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 °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°The Plot Thickens: A Writer's Dream°°°by Cecilio Morales
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            A gaunt, bearded man in a red turtleneck sits before a panel 
       of five professors, a doctoral committee assembled to hear the 
       defense of a thesis: a novel. Such events are the equivalent of a 
       celebrated lawsuit in the sleepy university town. Colleagues, 
       students, and townies fill a spectator's gallery, as the novelist 
       submits his work to the panel's judgment. It is a dark story of 
       human despair and the futility of existence told through the 
       squalid life of poverty, racism, and betrayal of an immigrant 
       from Tobago -- the paradigmatic "etranger." The narrator is the 
       gun with which the protagonist will kill himself; all tenses are 
       in the present; the gun, an inanimate object, expresses no emo-
       tion, offers no reflections, no conjectures: only cold fact.
       
            Chapter Two. A university town newspaper shows the photo of 
       a handcuffed black man being escorted by police to his arraign-
       ment. He is identified as an immigrant from Tobago, arrested for 
       disturbing the peace at the home of his ex-girlfriend. A long 
       story there, which unravels over time, becoming the town's chief 
       talk: an out-of-wedlock baby abandoned by the drug-crazed mother 
       -- also from Tobago -- to be found by the father ... more news at 
       eleven. Next.
       
            A man and a woman walk hand in hand down Fifth Avenue, 
       chattering with animation and warmth. Both sport a tweedy look, 
       just warm for early Spring in New York, studied casual ensembles 
       designed to put the observer at ease, but only enough to confirm 
       that they are not the stereotypical Bloomingdale's-rich of New 
       Yorker magazine ads. Professors? No, novelists in Manhattan to 
       discuss future projects with their agents. They stop at every 
       bookstore display from 30s to the 50s: Brentano's, Rizzoli's, and 
       the publishing houses' -- Doubleday, Barron's ... they're window 
       shopping, but not for books. "Look there's Gary's book ... right 
       there, third to the left from yours." Who's up, who's down. Who's 
       selling, who's not. Who's panned and who's praised. Village Voice 
       says "Smoking Gun" -- a doctoral thesis in the form of a novel -- 
       has begun the career of "the next Susan Sontag"; kiss of death -- 
       it's the author's fourth, his last? The couple laughs. Oh, poor, 
       poor whatzisname ...
       
            They meet in the quad: the man who'd been in New York and 
       poor old next-Susan-Sontag.
       
            "Congratulations on the Voice piece. Your work troubles me 
       to the core."
       
            Next-S-S smiles. "Thank you. You're the Catholic writer, 
       right? Priest?"
       
            "Married. Two kids."
       
            "Ah ... well, look forward to your defense."
       
            In another part of the town a black man from Tobago buys a 
       gun. He has been just released from police custody on a first 
       offender's suspended sentence; he'll straighten out, just as he 
       promised the judge, but he has to do only one more thing first.
       
            Cut to couple's enclosed deck. They remember how it started. 
       A man in the newspaper, then poor Next-S-S; he embellished and 
       neo-neod the story into a cross between Calvino and Pynchon that 
       Next S-S would love to hear called "Joycean." Her book, a farce, 
       was a secret satire built on "Smoking Gun." She set the events in 
       a convent. Sure, Muriel Spark had been there before. So had 
       Boccaccio before Spark, but he didn't get to laugh all the way to 
       deposit the movie-rights money. And then came Gary ... now the 
       couple roared, for Gary was there. Gary took the convent story, 
       which he picked up off her bookshelf one party. "Exciting idea!" 
       Had never heard of poor Next-S-S, much less the fireside gossip 
       at writer's workshops about the neo-neo project that was to 
       become "Smoking Gun." Gary wrote "Smoking Gun" with a happy 
       ending. He was in every drugstore in America, had been 3rd on the 
       New York Times' Top Ten for 22 weeks: "Tobago Steel." There was 
       talk of a mini-series.
       
            Chapter whatever: near-murder at the Cathedral had the 
       "Catholic writer" not spotted something funny in a side altar. A 
       man from Tobago, toting a gun, raises it to aim and fire. The 
       writer seizes it by the barrel. "Trying for first degree mur-
       der?"
       
            He exclaimed in an islander accent.
       
            "Come to the atrium. Want a cigarette?"
       
            Rains, pours. At the end of the conversation -- lost job, 
       can't get baby girl back, unfaithful bitch is back with cokehead 
       boyfriend -- writer jots down names and numbers. "You need help." 
       The man from Tobago stares stolidly at him -- the equivalent of 
       rolling one's eyes at the obvious.
       
            The Summation:
       
            "What we have here, first of all, is a failure: Smoking 
       Gun."
       
            A man rises from the audience and yells out something fast 
       and unintelligible. He points a gun at the speaker, "Catholic 
       writer," prompting three security guards to rush at him and 
       wrestle him into handcuffs. Ignoring the melee, the speaker 
       continues, addressing the doctoral committee.
       
            "He fails because he is not human. He has neo-neoed his 
       humanity into cold, calculated literary pyrotechnics. His passion 
       has ... no, wait, let him hear this ... nothing to do with the 
       man at the center of Smoking Gun. His passion arises only in 
       defense of his book, his novel, his doctoral dissertation, his 
       footnote in the literary journals. He is willing to trade my 
       life, as well as his protagonist's, for words on paper. That's 
       why he fails."
       
            The speaker used the prosecutor's pointing trick as he 
       turned at poor handcuffed Next-S-S, whose eyebrows were knit 
       upward diabolically. Then he waived in dismissal, which the 
       guards took as a signal to remove their prisoner from the cham-
       ber.
       
            "The next element is Wimples, the sardonic take-off. The 
       author is my wife, but although this may bias me in her favor I 
       have the advantage of insider knowledge. The work is well-
       written, compassionate as only humor can be. But we all happen to 
       know that the writer shamelessly and purposely wrote a highly 
       derivative tale with the main aim of milking Hollywood for all 
       it's worth. Half of humanity's literature has trod the same path. 
       Forgivable. I think it was the Arcipreste de Hita who remarked 
       that there are only three stories and three characters: 'the 
       relation between God and man, man with himself, and man and 
       nature.' The rest is embroidery. We do not live in an age of 
       Gothic absolutes, but my wife deserves the benefit of their mer-
       cies if the committee deems to call her work a literary misde-
       meanor.
       
            "Finally, we come to Tobago Steel, the work by my good 
       friend Gary, the only one in which our hero -- who I understand 
       is in the audience -- actually meets a happy ending. Gary be-
       lieves in happy endings and perhaps his faith -- echoed in the 
       phenomenal commercial success of his work -- attests to the 
       possibility that Mr. Tobago Man himself may yet stride out of 
       this or another august chamber as the protagonist of his very own 
       happy ending. In real life.
       
            "Because real life, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, 
       is what I have brought to you here. I have not brought you a 
       novel. I want you to know why right off: because novels about 
       writing, in real life, are terribly boring."
       
            He stood in place, let his mouth curl into a warm, generous 
       smile that brought light to the blue eyes behind his glasses and 
       even sparkled off the silver in his hair.
       
                                    -end-
                     Copyright (c) 1993 by Cecilio Morales