The Reality Conspiracy (66 page)

The presenting problem was my mother's deteriorating health. She was 120 miles away, living alone in the old family place—and that just wasn't safe. Frequent, often unexpected, trips to assist her grew quickly exhausting. At length I had to pack up my computer, box my reference materials, and head out to stay with her with the intention of providing round-the-clock care.
 

For weeks we were shut up together in that dark house. Just her and me, with lightless empty miles of unpopulated countryside between us and the sanity of town. It took me a while to discover the apparitions she witnessed almost every night were the product of her medications. At the time I feared they were escaping from my manuscript.

It was a stressful, terrifying ordeal. I began to avoid the manuscript because I feared where the narrative path might be leading me. With my attention thus divided between the book and my mother's wellbeing, a tremendous strain developed on my marital relationship.

My mother died while I was writing
DEUS-X
. My marriage ended. My own health degenerated to the point I was unable to work. And the billowing blackness in which I was trying to create left its ineffaceable stain on the novel. In fact, reading
DEUS-X
today, I can see all the grim life events I was experiencing reflected in the story's most horrific episodes.

Reality becoming fiction is normal, but the other way around can be quite scary. At the time it was easy for me to begin thinking magically. Was the supernatural subject matter facilitating too deep a dive into taboo territory? Or, was the something-from-nothing process of creation under such oppressive circumstances setting loose some subtle entity or energy more dark and dangerous than a simple work of fiction?

T
o say
DEUS-X
is a cursed book might be a bit of an exaggeration, yet is seems to have cast a negative aura on many things and people whose lives it has touched.

For example, while it was being editorially groomed as a lead selection in the Warner Books catalog, my editor was fired. More destructive still, he had neglected to schedule it for publication. Suddenly
DEUS-X
was orphaned, abandoned, and invisible. For a while Warner couldn't even locate the finished manuscript.

In an effort to keep
DEUS-X
alive, a book dealer friend brought the manuscript to the attention of a small startup publisher in New Jersey: Twilight Publishing.

In 1994, they released it as a limited-edition hardcover embellished with Steve Bissette's artwork and wrapped in a striking, bible-black cover. Although the few reviews it got were good, the alchemy was lethal: a little-known author combined with an unknown publisher guaranteed the book's ongoing invisibility.

Since then the Warner editor has died. So has the man who midwifed the Twilight deal. And Twilight has gone out of business (alas, not so Warner). Three movie deals were agented, all of them went belly-up before money exchanged hands. Then there was the almost deal with Tor Books. The less said about that the better.

Ultimately invisibility was sustained. Whatever was opposing me had won. Fewer than one thousand books saw the light of day. For close to a decade its invisibility continued.

Around 2004, UPNE (University Press of New England) tried to rescue the book from my personal slush pile. They produced an elegant trade paperback version with the expanded title:
DEUS-X: The Reality Conspiracy
. Almost synchronously my editor left. Immediately thereafter, UPNE was forced to drop their fiction line. Because they stopped publishing novels my book got less than their usual marketing thrust, which is to say "next to nothing." To date it has sold fewer than fourteen hundred copies.

W
hat I have told you is only part of the story. I have forgotten much of it. Specific names and other people's personal experiences with the book are private and cannot ethically be shared. What individual readers have told me involves confidentiality issues, paperwork permissions, and altogether too much work. I guess those are parts of the story that should remain invisible.

Though it might have vanished forever, the "cursed" book is back. It is visible, but no longer tangible. As an e-book you might say it now exists in another dimension. I will be curious to see if e-publication stunts its negative influence, or simply expands its toxic perimeter.

Time will tell.

I
n closing, I suppose we shouldn't take any of this "curse business" too seriously. The novel's content and the aftershocks it has delivered to everyone associated with it bring to mind an old comedy album by the Firesign Theatre. It was titled
Everything You Know is Wrong
.

To me there was never anything comic about that idea. It's a horrific notion and seems to be at the very root of
DEUS-X
. And the curse, like the book itself, may be all in my imagination.

—JAC

   
January, 2012

W
hen Warner Books was preparing to publish this novel in the early 1990s, I worked with an editor who helped me cut it back by about one third. In most, if not all cases, the cuts were good and right, so I have not tried to reintegrate them into the existing narrative of this e-book. Rather, I append them, here, at the end of the book, as extras.

I have not included every deleted transitional sentence or paragraph. Chunks of text are just gone, and rightfully so. Nor did I reinsert all the thousands of adjectives and adverbs that were deep-sixed in the copyediting process.

But here are a few chapters and fragments that might have vanished for all time were it not for the miracle of the e-book.

I have provided a short introduction to each.

Here for your consideration. . . .

(1.)

This first partial chapter originally came at the very beginning of the book and might have served as the opening if the editor hadn't pointed out that it wasn't the strongest place to start. Still, Denny LaChance is such a delightfully seedy character that I hated to see all his background vanish before he gets whacked. Besides, I hated to part with the MIBs. So this is how the book began when first submitted…

Los Angeles, California

Wednesday. November, 11

About noon . . . .

D
enny LaChance was about to light a cigarette when the men in black took him.

He was standing on the sidewalk outside Vigo's Kwik-Stop when they made their approach. At first he thought they looked like religious nuts, end-of-worlders, Scientologists, or something. Then the one with the crew cut and tortoise shell glasses grabbed his arm before his match touched tobacco. Without breaking stride, the man pulled Denny toward the green van with TramaTech written on the side. "What the hell?" said Denny. The unlit cigarette fell from his mouth.

"Don't say a word, motherfucker," said the man on his right.

"You'd regret it fast," the man on the left whispered. "My friend and me, we're both black belts. Say another word and you're hurtin' bad."

Denny fell the sweat burst from his forehead. "Hey! What the fuck's this all about?"

The man with the glasses squeezed Denny's elbow and a prickling jolt of pain numbed his upper arm, left it feeling full of tiny electric eruptions under his skin. Fear exploded. Just as quickly Denny's bladder let go. He wondered if the stain would be visible through his leather slacks.

A bag lady pushing a Vons shopping cart full of newspapers and aluminum cans waddled past. A black kid wearing earphones made a wide arc around them. A cheap-suited beaner eyed the dark-suited men and said, "Afternoon, Padres," then vanished from sight.

Denny wanted to look back, wanted to cry out to the black kid for help, but with a strong hand on each of his arms, he had no choice but to move forward. His crotch felt hot and wet.

The man with the long blond hair said, "You're gonna take little ride with us, Denny me boy."

In the distance, in front of Tommy's at Rampart and Beverly, a cop stood eating a burger and talking to a man in a stained white apron. The man was waving his hand and shaking his head. The cop was nodding and massaging the butt of his nightstick.

Denny wondered what would happen if he cried out to the cop. Would the dark-suited men throw a punch that would stun him? Maybe even kill him?

It was a chance, and Denny was used to taking chances. Still, the odds weren't in his favor. He was being clutched securely and these dudes were strong!

Well, fuck, no matter how strong they were, if he lunged forward and pulled away, he'd be out of punching distance before they even knew what was happening.

"Don't even think about it," said the man with the blond hair. He tightened his grip above Denny's elbow.

"Just get in the vehicle and act like you're civilized," said the crew cut guy.

Denny jerked his head back and forth between the crew cut and the blond.
Military types
, he thought.
Maybe FBI or something. They're just going to question me
.

No big deal. He'd been questioned often enough; usually it was nothing to break a sweat about. Ever since he got out of the slammer, pigs were always hassling him about something. Christ, there was that robbery over in Lincoln Heights. They'd spent three hours trying to convince him he'd been involved in it. Shit, he didn't even know where Lincoln Heights was. Then, two weeks ago, a couple of detective types had hassled him about some stolen dynamite.

Dynamite, for Christ sake. What did he know about dynamite?

So what was it this time?

The man with the crew cut seemed like the meaner of the two. In spite of his scholarly glasses, he had a pitted complexion and a face that it looked as if it was blasted out of concrete. His flat expression never changed. His eyes never shifted from straight ahead, but somehow Denny knew the guy was watching his every move.

Fuck
, he thought,
they're just trying to scare me
.

The blond-headed guy didn't look all that tough. His face was smooth and he hardly looked old enough to shave. A Beach Boy type, Denny concluded, probably a little more laid back.

But he knew better than to go up against any of these karate-guys. Of course, maybe they were bluffing. Naw, too dangerous to chance it; if they really were cops, they probably weren't bluffing.

They stopped in front of the van while the Beach Boy slid the side door open.

"Watch your step," said the guy with glasses, "we don't want you to hurt yourself."

He pushed Denny toward the open door.

Denny held back just a little. If he was going to make a break for it, it had to be now.

He turned, maybe a fraction of an inch. It was not as if he was trying to turn away. It was more as if he was adjusting the angle of his body so he could step into the van. But before real motion was so much as suggested, the blond man turned away too. Casually. As if he were simply looking at the people on the busy sidewalk. But his elbow—hardly seeming to move at all—worked like a jackhammer. It bore into Denny's kidney, bending the flexible bone at the base of his rib cage.

Denny pitched forward into the van. Sick, sour pain seemed to spray bile into his stomach. He thought he was going to puke as his face scraped along the gritty metal floor. His head spun. Nausea spread through him like a toxic river. The pain from the kidney punch was cruel and disabling.

He rolled over to see the van's door slide closed.

It was midnight black inside the vehicle.

(2.)

This section was intended to develop Dr. Sparker's character and to show what happened to Miss Damon after she flipped out in Sunday school. But in the final revision, Dr. Sparker and the fishfall and Miss Damon's Sunday school freakout were redefined as independent chapters extracted from Jeffrey's Chandler's book-within-a-book. With that decision the doctor and Miss D. stepped out of the principle narrative.

D
r. Lloyd Sparker paused outside Beth Damon's hospital room. He didn't want to go inside. He didn't want to talk to her.

The old woman had been here just since—he looked at her chart—Saturday, the twenty-fifth. That's a three-day hospital visit and still there was no noticeable improvement. Her injuries were minor; they should not have been that disabling. Strictly speaking, there was very little wrong with her. He suspected her lack of recovery was more a problem of spirit. So what more could he possibly do for her? He'd run out of ideas. He was certain Medicare wouldn't pay for many more days of in-house treatment, especially now that treatment seemed to accomplish nothing. And there was a limit to how "creative" he was willing to be on their documentation.

"Horse" Buckley, the consulting neurologist, wasn't able to provide anything useful. He'd said the CAT scan didn't reveal a thing beyond the normal indications of aging. The urologist, Bob Rosa, said the internal damage was healing, but would leave vaginal scarring and quite possibly painful urination for the rest of her life.