I hope the summer is going well! Sorry for not posting any new Spine & Arp stories lately, but I have been working on some things I wanted to update you on:

1: Wake Island podcast is back! We have several new episodes out, and more to come. You can check it out here (and lmk if there are guests you’d like us to have on):

2. A new novel is coming soon with Whiskey Tit Press. It’s a loose sequel to my novel The New House. This one is called The Chapel of Humiliation, and pieces of it can be previewed here:

https://www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2024/12/17/david-leo-rice-jakob-as-nazi-hunter

https://www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2024/1/15/david-leo-rice-jakob-at-mass-moca

https://www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2025/6/23/david-leo-rice-jakob-as-messiah

https://www.litmagazine.org/jakob-as-worm/

3. A yet-newer novel, set in the world of The Berlin Wall but this time in a bizarre fantasy version of South Africa, has been drafted and is awaiting revisions — I’m very excited about this one and hope to have more to share soon.

4. A computer-game adaptation of The New House, or at least set in the world of that book, is also in the early stages of development… more soon there as well.

More projects may also be brewing, but that’s a good rundown for now!

Take care everyone, and more soon,

David.

(This marks a brief detour from Spine & Arp)

I am writing this in the garage, hoping that one day, when I’m finished, or at least not too long after that, I will be let in to the house, across the driveway and up the back stairs and into what will then, by dint of my hard work, at last have become my home, the one place where I may finally rest. I don’t know why I think this—I am, even now, sane enough to acknowledge that no one promised me any such thing—but, even so, it is all that keeps me going.

The Night Crusher lumbers along the path between the garage and the house, patrolling the no-man’s land that I long ago gave up any fantasy of trying to force my way across before my work was done, much as that notion still appeals to me. If the Night Crusher came into the garage today or tonight, I would try only to convey that I am no threat, that the lack of courage I displayed at Yale, all those years ago, at the beginning of my relevant life, so to speak, is still coursing through my system, and thus that he needs only to leave me here a while longer, with the door open even, after which time I will emerge meekly with my pages in hand, blinking in the sunlight and begging for water. The will to, on the one hand, shirk my duty to Jakob’s life so as to live my own, and, on the other, to usurp Jakob’s role in his own life so as to come into my own from inside of him, like an infant from its mother, has long since ebbed out of me, leaving nothing but a calm and humble witness to long-past events.

***

Yale. I think back on it now, all those years ago, the “early 80s” according to the calendars in the boxes beneath the rolls of asbestos in the unfinished loft overhead, when Jakob, already world-famous (arguably more famous then than he is now) dragged his chain of heads up onto the burnished auditorium stage to deliver that year’s Eliot Lectures, a watershed moment in the history of art in this country, if I am to be believed—and if I am not, then who am I talking to?

The thought of ending up alone with this story, beneath that creaking loft, discomfits me now in much the same way that Jakob himself did when I first met him at Yale. I was working then as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate studio art course, which Jakob—at the request of Professor Dalton, my nominal employer—deigned to visit on an off-day between his lectures. I came to class early to turn on the lights and set out the paper and drawing materials for the students, who would surely, despite the immense gift they were being given, turn up late, if at all. When I arrived, with my coffee from the student snack bar in one hand and a greasy scone in a paper bag in the other, I assumed I would be alone, as I would have been on any other morning, in the clean, cool studio space before the day truly began. But even before I turned on the lights, I knew this morning would not be like all the others. Despite all I’m prepared to divulge in the pages to come, I’m still at a loss to convey what it was like to perceive Jakob sitting there silently in the dark, behind a locked door that (if he weren’t what I’ve come to believe he is) he couldn’t possibly have opened on his own.

When I saw him sitting on a stool in that studio, leaning against the common worktable like a common student, though far more elegantly dressed, I froze beneath the light switches, wishing I could turn them off again and take my coffee and scone into Supply Closet B and spend the rest of the day in there, because I knew, more clearly than I’d ever known anything up to that point, that if I approached him in good faith at that moment—if I left the lights on and strode to where he sat and introduced myself while taking a seat beside him—that he would become my whole future. He would bless me in the same way that some transcendental force had clearly blessed him, and then I would either join or become him, and my life would be made.

***

Had any of that happened, the years and years of bitter struggle, of living as a nobody in one New England town after another only to end up here, devoting what may be my final days to a mere biography of the Great Man, trapped in a garage by a Night Crusher who has no incentive to let me out, would never have come to pass. If only I’d summoned the courage to approach Jakob when he presented himself, or when fate presented him to me, in that studio classroom at Yale… if only… if only.

But, needless to say, I did not. I didn’t come anywhere close to such a feat. I stood beneath the light switches and stared at him while he stared straight ahead, at nothing or at what only he could see, calmly indifferent to my quavering presence. I stood there and waited for Professor Dalton to arrive, along with those few students who grasped the magnitude of the opportunity he’d arranged for them. Then I merged into the background, becoming little more than a piece of equipment, doling out drawing materials and focusing the overhead projector and bringing Jakob a glass of water when he requested one, partway through his lesson, from which I absorbed nothing at all. After class we repaired to the Faculty Club for lunch, where I likewise failed to engage Jakob in any way whatsoever, save perhaps for a few remarks so cursory and commonplace that I would’ve been ashamed to commit them to memory. Whatever my notion of myself may have been at the time, it became clear that I was capable of nothing more.

***

All of which goes to illustrate how I threw the better part of my life away that morning at Yale, shrinking when I should’ve done all I could to grow. I fell or was easily pushed from there into a desert of years on whose far side (or, for all I know, in whose middle) stands this garage, where I work day after day on the story of Jakob’s life as best I understand it, having convinced myself that if I tell it correctly, setting down for posterity the testament that Jakob himself has always been too immersed in his work to step back and consider, he will then materialize to deliver me—he, a man who, after that aborted morning, I often fear I never once saw again and thus, to be perfectly frank for the first and likely the last time, I never knew at all.

But then again, there are times, after I’ve worked myself past the point of lucidity, or else into a lucidity I otherwise never approach, when I think the exact opposite may be true: times when I think I know Jakob in a way that no one else ever has or ever will. There are even times, and I’m beginning to suspect that now is one of them, when I come to see that there never was any Jakob except the one I’ve conjured here in this garage, and thus there is no one at all in the house on the far side of the Night Crusher’s patrol, no one waiting to let me in when my work here is done. At these times, I am at last able to accept that I am the only Jakob, and that it is thus wholly within my power to doom that boy who was too afraid to approach me at Yale and take some of my burden onto himself, to an eternity of imprisonment, far from home, wandering back and forth and back and forth again across what I have here, in this garage—this garage that is the only place I’ve ever belonged or ever wanted to belong, where all my great work has taken shape, the work that earned me that stage at Yale in the first place—decided to call the Chapel of Humiliation, a room of infinite scope in which that boy, who once believed he wanted to become Jakob, will now spend eternity, because I’ve decided that he should and because decisions like this fall to me and to no one else in the universe.

Sitting at the table in that rundown kitchen with the sun setting outside the windows, Arp sips his coffee, munches an Oreo, and wonders what, indeed, he came here to talk to Spine about. Yalta, the railway carriage, the worked-over treaty: he glances at a bookcase lined with Naguib Mahfouz volumes and decides to believe that the record of the decisive conversation he would’ve had with Spine is contained on a comparable shelf in another room.

Here, in this room, both he and Spine are covered in scrapes and bruises, the result of a scuffle or attack that neither quite remembers—or, if either does, that neither is ready to mention. Thinking of Mahfouz’s Cairo, Arp thinks then of Durrell’s Alexandria, whose sparkling harbor and chaotic market squares lead him partway across the Mediterranean to the city of Siracusa, in southeastern Sicily, and into a lavish hotel room where he finds himself masturbating beneath a painting of a nun in an austere basilica.

“But it was really,” he begins, all at once aware that this is what he came here to tell Spine about, “because of something I’d seen at the beach earlier that day. There was a young woman whose bathing suit had slipped ever so slightly to the side as she climbed a set of stairs off the strand in front of me, and, well, being fifteen myself at the time, having never before seen what I saw then, there was simply no way to hold in what had only a few years earlier begun to demand its way out of me.”

If Spine blushes in the fading light, he does so invisibly.

“So I ran back to the hotel room I was staying in with the elders who must’ve brought me there, went into the bathroom, filled my hand with the lemon-verbena lotion that was on offer, as if precisely for this purpose, and did what I had only recently learned to do. As ever, I felt so much better afterward. Well enough, in fact, to lie down by the open window and breathe the sea air and drift into a mild afternoon doze. For a moment, anyway. But before my eyes fell all the way shut, they alighted on the stern, cragged face of another nun clutching a rough-hewn wooden cross on the wall above the bed. I could swear her eyes turned down to reproach me where I lay.

“I knew that, as long as her gaze remained fixed upon me, I would be frozen right there, locked within what I could only imagine was her damning appraisal of what nature had forced me to do. Her reproach was so powerful, so certain, that I began to quake. She pulled me in far more powerfully than that girl from the beach ever could have, despite how feverish my imagination, when it came to bikinis, in those early years surely was. That nun sucked me through the wall and into her nunnery, where, all of a sudden, I was seated at an immense mahogany table in a white raiment while a tribunal of Mothers Superior sat in judgment around me, the younger nuns seated silently on pews behind them.”

Spine seems shakier than he’d seemed when he sat down, as if hearing this story has weakened him, or even caused him to become slightly less real, though perhaps, Arp allows, it’s only the Maxwell House coffee he’s gone on drinking and drinking. (As if offended by his own over-consumption, Spine wobbles over to the counter, puts the coffeepot back on the burner, takes an open bottle of white wine from the fridge and puts it on the table along with two juice glasses, which Arp understands he’s meant to fill before continuing his story.)

When they’ve each taken a few sips, Arp says, “And so there I was in that nunnery, fighting for my life. The charge, I came to understand, was that of impregnating every single nun in there. Every last one, siring a race of degenerates whose provenance would normally be attributed to the Devil.”

He shudders to hear himself say this, an admission he’s made to no one else. He drains his juice glass, refills it, and drains it again. Then he continues, “The punishment they were loudly considering, for the crime I stood accused of—and the faces of those nuns, inside their wimples, did indeed, to varying degrees, resemble that of the girl I’d fixated on at the beach—was burning at the stake. The classic move, and one that, within the paradigm I’d been pulled into by that nun on the wall, I could hardly claim not to deserve. But it was precisely then, as so often occurs when one is faced with the absolute, that the idea which has defined my entire subsequent life occurred to me. ‘What if,’ I interjected, forcing the Mothers Superior to look my way, ‘I instead took responsibility for all those degenerates who have already been or will soon be born from the blameless novices arrayed here behind you, whose virtue I have so unjustifiably assailed?’

“The Mothers Superior eyed me slowly and carefully, as if to gauge whether I quite understood what I seemed to be saying. ‘You mean,’ one of them finally asked, ‘that you will be the God of a new world? An entire world populated entirely by your offspring, for whom you alone will be responsible for all time?’ Unsure quite what I was getting myself into, nor how much I would come to regret it if my request were honored, I nodded. ‘Yes, Mother. That is it precisely. Allow them to be born and leave them to me. I will align my eternity with theirs, so to speak—in whatever world you see fit to release them into, I will shepherd them from one side of it to the other.’”

“So that’s how you became God?” Spine asks, with a look on his face that oscillates between sarcasm and its opposite.

“In so many words,” Arp replies, awed at the magnitude of what he’s just admitted. “In that sense, I am your father and we are still in Sicily.”

The kitchen, filled with the darkness that has descended over the lawn outside, comes to rest as a lonely ruin in a rocky Sicilian valley, abandoned by Greece, Egypt, Rome, and even present-day Italy. Claimed by no one except Spine & Arp.

“The Treaty we signed in Yalta,” Spine adds, when he’s absorbed the possibility that this situation pertains equally to him, “was it merely your formal admission of what you’ve just told me?”

Arp looks at him incredulously. “There’s no Yalta, Spine,” he says. “There’s not even a Russia or a Germany. No China, no Japan, no nothing. There’s only this house, with you and me in it, and the nuns in their convent up the hill, brooding over our circumstance in ways we are not permitted to overhear. My original terror of being expelled from the hotel in Siracusa where I did what I did? It both has and hasn’t come true. In a sense that is only now dawning on me, the judgment that I used to believe was rendered unto me at the outset of this universe has actually not been rendered yet.”

He looks around the kitchen to force a pause. “I don’t know what more to say. I was told that a vast degenerate race would be born from my transgression, but you’re all that came out.”

Both of their noses begin to bleed, dripping past their chins and into their collars. They sit there in the dark while it pools on their chests and the darkness out the window deepens. Then the lights come on in the convent, on a rocky crag above the valley they’re nestled in, and they know that whatever’s about to happen—if anything is—will happen only after the Tribunal that has been convened up there reaches its final decision.

As if to encourage them in this line of reasoning, priests and sorcerers march up the hill holding torches that illuminate their triangular hats, thickening in the yard just outside the kitchen while Spine & Arp watch with the last of their wine.

Arp emerges from the apartment complex to which his previous role confined him, hoping to take a moment for himself, only to discover that he’s late for a private tour of the Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia. As there’s no time to ask any of what he’d like to ask, he simply accepts a mustache from the docent, lets her affix it to his face, and runs after the group he assumes must be waiting for him.

The halls of maps and dioramas are empty save for a few silent school groups who seem added only for realism, walking around and around without remarking on anything. Beyond this minor fray, Arp passes the lunch counter and the gift shop and hurries out into the courtyard, where he senses his group must be waiting.

He runs across the cobblestones, past a chained-up dog and a few crows in a tree, and over to a railway carriage parked beside a sign that reads WHAT STALIN TOOK TO YALTA.

Still needled by the feeling that he’s fallen behind his group, he adjusts his mustache, opens the antique carriage door, and gets in, making himself comfortable on the red velvet seat while looking down at the pen and papers spread lavishly on the table in front of him. STALIN’S PERSONAL NOTES ON THE YALTA TREATY are written in a bold, blocky Cyrillic, which he doesn’t ask himself how he’s able to read.

He sits there for a long time, fingering the pen while studying the documents and the maps of war-torn Europe on the table, wondering what’s taking so long. At first he thinks, maybe here’s the downtime I wanted for myself, but the restlessness he’s felt for so long, the feeling of being always on the clock, not only lingers but intensifies. His knees dance and shake and then he’s wobbling on his seat and chewing the pen and then, if only to break the silence, he shouts, in Georgian-accented Russian, “Let’s go!”

Though he can see no one inside the engine attached to the carriage, nor even any engine, the train comes alive with a loud whinny and bolts out of the courtyard, tearing past the museum and through the streets of Gori and across fields full of workers and then into a wide, featureless track-land where trains whiz past in all directions, many looking certain to crash, leaving soft dents in a warm blue-gray semidarkness. He watches, mesmerized by the flawless choreography, the inevitable crashes that never occur, the changelessness of the blue-gray backdrop, until his workaholism kicks back in and he’s forced to pull the pen from his teeth and put it to paper.

For the next several hours, he reads and revises and rereads and re-revises the treaty with the singleminded intensity that he’s brought to every aspect of governance he’s ever been involved with. He crosses out lines he jotted last time he made this journey (knowing there isn’t time to wonder when that was, or why he thinks he’s come this way before) and redraws national boundaries and shipping routes and nuclear quotas with frantic intensity as the word CRIMEA appears in bolder and bolder font against the blue-grey backdrop.

When that word has grown so bold it constitutes a sort of sunrise, he caps his pen, puts his hands in his lap, and scans the draft treaty one last time. As good as it’s gonna get, he thinks, using the same accent in his head that he heard come from his mouth when he shouted, “Let’s go!” Whether it’s an affectation, and what precisely that concept means in this case — and even what precisely this case means, in this case — is also more than he allows himself to consider.

Representatives for Roosevelt and Churchill amble over to greet him, their expressions steely and remote. He steps from the carriage with the draft treaty under his arm, dressed in a fine wool suit he must’ve changed into just a moment ago, and allows the representatives to lead him into the cloudy breakfast salon where Churchill and Roosevelt already sit waiting, sipping tiny cups of black coffee and smoking tremendous cigars.

In some way that is, like so much lately, just beyond Stalin’s comprehension, both Roosevelt and Churchill are played by Spine. Stalin unrolls the treaty on the table before sitting down and he jots, in place of a title at the very top, This asymmetry too is a kind of symmetry. Pleased at having articulated even this much, he accepts his own tiny cup of coffee and tremendous cigar and allows the interpreters to begin their work.

“Shall we agree, for now, and in hopes of achieving a peace and simplicity in the near future that has eluded us for too long, to revert for the sake of this conference to the prewar monikers of Spine & Arp?” one interpreter asks.

The other interpreter reaches over and pulls off his client’s mustache, puts it in his pocket, and nods. Spine & Arp sit back with their coffee and cigars, allowing the interpreters to take over for just a moment, which is all it takes for a thin film to form between them and Yalta: a thin film that thickens and hardens until they’re partitioned off in a barely real space, their bodies numb and their voices dormant, watching the map they will both have to share take shape around a table at which they are no longer seated.

As soon as they realize they are free to speak for themselves, the interpreters stop looking behind the partition to gauge the intentions of their respective clients and begin to negotiate in real time, each with a pen in both hands, leaning over a world map that is soon so covered in squiggles, arrows, and angry cross-outs that it could pass for any territory at all.

Spine & Arp sit in their respective darknesses and watch this haggling until they nearly lose interest and wonder what lies behind them — what would happen if they turned their backs and simply walked off? But when they decide to try this, they turn around and find the same spectacle repeated behind them, only with higher stakes now. Whereas the spectacle at first appeared to be a mere symbolic haggle, a bit of funny business on paper, now it appears that the interpreters are rejiggering real space, blacking out and decoupling and reconnecting the actual geography of the world that the two of them, along with everyone else, will from now on have to inhabit.

This is sufficient to cause concern. Redirecting their urge to flee, they turn around yet again and force their way through the partition, emerging torn and bloody into a room with a simple kitchen table, a box of Band-aids and a roll of gauze in a wicker basket.

“Want me to put on coffee?” Spine asks after both have bandaged their wounds, his voice substantially less arrogant than it’s been in many years.

Arp nods, clearing away a pile of newspapers covered in loose tobacco and burn marks, the crosswords half filled in. He looks at the words that whoever had been sitting here got right and he wonders why they gave up, until Spine comes over with the Bunn coffee pot and a little bottle of vanilla creamer and a few Oreos in a paper towel.

They sit quietly at first, nursing their wounds and sipping their coffee and wishing they had cigars, staring out through the half-windows above the sink at the setting sun over the aboveground pool in the yard. Then, when evening has replaced afternoon, one musters the courage to clear his throat, look at the other, and ask, “So, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

Back in the Theater of the Deep Spine, Arp has all the work he can handle. Well paid too, though in square footage rather than hard currency. It took him months of quiet living in the cramped apartment known — to judge by the Emergency Exit instructions posted on the door — as the “Respite House” to understand that he was already acting in an ongoing, ever-evolving play presumably scripted by Spine, rather than preparing to do so or waiting for formal instructions as to what else his role going forward might be. He looks at a tattoo on his wrist which must have been etched there during a long slumber he can no longer recall. “All time is down time,” it reads. “Repair to the Respite House.” This last word stretches across his shoulder and ends in an arrow pointing toward his back where — there being no mirrors in the Respite House — something else is likely written that he cannot make out.

The gist of the gig, which has finally become clear to him (in a moment of revelation that was surely itself part of it), is that he hides wherever he can in the Respite House and then, through a piece of stage magic whose workings he can’t yet explain, also takes the stage in a sort of “circa-1997-public-high-school-grade Gestapo getup,” marching up and down the suddenly cramped, dusty hallways of the “WW2-era Amsterdam apartment block” that the Respite House has been turned into in his absence (though he can’t recall having gone anywhere long enough to justify such a word, nor would he otherwise say that any time has passed between what he used to be thinking and what he’s thinking now).

***

“Anyway,” he continues, having more or less accepted that he’s narrating this routine, “making it up as he goes along,” he adds, as if speaking about someone else. Then he forgets what he was about to say. He pauses as terror wells up within him and he remembers, or comes to understand for the first time, that he’s a little boy facing the possibility of certain death if he’s found by the man now stomping through his — or his already-disappeared family’s — humble Amsterdam apartment.

So he runs, heart pounding, forcing his way through what used to be a wall but turns out now to be a curtain, into a cozy living room done up in somebody’s idea of fine midcentury modern style. “Mine, all mine!” he gloats, making himself comfortable in the limited edition white leather Eames chair with zebra striping on the backrest that he finds on one side of the chrome and glass coffee table. He sips an espresso and looks out a window at an almost certainly false view of a city he doesn’t try too hard to name, until it occurs to him, all at once, that the boy he’s been sent to apprehend will get away and he’ll have to return to his superiors empty-handed if he doesn’t make one last good-faith effort to track that little bastard down.

As soon as this thought “attains unconcealment,” as he puts it, filling his head with an image identical to that of the boy being caught and thrown in a dungeon but with himself as the boy, a wave of fear permeates his body and sends him running toward the far wall, filled with the dim, senseless faith that, if he hits it with enough speed, it will recede like a curtain.

Which it does.

Everything occurs exactly as he pictured it, with so little friction that he can no longer recall how, or even if, he pictured it at all. “Maybe all that ever happens is what happens,” he concedes, catching his breath in a new arena on the far side of the wall he now can’t be sure was ever there.

***

For a while, this pattern holds with no resistance except that which it generates internally. Arp runs from himself, transitioning between the Gestapo officer and what he’s come to call “the boy Anne Frank” with increasingly rapid — nearly seamless — fluidity, expanding the Respite House every time he builds up enough genuine fear of being caught, or of failing to catch the boy, to run through the wall that, until then, had stood as this scenario’s hard outer limit.

“So I just keep playing both of them?” he asks, not expecting anyone to respond. “You already know the answer to that,” he responds, in a Halloween-grade German accent, waiting perhaps a beat too long to feel the gush of fear just above his pelvis that means he has once again built up enough charge to plow through the next wall.

“For whom does the Respite House provide its respite?” he asks, panting, on the far side of the next curtain, aware that he’s stalling but willing to believe that his audience, if there is one, might take this as a genuine line, a real part of the play scripted by the generational talent known all across the Continent, from the coffeehouses of Vienna to the coffeehouses of Trieste, simply as “Spine.”

***

When his desire to go on stalling eventually fills him with so much fear that he has to run again, he plows through the next wall and into a space so large that he knows it’s time to renounce the term “Respite House” and replace it with “Halls of Power,” three words that he sees have already been tattooed on his other arm. He sits for a moment in another Eames chair, this one patterned after a kind of “gutshot Serengeti leopard” and rubs the raw skin beneath the clear bandage. Then he attempts to rise in terror and continue running, but, all at once, it’s too late. He runs toward the wall but stops short, aware that he’ll never know if he could’ve run through it if only he’d been scared enough of himself to try. But the purity of that former fear is gone, replaced by a sagging, anhedonic discomfort that fills the Halls of Power to which he only recently earned entry.

“The thing is,” he muses, returning to the chair with another espresso in one hand and a sulfurous mineral water in the other, “this game only works so long as I play both roles with total sincerity. The moment I lose the boy-Anne’s animal terror of being found or the officer’s animal terror of failing to find him, is the moment I—”

A hiss silences him. He sits back, closes his eyes and, when he’s ready, reaches into his ear and pulls out a boiling-hot earpiece that he throws on the table and stares at while the rest of his faith in Spine’s scenario evaporates. Who even told me any of this? he wonders, not altogether proudly. Why did I think this is what happened?

By the time the earpiece has cooled and the silence of its absence has filled his head, Arp understands that whatever the process of moving on will look like, it will lack the visceral clarity of the process that brought him here. He feels sick from the terror’s aftermath, his guts flooded and wrung out. He looks across the room at the fridge and freezer beside the brand-new kitchenette and understands that he is now “off-duty,” outside the scope of Spine’s play, if there ever was such a thing, and thus free to make his own dinner and eat it alone whenever he feels up to it… or, if that moment never comes, whenever he grows hungry enough to rise and rummage anyway, throwing what he finds onto a plate and into a bowl and microwaving first one and then the other and taking both, with a dishtowel beneath them so he doesn’t burn his hands, back to the chair he’d been sitting in before and beginning to eat with the flatware he found in the drawer in the cavernous penthouse where, he supposes, he might as well start acting like he’s lived all along, outside any past and future except for those which occur to him when he repairs to the king-sized bed on the far side of the silk curtains painted to look like the walls he once ran through, back in those long-ago days when he scared himself enough to conquer all he could see, impervious to the question of what to do then.

***

After yet another night of microwaving the food he finds in the fridge and drinking old egg nog in a Japanese whiskey tumbler, he gets in bed, closes his eyes, and returns to the dream about the boy Anne Frank. “The moment he loses Anne’s genuine terror of being found, or the officer’s genuine terror of failing to find her (‘People like you can always be replaced,’ he growls, seeming now also to be playing a high commander in a secret field office), the Respite House will cease to expand when he seeks shelter deeper within it and might even begin to contract, crushing him in a suddenly matchbox-sized container, immeasurably distant from the Halls of Power, for the mere sin of losing faith in his own shtick.”

Having said all this as loudly and convincingly — he still fears, however shot his nerves may be, that his performance is being evaluated from behind a screen or a pane of blackened glass — as a bedtime prayer, which in a sense it is, he closes his eyes, pulls a cool goose-feather pillow over his face, and falls into a dream wherein all the space he gained during the Age of Genuine Terror does indeed contract and, soon enough, he’s living in a tiny one-room apartment in some former Soviet City with no name or a dozen names and a banner that reads “Respite House” sagging off the walls like a Happy Birthday sign from the morose celebration of a mid-ranking officer retired or deposed in a previous century.

His final thought, as he drifts deeper into sleep with this banner wrapped around him like a blanket, is “Beneath my apparent desire to escape was always an unspeakable desire to be found. As if the only true Respite House was the place they would’ve taken me to had those walls failed to open for me, and there, in that place I was so afraid of ending up in, I would’ve lived a life so much fuller than the one I’m living out here, with no end in sight.”

A limp, faceless audience applauds when they gather that this is the end of the performance and then Arp rises from his bed, pees in the cold bathroom adjoining his lair, and returns to bed, uncertain, as he always is at this time of night, whether he’ll succeed in getting back to sleep or if this, despite the darkness outside, is already the dawn that his dream has abandoned him in.

Hi all,

If you’re in NYC, I’ll be reading from and discussing the new book with the great Tobias Carroll, editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn, at 7pm this Weds at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn — hope to see you there!

Cheers,

David.

I hope you're all doing well and enjoying the summer. I wanted to let you know that my new novel, The Squimbop Condition, is up for preorder now, from the great people at 11:11 Press. I've been working on this book for years and view it as a capstone of the past decade of writing, connecting the worlds of Dodge City and Angel House and moving forward in a new direction, toward whatever the next decade will entail:

https://1111press.com/the-squimbop-condition

This book is also my first hardcover and is beautifully illustrated by graphic artist JR Duennweller, so I'm extra proud of it. These stories were published serially in the Southwest Review, one of America's oldest literary magazines, and the preorder comes with a special standalone story that the SWR is publishing in conjunction with 11:11, as well as the SWR's fall issue.

All to say, I hope you'll check it out, and preorder if it appeals!

Take care, and much appreciated,

David.

Advance praise:

David Leo Rice writes fiction with a seething ferocity, brilliance, and arcane imagination; the Squimbop Condition is a surreal and profound leap into the timeless art of storytelling. David Leo Rice is a writer I greatly admire. – Brandon Hobson, finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and author of The Devil is a Southpaw

Reading David Leo Rice’s The Squimbop Condition is like stumbling into the world of an unmade David Lynch movie, getting lost in the dream of it. Tracking the escapades of the notorious Brothers Squimbop, it plays like a roadshow presentation full of mysterious visions from a realm both alien and familiar. Like Richard Brautigan and Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett, Rice is a marauding magician, and he’s both deadly serious and deadly funny. The Squimbop Condition is a majestic and strange force of a book, a work of wild pleasures for our unsettled, damaged times. – William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street

I’ve always been a DLR super fan, and The Squimbop Condition is a new pinnacle. It has a joyful rhythm, a cadence that pervades the psyche until our concepts of self, other, relation, and identity tumble out topsy-turvy. I cherish the hours I spent with this book. – Charlene Elsby, author of The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty and Violent Faculties

Much like his titular characters, David Leo Rice is an agent of chaos, inciting literary anarchy with an aptitude rarely seen in today’s so-called experimental writing scene. The Squimbop Condition unleashes a barrage of questions so incisive it renders any and all answers moot; functioning simultaneously as a medical text, a historical document, and even a holy book. It is a diagnosis of our collective malaise. A prescient lesson plan outlining a new golden age of American fiction. – Joshua Chaplinsky, author of Letters to the Purple Satin Killer

Arp descends into the basement of the Insurance Building to behold a factory in full flurry, table after table of workers hefting lathes, drills, and sandblasters.

Unbidden, like a gas through a hidden vent congealing into thought when it touches his head, Arp thinks, and knows the thought lives in quotes, like he’s performing it for the benefit of an audience seated behind a one-way screen, “All my life, I’ve assumed that reality was impregnable. That only within a para-reality, a representation, a sandbox, could my actions have any effect at all… and yet now, at what could be the end of my life, or at least a moment of permanent cessation, an unrelieved pause, I have arrived in the Theater of the Deep Spine only to realize that, in fact…”

He realizes that all the workers have stopped their work, depositing puppets in various stages of completion on a long, high table—“a Last Supper kind of table,” Arp thinks, in the same dazed, practiced manner as before, like he agreed at the last minute to replace whoever these lines were written for—before taking their seats around the edges of the factory, beneath screens that retract into the ceiling.

“You see,” interrupts an animatronic Spine rolling out of the shadows on casters, “generations ago, during my first apprenticeship in Leiden, my earliest years of sitting and talking with you, Arp, along the canals, back in what we might today affectionately call the Dark Ages, I set in motion a new congress between Madness and Reason that, after long, hard experimentation, after years and decades and generations of experimentation, resulted in the development of an all-new means of reproduction. A means free of the terminal blemish borne by all those whose existence stems from the congress of the old—freedom not only from death and dying, though of course these have always been the terminal symptoms, but freedom from all oscillation as well. With your help, whether you knew it or not, I found a way to overcome the restless oscillation between Ages of Madness and Ages of Reason. All one and then all the other, over and over again, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis, Reform… Awakening… Deconsecration and Reconsecration again and again, until everyone’s dizzy but no one can get off the ride. Until there’s nothing left to see and yet nowhere else to look. Tonight I declare: never again.”

The Spine puppet, which Arp decides to refer to simply as Spine, though he promises to always remember that this isn’t the first or only version, forces him into a leather armchair that two servants roll out into the middle of what he knows he’s expected to call the Stage, and then continues talking, accusatorially, as if reading Arp a list of the crimes he’s committed and for which he will now stand trial. “The geography involved in this multi-century breeding program was complex, requiring the near-entirety of the Dutch Empire, excluding of course Indonesia, a land we firmly maintain that we know nothing about.

“The first order of business was to engage Uncle Family, noted South African torturer, to round up as many miscreants from the Transvaal as he could find.” Spine picks a puppet off the table—a bulky, hairy-shouldered man clad in leather stirrups and assless chaps. Fitting his hand inside the puppet’s hole, he continues, “And, well, to elide the specifics with a mind toward keeping tonight’s performance suitable for a general audience”—he picks up a naked male and female puppet with snarls of red thread spilling from their groins—“breed the old genitals off of them so as to make way for the new. Order and Disorder, War and Peace, Matter and Antimatter—these were the antinomies that the Secret of Art, as imparted by the very first Leopold in an Amsterdam prison at the outset of what we now call The Enlightenment, required us to find a way to bridge… a bridge that could not connect the Near Shore to the Far without a centuries-long commitment from Uncle Family.”

This line, apparently a classic from a well-known routine, earns applause and knee slaps, themselves perhaps somewhat performative.

“Of course,” Spine continues, after giving the audience a patronizing “simmer down” gesture and then dropping the puppets to squeeze the headrest of Arp’s chair, “a breeding program of such ambition, at such scale, could not be kept secret forever. The ways in which Uncle Family lured these unfortunates into his work-shed and then, let’s say, caused them to forget the Enlightenment, could not help but attract the attention of certain units within the Johannesburg and Cape Town police forces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These units… well, if you’d known what they were like back then, you’d understand why even a hardened torturer like Uncle Family was reluctant to comply with their summons to the district court in Pretoria.”

***

The more Spine describes (and uses the full spectrum of available puppets to reenact) Uncle Family’s eventual extradition from South Africa and his trial at the Hague—unexpected parts of which earn boos, hisses, and wolf whistles—the more Arp remembers the Truth & Reconciliation Committee he visited upstairs in what he’d at that time been conditioned to call The Insurance Building. He starts to wonder, though he remains unsure whether this thought has any substance, if this entire play is a barely-masked allegory for the verdict that is about to be delivered on his own mostly unremembered role in the war that supposedly occurred at the bottom of the beanstalk.

“Am I,” Arp wonders aloud, “nothing but a common war criminal, awaiting my turn at the Hague?” The line, as he somehow knew it would, elicits the heartiest applause yet. “Or even”—he dares to go further—“is this, all of what’s happening right now, that very trial, occurring in real time and space, hastily masked, for the sake of decorum, by the trappings of the Theater of the Deep Spine?”

While the audience guffaws, Arp wonders—and something within him reflexively adds, “not for the first time”—whether he’s imprisoned here, a POW of sorts, a survivor of Mr. Derekis’ war but not a full escapee from it… forced now to behold again and again his own origin story, a story that, by virtue of being repurposed for Spine’s play, no longer bears any connection to his actual origins, even if, perversely enough, all of its particulars remain perfectly true.

***

“Therefore,” Spine continues, having let Arp say his piece, “the Secret of Art was revealed not all at once, not by any one Leopold in any one cramped office in the crumbling Habsburg days of prewar Zagreb, but rather again and again, in every era, as often as needed, up to and including—”

He points toward the ceiling in a gesture of overwhelming magnanimity, signaling that he’s reached the climax of the play, however little of its narrative has been resolved. Indeed, Arp has the sense that key parts of the narrative have been redacted, or that it took on a life of its own before many of those key parts had been worked out, like a baby that insists on being born, alive if not well, long before it’s due.

Spine points again at the ceiling, growing agitated, until an offstage attendant takes the cue to pull a rope which causes a flap to open and a bevy of maned lion heads to fall. They pile up on the ground and lie there in silence, as if waiting to ripen.

Then, responding to a nod from Spine, the audience—my judges, Arp thinks, though no one’s listening to him any more—rises and moves in formation toward the pile, where they pick up the heads and pull them over their own so that, when they form a circle around Arp, it appears that fifty Leopolds have banded together to guarantee that, this time, when they reveal the Secret of Art, he won’t misinterpret any aspect of what they mean.

***

While the post-show melee winds down, Arp considers that perhaps he’s sitting in the Berkshire Film Studies main auditorium watching Spine’s senior project—a stop-motion film cleverly, if a bit clunkily, disguised as a prison play. He rises and, eager to leave before Spine corners him to ask for his grade, he goes behind a curtain and into a modest apartment that seems to be have been set aside for his use. My after-show relaxation room, he thinks. A small but critical kindness.

There’s a cot on one side, next to a bookcase with a few James and Eliot volumes and a battered copy of The Go-Between on a shelf beneath a potted plant. A two-burner stove, student fridge, and toaster stand across from it, beneath a small window that seems to look out onto an air shaft or garbage chute. Allowing that this may be the cell to which the Hague has sentenced him, he lies down on the bed, opens The Go-Between, and nods off after reading part of the Preface.

When he closes his eyes, he thinks back over what he read. In his memory, it went as follows:

I confess everything, Arp. I led us out of the world and into a broom-closet beside or beneath it. A side-world, an eddy, an oxbow. I know what I did, and I want you to know that I know, and that I don’t blame you for empowering me to do it. At the very least, I hope you’ll accept my hospitality here. Uncle Family will be in to see to your needs in the morning. Tomorrow morning and every morning thereafter.

Sincerely,

The Deep Spine.

PS: Within the scheme of the New Breeding, you are my father to the same degree that I am yours. In time, we may both come to see what this means.

***

Unable to sleep, Arp rises and carries the book across the room, intending to check the Preface for the confession he knows he won’t find there. But before he does so, he stands at the window and looks out at what now appears to be the seafloor he crossed on his return to the States, after meeting Leopold in that office tower in Zagreb. He studies what may be no more than an artist’s rendition of that sacred geography, a hotel-kitsch reproduction of a once-salient part of the world, or the underworld—either that, or perhaps it’s the set for another puppet play, tomorrow’s or the day after’s.

He looks away and reaches inside his pajama pants, curious to check whether the play’s account of the transmutation of human genitalia applies to him as well. Order and chaos, he thinks, probing what he finds. Tan felt and red thread. Matter and antimatter. Self-sufficiency such that Spine engendered me and I him, neither of us distinct enough to convince the Hague that we ought to be allowed to live out our lives as individuals.

As he returns to bed, leaving the book unopened on the sill, he can’t shake the feeling that he should’ve tried harder to mount some defense, or to flee if that defense failed. Yet, as he drifts off—and seems to end up just outside the window, on the seafloor—he can no longer dredge up any aspect of what that defense would’ve entailed, nor even, frighteningly, the slightest image of any place to which his flight might’ve taken him.

Spine emerges through the hole that the beanstalk tears in the sky. The whole time he spent climbing, the stalk grew longer and thicker beneath his hands, as if drawing sustenance from his contact upon it. When it finally rips out the bottom of a cloud that turns to wood and foam as soon as his head passes through, he knows his climb is over.

He plants his feet on the foam-covered boards of an ample cloudscape, relegating the entire sphere below to some muzzy basement fugue he can tell it will now behoove him to forget all about. He glimpses the ape that was supposedly climbing the beanstalk lumber off into the distance, but when he looks away and then back again, no such presence, or even absence, remains.

“Good riddance,” he says, dusting himself off. In place of that ape, he now intuits an aura of Spine. He can feel the presence he first noticed in the woman’s garage at the bottom of the beanstalk, still attenuated up here but growing stronger, closer at hand, a pre-storm pressure thickening. The idea that Spine created the world below—the world of Berkshire, ravaged by Mr. Derekis’ rage—as a massive animation project in which to trap his former mentor so as to steal from him the Secret of Art, imparted by Leopold in prewar Zagreb, feels like the thinking of a bygone era. A naive worldview whose maintenance, up here, would serve only as a sign of incurable infantilism.

Just as this thought occurs to him, he looks down through a glassed-over hole in the clouds at the whirring and clacking of a great many animatronic machines on a dusty factory floor, as if arrayed to illustrate the point he just made. He sees sculptures of himself and Spine at an outdoor table beside a canal, lingering over beers and fries, discussing, surely, the films of Jan Svankmajer and Peter Greenaway. When he falls to his knees and puts his face to the glass for a closer look, a wire hand reaches up and screws a steel panel into the aperture, blotting out the scene.

***

Humiliated, Arp rises and proceeds into a landscape that takes on dimension and vividness a little at a time, seeming to respond to his presence just as the beanstalk did. Soon, he’s roaming a lonely highway punctuated by overpasses and minor accidents, then a bridge over a wide, icy river, and then a series of exits that all lead to the parking lot of an immense mall. The mall where, he remembers suddenly, Spine’s mother took him at the end of every summer to buy all his clothes for the coming year.

The mall across from the shabby office complex that Spine repeatedly referred to as The Insurance Building, an eidolon of his earliest youth, a building that no one appeared ever to enter or exit, and the marker on the highway between Near and Far relative to Spine’s home—the point where, on any outbound journey, the possibilities of the genuinely new first became tangible and where, upon return, the anticipation of security and relief replaced them.

The burning light in my bedroom window, guiding me up the darkest part of the street.

Arp can hear Spine saying exactly this, though he can’t place where or when, let alone why. Nevertheless, the thought kindles a light on the uppermost floor of the Insurance Building, all the way in back near the dumpsters, and this light pulls Arp across the highway, through grinding traffic that effortlessly, though narrowly, avoids hitting him, and then he’s in the Insurance Building lot, approaching on foot a structure whose only function, until now, has been to appear through the window of a speeding family station wagon.

He doffs his hat as if he were entering a cathedral or a funeral service, and presses his way through the revolving door, not quite on its hinges but still functional enough. The lobby is abandoned save for a sign pointing toward the elevator banks with the words “Truth & Reconciliation” printed in childish handwriting.

He rides the elevator in total darkness to the topmost floor, where the light he saw from the highway greets him as soon as he’s released onto the tobacco-stained carpet. He follows it down the hall and into the only open office he can find, in which a surprisingly dense though silent crowd awaits him. He takes a number from a woman with a roll of raffle tickets, and waits his turn.

When his number is called, he proceeds to the folding table at the front, bows his head while another woman stretches a medal over his shoulders, moves his lips without speaking when she says, “This committee thanks you,” and then reaches his hand into a bowl marked “Truth & Reconciliation Records” and pulls out a sweaty envelope clasped shut with orange wax.

He moves to open it but the woman who gave him the medal whispers, “Not here,” and motions toward another door on the far side of the office, more of a closet than an exit. He lets himself in and nearly trips down a steep staircase, almost a ladder, that leads into a space too dark to describe.

***

Clutching his brief in his mouth so as to grip the banister with both hands, he climbs through silence and warm dusty air until the grinding of machinery greets him from below. Though part of him wants to reverse course and climb back into the Truth & Reconciliation room, he knows it’s too late. No one up there would thank him again.

So he spills out from the ceiling and onto the factory floor, where Spine wheels over, grabs the brief from Arp’s teeth, and wheezes, “Now, let’s see what part you played in the War that forced me to do what I did.” He picks off the orange seal, pulls a letter from the envelope, and takes it to the table where Spine & Arp sit eating fries and discussing the films of Jan Svankmajer and Peter Greenaway.

“Gentlemen,” he says, placing the letter on the table between them, “your bill has been tallied.”