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Chapter 7 is now officially complete, at 15 pages and 4500 words. Yes, the consistency is wonderful. But what can I say of the chapter itself? It was written in chunks, some of it as long ago as September. Over half was done before last night. The half that I wrote tonight, however, it hurt me. Writing it sincerely hurt me. There is no other way to put it. Ralph and Mark discuss, briefly albeit, who is to blame, and by God, it is so painful to have to put two characters whom you love dearly through such a horrid conversation. I don't know. I just don't know. I can't paste that here, on this blog. Here is another sad excerpt, though not quite so sad.
“Oh, Ralph, you know that I have already left you. It is simply a question of when you can let me go.”
“And if I can’t, sir?” Ralph had never felt so positively abject, “How am I supposed to go on like this? How, sir, how?”
His smile vanished. Quite seriously, Mark intoned, “Live, Ralph. Just live until you die”
“And what if I don’t want to live?” he whispered faintly.
Mark smiled sadly before letting himself fade into the past, back into his schooldays. “Plutôt souffrir que mourir, c’est la devise des hommes.”
Ralph would have been surprised, if he had been capable of surprise anymore. Instead, he felt the weight of reality sink in his stomach—the knowledge that this wasn’t real, not any of it. Yet he indulged his fantasy wearily, “Sir?”
“It’s from a French fable,” Mark answered obliviously. “La Mort et le Bûcheron, or Death and the Woodcutter. The woodcutter lives a life of sadness—not loneliness, just simple sadness. He calls Death, and she comes without waiting. Then he changes his mind—decides he doesn’t want to die. That, Ralph, is the moral of the story: it is always better to suffer than to die. No matter how terrible things get, how horrible the world comes to seem, how cruel life becomes to you, do not forget it. There is always something for which to live, Ralph, for which to die. Always. And when you find there is no cause, no person, nothing worth living and dying for, then that is the day to die—the day when you lose faith in everyone and everything. That is the day that I was always afraid I would live to see, and thank God I did not live to see it. I hope you never have to see it either.”
“Don’t you see, sir?” the sum of Ralph’s sadness welled up in his tear ducts. “I’ve already seen that day, sir; I’m living it.”
“Oh, Ralph.” The pity in Mark’s eyes deepened profoundly with each sentence his poor Vice President uttered. “Don’t you see that you’re doing it to yourself? Everything that I am trying to warn you against, you are letting happen, Ralph.”
“I already told you, sir,” he answered meekly, “I’m self-destructing.”
“Stop it, Ralph. Stop it now,” Mark returned with the harshness he had had in life. “Stop saying it, stop thinking it, and by God, stop letting yourself do it. Focus on the positive; focus on your purpose. If you can do that, everything will fall into place.”
Ralph shook his head, “Sir, there isn’t any purpose for living so far as I can tell. I simply make a mess of whatever decent aspects there are in life. I don’t try, but it’s entropy, sir. Everything tends toward a natural state of chaos.”
Mark answered gravely, “Check your premises, Ralph.”
God, it took long enough, but I have finally completed Chapter 6: A Mouse in the Perfect Trap. For some odd reason, it is full of allusions to the first book. Ralph relives Mark's death. Something goes wrong in California. He decides to go to California. He sees Orion. He plays the part of the mouse. And, perhaps most happily of all, the conspiracy finally comes out. Because it is, by far, the most interesting part of the chapter, that is what I shall paste.
“How surprised,” it was her turn to match his calmness, “would you be if I told you that the Red National Army has sleeper cells in California?”
Ralph did not make a noise. It should have surprised him immensely, but it did not surprise him at all. His calm remained in tact as the puzzle pieces fell into place. Connections that had trouble his subconscious for twenty damn months suddenly made sense. He saw flashing was Robert Davidson had resigned—why the RNA had bombed San Francisco—why California and the others had seceded—why all the tragic events of those twenty damn months had come to pass. It hadn’t been random chance, random chaotic chance—hadn’t even been one catalytic cataclysm that set in place that tragic series of events. No, it had not been beautiful, random chaos but cold, calculated order and cosmos. It had always been as put together as that itch in the back of his head had thought. There was a reason why he had become the Vice President, and perhaps even why he had become the President. Surely every event was significant to the plot, even Mark’s assassination. It was such a marvelous plan, he reflected, and it had worked so brilliantly, so perfectly, that it had taken twenty damn months for anyone to realize the trap that Robert Davidson had laid.
“You see it too, then?” Felicity asked ruefully at his silence.
“Yes,” he returned very quietly. “Robert Davidson made a plan with Ai Mengrui. He wanted power, always had, but he knew that he could not compete with Mark Adams. He knew that California could be driven to do just about anything. He guessed that calculated chaos could drive the state to the breaking point and force secession. He figured that, if he were Governor of California, he could be his own President. He bet everything on his cousin’s ability to pull off a successful terrorist attack. He arranged for Governor Pierce’s rather convenient death. He resigned as Vice President in January, assuming that Mark Adams would pick a meek replacement as Vice President—someone who would do his bidding without questioning. He got his Governorship and waited. All he had to do then was wait—wait for Ai Mengrui and the RNA to drop their pretty little hydrogen bomb on Davidson’s own city. He did, and California got mad, just as he had expected. The state seceded, with some company. He got his cushy little Presidency and waited. Soon enough, an assassin, most likely hired by him, murdered Mark Adams. Soon I, the meek Vice President, end up in the big chair in the Oval Office.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been doing exactly what he wanted. He knew I would keep fighting his fake country, knew that I would disillusion the American public, and knew that whoever ran against me this year on a Free California platform would win.” His soul splintered farther than he had known possible. He was the enabler of history, the enabler of tragedy. He had been played, and in doing what he thought was right, he had allowed everything to come to this point and to get so terribly out of hand. He was responsible for everything that had happened since that horrid oath, he knew, and he would be responsible for everything that would come to pass. He would be responsible for what was sure to be a frightening regime under Erikson. He would be responsible for China’s collapse. He would be responsible for enabling Davidson and allowing his evil plan to succeed.
“It’s not your fault, Ralph,” Felicity answered his thoughts quietly. “You have responded to circumstances the only way you could. You have done all the right things. If you hadn’t fought Davidson, he’d have won anyways. Don’t you see, Ralph? It was a lose-lose situation—the perfect trap.”
“No trap’s perfect, Felicity.”
“Ralph, you aren’t perfect either. No one in the entire country had any idea what was going on. He fooled us all. You are simply human. Don’t be bothered by that fact, and don’t beat blame yourself for it—for your humanity or for history.”
To be brief, I have spent a few nights playing around with GIMP. This image is the result.
Pages: 87. Words: 26,307. Chapters: 5. Prologue? Yes, and it is damn good.. Epilogue? No, not there yet, though I do have a plan. Favorite Passage: I honestly can't say. I have written so much in so little time that I can't even remember it all. I'm rather inclined to say it's one of the passages about chaos in the fifth chapter.
I should have done this last night, or this morning, really, but I needed to get some sleep. Needless to say, I wrote nothing today. I don't really know when I will write again. I want to, desperately, and I think I know what to write, but I have gotten to that scary place again. I have responsibilities that I've ignored this last week. There are things that I have to do--that I need to do--and some that I don't but should. The first part took me to some unexpected places. I would be a fool to think that the second will be any different. Hell, I wouldn't want it to be any different. I like unexpected places, and I like finding myself beyond the threshold of the known world. I just can't afford to go there right now because I can't be sure that my door back to the known world will be open when I come back. I can't afford to have the important doors close while I chase a dream. This is a cruel form of masochism; I know that. But it's all part of The Plan. It's order and cosmos, and I just can't face chaos, especially not in my own life. I will be back, and I would like to finish by February 24, the two-year anniversary of the day I "finished" my first novel. I'll try. I just need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs and pray that I don't get lost.
Part One: Cosmos
I. The Last Honest Man in Washington
II. Handkerchiefs and Hardships
III. The Silent Scream
IV. Lost Causes
V. The Human Bomb
Part Two: Chaos
It is 5:30 am, and yet I am done. It seems impossible, but I accomplished my impossible goal half an hour before the deadline. I wrote two full chapters in one day. I am very nearly dead. Anyhow, Chapter 5 is 4600 words and 15 pages. (And because I didn't say earlier, Chaper 4 was 4500 words and 15 pages.) My consistency in terms of length is shocking.
But what I find very interesting is the direction in which my subconscious has taken this book. Ralph is a human bomb, apparently, and he is doing more than self-destructing. Everyone and everything dear to him... dies, it seems. Jane makes an impassioned plea that Ralph ignores in Chapter 5, and she makes a choice that could easily kill her. I don't know if it will yet. God doesn't always make decisions in advance. Some things are just chaos:
Because as a human being, Ralph was fundamentally a conservative. He did not act. He did not take initiative. He did nothing new, nothing more than he felt he had to do. All he did was react. He did what was asked of him. He did the tried and the true. He did not take risks because he was a conformist. He liked rules and order above all else. He chose the cosmos above the chaos.
That, he realized as he wept into his kneecaps, was why he clung to the memories to which he clung. Whenever even a hint chaos had entered into his perfectly, obsessive-compulsively ordered life, he broke down. Chaos upset his worldview, and he could not get past that.
His first experience with chaos had been his father’s death. His father had been a good man—a great man—and he had deserved better than an incompetent team of doctors who mistook an infection for cancer. They had destroyed his immune system, and he had died despite his overwhelming right to live.
Then there was Mark. Ralph had never expected to develop any sort of friendship or dependency on the President when he took the oath of the Vice President. He had expected life to go on as usual. Yet, a month after he took that oath, chaos gave them a terrorist attack over which to bond. The series of events that followed was something akin to the medical disaster that befell his father. Mark had stripped Ralph of so much of who he was—of logic and reason and right—that he left him raw and susceptible for grief. Mark had broken Ralph and had forced Ralph to become dependent on him. Then, before he could put the pieces back together, chaos had taken his life.
Those instances of cruel, unbridled chaos were more than he could take. He wanted, nay needed, so desperately to believe that the universe had a rulebook—that there were some things that people did, and others they didn’t. That there was right, and that there was wrong. He had never truly gotten over his father’s death; it was the fear of becoming an agent of chaos that had prevented him from becoming a doctor. It was why he became a lawyer, and thus why he was sitting here now. However, there had been plenty of stretches of time, months even, when he could function normally.
The results of Mark’s death were infinitely more catastrophic because Mark’s murder clashed all the more violently with his precious worldview. He believed that people were good, or just at the very least. He had seen murderers as Baltimore’s DA, true, but it had always seemed that there was some sort of order to human behavior and limits—extremes which no decent being would cross. Mark’s death denied logic, reason, and right. Mark was a good man who had done no wrong, and his death served no purpose but to land the incompetent Ralph Myers in office.
The severity of the chaos had as good as destroyed Ralph’s worldview of a good cosmos. People no longer seemed reasonable. People no longer seemed worth the benefit of the doubt. People no longer seemed generally good. They either fit into one’s boxes of acceptable beliefs and behavior or they did not. If they did not, then they did not belong in one’s life. Life was too chaotically short for one to suffer people who compromised. The world was so full of compromisers that one had to search for the few genuine, real good and true gems and cling to them. Their standards were the only ones that mattered. No ordinary, compromising second-rater was worth the trouble, and their standards did not matter.
This was the philosophy that Ralph found himself slowly adopting. It was the reason why he had betrayed Jane, who didn’t believe that California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada were lost causes worth fighting for. He viewed that as a fundamental compromise, and that was why it had bothered him so deeply these past few months. She had compromised, just like Navarro, just like Erikson, and just like the rest of the God-damned chaotic world. For all of the good in her, she had compromised, and the new and disillusioned Ralph found that unbearable. He had thought she was better than that, but he was wrong.
By these standards that he was only beginning to understand now, Felicity Adams was not a compromising second-rater, and thus, her standards mattered infinitely more than those of Jane. Felicity fit into all of his boxes, not just most of them. She never settled, and thus when he was with her, he did not feel like he was settling. The trouble was, he did not know if he was introducing chaos or order into the universe by being with her. It depended on the standards. If he followed the standards of chaos, Felicity’s standards ruled, and he was introducing order into chaos. If, however, he followed his old standards of order, Jane’s standards ruled, and he was introducing chaos into order. The latter possibility broke his heart. The former merely twisted it, but had the semblance of acceptability.
But it truly did not matter. Either set of standards hurt. By following one set, he betrayed another. No matter what was true, he still lost.
Chapter 7 is now officially complete, at 15 pages and 4500 words. Yes, the consistency is wonderful. But what can I say of the chapter itself? It was written in chunks, some of it as long ago as September. Over half was done before last night. The half that I wrote tonight, however, it hurt me. Writing it sincerely hurt me. There is no other way to put it. Ralph and Mark discuss, briefly albeit, who is to blame, and by God, it is so painful to have to put two characters whom you love dearly through such a horrid conversation. I don't know. I just don't know. I can't paste that here, on this blog. Here is another sad excerpt, though not quite so sad.
