"Full of surprises and always inventive, Nostalgia is a perplexing, intelligent, and thoroughly engaging novel." - IndieReader
Ted hits his head and becomes a narcoleptic time-traveler, sleepwalking through his waking life and daydreaming through the unconscious. Now haunted by a nefarious figure, all Ted wants is a way for things to go back to what they once were. The further away a normal life becomes, the more that everyday life is shown to be everything but.
Join The Narrator on adventures that include a self-declared Messiah, self-help tribes, retail store woes, bathroom reviews, supernatural powers, and a psychiatrist tormented by his own demons.
"Full of surprises and always inventive, Nostalgia is a perplexing, intelligent, and thoroughly engaging novel." - IndieReader
Ted hits his head and becomes a narcoleptic time-traveler, sleepwalking through his waking life and daydreaming through the unconscious. Now haunted by a nefarious figure, all Ted wants is a way for things to go back to what they once were. The further away a normal life becomes, the more that everyday life is shown to be everything but.
Join The Narrator on adventures that include a self-declared Messiah, self-help tribes, retail store woes, bathroom reviews, supernatural powers, and a psychiatrist tormented by his own demons.
A small boy was picking his nose in Maplewood, Minnesota. He had just finished eating a delicious bite of Skinny Nut Ice Cream, with part of his face failing to absorb the sustenance. The snack was being sold as a form of healthy dessert at Member$Mart, with people of all ages eating it up. His mind was lost in debate over what to do with the little sample cup left over. He shoved it into a pile of blue jeans in the clothing section.
Two aisles away, a twenty-seven-year-old employee watched this all unfold. His name is Ted. A helpful name tag, pinned to the chest of his standard-issue polo, said so. Ted slipped by several members with practiced ease, in his paid quest of a clean warehouse.
His full name is Teddy Bundy.
Not the serial killer, though everybody asks whether he's related.
He's not.
At Member$Mart (pronounced member smart) there are no customers. There are only members. People join a special club which allows them to buy everything in bulk.
On their first day, employees hear the following mantra:
"Remember: They aren't customers—they are Member$Mart members."
Member$Mart Training Video
This statement features in all three required training videos watched the first day on the job.
Ted failed to remember this and was unable to meet new Member$Mart sign-up quotas at the membership desk. He now picks up soiled trash from the clothing section, throws cardboard boxes into monstrous compacting machines, and navigates aisles with pallet jacks.
On break, Ted washed his hands. The CDC recommends that citizens should scrub with soap for twenty seconds. Ted knew this. He did this diligently. Afterward, this exemplar of a man chose to eat a Polish sausage that he bought for two dollars. What a fine deal.
You may ask yourself why anybody would write a story about such a cookie-cutout of a man. I certainly wouldn't write one.
This story begins to get interesting when, six hours later, his mangled body is in the back of an ambulance. His experience of the accident is a surreal and dreamlike journey.
What kicked this off was the accident, yes, but the other factors were the dreams. Dreams, for Ted, were recognizable only when they were too abstract to have been past events. I could argue for days that dreams are just as important as other experiences in life, since they can be just as memorable as the records your mind makes while you're awake.
One dream Ted had was during the accident itself.
He pulled over, turned the hazard lights on, and grabbed his phone. Mike called. There was a voicemail. Ted was going to get a job offer for a help-desk role, which meant he would be paid twice as much money to sit and be a therapist for computer users across the country. This was a time to rejoice, dance, and drink as soon as he was done driving.
He was along Interstate 694, just north of where it intersects Interstate 94, for those folks heading to get out of Minnesota on Sundays. Liquor stores were closed on Sundays, so Wisconsin provided for those who couldn't wait another day. I don't know, but I think there may be some religion-inspired law that prevented the whole taking-home-of-alcohol-on-Sunday thing.
Wisconsin also ends with the word sin, in case you hadn't noticed.
Heathens.
On this same interstate, a guy Ted went to high school with had killed himself by walking out in front of a semi-truck. It was even near where Ted was hit.
It was late. Midnight. Maybe later. The radio was vibrating, the bass turned up to max. His notebook was in the trunk. Within it? He had written the date, time, and location he needed to be at an hour ago. His phone was out of commission.
He popped the trunk, checked the rearview mirror for cars, and stepped out. He heard lyrics gurgle out from underneath the heavy bass of his car speakers, professing love for big butts.
Just like that, a semi-truck popped into existence.
God must have snapped his fingers. Maybe the devil? Or, who is that Zoroastrian evil being? Mazda? Maiyu? Something like that. I think the Mazda one was evil. Ted drove an old Mazda 6, and it had deep-seated problems.
The semi-truck came to a halt a few inches from his face. He could have kissed the grill and groped the blinding lights. I would have. He felt that tingling sensation of hair standing up on his back, and an electric-trickle creep throughout the rest of his body.
Ted turned back to his car. The music wasn't playing, but the lights were on. He stepped out around the driver's side of the semi-truck and saw pebbles of dirt. Not on the ground, but in the air. They were floating, trapped in motion. He was suddenly struck by a paradox, one that was mentioned by Zeno—maybe Parmenides—to either Plato or Socrates.
This is very important. If Ted could remember, he would tell everyone about this. It described the moment perfectly, and it explained the constant feeling of nausea that Ted experienced most days.
Zeno was convinced that motion is actually an illusion. That which is in locomotion must arrive at the halfway stage before it arrives at the goal, as Aristotle described it. It's called the Dichotomy Paradox. If someone needs to go somewhere, that place can be split up into an infinite number of halfway points. One can never reach one's destination. The Golden Triangle being drawn, without end, in boundless precision.
Film gives the illusion of movement by recording instants in time and then placing them all together to make us believe we really are watching people moving on screen. Ted was watching frozen semi-trucks in the theater of life, placed together in long strips.
Standing out there in the dark, he felt his left eye socket collapse. There was a burbling noise of a phlegmy cough. It was like a man swung a baseball bat into Teddy's head, full of paradox. It was a home run. That ball went completely out of the stadium, with a shattered window in the paid-parking lot.
He stumbled. He stuttered out a scream that was cut off by the pain pulling him to the ground. He was rolling around on the interstate pavement, where the only sounds were his cries and sob-interrupted mumbling. Ted could still see out of his other eye, and he noticed the semi-truck had snapped a little farther down the road. Another frozen picture. He couldn't see the demonic Mazda anywhere.
He stood up, wheezing like an asthmatic. He took a few more steps before feeling his left ankle implode. The Narrator can't think of any good way to describe this, other than a combination of two things:
First, imagine Thor swinging his hammer into Ted's shin, driving it down into his ankle.
Second, envision shattered pieces underneath the skin seemingly slide up Ted's shin as broken glass. Broken pieces.
Ted's friend Carl, back in high school, had once been arm wrestling. Carl won, but the other guy didn't take it well. The loser grabbed Carl's arm, shouted out "Again!" and slammed his arm down across the desk. The elbow shattered, with bone fragments slipping up the arm beneath the skin. Carl needed pins placed in his arm.
Ted let out a noise quite similar to the one Carl made.
He was crawling across the pavement with a mangled leg, looking through one eye. Just a moment before, he had been driving a car. The next, he was in this nightmare. A surrealist animation, painted frame by frame. Reality had split itself.
Ted couldn't crawl any farther. He rolled over on his back. Stared up at the night sky. He made out constellations he had never seen before. Stars flickered to keep themselves in place. His chest began to feel like it was being crushed.
If there was ever a man trapped at the bottom of an elevator shaft, who was crushed by an elevator cab, Ted imagined this was how it would have felt: slow, unstoppable, and nobody can hear you. The people being carried by that box to the first floor would be drinking their coffee, worried about whether their boss might see they were five minutes late to work.
When the crushing stopped, Ted felt himself float off the ground into a numbing pool of air. He levitated across the interstate. He was dead. This was the end.
He felt annoyed.
The sky morphed into a ceiling. The roof of an ambulance was above his head. He thought someone must have found his body and was now ferrying him off to declare his death. To ask his mother if they recognized this disfigured body. Ted, the one-eyed Jack of spades, an ugly corpse ready for a closed-casket funeral.
Flashing lights and supernovas from deep space transitioned into a white room. Ted watched himself as he would in a mirror. Pipes were growing out of his then-shaved head. Eyes rolled back. Blood dripped down his forehead. Over the tip of his nose. Into his mouth. The taste of iron. The vision of solid steel breaking through his skull.
Behind him, sitting at a small table against a bare wall, was a man dressed in a white suit. He was wearing sunglasses with large, rounded, blue lenses. His face had stubble beginning to break the surface.
The man stood up and spoke, "Who is looking at my face?"
Ted was no longer present. He didn't exist in the dream.
The man, standing alone, said, "There is so much vivid color here."
Ted felt his eyelids attempt to open, fighting medical-grade sedation.
The man said, with his voice raised, "You need to be my eyes."
***
Some people have family members listed as emergency contacts. Ted did not.
This is where his good friend comes in: Mike Turnkey, fellow resident of Minnesota, originally hailing from Ohio. He called Ted about getting the new help-desk job. Mike wondered whether Ted would be able to live a normal life again.
Mike was meant to get a sign-on bonus for recommending Ted to recruiters. This was likely not going to happen, given Ted's condition.
Ted had started describing hallucinatory experiences when he became conscious. It was hard to tell how much of it was drug-induced.
Mike wanted to record Ted.
Ted was drugged enough to agree.
***
Ted looked directly at the camera, briefly glimpsed at Mike sitting behind it, and talked.
Ted could not turn off.
Talked. Talked. Talked.
"Are we running?" Ted said, "Good. They say whatever happened was an accident."
It was why he had woken up in a hospital bed, with blurred vision and a numbness like he was floating.
"Yeah, I remember floating into the ambulance." Ted continued, gesturing at his neck, "That semi truck was why I had a tube down my throat, and a machine pumping in oxygen. It was to make sure my lungs were expanding."
Ted had been told something about ARDS—acute respiratory distress syndrome.
"What year is it?" Ted said, with a slight cough. "The year is 2016. I am 27 years old. I'm here right now."
Only about a third of people with ARDS on their medical record end up living through it. The lack of oxygen to the brain can cause memory loss, brain damage, and doctors administering drugs.
Lots and lots of drugs.
Ted's mom, Ellen, was there. She was telling him he'd be fine. She wanted to make sure he was fully aware his dad, Luke, would have been there at the hospital if he hadn't been really busy with work. He worked maintenance at a few apartment complexes.
She said, "He's a manager, you know. So it's really important that he's there. I'm here for you, Teddy, and I love you more than anything."
Ted knew this was code for another acronym in his life: his dad was MIA—missing in action. Most likely he was drunk and passed out in one of the units.
When Ted first gained enough conscious clarity to listen to someone tell him about his condition, a young nurse tried telling him that he had a noncardiogenic pulmonary enema.
He swore that was what she said, in her overly nice Midwestern accent.
It turns out edema means something very different from enema.
Why would anyone throw alien terminology at a disoriented trauma victim? He couldn't stop thinking about his busted car forcing metal up his ass, pinning him up against the steering wheel. That's how he was found, he was told.
At least he wasn't dead, or he'd have both the worst and best obituary ever placed in the Dakota County papers.
What the aftermath of this accident showed him, more than anything, was the amount of useless information he'd taken in over his short lifetime.
Telling the story of his life, following the accident, is like trying to understand a man with Korsakoff syndrome. Every few moments, details merge or new stories branch off in distorted memory.
I, The Narrator, am incapable of telling the story of Ted's life without telling you completely unrelated information. Ted is taken on trips through gravel pits of memory. Everything is an experience. A morning buttering of toast cannot be recalled without his hearing news about slipper thieves and triple homicides.
Ted had become a time traveler, whose vessel was a brain cavity without enough oxygen, unsure of what truly was part of his past or dream.
Nostalgia by Cori H. Spenzich, out May 24th from Story Influx Press, tells the chaotic tale of Ted Bundy (not the one you have in mind) after a bizarre car accident allows him to travel through time during each bout of his newly-gained narcolepsy.
Wearing the influences of Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick proudly on its sleeves, Nostalgia satirizes a somewhat familiar world of 2016, framing the year as if it were a long lost relic, and our intrepid Narrator is filling us in on what we missed. 2016 references, like the first crypto boom, play with a "nostalgia" that doesn't yet exist, making the novel a pre-mature time capsule. Maybe some day.
The Narrator is our constant guide, as reliable as we could hope for, filling in details about the times and places Ted sleeps and bumbles his way through, Minnesota Vikings helmet firmly on his head. Omniscient would be an understatement. The Narrator's jokes have approximately a 10% hit rate, but when those few land, they are good. The rest are usually pretty crass just for the sake of being crass. There are a lot of dick jokes.
There's a "throw everything at the wall, and then keep throwing" approach to the humor in the novel, when in actuality, the comedy is already there. Ted's encounters with cults and vampire self-help is hilarious on its own. The Narrator undermines what is working in the narrative, through dialogue, and through character. Explaining jokes ruins jokes.
Under the surface, there is an inkling in Nostalgia of commentary about the absurdities of the medical system, about living with mental or neurological issues, how downright comical everyone treats you that you might as well be walking around with a football helmet on. These moments are Nostalgia at its best.
The humor and how the novel plays with form might be off-putting to some readers, but the sporadic illustrations after certain chapters (like a light novel) do wonders to flesh out this world. The plot doesn't get going until the halfway mark. The villain and his coterie aren't properly explained.
All of that said, there's something to Nostalgia that draws you to it. Whether its the shrink haunted by demons, the MMO gold-farming roommate, the reference to Sephiroth, the heart at the center of a normal guy cursed with an insane situation after insane situation, for some reason you keep on reading.