Chapter 1

PART I

CHAPTER 1

“Give your liver to Princeton and your heart to the Plaza.”

— Hemingway’s advice to Fitzgerald

October, 2002, New York City

Autumn in Manhattan and nothing refreshes more than coming in from the crackling chill to the warm effervescence of the Champagne Bar. This afternoon the plush sounds of Dinah Washington weave with liquor-loosened voices. The intoxicated edge sharpens Ellie Shorter’s once dull spirits. What’s not to celebrate? Shorter has clinched a deal, the sequel of sorts.

“One Tall Shorter coming up,” the bartender nods to her, a Pavlovian response to the agent’s presence. In a flash and flourish, the bubbling concoction of Shorter’s own design appears: seltzer, dash of bitters, splash of Compari.

In the United States 327,952 new titles and editions are published annually. That’s about 37 books per hour per day. The critical mass of words might blur some eyes. Hundreds of new words flow into the English language each year—the Oxford dictionary is the gatekeeper of that basic unit. It used to take three years of usage and making the rounds before a word could be accepted as stay worthy. Now words and expression gain currency in months, weeks, days, even hours. Call it information, useful or useless, entertainment, truth parading as lies, lies as truth. It can numb the sharpest wit.

Ellis Shorter, who is about to contribute a miniscule drop to that six-digit stat, has long ago internalized the numbing effect of numbers. Like every dogged agent or publisher, she has had to reckon that meaning and purpose must transcend overwhelming odds. She knows that there is a handful of agents who turn down excellent works because they are waiting for what has not been said before. They consider it indulgent and superfluous to contribute to the glut unless it illuminates, instructs anew.

How can anyone on such high ground recognize illumination? Shorter knows with her reptilian brain that words are like water, finite fluid and universal solvent. Even if in a closed system, words can exist in different states depending on the ambient temperature. They flow and cascade eternally, never repeating the same exact random rhythm or chaotic pattern. And there are the random and chaotic synapses of the brains that receive the words uniquely. Ah, is it the cocktail or a recent success that sparks such rumination?

The mammal brain meditates further. Human speech is so recent in our evolutionary process that it only covers about fifteen percent of our communication. We still dialogue like primitives on levels we don’t admit to—each of us at one time or other is the gorilla in the room. The stuff we don’t have words for that comes out in our wars, nightmares, dreams—and best of all in our fictive dreams.

So, then, it follows, given speech’s limitation, the truth is not equal to the facts. The facts exist outside of our imagination or vice versa. Truth is stranger than fiction, the latter of which is going the way of dial phones as readers clamor for their neighbor’s dirty underwear. And there’s this: Readers and critics get torqued when they learn how much of an author’s “real” life went into her work of fiction. They get torqued if a writer reveals that parts of her personal memoir, of secondary or tertiary importance, were “composites”—that is, supportive scene setting, dialogue, or even characterization that employs novelistic devices. Shorter’s theorem is weaving its if-then logic on a completely unconscious level. She has other conscious thoughts for the moment.

Shorter would have preferred the Algonquin or Michael’s for this business but Daphne thought it a good idea to visit the Manhattan castle, the scene of her no-show crime. Shorter had mixed feelings. Anxiety being her default mode, did she have to relive that dreadful no show? She resists looking at her watch every thirty seconds but can feel by her (reptilian) sense of time that it’s going on ten minutes late. She lets that déjà vu feeling wash over her and assures herself the knucklehead won’t stand her up this time. Daphne G. Forest is not the same mousey writer she was a year ago. She has some drive and purpose now, Shorter hears it in her voice, and conviction. Shorter wanted her to take a year to write the “sequel,” as they refer to it, but Daphne insists she will have it done for the coming spring list. Well, OK. Shorter paws her sweating drink and flips pages of the contract.

She pauses and tries to recall when in recent publishing history, a book became a bestseller without leveraged media hype. The Celestine Prophecy comes to mind, criticized by the pious critics for calling itself a novel but being a vehicle for the author’s beliefs. Give me a break. So what, the millions of readers were hungry for a modern-day parable. Similar situation with word-of-mouth success, Mutant Message Down Under, which made the most miraculous transubstantiation (Shorter adores that word) from non-fiction to fiction, perhaps because the Australian aborigines in the book found it offensive.

Word-of-mouth success finds new spin with Sagebrush Biscuits and Chokecherry Jam, whose author made zero media appearances. One thing those sanctimonious fools won’t be able to sink their teeth into with Forest—her character development. The fictive dream, it turns out is Gospel! Up there with God and Angels. Let us not deny the hungry masses. Let us not be disturbed by the facts when the truth is that the publisher and the readers want another Daphne G. Forest cookbook.

So be it. The name though, Craving Alaska. The author insists it came to her during some epiphany she can’t explain. Daphne wants profiles of the Gwich’in (rhymes with bewitchin’ in Ellie’s head) and their life woven in with promises of one Rachel King to accompany Daphne on the media tour. There’ll be lots of Alaska delicacies, including Jason’s recipe for buffalo and moose burgers, which Shorter had the pleasure of tasting last night in Hoboken.

What is the moral of this story? Morality, thinks Shorter perhaps too complacently, is no more fixed than our spoken tongue, equally changing as fast as we turn spoken words into print.

Daphne arrives with her entourage, Jason, Kristie, and the hunter monk. This last speaks his mind after Daphne finishes introductions. “Hail, hail, affable bartender methinks an ale quite quaffable.” He’s been inspired by some glimpse of medieval stone. He plops his hulk down clearly evasive of social niceties. Hunter monk has taken Daphne hunting for venison and rabbit and possum and other foodstuffs for the fall pantry and larder. Wild mushrooms. He has just returned from a hunting trip up in Sussex, New Jersey. He has freshly killed black bear. He ponders only the work of fire and heat. Fire and heat, without them, man is nothing. The hunter monk has no thoughts or words until he speaks them. Jason sits next to him and orders the same. The hunter monk expresses his dilemma to Jason, how much to roast, barbecue, stew, or grind up into burger. Jason wonders only how the bear meat will compare to bear of the Far North.

Daphne, Kristie, and Ellie slip into some alien banter Jason vaguely understands. He has never wandered this far from Alaska’s unfiltered light. He recalls with a smile how naïve Daphne was that first meeting in smoky Cherokee Lodge in Delta Junction where they discussed their shared taste for moose and buffalo, following which they could not resist their gorilla instincts. (He’s touched that she’s asked for his recipe for the book.) Now he is the naïf whose eyes are larded with questions. And observations.

He recalls how they made love on the tussocky ground of the Refuge with the herds slowly migrating, clicking away around them. How far yet how near to the society of the beast that sets circular patterns on the land. The crude that lies beneath the Refuge could well be the refined essence that flows through gas lines above ground in Manhattan on an average work day. The heard society setting linear flumes of burned fuel in the jet stream, ribbons of macadam on a perfect grid. How those shapes affect our dreams and longings within and without. Even though he is as far as one can get in spirit from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the migration of exalibu, there is a symmetry. Manhattan, the narrow strip of land where migration of man depends on the crude beneath the surface on a narrow strip of land thousands of miles away.

Daphne has only to confirm a few points in the contract, signs two copies and then ponders love and its dark handmaiden, fabrication. She calls it imagination. After all, she justifies, the estimates of oil in the ground are related to the imagination. The imagination, without it, nothing good, no art, music, or culture or social and economic justice can be birthed into being.

She is aware that the natural birthright of all is to love and be loved. We can only get and give love if we can imagine what it is. It’s like fingerprints, snowflakes, the northern Light, no two people imagine love alike. It’s a fact that exists side by side with truth.

Kristie is pondering friendship and wondering what mysterious friend managed that brilliant interview—and the photos! Just what she expected. They fit Daphne’s descriptions to the letter. Daphne has received a mysterious letter via her publisher, a lead, but won’t divulge the details yet. Either way, she’s as delighted as she is flabbergasted.

Two months earlier the meeting of this cast was utterly unlikely and inconceivable.

To Be Continued