Gabriel is the story of a very bright young man who comes from a long line of exceptionally uninteresting people. He is also a young man with a group of extraordinary, imaginary friends.
States of Matter is the story of Emmanuel, a man who dares to challenge the very premise of what we know as our dreams. His exceptional discovery leads him to a place in the world (or is it a place within himself?) where the simplicity of goodness becomes an artifact of another order.
he Multiplication of Cats is the story of a novelist, Max Nightingale and his encounter with Death. A great deal is packed into this novella, a great, great deal ...
Excerpt from GABRIEL:
Gabriel Demos lived alone in a very small house with a peaked roof. The house was on a narrow lot in a quiet neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; it was white, and had a long, untended back yard. There was no back porch. A door from Gabriel’s tiny kitchen opened onto three wooden steps leading down into wild flowers and weeds that flourished there during the warm months. The small front porch had a flat roof that gathered snow in the winter, and an Adirondack chair next to the steps that led up from a narrow walkway. This was Gabriel’s favorite spot. He sat for hours on end, day and night, watching people and cars pass by and speaking to his extraordinary friends. Casual observers thought there was something wrong with Gabriel, and perhaps there was, but there was also a great deal right with him.
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Gabriel sprung from a line of notably uninteresting people. To his credit, Aristotle Demos, Gabriel’s paternal grandfather, doggedly worked his way through dental school in the 1930’s to become the first professional in a long line of barbers, though a more uninteresting dentist might have been hard to find. His chair-side conversation was so relentlessly tedious that despite the dry, hot drills still used at the time, his patients were often lulled away to sleep, an effect of obvious, though unintentional therapeutic value. In 1932, he married Annabelle Roos, a woman his same age, who would spend the next forty years gossiping with neighbors, gaining weight, and complaining that her husband had not become a medical doctor. Aristotle took refuge in the radio until 1950 when he bought the finest black and white television available at the time: a $499 12” Philco Console, in blond mahogany, with a built-in record changer, thus spurning his wife’s need for a Black Persian Lamb stole at the same price. He watched the Philco for a full ten years until he bought a RCA color tabletop model for $495. In 1970 then, Aristotle bought a Motorola “Quasar” for $599, which he faithfully watched until he died in 1985 during the pilot episode of “MacGyver.” Although Aristotle and Annabelle Demos had hardly exchanged a word during the last several years of their marriage, she followed him to the grave a week-and-a-half after his demise.
Gabriel’s maternal grandfather, Arnold Pfeffer married Rose McQueen in 1932. The two met on a Phillips Radio assembly line, where Arnold supervised a group of women who inserted vacuum tubes into appropriate sockets. Among the women on this line, Rose was by far the most consistent and efficient, despite (or perhaps due to) the vacant, unblinking stare that most often fixed the features of her round face. Arnold liked her because she didn’t talk. Rose liked Arnold because he didn’t want her to. At home, Rose’s sole occupation beyond housework was repetitively embroidering mottoes onto accumulating heaps of throw pillows: “Beauty is Only Skin Deep,” “Haste Makes Waste,” “A Closed Mouth Catches No Flies;” this, while Arnold busied himself in his basement workshop making wooden duck decoys for use on his occasional hunting trips. These decoys never differed, and Arnold produced them at a steady rate. His duck hunting forays to the northern part of the state, however, became less and less frequent, eventually requiring the spare bedroom in the Pfeffer’s small house to be relegated for storage of the hundreds of faux Mallards—a room which Arnold kept dark for reasons of his own, and which their daughter, Iris, born in 1935, recalls with fear.
