1 2 HIGHER THAN GOD ___________________________________ B S.R. SEGRIST ___________________________________ A NOVEL IN STORIES Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the Creighton University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English _________________________________ Omaha, NE May 3rd, 2011 3 4 Abstract for Higher than God by S.R. Segrist Higher than God is a collection of twelve pieces of fiction in a variety of formats such as modern short story prose, the memoir, the epistolary, poetry, and more experimental forms such as the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story and stream-of-consciousness writings. The works were written with the format of a concept album in mind where each individual piece of fiction is like a song which can be enjoyed on its own, but when read in order, reveals motifs, thematic echoes, and greater emotional resonance for the reader, similar to the effect a well-sequenced album would have on a musical aficionado. The protagonist of the “novel” is a young, white, male named Travis Steve. All the pieces attempt to reveal different aspects of his emotional/spiritual development or lack thereof through focusing on his turbulent emotional life which results from his various relationships and his experimentation with sex and substances. The work also relies heavily upon a myriad range of pop-cultural references, primarily rock n’ roll music, video game culture, and Hollywood movies. The end result is a totality of intra-textual meaning, as well as a bittersweet portrait and psychological examination of the protagonist. 5 Table of Contents The Fraud 6 Freshman Year: A Choose-Your-Own Misadventure 29 Sarah Bentworth’s Blank Book 56 Irving Bartholomew Long 83 Vyctoria Waddell 125 What Moves the Body 145 Imelda Marcos and the 12 Dancing Princesses 157 You and I, We Will Rise 178 The Original of the Species 182 A Letter to Travis 197 Coming to Light 199 Higher than God 223 6 The Fraud Travis Steve’s mind was made up before he hit the snooze button for the third time. That’s it—I’m sick. It was 9:15 AM (early for Travis) and he was most definitely not physically ill. While it was originally his intention to wake up early on that Tuesday to get a head-start on his first (and what would be the only) draft of a short story due that night, Travis knew in his heart that he just wasn’t creative in the morning. To make matters worse, he had to work a lunch shift at the Olive Garden. He was supposed to be there at 10:00 to refill salt and pepper shakers, a reliable chore for making him feel he was wasting his life. Even if business was slow and he got off early, he would still only have four hours to start and finish the story. Travis fumbled for his phone and dialed his employer. Fortunately, the lingering effects of sleep resulted in very relaxed vocal chords, lending a gruffness and extra bass-y timbre to his voice. He fancied himself an actor with prodigious vocal manipulation talent, so when Mike the Culinary Manager picked up, he transformed his voice into a raspy goulash of pitiful squeaks and coughs. Experience had taught Travis it was usually best to keep a lie short and sweet; liars tend to over-explain, to hem and haw, to say too much, to butcher the porky, to excessively elaborate until their believability erodes away into suspicious territory. “Hey Mike…this is Travis…I’m scheduled to be in at 10:00, but I’m sick.” “Oh, yeah?” “Yeah.” “Weren’t you sick last Tuesday?” “Yeah. I thought I had it beat, but it came back…with a vengeance.” 7 Travis cringed a little bit, wondering if perhaps his humorous attempt at a Die Hard reference worked against him. He could hear the sounds of cooks firing up the grills in the background. “Okay. Feel better, bud.” Travis snapped his phone shut and kicked his feet up, sending his comforter into the air like tossed pizza dough. He always felt a wave of release following the interminable suspense of a lie-in-progress. He thought: This is the feeling criminals must get when they pull off a heist, a score, a con. He had just bought himself an additional three and a half hours to conceptualize, compose, and revise a five-page literary masterpiece sure to dazzle and impress his peers and professor. He reset his alarm clock and went back to sleep. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Two hours later, Travis was still asleep, but not soundly; he was nightmaring about English 250—Advanced Fiction Writing (although the inclusion of the word “advanced” in the title seemed somewhat Orwellian.) In this freakish dream, it was always Tuesday night and he was locked for an eternity inside a windowless classroom, poorly lit by fluorescent bulbs, with sixteen or so other students all in a circle of desks, circulating manuscripts for peer revision. Some of their heads would be disproportionately larger than their bodies, like Charlie Brown’s. Some were dressed all in black. Some had misshapen folds of fat protruding from tight spandex outfits, their sausage fingers barely able to turn pages. Giant melting clocks adorned the walls and every thirty seconds, the professor, Dr. Harold Leibowitz, a short, balding man with gold- 8 rimmed glasses and a Freudian beard would yell “Switch!” and the students would pass whatever they were reading to the left before feverishly diving into the next hackneyed, contrived text. The only problem was that Travis didn’t have his manuscript, so people kept lining up at his cramped, little desk, tapping their feet in annoyance, waiting for him to produce what could not be produced: a story of his own. C’mon Travis, they’d demand in unison, before taking turns with their spiteful epithets. It’s so easy for you to criticize our stories. You think you can do better, huh? Why don’t you show us? Yeah, why don’t you show us, you pretentious little bitch. Show us. Show us. Show us. They yanked Travis from his desk, and Dr. Leibowitz made him stand before the class. Travis, you will fail this class unless you show us your story, he said in his squeaky voice. Silence filled the room as Travis stood awkwardly in front of the chalkboard. Well? The professor motioned the universal sign for “Get on with it” with his hand. “Uh…uh…my story’s right here…” Travis fumbled with his zipper. The chants began again: Show us! Show us! Show us! Travis pulled down his pants and underwear; his groin was merely a blank, airbrushed region of smooth flesh, like a nude Ken doll. “Gah!” Travis woke with a start, sat up and tried to rouse himself. It was 11:36. He had less than seven hours. 9 I’ve really got to finish this, if for nothing else than the ability to get a good night’s sleep. It was true his sleep was often punctuated with nightmares. Recurring themes of Humiliation, Personal Failure, and Impotence were the primary colors of his dream palette. What had happened to the time this semester? Travis had fully intended to commit to writing a page a day, but he hated everything he wrote and deleted it after he was done. Over the last few weeks, when he wasn’t in class or waiting tables, he watched movies for inspiration, but then he just felt bad when he’d write something and it’d just sound like De Niro or Pacino. He ran downstairs and dropped a Pop-Tart into the toaster, booted up his laptop, and made a trip to the bathroom. A mirror hung above the toilet, so Travis had several opportunities a day to ponder his reflection whilst emptying his bladder. Staring at himself in the mirror, he scanned his face for some kind of revelation, the way a scorned lover searches the eyes of a philandering spouse for explanations that never come. He must have searched for too long, because the scent of a burning pastry brought him out of his distraction. While consuming his charred breakfast, he performed his regular routine of checking his e-mail and various news sites at the kitchen table. He realized this was stalling, but he was a creature of habit: only after visiting each and every music, movie, comic, and video game website he frequented could he satisfy his media-hungry brain and he could feel he was in that elusive and transitory place where there was nothing left to do but get to work. Get to work! Travis thought in his most urgent inner pep-talk voice, the same voice heard in inspirational sports films when the coach/mentor’s words resound encouragingly within the athlete’s mind. 10 He opened his word processor and stared at the white page. The blinking cursor taunted him, dared him to press keys. You could just revise one of your old stories no one in the class’s read, but damn, you already did that for your first submission earlier this semester. You don’t want to have taken this entire class and not have written a single new story, do you? You need some inspiration, man. Why don’t you check out the newspaper? Travis went to the porch and retrieved the paper. As he flipped through it, he thought: The Beatles got their inspiration for “Eleanor Rigby” from reading a story in the newspaper.