It’s getting close, now.

The Tucson Festival of Books is one month from now. Four weeks.

This week I ordered my copies of the two Damnation Kane books, 30 of Volume I and 20 of Volume II; I should have waited, but I got worried that I might not have anything to sell at the Festival, and I hated that idea, so now I can at least be sure that I will have 50 copies of books about pirates. So I just have to hope that everyone who comes by is new, and hasn’t already bought both of those books. (Since I brought and sold the same number last year, there are at least ten people who bought the first book and not the second; so hopefully if they come back, they’ll want Volume II.)

But once I had that set, I turned to the new book.

Which was a pain in the butt.

I hadn’t put a book together at Lulu.com, which does my printing and online sales for me, for, what, three years? I forgot the difficulties in making the text look the way it’s supposed to look for the paper book. I edited the whole thing — 128,000 words, it is — and then I thought I’d be able to just drop it into the template I downloaded from Lulu. So I Control-A, Control-C, and Control-V — and the template disappears, and the text is formatted like the original document, set up for 8.5×11 pages instead of the 6×9 trade paperback format. I tried it again, same thing. Downloaded a new template, tried it again — same thing.

So I had to drop the text into Notepad: which erases all formatting.

Which included all of the italics. In 128,000 words.

But at least the margins were right.

So I’ve been going through the text and putting all the italics back. It’s been good, actually: I caught a couple more mistakes, made a few changes I like; I think the book is a little stronger for the effort I’ve put in this week.

And then when I put this chapter into this post, I realized I missed an incongruity: I changed the timeline of the book a few years, for the sake of believability for a later important chapter (where characters needed to be a leeetle bit younger), and missed one of the references I made. So now I need to double check all the time references to make sure I didn’t miss any others.

Sigh.

It’s fine. The book may not be out in time for the Festival, but even if it isn’t, I will publish it — and anyone who is interested in purchasing a copy can get it directly from me. Signed, sealed, and even delivered, if you live in the Tucson area and don’t mind me dropping by your house, or you want to come to my school.

So in order to keep you all as excited about this new book as I am, here’s another sneak preview: this is the first chapter, which comes right after the Prologue I posted before. I hope you like it!

Chapter 1

            I don’t remember dying.

            You’d think I would, wouldn’t you? The narrowing of vision as everything faded to black, the tunnel of light, the sight of loved ones there waiting for me: Gramps, and Uncle Bill, and Oscar, my first dog. If my buddies in the Army counted as loved ones, there’s be a whole parade of faces at the end of that tunnel. Though they might not be so happy to see me. I’m sure a psychologist would call it survivor’s guilt, the idea that my friends who died would hate me for living, but what the hell does a shrink know? If it’d been me who’d gotten nailed, I would have been royally pissed at everyone who made it out, who made it back to the world. Hell, I am pissed at all of you. That’s why I eat you.

            But I don’t remember any of it. The lack of memory might be because of the way of my dying: it could have been the booze, it might have been the smack, but whatever it was, whether it was cirrhosis or a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the abuse I put my body through in those last few years, I’m sure that at the time I was so wasted I didn’t feel a thing. I probably slept through my own death, which, I know, sounds peaceful and all – but I wish I could remember. I might even have been murdered, lying unconscious in an alley somewhere; I have scars I can’t account for, can’t remember where they came from – though there are plenty of ways I could have gotten those. I lived through my tour in ‘Nam, but I doubt that anyone came out of that without scars.

            I remember ‘Nam. I remember the fear, and I remember the disgust; and I remember the anger that came out of them, and made it possible to pull that trigger. More than anything I remember being tired: just wanting to sleep, sleep for years. I remember other things, too, but I don’t look at those memories. They were what pushed me into the haze of alcohol and drugs that carried me like a sleeping baby into the darkness at the end.

            I remember a few things from before the war: Mom and Dad, my sister Anne, my little brother Franklin, the farm in rural Iowa. I remember some things from after: San Francisco and the Haight, the few moments of lucidity in between stupors that could have lasted for weeks, months, or even years. I do remember a girl, kisses and whispers and silky movement under the moonlight, and for that memory, I’m grateful.

            For the most part, though, those days blended together into a thick gray fog, without beginning or end, for so long that I lost track. I wouldn’t have any idea how old I was when I died, except that I know what year it is now, and I know how long it has been since I shuffled off this mortal coil, and awoke again to see that face looming over me, awash in the haze of red light that has tinted everything I have seen from that day to this. A little subtraction tells me the answer: I was 27 when I died 29 years ago. I’d be 56 now, if I was still alive.

            But I’m not alive now, walking and talking notwithstanding. Those don’t count. You’re not alive if you don’t age: your years on this earth are nothing if there’s to be no end to them. The two absolutes are that everything must be born and everything must die; if one of those (or both) does not apply to you, then you are – nothing. My body may function, my eyes may still see, my ears hear; I may still think and feel, a little; but I’m dead. I killed myself in 1978, another delayed casualty of a war that nobody won.

            I was not reborn on that night when the vampire brought me back. I was remade. No longer human, not quite a machine, but a combination of both living thing and automaton. I am a slave, and I may very well remain a slave until the sun goes out. Who knows? Even that may not be the end. My master is a creature of the night, after all; perhaps the perfect blackness of space would be his idea of Heaven.

            Christ knows if there is a heaven like the one in the Bible, then he ain’t getting in. But then, neither am I.

            I walked into the apartment and threw my keys on the table by the door.  I was stripping off my clothes before the door even swung shut, dropping them on the floor in a line headed toward the shower. I had had to take a dip in the Bay, after, to wash all the blood off; I used the kid’s clothes to dry myself before getting dressed again. But then I had to bury him, along with his clothes, and that was a dirty business. Besides, you think the Bay smells bad to you? Try my nose on for size. Between the stink of sewage and rotting fish, the iron-scent of blood that lingered underneath, and the smells from his clothing, his sweat and soap and cologne, I felt like I would gag every time I caught a whiff of myself. The thought made me laugh. I could devour a human being with relish and pleasure, commit heinous and depraved acts at the whim of my master without batting an eye – but the smell of polluted water and body odor made me sick.

            When I didn’t stink any more, I got out, toweled off, and walked out of the bathroom. I spotted my clothes lying where I had left them like scraps of scraped-off onion skin, and went to pick them up. I went to the kitchen and pulled a large plastic garbage bag off the roll on the counter, shoved the suit into it and tied the bag closed. I dumped it outside the door, in the hallway. My laundry was picked up and dropped off each day. If they were going to clean it anyway, what did wrinkles matter, right? Besides, I had a dozen more suits just like that one – my livery, so to speak.

            I walked out into the main room of the apartment and looked around. The only furniture was the overstuffed, oversized armchair in front of the windows, the catch-all table by the door, and the stereo system that sat on the floor by one wall. I don’t have anything else because there’s nothing else I really need – not now.

            I haven’t turned the stereo on more than half a dozen times in the last two years. I used to listen to it every waking moment. The apartment used to be filled with books, and there used to be art on the walls, and even, as God is my witness, a potted plant on the windowsill. But that was before. I realized that nothing I could put in this apartment would make it anything but a cage, a kennel for the dog. So I took everything out, threw it all away because I didn’t know anyone I could give it to and I couldn’t see myself holding a garage sale. I kept the stereo because – I don’t know why. I’ll get rid of it, too. Soon.

             Suddenly I couldn’t stay in here any longer. I couldn’t smell the Bay, or the blood and sweat and the stink of humanity – but I could smell myself. Nothing in here but the stale smell of me, the hours – the years – I had spent sitting in that chair, watching the sun rise because it was the only rebellion I allowed myself, to look at what my master could not. I could smell every one of the days and weeks I had spent in this apartment, in some pathetic mockery of life; I could see it smeared on the walls and dripping from the ceiling. I had to get outside.

            I went to my closet, donned a pair of pants and a dark shirt, shoved my feet into loafers without socks, and left, throwing on my overcoat as an afterthought on the way out the door. I left the door unlocked. Any thief could have whatever he could find in there. It was all trash.

***

            I went downstairs and out onto the sidewalk, and I started walking. All I could think about with every step was how many times I had walked this way: how many times I had come up this street, gone through that door; how many times I had walked up the five flights of stairs to my apartment – no, that wasn’t right. Not my apartment: the apartment where they kept me. How many times I had washed blood from my skin and left a bag of stinking clothing in the hallway.

            Almost thirty years. And I barely remembered the first ten.

            Oh, they picked a good one when they found me, all right. Not that they knew my personality, of course, or the particular shape of the demons that drove their needles into my brain and dragged me down Skid Row to the morgue. They knew that I was young, that I had been in the military and thus had combat training, that I was big – a corn-fed Iowa farmboy – and that I had no family, proven by the fact that I died a derelict junkie on the streets of San Francisco, and my body then lay unclaimed in the morgue for a week. They might not even have cared about that last when they picked me out of the morgue drawer and laid me out for the ritual. I died young and left a good-looking corpse, and that was all they needed.

            No. That’s not true, and I knew it. They did not want a zombie: they wanted a monster. That’s why they picked me. They knew exactly what my demons were: knew that I suffered from a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder, knew that I drank and drugged myself to death to escape the memories of what I had done. This made me even more attractive to them: it showed that I take orders well, that I would do what my superiors commanded even if I personally found it so horrifying that I would rather be dead than remember it. After all, I killed myself so that I could forget – but I did the things I wanted to forget in the first place, didn’t I? I was already a monster before I died. I was already a slave. The vampires just gave me sharper teeth.

            But dying had done what I had wanted it to do: it had given me oblivion. At least for a while. For a long while, actually; for ten years, I hadn’t had a coherent, rational thought. I don’t know why that changed, not exactly. But it had: I had woken up, and my mind woke up with me; and once I started thinking again, I couldn’t stop. So I had tried to find a different way to live with what I was. That was when I decided that hedonism would make up for the fact that I was an undead monster.

            It still makes sense, in a way. It seems to me that we all have to pay for what we’ve got. If you have a good life, you owe, and you have to pay. A debit for a credit – balance the books. If I have been given this eternal life – eternal barring a violent death, of course – then I have to do something to earn it, to be worthy of what I have.

            And what makes us worthy of life? Living to our purpose. If, say, we are here to spread the word of God, then that’s what we need to do, and the happier and more enjoyable our lives are, the harder we have to work to earn that by spreading His word that much farther.

Of course, being an undead man-eating ghoul who hurts people for a crime syndicate run by a soulless monster pretty much eliminates “spreading the word of God” as my purpose, don’t you think? Yeah. Me too.

            No, when I started thinking again for the first time in ten years, I decided that my purpose was more earthy, something simple and concrete. I figured that a creature as unnatural as me has to work as hard as possible to make life as natural as possible, and to enjoy the natural parts of life as much as I can. Thoreau would have sent me to Walden and told me to grow crops, but to me, the natural parts of life are all the things that make humans human. That set humans apart from animals. Good music. Art. Literature and philosophy and science, wisdom and knowledge and imagination.

            After all those years living without thinking, I started spending all of my time doing just that: thinking. Learning. Reading, listening, seeing. I swam in a sea of beauty and truth, truth and beauty – and splashed as well through ugliness and lies and bloody, pointless deaths that put the cap on tawdry, shallow little lives. They were the twin currents that spun me, like a leaf in a stream, for almost twenty years. When I had a job to do for my master, or when I got hungry, I threw myself into the blood, into the pain and fear and death, and tried to revel in the animalistic slaughter. I tried to feel like the predator my rebirth had made me. When I didn’t have a job, when it was just me, then I read every book I could, I listened to as much music as I could, I saw every piece of art on display in San Francisco and as many other places as I could get to within my limitations.

            And for most of that time, for most of eighteen years, it was fine – I was fine. I actually enjoyed it, enjoyed the passionate lives I glimpsed in the jazz clubs and the galleries, in the books and on the streets, sweating and loving and bleeding and crying and laughing and dying. I loved it, loved them. Loved life.

            But the more I learned to love life, the worse it made me feel when I ended it for others. Every time I did it, every time I killed, I reduced a human being from the height of divine creation and earthly evolution to a mere bag of flesh and blood and bone. The more I learned to respect and cherish those lives and all that they were capable of, the more I hated myself for ending them, just so I could go on enjoying what they had made.

            And so, when I couldn’t stand it any more, I stopped. Stopped learning, stopped living life to its fullest, because it wasn’t my life that I was living. I already threw away my life, with a little help from Uncle Sam and Jack Daniels. Enjoying my stolen life as much as possible didn’t make it any less stolen: it made it more so.

            For the past two years, then, I have been trying to live like I did the first ten years after I was remade: without thought, without any connection to the world or events around me. Maybe I’m trying to atone for my life by not enjoying it now; I don’t know. I’m trying not to think that hard about why I do what I do, why I am what I am.

            But it isn’t working. I can spend my time brooding instead of reading, hating myself and the world instead of enjoying it, but I can’t get rid of the sick feeling in my gut. I can’t seem to wash off the stink. I can’t go back to ignorance. I can’t go back to being dead.

            I wish I could.

            I looked up then and saw that I had walked quite a ways, from my apartment near Fisherman’s Wharf to Dogpatch, at the base of Potrero Hill. I realized my hands were in the pockets of my coat, and I felt my sunglasses; startled to find that I wasn’t wearing them, I hurriedly put them on. It made me notice the light in the air, that the sun would be rising soon. I needed to head back. I got my bearings, turned around – and stopped.

            I knew that Hummer.

            I dug around in my overcoat, and found what I needed in the inside pocket: a small notebook, one of those things you can pick up for a buck at any drugstore – one of those things that makes an old Iowa boy like me think, “Back in my day, we could buy that for a nickel!” I flipped through the pages, scanning the entries, glancing up now and again to check the license plate on the forest green Hummer that was parked with two wheels up on the sidewalk to accommodate the thing’s wide wheel base. And there it was: almost two months ago now, the note “tree grn Hum. 3AHN619. 2x hit.” And then, underlined twice: “FAT.”

            I believe in karma. Maybe not the karma that a Hindu or a Buddhist would know; I believe in my own version of karma. It’s back to that balancing act I think we all have to do: something good to make up for something bad. There may be a power in the universe that takes care of that for us, but I don’t have enough patience to wait for it. I like to help out. It makes me feel useful. So I keep this little notebook, and when I see somebody do something that requires punishment, I write it down – and when I get a chance, sometime down the road a bit, I carry out that punishment. This notebook is my karma to-do list.

            Here in San Francisco, I try to focus on the most common, most frustrating, and least punished offenders: bad parkers.

            If you’ve never been to San Francisco, understand this: while every city has parking problems, good ol’ Frisco has the added bonus of being built on steep hills, with narrow, twisting streets, often one-way, often with a stop sign right at the peak. So not only is parking hard to find, but actually getting into a spot can be next to impossible. Naturally, not everyone handles this challenge well; naturally, when someone does it badly – or worse, rudely – it makes an already difficult situation into a melting pot of imminent murder.

            My job, then, as the karma assistant, is to teach bad parkers a lesson, in the hopes that they will change their ways, and make every driver’s life a little easier.

            This particular twit had, my note said, smashed into two cars while I watched – front and back – while trying to pull out of a space, and then driven off without even leaving a note. And because he drove a Hummer, his damage had been minimal, and all to the bottom of his massive black bumpers; but he had torn huge gashes in the hoods of both other cars. I had been hoping that I would have a chance at this one, and here it was. Just when I needed it most.

            I glanced around quickly to see if anyone was watching; it wasn’t yet dawn, though it was close, and the streetlights were just flickering off. People would be moving around soon, but right now, they were still hitting the Snooze button or getting into the shower. I had a few minutes.

            I moved around to the street side, the driver’s side, and lay down on my left side next to the mighty green beast. I reached under and took hold of the front axle, just behind the wheel, with both hands, and then I squeezed and twisted. Slowly and carefully, because I wanted to get it just right. Another little twist, and – there! The body of the car settled, just a little bit, but it held when I let go. I rolled over to my other side and turned around, and then did the same to the rear axle, crumpling the metal just enough to make the chassis sag maybe an inch, but no more. Then I slipped around to the sidewalk side and did the last two wheels.

            My goal here was simple: I had observed that the driver of this Hummer was, shall we say, built proportionally to his grossly oversized vehicle – hence the subtle notation “FAT” in my notebook. If I did this right with the wheels, then he wouldn’t notice anything wrong with his car until he sat in it – when the axles would fail and the wheels would all fold, and the whole thing would come crashing down. He wouldn’t even be able to get the thing towed, not without on-the-spot repairs of some kind, or else a crane. Which served him right. Really: how hard is it to leave a note? You can afford a Hummer, but not the insurance bill? How about two new axles, pal: can you afford those?

            I finished, and slid out from under the metal behemoth (which now rested on dainty girlish ankles, so to speak). I nearly queered the whole deal when I nudged it with my shoulder as I twisted my torso to get my hands under me; the metal groaned slightly and quivered, and I went absolutely still, holding my breath and waiting. It didn’t fall. I scooted a foot away and then came to my feet quickly, dusting myself off and checking for witnesses. None. I was clear.

            I just hoped the owner moved quickly, too, and jumped in before he discovered what I had done to the Hummer. But even if he didn’t get to sit down harder than he expected, I still got to cross this one off my karma to-do list, and there’s nothing better than completing a to-do list. Maybe I should make myself a complete self-improvement list – you know, things like “Adjust to new lifestyle” and “Learn to accept adversity with a zen-like serenity.” Maybe even “Free self from magically enforced servitude.”  But at any rate, I felt better now than I had when I left the apartment. My head felt clearer.

            I headed back. Home.