i) A Prologue

It came in the mail on Thursday - a plain envelope with a rubber-stamped bison (red) in place of a return address. Inside was one piece of glossy paper - an invitation.


...followed by an address, all laid out professionally between some black-and-white photography done by an actual design company. I showed it to Mark, the roommate with the harelip, but he barely glanced up from the scale, grunting noncommittally. Tereza, downstairs, protested that it had to be a joke until I showed her the hotel key taped to the back, after which she frowned deeply and concentrated on her salad. I couldn't find Beatrice; maybe she'd have known something. My datebook showed nothing on Fridays, and there was nothing I'd conspicuously left out of it, just in case (blood testing; xx6-1630; medication pickup; Emily Franzen), so the next night I underdressed and thumbed a ride there, spending most of my time on Route 20 between a bass fisherman and a wooden cabinet, rescued on a whim, like me, from the side of the road.


ii) In Which I Am Early, As Befits My Name

It's not a suite; it's not a conference room; it's just a hotel room with the twin beds cleared out, which is why I'm pacing around the small table, hands in my pockets, frowning to myself, confused. The decorations are cheap and juxtaposed against each other - streamers; framed headshots of Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Frost; fake ivy. It's too gaudy to be anything but genuine, so I sit down at the far end of the table and sip my hotel-lobby coffee and wait.

There's a basket at each seat; mine contains a cheap Bic pen, a tiny notepad, some small paper booklets marked "A NEW MYTHOS," and a business card labeled "Mission Statement." I flipped through the booklets quickly - unimaginative blocks of text laid out on cheap laserjet printer paper - and squinted to read the tiny text on the back of the business card.


It went on, but then the door opened.

"Huh - who're you," the man asked, walking in the room, street clothes wrinkled. A nametag read "Hello, my name is: CHUCK." I smelled unfiltered cigarettes. He sat down at the seat across from mine, and stared at me. "Are you in the industry? I don't think we've met."

"I'm, ah, Stephen Swift," I said. "What's with the cheap decor? Who's hosting this?" Chuck held up the business card and shrugged.

"Far as I know, we're just here because we're writers with writer's names." Lighting a cigarette, he nodded towards his basket. I hadn't noticed the book in it - a copy of Fight Club. I started.

"You're that Chuck?" He nodded, dousing the match by pinching the flame. "Palahniuk?" I mispronounced it, unintentionally. "Geez. My friends really like your work."

He nodded slowly and concentrated on smoking. My chair was extremely uncomfortable; it felt custom-made for someone much thinner. I reached back into the basket and pulled out "A NEW MYTHOS," this time noticing a sub-title:


Chuck shrugged and leaned forward, eyes half-lidded. Frowning, I opened the book, and started at the first page.


Story One: Man Recieves The Gift Of Fire

In the old times, before rain's trivialization and the dissipation of God-Fear, there was a writer, Lexicon, who feared the night. Without oil lamps, flashlights, phosphorescence, burning logs, neon, et al, it was impossible for him to write once the sun had gone down, and without the sun, he could not adequately express himself. He preferred to write things out first, to proof them, before he spoke, and as such, he could only speak and save face during the day. He began to get an ulcer, his stomach churning at each sunset.

In the outside world, his fellow humans had begun to sour. They developed currency and harbored envy and instituted social mores that promoted paranoia and self-loathing. These traits were a result of hubris; as the Gods walked among the earth, the humans dealt with their God-Fear by promising self-sublimation into a sub-God-state, from which one could become a god themselves. Self-sublimation was a myth, but often enough, neglectful, absent parents turned out to be gods, at which point one found the path to self-actualization. Enough humans self-actualized after this realization to promote the myth of self-sublimation. From this myth grew hubris, and this displeased the gods.

The gods came down from their home in the sky, up where the humans could not tread, and issued a decree. The gods did not know about the self-sublimation myth, and had decided that punishment was necessary. "We will take your sun," they said, "to teach you humility." And so they did, and the earth was cast into darkness.

When this happened, Lexicon found himself constantly terrified and unable to speak his true piece. His wife left him; his children disowned him, and told stories to other children made of pasted half-truths - "When Father Slashed The Mayor's Tires," - "His Lazy Eye As An Indicator Of Perversion" - "Once He Drew Blood From My Dog, And Laughed." As everyone was frightened, a man who could not express himself was a burden; he could produce scarce comfort, and was unloved. Lexicon turned to drink. He had no outlet; he could not see to put pen to the page, and as such, was a half-man

He turned to inventing new drinks; distilling alcohol from new sources. The water from the creek mixed with his own failed crops produced gin. His sweat was a weak white wine. Finally, he thought to ferment the ink from his pens, and upon imbibing it, entered a state that was other than intoxication, but which was not quite the other side of sobriety.

The story goes that, while in this state, he self-actualized - which is not self-sublimation, but which is the nearest extant, comparable action - and found a way to where the gods lived. The only stories confirming this - besides the obviousness provided by the aftermath - were that of the town drunk, who claims he saw Lexicon floating some several hundred feet in the air, with his eyes closed, and that of the town's lone accused witch, who found a scrap of cloth which sang when rubbed, left in Lexicon's cooling shoeprint.

What is known is that when Lexicon awoke, he found himself alone in his house, holding the secret of fire, which, itself, glowed, surrounded by thousands and thousands of moths, nearly apoplectic with desire.


iii) In Which Confusion Is Manifested; Dialogued

"That told us shit," Chuck said, but we were a little more at ease - he'd taken his shoes off and doodled a little during the denouement. "Man, I could be washing my car right now." My throat dry, I excused myself and walked to the water fountain down the hall.

"Excuse me," a man behind me asked, startling me into ramming the top of my head onto the upper lip of the fountain, "do you know where this writer's conference is? I have trouble reading numbers in sequence." I turned - the man was short and old - very old - his wrinkles were deeply creased and he stooped out of habit. But his voice commanded, and his eyes were warm, so I shook his hand and led him back to the room, where Chuck was halfway through a game of Solitaire. "Vegas rules," he noted without turning around, then sensed someone else in the room. "Is that room service?"

"I'm sorry, I'm being awful rude," the old man said, holding out his hand. "I'm Ford Madox Ford." Chuck gave a high-pitched laugh, borne of shock.

"Ford Madox Ford is dead, man." Red eight on the black nine.

"Yeah," Ford said, "well, I thought so too." He took a seat. "You two know anything about this conference?"

"Something about writers with writer's names," I said, showing Ford the business cards. He looked it over and grunted. "I got a notice in the mail with some clippings on marketing strategies and semiotics," he said, squinting to read the type. "Is this Garamond?"

"It's the Hilton," Chuck said, completing his stack of hearts.

"No, this font. I think it's Garamond."


Story Two: The Creation Myth (The Birth Of Honesty)

In the old times, everything - concepts, actualities, nouns - existed at once, without nuance, bereft of narrative. Cattle and semi-colons were both corporeal objects. Distance was non-extant. Nothing had been assigned value. Objects simply existed.

Climacta, a human, detached as of yet from adjectivity, was the first one to seek out and plead with the gods. All books were empty, all pages blank, so she took a wordless dictionary to the one lake. The god Jaw-Lock rose from the water and eyed her, warily. Climacta swallowed, hard, and said:

"I know not what these things are," - here she proffered the book to Jaw-Lock, who flinched - "I know only that they have a planned intrinsic weight. I have dreams where the term 'interlock' surfaces between objects, and they - they culminate. I can sense a solidity in that which is not, or not yet, if such a thing exists." She began to shake, instantiating the first emotion, which was trepidation. All volcanoes were removed from the present and placed in their various, specific plot points. In the skies, where humans could not tread, Number-Of-Fingers, the god of typing and thievery, paused in his game of Go, breaking the first sweat.

"It is true," Jaw-Lock said, "that there is something beneath objects. What you have been sensing, we term 'narrative.'" He looked up, unconsciously, searching for terminology. "We've suppressed it in favor of letting objects determine their own destinies, free of association or fear of juxtaposition. We had, of course, intended for you not to know."

"But now I do," said Climacta, thrusting her jawline forward, bravely, "and I wish to know how to enact this narrative." She brushed the stray hairs out of her face. "Maybe you do not know what it is like to live without these underlying connections."

"You certainly do not know what it is like to live with them," Jaw-Lock said. "We had hoped to keep things simple. That everything is secretly tied and granted denotations is a complication the magnitude of which you will never be able to comprehend. It is all we can do to understand it."

"It is not the understanding," Climacta stated, "so much as it is the honesty."

Jaw-lock sat in silence for several minutes. Finally, slowly, he gave Climacta a crowbar with which to pry out the tethers that had been restraining the narrative, which existed as a delicate thread that span through the exact center of everything. Then he climbed the sky back to the gods' home, and sat holding his own knees, and waited.


iv) Catalogues

So here I am, waiting outside a DB Mart with a dead man - Chuck had a nic fit halfway through the story so Ford had to walk and read, one eye on the sidewalk for four blocks. I can't get anything out of Ford, even cursorily - what being dead is like, what being brought back from the dead was like, if he's just supposed to be dead but isn't - he can name the current president and knows about Kurt Cobain, so we shrug and move on.

"What brings you to this conference," he asks, and I have to admit that I'm not sure. We go over the short, flaccid history of my own lack of publication, which mostly revolves around the stack of McSweeney's rejection letters propping up the TV stand in my apartment, and he tries to give me advice, but I get nervous and self-effacing, so he trails off.

A subway train passes below us, under the pavement, and Ford shivers.

Chuck comes out of the store and hisses at us to book it, so we shuffle quickly down the street - concerned, I hold the crook of Ford's elbow, and he doesn't say anything, but he doesn't take it away - and a block away he starts taking sodas and Starburst out from his coat and passing them around. "Their fault for watching TV on the job," he says, diplomatically, and lights a Lucky Strike. He turns to me and asks, "You guys were talking about getting published, right? I could see it in your eyes, from the bread aisle." Puff, puff, puff. "How edgy is it, on a scale of one to ten? Your work, I mean."

I think about it for a minute, trying to decide if open and frank discussion of heterosexual trysts still pushes copies; wondering how many times I've been shot in my own manuscripts. I finally rate myself a three for the ridiculously humanist stances I take on everything; my unwillingness to let women be beaten or slurs be printed, He nods.

"The problem is, edginess sells." He makes a small, quick motion with his head that I can't decipher. "Not that I'm saying that you should shoot for that either, really. Well - okay, story for you. I'm working under this publisher a few years ago with this idea for a story, but I can't find a hook for it. I'm trying everything I can think of, and finally I call my editor at six in the morning, half-wasted, and tell him it's going to center around a transvestite and a girl with half a face. When I come to, I've got a two-fifty-K advance and an option for a three-year extension on my contract." He finishes his cigarette, eyes closed. "Funny thing is, I'd really wanted it to center around a fifth-grade teacher and a numerologist."

"I wonder if that has anything to do with this conference," Ford muses, and the thought makes me feel greasy.


Story Three: The Afterlife is Merely Suggested In Footnotes

It started one day when all the children became lost in the forest, after having run off, abandoned by their parents, bewitched by pixies, heroically spurred on to save their lost siblings or friends, hypnotized by patterns in the water, led by subaural whispers, and transported through mirrors, books, cupboards, portals, wishes, and dreams. Their breadcrumb trails became entangled and mixed up, and none of them knew where they were going, so they sat in a clearing in the center, thousands strong, and prepared to wait.

Eventually their patience, or naivete, depending, paid off, and the Messiah appeared to them, in the form of a small dog, head cocked. "Come unto me," it said, large eyes doleful, "and break the cycle of the narrative you are locked in. For you are the ones who have been ground up into food, and enslaved by queens of ice, fire, air, and stone, and transformed into swans, and dissolved into sea-foam, and beaten by step-parents, and ravaged by plagues. Follow me, and nevermore shall you need to slay a beast whose heart is in its heel to save your village; nevermore shall you need to realize the one true word for love while being gutted by iron spikes; nevermore shall you realize all too late the relative worth of friendship or money as jaws, organic or metal, close upon you; nevermore shall you be consumed, raped, led astray, or turned to stone."

The children stroked the fur of the small dog, and picked the burrs off of his ears, and gladly followed him to an ark seven miles long and seven miles wide, and climbed into it, and when they had all boarded, a great rain flooded the land, and spirited the ark away, towards the horizon. And after the ark had disappeared, the rain subsided, and the land returned to normal, the adults unlocked their shutters, and called their children, and grew cold in their hearts, and prepared to stoke a cold hearth.


v) If There Were Microphones, We'd Be Covering Them

Our decision was that the conference was a marketing trick; something to get us to sign a contract by promising us that something deep lay in nomenclature - but right after we'd all had a good laugh over how we all let ourselves get tricked into coming to something so obviously base - the time-share condo of our chosen profession - Ford had asked if that wasn't our hotel a few blocks ahead, and even though we'd walked in a straight line we realized that we'd managed to just come back to where we'd started, and when we passed and came upon it again, six blocks later, and again six blocks after that, what else could we do but go back up to the room, and wait, and talk.

We made a pact of sorts, the three of us, to wait it out - to see what we had been called to the hotel for, after all. It's been six days so far, and none of us has been hungry, or slept. Chuck got bored with sketching designer sunglasses, and Ford gave up on finding encoded messages in the book of mythology, so we've all ended up just writing - the pens aren't my favorite, but they suffice, and the notebooks refuse to run out of paper. And I'd question the self-perpetuality of this entire experience, the cyclicality of the streets - believe me, we've all tried to hail cabs or find landmarks we recognize - or simply the oddness of it all; the fact that Ford is coming up on his 125 birthday in the next couple of years; the circumstance of being, given being's parameters. But we all agreed that the important thing is the oblique documentation of such, rather than the hashing-out of the whys of the actualities - and hopefully, if we strike upon some morsel of genius, maybe one of us will fill up our notebook.