Zanesville: A Novel Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  My Life Is Wind

  PART 1

  Afraid on Arrival

  CHAPTER 1

  Fort Thoreau

  CHAPTER 2

  Organ Donor

  CHAPTER 3

  Zugzwang

  CHAPTER 4

  Good to Go

  CHAPTER 5

  Deadland Running

  PART 2

  Continental Soldier

  CHAPTER 1

  A Quaker State of Mind

  CHAPTER 2

  Addicted to Strangers

  CHAPTER 3

  Big Duck Demands Dick

  CHAPTER 4

  Allegheny Banger

  CHAPTER 5

  Son and Shadow

  CHAPTER 6

  The Whispering Cage

  CHAPTER 7

  Ghost Meat

  CHAPTER 8

  The Life You Save

  CHAPTER 9

  The Abyss Stares Back

  CHAPTER 10

  One Blessing

  CHAPTER 11

  Professor Chicken’s Party

  CHAPTER 12

  Spizzerinctum

  PART 3

  Ooby Dooby

  CHAPTER 1

  Something Undiscovered

  CHAPTER 2

  States of Mind

  CHAPTER 3

  Sinister Harmonies

  CHAPTER 4

  Orders from the Chief

  CHAPTER 5

  Big Room Inside

  CHAPTER 6

  The Haunted Casserole

  CHAPTER 7

  The Hope of a Traitor

  CHAPTER 8

  AWOL

  CHAPTER 9

  Out of the Coffin Endlessly Rocking

  CHAPTER 10

  The Charisma Train

  CHAPTER 11

  Marriage Counseling

  CHAPTER 12

  Black Surprise

  CHAPTER 13

  Dust of the Road

  PART 4

  Dark Harvest

  CHAPTER 1

  Bend Times

  CHAPTER 2

  Skull & Crossroads

  CHAPTER 3

  The Nourisher

  CHAPTER 4

  The Sacred Gifts

  CHAPTER 5

  The Past Comes Back to Taunt You

  CHAPTER 6

  Cubby

  CHAPTER 7

  The Harrowing

  CHAPTER 8

  A Party on Ronald Reagan Boulevard

  CHAPTER 9

  Wrangling Dangler

  CHAPTER 10

  Where There’s a Wiener

  CHAPTER 11

  Root for the Home Team

  CHAPTER 12

  Every Day Is Today

  CHAPTER 13

  The Notorious Frontier

  CHAPTER 14

  Reverse Theology

  CHAPTER 15

  Painting the Town Red

  PART 5

  The Mind That Time Forgot

  CHAPTER 1

  Necropolis Now

  CHAPTER 2

  The Curse of the Brubakers

  CHAPTER 3

  Area 51

  CHAPTER 4

  Once Upon a Haggis

  CHAPTER 5

  Must Be 42 Inches Tall to Ride

  CHAPTER 6

  Over the Rainbow

  CHAPTER 7

  The Eagle Has Landed

  CHAPTER 8

  A Badlands Tea Party

  CHAPTER 9

  Drunk as a Skunk

  CHAPTER 10

  Wheels Within Wheels

  CHAPTER 11

  The Entities

  PART 6

  Spiritcruiser

  CHAPTER 1

  Apparatus

  CHAPTER 2

  The Regeneration Gap

  CHAPTER 3

  All Soul Night

  CHAPTER 4

  Smoke and Mirrors

  CHAPTER 5

  A Convoluted Canyon

  CHAPTER 6

  I Am the Door

  CHAPTER 7

  In the Wind

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Matt Bialer

  rabbi, amigo, co-conspirator

  Acknowledgments

  My loudest thanks go to my agent, Matt Bialer. Matt, along with his assistant, Cheryl Capitani, provided invaluable editorial recommendations and continuous personal bolstering. Thanks too to Anna Bierhaus for her support—and to Paul Witcover, who provided astute criticism at just the right time.

  I am fortunate to have a sharp and adventurous editor in Chris Schluep. To Chris, Bruce Tracy, Dan Menaker, and Gina Centrello, thank you for taking a chance on me.

  Over the years of rejection, several dedicated editors of literary journals have supported my work. I would like to thank in particular Jodi Daynard and Joshua Cohen of the Boston Review, Howard Junker of ZYZZYVA, Robert Fogarty of The Antioch Review, James McKinley and Robert Stewart of New Letters, Richard Newman of River Styx, Paula Deitz of The Hudson Review, the editors of In Posse Review and the Web del Sol team, and Roderick Clark of Rosebud.

  If there is a heaven, I’m sure it must be very much like the MacDowell Colony. The colony’s generosity, hospitality, and emotional reinforcement mean more to me than I can say. So too with the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

  On the personal front, I am grateful to my business partner, David Hobby, who not only lent his design expertise to the book’s website but has given me years of friendship, good advice, and much-needed tolerance—along with teaching me the survival value of optimism through the courage of his fight with cancer. Pete Walsh is my Web wizard and has been a huge help in so many ways.

  Just before the book contract was issued I went through an ugly divorce. Jeff Maynard and Zoe Hebdon, Glenys Johnson, and Janet, Vytas, and Alexis Didelis stood by me in a very crazy time. My oldest and best friend, Philip Abrams, and my loyal sister June, along with her husband, Ken, and daughter, Janie, could not have been more supportive. To my lovely Karen, who knows what lies ahead?

  Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Ellen Kester, a tireless teacher and inspirer of young people for more than fifty years, including me. To all these collaborators, my deepest gratitude.

  KS

  Man is a god in ruins.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  My Life Is Wind

  Eighteen thirty-eight. A time of transmogrification in America. Across the South the sweat and blood of black people turns into white cotton. A part of Mexico, which had turned into the Republic of Texas, will turn into the United States, which will turn into war. Fifteen thousand Cherokee endure the eight-hundred-mile Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, while in New York State an arithmetically inclined devout farmer named William Miller predicts the world will end in five years.

  It is out of this whirlwind that one of the most neglected geniuses in history appears:

  LLOYD MEADHORN SITTURD, born to Hephaestus Sitturd, a blacksmith and frustrated inventor with Shawnee blood (reputedly related to the great chief Tecumseh), and Rapture Meadhorn, the Gullah-speaking daughter of a freed Cumberland Island slave and a Kentucky mountain “granny woman.”

  Conceived on the great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, Lloyd is born in the town of Zanesville. His twin sister, Lodema, is dead at birth. At the time, his father, a reluctant believer in William Miller’s advent movement, is building a “Time Ark” to shield the family from the effects of the end of the world, while Rapture is pioneering the use of marijuana in the treatment of dementia and terminal illnesses.


  Lloyd is an inventive prodigy. By age four he is making miniature airships and writing secret books in his own invisible ink. At five he designs and builds a fully operational mechanical beaver.

  Following the Millerites’ Great Disappointment, when the world does not end, Hephaestus moves his family from Ohio and takes up a desolate farm property he inherits in Dustdevil, Texas. There, on the Fourth of July, while young Lloyd is tending the shrine he has created in his dead twin’s memory, a tornado whisks the boy away. He is gone for twenty minutes—and returns to the exact same spot. When asked what transpired while he was in the whirlwind, Lloyd says he communed with the spirit of his dead sister, who imparted to him knowledge of a higher order of evolutionary development. The story is dismissed as childish fancy, but one aspect of it rings incontrovertibly true—his prodigious inventive gifts are heightened further.

  It is his technological wizardry that later underlies the North’s victory in the Civil War—an outcome that would’ve been achieved much earlier had his ideas been followed more faithfully. (His strategy for the Battle of Shiloh involved introducing organic mescaline into the Confederate water supply.)

  Following the war, he experiments with new theories and methods of camouflage, hypnotism and accelerated learning, calculating and translating machines, new kinds of prosthetic devices, the use of organic drugs to treat mental illness, radical surgical procedures, early cinematography, psychical research, and weather control. His brilliance is undermined only by a pathological disrespect for follow-through, a voracious sexual appetite, and a lingering sense of guilt and loss over his dead twin sister. These demons drive and derail him, as his fortunes rise and fall—from the towering heights of wealth (at one point he maintains schools of Falconry and Dream Interpretation at his estate Labyrinthia, between the Black Hills and the Badlands of South Dakota) to absinthe-soaked orgies in seedy Manhattan hotels.

  His greatest commercial success is the grand amusement park known as Macropotamia, built at the convergence of the three rivers in Pittsburgh. It is here, long before Brooklyn’s famous Luna Park, that the world’s first true roller coaster debuts—an unprecedented achievement for its time. (It was Sitturd who coined the phrase “Must be 42 inches tall to ride.”) Sitturd calls the attraction—modeled on a tornado—“Lodemania,” but later changes its name to “The Rapture” following Mark Twain’s description of it as “a religious experience” (while strongly discouraging tobacco chewing).

  Twain’s assessment proves prophetic, for large numbers of patrons begin reporting spiritual visions while riding The Rapture, a phenomenon that deeply worries and aggravates religious leaders. Tension surrounding the roller coaster finally culminates in a controversial incident involving three young schoolgirls, which forces the ride’s closure. Accidents and attacks on other attractions follow.

  Destroyed by a suspicious fire, Macropotamia dwindles into legend. Sitturd travels under various aliases and eventually becomes a recluse, concentrating on breeding experiments and research into what today we would call artificial intelligence and robotics. Rumors regarding his investigations and achievements are rife within the Pinkertons and the Secret Service, leading to legendary claims that one of his “creations” was the real assassin of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, the event that led to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a former neighbor and friend of Sitturd’s back in South Dakota days.

  Weary and embittered, Sitturd retires to Dustdevil, Texas, the scene of his earlier experience with the whirlwind. There he rebuilds the shrine to his sister and begins a community dedicated to the lost principles of what he terms the American Spiritual Promise. He adopts no name for his followers, but people of all races are welcome—and it is interesting to note that he also refers to “all” sexes. It is unclear whether the latter remark metaphorically includes homosexuality or anticipates biotechnological variations. Another alternative is that Sitturd is so addled by a lifetime of drugs, he doesn’t know what he is saying. In any case, sexual relations are open, constant, and, in the eyes of conservative neighbors, depraved. To add further insult, Sitturd’s collective sweeps blue-ribbon honors at the state fair for the quality of their produce and livestock, not to mention the fact that they supply all their own electrical power with Sitturd’s unique double-helix windmills, which he calls “Turbinators.”

  During a swimming party and poetry reading, which is later described as a “pagan ritual with satanic overtones,” a vigilante force attacks the compound, sets fire to buildings, and attempts to lynch Sitturd from one of his own windmills. Fear, more than common sense or decency, keeps the murder from reaching its conclusion, but the shock of the attack and the threat of further raids drives off most of the commune’s members. Later, the rest of the barns are burned, along with Sitturd’s laboratory, the library, and the experimental crop fields. The trout and eel ponds are limed, the pigshit engines ignited, and the windmills pulled down by draft horses. Sitturd is left alone and old in the wreck of the last standing farmhouse.

  Then on the Fourth of July, 1913, a little after midday, a tornado of blood-red dust sweeps through the remains of the community and siphons up every remaining stick of timber and page of book. Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd is never heard from again, leaving behind only the shrine to his dead sister with the inscription . . .

  THE HIDDEN MAY BE SEEKING AND THE MISSING MAY RETURN

  Every child begins the world again.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  CHAPTER 1

  Fort Thoreau

  He crashed back into himself and felt the Easter evening damp. Dolls and chains hung in ritual fashion from the branches surrounding him, and through the knife-hacked oak trees he could make out great luminous spires and domes, and older, grim, but luxuriant blocks of apartments sealed with steel-plate louvers as if against attack. Beside these rose skeletal scaffoldings on which, judging from the hives of lights, whole families perched on open-air platforms while resourceful or desperate individuals dangled in slings and sacks suspended from guy wires.

  Across the sky, as though projected from behind the sulfur-tinged clouds, flashed pictograms and iridescent banks of hypertext. The word VITESSA was repeated often . . . and slogans like EFRAM-ZEV . . . THE RIGHT MOOD AT THE RIGHT TIME. He felt hypnotized by the messages, information raining down like some new kind of radiation. Then there were streams of news images and giant flickering headlines . . . AL-WAQI‘A STILL A THREAT . . . VOYANCY LINKS NOW HALF-PRICE . . .

  He’d been standing there for a long time, he thought, having woken suddenly by the fountain, amazed to find that his hair was long and so blond it almost seemed to glow in the dark. It reminded him of a childhood story but he couldn’t pin it down. Then he realized that of much greater concern was that he couldn’t remember where he was. It was a park of some kind, a vast shadowy garden in some siren-filled city. But which one?

  He heard a voice . . . garbled and yet unnaturally clear, seeming to come from inside his head. I’ll take Manhattan. It was a man’s voice, both far away and far too close.

  What did that mean . . . to take Manhattan? He tried to shake himself out of his haze. Something terrible had happened. Drugs, head injury. “I don’t remember my name!” he said aloud, and felt his heart pound at the implication. Even his clothes seemed strange . . . navy cotton drawstring pants, Guatemalan slip-ons, a T-shirt that said I’VE BEEN TO WALL DRUG, and a cream-colored windbreaker with a logo on the chest that showed a wheelbarrow with flames rising out of it. Judging from the grime and odor he might have been sleeping in the bushes for several nights. But Manhattan meant New York, that much he did think was right. Was that where he was? All he could bring to mind was waking with a start with some intuition of danger. Then he heard what he couldn’t decide was the same voice or another and glanced around frantically. It said, For I came down from heaven, not to do mine will, but the will of him who sent me.

  Shit, he thought. I’m hallucinating. Then a
sudden deep sense of alarm brought his whole being alive. There was another sound in the outer darkness. Someone or something was approaching. Seeking him out. Clip clop came the echoes that his hyperanxious ears filtered out . . . from the tunnel. He hid behind the bushes behind the fountain. His vision seemed to blur and his head filled with static. He waited, muscles cramping.

  Out of the black maw they emerged at last, one on a large chestnut horse, the other on a bay. The horses were shielded with synthetic face and chestplates, while the riders wore old-fashioned NYPD uniforms. When the figures stopped, he could see that they didn’t have faces. Just flat sheets with scanner slits. Up close, in the sodium lights, the scan masks were scraped and cloudy. From the south came bursts of gunfire and thudding low-frequency music, but here it was quiet enough to hear their echolocation sonar. His heart bounced as he smelled the tense, strangely sweet animal scent of the horses. At last a flare of static passed between the two mounted shapes. Then, just as they’d appeared, they moved on, the horses’ hooves striking the asphalt with a timeless Roman rhythm, their imposing silhouettes fading into the trees.

  The moment they were past, from behind one of the spray-painted boulders, a figure wrapped in matte-black cable tape wearing an NV helmet leapt out. “Yer ass is lucky,” the shadow said, grabbing one of his hands in a neoprene fighting glove—weaving through a labyrinth of stripped cars and barbed-wire effigies. They looked like origami contrasted with the turrets rising above the park, armorguard facets gleaming like reptilian crystals. “Hurry,” his guide called out. “Meter says you gonna have a meltdown.”

  The darkness became a membrane of endlessly falling slow-motion snow, only the flakes were like glass faces, painfully intricate but beautiful to behold. “This way!” the figure called, and it was like stepping through a wall of cool white light. Suddenly, all around were people. He felt a dart of warmth hit his arm. Then he fell, and he seemed to keep falling, or rising, as if he’d been taken up inside a whirlwind, faces and disintegrated memories orbiting around him. A whirlwind, he remembered. I came here by whirlwind.