I watched Amber laugh with me, and watched her cry. And that was okay. She looked down at the blue jasper stone hung over her breastbone, and touched it with her fingertips. Like she couldn't believe it was real.
Then she looked up at me again, reached for my face, brushed her fingers against my cheek. She looked at me like she wasn't sure that I was entirely human. But she smiled, and it was beauteous and it set me to rights.
"Are you a fleeting image in my dream?" she asked me, and I felt her hands on my waist.
My laughter faded, and I considered. Maybe I was. Maybe I was nothing more than a phantom that had crawled up out of the flooded subbasement of Amber's fractured psyche. Maybe I was not at all what I would seem. Maybe I was just a figment of her imagination.
I smiled at that thought, and saw my own twin reflections in her caramel eyes.
"If I am, I don't know it." But the truth was that I didn't really care. Not even a little. So I laughed again.
Because that was the only truth that mattered.
POSTSCRIPT
If it takes a village to raise a child, then this book is the offspring of a very large community indeed.
If I'm being fair, then I ought to simply thank every person I've ever met during the course of my life. I have stolen shamelessly from all of you, and my only hope is that I have used the pieces to build something great.
But if you believe that you have recognized yourself within these pages, then I assure you that you're wrong. That wasn't you. Because this story may be true, but this book is most certainly a lie of the greatest magnitude.
It is only right that I give credit to my wife for her part in the creation of this narrative. Without her infinite patience and unflinching support, this book would quite literally not exist. Her faith in me has never wavered, not even when my faith in myself has dimmed. She made me a better writer, but more important, she gave me a reason to become a better person than I believed I could be.
If I am the father of this book, she is unquestionably its mother. And if you know me as the man that I am today, then you owe her a bit of your gratitude as well.
My First Readers Assessment Team, otherwise known as the FRAT, deserves mention. They include Mac Flythe and Peter Troshak and Ashley Hall, and my fellow author Bernard J. Schaffer, and, of course, the gloriously honest April Fuchs. Those people tripped over all of my mistakes so that you wouldn't have to, and they all did their level best to keep me from making a public fool of myself.
The errors that remain belong solely to me.
Bernard in particular has earned an additional measure of gratitude. He's got his own life and work and writing going on at a blistering pace, and yet he responded quickly to every email, answered every question I asked him, gave every opinion, offered every scrap of advice, connected me with the right people. He found me in the dark wilderness, and he handed me a lantern and a compass and a map.
If my wife and I are this book's parents, then Bernard is its uncle and godfather and sunglassed bodyguard.
Further thanks are also owed to Keri Knutson, who is one of those Right People. She composed the phenomenal cover for this work, rescuing the western wall of my office from an unfortunate encounter with my head. I'd also be remiss if I didn't extend a degree of appreciation to David Schrader, whose exceptional photography was used.
Eternal thanks, of course, are due to my entire family. None of you asked to be related to me, but you have all done surprisingly well under the circumstances. My sister and brother in particular could write books of their own, and I sincerely hope they never do. I rarely made it easy, and for that you have my abiding apologies as well.
I must also thank my grandfather, because he gave me his light, and my grandmother, because she gave me her home. My wife may have given me a reason to become a better person, but my grandparents gave me the ability.
And I thank my mother. Because there was a woman in my life once who was plagued by a creeping darkness, and my mother destroyed her. We are never defined by who we once were, but only as who we choose to be.
If there is an argument to be made for the Life Work school of thought, then surely this book is it.
The oldest files attached to this novel – a treatment and two character profiles – are dated 22 June 1998. I originally conceived this story as a screenplay titled Junk Yard Dogs, and I wrote it as one over the course of the next three years as I attended Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales as a second-year member of its TV/Film Department.
I eventually failed out of Allentown College at roughly the same time that I abandoned my dream of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter. Shortly before I left school for the last time, I had a conversation with a fellow TV/Film major. I admitted that all of my failures were my own; there was no one else to blame. I admitted that my own Libran laziness had finally gotten the better of me. And I admitted that that was just "the danger of being me."
So At least I left Allentown College with something.
I tinkered haphazardly with the project for a year while attending Montgomery County Community College as a Liberal Arts major. It wasn't until I enrolled in a creative writing class with professor Patricia Nestler that I revisited my screenplay, considering for the first time the prospect of writing the story in prose. Of making it a novel.
I also changed my major to Secondary Education at that time, discovering, finally, an academic passion. The fact that my uncle personally footed the bill for that particular semester may also have been a motivating factor. I wound up graduating with honors from MCCC, and transferred to the Education department at Temple University.
I also minored in English there, and met professor Matt Chambers, he of the rectangular eyeglasses and the mop of hair. I enrolled in British Lit, American Lit, and Intro to the Short Story because of him. His encouragement led me to return to my own story, and I decided that it would be a novel, and that I would call it The Danger of Being Me.
I graduated from Temple University with a Bachelor's in English and most of an Education degree. I moved to North Carolina and married an infinitely patient girl who had waited seven years for me to grow up. I got a job in finance. And I wrote. Slowly, tediously, ploddingly.
And then I read The Catcher in the Rye. I should have done so years before, one of the many times that I'd been assigned the book in high school or college. But I waited until I was 27 years old, and 65,000 words into my own novel. And I didn't write again for more than a year.
The similarities between my story and Salinger's broke my heart. He'd already written the story I wanted to tell, and he'd done it so much better than I could ever dream. I abandoned my manuscript, and went about my career in finance. I actually chose to give up writing fiction.
Just before I turned 29, my wife and I discovered that we were having our first child. And suddenly I couldn't stop thinking about my novel again. We were four months along, and I reasoned that if I could write just 250 words a day, I could complete the book before the due date.
Life intervened. Our daughter came; the novel did not. And then there was a baby to take care of, and writing got sidelined for a while. And that's okay. Because life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Stephen King said that.
But I wrote. Slowly, tediously, ploddingly.
And then I read Whitechapel, by an independent author and the brother of a girl I went to high school with. I read Bernard J. Schaffer's first novel, and I read an interview he gave, and one line stuck inside my brain. "Stop screwing around," Bernard said, "and finish your damn book."
And it clicked. Somehow, that was all it took. I sat at a laptop with no Internet connection on August 14th, and for 85 days, I wrote. I didn't produce a thousand words every day, but most days I did. And on November 9th, I wrote the eight most improbable words that I will ever write.
Because after all the years, the story was finished.
When you tell someone that you've written a book, the first que
stion will be inevitable: "What's it about?"
Nothing gives me the shakes like that question.
I've always contended that if I could sum up the story in a sentence, I wouldn't have written a novel. I'd have written a sentence and moved on. But that's an arrogant writer's answer, and it doesn't win over any readers.
And more than that, it's really a way for me to avoid an uncomfortable reality: I don't actually know what the book is about. Not really. The novel is a deconstruction of my own life in many ways, and a fictionalization of my own memories. To understand what this book is about, I would have to begin to understand what my own life is about.
But that's a pretty arrogant answer, too.
I once said that the book was a story about the elegant misery of being a teenager. About the interconnectedness of the past, the present, and the future. About family. It's a love letter that doesn't know it's a love letter, and a novel about a kid writing a novel. I said that it was a book that begins twice and ends twice within its own pages.
All of that is true. I think. But none of it is helpful.
Because ultimately it's not for me to say what this book is about. That's up to you. You read it. You tell me.
Anthony J Fuchs
16 July 2012
The Danger of Being Me Page 31
