Fantastic Metropolis

SEPT. 1

He arrived in the small country town in the morning. He immediately went to the local stationery shop and bought all the calendars he could find, over $300 worth. The young clerk’s hands were shaking when she handed him the bags full of his purchases. He was particularly interested in the sixteen month calendars which began on September 1, his birthday and the first day of his new life here.

Calendars were arbitrary constructions anyway — why not one that began on his birthday? Linda would have said he was crazy. He would have said this trip was meant to keep him from going crazy. If he had been able to talk to her.

He didn’t want to think what his children might have to say.

He went back to the cabin and spread his calendars all over the floor of the one room. Art and photography calendars went along the outside edges of his collection, “On This Day In History” and “Peculiar Facts” types of calendars went on the inside.

He picked up the two that looked most interesting and gazed at September One. 1875: Edgar Rice Burroughs is born. His favorite author when he was a boy. Now Parker’s favorite. During the long summer the twelve-year-old had read a third of the Tarzan books. 1916: Congress passes the Owen-Keating Act. The child labor law. Child labor had been a horror, especially in the southern mills during his grandfather’s time. Little kids mangled by machinery — that’s the photograph that should have gone on the September page, not some flower or movie star. 1983: The Soviet Union shoots down a South Korean airliner, killing 269. How many children? He used to know, but now he couldn’t remember. Bad things happened to children all the time, and there was nothing he could do.

The worst thing a father can do is abandon his children. There is no excuse. The absolute worst thing. But that’s what he’d done. Continued to do.

No excuse. But he’d frozen up. He couldn’t do it anymore. Afraid of the risks, all the things that might happen, afraid of life. Afraid to let them go anywhere, do anything. God knows afraid to discipline them in any way. All the things that might happen. Afraid of what might happen to Linda if either Parker or Jennie died. Afraid of what might happen to him.

So he’d left his wife and children, taking just enough of the savings to live on, and come here where his mother and her old friend had raised him that first year.

His mother had believed that all the important things in life could be learned from stories. Her own father had told stories to her every day, and after she’d run away from that little country hospital the first day of his life, scared and all broken up inside, she’d told them to him, one each day even though he was too young to know what she was talking about. One each day, like some backwoods Scheherezade, afraid of what her drunken husband would do to her if he ever found her, afraid of what he’d do to the baby he’d never wanted. Terrible things happened to children. Even in fairytales. So the first story she’d ever told him was a nightmare. A nightmare about how he’d been born.

Not that he’d been aware. She told him all these things years later: about his father, about that night, about the stories. She said she shouldn’t have told a baby such a terrible story, but that night it had been the only story she knew. She’d forgotten all the others. But she would apologize to him, again and again. He couldn’t have heard her, could he? He couldn’t have known. It was just his first day.

His mother had never understood. He’d known because he’d lived the story. It just took him a while to remember it. She’d only reminded him of it. So it wasn’t strange at all that the first story he tried to tell himself after he ran away from his wife and children — the first story out of all those he remembered, made up, or retrieved out of some dark somewhere in order to repair himself — was this story. The story of September One. The story of his first day.

His mother had a neighbor lady take her to the hospital in the middle of the night. She’d walked three miles to the lady’s house, not having a phone and besides she didn’t want her husband knowing. He was sleeping it off thank god because if he’d been awake he would have killed them both, pulled that monster right out of her and thrown it in the creek he’d promised it a hundred times.

The hospital there only had one doctor and he was asleep a bottle in his hand and when they dragged him into the delivery room he turned pale and shook his head because he’d known her all her life he was a good man a kind man but he drank too much like almost every other man she knew. Including her father.

The baby started coming out and the nurses were all excited. “Look how big he is!” one of them cried (ten pounds she found out later) and there was so much blood she couldn’t believe it and the doctor reached down and pulled and she could feel herself breaking inside the baby was so afraid to come out.

The doctor stepped back and one of them said, “Don’t drop the baby!” and she could feel him slipping out of her, slipping away from her forever when the nurse stooped down and caught him before his head hit the floor and scattered his dreams across the delivery room (and wouldn’t those be a chore to clean out of linoleum!).

He’d cracked her pelvis in two places but lucky for her they got the bleeding under control. She was in a lot of pain but she left the hospital anyway in the middle of the night headed through the woods to her friend’s house who knew a little nursing. Her husband would be awake soon. She could feel his eyelids lifting like two scabs peeling off an infected wound and no way was she going to let him catch up to her in that hospital bed.

So it was through the gray woods with her husband wrapped in his shadows waking and her baby sleeping, falling headfirst into nightmare as she passed the black animal shapes she knew she would be telling her son about in story after story after story.

SEPT. 13

1876: Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio is born.
1971: New York state troopers crush a prisoner revolt at the Attica State Prison.

The bench between the post office and the town jail was the best place for people-watching. Sooner or later everyone in the community would pass by.

He wondered if the jail here was typical of small towns. Home-cooked, buffet-style meals were brought over in covered dishes by Minnie Hatcher and her teenaged sons. Special requests were frequently honored and an occasional treat for later might also be supplied. Sometimes she and the boys even stayed around to chat before taking the dirty dishes back to the house. The woman had an older daughter, but she wouldn’t let her participate in any of this, afraid “she might get a hankerin’ for the wrong kind of fella.”

The regular prisoners (drunks, mostly) put out a folksy newsletter with a circulation of a dozen or so. The deputy had his girlfriend at the clerk’s office photocopy the one-pager and it usually showed up on bulletin boards and store windows around town. Full descriptions of favorite meals were given a prominent position, although once the sheriff had censored the paper when a rum cake was mentioned.

This particular evening one of Minnie’s boys was sitting on the ground near the bench. A young man not much older, in gray jail coveralls, was sitting beside him, a deepset frown creasing his face. “But you gotta go back, Elmer,” the boy said with an anxious glance at the jail. “They’ll figure out you’re gone pretty soon.”

“Ain’t goin’. Damn deputy called me a criminal. Said it right in front of yore ma. What’s she gonna think?”

“Well, Elmer, Christ, you are in jail, you know?”

“That don’t mean he can say whatever pleases him. What kinda manners is that? Didn’t he have no momma to teach him right?”

“Come on,” the boy pleaded. “Jail breakin’ is a serious offense.”

“Hell, I didn’t break nothin’. Just followed you out the door, is all.”

“But, Elmer. Jailers, they don’t see that just as walkin’ out a door. They call that ‘jail breakin’, ‘bein’ on the lam.’ And I hear tell they take a pretty damn dim view of that kind of activity.”

“That deputy apologizes, then I go back in there. Not before.”

“You’re gonna get me in trouble. They’re gonna think I was in with you.”

“Why, don’t worry none, Bobby. I’ll just tell them I masterminded that whole damn escape. Hey! I’ll tell them I took you hostage. Howzat? Get your name in the paper I bet.”

That was when they saw Cal standing there. Bobby’s face turned red and he gazed down at the grass. Elmer started whistling, looking up at the sky.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” Cal said softly, ready to run if the need arose. “I think this young man was giving you some pretty good advice, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“Hell, I don’t mind. If I knew what I was doin’ I wouldn’t be in that place, I reckon. Hell, if I knew what I was doin’ no piss-ant deputy’d even think about callin’ me names. Set a spell, why don’t you?” And he gestured toward the bench.

Cal sat there for a time, staring at the ground while Bobby and Elmer stared at the sky, staring at the sky while Bobby and Elmer stared at the ground. This pattern was eventually broken when an angry Minnie Hatcher stormed into the small grassy area. “Bobby Hatcher! Get that prisoner back into jail this instant!”

“Ma, it wasn’t me!”

“That’s right, Missus Hatcher,” Elmer said sitting up straight. “I was the one what masterminded it.”

Mrs. Hatcher looked down at him. “You’re a grown man, or should be. You should know better, getting my boy in trouble.”

“Well, see, ma’am, that deputy insulted me and…”

“Lord, Elmer, you’re in jail! I’d think a little insult’d be the least of your problems.” Then she glanced at Cal. “Well, howdy-do, Cal. Heard you’d moved into your momma’s old place. I surely apologize for these two youngsters. Being a parent’s hard, but I’m sure you know about that.”

Cal’s belly tightened. Elmer looked at him. “You a daddy?” Cal nodded. “Well, you look like an educated man. My daddy, he wasn’t so educated. If he’d been educated, he might have taught me better.”

“Sometimes,” Cal said. “A daddy doesn’t even know whatever it is he’s supposed to teach.”

“Well, see now? That’s even daddy thinking, that is. My daddy couldn’t do none of that. Me, I feel at home in jail. I get so nervous outside I can’t wait to do something to get myself back in. Else I’d be long gone from here by now. This weren’t really no breakout, don’t you know — just wanted that deputy to pay attention.”

“Hold it right there!” A shout, and everybody turning.

A handgun exploding.

Cal saw the deputy not more than ten feet away, the image shaking because Cal’s head was shaking. “Jesus!” Elmer was holding his chest, but there was no blood. The shot had missed. Elmer looked down, rubbed the cloth of his shirt. Cal wondered if even the deputy knew whether he’d meant to shoot Elmer. “Jesus!” Mrs. Hatcher exclaimed again. “Put that gun away.”

The deputy was trembling, the handgun — held out fully extended with both his hands on the grip — waving back and forth. Cal backed away. Elmer stared at the deputy, then let his hands down. Bobby was crying like a baby. His mother went over and put her arm around him.

“Hold it, damn it! Hold it, I said!” The deputy walked forward, the gun still pointed at the small group. “Walk toward the jail. Slow.”

Elmer did what the deputy said.

SEPT. 17

1883: Poet and physician William Carlos Williams is born.

— THE SANDBOX (for my children)

I would give you this
sandbox upon the planet
whose pail and shovel
fill and empty the planet
with children’s play
with children’s hands
and feet digging the sand of the planet
rising and falling
to fill and empty
again and again the planet
with little progress
and no sense
of completion
but that,
my sandbox children,
my children of sand,
that is the best part.

SEPT. 25

1493: Christopher Columbus begins his second voyage to America.
1897: William Faulkner is born.

The endless sea in the dark why the madman would do this again I could not begin an understanding but the children, oh, what brightness their faces when I talked of the land o’er there the land of kingdoms and land, yes land for them their sons and progeny forevermore that we might leave this mire of poverty and close quarters that shut down the mind and bind the heart if only the labor were not so long nor the sea so endless deep wide dark as the dragons’ mouths who wait o’er the edge for any luckless ship whose madman captain wanders too close to his dreams and is snatched down by their fiery tongues. Children, children, if I live to see you again what a tale of darkness and madness and the golden land beyond thrilling with savages will I have for you then!

We left St. Louis for the children, for it were the children who would be living in a hellish city full to brim ten times over so that I and my wife Sally recognized the need to do something about it however dark and endless the plain that stretched between our intention and our dream for those children would not wither in the darkness of city smoke and depravity for our lack of courage to face an empty darkness however savage untutored its primitive inhabitants might be however dark my fear of what those demons might do to Sally and any good Christian woman like her as well.

Cal would dream in the long dark night of someday sending for Linda and the children if they’d have him even in their anger, send for them and have them make the long flight through the night to this town where he himself had grown up in safety in recollection if not in naked truth with seemingly limited exposure to the harshness of contemporary America so that they too might make the long journey across the sea across the plains to a home of hope and simplicity where he would not have to stay awake nights without sleep agonizing over their lives their futures the contents of their dreams now that they were delivered into another America so much like the other one but so much better hidden from the rest of the land and yet it had lain here, dreamed of, all along.

OCT. 1

1936: Franco comes to power in Spain.

It was one of those bothersome autumn days. Hotter than it should have been, clearer, so that he was thinking of springtime, but the vegetation had yellowed, browned, as if there had been an enormous fire nearby, killing everything. The sky had that red cast of a distant fires, and sometimes he could smell the vaguest trace of smoke. Spanish skies, he thought, like during the civil war there. The world looking vaguely normal: the trees standing, buildings standing, but fires were blazing underneath, creating smoky shadows that spotted the land.

He decided to take a walk by the creek, which he followed until the dead leaves had covered it, and then until these were gradually replaced with sand, and it was a mix of shallow water and gray sands he was chasing, and then the creek was all sand, a narrow ribbon of brilliant bleached grit winding between the trees and steep red clay embankments.

Where he eventually found the generalissimo, sitting by the sand with his shoulders hunched, his ancient hands fluttering in the red air.

“You’re here alone,” he said to the dictator.

He couldn’t keep his eyes off the man’s red, fluttering hands. In pictures, the generalissimo had worn gloves, and seemed so dignified, so serene.

“My children are all gone,” the generalissimo said. “Most have died, which is the unjust way of things the others have gone on with their lives.” He gazed further down the stream of sand where it turned off into the dark green shadows. A lizard crawled across his bald pate leaving scratches in the glistening pink.

“How do I keep them with me?” he asked the generalissimo. “How do I make sure I am always with them?”

When the old man laughed, a beetle slipped out of his lips and became tangled in his skimpy moustache. “I took advantage of their disorder to centralize my power. I ruled them with an iron fist. I told them whom they could see and what they could be. I tapped their phones so that I might limit what went into their little ears, and I spoke to them constantly and at length concerning all subjects imaginable. I tried to be their conscience. I tried to be their religion.”

“And still they left you behind?”

“Fathers are the hands that embrace you, and then hold you too firmly. Then they become merely the landscape you walk through on your way to somewhere else.”

Cracks had begun to form in the top of the generalissimo’s head. Roaches and scorpions pried their way out from between the thin layers of skin there and spilled to the sand below. Still his hands moved constantly, as if to stir the redness out of the air.

“The ones that died…”

“They all die. They are not really part of you. You are the landscape,”

He began walking away from the generalissimo. “It’s not fair. Where is the justice?”

The dry laugh behind him. “There is no justice. I should know.”

He turned around. The generalissimo’s head was a cascade of dry, dead flakes which, once beginning their tumble, fractured and brought the rest of his body with them.

The red air picked them up, mixed them with the leaves and sand, and sent them down the winding ribbon of white. He started on is way back to the cabin, anxious to get away from the smell of smoke.

OCT. 2

1879: Wallace Stevens is born in Reading, Pa.
1985: Rock Hudson dies of AIDS in Paris.

Autumn Refrain… grackles gone…

He’d had this gay friend, Leon. They’d been friends for years. A gigantic drama of a man, a splendid disaster, always in love. They talked very little about AIDS, because Leon didn’t want to, and he felt silly being more concerned about the disease than Leon was.

Leon was a kisser. He kissed everybody. Sloppy wet kisses from enormous neon Leon lips. When Leon kissed you, you stayed kissed. When Leon kissed him, he didn’t feel threatened — even though being from a small rural area he was generally self-conscious about such things. But Leon wasn’t trying to seduce him — Leon just loved him. And he loved Leon.

Every time Leon came over it was a party. Linda and the kids loved the man, too. He’d throw open the door wearing this huge chartreuse cape, and then there would be Leon hugs and kisses for everyone.

Skreak and skritter…

Leon’s visits became less frequent. He appeared more and more life-size. A shrunken tragedy: sweaty, worried-looking, his lips dry, peeling. They still would not speak of it. Leon still kissed them all, laid those cracking lips against their upturned faces. Dried mushrooms against their cheeks, a brittle scrabble of insect wings. Skreak and skritter.

When Leon died he had not seen his friend in weeks. He died alone, with the disease unvoiced. He would never forgive Leon for that.

…and sorrows of the sun…

He was ashamed even now to think of it, but after Leon died he visualized often those dry kisses on his cheeks, Linda’s cheeks, his children’s cheeks, and felt repulsed. No reason to be afraid, but when had he ever needed a reason? No reason for nightmares. But love and kisses had killed Leon. Might not love and kisses kill his own family?

In his dreams he heard the skreak and skritter, Leon’s kisses crawling over his children’s bodies.

Then late one night in his office at home, a dry rubbing against the pane. A press and the smack of lips. He’d looked up and Leon’s kiss was at the window, open to him and all dark to the bottom.

He jumped away from his desk and looked again. Nothing adhered to the glass but a residue of sorrows and moonlight. He walked to the door of his office and looked down the hall. He walked down the hall and checked each room: in their bedroom his children curled asleep, safe among the shadows.

But when he went back to his office he found the window open, the light fixture shattered, and a skreak and skritter in some dark corner of the room.

He stumbled around the room blindly, his arms hanging down apelike to the floor, his hands open and anxious to catch Leon’s crawling and scuttling kiss. But the kiss stayed always one dry scrape ahead of him, even though he could not see it, could only hear the smack and the nibble of it against the wooden floor, the skreak and skritter of it as its unseen appeandages provided locomotion through the dark.

You’ll smother them. Linda had always told him that. There’s such a thing as loving your kids too much.

But he could not push them out of his embrace, nor keep his own kisses away from their precious and timeless skin.

That night he’d gone madly chasing through their darkened home, hands frantic and spasming to grasp the love that kills.

He stumbled through the kitchen, hearing the skritter over the counters, the illuminated surfaces catching brittle reflections of Leon’s kiss as Leon’s kiss swept formica and linoleum, white enamel and chrome and stainless steel. Hearing the skreak as the door eased open, and Leon’s kiss scrambled through the dining room and living room, then back around to the hallway, and the few feet remaining before the childrens’ bedroom.

The stillness of everything as he raced into the bedroom, and found Leon’s kiss perched on Jennie’s pillow. Whispering into her ear.

Telling her a story.

Skreak and skritter when the kiss’s tale was finally told. And dropped off the pillow, curled itself up on the floor like a brilliant dried pod.

Which he swept into a dustpan and carefully, sorrowfully, buried in their back yard.

OCT. 7

1849: Poet, lecturer, and newspaperman James Whitcomb Riley is born.
1942: FDR promises US will join investigations of war atrocities after the war.

Now that Cal thought his family might have sent somebody to look for him he found himself spending a lot of time away from the cabin. Actually he almost hoped the fellow who’d been asking questions would find him and drag him back where he belonged. Of course he couldn’t know for sure that Linda would even take him back. And certainly he hadn’t learned enough, hadn’t healed enough.

One of the places he liked going on these long walks was up the hollow on a narrow dirt trail to Hermit John’s shack. It had been a road back when he was a teenager, but now it had bushes and trees growing in the middle of it, and floods had washed parts of it away and put stones down in the ancient ruts. If Hermit John ever came out of there it would have to be on foot or on horseback.

Hermit John had always kept pretty much to himself, just him and his son Roy who had been born severely mentally handicapped. People in town had referred to the pair as “the hermit and his feeb.” Cal had always liked Roy, and he’d always found Hermit John highly entertaining with his stories and his accent so harsh and broad that it became nearly a kind of poetry.

When he got to within a few yards of the shack he was pretty sure it was abandoned — it leaned crazily to one side and there were at least twenty holes in the tin and shingle roof — but then he saw Hermit John sitting on the porch just like the last time he’d seen him decades ago: a little red sack of a man with bulging eyes and almost no hair except for bushy sideburns.

“Mr. John!” he called, the polite way to greet him; no one knew his last name.

“Ay-yuh,” the hermit grunted.

“You recognize me?”

“Why course you the boy what left us. Had the momma with the mumblin’ hart.”

Cal came up to the porch and eased down on the step below Hermit John, which put their heads at about the same level. “How have you been? How’s Roy been?”

“Far,” the old man said, gazing down the hollow. “Purty far. Wunt beleeve sich a feelin’. Purty, purty far.”

Cal hesitated, then, “Well, that’s good news… I mean they grow up, I’m learning that one. Even Roy, and I know that’s not what you ever expected. But it’s good for Roy, I expect.”

The hermit just stared at him, a confused look on his face. “I heard ‘im raspin’, out theyr in the madder. Raspin’ an’ clackin’ like a hurt chick. Other fellers out the high school, they’s round early in theyr yeller car, with theyr wimmern-folks out struttin’ callin’ out hallylooyers like they’s preachers o’ the healin’ kind. Feeb, they callin’ ‘im.”

“Roy.” Cal looked away from the face made suddenly ugly in its earnestness.

“Why they do wha they do? I dunno. Some folks roun here put a pole through a hosses belly las yeah jes fer fun, I dunno why.”

“People are capable of anything, Mr. John. Someday I’d like to explain about that to my kids, if I could find a way that wouldn’t scare them.”

“Scare em… scare em,” the hermit recommended. “Purty far, tha was the thing.”

“They scared him away from here? Those high school boys scared Roy away? And you haven’t seen him since?”

But the hermit was looking past him, as if he wasn’t there. “Sees ‘im alls the times, I do, mah little Roy. I sees ‘im. Sich a purty far. Tha was the thing. I walked on down the madder, I did. To see it. Dint know what it was. Jes a purty far.”

Cal felt salt lacing his tongue. He eased away from the hermit, wishing he hadn’t come, thought about running back down that path away from there. But he could barely move. “Mr. John…”

“Purty far. My boy. Got closer I cud smell the gasoline in the madder. And I had me this feelin’. And thar my boy was afar, sich a purty far.”

OCT. 11

1963: Painter, playwright, and filmmaker (Beauty and the Beast, Blood of a Poet) Jean Cocteau dies in Paris.

In college Cal had wanted to be a writer. Rebel against convention, Cocteau had said, or art will stagnate and die. The muses were praying mantises, Cocteau said, who consumed those who loved them. Cocteau thought every writer was a medium for the mysterious force, a darkness, that rises within — that darkness needed to be put on paper. Cal decided he’d never be good enough, and he’d been just plain afraid.

But now he had begun redecorating the cabin into what might be called a series of theater sets: the walls painted with abstract trees and stars, unusual objects placed strategically to enhance their significance, as if they were props. Each day he passed from room to room, as if he were changing worlds.

He thought of Linda and the kids and he wondered how any husband/father could risk the unconventional when it might mean hurting the ones you loved the most.

Once upon a time there were two children whose father abandoned them over and over again. They were too young to understand that fathers were mere flesh and blood, prone to mistakes like every other human. He was their father — he should be there for them.

Their father would not have disagreed.

The final time he left them his children cried and begged him to stay. How could he tell them that seeing them cry like that, seeing the pain he caused and the clear evidence of his responsibilities, made him want even more to leave them?

Instead he took the handkerchief out of his pocket and began wiping the tears from their faces, then wiping more to clean away the dirt-tracks left by their tears (he’d always done this, since they were small children), then wiping even more vigorously because they told him to, they begged him to, even through their screams they were begging him, until he took the handkerchief away and discovered to his surprise that he’d wiped the features completely off their faces.

“Daddy! Daddy!” cried their mouths from inside his handkerchief.

He opened up the handkerchief and discovered his children’s eyes, noses, ears, and mouths embedded in the cloth in jumbled order so that he couldn’t be sure whose was whose. But as far as he could tell they did not appear to be unhappy features, at least taken singly. In fact one mouth — his little girl’s mouth he thought — was giggling. He put the handkerchief back into his pocket — there was an immediate, muffled cheer — and went out the door.

He kept his handkerchief with him constantly the next few weeks — dropping crumbs into his pocket to feed it, draping it over his dashboard so that it might see the countryside, washing it carefully to keep it fresh. It seemed to appreciate the attention.

Then one day he was running the shower and the mirror steamed up, and without thinking he grabbed the handkerchief and tried to rub the fog away. And rubbed two mouths, two noses, four ears and four eyes onto the gray glass.

They all looked surprised, but quickly acclimated to their new situation, singing, laughing, and telling childish jokes with no punchlines.

After that he did not hesitate to move them around, rubbing them off with his handkerchief then transferring an ear to his glove compartment door, an eye to his apartment’s kitchen window, two noses to a portrait of George Washington hanging on the wall, one mouth to his alarm clock and the other to the refrigerator door. His children’s features seemed to appreciate the change of pace and he appreciated the variations in decor.

One night he had them all back on his handkerchief, spread across his bedside table for some rest. He went to sleep with a severe cold and woke up the next morning with a handkerchief clean, white, and empty.

He has not been back to see them since. but still he imagines he can hear them whispering to him, giggling, singing. He imagines he can hear what they must be hearing, see what they must be seeing.

But he smells only himself.

OCT. 12

Columbus Day.

The old man had left his apartment after days inside and sat out on the front stoop. It had been a hot October, the hottest he could remember — the leaves had gone from yellow to burnt in a matter of days. Unnatural, uneasy weather. There had been an agitation in the neighborhood, which was what had kept him inside until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He had heard people outside arguing: bumping into each other, their voices boiling into unintelligibility.

His classic Studebaker had been parked in front of the apartment building all this time. Now it had someone’s name spray-painted on the side, and the date, as if they’d just made claim to it. As if they’d cleaned it all these years, oiled it, polished it, babied it, when all they’d done was made a sign. He would have gotten up and checked his car for more damage, but he was just too tired.

A fat man in baggy shorts and a stained T-shirt was trotting up the sidewalk with a golf club in his hands, a sock tied beneath the head like a flag. He stepped up onto the bumper of the Studebaker, then onto the hood, then pounded the windshield with the club until it cracked and shattered. He stuck the handle of the club into the broken window. He gently prodded the sock with his finger, as if encouraging it to wave, but it was stiff, dormant. He straightened up and raised his head. “I claim this in the name of Byron Mengele!” he shouted.

“Hey!” the old man cried. He stood up. Mengele began dancing on the hood. “Hey hey hey!”

Out of the corner of his eye the old man saw a series of bright colors. He turned just in time to see a squad of joggers in spandex race up his steps with long fiberglass poles, a silken purple cloth flying from the top of each one. One rammed his pole into the flower box by the front door. Another stuck his in the trash can by the street. Another threw his javelin-style through the manager’s first-floor window. Another used his to vault to the second-floor balcony where he erected it proudly by his side. “We claim these in the name of the 42nd Avenue Athletic Club!” they screamed in unison.

The old man began jumping up and down. Strangers approached from all sides of him running, walking, skipping, all manner of erect objects in their hands. “I claim this in the name of all divorced fathers!” a businessman said while spearing a baby carriage with a harpoon gun and a flag of boxers, the mother running away with her baby in her arms screaming. “I claim this in the name of the anonymous!” a nondescript man cried while waving a broken-off car aerial, thrusting it repeatedly into the air. “I claim this in the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury!” a bum cried while attempting to jab his crutch into the middle of the street pavement. He was subsequently run over by an out-of-control taxi cab with stakes, fishing poles, pipes, and other straight objects projecting from it so that it resembled a giant yellow porcupine, the surface of it covered with various clinging, quarreling claimants.

“Hey hey hey!” the old man cried. “We’re all Americans here!” when the enormous lady from upstairs, the one who’d always had such a crush on him, threw him to the ground, slammed her heavy black shoe onto his chest, and jammed the handle of her tattered umbrella into his protesting mouth, the umbrella opening with a spray of moths.

“You’re mine!” she cried, and grinned.

OCT. 16

1758: Noah Webster is born in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Cal had been interested in words since childhood. He remembered being seven or eight, and putting new vocabulary words his teacher had assigned him — phonetically related words like “itch,” “stretch,” “catch,” “reach,” “pinch” — on flashcards and reviewing them again and again, looking for similarities, thinking about how differently each tasted. Later, he became fascinated by what he called the “magnetic” quality of words. He would write a word down on a sheet of paper and find himself compelled to write certain words down beside it, then certain words around those. Certain words and phrases appeared to have an affinity for one another, they drew themselves together into phrases and sentences, even paragraphs, with seemingly no guidance from him. Sometimes they built stories as essential as the words themselves.

gen: birth natural origin general genial spirit engine embryo miscegenation generation nature race kin kingdom gender indigent gently begotten progenitor origin heterogeneous native genial renaissance germane…

general pregnant engines genius king free spirits kindergarten genocide families children general.

The General was pregnant with engines of genius. Everyone knew this. They came to him with their problems, and even if he couldn’t do anything immediately, he promised he would attend to their difficulties soon.

The King freed the spirits of the country’s kindergartens with genocide. He’d always been an insane king — he’d often said that every mother in his kingdom was guilty of the most bizarre forms of miscegenation, and that they’d given birth to a generation of monsters.

The families were distraught over the deaths of their children, and went to the General. The General said the king was guilty of crimes against nature and a traitor to his race and therefore must be punished.

The General disguised himself as Kris Kringle and travelled from village to village, convincing the remaining children that they should follow him if they wanted revenge for the murders of their young kin. There was wide-spread support for this mission both from indigents and those gainfully employed. The local psychics claimed that even embryos in their mothers’ wombs were in favor of the plan.

When the General as Kris Kringle and his army of childen arrived at the palace of the king they began to sing, at first gently and then louder and louder until the king finally ran out of the palace to find out what had begotten such a noise. Once he was outside the walls the General commanded the children to set upon the sinister progenitor, malicious origin, and terrible father of their country. Which they did. And they tore him into thousands of heterogeneous, bloody bits. Every native of that kingdom was pleased, and even the gendarmes were seen to applaud. The General was installed as the new, more genial king, and although the people expected a renaissance of sorts, he proved to

be an even worse sort of father and he too was killed during a broad-based revolution.

But that last event is hardly germane to this story.

OCT. 21

1797: “Old Ironsides” is launched in Boston Harbor.
1879: Thomas Edison invents the electric light.
1959: The Guggenheim Museum opens in New York.
1966: 140 people, most of them children, are killed when a coal waste landslide engulfs a school in south Wales.

His favorite thing when travelling was to visit the local art museums. He especially enjoyed abstract work although he didn’t think he really had the background to understand it. He’d been told that abstract artists, non-objective artists, attempted to distort, suppress, and eliminate the representational element from their work. He didn’t think it was possible. He thought it was a wonderful thing that these artists were bringing previously inaccessible realities into consciousness.

He was always impressed by Kandinsky’s work, and visited the Guggenheim every time he was in New York. Kandinsky viewed art as an expression of the artist’s inner life, the spirituality in man. Choices of color, form, and composition were to be decided only by a corresponding vibration in the human soul.

Kandinsky classified his works as impressions, improvisations, and compositions. Cal had always preferred Kandinsky’s improvisations: “largely unconscious spontaneous expressions of inner character.”

Improvisation 28. The embracing couple on the right edge of the canvas is unaware of the way the earth can turn upside down, inside out. Their hair is heavy with water and kisses so they cannot think clearly. Even the serpent in the water below them thinks more clearly than they, even though the serpent has turned from the cataclysm on the land behind them and is headed out to sea. Above them, the new light blazes down, warming their backs so that they can dream they are on a South Sea island and in love. While behind them the mountain roars like a cannon and the world turns inside out casting up Old Ironsides, her skeletons spilling out of the broken hull for the children to play with. But the world still turns upside down and children die, they die all the time, buried so deeply their singing mouths fill with stone and mud and the couple continues to embrace and kiss, blissfully unaware.

Painting with White Form, 1913. Blissfully unaware, the spirit walks in from the left side, not understanding the distress it causes among lovers who dare not think of death. Flashbulbs explode and the theosophists and spirit photographers gather around the ghost who is blissfully unaware. In the distance they can hear the cries of dead children trapped within the hull of the ghost ship Old Ironsides. But there is nothing they can do for them now. So they content themselves with taking pictures. There is nothing any of us can do.

Landscape with Rain. There is nothing any of us can do. The rain comes down and tears our vision into vertical stripes. The rain comes down and splits the mountainside. Year after year the rain comes down and sculpts the mountains with steady erosion. The children are buried inside the mountain and we cannot protect even their dead bodies. The rain comes down and waters the gravestones.

Landscape with Red Spots II. The rain comes down and waters the gravestones. They grow until they threaten to fill the canvas. Our vision becomes spotted with red from staring at them so long. They grow until they become the mountains themselves. They even grow their own church. The church and the mountains and the headstones become our children. They are all that we have.

Improvisation 33. They are all that we have. The restful blue and the blue-black of grief. And the red that tells us that passion is still possible. A naked woman in a field of flowers. And yet colors are all that we have to embrace.

Painting with White Border. Colors are all that we have to embrace. The light bulb tries to deceive us but our hearts know the colors by feel. The pregnant silence of white. The dead silence of black. The violet echoes of grief. The dead children speak with mouths full of black. At the center of the canvas the knight on horseback kills the dragon with his spear, the dragon who has eaten all his children, the dragon who is everything, the dragon who is the world. But the world is surrounded by white, and can only be defeated in dreams, and will eat all our children before it is done, without fear of reprisal.

OCT. 25

1400: Geoffrey Chaucer dies in London.

Sitting by the main street, remaining still and unobtrusive as the gray bench underneath him, Cal heard stories and snippets of stories.

From the local dentist, still wearing his white smock, talking to a local lawyer, “So Levi comes in with this set of dog teeth, jaw bone and everything, still warm from the boiling water, and he’s wanting me to make a set of false teeth out of them. He’s been having terrible trouble chewing, he said, and he figured these would help. He told me he would have had them to me sooner, but the first dog he caught ran away, then he remembered that Mayor Clemmons had this big Doberman…”

And from the lawyer, “…then Willy bribed the assistant undertaker to stage his own funeral to show Ellen Mays how much he’d really loved her, killing himself for her and everything, and right after Ellen cries and cries over him and tells his dead body how sorry she was old Willy sits up in that coffin and asks her to marry him and Ellen drops dead right there with a heart attack and Ellen’s brother Jimmy who was standing beside her pulls out his pistol and shoots Willy in the head. There’s five lawyers involved now and somebody’s even suing the town council for not having an ordinance specifically prohibiting fire arms in funeral parlors.”

From the local sheriff, “So the feller had this little spy glass thing, this little telescope, up on the mantle, and I don’t know why just an impulse I guess, but I picked up that thing and looked through it and there was another eye staring right at me, scared the bejessus out of me so’s I dropped the thing and the end of it pops out and that travelling salesman’s missing eyeballs come rolling out. And do you know what that feller tells me, you know what he says? ‘Oops,’ he says to me, like I’d just spilt some grape juice on his rug.”

From a little woman, the volunteer evangelist who’d preached to Cal in his cabin one afternoon earlier that month, “Now most of them, they believe He rose up on the third day, but our group has proof, I mean real proof it was on the fourth. Cal? Cal, is that you on that bench? Cal, I have a story to tell you about you know who…”

Copyright © 2003 by Steve Rasnic Tem.