January | 2019 | Eye-Dancers

Imagine this scene . . .

A man is driving along a lonely country road as midnight approaches. I don’t know how old the man is–perhaps 40, maybe 45. For the time being, it’s not important. Nor do I know his name. Jeff? Fred? Ferdinand? Pick a name, any name. Just as with his age, it is irrelevant right now.

The man (okay, we’ll settle on Ferdinand!) glances in his rearview mirror. A dark stretch of asphalt merges into the background, swallowed by the night. He can’t help but inhale deeply, taking in the warm summer air through the open window of his car. Above, in an oily canvas of night sky, hundreds of stars sparkle like diamonds. He used to study astronomy as a kid, and, momentarily, he looks up, through the windshield, seeing if maybe, just maybe, he can identify some of those stars. No such luck. Like eighth-grade algebra, the knowledge is gone, captured by the wide gulf of years, of time and distance.

He hasn’t driven through a town of significant size for miles. He’s “smack-dab in the middle of Nothingville,” as his mom used to say about the house and town he grew up in. Where is he headed? I’m not sure, and neither is he. Doesn’t matter. What matters is the drive, the stars, the gentle night breeze wafting in through the window, the fields and trees that come and go, come and go, as he drives on. There are few houses. But occasionally, there is a porch light in the distance, a beacon in the dark. It makes him reminisce. He grew up on a farm. He couldn’t wait to get away, escape to the city. Now he wonders if perhaps that had been a mistake. His life isn’t what he thought it would be. Maybe that’s why he’s on this long drive. Maybe he’s running away, fleeing something from a long-ago, irretrievable past.

Ferdinand sighs, turns on the car’s radio. He scans through the stations–not getting much, this far away from populated areas. He comes across a sports-talk station with a caller screaming in a heavy Brooklyn accent about why the New York Jets need to move in a new direction. The host cautions restraint, the caller yells again. Ferdinand presses a button, and the angry Jets fan is gone. For a moment, Ferdinand imagines the owner of that voice, that frustrated fan. He’s shut him out, erased him from the confines of the car, but surely the man is still raging from somewhere in Brooklyn. An apartment, perhaps? Maybe the guy lives above a bakery or a pizza parlor, or a pawnshop. Maybe he owns a brownstone on a busy corner, with cars honking and people talking on the streets and sidewalks outside. Miles away from Ferdinand. Worlds away.

He continues to drive, cruising along at 55. Not a single car passes him. The road is his, and his alone. He imagines driving through a vortex, through an intersection of space and time, plunging into a parallel world, as if a character in an old Twilight Zone episode. And all the while, he continues to scan through the radio dial.

There’s one station playing ’80s pop. He pauses on this one. Some of the songs he remembers well from his youth. This makes him feel at once nostalgic, and old. Could that really have been thirty years ago? He glances in the rearview again, not to look out for traffic–he knows there isn’t any–but to check his thinning hair and the worry lines on his forehead. Where has the time gone?

Muttering, Ferdinand fiddles with the dial again. The scanner skips over stations and plays back static with others, interspersed with a few more songs that he doesn’t care for–there’s a heavy metal piece, a country song. A grunge number from the ’90s. Just as he’s about to switch the radio off entirely, he hears something odd. A voice, talking to him. But not just any voice.

His voice.

“Don’t do it,” the voice on the radio–his voice–says. “Think twice, champ. Don’t. It will be the biggest mistake of your life–and that’s saying something, considering your track record. Don’t go there.”

Ferdinand shakes his head, hits his forehead with the palm of one hand. Don’t do what? Don’t go where? And how can he be hearing himself on the radio?

“I need some sleep,” he says. The next sign of life, the next town–he’ll pull over, get a room for the night. Maybe order some takeout, watch a movie. Relax.

He reaches to turn off the radio.

“Not that easy, you don’t,” his voice says back to him, tinny and crackling, as if losing reception. “You’re not going to shut me out . . . or up. Listen, for a change. Don’t do it. Don’t you dare.”

He takes a long, deep breath, looks out the window at the stars, at the empty, open vastness of the night.

Is he losing his mind?

And if he’s not . . . what does it mean? How can it be?

Maybe he has driven into the Twilight Zone, after all.

**************************

This is an idea that hit me with the force of a hammer last week. The scene unfolded in my mind as described above, formulated within seconds upon waking from an overnight sleep. As I always do when an idea that energizes me comes, I immediately jotted down the gist of it, the essentials–so I wouldn’t forget anything important. I did the same thing with the scene that came to me in a dream back when I was in high school–the dream that morphed into Mitchell Brant‘s dream in the opening chapter of The Eye-Dancers. For two decades, I couldn’t seem to fit that episode into a story–until, at last, The Eye-Dancers was born.

Will this new idea, this new situation, also take weeks or months or years to grow and expand and flesh out into a story, or even a novel? I hope not. But I don’t have much control over it, either. This is how ideas work for me, most of the time. Every now and then, an idea arrives fully formed, beginning to end, a complete story that only needs to be written. But that is the exception, not the rule.

The rule is both riveting and frustrating. Exhilarating and tantalizing. Because what normally happens is–I am given a piece, a small slice of the whole. Just enough to hook me, pull me in, grasp onto to me like a feisty dog taking a firm hold and not letting go. I am forced in, unable to discard, feeling the need to explore the path and see where it leads. See what discoveries await on the other side. Sometimes that process is sudden and immediate. Other times it is slow and full of pitfalls, as I await the pleasure of a capricious and all too often stingy muse.

So, for right now, I reluctantly set Ferdinand aside. Oh, I’ll think about him. I’ll turn his predicament over in my mind a thousand times before Sunday. But I know the full story cannot be forced. Just as Ferdinand’s voice spoke to him from the radio, so it will to me–in its own way, at a time and place of its choosing. I can coax and goad and ponder and cajole, but I cannot dictate. The creative process must be allowed to work its magic in its own inscrutable way.