Fiction Dreams, revised and expanded - rough draft
First, allow me to thank those who responded to my previous (incomplete) version of this story! I have implemented their changes -- at least to the best of my knowledge; it is conceivable that I have missed a few spots -- and I have also completed the story. Of course, I do not mean that I have absolutely finished the story. I have brought the plot to an end, but not the production. How I go about revising it -- which it no doubt desperately needs -- I greatly desire to receive some "feedback" (no doubt more pleasant than what you might get from a grouchy amp) from you concerning it. What are your thoughts on the success of the story as a whole? The feasibility of its premise? The interest of the main character? What weaknesses? What strengths? In other words, what I am asking is not really different from what I asked in my last post except that you are now privy to the entire story and not just a part.
I appreciate your time, and I hope that you find my story worth your time.
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“The Moon by Bicycle”
Quick, out of the door, he thought, and down the stairs, as his feet pattered against the concrete steps toward the street. Thirty feel or so away his bicycle waited, hidden around the corner. While he concentrated on his barely decorous descent, he distractedly caught a glimpse of the moon advancing among clouds stacked like cannon smoke. Behind him, the party went on. All stale wit and bawdiness, of course. The one felicity of the scene had just escaped, and he after it. He steadied himself at the base of the stairs, glanced once at the street to ensure that none of the night’s reckless children were on the prowl, and hurried toward the corner on the right.
Back in the smoke and the noise, he had been lucky to bow out of the eternal debate over the merits of Ulysses (which he suspected that none of them, including himself, had read). Just when Dr. Thraston had caught breath for the next stage of a monologue whose end seemed hopelessly remote, the lady in the blue dress had slid out the door. The next minute, all excuses, he had promised Thraston that he would be delighted to continue the discussion at another more convenient occasion. That took seconds, though: thick, dense seconds into whose mass must have gone the contents of a few rogue black hole more turgid even than Thraston’s mind (if imagination permitted the victory). When he had whisked out the door, leaving the faculty’s soiree behind, it was the moon, but not she, that was in sight.
Now he was up to it: the bicycle, painted a lunar silver four years but already flecking in places. It remained against the bike rack where he had chained it an hour back, but the slender yellow bicycle he remembered noting on his arrival was gone. His evening clothes-second hand suit covering a shirt with fraying ends, shoes unlikely to see another year’s worth of necessary functions, pants only too pleased to let the darkness hide them-these hadn’t gone anywhere, though, and he winced, imagining himself perched on the trusty bike, coat fluttering in the breeze, hair unkempt. He was sure that Miss Brand, his landlady, would be lurking in her porch chair, chortling while she waited for the ludicrous sight.
Atop the bike, and feet primed for movement, he looked both up and down the street. The woman could have gone either way or turned off, and he was unable to decide upon the probable route. After all, he knew little about her. Having taught English at the University of Oklahoma for over five years, he believed he knew everyone in the department. The mysterious lady, however, had mingled among the guests at the English faculty’s annual Vernal Convocation without rousing any surprised glances-he had been watching for them. Once, she maneuvered demurely between two of the older professors, their tusks locked as they wrangled over some obscure point concerning Belphoebe’s role in the second book of The Faerie Queene, and politely greeted the head of the department, Dr. Irene Shaddock. A calloused harpy of a woman, Irene smiled at nobody: nobody, that is, but this perplexing woman, slim inside her modest blue dress, straight raven hair tumbling past her shoulders. The next he had seen of her was a graceful but swift exit.
The road next to the building that hosted the party came from the town’s small industrial section, ran through the staid, graying monuments among which he now stood, and went on toward the countryside. Looking down this latter half of the road, his eye caught a flicker of motion vanishing into a street on the left only two blocks away. Then all was still: the sedate bricks of the convention center marching skyward directly to his right, the modest apartments across the next street, the sign blazoning an electronic message high above the gas station past the street after that. On the left, rows of unassuming offices, then the street where, if his eyes didn’t lie, the night had briefly stirred. Then he came to himself. With a sudden, vigorous pneumatism, he worked the pedals of the bike, jolting as the bike leaped the divide from curb to road, and wheeled desperately across the tarmac. The glare of electric light from the party until the gas station was dim and sometimes absent, and he only maintained balance throughout his reckless course by the moonlight. He passed the end of the bulky convention center, then the fence separating the apartments from the road, and then the gas station gaudy as a prostitute, and he veered sharply to the left where the glimpse that must have been the woman had vanished.
He was now where the bulky offices, gray as a lost quarry, parted to let the intersecting road slip between them. Looking past them, he was shocked to see a sudden opening up of the town into pastures, fences, and scattered groves of oaks and maples. The road he was on continued straight until it submerged beneath the crest of a hill. Just above the crest, a gibbous moon hung in a thicket of clouds. His surprise at these only occupied a moment’s time, though, for the woman, her blue dress lost in the blue of the night around her, a blue stronger than navy but deeper than ocean, and her bicycle gleaming and gliding along the road as it ascended the hill-she was in sight. Her hair was still. Though the air was cool, there was no breeze. Seeing her, he pressed for greater speed. She was already nearly a mile in the lead, however, and a few moments later, she suddenly reached the top of the hill, formed a perfect silhouette against the moon, and almost as quickly left his sight.
His feet kept the pedals moving in their orbit and his hands directed the bicycle in a line parallel to that of the road, but his mind sketched again the lady in the blue dress: now her figure, and now her face. Her dark hair reminded him of the perfect, measured black of a good paper-not that he had occasion to see many in his classes-and the geometry of her face suggested a symmetric novel, balanced on the point at its structural and thematic center. His own incomplete novel was sadly nothing of the kind, limping more often than leaping, and never lyrical, and would likely not be while he remained at the University. There were always more papers, and, once those were graded, more questions, and, once those were answered, more research, of which there was no end. He could hardly forget the time when Modern Novels (his favorite journal, no less!) had rejected his cherished project on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in favor of a paper on the same work by that twit Thraston down the hall. Thraston was always foiling his plans, one way or another, and he had not deigned to desist this evening when the lady had appeared and, more importantly, disappeared. She was always disappearing, it seemed, but the moon, the rich, incomplete moon, a honeyed and not a pure white, kept and for all he knew would always continue to keep splashing its milky light on the earth.
With nothing else to look at-no lady, that is-he had the moon, and the fields with their towers of corn, and the copses with their oak and maple. He tried to count these clusters, but the night and a mist he perceived only now cheated him, and he collected on the first count ten, on the second thirteen, and on the third eight. Looking at the moon again, he saw that it had grown somewhat, no doubt as he drew near to the hill. The hill, indeed, rose at a grade not nearly as gentle as he had judged when he first saw it, and the moon crouched above. Above the moon were the clouds-the fathers and mothers of the mist, he imagined. In front of him, they curled like smoke, and to his sides, they soared like spires. He realized that the moon was the lamp that illuminated the night’s dreams, for certainly no such smoke or spires were the work of nature’s waking. On the boundary of his vision to the left, one particular set of these cloud-spires encircled a brooding mass that might have been a castle. Through the shifting walls of the moonlit edifice, gray and ghostly at turns, and white at others, the dark blue of the night beyond kept breaking through. Trusting his instincts to keep the bike steady, he twisted his neck to catch a better view of the castle. He could see the hints of battlements toward the top, an airy pennant or a plume from some courtyard fire above that, and, even further toward the left, now directly to his rear, the marching mountains at the foot of which the castle had been build. It was a moment, however, before he saw that the clouds were all that was behind him, those and the straight road, and the fields with their statistical corn, and the copses with their oaks and maples: there was no more town.
The bike remained level, and he judged that fact the really remarkable thing, for seconds passed before his head could turn round again or his mind urge his feet and hands to persevere. In front of him, the hill seemed to leap up, and, his feet as quick as pistons and his hands locked on the course, his bicycle met the slope. His eyes fastened on the road ahead of him, but the road lapped against the moon, round and silent, at the top of the hill. It was clearly larger, though it hadn’t moved, neither could he remember its moving since he saw it from the gap between the dingy offices Focused as he was on the task of cycling, the offices soon slipped from his mind, as did that irascible Thraston and the poor novel that he would never finish. His muscles quickly wearied under the strain of the steep grade, and his mind flowed into his legs, which he realized could not and must not slow. Then he poured his mind into his arms, locked them, tied the muscles in place, searing them to the bone: the only direction could be into the moon, which now filled half the sky, a bare twenty yards away. He could not account for the way it grew at a rate larger than that normal for approaching objects, but his mind was concerned with his body and did not attempt a solution. Still intend, the groves, the fields, and the road behind tumbled out of his imagination. The only thoughts left lingering were the mute echo of the fortress in the clouds, and the lady in the blue dress.
The yards separating him from his destination shrunk to feet, to inches, and at last yielded the peak of the hill that now yawned desolately over the field in crags and crevices. Each square foot of ground shone with the full light of a moon stretched out to encompass the horizon, and there was no more ground or space beyond. The light was all. His bicycle slipped into it, and with it, him.