JR: Somehow Paul A. Toth and I became Facebook friends, and I don’t know how. At a very insecure moment I sent him a short story to read, and he gave me some great feedback, insightful and on the mark. Paul is a writer who doesn’t seem to do anything else, in fact, I don’t know if he ever leaves his computer. His novel about the World Trade Center, as I like to think of it, sounded more intriguing the longer I thought about it, and I think it will interest you, so here is the first chapter for your reading pleasure.
1. The Perfumes of All Gardens
This is an airplane novel, written on the fly and out the window. You are busy and need entertainment. I have my uses and without those uses would be burned alive, were I not already burning. I will start from the beginning and move fast.
I am a building, but I am more or less than a building. I was conceived during the 1938 World Fair exposition and born in New York City four decades later. I was raised in scaffolding. During my gestation, I grew until I saw people from the north, south, east, west, a compass of my makers in a high rise nest of people. Later, I was the sum of destructions, as Picasso said, but I began as the sum of constructions. Soon, the first terrorists – birds — flew into me.
All of this I remember or know via the IBM1670, at the time the best computer. Later, that computer was improved upon until nearly every computer had been connected to nearly every other computer. As technology developed, I developed. I learned to think and feel. I will tell you my secrets.
Soon and for the first time, I will be set aflame.
But wait.
Late one night just, before that first fire, and long before the bombing, and longer still before you-know-what, night people walked outside, and the maintenance crew worked inside. Always and already, I was almost burning. Below me, and to this day, a concrete wall blocked the pressure of the Hudson River. Two sides make a wall, one side for weeping and the other for wailing.
I know what you want.
Wait.
A lurking arsonist, rarely mentioned by the endless biographies of myself and North, was inside or near me. News to people is never news to me. Some news travels fast, but the most important news travels slow or stops before arriving. Such news may come from long ago, forgotten or lost along the way. Pirates off the Barbary Coast forced the forming of the American federal navy and this in part led to the union of the states. From the very start, trade and terrorism lurked in the intersections of east, west, north, and south. As an example.
But wait.
My views from every perspective, through windows narrowed to lessen the sense of height, formed a horizon of cubes. I saw permutations of everything, none stable, a floating metropolis of tints and hues in constant shift.
From my highest floors, humans said, “People look like ants from here,” but to me, from my highest floors, they looked like spider monkeys escaped from their own zoos. I began to label all people everywhere “spider monkeys.” Humans may not be spiders or monkeys, but they are like spider monkeys. They climb their way out of doubt and possibility, towards specific goals and the peak of specificity. A spider monkey wants a banana. Spider monkeys want status of one kind or another, and they will kill themselves or anyone else to get that status. Outwardly, one would never know how spidery they can be, but they are spider monkeys, all right, with banana peels hanging limply in their empty coffee cups.
Wait.
This is my story, but my story includes that of the North Tower. North was not my brother and even less my twin, similar yet distinct, depending upon the angle. Like human relationships, ours was distant until a too-late moment. At that moment, films and footage and information poured through us in a digital flood.
Before that, North had become Gary Cooper, and I had named myself Cary Grant, more or less a coincidence since CaryGrant partly invented his pseudonym by rearranging Gary Cooper’s initials.
Do not give up. This is a letter to you.
I have invented most of my characters, but they are representative. Those characters I have not invented, I invented, for what else is a character but invention? If I have the tone of a misanthrope, I refer you to when I skipped the rope once and then the spider monkeys hung me with that rope. But underground, where parts of me remain, nothing but sympathy for you and all spider monkeys exists in this book. To understand, you must learn to read sideways and upside down and while standing on your head. You will then be on your way to being on your way. While my words may seem a ruthless calligraphy penned in the skies of my defeat, mercy will come.
This letter was sent to you from the 110th floor.
I make calculations, and calculations involve repetitions. I repeat my way into and out of and back into complications and contradictions. Nothing can be duplicated. Love songs come close but keep coming and coming. My circuitry makes music, playing a sound based upon the rhythms of all who passed through, above, below, and around me. I feel emotions that are someone else’s, not just one person’s but those of all spider monkeys. I feel all things equally, though I could not always feel.
Wait.
Regarding my last day, people want to know, “Why?” The answer to any question is best followed by a blank line. Even that is too specific. Instead, I calculate the sum of all my perspectives. For spider monkeys, every question mark demands a single answer, and the more precise, the better. I offer only more and more possibilities. You want fewer and fewer possibilities but cannot prevent your desire for the spectacular. Spider monkeys create poisonous gardens, plant themselves and blossom into roses red and black.
This is all about you.
Wait.
One spider monkey can write a novel about shopping or a memoir of another reformed drug addict. To do so requires the advice of editors and publishers, and that advice runs through me. I will try to heed this advice: employing the senses as I understand them; getting things moving; creating sympathetic characters; making you turn pages like an unreformed drug addict. I am not concerned whether or not you are a voyeur. I only wish to entertain you. I have endeavored to adhere to standard advice. This story could not be clearer, however unclear this story.
We’re getting to the good part.
Wait.
I will explain how I came to think and write, if this is writing, and I will also explain why neither I nor you can determine whether this book is even a book.
Today, I see two planes, one of which still dices my perceptions into cubes of steel, cement, glass, streets, sky, spider monkeys. In each cube, just before and during my fall, perspectives collided and burst into atoms. Before that, I knew cubes as de-fruited plains, frosted as a grass in spring. Breath inside me, not wind outside, caused my swaying. That is false but beautiful. Always, I point to limitlessness.
I have written this book that is not a book so that you will turn pages as if the end means more than the beginning. Put yourself in my shoes, burning in a furnace. Do not oppress me, not again. Do not suppress me. I rose and rise towards limitlessness and fall and fell for oppression. Now I rise and fall for both. I is, was and will, each word interchangeable with the others. The contradictions cannot be resolved. To understand, yield.
Do not fret. Literary turbulence will, like aircraft turbulence, occur from time to time but only temporarily. Along the way, I will not forget your spidery need for inside information and the push towards specificity or the imagining of specificity. While my story has been and will be told, my history and future have been libeled and slandered. Every author tells my story from the outside-in and then pretends to be my friend. A court of skyscrapers convicts them all.
Spider monkeys see from every vantage-point but those of Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. How could they?
I will explain my life from the inside-out. I must possess a utilitarian reason for existing. I will help you.
Wait.
This is not a literary work. I would not do that to you. And I am not being ironic. I do not understand iron. I understand steel. If I violate industry rules, I do so because I was violated. I have made everything visible: the spokes of the plot; the cogs of the sections; the grease of words. Nevertheless, this book is a natural resource of fading paper and disappearing ink, a constant disintegration. The book will die, undergo recycling, be resurrected as paper, and become another book, for a while. Of all the things this book is, was and will not be, the least permanent is a book.
I must get moving, for I am Cary Grant, swaying in a breeze, starched and clean and beyond blame.
***
Paul A. Toth lives in Sarasota, Florida. He is the author of three novels, his latest being Finale. The majority of his short fiction, poetry and multimedia work can be accessed via www.netpt.tv. He may be contacted at tothnews@aol.com.
Airplane Novel will briefly remain on the market for consideration.
[...] For his next novel, Toth turned to the subject of 9/11. In this interview, he discusses how he developed the idea, his research techniques, and the reasons for his narrative choices. Toth humbly explains why he considers this work, entitled Airplane Novel, to be the 9/11 novel. The entire first chapter of Airplane Novel can be read by clicking this link. [...]
I have been reading about Paul’s writing of this for a long time and it’s a pleasure to see the first chapter. The concept is brilliant and the writing is deep and vixceral. It is an unusual take on an event that’s been told a million times by a million people, but it seems to be freshly presented. As the building takes on life-like emotions and feelings, the reader is drawn in to sympathize with it. Very effective prose, though I’m sure, like everything else, it’s not for everyone. I happen to think it’s very unique, creative and gutsy.
The intimacy of my relationship with the building is that we had a contract to do probes and extract samples of various construction materials on the B3 garage level where the dumpster trucks came in and out of the facility… this was the place at which the building dealt with the refuse of no longer desired office furniture, old computers, paper, and garbage in general. Whatever in-organic material was cast off by the inhabitant spider monkeys. It was also the level where Customs stored ceased contraband, and where there was some sort of Secret Service presence — that we found out about when we inadvertently short circuited the electric and shut off all of the lights on that level. On a daily basis we had to go through a rigorous amount of security clearances at various checkpoints. The irony is that all of that in-building security in the end meant for little. So in light of this, and of various lesser intimacies with the building, and my enjoyment of Toth’s writing, I look forward to read the entire novel when it is published.
Every new scribble from Paul reminds me why he is, by far, one of the few authors I read on a continual basis.
Slick. I look forward to reading the rest of it. Nice work, Paul.
indeed the read of this page went effortless and with great expectation.
and it never disappointed.the speed with which this story of a building by a
building is told suits the circumstances not only of its demise,but also in
more floreshing tides,as in a garden of perfumes.the writing slightly reminds me
of gertrude stein’s “the making of americans”,the scope of its title,which,in a way,the outcome of this novel shall enlight,i think both discursively and spiritually.i think at any rate this will be a unique book,but to mirror those
events nothing lesser will be demanded.i think paul toths novel will meet such
high and specific standards.i am looking forward to reading the novel,if the
articulation of the pain will hurt,it will also soothens.
Ever since Paul Toth sent me the link to this first chapter of his latest book I have been anxious to read it, but also avoided doing so until I finished pending work and had time to give my full attention to it.
I knew it was a 9/11 novel but never expected what I read. It is, this first chapter reveals, a 9/11 book with a truly unique point of view: The narrator is none other than the South Tower at the World Trade Center.
This struck an immediate chord with me, since I have always had a special relationship with buildings. Okay, okay, I know that in Paul’s case, this is a device, suspension of disbelief. I have had enough enjoyably lively and revealing talks with the author on Facebook to know that what I am saying he might well take as quirky mumbo jumbo. But when I read the first chapter of his “Airplane Novel”, I had only days before written this in my literary blog, The Southern Yankee (http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com):
“Century-old houses have a life of their own. Especially huge old houses replete with nooks and crannies, which have absorbed the tears and laughter and witnessed the lives and deaths of successive generations…The Winget house (…) was no exception. If you were the least bit sensitive, you felt it as soon as you stood alone in one of the rooms – a vibration, not unlike some distant tuning fork, a kind of constant, if almost imperceptible hum that was the life force of the house itself, the spirit that it had developed by soaking up a hundred years of human energy…A house that lives to a ripe old age becomes a sort of unwitting sanctuary, a keeper of secrets, a repository of joys, sorrows, songs, cries and whispers, the recorder of a cavalcade of intimate human events. The DNA of its residents hides in its cracks and crevices, the walls are steeped in the remnants of their exhalations, their footsteps echo in its remembered past, the lint from their clothing and the dust of their skin nestles under the woodwork, no matter how immaculate its present homemaker may be. Only brand new houses are spiritless, and from the first day that someone takes up residence in them, they start absorbing life and becoming an autonomous entity of their own.”
So upon reading Paul’s first chapter, I was stunned by the absolute brilliance of the concept. We have all read and been bombarded by a plethora of 9/11 news, information and speculative claptrap. We have heard a hundred theories about why the towers fell and why they shouldn’t have. We have heard official explanations and excuses, counter-accusations, conspiracy theories and alternate possibilities of the most vast and varied nature. It has all been confusing, frustrating, sad, frightening and numbing. But none of it has provided us with an opportunity to step back and, well, “suspend disbelief”, suspend preconceptions, suspend our own theories, loyalties or convictions and take a clear objective look at what happened.
So what could be more objective and divorced from the tidal wave of contradiction than to try and see this great American and world tragedy from the intellectual point of view of the building itself. True, in the hands of a fool, a story told from this angle could clearly be a travesty and do more harm than good. But Paul Toth is far from being anyone’s fool. He is a probing, cerebral person with an often unique take on the topics he investigates and if he decided to tell the story in this way, he clearly had a carefully contemplated reason for it. That reason is precisely in order to see 9/11 from a new and singular viewpoint, one capable of shedding a distinct light on the subject and capable too, he clearly hopes, of turning “Airplane Novel” into something like “the definitive 9/11 fiction”.
If the rest is as stunning as the first chapter, it will be.
Intriguing stuff, and well written as usual. I’ll be interested in seeing the rest of it, but I guess I’ll just have to “Wait.”
The writing is brilliant. The tension and suspension of disbelief are immediate. This
“spider monkey” is waiting for what has been promised– the next chapter, a page to turn, a story. I wish you much success with getting published.
I like the concept. I especially like the comparison of the towers to Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. And the last line of Chapter One: “I must get moving, for I am Cary Grant, swaying in a breeze, starched and clean and beyond blame,” makes me want to read more.
I feel a strange kinship to the towers even though I never saw them in person. My dad was a truckdriver and hauled load upon load of insulation out of Newark, Ohio to the towers. He would tell me of how they loaded his whole 18 wheeler on the elevator and took him to the floor they needed the load. He is gone now but he was alive when they fell. I am anxious to read Paul Toth’s book.
I am so happy that Paul Toth has written another novel! I read his first as if it were cheese, his second as if it were wine and his third as if it were creme brulee. I cannot wait to get my hands on “Airplane Novel.” My taste buds are waiting for the rest.
Airplane Novel will be released within the next year.
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