 It's an honor to be reading on the first night at the beginning of the residency. Welcome to everybody. I hope that you enjoy being here as much as I do. Mike Meshin, there's a book signing afterwards. I have three books of short stories that are available for purchase, and I'd be happy to sign them, of course, but what I thought I would do tonight is read a prologue from a novel I've been writing. This is the kind of prologue where the narrator introduces himself to the reader in hopes that you'll want to continue to be listening to his story rather than the kind of prologue where I build up suspense. There's a little foreshadowing here, but it's mostly about who he was before the murder mystery that centers the novel begins in the first chapter. The novel is called The Theater of the Invisible Guests, and that's kind of explained in this first chapter in this prologue, I should say. Am I close enough to the mic, Bill? Okay. Well, let me read. When Ben murdered Evelyn, oh, I should add, by the way, that I just want to say that I'm not an actor. If I were an actor, then this narrator would have a slight English accent, and you'll understand why as you listen to this. If Tom Remp were here, I'd ask him to read. When Ben murdered Evelyn, only a few blocks from where I lived, and I went off my trolley to figure out why, I came to understand that anything lived but not written down would haunt me until my last breath, even if termites or time made a mockery of such labor. My stubborn mum determined to crack the carapace I grew around myself after my father disappeared, had lectured me so often about the lives of the saints that I decided to become one. It didn't work. I'm writing this story to understand how we come to fit or not into the world, why fate destroys some of us, like my son Daniel, and gives some of us a second chance. It was a lesson I learned and forgot long ago. In my youth, I kept a daily journal on schoolbook paper, a careful, even obsessive account of my turbulent days of dislocation. It would be embarrassing to reprint anything found in those books, and at any rate, it's impossible. When I returned, broken by a wrecked relationship for a holiday from university, the wrecking I can see now was my own doing, but at the time, I wasn't capable of accepting blame, I thought that the voluminous daybooks full of rants and laments would help me get my bearings, understand why the woman I wanted didn't want me anymore, why I couldn't seem to fit anywhere. After dropping my duffel bag, I greeted my saint of a mom with a peck on the cheek which embarrassed her. What are you playing at? Get on now, none of that nonsense. I laughed. It pleased me to see her cheeks turn ruddy with happiness when her wayward son came home, which was not often. And I cursed, almost by rote, my absent father for deserting her. I went to the backyard storage shed, the size of a jail cell with a floor of hard-packed earth where she had stored my diaries doing one of her frequent house cleanings. The grass needed a mow, I saw, and I made a promise to take care of things around the house before I left. In those days, we lived on the edge of a small bayou town in subtropical Louisiana where my dad had relocated us. The must and decay and heat generated in the deep south by an intolerant sun scorching the shed's prefabricated tin roof took away my breath. The mosquitoes wouldn't leave me alone. I could hear the scurrying of cockroaches making their nests inside the boxes. No prize is for guessing that I felt as if I might suffocate and cursed my mom with rising anxiety and flop sweat as I searched through cardboard boxes that were moist from humidity and leakage. When I found the one I wanted, I could see before I picked up the topmost wire-bound notebook that most of it had been devoured by termites. I imagined a million tiny teeth, the pages that had not crumbled away had absorbed enough moisture to blur and erase the cheap ballpoint ink that filled every line in my weird convoluted scrawl. I remembered the fevered days and nights when I had scrunched over each page, writing down whatever came to mind as if inspired and drunk with insight, desperate to discover my secret life, and surely there must have been some of that in those mildewed, stuck-together pages, but plenty of times I must have been just plain drunk or high on my own babble. Standing there in that heat-soaked shed as if imprisoned, not only was I uncertain who I was, the ravage of termites and humidity had erased all the evidence of who I had been. I had nothing left. I felt hollowed out, soaked in perspiration. I was so bereft as if attending a funeral that I didn't even notice that my mom's wedding photographs carried all the way from England and stored in an adjacent cod-board box had suffered a like fate. Good riddance, I would have thought, at least something good has resulted from this bad thing. No more reminders for her of my father, the deserter. Many a night after he left, I had caught her pouring over the wedding photos with her prayer book near at hand as if the right incantation could bring him back and make our wee family whole again. Instead, twitchy and unable to face the loss of my earlier self, I launched away by foot from the termite-infested house with its carport that housed my mom's old slant-six Buick and the statue of a little black jockey in the front yard. Even my dad, a southerner who liked to shout, forget hell whenever the subject of the American Civil War came up, thought that was too much, too hoity-toity, but we had been renting the house. He decided that he couldn't dislodge the cheeky jockey with his jaunty cap, who was made of fiberglass, not stone. My English mom, ever practical but not conversant, with local culture, had covered it with a white plastic sheet that had been used to keep my mattress dry if I peed in bed. She called it Casper the Friendly Ghost after a cartoon. She had never heard of the Ku Klux Klan, but a kindly neighbor, a cigarette between her lips, trumped to our house the youngest of her brood clinging to her ham-thick thighs and brought her up to speed. Sugar, you don't want to do that. Folks will notice and talk. The color down here had been really well-behaved lately. Something like this can't do any of us on this block any good. You know what I'm talking about, don't you, sugar? The sheet was long gone that day of the termites, and the jockey's skin color had faded under the scorching sun so that he could have been an amalgam of humanity rather than the submissive representative of a particular race. I walked fuming for hours along the streets that smelled of melting tar and the railroad tracks that crisscrossed the town. Soon enough, the bayou and the town were behind me. For hours, I tramped a black-topped road with fields of sugarcane and corn on either side of me. The hot wind beating like a ton of heat and the cane stalks and cornfields seeming to swirl and whisper a dirge of some kind until vertigo overcame me and I hunched in the shade of an oak to catch my breath. An old Cajun in a rusty pickup truck pulled to a stop to offer me in broken English shot through with French a swallow of water from an old military canteen and a lift. His sweat-stained straw hat pulled down so low that it hid most of his face. But I waved him off with a thank you and a thin smile and headed back to town. By now, I was limping with a painful blister. Later, when the aroma of chicken fried steak and sizzling barbecue filled the air along with the croaks of bullfrogs and the clacker of crickets and fathers in torn jeans threw footballs to their sons or drank beer with their bare feet up on the railings of front porches, I stopped for a soda poppin' burger at the town diner. But I kept walking just as I did many nights at the university until the sun sunk behind the oak trees hung with moss in the bedraggled city park built along the muddy winding bayou where I found a picnic bench and sat until nightfall in a thoughtless angry stupor before heading back home with a six pack of beer under one arm. In those journals, I had built a moat MOAT. A moat of words and thoughts is a bulwark against my confusion. My defenses had been irreparably breached by termites. I imagined termites inside my head and under my skin and that night dreaming that my body was clotted with murky creatures. Developed a raging fever that gave mom permission to treat me like her little boy again and nurse me back to health. The saints had to deal with worse, she said. I went out there and took a look to see what might be salvaged. It was then that she told me about her wedding photographs. For her, it was the final straw. It wasn't long afterwards that she packed up her things, put on her old pea coat, and headed back to England for good. Years later, when my son Daniel tried, his words hesitant and not entirely comprehensible to describe to me what methamphetamine had done to his insides, I felt as if I was standing again inside that incinerator of a storage shed, sweat soaking my plaid cotton shirt, and the ruined day books covering the close packed earth floor, termites inside my bloodstream, each one living on words taken from me. After Daniel's death, mom had died long ago back in England. I traveled with a group of 12 expatriates, myself included, on a tour of the islands of Bali and Java in Indonesia. It was the dry season when we left Smogfield, Jogikota, in central Java, at dawn, and made our way through toxic congestion on Abimo, a dilapidated shared taxi Jerry built from what had once been an elongated version of a VW camper bus. It smelled of mildew and sandalwood and still had a sink, a refrigerator, and a top canvas that trembled like jelly when our Indonesian driver, a chain smoker with good English who told us to call him William, veered at full speed between motorbikes as if on an obstacle course. He called us the 12 apostles. It was a grand joke to him, and he laughed every time he said it. There was nothing very apostolic about us, though. We were ragamuffins and hippies and lost corrupt souls in exile from our own lives, guilt-driven and swimming in grief, I imagined, that I was secret. You can't know about me, I would think, if somebody tried to get close. I'm secret. Mount Marapi, Indonesia's mountain of fire and second most active volcano, only a few kilometers from the city center, had been our original destination. But it had spewed smoke and lava the previous day. The spirit's unhappy, William said. And I had dream last night, spirit's unhappy, disturbed. A wiry man with a wrinkled face and a few tufts of white hair, he motioned with his ever-present cigarette like a wand. He was not only our driver, but also our guide in Yogyak. Guide driver, he said, or driver guide. You, the 12 apostles, you pick which one. I can't even remember now why I was there. I think it was because I had no place in the world, was torn emotionally to bits over the broken marriage and a lost son and needed money. So I had worked as a project manager for a year, wet season, dry season, on one of the far flung Indonesian islands. There are 13,000 of them. For an international, a transnational energy company at a site where machines the size of dinosaurs tore at the earth determined to destroy it to extract copper and gold. I lived with the stink of sulfur on my skin. When the underpaid workers that I managed rightfully decided to strike, the security forces, Indonesian police hired by the company came at them with cattle prods and then gas canisters and finally opened fire with fusillads from automatic assault rifles. The poor sods only wanted to negotiate a living wage but they didn't have a chance, did they? Seven were shot dead just to keep the others in line. One was shot through the forehead, a pinhole in front, brain splatter like oatmeal flavored with tufts of hair and blood in back. I tried to administer aid after the slaughter but only managed to mat my short sleeve shirt and the company logo on it with blood and brain matter. After the massacre and a corporate cover-up that furiously blamed the Indonesians for their own deaths as if they had turned rifles upon themselves, I lost my stomach for the work. My boss, a brill creamed redneck from Louisiana shaped like a haunch of venison. A torso marbled with fat and legs like matchsticks made me understand that what happens on the Alcapelago stays on the Alcapelago. I shrugged, sick to my stomach from the stink of death and human dissolution but I told myself that it wasn't my fight. Don't worry, you cheeky bastard, I said. No chin wagging from me, I'm easy. I guessed it was what he wanted to hear from the Louisiana Brit who often drank beer with them even though he knew the company had cocked it up, had cocked up when it brought in mercenaries and that word would get out with no help from the likes of me. I was knackered so I took my considerable earnings and despite my raw anger I could feel my jaw muscles work while I waited bathed in perspiration for a company helicopter to whoosh me away from the murders, traveled to nearby Bali and joined the 12 apostles, the cultural study group. I couldn't handle the aggravation at the time and I wanted to clear my head of the things I had seen of the mayhem that took place to keep the miners in line. My mom was British, my father a yank, though mom as I've said no longer walked among us upon the earth and dad might as well have been a ghost because he had vanished from my life. I was born in Kakamaoth, a market town among the fells and lakes and mountains of Cumbria, the birthplace of Fletcher Christian and a William and Dorothy Wordsworth. That makes me pot mutineer, pot romantic wafer. Wunderlust was the bane of my life. I was game for anything in those days but I never could have guessed that day in Jogja Carter with the 12 apostles that it would write this story after years of making a living among the snowdrifts of the American Midwest. Along with the tragedy of my son Daniel, my silence at the time of those murders in Indonesia felt like a betrayal and became one of the reasons that I wandered the states for years like a spirit seeking alchemical change. I lived with my memories of failure and loss on a daily basis. When Ben murdered Evelyn, it was the icing on the cake. I couldn't forget even in the taciturn and bland Midwest, my mother's alarming stories about the lives of the saints. All that they endured, what they survived, how they provided inspiration and encouragement to those in need. We apostles spent that day in Indonesia with our guide William at a beach on the Indian Ocean. Afterwards, two of my fellow travelers told me that they had seen William levitate. I was there, I said, I didn't see that. I grinned at Karen. He was levitating, Karen said. She had a small container of lip balm in one hand and applied it vestidiously. I saw him. She lived in Kentucky with her father, the colonel, and her mother, known as the colonel's wife. At least that was her story when she was sticking to it. When she wasn't traveling to see the world, she was majoring in equestrian science. I intend to spend my life training thoroughbreds, she had told me, and then owning them. Fancy that, I said, Haas's scare me witless. She was thin and graceful, her skin the color of white sand, but I could see that her fingernails had been bit to the quick. Fancy that, she repeated and smiled while tilting her head so that I had to tilt my own head to see her straight on. Ever been to Kentucky, bluegrass country? Is that an invitation, I replied, causing her to blush? Maybe she said, crossing her arms over her breasts. Besides the lip balm, she had a plastic spray bottle of sunscreen close at hand. She feared overexposure to the sun. All of us in swimsuits were relaxing by the hotel pool, which was surrounded by lush vegetation and the fragrance of jasmine. We were back at the Hotel Swastika, whose name in Indonesia means oddly enough, well-being for one and all. I had a drink in one hand. I usually did. When something bothered me, I drank. The day was the day, and it passed. The night would soon surround us, and lizards would join me beneath the sheets on my bed if I was unlucky. Outside the hotel compound, we could hear the constant roar of motorbikes. Java is sometimes called the island of motorbikes and batik, and Bali isn't far behind. We could also hear a symphony of frogs. One of the lizards on the fringe of a small poolside lily pond studied me. Its throat expanded to the size of a golf ball. I could see that it was sizing me up to determine if I would be a good bed partner or not. You didn't see the levitation, Paul said, because you were off staring at the ocean. The musk of his closed cigarette made me sneeze. You're a daydreamer. Vegetative beings surrounded me, some seen, many unseen. The invisible guests, I thought, a conversation with a DeLong, or shadow puppet masters still fresh in my mind. I prefer to perform in daylight when people too busy to watch, he had said. His ecot sarong tied to a sash and a peche or a black felt cap tugged tight on his head because he and his musicians were rehearsing during the day when there were few of any spectators. He also wore a faded Rolling Stones exile on Main Street T-shirt. At night, he would dress formally in a Tlouc Biscop or a Javanese jacket with a sarong and would orchestrate for a lively audience of locals and tourists, his Waiya and Kulit and all night extravaganza performed behind a white translucent screen with two-dimensional puppets moving elaborately between the screen and an oil lamp or electric bulb to dramatize the ancient elongated myths of the Mahabharata or Ramayana to the clamor of a gamelan orchestra. He puffed on a closed cigarette while we spoke after he gave the gamelan players a break. In daylight, you the one visible guest, but I performed for the invisible guests, the ancestors. You see them? He opened his arms wide in a grand, deliquent gesture as though introducing me to a universe that until that moment had been out of my can. I scratched my hirsuit head, craned my neck, narrowed my eyes and studied the smog-filled urban landscape. He was clearly a master of a realm about which I knew next to nothing. Maybe it was a way for him to soften life the way my mom had done with her saints. I shrugged, admitting defeat. He and I stood in the middle of a busy pedestrian square paid with concrete. Business people in western dress hurried past, probably on their lunch hours without the slightest inclination to stop and gawk or listen as I was doing. This was a part of their culture that they had left behind. As far as I could see, I was the DeLong's only guest. He nodded courteously, stomped out a cigarette and called his scruffy gamelan musicians back to the unattended daylight rehearsal. He might have been a castaway on a desert island. They everywhere around us, he said, the invisible ones. When people don't listen, they listen, pay heed. A daydreamer, I said to Paul at the Hotel Swastika and chewed on the word like a stick of gum. It was probably true. I spent my English childhood in a housing estate. Then my American father took us across the pond where he worked irregularly as a rough neck on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico after situating us in that rented house in the States, the deep cockroach infested south in Louisiana where I developed a taste for gumbo and jambalaya and Dixieland jazz. When he deserted us, disappearing like a puff of smoke with a quote unquote seedy wave, mom's words, from one of the local juke joints that he frequented, she raised me in New Iberia, Louisiana, a bayutown where she worked until I came of age and went to the university down the road in Lafayette on a scholarship. Not long after the termites destroyed my daybooks, she offered me a proposition, return with her to England or make my own way. I stayed, she returned to a place that no longer belonged to her, a squalid slum and not the cozy of her imagined youth. And often enough I survived by daydreaming about where my dodgy father might be since he had vanished from my life like a gin into the great wastes of America or about who I might be, Fletcher Christian or William Wordsworth. Heroic mutineer, a transcended poet. I lived more vividly in my head than I did in the world. Levitating, wait a minute I said, where was Tom? He was the heavy set bearded cinematographer traveling with our group. He planned to put together a documentary about Indonesia that he wanted to call the land of motorbikes and batik. Let's go to his room and take a look at the film and see if William levitated. Karen made a face and shrugged in her bathing suit. She opened her hands as if offering me the earth. The battery gave out. She grinned triumphantly. He went off to walk in the water. He's a daydreamer too, like you. So there's no visual proof you have to believe Rama. She had fallen in love with Sita that I was meant to rescue her as Rama had rescued Sita from the snares of the Colonel who frequently arranged debutante parties in Kentucky so that she might meet a suitable bridegroom. Out against my better judgment I had accepted the nickname and taken to calling her Sita at least when we were alone. It's a question of belief, is it? What are you guys playing at, I said? William, he's a chain smoker, a lecturer. He's tied to the world, a guy, not a mystic. He's the last person I might imagine levitating. Who would you imagine levitating, Karen said and made her face lopsided? Me? I laughed. Sita, I can imagine you doing lots of things, I said, flirting, but levitating, that's a stretch. Have it your way, Paul said, grinding his freckled jaw. We saw what we saw. He took a sip of his drink and stood close to Karen. He had designs upon her and had seen the two of us getting close. He stared into the lily pond as if there was a shadow hovering over the water. I saw a green snake slither away in the grass. William was in the lotus position. He was floating, believe it or not. That's how it was. Karen and I both saw it. You weren't there, God damn it. Ah, I motioned for Paul's closed cigarette and he reluctantly let me take a drag. So it's not a question of belief, it's a question of experience, isn't it? I didn't see it, did I? The conversation irritated me. You know what I said? I wasn't there because I was levitating myself. On the beach, my goal is to be a saint. Holy, godly, pious, religious, devout, prayerful, virtuous, righteous, good, moral, sinless, guiltless, irreproachable, spotless, uncorrupted. I stopped to catch my breath. Karen was biting on a fingernail and smiling. Paul had narrowed his eyes. Oh, and did I add pure and angelic? It's hard work trying to be a saint. Sometimes I have to take a break and levitate. They left it at that and we went off to have chicken nasi goreng or Indonesian fried rice all washed down with plenty of bintang beer. We spent the next day exploring the Buddhist temple of Borobudur before we hopped on a plane for Bandung, a city where the pollution was so bad that some of my fellow apostles wore surgical masks outdoors which made them look like large insects. And then to Jakarta and Singapore and Tokyo and Seattle. Once we returned to the states, I never saw the travelers again with the exception of Karen, now my fiance. No, did I hear anything about William until years later when I came across a notice on the internet of his death from lung cancer, I remembered him chain smoking. That I had witnessed. So I walked from the ancient apartment building in the Midwest where I lived to the corner head shop or whatever they're called these days and bought a packet of clove cigarettes. I forget the brand, but I smoked a few thinking of William, our guide driver, our driver guide and tried to imagine him levitating on a beach near the Indian Ocean halfway around the world. Imagine how he might have hovered above the ground. A third eye almost visible in the middle of his forehead witnessed by dizzy American travelers except for Tom, the cinematographer and me. Daydreamers many thousand miles from whom mesmerized by the beautiful, depthless Indian Ocean. Surely I thought smoking the clove cigarette that was a kind of levitation standing on white sand staring into the blue-green sea and traveling by means of cosmic energy into the intricate latticework of the ocean waves. Thank you. So Bill tells me that nobody can leave the room until you ask some questions. So. I was wondering, have you been to all of the places you've written about? I grew up in Louisiana and I spent six months in Indonesia. Oh, Minnesota, the answer is that. I've never been to Minnesota. I've never been to Minnesota. Yeah, I have been to those places. So I can call upon memories as well as research. It was very clear. Did you always write this in first person or did you ever try it in the first person? Trying to think of the process of this novel. I think it's always been a first person novel. Yeah, I can't remember trying it in a different perspective. I've tried, I've written about it. I mean, this is a very different beginning than it once had, but this is, it's always been a first person narrative. No, the question about first person. When you're writing first person in short story or a novel, sometimes you model that first person voice in some direction. No, other times it's a process of you get in, you get his voice inside your head. Yeah. Would you dare speak about any of that? You. You. I'm modeling on you, Mike. No, just kidding, just kidding. It has more to do with literature than life, I think. I'm a big fan of the Louisiana novelist Walker Percy. His novel, The Movie Goer, is very much a Louisiana novel, but it's about a wanderer, a man who's stuck between places, psychic places, who finds his way eventually to what he calls a leap of, what he doesn't call a leap of faith, but the structure that underlies the novel is Kierkegaard's leap of faith, you know, and so this is that kind of book, I suppose my wife said that I should never in polite company use the word existential, so I won't use that word, but you know, a novel like Camus The Stranger or Walker Percy novels, and there are lots of others where characters are dislocated for whatever reason, and they're either trying to find a place or they're so alienated from their own lives that they don't even realize that's their problem. And this person here has become conscious that he's dislocated for very obvious reasons. He was physically dislocated from one country and brought to another. His father disappeared, he lost his son to drug abuse, so he's dealing with a lot of baggage. And the actual novel is about his attempt in Minnesota, in the Midwest, to solve a murder. This is probably the simplest way to put it, but to figure out why a murder happened, and all of this is part of what he brings to his search, and he's not aware enough to understand that what he's attempting to solve has nothing to do with the people who have committed these crimes, but it's all about who he is and where he needs to go. So the novel takes place in these places, Louisiana and Indonesia, but also the Midwest and in Kentucky. And he ends up spending a lot of time with his fiance in Kentucky. I don't know if that answered your question. I'm curious about this symbol of chewed up. Of what? Chewed up, chewed up notebook in this book. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And you came back to it three or four times, and you sort of wrote over it. I wondered why you didn't actually reveal some of the thoughts that was going on in that young man's now an older man's life. Some from the notebooks? From the notebook, and would it give us any insight into, was it profound or was it gibberish, was it? Both, there's probably both, but it's gone. He no longer has access to it. But there's none of that coming through to the reader right now, for what reason? Well, he's lost it, he can't get it back. I mean, it's a nice idea to quote from them, but the problem is that's also gone. At a certain point in his life, he thought he could return to his past. I was waiting for some profundity out of that thing that wouldn't be able to get replayed as you moved through the book. Well, there are flashbacks to that time of his life at the time, but he can't quote from the notebooks because he doesn't have them anymore. And it was sort of by a lot of the biological, graphical details that I was wondering about, was his father, did he meet his mother during World War II? I mean, how did this American in this English woman? He was in England, but he was not a soldier now. This is not a historical novel, in that sense, yeah. So I'm interested in it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, great. No, these are great questions, because there might be some details that need to be added that I haven't had yet. Al, say a little bit more about Walker Percy. I mean, The Movie Girl was once upon a time a real big book. I don't know how many people in this room know him. Yeah, all of you should read The Movie Girl. It's won the National Book Award. Walker Percy is a Louisiana novelist. He died in, I think, the mid to late 90s. He wrote several, four or five novels, two or three books of essays. One of the books of essays is called The Message in the Bottle. He started out as a kind of philosopher. Well, he got educated, he got educated actually as a medical doctor. And then he got tuberculosis. And so they put him in a sanatorium in New Mexico. And while he was there, he started reading philosophy and novels and never practiced medicine again. He recovered from his tuberculosis but decided that he wanted to be a novelist. And he wrote several novels that he considered unsuccessful. And The Movie Girl was his first published novel. It's about a guy named Binks Bowling who talks about a vertical search which is trying to find like the one truth that will explain everything versus the horizontal search which is wandering in search of truth. And so he's on this double axis and it's all set, mostly in New Orleans. And he's attempting to find his way to some authentic existence. He's a stockbroker. And he basically makes his living, selling, convincing other people how to make their own money and he makes money and he seduces his secretaries. And that's his kind of life, life of hedonism and material success. But his aunt is a woman of ethical principles and she thinks that you live a life according to an ethic. And either you do that or you're on the wrong path. And of course there's Mardi Gras and all of that taking place. So it's a very intricate novel and it's beautifully rendered. It captures vividly what it's like in New Orleans at certain times of the year and certain seasons and certain states of mind. And then at the end he finally makes a commitment to a woman for one thing and then also to somehow he says he hasn't decided whether to take his aunt's advice and his aunt's advice and become a doctor which he thinks is an ethical way to help human beings and succeed on one's own terms. He can't decide whether he should become a doctor or a gas station attendant. But he says whatever he becomes, his idea is to help people along it for selfish reasons. And that's all we can do in the world for good and selfish reasons, help people along in their journey. So the idea of the novel is if you buy Binks-Bowling's spiritual journey is that he finds his way to authenticity through the experiences that take place in the book. And so the journey taking place here for this character is similar to that kind of thing. I certainly have Walker Percy on my mind as I work on this book. I was curious what you said, did you ever have Raymond Chandler like Philip Merleau? Did I ever what? Philip Merleau? I like, I love mystery novels. I read them all the time. The way he's never really doing or subsist by throwing himself. Yeah, well what happens to this guy once you start reading the actual novel after the prologue, you know who he is basically and how messed up he is. And nearby his house, a guy kills a woman by luring her to his house pretending to be a nanny. It's based on a Craigslist killing that took place in Minneapolis probably six, seven, eight years ago now. And so he decides that he's going to be friend the killer who's in jail. There's no doubt about who did the murder. So he insinuates himself into the investigation and of course gets into trouble himself. The police suddenly start to think that he's perhaps involved because he breaks into the house for one thing and looks around the room where the killing took place and starts to gather what he considers clues as to who did it but to why it was done. And he's projecting his entire life into this crime. And basically it's, I told my wife I wouldn't use the word, so I won't. But it's basically a novel, it's basically a literary novel that uses a mystery as a MacGuffin. As readers hopefully you're not so concerned with why Ben killed Evelyn. Except in so far as we're all human beings and so of course we'd like to know why somebody commits a senseless crime. But what you're hopefully most concerned with is what happens with this narrator and his relationship with his fiance. They've had years, they've been engaged for many years but they haven't lived in the same state for many years. And if you know the Ramayana, the illusion is to Rama and Sita and their separation and so forth. Eventually Rama flies with the monkey king too, the monkey king, the monkey people to save Sita. So there's some, I try to make some use of Asian mythology and then obviously the contrast in his mind because his mother who was an Anglican had come to America and become a Catholic. So he's holding onto this conceit that he can somehow be a saint and he uses that. He plays with it, I mean he's not completely serious about it and until he can stop pretending that sort of thing he's never going to become authentic. But I have some fun with it hopefully in the book and hopefully readers do too. Just I guess the idea of the prologue and including the choice of including prologue, like how your own thought process went with that. I want you to, by the time you start reading the novel some people actually skip prologues, I'm aware of that. But by the time you read the novel I want you to be more interested in who this guy is than in this murder that takes place. Because otherwise if I start it with chapter one you might think this was some kind of crime novel. And it's not that, I do a lot of that, I've done a lot of research with that. As I say I've read a lot of crime novels and I've used some of the conventions of that genre. But it's not a genre novel and it can't work, it can't work on those terms for readers who prefer straight genre. So the prologue hopefully puts you in a place where you're interested in figuring out what's going on with this guy rather than who killed, why Ben killed Evelyn. In that case why the color of prologue and why not just make it chapter one which would maybe make it more interesting. Thank you, would you be my mentor this semester? I guess that was a little too much. I have a question though, once you called a prologue they changed the book, I don't know. Yeah, well it could be chapter one, yeah. I suppose I called it a prologue because I was thinking it's a prologue to the story that takes place. But that's no reason not to call it chapter one, yeah. I was just wondering, I know that Michael White has a research seminar this month with residency and this sounds like there was some research involved but I'm wondering how much of it is not so much research but like your reaction to what was actually happening because some of the elements what you wrote about actually happened. So in the prologue or the murder or what do you mean? The murder, yeah, I mean there's a certain amount where you can just respond to it and create your own interpretation of it. Yeah, it's not either or, it's both and. So you did invest some time in research to make sure that you understood what happened. Yeah, I have a big file of stuff. But then I would kind of like just dissolve it, like, I don't know, did you like kind of... Well I was personally curious about this murder that took place, I don't know if any of you know this Craigslist murder but it's grotesque. This kid pretended to be a woman and he put on Craigslist an ad for a nanny to look after a child of some woman and when this woman, I don't remember her real name, she called him, he would talk in a woman's voice and convinced her to come to his house to take, to her house, she thought it was, to take care of this kid. And after that nobody knows quite what happened but she went in the house alive and came out, shot in the back and basically her car was in the driveway, he put her in the trunk of the car, he drove to a nature preserve a few miles away, he left her in the trunk and then he took her cell phone, stomped on it and threw it in a dumpster, covered it with a towel that had blood on it and just left it. And so the roommate, this woman who was, this woman had a roommate and when she didn't show up after a day or so, the roommate called the police and said, where is she? And we're kind of worried, she went to this woman's house to be a nanny and I haven't heard back from her and at first the police thought they were investigating, they weren't sure what they were investigating and then somebody went to the nature preserve, they found this, they found her, not just her cell phone but her purse in the dumpster. So at first the police thought they were investigating looking for the owner of a missing purse and then when they realized this woman was missing, they put the two things together and it didn't take them long after that to figure out what was going on because when they opened the towel and they found that cell phone, the towel had this kid's name on it. And Magic Marker, it was like his mother had put his name on it, Magic Marker. So they brought the kid in and the kid at first denied anything and then they said, well, look what we have. And so he finally said, well, yeah, she was killed at my house but I didn't do it, a friend of mine did it. Well, I think you built the story around that. Yeah, yeah, so all of this is part of what this guy. It's imperative, but it's not. Yeah, yeah, I end up changing this story some but the basic elements stay the same because I was curious myself, like, what the hell? And oh, and the woman was not sexually violated. She was just shot. I mean, nobody could figure out a trial where his lawyer tried to claim that he was just trying to date her and didn't understand how dates work. Oh, right, okay, okay. He's in jail, he's in jail now, by the way. So yeah, some of it, I did a lot of research but I also followed the case. I mean, that was the impetus for this character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you look at everything else specifically, how did this stretch you in a different direction? What was the biggest challenge you had to... Well, I'm a short story writer. I've always loved short stories and I've always written short stories. I have three collections of stories that I've published and I'm writing a fourth collection now. So I wanted to work on a bigger canvas and try to connect the dots in different kinds of ways. I could have done it, maybe an interconnected collection of stories where the same character keeps reappearing, like what was the book out of Kittrich that we read, The Last Residency. But I wanted to try this kind of novel. So that's the stretch, to make things work, to introduce a metaphor, a character, an incident in chapter one that develops over several chapters and ends up nothing culminates into the end. So pulling that string tight, but not letting it go to the end matters. Am I too far from your microphone? Okay, one more question, then we should stop. I know how it works and how many people do we run and fight. Some of you have let me know in the question and answer session, but if any of you would care to give me additional information about what worked or didn't work for you, that would be great. You're a great sounding board and when you read something aloud to people, as many of you realize, you hear sometimes what's working and what's not working simply by the amount of attention that you can sense you're getting or not. Is that what you use your pen? Yeah, in a few places, I found myself making small changes. And that's true even when you've published something. I remember once we had Tim O'Brien at Minnesota State and he was reading from his book, The Things They Carried, a wonderful story, something about how to tell a true war story. And he was still making changes in it. And afterwards I said, what are you doing? He said, oh, well, eventually I'll publish the definitive edition for your chance. Thank you very much.