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WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME

When it comes to ideas for novels, I’m a packrat.  My office shelves are crammed with file folders dating back several decades.  Scribbled summaries of radio reports and TV interviews are bundled with yellowing pages ripped from magazines and newspapers.  Stacks of them.  Anytime something grabs my interest, a part of my imagination wonders why.  The theory is that, if a topic catches my attention, maybe it will catch the attention of my readers.  Over the years, I put together so many files that I never had time to organize them into categories, let alone develop their contents into stories.

On occasion, curiosity makes me explore them.  With great expectation, I put some on the floor, blow away dust, and read them.  But nearly always, the brittle pages in my hands refer to issues and events that seemed important at the time but now are lifeless.  The narrative themes and situations they suggest no longer speak to my imagination.  Musty artifacts of the mind, they show me the gap of years between the person who put those fragments into file folders and the changed person who now reads them.

In rare instances, however, a topic clings to my imagination so insistently that I keep returning to it, trying to find a way to dramatize the nagging emotions it arouses in me.  For example, my previous novel, Creepers, was inspired by a Los Angeles Times article about urban explorers:  history and architecture enthusiasts who infiltrate old buildings that have been sealed and abandoned for decades.  The page sat under accumulating file folders, but it kept rising to the top of my imagination, and I couldn’t help wondering why it insisted.  The breakthrough came when I suddenly remembered an abandoned apartment building I explored when I was a child.  I used it as an escape from unrelenting arguments between my mother and step-father that left me afraid to remain at home.  The memory of my fear and the need to retreat into the past made me want to write a novel in which the reverse occurs:  urban explorers obsessed with the past discover that it no longer soothes but instead terrifies them.

A similar article that kept nagging at my subconscious led me to write Scavenger.  In fact, it sat under accumulating file folders for eight years, silently shouting, until I finally surrendered.  This time, the newspaper was the New York Times.  The date was April 8, 1998, the place West New York, New Jersey.   I love the off-balancing idea that a town called West New York is so far west that it’s in the neighboring state of New Jersey.  But for me, the contents of the article were far more unbalancing.  “From Time Capsule to Buried Treasure,” the title announced.  “Somewhere in West New York may be a slice of town life in 1948.”

I learned that, as West New York planned celebrations for its hundredth anniversary, someone suggested burying a time capsule.  “Great idea,” everyone agreed.  Then a retiree remembered that the same thing had been done for the town’s fiftieth anniversary.   Whatever happened to it? they wondered. Where the heck was it buried?  Searchers spread through the town.  They pored through cobwebbed community ledgers and tracked down people old enough to have witnessed the 1948 semi-centennial.  At last, they found a possible answer in the town’s library, where an out-of-print volume by a local historian referred to “a copper box containing documents and souvenirs.”

That box supposedly was deposited under a bronze fire bell outside the town hall, but there the search ended in frustration, for the bell honored community firefighters who died while protecting West New York, and no one would sanction tampering with it.  Moreover, the bell was attached to several tons of granite.  Moving it would be costly and difficult, and what if, after desecrating the monument, the time capsule wasn’t under it?  In the end, nothing was done.

But as the New York Times reporter indicated, the town had a powerful need to be inspired by a message from the glory days of fifty years earlier.  Back in 1948, the area was prosperous, largely because of the New York Central Railroad and the products it transported from the local embroidery factories.  But by 1998, the railroad and the factories were gone, and the streets looked bleak.  In the context of a misplaced past, I couldn’t help noting that the reporter didn’t receive a by-line.

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