ABSTRACT HOLLOMON IV, JAMES ARTHUR. Fragments. (A Novel under the direction of Dr. John Kessel.) Alex is a young man losing control of his life. Almost a year after his fiancée of three years abruptly ended their engagement, he finds himself still tormented by both his ignorance of what precipitated the dissolution and his inability to conceive of himself without her in his life. His self-image shattered, he descends into cycles of self-recrimination and destructive behavior that alienate his friends and family and leave his personal and scholastic lives in shambles. Desperate to save himself, he attempts to recall who he was before his break-up, but doing so only feeds the darkness growing inside him. Viridian is an arbiter, a cybernetic-augmented defender of “reality” in a futuristic city where “logic” and “truth” are upheld as sacred laws and enforced at gunpoint. But when he catches a glimpse of a horror that lies just beyond the fragile veil of his reality, he finds himself under trial by the same virtues he upheld. Branded as tainted by what he has seen, the only hope for his redemption lies in giving up his basic humanity to combat the growing tide of deviancy at its source. Kazin is the last in a long line of shamans for a good reason; the land he has sworn to protect is dying, withering away under the effects of a mysterious blight. Unless he can somehow find a way to replenish the source of the land’s energy and sever the ties to the spirit that no longer supports it, his people will all perish. Yet doing so requires the aid of primal forces of destruction that his kind imprisoned long ago. In order to succeed, he must make a bargain with demons of a bygone age. And all three of these characters are the same person. Fragments is a story of loss, and the strange workings of the mind as it tries to rationalize and circumvent the pain of losing something precious. Through the mental escapades of a character’s alternate selves, we see how the self fights for its identity, the heart struggles to survive, and how in every brain are many minds just waiting for the right catalyst to run wild. FRAGMENTS By James Hollomon A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts In English Raleigh, NC 2006 Approved by: _______________________________ ______________________________ ____________________________________ DEDICATION This story is dedicated to the two most influential women in my life: The one who helped cause the problem and the one who helped solve it. Both my eternal contempt and my eternal gratitude are theirs; I think they know which one of them gets which sentiment. And also to my mother and father, for their support and patience, And above all, their love for me when I felt I had none left. You were both right, I’m happy to say. ii BIOGRAPHY Born seven days prior to the end of the Year of the Dragon in 1977, James Arthur Hollomon IV was once foolhardy enough to attempt to cure his arachnophobia by purchasing a tarantula (it worked.) He began telling stories at the age of four after his father made the mistake of showing him how to operate a tape recorder. A self-taught illustrator, painter, and sculptor, he turned away from pursuing visual arts as a career at age nine because “there’s no money in it.” His writing, however, served him well; a short story describing the unhappy fate of a magician’s apprentice named Kazin netted him a merit scholarship to Wofford College in the fall of 1995. Fragments is his third long narrative work, and he hopes that it will not be his last. As of this writing in the spring of 2006, James lives in Raleigh with his indispensable wife Ellie Feddersen (who kept her maiden name because her initials spell “ELF,”) their shih-tzu Sprocket (who, like his Fraggle Rock namesake, is really a Muppet,) and two black cats, Newt and Ripley. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks goes to Dr. John Kessel. This novel would not be complete without his patience and encouragement. Thank you for your guidance, and for helping me get over my fears. It is an honor to have worked with you. All songs and lyrics were written by Ronan Harris of VNV Nation “Kingdom,” “Rubicon,” and “Distant (Rubicon II)” appear on the album Empires “Epicentre” appears on the album Futureperfect “Entropy” appears on the album Matter + Form Thanks for letting me hear the sound of courage. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PART ONE: SHATTER………………………………………………………………… 1 PART TWO: DISPERSAL……………………………………………………………... 59 PART THREE: GATHERING…………………………………………………………. 99 FINALE: TRIAGE…………………………………………………………………….. 142 EPILOGUE: REASSEMBLY……………………………………………………......... 190 v PART ONE: SHATTER Nothing I can do that I have not done; No words I can say, no truths left that I can see; So must I let this end, let everything fall apart, Before I live my life as I have always done? Tell me what to do so I do nothing wrong; Something I can hope for, something real that I can see, So nothing falls apart, so this does not end; I cannot return; I can’t start again. -- VNV Nation, “Rubicon” 1 Failure is an ugly color. Mainly brownish yellow, tinged with green and gray, and certainly not the kind of color that Crayola would ever put in the 128 pack, failure colored his life and filled it with its stink, something between burning hair and wet newspaper. He stared at the mostly-blank Word document that was supposed to be his master’s thesis and took another pull off his Red Dog. He’d lived with failure for the better part of the past year. It assaulted him whenever he looked in the mirror and studied his sinking cheeks, his haunted, guilty eyes. It waited for him in the halls of the English department, where his professors gazed at him with pity or contempt, apparently aware of how he had let his potential and obligations fall by the wayside in his desperate bid to save a meaningless relationship. His computer games entertained him with failure, letting him sink further and further into it in ever more interesting ways. He heard his failure breathing on the phone lines whenever he lied to his parents about how his studies were going, and saw it stalking him in the aisles of booths at work, a hateful word permanently clenched in its teeth: waiter. He turned away from the screen and rubbed his eyes. His bedroom was dark except for the stinging glow of the monitor; the contrast was starting to make his eyes ache. Through the ground-level window, he could see the leaves of the camellia bushes dancing under the barrage of rain in the fuming orange light of the parking lot posts. The clock on his nightstand displayed 3:38 in unforgiving red blocks. He yawned and turned back to the screen. It’s funny, he thought, how you actually have to wait for your brain to make sense out of these little black shapes on the screen before you can identify them as words. He looked at the empty bottle in his hand and wondered if it was his fifth or sixth. He read back over what he had written, absently stroking his goatee. All he could see was the worthless shit that he couldn’t quite remember having typed. Some piece of junk science fiction story about a machine winding down slowly on a dead world in the galactic middle of nowhere, pondering its own existence and trying to rationalize that it was essentially going to die. It was the expanded version of the lyrics to Gary Numan’s “M. E.” He grimaced and switched off the monitor with a stab of his thumb. He didn’t bother to save his work anymore because he never wrote much worth saving. 2 Getting out of his chair and stretching, he noted again that his bedroom seemed to be colder than it should have been. Gooseflesh stood out on his thin arms, and he rubbed them briskly. He briefly considered putting another call in to the maintenance hotline, asking them to stop by and check his window for leaks or broken seals. But he knew that without him there to supervise them, they would simply come into his apartment, fart around for a few minutes, and leave yet another yellow service order on the cocktail table saying that they couldn’t find any problems. After all, hadn’t they done just that when he’d called them out to replace the moldy carpet padding left over from when his water heater had sprung a leak this past winter? His sinuses seemed to think so. Outside the rain had slacked off. The tattoo on the side of the building had diminished from a pulsing big-top drum roll to a sporadic smattering of golf applause. The wind, however, had increased. It howled raggedly around the corner of the building. Pulling the blinds apart, he saw the spindly pines sway. Living wood creaked softly. Every so often, a fresh batch of spring green leaves, made shiny by rain and sodium streetlight, would skitter past his window. “This should be a great night for writing,” he said to no one. “It was a dark and stormy, yadda yadda, bullshit.” He smiled. At least Bulwer-Lytton had been published. He pulled the last drop of beer from his bottle and dropped it on top of the others in the black wire wastebasket beside his bed.