A collection of short stories that mix humor, horror, and American existentialism. Over thirty years to write it, but you can throw it away in a matter of minutes.
Excerpt from In The Fullness of Time:
Standing in my high-rise flat, gazing out the window at the busy city below, my thoughts turn to the brother I killed.
I have been a traveler through time, a savior of the time line that courses through the whole of human history. I have been to the past, saving it from those who traveled from the future to change its course. I have been to the future, to protect it from those who traveled back from even farther into the future to destroy it.
Merlin was the son of an incubus and a human, condemned to age backwards, so that he predicted the past, remembered the future and used his skills to preserve the time line. At his death on March 14, 1879, which was not of old age but rather of pre-infancy, I held his baby hand and reminded him of who he was.
Thus grounded in the moment, Merlin became an infant again and began to age forward. Then I swapped him with the stillborn son of Hermann and Pauline Einstein, who would christen him Albert, so that he could grow up to once again preserve the time line.
Finally, bereft of my powers, I stand by this window in my own time: June, 2000. I have been told that my mission is done, my purpose in history served. Now I have nothing to do but wait for death. I look down on the foreign country that is now my home.
A few cars, a few more red taxis and a light bus, yellow with a green top, drive on the left side of the road. This is no longer an odd sight to me, an American who has lived in Hong Kong for six months. People walk across the road, near another construction site that will soon become another high-rise building.
The two constants of Hong Kong are the people and the buildings. Beyond the site, a blue ocean and a green mountain. Atop the mountain, more towering buildings reach up into a polluted sky. A single double-decker bus passes below me.
I view life, but I am no part of it. I sit alone, writing novels that will never be seen, stories that will never be understood, poems that will never be read aloud before the awed masses or the small crowds in the coffee shops. All is empty, futile, meaningless.
I am a most unremarkable man. Neither too tall nor too short, too thin nor too fat, too handsome nor too ugly. My hair is neither short nor long, neither brown nor red. My skin is neither tan nor pale and it is freckled but not noteworthy in its freckling. I am 36, almost 37, neither young nor old. All in all, I am painfully and boringly average.
I have been many things in my lifetime: a security guard, a dishwasher, a copier repairman, a high-powered executive secretary, a web site consultant. My dream was to write, but I was too busy with work. When I finally left all that to pursue the dream of writing, when my world consisted wholly of free time, I learned that I had nothing to say.
Then I was summoned by the Guardian of the Time Line. Great and wondrous adventures awaited me, of the sort that have been told many times before but which made me feel fresh and alive with their immediacy. Unlike the masses below me, I served a purpose. Such fulfillment I have never known before or since and all else pales beside the memory now.
