Andrew Statum

I was going for Borges, specifically, a story called "The Library of Babylon," which I thought would be perfect for the Chinese answer thought experiment, but I may have missed the mark.

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The Ministry of Answers (which others call the Universe) is housed in a single building that rises anachronistically from the barren, uninhabited countryside. The top of the Ministry soars to unimaginable heights, fading from view above the clouds and dissolving into a blue point somewhere in the upper atmosphere. Nobody knows how many floors the building has. It is believed that the building is still growing and that it has been continually built since the time when the ancients discovered masonry. Thus, the Ministry is infinite. The architecture of its facade supports this assertion: the first few stories are made of stone, changing to red brick at the fifteenth story, cheerless cinderblocks at the forty third, polished granite at the ninety sixth, steel at the hundred fifty first, lightweight polycarbonate I-beams and opaque Plexiglas at the two hundredth, and so on. There are no windows.

It had been five years since he’d seen the old man, five years to the day tomorrow. In that time, Marcus had changed. He had thickened through the arms and his hands, from the moving and shaping of rocks, were calloused and worn. His neck was corded and his legs, like tree trunks, had become hard and dense. A far cry from the doughy, irregular boy who went off to “build trails out West,” as he put it to the old man back then. A certain hardness now ran along the ridges of his lean face, and his brow, like the lines of a canyon, seemed carved by the elements into an attitude of rigorous contemplation, as if the land itself had adopted him, molding him, body and mind, over the years, into an image befitting its own natural offspring. The other men of the crew, happy, jocular men mostly, tended to curb the wild energy of their banter when he was around, believing him possessed of a severity of mind in a proportion more intense than theirs and therefore, disapproving of their lighthearted fraternity. This was not the case – he rather enjoyed a good bull session over a few cold rounds – but he wouldn’t have it otherwise. He preferred to maintain a slight air of mystery about his rule rather than risk the all-out fraternal insubordination he had seen infect the other crews. There was work to be done. And that was the way it had to be.

I was born in Colorado in 1980, a healthy 7 lbs, 10 oz. to a mother with thick brown hair and a father with a sharp nose and a perennially clueless air about his movements.

For my final project, I'm going to continue work on my creative writing workshop piece which I'm now thinking of calling "The Fugue of the River Bend Diner." Kitschy? Eh, maybe. I don't know, we'll see. The piece follows the thoughts of three characters (Marcus, Frances, Joseph) as they navigate their way through an afternoon at the River Bend Diner in River Bend, Utah. Their voices weave in and out of each other in much the same way the "voices" of a fugue move in relation to one another, with one voice developing the theme at any given time while the other voices play counterpoints. The overall idea I'm working with here is that everyday represents a kind of reckoning with one's past, and this reckoning takes place in the loneliness of one's consciousness, even while one is immersed in the minutiae of day-to-day interactions.

I hope I didn't start too strong without leaving myself anywhere to go. Frances and Joe have both come along beautifully while Marcus languishes at the table with his Dad. I know where I need to go with him but I'm not quite sure how to get there. Oh, and I think he might now be a closet homosexual. Joe, I think, has the most fully developed arc and his is the crisis that seems most prevalent in the three characters' respective consciousnesses. But its Frances who is the "hero" of the piece. She is the only one of these three who confronts her past, accepts it for what it is (don't know exactly what that means yet but hopefully that'll work itself out over my remaining writing sessions) and moves on with her life. Marcus "confronts" his past - in the form of his father - most directly, but he refuses to deal with what he finds and ends up literally running away from it. Joe is at the other end of the spectrum. He is haunted by the specter of his ex-wife and by the residual pain of a life spent feeling sorry for himself and he "deals" with it by overdosing on diet pills.

In all I think its working and I think the close third person voice helps me to abstain from judging these people too harshly which, I hope, increases the pathetic response in readers by helping them to see these characters in a more sympathetic light. For example, Joe may be dealing with his problems in a less-than-productive way, but I'm hoping readers will follow the voice as it reveals the anxieties and personal circumstances that have lead him to this point in his consciousness. Same with the other two who are, I think, far-from-exemplary, but also far-from-despicable.

As far as the fugal arrangement is concerned, I'm thinking of creating three columns, one for each voice. Only one voice would be speaking at a time with a little overlap when one voice "takes over" the narrative from another, except at the end when all three voices will be going simultaneously which, I hope, gives the piece a kind of symphonic resonance at the climax. We'll see if it works.