A Change of Season: A Novel

By Russell Clarke

On March 26, 1982, two men in a mysterious black pick-up truck brutally attack two bikers on the deserted bluff roads just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis. One biker is killed instantly and the other is severely injured, and the lives of the four men are indelibly changed and linked together, forever. A Change of Season accounts the final days of each of the men involved in this tragic confrontation and examines the philosophical and existential impact that such an immeasurable event had on each of their lives. Craig Lerrib, the main antagonist, leads a life of unexamined indifference and unending carnal exploration and ends up morally bankrupt and alone, a reality that permanently alters all those who are caught in the dangerous pull of his orbit. His partner in the black truck, Peter Doyle, a thoughtful man swept along by his desires, spends his life suppressing the guilt he feels for his part in the murder, as well as his own true sexual feelings, a process that leads to great existential searching and self-awareness, but also unrelenting loneliness and life-long isolation. Alfred Whitman, the surviving rider, is never quite able to get past the physical impairments sustained in the attack, and he attempts to authenticate in the sterile world of pen and paper what was lost in the physical world of living, a corridor that leads to existential angst and unresolved religious questioning. And in one last tribute, Alfred Whitman pens a short story in homage to the enigmatic young rider who lost his life that day, Thale, who, although dying at an early age, becomes the true protagonist of the novel and represents the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation that the other characters are lacking. In a larger sense, A Change of Season examines the relationships and associations that we make as humans through the restricted prism of our own beliefs, and then explores how these "connections' struggle for survival in a world of endless opposing ideologies. A philosophical process of discovery as mysterious, and in some ways, as unknowable as the very setting of it all, the Mississippi River.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098010577

Book preview

Craig

The only way to really know somebody—I mean really know somebody—is to know what they’re afraid of.

Craig

When the telephone first rang out in the small two-bed hospital room, the men sharing the space already knew each other quite intimately. Both men had been diagnosed with colon cancer, and in hopes of ridding their bodies of the dangerous cancer cells, both had gone through an extensive surgery to remove a portion of their large intestine; and it was the random fate of this illness, rather than any conscious choice on their part, that had created their unusual alliance. The fact that cancer had struck such relatively young men—one was thirty-five and the other was fifty-two—and the similarities of their treatment, had gone a long way in solidifying, what at all outward appearances, seemed to be an unlikely pairing.

They had been hospitalized for over three weeks, and as the endless stream of nurses and doctors had probed and prodded the two patients, any initial feelings of inhibition had long since disappeared. The harsh realities of hospital protocol, open gowns, catheterizations, sponge baths, bedpans, and perpetual bloodletting had done away with many of the unwritten social restraints and regulations that strangers practice when thrust into such close proximity, and although they might have preferred to suffer in silence, as most men do, their physical confinement had removed even the smallest hope for any measure of privacy. The luxury of daily ritual and routine that had masked the reality of a passing hour, which had allowed them to move through a day beyond any inherent comprehension or self-awareness before they were hospitalized, had been abruptly removed, and they were thrust into a world of pragmatic recognition where even the deepest secrets and emotions had been forced to the surface. As they accepted the next round of diagnoses and grappled with the harsh realities of treatments, they did so on a very small but very public stage, with an unalterable audience of one.

Ian, a small framed man in his mid-thirties with curly black hair and generous brown eyes, had the subtle, soft features of a poet, and his every movement, his every action gave indication of some deep mental process moving under the surface. He was a staff writer for a small monthly publication with aspirations of becoming a novelist, a fact he divulged with little provocation and had learned about his illness only two days before being hospitalized and had had little time to really contemplate, and accept, the challenging battle that lay before him, a very counterintuitive experience. Both of his parents and his older brother were already deceased, and he was forced, for the most part, to spend his time without the guidance of supportive family members and had become quite adept at filling the long hours. Although he was a young man prone to self-analysis and an extreme sense of self-awareness, he attempted to deal with the emotional aspect of his understanding by an unrelenting endeavor to keep busy, to occupy his mind in any way possible.

During the first days of his hospitalization, rather than lapsing into contemplative worries about the future, he passed the hours between suspended work projects and journaling even the most diminutive details of his consciousness, a practice he had done since early childhood and had started to develop an almost fanatical interest in the unfamiliar person who had suddenly been pushed into his world, and it was through this tenuous bond with a stranger that he slowly came to accept the realities of his own circumstance. Somehow, through the less threatening, mirrored image of a roommate, who faced an almost identical physical situation, he slowly came to terms with his own, a sort of two-pronged acceptance process. As he had emailed to his boss, it proved easier to talk about and face reality when it was not so pragmatically structured in the first person.

And as these almost-subliminal interactions took place, he began to disclose, quite reflexively, even the most intimate details of his life, something he had rarely done before, particularly with someone he had just met. On an unusually long evening, when, as he had written in his journal, the shadows in the small room seemed to outweigh the light, he had revealed to his roommate, in an almost cathartic process, that he was to have been married the following spring to a young woman from Memphis, a good five hours away, but had abruptly called off the wedding. He recounted, in very eloquent diction, how his bride-to-be had said, in all the right language, that she wanted to proceed, and how she had implored him to rethink his decision, and how he had flatly refused, sensing, as he had worded it, an ever-so-restrained incongruity between the tone of her voice and the actual words she spoke. The unalterable course of his disease, her youthful inexperience with the ugliness of infirmity, and the physical distance between them became an unconscious trinity, the perfect artifice to bring an end to a relationship that had suddenly become much too real. And now, instead of whispering soft words over the telephone, or texting sudden sentiments to a woman who had been such a large part of his life, he faithfully packed such thoughts and emotions into ardent sentences and finely crafted paragraphs, and attempted to discover in his trusted medium of the written word, what had been lost in the activity of his living.

The older Craig, only two weeks shy of his fifty-second birthday, occupied the bed next to the window and was an almost antipodal representation of his roommate. He had none of Ian’s observational skills or innate sense of awareness and seemed to view the world at face value and had an overpowering aura of sensuality, a physical attraction and almost visceral rankness, as Ian imagined Whitman would have put it, that seemed to, at least initially, draw people toward him. A young nurse trainee, acting on a girlish whim, had said he looked like a rougher version of Brad Pitt, only older and even an experienced nurse, whose bloom had long faded, had commented, with tongue in cheek, about his physical endowments, as she had so aptly worded it. He looked twenty years younger than his age and was of a much more physical nature, his body was that of a workingman, and his language was coarse and direct, a dramatic contrast to his sometime loquacious roommate; and he seemed to view the world, as Ian had reported to his boss, in a very one-dimensional format, an observation, that at least initially had created a great sense of concern in the mind the young writer. But he soon came to understand that these chasms of inconsistencies; these opposite ways of interpreting the world that had blossomed in the sterile soil of a hospital room had been bridged by the common reality they currently faced. With no prior history to cloud or influence their opinions, or interpretations, of one another, their connection was defined solely within the boundaries of a ten-by-twelve room, had been etched on a clean slate; and within these parameters, they were quite similar, faced quite analogous experiences, and had become quite close to one another as the hours turned into days.

Not only had they somehow capitalized on that unexplainable ability that people have of disclosing to strangers those things that would be unthinkable to consanguine connections, they shared a firsthand understanding of the arbitrariness of disease, had been given a shuddering glimpse at the finite element of living, had become members of a sort of elite club that had its own viewpoint of the world. As the days slowly moved forward, they came to understand that their pain, their suffering, the very language of their experience, was alien to co-workers and visitors who periodically stood at the edge of the room and peered in on what must have appeared to be, as Ian had so succinctly analogized, a foreign film without subtext, and so they had turned to each other; had come to learn a great deal about the stranger in the room.

Ian, the writer, the introspective one of the two, had discovered over the course of time that Craig had been married twice, had five children from three different women, and had lost contact with virtually all of his family members. His parents were dead and any brothers that were still living had long since disowned him, and both of his ex-wives, who, as far as Ian could surmise, had suffered greatly in their dealings with Craig, had gone on to remarry, but with greatly altered expectations the second time around. He learned that Craig had not seen any of his children for over ten years, a fact he disclosed without any emotional connection, and as Ian had penned in his journal, Craig seemed to live a very present-tense existence, where the past and future participles of his life were almost nonexistent, and most certainly never analyzed. The most poignant, and in some ways the most disconcerting discovery that Ian made came late one evening when Craig, in an almost childlike fashion, began to talk freely about his time in prison for armed robbery and disclosed even the most intimate details about his time behind bars; and Ian began to understand that Craig, for the first time in his life, had started to look at his past actions beyond his own myopic point of view. He sensed that the cataclysm of cancer, the sense of mortality that it invariably extracted, had forced his roommate, a man without any degree of self-awareness, to finally perceive, as he wrote in his journal, the connection between cause and effect, between tenet and practice. Ian came to realize that Craig had always viewed his life as just a series of actions, a course devoid of any type of introspection, and he felt that his roommate had started, on a very limited basis, to admonish himself for his past indiscretions, or at the least the impropriety of having been caught; and he came to feel a sense of restrained astonishment for a man who’s primal view of the world was so different from his own.

As the telephone rang for the second time, Craig, as he had done since the start of their time together, allowed Ian to answer, knowing that any call from the outside was most likely not for him, and he would, as had become the practice, sit in silence on his bed and listen to the one-sided conversations that would play themselves out on the other side of a thin, off-white curtain, covered in two dimensional geometric shapes, that quite symbolically divided the room. Craig, who had firsthand experience at close confinement, would lay awake, sometimes for hours, and stare at the outlines of triangles and parallelograms, and listen, an art that he had perfected behind bars, to Ian’s conversations, as he attempted to piece together the fragments of comments that he heard into something that made sense, like one might piece together a jigsaw puzzle—but with only half the pieces. He came to live vicariously through the visitors and calls that came in for his roommate, used them as an avenue to pass the time; and Ian, well aware of his roommates eavesdropping, had long since pulled the curtain back on his conversations and made no attempt to censure or edit his discussions; he had come, at least in the confines of a ten by twelve room, to trust the blue-collar roommate who had been forced into his life.

As the telephone started to ring for the third time, Ian set aside the book he was reading; and Craig closed his eyes and laid back in his bed and, as he had done since the start of their confinement, listened to the one-sided conversation that started to transpire.

Hello, Ian stated as he adjusted the bandages wrapped tightly around his waist. Oh, I’m okay, he said with a very familiar tone of voice as if he had a close relationship with the caller. Yeah, I’m much better today. Yesterday was pretty bad—but today, it’s okay. They have me on some new drug treatment, he went on as his voice became more reportorial, and I’ll be on it for the next two weeks, and then they might change me to something else. The doctor was in just this morning, and he seems to be pleased with everything. I asked him about going home, and he seems to think maybe sometime this week… What…? Did she really?

A short pause occurred, and Ian closed his eyes and seemed to be mentally transporting himself somewhere else.

I asked the doctor about coming back to work, Ian nervously said as he opened his eyes and grabbed a pen off the nightstand by his bed. Well, I appreciate that, but I can work on it from home.

Another pause occurred, and Craig opened his eyes and looked toward Ian’s side of the room to see if the phone call had suddenly ended.

Okay, okay, don’t worry, Ian finally responded. Craig closed his eyes again and continued to listen. Yes. So no one else is working on it? he asked very intently.

Another long silent pause occurred.

Good—but like I said, if nothing else I can work from home on it. I don’t want to lose that story. He paused a moment then added on, I’m getting to really like old Forrestal.

Ian reached down and pushed a button that raised the head of the bed as high as it would go and then rearranged the pillows that were wedged behind his back so he was sitting up straight.

I’m pretty far along, he said as he settled back in the pillows. It’s just so hard to get at the truth. There are so many conflicting stories.

What?

Yes, yes. That was supposedly the last thing he did.

I read that too, only it was from an anthology of world poetry by Van Doren, and it was definitely Sophocles.

No—yes.

No, it was the ‘Chorus from Ajax,’ a very dark, downhearted, almost melancholy poem.

Well, that’s not what I found, I—

Yes.

There was another very long pause and a faraway look came over Ian’s face.

He was writing it out long hand on a piece of paper out of the anthology, he said as his voice became very serious.

Yes. Yes, I have it in my notebook. Wait a minute. Ian placed his pen behind his ear and pulled a well-worn spiral-bound book from the table beside his bed, flipped through a few pages and started reading. Frenzy hath seized thy dearest son, Who from thy shores in glory came, The first in valor and in fame; Thy deeds that he hath done, Seem hostile all to hostile eyes… Better to die, and sleep the never waking sleep, than linger on, And dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone.

Ian looked up from the notebook. And it stopped there. That was the last thing he ever wrote.

Yes. I think so.

Yes. Now this is what several sources have reported—he placed the copied poem in the back of the anthology and then left it open to that page.

Yes, almost immediately.

"It was three o’clock in the morning. He went to