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Unexpectedly, Milo: A Novel - Softcover

Dicks, Matthew

 
9780307592309: Unexpectedly, Milo: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307592308 ISBN 13: 9780307592309
Verlag: Crown, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

 
The author of SOMETHING MISSING returns with another hilarious and sneakily profound tale about a man whose behavior is truly odd, but also oddly relatable.
 
 
Milo Slade, a thirty-three year old home healthcare aide, is witnessing the rapid dissolution of his three-year marriage to a polished, high-powered attorney named Christine. Though Milo doesn't quite know the root of his marital problems, he inevitably blames himself, or more specifically, he faults the demands his obsessive compulsive personality place upon him--the need to open a jar of Smuckers grape jelly or sing 99 Luftballons in front of an audience, to name just a couple.
 
Yet Christine is still none the wiser about these inexplicable quirks as Milo has painstakingly hidden them from her and everyone else for years. No one knows the true--and in his mind more insidious--Milo, and such is the root of his profound loneliness, especially now that he and Christine are living apart during a trial separation.
 
Then one day Milo stumbles across a video camera and tapes, left behind in a park. He watches the first tape, which is a heartfelt confessional by a young woman who begins to reveal her secrets, starting small at first, and finally revealing that she blames herself for a tragic death of a friend. But not all the details add up and Milo is struck with the urge to free the sweet confessor from her guilt. He is, after all, an expert in keeping secrets…
 
In typical screwball fashion, Milo sets out on a cross-country journey to crack the case, but quickly gets sidetracked as his un-ignorable demands call. But it is during these sidetracks that the true meaning of his adventure takes shape. Milo is weird, but as he discovers, so is everyone else. UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO is a humorous and touching novel about finding oneself, embracing the journey, and, unexpectedly, love.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matthew Dicks, who is not one for long, crafted sentences, preferring the stylings of Vonnegut over those of Saramago, is an author whose works, to date, include the novels Something Missing and Unexpectedly Milo; a successful blog and a number of Op Ed pieces, all of which, at some level or another, tend to examine the outcomes of the quirky and/or rebellious individual when forced up against staid society; however, to say that he is an author is an understatement (or possibly an overstatement, since he devised a contest to compose this author bio and then chose the ramblings of a theoretical biophysicist as the winning entry), for this husband and father from Newington, CT, who has faced a number of near-death experiences, lived in his car, and been tried for a crime that he did not commit, is also an acclaimed elementary teacher who has received the Teacher of the Year Award, is the co-owner of a DJ business, and still wishes that he could beat some of his friends at golf.

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prologue

The moment that Milo Slade had attempted to avoid for nearly his entire life finally arrived under the sodium glow of a parking lot florescent at a Burger King just south of Washington, D.C., along Interstate 95. His wife, Christine, about three hundred miles north of his position, was completely unaware of his pres­ent location. Though his sudden and unexplained disappearance may have been a cause of concern for her just one week ago, Milo suspected that it was significantly less so now.
Things had changed so much in such a short period of time.
The camera and the tapes, the objects that had ultimately led him to this moment, were also back in Connecticut, left there purposely lest he be unable to stop himself from watching. These items had been in his possession for less than two weeks, and he felt guilty enough for what he had seen already.
It was just after seven P.M., and his passenger and fellow trav­eler had expressed the need to use a restroom. Though Milo also needed to urinate, he decided to forgo nature’s call and use the time alone to access some of the jars of jelly from the trunk of the Honda in order to satisfy one of the mounting demands making rational thought almost impossible. Almost an hour ago, Milo had been forced to complain to his companion about the overwhelm­ing headache that had been plaguing him ever since the first of these demands had taken shape in his mind. Though he was loath to admit to the suffering, always wanting to keep every aspect of the demands as secretive as possible, he felt he needed to in order to limit the conversation in the car and allow him to direct all of his mental energy to the road ahead. An offer had been made to take the wheel, as he knew it would, but Milo knew that the pressure would only increase if he  were sitting in a passenger seat with nothing on which to direct his attention. With each passing mile, the demands had grown stronger and louder, though that wasn’t quite right since they issued no actual sound. Instead, each inex­plicable demand blazed away in his mind like a small sun, a silent, unstoppable imperative that consumed all thought and reason. And as they did so, the confines of the Honda had seemed to be­come smaller and smaller. He had grown fidgety, his arms and legs feeling almost electrified. Even in the limited space of the driver’s seat, he was unable to sit still. The fillings in his teeth had begun to ache. He was perspiring profusely. His brain felt as if it were trapped in an  ever- tightening vise.
The physical toll of the demands had never been so terrible.
He had tried switching the Honda’s cruise control on and off in an effort to release some of the pressure on his mind and body but found no relief. He had tried adjusting the power mirrors, and still no effect. He had pretended to accidentally lock and unlock the doors in hopes that the pop of the power locks might afford some reprieve, but it had not. Finally, he had risked snapping and unsnapping his jeans, just once, but even this had offered little in the way of respite. The demands  were too many and too loud for his usual delaying strategies to work. There  were four of them now, a  never-before- seen number, pressing on one another like a crowd battling its way to a locked exit door in the middle of a fire.
The demand to open those jars of jelly.
The demand to replace the stale air in the Honda’s tires with fresh air.
 
The demand to bowl a strike.
The demand to sing “99 Luftballons” to anyone who would listen.
He expected others to follow shortly, as the mounting pres­sure would undoubtedly force new and  ever- more- challenging demands to the surface. Weebles and ice cubes and drink boxes and those goddamn words would surely follow, and maybe even some new demands not currently found in his repertoire. He wondered how much more of this he could take.
In short, Milo was a man slowly losing his mind.
But he hoped that the jars of jelly would help. The twisting of the lid, the satisfying pop of the pressure seal, and the subse­quent, almost imperceptible yet supremely powerful hiss might alleviate enough of the building pressure to allow him to con­tinue his journey.
As he feared, two jars had not been enough. He had moved a total of nine from the trunk to the front seat, the remains of his stash, and though he would’ve liked to have found the time to conceal them under his seat, away from the prying eyes of his passenger, he had not. Delaying their opening for even a second had become impossible.
Milo was in the midst of opening his fifth jar, having lost all track of time in the euphoric pop of the pressure seals, when the passenger door opened, the interior light came on, and the woman attempted to reenter the Honda. She paused for a mo­ment, staring at the four opened jars of Smucker’s grape jelly (Milo’s preferred brand for satisfying this demand) on her seat, their lids stacked neatly in a rectangular space in the console, be­fore asking, “Uh... what’s this?”
Milo was sitting behind the wheel, a jar of jelly in his hand and four more sealed jars in his lap. His left hand wrapped tightly around the jar and his right gripped the lid, ready to turn. For a moment, he considered lying to the woman. After all, he’d
 
spent the last three years of marriage, and two years of courtship before that, concealing these demands from his wife. His parents and even his friends  were equally unaware, even though they consumed an enormous portion of his life. And even with the mounting pressure, greater than any he had felt before, he was still filled with shame of this secret part of him. Perhaps he could invent a story about contaminated jars of Smucker’s and the desire for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The story would have been ridiculous (least of all because he had no bread), but the truth, he knew, would be infinitely more so. Still, he might have tried to offer up a plausible explanation for the jars of jelly strewn about the car, but it was because he was about to open the fifth jar, and because he knew that he would need at least a couple more in order to silence the demand, that Milo fi­nally decided to forgo the lies. Though it might have eventually proven impossible, perhaps he would have been able to put off the demands a little while longer, maybe long enough to find a hotel room and satisfy enough of them to make it back to Con­necticut safely. But now that he was in the midst of satisfaction— had begun the pro cess of release— he knew that there was no stopping. He could not simply toss the remaining jars into the backseat and drive on as if nothing  were wrong. And from the look on the woman’s face as she placed the open jars on the floor, settled in to her seat, and turned to face him, it  would’ve been impossible for her to ignore the jars as well.
The time for secrets had finally come to an end.
“Just give me a minute and I’ll explain everything,” Milo said, then turned the lid on the jar, absorbed the satisfying pop of the pressure seal, and sighed heavily.
 
 
chapter 1
When he first spotted the video camera sitting on the end of the park bench beneath the dying elm, Milo didn’t take it. He had wanted to take it, to be sure. Not steal it, but claim it first in the event that it had been left behind by a careless own er who might never return. But there  were still a few stragglers in the park that eve ning, and one of them might have left the camera behind, relying on the goodness of man...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307592308
ISBN 13 
9780307592309
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
354
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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