"Mirrors" by The New Frontiers, Monday, September 6, 2021
THIS IS THE HOUSE WERE YOU WERE BORN. The constant cycle of snow, salting, melting, and spring flooding, makes driving a new car in Chenango County pointless. But everyone drove old GM-affiliated rust buckets that broke down in the winter, stranding you in the snow. It was only a matter of time that the 1970s Chevy would die and you'd have to fork out money to buy a 1980s Buick or Oldsmobile. When you got into the car and drove the roads in Chenango County, you'd be driving for a while between farms and fields and forests until you descended the hill into town--Oxford or Norwich, right or left. Allan's first home was off the highway before his family moved deeper into the hills, where his grandparents' commune was located. The first home was much better than the second, at least in Allan's memory. When his family moved to his aunt's old trailer, he was sick every winter, which, in New York was practically six months out of the year. But reflections in his memory of the cabin--pristinely kept, glazed wood, neat and tidy interior--probably never was as pristine as his memory. His parents insisted that the dilapidated shack they saw from the road was, in fact, just as his parents remembered it. The colors much paler, the roof much less stable, the porch much more rotten. "I never let the lawn get this bad, though," his father assured him. "I wonder who Uncle Nathan has living there now." "Do you think we can ask him to go inside?" Allan reverted to his boyhood, pleading with his parents like when he asked them to stop at the ice cream shop in town. "No," Jared said taking his old cap off and scratching his head. "I don't think that will be possible. Uncle Nathan hasn't gotten along with our family for years. Him and your grandfather got into a big argument at the family reunion last year. But there's always an argument. That's why we had to move away in the first place."
WE ARE ALL MIRRORS IN DISGUISE. Allan rewrote passages of Leaving Norwich after his Creative Writing class before realizing that the novel about a young man, Vincent, who feels trapped in the town that Allan would give anything to have grown up in was too incoherent. The girl that Allan thought he loved whom he modeled Daphne after was so flat he hadn't bothered to make a backstory for her. She simply was a few grace notes to Vincent's droning bass guitar concerto in Drop-D. No matter how much he built up the metaphors for Vincent wanting to be in love, Vincent was clearly is self-obsessed and only capable of loving himself. And as Allan became more and more aware of this fact, he wondered if this was true of him. "You should make him gay," Allan's roommate said one evening when they were talking about their homework. Allan looked horrified at this. "I'm not making him gay! He may not find love, but he's certainly not gay!" This was before he added the twist about the older woman, the music producer in Cortland, who ends up seducing Vincent. Allan was writing the story, imposing a late '90s to early '00s purity culture to Vincent's character, so giving him a cougar-lover was quite left-field. Maybe it was just to convince himself that Vincent wasn't gay. In subsequent drafts Allan experimented with first and third person narratives. He experimented by putting the story in the '90s. He tried stream of consciousness. This was bad, with Vincent's mind leading to whom Daphne was with now, if they were sleeping together, and why Daphne chose the other man, not Vincent, which got Freudian. The worst part was that he showed these drafts to some of his friends in college. Underneath the disjointed layers of the failed debut novel, Allan had to contend with the fact that his character had a murky motivation because Allan himself didn't know that Allan wanted, hence Vincent died on a Toshiba back in in 2010 before his remains could be saved to a flash drive.
Comments
Post a Comment