I’ve been a nervous wreck these past few days. It may have something to do with how inconsistent I’ve been about taking my meds. I’ve also been drinking a whole lot of generic brand diet soda from Aldi. It’s called “Summit Cola”.
I’ve also been writing a decent bit of fiction. Nothing close to my output in school, mind you, but on the whole it’s not nothing, which these days for me is pretty good. The thing I’m working on is a novel whose tentative title is Orgy at the End of Time...or just the Orgy. The story is set at the turn of the 21st century and will feature three-ish main POV characters and a network of side characters. Right now it’s told non-chronologically, but I’m not married to this structure. Really it just helps me write…I can jump around to scenes I’m excited about without worrying about how to get there. The last project I wrote this way I ended up starting over at one point, finding things I knew I wanted to keep and writing connecting tissue. This is maybe an insane way to work. Jury’s out on if I’ll continue to write this way. I’m sitting pretty at a paltry 4000 words, and probably a few thousand more in character sketches and synopses of the broad level plot. I’ve written like three or four different versions of the spiel you’re about to read.
The Orgy is a work of speculative fiction. I have a hard time explaining the premise of it succinctly, which is probably not great. Probably I need to really crystalize what happens in the thing. Get a goddamn logline, a tight, pithy little sentence that paints the whole thing in one’s mind, if only generally. But ok. As I said, the story takes place at the end of the 21st century and beginning of the 22nd. Climate change has radically altered the topography of the world. The east coast of North America has been turned into a sort of archipelago spanning the Appalachian mountains. (This is all pretty ludicrous. I was at one point hung up on scientific accuracy, then realized the other elements of this story are about as soft as sci-fi can get, and so stopped caring. I live near the Blue Ridge, and the phrase “Appalachian Archipelago” appeals to me on a sub-intellectual level, so there you go).
The setting is Sandymount, a formerly inland city that has been transformed into a hilly beachside metropolis. A popular form of recreation is a new way of ingesting drugs called “nightsoaking”, in which “soakers” float in “nightpools” whose water is laced with heavy-grade hallucinogens. It’s a form of collective dreaming.
One day an entrepreneur sets out to stage the biggest nightsoak in history by converting a warehouse into one giant nightpool. He cuts all sorts of corners, leading the already rather precarious project to spiral into a disaster. The hundreds of soakers who turned up for the event get their souls/psyches/whatever melded into a collective consciousness that gets called many things. The formal name that gets closest to sticking is “The Assimilation Entity,” but many start calling it “The Orgy”.
The Orgy leaves behind the bodies of those it assimilates as empty husks, though not vegetables exactly. More like lobotomites. The Orgy itself is contained in a single body that wanders the city, assimilating all it perceives into itself.
Eventually the Orgy dissipates. How exactly is unclear. People’s souls fall back to earth as rain. Basically no one gets returned to their original body, instead finding themselves split across several bodies which they are required to share. This ends up looking like a society with a sizable minority population of multiplicits (or “mults) who are roughly (maybe not very) comparable to schizophrenics or personality-split dissociators and are varyingly coherent and functioning.
So that’s the broad-level plot. What really matters are the lives of those affected by the Orgy–before, during, after. Here are some of them.
Joy. Joy de la Luz is a woman whose deeply unfulfilling job as the receptionist of a corporation whose product is seemingly nothing in particular leads her to become a pretty hardcore nightsoaker (and eventually daysoaker…soaking during the day, when the local population is mostly awake, has some weird outcomes). In her delusion she events a convoluted conspiracy that exists in parallel to a real conspiracy. She shows psychic potential, and so is kidnapped and taken to an underground facility where others like her are ostensibly receiving psychiatric treatment but are in fact being used to “manifest” desirable things into reality. The organization doing all this has many parties with different agendas, some utilitarian (reversing climate change), some militaristic (espionage), some achingly, painfully personal (healing a chronically ill loved one). We’ve gotten away from Joy, haven’t we?
Amaranth (“Am”). Amaranth O’Connor is an artist who, despite her numerous friends and lovers and cult following, feels a little empty. She begins a text correspondence with Joy, whose idiosyncrasies and egomania compel her. When Joy eventually goes off the deep end she declares that Am doesn’t exist and is a figment of her imagination/psyop/etc. Am is hurt by this. Normally she would be able to move on, but then she begins to gradually disappear. Her invisibility spares her from the assimilation entity. After it dissolves she finds herself alone, the aforementioned friends and lovers split across hundreds of people. She’s visible again, though. Good for her. I’m pretty fond of Am, though she’s not as fleshed out as the two other main characters. The first 1,500 words of what I’ve written is a day in her life after the dissolution.
Calculator (“Cal”). The third main character. Calculator Davis is an incel for the 22nd century. His father, Abacus (originally Stephen), named him Calculator for reasons having to do with the spiritual destiny he foresaw for his son. Cal’s mother, Jane, dies when he’s young, and his father kills himself just as Cal begins university, which is when we meet him. Cal struggles to connect to people. His kind if aloof demeanor hides deep-seated loneliness and rage. He’s sexually frustrated, maybe struggling to grapple with some flavor of queerness. He’s a game studies major, an archivist. He’s peer-pressured into attending the Biggest Nightsoak In History. I don’t know. Mostly I just wanted to write a character name Calculator Davis. Most of my ideas for him are taken from my freshman year in college. I was having a bad time.
Abacus. Cal’s father, as mentioned above. In his oblique madman way he foresees the Orgy, and believes Cal to have a pivotal role in it.
Mia. Mia Lubega is a member of Am’s polycule. She likes Am a lot. Her disappearance affects her deeply, so much so that she wonders what she’s doing around all these other people. She shows basic kindness to Cal, and to repay her Cal becomes a freakish stalker (that part very much is not based on my college years!!!!!). She’s into tentacleplay. She’s pays for her education through sex work.
Arranger. Arranger is a disgraced former Ph.D student who makes it his objective to document the Orgy by interviewing mults. We get glimpses of his character, but mostly he’s a vehicle for weird dialogues and essays on facets of human life post-orgy.
Patti. A one-off character? Patti’s a young girl whose mother is an empty shell. While most of the bodies left empty by the Orgy were eventually filled with something-or-other, some stayed empty. Patti’s father holds onto the vague hope that her mother might be returned to normal or at least filled with something, and so has his daughter take mom to the ocean everyday to soak her in the (presumably) psyche-rich water. Water is the vehicle by which souls travel, by the way.
Entrepeneur. The rich boy freak responsible for the whole mess. We get to see some of his ridiculous ventures pre-orgy.
Some members of the polycule who at the moment are little more than names: Joyce Wallace; Sid Barbells; Bee Vasquez.
Some “patients” in the underground facility in which Joy is housed: Lucia Belway; Ed Westchester; Nico Tavarez. The staff get some scenes, too.
Cal’s roommates are also characters, but I don’t even have names for them.
That’s enough about characters. Here are some influences:
End of Evangelion
The works of Philip K. Dick
Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven
George Saunders, especially Lincoln in the Bardo
Infinite Jest (sorry)
The works of Jonni Peppers
Disco Elysium
More general influences that loom over all my creative endeavors whether I like it or not:
Kafka
Woolf
Joyce
Bolanyo
Lynch
Murakami
Salinger
Borges
Gabo
pilotredsun