Nameless

by Sam Starbuck

  "Why do you say that?" I asked. He looked out over the lake, the wind ruffling his hair.

  "When someone gives you a gift, and you throw it away, you don't usually get it back," he said. "I earned the power I had in Low Ferry but it was also something...special. Something people don't get very often. I didn't appreciate it. Just not using it would have been one thing, but I treated it -- myself -- like I wasn't enough for the world. Life teaches hard lessons." He fell silent, watching the cars move back and forth, watching the shallow waves break on the concrete barriers beyond.

  "What happened to Nameless?" I asked softly. He snorted.

  "It sounds stupid," he said. "I buried him. Out in the field below The Pines. It wouldn't work anymore, you know. None of it. Not the rain, not the snow, not the mask. I threw away all that power, and I got my life saved..." a shy grin for me, "...but that's all I got back."

  "That's a hell of a lot, Lucas. Your life."

  "I didn't used to think so," he said thoughtfully. "Things are different now."

  "That boy you used to tutor -- " I started, but I couldn't figure out how to say what I meant.

  "Is he angry?" Lucas asked.

  "No, he disappeared. About the same time you did."

  "Disappeared?" he asked, looking faintly worried.

  "Nobody knows where he went. I don't think he was...I don't know what he was, but he wasn't normal. Have you ever noticed you can't think of his name?"

  Lucas frowned, brow furrowing. I watched as the familiar sequence of emotions passed over his face -- concentration, confusion, forgetfulness.

  "What were we talking about?" he asked after a while. I shook my head.

  "Doesn't matter," I said, though it did. It mattered that I was the only one with a clear memory. Which meant that the boy had not necessarily been there -- the Waxwing had not always stood guard over the door to The Pines -- for the sake of Lucas. Some part of all that magic had been mine. "Have you seen your parents, since you came back?" I asked carefully.

  He looked rueful. "Couple of days ago. They tried to talk me into a clinic until I told them Marjorie gave me a job. Now I'm on an installment plan for paying off the hospital bill."

  "Pulling no punches," I said.

  "Must learn responsibility," he answered, managing to look amused and regretful at once. He glanced down and kicked against the cement a little. "So, is this how it's going to be? Polite and friendly?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't know what you want, Lucas, except that you wanted to run away from me."

  "No -- no," he said, giving me a hurt look. "That wasn't what I wanted. Christopher, you don't think that."

  "You left," I said. "You didn't tell me why, you didn't call me when you got to Chicago. Marjorie thought you didn't want me to know. If you want me to go back to -- "

  "I found the mask you made," he blurted, words running together. I stared at him. "You didn't even give it to me yourself. You didn't wait until I woke up."

  "I...didn't know how," I said, startled.

  "Welcome to the club," he replied. "I left because I was scared. Christopher, do you even understand what you did?"

  "I thought so," I said. "But then you left, so I didn't know. I didn't even know you'd found it. Half the time I thought I was crazy."

  "I'm so sorry," he said, and there was real regret in his eyes.

  "What did you do with it, anyway?" I asked. Slowly his face transformed -- sadness into a kind of secretive joy.

  "What do you think?" he asked, and reached up to the back of his head. I thought he was scratching it for a minute, and then he cupped his other hand carefully over his face. When he brought it down again there was that same shimmer in the air, a sense that the whole world was focused on the empty space in his palm.

  I looked up from the mask and saw his shoulders slumping inwards, his head automatically dipping, eyes now trained anywhere but my face.

  "Your heart," he said, which I hadn't been expecting. I looked down at his hand, where a mask no-one could see dangled by invisible ribbons. "It's healed, isn't it."

  "You should know," I said. "You did it."

  "I thought I might have, but I couldn't be sure. So...I gave you this thing, health, and the right to choose – even if you chose Low Ferry instead of Chicago," he said. "And you gave me this. I'm not afraid anymore. I'm...still me, but I'm not afraid."

  "So why run?" I asked gently.

  "I wasn't sure you'd want to see me the way I am now. You liked me the way I was."

  I almost laughed -- would have, if I hadn't spent the last two months grieving a loss, only to find it restored to me. "I like you, Lucas," I said. "I always have. It doesn't matter to me."

  "Good. Because then I don't have to wear it around you." He lifted his face a little, into the wind. "Would you come back to the city? No, you won't, will you," he said, before I could tell him.

  "Low Ferry is my home," I told him. "The city can't give me anything I want, not anymore."

  "Nothing?" he asked, still staring at the lake.

  "Well. I'd like to see that gallery show of yours," I ventured. "And hear what you did with the Friendly."

  "Yeah?" A faint smile.

  "Yeah. And you know me..." I grinned at him. "If I had a good reason to visit the city, it wouldn't be any trouble to come up a few times a month. If you wanted to see me, say."

  "I do," he said quickly. "Marjorie too."

  A couple of kids ran past through the park, trailed by a panting mutt of a dog, all wispy terrier hair and lolling tongue. Behind us, the fountain's central jet began to plume.

  "I love the city," Lucas said. "I love everything about it. I fit here. So...thank you."

  "My pleasure," I said, and meant it. How often do you get the chance to give someone a city? "Lucas...I have a train to catch soon. I need to go home. I'll come back, though. I'll stay longer next time."

  He smiled and finally, finally looked at me without the mask.

  "I'll meet you at the station," he said. "We can take the El from there. I can show you the gallery I'm going to be in."

  "That sounds fine. And – don't wear the mask," I added. "Not with me."

  His free hand brushed my wrist, tracing down over the scar on my left hand. His fingers, tangled up in mine, had paper-cuts on them from Marj's books, paint and plaster under the fingernails from his masks.

  "Nothing's perfect," I said. "Doesn't mean it can't be good. Right?"

  He lifted my hand and kissed the back of it, lips brushing the thin raised scars -- then turned and kissed me, like some kind of benediction.

  "Come back quickly," he said.

  "Of course," I replied.

  ***

  Darkness fell when I was still on the train, halfway between Chicago and Low Ferry. Outside the window the moon was rising. The stars were coming out bright and clear, thousands more than you can see in the overshadowing constellation of the city lights.

  An hour ahead of me lay home: my shop, my books, the village. In a week there would be Lucas waiting for me in Chicago, maskless, with a shy smile and a whole city to give back to me. He could come to Low Ferry again sometime, too – everyone would like to see him. He'd get to see summer in my little town.

  Happy endings are pretty rare, but I think that's because things don't really end very often. Time moves you forward regardless, and all you can do is choose where it takes you. There were plenty of things to worry about between Low Ferry and Chicago, but there wasn't anything I could do about them on the train. So, why bother?

  No endings, then – just happy moments, in-between places where life is bright and good. That was a lesson I had from Lucas, if I hadn't already had it from Nameless.

  I've always liked trains, anyway.

  I settled lower in the seat, closed my eyes, and slept.

  POSTSCRIPT:

  Talking With Twenty Five Hundred

  You have to want to write, I say, not to want to be a writer.

  -- Alex Haley

>   "Incunabula" is the term for, among other things, a book printed in the infancy of the printing press. It is perhaps most well known to readers of the late great Dorothy Sayers, whose hero Lord Peter was a collector of incunabulae. The word is fascinating to me: it implies a birth, an incubation, a step from the restriction of knowledge in enclosed communities to its expansion into the wider world. Books are power, and incunabulae symbolize a transfer of power to the masses.

  In the summer of 2008 I was playing with the concept of the "next incunabulae," the process of free dissemination of information on the internet. I was writing a story in which several characters are dropped into a super-library in the fifty-first century -- courtesy of Doctor Who, the show which invented The Library. One of the characters was about to go exploring and, being a lover of books, he wanted to look at new turning-points for literature:

  "Fine," Nicholas says. "If you need me I'll be in Extribuli."

  "Exwhat?" Donna asks.

  "Look it up!" Nicholas calls over his shoulder, wondering actually how many volumes the OED now runs to. Extribulum -- ex, out from; tribulum, a machine. The opposite of the incunabula. Works that exist in electrical form, at the cusp of the rise of the e-published book.

  At the time I was just messing around, not to mention using some truly terrible dog-Latin, but it did seem useful. It became a handy term and acquired a definition, as new words so often do. Extribuli, singular extribulum, are books published first on the internet -- not books created on a computer, as so many are now, but books whose first printing was entirely digital and which were only afterwards printed in hardcopy -- as some put it, "dead tree" -- version.

  About eight months after the term extribulum came into being, I dusted off an old fiction manuscript I'd written years before, gave it a brush-up, and decided to post it for public critique with the intent to eventually self-publish. I have some unique advantages over the average online talking-head in that I have a wide readership: according to my stats, about 2500 people read my online journal regularly, which means I am capable of asking for the view of a fairly diverse reading public without the fetters placed on a professional published writer. A professional, especially an established one, usually trusts an editor or a very small group of readers, and only gets to hear criticism from a wide and self-selecting readership after the book has been printed. Which must be very frustrating, really.

  Giving literature away for free and then expecting and embracing reader-criticism is not a tradition of any kind. It is not something that is systematic. It is not something that is done in the literary world. Why should it be? Most people who sell literature for a living can't afford to give it away for free. And to be honest it's not like I planned what happened when I began posting Nameless -- I just stumbled into it, but there it was. I wanted to share a story and see what everyone thought of it, and instead I opened up a dialogue with a conscious readership about structure and interpretation and the author-reader relationship, about how to rewrite a book based on the thoughts and feelings of readers. Throughout the process, people have said to me, isn't this weird? Have you ever seen anything like this? and I haven't.

  What we did when Nameless first went up wouldn't even have been possible before the internet, or if it was possible would have been heinously expensive. I don't know that a published writer has ever tried putting a "finished" work in front of the public and saying, "Tell me what's wrong." Very few writers have ever even attempted to overhaul a published work because of public criticism. Stephen King released an extended-cut of The Stand which unfortunately resulted in several bizarre anachronisms when he changed the dates in the book, and Marion Zimmer Bradley rewrote a book she published twenty years before, but those are exceptions and not quite the same. George Lucas may have revamped Star Wars, but I'm pretty sure he did it over the protest of his fans, not in response to them.

  With Nameless, I said from the start that this was a book I intended to publish, a completed book that I wanted feedback on. This gave people a mindset with which to approach it: they treated the story as a "real" book they wanted to discuss and pick apart as if they were reading it at a book club. They pulled no punches, and this is a better book because of it. I know I'm a measurably better writer than I was at the start.

  Chapter by chapter, people told me what was wrong -- sometimes something as small as a mis-spelled word, sometimes a major structural issue. I learned what I was doing right, of course, which is a heady sensation, but more importantly I learned where my weak points were. My dialogue to action ratio was off; my characterization sometimes suffered from a lack of depth, and my cryptic arcs weren't always sharp enough to draw a reader in at the start. The ultimate importance of the first chapter in a book has never been lost on me, but now I understand better how to build something immediate: not everyone is going to trust a writer long enough to get to the good stuff, and a relationship with the reader has to be forged very early.

  Criticism is not something you can accept wholesale, of course. You have to pick and choose, but your readers tend to know which way the wind is blowing. If a dozen people notice a single flaw, then it's not a single flaw, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. There is some give and take, and it's a wise child who knows when to listen, but overwhelmingly the advice has been good advice because it's readers giving it. Readers know what throws them out of a book or why they don't trust a character or theme.

  It takes a great deal of self-possession to undergo something like this. Even if they like your book, you are never going to please all of the people all of the time and if you try you will end up with a very bad book. Still, you still need to appreciate all viewpoints. You might not act on to what someone says, but you need to take it into account, process it, and thank them for it. They are offering you their honest opinion, which is a precious thing to a writer. Or should be.

  All of this requires control on the part of the writer: controlling a knee-jerk "but you don't get it!" reaction, controlling impulses brought on by reader-response, controlling the direction of the book and learning how to direct and manipulate a readership that is responding in real-time. I don't mean manipulation in a negative sense at all, but rather in the sense of guiding your readers along the path you've chosen, improvising and accounting for their unexpected reactions as you go. Every night I read over the notes I'd been given that day and prepped the next day's chapter of Nameless for "publication". Most nights I found myself rewriting significant portions of the new chapter or adding portions that had not been there before, because the story needed them. The readers needed them in order to follow where I was leading.

  I have come to learn that control is the most basic tool in a writer's skill set, but not just control of the prose. It seems to me that, as the gap between writer and readership widens, sensible self-control becomes more and more uncommon. Anne Rice has become infamous for refusing to accept commentary from her readers. Some writers have rejected the internet, as a whole, because it is so uncontrolled. I theorize that they do not have the patience or understanding to accept that the burden of responsibility for reader reaction is on them now, I theorize that they fear losing the illusion of control they have had because they are insulated from the wild, organic humanity of the digital community, but who really knows? What I know is that I have accomplished more by exerting control over my shallower impulses, both towards my readers and towards my writing, than I ever accomplished under the assumption that because I was a Writer I knew everything

  Ironically, it's hard to articulate how I feel about what happened with Nameless. People worried sometimes that I was hurt, that the criticism was crushing, but I didn't feel that way at all. I was too overwhelmed by what was happening, by what a unique experience it was for me. I felt like I was watching an extribulum come to life. Nameless was a book published online, destined for print but open to examination and feedback prior to its final incarnation. I was looking at another inching step into the future of publishing, where a real dialogu
e could go on between a writer and a reader and that dialogue, rather than a writer's monologue, could be what went into the final print.