The Winds of Astrodon
By James Renner
The Winds of Astrodon
James Renner
Copyright 2013 James Renner
Discover more titles by James Renner at https://jamesrenner.com
Author’s Note
Like many parents of young children in the United States, I was profoundly affected by the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. The following story was my way of exploring the emotions I experienced in the days following the shootings.
I am offering this story free. If it moves you, please consider a small donation to the Red Cross.
Thank you.
1
The moment Adam Lanza shot Cassie Whitman through the heart with a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle, her father was in a bar off Union Square talking about his next book. It was his favorite place to meet his editor because the bar was a part of Manhattan that reminded him of Ohio. It was a honky-tonk bourbon bar called Blue Mountain and the oaken booths were sticky with spilled whiskey like they were back at the Driftwood in Franklin Mills. He’d moved his family to Newtown, Connecticut three years ago. The success of his first young-adult fantasy novel, The Key of Astrodon, made such a thing possible. The book was about to become a movie starring Bradley Cooper as the evil wizard, Mandell. A month ago, he had finally begun work on the sequel, tentatively titled, The Winds of Astrodon.
“Mandell had a protégé wizard,” said Jake Whitman, hands clasped over a tumbler of mahogany Blanton’s. “He trained this young man in secret, a member of the King’s Guard at Banner’s Crossing.”
“Nice,” said Dan Haverford, his editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dan was sipping a 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle and making faces at it.
“So after Liam defeated Mandell, his apprentice began planning revenge.”
“What’s the guy’s name? The apprentice.”
“I was thinking Raif. Maybe. Raif or Silas or something cutting, you know?”
“Okay.”
“Raif or whoever, he organizes this army of dark elves in the deep forests of Astrodon, but all the while he’s pretending he’s this good guy, right? This member of the King’s Guard, right under Liam’s nose. Liam is blinded by his pride and so he doesn’t see this traitor until it’s too late.”
“Good. Good.”
“Raif and his dark elves take back Banner’s Crossing and Liam is exiled to the tower of Unc. The story’s about his escape, his journey home, and how he manages to retake the kingdom from Mandell’s apprentice. But it’s also about how, you know, pride make us blind and how we need to remember where we came from in order to lead well.”
Dan sipped his bourbon and thought about the story.
As Jake waited nervously, his cell phone vibrated against his left thigh. Melody, calling. He pushed “ignore” and it stopped.
“Well?” he asked.
“Yeah, man, I like it,” said Dan. He smiled and for Dan that was big. “I like it a lot, man. Yeah. Good work.”
Jake noticed when the TV over the bar switched from local news to something national, some breaking story with blood. They were using that urgent red scrawl and harsh Helvetica lettering on the bottom quarter of the screen, now. A woman spoke to the camera from a news desk, her face pinched. The bartender, an older woman with obscenely large, round glasses was listening but Jake couldn’t hear anything from where they sat in the corner.
His phone vibrated again. He squeezed the volume button, sending the call to voicemail.
“How long do you need?” his editor asked.
Jake shrugged. “Nine months.” He was a fast writer, a habit from his days as a reporter at the Akron Beacon Journal. He would never be that literary sort of author who takes ten years writing a 250-page book. If he wasn’t writing, Jake was outlining, and if he wasn’t outlining or writing, he was insane with boredom.
“You can take your time with this one, you know,” said Dan.
“Why?”
The bartender began to cry. She tried to wipe away the straggler tears under her comical glasses but she couldn’t keep up. She took them off and dropped them on the counter so she could do a better job.
Jake’s phone vibrated again. Again, he sent it to voicemail. Now he was annoyed. Why the Hell was Melody interrupting? She knew he was in The City, today.
“What happened?” asked Dan, noticing the television for the first time.
“Dunno,” said Jake.
Dan swiveled in his seat to the address the bartender. “What happened?”
“School shooting,” she said.
“Thank God I live in Newtown, Connecticut,” Jake said. “Nothing ever happens there.”
The bartender frowned at him. “Is that supposed to be a joke?” she asked. “Is that supposed to be some goddamn funny joke?”
His phone vibrated again. Jake growled and pulled it out of his corduroys. Melody’s face looked out at him from the screen, that photo of her on the clay beach of the quarry in Franklin Mills. “What?” he snapped.
“Hoooooo,” she cried. “Huhhhhh.”
And that’s when he knew. Sort of. Something deep inside his subconscious was gathering the strings of the disconnected story coalescing around him, pulling it into a narrative. But no. Not possible.
“Hon,” he said, anger gone now, passing away like the winds of Astrodon, that made-up world he’d invented on the infinite blank pages of Microsoft Word. “Hon, calm down.”
“Cah-cah-cah… hoooooo,” she cried.
“Jesus, Jake,” said Dan, turning to him.
Jake held up a “one moment” finger to his editor and tried to talk to his wife.
“Jake,” said Dan. He reached out and grabbed Jake’s wrist and held it tight. They’d never touched before and it was weird, charged with the subtext of homoeroticism that Jake couldn’t help but place on any such contact after a lifetime of his father warning him about the dangerous homosexuals who lived in The City, hoping to recruit impressionable young men. Fags wore bowties, man.
“Jake,” Dan said. “It’s Newtown.”
2
On the Henry Hudson Highway, skirting the west side of The City, radio on, a man reported on a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary where Jake’s six-year-old daughter went to school. It was as if the voices on the radio had pulled those words from his mind, because that’s where Sandy Hook had existed until this morning, within the confines of Jake’s head, a word to be used at his family’s kitchen table and their community and not anywhere else, certainly not on the radio. It was the private name of a public school, a name, like a talisman, only to be spoken by those close enough to understand its power.
Jake had left Dan at the restaurant, had jogged out of the bar with no concern for the bill or the niceties of how to properly say goodbye to one’s editor. For a moment, he had forgotten where he’d parked. All he could hear was his wife’s cries on the other end of the phone and nothing in his mind would solidify. He had to consciously push her voice aside so that he could concentrate. It was a monumental task, like moving a boulder without a counterweight. Then he remembered he had parked the car at a meter across Union Square. Moments later, he was speeding down the 9A.
The phone lines at Sandy Hook were busy, that was the problem. Melody couldn’t get through and she was too shook up to drive the three miles to the school. She didn’t know what to do.
“She’s okay,” Jake reassured her on the phone. “Cassie’s okay, okay? I mean we’d know if she wasn’t. We’d feel it. We’d feel something like that, as parents. I’m sure everyone is fine. I’m sure they got the shooter before anyone was killed.”
Through the connection, Jake could hear the radio playing in their kitchen at home. Melody was listening to some other
station. On her end the news was being relayed by a woman though he couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly, Melody began to hyperventilate. Long grating gasps of air. “Huffa, huffa, huffa.” She was going to faint, Jake realized. If she didn’t stop it, she was going to faint and he would hear her body hit the floor and she would still be an hour away.
“Jake, huhhh,” she whispered. “They just said Dawn is dead.”
Dawn Hochsprung. The principal. He’d met her during conferences. She’d commented on his vintage Star Wars T-shirt.
“Who said?”
“The news. They said the principal was dead. Shot and killed, they said. They said ‘shot and killed.’”
“This in from ABC news,” the man on the radio said in that grim tone that was the tone for the day and the week and the year now. “Multiple bodies have been found at Sandy Hook Elementary…”
Click. Melody was gone. He knew why. It wasn’t that she’d fainted. She was doing what he would have done in the face of such news. She was calling in to the main office at Sandy Hook again. She would call and call and call now until she got through to somebody.
Jake dropped his iPhone onto the empty passenger seat and peered into the back at Cassie’s booster, the one she’d sat on this morning before he’d dropped her off at Sandy Hook and headed into The City. Her plastic cup with the faded Power Puff Girls sticker rested in its holster, half-full of cherry Kool-Aide.
No. He’d feel it. Like any father he’d feel it if she were gone. A sudden emptiness in that place of his heart that blossomed into existence the moment he saw her dark hair pushing out of Melody’s birth canal on October 28, 2006. Jake searched for that piece of himself where Cassie lived. It was still there. That must mean she’s alive, he thought.
His head buzzed full of bumblebees too loud for him to hear anything on the radio as he passed through Yonkers.
Who did this?
Who went to my daughter’s school with a gun today?
Who is he?
He pictured a middle-aged man. A man whose wife had divorced him this week. A disgruntled soldier-done-some-time-in-Fallujah nitwit whose wife was a teacher at Sandy Hook. She’d had enough of his PTSD and ended it and he’d gone into the school to kill her and anyone who stood in his way. That’s why Dawn was dead. The shooter would have had to pass by the main office to get in and Dawn was always there like a captain standing on the bow of her ship and she would have tried to stop him. Maybe that’s all the further he got. Maybe it would just be Dawn and this guy’s wife. If Jake let himself, his mind would conjure alternate versions of this narrative, testing out probabilities (not the most likely scenario but the most suspenseful scenario). He had hardwired himself to do this in the years since he’d written his first short story when he was eight years old.
Jake tried to send his mind somewhere else. He didn’t want to make up stories about Cassie. He pictured the tall tower that stood over the market in Banner’s Crossing. The Great Spire where Mandell had imprisoned Liam Tenderheart’s father in The Key of Astrodon. It played an important part in his next novel, Jake knew, but he was still working it out, seeing a narrative form in his mind a scene at a time, slowly uncovering the best version of the story—that’s the way his process worked: imagine, shape, write. But the picture wouldn’t hold. The story his mind wanted to play with was the story of the shooter: who he was, what his motivation could be. There was no hiding from the world in Astrodon.
The former Army soldier had dressed in his old fatigues still stained with the blood of dead Suni insurgents. He’d let the PTSD fester inside him like a cancer until it became him, until he was slapping his wife every time she stepped too loudly through the living room. She’d finally left. And so he dressed in his battle-rattle and holstered his Baretta M9 and loaded his deep pockets with 15-round box mags. His name was a nickname only. Something he’d picked up In County. Something like Boots or Skittles or Brownie. Maybe they just called him Newtown.
What would Cassie do? If Skittles walked into her classroom and pointed the 9 millimeter at her, what would my daughter do?
She’d asked him once about bad guys. It was summer and they were watching Coraline and they were snuggling on the couch, her head in the crook of his shoulder, her legs tucked up under her and she turned and asked him about bad guys. Are there really bad guys? Simple question.
No, he’d said. There are no bad guys. But there are guys who are sometimes bad. She’d nodded like she understood but she probably hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. She was six. Why the hell didn’t I tell her yes? Why the hell couldn’t I just say yes, there are bad guys out there and sometimes they abduct little girls who look just like you and sometimes they walk into schools with assault rifles and kill kids. Why couldn’t I say that?
Because he’d wanted to create a different world for her. He’d wanted to paint a picture over reality on a thin sheet of muslin he could stretch over the world around her.
What would Cassie do if a guy pointed a gun at her? She’d laugh.
3
Seconds before the Hawleyville Road exit, Jake realized he had to a choice to make: go home or continue to Sandy Hook Elementary. He chose to turn down Castle Hill, toward their cape cod on Taunton Pond. Maybe Cassie was already home and he could spare himself the frightful drive to a school that was now a crime scene. He didn’t want to see the cop cars, the yellow tape, the parents gripping each other in grief. And if Cassie wasn’t home by now (but she was) Melody could come with him to Sandy Hook and he’d at least have her company.
He’d met his wife in high school. At John F. Kennedy in Franklin Mills during a production of Flowers for Algernon. Melody was from an Irish clan: four brothers, two sisters in a century farmhouse by the quarry. He’d taken her away from her family, dropped her in Connecticut with their kid. Cassie looked so much like her mother. The high forehead, the single dimple below the left cheek when they frowned.
Melody’s Vibe was still in the driveway but their home was empty. “Mel?” he called out from an entryway clogged with Cassie’s flip-flops and Mary Janes. But he knew no one was there. He always knew when his house was empty. The old wood boards felt apologetic when caught alone.
Jake found the cordless receiver on the mantel still connected to some lost call. Jake listened to the dull bloop that said he was on hold somewhere, then turned it off and set it back into the cradle on the counter.
Someone knocked on the open front door.
It was George Sunderson from two houses down, an octogenarian who used to run the independent pharmacy in town. For Halloween, Cassie had dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West and George’s wife, Winnie, had dropped a full-sized Snickers into her pillowcase. Today, George was dressed in gray slacks and a cardigan. His eyes were red from crying.
“You just missed her,” he said. “Winnie drove her to the firehouse.”
“The firehouse?”
“Ayup,” he said in his New English drawl. “They asked all the parents to go there to pick up their kids.”
“Okay.”
“Jake…”
“What?”
George took a second to chew back a sob. Then he said, “He got a lot of the kids. Two whole class rooms, they’re saying.”
“Which classrooms?”
But George shook his head. He didn’t know anything more.
4
There was a moment after she came out of her mother when the girl refused to breathe and the nurses started to panic.
They had her on this tiny cart in the corner under a warm light and Jake stepped to her, leaving the doctor to attend to his wife. Cassie was the same bright purple as a Concord grape and she wasn’t moving.
“She swallowed some amniotic fluid on the way out,” said one of the nurses, listening to his baby’s lungs.
“Is she all right?”
The nurse didn’t answer him. Instead, she ripped open a plastic pack that contained a long thin tube. Quick as she could, the nurse jabbed the hose down
Cassie’s throat and suddenly all this grayish liquid was pouring out of her body and into a plastic basin. Cassie started coughing and that dead purple color dissipated and he watched his daughter’s skin turn pink.
“She’s okay, now,” the nurse said.
5
Jake hadn’t smoked pot since leaving Ohio. He’d had a friend back home who got it from a cousin who grew it in the woods. Back home he could buy it fresh and cheap and know it was good. Since the move, he’d been too paranoid to cast around for a supplier and he felt a little ashamed that he would even care enough to miss it. But driving to the fire station was like being doped up all over again and not in a pleasant way. He felt that disconnect he got sometimes when he smoked, that splicing of his timeline. He was in the car, seeing the line of vehicles on Riverside, a state trooper directing traffic and then he was out of the car, walking to the firehouse. Suddenly he was inside. It was like that movie, Inception, where you know it’s a dream when you don’t remember ever having traveled to your destination. You just go from one scene to another like a poorly-written short story.
The fire station was one long, clunky ranch home and this afternoon the whole place stunk like burned coffee. Admin was full of people he kind of knew, parents he’d nodded to in the grey foggy mornings when he dropped off Cassie. Everyone was talking over each other and he couldn’t hear a goddamn word. His ears did not distinguish their chatter. It was all too much nothing. There were no kids here. Where were the kids? He looked around for his wife but didn’t see her anywhere.
“Jake!” It was Winnie Sunderson. She was suddenly behind him, tugging on his coat. Her hair had not been done this week and she was covering it in a blue shawl.
“Where’s Melody?” he asked.
Winnie pointed to the front door where he’d just come from. Just outside, his wife was listening to a big fellow in a black police uniform. He went to her.
“Mr. Whitman?” the cop asked.