John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

" Al! "

Returning his fork to its intended use, their ariast (more pallid indeed, they noted now, than his never-ruddy usual) speared and dunked a final beef bit into the pot, just barely bubbling above its waning blue Sterno flame.

"Not A-L Al anymore, friends. From here on out it's A -M -L Al: Acute Myeloblastic Leukemia." And "here on out," he explained to his listeners too shocked to speak, meant possibly the whole upcoming academic year, if the methotrexate with which he was currently being dosed effected the brief remission that he much hoped for in order to wind up his goddamned myth dissertation, see his PartTime Fiancée's Interesting Condition resolved one way or the other, and maybe goose his Ritual Wandering Whatchacallit-pal one step farther around the famous Cycle. "Otherwise, guys," which VVLU's oncological gurus, Dad Baumann included, had regretfully informed him meant Usually, "we're talking maybe four to six months. Sorry about that. But ain't Truth swell? I feel freer already."

Winifred Stark's entire hysteria; Wilfred Chase's groaning speechlessness; Alfred Baumann's calm consumption of the last of his beef cubes, washed down with the red jug-wine to which the Three Freds treated themselves on Friday evenings before repairing to the Trivium and thence et cetera: In time, perhaps, one would be up to rendering such things into language.

"One better fucking had be," now growls Al's ghost. "That's what you're fucking for! "

Well…

"Well, hell! Take it from the edge, as we musician types used to say: Tell the Three Freds Story over and over, damn it, till you get it right! Even after you get it right, if you ever do."

Yes, well, Al…

"Check our job descriptions, man: I did my thing, and then got my fat ass offstage on cue. Win did hers by spreading her legs for me and then for you and then for Doc Mat-son's D and C. So now you do yours: Tell me! Tell us !"

Narrator had aspired to do no less: the protracted though mercifully pain-dulled dying, which would have been expedited by suicide, friend-assisted or otherwise, but for Al's determination to press on to the end with the final-drafting of his Rebirth of the Ur-Myth thesis. Winnie's late-July dilation and curettage, assented to reluctantly by her fiancé but right readily by his contrite cuckolder, and performed discreetly by gynecologist Matson under the pretext, routine in those days, of removing a suspicious cervical lesion. ("That's taking the Imperiled Infancy thing a bit far, no?" Al joked wearily — all but bedridden then and about to be shifted, of necessity, from Briarwood 304 back to his boyhood bedroom in his parents' house, his hoped-for remission having proved only partial and his need of nursing care ever more pressing.) His quiet December expiration, with his dissertation's closing chapter—"Will He Return?" — still in revision. The Three Freds' subsequently going, like the arms of an equiangular Y, their separate ways: Al to the Baumann family grave plot in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Winnie to a season of prostrate guilty grief and halfhearted psychotherapy, but then on to her college graduation after all, followed by a restorative summer in France with two Goucher classmates and a new life thereafter on North America's other coast, having nothing to do either with music (so Will heard through the Briarwood grapevine) or with her erstwhile fellow Cheatery preceptor — himself by then involved with another lover. Their Trivium-trio was replaced by a nameless electric-guitar/-bass/-keyboard outfit playing an overamplified new pop music called rock-and-roll, which its devotees predicted (absurdly, in Fred Three's mistaken opinion) would be to the century's second half what jazz in its several forms — Dixieland, swing, progressive, bebop — had been to its first.

And the nowise heroical Wilfred Chase? Still not yet twenty at the time here told of, just entering his junior undergraduate year at VVLU, he'll find that quite as he'd been shocked speechless by his Sidekick's Friday-night-fondue announcement of fatal malignancy, that irreplaceable comrade's dying will shock him, as it were, into speech — anyhow into a redoubled conviction of his calling, whether or not he proved capable of adequate response: an impassioned resolve to tell, not only Al Baumann's story, the Three Freds Story (trifles in themselves, and yet, and yet…), but also, though he could not then have put it into these words, the story of those stories. Maybe even somehow (rest in peace, bass-shaped buddy, while your determined tutee does his damnedest to keep the beat!) the capital-S Story's story, whatever that might be.

"Chances are, of course, he won't manage it," comments the slope-shouldered spirit of his erstwhile Helper. "The odds against him are about the same as against any given motile spermatozoon, even. And he's got so fucking much yet to learn!"

Granted, Al. Nor is he one of your capital-H Heroes, for sure.

All the same (concludes the Three Freds Story), he's going to try.

Once upon a time, I've been told, we Stories kicked off with "Once upon a time," or some other such Square One formulation, and then took it from there: Leda lays egg, egg hatches Helen, Helen lays Paris, Greeks lay waste to Troy, et cetera. Or, closer to home, "My name is I've Been Told. I began two sentences ago with Once upon a time, and here I am: wide-eyed hatchling, old as the hills but clueless as to who and where I might be this time and what'll happen next."

Not quite so. If some of my plain-folks ancestors (and some not-so-plain ones who for one reason or another wore Plainness as a camouflage) began as if straightforwardly at their "beginnings," others equally venerable thought it best to start off in the middle of things: in medias res, as Coach Horace famously put it, not ab ovo with the egg abovementioned. Which fateful ovum, be it noted, wasn't really the Troy tale's Square One anyhow, since in order for Ms. Leda to lay the thing, Zeus-in-swan-drag had to lay Leda, and back we go, chickenStories may begin at their "beginnings," but their tellings commence where their Teller sees fit, and since all hands know the tale already anyhow (for what kind of loser would invent a brand-new story, and so distract the house with What'll Happen Next that they miss Teller's cool new riffs on the classic tune?), better start off in the next-to-last year of the War or the Wandering, and then with your left hand remind 'em of the Tale Thus Far while your right keeps the plot-pot bubbling toward full boil. You follow me?

Fact is, an old pro like Yours Truly can have it both ways: Once upon a time, e.g., there was a story that began not only in the middle of things but well past that middle, just a hop/skip/hobble from Climax and Curtain — and that story c'est moi, guys, and here's how I go, now that I've got myself cranked and more or less under way:

Who "I" am, see, is your world-renowned, ball-busting Myth of the Wandering Hero — but you can just call me Fred. Or Frank or Florence, Fiorello or Fiddle-Dee-Dee; I've used a thousand aka's, and none of 'em's me, so Fred'll do. Old-Fart Fred, let's say: the kind of Seedy Senior you might see straggling west along the shoulder of the interstate, long raggedy hair and beard, patchwork clothes like some displaced Robinson Crusoe's, all his earthly possessions in cruddy sacks slung over his shoulders, heedless of the SUVs and eighteen-wheelers roaring by, which aren't allowed to stop and offer him a lift even should they so incline. Which you can bet your bottom buck they don't, any more than you would — who, however, have been enough taken by the queer apparition at least to slow down, shake head, and wonder where in the wide world I'm coming from, and where headed and why, and how I got this way, and what I think of myself and the story of my life, and how I'll manage to scrounge my next meal out here on the eight-laner, and where I'll lay my flea-bit carcass down to sleep tonight. Thanks for that, Reader dear.