Every Third Thought Read online

  Table of Contents

  other titles by john barth

  Title Page

  Dedication

  pre-amble:

  Chapter 1 - first fall

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #1

  SOLSTITIAL ILLUMINATION OF POST-EQUINOCTIAL VISION #1:

  Chapter 2 - winter

  Chapter 3 - spring

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #2,

  Chapter 4 - summer

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #3:

  D/V/T/W #3:

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #3:

  Chapter 5 - second fall? first fall ii? this fall? last . . . ?

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #4:

  epi-season post-amble:

  after words:

  Copyright Page

  other titles by john barth

  The Floating Opera

  The End of the Road

  The Sot-Weed Factor

  Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice Chimera

  Sabbatical: A Romance

  The Friday Book

  The Tidewater Tales

  The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

  Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera

  Further Fridays

  On with the Story: Stories

  Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative

  The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories

  Where Three Roads Meet

  The Development

  for Shelly

  pre-amble:

  CLEARING GEORGE I. NEWETT’S NARRATIVE THROAT

  “YOU DON’T KNOW about me,” Samuel Clemens kicks off “Mark Twain’s” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by having Huck declare to the reader, “without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

  Likewise, Reader, you don’t know about me “without you have read” a little short story series called The Development, having to do with life in the once-upon-a-time mid-to-upscale gated community of Heron Bay Estates, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in the quarter-century between its construction in the 1980s and its near-total wipe-out in the late afternoon of October 29, 2006, by a fluke tornado in the otherwise all but storm-free hurricane season that ended with those devastating few minutes. The seventy-seventh anniversary, it happened to be, of the calamitous stock-market crash of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and one more reason why a certain Has-Been (Yours Truly) came to be who he currently is.

  In Huck’s case, the chances were that the “You” he addressed in 1884 would at least have heard of, and quite likely even have read, his tale’s popular forerunner of 1876. A century and a quarter later, the odds are that You knew a thing or two about Huck Finn even before first opening any of his author’s books, so popular an American icon has that boy-on-a-raft deservedly become despite his narrative’s rough initial critical reception and its author’s neglecting to account for semiliterate Huck’s ability to sustain a 250-page first-person spiel addressed to “You.” No such luck in my case—let’s not go into that—and so permit me to introduce myself. “G. I. Newett” here, Reader, his name in wincing quotes for reasons no doubt to be explained although perhaps already obvious: self-styled Old Fart Fictionist and, until his academic retirement some years ago, professor in nearby Stratford College’s pretty-good/not-bad /quite-OK Department of Literature and Creative Writing. Wherein his indispensable wife and soul-mate—the pretty-good/ not-bad/quite-OK poet-professor Amanda Todd—still does her teacherly thing between stanzas, so to speak, and spins out her poetry (sorry there, Mandy: crafts her verses) between class and academic committee meetings, just as her longer-winded mate, in semesters past, used to spin out his All But Futile Fictions while coaching StratColl apprentices in the clearing of their own literary throats.

  Never heard of us? You’re excused. Being me, more or less, I’m tempted to say, “Gee, I knew it,” but the puny pun would be lost (good riddance), in the unlikely event of its translation. As will another to follow, central to the tale that “G.I.N.” aims to tell if he ever gets its shit together and his own.

  Which, begging Your leave, he and “I” shall now re-attempt, if and while and as best we can:

  More or Less Fresh Start

  What most bothers Yours Truly—George Irving Newett, with whom Reader is unlikely to be acquainted from having perused his scant and minimally published scribblings—is not so much the psychophysiological fallout from his Accidental Head-Bang in the late afternoon of September 22, 2007, although it could certainly turn out to be more than trifling. For if “Pride goeth before a fall,” what cometh after? Hairline skull-fracture at one’s former hairline? Intracranial pressure from subdural hematoma, leading to chronic headache and even (as shall be seen, or at least imagined) hallucinations? Loss of one’s already ever more fallible memory along with one’s already ageimpaired hearing, eyesight, libido, and general life-zest? We’ll cross those bridges when and if G. comes to them, if he hasn’t already without our realizing or remembering his having done so. Meanwhile, what we-all most fret at (Mandy too, fellow teacher and wordsmith that she is) is the ham-handed symbolism of his/my falling, perhaps in more senses than one, on the first day of fall—which moreover happened that year to coincide with Yom Kippur, the Judaic Day of Atonement! As if Adam and Eve’s fateful fall from grace had occurred on the autumnal equinox, and they’d lost their fig leaves just when the trees of Eden were about to shed theirs! G.I.N. would never have let one of his wannabe story-makers get away with such clunky symbolic coincidence back when he was coaching the Stratford workshoppers with one hand, teaching World Lit 101 with the other, and vainly hunt-and-pecking his own fictive follies with some presumable third—“vainly” meaning to quite limited avail, successwise, inasmuch as years of polite editorial rejection had early shorn him of authorial vanity.

  Did Eden, come to think of it, even have seasons before that “fall in which we sinned all”? Wasn’t the Expulsion from the Garden an expulsion out of timeless, seasonless Paradise into time, self-consciousness, mortality, and the rest? What’s more, that primordial couple’s “fall” occurred in the springtime of their lives, so to speak, and began both their sexual history and human history in general.... So hey, the Author of Genesis could maybe use a bit of symbol-adjustment, too: like Yours Truly, perhaps a better hand at coaching others to clean up their acts than at cleaning up His own?

  In any case (as if all the foregoing weren’t heavy-handed enough), get a load of this: Just as the tornadoing of our Heron Bay Estates community fell on the seventy-seventh anniversary of the Crash of ’29, so G.I.N.’s 2007 bean-banging fall day/ Yom Kippur fall happened to fall on the faller’s seventy-seventh birthday! Nor are we done yet (Muse forgive the shameless Author of us all!): It was on the first anniversary of that firstmentioned mini-apocalypse—the yortzeit, as it were, of Heron Bay Estates, a bit more than a month after his birthday trip-andtumble—that George Irving Newett, just beginning to imagine that he might after all escape any further fallout from that fall beyond a small scar in mid-forehead like a Hindu caste-mark, experienced the first of what has turned out to be (thus far, at least, as afore-feared) five serial, seasonal, vertiginous, and extended . . . visions.

  Yup: one dream/doze/vision/trance/transport/whatever per subsequent North Temperate Zone season through calendar 2008, we’re embarrassed to report, more or less coincident, after that initial five-week-late one, with each season’s inauguration-day, and each having to do with some pivotal event in the corresponding “season” of the visioner’s life. Nor is even that the end of our Clunky Coincidences....

  Aiyiyi! If we were making this story up, even G. I. Newett would pack it in and hit
DELETE. But facts are facts, as best we can reconstruct and report them—including hallucinated-or-whatever “facts”—and so here we by-George go, with apologies to Aristotle, for example, whose Poetics famously recommend to us storytellers the Plausible-Even-If-Perhaps-Strictly-Impossible over the Possible-But-Bloody-Unlikely, if push comes to shove in that department. Apologies too to South Temperate Zoners, whose seasons fall in different quarters of the calendar from ours, with correspondingly opposite connotations to “April,” “September,” and the like; ditto Tropics-dwellers, all but seasonless except for Wet and Dry....

  I give up.

  But not undiscourageable G.I.N., who, instead of DELETE, here clicks once again the signature key to every self-disrespecting O.F.F.’s career and to the lives of us still-traumatized Heron Bay Estates tornado-survivors:

  RESTART.

  1

  first fall

  LAST FALL—I.E., AUTUMN 2007, or more exactly the run-up to that September equinox—it being about to be G. I. Newett’s afore-specified birthday, he long since out to pasture from Academia and his wife enjoying a last well-earned sabbatical leave before her own retirement, the couple treated themselves to their first-ever cruise-ship cruise: eight days on the Baltic and North Seas (Stockholm/Copenhagen/Dover, with intermediate stops and shore excursions) followed by a week ashore in England and culminating, on G.’s birthday, in our first-ever visit to William Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. Motives obvious, over and above much-needed respite from the reassembly of our storm-smashed lives: couple of long-time English profs, both of whom routinely included bits of the Bard in their undergrad lit-survey courses (George mainly the plays, Amanda the sonnets, neither of us with scholarly authority, but both with the appreciative awe of fellow languagefiddlers). Add to that the Stratford/Avon connection: Our joint employer, as you may have heard, is a thriving two-century-old liberal arts college in the even older colonial-era customs port of the same name in Avon County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, where the towns and counties have English names (Salisbury, Cambridge, Oxford, Stratford, Chestertown, Dorchester, Talbot, Cecil, Avon, Kent) and the numerous tidal waterways are still called by names predating the Brits’ arrival: Chesapeake, Nanticoke, Choptank, Sassafras, and Stratford’s own winding Matahannock. What’s more, while neither G. Newett nor A. Todd attended StratColl as students, the writer of these lines was born and raised in Stratford town—more precisely, in the crab-and-oyster district of Bridgetown, a rough-and-ready working watermen’s ward divided from Stratford proper by narrow, wharf-lined Avon Creek. Which waterway ebbs and flows into the Matahannock River, which does likewise into Chesapeake Bay and thence <> Atlantic Ocean, <> Bristol Channel, <> lower Severn River (Britain’s Severn, not Maryland’s over by Annapolis), into which flows one-way > the non-tidal upper Severn, its upstream reaches fed in turn > by the River Avon. Which is to say (so Mandy informed me on location) “River River,” Avon being the Celtic word for same. Although none to our knowledge has ever done so, one could imaginably sail Stratford-to-Stratford, setting out from one of the wharves near “our” Stratford’s old Custom House (or from late lamented Heron Bay Estates’ once-upon-a-time Marina Club), working downriver and down-Bay, hanging a left at Cape Charles into the North Atlantic, crossing it northeastward to the U.K., and forging thence upstream to where the original Avon flows through its original “Strait Ford” (i.e., narrow crossing), the eponymous town on its northwest bank. Across from which, by George, and connected thereto by a modest bridge, is the original Bridgetown!

  Who knew?

  Not us Newett/Todds; nor did we make that happy discovery by doing a Captain John Smith in reverse and sailing from Chesapeake to Channel, New World to Old. Instead, we drove Mandy’s high-mileage, pesto-green Honda Civic through intermittent late-summer-afternoon showers from “our” Stratford (i.e., from the rented riverside condo in which we’d been making shift since Heron Bay Estates’ doomsday) up I-95 past Wilmington to Philadelphia Airport’s long-term parking lot and shuttled therefrom with our baggage to the terminal. Cashed one traveler’s check into Euros, tsked at the once-almighty dollar’s declining value, and boarded a Scandinavian Airlines A300 Airbus for the overnight economy-class flight to Sweden. A quite decent complimentary in-flight dinner, to our pleasant surprise, with champagne available at $5 U.S. per split, served at 10,000 meters (so the cockpit announcement informed us) above the already dark ocean. We treated ourselves to a brace of splits, toasted our survival, our much-blessed union, and our well-earned (and by Mandy well-planned) vacation; then sipped, nibbled, read, held hands, and dozed through the long, cramped flight, wishing we could someday fly first class, but impressed by how relatively more comfortable and better served we were than on the several long-haul U.S. airlines we’d used for earlier trips abroad, earned with frequent-flier miles from our credit card accounts. Adíos, American Century; hasta la vista, USA! Safely landed after a very early breakfast for our maiden visit to Scandinavia, we reclaimed our luggage, cleared customs, and were duly met by a cheery/brisk cruise-line rep holding up two signs, one reading NEWETT/TODD and the other HADLEY (a large Pennsylvania couple also booked for the voyage). Were by him Volvo-vanned through a sunny-mild Swedish morning to the cruise-ship docks, the jet-lagging four of us admiring en route the handsome busy city: so many bicyclists pedaling to work in their office clothes, a thing rarely seen back home, and everything so clean!

  Hefty, red-faced Tom Hadley, his accent more deep-Southern than Pennsylvanian, supposed to our driver, “Reckon y’all don’t have the mi-nor’ty problems we Amurkans have.”

  “Or else you keep your panhandlers and drug dealers out of sight,” his wife teased. “Wish we could!”

  “Or just maybe,” my Mandy suggested to the backs of their heads from our rearmost seat before our smiling driver could reply, “a more equitable economy, a better health-care system, and more enlightened drug laws do the trick.”

  Without bothering to turn around, “Yeah, right,” Hadley growled: “Plus taxes through the kazoo.” We Todd/Newetts exchanged knee-nudges; I contented myself with opining that the correct idiom was out the kazoo, not through it, that term being a slang euphemism for the you-know-what.

  Whereof, we agreed later, these particular fellow “Amurkan” tourists were prime specimens. But our professionally courteous driver-escort merely winked into the rearview mirror and declared in flawless English, “We Swedish have slang terms, too—and here we are, ladies and gentlemen! Enjoy our city and your cruise!” For we had indeed turned out of charming, canalveined Stockholm proper into its port area and specifically its busy cruise-ship docks, where half a dozen sleek, enormous vessels were tied up. By local time it was still only mid-morning; inasmuch as our ship’s embarkation was scheduled for seven that evening, and boarding not permitted before two in the afternoon, we tipped our driver, checked our bags as instructed at the loading area for delivery to our stateroom, and set out map in hand to explore on foot, per Mandy’s pre-planned plan, the nearby canal-side streets, shops, houses, and sidewalk cafés, pausing at one of those last for lunch and hoping we’d be able to stay clear of the Hadleys aboardship in the days ahead.

  Because while we had enjoyed a bit of small-boat day-sailing in decades past and were no strangers to foreign and domestic travel, cruise-ship cruising—as may have been mentioned?—was not something to which we had thitherto been inclined, and that not simply because of the expense. A Volkswagen camper, backpacks, and Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day had been our style back in the late 1960s (our early-professorial twenties and thirties); rental cars and modest hotels thereafter, through our less cash-strapped forties and fifties and on into our sixties. We were small-time academics, not CEOs! In the long summer vacation-time, when not wrestling with our separate muses we liked poking about the cities, towns, and countrysides of our nation and others on our own, not in guided tour-groups; enjoyed getting lost, asking directions, coping with languages and local customs
as best we could, following our guidebooks’ tips for lodgings and eateries within our budget. As a rule we preferred a country’s streets and plazas, parks and coast-roads to its museums and castles, and when touring the latter, inclined to do so at our own pace, not in a docent-guided tour group. And we had little taste for “nightlife” beyond an after-dinner stroll, if we still had legs enough at day’s end, before turning in. What use had the Newett/Todds for what we imagined to be the confines and enforced sociability of a cruise ship crowded with hundreds of fellow tourists? A cramped lower-deck “stateroom,” pre-set dinner hours and seating, bridge tournaments and on-deck shuffleboard, nightly stage productions, and the constant tipping of room-stewards and other functionaries—not our style.

  Until accumulating years began to make the prospect of on-our-own touring ever less appealing, to G.I.N. at least—been there, done that—and the accumulating resources of our modest lifestyle (two incomes, no dependents, adequate pension and medical benefits from our professorships at the College, plus a not-insignificant legacy from Amanda’s parents, who’d had more savvy than George’s in the estate-planning way) led Mandy to check out alternatives for her upcoming academic leave. After a bit of asking around among friends and colleagues and a lot of Internet chat-room research, “PrimeTime Cruise Lines Seven Seas,” she announced in September of ’06, over wine and hors d’oeuvres on the screened porch of our second-floor Blue Crab Bight “coach home” in dear old Heron Bay Estates: “Stockholm to Dover this time next year, with stopovers in Gdańsk, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Bruges. Eight days aboard ship with no constant packing and unpacking, no scrabbling around for hotels and restaurants! King-bed stateroom with balcony! Three onboard dining rooms to choose from, with no pre-set dinnertimes! Eat by ourselves or with others as we wish—and no tipping! Then from Dover we take a bus or train to Canterbury, London, and Stratford–upon-Avon and say hello to Chaucer and Master Will—unless we feel like renting a Morris Minor, driving on the left, passing on the right, and shifting gears left-handed: your call. And after Stratford we fly home from Heathrow. Whatcha think?”