Three Novellas, three journeys, three themes, Last Long Walk of Noah Brown, The King and the Clockmaker and The Vast Darkness
Noah Brown is a called "retarded", described differently by a friend as "too innocent for a guilty world" and he loves to walk. Begins his journey in 1965 from Annapolis, Md. to a commune on the other side of the state where he builds a canoe which he carries with him on his journey through the south ending in NOLA where in 2005 he finally fulfilles his destiny to save people during the great flood. The King and the Clockmaker starts where the legend of the fate of the maker of the great astronomical clock in Prague leaves off and examines the nature of time as well as the purpose of art and raises questions about good and evil. The Vast Darkness is about a young woman anthropologist studying the effects of isolated mountain living on her neighbors. She inadvertently plays a role and finds herself in the middle of a story of brutality and vengeance.
Excerpt
Part One
The King and The Clockmaker
Prologue
The workings of the clock had filled its maker's visions so fully and exclusively that when he closed his eyes to rest from his labors its workings filled the darkness and his dreams. And good for him that it did, for when it was done the King, jealous of its unique magnificence and the glory he believed it reflected upon him, ordered the clockmaker's eyes put out with hot pokers to prevent its duplication in some other realm.
Those were eyes of genius and eyes that could penetrate the secrets of a sick soul as well as the secrets of time. They were dangerous eyes and the King had been mesmerized by them, had loved them, felt compelled to destroy them and had waited only until the masterpiece was complete to act upon that compulsion. Now he was the proud possessor of the finest, most magnificent and advanced time telling machine in the known world and thought that he had no more use for those eyes he had loved and feared, the eyes that dominated his dreams whether tender or violent. He would order them put out, expecting to put an end to the dreams, get some sleep finally, some respite, some blessed rest. The guard, so ordered, hesitated and the King grabbed the wooden handle of the molten-tipped iron rod and put out the eyes themselves, forever imprinting upon his own mind's eye the image of their last look.
Chapter One
December
A child looking backwards and forwards at the same time, he’d suffered a recurring nightmare, wordless, just he physical sensation of struggle and suffocation. Later he understood it was his child’s memory of birth and then it came back after the blinding. In his adult dream he was born inside out with the slick pulsating thing that was his heart lying on his chest exposed to the cold dry air and the pain was beyond his understanding for it had no beginning and no end. Then he would awake to the darkness and remember. When the kind had seared his eyes with molten iron he did more than blind him, he violated him, got past the protection of skin and bone and turned him inside out. Forevermore the clockmaker was forced to look upon his own innards, the pulsing, bloody, pain-engulfed labyrinth confined in and confining his skin.
* * * * *
A bell rang somewhere nearby like a cowbell although the clockmaker knew that no cattle were allowed in the town. The sound must have been borne on the wind from the outskirts in that time of morning when sounds carry long distances, in their solitary clarity. The wind was warm, a prophecy of spring on that mid December morning when the clockmaker woke up blind. It smelled somewhat of a distant sea and carried a balm to comfort the injured soul with lost memories and bring visions to the wounded eyes: wounded unto death of course and forever that death, but in the earliest light of dawn, the clockmaker dreamed he saw the sun rising in the waves of warmth born on the wind. He imagined a healing that included sight.
He began to believe in God, having nowhere else to turn. He thought he should talk to the rabbis and began to plan his journey home in that moment of quiet between the distant bell and the morning calls of the crows and the geese. By the time the birds had heralded the day and roused the workers in the town and the people began to move about and call out to one another, the noise of it, the moment of magic submerged in it, the clockmaker succumbed again to sleep, to hide a little longer from the pain he felt returning.
It seemed only the day before yesterday he'd been whole because the days and nights since the attack had all blended into one long delirium of pain and strange sighted nightmares. A doctor had attended him at the King's command and had drugged him to let him sleep, let him heal. When he awoke screaming loudly or moaning softly, the doctor was there in the selfsame moment with the strange sweet liquor and soothing words and the clockmaker fell back into his world of dreams and visions, dreams being the only life where vision survived and therefore the more real life for him now.
He saw the moon as well at night, knowing night by its sound. The moon was vivid and huge and bright before him with dark shadings where eyes could be, blind eyes, the moon was blind like the clock blindly counting the minutes, hours and days. If he could envision the moon so clearly perhaps it had only ever been a vision of his mind and he had always been blind and if he had always been blind then all men were blind seeing only dreams in the darkness of their minds. And if all men were blind, counting out the minutes of the hours of the days of their lives which they only imagined before they died, what then? Who imagined the ones who had imagined life? So ran the thoughts of the clockmaker.
Professional Reviews
The Midwest Book Review
I cannot upload this review as I only have it as hard copy.
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