/lit/ - Literature

SYNOPSIS:

Semi-biographical about my father. Corporate lawyer loses job due to alcoholism. Turns violent. Loses his wife and children, his only love in the world. Ditches the booze and gets a job at a golf course cleaning the greens and doing grunt work. He falls in with a nefarious crowd of retired lawyers and big wigs at the course. There are children running around everywhere at the golf course. There's always little kids in the restaurants, hallways, etc. Protagonist gets spooked.

Eventually the protagonist finds himself caught up in a criminal kabal / secret society operating out of the golf course.

The powerful men in the kabal promise to get the protagonist's family back if he commits a certain evil deed.

Entire novel is interspersed with flashbacks to his former family life and life as a corporate lawyer, depicting how it fell apart. There are essentially two timelines.

The final scene is ambiguous as to which timeline it takes place. Whichever timeline you believe it to be will alter how the preceding climax transpired.

I'm not good at synopses.

[1/3]

A bass drum masks tremoring hands. I take Mariana’s from across a table ensconced in the corner of the restaurant.

“A bit too loud to talk, isn’t it?”

Her feet nestle mine, though I cannot be sure unless I lift the tablecloth.

Her head tilts, shoulders shrug.

“Maybe we should find someplace else?”

She smiles, embarrassed.

I point out the window to the lamp-lit alleyway.

“Let me get it.”

I thumb rusted coins onto the table. I’m unsure what they’re worth, though we’ve ordered nothing.

“Vámonos?”

Outside Mariana runs the back of her hand across my cheeks, registering the coarseness of winter for the first time. Translation fails her, so she smiles.

She flashes her expired student card to the bus driver, somehow gets us on for free. The aisleway is carpeted with black rubber, the tattered seats smell of diesel.

“Where are we going?” I ask her in questionable Spanish.

Something about a dance.

Mariana sits next to me, the contrast stark between her olive dress and the torn cloth seat. Through the window, the tops of mountains are given form by porch light constellations. Endless ghettos in the hills.

My eyes fall back on her, the magnetic lure of the girl. The tender-eyed undergraduate I once taught. The sleepy graduate student whom I tutored vainly over glasses of Grenache. The blazered post-doc speaking alongside me at a conference two years running; her presentation in Spanish, mine English. The sudden synchronicity of our lives a testament to the budding of her young career, the stasis of mine.

The bus speeds over a bump in the road and we bounce off our seats. And there it is, the sound I’ve traveled so many hours to hear: her laugh, the same blubbering laughter I remember from those faraway nights. How it trumpets through the air like a song. How it could purge a room of gravity. How it erupts like a caldera, opening the taps on whatever’s inside.

We lean into each other, in hysterics, though I’m unsure why. She runs her fingers over the top of my hand, letting die in silence what can’t be said aloud.

The bus stops and we’re thrown into the next row of seats. She shrieks, snorts. That spasmodic song. Our laughter is broken by shouting from the streets, a tapping at the window.