As much as I would like to celebrate the glorious return of winter to the valley by returning to bed to “hypernate”, as I call power sleeping, I feel compelled to finish the powerful and ethically meaningful story, more accurately a novella, that I began last week. I say began but of course these stories trace their multifarious roots far back into the deeper synapsian recesses of the writer’s mind, wending treelike through many bits of memory and dream fragments, they do not follow any particular chronological order in their development, no easily measured progress, meandering unseen and unacknowledged in the absolute darkness of the unconscious, bursting mysteriously through without warning into one’s mind to take blazing possession of the faculties, striking the writer like an unseen bolt of lightning! I am unable to sustain this impact with any amount of grace, unfortunately, and have tuned out like a radio in the middle of my own sentences, stumbled over a nonexistent obstacle in the middle of a walk, and literally come to my senses, as if waking from a dream, in the middle of a convenience store, gazing emptily at a package of juicy fruits in my hand like hamlet gazing at his tutor’s skull.
For this and other reasons I have never applied for a motor vehicle license. It’s basically a medical condition.
I prefer to confine my driving, if you’ll pardon my continuing the metaphor, to fictional pathways, with the good company of discerning readers. If you consider yourself such a one, and can stifle the common human tendency to backseat drive for a few paragraphs, I invite you to join me for a journey along a particular roadway I recently, a barely paved, meandering little lane called;
The Quest for the Orange Dragon, a novel of Magic and Adventure by Frank Sperber:
Excerpt 2
“Tell me you’re kidding, Jasper.”
This was not the reply that Kiera Knute, née Green Harmonsdottir, had drilled Kyle Knute on for months and even years, when the day ordained by fate and inexorable laws of probability at last arrived and Jasper the Red finally offered Kyle Knute the full Producer position in return for the favor that Kiera had assured Kyle would most certainly be welded to the offer that would most absolutely have to be agreed to no matter what. The favor was expected to be degrading and unpleasant and a powerful producer of moral qualms, but the idea of actual, high levels of physical danger hadn’t even occurred to Kyle, and if they occurred to Kiera she had not communicated this to Kyle. So he had been prepared to be disgusted and humiliated. He had assembled what Kiera had called his “success face”, a face so completely unrepresentative of the true thoughts behind it that even Jasper would be impressed. But all these preparations had come to nothing, the success face had paled with fear, the mouth prepared for vacant grinning had erupted in a high keening squeak, truly the very opposite of a success face, an unmistakably Nermite face.
But Jasper the Red was desperate and determined, and he did not shrug it off, as he would have if it had been some everyday humiliation favor, like the human piñata idea he’d been mulling over for his daughter’s 16th birthday party.
“I’m telling you Kyle, I’m surprised the board agreed to the promotion at all. They wanted to make it into this negative thing, like reduce you to scrivener again, just because of that terrible fire metal war thing you did that everyone hated, but I refused. This guy has done his time, I said, and we should give him a chance.
“Yeah, they totally wanted to fire your ass for that,” Harmony chimed in from the window seat that she preferred to perch on in order to keep an eye on the street outside Mama Lucerda’s while keeping the other eye on Jaspers hinky dealings at his corner booth as ordered by her cousin the young chairman who admired Jasper but did not trust him, and wanted to keep a family member on him at all hours. She was a squat, short but powerfully built girl with a broad nose that can be endearing in some people, but on her face the nasal area had taken up too much space between the eyes, so much so that they had grown rather independent of each other, “like that lizard with the long tongue,” as Jasper had described her to his friends that didn’t work or do business with the Royal Puppeteers
Jasper cast a not at all irritated look at Harmony while frowning with pleasure at the comment. “Her uncle would not approve of her language, and the only thing keeping me from reporting it to him is the incredible respect I have for her family, but she’s essentially correct,” Jasper told Kyle regretfully. “Look, I get it; you’re terrified. The northern forest is a rough place, and you’re a wimpy little scrivener basically. Just like me, right? If you take away my job title. We’re all wimps. Except for Harmony there,” he nodded toward her perch. “She’ll take on any forest bandit.” He grinned, granting Kyle a closeup view of his green teeth, with the little yellow and red food bits in the little spaces around his gums that Kyle thought were probably cheese or bacon fat.
“You bet I would,” Harmony replied, staring out the grease tinted window. “I’d kick their goddamn heads in.”
“See? Too bad she’s not coming with you,” Jasper guffawed. “But don’t worry. The company has granted you a generous budget to hire help. You won’t be expected to go in to the woods alone! Dignity will help you get the best people and equipment. Go to her office in the morning. This has the full support of the company, Kyle.”
“Give me any other job, Jasper. Anything.” Kyle got out of his chair and knelt before Jasper on the floor. “I am officially begging you. Please.”
Jasper turned away, appalled.
“Now now Kyle, you’re being ridiculous. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
Kyle clasped his hands in a gesture of supplication. Harmony had turned both eyes from the window to gaze at the scene of humiliation. Her lips were parted and a little drool dripped from her thin, cruel lips. She could barely wait to describe it all to her sister Dignity at lunch.
“Jasper, please. “ he cleared his throat. “Jasper, I would like to be the piñata at your daughter Chastity’s birthday party”
“May Ulfang pacify the storm within my belly,” groaned Jasper, hand over his mouth. “Just the thought of Chastity and her friends seeing those frog eyes gleaming from her birthday surprise made me almost lose my after supper just now.”
“Jasper I’m begging you!”
“Kyle, I’ve already chosen a piñata. It’s Childeric. As if I’d spoil my precious angel’s birthday with you! Gurg!” He turned his head toward the corner until the nausea passed.
“Childeric my assistant scrivener and puppeteer?” Kyle said in a small distant voice. “Why would he do that? I told him I was set to make him lead scrivener.”
“Childeric is a puppeteer,” Harmony snapped. “He doesn’t want to be on your pathetic scrivener producer track!” One of the many favors Childeric had done for Jasper in order to make the unheard of leap from the contemptible scrivener track to the coveted puppeteer track was to liaison with Harmony a few times a week on the brunch hour, affording Jasper the short break in surveillance he needed in order to conduct business in Gretel’s Inn, an establishment set at the leewardmost end of Capn’s Walk, a thin muddy trail along the Lakeside wharf where all the most dangerously unsanitary taverns clustered, and there in the shadowy corners of Gretels Inn, shabby men gathered to conduct the transactions so foul, so bereft of dignity and moral restraint, that even the People of the Sea, with their ancient proud traditions of fraud and thievery, avoided in shock in disgust. The board of the Royal Puppeteers had promoted Jasper because of his willingness to do business in Gretel’s Inn, but it didn’t mean they had to know anything about it.
So now Childeric would be a full puppeteer, far above an Associate Producer in pay and status within the company, and Kyle had not even known he’d been aiming for it. Only a full Producer could even speak with the Puppeteers as social equals, and Chastity’s birthday party was only two weeks away.
Kyle felt cold inside as he stood and told Jasper that he would go to Dignity in the morning.
“Have a drink,” Jasper said, as Litza the barmaid and bartender and main cook at Mama Lupita’s brought three steins on a rusty pan and slammed them on the wobbly table before them. Jasper nodded at Kyle’s, the one with the broken handle. “On me”.
Sperberspeak 