A Lion in Your Number: A Novel

By Kevin Klix

Twenty-two-year-old diarist Sally Fairfax is both beautiful and Autistic. After tinkering with her daily entries, fibbing to not only herself but her "Future Self," Sally feels she is misinterpreted for her pleasing outside looks and shunned for her eccentric ideals; unable to execute them to her womanly advantage. From losing mundane dead-end jobs, clubbing with her illustrious friend "Molly," and even vacationing inside Magic Kingdom, Sally's adventurous life is, as she puts it, "full of Lions inside Numbers." From the author of Biflocka comes a gritty, quirky-humored epistolary novel written from the troubled mind of a beautiful female with Aspergers Syndrome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Klix Artwork Ltd.
• Release date: Jan 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524255435

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A Lion In Your Number

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Copyright

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also by KEVIN KLIX:

Biflocka: A Novel

The Feels: A Book of Poetry

for Karen Newman

ALIYN by Kevin Klix

That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful things, and concentrate on the good ones.

— KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse-Five

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I’ve discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. and I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

— DANIEL KEYES, Flowers for Algernon

Introduction

Okay. If I may draw an analogy, there are several organs in the body of the living novel, many of which are unnecessary, none of which are superfluous. There is plot, there is rhythm, timing, voice, pacing, dialogue, characterization, topic, plot (grr!) and finally, there is Mousetread. Mousetread? Yes. You have almost certainly never heard of such a thing, so I will explain.

Mousetread is a hidden part of the novel, one of many things that exist between the lines. To describe it I will borrow from epistemology (from Greek episteme: Knowledge, acquaintance with (something), skill, experience), which is a big word for the study of what we know of things and ideas, and how we know them. Epistemology is a universe-sized can of worms, little understood, much maligned (though unconsciously practiced by every human, everyday), and not a field of study I would suggest for the faint of heart. It is the proverbial rabbit hole—what do you know? The bottom of every question—how do you know? The bottom of every answer—how do you know that you know? Mousetread is an unlit cigarette. What is that? An unlit cigarette? On the worn wooden desk I am sitting at, there is a tube of paper stuffed tight with dried plant material and tipped with fibrous, cottony stuff at one end. It is a cigarette. But what, exactly, about this little tube is unlit?

Nothing. The unlit-ness of my cigarette is no thing at all, that’s what it is. Nothing aside from a potential that exists in my mind about the thing itself, perhaps one that you share with me in some sense; unlit-ness exists between the lines of my idea/perception a cigarette, just as there is unpaid-ness of my rent, and un-mown-ness of my lawn. The use of such potentials, and related abstract ideas, in a novel, I call Mousetread. Mousetread is nothing—not a word, not a sentence. It crawls and sniffs and tastes and shits it’s way across the pages, burrows through the paper and builds nests in the binding. It sneaks from the hands of the often unwitting writer into his keyboard or onto his paper and hangs about invisibly until a reader reads the words and puts them into his head; and there the Mousetread finds something akin to its place of origin, fitting into little keyholes of thought, feeling, and perception.

In Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Flannery O’Conner wrote, Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. I am inclined to agree with her. In the process of writing my novel American Creamy, I gradually became aware that I had changed (was changing) as a person/perceiver/thinker. Before the novel, I may have had vague intuitions about such things as Mousetread, but these were unformulated blobs of thought in my mind, elusive and undefined. As I faced myself against the task of articulating such ideas, as I sat with a blank piece of paper on my lap, pen in hand, coffee in cup, knowing that I had the goods to get something resembling a decent novel out and down, but having never actually done it, I realized, as the words began to flow, that I, my novel, and my pretensions as a writer were lost unless and until I somehow found a way to transduce my way of perceiving into my way of describing. This fact forced me to face my reality as I had never done before, painstakingly so; and not only to face it, but to open my eyes and really, really look at it.

Eben and Preacherman, the protagonists of American Creamy, are both wildly deluded in their thinking and twisted in their perception of their worlds. But in order for me to make a reader identify and believe in them as fellow human beings, I could not myself likewise be so deluded, at least in the role of the writer. Otherwise, there is no way my characters would remain coherent over the course of 150,000+ words. No way, nada, absolutamiento no. I didn’t have to be able to do what I am describing to be able to turn out a batch of nice, rhythmic, readable, and grammatically and stylistically correct words. I knew I could do that. Been doing it since high school. But a novel is an altogether different animal. The writing of a novel takes more than just intelligence and finesse, requisite as those two characteristics are. The writing of a novel takes balls. (Lady authors will have to excuse the analogy. My favorite ladies in the world actually have huge balls.)

And why are balls so important? Okay. Why is courage so important for a novelist? Because when you sit down to write your fairy tale, if it’s going to be any good, all your little inner fairy tales are over. Our world can be a petty, sniveling, greedy, base and senseless place. An evil place. It can also be, and is, a very beautiful, mystical, awe-inspiring, good place. But, if you try to pretend that that’s all it is in your story—good and happy and sugar plums—then you have no balls, you haven’t faced the truth, and you are a shit writer. Sorry.

Of course, facing the truth doesn’t make you a good writer by itself. If you don’t know the difference between your asshole and the passive voice, then you are in trouble. Then again, you probably won’t be attempting to write a book any time in the next 1000 years either. So. The truth is that we humans are all a lot more intelligent than we give ourselves credit for. Giving someone directions to your house, for example, is a freakishly complicated process if you break it down to its barest components. Most of what is complicated about the process though, both on the giving and receiving ends, is unconscious (a tricky term). A writer describing such an event in a story is also working mostly on an unconscious level, only just this much less so. He has to have a deeper understanding of what is going on, both within and between the communicants. He better understands, for example, what a house really is.

This is another sort of thing that was an intuitive blob in my brain before I became a writer. What is a house? It’s not the bricks and toilets and roof and walls, etc., that we live in. It’s not even the totality of those things. In order for a thing to be a house, you and I have to agree that this thing that shares certain characteristics (i.e. bricks, rooms, beds, people live there, looks a certain way) is called ‘house.’ Then, and only then, is it a house, and it is so only in our heads. Philosophers argue about this sort of thing, but let’s keep it as simple as possible. I could call my house a greck so many times to myself that I start thinking greck when I look at it. That makes it a greck in my head. But if I were to write, Johnny and Suzie were caught playing doctor in Ms. Blatherton’s greck, you could only guess at what I meant without prior explanation. In fact, even if I replace greck with house, you only guess at my meaning. How old are Johnny and Suzie? What sort of house? What exactly do I mean by playing doctor? Who caught them? Every reader of that sentence, sans context, will interpret it a bit differently. It will disgust some readers, others it will turn on, still others will imagine the scene without emotion, in great detail, or very little, and using different parts of the brain. All writers on the scale from  halfway-decent up have to have a handle on this. We all think of it in different ways, but this is our talent. Olympic swimmers have their strong shoulders and sinuous bodies. Musicians have their rhythm, pitch, and timing. We have our Mousetread.

So Kevin Klix wrote this book he calls A Lion in Your Number. It’s his third completed novel, and well worth the read. He wrote it at the tender age of 22, which is quite a feat. I am such a different person now than I was at the age of 22 that I have a hard time putting myself in my past self’s shoes. I remember my passions being out of control, getting in a lot of trouble (some of it pretty bad), doing tons of drugs, falling in love at the drop of a hat, exploring all sorts of self-inflicted (non-intentional . . . mostly) pain, and just generally being a major fuck-up.

I didn’t mean to be all of that, I was and am a good person at heart. But choices have consequences whether we choose to believe in them or not, don’t they? And those consequences can, and often do, hurt self and others regardless of our motivations. I have some of my writings from that period, though not many. Some of that stuff is good, some of it the sort of garbage you have to get out in order to become a better writer, some it just blech, egotistical pseudo beat-poetry drivel. What I wish I had is a diary or journal from back then. What was I thinking? What happened? What did I dream about? What were my motivations?  Such a thing would be helpful to me in my work now. Kevin Klix’s novel is a perfect example of what I wish I had of my own work, something I wish I would/could have done back then.

This book, A Lion in Your Number, is a fictional journal that spans about a year’s time in the life of a girl Kevin’s age named Sally Fairfax. I have a strong feeling that much of Sally’s life is a reflection of Kevin’s. That’s part of my interest in it, why I wanted to be a part of it. Klix had the balls to tell the truth, to spill his blood and guts all over the computer screen and let the chips fall where they may. That makes the book gritty and rough at times, though he always seems to be able to pull it out of a teeter the times it goes too far. It is in the form of a transcribed journal, and therefore entirely written in Sally’s slangy voice. Here she’s writing about a conversation with her gay friend Josh:

I wish I could have told him more, but what’s the use? If I told him what I thought, it’s one ear and out the other. I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s better if I tell you what I said via just writing it down or whatever. I pretty much told him that I thought this world was completely a sensation, that it was only for the happy players of the world (whatever that meant). He didn’t really understand. I told him that it was more about my thinking about nothingness and how I feel like I’m a little kid going from this—the nothingness—to this—life. It’s like I’m depressed because I want to be. Sometimes I look at people and just see animals and their brains moving to the groove. If you’re hungry, bing! your brain tells you to go and get food and drop everything else. It’s like our bodies are predictable. Whatever. Lame as hell.¹

Klix clearly feels free here to make Sally whatever he wants her to be. She is frustrated, introverted, isolated, and sometimes bitchy. She’s smart, goes out of her way to let us know she’s pretty, a white girl with a black girl’s booty. She’s a liar, apparently even lying quite a bit about her life in the journal, which can make it a little confusing at times, a purposeful affectation. And she’s both strong and lazy, a weird combination. Reading A Lion in Your Number is a strange ride.  It’s really a lengthy character study, with the story itself playing second fiddle. That sort of writing is tricky to pull off. If the book were any longer (it clocks in at about 250 quick pages), I think it would probably have gotten too draggy. As it is though, it works.

A big part of why I think it works is Sally’s admission that she suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning disorder that falls in the broad category of Autism. Even doctors and medical researchers don’t know much about Aspergers. The outside symptoms present as severe social problems. It’s nearly always paired with anxiety, and people with Aspergers are more often than not possessed of what we call genius. Historical researchers have recently taken a great interest in Aspergers; speculations about who may have had the syndrome are wild and almost unbelievable. Just a few names: Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Benjamin Franklin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Marilyn Monroe, George Washington, Carl Jung, Emily Dickinson . . . the daunting list goes on and on.   

As I read Lion, sifting through Sally’s jags and travails, I couldn’t help but think, "Did she do this because of her Autism? Is that really how a person with Aspergers thinks? Shit, do I have it?" Thankfully, I don’t think I do. I’m crazy, that’s for sure, but I’m happy with my own strand of crazy, and I don’t need anything more wrong with me and my brain than already is, thank you. This speaks to the power of the book, though: its ability to cause the reader to ask himself/herself such a question. This is good Mousetread. The added depth that this aspect of Sally’s personality lends to the book makes it a much more interesting read, at least to me, and I think to anyone not afraid to dig into his/her own psyche. I wouldn’t be surprised if Klix himself has Aspergers. I haven’t asked him. But if nothing else, Sally’s condition must surely be a metaphor for some burden Klix totes around. I have found the passion to write, especially at such a young age, is often rooted in such a problem.

 Sally hates her world (she lives in Florida, America’s capitol of cocaine and old people), the government, corporations, and people. Her family life is estranged. Her world-views are delusional and pretend-apathetic. Her character is an amalgam of mental illness, immaturity, and scary intelligence. She symbolizes today’s youth, living in a godless roller-coaster world where it’s strange not to have some sort of psych diagnosis or other. Klix is giving us a snapshot of his generation, a bare-naked, and in many ways depressing, appraisal of modern life. As I read it I thought more about what’s not there in Sally’s life than I thought of what is there. Where is the hope, the sense of goodness and reason? It doesn’t exist. Even when she is giddily happy and connecting with her little nephew (she makes him an important part of her precious journal by asking him to make drawings for it), the feelings are edgy and disjointed.

Here is where Kevin Klix hits the truth most soundly. Our world is broken, his world is broken. It works very well for a few, leaving the rest of us feeling lost and alone. Everything that was once the great warmth and soul of humanity is fading away. Each successive generation, individually and collectively, becomes more and more remote from itself and its history. In the west, our creature comforts are fulfilled as never before. Even the homeless have access to air-conditioning, medical care, food, and shelter. Our middle class is materially rich beyond the dreams of yesteryear’s kings. Our elite, our 1%, are corpulent with excess, living in egoistic fantasy. We’ve got it made!

Anyone with half a brain or half a heart knows this to be the biggest lie. Somewhere along the path we’ve taken a wrong turn. There is a sense that, as a culture, we have missed something very important, stifled something fragile and necessary in our untrammeled pursuit of happiness. What is it? What have we lost? What is missing? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s any one particular thing, and I don’t think that success or failure in finding whatever it is that we are looking for can be placed on a scale, or documented in some scientific journal.

What I do believe, what I must believe, is that people with the balls to look at the truth can find it, find their little piece of it, anyway. And in their search, by their very search, they inspire others to do the same. We don’t have to accept the garbage we are being fed just because we are told that it tastes good. We don’t have to accept that something is true just because a thousand or a million other people say it is. A revolution has never occurred anywhere other than in one person’s mind and heart.

In this book, Klix is reporting on the truth as he sees it. It’s a small truth about a small girl in a small world; but I identify with it because her world is mine. Every word of her journal can be boiled down to one frustrated question: What the fork is wrong with you people!?

— Jonathan Spradlin, Author of American Creamy

ALIYN by Kevin Klix

March, 13

th

, 3:30 A.M.

You opened my journal, silly! You don’t have permission to do this (unless I told you in a letter), but hey! since you have already, I guess it’s okay! Girl, I hope your you’re some big-shot historian who’s going to do some big-time article on me, Sally F’ing Fairfax! If you’re a guy, though, you’re probably going to do what all guys do and fall madly in love with me or some bullspit, but if you’re a lady, you and me I both know there is one of two things you’re going to think of me (we always do): You’re either gonna going to think I’m a bad b█ch who you wouldn’t mind to kick it with, take advice from, listen to, all that nonsense, or (in more realistic standards) you’re just going to think I am simply a b█ch or w█re or s█t or s█nk², or a bad person if you’re a goodie-two-shoes. Which is fine and dandy, I guess. Just dandy. Just peachy. We girls are always in some F’ing lame competition with ourselves, and guys, y’all just know all those times you hit on us, we got an ego boost from it. But also, yeah, you’re the culprit in our little insane minds! Yeah, I know, we worry like crazy, crazy, but who can blame us? Right? Right. I mean you got some chick who spends a majority of her time looking cute so she can think she’s okay or whatever for this world. But then she comes home and wonders why she doesn’t get this guy or that, not looking at the broad and only looking at the superficial. Honestly, though, you guys are mean douchebags, and you know it! I mean, really, all you mother-F’ers have to do is say what we wanna hear. That’s it, and even then you F that up! Blimey! Do you know what we girls have to do? Do you know what we go through? █ ██ ██ Oh my. Insanity! We have to literally come out of our moms and be just all naturally pretty for you guys to even like us. And if we are not, mind you, then we have to be suckered into buying all this product crap that we obsess over, see. Gosh. All those calluses between my big toes and index toes from wearing those cute little pink sandals when I go to the beach that I bought at Target on sale for about, like, twenty—F’ing—dollars of my hard-earned cash, all ruined and worthless now next to the stupidity of trying to look good for the male species. So you know what? F it. But I’ve always felt that way. Nevertheless, ladies, hope you like me; and you men too, whatever that’s worth.

I guess I’m required to paint a picture for you. Here goes nothin’! I’m lying down in my knickers here, they’re white with pink poka-dots³ (like my drawing!⁴), and I have this light baby-blue over-sized shirt I got from my daddy about two years ago; out of a ██ whim, because it didn’t fit him anymore. He’s the one who encouraged me to go to college or whatever-spit—Okay, stop! I should never, ever curse. I have to cross things out when I make a mistake. I’m human, so bite me! I have to be lady-like, too. Taught better than that. Okay. Back to my daddy, now: He’s a hardworking man, my dad, doing the construction mumbo-jumbo. He thinks I’m at college right now, but really I dropped out because it actually really bored the hell out of me. I’m not too into it. I went for about, eh, two months? and then got hella bored with it? Don’t know. So I just went on in the one place of admissions and told them I’m done. I don’t think they cared, really, but it felt good anyway. Sometimes it feels good to tell people off. But anyway, I moved to an apartment and got a sweet azz deal with the lady down there. Her name is Bethany Rice. She’s super nice. She offered me a job, but I couldn’t see myself doing anything involving tours or anything. I guess call me lazy. . . . Oh, and guess what! I lied. Never been to college. I’ll let you decide how it really was. Or is. Ha, ha! Derf!

Okay, yeah. I got the apartment and ██, right now, I’m in my knickers and shirty shirt. It’s comfy right now while I write this. Bought this weird pen to, you know, be able to write this down effortlessly. (It was twenty bucks—same as my damn sandals; same place, Target, bought from.) Sorry if my grammar is bad, or looks bad. I don’t even mean it. I’m just pretty much talking how I talk in my head. Makes sense. Ha, ha! But anyway, I’m super into dice. Like black and white stuff. I don’t know what it is. I just have dice hangin’ all everywhere. Right now there’s a plush die on my black dresser. My damn lamp is dice for ██’█ F’s sake. My hand sanitizer is in a dice-looking dispenser. It’s coo-coo. People call it weird. But hey, keeps me happy. That’s all we all want, right?

I’m in the food industry. Don’t laugh. I know it’s cliché as F of me to be all into that mess, but it pays the bills. I’m young. Twenty-two. I’m not going to be young forever, but hey, get it while the gettin’ is good, as they say. I want to tell you about earlier today. Today I was working and jumping hoops through my ████ A-hole. I had about eight, ten tables at the same time asking for refills of their dang Cokes. Which is pretty standard, but all of them wanted to chit-chat or some whatever-thingy. I have to play nice because these people are my little ducklings that I have to put a show on for.

Waitressing is like acting, in some ways. All I have to do is make your stay pleasant, savvy, smooth, and fast. Then you pay your measly little fifteen percent, and we both part ways. Sound good? Well, um, not me! All of these people see my face and all of a sudden they like to shoot me compliments: "Aw, I like your shoes! You have a pretty smile!" I wish I had your hair! All that. Which is cool—not saying I don’t like it—but sometimes, ugh! it gets to be a routine. Sometimes I actually know what they’re going to compliment on. Guys are so simple. I just now sighed. Now I’m laughing that I wrote that.

Getting off topic here. Okay. Eh-hem! Ten people needing drinks. I get to the middle last table