*This is a new novel I’m currently working on. So far I have around 20,000 words down. I have an idea of where I’m going…but not exactly. Here is chapter 1. I’m wondering if people like it or not, whether it’s holding your attention, what’s working and what’s not, etc. Feel free to comment. Half is free, second half is paywalled. If you want to read each chapter (and a lot of my other posts), go paid for $35/year. (I believe you can even pay a bit less and it’ll accept that.) Or you can use your free paid preview option. Please vote on the poll below regarding the book! Happy reading.
HEAT
A Novel
~
1.
What did he really think of the world? That was the essential question, the true quagmire. Was it a mass of heaping brown shit, or something less sad and sinister, something more relatable and lovely and joyful?
Donovan didn’t know. For a moment he thought, I don’t care. But really that wasn’t true. Sitting on his old beige couch—covered in pee stains from his cats and a variety of dots from colored highlighters he used while reading his many books—he reached his left hand over to his mug of coffee, the white mug with a “D” printed against in thick black, and lifted it across a short space to his mouth, sipping slowly. The dark-Colombian brew tasted sour and gorgeous, exploding against his taste buds like some spectacular fire.
It was 7:00 in the morning, exactly, on the nose; he knew this by gazing across his living room to the microwave with the green digital numbers which told him so. He was alone, as always. In the lower unit of a duplex he’d just started renting in Portland, Oregon, a state he did not know much about, and a city he felt he didn’t quite belong in.
It's all a long, complex story.
And there was the woman, of course, who owned the bookstore. Jeanine. She was older—Donovan was only 32—and had owned the store for five or six years. He’d walked into the place two weeks back, asking for a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and she’d obliged him happily with an ancient, paperback, dogeared copy in the center of the store. The place was tiny, maybe 300 square feet, but there surely must have been thousands of titles. Old classics. Used and new. The 19th century Russians. Everything 20th century. A small smattering of contemporary 21st century literature—was this actually literature or was it feckless ideology?—and a solid nonfiction section including memoir, biography, self-help and how-to. The store was called Dusty Book Corner.
Jeanine was Black, or maybe half Black half white, attractive, tall—awkwardly, taller than him—and wore tight black jeans, white high-top Converse, jean jackets, white loose blouses, and a little makeup. She might have been late thirties, possibly as old as 40. Dark curly hair bobbed above her shoulders. She reminded him vaguely of the writer Zadie Smith. He’d gone back into the store perhaps four times over the past five weeks; each time they’d chatted amicably, smiling and laughing often, for maybe 15-20 minutes. He did notice a ring on her finger. As if that had ever stopped him. (Another complication.)
Donovan set down the coffee, wiping his chin gingerly. Sometimes a tiny spattering of coffee juiced into his thick brown beard and he’d wipe it away. His beard was too long again, probably an inch thick or close. He needed to buzz it down. Not shave it, he never did that; hadn’t done that for a decade. Just buzz it down with the head-buzzer. He liked a little scratchy hair left.
Slowly, he stood up and yawned, screeching as he hurled his arms out into a wide V. More coffee, he thought. Then he’d get moving with his day. He was a novelist writing no novel, a book editor editing a book he didn’t want to edit (a semi-memoir semi-explanatory book about a PhD professor’s journey into researching, studying and teaching Quantum Physics) and a man living a life he didn’t particularly want to live.
He’d left his native Manhattan—where he’d been born and raised—two months prior in order to “get out of the city.” Why Portland? Good question. He had a friend—now ironically no longer here—who lived in Portland and had convinced him to make the westward move. Why not? What else was he doing in New York but going on terrible online dates—they never looked like the photos on their profiles—reading biographies on Nabokov, walking feverishly around Central Park and Midtown just to get out and walk, trying to write The Great American Novel, or, more accurately The Decent or even Just Workable American Novel, and feeling generally bored and alone, spending way too much money on rent each month in a fourth-floor walkup on East 75th and 2nd Ave.
And so, even though the friend of his in Portland was himself leaving the city in three weeks, Donovan said Screw It and decided that life was a risk and Why Not and so he cleared out his little shotgun apartment (classically, absurdly tiny bedroom, bathroom, everything), broke his lease two months early (he could be irrational sometimes, and money was nothing more than symbolic) sold as much of his unnecessary stuff as he could, boxed the rest and Fed-Ex’d it, went out with his few literary friends at a bar on 7th Avenue, and took an Amtrak train (not a plane, mind you) across the country to Bridge City or Rose City or Puddle Town, any of the many nicknames for Portland, where things were better than in 2020 and 2021 but where homelessness, crime and drugs were still issues to be reckoned with.
He held his coffee mug, again filled with Colombia, the mug hot and lovely against the softness of his palm. He cherished that feeling, heat against flesh. The rich aromatic scent of hot Colombian brew; earthy, deep and thick. He liked heat, all kinds of heat: Physical heat, symbolic heat, romantic heat, inner heat. Donovan possessed a rich inner life, a life made up on billions of atoms of curiosity. He wanted to know everything about a person, especially himself. He supposed this was why he wrote novels (or tried to); he felt like an anthropologist attempting to discover a new, rare species (his fellow man).
It was funny, him being in Portland, but not much more than his having lived in New York City. It was his politics, and his philosophy. He described himself as a “free and independent thinker,” which he knew most progressives in contemporary times immediately identified as either a closeted Republican or some sort of weird Libertarian type who was just as awful. Really, he was neither. He’d voted Democrat all his life.
And yet, he appreciated facts, reality, and, especially, nuance. He liked leaning into versus away from complexity. He was a novelist: How could he not? He knew how complicated human beings were because he was one. He’d been studying himself all his life, of course. (In both a self-absorbed and objective way.) Distraction had never been his thing. Not with iPhones, alcohol, or even sex. He wanted to face, look at, push against reality, the gritty axiomatic substance of Death.
Who was Donovan Templeton? He’d asked himself that question many times. A man who’d grown up in privilege—not because he was white but because his family had money—in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the large apartment on East 87th and Lexington, in that weird surreal area where there was gorgeous beauty mixed with, only eleven or twelve blocks north, the rugged toughness of East Harlem. And so, a rich white boy of the upper-class, he’d nevertheless seen some things growing up as a kid. And he’d had some experiences.
He remembered one morning, around 10am on a Sunday in mid-March. He must have been about 10. Early 1990s. He and his friend Jake were strolling along Lexington Ave, just passing 98th Street. It was cool out, but sunny, not a cloud in the sky. He remembered the floral scent of spring in his nose, the taste of that morning’s pancakes still juicy on his tongue, a few teeny bits stuck in his teeth. He and Jake were lazily talking about W. H. Auden, the famous British poet they’d been studying in English class the day before. They laughed and talked quietly. No one was around; the street, somehow, was empty. A lot of folks were in church, especially up here. He knew that.
But then a gaggle—there were four of them if he recalled correctly—of Black kids from Harlem were suddenly walking towards them, coming from the north, around 100th Street. Jake looked up and eyed Donovan. Donovan swallowed and the two comrades seemed to communicate silently, without using language. It somehow seemed too late for that. Instinctively, it was as if they understood two things at once: 1. That they would look like cowards if they turned around now; and 2. They were afraid but weren’t going to show it.
At the northeast corner of 99th Street the two groups met.
The Harlem boys were a little bit older, twelve, maybe thirteen. Two were their size, two were a little bigger. They all wore the same outfit, baggy jeans, Nikes, backwards baseball caps. They looked like all kids of any race, including white, who were “lower-class,” a word Donovan knew even back then because he’d heard his parents using it. His folks, he grasped, were class-warriors.
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