ABDUCTION A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree A5 Master of Fine Arts 3G In M(p E«&cw Crea,ive Writine • by Lauren Amber Mendoza San Francisco, California May 2016 Copyright by Lauren Amber Mendoza 2016 ABDUCTION Lauren Amber Mendoza San Francisco, California 2016 Abduction is a fictional novel that tells the story of a journalist, a heathen, a fire-eater, a soldier, a Professor of telepathy, and a translator, all abducted in one way or another. It takes place in Austin and Marfa, Texas, in July, 1979. I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this Written Creative Work. Chair, Thesis Comjpittee Date CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Abduction by Lauren Amber Mendoza, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts: Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Andrew Joron Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Aa . Peter Orner Professor of Creative Writing ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to the Faculty and Staff of the SFSU Creative Writing department, in particular, Andrew Joron, Peter Omer, Junse Kim, and Carolina De Robertis for their assistance in this project. Thank you to my peers, Dirk Petersen, Karlee Johnson, Kacy Cunningham, and many more for the time they spent with this piece. Thank you to my family, the original Reyna Terror, my mother Kathy Reyna, my father, Rudy Mendoza, and my sister Tiffany Tantrum Mendoza for all of their encouragement. I’d also like to thank my new family in San Francisco for giving me a home. You know who you are. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. The Kewball Documents..................................................................................................1 II. A Yes or No Phenomenon.............................................................................................20 III. Marfa Lights................................................................................................................21 IV. Silence, Words, Wastelands .......................................................................................53 V. One Step at a Time........................................................................................................53 VI. Forever and Then Gone......................................... *.................................................... 87 VII. The Woman........................................ 87 VIII. The Perils of Meticulous Visions............................................................................118 IX. Something Reasonable With Vodka..........................................................................118 X. Human Silence............................................................................................................126 XI. Staring at Dead Flies ..................................................................................... 127 XII. Small Comforts........................................................................................................131 XIII. Simple Analog........................................................................................................ 145 XIV. Earth to Tizzy......................................................................................................... 146 XV. The Chill of Dreams That Linger.............................................................................173 XVI. A Ride With Sister..................................................................................................174 XVII. Forever and Then Gone.........................................................................................182 XVIII. A Pretty Penny.....................................................................................................183 XIX. The Diversity of Phenomena ........................................................... 188 XX. Stay With M e...........................................................................................................189 XXI. Gone Without a Trace.............................................................................................197 XXII. The Woman in White............................................................................................199 vi 1 “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” — Henry Miller “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” — Tom Robbins I Later than usual this morning, Rudy sat on his perpetually unmade bed, feeling quite unmade himself, a crisp manila envelope in one hand, a pack of his formal brand of cigarettes, Kamel Plums, limp and wrinkled as he, in the other. He sat chain-smoking in yesterday’s slept-in underwear, the spent elastic folding into weird origami around his aging bones, long since deserted by muscle and tone. The local radio’s single of the day, Look Whatcha Done, was bending through his vintage Pioneer system. Rudy usually enjoyed Jimmy Vaughn’s breakneck-quick guitar as much as any good Austinite, but this morning he had been prevented from doing so. The phone had not stopped ringing. Rudy was beginning to forget a time when the phone wasn’t ringing, struggled to recall a memory uninterrupted by the invincible bells ringing, Kriiiiidge! Kriiiiidge! Rather than answer the phone, Rudy turned up the volume on his stereo. He knew who was calling, could imagine his partner, Pepper Bruno, abusing their poor, doughy intern (Lara Something, Pepper had named her), his voice stem and calloused, telling the girl with 2 wrecked eyes, I said dial, you savage bint. Yes now, goddammit! and the intern nodding, Yes, Yes, Pepper leaning over her with his ear to the receiver, unconcerned about the ash falling from his cigar down the intern’s back, as he listened for the ringing, helplessly impatient to know if Rudy had opened the envelope and deciphered the meaning of its contents. Rudy thought about answering the phone just to give poor Lara Something a break, but it was pointless talking to his partner without having opened the envelope. Pepper wouldn’t rest without having something to tell the others at headquarters. Rudy didn’t know if he was going to open it, didn’t know if he was ready for another disappointment after so many promising possibilities had turned out to be nothing. He knew his partner, Pepper, a tall man who had once taught telepathy in Germany, knew that Rudy had been having doubts, had felt the pressure ever since the organization had started growing, its census growing richer, more powerful. To Rudy’s incredulity, the group had shifted towards investing more money into the group’s political lobbying than research. It left Rudy the sole Atlas, condemned to carry the weight alone. He had lost touch with the group. More and more, Pepper took care of the organization, left Rudy to do the only thing he really cared about: writing eager, albeit fruitless, translations of the few precious fragments he had mined from hundreds of thousands of tapes, the aural mapping and tracking of unexplained aerial phenomenon. But the more Rudy lost touch with the others, the more he confined himself to his quarters, he began to wonder if he wasn’t becoming, for the second time in his life, a laughing stock. After all, his life’s work had resulted in zero progress. Rather than results, his dedication and his sacrifices: 3 family, travel, education, had only given him doubt and self-loathing. He couldn’t bring himself to open the envelope, had begun to doubt his desire, his belief in the existence of trans-galactic translation, and his partner knew it. “Let it ring,” Pepper would tell Lara Something, his far away eyes punishing, pleading. Rudy considered shredding the envelope and the tape inside, burning the parcel, flushing it down the head, eating it, though, he thought, not in that order. Change didn’t happen overnight, so Rudy had been told again and again. Very slowly, he’d learned to accept this, despite, thanks to a particularly catalytic childhood incident, knowing of at least one exception to the rule. And now that he had accepted it, he wondered, what was the point of opening the envelope? What good could come from a tape that had, in all probability, recorded nothing more than the nasal breathing of some socially starved Trekky, who, with yet another free Friday night, had decided to volunteer his unique, scientific talents to spy on the stars for the Agency, content, like too many of his generation’s scientists, to know the how, but not the why. Rudy didn’t give a shit about the how. The how was a philosophical afterthought, Pepper had said the first night they’d met, summing up Rudy’s feelings succinctly over something potent Pepper had called a Pimm’s. There were machines that could map the image of a space wave, record the noise of a solar flare, predict to the minute when a comet would cross the sky, take the temperature of