by James Phelan
How?
Don’t die.
It’s that easy?
She doesn’t answer.
I say: Forgive me if I don’t believe you.
Yeah. Great. Do that.
What?
Be like that.
What?
I know? You left me, remember!
Did I?
I thought about it. Did she? Ultimately?
We stood at that intersection near Broadway. I was ready to run.
I take a final look at my friends. Anna is looking directly at me—has it always been that way? Her back to that familiar storefront. This is the place. This is where we say good-bye.
You sound sure of yourself, she says.
I’m remembering, I say.
Oh. Right.
Yeah.
Change it.
I can’t.
Change it.
Change this?
Why not? It’s your memory.
Why not? Because it made me who I am. Change this, those memories, what do I have left? What’s the point of living if we just make it up?
Don’t we? Make it up?
I suppose. But I don’t want to change it, not this, not now. It brought me here.
Where? Where did it bring you?
I look around.
Here, I say. I’m at Central Park Zoo. I am asleep. In a minute, I may be dead, but my sleeping self does not know that. There are other figures in the room. Sleeping, under blankets, forms of life; love.
Look, Anna says. It could be us.
No, I reply. I can no longer see Anna. I hear her voice, I watch myself and the three other figures in the room sleep, knowing it was only once, so briefly, like that. I know this scene as clearly as I know anything. I am there.
Be careful, Anna says.
It hurts.
Everybody hurts. Just hold on.
To what?
We are on a subway, the last car. I see a fireball, in the tunnel behind us, chasing us. It’s hot and bright and black. I am on my stomach, my world a mess around me. I close my eyes. It’s easier. I know what follows, what I’ll see, and I don’t want to see that again. I close my eyes and I wait. It’s coming. It’s hot as hell and it’s bright as the dawning sun and I know now that I will never wake up. I am joining my friends.
The final thing I hear is a voice, female, it could be my mother’s, Anna’s, Mini’s, Rachel’s, Felicity’s, Paige’s . . . but it’s not. It’s loud and it’s close and I hear it again:
“Jesse?”
The nurse checked me over. Doctors hovered. I could see through the clear plastic wall. The soldiers heading out. The sun was setting and in the coming darkness I could see fire, the flames enormous, there was an explosion that shook the ground. The sounds of screaming and crashing and then everything went . . .
From hot to black.
I’d miss this place, the cold, the people, the peace and quiet. Back home, it would be hotter than I could remember and life would have a different rhythm. Here, my friends would remain, rebuilding and getting on with life, laughing and crying as their world was built again.
“Jesse?”
later . . .
“Jesse?”
I looked at the psychiatrist’s clock. There were four in the room, so wherever the head-shrinker chose to look she could be sure of the kind of punctuality that probably mattered once. Outside it was dark, but the blinds were drawn, and the overhead light flickered for a moment, then burned steady. It had been almost an hour, so I was sure our time was about up. She’d listened, mainly, as I’d talked, but had followed that up for the past minute or so with silence as her note-taking caught up.
I’d been watching her write, lost in it, didn’t notice she was trying to engage me in more conversation. “Sorry?”
“I said,” she repeated, she didn’t sound annoyed—more a professional coaxing—“that’s quite a story.”
I fingered the gauze above my eyebrow.
“Three friends who carried you through—”
“Then I let them go.”
“Then you let go,” she said. “Then you made three new friends—”
“And I had to leave them, to see what else was there.”
“What happened to Felicity and her brother, Paul?”
“They’re fine. They got helped out by a convoy not an hour later.”
“And Caleb?”
I smiled. “They worked up the antidote and by the next night they were spraying the entire city with it. Caleb was where I’d left him, and they got him out. He’s—he’s doing okay, as well as any of them.”
She sat silently, made a further short note in my file. The silence went on; clearly I was meant to fill it.
“What do you want me to tell you?” I asked. “That Caleb turning into a Chaser and disappearing from my life was some kind of motif for—what?—my mom leaving?”
She watched me, silent, still.
“Or maybe you think that the three friends from the subway are my family? That each symbolizes someone?”
“Does it?”
I shook my head. I didn’t think that. Did I? Hell, you could make something from nothing if you looked at it hard enough, right? Was killing that Chaser a killing of my former self, or a separation from my childhood? And I’d blamed Dave because I couldn’t admit to doing it? And what of Caleb, of not being able to kill him . . .
I stopped thinking, because she had got back to her note-making, creating her own conclusion to my story. It was comforting to listen to the sound of her pen scratching across the pages in the folder on her lap. She looked up at me, her eyes settling for a moment on my clenched fists.
I said, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Say what you need to.”
I looked around me, not exactly searching the walls for inspiration, but more as a distraction from her demands to drag more stuff from deep inside me—stuff that I’d left behind, or maybe hadn’t even begun to think of. On the wall to the right of the curtained windows, I noticed an old print, a poem titled The Tyger.
“What does that mean?” I asked her. “Why a ‘fearful symmetry’?”
“That?” she looked at it, smiled, looked at me. “What does it mean to you?”
I remembered how I parroted Felicity when I’d first met her, as I looked at this poster: a tiger walking under a tree, the handwritten poem’s verses separated by branches.
“Symmetry might have something to do with beginnings and ends, who knows?” I said. “I wonder, why a tyger? I mean, the spelling?”
“Maybe it’s not about a tiger, or T-Y tyger, at all.” She looked at me closely. “Maybe William Blake intended it as a metaphor.”
She went to her bookshelf and pulled out an old, much-read volume. The cover just tattered red cloth, faded. I thought of Caleb, who loved books. What would he make of this one? She flicked through it but she seemed to know what she was looking for. She handed the book to me, opened at the correct page.
The poem was sweet, simple, yet profound in some way.
“Really, a metaphor?”
“Most stories and poems are.”
I smiled at her. She was trying to catch me out. I liked it, this. Could stay all day, going round and round. I handed the book back to her.
“Reminds me of a Poe poem,” I said, “ ‘Alone,’ I think it’s called . . . The line that sticks with me, is Of a demon in my view.”
I looked at her. She sat and watched me, pen poised, expressionless.
“You have an idea what that demon might represent, don’t you?”
I nodded.
The doc asked, eager now: “What are you thinking about it?”
I closed my eyes.
“What do you get?” she coaxed.
It was a good question. I wanted to answer it privately before sharing it with the shrink. I thought about my friends, as if they were once again lined up in front of me, come to check that I was okay. You get friendships that never end�
��eternal, infinite, everlasting—whichever way you look at it.
“Sorry?” I said. Now I looked at her.
“What do you get?” she repeated. “From the Blake poem?”
I looked at the tree, its branches holding the weight of words.
“More than anything,” I said, “it makes me wonder if I’m the lamb or the tyger . . .”
“Does it matter?” She wrote as she spoke. “Do you need to be one or the other?”
I shook my head. She looked up at me and I waited for her to put the pen down.
“We’re all the same,” I said. “We’re all capable of anything, everything.”
She watched me.
I said, “What does it mean to me? It’s just art.” I tried to shrug it off. She didn’t need to know it all, did she?
“Just?”
“It means we’re alive. It means someone out there is thinking, creating, putting something down for us to ponder. To create empathy, if just for a moment—isn’t that great?”
I laughed, moved in my chair, leaned forward and, elbows resting on my knees, looked at my useless feet.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“No, Jesse. Go on. Tell me.” She tried another tack. “Okay, why not tell me about the poem that does mean something to you.” She nodded. “ ‘Alone.’ ”
“What do you want to know about it?”
“How about you start by reciting it for me.”
Was she serious? I hadn’t come here for a poetry recital. But I found the words easily enough, which was a surprise. I wasn’t sure how much stuff from my old life would come back to me, or if it would all seem like some kind of weird dream.
“It starts: From childhood’s hour I have not been, As others . . . as others were . . .”
I stopped. Stared at the floor, searching. Had I forgotten it? What else had I forgotten . . .
“I think I know that poem,” she said. “Want me to—”
“No. I remember it now, all of it.”
I smiled, lost in a memory.
She asked, “What is it?”
“It’s just, I get it now—it makes sense,” I said, seeing not the floor beneath me but a collage of memories playing out. Every one of them a keeper. “And all I loved, I loved alone . . .”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Jo, Mal, Ben, Chris, Jesse, Sam. Thanks to Mark, Lot, Raff, Kerry, Stephen. Thanks Tony and Natalie. Thanks to Em, Matilda, JJ, Andy. Thanks, Robothams. Thanks to all the readers who sent feedback. Thanks, friends, bloggers, fans. Indebted to Pippa, Steph, Josh, Jon, Sam, Karen. Thanks to all publishing, bookseller, and library staff involved.
Love to Nic.
FROM IDEA TO BOOK . . .
James Phelan on the conception of the Alone trilogy
When writing the first novel, Alone: Chasers, I wanted to create a story that was entertaining while being something that would stay with readers long after they’ve put down the book. The ending has proved a great vehicle for that, and for stimulating word of mouth, judging by the feedback I receive through my website. The initial concept was to write something that showed both the good and the bad that can emerge from human nature in the face of catastrophe, and it gives us hope that even in the worst situations, there are those who will remain strong. I like to think that as we finish the book and go back over what has occurred, the reader will be aware that there is always choice and that “survival” is possible.
Prior to writing Chasers, I’d just written a dark thriller about the oil-related corruption in Nigeria and extraordinary rendition, and I was about to delve into the sequel that was set against the water crisis in India. I had really enjoyed talking to school groups with my first two Fox novels, and felt that the tone of that series was moving away from those readers. I had some meetings with publishers to discuss some options of writing a series for teens, wrote some samples (of what they wanted, which was boring, stock-standard boy-spy type material, kind of Fox-lite), and then one day, I thought: “what if everything comes tumbling down?” So, I started writing Chasers and was swept away with it so much so that sixteen days later I sent the finished manuscript to my agent.
But let’s go back a bit. The idea germed when I was in high school, after I’d read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a story that has never left me. That book gave me the concept of how a teenager would go in a war zone and explore how a character coped with her alone time—by communicating with imaginary friends.
At the time, I thought about incorporating this kind of concept into my character Lachlan Fox, who suffers from PTSD, as this was the first novel I started when I was fifteen (which eventually became FoxHunt, the first in a thriller series published in Australia) but I felt it didn’t work with the genre. It’s been on the back burner ever since, and I finally found a way of writing this literary technique into Chasers. While the three friends of Jesse’s are not “imaginary” (as is Tyler Durdan in Fight Club), nor are they characters from a book (as is Anne Frank’s coping device), these friends of his were “alive,” once.
So I had that and the idea that the first book should examine the meaning of being truly alone, isolated, and preyed upon. I wanted to write something that shows us we all have the will we need to survive, whatever the personal circumstance we might bring to the reading, so I explored the story of Jesse via empathy through voice, circumstance, choice, and strong imagery (well, that’s the intention!).
I’m a total sucker for postapocalyptic stories—I think the situation is fraught with suspense and ripe for characterization and commentary. I wanted a narrative that would make the reader want to jump into the story and shape it themselves—a quick but gripping read, with a building of tension, so along the way the reader can’t help but think, “What would I do?”—and by the final chapter their ideas and assumptions are turned on their head as they rethink the story. Overall, I wanted to write a book that said some things about life, and as a piece of literature would be discussed and remembered by its readers. Anyway, the sum of all this is that I’ve created a novel that’s quite difficult to talk and take questions about, in public, inasmuch as tiptoeing about and not to give away the ending!
Writing the first draft was easy, like I said it was sixteen days of feverish work where the story just poured out, but then making sure I made the narrative work given that Jesse is alone from the prologue on. As a literary device I took away the speech marks when he’s “talking” with his friends, as those discussions were something of an internal soliloquy. I think I got away with that device by stating that the prologue and the body of the book was separated by a THEN and NOW. Only at one point in the body of the novel does Jesse speak aloud, and that’s to the infected boy at the East River. That was a key moment where he realized that these chasers are not all evil, where he develops real empathy with them, and realizes that we are too quick to judge others. Then, it’s not until the final line of the novel that Jesse has the courage to admit to himself, out loud, that he is alone. I designed that to symbolize that we know he will be okay, that he used his friends all this time to survive, and now he’ll be all right on his own—he let them go, and with that act he set himself free.
As the series progresses, he meets other survivors. Also, the narrative picks up with action and suspense, so that these three books form a macro-story structure of three acts of a larger picture. We also get some scientific explanations, e.g. the chemical agent of the attack gets a logical explanation. As to “who” perpetrated the attacks . . . well, we get plenty of clues, there’s speculation, and there’s an “official” explanation at the end of Quarantine, but ultimately that is something that I want left for the reader to decide. This is very much an allegorical series and I’m not sure if I want to bore anyone with that yet.... I’ll wait and see how it’s received and discussed at first, and I always rather a reader makes of the book what they will rather than me being didactic about meaning.
Anyway! Both excited and terrified,
Jesse soon realizes there may be worse things than being alone. He learns fast that you cannot count on everyone to be there for you all of the time, that you have to be independent or else you will most likely not survive if you were to lose everyone. Trust and fear are big themes within the story. Although we aren’t given details about the attack that has destroyed the city, I don’t think we need to know what caused it. We already know how wars start, and we are shown how it ends. Fear? Greed? Lack of trust? All that and more are explored in the relationships of characters throughout the series.
Jesse is a likable narrator, with a natural voice and a well-developed personality. It’s easy to sympathize with him based on his situation alone, but he is all the more admirable for refusing to give up even in the most desperate circumstances. He deals with his problems with intelligence and courage, but still has those moments of carelessness and fear that make him human. Readers will be on his side from the beginning, even as they struggle to imagine how they would feel in his place. Though his final triumph involves some loss, it’s clear he will persevere and find a way to survive on his own, which makes the ending satisfying.
The only research I did was in relation to Jesse’s psychological condition, and that involved reading books and articles and talking to my psychiatrist. The book has many elements from my own life, and I’ve been to the places that Jesse goes to and sees, albeit the Manhattan I know is still (mostly) standing. I see this as a YA crossover and not gender specific, although I was conscious of writing a story that young male readers would enjoy reading. I’m sure there are some good books being published out there with similar appeal, but to me there seemed to be heaps of straight-up action/adventure books for boys and not much else. Alone was my answer to that.
KTEEN BOOKS are published by
Copyright © 2011 James Phelan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Previously published in Australia by Lothian Children’s Books/ Hachette and in the United Kingdom by Atom Books.