Edward: Dancing on the Edge of Infinity

EDWARD: DANCING ON THE EDGE OF INFINITY

by

BRUCE TAYLOR

Produced by ReAnimus Press

Other books by Bruce Taylor:

The Infinite Tears of Pablo Azul

Kafka's Uncle and Other Strange Tales

Kafka's Uncle: The Unfortunate Sequel

Kafka's Uncle: The Ghastly Prequel

Tales from the Good Ship Kafkabury

Alleymanderous and Other Magical Realities

Magic of Wild Places

Mountains of the Night

© 2017, 2007 by Bruce Taylor. All rights reserved.

First Printing/originally published by Volga Publishers, Moscow

http://ReAnimus.com/authors/brucetaylor

Cover Art by Heidi Lampietti

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

DEDICATIONS

INTRODUCTION

STATEMENT OF LIABILITY AND CONDITIONS REGARDING THIS MANUSCRIPT

PREFACE

UMBRA

OF PARADES, AVENUES, AND AFTERWARDS

OF HEARTS, SOULS AND STRAWS

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND

EDWARD AND THE RAINBOW

VENUS OF THE SWAMPS

THE HALLWAY OF INFINITE WONDER

EDWARD AND THE THESPISCIANS

SPACESUIT

DANCING ON THE EDGE OF INFINITY

NOW SHE CAME LIKE ONE HELL OF A WIND

THE HAUNTING

IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE AND NOT DOING A HELL OF A LOTorIN THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE, AND NOT TOO SURE WHAT TO DO

EDWARD AND HIS ALIEN (OH MY!)

WARNING:

FIVE-OH-SEVEN PACIFIC STANDARD DREAMTIME

Things To Do List, Part II

THE SWORD

APPENDIX

NOTES ON FOOTNOTES

READER'S NOTES & COMPLAINTS:

About the Author

DEDICATIONS

To the memory of childhood friends—I’ll never forget your friendship; the world is magic; thanks for the spells.

To a certain lady with brown hair and brown eyes way back in ’66, thanks for the love. I still think of you and wish you well.

To Diana Dain, Marilyn Holt, Clifford Wind, Mary Choo, Petra, and Ginger who, after being involved in some way or other with this manuscript—are still talking to me.

To the memory of the late Marie Edwards.

To Pippin Sardo for her dedication and tireless work on this novel. And thank you, Roberta Gregory, for your fine work and suggestions.

To the staff of 5 West B (the old Harborview Five Center) at Harborview Hospital, Seattle—you folks do work miracles; thanks for your love, patience and compassion; if I knew how it was going to be when I first started working there, I’d have made the same decision. I’m impressed and I salute you.

Thanks to John Bradshaw for your courage, humility and grace. Your book, Homecoming, is utterly astonishing and elegant.

One person can make a difference! Thank you Philip Slater for writing the books The Pursuit of Loneliness and Earthwalk. Saving the planet begins with these magnificent books. Bravo! Mr. Slater! Bravo!

To Black Elk, of Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt. I wept when I read that book; if there is a world beyond this one, I pray I may meet your spirit.

To Karel Capek: so funny, so tart, so inspiring. War with the Newts in style and content is masterful. Mr. Capek, can I be your incarnation? Please? Huh? Huh?

And, to the world: Here. This is for you. Here, world of pussycats, flowers, women and men, greatness and horror. Here world, of living, dying, pettiness and nobility, with laughter and loving, hurt and despair. Here, world, remember the words of Shakespeare, The world dances in laughter and tears. Here, world: I give this to you, a part of my dance. I hope you like the music. And thanks. I am glad to have been a part of it. Such a place this is; such a world! So many people. Oh, it’s gonna be hard to leave. But I’m glad to leave this book behind. Here, world: this is for you.

INTRODUCTION

Intertexted. Counternarrative. Crossplotted.

Literary genres and subgenres are conversations. Shouting matches between writers, some of them living and some of them dead. Voices echo down the ages, answering to the unknown author of The Epic of Gilgamesh, to holy Moses and J and the redactor and the rest of the Bible’s editorial board, to Homer’s wine-dark prose, to Virgil, all the way to the call-and-response of modern day science fiction and fantasy.

In this living, swirling mass of dialog and dialectic, some writers still manage to stand alone. Like a street corner prophet shouting signs of the Apocalypse and crooked stock tips in the same breath, Bruce Taylor is one of those literary Unitarians. His prose is as distinctive as his appearance: a lithe, lean man in a travel-worn ice cream suit and top hat who perpetually seems to have unfolded himself from the steamer trunk of someone’s imagining.

Taylor tells stories like a card trick emerging from the fast shuffle of bitten nails and sly, smiling patter. He plumbs the depths of biography, allegory and hagiography with a charming lack of self-consciousness. Edward is as real as your memory of last year’s breakfast and as strange as the Green Men behind the wheel of a monstrous SUV. All of it brought to the page with a knife-edged styling and a post-modern sense of structure that would keep a seminar full of MFA students cross-eyed for a month.

Subversion. Inversion. Perversion.

Reveling in the name of Mr. Magic Realism, Taylor pursues difficult themes and topics in his work. Edward the man is just that—a man—but Edward the book isn’t afraid of anything. Infused with both a psychotically persistent optimism and a powerful sense of indignation at the abuses of both authority and life in general, this book is a road map to the awakening of the American mind.

I might say he’s a leftist, but that would be to badly misrepresent Taylor’s politics. I might say he’s a surrealist, but that would too simply label Taylor’s aesthetic. I might say he’s a humanitarian, and there I would be right. His passionate conviction bleeds through his work, staining the words with a post-hippie samizdat leavened with heartfelt compassion.

Edward is Steal This Book, The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull for this decade, written by the love child of Tom Robbins and Philip K. Dick. Read it with an open mind and willingness to be folded into a world you might not understand or trust, but which will reward you.

Patience. Persistence. Results.

Is Edward his masterwork? I should hope not, if only because I expect much more from Taylor in the years to come. Is it a statement? Surely—apocalyptic shout and investment advice rolled together in eighty thousand words of peribiographical speculation and moral philosophy. Or perhaps Edward is a fun read, a slice of life that you can fold around you for a few shining hours.

What more do you want from a book? Quit paying attention to me and read Edward.

Jay Lake

Portland, OR

STATEMENT OF LIABILITY AND CONDITIONS REGARDING THIS MANUSCRIPT

WARNING: The authoritarial viewpoint of this book is Third Person Obnoxious. The author is constantly intruding into the narrative flow, making jokes and bad puns. If you suffer from seriousness, depression, Hemingway Objectivitis and the No Fooling Around Syndrome, do not, I repeat, DO NOT read this book. You will lose control and the Monsters From the Id* will leap out and destroy you and this civilization.+ People with diabetes, epilepsy, heart failure, cleft palates, lupus, vaginal itch, PMS, genital warts, mumps, chickenpox, catarrh, lazy eye, headaches and other ailments of the human condition should not read this manuscript without notifying their attending physician. Symptoms may get worse.# Also, persons suffering from Squinty Eyesight Syndrome may need to rest eyes occasionally due to the scandalous number of footnotes. END OF WARNING.

Proceed at own risk.

v~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~v

* Forbidden Planet, I thank you, but sometimes monsters can turn into pussycats. It may take a thousand incarnations and out of the body experiences for it to happen, but it does happen. Too bad the Krell couldn’t stick around long enough to figure it out. [return]

+This is bad? [return]

#They might also get better. [return]

^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^

Edward sayeth the Way of All Being (a soft and furry sentiency that runs through all, and appears in Edward with a sense of Swift Divinity, like a beam of light on roller skates), Go forth and adjust the antidifibulium with the sonosinclastic Ergophoblotern and math the chronodimensulator adjusted with perfection to the anti-delleriumum phonoplasticulator—

Huh? replieth Edward.*

v~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~v

* Author’s note: Edward is born into an incomprehensible world, but finds, nonetheless, great humor and irony in all of this, for, as he grows older, he discovers that everyone around him thinks that the world really is comprehensible. He knows this is an illusion and—he smiles.

^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^

PREFACE

(to the forward to the backward)

Welcome to the Book of Edward, etc. One thing you may notice about these stories¹ is that they are footnoted.² This is not meant to be a distraction, but rather a helpful way of squeezing in all sorts of extra information that, if left in the narrative, would be expository lumps³ of material that get in the way. The idea behind the footnotes is that you can cruise through the narrative and read the footnotes later, or you can pause, in a leisurely manner, and enjoy the footnotes as something like existential snacks in the main course of the story.

v~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~v

¹Or chapters, since this collection of stories is meant also to give the reader, if you will, a novel sense or a larger picture of this character, Edward. [return]

²Yes, you noticed that the footnotes have already started. Many thanks to Karel Capek and his book, War with the Newts, for such an entertaining idea. The book, by the way, is a wonderful excursion into the Byzantine mind of Capek and figure if it worked for him, why not me? Besides, America is absolutely crazy for footnotes and obscure facts*—like everyone is just waiting to challenge you on every statement you make in the quest for some Absolute Truth, or at least a clearing away of the film of mud that has caked and dried on the opaque glass of reality (somewhat disconcerting to those who like to think that some metaphysical clarity actually exists beyond the hallowed truths of birth, life and death). [return]

*That’s the only opinion I can formulate after writing Godknowshowmany papers in college, or maybe (and I suppose this is the real truth of the matter) for at least four years, people actually have—or try to have—their facts based in some kind of Objective Reality, as if somehow the mere choice of what they choose to see comes from an objective viewpoint. One can only wonder what objectivity really is, given all the fudging of data that occurs, from scientific studies to non-biased political polls. In all this quest for objectivity, maybe what can best be said is that there is an effort being made for at least a little fairness in considering both sides of a question, depending on which side of the question your subjective bias is weighing. [return]

³An example of an expository lump: Gosh, William said, who was named after his father, Sir William Mensly, Chief Operator of the Observatory in the Province of X, a place long known for its many brilliant men of science who came to the area after being considered renegades of Theology in the medieval ages, that’s really amazing. [return]

^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^

BUT—this structural cleverness, revelry, mayhem and whimsy doesn’t really begin until the second chapter because I, like all good and well-intentioned authors, have to give you a bit of background with the first part of the story, which simply stands alone, unadorned, unfootnoted. BUT! A bonus! The first story (or chapter) is in first person, so you can actually get into the character of Edward! Yes! You can, for a few minutes and a few pages, see the world right through his eyes, experience the world through his senses—feel the wind as he feels it, smell fragrances as he smells them, see through him the blue of sky, hear the rush of water of a creek and taste cooked trout. THEN the story switches to third person and a more distanced (at times) and objective (sometimes) view of this character, Edward. And in the second part of our story, (cont’d on page 21)

UMBRA

I remember how it was when I looked inside myself and saw Mars, saw the broad canals, the white, tall cities sharp against blue-black sky and lush, rambling vegetation spreading far and long. That’s the way I thought it was in 1956 when I was nine. And my best friend in the world, Roy, whom I had known for years, he and I rode our bikes on a store’s asphalt parking lots beneath the blue-black sky of a summer evening. Roy stopped and rubbed his crewcut head. What’s that orange thing in the sky?

I was breathing hard from pedaling a red, one-speed bike over asphalt. That—that’s Mars.

Gee, it looks big.

(I had said the same to my thirteen-year-old brother. He was tall, wore glasses and was really smart, and I envied yet resented him for that. But when he explained what opposition was, I liked him a lot because he explained it in a way that made me feel like his equal, not like his little kid brother in a dirty tee-shirt and zipper half-mast.)

Uh... I had to think what my brother, Cliff, had said. It’s big because it’s in oppa—opposition.

Roy looked at me with grey, uncertain eyes.

Opposition. Means Earth and Mars are real close.

Yeah?

Yeah.

What’s Mars like?

My father had just bought me a big picture book of Mars and I had seen the pictures, but read little text because I was too busy playing. But I liked the pictures of canals, wide and blue with water under the dark blue sky: pictures of the cities and what a Martian looked like.

It’s a neat place, I said, Martians have built canals. There are seasons, plants. Has polar caps, cities.

Yeah? He looked up again at the planet. How do you know?

Got a book. Tells all about it.

Yeah?

Yeah.

You wanna ride bikes some more?

Mars also has days like ours.

Huh. He looked around. Are we still sleeping in your back yard tonight?

And Mars, the color of a fat, ripe peach, hung large in the sky.

Later, when Roy was scrunched down in his sleeping bag like a larva bunched in a dark cocoon, I lay on my back and looked at Mars and the Martian was tall and slender; his features catlike with large, yellow gentle eyes. I met him as I stood on the rock-lined canal.

Hello, he said. I’m Umbra.

Hi, I said. I’m Edward.

Welcome, he smiled. Ah, his yellow eyes, so alert; the dark, narrow pupils vertical. How are you?

Okay, I said. Umbra put his arm about my shoulders. His fur was light brown and when the sunlight was just right, little rainbows appeared in it.

Would you care to go for a swim? asked Umbra.

I nodded. I took off tee-shirt, jeans, and we swam in sparkling water, surprisingly warm and deep. Afterwards, we rested on warm rock lining the canal. The wind was warm, sweet and rich with fragrance similar to a combination of rose and honeysuckle; the sky, a deep blue; and nearby, the city of Syrtis Major: how white, how tall the spires against the incredible sky.

He talked. He talked about many things. I told him about my vacation and what I was doing and he smiled—I felt something and Flak, our big white and black pet cat was licking my hair. The morning sun was warm and I reached and held Flak close to me and my world was filled with the cat’s rumble. It closed its big, alert eyes and my mother came over with daisies in one hand and a full basket of raspberries in the other.

Roy sat up, squinted in the sunlight and sneezed. The entire world was clear and sharp as if all existed in a strange dimension of intensity—oh, Lord! The grass, leaves—vivid and bright green! The cat escaped, leaping, and with tail high, dashed about the yard, only to stop, lick his front paw, then walk sedately away in the sunlight. My mother said, How did you boys sleep?

All right, I said.

Well, breakfast is ready for both of you.

Roy smiled, a little self-conscious, but grateful. He crawled out of his sleeping bag; rolling it up, he said, What do you want to do today?

Let’s go fishing. Hollow Woods.

Yeah!

And after breakfast, carrying collapsible fishing poles and a can of disgruntled worms, we set out. We talked little, climbed a hill. I pointed. Roy looked. We stared at the mass of Mt. Rainier, white and shining. Roy pointed. The Olympic Mountains were blue, ragged, snowy, looking transparent like jagged pale blue glass.

Roy sighed. Jeez. Then he looked curious. Does Mars have mountains?

No, I said. Hills, maybe. Mostly vegetation, canals and Martians.

Jeez. That’s too bad. I don’t think I wanna go there.

I do. At least for a while.

We started down into a valley. How long does it take to get to Mars? asked Roy, kicking at rocks with tennis shoes that had seen better days.

I dunno. A year?

The shadows of the trees were dark, the air cool; the wind hushed through maples, alders and cedars. Before long, we came to a creek, to water so clear that somehow the bottom of the creek seemed but an inch—not a foot—from the surface of water. We were quiet as we walked, listened to the slipping-slapping water, looked through a forest of shade, amazed at the apparent infinity of trunks, limbs, leaves. We studied vine maples, fished and caught nothing. After a while, we ate our lunches of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, overturned a log, saw an orange salamander scramble. We built a dam on the stream and were hard pressed to keep it strong; in building it, we disturbed a crawdaddy. And finally, sitting on a log that crossed the creek, I leaned back against an upright branch and closed my eyes and Umbra looked overhead to Phobos and Deimos tumbling in the sky, and appeared sad.

He stared at the moons. Sometimes, he sighed, sometimes it is so hard.

I shook my head. What’s hard?

He closed his yellow eyes. Enjoy, he murmured, enjoy, for it is madness and eloquence all at once...

What?

He continued to watch the moons. Oh, Mars, he whispered. He shook his head, then looked down. Forgive me, he said, embarrassed. Forgive me. Then he stood. Come, let us go to the city.

I put on my pants and my tee-shirt, but not my shoes because I liked to feel the warmth of the rock that lined the city side of the canals. I kept thinking how much Roy would like to ride bikes here. Then we entered the city of Syrtis Major. It was so bright, clean; the towers so elegant and tall. All I could say to Umbra was, Gee.

You like the city?

I nodded. It was gay and wonderful; we explored shops and saw the peculiar goods from Mars: ancient sea shells from a vanished ocean in Hellas. You mean the ocean is gone? I said. I could not imagine such a thing.

Umbra nodded slowly; there was something very sad in his eyes. He sighed, Yes, the ocean is gone. He tried to smile.

Teas from Arcadia. Fruits from Elysium. Fossilized plants. Umbra picked up a fossil, studied it tenderly.

Don’t these plants live any more? I asked, looking at the rock.

Umbra shook his head. Many plants don’t live any more. Gently he put the stone down as though it was fragile and delicate and Roy said, Hey, wake up. I think it’s time we went home.

Oh, I shook my head. Catch anything?

No. He laughed; it was not the fish we were after, it was simply being there, amidst trees, water, air and sky. It was with reluctance we headed home, slowly measuring our footsteps against long shadows of a hot afternoon. And when we neared home, I said, You coming over later?

Roy shook his head. No. Something’s going on with the family tonight. Gotta stick around.

Maybe tomorrow?

Yeah.

We parted and waved.

After dinner, clouds began to cover the sky. Later, lightning split the grey; thunder crashed and boomed. I did not see