get back from the funny farm or the fat farm?” The loudmouthed paperboy asked as he sped by.

And the pretty girl didn’t seem so pretty anymore once she started laughing at him.

He dropped the paper, ran inside and up the stairs to his bedroom where he retreated into Camelot, where that afternoon an insolent paperboy was slain by a young knight in training.

That was five years ago. He had not returned home for weekends since. Partly because he didn’t want to go back and face further humiliation, and partly because he had lost the privilege. Now they were calling him delusional. And this meant another round of treatments. They were no longer as terrifying, and he wondered if that meant they were no longer as effective. Finally, last month his parents came to visit him with tears in their eyes.

“They told us of another treatment. It’s a last resort.”
An operation, they said, that was called a lobotomy.

Nobody wanted to tell him much about it. But he had seen the effect of it on some of the other kids. And he couldn’t let it happen to him. And hadn’t he tried to be good? Hadn’t he done what they asked? Wasn’t there some other way? He really did want to get better. He really did want to be normal, and make friends, learn to drive a car, do the things that all the other boys his age did. He did not want to become what those unfortunate few of his classmates had become. The light in their eyes had been extinguished. Paul had called them the pod people.

“Oh I forgot, you haven’t seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” He said, teeth chattering as he shivered under an ice-cold sheet.

The nurses had left them there in beds that were side-by-side. Talking seemed to help distract them from their frigid confinement.

“Yeah we don’t see a lot of movies here. Only once in a while.”

“You gotta get out of here before they do it to you.” Paul whispered.

And that was they night they formulated the plan that had worked so far. Hitching a ride wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped, though. Why did they have to put the school in such an isolated place, so far removed from the rest of the world? As it began to rain, he wished he could have been in a city, near a bus or train station. But now the only way he could get to a station would be with the help of a stranger, and thank goodness a produce truck slowed down and the driver let him in. The trucker didn’t ask many questions, only where he was going, not why and how and what he’d do when he got there. But he’d been coming up with answers anyway.

His parents? They died in a terrible accident. He was on his own now. First name? That was easy. Just call him Arthur.

The money from the pills he sold to Paul’s friend was enough to get him a train ticket out of state. And he needed to get out of state before they found him and sent him back for the dreaded procedure. He worked his way east, taking whatever odd jobs he could. The school had prepared him for little more than a life of light industrial work. The few classes he had taken were too remedial to count for anything. To make up for his shoddy education, he spent his days off reading as much as possible at public libraries.

In one little town he even worked as a busboy at a restaurant that was so empty it must have been a front for something else. And through the owner he met a priest who created a false baptismal record he was able to use to get proper identification so he could finish high school. He found his way to Kansas City where some buddies at his factory job taught him how to drive. He still spent his free time reading, as he tried to find a way to understand all that his doctors had told him. He wanted to heal himself.

By the time he moved to Chicago, he was studying to become a psychiatrist at one of its top universities. And almost 20 years after running away from his own (mis)treatment, Dr. Arthur Lutkin was prescribing treatments of his own at a special school for emotionally disturbed children and teenagers. It was a place of healing, not of punishment, and it looked like an old castle.

for fiction friday: Invent a holiday for which your character is a big fan

Peter sat at his desk, folded his arms, and looked out the window. This was the coveted corner office view he'd always dreamed of. From the ergonomic cocoon of his Herman Miller Aeron chair--a luxury only bestowed upon upper management types--he could gaze down upon the parking lot to see his car in a newly reserved parking space that was much closer to the main entrance. All of this just for speaking up. All he had done was make one small suggestion at a routine weekly meeting.

How could they improve the bottom line? How could they maximize their return on investment? Jennifer had suggested National Landlords Day, but Shelly and Mike disagreed on the gender neutrality of the word "landlord" while Quentin reminded them that in some markets homeowners greatly outnumbered renters and they would not be able to sell as much product as a result. But police officers, he continued, were everywhere so why not launch a Law Enforcement Appreciation day? Jennifer and Shelly, in retribution for the attack on their Landlords Day idea, pointedly asked Quentin if giving gifts to a police officer might constitute a bribe in some areas, and if this was all just part of a scheme to keep his car from getting booted again for excessive outstanding parking tickets.

Finally, Peter spoke up. He had been surreptitiously working on his deep breathing exercises all throughout the meeting, and saying his affirmations in his head. He would be assertive. He would speak up. He would stop being a wallflower.

"How about National Send Someone A Greeting Card Day?" He said.

One of the advantages of always being so quiet was that few the times when he spoke Peter commanded everyone's attention.

One by one, all of them agreed that it was a fantastic idea. Anyone could send a card to anyone else for any reason. It needn't be based on relationships, religions, job titles or the time of year. Recipients could be young or old, married, single, divorced, widowed. It could even get some of those cards that were blank inside off the shelves! And what is a card without flowers or candies or fruit baskets to accompany it? There could be hats, mugs, t-shirts, a website, maybe a television special...

And so, sitting in his new office ready to reap the benefits of all the flowers, candies, fruit baskets, hats, mugs, t-shirts, websites, and a television specials his idea would sell, Peter decided that National Send Someone A Greeting Card Day was his most favorite holiday of all.

For Fiction Friday

Alice tried to remember who had given her the key. Had it been Mrs. Hooper, after the developers purchased her late husband’s store in order to convert it into a trendy new Caribbean-Italian-Sushi fusion restaurant called Dine? Or Gordon, after shaking his head and saying farewell to the street here he’d watched his children grow up? The 2 guys in the basement apartment—what were their names?—Bert and Ernie, that’s right. Bert liked to feed the pigeons, before city ordinances were enforced to forbid that sort of thing in this neighborhood. Which was why the big yellow bird was the first one to leave. A psittacosis scare would definitely cause the property values to plummet. And his giant elephantine friend wouldn’t help the situation. So it couldn’t have been either of them who had given Alice the key. They were already gone by the time she arrived with her real estate agent to see the property.

Next to the stoop in front the building was a collection of trash cans. Alice thought she saw someone with bushy eyebrows and beady eyes peering out of one of the garbage cans. There was a lid on his head, and though Alice couldn’t be sure, she was almost certain he was a grungy shade of green. But maybe that’s what years of homelessness had done to him. Well he’d be gone soon enough. On the way into the building, she and the agent passed one of the current tenants, who’d be moving out soon.

“Hi, Bob!” Waved the real estate agent.
But Bob just muttered something about the stress of trying to find another rent-controlled apartment with the same kind of character as the one he was leaving.
“What’s the matter with him?” Asked Alice.
“I don’t know.” The agent replied. “Usually he is so chipper!”

A few weeks later when Alice returned to show the building to her live-in boyfriend, Eddie, a deaf woman who lived on the first floor said something to them in sign language that didn’t look very friendly.

“What’s going on with these people?” Alice asked. “Every time I come here, I get the dirtiest looks from everyone.”

Gordon must have heard her. Leaning from his second floor window, he explained, “things used to be a lot friendlier around here. Until local politicians like The Count started taking bribes from real estate developers. Mr. Hooper didn’t want to sell his store or the rest of his building, but a few months later he died under mysterious circumstances. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

“Gordon? Are you at it again with your conspiracy theories?” Called his wife from somewhere inside the apartment. Then she stuck her head out of the window next to his.
“Don’t believe everything he tells you. From my understanding, what really happened is The Count got some crooked cops to frame this kid Elmo for selling drugs behind Mr. Hooper’s store. And the city was able to use imminent domain because it was considered a drug house.”

“Oh, so my version of it is a conspiracy theory but yours is true?” Asked Gordon. “What about what they said about the Cookie Monster? That he sent Mr. Hooper some macaroons laced with arsenic? You know macaroons were his favorite.”

“Cookie Monster just doesn’t have it in him. He’s not really a monster, you know.” She replied.

The tales of the sinister goings on in this block were not enough to frighten Alice away from the building. The unit she eventually purchased had been gutted and remodeled. It had hardwood floors, exposed brick, and antique crown moldings that had been painstakingly restored. The rusting fire escape in the back had been converted into a beautiful iron balcony that would be perfect for her new Weber grill.

There was something very romantic about this place. And even though she was a stock broker and Eddie was a lawyer, they could live like artists here in this trendy new neighborhood that would soon become the envy of all their friends. She had moved to New York City from England after a bad experience with her crazy ex-boyfriend, an accessories designer who made eccentric hats, and an incident involving his Cheshire cat. She had no intention to leave. Whoever had given her the key to the building, it didn’t matter. The place was hers now.

Moving day had finally arrived. The movers had gone on ahead of her. She was trailing them on her new mountain bike. But somewhere along the way she had gotten turned around, so at a red light she asked the driver of a cab beside her,

“Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?”