I've completed a readable draft of Yesterday's Sirens, which is the long chapter in Pilgrims Dream concerned with Orestes Herpetulian and his misadventures with the Herd (giant, mutant rats with weird psychic abilities) in the Fresh Kills Landfill, aka the Dump. I still have a few notes for revision, so there are still a few drafts to go, but I'm pulling my imagination out of that world. There is no more imaginative work to be done there. From now on, my only thoughts on Yesterday's Sirens will be issues of craft.
I feel a sense of relief and freedom, even as I'm a bit saddened to think I'll no longer be running with Orestes & K and the rest of the Dump crew as they deal with the Herd. I went deep into their world, and I've lived with them for a long time. (Orestes will continue in the rest of Pilgrims Dream, but he will be transformed and in another context. K is done for now, but he's been running in my imagination for about 15 years already, and I'm sure he'll be back around somehow.) I can't really explain what it's like, if you haven't experienced it yourself. There's an entire world in my imagination, the world of the Dump and the people who work and even live there. I've been building that world for a long time. I've dreamt in that world. I've watched it change gradually. So now it's time for goodbye, and probably not a moment too soon.
The chapter is basically about how Orestes' life falls apart. He goes all the way down to nothing, and doesn't even have his own sanity by the end. It's a strange thing to keep in your head for an extended period. In the context of the novel, Yesterdays Sirens is a chapter, but in itself it is the length of a novella (20,000 words) and could stand on its own. Now, my imagination is hugely important to me, and for that reason I respect it, which means I respect the dangerous power it can have if not handled carefully. The truth is I put myself out on a ledge with this chapter, and Yesterdays Sirens isn't a story I'd tell if I didn't know what comes after, about the reintegration and uplift to come.
An experience this weekend confirmed for me that it's the right time to leave. I went to see a performance of The Caretaker by Harold Pinter--I didn't know too much about the play and went based on my admiration for the theater company putting it on. It turned out to be about a drifter getting on in years, moving from place to place, and he's taken in by a couple of crazy brothers who have a sort of derelict building. They give him a bed, and that's all: it's not like they're trying to reestablish or reform him. You get the feeling it's the guy's last chance--he won't be able to hustle his way on the street much longer, and he's already far gone enough that he's not going to get help from anyone else. But the brothers turn on him and kick him out. The play ends. I thought, Jesus Christ. Watch a man lose it until there's nothing left to lose. It'll stop your heart. The play has the same basic arc as Yesterdays Sirens, and the correspondence was difficult for me to confront.
Then, later in the night, in a bar at a birthday party, there was a man with a guitar. He didn't seem to have a friend, and he approached every group in the bar strangely. He came uncomfortably close. It was like he forgot how to talk to people. At one point, he was playing a song at me, sort of forcing it on me, and then he broke off and went to the other side of the bar. I thought, Thank God, maybe something else will distract him. But he returned to me with his guitar case in hand, and out of it he pulled a decent sized piece of tupperware, which he opened to reveal the marijuana inside. He then asked if I wanted to smoke a joint. This sounds perfectly normal, like the sort of thing that might happen in any bar in Prague. What I can't quite explain is that he did these things without competence--when he showed me his stash, my only thought was, Someone's gonna rip you off soon. It's one thing to pass a joint to someone you've just met, and it's another to flash a substantial amount of drugs in front of the eyes of strangers in a public place. It was like he thought we were friends because I let him play a song at me for a few seconds. I wondered how long he would manage to keep his guitar. When I told a friend about the play I'd seen earlier that night, how the coincidence disturbed me, she said people don't become homeless (meaning the crazy sort of homeless) overnight, that it's a gradual process. The guy with the guitar was no longer able to communicate with other human beings. He was just enough in our world to talk at people. It was obvious that he wanted to connect, but he just didn't know how to do it. He's in an intermediary stage, so he can still manage, though just barely, to be in a bar and not get kicked out.
After spending so much time with a character who's losing it, then to see a play that powerfully echoes that, and then to meet such a character in the flesh, yes, I'm ready to move on. I've started to feel like I'm the one who's losing it, and that's what I mean about the dangerous power of the imagination.
So now it's on to Aleister Von Dirk, the unknown writer in exile, and his search for the angelic language, which he looks for on long walks through the empty streets of Mala Strana after midnight, where he meets Sophia Aurora, that strange, beautiful woman--then the powerful shock of his meeting with Agents Grossberger and Troutslop, who open up a larger world to him--and this is perfect timing, because winter in Prague is the season of such magic.
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