[Novel] Interlude time!
Back to that creepy third-person
Happy Monday, folks. A quick reminder that this space has become a split between teasers for my novel (which I’m releasing in full, a section at a time, on my Patreon to paying members), and posts about somatic therapy, attachment, trauma, and other things about the arts. Because of this shift, I’ve added a couple links to the top of my main page:
Fiction leads you to an index of all of the novel excerpts I’ve teased here thus far; each one contains a link to the Patreon page as well, where you can join to read the whole thing.
Attachment Series gets you all the posts I’ve written so far about attachment, a still-ongoing, if slow to develop, project.
And Performing Arts is about theatre, music, any other media I’ve written about, and of course the frightfully intermittent Old Art, New Eyes series. (I still owe you my thoughts about Dirty Dancing and The Lost Boys.)
And now, back to our program
We’re back in an Interlude, which means Strange Third Person Narrator Again. This one starts to get into some of the harsh ways that narrator can talk, and I’d like to get a sense of your impression of it. I won’t say more as I don’t want to unduly influence your read.
Next week, we’re on to Chapter 4.
INTERLUDE: TERRAH FIRMA
Unlike Eden, Terrah was a girl once. At least, that’s what she’d been told, though never in a way that endeared her to the term. “Girl,” they’d say, “get over here!” “Girl,” they’d shout, “shut your foul mouth!” “Girl,” they’d snarl, “you don’t get your ass moving I’ll move it for you.”
Her mother had called her Terrah, after a word she’d once heard for the earth. She thought it was pretty, and she’d wanted her kid to stay grounded. She’d need it, she knew. The world had always been hard for people like her, but Terrah’s mother thought that maybe, if she played things right, her daughter could find a foothold in this world that was changing so fast, with the megacorps and technology run riot. She herself had been smart and played by the rules, but it still wasn’t enough to get her out of her situation before bringing a kid into it. Maybe the kid would do better, find a new way. Terrah, child of earth.
For folks like them, of course, things actually hadn’t changed so much after the sea rise. The rich people kept getting richer, like they always had. And the poor people stayed poor — like they always had. Any money for recovery got funneled into projects that only helped those who were already doing well. The first floors of apartments too close to the water flooded. It got harder, with the worsening storms and crumbling infrastructure, for people to run their family businesses in the little downtown squares. Money continued to flow out, rather than in. Community leaders, Terrah’s mother included, picketed, demonstrated, ran for office, ran town halls. When that didn’t work they rioted, fought, and ultimately, went to war, in a last-ditch effort to take their neighborhoods back.
Some escaped. Some were jailed. And some just ended up staying in the same place. Trying to survive. To the extent possible, the larger population tried to forget that they existed. (Like they always had.) Largely, they were successful.
Terrah, child of earth, grew up, moving from apartment to apartment, from floor to higher floor, her mother protecting her as best she could but affording her little sense of solid ground.
Corporations became more and more powerful. Technological progress doubled, doubled again, doubled again. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer, et cetera. And the capitalist machine trundled on through its casually intrinsically racist progress. Eventually, the influence of corporations over governmental institutions went from covert, to overt, to blatant, until the understanding that the movements of nations are governed by the forces of megacorps became a commonplace questioned by only the most die-hard of retro-Socialists.
The outcome of all of this for the likes of Terrah’s family was, sadly, predictable, and, indeed, predicted, by the likes of the prophet Gibson and the prophet Stephensen (in more or less humorous and surreal interpretations and implications). That is to say: ghettos, as they previously existed, no longer functionally did. Nor did the pestilence of people living in doorways, under bridges, on riverbanks; the shelters stuffed with humanity, the proud freezing to death in the night on Boston street corners. Not to say that this never happened, anymore. Only that those problems, at first swelling in perplexity, calmed to almost nothing in the years after Walazon became the first megacorp to “revitalize” an inner city in Queens.
After that, the rest was simple. New-age housing projects, with capsule hotel accommodations, proliferated in cities, sponsored by tech giants with vast labor needs. The so-called “working poor” became the new middle class, retaining the run-down and climate-devastated properties they’d previously lived in, working their 50-hour weeks and enjoying access to relentless technologies, cheaper and cheaper, and more and more diverting.
The truly poor, the ones who previously were either homeless or near-homeless, always on the verges of society — these were given a choice. Come work for us — just 15-20 hours per week, no big deal. Get a place to sleep, three meals a day. Protein slop for the most part, served in the 24-hour cafeterias attached to the capsule-towers. But food, and shelter, for less than full-time work. And once everyone got their taps, the ability to jack in to a variety of inner, virtual worlds was limitless.
Does it surprise you that this, basically, worked? That, while there are a few die-hards that refuse to leave the streets, most poor folk were willing to work a few hours at menial jobs in order to go home and sleep in their coffins after a tasteless yet fully nutritious meal? Are there those whose pride is so great that they won’t take this deal? Of course. Sure, a life of pushing a shopping cart around the park and begging for enough change to buy a coffee at Dunkie’s far out-does the indignities of shelters, where any bum can steal your shoes or beat you half to death for your medication. But for most, working for an honest wage to have a private place to sleep and free food is not only an excellent deal, but far superior to street life. Somewhere along the line, private industry at last dropped the notion that people living in the street did so because they wanted to, an absurd conservative conceit covering the fact that there were no better options. After all, if they could profit from it instead…
Oh, don’t worry. A few mad poets, religious zealots, and so on survive. Shouting in the streets, or hiding beneath bridges, like the trolls of myth. There are few enough anymore that they serve almost as punctuation, as a small, shrill entertainment for those who, walking the streets by day on the way to their daily rounds, are actually caring enough to pay attention to something real.
For the rest, dozing in their capsules, their wired brains taking them wherever they wanted to go, whenever they wanted to go there...well, what good was reality?