Saturn in Retrograde I Prolog

Note: I wrote Saturn in Retrograde in 2004, in one white-hot week of insoiration. Back then, the subject of violence and mass-casualty shooting incidents was very rare. Over a decade later, it is, alas, all-too-common. This novel was based on a school shooting tragedy of the period. It has become, in our era, I feel a novel that was strangely prophetic. But, you'll have to decided. I plan on posting the various chapters seperately.

Prolog

Tanner Benjamin rolled around in bed and stared at the ceiling. Outside, a lightning storm seemed to have been imported from some classic Universal monster film. All that was missing was the manic presence of a Colin Clive, or the sepulchral, withered features of Ernest Thesiger. It was perfect nightmare weather, and that was what Tanner had been having. His dream, however, had been more than a dream; it had been a revelation.

Unfortunately, he had no idea how to put it all together, or what it really meant. But it was so damned eerie, he found sleep at this point to be impossible. It was as if he were connected to some vast, computerized intelligence. He could see the world (or at least his small portion of it) as if it were a form of diagram, or schematic. He realized, then, in the small hours of the morning, that all of life is interconnected in a strange way that is nearly, without the aid at least of some system of consciousness-expansion, impossible for the typical workaday mind to conceive. He closed his eyes. He was gone again, unexpectedly.

***

At precisely that moment, and that moment was either damned late or damned early depending on your perspective, two young men who had sold their souls away for bitter herbs and sickened bellies looked at their collection of pornographic DVD movies. They found it to be completely dissatisfying, and one of them remarked, “I wonder what it would be like to rape someone?” The other man, a tall, lanky man who was popular with young women, looked at him and said, “Why don’t you try it and find out?”

The two young men laughed.

***

Across town, Kevin Hickman was sitting in a bar by himself, wondering what had happened to his life. He hefted the glass to his lips, swilled down the dark, foul-tasting beer. It no longer held any sensation for him to drink. He had become numb, inside and out. It was honest addiction that kept him going.

“Hey man, you wanna come up to my place and smoke a joint?” The man sitting next to him was very drunk. He was a mental patient of Hickman’s acquaintance. A guy they called “Electric Jake” because of his brief, supposed, history of electro-convulsive therapy. The bar was nearly silent. Only a few tired souls dotted the respective benches of the great long wooden tables.

“Sure. Hell yeah. Let’s do it.”

Kevin finished his beer with one gulp, slid off the stool, and followed the smaller, swaying man outside. Outside, the decrepit storefronts that had seen so many businesses come and go over the years looked black and inviolate. It looked like they were keeping the secrets of the city at bay. Hickman followed the little man around the dark corner, down a block, past a waiting police officer, and then both men disappeared into a hole in the wall that led up a precarious, foul-smelling flight of stairs, into a veritable cubby with a bed and a toilet.

Home.

***

Several blocks away and closer to the bridge, in a little house that had seen far better days, Jill Lavender sat cross-legged on her couch, smoking a cigarette in the darkness of the night. Bruce had not bothered to come home. Bruce was staying out with his buddies more and more these days. He always told her she wasn’t his “mother.” But damn it, she was his lover, and it bothered her. And something else bothered her, too.

Something she had heard from a friend of hers. Little Lindsey was upstairs, no doubt snuggled away in the bosom of sleep. She loved the kid. She also felt damn guilty, too. Lindsey deserved a decent man to be her father. Unfortunately, Jill Lavender had had a habit of picking out shit heels to be her lovers, boyfriends, husbands. The habit had started in high school, with Lindsey’s biological father. She looked at the ridiculous TV programming. It was all infomercials at this hour. A very tanned, very aerobic-looking senior man was busy juicing different varieties of fruits and vegetable matter. She flipped the channel. Now, a highly-spastic individual wearing a purple Joker suit covered in question marks was telling her about the wonders of government grants. She wanted to bawl. She puffed at her long, skinny cigarette. The smoke curled into little clouds of noxious vapor in the cathode ray glare of the television. Maybe she should put in a video. Steel Magnolias, or something.

“Damn him,” she said to herself bitterly. “I’m still fairly young. I’m still good looking. Why does he want anybody else?”

***

Tanner Benjamin rolled and kicked furiously in his sleep. He could see it again, plainly. It was all interconnected. It was all a vast connection of different invisible life streams and time loops. His brain told him he was standing in the kitchen at Delcino's. “You better hurry your ass up man. It’s getting backed-up out there.”

Tanner moved at speeds human beings could barely comprehend. He filled endless racks with dirty dishes, slamming the mouth of the washer closed. The audible whoosh of the sprayer sounded like a hurricane drone in the theatre of his sleeping mind. He was alone in the kitchen. Where was everyone? He could see the waitress come in. He couldn’t see her face.

She didn’t seem to have a face. She walked away on incredibly grotesque, backward-facing legs. It looked as if she had traded legs with an obscure, featherless breed of giant bird. He wanted to vomit. He could feel slime in his soul. Suddenly, he heard the barking report of what sounded like a cannon. He rushed from the dish room, flinging open the door, and ran out into the maelstrom of the darkened bar. All that he could remember after that was blood. Terror. Screaming. And a body, floating like some elegant flower cast off into the ocean. How it crumpled.

It was a female body, so beautiful it made him want to weep.

He bolted upright in bed, sweat beading his form.

Outside, a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning illuminated the dull little room he called home. He got up from bed slowly, quietly, and slipped on his jeans.

***

The two young men who had sold their spirits stood outside in the sprawling backyard owned by the oldest man’s father. They watched the lightening play it’s magic upon the sky, and the trees swish, and dance, and shake in the wind. They could feel their own hideousness in the midst of this grand display.

“Kyle?”

“What?"

“We are going to hell, aren’t we?”

He considered.

The lightning threw a jagged spear across the heavens.

“Yes.”

“Do you care? I mean, that we’re damned?”

Pause.

“No.”

“Good. Because if you don’t care, well, then, that makes it easier for me. Because I know we have to do this now, man. I can feel it out here tonight. Can you? I can feel the presence.” It seemed, for a moment, like the two men could see an infernal, black shape move in the trees and bushes. They fancied it might be the Devil himself. At that same moment, Lindsey Lavender put her little face on her arm and began weeping in her sleep. *** Secluded in a tiny foul-smelling cubby that hadn’t been cleaned within recent memory, Kevin Hickman and “electric” Jake passed a very thick, very powerful joint between each other. Hickman had been drinking all night. He looked as if he smelled as bad as he felt. The lightening and wind conspired to cast the old building they sat in to it’s heels. Kevin looked over his shoulder, out the ancient window pane, and said, his voice the sound of dragging tires, “I hope your apartment makes it through the storm, man.” Electric Jake had slumped into a ratty armchair that looked as if it had been pulled from the dumpster of the local Salvation Army, and could barely keep his eyes open. He mumbled something barely intelligible. “No. Didn’t you hear me? I said, the storm might tear this apartment down. Man, I think I better be heading.” Kevin Hickman made sure to bogue the roach. Old Jake was too far gone already to even notice. Hell with him. Kevin managed to find himself back out on the street. He walked warily down the sidewalk. His place was an ancient house of monumental ugliness and disrepair. But it was, at least, a roof. Darkness. Darkness. All around him darkness and loneliness. Walking back to your room before the dawn, when the world slept through it’s nightmares, and being alone, was one of the hardest things he had had to get use to. It looked surreal. The faded bricks. The old storefront windows. Many men had walked here before for over a century back.

Did any of their ghosts still beat these pavement with tired shoes? He crossed over by the flower boutique, past an old bank building, heading into his own neighborhood. He was able to pick out the frame of the vast edifice through his bleary, dope-addled eyes. He managed his way into the side door. He didn’t notice, but one of the cars that passed him as he walked carried a very beautiful female form. He would meet this same woman in two nights, and though he would never in his life actually get to know her, his meeting with her would be an integral part of the story that was told later, and sold on checkout lines in cheap rags across the USA. Even the name of Kevin Hickman would have a sort of fifteen minute brush with celebrity. But he didn’t know that then, as he walked into the darkened kitchen, past the pool table, into the large foyer that had once belonged to a single family. He walked up the stairs, slowly. There was a doorway on the second landing that led to a side section that was all small rooms that could have accommodated college classes. The building had been added on to, changed around, demolished, and brought back up again in such a haphazard fashion that the architectural layout was nearly occult. On the uppermost floor there was an abandoned, vintage diner that dated from right after WW2. Even Kevin Hickman sometimes got the shivers in this house. Age is not our friend, he reflected.

***

Professor Milt Seebaum shoveled in a cold turkey TV dinner. He always bought around ten of them every pay day. He went through them damn quick. Ah, the bitter hours of morning restlessness. Lucky he didn’t have classes to teach today. Lucky for him, because he was damn irascible on no sleep. He wanted another one, thought better of it, and set the plastic tray on his nightstand. Who cared if he was a slob? Not like he ever had many visitors. Goodnight, Mr. Chips. The lightening and thunder were grand, really, He could see out the filmy curtain how intense, how alive nature was. And it always struck him as somewhat sad that his own nature was so restricted. So formal. So repressed. Then he closed his eyes. He remembered who he was. He was Dr. Milton H. Seebaum. He was a cultured man, a man who had spent his entire life in pursuit of learning. And teaching. Romance, he surmised, was not for everyone. He drifted into sleep. His dreams were all permutations of the same theme. He was holding back an army of drooling, pathetic ogres with a single torch of illumination. That torch was all that meant anything to him. But he was lost in a wilderness, alone. And the wind was blowing, and the fire was beginning to dim. *** Tanner stood in front of the rooming house with a cigarette clasped in his shaking fingers. He was half-terrified of the storm, but found it exhilarating in equal measure. His half-awake mind was still focusing on the images of his strange dream. The darkened panic.

Gunshots.

The

falling

woman.

(Later, Tanner would go back upstairs and sleep. His dreams would become even more troubled, dreams chiefly concerned with decay, with deformity, with themes of distress and repressed anger.) Around him, the world slept, awoke, shuddered, breathed, sobered, suffered and waited. And this was only one morning, just before dawn.

***

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