The Secret Life of Hamel: January 2010 Posts (plus 4 posts from February)

She knew it was an obsession, but the need to recollect and review each moment of the day before he’d vanished had grown stronger. Was it possible that she’d missed something — a sentence, a gesture — that might have foreshadowed her husband’s disappearance?

Hamel’s wife was no longer certain of her feelings about Hamel’s disappearance. Once she’d believed, fervently, that Hamel had been a victim of other people, other forces. Now she was no longer sure. If something bad had happened to her husband, wouldn’t someone have discovered something by now?

Hamel’s wife looked up the street to see if the bus was coming. There was nothing in sight.

She wondered if that was how she was going to spend the rest of her life, looking in one direction, then another, for some signs of her missing husband, and never finding any. Hamel’s wife wrapped her coat around herself more tightly and continued to wait for her bus.

CHAPTER FOUR: 22 YEARS, 5 MONTHS, 21 DAYS BEFORE HAMEL DISAPPEARED

The weather, as Hamel trudged from dormitory to library, was colder, grayer, and even more dismal than all of the other cold, gray and dismal days since the month of February had begun. Other students complained about it incessantly, reminding each other in whining voices how long it had been since the campus had enjoyed a day with sunshine. Hamel thought himself superior to them: for some reason, the cold and damp did not seem to affect him, and the grayness of the skies often matched his outlook on the life he was living as a student, flat and monochromatic.

Hamel often wondered about other students in classes or the dorms. They seemed so enthusiastic about so many things: basketball games and concerts and parties, even activities like food drives and tutoring programs and volunteer efforts. Hamel did some of those things himself, had recently attended a concert with a group of five others from his dorm floor, and had gone to his first basketball game only two weeks prior.

He had never participated in volunteer activities of any kind; as a student, he had plenty of time to do so, but never the inclination. Why spend a Saturday clearing an abandoned lot for the neighborhood? Wasn’t that the city’s job?

It wasn’t a question of time: Hamel was honest enough with himself to admit that he just did not care. The good thing about being a student is that you had an automatic excuse for side-stepping whatever you wanted to avoid: Sorry, I’d like to, but I’ve got this paper I’m working on. Sometimes, of course, the excuse was the reality.

This was clearly Hamel’s challenge as he neared the library. The paper that he’d begun so confidently weeks ago on the topic of Peak Experiences needed to be completed. But since his last visit to the library, when he’d been disappointed by the absence of the dark-haired librarian, Hamel had lost interest in the paper. Now, like so many of his academic endeavors, the paper had become
a burden.

But something had to be turned in. And that meant a dull and painful evening ahead, frustrating hours in the library followed by the tedious job of typing in his dormitory’s study lounge. Perhaps he would finish by 3am; perhaps not. At this point, Hamel was approaching the assignment with the attitude of a person trying to paint a very large room. The best way to do it was to avoid looking at the unpainted surfaces. Just concentrate on what was immediately in front of him.

In Hamel’s case, it was an almost blank page with a paradoxical heading: Peak Experiences in Everyday Life. When he’d first started to work on his paper,
Hamel was sure that this section would be the heart of it, and that he would be able to write lots, and well, from his personal observations of the people around him on the campus.

Hamel considered himself to be a keen, astute eyewitness to the human condition as it played itself out around him. Much more than an onlooker, way past a casual bystander, Hamel believed that he possessed a special gift for discerning the nuances of human behavior. It was the biggest reason why the few minutes spent with the pretty librarian frustrated him so much. He thought

A Full Year of Posts -- Now What?

Today I posted the Feb 4 tweet to The Secret Life of Hamel, a novel on Twitter. So a milestone of silliness has been achieved: one year of posts (except for six or seven days which I would claim were due to writer's block except that the idea of a block so massive it could obstruct 140 characters is ridiculous).

Anyway: a break is needed. Time to assess what got writ (I have very low expectations that much, if any, could be salvaged into real fiction.) I learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and really appreciated the fact that there were three or four people whose last names are not Diccicco who took the time to read some of it.

I will post to this blog all of the January tweets -- and the four tweets from February. And then we'll go on hiatus.

The Secret Life of Hamel: December 2009 Posts

she asked. “Who can give me some information about my husband’s death?” The man in the dark suit spoke immediately. “For the record, m’am, we do not know for sure if this man,” he gestured slightly with his head, “is your husband.”

He paused, and then spoke quickly and officially. “One of our officers was on foot patrol near City Park last night. He saw a vehicle that appeared to be abandoned: one of the car doors was left open. He went to investigate and found this man,” again, a gesture of the head toward the covered body, lying beside the vehicle, not breathing.He called for back-up immediately, and tried to administer some emergency medical treatments, but there was no response.”

As he spoke, Hamel’s wife fixed her gaze on the sheet covering the body in front of her, steeling herself for the moment that was to come.

The man in the dark suit gestured to the man in the blue scrubs who moved to the head of the table and gathered the edge of the covering sheet. “M’am,” said the man in the dark suit, “I’m sorry, but I must ask you officially, is this your husband?”

Hamel’s wife fixed her gaze, not blinking, as the sheet was folded back. She stared into the face of a stranger.

“It’s not . . . ” she hesitated, her voice shaking slightly. “It’s not Hamel. It’s not my husband.”

Hamel’s wife looked around at the men, expecting somehow that they would share in her emotion. They did not. She glanced back again to the cold face before her, saw the resemblance between this man and her husband, understood how such a mistake could be made. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, “it’s not Hamel.”

She did not know what else to say, and almost expected that the man in the blue suit would challenge her, ask her to look again, ask her if she was sure.

He did not. The three men glanced at each other. The man in scrubs replaced the sheet. Then the man in the blue suit apologized for taking up her time. Followed by the man with the Coroner Office badge saying, “I’ll walk you to the lobby, m’am.” He turned, took her elbow, started to steer her toward the door.

Hamel’s wife pulled away, politely, and looked directly at the man in the blue suit. “Excuse me, please. What about Hamel? What about my husband?”

She knew her question made no sense at all: how could this misidentified dead man in front of her provide information to authorities about her husband gone missing?

“It’s been three months,” she said evenly, “and I know nothing. Nothing at all. People don’t just disappear. They leave a trail. Some kind of a trail. Clues. Something . . . ”

Hamel’s wife heard her own voice trail off into a murmur. The helpless feelings
of the past three months returned, full force. She wanted to be challenging but she simply felt defeated. Over the past thirteen weeks, she had come to believe one thing: The system was the system and it did not give a fig about a middle-aged woman whose husband was missing.

The man in the blue suit started to say something, but Hamel’s wife overrode him. “Please,” she said, “if all you are going to do is tell me that your department is still actively working on finding out what happened to Hamel – and that you will call me with new information the minute you learn it, well, don’t bother.” She spoke bitterly: “I don’t believe you.”

Hamel’s wife took one more look at the sheet covered body, felt a surge of despair course through her. Then she steeled herself, walked to the door and spoke over her shoulder without looking back. “I can find my own way, thank you.” She did not expect a response and she received none.

Standing outside the hospital at the bus stop, Hamel’s wife thought again about the last day she’d seen her husband.