When October comes and the world grows cold, when you look out in the morning wondering where’s the frost, when the blankets you have don’t work at night, when the house is feeling weary like a cage and draft-ridden, worn, and old, and when all the ruddy red is in the trees and the garden ground is crisp and cold is when October’s come.
He felt that he was now part of a definable group who’d made a historic convergence, and he felt that they were in the prime of their being, that they’d gotten up on stage and the spotlight had been just flicked on, its beam shining down hotly, and that he only had to build up the raw courage and the nerve to walk up to the microphone and speak, and say that they were ready—that this alone would be enough to make the moment live forever.
That generation he was a part of, and who were presently pushed upon the stage, also had a name. They called it Generation X.
‘The first generation whose expectations were lower than their parents’,” Judy would often say, proclaiming it as some kind of gospel of the hour, just as he imagined they were all declaring in those very words wide across the land—ah, Judy, she knew what was going on, she knew the way, and he liked to hear it from her lips because it made him feel more connected to the others who were surely out there at this instant, and had been blessed with this revelation too.
It was verily the prevailing wind—so of course, their expectations sagged. As a generation, they really hadn’t any. They had the shared sentiment of their childhoods, yes, the searings of those distant memories, and they lived in the ironic contrast between the happy charms of then and the terrifying emptiness of now. But something great had happened in between—and something great had gone away.
Culturally, they were in a panic field, a dead zone. There was nothing good ahead. They could presently enjoy the blinding procession of imported gadgetry, outrageous imagery, and declining social mores—all of that was instantly available to every one of them, and such indulgences were constantly encouraged. Most of them had no idea that none of that in essence was radically new, or even good; it was all just the result of a civilization gone off track, one that was quickly losing itself, as had already happened a thousand times before. Well, they’d been given that—but no ticket to a living future.
The American heights were obviously now in the past, tucked away somewhere in the background scenery of old Humphrey Bogart films and those square photographs with white-frilled trim around the edges, month and year noted with cold precision in the border. It’d been mothballed, somehow lost among the years, and was slipping steadily away.
According to this unspoken but universally acknowledged view, it was pretty much all over now—they’d fallen off the edge, and were only coasting on a downhill ride into the dark.
That’s when I just stood there, with my arm and elbow on the meaty marbled ledge of the one long window in my apartment, on the day that I had finished my first novel and when I knew that it was done. I did not know what would become of it or of myself, even, but I did know that this thing that had haunted me for so long, this book-length work, which in fact was not very long, was the shortest book that I would ever write — I knew at that moment in the stillborn afternoon of early spring that it was done.
There was nothing but the mesmerizing hush of distant autos from the turnpike, and sometimes a soft, faint rumble of a plane—that combination of a thousand far-off engines that makes a sound so soft and tiny, so quiet, delicate as the heartbeat of an insect—and at that moment it was as if all the world out there beyond the window-screen was in it, and was separate from me, and had suddenly paused—a clanging factory in downtown Houston, the blare of Kenwood speakers from some car radio on a California freeway with its tan and black interior, the hidden sloosh of water against a dock in rural Maine, the creak of a shifting back-room floorboard in a general store along a desolated crossroads out in Iowa, surrounded by open fields—and all the world as well, including a pale-weeded plain in Asia, moist and loamy; the birdcalls from a cool and rocky mountain range, somewhere high in Paraguay; some hard-stoned tight back alley, in Bavaria, behind a shouldered row of stores, with a strong unpleasant reek almost approximating gasoline. All the cities, and the streets, the clang of all the peoples, the fields and valleys of the world and everything was out there, beyond my screen, waiting for me, and at this moment frozen at attention, as if to see what I could do.
Michael Stutz is the author of the Circuits of the Wind trilogy. His band Heaven debuts in 2012. Follow him on Twitter.