"Tongue," titled after the R.E.M. song of the same name, was the very first story written for Tales From Memorial Union back in 1997 and to this day, I am not entirely certain if it should be a part of the whole collection or not.
As I mentioned at the start of this month, I feel the story possesses a quality that is more "ghostly" or foggy or somewhat dreamlike in a way, even though I am presenting everything in the story as real. It is the one story that is unlike every other story of the book in terms of tone, presentation and even the shortness of its length, as it is only about 10 typed double spaced pages, making it the shortest story in the collection that I am envisioning. As I was re-visiting it, it confused me as much as it did when I first wrote it and as I have thought about it over and again over these many years. Even so, I feel compelled to include it as it was the seed that began this entire ride and most importantly because...it all came to me in a dream. Honest!
Here's the story. In the middle of the night on September 2, 1996 (according to my first journal), I woke up with the following words spinning inside of my head...
"She never intended this to be her life
But it was..."
I remember getting out of bed, heading to the couch in the living room, picking up my journal and I just began writing whatever popped into my head and the words just flowed from there until I was just too tired to think (which wasn't very long at all). That night and the remainder of "Tongue" was written during three occasions between that night and January 6, 1997 and to this day, I am baffled as to where it could have come from. But, I do have some answers...
The story is told by an omniscient narrator, just like in "Fourteen" and the future "December Boys" and the novel's final story. Our leading heroine is nameless until the very last line of the story, not for any real significance with the name itself but at the time I wrote it, I was reading quite a bit of Jay McInerney (famous for the usage of the second person narration in his Bright Lights, Big City) as well as the pitch black novels of Bret Easton Ellis. (For the record, I prefer McInerney's writing as it feels more humane to me.)
She is not based upon anyone I knew, either real or imagined...at least not directly. I thought of how the character of Zooey Glass from J.D. Salinger's Franny And Zooey made me feel when I first read her. I thought of a girl named Christine that was a friend of my wife's (then college girlfriend) back then--but even so, I never really knew her well. But this girl is essentially a lost soul, a quality that contributes to the "ghostliness" of the story, I think, as we are spending time with a person whose life has unraveled and she cannot even begin to figure out the hows or whys, so she just...exists. .
Thematically, and in retrospect, I can see how some residual elements from my "Bailey Undertow" screenplay informed some of the emotions contained in "Tongue," combined with a person I did know briefly, a story which will appear inside of the "Paul Westerberg" story, so I won't recount it in full now. But I will say that essentially, what the character in "Tongue" is experiencing is anxiety abut college nearing its natural end and furthermore...perhaps, she was not built for the experience of college in the first place, as college is not designed for everybody.
Well, my plan is to publish it in two parts and all I can say is that I tried, it's different and I hope that it does effect you somehow (and positively), that it weaves a certain sad, dark spell but one with empathy. Think of it like a moody folk song with those lines that arrived in my dream as some sort of repeated refrain.
Or also, please listen to the R.E.M. song to get a feel for the mood I wanted to capture. Maybe that will help too.
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