i knew him for a time.
we flew around
the room of the world
like crazed moths,
bumping into one another
more often than not,
knocking loose the dust
from our wings
i heard he changed his name –
funny, i did too. we made
pentimentos of ourselves,
scrawled over the names
we once called one another
with ink & with wax.
we were wildeyed,
two jongleurs of
an old &
sour tradition,
ghoulish and gabbling
under the scold
of the moon,
ghastly and garish
under the scald
of the sun -
we unravelled ourselves
then gleefully set to the strings
with our teeth,
sawing giddily
back and forth,
magnesium sparking
exothermically
in our bellies
then suddenly
i knew him differently,
like a book from childhood -
he acquired a dingy patina,
became covered in
something sticky
like spilled jelly -
i came to know how
he acquired clothing:
by osmosis -
something borrowed became
something his
just because of how he wore it.
that,
and the stink.
i came to hate hearing him play
“her majesty” on the guitar,
especially the whole
bellyful of wine bit,
came to loathe
both his wistfulness
& his ardor,
latenights,
by the bungalows, crooning,
while girls, swooning,
clutched at his threadbare sleeves
how the ragged fall apart!
years down the line
i think of him,
somewhere west,
past the heaving, sighing Rockies,
past the arid and
steaming deserts -
i think of him,
sitting high up in a redwood
amongst whispering,
adulatory leaves,
in a familiar jacket
pressing a looking-glass to his eye,
facing east -
i am not so high as you;
i am nestled snugly
in my harbour-town,
an island amongst islands,
one for every day of the year -
& i have always preferred
the hard sheen of the Atlantic
and you,
you’ve always preferred
to be pacific -
once,
i broke the string of your guitar
on purpose, and never told you,
viciously turned the knob
as easy as turning a key
in a greased lock –
i blamed it on the humidity -
these things happen, i said coyly,
when they’re pulled too taut –
they capitulate,
sing one desperate chord
and then
twang
like the zithering lash
of a downed power line.
my fingers thrilled
to the snap, yanked away
as though burned,
itched -
for days after.
i can still hear it,
that sound –
can still see your manic,
berserker eyes
over your manic,
berserker beard,
i can still hear you
galumphing through your
frustrated coitus,
grunting and moaning,
slapping and sighing,
as though wresting madly
at the lock on the door
where love is kept captive
secreted away
in a dark corner,
shying away from your
red-faced advances -
we battered at the world,
ran full-hearted at doom
heedless of warnings
and admonitions
from those who had run
the same path before,
grinding our teeth
while congratulating ourselves
on outwitting the slow men,
the low men,
the causers of this and that and thus,
removed ourselves,
turned frail and brittle,
cracked
in more than one place –
for me,
the thunder of our separation
still reverberates
through time’s
glassy echo chamber,
like an orchestra halted
at the point of climax,
for you,
it’s no more
than a whisper,
the susurrus of drug
still feathering
your heart,
no more than
a moth’s wing
against your face
in the dark,
no more than
the schuss of cars
going through puddles
in the night,
somewhere between
departure
& return
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
widdershins
ed. note - this is a combination/revision of two poems found below. please excuse the repetition - they just seemed to work really well together.
and so today was a
slow itemization of things
that turned against me:
i woke from a dream-tossed sleep
into a pellucid morning,
fear dripping into my veins
from the invisible machine
of nightmare,
had to turn the light on
and stare at the shadows
until they melted back,
outside,
the necessary cigarette
left me
as always
unsatisfied
and doing nothing
was justified by reducing it to
small somethings,
like reshuffling the books
because the spine of The Idiot
is smaller than that of The Devils,
and i don't know,
maybe i felt something
a little like sympathy,
and then
the cat hissed at me
though i had done nothing,
and i saw my fear
reflected in her eyes,
a weird shimmer
like the lake of heat
you might see
over summer asphalt,
for a damned second,
heart pulpy in my mouth,
i stood staring at
the ridges of her palate,
thought how they looked like
the marks the waves make
in the sand at the beach
i rubbed my tongue over my teeth
and prepared to hiss back,
but the rumble and mutter of a truck
shoving by importantly
on the street outside
sent her fleeing
for the nearest couch.
the sun went behind a cloud
and didn't come back -
amateur Houdini –
i am jealous
despite my scorn
then,
now,
this,
and i say to myself
this is one of those days,
an exhausting pageantry of hours
whittling myself to a sharp point
& by the time i’m drunk
i jab at anyone
who comes close enough
& my friend says
i drive people away,
says through a froth of drunk
and pot,
and later we sit
on his couch,
like a couple of knives
rasping in a drawer.
by the end of it
we have dulled each other
and the window is repainting itself
with a fragile blue
& the birds are
going apeshit in the trees -
and so today was a
slow itemization of things
that turned against me:
i woke from a dream-tossed sleep
into a pellucid morning,
fear dripping into my veins
from the invisible machine
of nightmare,
had to turn the light on
and stare at the shadows
until they melted back,
outside,
the necessary cigarette
left me
as always
unsatisfied
and doing nothing
was justified by reducing it to
small somethings,
like reshuffling the books
because the spine of The Idiot
is smaller than that of The Devils,
and i don't know,
maybe i felt something
a little like sympathy,
and then
the cat hissed at me
though i had done nothing,
and i saw my fear
reflected in her eyes,
a weird shimmer
like the lake of heat
you might see
over summer asphalt,
for a damned second,
heart pulpy in my mouth,
i stood staring at
the ridges of her palate,
thought how they looked like
the marks the waves make
in the sand at the beach
i rubbed my tongue over my teeth
and prepared to hiss back,
but the rumble and mutter of a truck
shoving by importantly
on the street outside
sent her fleeing
for the nearest couch.
the sun went behind a cloud
and didn't come back -
amateur Houdini –
i am jealous
despite my scorn
then,
now,
this,
and i say to myself
this is one of those days,
an exhausting pageantry of hours
whittling myself to a sharp point
& by the time i’m drunk
i jab at anyone
who comes close enough
& my friend says
i drive people away,
says through a froth of drunk
and pot,
and later we sit
on his couch,
like a couple of knives
rasping in a drawer.
by the end of it
we have dulled each other
and the window is repainting itself
with a fragile blue
& the birds are
going apeshit in the trees -
dissever
and the blank-eyed men
are out again,
pious saints of discord with
melted-wax faces
& grasping fingers,
absently adjusting
the ties at their throats
& cracking their necks
from side to side –
they slip sideways between us,
nimble dancers with
poised, gleaming scissors,
murmuring snatches of song
culled from other lovers
they’ve dissevered –
we never see them
though they live in our house,
share our bed,
sit in the empty chairs
at suppertime,
gorging themselves on our silence -
while in the dark,
under the table,
the dog whirs & whines
with alarm
soon enough
sleep becomes a five-second shudder
between one & two in the morning
and we wake up at the same time
unable to look at one another,
afraid of what we might see
and outside, the wind is
shearing leaves from their branches
and the rain is pounding the roof
like a hundred thousand tiny fists
and the sea is going in and out
of the harbor
like murderer’s knives
we share invisible,
vibrating smiles,
hold hands
and watch as the lightning
blotches the face of the sky
like an incandescent rash,
our teeth
glued together
inside of our mouths
when the electricity finally fails
we are plunged into
bristling, barren black
extending all the way up to
the cosmos
and when you say
timidly
that you love me
all i hear is scissorblades
going
snip
are out again,
pious saints of discord with
melted-wax faces
& grasping fingers,
absently adjusting
the ties at their throats
& cracking their necks
from side to side –
they slip sideways between us,
nimble dancers with
poised, gleaming scissors,
murmuring snatches of song
culled from other lovers
they’ve dissevered –
we never see them
though they live in our house,
share our bed,
sit in the empty chairs
at suppertime,
gorging themselves on our silence -
while in the dark,
under the table,
the dog whirs & whines
with alarm
soon enough
sleep becomes a five-second shudder
between one & two in the morning
and we wake up at the same time
unable to look at one another,
afraid of what we might see
and outside, the wind is
shearing leaves from their branches
and the rain is pounding the roof
like a hundred thousand tiny fists
and the sea is going in and out
of the harbor
like murderer’s knives
we share invisible,
vibrating smiles,
hold hands
and watch as the lightning
blotches the face of the sky
like an incandescent rash,
our teeth
glued together
inside of our mouths
when the electricity finally fails
we are plunged into
bristling, barren black
extending all the way up to
the cosmos
and when you say
timidly
that you love me
all i hear is scissorblades
going
snip
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
ochre & umber
Lord: it is time. The summer has been immense.
- Rilke
Exhaustion: a seep, a leak, a hiss, a sigh. Above, the fullness of the moon, pendulous in the sky, like a fat white berry about to drop from its invisible branch. You lick your lips self-consciously, flashing the barest sickle of tooth in a grin. You roll over onto your left side and study me in the dark. I have always looked better in the dark. Your eyes flash like garnets in a mine. Their glimmer is furtive, nimble, darting.
It is not yet cold, not thoroughly. Summer’s lungs still pump, though fall’s breath is coiling in her mouth. This is my favorite time of year, and you say it is yours, as well, though sometimes I am afraid that you lie just to make me smile. I don’t mind the lies, but I mistrust how you make my mouth behave. You’re murmuring something about the cats. I’m not really listening, and feel that brief twinge of guilt as I scramble to catch hold of the conversational thread. It’s another one of your banalities, catalogued as something meaningful in that teeming card catalogue within your skull. I’ve grown used to the little twist of introspection in your tone after we’ve had sex, how you look at me and then away, even as you’re talking about the grocery list, the pile of debris in the kitchen yet to be swept, or what needs to be done to the apartment in order to defend it from winter.
The lightest skirl of wind, dainty and mischievous, makes a whorl over your exposed shoulder and you immediately horripilate, shivering violently and yanking up your shirt as if to disengage from some invisible assailant. This will be the last time this season that we meet like this. For the next few weeks, it will be long walks, barely touching, coats knitted up to our throats and hats jammed on our heads. You dislike the cold and I say I dislike it too, though secretly one of my favorite things in the world is to come out of the cold and take my jacket off. Secretly, the cold makes more sense to me. I know what to wear in the winter. You make fun of me because I don’t wear shorts in the summer, and I’ve confessed once that I don’t understand why even though, in truth, I know.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world. It still surprises me how much you like to be outside, when you seem at your most comfortable curled up on the couch in an afghan, buried in a book. You just finished a book on colour theory and are contemplating taking up painting. I encourage it. I think sometimes that I fall in love with images of you that I film in my head. I’ve seen you do things inside of my head that you’ve yet to do. I’ve always wanted to make a movie, but you hate to act and say you can’t. I have fifteen or so unfinished scripts with you as the main character. They gather dust and spiders in one of my desk drawers.
In fact, this whole thing could be one of my dreams. This whole thing with you and I could be nothing, could be nothing more than another scene in the movie I’m writing and will never film. I hear the soundtrack to it in my dreams at night. This morning I woke up with “Golden Brown” stuck in my head, and when I looked over at you, the images came rushing back … a subway, rocking and tilting, rocketing through the tunnels of some city. Probably Boston. The lights go on and off, intermittent and epileptic, spasming. You hold on to one of the bars with a white-knuckle deathgrip, but none of the fear in your hands registers in your eyes. You are determined to survive, though there is no immediate threat. That song on the loudspeaker, dim and crackling, though unmistakeable.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world, secrets of summer buried deep within our bodies like seeds. We keep them dormant and savor them through the whole of winter.
You’ll go away, off to another city, and I will wander the autumn roads after you depart, kicking desultorily at the sodden leaves. It rains the entire week before you go, denuding the trees of their foliage. You call the wind Delilah and I confess I do need a haircut. You’ll laugh, but it’s nothing like your June laugh. This is your October sound, and it’s full but dry. I can taste the anger in it, that dull, thudding sound like a sluggish heartbeat. It’s tinged with wistfulness. I am used to the twist in your tone. As we draw nearer to your leavetaking, you become slightly distant. You look at me less. You are preparing.
I wake up one morning near Halloween and roll over to touch the space in the bed you used to occupy, now vacant. I am like a tongue aimlessly exploring the abscess left by an extracted tooth. You’ll come back – you always do – but I am always here. I’ll get up from the bed and pad to the desk, pull out the unfinished script, and stare out the window while the cats butt their heads against my calves and purr insistently, as if to tempt me with the spectre of their future pleasure. I want no part of them, and swat them away with an outstretched palm – they just push their small skulls into my hand and burr their pullulations even louder. They are both of ours, though they’ve always belonged to you.
There’s a heaviness in the air, though there is a distinct fragility, too, like eggs in a nest of swaddling cloth. I am sometimes afraid to walk outside without your hand in mine, and the eyes of strangers seem to know and understand that I am one-half of who I should be. Winter is a fractious mathematician – it leaves us all one-half of who we should be. Our steps become slower, more cautious, down city sidewalks. It takes twice as long to get anywhere. Lights come on earlier and leak out of the sides of blinded windows. I take to drinking, first just beers at home, six-packs of cheap lager. I sit in front of the television with a glass bowl in one hand and the can of beer sweating on the coffee table. I think of nothing and everything at the same time.
I’ve called you a couple of times now. You sound so distant, as though I’m calling the afterlife, and your spirit is annoyed at having been invoked. I make hesitant, tentative conversation about the city and our friends, and how, the other day, flakes of snow tumbled from the sky’s cotton-stuffed mouth. I make a bad joke and you laugh, but it’s polite and gray, like a deserted spiderweb. I am afraid you’ve found some robust someone in your city and you spend your cold nights with them, curled up on their couch, reading. I make a brief, coy allusion to our last night together and the silence is impassive, like a tomb’s door. I won’t give up hope – I know you will come back for a break, and then for the summer in the spring. This is how it has always been and how it will always be. I turn the conversation to you and you are evasive, vague, banal. In the long silence before I end the call, I suddenly find myself hating you. I remember the catlike flash of your eyes, your drunken pinwheels. It’s easy in these depths to freeze. I remember to breathe, and apologize for the call. You are quick to remind me that there’s no reason to be sorry, though I do it again, anyway. I don’t say “I love you” when I hang up, and you don’t either. You tell me to say hello to the city for you, and I will. I see myself standing at the Top of the World, up on the hill, arms outstretched, bellowing my salutation on your behalf.
I go the wrong way down one-way streets on purpose in my old Volvo, late nights, when I can’t sleep. I roll all the windows down and smoke American Spirits because I know you hate it when I do. I find myself wondering if I miss you at all, or if it’s only that I miss how I look when you look at me. I figure it’s probably the latter, though the former makes more sense to my viscera -- which, as of late, behaves like a contortionist at every memory. Perhaps you are why I have come to dislike summer.
I have become unmoored from time in a way that I find pleasing. I drift ceaselessly, become unconcerned with appointments, dates, times. Work is the only thing which provides structure, though I hate what I do and have never been able to find something that I enjoy. This year, you have taken more of yourself with you when you left than you ever have before.
It’s one night in the bar over an Irish coffee when I decide maybe it’d be a good idea to come visit you in your city. My limbs are jittering because I have a sensitivity to caffeine, though I could also chalk it up to anxiety. I go outside and lean heavily against the side of the building. A friend of mine is here. I admit that once I liked him like I like you, though not with the same heat. He’s always been cold to the touch, and you – you’re liquid fire, you’re pyroclastic, even when your voice is chilly. He has a new scar on the side of his face, under the trapper hat whose ear-flaps slap his cheeks in the wind. That night, I catch him in the men’s room, leaning with both palms on the porcelain sink, staring at his reflection and gritting his teeth like an athlete about to take on a rival. He pretends its nothing, says he was just fooling around. I don’t believe him, but we’re not as close as we used to be. Before, I would’ve put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed with all of my fingers, but now I just nod from the doorway and slip out sideways. I think he might be a little jealous of you.
I have decided to come visit you in your city. I swallow the last of my Irish coffee and it plummets into my stomach like an unexploded depth charge. I am bottomless, I am fearless, I am confident. It is the distance between us which is my rival, and I will defeat it with my stride. My friend is waiting outside when I leave, throwing my scarf around my neck like a hero in a movie. The sky has emptied of clouds and now is bare, bristling black all the way up to the cosmos. The wind is still and my boots crunch on the packed snow. He wants to talk about something, he says, and he refuses to look away from my eyes. His are shockingly blue, like the guts of a flame. He’s letting his beard grow out. He’s shorter than me, though wider in the shoulders. Tonight he’s in a flannel jacket, buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple, and the top button bobs when he swallows. He doesn’t own any scarves or gloves. He says he hates them, but I think it’s pride.
When I see him outside the bar, he’s smoking again. The last time I saw him, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over six months. I’d like to ask him what made him start again, but the look in his eyes makes me reconsider. He asks me where I’m going and I say home, he asks if he can walk with me. I don’t mind, though I’m wary. He seems invisibly crippled.
The walk isn’t a long one. My friend has a manner of speech that I’ve always found myself endeared to, halting and somewhat vague. It’s nothing like your cadence, which is maybe why I like it so much. He’s circuitous, coloring in the scene around the thing he needs to talk about before actually attacking it, like a dog mistrustful of his bed. He is much more direct with eyes than you’ll ever be. I’m not sure I like it. The whole time he is talking I am half-listening. I am preoccupied with the thud of my heart and the images of you from my dreams, on the subway in your city. Placing myself there next to you – we’re not even touching, we just stand and let the motion of the train rock us back and forth while the song plays. I find myself even in dream behind you, staring at your dark hair loose over your pea-coat. How your shoulders tense almost invisibly beneath it when the subway bangs around a corner and rattles through the tunnels like a teeth in an jaw gone slack.
He’s telling me about her, his you. He’s angry, but sad, and suddenly I imagine we’re oil and water – he’s the oil, and on fire – and I am refusing to help extinguish him. All at once, I put you out of my mind and stop walking. He stops too, a step or two away, and looks back at me. He is at once apologetic, and I tell him not to be. I look at him and tell him that things are going to be all right. I notice the scars again, and it’s obvious now that they’re from fingernails. When I ask, he says nothing, then curtly turns on a heel and mutters something about having deserved them. I walk alongside him for awhile in silence, our depths mirroring the bible-black empty of the sky over our heads.
We arrive at the back door of my apartment and I, as always, am immediately putting the key in the lock to turn it and allow ingress when his hand – cold, red-fleshed and white-knuckled – comes down to rest on mine. His eyes are the same color they’ve always been, though the blue of them has now frozen over and seems nearly Arctic. He confesses that he has something to confess and I take my hand from the doorknob to withdraw a cigarette from my pack. I notice that I have somehow unconsciously become distant, and I hope it doesn’t show in my outward demeanour. I offer him a smoke and he accepts both it and the flame from my lighter. I urge him to continue silently, but he takes a long, shuddering drag before he does.
He confesses that he hates himself and that he has for a long time. This is not surprising to me. Unbidden, my thoughts return to you. Perhaps it’s something about the crunch and hunch of his shoulders over the cigarette, or the way he won’t stop shivering. I feel a gentle derision for him sweep over me, like the loving loathing of an older brother or parent. In another time, I would have slapped him until he stiffened his spine and narrowed his eyes. I find myself hating myself for being unsure how to proceed. I listen. He is again stalking around the edges of the conversation. This is how he prepares himself. He is telling me how much he loved her, his you, but that things one day just grew wrong, went askew, like a tree being forced to split itself in two to grow around a boulder. He is in the middle of luridly describing the night they fell apart when I stop him and put my hand on his shoulder. My breath is moist, hot, and turns instantly to vapour when it encounters the air outside of my mouth. I suppose it’s my way of slapping him in the face. I do it as gently as possible; I ask him what’s wrong, what’s really wrong. He looks me in the eyes and breathes his first complete lungful of air since I’ve seen him and winces at the invading cold.
“It’s you,” he says, and stiffens his spine. He’s no longer abstruse about it, no longer darting or sneaking. It spills out of him like water from a ruptured pipe, gouting madly out of his mouth. His feelings, his thoughts. All those dull platitudes you never want said but secretly wish to hear. I can feel something exploding way down deep inside of me, fathoms into the pit of my stomach, and can hear your voice ringing like a cathedral bell in my skull. Again, the rattle of the subway car. Again, the haunting refrain.
He asks to come in, and I let him. We leave our boots by the door.
I wake up. There’s a moth in the room, an ugly brown-winged furry thing that keeps battering at my face. I wake up in a haze and it’s gone, but as soon as I close my eyes it’s back, rubbing and fluttering against my jawbone before disappearing again. I’m surprised it hasn’t woken you yet. You’ve ended up in my bed. We didn’t take our clothes off, though our hands have played cartographer for a number of hours before eventually capsizing like yawing sailboats in a tempestuous sea, folding beneath the waves of each other’s hair. They have migrated during the night’s hours to different locales – sandwiched between pillows, as a trivet for the heated head, at rest on the shoal of a shoulder, limp and disused in the crevasse between our bodies. As I wake, so do my hands, and they resurrect themselves, crawling out of their hideaways, blinking and startled in the morass of sheets.
Then the tidal bore of wakefulness, tinged with the rye-brown of drunk, a wave through the estuary and up the wide-mouthed river of sleep. You are there, towheaded and tousled, breath fluttering in and out of your mouth left ajar. There is no moth, I realize. You stir, soundlessly, and I remove myself from the bed. The heat's come on, and I am sopping through my clothes. The bathroom's anodyne light causes my eyes to rebel, and I stagger away from the mirror, muttering something unintelligible to myself, like a warding spell, before I realize it's your name - though which you, I am uncertain.
I have never been certain of much. It's always one thing, then the other, and then another on top of it. How life goes: an unending accumulation, like silt at a delta. We deposit and are deposited upon, a chain of transactions that leaves us somehow always with one more thing than with which we arrived. I wouldn't categorize you as a thing, either of you, nor myself. We are epistolary, all of us - fragments, spinning, like a shattered window in slow motion. I have told you that I do not believe in being whole, and you make your customary frown before launching into a tedious dissertation regarding fate and the like. I don't believe in such things, but sometimes I tell you I do and listen with rapt attention. Sometimes I can even convince myself that I do believe in your grandiose notions of how the world operates, as if on some invisible axis comprised of spirits and unearthly beings who take interest in our mortal affairs. It's easier than the brittle realism of cause and effect, easier still than the blank face of reason and logic, like a Greek god on its plinth, boring its eyeless, infinite stare across the centuries. Though I always catch myself, you decorate the hook well and I am constantly drawn to its spiralling glitter.
I used to call you by colors, both of you, and perhaps it'd be best if I revert to that now, for the sake of clarity. You are Ochre, the hue of your hair, the hue of red-clay earth. You are Umber, the raw brown of varnished wood. This makes it easy to tell the two of you apart, even though distance separates you. I am standing in front of the door, waiting for you to pass by, smoking a cigarette. A transient with gaps in his mouth asks me if I have fifty cents and I give him a penny out of spite. He throws it on the ground in front of me and curses me in some bile-inflected, spittly tongue. I am indifferent and blot him from my sight. He vanishes appropriately, though I am made nervous by his indictment and the memory of him lingers in my brain long after suppertime. I am poor, lately, too, and my pockets are fast becoming threadbare. I am always seen wearing the same pair of pants, and sometimes, the same pair of socks.
The sky above tumbles by, as if it is trying to get ahead of itself knowing it never can. The wind is loud and blustery, more befitting an April afternoon than a December evening. You've been working all day, chained to a desk by a headset, answering phone call after phone call. I imagine you in mechanical repose in front of your computer, inert until needed. A strange sense inside of me is awoken at this image. It has been days since I've thought of you. I've prepared a bottle of whiskey, which is to say, I've opened it and had a shot. The warmth of it is even now is metastasizing inside of me, spreading from organ to organ. I have my head tilted up, slightly, and am watching a fat bank of clouds shove itself imperiously along. I know that by midnight they will have usurped the heavens and will dump their accumulations on top of us, unceremoniously, and with little regard for our bared heads. A bus lets off and I watch the passengers shuffle their way out of the heaving vehicle's innards. Umber is a bad name for you, but it's what I've got. I might tell you tonight, though I don't think you'd appreciate it.
I'm playing music in my head, and the urge to throw myself at the bar is gargantuan, like a hand pressed firmly against the small of my back, goading me on. I know I might find you there. You've lost your phone and I don't even know where you live. I've told you to knock on my window, though for the past week the window has remained resolutely silent. My doorbell is broken, and I've tried to fix it, though only ended up with the frottage of an electrical shock for my pains. I know I might find you at the bar, though I am resolute in waiting.
The fifth of whiskey goes down smoother after the first three shots. I have forsaken a glass and have taken to drinking directly from the bottle, as classless and gauche as it is, taking great pleasure in swimming within its brown depths. I imagine myself in miniature, dancing like an angel on a pinhead, around the rim of the bottle, before teetering and falling in. I imagine a hand - yours - opening and closing, slowly, then quickly; as if asking for something, then begging, then demanding. My head is beginning to spin, wobbling on my spine like an unbalanced, greasy ball balanced precariously at the top of a tall pole. This delirium, I tell myself, is more comfortable than loneliness.
A man with dark-rimmed glasses and a white coat is leaning over me. He is fastidious but for his beard, whose gray coils spring from his chin like the innards of a broken pocket-watch. His brow is unevenly furrowed over wiry eyebrows and brooding, dark eyes. He has concern coming out of his mouth, but I am barely able to hear it through the booming tripartite throb of my heart. I hallucinate that I am lashed to a gurney on a subway, staring at your dark ochre hair. You never turn around, even in my dreams.
I wake up on my couch, unkempt and with vomit staining the corner of my mouth like an ill-advised brushstroke. You are laying in the bed, one shoe on and the other off, sock bunched up and dangling from the edge of your toes. There is a thick, musty stillness in the room which, after a moment or two, I realize is the smell of my own sick. I am immediately overcome by a surge of embarrassment. You are just as you were the last time you were here, laying in exactly the same position, lips parted exactly the same way, breath fluttering out of you in resigned, slow patterns. I imagine I can see it in the air; frosted iterations of gentle recrimination. I do not know what day it is, though the whiskey bottle sits not far away from me and still has a drop left in the bottom. My fingers are stained with the yellowing scent of just-smoked cigarettes. There is no clock in my room and I do not care what time it is.
I stumble up from the couch into the bathroom again, giggling slightly at the repetition. My mind sharply invokes the image of the transient, cursing and spitting, and I giggle a little harder. The laugh causes my stomach to cramp and I bend over the sink to eject more poison from my insides. It's only poison on its way back up, I think deliriously to myself, amid whorls of head-splitting pain.
Your hand comes to rest between my shoulderblades, and I hurl myself as far away from myself as possible, feeling a sudden collapse incipient. I sag at the knees and you curl your elbows beneath my armpits, hoisting me up. You're stronger than I thought you were. Your fists curl at the sides of my jaws and I notice that your fingernails are ragged - some are discolored with the ochre of dried blood.
- Rilke
Exhaustion: a seep, a leak, a hiss, a sigh. Above, the fullness of the moon, pendulous in the sky, like a fat white berry about to drop from its invisible branch. You lick your lips self-consciously, flashing the barest sickle of tooth in a grin. You roll over onto your left side and study me in the dark. I have always looked better in the dark. Your eyes flash like garnets in a mine. Their glimmer is furtive, nimble, darting.
It is not yet cold, not thoroughly. Summer’s lungs still pump, though fall’s breath is coiling in her mouth. This is my favorite time of year, and you say it is yours, as well, though sometimes I am afraid that you lie just to make me smile. I don’t mind the lies, but I mistrust how you make my mouth behave. You’re murmuring something about the cats. I’m not really listening, and feel that brief twinge of guilt as I scramble to catch hold of the conversational thread. It’s another one of your banalities, catalogued as something meaningful in that teeming card catalogue within your skull. I’ve grown used to the little twist of introspection in your tone after we’ve had sex, how you look at me and then away, even as you’re talking about the grocery list, the pile of debris in the kitchen yet to be swept, or what needs to be done to the apartment in order to defend it from winter.
The lightest skirl of wind, dainty and mischievous, makes a whorl over your exposed shoulder and you immediately horripilate, shivering violently and yanking up your shirt as if to disengage from some invisible assailant. This will be the last time this season that we meet like this. For the next few weeks, it will be long walks, barely touching, coats knitted up to our throats and hats jammed on our heads. You dislike the cold and I say I dislike it too, though secretly one of my favorite things in the world is to come out of the cold and take my jacket off. Secretly, the cold makes more sense to me. I know what to wear in the winter. You make fun of me because I don’t wear shorts in the summer, and I’ve confessed once that I don’t understand why even though, in truth, I know.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world. It still surprises me how much you like to be outside, when you seem at your most comfortable curled up on the couch in an afghan, buried in a book. You just finished a book on colour theory and are contemplating taking up painting. I encourage it. I think sometimes that I fall in love with images of you that I film in my head. I’ve seen you do things inside of my head that you’ve yet to do. I’ve always wanted to make a movie, but you hate to act and say you can’t. I have fifteen or so unfinished scripts with you as the main character. They gather dust and spiders in one of my desk drawers.
In fact, this whole thing could be one of my dreams. This whole thing with you and I could be nothing, could be nothing more than another scene in the movie I’m writing and will never film. I hear the soundtrack to it in my dreams at night. This morning I woke up with “Golden Brown” stuck in my head, and when I looked over at you, the images came rushing back … a subway, rocking and tilting, rocketing through the tunnels of some city. Probably Boston. The lights go on and off, intermittent and epileptic, spasming. You hold on to one of the bars with a white-knuckle deathgrip, but none of the fear in your hands registers in your eyes. You are determined to survive, though there is no immediate threat. That song on the loudspeaker, dim and crackling, though unmistakeable.
We will get up from this place and rejoin the world, secrets of summer buried deep within our bodies like seeds. We keep them dormant and savor them through the whole of winter.
You’ll go away, off to another city, and I will wander the autumn roads after you depart, kicking desultorily at the sodden leaves. It rains the entire week before you go, denuding the trees of their foliage. You call the wind Delilah and I confess I do need a haircut. You’ll laugh, but it’s nothing like your June laugh. This is your October sound, and it’s full but dry. I can taste the anger in it, that dull, thudding sound like a sluggish heartbeat. It’s tinged with wistfulness. I am used to the twist in your tone. As we draw nearer to your leavetaking, you become slightly distant. You look at me less. You are preparing.
I wake up one morning near Halloween and roll over to touch the space in the bed you used to occupy, now vacant. I am like a tongue aimlessly exploring the abscess left by an extracted tooth. You’ll come back – you always do – but I am always here. I’ll get up from the bed and pad to the desk, pull out the unfinished script, and stare out the window while the cats butt their heads against my calves and purr insistently, as if to tempt me with the spectre of their future pleasure. I want no part of them, and swat them away with an outstretched palm – they just push their small skulls into my hand and burr their pullulations even louder. They are both of ours, though they’ve always belonged to you.
There’s a heaviness in the air, though there is a distinct fragility, too, like eggs in a nest of swaddling cloth. I am sometimes afraid to walk outside without your hand in mine, and the eyes of strangers seem to know and understand that I am one-half of who I should be. Winter is a fractious mathematician – it leaves us all one-half of who we should be. Our steps become slower, more cautious, down city sidewalks. It takes twice as long to get anywhere. Lights come on earlier and leak out of the sides of blinded windows. I take to drinking, first just beers at home, six-packs of cheap lager. I sit in front of the television with a glass bowl in one hand and the can of beer sweating on the coffee table. I think of nothing and everything at the same time.
I’ve called you a couple of times now. You sound so distant, as though I’m calling the afterlife, and your spirit is annoyed at having been invoked. I make hesitant, tentative conversation about the city and our friends, and how, the other day, flakes of snow tumbled from the sky’s cotton-stuffed mouth. I make a bad joke and you laugh, but it’s polite and gray, like a deserted spiderweb. I am afraid you’ve found some robust someone in your city and you spend your cold nights with them, curled up on their couch, reading. I make a brief, coy allusion to our last night together and the silence is impassive, like a tomb’s door. I won’t give up hope – I know you will come back for a break, and then for the summer in the spring. This is how it has always been and how it will always be. I turn the conversation to you and you are evasive, vague, banal. In the long silence before I end the call, I suddenly find myself hating you. I remember the catlike flash of your eyes, your drunken pinwheels. It’s easy in these depths to freeze. I remember to breathe, and apologize for the call. You are quick to remind me that there’s no reason to be sorry, though I do it again, anyway. I don’t say “I love you” when I hang up, and you don’t either. You tell me to say hello to the city for you, and I will. I see myself standing at the Top of the World, up on the hill, arms outstretched, bellowing my salutation on your behalf.
I go the wrong way down one-way streets on purpose in my old Volvo, late nights, when I can’t sleep. I roll all the windows down and smoke American Spirits because I know you hate it when I do. I find myself wondering if I miss you at all, or if it’s only that I miss how I look when you look at me. I figure it’s probably the latter, though the former makes more sense to my viscera -- which, as of late, behaves like a contortionist at every memory. Perhaps you are why I have come to dislike summer.
I have become unmoored from time in a way that I find pleasing. I drift ceaselessly, become unconcerned with appointments, dates, times. Work is the only thing which provides structure, though I hate what I do and have never been able to find something that I enjoy. This year, you have taken more of yourself with you when you left than you ever have before.
It’s one night in the bar over an Irish coffee when I decide maybe it’d be a good idea to come visit you in your city. My limbs are jittering because I have a sensitivity to caffeine, though I could also chalk it up to anxiety. I go outside and lean heavily against the side of the building. A friend of mine is here. I admit that once I liked him like I like you, though not with the same heat. He’s always been cold to the touch, and you – you’re liquid fire, you’re pyroclastic, even when your voice is chilly. He has a new scar on the side of his face, under the trapper hat whose ear-flaps slap his cheeks in the wind. That night, I catch him in the men’s room, leaning with both palms on the porcelain sink, staring at his reflection and gritting his teeth like an athlete about to take on a rival. He pretends its nothing, says he was just fooling around. I don’t believe him, but we’re not as close as we used to be. Before, I would’ve put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed with all of my fingers, but now I just nod from the doorway and slip out sideways. I think he might be a little jealous of you.
I have decided to come visit you in your city. I swallow the last of my Irish coffee and it plummets into my stomach like an unexploded depth charge. I am bottomless, I am fearless, I am confident. It is the distance between us which is my rival, and I will defeat it with my stride. My friend is waiting outside when I leave, throwing my scarf around my neck like a hero in a movie. The sky has emptied of clouds and now is bare, bristling black all the way up to the cosmos. The wind is still and my boots crunch on the packed snow. He wants to talk about something, he says, and he refuses to look away from my eyes. His are shockingly blue, like the guts of a flame. He’s letting his beard grow out. He’s shorter than me, though wider in the shoulders. Tonight he’s in a flannel jacket, buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple, and the top button bobs when he swallows. He doesn’t own any scarves or gloves. He says he hates them, but I think it’s pride.
When I see him outside the bar, he’s smoking again. The last time I saw him, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over six months. I’d like to ask him what made him start again, but the look in his eyes makes me reconsider. He asks me where I’m going and I say home, he asks if he can walk with me. I don’t mind, though I’m wary. He seems invisibly crippled.
The walk isn’t a long one. My friend has a manner of speech that I’ve always found myself endeared to, halting and somewhat vague. It’s nothing like your cadence, which is maybe why I like it so much. He’s circuitous, coloring in the scene around the thing he needs to talk about before actually attacking it, like a dog mistrustful of his bed. He is much more direct with eyes than you’ll ever be. I’m not sure I like it. The whole time he is talking I am half-listening. I am preoccupied with the thud of my heart and the images of you from my dreams, on the subway in your city. Placing myself there next to you – we’re not even touching, we just stand and let the motion of the train rock us back and forth while the song plays. I find myself even in dream behind you, staring at your dark hair loose over your pea-coat. How your shoulders tense almost invisibly beneath it when the subway bangs around a corner and rattles through the tunnels like a teeth in an jaw gone slack.
He’s telling me about her, his you. He’s angry, but sad, and suddenly I imagine we’re oil and water – he’s the oil, and on fire – and I am refusing to help extinguish him. All at once, I put you out of my mind and stop walking. He stops too, a step or two away, and looks back at me. He is at once apologetic, and I tell him not to be. I look at him and tell him that things are going to be all right. I notice the scars again, and it’s obvious now that they’re from fingernails. When I ask, he says nothing, then curtly turns on a heel and mutters something about having deserved them. I walk alongside him for awhile in silence, our depths mirroring the bible-black empty of the sky over our heads.
We arrive at the back door of my apartment and I, as always, am immediately putting the key in the lock to turn it and allow ingress when his hand – cold, red-fleshed and white-knuckled – comes down to rest on mine. His eyes are the same color they’ve always been, though the blue of them has now frozen over and seems nearly Arctic. He confesses that he has something to confess and I take my hand from the doorknob to withdraw a cigarette from my pack. I notice that I have somehow unconsciously become distant, and I hope it doesn’t show in my outward demeanour. I offer him a smoke and he accepts both it and the flame from my lighter. I urge him to continue silently, but he takes a long, shuddering drag before he does.
He confesses that he hates himself and that he has for a long time. This is not surprising to me. Unbidden, my thoughts return to you. Perhaps it’s something about the crunch and hunch of his shoulders over the cigarette, or the way he won’t stop shivering. I feel a gentle derision for him sweep over me, like the loving loathing of an older brother or parent. In another time, I would have slapped him until he stiffened his spine and narrowed his eyes. I find myself hating myself for being unsure how to proceed. I listen. He is again stalking around the edges of the conversation. This is how he prepares himself. He is telling me how much he loved her, his you, but that things one day just grew wrong, went askew, like a tree being forced to split itself in two to grow around a boulder. He is in the middle of luridly describing the night they fell apart when I stop him and put my hand on his shoulder. My breath is moist, hot, and turns instantly to vapour when it encounters the air outside of my mouth. I suppose it’s my way of slapping him in the face. I do it as gently as possible; I ask him what’s wrong, what’s really wrong. He looks me in the eyes and breathes his first complete lungful of air since I’ve seen him and winces at the invading cold.
“It’s you,” he says, and stiffens his spine. He’s no longer abstruse about it, no longer darting or sneaking. It spills out of him like water from a ruptured pipe, gouting madly out of his mouth. His feelings, his thoughts. All those dull platitudes you never want said but secretly wish to hear. I can feel something exploding way down deep inside of me, fathoms into the pit of my stomach, and can hear your voice ringing like a cathedral bell in my skull. Again, the rattle of the subway car. Again, the haunting refrain.
He asks to come in, and I let him. We leave our boots by the door.
I wake up. There’s a moth in the room, an ugly brown-winged furry thing that keeps battering at my face. I wake up in a haze and it’s gone, but as soon as I close my eyes it’s back, rubbing and fluttering against my jawbone before disappearing again. I’m surprised it hasn’t woken you yet. You’ve ended up in my bed. We didn’t take our clothes off, though our hands have played cartographer for a number of hours before eventually capsizing like yawing sailboats in a tempestuous sea, folding beneath the waves of each other’s hair. They have migrated during the night’s hours to different locales – sandwiched between pillows, as a trivet for the heated head, at rest on the shoal of a shoulder, limp and disused in the crevasse between our bodies. As I wake, so do my hands, and they resurrect themselves, crawling out of their hideaways, blinking and startled in the morass of sheets.
Then the tidal bore of wakefulness, tinged with the rye-brown of drunk, a wave through the estuary and up the wide-mouthed river of sleep. You are there, towheaded and tousled, breath fluttering in and out of your mouth left ajar. There is no moth, I realize. You stir, soundlessly, and I remove myself from the bed. The heat's come on, and I am sopping through my clothes. The bathroom's anodyne light causes my eyes to rebel, and I stagger away from the mirror, muttering something unintelligible to myself, like a warding spell, before I realize it's your name - though which you, I am uncertain.
I have never been certain of much. It's always one thing, then the other, and then another on top of it. How life goes: an unending accumulation, like silt at a delta. We deposit and are deposited upon, a chain of transactions that leaves us somehow always with one more thing than with which we arrived. I wouldn't categorize you as a thing, either of you, nor myself. We are epistolary, all of us - fragments, spinning, like a shattered window in slow motion. I have told you that I do not believe in being whole, and you make your customary frown before launching into a tedious dissertation regarding fate and the like. I don't believe in such things, but sometimes I tell you I do and listen with rapt attention. Sometimes I can even convince myself that I do believe in your grandiose notions of how the world operates, as if on some invisible axis comprised of spirits and unearthly beings who take interest in our mortal affairs. It's easier than the brittle realism of cause and effect, easier still than the blank face of reason and logic, like a Greek god on its plinth, boring its eyeless, infinite stare across the centuries. Though I always catch myself, you decorate the hook well and I am constantly drawn to its spiralling glitter.
I used to call you by colors, both of you, and perhaps it'd be best if I revert to that now, for the sake of clarity. You are Ochre, the hue of your hair, the hue of red-clay earth. You are Umber, the raw brown of varnished wood. This makes it easy to tell the two of you apart, even though distance separates you. I am standing in front of the door, waiting for you to pass by, smoking a cigarette. A transient with gaps in his mouth asks me if I have fifty cents and I give him a penny out of spite. He throws it on the ground in front of me and curses me in some bile-inflected, spittly tongue. I am indifferent and blot him from my sight. He vanishes appropriately, though I am made nervous by his indictment and the memory of him lingers in my brain long after suppertime. I am poor, lately, too, and my pockets are fast becoming threadbare. I am always seen wearing the same pair of pants, and sometimes, the same pair of socks.
The sky above tumbles by, as if it is trying to get ahead of itself knowing it never can. The wind is loud and blustery, more befitting an April afternoon than a December evening. You've been working all day, chained to a desk by a headset, answering phone call after phone call. I imagine you in mechanical repose in front of your computer, inert until needed. A strange sense inside of me is awoken at this image. It has been days since I've thought of you. I've prepared a bottle of whiskey, which is to say, I've opened it and had a shot. The warmth of it is even now is metastasizing inside of me, spreading from organ to organ. I have my head tilted up, slightly, and am watching a fat bank of clouds shove itself imperiously along. I know that by midnight they will have usurped the heavens and will dump their accumulations on top of us, unceremoniously, and with little regard for our bared heads. A bus lets off and I watch the passengers shuffle their way out of the heaving vehicle's innards. Umber is a bad name for you, but it's what I've got. I might tell you tonight, though I don't think you'd appreciate it.
I'm playing music in my head, and the urge to throw myself at the bar is gargantuan, like a hand pressed firmly against the small of my back, goading me on. I know I might find you there. You've lost your phone and I don't even know where you live. I've told you to knock on my window, though for the past week the window has remained resolutely silent. My doorbell is broken, and I've tried to fix it, though only ended up with the frottage of an electrical shock for my pains. I know I might find you at the bar, though I am resolute in waiting.
The fifth of whiskey goes down smoother after the first three shots. I have forsaken a glass and have taken to drinking directly from the bottle, as classless and gauche as it is, taking great pleasure in swimming within its brown depths. I imagine myself in miniature, dancing like an angel on a pinhead, around the rim of the bottle, before teetering and falling in. I imagine a hand - yours - opening and closing, slowly, then quickly; as if asking for something, then begging, then demanding. My head is beginning to spin, wobbling on my spine like an unbalanced, greasy ball balanced precariously at the top of a tall pole. This delirium, I tell myself, is more comfortable than loneliness.
A man with dark-rimmed glasses and a white coat is leaning over me. He is fastidious but for his beard, whose gray coils spring from his chin like the innards of a broken pocket-watch. His brow is unevenly furrowed over wiry eyebrows and brooding, dark eyes. He has concern coming out of his mouth, but I am barely able to hear it through the booming tripartite throb of my heart. I hallucinate that I am lashed to a gurney on a subway, staring at your dark ochre hair. You never turn around, even in my dreams.
I wake up on my couch, unkempt and with vomit staining the corner of my mouth like an ill-advised brushstroke. You are laying in the bed, one shoe on and the other off, sock bunched up and dangling from the edge of your toes. There is a thick, musty stillness in the room which, after a moment or two, I realize is the smell of my own sick. I am immediately overcome by a surge of embarrassment. You are just as you were the last time you were here, laying in exactly the same position, lips parted exactly the same way, breath fluttering out of you in resigned, slow patterns. I imagine I can see it in the air; frosted iterations of gentle recrimination. I do not know what day it is, though the whiskey bottle sits not far away from me and still has a drop left in the bottom. My fingers are stained with the yellowing scent of just-smoked cigarettes. There is no clock in my room and I do not care what time it is.
I stumble up from the couch into the bathroom again, giggling slightly at the repetition. My mind sharply invokes the image of the transient, cursing and spitting, and I giggle a little harder. The laugh causes my stomach to cramp and I bend over the sink to eject more poison from my insides. It's only poison on its way back up, I think deliriously to myself, amid whorls of head-splitting pain.
Your hand comes to rest between my shoulderblades, and I hurl myself as far away from myself as possible, feeling a sudden collapse incipient. I sag at the knees and you curl your elbows beneath my armpits, hoisting me up. You're stronger than I thought you were. Your fists curl at the sides of my jaws and I notice that your fingernails are ragged - some are discolored with the ochre of dried blood.
episode 3: the snake & the pocket-watch
He had always had a negligible relationship with time. Whether it was the malingering before school early in his life or whether it was the difficulty wrangling the space between one thing and another later in life, he had always found himself either uncomfortably early or uncomfortably late. Nothing he tried would fix it. It was as though he had, somewhere along the line, broken time's heart, and now time edged away from him every time he came into contact with it, preferring instead to avert itself, take subtle detours. The story of how this came to happen is presented below, as anecdotal evidence.
1.
Half-past-one in the afternoon, October 11th. Fifth grade recess overlapping by chance with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade recess. A dangerous mixture, but one which the administration allowed due to some sort of catastrophe in the kitchen and, as a result, the compression of what should have been two waves of outdoor recreation into one. The activities were over-staffed as the students ran around in the sunlight, at their various games. There's an impromptu kickball game, watched over by the militant gaze of Mr. Hardwell and the stentorian vocals of Ms. (not Mrs.) Kravitz. There's the game of tag (not to take place on woodchips, and Mrs. Rathburn's intervention when it did); the various playground chatter, girls grouped on the grass in circles talking about horses and the Babysitter's Club books; the loners; the dirtbike kids; and, finally; the game of spies-in-the-bush.
2.
At approximately 1:45 P.M., the administration was largely satisfied with its policing. Three of the ten supervising teachers were allowed to return inside, to their lounge and their lunches, and the game of spies-in-the-bush intensified. Delineated below, for the purposes of dramatis personae, are those involved.
A. Nikos Kazanstakis, leader of the Rogue Snakes, age 10. Denim jacket embroided with Harley-Davidson patch. Terminal sneer on his littleboy's face.
B. Craig Wilcox, second-in-comannd of the Rogue Snakes, age 11, held back one year. Plans to oust Nikos not-quite-formulated.
C. Bruno and Toby Farragut, twins - though not identical, and perhaps not even fraternal. They stuck to their story despite the fact that almost no one believed them. Age 10.
D. Simon Eyvind, a freakishly large 11 year old, similarly held back. Of Norse descent. Considered "the muscle" of the Rogue Snakes.
The manifesto of the Rogue Eagles, crudely illustrated by Nikos' own hand, lived in the hollow of a tree just beyond the limits of the playground. The tree stood at an awkward angle, having shoved itself right up against a large, flat rock made up of schist, granite and mica. The namesake of the gang had been declared the day that Nikos stumbled upon a copperhead, Agkistrodon contortrix, coiling in the cool shade of the rock. Nikos had not displayed any outward show of fear, but stood there, staring at the viper, unblinking, untwitching. Just in time, a teacher had investigated, and shrieked aloud at the sight. They had since been disallowed to congregate at their rock, but none of them had ever shown much regard for that particular edict. They had been in existence for two school years now, since the third grade.
There is also the rival gang, who exist nebulously around one young man whose parents enjoyed the largest house, up on the hill. His name was Kevin Bailey, age 10. His infamy was based around one mythological incident; it was said that he had mercilessly abandoned Dennis LaChance on the roof of the school and left him there for three whole days. Those three days, a record rainfall was set, and, once Dennis had been found by his fearful, quivering parents, the local sheriff, and the super-intendent of schools, he could not speak without his teeth chattering. It was rumored that Kevin had no reason for the cruelty. When asked, Harold Vernor (one of Kevin's "lieutenants") had shrugged and simply said, "He didn't like him."
There is also Dave Granger, and it is he whom this anecdote concerns.
2.5
Dave Granger always carried around a small, gold-plated pocket-watch that he had found in the basement of his house, in his father's old workbench, covered in sawdust within one of the drawers. When he found it, the gears were stopped and the device was silent. He had held it up to an ear, rattled it once, experimentally. He flicked it, once, with the index finger of his right hand, on its back. Sawdust swirled in minute, hesitant curls through the musty air of the basement, and the watch startled to life, the second hand resuming its staccato progress ever around the circle of hours. A wet paper towel or two later, and the glass face of it was clean, though scratched more than a few times. It possessed no chain, though the knob at the top was slightly sticky, and refused to wind. Incredibly, it still told time perfectly. On more than one occasion, Dave had intentions to open it and commit surgery on its insides, though he could never seem to pry the back off, even with a screwdriver and the claw-end of a small hammer.
His father had been gone from the house for years, departed in his own swirl of sawdust, like a magician's vanish gone wrong and with no audience to witness it. Echoes of him remained - his towering bookshelf, crammed with paperbacks of Alan Dean Foster and Piers Anthony, in contrast to his mother's neat rows of Danielle Steele and Phyllis E. Woodiwiss, bookended by photographs of lighthouses at sunset and leaves with their fall vestments on. Dave didn't know his father's face or voice, but had seen pictures. He had his hair. Once or twice, he found a piece of paper written by his father - a legal document here, signed in a completely illegible scribble. Technically, Dave Granger was David Granger Jr., though the Jr. was more or less negligible at this point.
His mother refused to speak about it. She walled herself off from the world, coming home from work with tired smiles and brief pats on the head, absented stirrings of the spaghetti sauce while the news blared behind her on the small kitchen TV. Dave entertained weird notions that his father's soul was in the pocket-watch, though never really believed it. He was no stranger to oddities and arcana - mornings, he lay awake, staring at the red LED of his clock, slamming his eyes shut and attempting to force time forward by the force of his will alone. This never happened, but it never kept him from trying.
3.
1:50 P.M., and Dave Granger, who had just finished reading My Brother Sam is Dead, decided to become a profiteer. This is where the trouble starts. He had long since known about the existence of the Rogue Snakes, and rode to school on the same bus as Nikos. They had never spoken to one another, though they both preferred to sit at the back of the bus and stare out the windows at the cars which trailed behind.
There is one encounter, during which Dave Granger established his own slight infamy. One Sean Walker, a seventh-grader, who boards the bus further down the route than Dave, decided to begin a turf-war with Dave over the back seat. It was a short-lived war of subtle intimidation. Sean sat in the seat in front of Dave, turning around to declare his intent one morning. Nikos had watched, but did not intervene. Sean put down the gauntlet, threatening to make Dave's life hell if he didn't get his "four-eyed, nerdy ass" out of that seat from then on. Dave had blinked once, pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, and remained silent.
The next morning, Sean Walker boarded the bus, and immediately swept his gaze to the back. There was Dave, sitting in his regular seat, backpack open next to him. Sean sat in the seat in front of him, and, when the bus pulled up in front of the school, began his second act of war. As the rest of the kids stood up and began clamoring, obscuring the driver's rearview gaze, Sean stood up, fist at the ready, warning between his teeth - and suddenly found his gaze blackened and his head slamming to one side.
As soon as he had seen Sean's fist curling, Dave had pulled the red-spined American Heritage Dictionary from out of his backpack and swung it through the air, savagely connecting with the side of the bully's face.
Everyone's got a rumor connected to them. Dave's lingered in the hallways of the school for a good week before it was usurped by Fred Kessler's urinary incontinence in the cafeteria. It wasn't forgotten. Nikos had watched Dave swing the dictionary and approved of the violence, though he didn't like the kid that much - didn't trust him; never trusted a loner like that - though he did have respect for him. Nikos didn't need anyone else in his "gang," however.
4.
11:50 A.M., and Dave Granger was in possession of a secret. He spoke rarely, but he had a gift for listening. Class bored him, and his eyes roved around the room, around his fellow students. He always sat at the back of the class for this very reason, sat alone, in corners, in the lunchroom, usually reading. Once in awhile, someone would approach him, but he would only ever do the same thing he ever did - blink at them, somewhat owlishly, and nod, before returning to his book. The incident on the bus was the only thing anyone really knew, concretely, about Dave Granger. He did well at school, though never applied himself, and was the subject of much frustration between guidance counsellor and teacher alike. This day, being the last one to leave the room, Dave happened to notice a piece of folded-up notebook paper dangling out of Harold Vernor's desk. As he walked by, the note fell to the carpet. Somewhat absently, he picked it up, and without thinking, opened it and read the line therein:
TODAY AFTER RECESS WE GET THEM
Dave Granger was in a unique position to understand the contents of this note. He had known for awhile, that Kevin Bailey had decided to take down the Rogue Snakes. Kevin despised Nikos and every member of his "gang." He had called them dirty fuckers, having only just learned the word, and declaring that they should be "put down." Dave had overhead this conversation because he was in a habit of finding lonely, dim places to read his book where he wouldn't be bothered. This day, it was just behind the equipment shack beyond the baseball field. Dave had broken in (the lock was rusty and wouldn't snap to) a few days prior and had successfully established himself in what he liked to call the Lookout.
In a similar fashion, the Rogue Snakes had found a reason to exist beyond holding fake 'meetings' and discussing inanities. Dennis "LaChatter" LaChance had been inducted into their gang because his dad worked at the race-car track a town over and had promised them all tickets to the race the following week. His price? Revenge. Dave knew this because Dennis had told him in the cafeteria just two days prior. Dennis had to tell someone, and he didn't know anyone, so he sat down next to Dave and had the story out after a brief interval of awkward hellos and eye-twitching. In a way, Dave was curious about Dennis and felt pity for him, though in no way felt invested in the situation. He had looked up, blinked, and ... just once, nodded, as if to say he understood. The nod was all that Dennis had needed for verification, and had left Dave alone, confident that he wouldn't say anything to anyone.
5.
2:01 P.M. The recess bell has shrilled over the playground, and swarms of kids are migrating to the doors of the school. Teachers are busy herding them, making sure no one is left behind, standing sentinel by the building, scanning, squinting to see who is lagging at the edges. Mrs. Rathburn is pre-occupied with her impending divorce from her adulterous husband, and old Mr. Rubenstein can't see much beyond the tips of his fingers. The rest of the supervisors have been released to their classrooms.
The doors shut behind them as they usher the last of the students inside.
6.
1:55 P.M. Dave puts down his book in the Lookout and stares at the inside of the shack door. The woodgrain seems to be moving, though it isn't. He's just tired. Last night, his mother came home and forwent even her usual pat on his head, went right into her bedroom and locked the door behind her. All night he could hear her sobbing, and he still doesn't know why.
All at once, he stands up, exits the Lookout, and crosses the playground. He is not determined, he is not sure of purpose, he simply has committed to action. He knows the place he is walking, and it is right into the snakepit.
Nikos is holding court, though the business portion of their meeting has concluded. He doesn't say anything as Dave walks up, though Simon Eyvind steps in Dave's way and inquires as to his business with the group.
"I have information," Dave says, proferring a piece of notebook paper.
7.
5:15 P.M, and Dave's mother is just getting home from another day at work. There is a message on the answering machine, evidenced by the flicker of the red LED light on the console.
It is Dave's father, Dave Granger Sr. She does not listen to it beyond the words "Lee, it's Dave ..." preferring instead to wildly jab at the DELETE button with her index finger, over and over and over and over again, tears springing to her eyes.
Dave walks in just as she is closing the bedroom door. The evening whorls in like a flying saucer, darkening all of the town with its shadow. He stands in the front door's rigid embrace, staring at the clock on the opposite wall.
The phone will ring a great deal that night, and there will even be repeated knocks on the front door of the Granger house. It will be revealed that Nikos threw a snake - Agkistrodon contortrix - at Kevin Bailey, and that the two groups converged on one another like weather fronts in the aftermath. It will also be told that Kevin Bailey has been envenomed by the snake from a particularly nasty bite on his right hand. Even though Agkistrodon contortrix's venom isn't particularly fatal, Kevin - it turns out - is allergic to most reptile venom, and has gone into tachycardia on the playground. He is rushed to the hospital, where he remains for most of the night in critical condition before being downgraded to stable around six in the morning.
Dave Granger will not blame himself. He stood back from it all and watched the physical portion of the fight - the actual scuffle - happening between Kevin's gang and the other members of the Rogue Snakes. Nikos and Craig had held back until Nikos entered into the fracas with the snake in hand. Dave is possessed of a secret, wild elation. He sleeps until midnight, where he wakes in a sudden froth from a red-hued dream of a man with snakejaws. He gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen, crouches by the cabinet under the junk drawer and withdraws an old, dust-covered bottle of Popov vodka. Without hesitating, Dave tips the bottle back and takes his first swallow of alcohol. He promptly vomits it back up, retching, eyes filled with the bitterwater of tears. His mother still does not wake up, even over the retching. Dave is forced to clean up his sick on his own, alone on the linoleum with not even the cold moon to illuminate his progress.
8.
1:34 P.M., October 18th. It's a Tuesday. Kevin Bailey has been out of the hospital for a few days now, and this is his second day back in the classroom. As a result of the treatment with the antivenom CroFab, his skin is mottled with raised red rashes and he is cursed with an uncontrollable, tic-like itching motion. He has also acquired a nickname: Itchy. His fury is deep, and comes from a sinkhole that has collapsed somewhere inside of himself. His prior position, somewhat invulnerable, is completely decimated.
Kevin Bailey has been approached by Craig Wilcox, Nikos' second-in-command. Craig's mother is friends with the Baileys, though this is a somewhat new development. The Wilcox family has recently come into a bit of luck - they've won a substantially more than modest sum of money via the state lottery. Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox immediately summon the aid of Mrs. Evoria Bailey, Kevin's mother, also a real estate agent. They want to move higher up on the hill. They are invited to dinner, and this is how Craig comes to know Kevin. Their parents want them to be friends - why wouldn't they be? - and Mr. and Mrs. Bailey are concerned about the scuffle. Nikos has been suspended, and Craig sees this as a perfect time to begin his takeover.
This is how Kevin Bailey comes to know about Dave Granger. A certain piece of paper has exchanged hands for the second - no, third - time in a week. A certain piece of paper with one line on it. Kevin Bailey takes the note in his hand and folds it cleanly, obsessively, twice - four times - eight times - sixteen times, until the paper is a lump of pulp that won't bend further. Kevin Bailey scratches at the nape of his neck and Craig Wilcox wins an ally.
9.
1:45 P.M., and it's exactly one week after Kevin's been bit. His rashes are beginning to fade, though he still itches like a madman, uncontrollably. His fury is the path of an oncoming storm. Like leaves on a tree, the whole population of the school turns whitebellied and scatters. No one goes near the edge of the playground - not that they did anyway. Dave Granger's in the Lookout, reading, alone, but he can't keep his mind on the page. He reads the same sentence, over and over again, trying to latch his mind onto it. He tries to skip a page, but it doesn't work. The sentence is "They huddled in the dark, waiting for the threat outside to subside."
Abruptly, the door to the shack is thrown open and it becomes clear to Dave Granger why the day hasn't felt right. Everyone's eyes have slid off of him - and moreso than the usual, where no one used to look at him at all, even recognize his presence - today, today ... it's been different. They have noticed him. That's what he missed. They all - all of them - noticed him. But now it's too late. The door to the Lookout slams shut behind Kevin Bailey.
10.
6:30 P.M., and Dave Granger's mother still hasn't come home. Dave sits at the kitchen table, his sneakers muddy, his face a bas-relief map of bruises and blood seeping out of more than a few abrasions. He breathes heavily. On the table in front of him is his pocket-watch, mangled and in shards, the springs bleeding out of the back of it like miniature metal snakes. His eyes keep twitching, relentlessly, to the cabinet under the junk drawer, and then to the clock on the wall. For an unspecified reason, the pocket-watch has not ceased to tick, even though it has been eviscerated and smashed beneath Kevin Bailey's heel. Dave Granger's throat is also on fire, most likely from the gears and cogs that no longer reside in the pocket-watch but now sink in a sea of gastric acid within his stomach.
All at once, Dave gets up and limps over to the clock on the wall. He stands beneath it, staring up at the second hand as its zombielike progress continues, inexorably up the arc past the 9, scales to the 12, and begins its descent down (somehow seeming faster) toward the bottom of the circle. As it passes the 1, Dave Granger steps away, dragging a kitchen chair to the base of the wall. As the second hand hits the 4, he is extending his shaking hands to the sides of the clock on the wall. As the second hand hits the 6, Dave Granger's lifted the clock off of its nail and holds it above his hand. He does not know what number the second hand is on when it meets the linoleum in a satisfying, gibbering crash of glass and plastic. He stands there, staring at his ruin, when he notices the blinking number 1 on the answering machine across the room. For a moment, the ticking has stopped and the only sound he can hear is the schuss of his breath, rasping in and out past his blood-crusted lips. As he climbs down off of the chair, the sound resumes and Dave Granger winces involuntarily, though whether it is from his dismount or from the sound, he cannot tell.
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
Dave Granger lights a cigarette and leans against the building. His head is muddy with beer and his legs are shaky. He is trying to remember the last time he ate anything substantial, though his mind keeps straying to a conversation he's had days earlier with his closest ally Tom. Dave's hair has grown out and his beard has grown in, though it is patchy and uneven. Some days he hates himself, though those days are full of quiet loathing, and Dave thinks of it as the muttering of a demon that lives somewhere in the Byzantine coils of his insides. Dave was a theology major for awhile, but that soon lost its lustre due to a professor more keen on inculcation rather than education. He tried English, but grammar bored him. He tried theater, but the incessant narcissism of every other student-major made him physically ill. For years, he frittered away time to small splinters, choosing to develop a friendship with a commuter student who grew marijuana up north. Dave lived on campus in the building where all the other undeclared students lived. He had been shunted in with a cocky freshman out of Duxbury, Mass. - a hockey player who had been granted scholarship and who would, nightly, have rendezvous with a girl named Michelle, oblivious to Dave's presence. He reminded Dave of someone he'd known a long time ago - but then, he found that most people did.
His friend the grower went by the unfunny (and perhaps unwise) nickname of Mr. Green, though Dave called him Tom. They would lay back in Tom's 1986 Buick Century station wagon and smoke endless amounts of dope, until, at times, they would fall asleep next to one another. Somehow they were never caught by campus police. Tom always parked his car next to the water tower, right in the thick of everything, unconcerned by passersby. In fact, he even claimed once, it helped his business. People knew where to find him. No one cared. Dave felt a peculiar sense of belonging, and even thrilled mildly at the risk. He experienced brief tingles in his fingertips as he sat in the car. Joe did most of the talking, and Dave Granger did most of the listening, which was about par for the course. Tom often mused on cosmic conversation, preferring to fill the void of silence with (sometimes completely erroneous) information gleaned from various websites on the Internet.
"Did you know," Tom had said lazily, propelling a caterpillar of smoke out of his mouth, "the Greeks divided time in two parts?" Dave didn't reply. He knew there was more. There's always more. "Yeah ... Chronos, and Kairos. Chronos is like, you know. The numbers on a clock, but like .. Kairos? Kairos is divine time. Kairos is like ... strike while the anvil's hot, you know?" Tom leaned back and closed his eyes, proferring the joint across the seats to Dave. "I wish I had a clock that told Kairos time, man. That'd be awesome."
Dave nodded and blinked, coughing out the smoke. "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He finished the quote and passed the joint back. He had found that he was always the fastest one to take a hit - most people took their time, preferring to orate, or lapse into the television screen, joint burning down in their fingertips, while Dave Granger took it, smoked it, and passed it all in less than five seconds.
"Who's that?" Tom was used to Dave's quotes, but it was rare that he would be familiar with any of them.
Dave turned to the passenger side window. The sun was setting over the hills, as red as tomato soup, and the sky around it a virulent orange. "St. Augustine."
Tom nods, languidly, and exhales.
"Kairos time," Dave Granger repeats, a hint of color in his usual monochrome tone. "Huh."
The cigarette's gone out, and Dave's mouth is dry. He can tell by the way his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth - only slightly - and how the insides of his cheeks stick to the sides of his molars when he opens his jaws to yawn. This, of course, is due to dehydration, but Dave mistakes it for the need to return to his beer. He flicks his cigarette - Camel light - into the street, and returns inside.
The bar is familiar to him, a bit of a dive, the only place he feels entirely comfortable in the world. For months now, he's lived alone, and it's been like a bit of paradise, but even Adam got lonely and prayed for companionship. This is something he likes to say to excuse his frequent visitation to others ... and probably also by way of excusing his alcoholism to himself. It is also entirely possible that Dave Granger is not an alcoholic. The staff at the bar is familiar to him as well, though he keeps largely to himself and enjoys roughly the same position there as he did in middle school - at the edges of things, usually with his face in a book, though at times the alcohol would cause breaches in the social wall he had erected for himself.
1.
Half-past-one in the afternoon, October 11th. Fifth grade recess overlapping by chance with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade recess. A dangerous mixture, but one which the administration allowed due to some sort of catastrophe in the kitchen and, as a result, the compression of what should have been two waves of outdoor recreation into one. The activities were over-staffed as the students ran around in the sunlight, at their various games. There's an impromptu kickball game, watched over by the militant gaze of Mr. Hardwell and the stentorian vocals of Ms. (not Mrs.) Kravitz. There's the game of tag (not to take place on woodchips, and Mrs. Rathburn's intervention when it did); the various playground chatter, girls grouped on the grass in circles talking about horses and the Babysitter's Club books; the loners; the dirtbike kids; and, finally; the game of spies-in-the-bush.
2.
At approximately 1:45 P.M., the administration was largely satisfied with its policing. Three of the ten supervising teachers were allowed to return inside, to their lounge and their lunches, and the game of spies-in-the-bush intensified. Delineated below, for the purposes of dramatis personae, are those involved.
A. Nikos Kazanstakis, leader of the Rogue Snakes, age 10. Denim jacket embroided with Harley-Davidson patch. Terminal sneer on his littleboy's face.
B. Craig Wilcox, second-in-comannd of the Rogue Snakes, age 11, held back one year. Plans to oust Nikos not-quite-formulated.
C. Bruno and Toby Farragut, twins - though not identical, and perhaps not even fraternal. They stuck to their story despite the fact that almost no one believed them. Age 10.
D. Simon Eyvind, a freakishly large 11 year old, similarly held back. Of Norse descent. Considered "the muscle" of the Rogue Snakes.
The manifesto of the Rogue Eagles, crudely illustrated by Nikos' own hand, lived in the hollow of a tree just beyond the limits of the playground. The tree stood at an awkward angle, having shoved itself right up against a large, flat rock made up of schist, granite and mica. The namesake of the gang had been declared the day that Nikos stumbled upon a copperhead, Agkistrodon contortrix, coiling in the cool shade of the rock. Nikos had not displayed any outward show of fear, but stood there, staring at the viper, unblinking, untwitching. Just in time, a teacher had investigated, and shrieked aloud at the sight. They had since been disallowed to congregate at their rock, but none of them had ever shown much regard for that particular edict. They had been in existence for two school years now, since the third grade.
There is also the rival gang, who exist nebulously around one young man whose parents enjoyed the largest house, up on the hill. His name was Kevin Bailey, age 10. His infamy was based around one mythological incident; it was said that he had mercilessly abandoned Dennis LaChance on the roof of the school and left him there for three whole days. Those three days, a record rainfall was set, and, once Dennis had been found by his fearful, quivering parents, the local sheriff, and the super-intendent of schools, he could not speak without his teeth chattering. It was rumored that Kevin had no reason for the cruelty. When asked, Harold Vernor (one of Kevin's "lieutenants") had shrugged and simply said, "He didn't like him."
There is also Dave Granger, and it is he whom this anecdote concerns.
2.5
Dave Granger always carried around a small, gold-plated pocket-watch that he had found in the basement of his house, in his father's old workbench, covered in sawdust within one of the drawers. When he found it, the gears were stopped and the device was silent. He had held it up to an ear, rattled it once, experimentally. He flicked it, once, with the index finger of his right hand, on its back. Sawdust swirled in minute, hesitant curls through the musty air of the basement, and the watch startled to life, the second hand resuming its staccato progress ever around the circle of hours. A wet paper towel or two later, and the glass face of it was clean, though scratched more than a few times. It possessed no chain, though the knob at the top was slightly sticky, and refused to wind. Incredibly, it still told time perfectly. On more than one occasion, Dave had intentions to open it and commit surgery on its insides, though he could never seem to pry the back off, even with a screwdriver and the claw-end of a small hammer.
His father had been gone from the house for years, departed in his own swirl of sawdust, like a magician's vanish gone wrong and with no audience to witness it. Echoes of him remained - his towering bookshelf, crammed with paperbacks of Alan Dean Foster and Piers Anthony, in contrast to his mother's neat rows of Danielle Steele and Phyllis E. Woodiwiss, bookended by photographs of lighthouses at sunset and leaves with their fall vestments on. Dave didn't know his father's face or voice, but had seen pictures. He had his hair. Once or twice, he found a piece of paper written by his father - a legal document here, signed in a completely illegible scribble. Technically, Dave Granger was David Granger Jr., though the Jr. was more or less negligible at this point.
His mother refused to speak about it. She walled herself off from the world, coming home from work with tired smiles and brief pats on the head, absented stirrings of the spaghetti sauce while the news blared behind her on the small kitchen TV. Dave entertained weird notions that his father's soul was in the pocket-watch, though never really believed it. He was no stranger to oddities and arcana - mornings, he lay awake, staring at the red LED of his clock, slamming his eyes shut and attempting to force time forward by the force of his will alone. This never happened, but it never kept him from trying.
3.
1:50 P.M., and Dave Granger, who had just finished reading My Brother Sam is Dead, decided to become a profiteer. This is where the trouble starts. He had long since known about the existence of the Rogue Snakes, and rode to school on the same bus as Nikos. They had never spoken to one another, though they both preferred to sit at the back of the bus and stare out the windows at the cars which trailed behind.
There is one encounter, during which Dave Granger established his own slight infamy. One Sean Walker, a seventh-grader, who boards the bus further down the route than Dave, decided to begin a turf-war with Dave over the back seat. It was a short-lived war of subtle intimidation. Sean sat in the seat in front of Dave, turning around to declare his intent one morning. Nikos had watched, but did not intervene. Sean put down the gauntlet, threatening to make Dave's life hell if he didn't get his "four-eyed, nerdy ass" out of that seat from then on. Dave had blinked once, pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, and remained silent.
The next morning, Sean Walker boarded the bus, and immediately swept his gaze to the back. There was Dave, sitting in his regular seat, backpack open next to him. Sean sat in the seat in front of him, and, when the bus pulled up in front of the school, began his second act of war. As the rest of the kids stood up and began clamoring, obscuring the driver's rearview gaze, Sean stood up, fist at the ready, warning between his teeth - and suddenly found his gaze blackened and his head slamming to one side.
As soon as he had seen Sean's fist curling, Dave had pulled the red-spined American Heritage Dictionary from out of his backpack and swung it through the air, savagely connecting with the side of the bully's face.
Everyone's got a rumor connected to them. Dave's lingered in the hallways of the school for a good week before it was usurped by Fred Kessler's urinary incontinence in the cafeteria. It wasn't forgotten. Nikos had watched Dave swing the dictionary and approved of the violence, though he didn't like the kid that much - didn't trust him; never trusted a loner like that - though he did have respect for him. Nikos didn't need anyone else in his "gang," however.
4.
11:50 A.M., and Dave Granger was in possession of a secret. He spoke rarely, but he had a gift for listening. Class bored him, and his eyes roved around the room, around his fellow students. He always sat at the back of the class for this very reason, sat alone, in corners, in the lunchroom, usually reading. Once in awhile, someone would approach him, but he would only ever do the same thing he ever did - blink at them, somewhat owlishly, and nod, before returning to his book. The incident on the bus was the only thing anyone really knew, concretely, about Dave Granger. He did well at school, though never applied himself, and was the subject of much frustration between guidance counsellor and teacher alike. This day, being the last one to leave the room, Dave happened to notice a piece of folded-up notebook paper dangling out of Harold Vernor's desk. As he walked by, the note fell to the carpet. Somewhat absently, he picked it up, and without thinking, opened it and read the line therein:
TODAY AFTER RECESS WE GET THEM
Dave Granger was in a unique position to understand the contents of this note. He had known for awhile, that Kevin Bailey had decided to take down the Rogue Snakes. Kevin despised Nikos and every member of his "gang." He had called them dirty fuckers, having only just learned the word, and declaring that they should be "put down." Dave had overhead this conversation because he was in a habit of finding lonely, dim places to read his book where he wouldn't be bothered. This day, it was just behind the equipment shack beyond the baseball field. Dave had broken in (the lock was rusty and wouldn't snap to) a few days prior and had successfully established himself in what he liked to call the Lookout.
In a similar fashion, the Rogue Snakes had found a reason to exist beyond holding fake 'meetings' and discussing inanities. Dennis "LaChatter" LaChance had been inducted into their gang because his dad worked at the race-car track a town over and had promised them all tickets to the race the following week. His price? Revenge. Dave knew this because Dennis had told him in the cafeteria just two days prior. Dennis had to tell someone, and he didn't know anyone, so he sat down next to Dave and had the story out after a brief interval of awkward hellos and eye-twitching. In a way, Dave was curious about Dennis and felt pity for him, though in no way felt invested in the situation. He had looked up, blinked, and ... just once, nodded, as if to say he understood. The nod was all that Dennis had needed for verification, and had left Dave alone, confident that he wouldn't say anything to anyone.
5.
2:01 P.M. The recess bell has shrilled over the playground, and swarms of kids are migrating to the doors of the school. Teachers are busy herding them, making sure no one is left behind, standing sentinel by the building, scanning, squinting to see who is lagging at the edges. Mrs. Rathburn is pre-occupied with her impending divorce from her adulterous husband, and old Mr. Rubenstein can't see much beyond the tips of his fingers. The rest of the supervisors have been released to their classrooms.
The doors shut behind them as they usher the last of the students inside.
6.
1:55 P.M. Dave puts down his book in the Lookout and stares at the inside of the shack door. The woodgrain seems to be moving, though it isn't. He's just tired. Last night, his mother came home and forwent even her usual pat on his head, went right into her bedroom and locked the door behind her. All night he could hear her sobbing, and he still doesn't know why.
All at once, he stands up, exits the Lookout, and crosses the playground. He is not determined, he is not sure of purpose, he simply has committed to action. He knows the place he is walking, and it is right into the snakepit.
Nikos is holding court, though the business portion of their meeting has concluded. He doesn't say anything as Dave walks up, though Simon Eyvind steps in Dave's way and inquires as to his business with the group.
"I have information," Dave says, proferring a piece of notebook paper.
7.
5:15 P.M, and Dave's mother is just getting home from another day at work. There is a message on the answering machine, evidenced by the flicker of the red LED light on the console.
It is Dave's father, Dave Granger Sr. She does not listen to it beyond the words "Lee, it's Dave ..." preferring instead to wildly jab at the DELETE button with her index finger, over and over and over and over again, tears springing to her eyes.
Dave walks in just as she is closing the bedroom door. The evening whorls in like a flying saucer, darkening all of the town with its shadow. He stands in the front door's rigid embrace, staring at the clock on the opposite wall.
The phone will ring a great deal that night, and there will even be repeated knocks on the front door of the Granger house. It will be revealed that Nikos threw a snake - Agkistrodon contortrix - at Kevin Bailey, and that the two groups converged on one another like weather fronts in the aftermath. It will also be told that Kevin Bailey has been envenomed by the snake from a particularly nasty bite on his right hand. Even though Agkistrodon contortrix's venom isn't particularly fatal, Kevin - it turns out - is allergic to most reptile venom, and has gone into tachycardia on the playground. He is rushed to the hospital, where he remains for most of the night in critical condition before being downgraded to stable around six in the morning.
Dave Granger will not blame himself. He stood back from it all and watched the physical portion of the fight - the actual scuffle - happening between Kevin's gang and the other members of the Rogue Snakes. Nikos and Craig had held back until Nikos entered into the fracas with the snake in hand. Dave is possessed of a secret, wild elation. He sleeps until midnight, where he wakes in a sudden froth from a red-hued dream of a man with snakejaws. He gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen, crouches by the cabinet under the junk drawer and withdraws an old, dust-covered bottle of Popov vodka. Without hesitating, Dave tips the bottle back and takes his first swallow of alcohol. He promptly vomits it back up, retching, eyes filled with the bitterwater of tears. His mother still does not wake up, even over the retching. Dave is forced to clean up his sick on his own, alone on the linoleum with not even the cold moon to illuminate his progress.
8.
1:34 P.M., October 18th. It's a Tuesday. Kevin Bailey has been out of the hospital for a few days now, and this is his second day back in the classroom. As a result of the treatment with the antivenom CroFab, his skin is mottled with raised red rashes and he is cursed with an uncontrollable, tic-like itching motion. He has also acquired a nickname: Itchy. His fury is deep, and comes from a sinkhole that has collapsed somewhere inside of himself. His prior position, somewhat invulnerable, is completely decimated.
Kevin Bailey has been approached by Craig Wilcox, Nikos' second-in-command. Craig's mother is friends with the Baileys, though this is a somewhat new development. The Wilcox family has recently come into a bit of luck - they've won a substantially more than modest sum of money via the state lottery. Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox immediately summon the aid of Mrs. Evoria Bailey, Kevin's mother, also a real estate agent. They want to move higher up on the hill. They are invited to dinner, and this is how Craig comes to know Kevin. Their parents want them to be friends - why wouldn't they be? - and Mr. and Mrs. Bailey are concerned about the scuffle. Nikos has been suspended, and Craig sees this as a perfect time to begin his takeover.
This is how Kevin Bailey comes to know about Dave Granger. A certain piece of paper has exchanged hands for the second - no, third - time in a week. A certain piece of paper with one line on it. Kevin Bailey takes the note in his hand and folds it cleanly, obsessively, twice - four times - eight times - sixteen times, until the paper is a lump of pulp that won't bend further. Kevin Bailey scratches at the nape of his neck and Craig Wilcox wins an ally.
9.
1:45 P.M., and it's exactly one week after Kevin's been bit. His rashes are beginning to fade, though he still itches like a madman, uncontrollably. His fury is the path of an oncoming storm. Like leaves on a tree, the whole population of the school turns whitebellied and scatters. No one goes near the edge of the playground - not that they did anyway. Dave Granger's in the Lookout, reading, alone, but he can't keep his mind on the page. He reads the same sentence, over and over again, trying to latch his mind onto it. He tries to skip a page, but it doesn't work. The sentence is "They huddled in the dark, waiting for the threat outside to subside."
Abruptly, the door to the shack is thrown open and it becomes clear to Dave Granger why the day hasn't felt right. Everyone's eyes have slid off of him - and moreso than the usual, where no one used to look at him at all, even recognize his presence - today, today ... it's been different. They have noticed him. That's what he missed. They all - all of them - noticed him. But now it's too late. The door to the Lookout slams shut behind Kevin Bailey.
10.
6:30 P.M., and Dave Granger's mother still hasn't come home. Dave sits at the kitchen table, his sneakers muddy, his face a bas-relief map of bruises and blood seeping out of more than a few abrasions. He breathes heavily. On the table in front of him is his pocket-watch, mangled and in shards, the springs bleeding out of the back of it like miniature metal snakes. His eyes keep twitching, relentlessly, to the cabinet under the junk drawer, and then to the clock on the wall. For an unspecified reason, the pocket-watch has not ceased to tick, even though it has been eviscerated and smashed beneath Kevin Bailey's heel. Dave Granger's throat is also on fire, most likely from the gears and cogs that no longer reside in the pocket-watch but now sink in a sea of gastric acid within his stomach.
All at once, Dave gets up and limps over to the clock on the wall. He stands beneath it, staring up at the second hand as its zombielike progress continues, inexorably up the arc past the 9, scales to the 12, and begins its descent down (somehow seeming faster) toward the bottom of the circle. As it passes the 1, Dave Granger steps away, dragging a kitchen chair to the base of the wall. As the second hand hits the 4, he is extending his shaking hands to the sides of the clock on the wall. As the second hand hits the 6, Dave Granger's lifted the clock off of its nail and holds it above his hand. He does not know what number the second hand is on when it meets the linoleum in a satisfying, gibbering crash of glass and plastic. He stands there, staring at his ruin, when he notices the blinking number 1 on the answering machine across the room. For a moment, the ticking has stopped and the only sound he can hear is the schuss of his breath, rasping in and out past his blood-crusted lips. As he climbs down off of the chair, the sound resumes and Dave Granger winces involuntarily, though whether it is from his dismount or from the sound, he cannot tell.
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
Dave Granger lights a cigarette and leans against the building. His head is muddy with beer and his legs are shaky. He is trying to remember the last time he ate anything substantial, though his mind keeps straying to a conversation he's had days earlier with his closest ally Tom. Dave's hair has grown out and his beard has grown in, though it is patchy and uneven. Some days he hates himself, though those days are full of quiet loathing, and Dave thinks of it as the muttering of a demon that lives somewhere in the Byzantine coils of his insides. Dave was a theology major for awhile, but that soon lost its lustre due to a professor more keen on inculcation rather than education. He tried English, but grammar bored him. He tried theater, but the incessant narcissism of every other student-major made him physically ill. For years, he frittered away time to small splinters, choosing to develop a friendship with a commuter student who grew marijuana up north. Dave lived on campus in the building where all the other undeclared students lived. He had been shunted in with a cocky freshman out of Duxbury, Mass. - a hockey player who had been granted scholarship and who would, nightly, have rendezvous with a girl named Michelle, oblivious to Dave's presence. He reminded Dave of someone he'd known a long time ago - but then, he found that most people did.
His friend the grower went by the unfunny (and perhaps unwise) nickname of Mr. Green, though Dave called him Tom. They would lay back in Tom's 1986 Buick Century station wagon and smoke endless amounts of dope, until, at times, they would fall asleep next to one another. Somehow they were never caught by campus police. Tom always parked his car next to the water tower, right in the thick of everything, unconcerned by passersby. In fact, he even claimed once, it helped his business. People knew where to find him. No one cared. Dave felt a peculiar sense of belonging, and even thrilled mildly at the risk. He experienced brief tingles in his fingertips as he sat in the car. Joe did most of the talking, and Dave Granger did most of the listening, which was about par for the course. Tom often mused on cosmic conversation, preferring to fill the void of silence with (sometimes completely erroneous) information gleaned from various websites on the Internet.
"Did you know," Tom had said lazily, propelling a caterpillar of smoke out of his mouth, "the Greeks divided time in two parts?" Dave didn't reply. He knew there was more. There's always more. "Yeah ... Chronos, and Kairos. Chronos is like, you know. The numbers on a clock, but like .. Kairos? Kairos is divine time. Kairos is like ... strike while the anvil's hot, you know?" Tom leaned back and closed his eyes, proferring the joint across the seats to Dave. "I wish I had a clock that told Kairos time, man. That'd be awesome."
Dave nodded and blinked, coughing out the smoke. "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He finished the quote and passed the joint back. He had found that he was always the fastest one to take a hit - most people took their time, preferring to orate, or lapse into the television screen, joint burning down in their fingertips, while Dave Granger took it, smoked it, and passed it all in less than five seconds.
"Who's that?" Tom was used to Dave's quotes, but it was rare that he would be familiar with any of them.
Dave turned to the passenger side window. The sun was setting over the hills, as red as tomato soup, and the sky around it a virulent orange. "St. Augustine."
Tom nods, languidly, and exhales.
"Kairos time," Dave Granger repeats, a hint of color in his usual monochrome tone. "Huh."
The cigarette's gone out, and Dave's mouth is dry. He can tell by the way his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth - only slightly - and how the insides of his cheeks stick to the sides of his molars when he opens his jaws to yawn. This, of course, is due to dehydration, but Dave mistakes it for the need to return to his beer. He flicks his cigarette - Camel light - into the street, and returns inside.
The bar is familiar to him, a bit of a dive, the only place he feels entirely comfortable in the world. For months now, he's lived alone, and it's been like a bit of paradise, but even Adam got lonely and prayed for companionship. This is something he likes to say to excuse his frequent visitation to others ... and probably also by way of excusing his alcoholism to himself. It is also entirely possible that Dave Granger is not an alcoholic. The staff at the bar is familiar to him as well, though he keeps largely to himself and enjoys roughly the same position there as he did in middle school - at the edges of things, usually with his face in a book, though at times the alcohol would cause breaches in the social wall he had erected for himself.
Friday, October 7, 2011
dipso
it wasn't that he had bad dreams.
like that's the way to start something by saying what it wasn't but it doesn't matter since that's how it goes. he was starting to have trouble discerning between what happened in memory and what happened in dream. this is probably due to the fact that he drinks way too much. this is because he does not know what else to do.
this is probably untrue but it doesn't matter since that's how it goes.
like that's the way to start something by saying what it wasn't but it doesn't matter since that's how it goes. he was starting to have trouble discerning between what happened in memory and what happened in dream. this is probably due to the fact that he drinks way too much. this is because he does not know what else to do.
this is probably untrue but it doesn't matter since that's how it goes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)