Reuben Julian Solo

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9662868-2-3
Verlag: Bernard Street Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

Julian Solo is a novel about a brilliant scientist who died...and yet lives, and who, having experienced this impossible transition, seeks to recreate the circumstances again and again. His purpose is to conquor death; his passion is to save the life of the woman he loves; and his journey is into the void. He wants us to come with him.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reuben, Shelly

Leseproben

I am a fortunate man. My guilt or innocence is currently being considered by a grand jury hearing of my peers; my mother is probably dead; my father has, for a long time, been dead; and my stepfather is certainly dead. But … But, I am twenty-one years old, strong, and all of this is taking place in America, where, despite the unpredictability of our jurisprudence system, I have a reasonable expectation that I will not be mob-lynched. Also, I am surrounded by people who love, like, or are at least pledged to assist me. Me, being Mathew Wylie, offspring of the union of Martin and Cynthia, stepson of Julian Solo, a.k.a. “the Accused.” My attorney, Dominic D’Amato, is certainly pledged to assist me, and may someday even come to like me. As he has glowering black eyes, a glowering black disposition, and a vague aroma about him of garlic and breath mints, I shall not actively strive for his love. I shall, however, continue to seek out his approval, since my life is in his hands. Also, since the one activity in which I can engage at present, and of which my attorney not only approves but actively encourages, is the composition of this journal, I herein record all of the thoughts, memories, feelings, and discoveries that led to the fatal night in question. I have, assisted by my friend and inspiration, Detective Michael Laffy, stolen, borrowed, or otherwise absconded with notes, memoranda, diaries, and journals belonging to friends, family, enemies, or acquaintances of mine who were involved in this case, but who are not themselves accused of anybody’s murder. Those with whose love I have stated that I am surrounded are the aforementioned Detective Laffy; my mother’s friend and my “aunt,” Nancy Lee Meyers; and Dr. T. Gideon Humphries. These three individuals being the extent of my “luck,” I shall focus the remainder of these memoirs on the circumstances that resulted in my present misfortune. The events in question began slightly less than a year ago, on January 15, 19 –. At that time, I had been out of college for over six months, but still didn’t know what to do with my life. A part of me inclined toward business, where I was fairly certain I could become successful; yet another part of me yearned to do my small part toward improving the human condition. I am embarrassed to admit that despite all that has happened, I can still understand and identify with those humanitarian yearnings of my youth, and have not yet been able to dispel the notion that man is essentially good, noble, and heroic. Dr. Humphries, with his benevolent disposition and almost metaphysical cheerfulness, has contributed somewhat to my refusal to give up on man. More significant, though, is my mother. When one is nurtured, guided, disciplined, inspired, encouraged, and loved by a heroine of the first magnitude, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to deny man’s potential. As my mother once said, “If a teacher demonstrates to you your capacity, you then have two choices. Either you can achieve it, or you can kill your teacher.” Mother was given to dramatic pronouncements, a characteristic that I fear I may have inherited. But to get back to my story, I had spent the seven months since my graduation working for a graphic arts company that produced mail order catalogs. I had begun as a glorified messenger. After two weeks, I was promoted to the stock room, where I unpacked, inventoried, repacked, and delivered the merchandise to the studio where it was photographed for the catalogs. After photography, I had it all returned from the studio, where I then unpacked, inventoried, repacked, and shipped the same merchandise back to our clients. Within a month of my promotion, I was promoted again, this time to assist the account executives in coordinating all of the photography, copy, artwork, paste-ups, and mechanicals that were involved in the preparation of a catalog. Finally, in December, I was promoted once more, to junior account executive, with a substantial increase in salary and responsibility. At this point, I thought it would be wise to resolve my career conflict before I was appointed chairman of the board. (That’s supposed to be humorous.) The direction in which my humanitarianism leaned was, at that time, medicine. Detective Laffy had told me that several police- and firemen he knew were retiring with their pensions after twenty years, and taking up nursing as a second career. Since men were successfully invading this formerly female-dominated profession, I thought that I might become a nurse, or, perhaps, a physician’s assistant. I ruled out becoming a doctor because I could not see myself spending another six years in school. In fact, I wasn’t even about to go back to college to study nursing unless I was certain beforehand that the career was right for me. Therefore, I took a leave of absence from my job, and decided to spend the subsequent six months living off my savings, doing emergency room volunteer work in the local hospitals and researching career opportunities. (I also intended to read a lot. Among other things, everything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote.) Once, when I was endeavoring to explain my state of mind to my mother as “trying to find myself,” she grimaced and said, “Mathew, it’s so common for a young man to be trying to find himself. Why don’t you think of yourself as larval, in the process of a more or less stressful molt.” So there I was at twenty-one years of age: independent (I had my own studio apartment on West Eighty-third Street), somewhat lonely (no beautiful fairy princess had yet deigned to honor me with her beneficence), confused, eager for life … and molting. It was at this stage, and in this state, that I first encountered Julian Solo. Julian is the kind of man one reads about but never actually meets. He is the man sipping Courvoisier on the deck of a yacht; the gentleman whose white cuffs beneath the sleeves of his tuxedo always seem to be whiter; whose pants’ creases seem to be more sharply edged; and whose shoes always seem to retain that perfectly buffed but not-too-polished look that we lesser mortals can never achieve. Everything that Julian Solo was took the cliché out of elegance and gave it back its status as an ideal. Julian’s hair was thick, wavy brown, and fox-silver at the temples. His forehead was high; the skin was tight and unfurrowed, like a smooth band of flesh stretched across his brow. His features were classic. Aquiline nose. Square jaw. Ice blue eyes. He was slightly taller than medium height, taut and slender. I once saw him in formal dress: black tux, diamond cuff links, patent-leather shoes. Although he was moving slowly and gracefully toward a limousine, I evolved an image of him then, not as a man opening up a car door for a beautiful woman, but of a man, in formal dress, running forward at an even, relaxed pace, with a javelin held loosely in his hand. And, just before he reaches the limousine, he straightens up, snaps his wrist, and releases the javelin with an explosive force. The javelin, of course, hits the target, whatever that happens to be, and then Julian ushers the beautiful woman into the back seat of the limousine and is driven away. This is the image I still retain of Julian Solo; it was not, however, my first impression of him. The first time I actually saw his face, he was dead. On January 18 of this year, almost one entire revolution of this, our earth, around the sun, when I had an eager appetite for living a life about which I had little knowledge, and when I was standing at approximately this very same spot (give or take a few perturbations) in our solar system, Julian Solo was standing in front of the main library building on Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue. Immediately after the traffic light changed, and just as he stepped down from the curb, a bicycle-riding messenger swerved out of traffic to avoid an oncoming car, and crashed into Julian Solo. Julian was propelled by the impact back into the very same car that the messenger had successfully managed to avoid. A theologian might describe the incident as an example of God stealing from Peter to give to Paul, or God’s right hand not knowing whom His left hand is pushing in front of a bumper. Regardless of the philosophic meaning of the accident, its immediate outcome was the brake-screeching delivery of Julian Solo’s unconscious body to the emergency entrance of the hospital at which I had begun volunteer work on that very same day. Now, hospitals do not ordinarily perform operations, nor do they usually do any but the most imperative procedures, in the small trauma room on the ground floor of the emergency ward. My supervisor at the time described this room’s function as a place through which the most serious cases travel, or in which the most serious cases die … something resembling a nondenominational purgatory in which the surgical resident (Saint Peter) guards the pearly gates to the operating rooms on the eighth floor. Even the defibrillators in the trauma room are used only in the event that the resident feels the patient wouldn’t make it as far as the elevators without them. Usually one of the surgical assistants or emergency room nurses assists the resident in the trauma room, if a patient gets wheeled in there. My first day at the hospital, however, the combination of a flu epidemic and a Long Island Railroad strike had so depleted the emergency room’s staff that when Dr. Beale whizzed past me behind the stretcher carrying a newly arrived accident victim, his one hand reached out immediately for...