Worldly and Otherworldly Influences Upon My First Novel by Geri Lipschultz

Grace Before The Fall by Geri Lipschultz will be published by DarkWinter Press this September. Here, Geri reflects on the novel's origins and conception.

Some of it started with a dream. Lots have started with dreams. The sublime and the profane of it. Starring in this dream was an articulate worm. Maybe a centipede. Maybe a serpent. A small creature, its tiny body comprising a handful of golden balls, only a few centimeters long. I’d met him on a bus. We were both headed to the Library of Congress. I was going for the congress, for eros. I hungered for someone to hold tight. The worm was going for matters philosophic.         

He charmed, sharing his curated philosophies. I listened, I questioned, extrapolating on his theories, beyond touched that he had found me worthy of such lofty discourse.          

A second dream featured a broken-down television. I had telephoned a TV repair man, and he had come to my apartment. In the real world of my life, I had little use for a television. However, in that real world, there, in the recesses of my studio apartment, a small television dwelled. Someone had determined this a necessity. I should have one, they said, in case of an emergency. I stored it in the closet. I can recall two moments when I removed it from the closet: once when my mother called. She was concerned about the police chasing “O.J.” (both my parents football fans, and my father died swearing he was innocent); the first time occurred when John Lennon was shot. Otherwise, it lived in the somewhat congealed, disorganized chaos that fell in with itself whenever I closed the closet door.

I’d given up films, virtually all manner of moving pictures, exception made for the Russian version of War and Peace that was showing at a local theatre. A friend convinced me to go with her—a Russian scholar. I didn’t regret seeing it in the least. I hadn’t expected anything quite so captivating, so beautiful, so clean in its representation of the book. I suspect a flight to Moscow itself would have been about the same length of time. But the film should have been enough to convince me that perhaps I should reconsider—although the near fifty years that have elapsed since that moment, would not support any change in my preferences. I have been witness to perhaps but a handful of films.

As for the dream, it amounted to a man coming up to my apartment, there to fix a television whereby he pulls the plug, lifts the old monster to the opened window and promptly drops it. The television falls three stories down. First, he checks to see there is no one below.

When asked how much I owe, having seen him wave a stash of invoices, he shows me the receipt: $64,000.00.    

But he holds onto it, pulls it towards him when I go to grab.

I don’t recall whether he tears it up or drops it, too, out the window.

But what is clear is that I need not pay.

And for that kindness, I behold him with loving eyes, warm heart, and a blossoming infatuation.

And he is gone, disappeared.

A reader would likely find resonance, would likely sense where and how this information fits in.

Otherwise, the book inspired by these two messages from the beyond is set in my beloved New York, largely in a room that resembled my studio, in an office that resembled the one I had done some part-time work in, at a time that existed in the world when the devastation that would be named AIDS was not yet named—and before the felling of the towers.

I was writing this book—and it takes place—during the Iran hostage crisis, a few months after a failed attempt by President Jimmy Carter to retrieve them.       

I should also mention my own series of heartbreaks, which fueled a desire to create the perfect man.

The reader will have no trouble finding him.

About the worm…I would discover once there in that galaxy of books that while my mission could best be described as “congress,” he’d gone for the Library. And somehow, I’d lost him. In the middle of my frantic search, I reflected that I had fallen in love with this worm-prince. That, added to the forsaking of my responsibility for his survival in this precarious world of ours, as well as the fear of never seeing him again, filled me with terror and despair. 

I searched in the stacks for hours, until it suddenly occurred to me that he was not lost, though likely never to be found, and the revelation that this last fact was by way of his own decision. 

His choice never to be found. 

His choice to live within the walls of a book.           

I woke up from that dream with a profound sense of both gratitude and sorrow.

Although I did not actually travel to Washington D.C., initial research had me taking my bicycle to the courthouse in lower Manhattan, where I roamed around and asked questions about how arrests were made, where offenders went, and for how long until they were arraigned.

In second and third drafts of the novel, I made changes—adding characters, deepening backstories. For one of the drafts, I had about one hundred footnotes—all gone now, and some of them incorporated into the main text.

Regarding that very first iteration, however, I was steeped in my own setting, taking note of the smells and sounds and sights.

More than forty years and numerous revisions later, that book I wrote in a fever dream of sorts, while I was working, as does my character, for the city of New York, will be published this September.

The streets of New York have not changed, and some of the clubs and hospitals and prisons and courtrooms and parks have remained, but those towers are gone, and with them, a certain slant of innocence that, search as you might, is, like the worm, nowhere to be found.

(Image: a painting by Philip Henry Allen. Used with permission.)