Chapter 10. Well? Will it?

Her question cuts through the darkness. “Is it going to have a story?”

“Of course it will. It does. Things are already happening in three timelines. Don’t you think?”

“Mmmmm. I’m just trying to get a hold on all the characters.”

“But you are paying attention to all the characters then.”

“Yes.”

“Good, good. You like that?”

“Yes ... but come on, the whole thing is really just an excuse to post pictures of babes, right?”

“Perish the thought.”

“Come here.”

“...”

“So. Is the fox significant or is it a red herring?”

“The fox is the fox. The red herring is the red herring.”

“Very droll. Is ... it ... significant?”

“Oh. Oh, um ... come on, um, you have to read it like a book. On some, level. You’ll see what, happens.”

“And all the metafiction stuff?”

“It’s 2009, isn’t it? Gotta have the meta...”

“Now. Oooooh...”

•••••

Thus did it come to pass
That while Abélard was utterly absorbed
In pride
And sensuality
The cure for both diseases
Was forced upon him
Even though he
Forsooth
Would fain have shunned it.

For his sensuality
He lost those things
Whereby he practiced it
;
For his pride
He knew humiliation.

Chapter 9. Brad reads comic books

Chapter 8. Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Fox (*But Were Afraid To Ask)

• The red fox (vulpes vulpes) is the single most widespread and abundant wild carnivore on the planet, existing virtually everywhere except “Iceland, the Arctic islands, some parts of Siberia, or in extreme deserts.” No species of fox capable of human speech is known to exist anywhere, however.

• It has been said that a fox’s hearing is sharp enough so as to be capable of hearing a watch ticking from forty yards away. Additionally, the typical fox hits the snooze button an average of 2.3 times per wakeup.

• A red fox can live for up to 20 years, by which time he/she is really just hitting his/her prime.

• Aesop fable: The Fox Who Had Lost His [CENSORED] A fox caught in a trap escaped, but in so doing lost his [CENSORED]. Thereafter, feeling his life a burden from the shame and ridicule to which he was exposed, he schemed to convince all the other Foxes that being [CENSORED]-less was much more attractive, thus making up for his own deprivation.

He assembled a good many foxes and publicly advised them to cut off their [CENSORED], saying that they would not only look much better without them, but that they would get rid of the weight ... which was a very great inconvenience.

One of them interrupting him said, "If you had not yourself lost your [CENSORED], my friend, you would not thus counsel us."

• Sexually speaking, the red fox is nearly unique among the animal kingdom in terms of child-rearing duties and living arrangements. Though the fox often mates in monogamous couples, males often co-habitate with two females. Oftentimes, one female is a non-breeder who shares the den, assists in the raising of cubs, and participates in, ahem, all other activities.

Finally, even though the male fox may be polygamous at home – where he is the only adult male, no less – he may still seek further mating possibilities elsewhere. Damn.

• The first foxes in America were brought by Maryland colonial governor Robert Brooke, Sr. who brought some two dozen of the little buggers from England. Brooke was quite the fox himself, producing fifteen pups with two wives and you can bet he kept at least one of his seven maidservants busy like that, too.

• The word for “fox” in Esperian is “vulpo.” The diminutive form would therefore be “vulpi.”

Chapter 7. Conversation with a fox

“Hello,” said the fox in firm, if slightly surprisingly high-pitched, voice.

“Damn,” countered Jefferson Jones cleverly, “absinthe is good.”

“Yes, we’ve done that bit. I wouldn’t normally take the time but since you dreamt me into manifestation, i suppose you get the name. It’s Abélard.”

“Abélard? Peter Abélard, né Pierre du Pallet?”

“Well, i ain’t Bill Marston.”

“But this means you’re ... reincarnated!”

“Actus reus,” facetiously said the fox. “Imagine my surprise, having worked for The Man all those years – even after getting neutered and all – only to realize that the Hindus had it right all along. Or at least significant bits of it. So there i was, my spirit buoyant in the ether when all of a sudden after almost 900 years of relative peace, i’m ripped asunder from that place of comfort and thrown back to Earth, all thanks to the not-so-divine summoning forth by some acolyte priest flipping out in Amsterdam.”

“But then you’re not reincarnated. You’re a fiction, a hallucination.”

“You got something against fictions? Besides, i didn’t say that the Hindus got it all correct. Not by a long shot, believe me.”

“But how can i be having somebody else’s hallucination?”

“I don’t write ‘em. I just do ‘em.”

•••••

“My head is spinning.”

“You should’ve seen the guy in Amsterdam.”

•••••

“Will we engage in debate or what? If not, i would much appreciate being willed out of this plane of existence again as soon as possible. Nice though it is to be kept alive in American pop cultures, if only on the very furthest fringes, the fictionalization of the writer through time as hacks craft biographies is much more painful than Kundera let on and are you just going to let me keep talking on and on like this?”

“What am i supposed to do? Answer back so that everyone out here can see the crazy man ranting to himself? Besides, you’re fictional.”

“Again with the fiction stuff.”

“Look. You don’t cast any shadow in the water. That proves you're not real.”

“It’s cloudy.”

Jefferson Jones’ thujone-addled brain is bamboozled by this logic momentarily.
A lengthy momentarily.

•••••

“Listen, man. It’s easy ... well, it’s not easy. After all, i am, or was, the greatest philosopher of the late 11th/early 12th centuries and maybe the greatest dialectician ever. In short form, however, we may say this: I am fiction, therefore real. You can use that one if you want.”

Still numb from the cloud trick, Jones finds the will to respond. “You are...”

“Fiction. Therefore real.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Obviously.”

“Ask yourself this: How well do you know, say, your neighbor?”

Jefferson Jones thinks about this – and o boy is thinking getting nigh impossible – for probably far too long. He remembers that their last name is Franklin ... he’s in banking or something financial ... they’re white...

“Right. Hardly at all. Now how about Luke Skywalker? Anyone could pick him out in a lineup or recognize him in a picture. And not Mark Hamill, either: Luke Skywalker. Plus, you know where he’s from, who his friends are, his innermost beliefs ... you probably even like him.”

“Wait a minute. How can you know about Star Wars?”

“I first came back in the 1980s, remember? Sheesh, to say you’d be a pushover in a debate setting is the most monumental understatement since Moses claimed God had something a bit important to talk about. Now stay on point, Jones, and consider: Is Wonder Woman real? Is Huckleberry Finn real?”

Abélard the Fox went about fussing with his tail; a thorn had lodged itself somewhere within the bushy fur.

“You mean, fiction shapes reality?”

“Nah, nah, you’re still not getting it. Fiction is reality.”

•••••

“Well,” reasoned Jefferson Jones, “my fictional characters aren’t real.”

“Ah, but your hallucinations are, right? Bethany, Jennifer, Etta...”

“You?”

“Hey, let’s not get personal here. The only reason your characters aren’t real is because they’re unfinished. Just look at this ‘body of work’.” Here, Abélard the Fox indicates the paper scattered around the duck pond. A few pages of Jefferson Jones Takes Over the Rush Porcine Show II had even been blown into the water, floating aimlessly on the water’s surface. “Talk about your exquisite corpses.”

•••••

“So what about this script you’re going to stage in the spring? What’s it called?”

“Abélard in Love.”

“Yes, Abélard in Love. Terrible title. So what about it? I assume that’s why you brought me here. Finished yet?”

“I never start productions with a finished product.”

“Yes, yes. Even in the ether, we have heard tell of the masterful creative process of Jefferson Jones.”

“Really?”

“No. Sorry. Think about it: You’re at Maryland Atlantic. It isn’t exactly Notre Dame, n’est ce pas?”

“Well, excuse me.”

“Anyway, have you considered the whole moral influence angle? You know, like how i used to espouse Jesus coming to earth to show us what it is to live a life worthy of God.”

“Ah, Christ...”

“Precisely!”

“...i don’t want to get entangled in theology. I want to explore the lust of the Abélard and Héloïse relationship and the wonderful, beautiful love ... Ah, screw it. Maybe i’ll just resurrect My Six Ex-Wives.”

“That’s a good idea,” Abélard the Fox sarcastically assents. “Hey, look, i think pages 25 through 37 are lying over here!”

“Smart ass hallucination,” mutters Jefferson Jones.

•••••

“All right, i’ll spell it out for you. You want to do Abélard in Love with the love and sex and S&M stuff – by the way, you’re going to lose your job over this one as is – here’s what you need to know: Abélard was the first romancer, so his was the Original Sin. I, or he, made a sacrifice for the sins of all lovers to come. Every time you enter a relationship with a disproportionate balance of power, you should thank Abélard for making it possible.”

“So Abélard paid for all of our sins in advance ... yes, i could work that. God shows Abélard the promise of eternal life held within BDSM. And the leather represents the shame of being naked before God! And...”

And Jefferson Jones wants to bounce these ideas off Abélard the Fox, but the animal has already happily disappeared back into the comfortable no-space of non-existence.

•••••

Jefferson Jones disentangles his constricted, ten-foot long legs to stand unsteadily. There’s no way he’s driving home like this.

Chapter 6. At the duck pond

Damn, thought Jefferson Jones, absinthe is good.

The hallucinatory aspect of absinthe is overblown, of course, and the absinthe high is not so much about tripping balls but euphoric colors. Absinthe allows the controlled and attentive to shape elements of the outside world into any form.

For the self-denying melancholic Jefferson Jones, the Bethany-shaped and Jennifer-shaped holes in the very space around him coalesce into Bethany and Jennifer. And Etta, always Etta.

Jones felt cruel for imprisoning the beautiful memories in this world – though no qualms about trapping them in his wormwooded mind – and so let their forms dissolve...

...dissolving to form pages at his feet, pages of the forever unfinished works of Jefferson Jones. There were whole chapters Being Jefferson Jones and She, America, Gone. Here at his feet, a couplet from The Trip; at the periphery of his vision to the left, scene two of My Six Ex-Wives.

•••••

The duckpond. Ever curiously shaped (a Maryland Atlantic University legend has it that opinion on the pond’s design was equally divided, with half favoring an ovular shape and the other half preferring a meandering trail setup; the two designs were combined to form something that in form resembled a kidney stuffed with a generous portion of lower intestine), meticulously kept, and located dead center on campus, this spot had served as stage to tens of thousands of romantic dramas through the decades.

Hell, Jefferson Jones himself’d had a couple.

He proposed to Bethany here and half and hour later attempted to soothe the inconsolable woman with reassurances that the second Mrs. Jones would be no less significant than the first.

And his third marriage had essentially ended here. He’d tried to fan the flames with an ego-centered road trip to old stomping grounds, only to be quashed in a dreary cold characteristic Maryland rain – she’d known it would be the end then.

With absinthe, you don’t so much as trip balls as give rise to living memory.

•••••

Jefferson Jones feels the giggly days of college so far behind as to be another lifetime, and he doesn’t like how everything is uncomfortable remembering.

He takes another sip from the flask.

•••••

Maybe i should call Etta, he thinks and backs down with a mental no, no, no.

He had promised himself ages ago he’d never try to call her while he was drunk.

Does that mean I’m drunk? Oh god, figured Jefferson Jones, maybe some.

He draws a long draw, licks his licorice-infused lips, looks down lazily and sees the fox standing by his feet.

“Nice day for a little conceptualism, don’t you think?” asked the fox. “By the way, my name’s Abélard.”

Damn, thought Jefferson Jones, absinthe is too good.

Chapter 5. Young man's game

“...so, here Biden is, saying we’ve always been there for the oil, and that our troops are there for oil...”

Hey, don’t blame me, chuckles Jones, i voted for Kodos, the scraped undercarriage of the Citroën long forgotten. Social change is a young man’s game, thinks Jefferson Jones, left that a long time ago.

Jones eases himself out of the car. He notices a couple spaces away to his left in the beaten behemoth pickup. Still arguing? No, not arguing. Singing, no: rapping. Screaming at the tops of their lungs to the music – pure atonal joie de musique.

Jefferson Jones had nearly forgotten what that was like.

“Now, we didn't fight the war for oil. We don't have their oil. We have reserves offshore. We didn’t fight the war for oil. We don’t have their oil –”

If a talk radio host speaks and no one is listening, does he still sound off? Jones kills the radio and emerges squinting into daylight, bass from the pickup throbbing around him.

••••••

INT. HENNINGS THEATRE BUILDING – DAY

Jefferson Jones enters, looking tired though it’s not even ten o’clock, looking 55 though he’s 45 without a single gray hair or wrinkle when wearing a straight face. He is unwittingly sloppily dressed, about which department secretary Tammy Simoni will soon acidly comment.

Switch to:

Jones’ POV. A left turn, another left, a third he takes, passing through labyrinthine hallways of ... empty space, really. So much of theatre is empty space: Rehearsal space, dressing rooms, backstage area, the green room. Jones rounds the final corridor into the stunted hall at the very back of Hennings, whereupon he sees Tammy. She is dusting the office door opposite Jones’.

JONES (V.O.)

When did the theatre script switch to cinema? Ah well, it’s Tammy anyway. She makes for crummy dialogue in any genre.

•••••

Jefferson Jones used to try and imagine her as a Christina Hendricks-on-Madmen type, pure bombshell sexuality repressed beneath the social uniform. After all, Tammy tied herself down tauter than a bedspring.

The conservative clothes.

The hair clamped back severely.

The glasses, of course.

And the preference to completely cover up neck to toe in all but the stickiest-humid of Maryland days.

The package adds up to everything fantastic about women in uniform: the creation of a critical mass of sexual energy barely held in check by fit-to-bursting all-too-flimsy clothes.

But Jefferson Jones hasn’t lusted, flirted, joked like that, hustled, insinuated, sought dalliance, pursued, perused or put forth signals in five years with Heather. Even if he were attracted, the old romantic reflexes are flaccid. Tammy may be an animal in bed, but Jones keeps out of reach.

And, oh, the dialogue. Brutal.

“Hello, Professor Jones.”

“Still on the ‘professor’ thing, Tammy?”

“What? Oh, yes. That’s my thing, well, one my things. I have lots of things. That I’m on. Anyway, how was your summer?”

“Tammy, I was in here last week. Twice. And the workshop was two weeks ago.”

“Yes. Yes. Still.”

“My summer was fine. Uneventful.”

“And that’s good. These days. Right?”

“I’m going to go into my office now and I’ll probably close the door behind me.”

“Oh. Oh. Yes. You’re busy. Last minute preparations, I suppose.”

“Yes. Last minute preparations.”

“Can’t wait to see your production in the spring, Professor.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t do anything i wouldn’t do,” calls Tammy as Jefferson Jones has just about managed to disappear.

“Sorry?”

“I said, ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’”

“Yes, I know. And it sounds like useful advice, something I might even use. Except just what do you imagine I’d that you wouldn’t?”

She’s taken aback, falling back verbally. “Um. I don’t know. Pray?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“You could be Jewish...?”

•••••

Last-minute preparations? His mental ramblings could be called that, but Jefferson Jones hardly ever devotes time to actual lesson planning anymore. So “semester-eve ruminations,” is maybe more appropriate. Or “idle paper-shuffling.”

Dully his eyes see without registering the list of names, Abeson, Ainge, Allen, he’s looking for what, Campton, Collier, Davison, for that special name maybe to leap off the page and declare itself a once in a lifetime talent, Lawson, Monday, Muru, to nuture. Muru, Helena. To bring along, to nuture. Muru.

•••••

“It was this young girl whom I, after carefully considering all those qualities which are wont to attract lovers, determined to unite with myself in the bonds of love, and indeed the thing seemed to me very easy to be done...”

•••••

It would be fucking nice, thinks Jefferson Jones, nice to justify this job to myself. Please may just one of these ... students have a germ of talent, please. Wait a minute, who am i asking?

Now. Absinthe. Ah, come on, you’re going to start hitting that shit already? It’s what, 10:30? You can’t start until noon. You set yourself that limit years ago. ‘Course, you’ve broken it a few times since then, but that’s not the point. Don’t do it. But hey, i’m going to start at noon today, anyway, so what am i going to do? Go home and immediately open a bottle? Yeah, like Heather’s going to let that happen. So i’ll have some now, a little, a tiny bit, now, and not have anymore today. Yeah, that’s what you’ll do. That and maybe a beer tonight. Or at dinner. A couple. Fill the flask. Duck pond.

Jefferson Jones fills the flask from the bottle in the bottom desk drawer – his personal inside joke to himself – without spilling a drop.

Still got it, he thinks.

Chapter 4. Jefferson Jones

“...We don't have runaway capitalism in this country, in this world. You simply cannot loan money to people that can't pay it back and survive, as the lender...”

The only reason Jefferson Jones still listens to the Rush Porcine Show (on the Excellence in Radio Network) is to keep tabs. He keeps tabs on Rush because he’s sure Rush keeps tabs on him, like he keeps tabs on the most obscure of liberal senators; of course, Rush can hire tab-keepers to keep tabs, maybe even interns in tabulatory grad school who will surf for Jefferson Jones and tab Jefferson Jones should Rush need to take Jefferson Jones on in a media-hosted war of words again. Despite the resource gap, Jones fights on for his tabs. And he keeps them.

“Come on, people,” the bombastic radio-show host urges, “isn’t it obvious that every single person in this administration is Peter Principled? Do we really need more America bashing from this administration...”

No, Jones doesn’t really believe that fantasy; fifteen years after he’d gained his modicum of literary fame by fictionalizing Rush, Jones’ paranoia gland has neither the energy nor strength remaining to imagine Rush as Watching Him. Fifteen years after the publication of Jefferson Jones Takes over the Rush Porcine Show, thirteen and a half since the multimedia version and Jones still mulls it nearly every day. Think Rush is stuck reliving his glories of the Clinton days? Ha!

Sure, once in a while, Rush gets a tiny urge to slag the once neo-megalomaniacal author off in an interview or a throwaway remark on the radio show, but Jefferson Jones isn’t worth Rush’s while. The face of the Republican Party clearly has bigger – and preferably endangered – fish to fry.

“...Obama! I mean, you Obama people cannot have it both ways. You want lost opportunities, you’re gonna get lost opportunities...”

Lost opportunities, Jones muses –

•••••

– momentarily, but an angry blare from the dwarfing, ugly gray hulk of a pickup truck behind wakes him enough to automate the sensible Citroën into motion. Before Jones can push the car – Heather’s car, he hates driving – all the way through the intersection, the lumbering hunk jerks out to his left then accelerates past in a roaring of metal machinery, its two youthful occupants engaged in animated good-natured debate.

On a perfectly good Sunday and with a home less than a mile from campus, Jefferson Jones can hardly justify driving in.

I mean, when i was their age, he calculates, i railed against widescale American acceptance of the Gulf War. The first one. I threw blood at “counter-protestors” even when the cameras weren’t watching. All right, not real blood. Caro syrup. Hollywood blood. But still. All he knows now is that he’d had to put distance between him and them. His wife. Her daughter.

He pulls the car over, maybe 50 yards from his cornerside building on campus. It’s just beyond his reach, that sanctuary. From here, he could even walk it in three minutes.

He sits.

Jefferson Jones’ voice inside turns panicky:

Why the feeling of stifling nearness?

Not closeness. Nearness.

And does she even know?

How many more times can i do this and does she even know and before, when i was their age, well, why the feeling of oh so, so, ... “so after years and years of Democrats, led on by those like Biden who gained currency with the liberal crowd by saying how the war was unjust because it was for oil...”

•••••

To subsume what happened, Jefferson Jones seeks refuge instead in a younger voice accented with a David Hare obsession.

Open script. Scene one. Action.

Curtain rises. A non-descript kitchen at which a non-descript husband and wife – these are JEFFERSON and HEATHER – sit across each other at a round, non-descript kitchen table.

JEFFERSON: It’s time.
HEATHER: As always.
JEFFERSON: For work.
HEATHER: On Saturday.
JEFFERSON: On Saturday.
HEATHER: Leaving us.
JEFFERSON: Have to.
HEATHER: Leaving again.
JEFFERSON: Have to.
HEATHER: Problems exist.
JEFFERSON: They do.
HEATHER: It’s Saturday.
JEFFERSON: It is.
HEATHER: Let’s do...
JEFFERSON: Do what?
HEATHER: Do nothing.
JEFFERSON: It’s time.
HEATHER: On Saturday.
JEFFERSON: It is.
HEATHER: How worried?
JEFFERSON: Not worried.
HEATHER: Not worried?
JEFFERSON: Very worried.
HEATHER: Very worried?
JEFFERSON: Not really.

•••••

When he finally drives on, he realizes he shouldn’t be driving. He hates driving. When he parks in front of his building, he grinds undercarriage metal against the concrete parking bumper.

Jefferson Jones hates fucking parking, too.

•••••

Jefferson stands to leave. He confirms that the flask is still in the suitcoat pocket, then approaches Heather and kisses her on the forehead.

HEATHER: Need anything?
JEFFERSON: Have everything.
HEATHER: Sunglasses, maybe.
JEFFERSON: No need.
HEATHER: No need.
JEFFERSON: Back soon.
HEATHER: See you.

Jefferson exits.

HEATHER: Miss you.

Curtain.