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The Vagabond King – Chapter 1
This is the first chapter of a novel I have decided to market to the YA niche. It might be considered edgy and risque. It deals with themes of meaning/meaninglessness, religion, sex and all the other things that are involved in coming of age for a 16 year old boy.
I am thinking about including a subtitle to the book upon publication. The Vagabond King: a teenage boy’s quest through time, space and the magical bed of an older woman to become one with the universe
I am preparing a marketing platform and plan to self publish in the near future. Any comments or suggestions on potential market niches, or places (websites etc), people or organizations that might appreciate the content of this book would be appreciated beside any critiques. I would also be interested to find if my book or writing is similar to any other writer’s you may know of. Also, I would appreciate frank commentary on whether or not you think this book is ready for publication. Thanks in advance!.
The morning after my mother’s death, I was surprised to see the sunrise. From behind the curtain of my bedroom window I was surprised to see the people leave their homes and begin the day. Downstairs, the hands of the grandfather clock continued to tick, marking each passing hour with a chime that echoed over the black and white chessboard tiles of the front hall. I was surprised to see the mail come at the same time as the day before and, later that evening, the sun set once more as it did since the beginning of time. My mother’s death did not disturb the planets in their courses. And, though everything kept moving like she never existed at all, my world erupted into chaos until the universe swirled around me like a whirlpool of scattering stars.
“The Egyptians buried their dead with what they needed in the afterlife, and instructions to help them find their way.” Magda said.
Each night, she moved through the diner taking orders and clearing plates. She reminded me of a jungle cat I saw once as a boy pacing back and forth, back and forth; sleek, fluid, sexual, seeking release behind the bars of a cage. Occasionally she stopped to bend or twist so that the fabric between the buttons of her pink polyester uniform puckered and revealed to my eager adolescent eyes a glimpse of the black lace mysteries contained within. Oh, I imagined the plastic buttons of her blouse melting like butter between the heat of my fingers and, each time she caught me staring, she widened her dark, feline eyes at me before curling her lips into a cruel little grin that sent a shiver through my bones and set me off like a seismograph.
She was very well-read and, over time I learned that, though she worked as a waitress for many years, she had a college degree in philosophy. Late at night, when I was her only customer, she spent her idle time reading on a stool behind the counter. She was interested in everything from ancient history to modern astronomy and, though I was afraid to talk to her at first, she was very friendly and, like Sheherezade, she entertained me with stories from her latest readings.
“Throughout the ages, whether it was the chariot of an Egyptian prince or the frying pan of a Mississippi slave, the dead were never buried without the things they needed in the other life.”
But many people told me many things and, as I sat with my father in the front pew of St. Columban’s Catholic Church, listening to the priest talk about how sin was the source of death, they all ran together and swirled around me like a whirlpool down a drain.
The only thing I really knew for sure was that my mother’s favorite pearls and diamonds did not accompany her to the grave because, it was obvious, their only value was to the living. Not even the construction paper cutouts and drawings of mine she cherished since my childhood were placed in the coffin to accompany her and comfort her soul in its loneliness. “She no longer has a need for them,” my father told me. “She will never need anything again.”
The message was clear and, no matter what anyone said about an eternal soul or life after death, I realized that to need nothing implied she no longer existed. With my mother’s death there was a sense of finality which was so unarguable that, though I tried, I could not deny.
Death had entered the garden and nothing in my life informed me of its presence lurking behind the curtain of my bedroom window. Mine was a world of cartoons and commercials, smiles and upbeat moments, of half-hour plots and happy endings. From my earliest years I was intoxicated with these apparitions. My feelings and emotions were generated and inspired by them and my core beliefs developed through stories designed to sell toothpaste and toiletries. Nothing inspired me to live a life more substantial than I had seen on television and, now that my mother was dead, I did not know what to believe.
“Throughout history,” Magda told me, “burials didn’t mark the end of existence but,” She paused to look me in the eye, “like the passage from boyhood to manhood, they represented a transition from one existence to another… Around tombs in Byzantium they prayed for the dead to a time scale developed by the astrologers of ancient Mesopotamia.”
But there was no learned astrologer to determine where my mother’s soul had gone. There was only a wrinkled old priest who looked like a breed of hairless cat that scared me once as a boy.
“When we look around the world today for proofs of the Almighty we see many things.” He was a thin and ancient man with a thin and ancient voice like the splayed pages of a vellum Bible. He moved his shaking head, slowly, observing the audience and then asking, “but what is the one thing we do not see?” He paused to add a touch of pregnant drama.
While he spoke my thoughts wandered from the statues to the music to the candles, and then to the cross above the altar from which hung the bruised and bloodied body of Christ.
Our world, Magda said, was unmoored and cut adrift like a ship on the black and rolling waves of some vast and uncharted ocean. “These days there is no star in the sky for a sailor to guide by.” Like Columbus, sailing further and further from the safety of the known world, we overestimated our horizon only to find that fabled place, the edge of the world, where cartographers in ancient times were tradition-bound to write, ‘here there be monsters.’
Thrown by chance and the Powers That Be, I was sitting on a skipping stone and fear, not confidence, increased with the ripples of uncertainty, expanding forever outward through the universe. Mine was a world without center and mine was a mood born of meaninglessness.
“What is one thing we do not see?” the priest asked again before he raised his hands in exclamation and said, “Angels.” He paused, as if waiting for a response before continuing. “And why is it that if angels truly exist you may ask, we do not see them?” no one spoke as he paused again. “Because angels, whose wings bear their feet well above the mortal road we tread and trip down as men, are without sin.”
But the metaphysical certainties of our medieval ancestors no longer existed; and, the day my mother learned she had cancer, she said she felt like she was standing on the edge of her existence, staring at the gaping void before her.
All her life she searched for something that was missing. She saw a therapist on a regular basis and always read self help books. She went on buying sprees that, for a time, defined her personality. I remember when she spent months reading about and investigating the cuts and clarity levels of precious stones, spending thousands on emeralds, diamonds, sapphires and rubies. But after the mood ran its course she stopped, and never bought jewelry again. Or, the time she decorated our new house. Again, she threw herself into the task with all the momentary passion of a one night stand until she lost interest and turned her thoughts to furs, leaving my father to decorate his office and billiard room on his own. But, faced with her mortality, she searched now for the meaning of life itself.
Though she and I never went to church other than Christmas and Easter, we now attended on a regular basis. She read the Bible, of course, front to back in a month, searching for some clue to her existence. But soon her interest waned and, though she continued attending church, she looked for answers in other places as well. She brought home books like the Bhagavad Gita which, though I read also, I could never pronounce.
Over the months I accompanied her to different houses of worship on what she called field trips. We went to Buddhist temples, Muslim Mosques, Jewish Synagogues and a wide variety of Christian Churches.
Everyone was very nice at first and welcomed us with open arms to the fold. But, when I started questioning them, I mean really questioning them, their smiles disappeared and they began to point fingers like children arguing over who spilled the milk.
The Jews believed they were the chosen people of the one true God who would one day send them a Messiah, a savior. But the Christians said the Messiah already came. “Jesus was the Son of God who died for man’s salvation.” The Jews, they said, simply chose to ignore him.
“No. Jesus was not the Son of God,” The Muslims said. “He was but a messenger of Allah. The One True God.”
“It says clearly in the Bible that Jesus and the Father are one.”
“But that was taken out of context,” the Jews contended. Because only the verse before that he said, “my father is greater than all.”
“Just another example of how the Bible is full of irrational contradictions,” the Muslims insisted. “The Bible was corrupted over the ages and is not the true word of God.” That was why the angel Gabriel came to the prophet Mohammed and recited The Word of God.
“All the revelation given to man is found in the One True word of God – The Bible,” the Christians said. “Even if an angel from Heaven, preach any other gospel to you other than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.”
But since the rise of science, all religions were suspect. The universe, our scientists told us, was created not by any God but by the violent explosion of a single atom. From that Big Bang was woven the fabric of reality as the threads of space and time spun outward, ever outward over billions of years and trillions of miles. No longer was the Earth the center of God’s creation. No longer was man the masterpiece of God’s great design, but the descendant of a fish with legs that slithered up on the shore of some primordial ocean. No better than the monkeys to whom we now found ourselves related, our place in this vast and expanding universe was reduced to that of a grain of sand on an eternal shore.
“Reality,” somebody once said to me, either at one of the Hindu or Buddhist temples my mother took me to, “was a dream, an illusion, an image which existed only for a while before it was absorbed into the nothingness from which it came, only to be remade again.”
“The world is as you believe it to be,” Magda said.
But I did not know what to believe and so I turned to my father for the answers.
He was a man full of his own confidence and whose opinions were as definite as the creases in his pants. Like reading from the teacher’s edition of my trigonometry book, what he said and did was right and everyone else was wrong. He had a slogan to live by for every occasion and, to emphasize his certainty he always ended his pronouncements on life by pounding his clenched fist, like a hammer on an anvil, into his open palm with a rousing “Boom.”
I longed for him to dispel my fears and concerns about life with the firm weight of his hand upon my shoulder, so I could stop thinking for myself and rest assured that, if my father said so, it must, in fact, be true.
And so, one night, I approached him while he sat behind his large mahogany desk.
When I was a child he caught me browsing through the drawers and gave me such a whipping that my mother let me miss three days of school. Since then, under no circumstances did I set foot into his office without permission. His office was his inner sanctum, he said. Though my mother referred to it, with sarcasm, as his lair.
So, I stood at the threshold staring at him, across the Oriental rug, pouring over a stack of papers with a glass of scotch in his hand.
“Dad.”
I waited for him to respond, but he didn’t. He always seemed to have a lot on his mind and I imagined that there was a continuous list of numbers running through his head: totals and sub-totals, margins and operating costs, profits and losses.
“Dad?”
He lifted his head and looked at me without saying a word. But I did not know what to say or how to say it, and so I fumbled around trying to get to the heart of the matter. “You know the ancient Egyptians?”
In the front hall of the house the grandfather clock tolled out the hour over the black and white marble tiles. He looked up at his own clock on the wall and sighed, took off his glasses and tossed them on the desk. But still, he did not speak.
“They saw this world as a fleeting dream.”
He looked back down and signed the paper he was working on before looking up again.
“Is your homework done?”
I shook my head. No.
“An answer like that is not going to get you into Notre Dame. Is it?”
No. It wasn’t. But I did not want to go to Notre Dame, and I did not want to study business or economics or finance or any of the things he wanted me to study. I wanted to be an astronaut sailing through time and space upon the dark waves of the cosmic ocean. I wanted to float, unencumbered beyond the atmosphere, a discoverer of other worlds. My mother knew this, but my father never seemed to remember.
For him, life was nothing more than economics and politics. Nothing more and nothing less and, the sooner I got used to that fact, he told me, the better. “You are at the age when you must start becoming a man. And in this world, regardless of whatever the ancient Greeks thought, you must profit or perish.”
I nodded again.
“You’re far too intelligent to daydream your life away.”
Yes, dad.
“Now, you’ve got to stop wasting your time thinking about those things.” He lowered his head again and said, almost as an after thought, “turn those thoughts into cash.”
But I could not. For over the past few weeks, lurking like some harbinger of doom, I felt a growing presence in my life behind every curtain in every room, like a gargoyle perched and lurking above the world. I imagined him gazing down on me, his wings half spread and ready for flight. His were the eyes that watched me, his were the feet that followed me through the walls of my life to cast doubt upon my existence until the day I too died a meaningless death.
Though I was raised to believe in the pursuit of happiness, for the first time in my life I was questioning, truly questioning the world around me. Each day in school my mind wandered as my teachers stood beside the blackboard scratching out the answers to the questions they asked. But, staring out into the world beyond the window, a snake-like voice echoed through my head.
“Seek yourself in a deeper question…”
Again and again my teachers drew my attention back to the lesson at hand: math, history, English. It was all the same. “The answer to the question is not out there,” they said and suggested I start paying attention. But, I thought, they were wrong. The answer was out there. It must be.
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