Message in a 300 Page Bottle

Author's note: The events related are chronological within each point of view, but the events in different points of view are presented in emotional order.

**********

Part One: 2012

Doug

"Watch this," Mikey said. "I bet you dollars to dog donuts that he back flops."

"Not taking that proposition. It's a sure thing. Look at him. I can tell."

Below us, Henry was preening as he gripped the rope. Three girls waited in line behind him. Henry flexed his arms, bent his knees, loosened and retightened his grip on the hemp. Then repeated the whole ritual, trying to pretend he wasn't glancing back at his audience using his movements as a blind.

"That's fucking delay of game, right there," I said.

Claire twisted the top off a beer. "Guys are stupid."

Mikey and I both nodded. No reply to that statement was needed or probably would be welcomed, though we were the experts on the subject matter.

"And cheap." She continued. "Bud Light. Really? Don't we all have jobs? Ten million microbreweries in western Massachusetts and we have to settle for Bud Light?"

"Thank yer gods it isn't Bud Light Lime," I said.

Mikey shook his head vigorously. "You posers are denigrating a classic American lager. Crisp and drinkable. You know they make it with orange and lemon now? Saw a stack at Cappy's. Plus, it is the best goddamn thing to drink in the parking lot after hockey. Try that with your triple-hopped IPA small batch bullshit—"

Henry had finally judged that he had squeezed as much testosterone into the situation as he could without actually appearing to be doing so, even though everyone in his audience and in the dispassionate gallery above knew he was doing so, and he jumped.

Well, he didn't actually jump as such. He pulled the thick rope taut, took one big step back, and launched himself out over the Connecticut River.

Physics being what they were, he had misjudged. Miscalculated. Put the wrong values into the equation for velocity, force, angle, you name it. He pendulumed on the rope too hard and went too far up the other side of the curve. Then he doubled down on his error by releasing the rope at the apex of his swing.

Henry shouted with glee as his body rotated around his hips. Sounded like glee, he tried really hard to make it sound like glee, but everyone watching knew it was a cry of regret and embarrassment. And in the one out of control second before he pancaked hard onto the unforgiving water smack on his exposed and already sunburnt back, of terror.

"Back flop," Mickey said. "Called it."

"Guys are stupid," Claire said.

We did not dispute her. Claire had been with us since first grade. She had watched us grow from drooling snot-nosed elementary boys into drooling snot-nosed college students.

She kicked the cooler with one bare foot. "Do men ever grow up?" She nodded down to where Henry was dog-paddling back to shore, bravely trying not to show the incredible burning pain such a sensationally-bad landing must have caused.

Mikey and I looked at each other. The answer was No, but it was a rhetorical question.

**********

Mary Kay

It's just a notebook.

Actually and specifically, it is a Composition Book. 100 sheets, 200 pages, 9 by 7ish. Mottled black and white pattern on the cover. Static on an old tube television. Carol Anne talking to the poltergeist. Wide ruled. I like wide ruled paper for some reason. My eye likes it, and my eye liking makes it easier for my hand to write in it.

Problem is, my hand won't. The damn notebook, sorry, Composition Book, is empty.

I can sit and stare at it all I want. And I do. Believe me, I do.

I have in the past had several notebooks going at once. I would just grab a spiral-bound from an old chemistry or philosophy class that had empty pages at the back. Rip out the pages in the front. Useless data. Passed the tests, don't need the memories. I had a collection of notebooks. Spiral-bound, book-bound, old journals given to me as presents at junior high birthday parties. All filled with scribbles of ideas - gems and duds.

Okay. But now I am a professional writer. I have been paid for my scribbles. That's all it takes to be in the club. So I downsized to one notebook. Easier to manage. What if I wrote down the plot for a wonderful transformative novel and lost the notebook?

So. One Composition Book. Zero plots. There is not one line written in the damn thing. It is virginal, unsullied.

Problem is partly: It is beginning to be clear that I don't know how to make ideas in notebooks into novels.

The book that I wrote, the one I am coasting on, the one that surfed some cultural wave or other into the fore of the popular media, the one I humped on talk shows and book stores and podcasts, the one that destroyed my innocent anonymity, the one I am now living off, the one that was a cosmic freebee?

Yeah, freebee. It didn't come from a laborious and studied process of plot and character development or pouring over copious notes in one of my multitude of such and distilling out the essence of a story from them. It came to me in a dream.

That's right. I had nothing to do with it. At least my waking mind had no part in it.

It was my junior year at Smith, about three days before I was flying home for summer. I wrote my communications final that morning, the campus was emptying fast. My roommate left the day before, and I stayed up until 2 am watching Tom Hanks movies. I forgot to turn my alarm off. Six in the morning and I was ripped from peaceful sleep by REO Speedwagon. I hate REO Speedwagon. As a matter of fact, I hate most of classic rock. I set my radio on this station because the hate will turn to rage which turns to wide awakeness. Seventies music is the annoying beeping of my life.

Then I realized there was no reason to be up. Sighing with remorse and relief, I rolled over and emptied my mind. Went to my happy place, which back then was sitting on a sandy beach while Percy Faith's Theme From A Summer Place played along with the wave sounds. Don't you dare judge me. It works.

Wake up when the sun is shining and you know that the world outside is well into its routine. Your body wants to get out of bed and get going. It's instinctual. But I thwarted nature. I rolled over and played in my head lush orchestral music and went back to sleep. The dreams came hard and clear in the next hour or so.

Try it. You wake up remembering fantastic adventures. You were going somewhere. You were doing something. If you are quick, you can recall the whole life you led in that brief tick.

I opened my eyes and it came back to me.

The boy.

The pig.

**********

Doug

We were playing a variation of doubles that night because we had gotten tired of regular doubles. This version, which I think we made up ourselves, was singles: one game, loser sits, winner stays. The two not on the court replace the loser in the order they had sat down.

This method let two of us at a time hang out and sneak sips of beer from the cooler.

We had all been 21 for a while, but old habits.... We were adults, but maybe public consumption was illegal. I hoped so, otherwise we were getting a forbidden thrill out of it for nothing.

Madison and I were currently riding the pine. The bench was a steel mesh, but nobody ever romanticized riding the steel mesh. Mikey was trying to run down Claire's lob.

I had the power but not the consistent accuracy. Mikey had boundless energy but inconsistent groundstrokes. Madison had a great baseline game but was hesitant at the net. Claire did not have any outstanding aspect to her game but on the other backhand she had no soft spots you could reliably exploit, which was why she stayed on the court longer than any of the rest of us. Eventually she would get tired and lose a game. It might take an hour or more for that to happen.

"Did you read it?" Madison asked.

I made a noise that might have meant no or not yet or I will get around to it or please stop asking me that question, then I said in actual words, "Can't find a copy."

"Jeez Louise," she said in amazement. I was amazed that anyone under the age of 75 would say jeez Louise.

"Why didn't you—." She continued. "Nevermind. I know why you didn't buy a copy in May."

My procrastination game was legendary, apparently.

"It's not even that long. I'll get one and skim it before I go back. How hard could it be, for fuck's... I mean for jeez Louise's sake."

Madison gave me what my parents would call the stink eye. I never got that bit of sensory confusion.

"It's about a kid and a pig," I said. "It probably rhymes. Like the Cat in the Hat and shit."

"It's about more than that. It's about how we mistreat animals. It's about animal rights and human rights." She reached into the cooler. "It made me cry."

"A pig made you cry."

"Shut up. You haven't read it. I bet you'll cry."

"The only thing that will make me cry if is I can't find a copy to read in the next week. Can I have yours?"

Madison shook her head. "Gave it to my sister."

"Don't tell me they are reading it at UMass, too."

"Apparently so. Seems to be a thing."

"Wow," I said. "Wish I had written it. Must have sold a million copies."

"Yeah," she said. "So when you get back to Amherst and tell your proctor you couldn't find a one...."

**********

Mary Kay

"A pig." My advisor said. I couldn't tell if it was a question or a statement. She leafed again through my outline.

"A hog," I said meekly. "Technically."

I understood her askance look at my senior thesis outline. Senior theses in the Smith College Department of Creative Writing were expected to be publishable-quality works of great import. The other 11 seniors and I had discussed at length potential subjects and workshopped ideas until they started to coalesce. There were dysfunctional family dramas presumably drawn from real family trauma. There were coming of age stories presumably drawn from real growing up trauma. There were women who were mysteriously transported back in time; strangers showing up to cause havoc in the heretofore normal lives of couples; revealed truths; missing spouses; the powers of memory, love, forgiveness.

There was not one damn story about a farm animal.

I was in the initial flush of creation when I foolishly mentioned my theme to a couple of classmates.

"Oh," they said. "Like... uh... Charlotte's Web?"

Fuck them. It wasn't anything like Charlotte's Web. And anyway, who wouldn't have wanted to write Charlotte's Web? Always makes me cry.

I didn't bring it up again. I told them I was working on a story of my dysfunctional family.

Northampton being many leagues removed from Oxnard, California, where my very functional and disappointingly normal family lived, they could not guess my lie.

But I could not lie to my advisor. She had to approve the outline. She tried not to look like she was wasting her valuable time with a loser as she signed the cover page.

**********

Doug

Claire finally lost. We sat watching Mikey and Madison relapsing the sport of tennis back several decades. She wiped her face with a towel and drank a beer.

"Son of a bitch," Claire said, staring at the bottle. "This really is good when you're sweaty."

I touched my bottle of Bud Light Lime to hers. "Are guys stupid now?"

"Yes."

"Fair enough."

"You read that book yet?"

"Shut your pie hole."

"So... no."

"What is the big fecking deal," I said. "Everyone at school will have the damn book. I will borrow one and read it. I'm a fast reader."

"Fecking? You have time to burn reading Irish crime novels but no time to read... um...."

"See? You don't even remember the name of it. Remind me why I should have to endure it if you who have read it—"

"And cried."

"—and cried can't even retain the title?"

Claire was quiet for a while as she sucked down her non-IPA non-microbrewed common man beer.

"It is really good," she said at last. Very seriously, and I believed her. I always believed Claire, even when she belched. Like she did just then.

I surrendered to inevitability. "I'll find a copy."

**********

Mary Kay

I had literally jumped out of bed. No, literally. I know, but I did. I was so excited I stood up in my bed and jumped onto the floor like my older sister's four-year-old.

One of my half-filled notebooks was in the middle of a pile of papers, envelopes, flyers, and other undergraduate miscellany on my desk. I shoved the overburden off onto the floor, flipped open to the first blank page, and started writing so fast I had to force myself to slow to maintain legibility.

It just flowed out. It built itself. From colors and moving shapes in my memory to adjectives and nouns. I knew I could not delay or the memories would decay as the memories of dreams do.

By noon it was done. Must have been about 6000 words and my hand was sore.

I sat back and stared at the pages.

What the hell just happened?

**********

Doug

Mikey didn't have a copy. Actually, it was his mom who didn't have a copy, because Mikey was no slave to the zeitgeist and anyway if it wasn't a graphic novel he wasn't going to labor over actual unillustrated prose. His mom was the reader. She belonged to four, count them carefully one more time, four book clubs. But she had given her copy to a friend in yet another book club. I imagined the intertwined series of book clubs spanning this great nation from sea to Shinola sea, but none of them had a spare copy for me.

His mom said it was a really good book, though. It had made her cry.

Didn't go me any good. Unless I could show up to the discussion groups and just burst into inconsolable tears for an hour. Once a week. Yeah, no.

Some bonehead in administration thought we seniors would be lolling about with so much spare time on their hands that we needed extra work. This College Teacher of the Year candidate who had apparently never interacted with a breathing student latched upon the idea of a class-wide book club. We would all read a book, one book, the same book, and talk about it once a week for an hour. It was supposed to build community and shit.

You know what really builds community and shit? A good goddamned kegger.

I needed that freaking book.

It counted nothing towards our grades or class standing or anything, but I was not going to be the one standing around with my thumb exploring my sphincter if I could help it.

Claire had read it, cried, donated it to the Friends of the Turners Falls Public Library book sale.

Good idea that, but the book sale had no remaining copies.

The Library of which there were Friends of had no copies on the shelf.

Did I already mention that I tried Amazon, the Barnes and Noble website, eBay?

The day before I had to load up my dad's pickup with my college gear and haul it down to Amherst, I came back emptyhanded and dirtyhanded from the Turners Falls landfill and recycling center after digging through a small mountain of free books in the reuse shed and a large mountain in the to be pulped dumpster.

The hell? Had the first print run been like ten copies? And the million people who had read the thing to date had just passed the same copies around and around and around?

I was going to steal a copy from somebody on campus and xerox the whole thing at the library for a dime a page. That was a couple of pizzas that I was never going to get to eat, but such is the tax on not pulling the trigger when you had the chance.

**********

Mary Kay

You would have had to been trapped for the past year in a mine accident to not know what happened next.

I expanded those 6 thousand words into 90 thousand. Proofed it, added a bit here, trimmed a bit there, and turned it in.

I got a fucking B on it.

A B. I shit you not.

I swear my advisor only gave me a B because it was well punctuated.

She made the mistake of letting her boss, the chairman of the English Department, read all the theses. His wife the real estate agent read them as well in between her showings of houses and her trips down to the City to hang with her old college roommate the literary agent. You see where this is going.

I got a call from the old college roommate offering to rep me.

Muriel Bloom ran the small eponymous agency which had represented more than its fair share of impressively serious writers. I just kept saying yes, ma'am and signed a few forms. One visit to FedEx and I was a real honest to god author.

After that, Muriel and her agency did all the work. I just smiled for the camera.

About that camera business. And why I don't look like myself on the jacket.

My other older sibling, the guy in the family, is in cyber security. His advice to everyone is: Don't be yourself on the internet. When I emailed him the first shots from my photo session for the dust jacket, he freaked.

"Jesus Christ, Mary Kay. Don't show your face," he said.

I smiled into the phone. Everybody loves me, silly paranoid brother.

Then the emails started.

My agent's assistant called me. She was trying not to sound flustered and upset, which made me upset and flustered.

"Um," she whispered. "Mary Kay?"

"Yes, Roxy. What is it?" Now I was whispering. Why was I whispering?

"Don't... well... worry...."

My stomach was starting to not digest the bagel.

"We're getting emails," she said, still in an attenuated confidential aside if not a whisper. "They mention your address. Some of them are... you know."

No, I did not fucking know. My address?

I was living in a studio in Boston, in the South End. I looked out the window as I pressed my cell rather too hard against my ear. My peaceful secure shady street.

I was a child. I should have known that a book about any right was going to get some hate. A book about animal rights in a Southeast Asian country? Lots of hate. And lots of anger, accusations of cultural appropriation, racial biases, white man's burden....

Wait. What were they on about? I was a woman. I was allowed to write about downtrodden peoples, wasn't I?

There were those who disagreed. Lots of them had gmail. I disconnected Roxy and called my brother.

Two weeks later, I was arranging the artwork on the walls of my new apartment. In a small development in a small town just outside Amherst, Massachusetts. Near enough to Manhattan, far enough from everywhere.

Luckily, I had money from the advance. My farm story had been put out to auction, and the publishing houses had seemingly grown weary of the dysfunctional family/coming of age/teenage angst/teenage vampire/teenage anykind of lovable misunderstood monster avalanche. And bid against each other for something new - me.

So here I was, in a nice place leased to a shell corporation, with a new phone number assigned to another shell corporation, and all other necessary communication avenues and stuff under the name of some other shell corporations. Shell corporation sounds so sweet, like you collect them at the beach.

I had a panic button and a wig. The panic button was a ring. Looked just like turquoise set in silver like you might buy in Arizona at a Navajo reservation shop. Flip up the stone and press the red button underneath and a signal went to the local police and to the security firm my brother hired to drive past my place three times a day.

The wig I bought myself. Long, straight, black. My hair is short and blonde, so just putting this Addams Family thing on my head turns me into a different person. Add a pair of fashionably overlarge glasses and mascara and lipstick and my own mother would walk right by me if she were carrying a weapon and looking to do harm to me because I wrote a stupid book.

Yeah, I was not happy. I was happy being anonymous. I was happy being a writer.

Now I was a target. Now I had one lone empty notebook.