AFTERWORD

LATE WINTER

Tying Things Up

Boy, there are a lot of things to tie up.

In a corner of this empty living room I have peeled back the carpet to reveal another layer of carpet. Getting my fingernails beneath it, I pull and discover yet another layer—a spectacular circa 1973 olive green and orange over white crotchet pattern. I can feel my eyes widen. I like the look of it. I don’t know why Farah Fawcett, The Fonz and my mom’s date bars come to mind (likely Sunday evenings when I was a kid, lying on the basement floor watching TV with my brother). The memories are dashed, for as I pull now on this bottom layer I quickly learn it has been glued down. Taking a firm grip of the triangle of carpet layers, I pull and my legs push. Staples snap, the backing rips and the wall trim splinters. A thick tar-like residue remains adhered to the floor like a black foamy sticker. And cat. Oh yes, cat—you know the stench. The house hears my first string of heated profanity—something about wanting to meet the bastard that thought gluing was a good idea—I suggested plagues upon him—upon his own house—et cetera. A few minutes later I am scraping the tar. I find the floor. Douglas fir, aged wood floors. Scarred, stained—perfect. But this is going to take some time.

The carpet’s stains, the cat piss, the furniture crop circles read like a diary of the house. How many memories, footsteps, wine spills, nervous, hundred-turn paces happened on this floor? How many pitter-patter sprints to the Christmas tree? How many wrestling matches?

I lay back, stare at the ceiling and whimper, “Boy, there are a lot of things to tie up.”

It is another story altogether to explain why I am lying here on three layers of carpet in a house that was built in 1910. A house my son and I have just purchased. Another story entirely to explore the shocking and unexpected turns of matrimony and how it breaks. Another tale for another time to discuss the better part of the dark three years that have knocked me down on this overly cushioned, mattress-like floor. And, I think, if I stay down here, where its dark, I’ll stay here—so I sit up, I climb to my feet, I put my hands on my hips and I say to the house, “Alright, my darling, be that way. I’ll have your coverings. There are new memories to make. Out with the old—in with the new. Let’s get on with it. Boy, there are a lot of things to tie up.”

Why do I keep saying that? Boy, there are a lot of things to tie up. Probably because during all the monumental shifts in my world over the last few years, I’ve been in the process of writing the third and final book of a rather involved trilogy. The story was seeded sometime around 1996 and has since crowded my daily thoughts, my journals, countless conversations and, I’m thrilled to include now, it has inserted itself into a relatively notable number of readers. And it has been remarked by many that the Newirth Mythology is, thankfully, not spoon-fed fiction, but rather, “Thoughtfully complex and meticulous with plenty of unexpected pathos.” (I didn’t write that, someone else did.) Aside from the story’s penchant for a cliffhanger or two—or three, there’s the occasional unresolved philosophical meandering (for instance the heavyweight “why am I here” puzzlers), and never mind the time jumps from a witches pyre in the 14th Century, to an evening with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, to a psychologist’s journey across an ocean of death to what some may name the place where artistic inspiration is birthed and others, the Afterlife. Bearing all of this in mind, my publisher, Andreas, Dad, my friend Scott, my editor, Allison, the very nice gal at Safeway, nearly every fan I’ve met at signings, almost every person that knows I’m working on the last book of a trilogy has, in one way or another, expressed, in no uncertain terms, a kind of proclamation or unchallengeable edict from deep within the collective knowledge of spun yarns, for don’t we all know a story or two ourselves—and by God, we all know that stories should end a certain way. They have all said regarding my not yet released, third and final installment: “No pressure. But, boy, there are a lot of things to tie up.”

Other reader comments include—this one is my personal favorite, “How does it end?” That’s a toughie to answer. Second place is, “Do you know how it will end?” I typically shake my head gesturing no while I say, “Yes, of course.” And coming in third, but not necessarily last, “What’s it like putting a book together? Because, hell, there must be a lot of things to tie up.” Sometimes I think I just might have the right energy and vocabulary to effectively answer. Certainly I’ve been doing this long enough to at least offer my particular method and process when it comes to creating a long piece of fiction. For example, I might talk about how most of the story develops out of simply doing the work, staying at the desk and writing it. I might discuss themes and plot and character development, et cetera. But in the end, endings and knowing how to put together a book has mostly to do with, well, you’ve likely guessed: tying a lot of things up. Into a neat little package—with a bow, no less.

Meanwhile, I make lists for the house: paint (hobbit colors: burnt umber, yellow ochre, autumn leaf crimson), brushes and scrapers, electrical tape, masking tape, work gloves. Call on new furnace. Call a flooring company. Make a dump run. Fix the ceiling fan, the back door hinge, the leak in the kitchen, the broken railing, the rotted porch steps. Create a room to sleep in. A room for Michael my son to sleep in. Make a home. I crimp my eyes shut after a few hours of demoing a water damaged bathroom floor and keep reminding myself: the house is scarred, stained and perfect. I take a break from hacking out the bathroom floor and survey the rest of the house to determine the right position for a temporary writing desk. It isn’t long before I fully understand that I can only do one thing at a time. One foot and then the next.

Daylight slips into evening. I pour a scotch. Dusty and tired I sit on the porch and watch a violet sky fade into purple.

In the morning I wrestle a desk into a corner, open my laptop to the where-I-left-off-place and turn to the kitchen to brew coffee. The wreckage of my life crowds around me—boxes and boxes of books, LPs, a turntable, two drum kits in cases and art supplies. A bag of tools sits beside a massive pile of old, stinking carpet.

I think of the trilogy’s main character, psychologist and writer, Loche Newirth, and his horrible plight. How the stories he has written—his works of fiction have become real, and they are destroying not just the lives of those surrounding him, but worse, eliminating the promise or chance of life after death. I recall thinking early on about worst case scenarios for my story, and how I wanted to do something I’d never seen done before. Typically, the worst case scenario for one’s characters is, well, death. Imagine it: the gun is held to the captive’s head, the bad guy says, “Don’t take another step or else” So, now we’ve got some tension, right? Death and its permanence—and we all agree to define that as bad. Well, for the Newirth Mythology, I wanted death to be a scenario, but certainly not the worst case. Instead, I put into harm’s way the hope of an Afterlife. The destruction of what some might call Heaven. It took some doing. First, you need to provide some plausibility that an Afterlife truly exists outside of mythology, outside of the hearsay, “I saw the light” stories, and the old, “There’s an afterlife because, well, it would be stupid if there weren’t.” Then you need to surround the Afterlife with potential killers, put a gun to Heaven’s head and say, “Take one more step and the Afterlife gets it,” and so on. Needless to say, Loche is in a bad way. And so is everyone else. You too, I expect, if you happen to be hoping there is a place waiting for you beyond this life

SPRING

Supernatural Trickery

“Let me make this perfectly, abundantly (add more adverbs here), clear—I do not believe in the supernatural.

I do not believe in ghosts, hauntings, or what the Immortals in my story would call Bridging Spirits or Bridgers, or Godrethion.

I do not believe in gods, prophets or messiahs.

I do not believe in planet position personality predictions, augury lifted from out of palm wrinkles, nor foretelling from flipping a few cards.

Neither do I hold faith in McKenna mystic psychonauts, meditation, shamanism, yoga, crystals, essential oils, new age manifestation, Hicks existential high vibrational gonna-get-it-done-now-to-find-fucking-meaning spiritualism.”

I share these personal laws aloud one late, rainy afternoon in May as I witness my new bedroom door close entirely by itself, accompanied by a Stokerian hinge creak—a groaning, longing, spine scraping, torture chamber creak—the kind the vampires of Transylvania pay high dollar (or lay) to have installed. I stare at the door in mid stride with a bucket of paint hanging from one hand, and in the other, a raised hammer. I wait for the gooseflesh to smooth out—my breathing to slow—my eyes to find the reasonable answer. I tick through logic. Wind? No, there’s no wind inside. The heat is off. I bumped it when I passed? No, I am on the other side of the house—and have not been to the bedroom in hours. My heavy footfalls perhaps? I say aloud, “It must be…” and I drop off. I try again—my inflection rising questioningly, “The explanation is easy Scoob—the door opened because—the weight—of the—tri layered—carpet—being gone—has allowed the foundation—to settle—a little ——bit.”

I open the door, press it to the wall and place a doorstop at its base.

After this, I begin talking to the house in earnest.

I place a book or two upon a shelf. I say, “Hello, House. I’m placing a book up here.” The last piles of cruddy carpet I heft into a dump pile outside. I say, “House, I’m cleaning up your floor. Making room for new memories.” All the baseboard trim has been removed for the painters coming tomorrow. “House,” I smile, “new clothes tomorrow.” I startle at another sound. Hail clatters on the porch and the metal roof. I listen carefully to make sure it is not a chain being dragged from room to room upstairs. After some time with my head tilted ceiling-ward, I’m still unsure.

Later, at my desk, I try cleaning up a few paragraphs from the day before. I stack words into new sentences. Tools and dust and bent nails and sandpaper, clutter the corners of the room around me. Ignoring the chaos, I secretly wish the bedroom door, there on the other side of the dark living room would yawn and creak closed again. Loche Newirth would love for that to happen. But then, I think, with all he’s been through now, Loche might likely use a scary groaning door as a sleep aid.

Part Three, The Shape of Rain has its share of supernatural bumps in the night, or to be more accurate, bumps in the mind. If Part One, The Invasion of Heaven dealt with the power of stories and the transforming influence of myth upon beliefs and behaviors, Part Two tells of the repercussions of said beliefs—murder, assassinations, the descent into the maelstrom of madness. These stories tell of supernatural lovers. Betrayals. Of trespassing gods upon the Earth and an Order of guardian Immortals sworn to send them back across the threshold of death —and all of this, created and penned by the main character, a conservative psychologist and non-theist, Loche Newirth, whose writing has altered the course of history, and his catalogue of created characters are all now living and plotting to interfere with our mythical beliefs of afterlife, our notions of gods, and the hope that our lives in some way, matter—Part Three, The Shape of Rain, wrestles with it all. Each day I have errands within the narrative. Lines to follow. Plans to see through. Each day there is seemingly something new. I move my characters through the paranormal while they struggle to see through their new lenses of reality.

SUMMER

The Burrow

My son and I have given the house a name. We call it The Burrow after JK Rowling’s description of Ron Weasley’s house in the Harry Potter series. A house, she wrote, “that looked like it was held up by magic.” In the center of our Burrow is a staircase that coils its way up to four small, almost hobbit-sized bedrooms, each meeting at the stair landing. It feels like a fort, as Michael describes it, “Like Ron Weasley’s fort…” Thus, we call it the Burrow.

But long before the name The Burrow caught on, I wanted the interior of the house to match what I imagined Bilbo Baggins’s home, Bag End, would look like. Now the walls are painted a parchment yellow. The old-world wood trim around the doors I have stained to a rich mahogany. And the floors? Did I mention the floors? After cleaning, sanding, a few repairs, and swathing an oil color stain somewhere between burnt sienna and chocolate, the hardwood patina turned out better than I could have imagined. These are Bilbo’s floors. This is the floor of an Irish pub (only slightly cleaner). And now when I rise in the mornings, the entire house glows amber and gold. There’s hand made crockery in the kitchen, and swords in the hall, and medieval maps on the walls, and candles. Quill and ink on the desk, and old books on the shelves. And tucked away in a room near the back is a desk lit with a single lamp. Four coffee cups, two empty, two half full, stand guard around an open lap top.

It seems the more I find the proper places for things, I find more places that need filling. A lonely corner of the living room is without a lamp. The empty walls up the staircase need framed pictures of Sheree, Auntie Jo, Auntie Mel, Uncle Stan, Shakespeare, Buttercup and the Man in Black, Jeff Spicoli, a picture of my band mates Cris and Cary, Scott and Mark.

Then, at the same time, I feel as if I have too many things, (or better stated, too much shit). The pack-rat genetic trait has been firmly lodged in my DNA. My father’s voice, “You never know when you’ll need—” insert peculiar metal rod that’s been leaning in the corner for twenty years, or bag of old coat hangers or the weird tool that does that thing that you found with the stuff that you got from that guy that time when you needed that thing… you know, that thing. Why do I continue to haul around this Barry Manilow record? Why do I keep T-shirts that are over thirty years old when I don’t wear them? And while these questions deserve consideration, all I can think of is, where in the hell do I place the T-shirts, the Barry Manilow record, the coat hangers and that thing I got from the guy with the stuff that time. For some reason, all of it needs to stay.

Head scratcher… head scratcher, indeed.

Michael has left a wooden sword leaning just beside my desk. It is in my best interest to pick it up when I rise to refill my coffee cup, lest I am defenseless against an imminent attack. Outside, the backyard is shaded beneath the canopy of a walnut tree. Moving patterns of electric blue sky wink between the leaves. It is hot. Michael and I should be at the beach, but there’s a book that needs to get written. There is so much to do. So much to tie up.

The messy baggage of the roommates of my mind… these characters of mine. I have shared the very small place that is my head with Loche, and Basil, and William Greenhame, and Albion, and Julia, and Helen for over twenty years now. Their stuff is scattered everywhere. I have Loche’s earliest thoughts, Basil’s first paintings, William’s history drawn from countless sources. There are so many pieces and parts that I have decided to include an appendices at the end of this final installment, The Shape of Rain. Call it excessive. Call it Tolkienesque. Call it what you want. All I know is—these things need a place. They need to stay.

In order to begin telling Loche’s story it was necessary for me to complete the back history of the Wyn Avuquain Immortal race, their belief systems and their heritage. At the same time it enabled me to offer the Pacific Inland Northwest of the United States a mythology of its own. Included in the appendices are maps, character lists, historical timelines, treatises on Immortal culture, charts outlining the Itonalya influence upon astrology as we know it, rules for the game of Shtan, and various definitions and footnotes.

Also, I’ve made room for a few of the earliest Itonalya folk tales—for example the Lay of Melithion and Endale which tells of the love story between the Earth and her guardian, the Moon.

The final section of the appendices is dedicated to the Itonalya language, Elliqui. Included are usage rules, grammar, pronunciation tables, letter and tone charts along with both English to Elliqui and Elliqui to English dictionaries. The effort is a culmination of work that I began, I think I can safely say, when I was fourteen. Since then, the language has grown considerably in both its depth and sophistication. But in the last decade the lexicon has taken on a life of its own. Words have begun to link larger meanings—metaphorical if not etymological.

FALL

Scarred, Stained and Perfect

The sun’s light slants and adds a little extra shadow to everything. Trees along the street explode into reds and golds. Mornings are brisk. Frost on my windshield.

Days roll together as I face the final few chapters not yet written. I rise before Michael to make his lunch. I brew coffee. I wake the boy and we wrestle into clothes, brush hair and teeth, and on the way to school discuss the finer points of swordplay, dragon culture, why leaves turn colors. When I return, I notice how the house looks more like a home. I’ve managed to pull together some furniture. There’s art on the walls. There are coats hung on pegs, clothes in the closets and things placed where things should be placed. At least for now.

Truth is, I don’t have any idea how to do this whole house/home thing. I don’t really understand how my furnace works, or how to fix a sink or if the sofa is really in the right place. And this thought occurs to me: there will always be loose ends. Each year, the leaves will pile up and they will need to be raked. The washer and dryer will break down. We’ll change the paintings on the walls and swap out the pictures on the shelves. There’s no end to what we’ll do here. Things will always be a little scarred, stained—and perfect.

I settle in behind my desk, scan emails, put fires out, then I fill the screens with the book. I read, edit, work a few sentences. I stand and pace. The coffee is bitter. I try a thread, pull it through the fabric of the story. It tangles an hour later—I pull it out—cut it—try another. Sometimes I move the story forward: Astrid Finnley to Venice—Loche through the gates of Wyn Avuqua in the year 1010AD. Fausto’s shop. Hours pass.

Truth is, I don’t have any idea how this book will end—not until I arrive there. Rain taps at the roof. In the back of the house I think I hear the bedroom door creak ever so slightly. The thought occurs to me that I’ve been listening to that recording voices saying, “Boy, there’s a lot of things to tie up,” over and over since I began Part Three, and now I suddenly question if this vein of logic is true. Do all stories have to end neat and tidy, wrapped with a bow? How tidy is a life after all? And how beautiful is the ragged hem that is our story? A rage and defiance rises up within me. Embrace the unexpected, and what is natural. Don’t over think. Let go and accept the chaos—take the non novel path—as in life, so too it is in fiction. “Yes!” I tell the Burrow. “Yes!” I shout at the lines of text on the screen. Maybe it is not about tying it all together, but rather, unraveling it—to find what is inside. Pull back layers. Find the floor.

When Michael bounds up to my desk with sword in hand, “Are you done yet, Dad? How does it end?” now for the first time since I began, I truly believe I have an answer for him. “Dad, how does it end?”

I tell him, “It ends scarred, stained and perfect.”