Sticky Fingers Pt. 3b. Digression.

Before we get too far into Part.3b it should be noted that the author had more than a little trouble with it. It was supposed to flow smoothly on from Part 3 but the narrator got in a muddle. Omniscience fatigue most likely. Tense changes, flashbacks etc. are never easy to write. Things got so bad he went back to part 3 and made some changes. Arthur’s mother’s ghost showing up was the main problem. She could easily send the narrative off on a wild uncontrollable tangent. So he shuttled her into the bathroom and instead of Arthur nodding off we now find him staring at Princess Diana’s portrait. It’s a cheap reproduction, one of millions, but it’s something to focus on, and for Arthur it may contain the answer he is looking for. But Diana just stares back. And it seems to him she lived her life like a candle in the wind. Her smile is inscrutable. Life’s mysteries remain intact. The author is now thinking the whole passage should be filed under SF Pt. 3c.

It had been quite a confusing day. It began with the cremation. Then the meeting with the estate agent. Then came the first train journey on the Brighton Line in twenty years followed by lunch with Simon in Sticky Fingers. A full day with plenty of food for rumination. But Arthur is starting to drift off. He has entered that nebulous state just before sleep comes. This is fertile ground for writers. Ideas seem to appear out of nowhere; whole paragraphs pop up fully formed. The trick is to write them down. Put it off and they vanish. Just before Arthur falls asleep he hears voices in the bathroom. One female, middle-class English; the other male, mid-Western American.

‘OK. One of my cats got in a fight with a coon.’ Says the sepulchral American voice.
‘Oh dear.’ Says the English voice. Arthur knows it well, ‘Nothing serious I hope.’
‘He’s got one eye out and an ear hanging off.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘I stitched him up. He’s a tough bastard. Should be OK. Shot the coon.’
The English voice is familiar of course. It’s Arthur’s mother’s ghost. The American voice is harder to place. Arthur badly wants to go to sleep but he is intrigued. These are voices from beyond after all. Perhaps they know something.
‘Tell me Mr. Burroughs…’
‘Call me Bill.’
‘Tell me, er...Bill. Do you regret anything?’
‘Everything.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘Oh man. Well killing Joan of course. That was wrong. Taking another human life, even by accident, is wrong.’
‘But it freed you up to write. You’re on record as saying you wouldn’t have started writing if the William Tell incident in Mexico hadn’t happened.’
‘It’s true. Writing became a compulsion because of that. A way of keeping my sanity.’
‘And of suppressing the guilt?’
‘That too. You’ve done your homework. I failed as a father too you know.’
‘So you’ve made a few mistakes?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Er, Bill, there’s no actual plot-line in most of your work is there?’
‘Naked Lunch you mean? That’s true. There never was a storyline. It was just a bunch of stuff I wrote when I was out of my pod. I called them routines. Ginsberg put it all together. Made a book out of it.’

This is absurd, thinks Arthur. My mother’s ghost is in the bathroom interviewing William Burroughs! She knows nothing about writing. He’s dead too come to think of it. Who’s writing this stuff anyway? Now comes the sound of the toilet flushing. What are they doing in there? What does it all mean? Don’t expect an answer. Even the author doesn’t know. Another reason to avoid using an intrusive narrator. Best to skip the whole episode and move to Pt. 4.