An aging couple and their closest friends piece together a life-changing plan from an otherworldly text.
Maggie and Charlie Latecomer, at the beginning of the last third of their lives, love each other but are conflicted over what it means to age well in a youth-oriented society. Forced into early retirement and with grown children in distant cities, they’ve settled into a curbed routine, leaving Charlie restless and longing for more.
When the Latecomers and their friends discover a mystical book of indecipherable logographs, the corporeal world and preternatural world intertwine. They set off on a restorative journey to uncover the secrets of the book that pits them against a potent corporate foe in a struggle for the hearts and minds of woman and men the world over.
A treatise on aging, health, wisdom, and love couched in an adventure, The Latecomers will make readers question the nature of deep relationships and the fabric of modern society.
THE LATECOMERS
© 2020 Rich Marcello
© 2020 Rich Marcello
GROUND
Hello. You’ve reached Charlie Latecomer. I’m away now, probably
spending time with my lovely wife, Maggie. Please leave your name and number so
we soon can have a deep conversation about the meaning of life.
I hung up my phone and smiled. Soon after, I got down on my hands and
knees and began digging. The dirt, rich and fertile, scooped out easier than
expected. A few inches down, I exposed a circular metal door resembling a
submarine hatch. I opened it.
Stale air rose out of the hole. A wooden ladder extended down into
cobwebs thick enough to obscure what was below. I secured a nearby branch the
size of a cane, and using the branch to clear the way, descended into the
opening. At the bottom of the ladder, a long passageway, high enough to walk
upright in, extended down at a steep angle. The walls of the passageway, solid
red stone, were covered with logographs and lit by bare lights. I descended
flight after flight of stairs, taking in the logographs on the wall, as
beautiful in stone.
At the bottom of the stairs, two thousand steps and three hundred
logographs later, a steel-reinforced door impeded my progress. I studied it for
a time, running my hand over the metal, looking for a way in until,
unexpectedly, the door slid open. A rush of air flowed over me with the same
intoxicating ambrosial scent I'd experienced earlier in front of the cave
painting. As soon as I entered, the door closed behind me.
The cavern, as big as the entire lake about it, with naturally
illuminated ceilings probably two hundred feet high, housed thousands of
plants. The plants directly in front of me, five feet tall and half as wide,
with seeds the size of chestnuts, were vibrant and full of the same colors I'd
seen in the cave animation. I went over to a plant and tasted a leaf. Above me,
the entire ceiling glowed in pulses, not only generating light but heat, enough
to maintain the cavern as an underground grow room.
I heard machines in the distance. As I moved through the plants toward
them, a sense of well-being infused each step I took, and despite the
uncertainty of what was ahead, I knew I’d found ground again.
PART I — MOAIS & ELDERS
IN A SILENT WAY
Maggie
Charlie, hands resting on his hips, silver hair making art in a gentle
breeze, naked except for the guitar strapped to his back, waded off into the
ocean, staring at something in the distance I couldn't make out. Maybe a
longship or an island or a woman? Tattooed on his free shoulder, an oversized
pair of sympathetic eyes weighed what he'd left behind. Above him, the colorless
sky propped up mostly gentle clouds, one shaped like a sheltering hand, another
like the priest's altar, and a third like Sabina's rope. Below him, the water,
brain- like, surfaced with ever-moving sulci and gyri, welcomed Charlie as he
fell into himself again, maybe for a final time.
"Maggie, it's time," he said, fully dressed, from the doorway
of my studio. "Okay. Be right there." I glanced at the digital. Noon.
The man's acute awareness of time pulled at me for a moment, but Charlie's Moai
pulled me back. Moai, my lovely Okinawan word, defined then as a circle of
people who purposefully met up and looked out for one another. Ours contained
the two of us, though Charlie resisted such a small configuration. Although I
had most of the basic elements of the painting roughed out, I still wasn't
clear on the colors. Bright or subdued? Variants of a single color or widely
varied? Sharply contrasted or melded? The colors would come later.
On my way to wash-up, I stopped in front of the other pieces in the
series, all painted over the previous eighteen months, all lined up and mounted
on the wall, all centered around Charlie. In the first, Perfect Ass, he lay
mostly naked on his stomach on our bed, sporting only his
I-can-talk-you-into-anything smile, fully aware of his power. Next up, on a
walkabout in the Outback, an aboriginal elder at his side, wearing nothing but
his favorite Wigens Longshoreman's Cap, Charlie cast about for tribal wisdom.
I'd named that one Sunscreen. Third, in How to Avoid a Crush, riding shotgun
down a rock slide next to Jenna and wearing only a pair of paisley-colored
cowboy boots, Charlie hunted for a safe way off. Fourth, and my favorite, The
Big Swirl had him sitting naked in a lounge chair, wearing a pair of
extra-large Ray-Bans, contemplating the event horizon of a black hole. Fifth, a
blank space waited patiently for the last in the series, the finished Charlie's
Moai. Eighteen months earlier, when Charlie had posed for the first, Perfect
Ass, I'd felt relieved I hadn't known him when he was young. He would have been
too much. But that morning, in Moai, too little of him connected.
As I washed my hands, the ever-changing, timeless, warm water streamed
into the sink and held me. Painting full time had been good for me, as building
things had been good for Charlie, in part because we needed time alone each day
for our time together to be generative. I closed the faucet, dried off, and
examined both sides of my hands and
forearms. I would scrub off a few specks of blue later.
In the mirror, I caught myself. I was still okay. More wrinkles and
gray, yes, but okay. On most date nights, I cleaned up pretty well, and on most
days, I smiled and laughed often, happy simply to spend my time with Charlie.
For twenty years, we'd been good together. Though it had been harder after our
careers had ended. Had we reinvented ourselves as artists, as I liked to say,
or had we been forced into early retirement, as Charlie often claimed? I did
like to paint, and Charlie did like to make stuff — furniture, wooden
sculptures, guitars — but for over a year, I'd often thought he missed his old
life. Or something. Not that many years earlier, before the financial crash,
we'd been on a different path. I thrived as a C-level executive at a big pharma
company, and Charlie acted as a mid- level manager at a mid-sized company, but
like death-in-twos in true-love marriages, we'd lost our jobs within a month of
each other.
Did Charlie honestly miss his old life? Or as a Latecomer in more than
name, did he long for a new life, one we hadn't fully created, our rightful
one? All I knew was that I was okay. Maggie Latecomer — wife, lover, best
friend, creator — that was who I was. If we'd finished out our lives in our
Northampton house, in love, doing retirement art, I would have remained more
than fulfilled.
I stopped at my studio window and surveyed the yard. Charlie had
finished his chores early. The annuals, freshly planted, filled the perimeter
with reds, yellows, and oranges. Four cords of wood we would need for the
winter had been expertly stacked in squares next to the shed. The soil in the
garden, tilled and organic, held new vegetable plants. We planned to sell the
extra tomatoes, peppers, and corn at the farmer's market in the fall.
Our small Northampton cape suited us. I was thankful it was well
outside the city, off the beaten path, and modest, except for the bathroom and
the bookend studios we'd added on, one for Charlie's making stuff and the one
for my painting. Years earlier and right before we got married, we'd built the
house together on the piece of land where I'd first sketched Charlie, the one
where he discovered love wasn't always stillborn.
Our Northampton house was not unlike our summer house in Nova Scotia, a
house Charlie had summered in for much longer than I'd known him. Bigger, yes,
but as modest. Charlie's thing for Nova Scotia was as strong as ever, because
of some mystical balancing of rugged beauty and angst, he said, though I
thought it was mostly angst. That, and the transplanted Nordic folks. Charlie
loved everything Nordic, from the Vikings to the myths to the goddesses. I
didn't mind because I too had a bit of Nordic goddess in me, or as Charlie
liked to say, many Nordic goddesses. Sometimes Freya, a goddess with endless
strengths, helped me when Charlie needed balancing, especially when he got lost
in an ideal, the past, or a mind rift. After the previous summer's difficult
balancing on Flogo Island, a summer in which he'd come dangerously close to
sinking back into the ocean, the same ocean I longed to capture in Charlie's
Moai, he'd told me how his sadness had calmed when he found me again. Though
what he'd really found were the idealized parts of me, the ones reminiscent of
Freya.
On the way outside, I entered our main hallway, its walls covered with
framed photos of our children, awards we'd won during our careers, a photo of
the first painting I'd sold,
another of Charlie's first guitar. There were numerous photos taken
when I was a young activist endlessly protesting for the Equal Rights
Amendment, sensible gun control, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As I always did when passing through the hallway, I brought three fingers to my
lips, kissed them, and then touched one of the activist photos. On our patio, as
the twelve-thirty sun threatened to break a sweat on my forehead, Charlie
towered over the table, waiting for me with his hands in his jean pockets. When
I reached him, I gave him a quick, moist peck on the lips and took my seat
under the canopy. He served me my favorite salad of steak tips, quinoa, and
greens and filled my glass from a pitcher of fresh ice-cold lemonade he'd made
to help combat the heat. As I pressed lemonade-coated ice cubes under my tongue
to cool off, I glanced over at the wall clock to confirm the time.
"How was your morning?" he said. "Slow. Still working on
the moai canvas. Yours?" "Good. I finished the oak table."
"We can use the money." "I know." I glanced at the clock
again. Charlie didn't know the exact moment when he was born, so each of our
twenty years together I'd wished him Happy Birthday at a different time of day.
Both hands on the table, I tapped in unison as I counted down from ten.
"Happy birthday, my love," I said. "Sixty years
old!" Charlie smiled. "Shall we have the cake with lunch or
tonight?" "Tonight. Midday and ice cream don't go well
together." I smiled in his favorite way. "How about, instead, we cool
off after lunch?" "I'd love to," he said. We ate in spurts,
talking in between bites, often pausing to let each other's thoughts sink in or
to drift off in search of a new train. In a Silent Way played in the
background, the first of Miles' electric albums, a perfect melding of sonata
form and fusion.
Train one carried our finances. Neither of us was making enough money
through our art to cover basic expenses, and as a result, we were running
through our modest savings at an alarming rate. To help, Charlie agreed to
build more lucrative high-end guitars, and I agreed, after I finished Charlie's
Moai, to paint easier-to-reel-off-and-sell Berkshire Mountains landscapes.
Train two carried our children. Of concern to me and delight to
Charlie, my twin sons, both living close to their father, both recent
university graduates, had entered their wandering phase, a phase filled with
too much alcohol, pot, and casual sex. Charlie's daughter lived near her mom,
ran a burgeoning alternative medical practice, and played house with a guy I
liked and whom Charlie referred to as “the Ken doll.” We missed our children,
spoke of them often, and sometimes wished careers, school, and divorce hadn't
carried them far away from us. We would have welcomed them into our moai if it
were solely up to us.
Train three carried our health. Overall, by accepted standards, we were
in fairly good
shape for our ages, but we spoke of exercising more, dropping pounds,
and going off our meds, as we often had the previous year. We even flirted with
going the holistic medicine route and trusting our wellness to plants, herbs,
and ancient practices — something I'd never even fathomed given my corporate
background.
Though long-standing topics, the fresh words, ideas, and laughter
flowed like good jazz, like the album playing, like my other loves: Mingus,
Coltrane, and Davis. I was thankful our talks had often been effortless,
silver-tongued, indelible, improvised. Talking and sex; sex and talking; they'd
edged our relationship from the start. Once, Charlie compared us to camels who
had stored up millions of gallons of love in preparation for our time together
in the desert of age. Desert and all, I'd resonated with that thought because,
for the most part, it had turned out to be true. For me, our Northampton life,
in our moai of two, exemplified life at its best, a life filled with love, with
self-expression, with presence. Wasn't that everyone's dream of gracefully
growing old? Still, sometimes in the middle of the night, I woke and watched
Charlie sleep. Invariably, the restlessness on his face suggested our last act
would be built from more than wood and paint, more than Northampton, more than
us. After we cleared the table and went inside, I gently took Charlie's
hand. Like young lovers, we ping-ponged our way off the hallway walls
toward the bathroom, him pushing me up against one wall, kissing me
shallow-deep, the way I liked it, me pushing him up against the opposite wall,
slipping my hand down over his stomach, over his already-erect penis, kissing
him shallow-deep, the way he liked it. He tasted like lemons. At the end of the
hallway, I smiled at the tilted photo frames.
In the bathroom, Charlie turned on the shower. I glanced over at the
vanity and took in our row of amber bottles full of chemicals for high blood
pressure, for high cholesterol, for high blood sugar, for depression — all
prescribed within the last few years. I shook my head. How could we make love
like we were in our prime and, at the same time, need so many drugs? The drugs
had crept up on us.
As we slipped out of our clothes, the mirror fogged over our extra
pounds, mine from menopause, his from love of food. I took Charlie's hand, and
we entered the shower together. The shower, one of those oversized
double-rainspout ones sometimes seen in movies, walled with artistic,
eight-inch square tiles a friend of mine had made for us as a housewarming
gift, centered the bathroom. Each tile was adorned with abstract carvings
Native American elders might have scratched on a cave wall long before the
fall, and when combined into a mural, gave one a sense of a lost way of life. Years
earlier, the first time Charlie and I made love in our shower, we held each
other under the same spout as rain sheltered our bodies. Afterward, the water
still running, Charlie began to sob, as if he needed the water to cover him so
I could see and not see. I was thirty-five at the time. Back then, Charlie
liked to tell people he was the same age.
Charlie lathered his hands with my favorite rose-and-cinnamon- scented
soap. With slow circular movements, he washed my shoulders as I rested my hands
on the tiles. From there, he glided down my body, not missing an inch of me.
Lower back. Buttocks. Hamstrings. Calves. Feet. Then he turned me around and
before he worked the front,
kissed each eyelid, my lips, each side of my neck. With each stroke and
kiss, I took a step closer to release.
When my turn came, first I shampooed and fingertip massaged his hair
using a technique he loved almost as much as sex — slow, firm, circular
movements, clockwise, counterclockwise, as though I was dialing knobs up and
down. The hair on Charlie's head had fully grayed over the year, along with the
hair on his body. He wasn't fond of the change, but I loved gray even more than
gray-black.
As we escalated under Charlie's spout, a special gentleness and a
mastery guided his geometric strokes, dabs, and caresses, not unlike how I
imagine Klimt painted The Kiss, and an intensity, too, as if he would never
forget. I met him halfway, with gentleness and mastery, and for a few moments
lost myself in what we had created in the shower, in our bed, in every part of
our home. It was a work of art.
It didn't take either of us long. When we left the shower, Charlie
reached for an oversized white towel and slowly dried me, beginning with my
hair and working his way down. I drifted back to our first year in the house,
during another drying, when I'd asked Charlie what we should master in the last
phase of our lives. He'd signaled with his favorite contemplative look, one
he'd often used, one suggestive of searching for the perfect answer. Then he
dropped the towel to the floor, pulled me close, my back against his chest, and
while both of us were looking into the full- wall mirror, he slicked my wet
hair front to back, and said, "This."
If we'd snapped a picture every year of the defining moment, the one
capturing the mood of the time with absolute certainty, if we could somehow
have gone back to our start and studied all the snapshots together, as augurs
of a sort, would those photos have been enough to navigate twenty, thirty,
forty years together?
Both dry, we slipped into our bathrobes and stood in front of the
mirror. Charlie rested his hands on my shoulders and softly kissed the crown of
my head. His reflection was calm, at peace, and, even though I knew the peace
was ephemeral, it pulled me in.
"Deep in thought?" I asked. "Yes, though I'm not ready
to talk about it." "You sure you want to wait?" Charlie kissed
my crown again as his hands tightened a little over my shoulders. The
tightening, one of his tells last triggered when he'd lost his job, signaled he
had something difficult to discuss, a topic we would need to work through
together; I speculated an add-on to our earlier discussions about money.
"I want to leave for Nova Scotia soon," he said. "That
would be a welcome change for us. Pick a date." "I need to go by
myself this time." "How come?" Charlie looked away from the
mirror. "What's wrong?" "I've made a decision." "Tell
me, love," I said.
With a resigned look on his face, one I'd never seen before, one that
made me wonder if I'd been right about his tell, Charlie slid his hands off my
shoulders and rested them at his sides, only to return them a short time later,
hands trembling.
"Maybe it would be better if we talked more tonight," he
said. "That bad?" Charlie didn't answer. "You're scaring me,
Charlie." "I'm sorry." "Remember, radical honesty in the
moment is our rule," I said. I crossed my arms over my chest and placed
both of my hands on top of his. With my index fingers, I caressed the top of
his wrists, hoping I might calm him. He feigned a smile, and then, as if he
were still posing for Charlie's Moai, went almost breathless. A thought —
nothing will ever be the same again — dug until firmly planted in my mind. With
all my strength, I struggled to rip it out.
Charlie looked down at the floor for what seemed like a long time. When
his reflection came back to me, in a whisper he said, "I'm leaving . . .
here . . . I'm leaving . . . you."
"No." I said no a few more times, I think, until my breath
caught, the air trapped inside my chest waiting for Charlie's mirrored image to
recant. When it didn't, I pulled away and turned toward him to see if the
mirror had lied, only to backtrack until I was leaning against the mirror,
hands hard pressed. I homed in on the black-and-white floor tiles, some
hairline-cracked.
"Why?" I asked. "There's something I've lost."
"What?" "I don't know. I'm so sorry." "But we always
work through things together . . . Can't we do it this time?" "I
don't think so." "Why?" "I don't see them in you
anymore." "I never thought — " How had he lost sight of the
goddesses? Had I done something wrong? Had we run our course? When we'd
committed to each other years earlier, neither one of us believed in forever.
Instead, we'd focused on every day, convinced of the power of stringing them
together. But what happened after your husband no longer saw the goddesses in
you, after the love of your life stopped stringing?
I took a deep breath. Another. I tried to focus on the out-breath for
relaxation as I'd been taught. Telling me was better than not, right? That had
been our agreement after the Wave of Incidents. Radical honesty, no matter what
the fallout. Besides, leaving was not new information; the canvases had warned
me. At least, one way or another, we would get to the bottom of his
restlessness, and after a short time, life would return to normal. Yes, normal.
I raised my head. Charlie met me with the kindest face, the same one
that in the past had signaled green, had signaled that we were workable, had
signaled we wouldn't be out of sync for long, except his cheeks were stained
red. I had this strong urge to marshal him back into the shower, to scrub his
face white with sea-salt soap, but instead, I asked, "Have we run our
course?"
Charlie took a step toward me and softly clasped my hands, circling his
thumbs on my palms as he often did in gentler moments. Even after his news, I
went thoughtless at his touch for an instant. Then I uncuffed my hands and slid
them into my bathrobe pockets.
"I don't know," he said. "You don't know?"
"I'm not trying to hurt you, Maggie, but I have to work through this
alone." "Will you be alone?" Charlie discovered the bathroom
floor again. I traced a crack, long and jagged, zig- zagging across two tiles.
Was it possible he had met someone else? How would that happen without me
knowing? Was she younger? Nordic? Weren't we too old for any romantic drama?
When Charlie found me again, the deepest sadness draped his face.
"I don't know if I'll be alone." "Oh. Do you know who
might join you?" "No." "Are you sure?"
"Yes." I cycled through the women he knew in town. Judy. Michelle.
Sienna. None of them were strong enough to be more than good friends. In Nova
Scotia, none of our island acquaintances were strong enough, either. Linnéa.
Ebba. Sanna. No, I believed him. I wanted to. I had to. Charlie would work
through things as fast as he could, and then he would come home.
"When are you coming back?" "I don't know."
"Why would you make love to me and then tell me this?" "Because
I do love you." I studied his face. "I do," he said. "I
didn't plan to tell you until tonight, but I couldn't keep it in any
longer." "You planned to tell me on your birthday over cake?"
"Why don't we go to the living room and talk more? I'll make more
lemonade." "Fuck lemonade." A dry-ice cold shiver stabbed me
from the inside out. Fuck Nova Scotia, fuck Charlie and his fucking
restlessness, fuck all young, unnamed, of-Nordic-descent women. Was this how
Charlie planned to master our relationship? And what about the time we'd
brought in young American Jenna? Hadn't she been enough? But none of the fucks
beyond lemonade surfaced, and instead, we dressed in silence. I had lived long
enough to know what was underneath all the fucking was a broken place, and
although I couldn't name it, that day its size, its weight was overwhelming and
unlike anything I'd experienced, as
though the collective loss of all humanity had been stored in my chest.
On the way back to my studio, Charlie stopped and tried to place his
arms around me, but I swatted them down. No, I didn't want more lemonade-talk.
No, I didn't want touch. Yes, I needed to be alone, silent, with paint.
Reluctantly, Charlie nodded like he had heard my no-no-yes, then haltingly
backpedaled away down the hallway, a moment later disappearing behind his
studio door.
In my studio, I turned on In a Silent Way, from the beginning. Miles's
trumpet sounded fuller, with each melodic phrase sweet and sad, old and new,
full of love and loss. As he played, I worked at a feverish pace, adding bright
colors to the canvas. The altar took on orange. The rope sprouted Picasso-blue
hearts. Charlie donned a red bathing suit. So, what was off in the distance was
not an island or a longboat.
About the Book
The Latecomers by Rich MarcelloSeries
n/a; standalone
Genre
Adult
Literary Fiction
Magical Realism
Publisher
Moonshine Cove Publishing
Publication Date
January 19, 2020
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Tour Wide Giveaway
To celebrate the release of THE LATECOMERS by Rich Marcello, we're giving away a paperback copy of his book The Beauty of the Fall to one lucky winner!
GIVEAWAY TERMS & CONDITIONS: Open US shipping addresses only. One winner will receive a paperback copy of The Beauty of the Fall by Rich Marcello. This giveaway is administered by Pure Textuality PR on behalf of Rich Marcello. Giveaway ends 4/30/2020 @ 11:59pm EST. CLICK HERE TO ENTER!
About the Author
RICH MARCELLO is the author of four novels, The Color of Home, The Big Wide Calm, and The Beauty of the Fall, The Latecomers, and the poetry collection, The Long Body That Connects Us All. He also teaches creative writing at Seven Bridges’ Writer Collaborative. Previously, he enjoyed a successful career as a technology executive, managing several multi-billion dollar businesses for Fortune 500 companies.
As anyone who has read Rich’s work can tell you, his books deal with life’s big questions: love, loss, creativity, community, aging, self-discovery. His novels are rich with characters and ideas, crafted by a natural storyteller, with the eye and the ear of a poet. For Rich, writing and art making is about connection, or as he says, about making a difference to a least one other person in the world, something he has clearly achieved many times over, both as an artist, a mentor, and a teacher.
Rich lives in Massachusetts with his family. He is currently working on his fifth and sixth novels, Cenotaphs and In the Seat of the Eddas.
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