I decided to post something a bit different this week for Burning Violin. As you may have noticed due to the addition to the right side of the page, my first novel is in print and for sale on Amazon (amongst several other online retailers). Here's what I said about it a few months back when I announced that it was available on the Kindle electronically:
It's a very dark and very funny cross between The Gulag Archipelago and Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky. It's not a terrifically long book, but I think that it's a good read, and being the author, who would know better than I? Besides, my mom said it was a beautiful story, and she's utterly objective. When I finished the first draft of my first attempt at a novel and let my mom read it, her response was "well it's okay, but it just doesn't seem like a real book." After years of drinking and darkness, and several more manuscripts, this one gets her seal of approval.So, I've included the first few pages of the novel below, to give a bit of the flavor of the novel. Enjoy, and remember that if you buy two copies, you can read the novel in stereo, and with six copies you can read in surround-vision.
Chapter One: The Real WorldA peaceful society cannot contain violent elements. Such anti-socials consume the very fabric of society and must be excised with the same precision as the scalpel that cuts out a tumor.
-Hegemonicon, Vol. XXIThey say that the winners write the history books and that's why the good guys always win if you read the party line. But think about that for a moment. Every winner throughout history has had one thing in common. Not ideology. Not philosophy. Not morality. Not righteousness. The winner of every war was the side that was the better killer. Imagine the sociopathy of a society that could manage to conquer the world.
-Underground Diaries, a Collection1.
Europe went to war, as it is apt to do a few times each century. East fought west since north and south had less of a quarrel. Fifty million men faced off across the imaginary lines arcing from Mediterranean to Baltic, tracing bloody boundaries over rivers and hills, highways and cities. A few men on each side were zealots, a few pacifists, but most just wanted to stay alive until the end. Politics made no impression on the ancient steppe as it swallowed another generation whole, the latest meal for the rich black soil.
The fighting spread through the mountains and streets until it raged or simmered or bubbled up the whole world over. In time, of course, there was a winner, stumbling alone across the finish line, arms too tired even to raise in triumph. No grand last battle, no determined final stand, just the survivors gradually acknowledging that it was over.
They trickled back to their lives, to the real world, and found the loved ones that remained, or at the very least found their way back to familiar environs: the Irish pub down the street, the little league field on fourth and Stevenson, the book store behind the 7/11. Most of these veterans disappeared in the first wave, picked up at night in their homes, the furtive knock on the door the commonality in Berlin, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Melbourne.
A Great Society arose from the ashes, promising an end to war, and end to need. It destroyed many of the old structures that had caused such division. It had the terrible vision and calculation necessary to break down the old in order to build the new. Can't make an omelet without killing a few people. War was impossible now. One leadership maintained order around the globe, the slightest disorder treated as a challenge to law itself.
The people slept now under watchful eyes, as if society's parents had returned after some millennia. Our long global nightmare was finally over.
2.
The dog was going to die and knew it. He had that distant and sad look in his eyes that let everyone know that the fighting part was done, now was the part for finding a cave away from the eyes of the pack and laying his head down on his paws for one last long sleep. Doug knew it, and although he was the sort of veterinarian to be a little too sunny sometimes with his prognosis - optimism not delusion, he insisted to himself - he had made it more than clear to the owner.
The owner was the problem.
"Petey's going to be fine, you'll see doc, you'll see." The owner was saying, not for the first time.
Doug shook his head and tried to pull Mr. Anderson's hands away from Petey's fur where they dug painful furrows that Petey was too kind to protest. "Mr. Anderson, we've been through this. Petey's organs are shutting down. There's nothing we can do to fix this. He is old, he's had a good life, but there's not any more we can do."
Mr. Anderson shook his head some more and Doug sighed silently. Doug left the exam room through the sliding wooden door and disappeared into the small maze of equipment and stacked boxes to emerge through the back door of reception.
"Is Petey the last one we've got today?" Doug asked the receptionist.
Roberta was the kind of thin twenty-year old who would be a hundred pounds overweight once her teenage metabolism finally ground to a halt. She gulped at her ubiquitous Diet Coke and continued playing minesweeper. Doug grimaced as she lost the game, lifting his hand to stop her a moment too late. She immediately opened a new game and clicked randomly until she lost again. Doug wondered, not for the first time, if she even knew that the game had rules other than luck. An economy sized bag of Cheetos disgorged half its puffs across the desk and onto Petey's paperwork. One pink ear-bud headphone dangled over Roberta's shoulder, blaring some remixed club electronica in tinny tones.
Doug began to ask again, thinking she hadn't heard, but Roberta nodded impatiently and yanked out Petey's stack of paperwork from underneath the Cheetos, handing it to him without noticing either the crusty fingerprints she left or the glare that Doug leveled at her back.
"Next mutt's tomorrow at ten, Dr. B," Roberta called out as if he were in the next zip code. "Robbie, I think." She crammed half a dozen puffs past her teeth and bit down with a rumbling crunch while she started minesweeper and lost again.
"Bobbie," Doug corrected, but Roberta only shrugged.
Mr. Anderson entered reception with Petey in tow, who walked with an awkward gait that alternated between standing and bolting forward two or three steps while his legs held out. Deterioration of the brain stem due to complications from an old injury had given Petey the shakes and the steroids didn't do much to help. Petey looked up at Doug, grinning through his panting - it was chronic at this point - and waited for the treat Doug had been tossing to him on his way out for the last six years. Doug obliged and winced as Petey's legs collapsed under him as he lunged forward for the treat, his jaw bouncing hard off the tile and the treat skittering away to safety under a cabinet. Roberta finished another game of minesweeper and then handed Mr. Anderson a sheet of paper.
"That will be two hundred fifty-seven dollars, will you be paying with cash or credit?" Roberta asked in a squirt of words that left her mouth almost as one syllable.
Mr. Anderson stared at her for a moment, and then seemed to find some iron in his spine. "Two hundred fifty bucks? You didn't do anything. You just told me my dog is going to die. What the hell did you do for two hundred and fifty bucks?"
"Sir," Roberta started, but Doug brought a quick hand down on her shoulder.
"Mr. Anderson, it's the listed expense. It's not something I can do anything about, as you know." Doug said and frowned. "If it was up to me, there'd be no charge, but you know I can't do that."
"Should report you," Mr. Anderson ranted. "That's what I should do. Let them know that you're racketeering in here. Turning a profit on the people's backs, that's what you're doing. Be in the next black van, you would."
Doug held up his hands, not quite panicking but feeling it rumbling up anyway. "Mr. Anderson. I swear to you, I have never charged you anything but the legal requirements. I'm a good Hegemonist just like you. A party man for ten years next week." He said the last with pride and a smile. "Why don't you just swipe your card and take Petey home. Give him some hamburger if he'll eat. Take care of your dog."
Mr. Anderson nodded, paused, asked "are you sure you can't do anything?" one more time and then sighed and waved his right index finger over the scanner mounted on the desk. It beeped, churned away for a long minute like an old man trying to remember whether he had grandkids or not and finally beeped twice to confirm the transaction had gone through. He pulled Petey through the door and disappeared into the grey afternoon. Doug sighed.
"Roberta, can you make the arrangements so that Petey can be disposed of if Mr. Anderson calls back and needs the service?" Doug asked.
"Sure thing, Dr. B," Rebecca said and made no move to minimize minesweeper.
Doug sighed again and went out into the little lobby across from Roberta's desk. He examined the bulletin board, just looking for something to distract his eyes. Rattlesnake vaccines, puppy training classes at the park down the street, order forms for indestructible rubber toys and anti-coprophagia tablets (now in wintermint!) lined the wall, just the normal vet clinic bulletin board kit. A photograph of the First Citizen printed en masse on high gloss and distributed with all such kits stared down at Doug, beaming and proud and defiant, with that wrinkling around his eyes that a legion of designers had probably decided implied a fatherly affection. First among equals! Doug pushed a spare pushpin through Joseph Steel's right eye and felt a little thrill of misbehavior. He cleared his throat, pulled the pin out and stuck it back in the wall. He caught Roberta looking at him.
"Damned kids," Doug muttered. "Don't have anything better to do than vandalize public property."
"Hey Dr. B," Roberta said in her nice voice. It was different from her indifferent normal voice because it meant she wanted something. "Have you thought about hiring on my friend Susie part time like we talked about?"
"I don't have the money," Doug said. "I told you that."
Roberta shrugged. "Well, I enter all the billing, and we're doing really good lately, all this income, and," she added the dramatic sigh, "all this work to do, I think we need the help."
"Roberta, we're barely scraping by, you know that," Doug said. "I'm lucky I haven't had to cut back your hours." He regretted it as soon as he said it, and Roberta's face hardened.
"Well, I wouldn't want you to have to cut back your hours, of course." She snapped. "I have rights, you know."
"Yes, yes, I know, Roberta, believe me I know." Doug excused himself to his office in the back and collapsed into a chair to sigh. He could not find a glass, so he filled a beaker to the brim from a bottle of delightful merlot that was flown in from France each week. Doug had six stashed beneath his desk.
He toasted the black and white candid photo of a dog running on the beach, "Rough day here Sam, how's heaven treating you?" Doug asked his long dead dog and drained the two hundred milliliter beaker. "Because this world bites."
Doug frowned in honest wonder. "Now why would I say that?"
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