The Annotations of A. M. Stone

READ ME FIRST

Hello, Mr. Josiah Fielder.

In this packet you will find my only correspondence to you. As you can see, there is no return address. You will be pleased to know that your unwanted and invasive appearance on the front porch of my mother’s house a few months ago resulted in my moving into another residence. I pay for a room with cash now. You’ve turned me into a fugitive. I’m sure that this news causes you to lick your lips salaciously or perhaps even manipulate your diseased genitals in some manner. I won’t speculate on the specifics of your disgusting proclivities, but I imagine you can only reach orgasm after strangling a helpless animal. I’m sure the blood rushes from your brain when you see pain, and the matter of your consciousness ascends a delirious chain to the oxygen starved acme of frantic, grasping need for more agony points activation of the prefrontal region, limbic and amygdala into a holy congress of the catch-breath and crawling around the edges of the eyes.

This packet contains your moronic article about me and my book. I took a printed copy, cut out the relevant portions and pasted them onto office paper so that I could easily write notes alongside the excerpts. I felt the tactile interaction with the material necessary. You are a very transparent person. You will see from my comments that your motivations are extremely easy to read. I’m sure that you consider yourself to be quite clever. This perception is utterly misguided.

Now to answer the big question. Why go through the trouble and send you this annotated article? This project was my own devising on the recommendation of Dr. Katzenberg. Part of my plea agreement following The Total Atmospheric Collapse Event in The Summer of Golden Fire Smeared in the Upper Reaches of Vision as the Pulse Pounds Hot like a Terrifying Metronome was that I see a therapist. Katzenberg recommended that I come up with a project to stimulate my creativity and that it be related to my former work in some way. He is under the impression that I should make peace with The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree. I’m not sure what he means by that, since I’ve been all too happy to put that book behind me and not think about it anymore. I would have put it fully out of my mind were it not for your meddling. Your appearance in front of my mother’s house made wrestling with my once-forgotten work all the more urgent, so I took Katzenberg’s advice. This project is the result. If you seek me out again, I may take violent action to protect myself. Approach me at your peril.

-A. M. Stone

I walked down a residential street in Boise Idaho on a cool summer morning. Birds chirped cheerfully in the trees among the sleepy, middle-class houses. The mist of a few hissing sprinklers drifted across my path in wandering veils and left damp patches on the sidewalk. I’d never been to Idaho before. I was searching for the reclusive A. M Stone. He had not responded to any of my emails.

1. To call me reclusive is inaccurate and clearly a method of injecting some mystique into the first paragraph of your article. I never intended to talk to anyone about my writing. I am a private person and never publicly shared my real name because I wished to avoid people like you and your pestering. The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree was an outpouring of my soul in an agitated state, not an invitation for conversation. I did not respond to your emails because I do not read my emails anymore. Like the physical mailbox, email is an entry-point for a cruel, hostile and stupid world. I’ve cut myself off from all avenues of invasion save for an old flip phone. The result is a very peaceful existence. I associate only with those I choose to associate with.

When I reached the front porch in question, I waited on the sidewalk for some time and listened to the hollow, tenor peals of the wind chimes hanging from the eaves to the right of the brick steps. I ascended to the stained planks below the overhang, and a friendly, orange cat stirred on the railing and sniffed my arm before curling his tail into a question mark.

2. The cat’s name is Leroy, and he did not like you. I can tell because he will stretch out from the railing and rub his cheek against people whom he likes when they move into his proximity. I can’t help but notice that you did not mention whether he was purring. If he had been, I’m sure you would have included the detail as evidence of your saintly intentions.

I paused again, now directly in front of the door, and wondered whether I should go through with the unannounced visit. I do not believe A. M. Stone deserved to have his personal information leaked on the internet, even if he has been associated with political extremists. Unlike the scandal-seeking journalists, my mission was not to discuss that with him primarily. As an admirer of his writing, that topic was my main concern.

3. Political extremism is a charge made by the unintelligent who lack imagination or the ability to think abstractly. You claim to disapprove of my harassment yet took advantage of the information compiled and disseminated by vicious simpletons. I am deeply suspicious of your claims to be a genuine admirer of my writing but will elaborate on that later.

I first tried the doorbell but heard nothing inside the house. I then knocked on the door a few times, and a polite woman with short, gray hair and blue eyes pulled it open just wide enough for me to see her face. I asked if Stone was there, although I used his real name. She told me that he was not. The woman looked worried in the passive manner that mothers manage deftly when protecting their children. I told her that I only wanted to interview Stone and that I was a private citizen. She said that nobody with that name lived in the house. She was firm but civil. I further explained that I worked for a reputable literary journal and not some cheap smear publication, but these assurances did not change her demeanor. I gave her my card and returned to the sidewalk. A quick glance up to the house’s second floor caught a flash of movement as someone who had been watching me pushed the blinds closed.

4. Yes, I was watching you from the second floor. You are a short man and balding, despite not appearing very old. The thinning pattern in your hair is very obvious from above. Although your description of the interaction with my mother and my seeing you from the window was factually accurate, I resent the implication to the reader that I was cowering in my mother’s house and allowing her to face invaders at the door in my stead. I moved back in with my mother at her request after The Summer of Golden Fire Smeared in the Upper Reaches of Vision as the Pulse Pounds Hot like a Terrifying Metronome. She was under the impression that I needed to recover under her care. On the day you came by, I did not hear you knocking at the door from my room upstairs and only knew that someone was at the door after hearing my mother’s voice filter up from below. If I recall, the batteries in the doorbell were dead. By the time I looked out the window, you were already leaving. I can’t help but notice that your unwanted visit echoes Aspen Cain standing at the threshold at the end of The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree, although in his case the question of whether the door opens remains unanswered.

I decided to watch the house for a while to see if A. M. Stone would come out. Although I’m not much for playing the private detective, I couldn’t think of another alternative in the moment. I had not planned for a long trip in Idaho and attempting some other methods of meeting the man I had come to see seemed worthwhile. After about twenty minutes of loitering at the corner under a big oak tree and trying not to trip on the concrete tectonics of the sidewalk disturbed by its root system, a middle-aged man came out of the nearest house and asked if he could help me in that way which implied I’d become a suspicious character. I realized that my loitering probably did seem odd to the locals. I explained that I wrote for a literary magazine and had been hoping to talk to the man who lived with his mother in the two-story, olive-green colored house down the street. The man thought it strange but did say that he knew of the person in question and typically saw Stone come out of the house for a walk around the neighborhood most afternoons.

5. a. Judging by your position under the oak tree at the corner of the street, you were talking to John Gleason. He’s a stupid man with no imagination whatsoever. He’s a quintessential American in the worst sense. His garage is brimming full of things he doesn’t need and rarely uses. Sometimes on my afternoon walks I see him standing in his driveway with his round belly protruding out over his cargo shorts and flip flops as he drinks a beer and stares at nothing in particular like some kind of grazing herd animal but with no soulfulness in the eyes. He’s hyper-conscious of his immediate surroundings. He and his even fatter wife complain about anything they see out of place on the street. The two of them are the dissonant out of place and extremely contemporary/oraneous everything on its face and busy without doing anything of consequence, extrospective in an absolute totality beings. Of course he told you about my afternoon walks. As you recall, I did not go out that day. A pity for your plans.b. A further note on the suburbs in general. When I first went to live with my mother in Boise, I found the suburbs rather peaceful and beneficial to the healing of my wounded psyche. For months I did not feel, “A strange other thing hanging over like heavy atmosphere but harder and more tangible, a dome-like covering that crept slowly up and over from the edge of the sky and pressed down omnipresently like the parietal and frontal bones while the latter juts out over the cavernous sockets, and the eyes recede into tunnels of uncontrollable introspection.” (The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree p. 38) In the case of Boise, I saw the crawling fingers of the universal indolence digging their way into the sod of the manicured lawns. I saw mothers of infants, what should have been respectable, middle-class white women, sporting facial tattoos like the common whores in a gangbanger’s retinue. The children as young as ten years old listened to idiotic, negroid sonic-brain-melt terrorism on portable speakers at full volume. With time, I made peace with the realization that there is no escape.

When A. M. Stone still had a presence on social media, he had posted about doing much of his writing at the public library, so I decided to head over to the one in Boise to see if he had kept up the practice after moving there. He never showed for his afternoon walk, so it seemed like the next best option.

6. Would it surprise you to know that I followed you to the library? Your presumption that I was a frail being, a ghost shadow in the window upstairs able only to watch forlornly proved wrong. Perhaps you had forgotten all the details surrounding The Total Atmospheric Collapse Event. You probably read too much of The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree as irony. I did follow your ride-share to the library in my mother’s car. While you were out at the corner of the street under the oak tree, I watched you with binoculars. To quote Mitochondrial Asphyxiom in Austere Branches: “You awakened in me new hungers or perhaps ones old and forgotten.” (p. 81) I wanted to know what kind of psychotic would show up unannounced at my place of residence.

I asked the woman working at the front desk if they had ever talked to any regulars who were authors or came to the library to write. The staff seemed a bit suspicious of me at first, but I retrieved a copy of the latest Contemporary American Literature Quarterly from the periodical section and showed them my photo in the front cover with the bios of the editorial staff. That satisfied them that I wasn’t some kind of nefarious character.

7. If only they knew the depths of your depravity, Mr. Fielder, they would not have proved so gullible. As you well know, the crisis of The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree chapter seven is that Alistair Drake convinces Aspen Cain that he is an admirer of his artwork and uses that pretense as a means of infiltrating his life. There’s a sick kind of dynamic between creative types who desperately seek approval and their ostensible admirers who abuse the trust inherent in that desperate seeking. If you had closely read my book, then you would understand that I’m very aware of these dynamics.

The ladies told me that, starting a few months ago, a young man had been coming into the library for a few hours a day to write and would behave rather erratically at times. He paced and gesticulated while talking to himself at a disruptive volume. Although they fielded many complaints about him, he was cooperative and would typically apologize and calm down when warned. I asked if he still came in, and they told me that he showed up nearly every day. The appearance of this character a few months ago lines up with Stone’s unfortunate crisis, detention by law enforcement and move to Boise. A younger member of the library staff joined our conversation after a few minutes and asked if we were talking about A. M. Stone. She was familiar with the Coulter Jones shooting in Phoenix and did not like that Stone came around to the library. I explained that there had not been any evidence that the writer did anything wrong in relation to that unfortunate event.

8. Of course there was no evidence. The fact that the FBI even detained and questioned me was absurd from top to bottom. What control do I have over a mass shooter carrying a copy of The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree in his duffel bag alongside his manifesto and spare magazines? What brand of shoes was Jones wearing when he opened fire in that shopping mall? Will the FBI detain their CEO? The shoes did more to help him in the act than my book. Do you want a medal for defending my honor to a recent college graduate working in the circulation department? What is a public library anyway but a place for homeless people to devise methods for watching internet pornography? In the moment when you gently rebuffed that young woman, I imagine you felt contrarian or dangerous in a cursory intellectual sense.

After some more discussion with the women at reception, I grabbed a few periodicals and sat where I could keep an eye on the entry doors. By now it was late afternoon, but there was still a chance that Stone might make an appearance. I played a game that I enjoy sometimes where I see how many grammatical and punctuation errors I can find in each publication. I have running averages saved in a note on my phone.

9. I will confess that your article made me laugh aloud at this point. Your grammar and punctuation game reveals a great deal about your thinking and the limitations of your brain. The English language in a mongrel tongue, and I say that without the intent of demeaning it. English is the descendent of old Germanic languages with heavy borrowing from Latin and some from Greek. It’s the synthesis of high speech from the pinnacle of civilization and the guttural utterances of warlike and superstitious oral traditions. It is an auditory language first and foremost. It is best heard and not read. It lends itself well to the sweet syrup of dense poetry and song. The librarians spoke of my pacing, speaking and gesticulating because that it how I write. I put nothing on a page which does not first pass my lips. “Proper punctuation” and pedantic adherence to the mechanics of written English are the concerns of the resentful clerks of the classroom who fail to wield its true magic effectively and lash out like self-appointed policemen for a system of laws respected only by talentless schoolmarms. In one of your earlier articles about The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree, you remarked on the possible hidden meaning behind the inconsistent punctuation and speculated that a kind of author’s conspiracy might be afoot. I can tell you with great certainty that you were wrong. I let the muse move my hand once the words pass my lips with very little concern for proper punctuation. If a reader cannot meter with breath the movements of the literary song without the need for perfectly systematized dots and dashes, then they have no business singing English from a page.

I waited up until the library closed but saw no sign of A. M. Stone. Finally, at the patient urging of the staff, I left.

10. The truth is that I was there the entire time. I slipped by wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap while you were talking to the staff at the front desk. I listened to your conversation and watched you play your little grammar and punctuation game with the periodicals. The most amusing part of the whole situation was that I had my late father’s .38 revolver tucked into my waistband. I’m not mentioning this to claim that I intended or planned to shoot you. I just find the ability to tell you retroactively that I could have done so very funny. What would have been the purpose of my approaching you from behind as you flipped through the magazines with a very self-satisfied look on your face and that thinning pattern in your hair burning an offensive symbol into my vision and pulling the trigger? None whatsoever. Violence should be reserved for the real troublemakers, the incorrigible creatures who won’t shut up and present no other options. In fact, it should have been you approaching me from behind with a revolver. That you showed up to my mother’s house unarmed and without the intention of killing me is an insult in retrospect.

I slept fitfully in my hotel room and made a second attempt to contact Stone by email. The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree is one of my favorite novels, and I genuinely believe that it is one of the most unique literary accomplishments of the 21st century thus far. Sometimes I wonder whether it could have been written by anyone other than a frustratingly reclusive and ideologically caustic person like Stone. Perhaps he as an author is the self-fulfilling prophecy of his work. I decided that I would make one more attempt at his house the following morning before my flight back to Los Angeles. At one point in the night, I thought I heard a purposeful series of knocks on the door of my room and rose to check the peephole, but nobody was there. I concluded that the phenomenon was a confabulation of my tired brain.

11. As you can likely guess at this point, that knocking was no confabulation. After following you from the library, I waited in the car in the hotel’s parking lot and watched your door. At around ten PM, I decided to knock and then walk away to give some evidence of my presence for a future revelation. If it makes you feel any better, I left the gun in the car. When I returned to the driver’s seat to see if you would open the door, my mother called me out of concern for the lateness of the hour and my not having returned home yet. After The Summer of Golden Fire Smeared in the Upper Reaches of Vision as the Pulse Pounds Hot like a Terrifying Metronome, I gave her access to my email account so that could filter any important messages for me. After your arrival on her front porch that morning, she checked my inbox. She told me who you were and that you were trying to track me down for an interview about the book. Maybe she hoped that it would make me feel better. It did not.At that point, I knew exactly what kind of person you are and was glad to have avoided you. You are the kind who wishes to be the designated keeper of a person like me. You know that your admiration of my work creates a morbid fascination among your peers in the world of literary criticism. They wonder why someone so proper and well-adjusted would take such an interest in a vile person associated with violent loners and political extremists. The fascination is one thing, but if you could befriend me or become my acquaintance and present me to the world as a humanized or perhaps misunderstood character, then you would accomplish something enviable in your circle. Perhaps you could even get me a movie deal with an art-house studio. You would sanitize me, baptize me, rotate the circuitry in my headspace into a congruous and rhyming cool and assuaging object lodged into the cranial crevices of the once shock-neuroned revolto-distant observers. In a sense, The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree would belong to you from that point on.

Early the next morning, I received an unexpected call from A. M. Stone’s mother. She explained that she had read my emails and understood that my appearance the prior morning was not malicious. She said that there was no possibility that her son would see me under any circumstances and that my presence in Boise had agitated him to a degree she had not seen since his troubles. I determined not to make any further attempts at a meeting and thanked her for her understanding.

12. I do not resent my mother for making that phone call. She did it out of love, which is a motivation that can result in irrational behaviors. As Aspen Cain remarked: “Love is a paradoxical animal virtue belonging in its perfect form to neither man nor earthly beast. It’s not born from the rough approximations of human laws or moral codes, and the other creatures of the natural world only graze its outer edges tangentially and unthinkingly. Love belongs to an unknown third animal which breathes it like air and exercises its fullness by mere instinct.” (The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree p. 97) My mother thinks of my writing as a tragic gift that I ought to pursue because it makes me a unique and beautiful person. I don’t doubt she wished I met with you for coffee and to discuss my book like a salesman hawking commercial products to a corporate representative with desperate intention shrouded in an affect of nonchalance. Like you, she thinks that I can be sanitized and redeemed. I cannot hate you fully, Mr. Fielder, because you carry some of her hopeful naïveté within you, although in your case it is much more cynical and opportunistic. Still, the sentiment lingers.

If you read this article, Mr. Stone, my door is always open to you. If my appearance in Boise caused unwanted disruption, then I am sorry. It was not my intention to add to your worries.

13. And just like that, you absolve yourself. How convenient. After your article came out, The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree sold fifteen more copies. Perhaps that will give you an idea of the reach of your influence. Coulter Jones did one hundred times better when he put my name in the headlines by killing seven people in Phoenix. In either case, yours or his, those numbers mean nothing to me. God give me voiceless and meek readers who sing the English from the page only for a quiet contentment. There is a pure kind of soul who finishes a book and returns it to the shelf with a subtle smile of remembrance at the pages their fingers traveled and nothing more. Those are the only ones I ever wanted.

Final Note:

Now that I’ve moved away from Boise into even deeper obscurity and work a simple nine to five job that requires no experience or education alongside entirely unambitious and largely unintelligent people, I’ve felt an overwhelming peace fill my days and seep into the vacant spaces between work and idle leisure like an oozing, industrial sealant that ensures a perfect immobility. The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree was born of the unique circumstances of The Summer of Golden Fire Smeared in the Upper Reaches of Vision as the Pulse Pounds Hot like a Terrifying Metronome. That confluence can never repeat nor rhyme. These annotations are the totality of my writing since seeing you in Boise. There is nothing more to say that I have not said before.

“The artist bares his soul to the world and gets everything that he deserves. There is great hubris in the imposition of one’s aesthetic and spiritual view onto his habitat. Never pity the mediocre creative but also do not overly resent him. He grasped for the laurels and came up short. His public work is the testament of his failure. That’s punishment enough. It’s a hard life being a true artist, one who cannot be satisfied because what he seeks is by the laws of nature beyond his capabilities. He’s been marked by that third animal which breathes love like air. Yet love does not make sense because in its purest form it belongs only to that third animal. We try to twist it to our ends when sometimes it crawls like a centipede causing us to recoil at its alien contours marked as hostile by some further back echo along the ancient corridors of our blood. It’s bizarre because it does not belong to us. It seems both a promise and a curse, a calling and an imposition dictated absurdly from among the austere branches of the burning tree.” (Stone, The Austere Branches of the Burning Tree p. 312)

END