Excerpt from Revised Book 1
Someone asked me to post a sample of some newly revised material from Book 1-2e. I decided to give an example of something that I did not have to revise much at all, as an example of how close Book 1-1e was to being right. I feel this is a decent enough example of how the book blends several different genres, only one of which is Science Fiction. ===> EWhen he awakened, it was to the sound of voices in the courtyard outside his apartment. He knew the voices. They were his neighbors; just about all of them seemed to be there. There was the unmistakable sound of a pop-top on a beer can opening. That meant Paul was there. A radio was playing dance-mix disco music so that meant that Maria was there. Andy sat up, stretched, raked his hands through his hair, stood-up slowly, went into the bathroom and caught glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. For some reason, the reflection struck him as a
peculiarity.
He studied his hands, first the palms then the backs, wiggled his fingers. What a miracle a hand is! He then looked at his reflection again. He couldn’t quite place whatever it was that had been so important before he fell asleep. Everything had strangeness about it, as if something was slightly out of synch with nature or time. He tentatively decided it was just a dream that he could not recall at the moment, that the dream had made him feel stupid in waking. He splashed some water onto his face and toweled-off. Then he paroled a beer from the refrigerator and went out to the courtyard to join his neighbors.
“Andy,” Paul greeted him. Paul was an automobile mechanic who Andy generally liked but he was also the sort who flirted to excess with women, which Andy didn’t really care for at all. Andy had stayed-up late in the courtyard with him one evening and got drunk listening to his war stories about various conquests throughout his younger days.
“Sit down,” Maria scooted over to one side of the bench to allow Andy room to sit beside her.
The others nodded, smiled, greeting Andy silently with head nods.
There was Julie who was a recovering alcoholic who had divorced her husband in the heat of battle over her drinking. She’d found salvation in the Lord and was taking life one day at a time. She had two daughters living with her, the fourteen-year-old had the body of a nineteen-year-old and Andy had almost asked her out on a date before he found out how old she was. Her other daughter was twelve and promised to follow in her sister’s footsteps.
Sam was also there. Sam worked for the postal department, sorting mail. Sam had been a track star in high school. He’d served two years in Viet Nam. Ten days before he was scheduled to leave, he took a bullet in his lower leg. His buddies helped him out of the thick to a clearing where a helicopter evacuated him to a M.A.S.H. unit. His leg was so damaged by the exploding tipped bullet that it had to be amputated from the knee down. The doctor had told him that he was a little surprised there was as much of it left as there had been. He was bitter about the war and didn’t like to discuss it much. Paul, Sam and Andy had gone out on a boat that belonged to one of Paul’s friends for a day of drinking beer and fishing, more of the former than the later as it turned out. Sam had told them about the war, and then made Andy promise to never willingly join the military. Sam rarely got that drunk and generally stayed to himself except for the evening get together in the courtyard.
Tim and Kim, still known as the newlyweds even though they were going on their second year, were also in attendance. Kim was expecting though not showing it that much just yet. They sort of sat off to themselves yet close enough to the others to engage in any interesting conversation that might arise. Andy had lived there the least time but as he sat closest to the conversation he was usually directly engaged.
Ralph and Mike were rooming together, worked opposite shifts but happened to share a night off every so often. This was rare that they had no plans for the evening. They usually went somewhere, always together. They both worked for a grocery store. Ralph ran the night stocking crew. Mike was the produce manager. Although neither said much regarding any relationship they had other than working for the same store and sharing an apartment, the courtyard chorus suspected that they were gay. Andy had decided long ago which side of the fence he came down on with regard to gays. He had met a few couples in Austin, at college. His next door neighbor in the apartment building where he lived in Austin was gay and had always invited him to any parties he threw - out of courtesy because Andy could not have possibly slept during the parties anyway. Andy had always felt pretty much accepted despite his being straight. The parties were parties. To Andy, there seemed a lot less interpersonal tension. As a result, Andy was not in the least threatened in his manhood. He knew who he was, just as they knew who they were.
Sam and Paul had little use for Ralph and Mike and would just as well preferred they stay in their room as to join the impromptu courtyard gathering, except that out of boredom alone, they were present.
Carol was absent. She worked late a lot. She was trying to hold two jobs to help keep her mother in a nursing home. Her mother had Alzheimer’s and her care was to the tune of $30,000 a year! Her mother believed Carol was her sister instead of her daughter. Carol had a hard time dealing with that at first but had overcome it. She had reconciled the disease as having already taken her mother away. All she was doing now was just going through the motions of whatever relationship they might still have. Some days her mother was better and actually seemed to spend a few moments in reality with Carol. Carol cherished those stolen seconds from the traumatic truth of her mother’s premature mental death.
Andy liked Carol a lot. He let her borrow five hundred dollars to help with the rent and her mother’s expenses, never intending to ask for it to ever be repaid. Carol was right there at his door next payday with half of it and a promise to give him the rest next payday. She asked nothing of anybody and was the most honest person that Andy had ever met in his life. She had no life of her own, though. Her mother had taken ill shortly after Carol’s stepfather had died and neither of her three older stepsisters could do anything for their mother as they had their own lives, families and obligations and none of them lived in Florida. Carol was the only one in the world that her mother had left. What else could she do? She was thirty-five, but looked a little older for all the worry and trouble that she had, yet attractive both physically and spiritually. Everyone liked Carol.
These were the characters of the soap opera called ‘The Apartment Complex’. Andy knew all of them to varying degrees. At one point or another during such courtyard gatherings he had either spoken to each or gleaned it from their conversations with the others. At any rate, he knew just about all that was required for a neighbor to know, perhaps more than anyone would have wanted to know in some cases.
The apartment complex in Austin hadn’t been like this at all. There was little feeling of community there. Perhaps it was too large and impersonal or because many of the residents were students who had to study a lot of the time. Andy liked the courtyard gatherings in Florida. During the day, he found himself looking forward to them. It was always after his workout, shower and nap. For some reason, no one ever left the gatherings to watch a favorite TV show or anything. That was what their VCR’s were for, anyway! The little parties broke-up about eleven o’clock during the week and around midnight on weekends. Sometime people would have other engagements and be absent, but the party still went on.
Mostly Andy listened. He would respond when spoken to, but usually didn’t volunteer to speak. He was a quiet one, they’d say about him in his infrequent absence. They knew that he was a college student. They knew he had a job in the mornings. They knew he was into personal fitness. Paul had found out he knew karate the hard way. Paul had one drink too many one night and got into an argument with Ralph and called him a faggot. Ralph threw a punch. Paul returned it and leveled Ralph. Andy stepped in to break it up and Paul took a swing at Andy. Before Paul knew what had happened, Andy was kneeling over him with a hand on his throat telling him to knock it off.
Sam knew martial arts as well, had learned it while he was in the Army. Sam told everyone that Andy must be at least black belt. That move he put on Paul was clean, precise and extremely quick. Sam knew that Andy could have killed Paul had he intended to. The restraint just short of maximum force was a sure testament to Andy’s level of skill and training. Maria asked Andy flat out once where he had learned karate. “I’ve been studying it since I was a kid,” was all that he had said.
No one suspected that Andy had any real money of his own, other than what he made from working. He did nothing nor said anything to express otherwise. He had bought an old Toyota Corolla when he had first come to Florida. It was in pretty good shape, really, considering it was one of the first model years Toyota was sold in the U.S. He decided to buy it because the owner’s manual of all things was pricelessly amusing. It was written with a bad Japanese accent. In many words the “r” and “l” were exchanged. As a student of oriental language he found this very funny. To think that a very large company with aspirations to market products abroad would allow such a document to be published! Of course, as Andy had learned in marketing courses he had taken in college, many American companies had notched up even more impressive fiascos when first entering international markets.
Misspellings were minor, but interesting.
The phonetics of “r” and “l” are extremely close, even in English although native speakers do not seem to notice. Oriental cultures have trouble with an “r” or “l” sound and a “b” or a “p” sound when it is the initial sound in a word. There is a distinction of the sound in oriental languages that is not so obvious in spoken English.
As Andy sat in the company of his neighbors, his mind would wander to other times and places, most often to what fragmentary memories he had of his natural parents. Andy suspected that his affection for the gatherings were in a sense his feeling of belonging to this social class of America. Had his parents lived, he would have been among these people more so that the daddy-feel-big’s and corporate supreme-high-rectum’s of the world. He sensed that despite all the intelligence he had and the hard work he had put forth thus far in his trail by life he probably could have never hoped to attain the personal wealth that he had as the legacy of his adoptive father. The American Dream had changed that much over the decades.
It still happened that people could accumulate some wealth by being either here, or there, and doing this or that and finding success. It was rare, very rare. Maybe it always had been that way. At present it was more often birthright or lucky intuition than hard work that granted people wealth. An alternative was to do the illegal or unethical to gain some unfair advantage. To Andy there was little difference between illegal and unethical. Yet, in the eyes of the law, some unethical practices might not specifically be illegal. A good many fortunes had been amassed over the course of history by splitting the fiber of difference between the unethical and the illegal.
Those with wealth would undoubtedly argue that point but from all Andy had seen in the course of his overly comfortable life, those with wealth seemed determined to keep their unit close-knit and exclusive. Occasionally there was an upstart who beat the odds. Some of the richest men in the world, for example, had made fortunes by finding the best ideas in others and making them better in some way, then marketing them to the world through licensing fees and aggressive competition. Some may call it smart business, however to others, it seemed unethical exploitation. The difference between the exploiter and the exploited is seizing the opportunity. What is not specifically illegal is often seen as a means to grow entire industries.
Andy suspected it wasn’t all that easy to make a fortune a hundred years ago either. There were always examples of greedy opportunists to be sure, but many simply had good ideas, excellent timing and were not afraid of passionately pursuing their dream. Every example of someone exploiting others and gaining unfair advantage infuriated Andy and engendered some cynicism within him. Those who have more ambition than insight spoil the dream; where the law is vague and they capitalizes on the flaw. Is that criminal? Not specifically. The governing institutions of the world define what is illegal. Those who break the written law are stupid and live in fear of the legal ramifications for what they have done. True exploitive opportunists circumvent the law to make fortunes until the government intervenes in the public interest to establish boundaries or level the field.
Despite the mind’s apparent penchant for circumventing the law without breaking it, the majority had probably earned their wealth in a fairly legal and honest manner. All the same, Andy felt it had to be easier back whenever than it was now. Andy knew his adoptive father well. He also knew where some of the figurative bodies were buried and only suspected that there might have even been a literal corpse or two sacrificed to the gods of Joseph’s ambition. Despite his general respect for Joseph Henderson, he knew that he hated the manner in which Joseph conducted business. Because of it, Andy did not want the reigns of Henderson Industries.
Andy had slept a dreamless sleep. When he awakened, he did not feel the same at all. He was unsure why he felt different since he awakened. He had hoped that the beer would help. Still the strangeness persisted to the point that he wasn’t even enjoying the conversation in the courtyard. It all seemed mundane and some of it seemed like old news, stale for having been heard time and again. There was also the feeling of disjointedness. It just felt uncomfortable being awake for some reason, as if something was nagging to get his attention, something unrelenting inside.
Several times Maria spoke directly to him and had to repeat her comment or question. She even asked more than once if he was feeling all right, said that his mind seemed a million miles away. Against all efforts to snap out of it, the fog remained and, if anything, it was getting thicker.
Suddenly there was a breakthrough, brief, startling, and alarming. It was a voice from within. There was something alien about it, but also familiar. “I am part of you. We have to talk,” was all it wanted to say.
He’d struggled enough and at the risk of being rude, begged out early and returned to his room. Everyone understood because he was not quite himself. He was the subject of some hushed discussion afterwards. He could tell they were talking about him. Or was it paranoia?
“I am not here to make you crazy,” the voice spoke clearly, and from behind him. Andy spun about, heart racing, panicking, and tentatively he walked into the bedroom, only to be horrified by what he saw seated on the edge of his bed.
“I am you, from a few years hence. There was an accident and somehow I now leapfrog in time and space, but at present this is all new to me. I lack the ability or the insight as to how I can go home. I was inside you, but we fell asleep and I guess things don’t work so easily with the mind domination thing when the one you are overpowering wakes up before you do. Anyway, I have no idea how to get control over you again, so I won’t even try.”
Andy looked away, then back.
“I’m real. You can believe that. I’m also a figment of your imagination, so to speak, because you are the only one who can see me... because I am you. You are not crazy, that is unless I am too - which could be argued at some length. Why I am here is also debatable. You see I also have a future aspect of myself who visits me from time to time. In fact he had just left before we went to sleep. Anyway, he thinks I may be here to prevent life from ruin, the life of someone named Angela who you haven’t met yet. She knows Maria. Maria does her hair. She is a waitress in a bar. My own feeling about my coming here being for her sake is contrary. I think we all have our own little scenarios to play out. You have yours and I have already played through this one once upon a time. I am here and I am not real happy about that except that this was one of the more pleasant periods of my life. I do not know why I am here. I will say that you could have a very interesting summer if you did meet this Angela. She is hot! Of course, it won’t be easy. I certainly didn’t hit it off with her when we met. If you don’t follow through with it, you will still have a very good summer, after your own fashion of liking things.”
Andy felt as if he needed to raise his hand to get a word in edgeways, but he cleared his throat and the elder Andy took a rest. “If this future self that visits you can leave, why can’t you leave?”
“Good question. I’m green at this stuff. The other ‘me’ is not. He won’t share the knowledge. He says I have to learn it by doing. I hate that line of thinking. Just friggin’ tell me the secrets so I can move on with it. From my one and only past experience in this sort of thing, when something is altered to the point of changing things, I shift to the next decision point. I don’t know what I am here to do unless it is to strike up a relationship with Angela. I know how you are with women. I’m you, or I was you.”
Andy sat down in a chair, looked at the ghostlike other Andy on the bed. “I actually come to look like you? How soon?”
“Does it matter?”
“Why didn’t you, err uh I stay in better shape?”
“Lots of reasons; mostly I lost interest. I discovered that most people find fitness nuts overbearing, irritating and condescending. Most people are not happy with their bodies and don’t like someone who is in better shape extolling the virtues of a life-style that is completely alien to their ‘American way of life’, whatever that may be in their minds. Fact is there are as many various life-styles as there are people. We are individuals. You can’t generalize too much. Most people do generalize too much. How’s that for generalizing? There is always friction between people because of their differences. But when you love someone, the similarities are what really annoy you most.”
“I bore people, don’t I?”
“Just like I’m boring you. Yes, to be perfectly honest, you do. I do. I have known it for a long time. You came to that realization about yourself and will be better for it. I will say that once people know you, they find you fascinating, as long as you are yourself and stop trying to impress them. You don’t know what other people like or consider important. For that reason, your best intentions to impress people fall short of the mark. So, let people get to know you first. You can stay in good shape if you like. The future for you is not fixed. My turning out as I am now here before you is my life not yours, unless you do as I did. We share only this common moment, really. Oh, our pasts are identical as well, but that’s how this leapfrogging works. You can be anything you want and do anything you want from here on out. You don’t have to do all the things I have done and in the interest of not affecting you either way, I do not want to tell you how things turn out. I am just telling you what you already know. You are not attracting anyone talking about how fit you are. So, just accept people as they are. Don’t judge them.”
Andy had received a lot to think about in a short time, and he slouched in the chair, threw back his head and closed his eyes. “So, this Angela… you’re saying she’s hot?”
“Yeah… She’s scorching! If you let things play out as they did for me, you’ll regret not having pursued her, at least for a little while. Other things happen after that and you sort of forget about her. But...well, I am not going to get into that. Your future may be different.”
“She knows Maria.”
“Yes.”
“Maria introduces us, then?” He asked as the revelation opened his eyes and brought him to the edge of his seat.
“Yes.”
“I thought Maria was flirting with me.”
“She is.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I am an iceberg.”
“You are.”
“Does that change?”
“Somewhat, but not as much as it needs to.”
Andy nodded. Then, “If I change the events that you know as your past, does that mean you’ll cease to exist?”
Andy laughed at himself, “You’re thinking far too narrowly. Besides, my being here for some reason enables me to recall both the old and the new pasts. No one ceases to exist. That’s not how it works. Don’t think of time as a line but as a plane with lines coursing its surface and your experience is one set of lines as is mine. We share only a past right now, although you are the same person at this moment that I was, you really may not turn out to be as I am. Choices! Do you follow?”
“Each moment makes us someone unique for having experienced that moment.”
“Precisely.”
Andy smiled, “So, I don’t owe it to you to do much of anything?”
“You owe me not a single thing, Andy,” the elder said.
Andy grew silent for a moment, and then the obvious thought exploded, “Our parents, I mean mine, the real one’s...”
Andy read his own mind, “I have considered helping them. It creates a whole new set of problems, though. You’d either grow up to be a writer or a truck driver had they lived. At least those are the two courses I have seen.”
“I always wanted to drive a truck.”
“And be a writer.”
“Yes, that too. So where is the problem in any of that?”
“I am not certain. I think we would die sooner in that course. There is a void of sorts that I cannot see into. I have assumed it is death.”
“That would not be so good, then.”
“Well, and the fact that thousands die as a result of anti-drunk driving legislation not being passed. You see, the guy who went to prison for manslaughter when our parents died found religion and when he was paroled, he began a crusade against drunk driving which resulted in legislation being passed in Texas that actually worked in saving lives. His efforts in Texas were a model used by groups in other states and so many millions of lives were preserved as a result. Now the way this world works, perhaps someone else might have come along to accomplish a similar thing. They might even get more expedient results that result in saving more lives. But that would be the gamble.”
“It’s not worth the risk, then,” both Andy’s agreed aloud simultaneously.
Andy stood abruptly, went to the closet, brought out some nice, casual clothes, and began putting them on.
“You’re going to meet Angela?”
“If that is the only way to get rid of you,” he smiled. “I’m only joking. You are just a bit much to have around. I’m still expecting to wake up except I know I’m not dreaming.”
“People do this all the time, really. Whenever you remember something, you revisit the event. Only you never change anything except in your imagination. Well, I can’t change anything now either. I can give sparing advice. I’ll even stay here if you like.”
“No, no, you are coming with me. I am nervous enough around pretty women. I need moral support. Besides, you have to have more experience with women than I do.”
When Andy left the apartment, the courtyard get-together was still going strong. Maria asked him where he was going, but Andy just smiled. “I have an appointment. I forgot all about it,” was all he said.
An appointment...with fate or destiny or whatever, Andy thought to himself. What if Angela still did not like him? Well, at least he had tried.
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