THE I’M NOT SAM BLOGS by Jack Ketchum

Editor’s note: Back in September, Jack Ketchum had a blog tour for I’M NOT SAM.  At that time, Horror World hosted Part 5 – Chaos Theory.  We’re honored that Jack Ketchum has decided to make Horror World the full Blog Tour’s permanent home.

PART ONE: THAT WORD

When Lucky McKee and I sent I’M NOT SAM to our agent, Alice Martell, it took her a few days to respond.

This was not at all like her.  She’d always been johnny-on-the-spot with our stuff, bless her heart.  But you didn’t want to push her.  Hell, no.  I’d been an agent myself.  I knew that pushing your agent is as likely to get you what you want as throwing a tantrum in Times Square is likely to get you a cab.  When she finally did respond, she called and said she’d actually lost sleep over the thing.

And then she paused.

Try to imagine me at this point.  Inside that pause.

I don’t care how many books you’ve published.  Writers are still quite capable of flop-sweat.  There are times you feel you’ve had it all your life, like a herpes virus just waiting to pop up on your lip.  You do learn what to do about it though.  What you do is, you say not a word.  You button up and wait.  I’ve known Alice more than twenty-five years now and she is nothing if not straight-up, no bullshit honest.  And I trust her taste even more than I distrust politics.

So here I am holding my breath on the telephone waiting for the hammer to fall.  She hates it.   She thinks it’s a great big fucking letdown from our work on THE WOMAN.

What she told me was that it really had messed with her sleep.  That she found the book that disturbing.

She didn’t use the words “scary” or “twisted” or “gross.”  You know, the kinds of words I‘m used to.   She said it was disturbing.

And I thought, bulls-eye.   Perfect.

So just for fun I looked it up.  Disturbing. 

We use it all the time.  Figured I’d pin it down.

The first definition in my dictionary was to break up or destroy the tranquility or settled state of.  The second was to trouble emotionally or mentally.  Number three was to interfere with, to intrude upon.

And finally number four.  To put out of order, to disarrange.

I liked them all.  I thought they all worked for our book in spades.

But number four really made me smile.

PART TWO: WHERE’S WALDO?

So what’s disturbing?  What’s troubling, emotionally or mentally?

Loss is, for one thing.

The novelist Michael Chabon wrote, “if you can still see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible.”

I agree.

I’ve been going through some old files lately, actual paper files, excavated from the deep recesses of the bottom drawer of my four-door filing cabinet in my dark walk-in closet, trying to impose some order on what’s inside, separating unfinished fragments of manuscript from notes to myself, story ideas, letters, lists and throwing out the by-now undecipherable stoned maunderings of my youth — there’s a flake of something in my soup, I wish I had a dock to sit on.

It’s an interesting thing to do, this kind of housekeeping.  Like looking at snapshots of your brain.

This is your brain at twenty-five.

This is your brain at forty.  

I’ve been separating the letters into two piles.  Letters to and from other writers and more personal letters, from people you‘ve never heard of, although if you’ve read me and then went through the latter pile, you might just recognize a few of them as thinly-disguised characters in my stories.

But in this latter pile are love letters.

Letters that still have the power to make me smile, or bring tears to my eyes.  Or both.

Because while I think that Chabon’s statement is true, that love never goes extinct, it’s also true that in most cases and to many varying degrees, the object of that love has gone out of reach.  Has married or moved away or even died.  Cannot be touched.

And to be unable to touch a loved one and yet still remain in love — that’s a very great loss indeed.

In I’M NOT SAM, Lucky and I wrote the following…

“I think of Sam and me at the amusement park in Kansas City years ago, before we were married, the way she kissed me from a bobbing horse when I managed to grab that brass ring.”

Sometimes, in a letter, in a memory, you can almost feel that ring, and taste that long-lost kiss.

PART THREE: THAT THING IN THE WATER

I’m often asked, “what really scares you”  And my answer is usually something along the lines of you do.  Meaning that I have no idea, really, what you’re capable of, and that I’m fully aware that beneath that placid exterior or shit-eating grin you might be the kind of guy who keeps a six-year-old tied up in your basement.

But there’s also the terrible unexpected.

I was walking down Broadway one sunny spring afternoon on my way home from Love Cosmetics or Gartner’s Hardware or somewhere and I’d just stepped up over the curb onto the sidewalk at 70^th Street when an entire chest of drawers hit the sidewalk three feet in front of me.  It sort of bounced once and then toppled over on its side like a king on a chessboard in checkmate.  Only a fuck of a lot bigger.

A nice wooden chest of drawers.  Ever fire a shotgun?  It sounded a little like that.

Turned out it came from three floors above me.  Some movers were working in an apartment with a floor-length window and somebody backed into the thing.  It had done a three-sixty roll in mid-air and landed on its feet.

I nearly lost mine.

Know what?  Your legs really can turn to jelly.  Your heart really can skip a beat.

A couple of beats.

One more step and you wouldn’t be reading this, folks.

Was I scared?  Fuck, yes.  And was I mad?  You haven’t seen mad.

They say there’s never a cop around when you need one but I guess I got lucky that day because I turned around to head for 72^nd Street, my best bet to find one — and a squad car materialized right across from the subway station.  I told them what happened and they drove over and shut the whole operation down right away.  I calmed down and walked home and went about my business.

But was I disturbed?  Hell, yes.  Disturbed by definition.  I felt interfered with.  Intruded upon.

My easy-going day had damn near been my last one.

It’s a sobering experience, the kind some of you may have had under other circumstances.  Here’s a piece from I’M NOT SAM, edited slightly so as not to give too much away.

“I’m halfway through my first beer when I see the snake.

The beer hits the deck and I’m up on my feet with the rake in my hands and it’s coming toward her, its body a black undulating streak in the water behind a raised head as it rises over a drifting branch and she doesn’t see it, doesn’t even know it’s there and I’m yelling Get out of the water! Get out of the water NOW! and she hears the panic in my voice and looks confused but starts swimming anyway, Sam’s powerful stroke, yet the damn thing’s gaining on her, no more than ten feet away.”

The terrible unexpected.  In a river, on a corner in New York City.

Anywhere.

PART FOUR: THERE’S A WHEEL IN MY HANDS AND I CAN’T STEER

Not long before my well-loved cat, Zoey, died at the age of twenty in December of last year, I had a dream in which I woke to see her walking the ledge outside my open living room window, me asleep on the couch, the window never open in reality without a screen, the drop to the street not twenty floors as in the dream but only two.

But I awoke in utter terror.  In the dream she’d gone along the ledge beyond the window and I could see the confusion on her face.  She wanted out of this place but didn’t know how.  All she had to do was back up, really, then step inside but she didn’t seem to realize that, she tried to turn around instead but the ledge was far too narrow.  And as I leapt reaching for her from the couch she fell off into empty space.

When I really woke, I was shouting.

I knew what the dream was about of course.  I could “read” every instant of it.  Her health had been failing for quite a while by then.  But she was my cat, and to the very end I’d want to try to save her.  Yet there was nothing I could do to stop that fall either.  Even in my dreams I knew it.

To break up or destroy the tranquility or settled state of.

That’s one definition of disturbing.

My household with a healthy Zoey in it was quite settled, very tranquil.  And it would be again one day I knew, sometime after she was gone.  But for now, with her loss of appetite, her hind legs going, and then because she was a diabetic, me watching over my shoulder while at the computer whenever I heard her in the litter box in the bathroom so I could quickly Diastix her urine to evaluate her blood sugar and thus shoot her up with the appropriate amount of insulin — flying blind some days, guessing at the correct dose if I missed her in there — for now it definitely wasn’t tranquil.

Some days she’d piss over the lip of the box onto the bathroom floor, because she couldn’t hunch down low enough soon enough.  Some days I got so frustrated and I yelled at her.  Dammit, Zoey!  And then felt like the worst kind of prick in the world.  It wasn’t her fault.

Zoey was on a ledge and couldn’t back up.  Couldn’t turn around.

And I could only do what I always did.  Give her comfort, food and love.

Beyond that I was unable to reach.

There’s a terrible sense of impotence that comes with this.  A sense of something which is out of your hands and which is slowly winding away, inevitable, slowly spinning out of control.

You want things to be like they used to be.  Like they’ll never be again.

You want that control back.  But life rips it away from you.

Finally, it always does.

We used a variation on this this dream of mine in I’M NOT SAM and Zoey as our fictive cat’s name.

That, and the sense of  a life spinning, falling away.

To somewhere unseen far below.

PART FIVE: CHAOS THEORY

The fourth definition of disturbing in my dictionary’s the one I like best.

To put out of order, to disarrange.

Think about entropy.  Another word I really like.

Forget about thermodynamics for a moment.  I don’t know about you, but for me forgetting about that’s easy.  Simply stated, entropy’s the tendency of things to fall apart, the tendency toward chaos and disorder.

Cats and kids are entropic.

Writing a novel or cleaning out your basement are anti-entropic.

And maybe because what I do all day is writing, imposing order as best I can, I like a little chaos in my life.  I like a desk with papers scattered all over it.  I like clutter on the shelves and in the closet.  I like knowing vaguely where I put things but not exactly where I put things — the challenge of the hunt.  The fun of saying to yourself aha! there it is!

A little chaos is, I think, a salutary thing.

But too much is not.

Consider this, from I’M NOT SAM.  Our narrator is asleep.  He’s made love to his wife of many years last night and it was lovely.  More than lovely.  On falling asleep he counts himself a happy man and wishes that this life he shares with her will never end.

And then.

“I wake to a sound I’ve never heard before.

It’s the middle of the night, it’s pitch black but I’m awake so fast and so completely it’s as though somebody’s slapped me.

It’s a high thin keening sound and it’s sure not Zoey with her toy.  I reach over to Sam’s side of the bed.  It’s empty.

I pull the chain on the bedside lamp and the bedroom suddenly glares at me.  That keening sound rises higher and more urgently, as though the light were painful.

I see her.  There she is.  On the floor in the corner wedged between the wall and the hutch, facing the wall, her naked back to me, her arms clutching her knees tight to her chest.  It’s not cold but she’s trembling.  She glances at me fast over her shoulder and then away again but I see that she’s crying.

That sound is Sam, crying.

But I’ve heard Sam crying when her mom died and it doesn’t sound anything like that.  This doesn’t sound like her at all.”

A life put out of order.  A life disarranged.  No, two lives.

In entropy and chaos.  Disturbing.

I’M NOT SAM is available from Cemetery Dance in two states – Signed Limited or Trade Hardcover and from Sinister Grin Press as a Trade Paperback