Somewhere Over the Sun

West Texas goes on forever.

Desert and trees, farms, plateaus, ugly little gas stations, rolling green pastures, it was hard to tell just what the geography was like, they’d been in the car that long. Time was measured in miles, in playlists, in podcasts of This American Life.

“I don’t know why Israel and Palestine are so caught up in that little bit of land. All that sand,” he looked down at the gauges to check the gas tank, “I don’t know why they don’t come here. It’s empty. All these farms. I’m sure their quality of life would improve.” A storm was rolling in from the south, and they were both certain that they’d drive right through it, right past it, they’d still be driving when the next storm came through. “Would anyone mind?”

She was craving a cigarette. Her feet were up on the dashboard, the air from the vents climbing down her legs, giving her a cool reprieve from the heat of the chair, the heat of West Texas. The taste of him still lingered on her lips from a few hours back, when the privacy of a swarm of eighteen-wheelers had sent her wordlessly to his lap. Nestled between his abs and the steering wheel, she’d had the urge to nap.

“Lightning,” he said, looking at the horizon to his right. He’d said it calmly, as if the word was completely disconnected from the electricity of what it described. He imagined himself, briefly, as an airline pilot on a transatlantic flight, or something longer. West Texas was as big as the sky. He looked at the smudge her toes had left on the windshield and knew they would be there for a very long time.

The tiny shard came from a drinking glass which had been kicked aside on New Year’s Eve—by which one of them, no one could recall— and left shattered on the ground until morning, when the two squatted, naked save for a pair of slip-on shoes to protect their feet, to pick up the pieces. The tiny shard had failed to catch any reflective light, and by the time the couple purchased a vacuum cleaner, it had worked its way into the jungle of curly beige fibers of the carpet. Now it was an unreachable, occasional glimmer just off to the side of their bed.

Some nights, the couple hugged each other in bed, staring at the spot in the carpet as if waiting for a shooting star. These were nights where they kissed each other softly and hurriedly and with a never-quenched thirst. They called the glimmer their north star, and wished upon it, wished out loud, and wished a few things secretly, wishes they might wish to take back on a different night.

When they fought, they tossed a pillow over the shard of glass and they never yelled. They thought long and hard in between answering each other’s complaints, and sometimes they worded these answers so poorly that a new fight would start and stretch out for hours, only a few things being said, like sparse gunshots in an ancient battlefield.

One day, they decided to drink wine in bed, and they loaded up on bottles and took off all their clothes. They had forgotten to bring a bottle opener, but he had heard that you could just push in the cork. It worked, but wine sprayed out of the bottle, stinging their eyes and painting the walls, making it look like someone had been murdered. The other three corks they pushed in uneventfully splashed into their bottles, as if the first geyser-like eruption had been a once-in-a-lifetime thing. They kicked another glass over that night, a half-full flute that didn’t break on impact, but bled out on the carpet next to the shard.

The people who moved in after the couple tore the carpet out of the room, putting hardwood floors in its place.

The following unfinished short story may or may not be continued at a later date. I make no promises. Enjoy. 

Like everyone else at the dinner party save for himself, the girl he was there to see was fictional. The dinner party itself was real, as far as he could tell. The table was made of solid wood and covered in a fine navy-blue tablecloth. The food smelled, and as wonderfully descriptive and imaginative as fiction could be, Samuel had never encountered fiction that actually smelled, and so he concluded that the food coming from the kitchen was completely real, too.

However, there was jazz playing from the speakers, just loud enough to fill the spaces in between conversations, and that seemed to only happen in fiction. Samuel could never differentiate very well between a trumpet and a saxophone, between Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald, could never actually name a tune except La Vie en Rose (although that didn’t count because everyone could name it). The girl he was there to see could name every jazz song that played, even if it didn’t have lyrics, and he loved glancing around the room and seeing her stop herself in the middle of a sentence in order to listen to a verse, or a riff.

The word that came to his mind whenever he thought about her was ‘wonderful’ and so he had come to terms with it as a fact: she was wonderful. It was true that she was mostly made up, mostly imagination. But she was held up by real details, little concrete bits and pieces that all fictional characters are comprised of, like buttons holding together a shirt.  Except that they weren’t very easy to point out, weren’t aligned like buttons on a shirt. There was just something about her that wasn’t entirely fictional, just like there was something about him that at times did not feel entirely real.

The food had yet to be served, and everyone had broken off into separate conversations. All the bookish characters had poured themselves generous glasses of scotch and imperfectly mixed martinis, and were out on the balcony smoking, knowing full well that they would never develop lung cancer. They spoke softly about things that mattered, and although it was clear some of their features were very well described, every time Samuel looked at them, there seemed to be something hazy about their appearance, something left to the imagination. The movie characters sat around on the leather couches in the living room, looking like famous people.

Samuel had chosen to step away from the girl, to not seem so damned enchanted by her every move, although he couldn’t help but keep an ear cocked in her direction as he talked to her father, who was not a main character in any work of art, but simply existed because, no matter how fictional the girl was, she needed to have had a father. This set him and the rest of her family apart as more fictional than the rest of the dinner party guests, and thus, in Samuel’s opinion, the most interesting ones to talk to, save for the girl herself.

I came up with a new game today. It’s one of my favorite types of games; the sit at a bar and imaginatively judge people kind of game.

You know how (the proverbial) they say that absolutely everyone’s got at least one book in them? Well, next time you’re out in public people-watch and try to figure out what kind of book people around you would write. That bartender with the impossibly meticulous facial hair, the popped collar and the very impressive skill of making an avocado martini taste like an orange muffin; there’s something about him that just screams detective novel to me.

Most people in bars look like they’d write memoirs. Excusably self-indulgent works, since most lives are self-indulgent and you should write what you know. Or romantic comedies. A lot of people would write romantic comedies. They do already, I guess.

Incredibly smooth segue into…

My writing contest is over tonight! Let out a little bit of the novel inside of you and you could win a free copy of my book, Somewhere Over the Sun. The contest closes at 2/19 11:59 p.m, Central Standard Time (check what that means for you). The guidelines are simple:

The Guidelines

If you had the ability to turn fiction into reality, written words into truth, what story would you write? As per the limitations that my protagonist Alan lives through, assume that you cannot summon gold, or cure diseases or reveal any kind of deity. Entries should be between 200-1,000 words (I won’t strictly adhere to either limit) and can be the story itself or just the idea behind a story. I will pick the winner based on style, content, originality and that ever-subjective quality of likability. With his/her permission, I will post it on this site. All stories should be emailed to adi.alsaid@gmail.com. This contest is open to absolutely everyone on the planet.

The more I live, the more I think telling each other stories is why we live.

We look forward to our next breath, eager for life to write us a story that we can retell to the characters that shape our lives. We call each other on little devices that were once the stuff of science fiction and we say to each other, “Let’s meet here or there, now or later.” And then we drink things that loosen our tongues so that we’ll have the courage to tell each other not only our newest stories, but our most important ones, our most heart-expanding and heart-breaking ones. And through our stories, big or small, we undoubtedly prove to ourselves more than to anyone around us that we have lived. Things have happened to us, people have appeared in our lives in noteworthy fashion, stuck around in noteworthy fashion, left in noteworthy fashion.

Every day stories pile on to each other. Strangers tell us stories through television and songs and books, tell us their stories with the looks on their time-worn faces, even when they don’t come leaking out of their mouths a sentence at a time. If this planet ever strays from its orbit and sinks to the very bottom of space, it’ll be because of the weight of the stories we tell and don’t tell each other. Stories about what it means to be alive, a topic which will never be accurately summed up by any amount of written, spoken or lived retellings.

Don’t stories palpably texture the air around you? The fictional ones and the true ones alike, intertwined indistinguishably until who knows which speaks more truthfully about your desires and your needs, your experiences and your self?

‘“What do you have in common with Alan, your main character?”

If you read my last post, you’ll know how I feel about fiction coming to life and life coming to fiction. One has an advantage over the other, but who knows by how much.

Alan is an extension of myself, yes. In my first novel, I knew I had to give the main character a voice a lot like mine so that it would be a little easier to transition from shit I just needed to write into prose that would make sense for the novel. If I’m being more honest, though, that’s a bit of a stretch. I don’t think I had that much foresight. Alan was always me, not because it was the wise, writer thing to do, but because the book is too much a part of me to leave myself out of it.

Alan loves words, loves people, loves life. Stephanie Stringham wrote the following about my novel: “Lyrical and beautiful expression of love between a father and a son. Perfectly captures my sentiments of words, and feeling a natural calling, a pull to words, experienced by writers and editors and others who work with and toy with language as a way of life.” I think what she’s getting is myself shining through via Alan’s voice. We both love words, and it’s obvious to anyone who’s interacted with us.

In a very Thanksgiving-appropriate way, I think what I most have in common with him is the ability to appreciate, to be thankful for the happiness that most people ignore, the ability to see perfection where others see mediocrity, the ability to turn the mundane into the beautiful, just by phrasing it the right way.

We share plenty of memories, which should be expected of a debut writer and his first main character. We love the same things, like tomatoes, and girls whose names start with the letter ‘D.’ (Two out of the two girls I’ve been in mutual love with had names that started with that letter. It’s a strange observation to make, since it might not mean anything/ is very unlikely to. Who knows what loving people with a certain letter in their name says about us? If someone had come up to me as an eight-year old and said, “You will love two girls whose name starts with the letter D,” how would I have reacted? Would I have rejected the notion, since at the time I couldn’t feel anything toward the letter, even its sound or its shape.)

We share great parenting, although he has only a father, and that broke my mother’s heart, on some level. Alan knows a lot of the same people I do, although in his words they’re meshed together, and sometimes their lives are only a sentence long.

As you may have picked up on from the novel’s synopsis, Alan has a desire to help people. I think this stems from a book both he and I have read. It’s called Timbuktu by Paul Auster, and one line Alan and I have been repeating to ourselves and tons of others is: “ That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab, humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.”

Alan and I are both trying to leave behind a better world and the only way we know how is through our writing and our natural predilection toward kindness, the appreciation of beauty, and our unnamed need to share both with the world.