Author: ST King
“Lucky for you,” he said, “I have commandeered a portable chair for just such an occasion. It is sure to be your favorite color.”
He spoke in a careful, calculated, almost unnatural way. He held up a package, one side of it wrapped in mesh. Then he grasped it by its round center and tossed it into the air. Somehow I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to catch it. I watched it, and it seemed to float toward me in a strange, predetermined arc. When I finally reached it, it lay stiff against my shirt pocket. It was dusty. But it was white. My favorite color had always been red.
The room he and I shared—it was easy to describe: a cube, with glass walls and ceiling. The floor was cream, freshly mopped. A camera watched us, like the single eyestalk of a plastic slug. It made me long for the night sky.
The sky became colorless between the fading stars.
– from pinewritten by Robert Dunbar.
Isn’t that what a writing journey is all about? One who hammers away at the keys of letters without a care or ethics; it’s not that he’s negligent. In the case of the Operator (though he could just as well be Robert Dunbar – yes, writer) – he’s more concerned with the experience than the conclusion. In fact, everything he does is meant to support that fact. It’s because he’s the one who works late into the night. Every tree he plants here: the pine, the quiet watcher – they come from the dusty white sands, all of it is carefully considered and carefully placed.
It took me longer than I cared to admit. But eventually I managed to get the chair unfolded and in position. I leaned back in the chair, resting my weight on my hands. I looked at him nervously at times, wondering if he regretted letting me accompany him. But his attention to his work was cold and mechanical. I didn’t know what to make of it. I gave the chair a final check, and when I was sure it would hold up, I placed it in front of the operator’s desk. On his spotless white desktop lay a whiteboard and markers. “These are for you,” he said.
Without blinking, he continued, “Jersey Devil, thank you.” I hesitated, longer than either he or I expected. “Write it down, please? On the blackboard? Jersey Devil?”
“Okay—okay,” I said. This was my job, after all. I picked up a black marker, leaned over the table, and wrote “Jersey Devil” in big letters across the top. The operator had prepared two columns of numbered lines, the same height as the whiteboard.
Her legs and arms ached from the sudden increase in blood pressure, and her bladder emptied as she turned with excruciating slowness.
The darkness moved.
– from pinewritten by Robert Dunbar.
The manipulator who created this world (he may or may not be Robert Dunbar) pinein the Pine Barrens – I’ll tell you what he did – if I can correctly assume what he intended to do at the beginning. I promise you will do it in the process. If you look around the dusty roads and the wet swamps, the dilapidated farmhouses and shacks, I believe you will find that hope does not exist here. In fact, from the beginning. Isn’t that a good pace? That’s what it’s about: dying at the speed of life.
One room, as big as this one, pulled by huge chains: then another room – along solid steel rails. The same thing happened around us, I noticed. Even above us: other bright rooms exactly like this one, rotating tirelessly around each other.
What was in one of the rooms? A horse? A hard bony horn protruded from the tip of its nose. In that room, another room, it seemed to be collapsing, swaying from side to side on rough wooden stakes, and the floor seemed to be covered with a fat cartilaginous body: a huge snake with a patterned hood like two black teardrops.
The room with the Jersey Devil, which I was not familiar with, rose from below us. Then all the moving rooms stopped, swaying on their chains. It was over. Then, a corridor appeared in front of the room. The winged monsters rattled along the walls and flew off into the darkness. The room closed. Then there was silence. But it didn’t last. The operator started into the next chapter.
“Crazy dog,” he said.
I opened the tip of the marker and put it aside Jersey Devilseems appropriate, with the same capital letters I put, Mad Dog.
“I’ll tell you what I want to do. Those dark and stormy nights are what I’m after. Have you ever lost your way?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
Now there was another thump, like an exploding engine, and the room around us began to sway and slowly move again.
“I wanted Athena to be lost, she’s the main character here – so I put her in this farmhouse. I also gave her a retarded son.”
The glare of the headlights cast a grim light on the patchwork house: the clapboard walls painted like ghosts, the first-floor windows boarded up because she couldn’t afford to fix them, the ramshackle front porch propped up with old bed boards and cinder blocks. She turned off the engine and got out, and night fell.
– from pinewritten by Robert Dunbar.
She was all alone there, did you see? ” Then he sighed and opened a drawer. I couldn’t see what he took out of it. “But I did much more than that.”
The operator went on, a lot of stuff: he told me about the Pineys and inbreeding and the dangers of the muggy night. That’s when I finally saw the dogs: dozens of them, hopping around in there: one or two of them dead. But that was enough, I guess. Most of them were out before the door was raised a quarter of the way.
“Athena was lost for too many reasons to list: because she was a woman, and she was black. She had a disability. We’ve talked about her son before, haven’t we? He was mentally retarded, did I tell you? But he wasn’t all bad. He had the golden path to redemption through his offspring.
“He and it“He said. “Stop looking for bad omens. Those are the pine trees. I hand-picked each one. As you’ve seen in this story, trees are great watchers. Can you imagine if those trees were stained with your blood?”
“The dark is not safe—that’s the moral of the story, young man.”
He finally picked up the plastic bag he’d reached into and put it on the table. “I didn’t give you any,” he said. There were a few pieces of baby carrot stuck to his tiny, perfect teeth. He made a swishing motion with his mouth, but it had no effect. Then he found the carrots with his fingers, took them out and threw them into the trash.
What Operator does with the story, and the space in which all these monsters hang out – the Pine Barrens, and other people like Athena – and others lost for their own reasons – is strangely enough that I find I can appreciate it for what it is: the low-level entanglements of small-town life and death, and the cold, oblivious nature of the latter. But on the other hand, this is actually the reason I can no longer work with Operator (although I certainly don’t mind reading his books). It’s because it becomes bland and boring very quickly. Maybe I’m just too jaded, but there’s nothing new to see here.
There are some bland writing here and there. In these bland writings you can expect to find men and women who are struggling with their own demons (which most of them are not); but many of them, while human at the beginning, become dehumanized as a whole by the constant use of manipulators – unifying them, making them homogenous. Who is who? Who knows? And so on. In the end, I found that this was more than just a small piece of depravity. It swept through the entire writing, washing away what might have been lovable characters.
I still visit this operator from time to time. I do so because I admire his craft: he has somehow grabbed a tiny piece of the universe and blew it apart and made it gigantic—he takes as much of it as he can. Then he squeezes it together and binds it into volumes. There are limits to what he can put in there, but he makes use of what he has. That’s admirable.
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Final rating: 3.5/5
About the author: An aspiring novelist with a penchant for darkness and an insatiable thirst for fantasy, ST King currently works as a mental health counsellor, helping people purge their closets of darkness – although he admits he thinks it’s more fun to put it back in.
