Last week, someone challenged me to post an excerpt from my novel-in-progress on this blog. In fact, I've done so previously, but I've never been one to skirt a challenge, regardless. In any case, I've posted an excerpt here, a paragraph, that may or may not make sense out of context. The novel, as I've written before, is Happy, and it's based in large part on my experiences in Porn Valley--and beyond that, too. The central character, which I've talked about some here and there, is Xerxes Xavier. More recently, I've redacted his occupation. Over the last few years, I've found bits of my work in the works of others, and I suppose I've grown more cautious about what I reveal when it comes to this project.
In any case, this particular passage from the novel was born out of a period of time in my life during which I wanted to kill myself. I've written about this--oh, I suppose I should say--somewhat obtusely on this blog. That period of time was roughly from February of 2005 to April of 2005. I wanted to die pretty much from the time I woke up until the time I went to sleep. While things peaked--or should I say bottomed out--around my birthday of that year, the feelings stayed with me until approximately August of that year.
I believe, closing in on being nearly halfway done with the novel, I chose to make the main character a male because it enabled me to immerse myself in all these things but to maintain a kind of distance from it--or perhaps a fantasy of distance from it--that without which I don't know that I could write it. Of course, this "fiction," if that's what it is, doesn't really accurately capture what happened. Words fail it. Instead, I attempt to make light of it. Nothing funnier than the time you want to die, really.
The person who suggested I post this excerpt suggested, at least in my interpretation of it, that the excerpt wouldn't stand up under scrutiny on its own alone. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it really matter?
I was interested in a story from last weekend's New York Times Magazine: "The Urge to End It." There's a great line in it: "What united all the survivors I spoke with was a sense of having been so utterly transformed by their experiences that, in essence, they had become different people." As I write this, it all seems like another life--and like yesterday. Writing about it in the novel has been a catharsis of a sort I hadn't expected. Kathryn Harrison writes about "[t]hose of us who insist on speaking what's often called unspeakable..." And this is that. Because as much as it remains a thing of the past, once you've been there, you live with a certain kind of quiet fear that from the bowels underneath your bed, the Boogeyman will reappear.
"Somewhere between the here and the there of his life, Xerxes has begun to malfunction like a robot with a damaged microchip in it. He isn’t sure what comes first—the wanting to die part or the slowly dying inside himself part—but either way he is a human being trapped inside an exoskeletal suit that will not stop slamming itself forward, no matter what he does, even though all he wants to do is nothing anymore ever. Since January 1st, when his last girlfriend left him after he did something very bad that he may or may not recollect, he has considered killing himself a million different ways a million different times. In February, he contemplates hanging himself by one of his belts in the walk-in closet alongside his perfectly pressed suits but doesn’t because he’s worried no one will find him until the smell becomes unbearable, and he is bloated and blue in the face and more horrible in death with his black tongue protruding like a giant leech than he was in living. In March, he inserts his head into the oven on one especially depressing morning before he realizes the stove is, in fact, electric, not gas, and learns little from the experience other than he eats take out food and relies upon the microwave far more than he had thought previously. In April, he considers taking a bath with a household appliance, but the toaster feels like a total cliché, and being as tall as he is, bathtub spooning with, say, the living room lamp seems really awkward. Most of the time, he stays alive for reasons he can explain to nobody and ends up feeling like a zombie, his rotting arms stuck straight out in front of him, his face sliding down his front, this lowing, this horrible moaning coming from inside him, scaring away small children who skirt him like the virus he is as if he will contaminate them if they get too close. His pallor is a seafoam green. Late at night, he puts his hand on his chest, and he doesn’t feel anything. In the doctor’s office, he is, frankly, surprised when the man in the white jacket places his cool stethoscope against his chest and listens quietly, as if the doctor can hear something in there talking to him; Xerxes is dubious. He’s wasted his life, all this time, the whole day like this. Now, the world is black, but none of it compares to the forever twilight inside himself, and he can’t take it anymore. He puts his feet on the floor, dresses himself, stands in front of the mirror with his shirtfront hanging open, and spies in the half-dark reflection swaying before him in the glass that the place in his chest where he used to have a
is in the shape of a 
, and once you’re there, he knows, there's no coming back."
