The Death of the Author as a Young Man (fiction)

The Death of the Author as a Young Man (fiction)

While the work clearly stands on its own as a masterpiece of prose fiction, William Bright’s & Testament takes on greater meaning, and is perhaps only fully explicable, in the context and reality of its creation. As anyone who watched the included DVD of the funeral might remark, the story is only the merest part of the total performance art experience called Life. But, to quote one of the author’s favorite poets, whose sensibility underpins Will’s writing: “we had the experience but missed the meaning, and approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form, beyond all happiness.” Challenging the commonly held critique of the intentional fallacy, it seems we can only approach this experience through meaningful moments in the author’s own life, restored through the memories of those who witnessed the events first hand. Hence William Bright’s final request that a series of interviews with his family and friends be appended to the text once, “the body lay rotting in the world, where all is said and done.” If ever it can be, for as long as the memory of a person lives on, there remains ever more to say about their life and work. – Ed.

Nim Bright: He couldn’t wait to get there, could he? Since we were born he was first, twelve minutes before me, and that kept going the rest of our lives. Will’d always be the one to try something, to make mistakes, figure out the instructions, while I sat back and watched and made my mental models of the problem. And then performed it right. Hell, I figured on at least another fifty, seventy years before we’d have to figure this one out, though he seems to have nailed it in his book. He always had to be different. I don’t blame him for it. We used to fight a lot, after we grew apart and he moved away. I’d tell him, Will, you’re wasting your energy, you have to be like me, patient, like water, he never did understand Taoism. But he didn’t want to be like me, that’s what drove him, his whole short life trying to escape the fact that on the genetic level we are, were, the same person. He wrote me a long letter last year, apologizing for his perspective on all of it. I… kept meaning to reply.

Yeah, we got along till about middle school. No, forget that telepathy nonsense, having a twin’s like having a best friend, another you, to play with, but not in your head. Who needs anyone else? Right? We shared everything; we’d go on these walks on the beach and dream up this elaborate mansion, imagining room after fun house room, the heart of this whole internal reality that we could always come back to. It’s what got me into computer programming, and Will into story writing I guess. Our whole childhood was like that, made up games, invisible adventures. We told each other everything, except for our fears, maybe if we had been able to say them out loud… God, I remember we must have been six or seven, I don’t know why but we were both having a lot of nightmares, skeletons, dark wizards; the usual fancies. Will wasn’t sleeping at all though. Dad told me later Will was lying awake trying to imagine what death was like. Not some vision of heaven or hell, though we were raised Catholic we never believed in any of that afterlife nonsense, but death itself I think, the existential experience of not-being. He said the closest he could imagine was like lying, immobile, in some vast empty space, and being condemned to think for eternity. It’s terrifying when you’re a kid, isn’t it? But that’s where we’re headed. See I’m working on this program to upload consciousness into a digital medium. We can live forever in the neural network. Will knew. It was in his story, the only part of his testament we couldn’t follow. But once I get through this layer we can take his brain off ice, and he can live, er, think out his dream of being the eternal storyteller. How exciting! And then I, I guess I could apologize, for not having it done in time, or for not replying to his letter, when it might, um, have made a difference.

Mary Sinclair: Oh Will! Why did he do it? I don’t know if anyone can understand, certainly not a simple-minded Pooh Bear like me. He was always so different, so unique, more than anyone else we went to school with. I remember, when we met, in middle school, he came into orchestra class in this long black trench coat, so tall and intimidating. Oh! It wasn’t what he wore though, though he did dress pretty strange with the years. It was how he thought, always so complex, these circles, I never knew what he was talking about, these… No, it was that he smiled, at a silly fat girl like me. And kept smiling. Because he understood, we were on the same side, the outside. I don’t know why no one liked him, or Nim either, but Will, he was brilliant, beautiful, he always cared, always listened through the years when I’d gotten my heart broken again, he’d be there and listen, and never ever judge me. And after he moved away he’d tell me stories about his life, his dreams and adventures, whenever I wasn’t telling him who died that year, which someone always did and he always wanted to know about it, and I never got anything he said but I just sat their and smiled too, because we were friends, because he was William Bright.

No, he wasn’t outside, though we hung out with the other misfits out back of T.C. during lunch. He, he had this way of, everywhere he was, it was like, that was the center of life. I don’t know how to explain it. He made the world around him? Like he made his death too, his bones. Oh, why were they just bones? I… don’t know what I expected… gold. I was glad of the parade though, I didn’t know Will had touched so many people’s lives, like he touched mine. He was so caring… Before our senior year, our friend Red killed himself, took acid and hung himself right in front of his sister. It was horrible! But Will, maybe he was out of town that summer, but no one told him about the funeral. He got upset, he wanted to pay his respects, so he made us, well, he suggested we all go down to the tunnels, the sewers under the school we sometimes hung out in. I hated the place, crawling through those dark, wet rooms. But it had been Red’s place, and Will knew that so he took us there, and lit a red candle, and we sat on the rocks and smoked a long joint in memory of Red, what he would have done for any of us, you know? But the joint started running and the cherry fell off, and before I could relight it Will said no, this joint is like our friend, burnt out before his time. Then he blew out the candle. I… guess it sounds silly now, but then it was the smartest most caring thing anyone could have thought of to say. We all cried there in the dripping darkness, we were not alone.

Phoebe Zeitgeber: I always knew something was eating at Will, like he was a top spinning around the edge of a sunlit abyss, and he couldn’t ever leave that cliff alone. Like when we were doing those writer’s groups back in the day – I gave him his first journal you know – he’d always bring in this one line, one theme: “I walk the twisted streets alone again, between shadows and the lamplit avenues.” Maybe used it in five poems? I always thought it was abstractions, hollow symbols, but thinking back that’s what he always did, walk the night time streets again and again, searching for some answer, some goddess, anything that could tell him why he was the way he was, why nothing ever made sense. God, the number of times I had to talk him down from a tempting ledge or a new girlfriend. It’s not that he wanted to be different, he just was, and that scared him down to the core. Do you ever feel what it’s like never knowing who you are or what you are supposed to do, but being possessed with this unaccountable energy, this prodigious imagination, and still not knowing what you were supposed to do with it? Will did. He was always asking me for advice. That or just channeling these strange desires, being a medium for the Universe, he put it. A medium for worms now, and one day, a tree. We’d always talked of that, being planted with a seed in the gut to renew the cycles of the Earth. And the eating, I came up with that too.

No, we hadn’t talked much recently; I’ve been real busy since I moved to Prague, when he met Glory. I can’t imagine what she did to him, to drive him to this… No, he always drove himself. Even when we were together he drove himself. I recall, back in high school, our punk rock salad days. There was a show, Grimple was playing, we were all into them that year. Anyway, before they even got on stage a kid who was tabling in the back suddenly collapses. A heart attack. Everyone rushed over, except Will, standing off to the side with a look of horror on his face. See, he had been a lifeguard that year, still certified for CPR, but he told me that in that moment, when someone’s life might depend on it, he panicked and forgot what to do. I told him it was okay, could happen to anybody. Seven other punks couldn’t resuscitate the body, the kid was DOA when the medics showed up, but Will, I don’t think he ever forgot that moment, or stopped blaming himself maybe for not being able to be the hero. It ate him up, knowing that even when you know what to do, and how to do it, sometimes you can’t.

Dr. Randolph Carter: I didn’t know William Bright all that well. In fact, I only had him for one class at the University of Maryland, back in 2000. But it’s like any teacher who’s been teaching long enough will tell you, there are those students who even decades later you can not forget. It’s something about their eyes, that voracious gaze, as if they can stare straight through time and space. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’m sure William left teachers wondering his whole life just what he would get into when he left their classrooms. I guess we all know now.

The class was called Thanatos: the Many Meanings of Death. I was quite proud of that title. I wanted my students to learn to question the cultural taboos on dying in order to more fully appreciate the lives they were living. I mean, it was rather dull actually, all textual based: Ivan lllych, Kubler-Ross, Ariés. If I ever taught that class again I’d take them to a morgue. But you’d be surprised at how hard some of these kids took it, as if they’d never been told that they would die before. So I had them keep journals of their emotional reactions to the texts, so that I could make sure no one wanted to look at death too closely, if you know what I mean. Well, William’s journal, I don’t think he understood what I meant by emotions, he had never journaled before. But the rest of it, it was this collage of ideas, research, mythologies real and imagined, some of it rather impressive if not a little overblown. I chalked that up to youth. He had even written a couple stories there, one actually that was mainly a collection of funerary rituals. I guess he never let that idea go. I recall how fascinated he was with the concept of aerial burials, and I guess I was a little pleased though admittedly sickened, watching those ravens tear at his organs. Actually it was beautiful, that moment when one raven picked out his eye. I’m glad that part made it onto the DVD, even if I can never bring myself to watch it again.

I think he always knew it, even back in 2000. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, like he knew that he had to experience the fullness of life and the fullness of death, but he was only waiting for someone to tell him to go ahead. This one day I did. It was early spring, none of my students wanted to be in class, all sitting there with their heads in their hands, bored even with this, the greatest of mysteries. I grew furious, I wanted to get a rise out of them, so I said, if you are ever doing something that you don’t want to be doing, even sitting in this classroom right now, and you know what you’d rather be doing instead, then go do it! And William, rest his soul, stood up, fixed me with his penetrating blue gaze, and then he walked out. Just like that! How could I ever forget it? None of the rest of the kids even moved. When I read his book, those passages about meeting God, that’s all I could think, what it would have been like to see the world through those eyes. Maybe this is the closest we get, maybe…

Flip Rogers: I didn’t have to be there to know it; I had a gig that night anyway. They incinerated his heart, right? So what? Will’s heart was always on fire. That was his anthem, he wore it on his patchy sleeve: live passionately, love fully, with his big dreams and outrageous songs, as if he was the hero of his own story. We used to argue about it constantly, living your life as material for your writing. An’ that’s what we were doing, with the Moment, the whole Bumrush poetry thing, living our dreams. Least till it ‘came obvious those dreams weren’t attainable. We’d argue an’ I’d say, yo God, Kerouac tried it, the whole Beat thing, this personal mythology. It’s been done, no one cares, you can’t do it anymore. The first person narrator is dead. But he’d just shrug an’ go out wandering, get involved with a circus or some fool shit, you know? Will’s dreams were bigger than any of us realized, just he never told no one what they were.

It’s like back when we were first starting the band, he wrote this one song called Momento Mori, “pain reminds me I am alive” and all. Yeah he was always thinking on that level. Deep, too deep, way out in left field where none of us could catch him. Like, Phoebe tried to keep Will straight, an’ I tried to keep him bent. I got him drinking beer back in the day, even gave him blow-caine once when he asked for it. All our wild, meaningless adventures, like I had to keep him entertained, him and everyone else for that matter. But then, just when no one expected it, Will’d go off and sell fairie wings for a living, or join up with some shamanic ritual cult or something. For what? The experience? Who the fuck knows! Will never shared what was in his heart, but it was burning, burning, his desires were unquenchable. Like after Terra dumped him, an’ he spent a year drunk an’ courting the Horror. He threw himself just as passionately into dying.

That one night, we were all fucked up, an’ Will starts getting the shakes, like someone’s walking over his grave for hours an’ hours. His temperature had dropped a bunch an’ so Lady’d put him in a hot bath to warm up and knock it off. He said he was dying. None of us listened really, I mean, people’ve got sick before an’ got over it. But then, I remember we were listening to Mirah sing Wile’s “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” an’ then Will starts yelling from upstairs, he’s praying, like in some foreign language, saying that if he lived through the night he’d get his shit together an’ do everything he was put on Earth to do, real spiritual like. Sent chills up my spine, an’ fuck, I though I’d heard everything! I don’t know if he did get it together, if he did what he had to do whatever that was. We stopped talking after that, when he met Glory. I jus’ know he fell into her with as much passion too, an’ maybe when that went belly up an’ he finally realized he couldn’t be a hero in life like he wanted to, well, he decided to be one in death, like Peter Pan puts it, “to die will be a terribly great adventure.” An’ you know what I say to that? Ain’t get to enjoy no adventures when yer dead.

Albion Mazara: The thing you have to understand is that reality is not just this. There are other layers, larger patterns of which we are only the smallest part. Will understood this, he called them symbols, metasymbols; you may as well call them godforms, or the Council of Ancient Intelligences like I do in my art. That’s what we were after, the greater reality, the hidden reality. Except he saw it, Will went there, Saint Peter opened the gates for him on Earth. We were all tripping, not Matthew of course, and John was puking his up, but then I saw that fish Mark had caught and Luke had hung on the tree. It was still breathing, dying slowly out of its element. We had betrayed life. It threw me into a hell world, years of fighting my own shadows. But Will, he saw that fish and saw a key to life! He tried to explain it later, while I was warped up in the darkness, the Akashic Records, the connection through the back of the skull, like we are each cells, atomic structures in the larger organs of society, time, and space, all building up into larger living structures of intelligence until it, we, are all Existence. What is one cell? The skin on your finger dies all the time. It was like when Frank died, when those kids shot him in the head. It was just a death, but we finished his walk for him, year after year, building up a pattern, a ritual, that keeps him alive, a part of us. That’s how Will put it.

I saw hell because my life had been a heaven before. Will saw heaven because his life had been a hell. Since we met, it always seemed that something was going wrong for him, usually of his own making. Except he knew a way out, he knew how to dream. Will had this theory, how ancient cultures and shamans would leave tools with their dead to aid them in the afterlife, the otherworld. But that place, Will said, was no different from the drug state, the dream state, the imagination. Will died every night and wandered through his soul, unraveling the darkness before he was reborn each morning. He even took tools with him once he told me, under his pillow, which allowed him to get to the other side of his own personal hell. He had me make one of my little mummies, a tiny clay Will Bright. We buried it with his tools: the coins, the mirror, the length of string, a miniature blank journal. This wasn’t in his story, or the funeral. If they were he wouldn’t have been able to come back for them. I believe he did, you know, when I opened the tiny tomb, his simulacrum had already set out for the bridge between worlds.

Murphy Bright: Marta isn’t able to say anything. William asked her to participate too, but she hasn’t been able to stop crying yet. Even the best of the Scotch hasn’t helped her calm down. It’s the first time she hasn’t had the first word since the twins were born, which would almost be funny if it weren’t the death of our son. I should be drunk too, surprised I’m not, except I’ve had no desire to drink, like I feel this more pressing responsibility to finish William’s story. Over all the years, ever since I told the boys those animal tales when they were little, I think he was trying to get me to talk. When I started working on the genealogy William challenged me not to just record the names and dates, the tangibles, but to tell the stories, the lives and strange connections that make people real, that make our family tick. But really I think he was pushing me to tell him about my own life, but I never could, though he did get me painting again.

One story I did find though, was that for generations our blood would dig into one location, one way of life, that stubborn Southern mentality. But then one member would suddenly drop it all and run off to be a lighthouse keeper, or an artist. William loved that one; I think he felt it explained why he always had to push boundaries, like there was some genetic urging that could never be stilled, never be satisfied, that was always curious and revolutionary and so, so caring (which, if you look at even our recent family history is certainly a change from the norm). Take my mother’s funeral for example. I was having a really hard time of it myself, but William came down to Virginia immediately, dressed nice, helped out as much as possible. And he encouraged Marta to read the little poem she’d written and would have been too distraught to read otherwise. It wasn’t much, but it made the otherwise typical funeral a little more personal. Will wrote his own poem afterwards, it was so moving it made us both cry, because it addressed everything else that was going on around that day that did indeed make her passing special.

I think that’s one of the reasons William did this. His funeral was one that nobody will ever forget, though I couldn’t bring myself to eat his flesh. I wouldn’t be surprised if ages hence it became a national holiday, or a religious celebration. He had that power in his writing, in his art, even when it was weird, the power of truth, of what he called Total Reality. Even in the face of death, William wanted to see through to the other side. I think we can all learn from that, I certainly have. If there’s one thing I could tell my son, it’s that I started working on that story of my childhood again, the one he always wanted me to tell him.

Glory Bev Khora: We argued about it when he first read that Barthe’s essay. Will was outraged, adamant that an author’s life does have meaning, any life for that matter. That’s when he came up with the story idea, I just thought it was a clever intellectual exercise, I just never expected him to really follow through with it, not just the writing but the actual dying… If only we hadn’t broken up, that’s when everything turned. I was the only person Will had talked to in years; he’d abandoned everyone else. I kept telling him to make friends, to see a therapist, but he wouldn’t, he insisted that he could work through all his problems in his writing. But other people, they’re what gives life meaning, even if sometimes it feels like hell. Will was so lonely, so outraged, like his father, who Will said clung so hard to his beliefs that he eventually lost all his friends over it. Will didn’t want to end up like that, but he did. I think he was scared of losing people, or saddened that he’d driven away so many already. He said that he’d seen most of them die, not literally, but in his dreams. He said that meant you were killing off an old projection of that person that no longer worked anymore, so you could see them for who they really are, even with all the flaws.

But the image he could never get beyond was his own. When things were really bad between us I asked him, how he could manage to change the world if he couldn’t change his own perspectives? Maybe he couldn’t, maybe he just gave up after I told him I wasn’t ready to have children, when I broke off our engagement. That’s one of the ways he wanted to find meaning too, a lasting, to leave something behind that would endure. But can anything? You know, in the winter, right before he vanished, Will was furious again, about what? About that the stars were all going to disappear from the sky, something about the rate of expansion of the Universe speeding up. He wanted to fight the death of the Universe! And that so many billions of years away it’s pointless to even think about it. Talk about tilting at windmills. Talk about looking for meaning. But he must have thought, how can anything I do endure if billions of years from now there won’t be stars, planets, life to enjoy it? Clearly that’s not the right way of looking at it. Sure the author’s important, so’s our work, but we can’t be so important that it stops us from doing God’s will, here and now, whatever that is for each of us, getting along maybe, dying gratefully after the life we’ve had.

Gah, but this is all academic, isn’t it? Will’s not dead. I guess I’ll ruin his surprise. At least I don’t believe it. For starters, how did he die? No one knows, no one’s talked about it either. There was just the manuscript and the body. It could have been any body, a cadaver already anonymized, portioned out for the specific rituals. We couldn’t even see his tattoos, since the skin had already, supposedly been preserved somewhere. No, actually, dying would be entirely inconsistent with everything I know about him; even in his worst moments he was full of life. No, he’d rather play the joke, or just disappear completely, vanish to some hermitage somewhere and years down the road we’ll get a package in the mail that’ll be the manuscript of his next book. Author returns from the dead, will be the headlines. Of course, maybe that’s just what I want, what we all want. If Will’s not actually dead we’re all gonna kill him for it.