Again, this blog is intended more to discuss the themes of my book than the book itself, but for kicks, here's the latest draft of my synopsis. Feedback is welcome!
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COMPANIONS OF THE GARDEN
Micah R. Bochart
Two wayfaring New Yorkers. A long road South. A nation on fire with God, the Blues, and the mass flailing for identity.
DIG CARSON, 27, an age renowned for the destruction of volatile thinkers, has abandoned in the same gesture his apartment in Brooklyn and the medication that kept his manic depression at bay. ABIDA KAHLEEL, 25, prays five times daily and wears her hijab with pride, but has come to question fundamental aspects of her faith and culture.
The two cross paths for the first time in a New Jersey gas station, her stranded by a breakdown on an ill-fated bus trip to Baltimore, him driving for driving’s sake, headed south to New Orleans. Dig offers to give her a ride, an offer she accepts, the direness of her situation trumping her cultural inhibition about traveling alone with a strange man.
Within an hour of sharing the road, their explosively kindred natures catch both by surprise. Both hunger for a form of liberation, both long to experience a nation they barely know, and – as we discover in short order – both suffer from the same species of mental illness, which rollicks them from intermittent states of despair to fits of genuine reverence.
Two days later, the two of them arriving in Washington by separate roads, Abida calls him and asks if she can accompany him to New Orleans. In love already, and a novel away from admitting it, Dig says yes.
They make their way south, an improvised, back-road pilgrimage to a Mecca of their choosing. Their progress is episodic, a string of unlikely encounters, each in some way speaking to the eruptive character of a nation whose search for direction mirrors their own.
An artist in Virginia paints a dynamic array of American freeze frames on an assortment of fungus. A young Muslim poet in Birmingham rants on her American right to cover her hair. A brutal car crash in rural Alabama throws into fleeting unity Abida and two Baptist women, who pray jointly for the souls of two trapped passengers, while Dig founders in the helpless sensation of having nothing to pray to. Two Mississippi highway patrolmen detain them on false charges, but crack under pressure when Abida, vehemently defending her rights as a citizen to go wherever she chooses without harassment, threatens to call down the press.
Themes of decline run tandem with the prevailing theme of ardor.
The road winds down toward the Mississippi Delta. The two slide further into madness. Dig falls deeper into love.
He watches in awe as Abida strides defiantly through a small Virginia hamlet, daring the locals to stare at her. He watches again in the Blue Ridge Mountains while she kneels in prayer to the sunset, her rug spread open on the cooling asphalt of the parkway. The two trade rides on a makeshift plank swing near the Tennessee border, and Dig is caught off guard when Abida puts her hand on his back, pushing him upward in spectacular arcs. After a week of resistance, in a dive hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, he binge-drinks to the point of wreckage and collapses in the shower, resigned at last to the awkward truth that an unattainable girl has snatched up his heart.
In a trance, euphoric but weakening, they drift through the forests of Mississippi, arriving at the banks of its namesake river, the cathartic peak of their journey. Dig’s spirits sustain him into southern Louisiana, then crash for the final time.
They roll into New Orleans on a tide of confession, Dig admitting first his resignation to suicide and then his attraction to Abida. Abida, at wits end, retreats into her hotel room. Pushed over the edge by the perceived rejection, he tumbles through rain-pummeled Bourbon Street, drinks into blackout, and attempts to drown himself in the river. Abida saves his life.
They speak for the last time in the cozy aesthetic of a hospital room, Dig recovering from alcohol poisoning, Abida struggling to come to terms with just what their relationship has meant for her. With the implication that she in fact loves him back, she agrees that it’s in the best interest of both her faith and her future if they refrain from meeting again. They hug each other goodbye, and Dig is left to wander the streets of the city, to reign in the enormity of their odyssey – the scattered splinters of faith, love, illness, and national identity all united by the common thread of reverence – and to glimpse in the wreckage of his near-death experience something akin to the wiping of the slate, from which something fresh can begin.
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