Part III: Memories

If at first you don’t succeed, whatever. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies Mom “Michael! Darling! You look wonderful!” Her Brooklyn accent and eighty years of heavy ci­ garette smoking made her voice unmistakable. “Mom!” I said, surprised. “What are you doing in my metanovel? You’re supposed to be dead.” “Dead, shmed,” she said. “If you think a little death can stop me, you’ve got another think coming. Can I smoke here?” “I guess so,” I said. We’d made her smoke outside the house while she was alive, but it seemed stupid to make her smoke outside the metanovel. And what was outside a metanovel? She reached into her battered purse, rummaged around and pulled out a pack of Camels and a Bic lighter. She pulled out a cigarette—her hands were still shaking, death hadn’t helped the tremor—and handed me the lighter. I lit her cigarette. She took a healthy drag. “Dad says hello,” she said and she blew out the smoke. “He’s playing bridge. Maybe he’ll come by later.” She looked around. “Page 53!” She said. “Very nice! I always knew you’d write a book some day. It’s really too bad you didn’t write it while Dad was alive.” “I’ve written a lot more than 53 pages,” I said. “They come later. And you’ll be in it later. In fact,” I checked the last draft, “the last page is 216.” “Wonderful, darling, wonderful.” She looked around. “Can I smoke here?” “You’re already smoking,” I said. “Let me get you an ashtray.” Her ashes were dropping on the page. “One nice thing about being dead,” she said. “you I don’t have to worry about cancer,” she laughed and took another drag. Led by our fearless Mom, we learned to laugh at death and adversity. After Dad died, my brother, Mark, and I wrote his obituary. Dad’s mother had emigrated to America from Hungary after she’d been forced into marriage. She had not bothered to divorce her husband before mar­ rying Dad’s father which made Dad technically illegitimate. Dad had been a preemie, not expec­ ted to survive, so his birth wasn’t registered for six months. As a result Dad had two birthdays a year—one on the day of his birth, the other the day of his registration. Dad died at age 84 and the headline we would use for the obituary that Mark and I wrote was obvious to us: Bastard Dies After 168th Birthday. Mom thought it was great. “So did I,” said Dad. “I’m dummy on this hand, so I thought I’d say hello.” “Hello,” I said. “Sorry, I can’t stay long,” said Dad. “My partner just laid down the rest of his hand. I’ve got to deal. Bye.” “Bye,” I said. “Bye,” Mom said. “Do you know how much money those crooks at the funeral home want for an urn?” Mom had asked as we were preparing for Dad’s memorial service. “Two hundred fifty dollars! It’s a jar, for God’s sake! We’re going shopping!” For twelve dollars we got a nice cookie jar where Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies most of Dad still rests, and for a few bucks each got small ceramic containers for each of us to have a bit of Dad. “Have you ever met my father?” I’d ask people. “No,” they’d say. I’d pull out Dad and make introductions. “Don’t listen to anyone who says your book is crap,” said Mom. “If you wrote it, I’m sure it’s wonderful.” Nothing stopped Mom. She’d talk to anyone she wanted to, make friends with anyone she wanted to, and fight anyone she had to. She’d work her way around bureaucracies by charm if possible, and by intimidation if charm didn’t work. She was street smart and intellectually curi­ ous, but a poor student. “The only way I got through high school,” she told us, “was by dating my teachers.” I wasn’t my mothers’ son. I was bookish and shy. Talking to strangers was an ordeal. And watching Mom in action was embarrassing. I just wanted to be left alone to read and dream. “Darling, you look wonderful!” Mom said again. “Can I smoke here?” “Yes, Mom,” I said. “Of course.” Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies Your Mother? “What’s your mother doing in your metanovel?” Asked my inner critic nastily. “She’s dead.” “I know,” I answered. “It’s July and she just showed up in this draft. I don’t know why she’s here.” But there were reasons for everything in the metanovel, even if the author didn’t know some of them until many drafts after he’d written them. He didn’t realize it, but his mother had been in the metanovel from the beginning. He was finally ready to let her become visible. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies In the Beginning Before the beginning, his beginning, half of what was to become him was a fast-swimming, determined, spermatozoon from his father’s recent ejaculate; the other half was the ovum that his mother had ripened from an oogonium just in time to meet that plucky, lucky, tail-lashing sperm. His two halves joined and he became a human zygote—Zygote 0.0 in the zygote number­ ing system he later invented to amuse himself and annoy his daughters—a single-celled animal whose ontogeny would recapitulate its phylogeny as it raced for 266 days, at the rate of 165.34 years per second, down the evolutionary trail that his ancestors had taken 3.8 billion years to blaze. The little zygote wasted no time. Even as he drifted down his mother’s left fallopian tube on the long, one-stop journey to the outside world, he began to divide mitotically. After four genera­ tions he reached his first metazooic stage and had become a clump of about sixteen cells known as a morula. It was the first of the self-transformations that would continue the rest of his life. He kept dividing, and by the time he had reached eighty cells he had become a blastocyst. But he didn’t stop. He pressed on through gastrulation, formed a protein shell around himself, hatched, and implanted himself in his mother’s endrometrium. Now the young gastrula looked much like the simplest animals—sponges, coral, and jellyfish—but with three cell layers, not two. He continued to transform. He became worm-like, then tadpole-like, then grew fish-like gills and discarded them. His arms and legs budded. He grew a penis. By eight weeks he’d graduated to fetus He looked like a movie alien, and was en route to becoming a human. And he was con­ tinuing to transform himself. He evolved and grew until he was a complete human baby able to carry out basic baby func­ tions like breathing, sucking, crying, pooping, and keeping parents awake. Now it was time for the final leg of his journey: his mother’s powerful uterine muscles would squeeze him through her now-dilated cervix, down her birth canal, out her vaginal opening, and into the cold, bright world. “Ewww! Dad!” Said my each of my daughters, as each read her draft . “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard of.” “We’ve all made that journey,” I answered. “Even you were once squeezed…” “Ewww!” Interrupted my daughters, joined by most of the metanovel’s readers. For 266 days he’d been trapped inside his mother’s body. He’d finally gotten out, become separate: but his freedom was illusory and limited. He would spend years fighting her before he wrote this paragraph and realized the truth: she had always been with him, and she always would; half of what was in every one of her cells was half of what was in of every one of his cells. She was inside him, and inside this metanovel from the beginning, and whenever he had thought he was fighting her, he had really been fighting himself. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies Mom My mother ruled the family and ran her life until benign senility began to burn out everything that was hard, angry, or bitter and left only the laughter and the charm, and her say­ ing…” “I know,” said Mom. “Every day is a blessing.” She said it every day. Then as her mind began to slip, several times a day. Then she said it as often as twice in ten minutes.” “Every day is a blessing,” Mom said. “Even dead, it is.” Death sucks, as God will tell you in chapter 19, Enjoy Life! on page 163. Every day was a blessing for Mom because she was not completely dead, and wouldn’t be for some time. The reason will be clear once you read about literary near-immortality, which you can do as soon as you turn the page. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies Literary Near-Immortality Kurt Vonnegut had lived both as a human person in the real universe and as a metafictional character in several of the books he wrote: Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, and Timequake. Each time Vonnegut projected himself into one of his book he increased his chances for literary near-immortality. Vonnegut, the human, died in 2007, but metafictional Vonneguts will live as long as any one remembers him, or any copy of any medium in which he is a metafictional character exists. An image of Vonnegut had lived in the author’s memory ever since he read Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle and continued to live there after Vonnegut’s death. Because of the nature of the author’s metanovel, the Vonnegut memory was able to push its way from the back of the author’s mind to the front, to get Vonnegut mentioned in New Chapter 3, called Writers I Admire on page 141. Vonnegut appeared for a one-liner in The Imagined Meeting on page 143 and the author’s mother talked about him in The Tree Of Life on page 172. Emboldened, the Vonnegut living within the author helped write and edit this chapter. It wasn’t as good anything that Vonnegut had written when he was alive, but for a partly dead guy, it wasn’t bad. “So it goes,” Kurt Vonnegut said after reading what he’d helped write.. “So it goes.” Not Quite Omniscient Narrator knows that in the Earth year 214,334 a space explorer, named Kilgore Trout, after one of Vonnegut’s fictional characters, will spend 20,000 of his ex­ tended life-span years searching for evidence that the Vonnegutian fictional planet Tralfamadore which exists in five separate Vonnegutian fictional universes: The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-five, Hocus Pocus, and Timequake, also exists in his own universe. Trout will accidentally drop a carbonite-encased, nearly indestructible Condensed Library of Babel Chip on asteroid KB71W91223 as it travels through intergalactic space. The Con­ densed Library of Babel is similar to the Library of Babel—a concept attributed to the Earth au­ thor Jorge Luis Borges by the Earth philosopher Daniel Dennett who introduced this book’s au­ thor to it through Dennett’s book Freedom Evolves, which describes the library as one containing all possible books. Unlike the full Library of Babel, the Condensed Library is contains only books that were completed after 2008. the year after Vonnegut’s death and which will have been completed before the Earth Year 20,552, the year in which the last bit of useful knowledge will have been discovered by the Jewish Chinese scientist, poet, and talk-show host, Mordecai Fong. The Condensed Library contains this book, which in turn contains Kurt Vonnegut. Because of Kilgore Trout’s accident, long after all the last star in the universe burns out, KB71W91223, with its nearly indestructible library chip will continue its nearly endless and largely meaningless journey toward the heat death of the universe, giving both Kurt Vonnegut, this metanovel’s metafictional author, and all the other characters in the metanovel, a nearly end­ less and largely meaningless continued existence. “So it goes,” said the author to Kurt Vonnegut. “So it goes,” Vonnegut replied. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies Mom, Continued Mom was funny, creative, adventurous, and utterly fearless. She supported whatever we did —unless we crossed her. No one who crossed her got away with it. Not Dad. Not us. Cross her? Watch out! “That was me?” Asked my mother. “I don’t remember that.” Everyone loved Dad. He was a sweet, smart man who didn’t seem to mind being the butt of so many family pranks and jokes. He was stroke stricken at 76, lost mobility and gained speech problems and a walker. The important parts of his mind stayed intact. The stroke, on top of late onset diabetes, led to poor circulation in his feet, and ten years later to gangrene. “We have to amputate,” his doctor told him. “No,” Dad answered. “Then you’re going to die,” his doctor said. “I was going to die anyway,” Dad said. They didn’t amputate. He did die. But, as my then- brother-in-law Glen said at Dad’s memorial service, “He went down undefeeted.” “He did?” Asked my mother. “I don’t remember that.” We all loved Mom. We all feared her. And for parts of my life I hated her. When I hit my teens I started reading books on abnormal psychology and learned that she was the reason I was so fucked up and miserable. I was gracious and I didn’t hold it against her; I understood how lesser people could make these sorts of mistakes. Generously, I shared the fruits of my research and patiently explained all the mistakes she’d made with me so she could avoid fucking my sis­ ter up. For some reason this enraged her. And it didn’t help my sister. “You did that?” Asked my mother. “I don’t remember that.” From time to time we’d patch things up, then things would fall apart again as our power struggle continued. As an adult, so-called, I got so angry that I cut my Mom out of my life. Dad was attached to Mom, so I cut him out, too. Too bad, Dad. It was hard to understand how the person I knew myself to be—someone who, Christlike, would have died to save the world if dying wasn’t such a buzz-kill—could have behaved the way that I did. But he did and I did. I knew that there was something wrong with me. If you’d read the books on abnormal psychology that I had read, you’d know, as I did, that everything wrong with me was Mom’s fault. Because I wasn’t speaking to them, I didn’t tell Mom and Dad when Bobbi became pregnant with our first daughter, Dana. After she was born, in what I convinced myself was a gesture of reconciliation, I showed up on their doorstep and presented their first granddaughter. I didn’t say the words, but my message of reconciliation was clear: “Fuck you, Mom!” “I don’t remember that,” Mom said. “Did you do that?” Dad was furious and threw me out. So I left, angry and vindicated, instead of apologizing as I should have. Fuck you both! I thought. When my sister got married I was invited to the wed­ ding, held at my parents’ house. I showed up with Dana and her sister Mira in tow, did my best to charm everyone’s ass off, was scrupulously polite to my Dad and Mom, left, and didn’t com­ municate for another few years. In other words, “Fuck you some more.” Finally I came to my senses, realized what a jerk I had been, and apologized to them both. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies “And you thought you were me!” said Jesus. “What a surprise to discover you were not the forgiving, loving, gentle person that you thought that you were!” “You’re right,” I said. “I spent my life believing I was a better version of my Dad, while act­ ing like…like…” “…like your mother without any of her redeeming qualities,” Jesus finished. “I’m sorry I hurt Dad,” I said to Mom after I had apologized, “I didn’t mean to. I was trying to hurt you.” “You didn’t hurt me,” Mom said. “You just hurt him.” “I know,” I said, “but I couldn’t have lived with myself if I didn’t try.” When I told her that, she nodded understanding. She didn’t tell me what an idiot I was. And I didn’t tell her that what I had done was insane. My explanation seemed sensible to both of us at the time. That tells you something about our relationship. And it tells you something about me. I’d become what I’d fought against. The worst parts of my mother. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies Can I Help You Darling? It took several false starts, edits and redrafts of the previous chapters before I realized that Mom was in my metanovel to help. She’d always been in my life wanting to help. I hadn’t let her. “If I’m going to help,” Mom said. “I can’t be senile. And unless you reduce my senility ret­ roactive to this paragraph, I’ll be too senile to help by pointing this out.” “She’s not here to help,” my inner critic said contemptuously. “She’s a distraction. And a problem. She’s going to try to take control. If you can’t get rid of the whole metnovel, at least get rid of her.” “No,” I said. “She’s my Mom. I love her. She’s here for a reason. She stays.” “You’re an idiot,” said my inner critic. “You were almost done, and then she shows up in this draft. And now what? You’ve to rearrange what you’ve written. You’ve got to write trans­ itions. You’ve got to figure out why she’s here. And now you’ve got another dozen scenes to edit every time you do an editing pass. You’re never going to get done.” There was some truth in what my inner critic said, but I wasn’t going to admit it. “There’s some truth in what you’re saying,” I admitted. “What happened to ‘I wasn’t going to admit it?,’” Mom asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “If you make a decision, you need to stick to it,” Mom said. “I know,” I said. “Throw her out of the metanovel,” my inner critic said. “No,” I said. “Are you going let her push you around?” my inner critic asked. “Are you going to let your inner critic push you around?” Mom asked. Things were rapidly becoming complex. “Do I have to decide right now?” I asked them both. “Yes,” said my inner critic. “Whatever,” said Mom. Whatever. When mom said ‘whatever’ sometimes it meant “Either choice is fine. Do what you want.” And sometimes, usually accompanied by the face, it meant something quite different. The face combined the expression of someone sucking a lemon with an exaggerated look of non­ chalance. The face meant Mom was pissed. “What’s wrong, Mom?” We’d say, as soon as we saw the face. “Nothing,” she’d answer, and double down on the face. “Really, Mom, what’s wrong?” “Nothing.” And more of the face. “You’re procrastinating,” Mom said gently. “Maybe,” I said. “Procrastination comes from fear,” Mom said. “Didn’t you read that in one of those psycho­ logy books you told me about? You did read that somewhere, didn’t you?” “Maybe,” I said. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies “That’s why you’re going include the stories about your fear in your metanovel,” Mom said. “It will help you.” “I don’t have any stories of fear in the metanovel,” I said. “It’s not that kind of a book.” “You will,” Mom said. “Trust me. I’m your mother. I know these things.” “I can hardly wait to find out what happens next,” my inner critic said. Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for D*mmies