Prologue

 

This is not a prologue. Prologues are stupid.  Just call it chapter one, for crying out loud. So this is definitely not a prologue, though my editor-slash-publisher-slash-best friend insists on calling it that. 

But it's not. 

Here goes:

“The Absurdist” is the alias of a man whose life has been fraught with peril. His mother died at birth, so his father, having seen an ad in the newspaper, sent him off to be raised by bank robbers. He had given up on the world, and decided bank robbery might just be the skill with the most promise for a rich and prosperous life. 

But when the Absurdist turned seven, his family of bank robbers were arrested for, of all things, jay walking. They'd happened into a town deep in the American South where jay walking was seen as, according to their law books, “one of the more pernicious acts of betrayal to god and country, along with theft, driving on the wrong side of the street, homosexuality, and asking women for advice.” 

He spent eleven months in the county jail, where he met inmate number 637, an eighty year old man who taught the Absurdist the art of street magic. 

Once out of jail, he joined up with a nomadic circus troupe and used his magic skills to entertain guests. This went on for a few years until one night in August, after making a man's wife disappear, the man, along with his five sons, began pummeling the Absurdist, nearly killing him. While recovering in the hospital, cursing his fate and wondering what he would do for work, a man named Clyde visited him and explained that the Absurdist’s skills might prove beneficial to him, and the US government, if he were to take a job with the CIA. 

Considering his sad state, and the fact that the man at the circus and his five sons were still looking for his wife, and that he was facing a long prison term for, quote, “misuse of magic leading to the disappearance of a living person or persons,” unquote, he accepted the job offer. 

What the CIA didn't know was that the man’s wife at the circus had not been magically transported to some alternate realm where she was somehow suspended in time and in space, as they believed her to be. No. She was in fact living with her sister Gloria in a mobile home in Tampa, Florida. 

So when the Absurdist failed to disappear the communist dictators in Central America and northern Africa, the CIA sent him to Bellevue, Double-you-a, where he was assigned a desk job in an office overlooking Lake Washington. 

The Absurdist had loved his time in the field, traveling the world, meeting important people. He made friends with these people, got invited to parties, cruised on their yachts, fished for great whites, hunted jaguar and elephants. He climbed mountains with presidents, prime ministers, oligarchs, and kings. He attended the weddings of their daughters and was even offered a harem by the Archduke of some random eastern European country. What he didn't know was that each time he left one of these locations, a CIA clean-up crew flew in and assassinated everyone he'd associated with, including the harem he'd so reluctantly turned down. 

By the time he found himself looking out his twelfth-story window at Lake Washington, the Absurdist was fifty-two years old and not at all ready to slow down. Failure behind him, he felt certain whatever lay before him was certain to succeed. 

He was wrong. 

He moved to Thailand and bought an island. He hired a group of local workers and together they began building a small resort, but a tsunami came and wiped everything away, including the island itself. 

He tried running a ski shop in Canada, but he didn't know how to ski. He hid his incompetence by lying. “Triple black diamond is the best,” he told a group of wealthy newbies from California. “Because,” he explained, “racism, you know?” The poor advice resulted in broken bones, concussions, divorces, and several murders. 

Skiers by the hundreds would fly off the sides of the mountain cursing the Absurdist, cursing fate and the government, promising revenge they'd never exact. Hospital rooms were full, and nurses and doctors had to be brought in from other countries. But once the Absurdist was gone, the patients stopped coming and the newly-hired nurses and doctors were all fired. 

He tried television, real estate, several promising Ponzi schemes, he joined an almond cartel in central California, professional surfing, documentary filmmaking, and ran with a local wrestling circuit. He joined cults that never lasted because they were always committing mass suicide. He only pretended to drink the Kool-Aid, and then would tiptoe out of the jungle and find his way to a new one. 

Success came after wandering into a book store in Boulder, Colorado, and pursuing several autobiographies with titles like, “Travels Through Africa,” “My Life on the Road,” ”Life in the Mother Tree,” ”Journeys Down the Amazon,” and so many others. 

These are books written by unfamiliar authors who simply wrote down their experiences, found a publisher, and became unimaginably wealthy literally overnight. 

If they could do it, he thought, so could he. And though the unimaginable riches were neither unimaginable or, in fact, riches, he was able, over the years, to write down many of his absurd experiences, including this one:

 

All I can say about Verna is this:

She had round, blue, saucer-like eyes, a mein of black hair held tightly by a red band, her hands were continually held in front of her as if to invite you in or to hold you back. It was something you would consider: stepping in close and risking a slap to the side of the head, or stay away and risk missing out on a warm hug or amusing story. 

The story might be this: flies have invaded her home, and she doesn't want them here. This is not to say that Verna isn't kind or doesn't care anything about the sanctity of life. 

But these flies are the size of basketballs and are loud like artillery fire. They are elongated alien beasts whose long, transparent wings create whirlpools of wind strong enough to knock newly-built walls to the ground, which was often the case. 

Verna has named them, because this is what she does. Her naming skills have always been crucial. Her sister tried to name her first child Hansel, until Verna came along and, with a steady hand and a steady mind, suggested Stuart. Stuart Longfellow grew up to be CEO of a very important company in the valley, while somewhere else in the world a Hansel Longfellow tried making his fortune selling encyclopedias door to door in the age of Google. He ended up homeless and unloved. So that tells you a lot. 

Verna named the flies Corbin, Bernie, and Jack, after three boys she'd dated in college who'd each fallen in love with Verna’s cousin, Patti, the famous opera singer. This doesn't bother her now, though; she'd met and married Ted, the ornithologist, who took her around the world studying and writing about birds. Together, they wrote dozens of plays she was then able to produce and direct at the local high school. 

Eagleton High School, home of the Fighting Cranes, had a theater that held six thousand people. The enormity of the theater was the result of a grant from one Leopold Nestcracker, who prided himself on being a distant relative of some part-time actor who once appeared on Broadway in the short-lived Our Town II, A Move to the City. 

Leopold valued his family legacy and thought it should be vigorously promoted. He granted several million dollars to build the school a theater, stipulating that the money must be used for nothing other than quote “The construction, beautification, and stylization of said structure,” unquote. 

It purposely excluded any wording regarding upkeep, funding for wardrobe, sets, or hiring outside talent. 

To avoid future loss of funding, the school got, in the words of one local journalist, “creative.” They constructed a number of unnecessary features, such as the before-mentioned abundance of seating with its Saffiano leather; a sound and lighting system that Madison Square Garden couldn't afford, and a thirty by sixty square foot digital screen at the entrance streaming live feeds from some of Broadway’s most popular productions. 

What was not addressed in all this was the lack of anything resembling a theater department. 

They’d attempted a production of Cats. Half the football team bullied their way into the production, only to quit during intermission on opening night. The next year, their production of Into the Woods held promise, but they only sold one ticket. An anonymous blogger had written an article stating that the play was quote, “a blatant attempt to indoctrinate kids and turn them into gun-loving vegans,” unquote, effectively alienating those on both ends of the political spectrum. 

These were, oddly enough, the golden years of theater at Eagleton High School. After that, no one showed much interest. The drama teacher quit to take a job directing propaganda films for a small splinter group of the Taliban called The Southside Swingers, and when the school couldn't fill the vacancy, they stopped offering theater classes altogether. 

The theater fell into disuse. Sections of the massive screen were taken down and used for the recently formed Frisbee golf club. The sound and lighting system was stolen and ended up in a kid’s 1978 Chevelle. You knew he was coming when your dog seized up and all the windows in your house shattered. 

The seats were torn up and the leather was used for cobblering, another new hobby the students were learning. Almost everyone at the school, students and faculty, could be seen sporting new leather shoes. 

Then came Verna, the woman with saucers for eyes, her husband Ted, and their boxes full of ornithology plays: Death of the Falcon, The Great Robin Robbery, The Falcon Returns, Parakeet Versus Crow, Death of the Falcon Part Two, The Goldfinch Goes to Washington, Mourning Dove Mourns No Longer, Tufted Titmouse Takes Two, Wren From Heaven, The House Wren of Albuquerque, and a hundred others. 

It wasn't so much their credentials or the quality of their work that earned them acceptance into the rat-infested halls of Eagleton High School theater. It wasn't their passion or their vision. Mostly it was that everyone had dismissed the theater like an alcoholic uncle - there, but better off ignored. 

The place is yours, said the principal. But there were conditions: they had to clean up the theater, restore it to, if not its previous glory, then something like it. It would require expensive mold and asbestos removal, a few thousand pounds of rat poison, and a team of coroners to determine if in fact the remains beneath the stage were what's left of the 1997/98 English department. 

It was a daunting task, but the world of ornithologists is vast, with deep pockets and influence. 

It was a slow year for ornithology, due to the pandemic. When Verna and Ted arrived at the annual ornithology convention late that year, hats in hand, only a few people had arrived. The focus that year seemed to be the attendance of Bill Oddie. But when he failed to show, and no one seemed to know what to do for the final four days of the five-day conference, Verna took the stage halfway through the morning's cebu flowerpecker-themed breakfast, and explained their situation and the dire need for their financial help. A pillowcase was passed around, and twenty minutes later, backstage, Verna and Ted counted the loot:

Seven dollars. A spoon. And fifteen half eaten dinner rolls. 

Ted returned to the stage and raised his fist high over his head. “Damn your eyes, all of you,” he exclaimed. “For shame, for shame, for shame.”

“Sit down!”

“Shut up!”

“Be gone!”

“Away with you, you Esmerelda’s Woodstar, you weebill, you Cape Penduline tit!”

Ted cried out, “You call yourselves ornithologists? I say, little more than bird watchers! Who is the Crimson chat? The tropical parula? The brown gerygone?”

“Sit down!”

And:

“Someone shut him up!”

And:

“Off with his head!”

Ted: ”You call yourselves ornithologists! But I doubt you'd recognize a kakapo if one landed in your lap! You'd see a Rufus-headed hornbill and call it a…a…a…a fish!”

That was it. Ted had crossed a line. Ornithologists are famous for their humor, but once that line is crossed, be prepared to defend yourself. Dozens of half-eaten rolls, still warm with melting butter dropping from the edges, were hurled at poor Ted, who countered with the nearest thing at hand: two plastic spoons, which he held up to deflect one, two, three EZ-bake rolls. But there were just too many. The crowd, now on their feet, in a frenzy and frothing at their mouths, continued to pelt poor Ted as if he were a teenage magpie. 

Verna came into the stage holding the group's Sacred Emblem: a brown and white, four-foot long hawk's wing that came out only for the opening and closing ceremonies of each ornithology conference. They had forgotten about it this year because the guy usually responsible for the ceremony was in hiding after spending the last year stalking various female senators. 

Verna found the Sacred Emblem in a black case behind the stage. She didn't know what it was, but she did think it would be an ideal shield to save her beloved Ted. 

And as she stood there with her husband, she saw, as if in slow motion, a single figure rise from his seat amidst the chaos. Noah “Big Year” Stryker looked around the room, cleared his throat, and began to speak. He said, “What is all this fuss about?”

No answer. 

“What are we? Literists arguing the Oxford comma?”

Chuckles. Laughter. 

“The man comes to his peers, the most revered collaborants in the scientific community, for help. And we offer him this?” He held up an EZ-bake roll. “Let us be more like the wise crow. I say we listen to our friend.”

You could see the crowd looking down at the EZ-bake rolls in their hands, wanting so badly  to hurl them across the room. But cooler heads, as the saying goes, prevailed. 

Mr. Stryker sat down, and the rest reluctantly followed suit. Stryker nodded at Ted, who nodded back. Ted spoke:

“I was aware of our guild's history of bloodshed, but I'd thought all that was left behind us so many centuries ago.”

Stryker raised his hand and said, “No need for any of that.”

Ted looked around the room, took a deep breath, and said, “As I was saying, we come for your help.” 

And help they did, though with enormous reluctance. 

The theater was rebuilt, including the leather seats, the digital screens, the sound and lighting systems. Even the multitude of bodies was finally removed, though no one really thought they were the famous English department of 1997/98. 

Several additions were made, including a tower in the lunch quad just outside the theater’s entrance. They thought it would serve for outdoor productions of Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Rapunzel, or an abridged version of the second Lord of the Rings novel. But the tower was so high that no one could hear the actor even when she learned so far out the window that people feared for her life. 

The first of what the local bloggers called “Eagleton High’s ornithology series” was called Common Grackle Says No! It's about a girl growing up in Arkansas. She grows up thinking her family, and by extension the entire town they live in, is about as exciting as, in her words, “the erasor side of a number two pencil.” But then her older brother dies in Vietnam, her mother is diagnosed with cancer (her fate is never resolved), and the father who'd abandoned the family when the girl was barely three years old returns for the son's funeral. The girl learns that what appears common and mundane from the outside can be quite the opposite when it's happening to you. The play ends with the father, who has by now made amends with his family, asks the girl to go with him to California. You can probably figure out what she says. 

Most of the local bloggers, vloggers, Tweetists, and Instagram diarists condemned the play as overwrought, derivative, ham-fisted, and plain boring, but it sold out almost every night of its six-week run. 

“Well, it's not our best work,” said Verna, hopeful that the next outing would prove more engaging to the critics. 

But still. There'd never been a success like this in the life of the garish Eagleton High School theater. They'd never sold any more than a dozen tickets, and now they were selling thousands. 

Verna, who'd directed the play, didn't bother with the critics. It was the audience that counted, and as long as they kept coming, and as long as they kept applauding, nothing the critics could say - bad or good - mattered. 

The vote was in, as the famous comedian-slash-TV star once said, and the result? Ted, Verna, and everyone involved in the show: 1; the critics: 0. 

 

That's a lot to say about someone about whom there's very little to say. Saucer eyes. Black hair with a red band. A husband named Ted. And a box full of plays that were being produced one after another, often simultaneously, each more successful than the last. 

Then came the flies, giant and loud by any estimation. They bounced through windows and walls and formed large holes in the ceiling. They'd find spiders the size of baseballs and carry them off screaming like locomotives. Sometimes they'd mistake pets or small children for dinner and Verna would have to hunt up and down the city for hours until found. 

The flies were not prone to intellectual pursuits, such as poetry or calculus, so it's easy to see how they could mistake a three-year-old human for the far tastier carcass of a pig. 

Verna demanded that Ted find his rifle and shoot the flies, but Ted did not own a gun; in fact, he wasn't even sure he knew how to fire one. Even if he did, he explained to his wife, he'd be afraid of what would happen. 

He'd probably shoot off his foot, he said. 

One of the flies was napping on Verna's head when he said this, so all Verna could say was that this was not the answer she was looking for. 

 

For the complete version of Until Then, the Universe, please click here.