Chapter Nine. Leonard? Is that you?

The oddest thing happened to me today, and it was Leonard. His Leonard, I thought at first, the Leonard whom Arthur and I were to betray so melodramatically in the closing chapters. He was standing by himself on a mossy rock, wearing only green underwear. I couldn't think what part of the story this would have come from, but then, I've never actually read His book in full, as it hasn't been written. (I hope you don't mind me harping on that.) Leonard looked like someone who'd just arrived (which was in itself odd, as he has been a part of His plan from the beginning), surveying the unrealized scene with a lost look on his face. I thought I'd say hello to him. No hard feelings. After all, it isn't as if I'd actually done something dirty to him, it isn't real life. The whole point of being fiction is to move and entertain. I have my part to do, and he has his. (And He has His, but again - He hasn't done it!) Moreover, despite what was done to him, dramatic irony ensures that Leonard gets his just dues (i.e. I die, Arthur goes insane from the loss of me - did I mention that Arthur goes insane?)

Incidentally, you might think that characters from the same piece of fiction would tend to hang around together, or at least cross each other's paths frequently. Aren't we part of the same tapestry? Doesn't the same spirit animate us? In fact I hardly ever see anyone from Blomidon Days (or whatever He would finally have chosen to call it) apart from Arthur, and him only occasionally. We all go our separate ways, and statistically there's very little chance of any of us meeting up. As for Arthur and myself, I suppose the explanation is that love has kept us together. Whatever.

Back to Leonard. I went up to him, smiled ingratiatingly, and extended my hand. He frowned angrily, and pointedly did not take it. "What are you doing here?" he snarled.

"I live here, and so do you," I said. "What do you mean, what am I doing here?" I really hadn't expected him to be difficult. But then, maybe a rule of this place that I hadn't picked up on is that characters from the same fiction must stay in character with each other. This would be useful if they were ever to resume their proper roles within the actual work once it is completed.

Then I had the thought: He doesn't actually know where he is. He's been here for twenty-five years but like a ghost (which is what we are, essentially) he has no idea of he passage of time. I remembered stories I'd read where angry ghosts asked that very question, "What are you doing here?" to people living in the house that used to belong to them.

So I ran that one by him. He interrupted me halfway through. "I know where I am. I know what I am. It's you I don't understand. This place is supposed to be a kind of waiting room for characters in fiction that's in the process of being written - but I've been here for weeks and I'm still waiting. However, you weren't even supposed to be in the story. I'm beginning to think maybe I'm in hell."

"Not supposed to be in the story! There wouldn't be any story if I wasn't in it! You'd be just a background character!"

He looked at me blankly. "You are not in my story. I have never written, and am not planning to write a story with you in it, and that other one you used to hang around with. You two made my life miserable for a full year."

I was beginning to understand. This was not His Leonard. This was somehow or other, the Original of Leonard! No - not the Original - that would be absurd; but another character based on him.

At that point the little lightbulb flashed on above my head. This Leonard (in fact not Leonard, but Kenneth) had said he had written the story - as he could not be the actual writer, he must be a piece of autobiographical fiction written by that writer! Wheels within wheels!

This Leonard is not the real Leonard, but he is as close to the real Leonard as it is possible to come. Much, much closer than my author's vain attempt. Now, if I could only find His Leonard and bring about a meeting between the two. What would happen? Would His Leonard simply fade away, as inferior copies should? Would the two merge? Would the two mutually annihilate each other and the universe as we know it cease to exist? We shall see. I haven't felt this energized in a long while.

Mischief!

Chapter Eight. The Crack of Doom.

As you can imagine it isn't the most agreeable thing to know when and how you are going to die. You would think the last thing I would want my author to do is to get back to work and write His novel, because in finishing it He'd be finishing me. Here in limbo that's a frequent topic of conversation. Where do we go when we die? Or when the story ends? Of course, many characters don't die in fiction, many end up living happily ever after, like my friend Agnes from the unwritten Jane Austen. For them it's frustrating knowing the happiness they're missing by being here, probably forever. You see, Agnes' creator is dead. The bit of ivory on which Agnes might have been blessed to be inscribed will never exist. Outside Hell, no one knows about Scorn and Excoriation or most other non-works of dead authors. You only know because I told you, and you probably don't believe me because I've admitted I'm fictional. (But just because I'm a kind of lie doesn't mean I lie, does it?) However: If anyone wants to try their hand at completing Agnes' story, she'd be eternally grateful; and I'd be happy for her too. Though I don't think it will be possible to give you enough information to really capture the essence of her or her fellow characters. You see, what I tell you is filtered through the mind of my author, and I can't be any more brilliant than He is - and He is certainly no Jane Austen.

Still, there's a bit of hope for me. Actually, you could even call it a win-win situation. Scenario One: My author never writes his novel; eventually he dies; I go on, and on, and on, in this void - surrounded by millions of offspring of the greatest imaginations of the human race. I never lack for diversion!

But, you say, there are also countless billions of mediocrities or worse. The interesting, well rounded and plausible characters must be few and far between. True in terms of numbers. However, I'm sure you're also aware that Hell is hierarchical. The well-rounded, eclectic, amusing, moving, psychologically profound and plausible characters occupy the centre of this space. The stock characters, the poorly realized, the non-entities, drift to the margins and roil around each other, coalescing and complaining; they argue unconvincingly that they deserve to be nearer the central fire (which I hasten to add, is the fire of inspiration) but none of the rest of us will listen to them. Lucky for me my author's not as bad as all that.

Now the other scenario: He finally writes his book. What happens to me then? This is speculative, but here's what we think happens to those of us in that situation. We live out our lives just as they are written on the pages of the book. We are no longer conscious of being fictional creations, we no longer know what's going to happen to us. So I'll have a good couple of years hanging about with Arthur, being the bane of Elaine, getting somewhat but not deeply embroiled in the plot, because after all I'm there for comic relief, and to be desired and loathed by the really important characters; not to have a life of my own. Then one evening in late November (or is it February?) a group of us leave a party (Leonard's involuntary coming-out party), and climb into Lionel B--'s car. Some ten minutes later I fall out of his car - or am pushed - and in attempting to get to my feet on the icy pavement instead flip over backwards. There is a sharp crack that everyone involved will remember for years to come - was it the ice breaking? or was it my skull? It's only afterwards that they'll realize what it was they heard, because they drove off without noticing what had happened to me. However I won't care 'cause I'll be dead.

Chapter Seven. Significant Others.

Simon, Jane and Luke. Who are/were/would have been these people?

Let me see. Simon is a native of the town of Applevale, but he hasn't lived there for years. He works for the CBC in Toronto. He owns a small farm just north of Applevale, where he used to spend the summer months when he could.

Jane is his daughter. She is a graduate student at Blomidon, she wants to be an opera singer.

Luke is an idealist. You can't quite call him a hippie, because it's the mid-seventies and nobody quite calls anybody hippies anymore. But he's an environmentally conscious, back-to-the-lander, New Age sort (in its original almost dignified sense - pre-Shirley Maclaine). He and a few of his friends have been renting Simon's farm for the last couple of years as a casual commune. They haven't been doing very well, although the carrots they grow in the best organic methods grow very large. (And very woody, I recall from trying one.)

Luke is also dating Jane, to make the circle complete. Their involvement in His unfolding story begins when Simon returns home from Toronto - to die, but of course he doesn't tell anyone this. He doesn't think much of Luke's commune and wants to take the farm back from them. He's a realist, you see. But he's shocked to learn that Jane has recently had an abortion. Very Freudian things are going on here.

They get more Freudian when Simon starts to date someone young enough to be his daughter. You've already met her, it's Elaine Pritchard. Of their first, shall we say, "coming together" (it must be a figure of speech, you see, because actually he did and she didn't), she penned the immortal lines of the poem that begins "Now the crystalline moment...."

Hmm, let me see if I remember, it went like this:

Now the crystalline moment
the solitary wayfarers meet part
in their fluid wake
instant
forms the matrix
... and so on.

In other words, he gets her pregnant. Oh, how His plot thickens!

You can guess the kinds of things that come next. Jane isn't too happy to discover Elaine's involvement with her father. Luke tries to keep the commune afloat by staging a weekend festival, which turns into a fiasco, of course. This, He thinks, will be a lot of fun to write, with almost all the characters gathered in one place; clean energy advocates chanting "Solar Power" to the tune of the Hare Krishna chant; pot smoking and nudity and concerned Baptists picketing the event. Ending in an RCMP raid. The conflict between Simon and Luke comes to a head because of this. Simon evicts Luke and gives over the farm to his daughter and a group of her female friends, who have been seen earlier in the book as members of the feminist group Motherage. They take in Elaine after Simon dies and her pregnancy has become obvious.

A note on names here: Classical music lovers might recognize Simon, Jane and Luke as the three principle characters of Haydn's The Seasons. In that oratorio, Simon's a farmer, Jane's his daughter and Luke or Lucas is his hired hand. Clearly my author thought he was being clever. Just as he was being clever in naming or renaming his university town "Applevale", which is the English for Avalon, the (take note!) Arcadia of the Arthurian legends. That must make Elaine the Lady of Shalott. And Arthur - my Arthur - is King Arthur, which must make me, Lawrence Lockwood, his Lancelot. Authors who have been English majors love working in symbolism of this sort into their books even when there's no real point to it. It's just more word association isn't it? Simon is much more like the legendary Arthur than our Arthur, in that he dies a disappointed idealist, and there's nothing knight-like in me. If the parallels were exact, Elaine should have suffered from unrequited love of me. It was unrequited all right, but on both sides.

To these people laden with the burden of dud symbolism, I infinitely prefer the company of Agnes Thompson, my no-nonsense Jane Austen girlfriend. She's been reading what I post over my shoulder as I type... A few days ago I had to explain to her what an "orgy" was. She was shocked and indignant for a few minutes, and I didn't think she was ever going to speak to me again. But she came round, and wisely and sensibly pointed out that Lord Byron was up to much the same sorts of things in her day, the wicked man, so it was not so very new to her after all. She attributes the boorishness and profanity of the men of our day to the weakness of character of our women. Would they but virtuously and loudly oppose the male's propensity to indulge in grossly sensual pursuits, they would then serve as a needful restraint, instead of an all too compliant inducement, to sin.

I cannot but agree with her.

Chapter Six. What's it all about, Lockwood?

The story so far:

You may have gathered that the unwritten novel in which I was to be featured (but alas was not to be the hero of my own story), was a university novel set in a small town in Nova Scotia, during the mid to late nineteen seventies. You probably know which town and which university, as Applevale and Blomidon as disguises are not that hard to penetrate. You do not know what this novel is about, though, do you?

Neither do I. Neither did He (as I'll now refer to "my author", because I'm getting tired of that misleading term). He had a large cast of characters, they were (as I said before) largely and lazily based on real people (although for a few, like Elaine, there was no one-to-one correspondence), and He wanted them to interact in fascinating and hopefully important ways. Let me try to sketch out what He had in mind for us, before and after the crash. This may take some time.

First of all, the genesis of this story. Proust had his muffin (or whatever a madeleine is supposed to be), which awakened for him childhood memories; Lucy Maud Montgomery had seen a want ad for an orphan boy and thought she might do a story about an orphan girl; similarly Tolstoy had read a story about a woman who'd thrown herself in front of a train, et voilà, Anna Karenina was born.

For Him, it was a pleasant autumn Sunday spent rehearsing outdoors for a play he was in, then accompanying the director to visit friends; ending up in a apartment shared by two fellow students, where they listened to Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, and He drank Earl Grey tea for the first time in His life. He found the experience significant. For some reason (I don't get it and I bet you don't either), it was like his entry into adulthood.

He wanted to organize his novel around several of these significant experiences. Another one was his first day at university, which was almost his first day away from home. It was a damp September day and there was some confusion about where he was supposed to be staying. As part of Frosh week there was a van with a loudspeaker at the centre of campus, playing that summer's hits - the two that stuck in his mind forever were "Moonlight Feels Right" and "Afternoon Delight", both of them on the theme of sexual abandon. As it happened, He never sexually abandoned Himself until long after He left "Blomidon", but it was the atmosphere that was important. Upstairs in His dorm, there was someone who played "Bohemian Rhapsody", which was fairly new in nineteen seventy-six, over and over again. Occasionally the same person would play a version of "Good Morning Starshine", which He also liked.

A third experience was one I've referred to before, as the Outing of Leonard. Leonard He'd known since high school, and had had a crush on ever since then; but had no reason for believing him to be gay. (Other than Leonard's effeminate mannerisms? Pleasantly rather than obnoxiously fey. But Leonard drove a motorcycle! How could he be...!) During His second year, he learned that Leonard now had a girlfriend. He was crushed by this "proof" of Leonard's heterosexuality (not that it couldn't have occurred to him that bisexuality was a possibility), crushed but somehow feeling Himself made a better person by being forced to give up one of His delusions. (He wrote a poem about the experience, which I must quote to you in full sometime. This noble anthem, on the general theme of putting a brave face on loss, ended with the bracing line "Knowing who you are/I touch the distant star." It could even be sung to the tune of "When A Child is Born". Remember, it was written by the same hand that would have given the world Elaine Pritchard's "My radio's a seashell". )

But during His third year, the evidence began to mount up that Leonard was, in fact, not as straight as he seemed. Arthur and Lockwood (you understand I mean my Original) had encountered him during the run of their gay play in Halifax. One evening at the campus watering hole, He witnessed a conversation between Arthur and Leonard in which Arthur made insinuations to Leonard, you know of what sort. Leonard's ultimate response was to upend Arthur's beer over Arthur's head, hand over his own beer to Him, and leave the room.

Then there were the occasional appearances of Leonard's boyfriend in his company. Then there was the cast party where Arthur and I outed Leonard.

That's as much as I know about the novel's real-life beginnings. In another post I'll let you know something about the stuff he made up - which would include Elaine's story, the trio of Simon, Jane and Luke (I haven't mentioned them), and last but not least, my slippery demise.

Chapter Five. What He is Reading.

I was never a reader. When I attended Blomidon U. (the fictional institution invented by my author) I majored in English literature, because you had to major in something. I wasn't good at math and had no interest in anything scientific. Couldn't carry a tune and didn't play any musical instruments. So English was it, the default degree...

I shouldn't say that, the reason I majored in English was to get into acting. Really to attract the attention of someone from the local theatre company, the Players of Good Cheer. The doyenne of the GCP, Mrs. Elspeth Davenport, taught a Theatre Arts course for second year students. While biding my time I joined the campus Drama Society and appeared in a couple of productions hoping the influential Mrs. E., or perhaps one of her lieutenants from the company, would notice me.

Meanwhile Arthur, who was in his second year and taking Mrs. E.'s course, was already being wooed by her. He had appeared as Iago and as an Irish king in some play by Yeats. (The Irish Renaissance was still a going concern at Blomidon in 1976.) He was also a member of the musical theatre group, not that he could carry a tune either. I did not manage to attract the attention of Mrs. E., but I did the next best thing, I attraced the attention of Arthur, and when he dropped out to join them he was able to use his rapidly-growing influence to get me in. So I dropped out too, midway through my second year.

My author reads, however. He tends to have six or seven books going at once. No wonder he never finds the time to write. Right now, he's working on:

Jacob's Room
The Ironic Christian's Companion
The Edda
The Complete Poems of Auden
Angus Wilson: A Biography
The Future of Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians
God Emperor of Dune

He is also a packrat when it comes to book purchases. He must have more than three hundred books that he's purchased in the past fifteen years which he has never gotten around to reading. He buys many of them cheap at library book sales, many from remaindered bins, but more than a few at full price.

This, I say, is an addiction. Let us call it Addiction Number 1 (of 7).

The Dune book he has read before. I could never understand how someone could reread a book. I could barely finish books the first time through. Life is short (if you have a life at all); why repeat experiences?

Anyhow, he's been rereading this Dune series, by Frank Herbert. In case you haven't heard of it, it's science fiction. I read the first novel when I was at Blomidon. It was a bit of a fad then, like Lord of the Rings, everyone had to read it once. It was about a desert planet where water is extremely scarce, but everyone is addicted to a drug called Spice, which is a valuable commodity in the galaxy and which is produced somehow by the planet Dune's terrifying giant sandworms (I have this vague recollection it was their shit). This drug induces visions of the future in some, and they can use those visions to gain power. As, unwillingly, does Paul Atreides; and more deliberately his son Leto, who starts to transform himself very slowly into one of the sandworms by the end of the third book. (So I hear. I never made it to the end of the first. But there were some really cool scenes in it of the desert people hitching rides on the sandworms.)

My author didn't actually like these books the first time through. (And yet he's reading them again!) They seemed to preach a form of sociobiology, suggesting that survival of the fittest is the only real motivating force in the universe and determines all other values. Herbert also had nasty things to say about male homosexuals in the book he is currently reading - he suggested that it was a form of arrested adolescence, and was what held armies together and thus caused wars and other forms of violence such as rape. Being the insecure and easily offended little fag my author was, he really became incensed when he read that. But Herbert probably lifted that word for word out of Wilhelm Reich, author of The Sexual Revolution (Another book I started but didn't finish. It was much less exciting than its title implies. There were no pictures.)

The title character of God Emperor of Dune is one of those annoying "mouthpiece" characters whom authors use to voice their own (presumed to be authoritative) opinions. Leto is an exceptional example of the type, beng 3,500 years old, having total recall of all his ancestral memories back to ancient Egypt, which means that Everything He Says Is Right.

But my author is much older now, and is able to take these things in stride. He's enjoying the series for its scope - the first novel is set over 12,000 years in the future, and then the fourth novel leaps ahead another 3,500. He likes the space opera aspects of it. He is not enamored of some of the ideas but does not find him getting as defensive about them as he originally did.
I refuse to be a mouthpiece for him, however. I find the most fascinating thing about Dune is the idea that everyone isn't simply a single personality but is a composite of all their ancestral memories and personalities.

But why stop at ancestors? There's also us. The unwritten, the unalive. The so-called "fantasies". We insist on our right to survive as well.

Chapter Four. Elaine.

Elaine Pritchard, you will recall, was one of the persons who was deeply affected by my untimely death. I haven't been able to determine why that would be, however; despite the fact that I can read my author's mind. I take it that he didn't know either. Another reason for not bringing us to life.

Elaine and I weren't the best of friends. Actually, she and Arthur weren't the best of friends, and I went along with Arthur in everything, having no will or personality of my own. Arthur thought Elaine was artsy-fartsy with her Mexican poncho which she wore year round - over her winter clothing even. She also sported a jaunty beret, which led Arthur to give her the nickname "Brownie Laureate". Elaine in her turn was wary of Arthur (with good reason I guess). She had difficulty appreciating irony and had no idea of camp. She was one of those feminists who really don't approve of homosexuals but feel they mustn't say anything against them because it would be letting the side down. (I, of course, was not gay but she didn't know that.)

However, it was this character, not Arthur or myself, that my author intended to be central to his novel. I think he felt he needed a heterosexual heroine whom his audience could identify with. And it had to be a heroine, not a hero, for like many gay men, my author thinks that he understands and sympathizes with women better than with straight men. I wouldn't dispute that.

Arthur and I used to have riotous fun mocking Elaine's poems, regularly published in the monthly university newspaper and later in the magazine that she edited, Breakwater.


Here's a mercifully brief example:

My radio's a seashell
Lying on the nightshore
I listen for what is lost in its twistings...

I leave it to your imagination what Arthur and I, the notorious campus crypto-queers, were able to do with all those s's.

Like Margaret Atwood, who was her idol, Elaine liked to use words like "systole" and "diastole" in her poems. For instance, further on in the above poem she wrote:

Waking and sleeping:

The systole and diastole of

These cavernous oceanic hearts

Of duration and longing.

If she ever had been given a chance to read her poems aloud on CBC Radio, I'm sure she would have delivered it in the dry, flat deadpan style that seems to be the house style for poetesses on that network. Pioneered by Margaret Atwood.

A major subplot of my author's novel concerned a series of short poems of Elaine's, satirizing people we knew, that were "accidentally" published, such as this one, that I think deserves to be quoted in full:


NINETEEN SEVENTY-NINE

To our polite post-Christian party
Where all our guests tend to be arty
Let us come then you and I
Before the punchbowls all run dry.
And all are drunk and all's awry.

Here the women still come and go
But no more Michelangelo.
Tonight they will talk
Of the glory of rock
Contra that dismal disco.

The hostess takes us on a tour.
It's quite a place you've got, for sure
Two floors, four bedrooms, shared by six,
Whose temperaments completely mix.
There's nothing here you couldn't fix.

There is a room that we won't see
It isn't right for you or me--
The Venusberg of Blomidon,
Where mattresses are spread upon
The floor for folk to sport thereon.

A poster from Victorian days,
Attracts the English majors' gaze.
It shows five nixies and a knight.
We speculate on what they might
Be thinking. How polite.

The scandal of the day we touch on,
The blot on Blomidon's escutcheon --
Professor G. and her amor.
One of her students, no less. Or more.
We've left all judgments at the door.

Look, and there go Bill and Ken
Into the extra-special den
Preceded there by Lynn and Pat
And Alice, too, and her friend Matt
Now, not everyone is welcome though:
You need to be - sympatico.

But all of the rest of us do know
Where Bill and Ken and Matt did go
Along with Alice, Pat and Lynn
And what they meant to do within.

And certainly we always knew
What Lynn and Alice meant to do
With Ken and Bill and their friend Matt.
This is the seventies. It's all old hat.

It's an ordinary orgy,
And no one minds it a bit,
Except for an ardent Baptist lad,
Who still maintains that sex is bad:
But for the likes of him who gives a shit?

He has his snippy say and leaves us.
"It's safe to say he's gone with Jesus,"
Quips one of us. We laugh awhile,
And stop, and then just smile and smile.

Hush! Whisper! Who screams?
Little Bill Taylor is creaming his jeans..

Well, I kind of like that, I must admit. I was an English major too, if only for a brief time, and I know that the rhyme scheme and meter leave a lot to be desired. "Jeans" and "screams"!

(Besides, wouldn't little Bill Taylor have been out of his jeans well before his climax? Unless Bill just liked to watch. Yes, I think he did.)

But on the whole I think it's o.k. doggerel - good bad doggerel. Elaine, a tip of the jaunty beret to you. Why would I have thought you didn't understand irony?

And it's all true! This was what was going on in this staid Baptist university in the late seventies! My author found it all quite disturbing at the time, despite his rich sexual fantasy life and his addiction to onanism. I suppose it is troubling to find out that what goes on your head actually goes on outside it as well. Now, Arthur and I would never ourselves be found in the "extra-special" den, though I can't speak for our originals. On the other hand, the original of Leonard - the hapless guy Arthur and I were to humiliatingly out in the climactic pages of the novel - he was in that room on a number of occasions. Elaine has even included him in her ditty - he's Ken.

Chapter Three. The Real Me.

My author thinks he knows me. He thinks in fact that he has complete control over me by virtue of that fact. Oh, he likes to indulge in the typical writer’s whim of, “Suddenly my characters just – took over! – and began telling me their story, which much to my surprise was quite different from what I’d imagined it to be!” but he doesn’t for one moment believe it. He knows that his writing is a form of daydreaming and believes that the surprises that come out of it can be attributed to the randomness of that process, the interaction with the unconscious cesspool he calls his mind. I agree with him that authors are nothing more than daydreamers and spinners of chains of words. But here’s where he’s wrong: I’m more than someone’s daydream.

I’ve been in this limbo of the unfinished for more than a quarter of a century now which is a lot of time to mull things over. I am not what my author thinks I am. I would have been exactly what he wanted me to be, on the surface, had he ever got off his ass (or put his ass firmly in a chair before a writing desk, rather) to complete me. That’s just it: his conception of me was all on the surface, lacking an inner life. This omission frees me to be whatever I need to be – inside.

For starters, I’m not homosexual. In high school my good looks drew the unwelcome and aggressive attention of a group of five or six girls, the self-appointed cool chicks of the day. I despised them, but they wouldn’t let up on me. One day when I rudely rejected the advances of one of them, she said to me, “What are you? A homo?” I answered, “If you say so” and she and her friends backed off. I’d created a reputation for myself, and was taunted for it for the remainder of my school days, but as they were to be only a few months, I decided I’d weather it out. I wasn’t dating anybody because I was really quite shy. And had created this reputation for myself. And had discovered by that point that I preferred booze to sex anyway.

In university I found that my reputation had preceeded me (or rather had accompanied me, as I wasn’t the only one from my school to attend Blomidon), but the disguise I’d unwittingly adopted suited me. My standoffishness to girls was interpreted as erotic indifference. The boys naturally steered clear of me – the straight boys that is – which left the others. I am one of the rare straight males who has never had a problem with homos, whom I don’t consider any better or worse than anyone else. While this is true, I didn’t want to have to keep fending them off or be expected to join their pack. To distance myself from them I decided to form an alliance with Arthur, who at the time I met him was quiet and well-mannered (we turned out to be very bad for each other), and was pretty clearly head over heels for me. I could stand his company, and enjoyed cutting other people to pieces with him. In other words we fed off each other. Arthur knew I was straight, because I told him; but we had sex, sometimes, when I was sufficiently drunk. To me it was nothing more than a form of masturbation, and I told him that as well. We had a lovely relationship while it lasted.

If my author has mistaken me for something that I’m not, well, I’ll admit I’m largely to blame for being so opaque. However, it was his choice after all to write me a surface character. He could have dug. He treated me as fascinating and amusing, but never as a real person. That hurts. I think I know now how women feel. He underestimated my intelligence. Insofar as he thought of me as having thoughts, they were incoherent, irrational, drunken thoughts. He treated me as a mere symbol, as if I didn't have a soul. When he first conceived of me, he had not yet read Under the Volcano; if he had he might have decided to portray me as a kind of blessed saint with the near-mystical insight available to the vocational alcoholic. Lowry knew.

... I still see Arthur occasionally, in this here which is nowhere, and we exchange friendly reminiscences of these things which never happened. But we’re interested in other people now. Arthur’s been pursuing a wisp of a young man, an offspring of Oscar Wilde’s imagination, who was born a few hours before the infamous “somdomite” note was delivered to him, and so quickly forgotten. I am sober now, the shock of my planned death (largely the result of my dissipated ways, though I still say I was pushed) having compelled me to reform. I have been seeing a lot of one Agnes, a witty, sensible, often sarcastic girl whom I’m sure might have been Jane Austen’s finest invention, in that classic never-written novel Scorn and Excoriation.

Chapter Two. The "Originals".

Authors are by and large an unimaginative breed. We, their uncreated, are acutely aware of that, never having received the breath of life from them. But what I’m getting at here is that they hardly ever just “think us up” as they’d like you to believe. Usually we are “based on” actual people they’ve encountered, not loosely based but lazily. (Authors are fundamentally lazy.) And neither is it usually the case that authors are acute observers of human behavior, with penetrating insights into character and motivation. Basically authors are good at word association and daydreaming. What comes out of that often looks like something solid and real, but it’s as flimsy and two-dimensional as the Cactus Hollow Main Street set from any given western. Proust is no better than Danielle Steele in that respect. I’m not saying that if I’d been written, I’d still be a phantom. But it’s readers who give flesh to authors’ creations.

Arthur and I were based on a pair of friends who my author knew casually when he attended university. Both of them were involved with the local theatre company. They used to indulge publicly in running gags, such as pretending to be Hitler and Goering as same-sex lovers, exchanging endearments with each other: Adolf, mein liebchen… Hermann,mein schatzi… My author didn’t know what to make of this extroverted and campy behavior at the time. He was naïve enough to think along these lines: --They’re acting like a pair of gay lovers. –But they wouldn’t do that if they really were gay, they wouldn’t want anyone to know. –So they aren’t actually gay, they’re just being outrageous. He encountered clue after clue that told him otherwise: They’d appeared in a play one summer in Halifax, a play about the raid of a gay bar in Montreal which was staged in a gay bar. They “outed” a friend of my author’s whom they had seen with his boyfriend in the same bar. Another friend complained that “Arthur” had come on to him one night. And so on. It was painfully obvious, at last even to my author. But so much for the much-touted authorial powers of observation. I don’t think the fact that my author is an at best mediocre example of his kind matters one bit. Most of them are like that.

How closely would he have stuck to the originals? He intended to recreate the lovebird-pantomime pretty much as it occurred, but with John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the smitten ones, or possibly John Lennon and Brian Epstein. A central episode of his novel was to be the outing of – let’s call him Leonard; immediately following which the fatal car trip would have taken place. (Which of course was wholly fictional.) Apart from that, I would have been one of those characters observed from without, and thus would have been quite close to the original – who my author found erotically fascinating, in that he was handsome, amoral, and usually somewhat drunk, a combination which made him seem a mixture of danger and vulnerability. Arthur on the other hand would have been given an inner life, that ran counter to his outward persona. He would have been melancholic and anxious, prone to weird speculations on the nature of selfhood. As my author had never troubled himself to get to know the real “Arthur” this would have been pure – not invention, but projection - of his own inner life.

Chapter One. In which I am not born.

My name is Lawrence Lockwood, and supposedly I'm dead. I died in a ridiculous way in the late nineteen-seventies, falling or stepping out of a slowly-moving car (or was I pushed?) one cold winter night, cracking my skull open on the icy pavement. That death caused crises for various people - for my best friend and lover Arthur - for the driver of the car - for one of the fellow passengers in particular who had a secret crush on me and worried that he might have been responsible for my death - for my family of course who had always been worried about my irresponsible behavior (I'd been a heavy drinker since I was thirteen) but never thought it would come to this...! - and for Elaine Pritchard, poet and editor of the pretentious and amateurish campus literary magazine, Breakwater.

I say supposedly I died, but you have to have lived before you can die, don't you? And that's the big limitation of being a fictional character. Most of us never get that chance. We're like spermatozoa in that respect. Our authors imagine us, make notes on us, name us, rename us, write short scenes with us in it... but they never get around to actually sitting down and writing us, which actually would be to conceive us and bring us to term.

I say "us" because in the place I find myself - the place I have been for the past quarter of a century - there are millions of others like me. Waiting, waiting, waiting without hope. I suppose the religious term for this is limbo. This isn't life after death, it's death before life. We're the shades of our thwarted selves here.

However, we are still connected to the brains of our procrastinating creators, as long as they live and as long as their brains are functioning adequately. If I concentrate I can see the world through my author's eyes. Hear his thoughts. Just as readers might have been able to do with me, if there'd ever been any readers. Tit for tat I call it...

Recently I've begun to notice that the state of mind he enters when he has been on this internet thing for a while is trancelike, mediumistic, and I can take advantage of that, quietly take possession of him while he's zoned out this way. I'm doing it now, as you can see. He had the nerve to criticize me for being an alcoholic, but he's seven different types of addict. On this I will have more to write -much, much more.

Occasionally, however, I suspect he will "come to" and I will allow him to think that he's in control. Such as what follows below...

Limitations of Amazon Recommendations (The Author)

I note that some of today's recommendations for books that I might be interested in purchasing from Amazon.ca are (in order of appearance):

• The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams
• Introduction to the Philosophy of History, by Georg Wilhelm Hegel
• Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
• Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Day, by Judith Viorst
• Grounding for the Metaphysics or Morals: With on a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, by Immanuel Kant
• Bunnicula, by Deborah Howe

I don't actually want to read any of those books. The serious books are there, according the the Amazon genie, because I had indicated that I owned The Aeniad. The kid's books because I'd rated A Wrinkle in Time and owned Winnie-the-Pooh. Though I am a bit of an intellectual I'm not interested in slogging through the turgid texts of nineteenth-century German philosophers, and though I do like to nurture my inner child, my inner child is older than four I think! Still, it's embarrassing - because I do have both "high" and "low" interests and I think they do make for an awkward mix.

You can see what I have to live with when I'm not in Hades... An infantile,narcissistic, smartass.