Leaving Wonderland (Preview)

January 4th, 2009

Leav­ing Won­der­land is my first novel. The 4th draft is com­plete at around 250 pages. While I’m fig­ur­ing out the bizarre world of pub­lish­ing and mak­ing some final revi­sions, you can read the first few pages here.

~ Nick ~

“Can I tell you a story?” she asks.

It’s her only intro­duc­tion as she sits down beside me on the floor, arms clasped around her legs, chin rest­ing on her knees. She looks at me, lost in thought, mulling over whether what­ever she wants to say should be said or not.

“I don’t even know how to start, really.” She laughs and flashes me a shy glance. And then, from out of nowhere, comes: “Hey, do you ever think about what it’s going to be like when you die?”

The air feels heav­ier, and I notice that I’m hav­ing trou­ble breathing.

“You’re going to have to think about it at some point, right? I mean it’s not like it’s not going to happen.”

I will my lungs to inhale, but noth­ing hap­pens. My heart beats faster, and all these ques­tions flash through my mind: What makes me think it couldn’t hap­pen right now? Am I ready for it? When it comes for me, will I be brave?

“You don’t really want to hear any of this do you? Want me to leave? I can leave. I’m sorry.” She starts to get up, and damn it, I have to keep it together.

“No!” I say quickly. “I can han­dle it.” And I’m breath­ing just fine. Every­thing is just fine.

“Okay,” she says slowly, rais­ing an eye­brow. There’s a painful minute of silence before she begins to speak again. “Alright, here goes… You sure?” I nod my head. “Well, my grand­mother had this idea about why we close peo­ples’ eyes when they die…”

I look around, and we’re in the land of the dead.

“…In fact, she didn’t believe that any­one really dies. She said we only call them dead because we don’t see any signs of life as we know it.” Silence again. She laughs to her­self and turns to me. “I never even asked your name!”

“Nick,” I say, very con­scious of this strange label I’m using to describe the per­son sit­ting beside her. “I’m Nick.”

What does that mean, exactly? Does she really know any more about me now that she has a name?

“Hi Nick, I’m Marianne!”

Some­how it does make a dif­fer­ence. My arti­fi­cial smile turns into a gen­uine one, and for the first time since this party started, I don’t feel that anx­ious need to keep mov­ing. “Nice to meet you, Marianne.”

“Like­wise!” she says, smil­ing and drilling into me with her bright, shin­ing eyes. I don’t want to do any­thing but explore the uni­verse in those eyes, to become reflected in them. She notices and becomes self-conscious for a moment, los­ing her train of thought.

“So, you were talk­ing about…”

“Some­how, we’ve con­vinced our­selves that the soul leaves the body at death. But why? What if there’s some­thing still there? All this time, we’ve been wor­ried about the end, but what if the end is just a fairy tale? Maybe there is no escape. Maybe our body becomes a prison.”

She pauses, tak­ing a deep breath and lis­ten­ing intently to the music in the back­ground. “I love this song.” Mar­i­anne and I lis­ten until the the track morphs into a com­pletely dif­fer­ent track, the actual tran­si­tion lost some­where in the middle.

“That was a great switch!” I say. “Did you notice it?”

Mar­i­anne shakes her head. “I remem­ber her explain­ing all of this to me, and I remem­ber see­ing my dad stand­ing just off the entry­way to the liv­ing room, lis­ten­ing to the whole thing. She didn’t see him and he didn’t notice me look­ing — and I never told either of them.”

I notice that our breath­ing has become syn­chro­nized. Did she fall into my rhythm or did I fall into hers?

“That moment’s like a snap­shot, and it really both­ers me some­times. It was a turn­ing point. Every­thing still seemed okay, but it was about to get really, really bad — and I sort of felt it. I think we all felt it. Even grandma. She started to get real hushed, like peo­ple nat­u­rally get when the lights go out and there’s a sud­den darkness.”

The beat crashes back into our real­ity for a time, and I allow myself to drift into it while my new friend drifts inside her past. “Sorry,” she says. “That was just a bit intense. I mean, whoah! I was there again, man. Right there.” She takes a deep breath, and then she con­tin­ues. “I remem­ber this awful, ugly look on his face…”

“Did he say any­thing about it?”

“No, he kept it to him­self. But I could tell that he was brood­ing about it. I think he hated my grandma for say­ing what she said.”

Mar­i­anne stares off again into the scene in front of her face. The liv­ing room is packed with peo­ple, talk­ing over the music play­ing in the back­ground, the source of it bounc­ing back and forth between a cou­ple of turnta­bles, man­i­fest­ing in the air in front of a pair of 800 Watt JBL speakers.

“She died a week later.”

“I’m sorry to…”

“I think he killed her.”

Things are sud­denly very tense. It’s like the entire world goes fuzzy and then con­nects again onto a com­pletely new fre­quency. I’m not so sure I like this one. “What makes you think that?” I say.

“Some­times some­one just hates an idea so much.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think it all means?”

“I think she meant that as long as we iden­tify our­selves with our body, we’re trapped there. The liv­ing close our eyes to make sure that we don’t have to see what goes on next – so we don’t have to see our­selves get­ting buried, get­ting filled with worms, decom­pos­ing – you know all that stuff that would just give you the shivers.”

I get the shiv­ers as she says this. My mind races with thoughts of worms and other crawl­ing, creep­ing things. “It’s more for the liv­ing than for the dead, I guess. It would still be hor­ri­ble. But what can you do?”

What can you do?

I’m attacked by this split­ting headache. I close my eyes, and all I can see are worms and dead things. Marianne’s ask­ing what’s wrong and I’m say­ing nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong, but at the same time, some­thing is hor­ri­bly wrong. I want to be any­where but here. I feel like, if I can’t get out of here right now, I’ll go insane.

Blink.

I’m in it. Instant bliss. Instant con­nec­tion. Instant hap­pi­ness. I blink and look on the world again with fresh, child­like eyes. There are lights. Clean, crisp, and hope­ful. There are peo­ple danc­ing. The music flows through them and into me and back out, back through the peo­ple, and it’s one infi­nite cos­mic cycle, pass­ing the energy back and forth. Sort of a big feed­back loop. And as it ping-pongs back and forth from per­son to per­son, the energy actu­ally grows. It’s a big mon­ster of energy now. Noth­ing can stop it. Noth­ing can stop us. Life. Love. Motion.

Can you feel that uni­ver­sal pulse? I mean, can you feel it? It’s right here, so close that you won­der if you put your ear in just the right direc­tion, you’ll hear every secret exposed – all at once.
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