The following is the beginning of my aborted start to my novel, written in 2009. I present it here as a record of change from what (hopefully) the novel will ultimately become.
On both sides of the mountain, snow began to fall. Through the valley, the winter weeds shivered as an icy breeze swept over and across them while flakes stacked up on the red rocks that held them apart. Night was setting in and the last indigo glimmers of a fading sunset turned the view through Khalil Rostau's window from the mountain to a reflection of his face, lit dully by the soft light that surrounded him in the fourth floor attic of his canyon home. He looked into his own eyes with curiosity, set as they were straddling the peak that was swiftly vanishing with the moonlight. A damp whiteness grew across the window as he gently exhaled, careful not to wake the sleeping infant he held against his bare chest.
He thought his eyes looked tired. The feeling of weariness had been creeping into his movements more recently, but now, it seemed, he was really starting to look it. Behind his curly chiaroscuro beard, the skin on his face was beginning to droop the heavy droop of disappointment and his eyes had a smoky lackluster about them. He felt he looked substantially older than he had ever seen himself, and for a moment he wondered how he would look if he shaved off his beard.
Professor Rostau (for that was what he was generally called) turned his gaze from his reflected self to the warm and snoring mass in his arms: his two week-old son James, a little god in his freshness, he thought, all powerful because he was still too young to smile. James (or 'Jamie' as his mother was already calling him) was everything that he himself no longer was: The baby’s arms were little rubber sticks that could bend wherever the boy might need them to, while the professor’s arms creaked with an old pencil stiffness from forcing numbers through the grinders of abstract social theories for too many decades, though he was barely thirty-nine. The baby’s mind was free of any kind of discrimination, while the professor, who’s field was economics, had spent the whole frosty day in his office trying to apply one of his general principles of social and sexual growth among proletarian teenagers to the accounting measures of some deadeyed bourgeois assholes (on commission, of course) whose money had failed to buy them any shreds of compassion. On the other side of town, a tadpole dotcom was paying him to speculate over some stock market business for them, when really, to be truly honest, with a business plan like the one they submitted…he was too tired to even get depressed about all of it. He took a deep breath and thought about how nice it would be to maybe take a short walk through the woods: clear his mind a little; but looking out the window again, he remembered the snow. The mountain was completely whited out now. A full scale blizzard was seeping in. It looked like they could be socked in for a day or two. He exhaled harder and the view was once more shrouded over with breath condensed across the window leaving him only to look upon himself and his son, incubated in their home by a state-of-the-art central heating system that worked by pumping hot water through pipes in the floor.
Barefoot, he now noticed the soft and comforting warmth his house radiated, enveloping him. Then he noticed more acutely the greater warmth emanating from James, straight into his own heart. Thoughts of the boy dragged his mind to his wife Tara, who he now saw reflected in the window, standing in the doorway behind him, looking vaguely annoyed about something. The thought depressed him that once he found out what was bothering her (probably troubles in her salon), he would yet again have to choose between either comforting her with obvious words or standing a beacon of understanding silence. Both options, he knew, would seem condescending to her, but how else could he respond to such redundant, childish complaints? A gulf was eroding between them, he could feel it without even looking at her: somewhere between his back and her front, like she was falling slowly farther and farther behind him, forgetting how to walk, while he just continued plodding along as usual. Her mind, he felt, had been slipping for all of the last two years: ever since their first child, a girl they had named Virginia, had been born prematurely.
From her position in the doorway, Tara caught Khalil’s Arabian eyes reflected in the window. Piercing her. Sinbad's curved sword, jingling hoops of gold and sharp ivory minarets singing out the songs of the dawn. A hot itch crept up her spine (Kundalini was it? or Mahayana?) even now, after three years of marriage and six years of touching this man: her breath coming asthmatic - in and out - tight, irregular spurts.
What about the salon? Green fabric with winterlace- Her husband…she lost her train of thought. Avoiding his eyes: too sharp. Graying hair curling his back. An old man already or more now distinguished? Changes. What would they say if they could see? Dignity, wrapped in his arm, the great thinker, silent revolutionary like who was he? Lying in his bed with all his great thoughts…Baudelaire? Or was it Baudrillard? Sculpted too, didn't he? Standing half naked on his coasting merrels. Breathing. Up and down his shoulders: those nameless people in his ideas. Ganesha the Destroyer cradling her little-their little boy.
She stepped forward and ran her newly manicured palm over his back. Ebony on ivory: no wait, other way. Moist and warm, or hot, like usual. Unreasonable amounts of body heat. Tara smirked. The money they could save on heating bills if they only piped the system through his bloodstream. Desert blood. Her hand tingled moist.
The professor felt cool the request of her touch, the love behind her caress, and it eased his mind a little. He smiled and turned to face her. An anxiety flooded suddenly her blue eyes, as if she was mentally bracing herself for a suckerpunch expected any moment. Lately it seemed she was always wearing some degree of that look around him: an observation that disturbed (and embarrassed) him more than just a little bit. But there was warmth in his eyes now and that warmth seemed to thaw her out for the time being. He bent in to kiss her, carefully leaving enough space to avoid upsetting the baby in his arms. Tara jerked forward suddenly to meet his kiss halfway, arching over Jamie, who, had he been awake at that moment, would have looked up to see two inconceivably huge figures colliding above him. In his sleep, however, the rhythm of his dreams began to shift as discordant heartbeats sped up on both sides of him. A tonal duet.
Jamesie softly moaned.
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