3

by Peter Neill

Overview

With three Peter Neill novels in one binding, this omnibus provides literary experimentation, creative narrative, and imaginative prose from the second half of the 20th century. A Time Piece addresses three moments in time and four levels of consciousness, revolving character and gender, and the interrelationship of superstition, religion, and science as the basis for the evolution of idea and belief. Mock Turtle Soup follows the voyage of two turtles from Ark to Death, the autobiographical passage of a young journalist from real to ideal, and his resolve to liberate himself and all women from the prisons of inhibition, social conformity, and the law. Acoma is a dystopian comedy set in a utopian future of “perfect health” that interleaves the self-consuming reveries of an anonymous narrator and the destructive antics of a revolutionary snake with the reality and aspiration of a native matriarch and her climb to freedom. The novels play with the interaction between linear and nonlinear structure, internal and external voice, literal and fantastical description, and word play.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780918172501
Publisher:	Leete'S Island Books
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Peter Neill is the former president of the South Street Seaport Museum, the founder and director of the World Ocean Observatory, and a writer. In addition to the three novels in this collection, he is the author of numerous volumes on maritime art and literature, including American Sea Writing, Great Maritime Museums of the World, Maritime America, and On a Painted Ocean. He lives in Sedgwick, Maine.

Read an Excerpt

3

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By Robert Neill, Susan McCrillis Kelsey

Leete's Island Books

Copyright © 2013 Robert Neill III
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-918172-52-5

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CHAPTER 1

A TIME PIECE

To Horse and the Future

autobiography

anna

aimee

amura

annastasia

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

How do I begin? begin with events which are not completed; which have no logic; which span so little, so much, of Time? It is an impossible task to begin at the beginning. For all I know the beginning may yet occur within the next moment, may have already occurred somewhere in the middle, may have occurred even before the first few facts I know for certain. If there is to be a beginning and an end, they must be arbitrary; points which will last only an instant before a new departure replaces an old completion and my story begins again.

Point ... on a circle.

With this, I take my life.

I go to join my dead wife. I jam the nib of my pen into my wrist, I dive beneath the hammering keys of the typewriter, I attempt my autobiography. There is an accepted technique: narrate at length the events of one's life in chronological order to create a compilation from which may be drawn some meaningful impression or conclusion about oneself.

Cantankerous old fart that I am, I must do the opposite.

I will tell everything at once, bring all my lifetime to bear upon a single moment.

one

single

moment

point ... on a line

The blood, look! is already flowing.

Who am I, then, is the question.

It is the twenty-fifth hour of an ensuing day. I must hurry, whisper, my lips moving quickly against the microphone. I must complete it before the end.

The Circle has just left, gone their new ways; my eyes shifting about the room mark their leavings, the traces of their presence which before dawn I must remove; fingernail parings, plastic glasses coated with hardened drinking syrup. All must be put in order.

My name is Frank Timmins. I am sixty-two years of age. I was married for thirty-three years to the former Annastasia Saxton until her sudden death six weeks ago. No children. My preoccupation is teaching. I belong to no clubs, detest committees and academic conventions, I am listed in none of the catalogues of famous people. I am widely published, have written seven books on various aspects, several monographs; yes, a book of poems, and many learned articles. To the distress of my publishers and the university administrators and to my great satisfaction, I have released all my work under the pseudonym of Marcus Chais.

But this is all so incidental ...

Lost in the past, there is a journal, printed in blue-green mold, bound in transparent leather. It reads: I was petrified, lest the mob of ungrateful fools discover me where I lay. I knew the anger of such crowds well, having moved their fickle natures myself with word or gesture. But no more, all is ruined and destroyed beyond my repair. I have been betrayed by their ignorance, but not by my lord who appeared to me in my dreams that first night in Bel. That was the beginning; a first word spoken; a certain knowledge that I could lead a village and transform them from impoverished serfs to great landowners and tradesmen; lead them from the tillers of stagnant fields to the custodians of the yellow-gold squares of plenty and silver streams of Paradise itself. That I could elevate Bel from a cluster of hovels, from lanes lined with broken stones, from a polluted well and gutters arun with sewage, to a great nine-tiered world within itself, a city worthy of epic and song, a seat of many parliaments and a focus of all good. Through me Bel would be seen for as far as the eye of man could see. I was to outline the city's nine sides for all posterity. I was given the covenant.

Let me try my introduction once again.

My name is Marcus Chais. I am married, divorced, constantly in love. I revel in the camphor of old lace ladies, I violate the pubescence of sweet, young things. I have many wives. I am a poet — unpublished, but filled with anticipation of my first review. I am a priest, doctor, locker-room lawyer, Indian chief. I earn my worldly living as that celebrated vaudeville figure, Marcus the Magician.

And in the present:

Marcus, slow down!

That is Lobe's voice from the back seat. We are driving at eighty miles an hour along a desert road, looking for a white barrel.

Forty-seven miles past the last station? That's what it says.

We've been forty-five. Keep a look out.

Eighty miles an hour and yet we are standing still. The sand stretches out to right and left and to the horizon, flat, desolate. I am the driver, I have knowledge of our speed as my eyes can see the white dashes of road markings passing so quickly they fuse to a single solid line. Aimee, beside me, can see them too, and, oh yes, perhaps Lobe can see them if his eyes are open. Lobe is frightened by the car and speed, Lobe is always frightened.

There it is! cries Aimee. There on the right!

... painted barrels mark the route but in the storms they are blown like papers across the sand, rearranged by the desert wind to make the journey impossible or never-ending; white barrels stationary until beside them accumulate piles of bones, roadside markers with no more meaning than the stars themselves, leading the caravan master from his true course into the labyrinth with no walls no dead ends no dangers

The car bumps off the hard-top, tires spinning in the loose sand, until it maneuvers onto the surface hardened by the sun and cleaned by a wind that leaves unfortunate wanderers deaf and dumb.

Lobe, roll up your window, sand is blowing in.

But Marcus, I need air. I don't feel very well.

Roll it up!

We go fifteen miles due south keeping a watch for barrels, says Aimee.

I glance at the windshield compass. Due south. Aimee has the map spread over her knees, she looks up at me with the instructions, all breast and sunglasses.

... but mirages: white heat turning sand to glass: from the distance another car looms, a sign of life, running toward you with equal urgency, with equal speed until you collide in the empty desert with the other driver's terror and realization in your eye

Wouldn't it be funny if we had an accident?

Aimee smiles. Lobe seems to have fallen asleep, fat little man with moustache, in his rumpled seersucker, a newspaper protruding from the pocket. He snores once and fills with sand. We know little of him except his fear, his fear of everything between St. Louis and the desert, of motel sheets and restaurant spoons, of cheap hamburgers, truck drivers, and running children, his apparent fear of us. It is inevitable that he should be along.

Marcus, we must be late, it's getting dark. Can we drive at night?

I don't see why not. We have the compass and lights, and they'll be looking for us once it's night.

There is no sunset, no flamboyant spreading of color across the sky. It is as if the horizon is too vast for the energy of the sun to light with intensity. There is only a gradual dimming, batteries failing, filaments melting, then it is black.

Freud: "Past, present and future exist simultaneously in the subconscious."

And, therefore, I can take liberties. I can appear as a character in my own autobiographical dreams.

Marcus, are you thinking or dreaming?

Frank Timmins stands in the doorway, his white hair lit strangely by the light behind.

Sometimes there isn't much difference, Frank. Come on in.

I love this old man, his perfect academic stoop, his hair hanging down the side of his face, and above all the vitality in his eye, in his hand and in his books. My love is that mixture of affection, envy, ambition and hatred a best student has for his professor. How can I ever repay him ... or forgive him ... for teaching me everything I know.

Marcus, you have taken root in this room like some grotesque flower thriving on lack of sunlight. What in this world is the matter with you?

He sits across from me, his vest too large now as age has deprived him of his slight paunch, he sits and immediately begins the habitual searching of his pockets for an unknown object he never finds. For a second, I see him as a corpse. Annastasia of course; her death has begun to tell on him.

Put me on the couch, Frank. I think I have caught a disease extinct for four hundred years.

Exemplary scholarship virus, I suppose.

Something which has grown from what you taught as good scholarship yes, and something from rank superstition and coincidence. Let me read you something I found in the bowels of our library.

I take up the journal from my desk and read at random: The time was near; to the west I could perceive a marshalling of clouds that seemed to roll skyward to the limits of that void above us. I called for the ceremony to begin. The populace of Bel crushed around me, their clothes ragged and torn, their faces ravaged by the drought that had dried their fields to iron and sent fissures through the foundations of their homes weakening them to collapse. The infernal heat threatened even to destroy the children and the aged with ultimate death by vaporation. I stood among them, in rags myself, seeing all their eyes upon me. The last sheaves of wheat were brought forward by young girls and laid before me on the cobblestones. A terrible silence commenced. At last I took the knife in hand and stepped in front of the five boys dressed in innocent village costume. With a glance to the west, I reached down and slit the first boy's penis. He gasped, cried out, and bled. I moved from boy to boy until at last, my hands bloody, I stepped back. The youths had fallen to their knees and the blood from their organs spewed onto the sheaves of wheat, flecking that brittle stuff with spots of life. I called aloud and to the west was answered by an immediate low rumbling response. The villagers were transformed from dejection and hopelessness to joy. They grabbed up the wheat and ran to spread it through the fields. The boys were carried on their shoulders and I followed knowing that when the rain beat upon the furrows and wells and washed the wounds of those five small boys, the joy in their hearts would encompass me.

It is powerful prose, Marcus, that makes a man of nearly seventy years feel a distinct twinge in his groin. Who is responsible?

A fourteenth century magician named Chais.

Oh Marcus, absurd!

Autobiography in the theatre of no-Time: what the Sixth Patriarch said to Ming, "... see what at this moment thine own original face doth look like, which thou hadst even prior to thine own birth."

The high beams don't do much good, they don't light up the sky.

I flick the beams up and down to determine which to use. Aimee is right, the highs are useless and the lows do not carry far enough to allow for speed at all. I slow, check the odometer. We have gone only six miles since turning off the highway. The compass reads south, but we have seen no barrels but one. Ten more miles at least.

Hey Marcus, how about some heat; it's cold back here.

So Lobe is awake. We will soon hear how he is afraid of the dark.

Where the hell are we anyway?

Aimee turns to answer him.

We're in the desert on the way to the meeting point, but we're late.

Oh Jesus! How can you tell if you're going in the right direction? You could be going in circles, Marcus!

We have a compass, Lobe.

Yeah sure, shit, that plastic thing is really reliable, sure.

Aimee, give him some coffee to calm those nerves. You must be the worst tattoo artist in St. Louis with nerves like that.

I'm the only tattoo artist in St. Louis, and I'm not nervous. Just smart, that's all. You're the goddamned scholar, aren't you, but you don't know that you don't drive around at night in the desert like it was the goddamned freeway!

I bet I can push a tattoo needle.

I've always wanted to be tattooed on the breast, says Aimee.

The Army guys want 'hot' and 'cold' the Navy guys want 'port' and 'starboard' and the jigs want 'love' and 'hate.' You'd think it'd be really hard to tattoo a spade. I use red ink. Everybody wants it above the nipple. Where do you want it, ma'am?

... in the heart in the sunlight in the heat in the desert in the end, she took it, freely given, like a lover might, a welcome thrust, hot and cold yes, love and hate yes, the heart is rigged to port

Why not there too? Circles around them, purple circles.

Can you do that?

It's all the same to me. That's no crazier than any of the rest of them.

I think it's ridiculous Aimee.

A barrel! illuminated clearly by the lights. I drive as if to touch the rust and peeling paint, as if that touch could prove my bearing right.

OK Lobe, we're on the track. You can go back to sleep.

Just be careful, will you.

There's no Time for that.

Permit me this metaphor: in a forest of many trees, a man wanders, his dogs circling before him. If his way is lost, it is to the confusion, the vision of each tree duplicating before him, each branch echoed by one just removed, and beyond that, another ghostly line. Fog settles in, leaves accumulate on the bottom of the mist, it is this collision of cloud and forest that separates solid objects into tri-dimensional parts. The dogs run and seem to slip between surfaces of a tree, their mad barking compounds their absence into a mix of scent-inspired calls. The woodsman feels his way, loses balance on the oriental ground, grasps out for support, seeking a tree to steady him. His hand plunges past the hard edge, past all support, fingers closing on the nothingness that was sure bark, the certainty that was illusion. The dogs are gone, their yapping diminished. We hove wandered, woodsman, into a shadow world where sunlight is broken like a diamond into moist reflecting fragments and truth becomes no single colored leaf in the carpet of ten thousand.

What to do: revolution? creative change?

The third alternative is of course to stand still forever, your boots impressed into the earth, nuts hidden in your cheeks and grub worms foraging between your rooted toes. The colors of your flannel jacket will fade away, mold will grow in your armpits and moss on the north side of your shins, your trousers will change to corduroy bark, your blood to sap, your brain to a resting place for migrating birds.

So there you are.

Come on, woodsman, choose.

Choose for me.

Choose.

Digging in the sand my excavation crew uncovered an automobile, mid-twentieth century. I remember the blue roof, pitted and worn by hundreds of years — slow friction of sand on metal, friction caused by the motion of the earth, by the tides, by sudden shifting movements beneath the crust many thousands of miles distant. There was a certain amount of excitement, I recall; one of the younger men speculated that it was an example of the heretofore legendary 1944 Pontiac. We vacuumed deeper only to realize we had found a '48 Buick of which there were already a number of excellent specimens on display in the museums. I was slightly perplexed however by the existence of the vehicle in that very spot and went so far as to consult certain ancient highway maps then in my possession. There was no known road passing any nearer than ten miles and no reason for anyone to have strayed in that direction at that point in history. We left it, continued about our business. It was of course another of those indecipherable riddles that make men archeologists in the first place.

No, I should not start there. The machine is tireless, and already I feel fatigue and creeping hoarseness. I must try again, begin from a new point, begin perhaps with myself?

I am a creative archeologist by profession. My name is Marcus Chais.

My work is that of peace. The battlefields of history on which I walk, the deserted cities I explore, once saw an instant of immense explosion which rocked the earth at war. Such phenomena, you see, disturb us no more. We live in the Entertainment world.

There are, however, new kinds of wars, fought in order to create political allegiance through the medium of the hypnotic power of entertainment.

Present Time is a void; it exists only as empty people exist, without significance. It is the political mission of all nations to fill Time and give it meaning. Man's brain has lost the ability to project itself. It must be projected to before it can perceive, remember or forget, before it can be occupied, entertained and happy.

My work is the creation of artificial imagination, the ultimate entertainment, perfect and equal in every human life. Through my efforts, man will have the capability to re-create in its entirety any point in his own history, any event, any perspective, any biography, purely for his own entertainment. With this ability, our Control will be able to rule a world in peace through the projections of historic events on public screens.

For myself, it is not a question of politics but of pure science. There has existed an unfortunate belief that the more we know of history the less we know for certain. Such relativism is heresy to science and I am motivated to upset for good this false premise.

Scholars have always selected facts and arranged them in such a way as to simulate history. But controversy has existed, conflicting arguments have been presented, which discredits any concept of the truth. This is of course the result of incomplete research, itself the result of imperfect discipline. There is an absolute; historical events actually happen and in that instant of happening they are imbedded in permanence with a cause for each effect, a motivation for each act, an explanation or relationship that can be determined for everything.

... cities beds and coffins imply permanence, men live and sleep and die on the treadmill: in what direction and at what exact speed does that man with legs stiff as stovepipes push the stone

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from 3 by Robert Neill, Susan McCrillis Kelsey. Copyright © 2013 Robert Neill III. Excerpted by permission of Leete's Island Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

1 A TIME PIECE,
2 MOCK TURTLE SOUP,
3 ACOMA,