Prologue

Prologue

May, 1985

A fire drill an hour before final bell and a bright spring afternoon had moved Principal Stone to a rare act of benevolence. From his roost at the summit of the concrete steps that led up to the rear entrance of Gustav Mahler High School, P.S. 114, the gangly figure in the gray tweed suit had whipped out his bullhorn (the student body concurred that the arch-disciplinarian’s obnoxious plaything was preferable to a wooden paddle or Louisville Slugger) and heralded the news in a screechy monotone:

“Attention everyone! [kkkkeeee kkksss] Those of you with access to transportation may go home [sssskkkkeeee]. The rest of you, please remain on school grounds until your guardian or bus has arrived [kkkkssss]. Enjoy the day. Be safe.”

The dizzy throng of hormone-laden creatures milling about on the soccer field sent up a brief, raucous huzzah then scattered like mice.

Richard Waters was justifiably bemused by this development. Stoney’s letting us out early? Wha? He was not inclined to circulate among the other ill-fated carless souls as they waited for the bus or their parents’ station wagons to lumber into view, so he decided to speed-walk the three-plus miles to his house in Gravesend.

Richard staggered through the back door to the kitchen and, teetering on rubbery legs, his mind altogether elsewhere, banged the sweet spot of his hip against the corner of the heavy oak trestle table. Rocking unsteadily, Reeboks scuffing the newly mopped linoleum, a young bruise maturing on his left side, he nevertheless maintained course. Flying open the topmost cupboard above the fridge, he seized his father’s stash of Twinkies, uncleverly “hidden” behind an unopened box of wheat germ (puh-lease) and a barricade of canned vegetables (yeah, right). He polished off one, two golden sucrose-tubes—what the hell, make it three—chasing them with a grape Hi-C juice box, which he scrunched into a pencil-thin strip of pulp, extracting every last purple dewdrop. He leaned against the formica countertop and quivered with glycemic ecstasy.

So, how to squander this precious gift of free time before his mother came home from grocery shopping and beseeched him to help with dinner. Video games? Air-guitar session to Ride the Lightning? Pick up where he’d left off in The Silmarillion (Gondolin in ruins)? Possibilities fanned across Richard’s mind. But his bookbag, gone cuboid from the half-dozen hardcover textbooks wedged therein, was an unwanted reminder. Trig quiz tomorrow, three chapters for Social Studies, illegible chem notes that needed copying—all that, and an English paper looming darkly in the distance. Due in a week. Eight to ten pages, typed, double-spaced, with footnotes and a bibliography. “School fucking blows,” declared the fourteen-year-old, wise beyond his years, to the empty kitchen.

On the way to his room, Richard passed the den and poked in his head. There were the worktable and file cabinets that took up one wall; the wobbly, jam-packed bookshelves that occupied the other three; the wingback chair with faded and ripped polyester-velvet upholstery, brooding in a corner. Other than the single window partly obstructed by blinds and gray gauze curtains, the room’s only available light emanated from one of those emerald lamps usually confined to libraries or banks.

Richard almost didn’t notice his father slumped over his child-sized writing desk in the center of the room, his backside grafted to his squeaky swivel chair, head partly concealed by his vintage Smith-Corona Super 5 typewriter.

Ivan Waters spent every free moment in this pensive space, in the same immobilized posture, reading, writing, grading papers, dozing, or just staring into the void, having long since blended into the décor, another familiar fixture. The old man was a tenured professor in the English Department at Long Island University—and, at fifty-five, his father was old, to Richard at least, although he supposed the apt adjective was “distinguished,” a provincial word, commonly applied to the lofty hill tribes of High Academe, conflating age and status with certain measures of self-verification and -justification.

This day, Ivan was deep in one of his brown studies, its precise shade falling somewhere between burnt sienna and scorched birch bark after a lightning strike. He was perusing a red leather-bound notebook. A private journal, Richard had always suspected, though Ivan had never mentioned the red book or shared any of its contents. Out of respect for his father, Richard had never asked about it or gone snooping, though the temptation toward the latter was at times overpowering.

“Hey,” said Richard, shuffling into the den.

Ivan started. As expected, he snapped the red book shut, dropped it behind a stack of accordion folders in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet, locked it, then plunged the tiny key into a pocket of his Bermuda shorts.

“Oh, hey there,” said Ivan, mid-swivel. “Home so soon?”

“Yeah. Late fire drill. Stoney let us go.”

“You walked home?”

“Yeah,” muttered Richard, cognizant of the kitchen-table twinge in his side and the sweat stains blotching his lemon-yellow Izod shirt, which he only ever wore to school. “You left early too?”

“Affirmative. Student canceled on me, so I skee-daddled.” Ivan nodded toward his son’s bookbag. “Homework?”

“Yeah. Stupid trig quiz tomorrow. Social Studies. Chem. English paper.”

“Ah,” Ivan intoned.

Richard explained how his English teacher had distributed to each student in his class an index card from a randomly shuffled deck with a single word written on it. Whatever was on the card was your paper’s theme. The assignment was to uncover five distinct examples from literature that represent the attribute written on the card, and consider the various ways the author of each work treats that particular attribute. You could choose any author from any time period or genre (except for comic books, children’s books, or steamy romance novels). One of Richard’s classmates drew Motherhood, the first-string quarterback got Vengeance, a defensive end got Mercy. Awkward, pimply Frankie Getz got saddled with Perspicacity. The consensus was that the luckiest draw went to the quiet girl from the back row who wore an ankle-length skirt and frumpy wool sweater every day to school (even in the hot months) and was never seen without a gold crucifix pendant dangling between the twin mounds of her early-developed breasts. She would be writing about Wickedness.

“So what’s yours?” asked Ivan.

“Heroism.”

The man lit up like a Roman candle.

“Lucky boy. The canon is aswarm with heroes. They’re like the plague. Do you know whom you’ll write about?”

“Well…” Richard hadn’t lent it a single thought until that moment. “Frodo?” he said with a shrug.

“Hmm,” said Ivan, index and middle fingers forming a steeple under his chin. “Naïve hobbity gumption. He’ll do, I suppose. But when I think of ‘heroism’—in the classic sense, I mean—it begins with Aeneas. Incorruptible, thorny, difficult to eradicate; survivor of the underworld; founder of Italy. And, I might add, he carried his father on his shoulders out of a burning city.”

“But what about Odysseus?” asked Richard. “Didn’t he come first?”

“Bleh!” said Ivan with a dismissive wave. “Deceitful, vain, self-serving. A fathead. I’d avoid him. Who else ya got?”

Richard was enjoying this. His father was taciturn by nature and generally unenthused about much of what the universe submitted for his approval, but so much as breathe the name of a title, writer, or character that piqued his fancy, or quote from a favorite poem, or prod him with an oblique allusion from some half-forgotten eighteenth-century novel, and watch his core ignite and the fusion process commence. At that point, all you can do is try not to get yourself incinerated as he burns through a seemingly inexhaustible supply of intellectual energy like a newborn star.

Richard thought for several seconds as his father’s eyes oscillated wildly. He could almost hear them buzzing in their sockets.

“Um … King Arthur?” he finally blurted.

Ivan harrumphed. “That cuckolded putz? All he was good for was lounging around and sponging accolades off of those obsequious kuh-niggets.”

Ivan leaned back abruptly, and his eyes halted mid-boogie. His gaze widened and sidled past Richard into the hallway, heading for the kitchen.

“I knew a man,” murmured Ivan. “A king. A stone king … er, no, no, no. I shouldn’t speak of that.” He snapped back to his original position, nervously chewing his lower lip as he waved off this curious, though not atypical, digression.

Stone king, Richard thought. The attic of Ivan’s mind was stuffed with all kinds of clutter. Whenever a mental tremor caused any of it to shift or topple, the result was often inscutable professor-babble. Richard paid it no mind.

“So, Arthur’s out,” said Ivan. “Let’s see, let’s see—”

“Well, there’s the guy who takes on the Green Knight,” interjected Richard. “Gwin? Gwain?”

Ga-wain,” said Ivan. “Arthur’s nephew. Better example. In the poem, Gawain’s virtuousness trips him up, and thus humanizes him. We can sympathize with him because of his failings. Unlike those insufferable twits Galahad and Tristan.”

“Would Hamlet count?” asked Richard.

“Sure, why not,” said Ivan. “The twisted, tragic hero. A nice contrast to the gallants and empire-founders. But what about the ladies?”

“Well …” A name popped into Richard’s head. He’d recently finished the book. Took him four months, but he’d gulped down every word. “Molly Bloom?”

“Yes!” said Ivan, delighted. “I’m still reeling with amazement that you’ve managed to make it through Ulysses. Most boys your age couldn’t spell ‘Ulysses.’”

“Yeah, well, Molly’s cool,” said Richard, basking in his father’s zeal. “Like in that final chapter, when she, you know … affirms her humanity?”

“Right,” said Ivan, becoming more animated. “She insists on experiencing exhilaration, rejecting the petty cruelties of Dublin society and her milquetoast husband. That volcanic monologue—whew! Nothing more heroic in all of literature, one could argue.” He smiled, and his flabby cheeks and bulbous chin that could have served as a template for a curmudgeonly headmaster in an illustrated volume of Dickens, suddenly grew taut and smooth. “I think you’ve got yourself a paper, young man.”

“Yeah, I think so too,” said Richard.

Ivan leaned in and took Richard gently by the wrist.

“Just remember, son. There is no one attribute or archetype that screams hero. The heroes who endure in our myths and stories—the ones whose names we can rattle off—aren’t heroic because they slay dragons and rescue maidens locked in towers. No, they’re men and women who have found it necessary to free themselves the humdrum world, with its vices, complications, and violence, in favor of something … starker, more honest. But they refuse to abandon the world, unsavable though it might be, choosing instead to fight for its preservation, risking failure, even death for the chance to do something, well, heroic.”

He paused. The dying afternoon light that stole through the window-slit produced a coronal-like effect as it refracted off of Ivan’s bald spot, which was as round as a tea saucer.

“Yes,” he continued, “it’s all about risk, chance, fate—courting catastrophe, spilling blood in the naked sun. That’s where heroes earn their herohood. And why we remember.”

Ivan let go of Richard’s arm and swiveled back to his desk. A barely audible chuckle exited his throat. He rubbed his brow, temples, scalp, then sighed volubly and sucked his teeth. Richard had never seen him like this—one minute a whirling Dervish, the next a tree stump; nor heard him like this—talking of failure, death, and blood without the insinuations of bookish irony sheltering the words.

“Honestly, Rich, sometimes I don’t know what I’m saying,” said Ivan, chuckling again and shaking his gray head, which moved out of the slanting sunlight and hovered in parial shadow. “Just do me a favor and don’t listen to me. Write whatever you want.”

“No, no,” said Richard, attempting to convey a sudden effusion of pride and gratitude without actually saying the words and spoiling the moment. “That was just what I needed. ‘Earn their herohood.’ I like that. Can I close with that?”

“What’s mine is yours, son,” said Ivan. “What’s mine is yours.”


Next Chapter: Part One: The First Sphere, Chapter I