If this novel ever sees the light of day––which is uncertain, because it gets too deep into the mind of a rapist for must publishers (and most readers, probably)––I suspect it will have another name. It had a go-round with the literary establishment when I was forty, until my superstar agent at the time decided that a first-person novel narrated by a sexually violent predator was too hard of a sell. It's having another go-round a decade later, completely rewritten in third person, but I have modest hopes. 

I know what America wants, and it's not my restless, insistent probings into our problems with sexual and emotional violence.  

This novel is dear to me because I want Wallace Spurgeon, its main character, to make it in some small way. I want him to recognize what he's done wrong and see the role of his own past in shaping what he became. He's done horrible, horrible things, but he can see the light if he wants to. 

Wallace never knew his real father, so the father figures in this book are obscured by dream. These two excerpts––from the original version of the novel, circa 2003––show the clearest of them. 

Bricklayer

I got a soul around 3:00 in the morning—from London in November of 1903, a man asleep in his bed in a cheap little room. The place doesn’t even have its own bathroom, and he’s so cold he has to keep his bed next to a little wood stove just to stay warm. He’s real strong, a bricklayer with thick rough hands, and he doesn’t sleep that easy because he doesn’t have a wife next to him anymore. He hit her and she ran away and left him with their little baby boy, who’s asleep next to him in the bed. The kid’s so close to that radiator it feels like his skin’s cooking, but he keeps his mouth shut about it even though he’s barely a year old. He’s a tough little kid, like his dad’s tough. 

Anyway the bricklayer’s asleep when there’s these knocks on a door down the hallway—three loud bangs, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. He shoots up in bed and then he hears the knocks again, coming closer. After awhile whoever’s doing it gets to his room, and he looks through the crack under the door to see who’s standing there when the knocking comes. But there’s nobody, just the BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, and it freaks him out because he knows it can’t be a person making that noise. If it was, then he’d see some feet through the crack, right? So the bricklayer’s scared as shit and his kid starts screaming on top of that, because he can feel the thing at the door and he knows it’s not human, same as his dad knows. 

The knocking keeps on going down the hallway past them, and the bricklayer gets up and turns on a light. Right then he sees somebody else’s light go on across the street, in another shitty building just like his, and there’s another bricklayer in a little room alone with another baby—all the sudden it’s like he’s living inside the biggest mirror in the world. The bricklayer watches the guy across the street pick up his kid, who’s a boy the same age as his, and lift him way up over his head. He does the same thing, and he can hear both kids screaming at once. 

Then he gets down on his knees and holds that baby to his chest like he’s got a tit for it to suck on. But the screaming doesn’t stop, so instead the bricklayer drops him on the floor and pushes down on his head, smashing the side of his face into the wood till his screams sound more like gurgling. He keeps squeezing down, using both hands now, till the gurgling stops for a second. Then he lets up and the screaming comes back, and the bricklayer pushes down real hard with both hands this time. That shuts the baby up for good. He looks across the street at the other guy, who’s doing the same exact thing, and the bricklayer doesn’t know if he’s the one who started it or the one who copied it. 

Stealing the Fruit Within

I can’t say I didn’t know what soul was coming down to me that night—the nasty one from Texas or Oklahoma with the sharp face and the big hands who started falling through me the night I got beat up. He wasn’t at home like before, with his wife and son. Instead he was walking to a farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska or Kansas maybe, and you could tell he’d been walking a long way from all the dust on his face and his shoes. It turned out he was a healer, the kind of guy you call when the doctors can’t help you anymore. When he knocked on the door it creaked open real slow without him even turning the handle. 

The people who lived in that farmhouse were poor—they had one big room with everything in it, and in the middle was a kid on a bed with a sheet stretched over him like they were waiting for him to die. The kid was maybe fifteen or sixteen, with his face sucked down so tight to the bone you couldn’t even pinch his cheek. No hair on his head, just skin so thin and pale you could see the veins twitching on his skull. He opened his eyes when the healer came in, because that’s pretty much all he could do to say hello. He tried opening his mouth, using all the muscle he had left in him, but it’s like his lips were glued shut. Then his family saw the healer coming in, with a big ball of light floating around him, and they got down on their knees to pray. 

Well the healer takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves real careful, then pulls the sheet off that teenage boy. His body’s pulled in as tight to the bone as his face, and it looks like a dead cow in the sun nobody bothered to move. The healer rubs his hand against the kid’s belly and can hear his fingertips scraping against it, that’s how rough and scaly that skin is. Then the healer closes his eyes and whispers something, his fingers find a weak spot in the boy’s skin and poke right through his belly. He makes the hole bigger till he can get his thumb and first two fingers in, and then he pulls out a shiny black ball about the size of a marble. It wriggles in his palm a bit, like it could live outside on its own, and he puts it down on the bed next to the kid. He pulls out another one, and another one, till there’s seven of them on the bed. Then he gets down on his knees to pray and holds that last black ball up to show the family, and while they’re looking at it he slips one from the bed into his pants pocket. 

Nobody notices him stealing that black ball except the kid, who tries even harder to yell through his glued-up mouth. The family’s saying “Thank you, thank you,” because they see how the kid’s dying all the sudden—it’s like those black balls were keeping him alive longer than he should’ve been, and the healer guy was the only one who knew that taking them out would finally let him die. The kid’s still trying to talk, but all the guts inside him are slowing down to nothing. His heart gets all squishy, and his lungs feel like they’re made of concrete, and he feels that hole in his belly getting bigger and bigger, so his soul can come out through it. That’s when the healer reaches inside him for one last black ball, and he slips it into his pocket without anybody noticing. 

The kid wants to die with all those pieces still inside him, though, and he knows that healer guy is nothing but a thief. With his last bit strength he makes his heart beat real strong, so hard it shakes the whole house. It beats three more times, like God’s banging his fist on the ground right outside the door, and everybody’s so scared they stop breathing awhile—even the healer guy, because all the sudden he knows he won’t get away with the sin he just did. 

The last thing I got from that soul was his hand in his pocket, hiding the pieces of that kid he stole and hoping God wouldn’t notice. When I woke up my hand was in a half fist like it had something inside it, something alive that didn’t belong to me. 

“I stole pieces of you, didn’t I?” I asked Gina. “Kept them for myself, too.”