Forbidden Boolean String

According to this article in the LA Times, the internet makes it easier to become a terrorist. Easier than what? I ask, but deduce from the open-ended question they mean easier than without. The logic in that is shoddy, but we'll ignore such a discrepancy in order to have the discussion move past the poor rhetoric it displays.

Another objective flaw in the article is its attention solely to Islamic radicals.

From charismatic clerics who spout hate online, to thousands of extremist websites, chat rooms and social networking pages that raise money and spread radical propaganda, the Internet has become a crucial front in the ever-shifting war on terrorism.

to

[F]iery Internet imans who use English to preach jihad and, in some cases, to help funnel recruits to Al Qaeda and other radical causes.

I've encountered plenty of radical hate-mongering from far more than Islamic voices. I think the easy way to rationally discuss this sort of thing is by just killing everyone who's viewpoint is different than . . . hmmm, that doesn't work because then . . . we'd all have to . . . end up shooting . . . each other.

Okay, to rationally discuss this topic, instead of pointing fingers at just one religious sect of wingnuts, how about point our fingers at all spectrum of wingnuts.

Hmmmm, that really doesn't work either, sing who defines who the wingnuts are?

"Decent society" I guess. Although I've seen damn little proof such a place exists.

And so I tried something. I used Google to help my terrorist indoctrination. But alas! Google failed me. I shan't be able to join my hoped for radical group since, apparently, they don't exist:

· • ·

Peculiar Crossroads

In archiving these papers, I come to find out I don't have a copy of the final draft of this one. A fact that annoys and pains me a little. I finished it at school, printed it, and saved it on a flash drive. That flash drive bit the dust and the printed copy was turned it. Being the final paper of the semester, it wasn't returned. [insert myriad frowny faces here].

This does mark (ha-ha) however, the first time i tried writing about the hitchhiking days and Yellowstone and Mark Em—I mean Marcus Amory...

Since we'd been writing parodies in Fiction II, I asked if I could make this assignment a parody as well.

(The references to Orwell in this concern Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma which we read for this class.)

The comment I remember most from Eric May (the teacher whose class this was for) was that there was no sense of Me in this story. I never had any description of Me-as-a-Character. Eric looked at me and, being a wide-girthed man, noted my height. "There's a low ceiling you talk about in the story, but was it a low ceiling to anyone other than you?"


~•~



CRW: Writers on the Road
4/17/08
Creative Essay: First Draft

PECULIAR CROSSROADS


I first met my Dean Moriarty not long after I came off the road. I'd been hitchhiking again--perhaps my longest single stretch of hitching I'd done then, from the magic sweltering Gulf Coast South out to the splosh splawrsh of the rocky coast in Bolinas California where Marin County sticks out its little finger as if testing the waters of the Pacific and then up the angled coastline through Crescent City and beyond--to Seattle where I turned away from the coast and came back through the flat plains of eastern Oregon where it seems that on a clear enough day you could stand there on that dust bowl prairie and gaze back east all the way to the hills and caves of Utah. After a series of flaming Roman candle adventures that took me through a hospital stay (from a motorcade inconvenience that left me with cracked ribs and a headful of missing time) and the hallowed halls of an odd temple in Salt Lake City where the people smiled entirely too much for my comfort, I sat recovering atop a mountain in Colorado with some mad people just burning to live--to move--to experience what the universe conspired to give them. Then, after a few sunrises from those mountains of madness and delirious delights I took my feet back down to the ribbon of highway and shook my thumb for another ride. A few weeks later I had circled around again and was dropped off on the side of the road outside Three Forks Montana and went east into the hissing steam and glug-glug-glugalling of the mud pots and geyser springs of America's own fantasy nature playground called Yellowstone Park. No stranger place had i ever seen--no more wide-eyed had i ever been than when I first set foot in and feasted my road-weary eyes upon the yellow rock veined with hues of blues and reds and obsidian cliffs and porous rock and the steam whispers of holes in the earth that said pssst, pssst, c'mere and I'll tell you a story you've never heard of before and the bubbling waters of iridescent springs that flaunted their abnatural colors like some prehistoric alien peacock strutting and preening across the basins and valleys between proud and protective mountains. It was here, in this almost unearthly landscape that I first encountered the man who would be my Dean Moriarty. Marcus Amory was his name and it was him who blazed like a candle flame everyone else fluttered around like a frenetic mothswarm. I first saw the brightness of his flame my first night in Yellowstone. I had stepped into the small dark smokey lounge that was the employee pub, a wooden bunk house out behind the grandiose log cabin-style Old Faithful Inn, and let my eyes run slow across the walls laden with an almost indecipherable script hand-written graffiti and simple drawings that amazingly never crossed the border from the absurd and vulgar into crass and disgusting. I sat myself down at a table in the middle of the small room and bobbed my head to the mad jazz riffs blowing from the small speakers in the four corners of the room. I nursed a drink of melting ice and wondered what it was that brought me into this place. That same sense of looking--of seeking--of plaintive searching and never resting, never happy with what I've found because I am never really looking for a particular something, just searching out that indefinable anything. It's the seeking that interests me more than what it is that I find. So I sat in this dim, bopping, smokey room and drained the last of the cold water from the remaining ice in my plastic cup and about to cut out of the word-scrawled pub when this fellow I hadn't seen before slipped himself into the chair across the small squared table from me as if he'd always been sitting there and I just noticed him. A bushy-haired nice-looking guy with long fingers that belonged to a jazz piano player or Renaissance painter. He tipped a beer bottle up to his lips, set it back down on the table with a quiet thunk and let loose a bright smile that was the spark of his candleflame. "Hi, I'm Marcus Amory," he said to me and added a little nod to his shining smile. I nodded back to him and felt right off that I was looking at a mad character who just hopped out of a beat novel and appeared in the chair across from me. I nodded and tipped my cup of water in his direction. Without a pause from him to await any comment I might offer Marcus spoke up again and didn't waste time, as if words for him were an inconvenience in conveying what he wanted to impart. "Saturday around noon we're going to be having some fun at my room." He tilted the beer bottle up to his lips again and his eye glinted with a delirious delight. I sat there and for a moment thought I was the mark of someone coming on a little too strong. Like a single pretty girl hanging out at a party that vibrated with too much testosterone, where all the young dudes swung their dicks around with a little too much ferocity. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of something as open an invitation as that. "Oh, yeah?" I raised an eyebrow and held a slight grin to show I took no offense even if the invitation was something a little too personal for my interest, "And what sort of fun would that be?" Marcus Amory tossed his answer right out with such an obviously discreet reply that I would either be hep to what he was saying or miss it by a mile and a half. "I just got back from the Jerry shows in Palo Alto." I already wore a Cheshire grin when I finalized the date: "Noon, you say. I guess I'll be skipping work on Saturday..." Marcus Amory and I burned across the landscapes of Yellowstone, the mountains of Montana, and the soft geographies far beyond the physical realms like two mad cats setting fire to the blue note highways of some past poetic time. And as I sit here now, distant and remote from our days together, I reflect on our trips and conversations and lysergic-soaked eep hours of bright dark nights of our souls that seemed to be poured from the eternal archive of mystic experience and steeped in the tea leaves from a lush and exotic jungle where ideas not yet conceived of grow wild on tangle vines before bearing fruit in our minds. I ask the ghost of this memory that is Marcus Amory about those days and nights we spent seeding precious singular moments so that they might flower and bring the beauty of our ideas into being. Marcus Amory moved through place and thought with a fiery intensity and latched onto me through some cosmological ninth sense that told him I would be a willing and able psychonaut to join him on his acid-fueled ramblings down mountain highway and up cliffside trails. I reflect, conjure, and speak to this memory of my Dean Moriarty and question what rules define telling these stories. What defines truth and fiction? What boundaries were breeched and what limits were kept constrained when Jack Kerouac became Sal Paradise and began committing the stories of his life to paper? Where does the thinly-guised fact become fabricated fiction? If I were to write of Marcus Amory and myself--committed in story as Syd Persona--what would I reveal of the psychedelic intimacies he and I shared. And what of the others were who passed though, went along for a distance with, and stepped back with quiet apprehension from? Would I be transgressing any sort of personal privacy they might have reasonable expectation of if I wrote them into the narrative of this slipstream story of hand-painted mini-vans, stumbling glorious wanton hysterical along the boardwalks of Old Faithful's geyser basin and driving, always driving--? Marcus Amory was the maddest beautiful driver I've ever known, which was only appropriate since I viewed him as my Dean Moriarty around whom I fluttered and flipped and kept up the pace with--driving with one hand one the wheel, one hand pinching a joint, his head nodding and bobbing to the music and his smile fixed bright on his face. I think about those times and those events and those people and find myself, even typing this, going back and deleting certain information, altering some truths until their are partial fictions and considering what might be added to this to make it no longer a recollecting tale with minor factual details excised or metamorphosed into subtle fancy. What choices should I make in recreating certain events on the page?—


What choices did Jack make? What observations in On The Road are Jack's and which ones are Sal's? Like my ghostly memory on paper of Marcus Amory, Dean Moriarty was certainly a more beautiful, wild, be-bop-beat mad cat in many ways than Neal Cassady was. But then Neal Cassady wasn't Dean Moriarty anymore than Emma Larkin found George Orwell in her bumbling down the sweltering river of Burma (which isn't really a country at all anymore, except in the past of people's memories). Neal Cassady was a living breathing beautiful laughing angry asshole. Just like any person is. Dean Moriarty was a character, who really and truly existed only in Jack's mind, on the page, and in the hearts of anyone who opened themselves up to the story in which Dean rambles endlessly forever down some long lost highway of hope until he recedes to becomes but a speck on the distant horizon, and then it's goodbye to all that--at least, until the reader reopens the book and starts the journey all over again.


—I go searching, and try to find the truth in my own fiction, the fiction in my truth. And, in searching the canyons and highways of my memory and past I come upon a Southern crossroads, not farm from the ramshackle shotgun shack of Old Bull Lee and encounter Flannery O'Connor standing on the side of some dusty highway waiting for the Misfit to come back from the forest where he walked in with the Grandmother. Flannery tells me not to linger too long--and I don't. Crossroads aren't meant for lingering anymore than road novels are meant to leave their characters stationary for any span. But before I stick my thumb out again to catch a ride away from here and off to some place out there somewhere, Ms. O'Connor tells me, "The Writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. Their problem is to find that location." And then I know what it is I've been looking for all these years. Where I have sought to be. The peculiar crossroads where I will find my past present and future mingling with every highway road and trail I've even imagined, and the divine moment that lifts itself out from the swampy muck of confusion and obscurity and hangs there, just above the here and now, where it shimmers for a moment and then disappears as I keep going further. It's all a mirage, rising like heat waves on a desert highway. It disappears like a fleeting memory of the past that no one holds in their hearts anymore, no one speaks of, no one remembers. I think of Jack Kerouac, following me all these years since I first encountered him, and Sal Paradise who never quite existed for me even when I hopped in the car with him and drove out to San Francisco--him and Dean, Dean and Jack, Jack and Neal, Neal and me, me and Marcus Amory. Me and Jack. I grapple with my own secrets, my own untold stories, my own hesitations and I think back to Marcus Amory and the headlights showing only a small piece of the long dark night we travelled--only the immediate future of the road just ahead of us--and beyond that light only darkness and the mystery of what will be--what could be. I think of Marcus Amory, I think of Marcus Amory. I think of Marcus Am-or-ry.


· • ·

Irony Poisoning.

This was the third parody I wrote for Fiction II.

~•~
(draft 1.5 again, and no, I won't acknowledge it as a 2nd draft)


FICTION II
02/25/08
Parody III: The Metamorphosis


Irony Poisoning.


When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 on Tuesday morning he was still human. He slept in his own bed in his own room of his own apartment. When he woke up at 4:19, rolled over a little to look at the clock and make a hypnagogic deduction that two hours and some minutes between then and the time the alarm was set for provided plenty more time for sleep, he fell back into his fitful dreams which always seemed to be about things which eluded his conscious mind. But anyway--he reasoned while giving a few moments of thought to it when awake before getting on with important things in his life like crunching numbers at the accounting firm--dreams weren't meant to be understood at all, not by the analytical mind, and so he quickly dismissed whatever he remembered about his restless dreams.

When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 in his own bed, covered with green and blue flannel sheets and a thick pleated quilt his grandmother had made which kept him warm on even the coldest of nights, he was still human. The room around him was very much his own, with a few Spartan personal items; bare walls and a closetful of nearly identical suits, a night stand with most un-decorative lamp and simple digital alarm clock with buzzer and radio, simple wooden beige chest of drawers over in the corner held his socks and underwear, and a box set on top with his neatly-arranged tie-tacks and cuff-links. That is also where he placed, at night before going to bed, his wrist watch, cell phone, and PDA.

Everything in the dark quiet hour of 4 a.m. was as if should be in Merald Kroach's room. Ordered and neat and evident.

Nothing about the room or objects in it had changed during the next few hours that Merald Kroach slept. Although he had never done so in his entire life, last night before going to bed, Merald Kroach forgot to set the alarm on his digital clock. At 6:35 a.m. the alarm did, in fact, not go off, and for the first time in his entire life, Merald Kroach overslept.

Ordinarily, the alarm would awake him at 6:35 and he would be out of bed by 6:45 when the coffee machine started brewing a pot; shower and shave, 6:55; toast with butter and two cups of coffee and he was out of the apartment at 7:20 to catch the train into the accounting firm to sit down at his cubical desk at 7:55, where stacks of papers with numerous columns of numbers waited his attention. Numbers didn't leave any room for interpretations and comparisons. Numbers were factual and definite.

Weren't they?

This morning, 6:35 a.m. came and went without a sound, because he had forgotten to set it. It was 8:23 when he opened his eyes to the brightness of a day already several hours old.

Merald Kroach opened his eyes and the clock seemed indistinct and out of focus to him. He tried rubbing his ideas but his thought of doing so slipped into a foggy gray area of his head and he suddenly didn't feel like himself at all.

He felt like...like...like he was a bug, trapped beneath his grandmother's quilt, lying in bed; like he was a prisoner and his bedroom and the apartment and even everything in town was merely a façade meant to give him the false sense of normalcy; like everything was familiar but he was alien and foreign to it; like he was a stranger in a strange land.

Merald Kroach tried to roll over in bed but the best he could do was lie as he was and imagine jelly rolls and drums rolls and rolling, rolling, rolling down the river. His thoughts drifting from an old song to Mark Twain using the Mississippi River as a whatchamacallit for Life. A model or something, Merald thought, but was reaching for another idea.

But he felt helpless as a child; like a fish out of water; flaccid as an overripe cliché.

What was wrong with him? Why couldn't he move?

He tried to roll over again, or at least lift an arm, but found he couldn't exactly feel his body anymore. Maybe he was paralyzed?

Frozen in place like a wet tongue to a metal pole in subzero weather, heavy as a lead elephant. With every thought, his mind would slip away from the subject he tried to focus on, but it would slip away from anything concrete like water glistening off a rainbowed-surface of oil--like three hillbillies in a mud farm trying to catch a greased hog.

The clock showed 8:51, and Merald Kroach still lay like a stump on a log, unable to move beneath his pleated quilt blanket. Usually by this time of the morning at the accounting firm he'd be as busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest.

This was insane! Why couldn't he move? What happened to him?

Even though he felt unable to move, Merald Kroach wasn't in any actual physical pain. Just frustrated by his thoughts not being able to focus clearly on anything, and the growing concern that such abstract mental processes were certainly going to be a hindrance at the accounting firm.

Perhaps this was one of those--what do you call them?--lucid dreams? That's it! He was awake inside a very vivid dream. And that meant he must still be sleeping.

He suddenly felt very reassured. Yes, that was it...this was one of those minute brief dreams he sometimes had between snooze bar hits. The alarm had gone off and he fell back asleep immediately and he was dreaming that it was after 9 a.m. and he had transformed from being a human into being some sort of ghost of Christmas past, shadow of a thought, will-o-wisp of the mind.

Any moment now, the alarm was going to go off again and Merald Kroach was going to get up and get on with his morning as usual--shower and shave his very human face--then head off to work at the accounting firm and crunch the numbers that define finances and business and politics and news and life and important things like that. He had no time for pondering silly ideas and allusions.

Numbers were what mattered. Good, concrete, invariable numbers----like the Square Root of Negative One, Gauss's Constant, Pi, or Zero...?

Merald Kroach's brain itched like a ten-year-old with chicken pox and ants in his pants. He wasn't used to having circular thoughts that slid away from things like snot off a doorknob. Every time he'd think of something, his mind would tangent off into some sort of similar comparison of what he wanted to think of, and wind up wandering a starry desert looking for the trail of where he began. Trapped like a rat in a cage he made and now he'd have to lie in it.

Stop it! he wanted to shout, but the best he could do was briefly form some sort of analogy to what he wanted to think about.

Then the dawning awareness struck him like a ton of gold bricks.

Merald Kroach woke up to find himself transformed into an alliterative metaphor! He'd become some sort of allegory typed into the lines of a structural parody!

The thought was insane, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter. But what else could it be? His mind raced down a white-water stream of consciousness, flushed into a swirling spiral of similes into the rhetorical murk and muck of anthropomorphic pathos. His proverbial blood froze at the flittering metonymic thought: What if in his being transformed into an allusionary idea in a work of metafiction, the Author-Creator never hit SAVE? What would happen to him?

He had to escape from this pastiche world...break through the Fourth Wall and return to his analytical life. However this happened didn't matter any more than growing a third testicle, but he needed to find a way out from this story before it fell into a mess of plot holes or infinite recursion.

How would McGuyver get out of this? What about James Bond? Indiana Jones escaped dire situations dozens of times, but he had a whip and a hat when he did. And a human body...

Since his thoughts seemed to be his body, maybe he could imagine a place, really see it, then think of some words and they might become the reality of what he imagined they could be. He'd imagine himself out of being a metaphor.

However he was going to do it, he had to make it quick. What if he lay here like unnoticed McGuffin and starved to death? Or worse, what if someone from the firm came over and found him like this? A mere figmentary parable, a rhetorical trope, a literary device...

What were those things called that always seemed to come in and save the day at the end of thriller stories?

The Calvary? No. Superman...? Han Solo? Chechov's gun?

He wasn't sure what Chechov's gun was, but if he had it, he'd be sure to use it!

Enough of this! Merald Kroach imagined he yelled, tasting the bitter irony poisoning of his situation. Then the idea fluttered past him like a drunken butterfly stumbling home from a three-day bender. The way out! He thought of the thing that could get him out of this...this whatchamacallit!

That was it, he finally decided, clutching to the epiphany before it had a chance to slip away like a squiggling fish and turn into something else...

Since he was a metaphor in a short story parody of some Phildickian-Kafkaesque piece of fiction, he was going to need a Deus Ex Machina to get out of this.

English or Latin -- it was all just Greek to him.


· • ·

The Night Auditor.

In Fiction II, parodies are attempted. There's three or four stories you can opt to parody, and as I remember, two or three had to produced. Then one of those was completed by the end of the semester.


~•~


FICTION II
02/18/08
Parody II: Bartleby
(first draft)


The Night Auditor.

I forget his last name now, Tom Bartholomew, maybe, but I can't be sure. TOM B. is what the gold plate name tag showed, and that's how I remember him. We all had name tags, but no one else really went by what they showed. So it's kind of odd that I remember Tom B.'s name tag but everyone else's nicknames. I guess because I knew everyone else so much longer. Tom B. only worked at the hotel for six months. The last six months the hotel was open.

I supervised three other people on the midnight shift. The night auditor, the maintenance man, and the lounge bartender. Once autumn, the night auditor quit and the hotel searched for a new auditor. Turnkey and Nausica, the maintenance man and the bartender, and myself took out guesses at the sort of person would take the job.

He was like none of us expected.

The hotel was a grand display of crimson red carpeting and wooden gold walls. A massive stone hearth stood in the center of the room reaching the three-floors up to the ceiling of the octagonal lobby. The hotel had been around for almost a century before it had electric light. The lobby was lit with light bulbs that look like flames, but they are in wall sconces where torch and oil lamps once were.

I'd been with the L'Éminence Rouge for a seven years before I was given the position of overnight concierge, which I then held for the next ten. Right up to when the hotel closed.

But however long I had been with the L'Éminence Rouge, Turnkey had been there more than a decade longer. Turnkey was good at fixing things for the first half of his shift, but by midnight, Turnkey would take his lunch break--which consisted of propping himself up on the bed in a vacant room with a bottle of bourbon and a pack of cigarettes and watch t.v. until he passed out around 4 a.m. Around 4, Nausica would have closed the lounge and counted out with the auditor and gone off to find where Turnkey had taken lunch, then wake him up, and go on her merry way by 5.

Turnkey pushed the limits of employment and tolerance only because he got the necessary things done in the short amount of time he actually devoted to work, and because he had worked at the hotel for so long, no one could imagine not seeing him chain-smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in the span of an evening.

Nausica worked more than Turnkey, certainly. More than she maybe should have. It became apparent slowly over her time at the hotel that she had another job as well, one which clients showed up for at the bar from time to time. They'd drop by for a quick drink and leave shortly after, a few grams heavier than when they arrived. But, like Turnkey, Nausica kept her job because she was good at what she did, completed it within the alloted timeframe, and didn't crack up always working opposite the sun.

On the midnight shift, each hour has more significance than during the day shift.

Especially for the night auditor. Each hour meant a different set of reports, a different audit to be conducted. The job went something like this: run a series of reports, and while they're printing, start checking over the house and people count. Then a run down of various accounts and expenses, and everything needs to balance, as close to possible to zero. Then, after hours of printing hundreds of pages of reports, the auditor separated them into various piles to send off to the accountant and the sales office and the front desk manager and housekeeping and maintenance and the food and beverage manager, and so forth and so on. The paper-trail that is the foundation of business operations itself.

Tom B. was hired on as the night auditor, responsible for the meticulous and detailed work of printing and checking the hotel reports. When he first started at the hotel, Tom B. was amazingly quick, accurate, and precise. He ran and checked reports in a third less time than his predecessor, and accurately checked them quicker than seemed feasible. His attention to filing was no less incredible. For the first few months no one could have found a bad thing to say about Tom B. He was the best night auditor the L'Éminence Rouge Hotel had ever had.

So it was immediately strange when I noticed the expanding piles of paperwork that had sprung up around the front desk office; unfiled audit reports dating back a full week. Tom B. had simply not been filing any reports for five nights in a row. He ran them and checked their figures with as much skill and detail as he always had, running a long ruler across each row of numbers, but he just didn't file them.

The next week several departments complained about it, asking why he refused to do his work.

Well, refused isn't precisely accurate. Tom B. never actually refused to do his job. He checked and balanced every report, he just wouldn't file the paperwork. The only response anyone would get from him was, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Each department of the hotel began to print out their own copies of the audited reports, so after the initial drama of it, no one complained very much about not receiving any filed reports. Yet the number and height of the growing stacks of unfiled paperwork was growing. It had filled an office closet already and stood, floor to ceiling, in some dozen or more stacks. And they kept growing.

Tom B. would take his time, sitting in his office chair, going over each line of every single report. But never file the papers when he was done. Every few days someone on the morning shift would ask Tom B. about why he hadn't filed the reports and he would always respond in the same slow tone, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

It was about a week before the fire that we found out he'd been living at the hotel from the very first day he worked there. Tom B. had taken up residence in Room 18 just a few doors down the hall from the front desk. Room 18 was where we put half-broken things. Lamps that flicker when they're on, a t.v. that won't change channels. The hotel didn't like to throw things away. I guess that's why Tom B. was never actually fired for not doing his job. He showed up to work--never really left the hotel--and that was good enough.

That was when I started looking into Tom B,'s background.

I called his former employer and was mildly socked to learn that in his previous job Tom B. filed paperwork for a crematorium. The death certificate, funeral home contacts, the bill for services rendered.

A job like that was bound to change a man. It seemed to be that it was no wonder Tom B. was a bit odd, even considering the sort of people one encounters during the small dark hours.

I looked at the stacks and stacks of unfiled and reports and wondered if maybe Tom B. didn't file them because that might remind him always of death. Perhaps not filing the audit reports was his way of reminding himself he was still alive.

There was one night I was going to asking him directly about that. But that was the night of the fire.

The fire was caused by Turnkey.

Around 4 a.m., April 19th. When Turnkey passed out that night, his bourbon spilled over the bed and the cigarette in his hand when he fell asleep sparked a flame...

Nausica had just begun her Where Has Turnkey Passed Out Tonight? game. She found the fire before it spread from the room, but Turnkey had already become charcoal and the flames were licking at the edges of the room.

Within minutes the entire wing of the hotel was blazing.

As the fire devoured the hotel, I made sure all the guests were out and striding back through the lobby after directing Nausica and the baker-girl, Pumpernickel, out. Turnkey was gone, his burial in a flaming rented bed, but everyone else had gotten out. Everyone except for the night auditor, Tom B.

I found him sitting in his office chair, the fire crawling with branching red fingertips up the floor-to-ceiling columns of unfiled paperwork all around him.

"Tom," I shouted to him above the roar of the flames, "Everyone else is out, come on!"

But he just sat there, holding a ruler to the page of report on the desk in front of him, his head turned to me for almost a full minute before he turned away. I felt my hair singeing in the heat.

I wanted to turn and run out of the burning place, but I couldn't just let him sit there and be roasted in the fire--I was frantic, "Tom, this is crazy. We've got to get out of here!"

Even with my hair sizzling, I was drawn to stand there staring at him. How calm he was, sitting in his office chair. "No," Tom B. said to me, the heat peeling back the upholstery of the chair around him, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Tom B.'s skin blistered red before cracking, engorged by the flame of his paperwork crematorium.

I ran from the tinderbox lobby and greedily gulped in fresh air when I stood outside far from the fire and smoke. The red-orange glow lit the rest of night, the embers dying only when the sun finally chose to begin the day.

The L'Éminence Rouge Hotel burned to the ground.

It was never rebuilt.


· • ·