The beginning of a new version of a novel I started in 2002 and stopped working on in 2004.

My mother would tell you that it was fate. Were she still alive she would tell you that fate had decided it was “my time” and there is nothing that can come between such a determination and its realization. She saw the universe like the Ancient Greeks: as a bullying advocate of equilibrium that would sooner give a powerful deity a bloody nose than let things move outside their prescribed arcs for too long. My prescribed arc, she would have said, laid with Markus Moorchild. So fate did not hesitate to lay out a few bloody noses for my benefit. My well being, of course, is not something that fate cares about, so it was more the case that fate decided things needed to be shuffled about, and I was one of those things.

But then from certain perspectives, namely mine, it was not fate at all. The intermingling consciousnesses that make up any society invariably generate their own chaos engine, moving people not along arcs and circles but in a maelstrom of never entirely evident impulses and half understood incongruent actions.

I was in the archives of The San Francisco Courier, looking for an article that had been published on Yitzhak Rabin in 1989. Charles Gellon had interrupted my important copying of a memo to ask me to fetch this article for him; being an intern means that anyone save another intern or maybe someone who works in the mailroom can ask you to do whatever task they don’t feel like doing themselves. Charles was the most enthusiastic employer of my “otherwise wasted time,” and being an editor on the international desk, was convinced of the importance of everything he did. The result of this was that he invariably gave me a long monolog about how any job he asked me to do for him was fitting into his grander schemes and how important it was for the “health of this establishment.” He thought, I am convinced, that he was filling me with vigor for my menial tasks rather than new stories for the bar gatherings of interns, junior reporters, mail sorters, and layout assistants which occurred twice a week or more.

The archives of The Courier were, as they usually seemed to be, in the basement. It was a voluminous space, a little malformed city, shorn in concrete and hard steel, lit by hundreds of sickly florescent bulbs which showed every scuff from the arcane shuffling its residents and structures: boxes amid shelves and files amid cabinets. Outside a few basic laws, there seemed little logic in the archive’s constant reorganization. We bourgeois elitists from above would descend into this gapping gutter where time washed The Courier’s once glorious and space dominating newspapers into a raisined reformation of their old selves. That nothing was ever the same demanded that we speak to the archivists – the Morlocks they were sometimes called – to find anything; it was not helpful that they were still in the process of converting from microfilm to servers.

I had lost track of time when a voice behind me said, “Mr. Cull.” I was making the long scroll through a piece of microfilm, scanning headlines and intermittingly reading a little bit of the actual story. Charles could remember the story had been published in 1989, remember what it had been about, remember it had been on the front page, but he didn’t even know what month it had been published let alone the date. Since parts of 1989 were still on microfilm and other parts were now on the server, I had spent over an hour looking for this article on terminals running still in development software before moving to the microfilm. I knew how long I had spent on the terminals because I went upstairs to get myself a cup of coffee before beginning in on the microfilm, but I had no idea how long I had been at the microfilm when I was interrupted.

“Mr. Cull,” it came again when I paused before turning around. Ellen Hessing stood a few feet away, hands behind her, leaning back on short heels with her legs bowed inside their spacious woolen trousers. I had met her twice, once when I had been taken on as an intern, and the second time at a company party when she pretended, almost convincingly, to remember me. I was still disorientated, not only from the draining task of pouring over archives but seeing one of the executive editors for the paper addressing me. I looked over to my cup of coffee a reassuring wisp of steam from the styrofoam depths – a wash of hot liquid down my gullet might bring me back from 1989 – but found little solace in the bits of congealed fat that had escaped from the half-and-half’s proper place to float atop the liquid.

I had never felt entirely a part of either of the two worlds I was familiar with at The Courier, the above world of windows and this underworld filled with Morlocks that kept such a vital organ of the paper operating. I spent an almost equal time in both, and knew some of the archivists well enough not to fear that they would feast on my pale flesh, but also knew that I was not of their kind. At the same time, I was not of Ellen Hessing’s kind either. I had learned from my few years in the professional world that if one wants to avoid violating a superior’s delicate worldview, never a pleasant occurrence for those below, that it is better to remain indistinct. I did not want to place myself into a particular power relationship with this woman, no matter how far below her, so I simply did not open my mouth until I absolutely had to.

“Mr. Cull, you recall when you wanted to interview that screenwriter a couple of months ago and you gave some old interviews you did to Herman? Well, I looked over them today, and they’re not bad. You’re certainly no Terry Gross, but you show some promise. How’d you like to do an interview?”

“I suppose, but I suppose I should know who I’m going to be interviewing before I agree to anything…”

“Markus Moorchild. Herman tells me that the two of you once had a conversation about Moorchild; you’re familiar with his work. I expect, from that, that you know how reclusive Moorchild is, and thereby how rare it is for him to give anyone an interview. I would also expect that you would realize what grade of assignment this is, certainly better than being down here and doing Charles’s busy work for him.”

I nodded. Markus Moorchild…

“My interview skills are a little rusty, Mrs. Hessing. I’d love to interview Mr. Moorchild, but it seems like there must be someone else more qualified than me. I don’t want to make you feel like you need to give me a chance, and just because I read=”

She laughed, dry and high in the monochromatically edged light. “As evidence by your age, Mr. Cull, you don’t yet know not to look too closely at any gift that doesn’t come shrink wrapped and sealed away. The fates, one might say, have conspired on your side. Veronica Schetz, who is familiar enough with Moorchild, and a far better interviewer, is off visiting her sister in Maryland. Dean Tremis got hit by that creeping MUNI last weekend and it broke both his shins; he’s either in extraordinary pain or doped out of his mind. Seems a shame to be hit by a MUNI and live. Mr. Jefferson is still convinced that San Francisco is about to be attacked by terrorists, and whenever I have him do any assignment that isn’t at least vaguely related to his paranoia, he sabotages it. Sometimes I feel like we’re a university here and have far too much tenured dead weight. Juan and most of the other literary staff managed to have themselves a little party with some bad coldcuts – who’s ever heard of salami going bad? – and they’ll all be tied to a toiler, or at least a bucket, for a few days. Samantha knows Moorchild’s work well enough too, but managed to throw out her back moving into her new office yesterday. She can probably get more good out of whatever Tremis is taking than he can. Herman knows Moorchild well enough, and is a decent interviewer, and that’s actually where I went first, but he insisted that I talk to you first after looking over your old interviews. We got the call from Moorchild’s agent today, and the invitation for the interview is for tomorrow, so we don’t exactly have a lot of time. So you see, Mr. Cull, the universe does very much seem to want you to do this interview. Perhaps you helped some old lady across the street. Or at least tossed a boy scout to deflect a hurtling MUNI.”

“I don’t like boy scouts.”

“Neither do I, Mr. Cull, although I’m sure they’d be better for tossing than midgets with all the Jesus grease they’re fed. More insurance issues though, being underage and all.” She considered the projection screen from the microfilm; I could see the barest hint of in her eyes that was the light from plaster cast politicians, unset and unboxed celebrities lost even to themselves, and shattering events paved and heaped over again and again. All the elements of a past distilled and sculpted around the willowy bones of truth for the sale of a wad of loose paper that shared a punch line with a sunburned zebra. “What do you think? Think you’re up to this? Rust and all?”

I couldn’t help grinning at her. “My rust and I will have a long talk. Anyway, I think my neighbor might be Jack Lemmon reincarnated and I can practice interviewing him tonight for practice. I might come back with two stories.”

“Which you can sell to two papers. Which will pay you more is to be determined.” Letting her eyes move to her left food she tapped it twice on the concrete floor. The sound was that of a lustful green pea fatefully snapping its last egotistic spasm. “Be here at 7am tomorrow, you’ve got a ways to go to get there. We’ll have a car waiting for you.”

“Where am I going?”

“I don’t know yet. His agent is going to call about then to tell me.”

“Christ, it’s like I’m going undercover.”

“Mr. Cull, the only people with a more absurd sense of drama than politicians and reporters, which is why I’ve always thought they share such a symbiotic relationship, is writers of fiction. They are capable of imposing their own distorted view of reality on everyone else, and that always thrills them.”

I can still remember the smell of my father’s car, a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk. Like a record store, all heated vinyl and exploited electronics, with the sharp tang of my father’s Lucky Strikes, which he was usually smoking right there beside me. I loved watching the little shapes of smoke form in the air, anything reasonable or recognizable was fleeting. In the winter, when he had only one window cracked, a whole layer would develop against the roof the car. In that layer complete worlds would fold into and out of being, in the matter of seconds, creatures being formed and washed back into the ether, communities, towns, cities, nations rising and falling with a scrape of wind or careless breath . I used to imagine that I was a minor deity, I could watch but not touch.

My father was the wraith of my childhood, my imaginary friend promoted to a senior board member. I was raised by a parental aunt and uncle, Jill and Sebastian, and, on occasion, my mother. My father would appear at night, often right as I was heading to bed, or early in the morning before school, or on a dreary Sunday afternoon when the vigorous career of a storm from on high had tumbled and spilled across the sky in tepid contortions. He would take me out for burgers, or breakfast, or pizza. If it was too late, he’d take me to The Lost Friend, his favorite bar and I’d toss mixed nuts and pretzels at the ceiling fan while he nursed a double Johnny Walker on the rocks. We’d talk, he and I and Herm, the bartender, each lost in his own mindless physicality, about everything. This formed much of my early understanding of the adult world, as my aunt and uncle and mother all confined me to that part of their lives that was a child’s cul-de-sac. Almonds flew the most true. Pretzels made hitting the moving fan blades all but impossible, but when they did they burst with the greatest satisfaction: bits of shrapnel hitting the other patrons and landing in open glasses. Here was conversation that could avoid employing me as a subject – aren’t you getting big? what grade are you in now? – and simultaneously employ me as a participant. The shifting surfaces, tilting one way, then another, weights and ideas sliding about, of these conversations fascinated me. Here was also when I first heard the name Markus Moorchild.

The shallow gaudiness of Van Ness turned into the uncomfortable proletariat of Lombard which spit me out onto the Golden Gate. From there 101 regained its essence: the long cake-battered hills of last year’s grasses and the persistent costal shrubs that run from its tangled emergence amid LA’s freeways until its final dwindled looping around the Olympic Peninsula’s jumble of peaks, glaciers and rainforest.

I juggled a coffee and the regret that I had not eaten a better breakfast as I drove north, sliding along the reluctant cusp of a sunless morning. I had met Herman and Ellen in The Courier’s main parking structure a bit before 7 am, the ambitiously deformed egg of a car that was a white Ford Taurus Sedan complete with The Courier’s hand-grappling-a-newspaper logo portending the reality of my fate. Both Herman and Ellen referred to it as such. A few minutes before 7 am Ellen’s cell rang, and she spent a few seconds writing something in a notebook before snapping her phone shut. We then poured over a map of the North Bay, and my two superiors confirmed that I would indeed find the place without plunging over any waterfalls or straying into a forest teeming with evangelical spiders. I felt as though I should have to shout a few nautical phrases at rough men of the sea, of at least hoist myself up onto a sled with only the gnawing emptiness of a tundra before me, before setting out. The clean growl of the Taurus starting and anchoring myself into cloth cushioned seats felt a betrayal of an ancient pact.

Moorchild was in an psychiatric hospital in Marine County called Young’s Rest. I had lived around the Bay Area all my life, and had never heard of it. Ellen explained that it was an exclusive establishment, expensive to the hilt, and served a clientele that would rather keep not only their employment of its services a secret, but its very existence as under wraps as possible. Moorchild was their voluntarily; I knew nothing else of his situation but had heard rumors for years that Markus Moorchild was unstable and would commit himself to such establishments in much the same way that other Americans went to Disney Land.