An Endless Idea

“He Had This Party…”

I’ve been living with the idea of the Endless Party for over 20 years now. It’s like having something between my teeth that my tongue won’t stop playing with. It started in Philly when everyone in the house had this party that went on all weekend.

I mean, when I went to bed Friday night, it seemed like the party was over. But when I woke up the next day, I discovered I was mistaken. There were still people in the living room and on the front porch, and by evening, the whole house was alive again with even more people.

By late Saturday night, I remember feeling resigned to the idea that this was going to be my life from now on - trapped inside this Endless Party. People would ask, “Whatever happened to Christian?” and someone would turn pale and say, “You don’t know? He had this party and it never ended…”

The house we were living in was a century and a half old. It was called the Castle. The place represented a special time in my life and a lot of it had to do with the house itself. It felt alive and full of magic. But this magic worked in good and bad ways. When the sunlight poured in through the large windows, the house felt fantastical, otherworldly. But at night, when it creaked and groaned, and it was full of ghosts, there was this feeling that if I turned a corner the wrong way I’d be displaced somehow. Over time, I had this idea that such a wrong turn could trap me in a past incarnation of the Endless Party.

The Endless Party first appeared in my 2001 short story “Eight White Russians”:

(Eagle-eyed readers might recognize a variation of this story in “The Trick” from KILLING IT. What can I say? Ideas stay with us!)

Going through my older stories, I can find fragments of the Endless Party here and there. Even when it’s not explicit in the story, I can feel the shape of it in the words.

The most overt attempt to bring the Endless Party to life was in a novel I was tackling in 2010. While the book itself was never finished (the idea sort of evaporated the more I got into it), the chapter where the Endless Party is introduced is fun.

And I’m sharing it here after the break…

The Endless Party

The Endless Party is not as endless as you would think. It is easy to think that, especially if you have been there. Once you have taken off your coat and entered the main hall, you implicitly know that time is meaningless there, even though if you drown out the music you can practically hear time cracking like impatient thunder.

Outside the doors of the mansion, it is now - now now. But inside, it is always June 15, 1918. This is the 50th birthday of Victor Van der Luyden1, the eccentric millionaire who spent his whole life outdoing himself, and who wished for the party to end all parties. 

 Now there are a lot of stories about how the Endless Party actually started. The most recent story I heard was that an old-school Satanic ritual – led by Van der Luyden’s bitter older brother Albert – was taking place in the basement. During the ceremony, in the middle of an important incantation, Albert had a heart attack and died. Because he didn’t finish what he started and offered an ill-timed sacrifice on top of that, something went terribly wrong and the whole mansion became trapped in some kind of spell nonsense. The time of Albert’s death was 11:19 PM. 

Now there are a lot of things wrong with this story, but when you have seen what I have seen over the years, this one is not as bizarre as you would suspect. Still, though, the story is too simple, too easy, and thus too boring.

Another story – my personal favorite – is the one about the Sanskritist expert Devadatta Yashodhara, who at the turn of the century was the leading authority on the Kama Sutra. It was said that he always carried with him the definitive version of the text (the one no one knew existed) and was never shy about sharing The Knowledge. Van der Luyden had met Yashodhara a few weeks before the party and insisted that he attend. Once at the party, Yashodhara caught the eye of Van der Luyden’s eldest daughter Alexandra, who in her own right was a brilliant poet. Yashodhara had flirting down to an exact science and was able to seduce any woman in less than five words (in any language). Alexandra, on the other hand, was blessed with the power of words, and it was rumored that she could seduce anyone in three syllables or less and she had reportedly driven a man insane once with an overzealous haiku. Eventually, they made their way to her bedroom upstairs and he shared with her all of his knowledge, and she in turn shared her own. Between his touch and her words, Yashodhara and Alexandra achieved the supposedly impossible Cyclotronic Peak, an orgasm so perfect and Earth-shattering, it has been known to disrupt time and space. This happened, of course, at 11:19 PM.

I heard one about the German physicist Professor Erwin Splettstoesser, Van der Luyden’s best friend from childhood. Apparently, he was either batshit insane or seriously ahead of his time - it depends on the biographers' mood apparently. He wanted to impress Van der Luyden for his birthday, so he invented this contraption that lit up all blue and produced a portable fireworks show once it was warmed up. They said it looked like little blue palm trees forming and reforming in the palm of your hand. Van der Luyden loved it and took it around the party showing it off to everyone he could find. 

While they did not have the vocabulary for it then, we would probably understand Splettstoesser’s invention today as a handheld particle accelerator. Everything was fine until Van der Luyden’s youngest daughter Elizabeth - who just the year before made international headlines for having photographed an Elder God she claimed to have been living in the water fountain on the Van der Luyden estate (it turned out to be a water nymph instead, a revelation that brought shame to the family) - got her grubby hands on Splettstoesser's gift and did everything you would expect any six-year-old liar to do with a shiny object. She dropped it at 11:19 PM, which was seriously past her bedtime.

No matter which story you want to believe, what is important is that the party continues today, Van der Luyden is still celebrating his 50th year on Earth. And while you can argue how it happened all you want, it is best to not fret over the details, such as the fact that Van der Luyden died of a heart attack in 1931, at the age of 63, while vacationing in Rome with his family. Or the fact that the party ended at sunrise on June 16, 1918, when the police arrived, even though you could be at the Endless Party this very moment sharing a drink with a charming bio-roid from the 23rd century. Or the fact that you could have visited the Endless Party as a child and then returned decades later to have a conversation with your younger self.

Maybe I lost you with that last one. You see, if you find yourself at the party, a copy of you remains there. If you were to leave the party, you would also still be at the party, never aging, never changing; you’d be stuck in this loud, alcohol-fueled loop. It’s called a Quantum Echo. Not a bad life, honestly. If you returned and had that aforementioned hypothetical conversation with yourself and left again, there would then be two of you at the party.

There is the story of Gerard Hennessey who attended the party in 1977 with his wife Barbara. Their well-documented tumultuous marriage of then-nine years peaked when they got into a fight near the kitchen. Those who knew the couple could recite the argument word for word because they had heard it so many times before. In a moment of clarity or insanity, depending on your point of view, Barbara took a deep breath and told Gerard to step outside to get some air. Gerard left in a dramatic huff and returned 15 minutes later to find Barbara standing over his lifeless body. "Did I put up a fight?" he asked her matter-of-factly. She dropped the knife and stepped towards him. "If you want to call it that," she said. They kissed and it felt like their first time. People around them clapped and howled. Van der Luyden's incredibly efficient staff were already dragging the body away.   

The Endless Party exists only within the walls of the mansion. If you stood outside, you would never know there was a party inside. Even the windows with the curtains open reveal nothing. It is not until you step through the door that the party reveals itself. You would never know that the walls seemingly encompass all space and time while remaining outside of it.

The original guest list for Van der Luyden’s 50th birthday party had 62 people on it, but now there are thousands of people in attendance. The interior of the mansion grows to accommodate the party, perpetually folding in on itself without compromising its exterior, all the while time bends and contorts to satisfy every new cycle that emerges with every new guest.

The Endless Party is one of reality’s greatest secrets, and because of this, it is also one of reality’s ultimate hiding places. Gods have wandered the halls of Van der Luyden's home to marvel at how its existence laughs at their rules - a cosmic joke at their own expense that even they can appreciate the beauty of. But with gods - like remoras to sharks - come monsters. 

The Endless Party is full of monsters. 

And that is where we come in.

…And It Never Ended.”

I put this together this week to show you how some ideas just stay with writers.

Some ideas come fully formed and getting it all down on the page is effortless. My short story “The All-Inclusive Vampire” from KILLING IT is a good example of this. Once I knew the hook, the first draft was done within an hour.

Other ideas stay with you for so long they feel like a real memory. I have one idea that I’ve been playing with for years now and sometimes at night before I fall asleep, I play it like a movie in my head and every so often I get a little further into the story. Most times I hit the same dead end.

And some ideas simply don’t make it, no matter how hard you try. Like the Endless Party and so many others.

Ideas are a lot like outfits - you don’t know if they work for you until you try them on.

We good?

I’m on vacation this week. By the time you read this, to paraphrase the Walkmen, I’ll have sand in my suitcase and salt in my teeth. Or maybe it’ll be cold and rainy. It’s hard to tell with the Polish seaside.

If you’ve been playing with an idea, maybe this is the week you’ll do something with it. Or maybe bring your friends together and have yourself a party. There’s no need to make it an endless one, but you do you.

See you next time.