John Barth - Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons

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for Shelly

YOU DONT KNOW about me, Samuel Clemens kicks off Mark Twains 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 dont 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 Marylands 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 Hucks case, the chances were that the You he addressed in 1884 would at least have heard of, and quite likely even have read, his tales 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 authors books, so popular an American icon has that boy-on-a-raft deservedly become despite his narratives rough initial critical reception and its authors neglecting to account for semiliterate Hucks ability to sustain a 250-page first-person spiel addressed to You. No such luck in my caselets not go into thatand 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 Colleges pretty-good/not-bad /quite-OK Department of Literature and Creative Writing. Wherein his indispensable wife and soul-matethe pretty-good/ not-bad/quite-OK poet-professor Amanda Toddstill 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? Youre excused. Being me, more or less, Im 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:

What most bothers Yours TrulyGeorge Irving Newett, with whom Reader is unlikely to be acquainted from having perused his scant and minimally published scribblingsis 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 ones former hairline? Intracranial pressure from subdural hematoma, leading to chronic headache and even (as shall be seen, or at least imagined) hallucinations? Loss of ones already ever more fallible memory along with ones already ageimpaired hearing, eyesight, libido, and general life-zest? Well cross those bridges when and if G. comes to them, if he hasnt 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 fallwhich moreover happened that year to coincide with Yom Kippur, the Judaic Day of Atonement! As if Adam and Eves fateful fall from grace had occurred on the autumnal equinox, and theyd 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 thirdvainly 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? Wasnt the Expulsion from the Garden an expulsion out of timeless, seasonless Paradise into time, self-consciousness, mortality, and the rest? Whats more, that primordial couples 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 werent 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 fallers 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-apocalypsethe yortzeit, as it were, of Heron Bay Estates, a bit more than a month after his birthday trip-andtumblethat 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, were embarrassed to report, more or less coincident, after that initial five-week-late one, with each seasons inauguration-day, and each having to do with some pivotal event in the corresponding season of the visioners 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 themincluding hallucinated-or-whatever factsand so here we by-George go, with apologies to Aristotle, for example, whose