We Knew the Glass Man

The following is a selection of print excerpts from John McDaid's upcoming hybrid digital/print project, "We Knew the Glass Man," which builds on and intersects characters from his acclaimed 1993 hypertext novel Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse. "We Knew the Glass Man" comprises scores of short passages, many accompanied by images (digital version), which present multiple possible narratives about the lives of several people who are second-degree acquaintances of the original project's vanished writer.

Readers can experience the interactive hypertext version of this project—built using Twine—via the I/O section of Cream City Review's website (https://uwm.edu/creamcityreview/i-o/).

Author's Introduction:

Hypertext never drove my writing—rather, it was the medium that allowed me to capture the multiplicity ad indeterminacy I experienced when translating ideas into text. The crafting of Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, the hypermedia novel that "Glass Man" calls back to, came out of intellectual explorations in philosophy, physics, and narrative theory. I found myself, some 25 years later, still tussling with many of the same issues, only now a bit farther down the road. I began to think about the "second bounce of the ball" and sought to capture some of that in a fiction. My friend, the playwright Richard Alfredo, had suggested Wallace Stevens' "Asides on the Oboe" as a writing prompt years ago; it took a while to percolate.

–John McDaid

We Knew the Glass Man(Excerpt of an interactive fiction)John G. McDaidIn memoriamFred | Linda | Tavis | Mary | Brian

The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

—Wallace Stevens, "Asides on the Oboe"

Fiction flowed in his veins like blood. He seemed to walk through reality like a matte shot, as if nothing, or only he, were real. Steadicam tracks, motion capture, all manner of industrial lightness and magic come to mind.

Now.

But not then. Not when he was with us—we never noticed. Then, it was day-to-day—one hesitates before saying it—reality. At least for us. Though who knows what it was for him. Gone, now, no way to ask. But I knew him.

The Glass Man.

The beer in front of me tips back down and I look at a hot summer living room: dog-barking backyards and the distant grind of trucks jaking down the hill before the bridge linger in the background. But still, somewhere in my memory is the Winter, and the voices, and him...

________

"Here," he said. "Chop it up here."

Brushing snow from the vinyl roof of a '78 Plymouth Gran Fury, leaning into gravity on the downhill of Clarendon Street, a block up from campus. I unbent the foil (metal Merck origami, I remember thinking twistedly) and began hacking out lines. He leaned back, flakes falling in crazy radians past him, and laughed up at the stormy Syracuse sky. Penny and Claire waited, down where the tar took over from the hill's cobblestones, for us.

In that moment, remembered...

"Jack?"

"Yeah?" Over my shoulder; half a laugh with obsessive slicing—this poor fucker's roof gonna look like Tippi Hedren...

"Promise me you won't forget this."

"Uh...what this?"

"All this. Us. Them. Here. Now. What we're doing. What it feels like from the inside. To be. People forget that."

"Sure, sure..."

"No, really. To be here man. You'll never know this again. To forget, that's what we all think we have to do. You think forgetting is liberation. Free-dom. No. It's the forgetting that drags us loose from this place, this whole place...(he made a gesture that indicated the streetlight, but somehow seemed to take in the hidden night sky and whatever he thought was beyond)...and it will fucking tear you apart."

"Yeah, okay." Shielding snort from the snow, uneasy and spooked, not wanting to follow down this particular rabbit hole right now.

"Jack?" His eyes met mine, as he leans down on the car hood...