Suicide is Just a State of Mind (1987)

I took a creative writing class my first year of college, and this is one of the stories I wrote for that class. I remember people liking it. I thought it was a little cliched. 

+ + +

Jack stared at the forty-four. Big gun, he thought. Cold stainless steel. Eight-inch barrel that fired slugs as big as a marble. Dirty Harry. Make my day. He hefted the firearm into the air and felt its weight strain against the muscles in his wrist. Heavy. With a lot of kick. Put both hands on that baby or she’ll break your arm. Just sight down the barrel and squeeze the trigger. And that’s all she wrote.

Jack swung out the cylinder and dropped three bullets into the holes, leaving an empty chamber between each pair of hollow points. He gave the cylinder a good spin and flicked his wrist, snapping the cylinder back into place. Without pause, without ceremony, he cocked the hammer, placed the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

…click.

Jack brought the gun down and opened the cylinder. He retrieved the bullets and set them down upright on the nightstand, next to the three hollow points already there. He closed the cylinder, wiped his saliva off the forty-four with a rag, and set the gun down next to the bullets.

This was the third time Jack had tried to kill himself. Each night, usually around seven, he would slip a growing number of bullets into Mr. Loudmouth and play a round of Russian Roulette with his tonsils. And tomorrow the odds of Jack surviving would fall to one in three.

Jack got to his feet and walked to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. He was standing in front of the open refrigerator, trying to decide between the turkey and the ham, when the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Jack? It’s Kelly out at the observatory.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I hate to bother you like this, but I’m having some trouble with the drive on the Schmidt, and I was wondering—”

“You were wondering if I could come out and take a look at it.”

“You’re a mindreader, Jack.”

The Schmidt-Cassegrain, Jack thought. I’ve replaced more parts on that telescope than I have on my car. Nearly the only original thing left on it is the objective, a smooth thirty-six inch parabolic mirror.

“Jack?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Thanks, Jack. I owe you one. Oh, and could you get here as soon as possible? I want to get the Crab before it sets.”

“Twenty minutes?”

“You’re an angel, Jack. See ya.”

+ + +

Kelly Pemberton was a college senior working nights at the observatory for credit. Astrophysics was her major, but Jack had her pegged as someone who just liked to watch the stars. Jack liked her, they had much in common, and he often wished he had known her back when he was in college. All the women he had known then had either dismissed the stars as trivial points of light in the sky or had asked him his sign when they found out he was an astronomer.

When Jack reached the top of the mountain, he parked next to Kelly’s red Toyota and entered the observatory through the office entrance. Kelly was sitting there, reading a Stephen King novel.

“Hey, Jack,” she said when she saw him. “Thanks again for coming.” She put the book down and crossed the room to the sealed door that led into the observatory. She turned out the light and opened it.

“What’s the assignment tonight?” Jack asked as they entered the circular room with the domed roof.

“I don’t know,” Kelly said with a wave of her hand. “Some quasar in Draco.”

Jack nodded. “Three Cee Three Five One.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Now, what about this Cassegrain? I hit the drive and nothing happens.”

“Probably a stripped gear. Go get me the toolbox out of the office.”

Jack watched Kelly walk back to the office. She has a nice figure, he thought. She’s nice all around, really. And we have so much in common. Shooting the more spectacular parts of the sky while waiting for the exposure on the assigned target. I used to do the same thing when I worked here back in college. If only I was ten years younger.

Kelly returned with the toolbox. “What’s the damage?”

Jack crouched down and looked at the motor below the telescope. “Yep, stripped gear all right.”

“You don't have to run out for parts, do you?”

“No,” Jack said. “I should have some spares in that toolbox. Hand me a crescent wrench, a screwdriver, and a three-inch gear.”

Jack put his hand out behind him, took the materials from Kelly, and brought them to his face. He remained hunched over the motor for a moment and then stood up and turned around.

“Done?” Kelly said hopefully.

Jack smiled and held out a pair of pliers. “I said a crescent wrench.”

+ + +

“Okay,” Jack said with the stripped gear in his hand. “That should do it.”

“Great,” Kelly said. She began to page through a star catalog.

“Shooting the Crab, eh?” Jack said.

“Yeah. Just as soon as I can find the coordinates.”

Jack nodded. “Five hours, thirty-three point three minutes, right ascension. Plus twenty-two degrees, one minute, declination.”

Kelly look up from the catalog. “Why do you bother memorizing all that stuff? It is written down, you know.”

Jack put the tools back into the box. “Look, Kelly, I did have plans for tonight, so if that’s all you need...”

“Oh sure,” Kelly said. “I understand. Hey, thanks again.”

She followed Jack as he walked back to the office. He opened the door and entered the room beyond, and was about to pass through the outside door when Kelly stopped him.

“I didn’t know you had plans tonight, Jack. I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you by cooking you dinner tomorrow night.”

Jack looked down at her curly auburn hair and her large green eyes. He thought again of how much he really did like her. He thought of their similar interests, of her pretty face, of her beautiful body.

“Come on, you’re not going to turn down a free meal, are you?”

And of her wonderful personality.

Jack smiled. “Okay.”

“Super,” Kelly said with a smile of her own. “Drop by around seven.”

Jack stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He looked up at the sky and saw the mighty hunter, Orion, forever locked in battle with Taurus the Bull. He remembered how he had felt as a child, staring up in wonder at the stars; dreaming of what they could be and what mysteries they could hold. And now that he could pass those distant worlds off as mere balls of hot gas, now that he knew what they were and what powered them, he realized he still felt that same childish sense of wonder.

+ + +

It was fifteen minutes before seven when Jack reached for the revolver. He methodically opened the cylinder, dropped in four hollow point bullets, spun the cylinder, and flicked it shut. His thumb drew back the hammer and he placed the muzzle against the roof of his mouth.

He paused.

He thought of Kelly. He thought of her trying to call after he had not shown up at her place and listening to nothing but the phone ring time and time again. He thought of her eventually working up the nerve to come over here, once she had convinced herself that something must have happened to him. He thought of her knocking more and more loudly on his door and then walking in cautiously after trying the knob and finding it unlocked. He thought of her calling his name out through the empty house and of her finally finding him here on the floor with half his head splattered on the wall.

But I’ve already decided to commit suicide, Jack told himself. After all these years of lying to myself, of brainwashing myself into thinking that things might get better, how can I forget the promise I made to myself and go back to my deluded life? I know this feeling I’m experiencing now. It shows up whenever there’s the possibility of a new relationship. It’s a dream-like sensation. It tells me that things will turn out the way I want them to this time and that I won’t get hurt. It tells me that this will finally be the one that works. It fills me with hope by dangling love in front of my nose like a carrot on a stick. Oh yes, I know this feeling well. It’s the one that lies to me.

Jack squeezed the trigger.

…click.

Jack slowly removed the gun from his mouth. He opened the cylinder and took out the bullets. I’ve beaten the odds one too many times, he thought. By this time tomorrow, I’ll be dead.

Jack wiped the gun off with the rag and then used it to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

+ + +

“I’ve been staring up at the stars for as long as I can remember,” Kelly said before she took a slow drink from her wineglass.

Jack was staring at her. He couldn’t think of a time when she had looked better than she did that night. Her auburn hair fell in locks to the shoulders of a dress only a shade removed from the color of her eyes. Shadows from the flickering firelight danced across her delicate facial features, and her smile was more warming than the fire.

“When I was twelve,” she said, “I asked for a telescope for my birthday. I got a Viewmaster instead.”

Jack laughed, and Kelly quietly joined him. The night had gone well. The meal was good, and the conversation was better. I think I’m falling for this girl, Jack told himself. She’s so different from all the other women I’ve known.

“How about you, Jack? What got you into astronomy?”

“I think I was born with it,” Jack said. “My father was a backyard astronomer, and as soon as I was able to stand I was out there helping him. I was photographing galaxies before I was reading, and once I learned how I simply read everything I could find on the subject. When I was eleven, I built my own four-inch Newtonian reflector. It was crude, but it worked.

“I missed more than my share of school because of staying up late nights trying to catch elusive quasars or periodic comets. A lot of people thought my behavior was obsessive, and it more than likely was, but that never bothered me.”

Jack saw Kelly smile and nod her head as if she knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Realistically,” Jack said, “those twinkling lights in the sky are all I ever really cared about.”

Jack and Kelly sat looking at each other for a long moment in silence. Kelly’s eyes were watering, making them sparkle in the firelight.

Jack felt his heart swell within his chest. This is it, he told himself. The moment is right. Tell her how you feel.

“I love you, Jack.”

Jack almost didn’t hear her. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘I love you.’ You’re so different from all the other men I’ve known. They weren’t looking for a girl like me. All they wanted was to hear how great they were in the sack. They didn’t want to hear the theories of Einstein or lectures on the physical universe. Or, God forbid, any original idea I might have about anything. So, when Mister All-American discovered he needed a dictionary to hold a conversation with me, he dropped me and picked up a bubblehead.”

Jack searched his feelings. He believed he loved Kelly, and he wanted to tell her that, but he just couldn’t bring himself to say it. He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

“I understand,” Kelly said. “I know your life hasn’t been easy for you. You’re afraid to give up your love because of how much pain that’s caused you in the past. It’s okay. I know. I feel the same way sometimes.”

Jack’s mind reeled. She was reading his thoughts. He didn’t have to tell her he loved her. She already knew it.

Kelly took Jack’s hand. “We really do have a lot in common.”

Jack held back a tear and kissed her.

+ + +

Kelly woke before dawn the next morning, still in Jack’s sleeping embrace. She felt the rise of his chest against her back with each peaceful breath and the warmth of his body against hers. Their lovemaking had been more than physical. They had shared something intimate, something they both had been searching for all their lives.

Kelly carefully crawled out of Jack’s grasp and slowly out of the bed. She stood nude before the large bay window and could see the Summer Triangle, which would be high in the sky in the coming months, twinkle at her from the horizon. Cygnus the Swan floated on the river of the Milky Way again. Summer was on the way.

Kelly sat down on the edge of the bed and watched her new lover dream. She knew she had found happiness. She knew that her turn had finally come. She and Jack would live the rest of their lives together and never run out of love.

She sighed.

And most of all, she knew she would never again find herself with the muzzle of her twenty-two caliber pistol pressed to her temple.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Cruelty Is The Point by Adam Serwer

This one was a bit of a disappointment. Admittedly, I bought it on the strength of the title, expressing, as it does, something that I’ve thought for a long time. That for bullies, the cruelty is the point. They have no other motive, no larger goal to be achieved through the application of their cruelty. They are cruel. And being cruel is all it is ever about.

Serwer, of course, takes that concept and applies it to one of the two primary political parties in the United States -- something he does with expert precision in the one essay in this book that actually shares this title.

The artifacts [in the Museum of African American History and Culture] that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street -- one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death -- and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

That might be the larger point: that bullies feel an otherwise absent sense of solidarity and closeness to others in their cruel acts. And that may be the point of the cruelty. 

But the fact that this book is a collection of essays, and not a single book supporting this single thesis, is where most of my disappointment comes from. Serwer tries to connect them through connected replacement titles on the different essays he had written at different times for different purposes -- The Cruelty of the Backlash, The Cruelty of the Lost Cause, and The Cruelty of the Lies We Tell Ourselves, for example -- but that’s a gimmick that didn’t really cohere -- at least for this reader.

The different essays did provoke some thoughts, however, that I think are worth retaining. Here’s a few.

In The Nationalist’s Delusion, we get some data points on how white Trump’s support was in 2016, and how that, and not a more general sentiment among the lower economic class, is what catapulted him into the White House.

Clinton defeated Trump handily among Americans making less than $50,000 a year. Among voters making more than that, the two candidates ran roughly even. The electorate, however, skews wealthier than the general population. Voters making less than $50,000, whom Clinton won by a proportion of 53 to 41, accounted for only 36 percent of the votes cast, while those making more than $50,000 -- whom Trump won by a single point -- made up 64 percent. The most economically vulnerable Americans voted for Clinton overwhelmingly; the usual presumption is the opposite.

If you look at white voters alone, a different picture emerges. Trump defeated Clinton among white voters in every income category, winning my a margin of 57 to 34 among whites making less than $30,000; 56 to 37 among those making between $30,000 and $50,000; 61 to 33 for those making $50,000 to $100,000; 56 to 39 among those making $100,000 to $200,000; 50 to 45 among those making $200,000 to $250,000; and 48 to 43 among those making more than $250,000. In other words, Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won the workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one.

And these data points help Serwer reach these conclusions:

Overall, poor and working-class Americans did not support Trump; it was white Americans on all levels of the income spectrum who secured his victory. Clinton was only competitive with Trump among white people making more than $100,000, but the fact that their shares of the vote was nearly identical drives the point home: Economic suffering alone does not explain the rise of Trump. Nor does the Calamity Thesis explain why comparably situated black Americans, who are considerably more vulnerable than their white counterparts, remained so immune to Trump’s appeal. The answer cannot be that black Americans were suffering less than the white working class or the poor; rather, Trump’s solutions did not appeal to people of color because they were premised on a national vision that excluded them as full citizens.

When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative -- one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white.

In Civility Is Overrated, he reminds us of the history of political violence the United States has already suffered.

Civil war is not an imminent prospect. The impulse to conjure its specter overlooks how bitter and fierce American politics has often been. In the early days of the republic, as Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace wrote in their 1970 book, ‘American Violence,’ the country witnessed Election Day riots, in which “one faction often tried violently to prevent another from voting.” In the 1850s, the nativist Know-Nothings fielded gangs to intimidate immigrant voters. Abolitionists urged defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act and lived by their words, running slave catchers out of town and breaking captured black people out of custody. Frederick Douglass said that the best way to make the act a “dead letter” was “to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”

During the Gilded Age, state militias turned gas on striking workers. From 1882 to 1968, nearly five thousand people, mostly black Americans, were lynched nationwide. From January 1969 to April 1970, more than four thousand bombings occurred across the country, according to a Senate investigation. As Hofstadter wrote, “Violence has been used repeatedly in our past, often quite purposefully, and a full reckoning with the fact is a necessary ingredient in any realistic self-image.”

It is unfortunately a history worth understanding, as there are signs that it is continuing to this day. One consistent theme has been violence stemming from a backlash against the expansion of the franchise to previously excluded groups and citizens. In this regard, the current day seems eerily similar.

Trumpists lamenting civility’s decline do not fear fractiousness; on the contrary, they happily practice it to their own ends. What they really fear are the cultural, political, and economic shifts that occur when historically marginalized groups begin to exert power in a system that was once defined by their exclusion. Social mores that had been acceptable become offensive; attitudes that had been widely held are condemned.

It’s a sentence worth repeating: “What they really fear are the cultural, political, and economic shifts that occur when historically marginalized groups begin to exert power in a system that was once defined by their exclusion.” To conserve a system that is undemocratic means opposing the extension of democracy to those previously excluded. When those excluded individuals are minorities, the mission takes on a racist cast, but the impulse itself may not necessarily be so.

In Not The Right Way, he reminds us that the apparatus of political cruelty has been built over multiple administrations, both Republican and Democratic.

Another irony of American immigration policy is that Barack Obama, a living symbol of American multiculturalism, presided over a much more active removal apparatus than did Donald Trump.

The Obama administration erroneously believed that harsh immigration enforcement would bring Republicans to the table on immigration.

Under continuous pressure from immigrants’ rights activists, the administration adopted a more lenient approach toward the conclusion of his first term in 2012. Nevertheless, year by year, Obama deported hundreds of thousands more undocumented immigrants in his first four years as president than Trump did, despite Trump’s open contempt for non-white immigrants. It is a reminder that politicians wearing the smiling face of liberalism can provide a more effective facade for cruelty than those who make cruelty their public purpose. Trump did not invent the American deportation machine; he simply took advantage of its powers in ways recent presidents had not contemplated.

In The Cruelty of Exclusion, he reminds us that modern day Republicans failed to learn one of the lessons of the Tea Party -- that the party and the base are two different things, and that you can’t control the base by controlling the party, but you can control the party by controlling the base.

But what was the Tea Party movement? To most conservative writers, it was the revival of small-government constitutionalism. Others discerned something more complex. In ‘The Weekly Standard,’ a conservative outlet whose demise was a direct consequence of its criticism of Trump, Matthew Continetti wrote that the Tea Party had two faces. “One looks to the future. The other looks to the past. One wants to repair deformities in the American political structure and move on. The other is ready to scrap the whole thing and restore a lost Eden.”

Conservative intellectuals misunderstood that Eden and what it looked like. They projected their low-tax, federalist, small-government beliefs onto a Republican rank and file whose views were far more complex and far more motivated by identity than conservative commentators wanted to admit. So when an authoritarian reality-show star who insincerely vowed not to touch Medicare or Medicaid and to raise his own taxes appeared, promising to “Make America Great Again,” they believed the conservative base would reject him, because the version of the electorate that conservative intellectuals imagined was a fantasy.

“Not a single grassroots Tea Party supporter we encountered argued for privatization of Social Security or Medicare along the lines being pushed by ultra-free-market politicians like Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity,” wrote the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson in their comprehensive 2013 study of the Tea Party, ‘The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.’ The Tea Party “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people signal a larger fear about generational social change in America. … When Tea Partiers talk about ‘their rights,’ they are asserting a desire to live again in the country they think they recall from childhood or young adulthood.” A country that never would have elected someone like Obama.

This is how Trump was able to steal the Republican party away from the objectivist wonks like Paul Ryan. He spoke to the base, not the party, and the base, like in the days of the Tea Party, became the party.

In The Cruelty of the COVID Contract, he reminds us of a moment that should never be forgotten.

Then, in September, the president himself simply blurted out that “if you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level, but some of the states -- they were blue states, and blue-managed.” The sentiment was grotesque but illuminating. Trump did not imagine himself as much more than, as my ‘Atlantic’ colleague Ron Brownstein put it, “a wartime president, with blue states, rather than any foreign nation, as the enemy.” For Trump, holding him responsible for protecting the lives of Americans who did not vote for him -- or who merely lived in states where a majority of voters preferred the other candidate -- was nonsensical.

Oh, it was far more than nonsensical. It was a violation of his oath to protect the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The president of the United States, dismissing half the country in times of national emergency because they live in “blue” states. It should have been criminal.

In Abolish Police Unions, we have the best argument I’ve heard for why police should not be allowed to collectively bargain.

There is a simpler argument. Police should not have unions because armed agents of the state empowered with the authority to use lethal force should not have the capacity to use that authority to advance their own political purposes. It is a fundamental principle of democracy that those who wield state force be accountable to the people, lest that force be turned against the public. That principle applies to the military. It should also apply to the police.

And in The New Reconstruction, he reminds us of another time that should never be forgotten, this one during the nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd, and this one with eerie echoes of another time.

A majority of Americans have accepted the diagnosis of Black Lives Matter activists, even if they have yet to embrace their more radical remedies, such as defunding the police. For the moment, the surge in public support for Black Lives Matter appears to be an expression of approval for the movement’s most basic demand: that the police stop killing black people. This request is so reasonable that only those committed to white supremacy regard it as outrageous. Large majorities of Americans support reforms such as requiring the use of body cameras, banning choke holds, mandating a national police-misconduct database, and curtailing qualified immunity, which shields officers from liability for violating people’s constitutional rights.

The urgency of addressing this crisis has been underscored by the ongoing behavior of police departments, whose officers have reacted much as the white South did after Appomattox: by brutalizing the people demanding change.

In New York City, officers drove two SUVs into a crowd of protesters. In Philadelphia, cops beat demonstrators with batons. In Louisville, police shot pepper balls at reporters. In Austin, Texas, police left a protester with a fractured skull and brain damage after firing beanbag rounds unprovoked. In Buffalo, New York, an elderly protester was shoved to the ground by police in full riot gear, sustained brain damage, and had to be hospitalized. The entire riot team resigned from the unit in protest -- not because of their colleagues’ behavior but because they faced sanction for it.

Yet the more the police sought to violently repress the protesters, the more people spilled into the streets in defiance, risking a solitary death in a hospital bed in order to assert their right to exist, to not have their lives stolen by armed agents of the state. “As the uprising went on, we saw the police really responding in ways that were retaliatory and vicious,” Noor told me. “Kind of like, ‘How dare you question me and my intentions and my power?’”

Even now, much of this seems forgotten. These things happened, didn’t they? People protested in mass, and the police responded with excessive force. When and where have we seen that before?

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Wizard's Revenge (1986)

This is the first short story I ever completed and was willing to share with others. I wrote it my senior year of high school, based loosely on some themes and characters that would later coalesce into my first series of novels.

+ + +

Sir Gildegarde Brisbane rode his quarterhorse down the old forest road, closely followed by his squire on a smaller yearling. His weapons clanked against the light chainmail blanket draped over the horse with each gallop and a strangely shaped bag hit each time with a thud. Soon, the pair came upon a watering hole and dismounted to give the equines, and themselves, a much needed drink.

After a particularly long drink, his squire spoke. “I’ll bet none of the others defeated a wyvern! They would be too frightened to face such a beast!” He gestured towards the sack hung on Brisbane’s saddle. “When you pull its head out of that bag, they’ll probably run in terror!”

“Now, Wisk,” Brisbane scolded. “The Knights of Farchrist are a brave lot. I’m sure each will return with a fitting tribute to the King.”

“It was the largest creature I have ever seen,” Wisk continued. “To kill such a monster is a feat only the bravest of those knights could accomplish.”

Brisbane smiled. Ah, the devotion of a squire. It indeed knew no limits. “We were lucky to find one so soon,” he said, trying to end the embarrassing praise. “We’ll be back at the castle long before any of the other knights, and I can be back protecting my lord.”

“Why do you worry so much about the King?” Wisk asked. “Farchrist is a peaceful land.”

Brisbane smiled at the lad. Yes, for him Farchrist was a peaceful place. Wisk didn’t know about the early years, after the King had just taken power. He didn’t remember the bitter rivalry between the young King Farchrist and the mage Dantrius. He wasn’t present to witness all the malicious attempts the wizard made to steal the throne. He hadn’t seen the trials or Dantrius’ imprisonment and he had never heard the magician’s threats of revenge.

“It’s my duty,” Brisbane said at last, “to protect the King to my own death.”

+ + +

Something was very wrong. Brisbane had left Wisk to tend the horses at the front gate of Farchrist Castle and had ventured inside to search the seemingly deserted palace alone. There were no guards, no townspeople, nobody at all. Something was definitely wrong.

He burst into the audience hall, a room as bare as the rest of the castle. The huge pillars seemed closer together without the throngs of people between them, and for the first time he noticed the beautiful mosaic that was set into the floor. His eyes followed the colorful geometric shapes to the throne, and there he saw the skeletal form of the King.

“M’lord!” Brisbane shouted as he dashed across the tiles to kneel at the King’s feet. The King’s flesh barely hung on his frail bones, he had lost nearly all his hair, and he shook uncontrollably. “M’lord,” Brisbane said. “What has happened?”

The King weakly raised his head to see who was addressing him. “Brisbane!” he gasped. “You’ve returned!”

“Yes, m’lord. I’ve returned, but to what I cannot fathom. Where is everyone?”

The King broke into a fit of tortured wheezing that struck fear into the knight’s heart. His lord was dying.

“D…D…Dantrius,” the King finally managed to stutter before he lapsed into another spasm.

Brisbane rose to his feet, the anger coursing through his veins. He knew he shouldn’t have left the King unprotected. But it had been quiet for years and most people had forgotten the wizard Dantrius. Things had seemed safe. Too safe. And that was the problem. Something had told Brisbane not to go off like the other knights, searching for tributes. His instincts had warned him against it, but Brisbane had gone anyway. And now it was too late.

Brisbane called for his squire, his voice booming through the empty palace. Wisk soon arrived and paused, horrified at the King’s condition.

“Wisk,” Brisbane said. “The King and this castle have fallen under evil magic, the magic of a very evil wizard. I must go and try to put an end to it, but I need someone to stay and take care of the King.”

Wisk looked to the King again and a tear came to his eye. “You can place your trust in me, sir. I won’t fail you.”

Brisbane smiled at the boy and ran from the room, vengeance heavy on his mind.

+ + +

After Dantrius had been released from prison, he was banished from the land of Farchrist, so he traveled to the border and there he constructed a tower in which to reside. Since that day, the Tower of Illzeezad Dantrius and the area around it has been shunned by all wandering merchants, and rumors of evil magic radiating from the tower have cropped up in all the nearby towns.

It was to this place that Brisbane rode in his fury. He brought his steed to an abrupt halt and vaulted to the ground, sword in hand. He marched up to the door, raised his boot, and with a mighty thrust, kicked the door inward. He jumped through the portal but slipped when his feet hit the floor, falling in a horrendous crash of armor and weapons.

“Serves you right!” he heard a feminine voice say. “Breaking down a perfectly good door. Don’t you know how to knock?”

Brisbane scrambled to his feet, making more noise than he had going down. The room was circular like the tower, and had no furniture. The floor was wet with soapy water and, in the middle of the room kneeling over a bucket and scrub brush, was a young woman, obviously a maid.

“I beg your pardon,” Brisbane said, somewhat confused. “But I have a score to settle with your master, the wizard Dantrius.”

“I’m sure he’ll have a score to settle with you once he sees his door!” the maid scoffed.

“Where is the wizard!” Brisbane demanded.

The maid uncrooked her back and put her hands on her hips. “Oh, if you must know, he’s upstairs!” She gestured to her right and returned to her work.

Brisbane looked to where she had directed and saw a staircase rising along the wall until it ended at a trap door in the ceiling. Funny, Brisbane didn’t remember having seen that when he entered the tower. Of course, this was a multi-story structure; one needed stairs in such a building. They must have been there, he just hadn’t noticed them in the embarrassment over his fall.

He began to climb the stairs and was over halfway to the top when he heard a squeaky voice behind him say, “Fool!”

Brisbane spun to see the magician Dantrius standing where the house maid had been. He was a short, pipsqueak of a man dressed in a light green tunic and dark green trousers. He was mumbling to himself and making strange motions with his arms. Realizing the diminutive wizard was casting a spell, Brisbane leapt off the staircase and grabbed the handle of the trap door, just as the stairs vanished beneath him.

Hanging a good six feet above the floor, Brisbane knew he was an easy target for another spell. So he let himself drop, even though a fall from that height would certainly hurt in full plate armor.

Brisbane crashed to the floor as he saw the area where he had been suspended explode in bright green flame. What a fool he had been! Without his armor, he could have easily dropped to the floor and rushed the dwarfish mage before he could cast another spell. Dantrius fought with magic, not with weapons. Brisbane’s armor not only didn’t help, it was losing the battle for him.

The knight struggled to his feet as fast as he could, trying to ignore the pain. But just as he managed to stand upright, a wave of sleepiness overwhelmed him and he collapsed in a dead faint. Dantrius’ magic had finally caught him.

+ + +

Brisbane awoke in a jail cell, stripped of his armor and weapons. Three walls of the cell were solid stone but the fourth was made up of many thin, closely-placed bars. The room beyond these bars seemed unoccupied, but Brisbane could not see all of it. His first thought was to escape. He was a heavily-muscled man and probably could bend those bars, if his strength hadn’t been drained by evil magic.

Brisbane approached the bars cautiously, and as he neared them they began to glow with a pale green light. He slowly reached out his hand, but just before he touched the bars, a sharp green spark shocked him, and he jerked his arm away in surprise and pain. Even if those bars were made of paper, he couldn’t break through them.

Suddenly, Dantrius stepped out from behind a workbench and stood in front of Brisbane, safe on the other side of the bars. “You’ll never get through those bars,” he cackled in an irritating tone of voice. “I’ve enhanced them magically.” He seemed quite pleased with himself.

“What did you do to the King!” Brisbane screamed, forgetting his own personal danger.

“Oh, did you like that?” the puny necromancer piped in shrilly. “That particular curse worked out very well for me. As well it should—it took me several years of magical research to get it right. You see, every couple of minutes, a person under the King’s rule vanishes from this world, and with each missing person, the King himself gets physically weaker.” Dantrius began to laugh.

“Villainous runt!” Brisbane shouted as he rushed for the bars. This time they zapped loudly and nearly knocked the knight off his feet.

“Ooooo!” Dantrius moaned unpleasantly. “You shouldn’t have called me that! I am not a runt. Just because you are such a huge lummox, that doesn’t mean people of average height like me are short!”

“You,” Brisbane said with cool malice, “are a pint-sized, sawed-off, insignificant gnome.”

Dantrius’ face turned red and his green eyes nearly popped out of his skull. “You shall pay for such remarks!” he shouted, his voice squeaking like never before.

The petite prestidigitator clapped his hands and suddenly a huge humanoid beast burst into view. It had limbs as thick as tree trunks, strange patches of green hair, and horrible fangs erupting from a cavernous mouth. It stood at least nine feet tall.

“Otto,” Dantrius addressed the monster, slowly regaining his composure. “Would you please bring our guest out here into the torture room?” He waved his arms and the bars before Brisbane disappeared.

Jumping at his only chance, Brisbane dashed from the cubicle before Otto could block the exit entirely with his bulk. He just escaped the beast’s grasp and dodged around the impish wizard in one swift movement. He saw the door and headed for it.

“Otto! Get him!”

Brisbane was nearly at the door when it sprouted a mass of green slimy tentacles. Cursed magician! Who knew what poison they would inject? Brisbane did not want to find out, so he turned to face Otto, who was immediately upon him. The monster grabbed the knight by the waist and began to haul him to the rack. Brisbane struggled, but Otto was just too strong for him. He squirmed and flailed his arms in vain, trying to break the iron grip. As he was pulled past a table, he desperately grabbed one of the various corked bottles set there, each filled with a different shade of green liquid.

He uncorked the bottle and dumped its contents on Otto, hoping for the best. The huge monster instantly shrunk into a tiny green lady bug that Brisbane promptly squashed under his foot.

“That’s not fair!” Dantrius wailed as he began to wave his hands in preparation for another spell.

But the unarmored Brisbane was able to rush the wizard and grab him by the throat, thus interrupting the intense concentration needed for spell casting. Dantrius hit and kicked the knight as he felt his breath being taken from him. But the mage was weak, so the blows didn’t bother Brisbane.

Eventually, Dantrius’ body went limp and Brisbane let him drop to the floor. He looked to the door and saw the tentacles writhing there shimmer and vanish. Illzeezad Dantrius was dead.

+ + +

On his way back to Farchrist Castle, Brisbane had plenty of time to think of what he had just experienced. And the more he thought about it, the more he felt pity for Dantrius. He felt the wizard had deserved death, for this latest curse and for all the treachery he had caused in the past, that was certain, but Brisbane still felt regret for his part in the mage’s demise.

Dantrius had seemed so childlike in so many ways. He was small of stature, and was very possessive of anything that was his. His magic and his revenge. Brisbane could not imagine how anyone, no matter how evil, could keep a grudge for so long. All those years of seething, bitter hate of King Farchrist must have driven the mage stark raving mad.

But then Dantrius couldn’t really be blamed for this latest—no, it was all over now. It would be best not to think about what could or should have been. Brisbane kicked his steed’s flanks hard and rode off towards the castle.

+ + +

When Sir Gildegarde Brisbane rode into Farchrist Castle for the second time that day, it was returned to the bustling center it had always been. He requested an audience with the King and was quickly granted it.

The audience hall was packed, as Brisbane was used to seeing it, and the King was the slightly pudgy man Brisbane remembered. A huge table sat off to one side and was covered with all kinds of savory meats and delicious sauces.

“M’lord,” Brisbane said solemnly as he lowered himself on one knee before the King.

The King rose to his feet, his regal robes falling over his broad shoulders and down to his ankles. “Sir Gildegarde Brisbane, my kingdom thanks you and I thank you.”

The crowd burst into thunderous cheering. The King raised his hands and the din slowly diminished.

“And,” the King continued, “for the brave deed you have completed, I formally ask you to assume the position of Captain of the Farchrist Knights, to train them in the knightly disciplines you have perfected.”

The hall was silent as Brisbane remained crouched before his lord. He thought about the death of Dantrius again. Had it really been necessary? The wizard had been an evil man, but he hadn’t been a monster, like the wyvern. Couldn’t something have been done to avoid his fate? And why did Brisbane feel so responsible?

“Brisbane?” the King questioned, strangely nervous.

Brisbane raised his head and slowly stood before the King. “M’lord,” he said. “I cannot take good Sir Walford’s position for what I have done. I am sorry.” Brisbane turned and rushed from the chamber.

The King slumped into his throne, shocked as the murmurs began to rise throughout the hall.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Wall by John Hersey

I forget how I heard about this one. Probably I stumbled across a reference to it in some other book I was reading, thought it sounded interesting, and put it on my list of books to get.

I shouldn’t have bothered.

The book is highly regarded and reviewed by others. Indeed, a quote from The New York Times is prominently displayed on my paperback copy: “You do not ‘read’ The Wall -- you live it.”

Yeah, sure. As it turns out, there is a very specific reason why I had a hard time ‘living’ The Wall. Its subject matter is compelling -- the story of a group of Jews imprisoned in and attempting to escape the Warsaw Ghetto imposed on them by the Nazi regime in the 1940s. But its frame is distracting and needlessly complicated.

We are reading, supposedly, a secret journal kept by one of those Jews -- Noach Levinson -- discovered later and now being edited by an editor who is never named nor even described. This editor interrupts the story frequently with his own parenthetical comments, but most disrupting of all is this little gimmick:

In the case of each note, the reader will find first the date of the events therein described, and then the date of Levinson’s entry. Levinson was careful in every note to designate his source, and these attributions have been kept. Where the note was based on his own observation or opinion, he used, as this volume uses, the initials N.L. The reader will notice that a number of passages are marked with a star (✡). The passages are all taken from the context of a series of interviews that took place on May 9-10, 1943.

You probably didn’t follow all of that. I surely didn’t when I first read it in the Editor’s Prologue. But essentially what it means is that there is no logical, chronological flow to the story you’re about to read. Levinson is always, I suppose, writing in the past tense, but sometimes he is chronicling events on the very day that they occurred, with almost no benefit of hindsight, and sometimes he is reflecting back on events that happened days, weeks, or maybe months before -- and throughout all that confusion, the editor is interrupting with tidbits of context and knowledge, either from the very end of the story when the starred interviews occurred, or with the historical perspective that he has, living as he does, years into the future after the story’s events. It is, from the perspective of chronology, a mess.

Whenever I stumble across a novel that adopts an artificial frame like this -- and there are many of them, it being something, I think, of a literary tradition -- I can’t help but ask myself why. Why are you doing this? What is the point? Why not just tell a story, from beginning to end, with a detached if not omniscient narrator? Do you think that’s artificial? Do you think the reader will question the validity of your story? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret -- the only time a reader examines the frame of a story -- as in who is this narrator that is speaking to me and how does he know the things that he knows -- is when you adopt one of these artificial frames for your story. The Wall is a clear example of a novel where the frame overwhelms the story, and does little more than remind the reader that he is reading a novel. In this reality, there is no possible way to ‘live’ The Wall. One can only ‘read’ it.

Having said all of that, there was still something of interest here. For me, that was the character of Dolek Berson.

He was born, he tells me, thirty-two years ago, here in Warsaw. His father was religious and stern; a glove manufacturer; moderately prosperous. Dolek was an only child. His parents sent him to Heder and Tarbuth schools, but he also had a good secular education, at first from tutors and later in a Polish Gymnasium, where, he now says, he learned a certain flexibility about his Jewishness: he sometimes defended himself in fistfights and sometimes passed off abuses as if they had not been offered. As a small boy he was rather fat and was therefore the butt of both Jewish and Polish teasing. He became, as a consequence, more skillful than most of us in the use of the timely retort, the opportune lie, the slow-absorbent insult, and the vituperative retreat. He also practiced up on boxing, at his father’s insistence; this he hated.

He showed a musical talent by the age of seven, when he began piano lessons. Possibly his playground tortures made him more friendly with the piano than he would otherwise have been; at any rate, he practiced three and four hours a day when he was only ten. His diligence at the piano was not, however, altogether spontaneous. He says that when his mother discovered that he had some talent, she pushed him and pushed him and pushed him; she always used to say she wanted people to know what a Jewish boy could do.

When I first came across this biological sketch of Dolek Berson, by far the longest that I can remember any character being given by our first layer narrator, I thought I had stumbled upon something important.

As he grew into young manhood, Berson rebelled more and more against the religious atmosphere of his home, and so began to run away, like so many of our generation, from his Jewishness. This was when he went to Bonn to study. While there, thanks partly to his ability in music, he was pretty well assimilated and was accepted by his University acquaintances as a Pole. His mother died while he was out of the country.

After his return from Germany, Berson worked for four years in his father’s glove factory, and disliked it: working down from the top, he says. This career was ended by his father’s death and the sale of the plant. Berson then tried a number of kinds of work: as a newspaper reporter, a clerk in a millinery store, a messenger for a law firm (he studied at night, thinking he might eventually pass his examinations), and even from time to time in artisan trades, as an apprentice locksmith, as a cartwright, and in a bookbinding plant. All these changes of job account for his wide range of acquaintance, some of it apparently inconsistent with his background and education: his friendship with the baker, for instance. For one black period soon after his father’s death -- I could not discover the reason for this; there is some mystery -- he joined the Lumpenproletariat, the world of tramps, moving with them from town to town, eating in charity kitchens, sleeping in fifty-groszy dormitories, begging, stealing, and loafing. Certainly it was not poverty that drove him to this adventure, as he enjoyed a fair patrimony; curiosity, perhaps. Curiosity has in fact grown unusually stout in him. He is one of those people who think they are always learning: ‘That was good experience,’ he says of one job, or, ‘I feel that that was part of my education.’ He has taken up many kinds of out-of-the-way study, such as bookkeeping, electrical mechanics, astronomy, and so on. He remembers surprisingly much of these various bits of nonsense, if one can judge from random conversation in a prison cell.

This, I thought, is an everyman. Perhaps, if you’ll forgive the usage, an Every Jew. An collective example of the kind of person who will live (or die) in the Warsaw ghetto. His name, Berson, is even a clue, close as it is, to Person.

He married, five years ago, a girl who is frail and delicate, it seems, often sick and usually helpless, Childless.

Berson evidently reads a lot, though there are shocking gaps in his reading. No Goethe. No Gogol. No Peretz. He has read my books. He has read them carefully. (I would not be myself if I did not admit that this may be most of my reason for liking him.) In a long talk one afternoon he discussed what I had to say about the Bar Mitzvah ceremony in Customs: a really remarkable memory for details, but here and there he had missed the larger points altogether.

His judgment of people is spotty. Although he seems to be quickly offended -- Breithorn has got under his skin two or three times here in the cell -- he seems very trusting and generous, and he hates to believe badly of anyone. Of old Benlevi, for instance, he is extravagantly admiring. He refuses to understand that this once fine man has been victimized by his fate, to the point where he is now a name, an actor, and even a fraud. I acknowledge here an excessive severity on my own part. I seem increasingly to dislike everyone. Hence my surprise at feeling well-disposed towards Berson.

Once I saw this reading of the text, I was unable to unsee it, and I paid close attention to everything that was said about Berson and to everything he did. When Berson decides to join the local Jewish police force, initially responsible for patrolling the ghetto, the description of his thoughts and motivations become pregnant with meaning for the everyman.

He thinks the main reason why he considered becoming a policeman is that he yearns for order. The name of the police force appeals to him very much: Jüdisher Ordnungsdienst. Jewish Order Service. He wants to help restore order. I had not previously noticed any strong tendency toward tidiness in Berson, I must confess; though I can see how our present circumstances might have brought out this hidden quality, if he had it at all, since up to now the most obvious definition of being in a ghetto is: disorder. The Jewish district is, above all, chaotic. Only now do we begin to understand what happened during the past four or five weeks. Eighty thousand Poles moved out of this area, and one hundred and forty thousand Jews moved in. The street scenes have been dreadful: crowds and crowds of Jews with all their goods on small pushcarts wandering through the streets looking for homes: no, looking for less than that: looking for mere corners in crowded rooms. The office the Judenrat set up as a clearing-house for apartments was overwhelmed; one saw hand-written placards advertising for living space on the walls of coffee-shops and even in the streets. One could see lines of people waiting in the streets for God knows what for days on end. One saw bargaining and arguing everywhere. Groaning was our music. Everything was transacted in a whine. Dr. Breithorn’s many years of sourness were justified in one terrible event: the transfer of the Czysta Street hospital within the boundaries of the ghetto -- the parade of the sick and dying from a modern building, with the finest medical equipment, to two drafty buildings on Leszno Street. Instruments and laboratories had to be left behind. One can see hunger-panics in the streets every day. The Poles, against whom the Germans discriminate in rations, still get delicacies, such as 250 grams of artificial honey, 62.5 grams of margarine, 100 grams of dried peas, and one lemon, every week. Our people get bread and groats and, if they are wealthy, a little saccharine. Smuggling has begun, of course, but smuggling brings high prices. How long will our money last? Is there any wonder that Berson craves a little neatness.

Not just Berson, of course, but everyman, all of us, we all crave a little neatness. And order. An overwhelming need for order drives so much of what we do and what we’re willing to sacrifice.

Because soon after, Berson reflects on his choice.

But when Berson went to his room to take off his trappings, he looked in a mirror -- and he says he was frightened by what was reflected. He saw in the glass an apparition of cruelty. He suddenly remembered what it had been like to have a club in his hand all day. He remembered chasing a group of beggars away from his corner. He remembered what had happened when some Germans had come along: the only thing he had resisted was his own impulse to hobnob with them.

Berson has a theory. He thinks that because cruelty -- and there, in one word, I suppose, is the definition for this ghetto I have hunted for -- because cruelty has been inflicted on him, he now feels the need to pass the cruelty on to someone else. He said tonight:

-- I am like a cup. I’ve been poured full with a too hot fluid. It has to be poured out of me, before I crack.

It is on this level that I most enjoyed The Wall, but there, sadly, was not enough of this to really satisfy me.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.