ABSTRACT the EVOCATION of DANCING STARS by Edward
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ABSTRACT THE EVOCATION OF DANCING STARS By Edward Quine Brengle IV This thesis is an anthology of short-stories and a single one-act play that come together to comprise a strange, metaphorical journey from damnation to a very human kind of apotheosis. All occupy a borderland between “conventional” contemporary literary fiction and science-fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy and magical realism, using the absurd, the apocalyptic and the spectacular to examine the smallest, most mundane, yet most important of human concerns. Most of the tales feature a crafted holism in terms of story structure, with quantum mechanics and other fields of the higher sciences forming a metaphor for the chaotic grace of human relationships, modern existence and their fuzzy, self-conscious mediations between humor and sadness. A collection of modern myths. THE EVOCATION OF DANCING STARS A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English by Edward Quine Brengle IV Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2005 Advisor___________________ Brian Roley Reader____________________ Eric Goodman Reader_____________________ Rich Erlich Table of Contents INFERNO Hero of the People…………………………………………………2 In Seas of Shattered Glass…………………………………….…..17 PURGATORIO Ballets of Dark and Light…………………………………………25 Devil’s Due……………………………………………………….29 Alone Together (a play)…………………………………………..38 “The last man on Earth is sitting in a room…”…………………...74 PARADISO A thru Z in the August Alphabet…………………………………90 ii For Jane iii INFERNO Hero of the People Once, I was a rogue. A rake. A knave. A hero. Once. ***** I had been dispatched to the corner supermarket after a few highly suspicious rounds of Rock-Paper-Scissors between the three of us in the office. We were celebrating selling out, and decided this was best done with a tube of cookie dough. Okay, two tubes of cookie dough. We were too exhausted for anything else. It had been a long couple of months for our beloved little dot-bomb, but we had finally made good and turned it all around. In fact, after all the wheedling, shilling, straight-up bunko, occasional technical breakthroughs, and working lunches with flesh- eating lawyers from Microsoft™ (which made catering difficult), the call that afternoon that officially green lighted the sale was almost anti-climactic. My partner Nick did a little dance. Molly, our computer programmer and the only one of us who actually knew what the hell she was doing, spun around in her chair until she turned vaguely green. I just wrote a little note that read, “See? I told you so,” and taped it to my chest. Sure there had been some lean times since we launched, but they now looked charming. Besides, they only allowed my partner Nick to develop innovative new methods of dealing with our creditors. These often involved him taking on the personae of a raving, socialist custodian named Lenny, or faking his own suicide half-way through the call by shooting a starter’s pistol and tossing the receiver over his shoulder. We actually received flowers from one particularly naive collection agency expressing condolences. We were quite touched. That agency was now involved in intermittent, increasingly incoherent negotiations with “Lenny” for a copy of Nicholas Stroag’s death certificate for their files. But now we could cut out on our bills with honor (or just pay them—but what fun is that?). And I never again had to watch another one of Nick’s PowerPoint presentations on how to save the company, which always involved Roofies and venture capitalists. As I started to leave, Molly cornered me at the doorway to the office. She was short and pleasantly plump, with a deceptively genial disposition. But her body type just meant she had a low center of gravity if she wanted to toss you through a window, and her big, happy grin would just lull you into a false sense of security and allow her to strike unexpectedly. I had worried about this eventuality during out darkest days. She had only been a semester away from graduating from college before I whisked her away to the private sector with wild tales of wealth, stock options, magazine covers, and a split level ranch where she and her girlfriend could raise Dalmatians and eat cookie dough ice cream. And all before we were 30. “Thanks,” she said and hugged me. “You coded it. All my soft-selling in the world wouldn’t have meant a thing if you hadn’t made it work.” “Damn straight. But still.” I tipped my gray fedora hat. “Just doing my job, ma’am.” 2 Nick, who was sitting at his desk making paper airplanes out of pink FINAL NOTICES! and tossing them out the window, piped up, “Yeah, you’re my hero. Now don’t forget my microwave burrito.” I bopped downstairs and as soon as I was outside, I heard a whistle from three floors above and then a small white paper airplane cratered in front of me. I picked it up and expected to see Nick’s nearly illegible scrawl. He always wrote this way because it simply gave him another level of plausible deniability. Instead, while clearly Nick’s writing, it didn’t require a Rosetta stone and an electron microscope to decipher it. I was touched. It read: “Jones, Okay, I admit it: You did good. I give you permission to frame this if you like.” It was unsigned, but it’s the thought that counts. I had to walk a couple blocks to the supermarket, (I’d had to sell my car a few months earlier at our lowest ebb to make sure Molly would still get a paycheck), but it was a nice afternoon. I fear my happy disposition made me look suspicious to everyone I passed on the street, but I was bursting. I went over in my mind the last gamble trip to the consumer electronics show in Vegas. It was am archetypal, Joseph Cambell-esque descent into the underworld starring Visigoth hoards of geeks with no social skills and gobs of cash, the software executives who owned Park Place seeking to glad-hand or poison the software executives who owned Boardwalk, Hollywood crawlies looking for a combination PDA/dashboard hibachi for their humvees, and other phylum of the truly damned. For a few shining days, it was literally the worst thing happening in Vegas and tackier than an all-drag-queen, musical production of Medea. And I went into the belly of the beast, and with Nick’s help, orchestrated a delicate game of Chinese whispers that led the unwary to think our little database/web browser application/security suite was being ardently perused by Sun Microsystems. “How the Hell did you do that?” Molly asked when we got back to the hotel after our meeting with a endearingly credulous Microsoft rep. “Good product. It sells itself. Told you it would.” “No, I mean the meeting.” I just smiled. “It’s a gift.” I reached the supermarket and walked through the doors. The change in pressure billowed my gray trench coat behind me dramatically for a moment. I stopped at the familiarity of the feeling and, for once, let it all come back. I had started wearing a coat like this and the accompanying gray fedora hat in junior high while trying to claw out some ostentatious individuality of my own. For whatever reason, I kept them both. It was now four o’clock and outside the sun was low on the horizon behind me. Winter was slowly giving way to spring and there was that vibration in the air, that faint shimmer of promise. I remembered that same shimmer in the spring air on those last days I walked into my high school as a senior and the pressure change inside would billow the flaps of my coat as I entered the building and Sandy would be holding my hand and she would blush like she always did whenever her emotional state changed from one thing to another and she would smile with at me with those clear, almost silver, eyes of hers and I would feel…. 3 I would feel…. An ornery mother of about seventeen kids then entered the store, almost plowing her shopping cart through me, breaking my reverie—thank Christ. She flashed me a sour look as she passed, silently upbraiding me for blocking the entrance. Considering the size of her brood, it made sense that she would have the wordless communication thing down pat. One of the adorable little urchins who accompanied her, a nine-year-old boy with dirty cheeks piped up as he walked by, “Nice hat, goober.” I smiled warmly and waved cheerily at the little twerp, making a mental note to tell the store manager that I saw him shoplifting before I left. I was in a good mood, but I have limits, you understand. I wrapped my hands around the cracked blue plastic handle of a shopping cart. I tore it lose from the others it was humping with a cacophony worthy of dropping a brass section down a staircase. No matter how well everything else is going in my life, I also always pick the one cart in the store where every single wheel had a gyroscopic mechanism installed in the base that assures that the wheels are always pointed at a 90- degree angle to the direction of motion. Leaving thick black skid marks on the previously shiny tile floor and a symphony of shrill screeches in the previously serene, MUZAK-tinged air, I made my way through the supermarket.