Yet Today
by Anthony Caplan
Genre: Contemporary Family Thriller
School's out for summer, and that's when Gillum Kaosky heads for the exits. Poised somewhere between neediness and nothingness, Kaosky sets out for summer adventures.
Gillum is a Spanish teacher. He's been married for twenty years and has three children with his wife Sibyl. They have raised their family on a farm in central New Hampshire. But this summer, Gillum lands a job that will change everything: wire-tapping the Dominican crime families responsible for bringing heroin and fentanyl into northern New England. Meanwhile, his son, Jonah breaks into the Department of Defense in a hack attempt that lands him in jail. Nothing remains the same, and love does not always conquer all in Yet Today, a thrilling, contemporary family saga from Anthony Caplan.
STRANGE
ENCOUNTER -- YET TODAY
Here's a sample
from YET TODAY, releasing on May 5, 2020, Teacher Appreciation Day. It's the
last day of school and Kaosky is heading for a faculty party to celebrate.
Instead, he feels increasingly disoriented . . .
Outside, on the
streets of the town, there was an odd calm, as if the panic he felt were truly
an illusion. The rest of creation seemed to be awaiting the further development
of nothing extraordinary. He stopped at a traffic light and checked the faces of
the oncoming motorists. They seemed astonishingly ugly in their cheap, mirrored
sunglasses, their cheesy grimaces protecting against the glaring noonday sun.
Out on the ruined strip, with its line of closed, boarded up storefronts, was a
Dollar Store and several ancient fast food restaurants. On the corner was the
multilevel furniture outlet blaring deals in some ballooning white lettering
from its glassed front. It had been there forever, surviving downturns and boom
times with an equanimous allegiance to the balloon font, attracting shoppers
from as far afield as Quebec and New York State with its specials on Chinese
futons and designer mattresses. The yearning for a good night’s sleep was
apparently a constant through thick and thin. Next to it was a new vape shop
with the logo of an aquamarine unicorn that already seemed tawdry and dated, as
if that was part of the appeal. He parked in the lot next to the vape shop. The
clientele here had moved beyond yearning for sleep to hankering after the deep
six. It seemed to Kaosky a logical if somewhat depressing progression. Next
down was the New Hampshire Liquor and Wine outlet. Out the door of the vape
shop stepped a young woman with thin arms and an illegible tattoo sprawling
across one shoulder, barely covered by a thin spaghetti strap. Her pelvic bones
extended above her jeans. They avoided eye contact, but her tilting step caught
Kaosky by surprise, as he tried and failed to evade her.
“Excuse me,” he
said.
“Jesus Lord. I’m
sorry,” said the young woman in a raspy, high voice, like compressed air
releasing from a leak.
“That’s okay,”
said Kaosky.
“Wouldn’t have a
fiver, would you?” she asked. Her head seemed to wobble for a second as if she
was about to fall.
“No, I’m sorry. I
don’t carry cash.”
“That’s not great.”
“Sorry.”
“You already said
that. You think I didn’t hear you?”
“No. You heard me
fine, I’m sure.”
Kaosky stepped by
her on the sidewalk and checked himself mentally. He turned to the girl. She
glared at him, but despite her anger there was something in her look, a
weakness that seemed almost pure in its acceptance of infirmity. She wasn’t
hiding her desperation and lack of recourse to anything beyond her words and
sharp anger.
“You want
something to eat?”
“Uh. Why?”
“Well, I’d go
into the Burger King there and get you something.”
“That’s across
the street. Why didn’t you park there?” She was disgusted by him.
“I would go there
if you were interested. I’m sorry.”
“Holy shit, you
really are a creep. I’m looking for some cigarettes. I’m sure you don’t smoke.”
“I used to.”
"You quit or
something. Right? Nothing worse than a quitter.”
“It’s been a long
time. What do you smoke?”
“Kools.”
She must have
been no more than eighteen or nineteen despite the lines around her eyes and
the sunken cheeks.
Kaosky picked out
a six-pack of something called Jackman’s Victory Ale, a local craft beer with
an alcoholic content of seven percent. At the checkout he asked for a carton of
mentholated cigarettes. He looked to the sliding front door. Two older men
walked in, both wearing Patriots ball caps, plaid flannel shirts and olive
green Dickies despite the weather. He thought he saw the girl, but he wasn’t
sure. She could have gone already. But when he walked out there she was,
waiting around the corner, leaning against one of three yellow steel bollards
installed in front of the parking lot, some subliminal iteration of state
power.
“I got you
these,” he said, holding up the pack of cigarettes.
“Sweet,” she
said, but stayed leaning against the bollard. Her frailty had a stink to it.
“But I got a
question for you.”
“Anything you
want, mister. That’s real nice of you.”
“I want you to do
something with these. Not just smoke ‘em.”
“What else you
going to do with cigarettes?” she asked teasingly, her curiosity piqued.
“I don’t know. Go
home and talk to your family.”
“I don’t have
family. My mother’s dead and my father’s some shithead I don’t even know. Last
I heard he was in the VA hospital with stage four pancreatic cancer or
something. Good riddance.”
“You’ve got a
family. Grandparents. Cousins. Somebody who will take you in somewhere.”
She opened the
carton, used her teeth to rip the cellophane off a pack and knocked it against
the flat of her hand to dislodge the first one.
“You want a
smoke?” She held out the pack with the protruding white tip invitingly.
“No, thanks,”
said Kaosky, disgusted, waving it away.
In the car, he
started the ignition and fiddled with the radio dial. His hands were shaking
with the pent up nerves of what he’d done. He watched his hands with a sense of
distance, as if they weren’t really his hands. He’d been acting the part of the
philanthropist, buying the girl the carton of cigarettes and then setting her
up with the promise of grandiose things. It was all such an absurd act, reading
of lines from some ideal prompter. He had no idea from where the impulse had
come to him. Since the day in the woods watching the children and Sibyl behind
the trees, he’d fallen into a spell, watching his life, observing instead of
doing, as if he’d taken a turn into another reality and he was stuck now
watching from the old space, doing and feeling in ways that were incompatible
with his former self, not able to stop. He should have taken a cigarette; he
felt like he needed one now.
Posts for Silver Dagger Tours:
- Are your
characters based on real people or do they come entirely from your
imagination?
This is an interesting question and one I really have
to tackle and be upfront about. I will start by quoting the disclaimer at the
beginning of Yet Today.
“This is a work of fiction. Consequently, any resemblance of
the characters herein to the living or the dead is unintentional and random.”
But there is a larger picture that does not negate the
disclaimer. Instead it opens the story up to the subconscious realms that you
need to draw from in order to really reach down and grab something meaningful
as a writer.
My family and
lived experiences seem to form a large part of the material of the story: the
type of characters, the details of their lives, their personalities and
conflicts. I think of it as a scaffold, a trellis for the story to take shape
and grow on. The final product is fiction, it’s a made up story with an
invented narrative that in some almost magical way, in the way of storytelling,
tells about a larger truth.
But my process is heavily dependent on what I know,
especially when it comes to writing a contemporary story about a unique family
living in unique times and how the larger world comes to bear on their
relationships and the decisions they make as individuals. At times it might
seem like I’m writing what some would call autobiographical fiction, but I call
it semi-autobiographical because it is purposely distanced from reality in that
my aim is not to mirror the obvious but to reflect on deeper questions.
The story of Yet Today has definite echoes of my
real life -- the main character is a high school Spanish teacher, check. He has
three children, check. He spends a lot of time reflecting on the direction of
his life, his relationship to his wife and children and hoping for a better
world, check. But things get a lot crazier in Gillum Kaosky’s life whereas I
have a relatively boring, sedate existence.
- Do your
characters seem to hijack the story or do you feel like you have the
reigns of the story? Convince us why you feel the book is a must read.
There were times in the writing process that my
characters definitely took over and surprised me. I’m thinking of the children
in particular. Gillum Kaosky’s older daughter lives the tension in the family
and acts out in strange ways. His son ends up in jail, and the choices he makes
when he gets out are unforeseen, because I had no idea that he would make them
before it happened in real time as I wrote that part of the book. But that is
the beauty of writing, the fact that your characters will take on a life of
their own if they have something that brings them to life in your imagination.
The fact is that I write in large part as some kind of
fortune telling to help me look into the future. That’s an obvious byproduct of
writing my science fiction trilogy The Jonah. But even in a
contemporary story such as Yet Today, I wanted to see what
would become of the family, of the marriage between Gillum and Sibyl, of the
children, just the way anybody in real life would like to know how things will
look in one year’s or ten year’s time for their loved ones. Having said that,
I’m not at all sure what will happen to me and my family, but one thing is for
sure, the writing of Yet Today was a lot of fun, and I
can only hope that readers will get out of it as much pleasure as I got in
writing it.
- What’s the
most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?
This brings up the question of identity in literature
which has taken on such a recent controversial air recently. Can someone from a
particular background even claim to be able to tell a story from a point of
view with which he, or she, or they have seemingly nothing in common? That’s
the question that many seem to have such a hard time dealing with. I would
argue that of course it’s possible to tell a story from another’s point of view.
That’s the whole point of fiction, to open us up to the world through other
eyes. Imagine if only white males could be depicted in stories by white male
authors, or black females in stories of black female authors. The literary
world and our culture would be greatly impoverished, in my humble opinion.
Is it easy to write from a female perspective if you are not a female?
Of course not. Yet Today is about a
white guy coming to terms with his privileged perspective as he gets older and
his wife and daughters’ stance towards the family change in ways that reflect
the larger society. But I would say that an intentional writer can lay claim to
another’s perspective. We are all related to each other and consequently are
hard-wired to understand and see ourselves and the world through the eyes of
the people we care about. The crucial element is to care for each other.
Anthony Caplan is an independent writer, teacher and homesteader in northern New England. He has worked at various times as a shrimp fisherman, environmental activist, journalist, taxi-driver, builder, window-washer, and telemarketer, (the last for only a month, but one week he did win a four tape set of the greatest hits of George Jones for selling the most copies of Time-Life’s The Loggers.) Currently, Caplan is working on restoring a 150 year old farmstead where he and his family tend sheep and chickens, grow most of their own vegetables, and have started a small apple orchard from scratch His road novels, BIRDMAN and FRENCH POND ROAD, trace the meanderings of one Billy Kagan, a footloose soul striving after sanity and love in the last years of the last century. His latest fiction effort, LATITUDES – A Story of Coming Home, to be released on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords and paperback in the summer of 2012, is a young boy’s transformative journey overcoming dysfunction, dislocation and distance.
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