From the Outside

I had a nice old colonial house that sat in a clearing with clusters of weeds growing around the foundation, but for some reason I always slept on a straw mat laid out on the front lawn, curled up in a wool blanket that had gathered thistles and thorns.  There was something appealing about forsaking the shelter of the house in exchange for being out in the open air, under the stars, exposed to the elements, and all just mere feet from my door.

One morning I awoke to find a small group of people gaping in at the windows at the corner of the house beside the front door.  I wasn't bothered at all by the impropriety.  I just rubbed my eyes and crawled out from under my blankets.  I heard them complimenting the rustic furnishings, the carvings on the wood, the inviting comfort of the interior.  There was a desk there beneath the windows, nested in the little nook at the foot of the stairs.  There were wooden figurines scattered on the desk, their fine details painted to various degrees with a toothpick and a set of acrylic paints.  A magnifying glass on a metal crane shined a light down on this cluttered work space.

I fell in along the back of this clustered group, almost impersonally partaking in their gaping admiration of my house's charming interior.  But I knew I was going to have to tell them the truth.  I wasn't responsible for any of it.  The previous occupant had done all of that.  All I had ever done was hang some paintings on the walls.

Decomposition

My friends had a son that really loved video games.  They had a little area set up over in the corner of the room with a small TV and some shelves to keep all of his games on.  The kid would spend hours sitting over there on the floor playing his games.  He spent so much time over there, in fact, that his parents didn't notice for quite some time that he had died sitting there facing the screen.

He sat there for several weeks, rotting away. His skin began to turn green.  The features of his face began to droop and run and flake and even ooze off everywhere in a very unsightly manner.  Flies had even begun to buzz about him, settling unperturbed on his arms and the back of his neck.  The game controller lay loose in his hands and the bones of his fingers and knuckles were starting to show through where the flesh had rotted off.

Finally his father stopped by to give the kid's head an affectionate tousle.  This caused the boy's jaw to unhinge and fall to the floor in front of him.  As the father pulled his hand back loose clumps of hair came with it and the body pitched forward limply.  At that point, I imagine he began to suspect that something might be wrong.

Chemicals of War

My friend and I were discussing World War I, and it was as if we were right there, witnessing it all first hand.  We stood on a high hill where we had a view of the whole battlefield of Europe laid out before us, the soldiers all digging row upon row of those endless trenches beneath the broiling late afternoon sun, making all the vast preparations for war.  My friend nudged me and told me that the army issued many of these soldiers such substandard equipment that often times they ended up being exposed and dying from the gas themselves as they were releasing it on the enemy.

As I considered this unpleasant piece of information, I found myself in a dark place, lost amid piles of skulls and bones piled higher than I could strain my neck to see, piles high enough to block out the light and the sun.  I could hear the awful rasping rattle of someone's dying breath, all sick and muffled.  I turned and saw a gas mask staring out at me from one of the piles, the eyes black and empty.

I knew that the gas had been released in the air.  I tried to hold my breath and run.  But I just kept hearing that rattle, right over my shoulder, right at my ear, dogging my heels.  I kept seeing those black-eyed masks staring out at me from every pile.  I ran on and on, but there were just more and more piles, and I knew I'd never make it.  I'd never escape the gas before my lungs gave out and I'd be forced to take a breath.

Storybook Illustration

I opened this children's book to a random page and there was a colorful drawing of a girl climbing over the fence of an amusement park that sat beside a small lake.  The wooden fence meandered along the shore to the spot where she climbed in the foreground; the Ferris wheel there, spinning off the edge of the page.  In the background, amongst all of the other rides, there was a huge animatronic dinosaur tethered with ropes or wires.  The text in the bottom corner explained the scene.  It said that the girl was fighting some monster and she recalled seeing the same creature in that theme park many years ago.

I was more fascinated by the picture, however.  I felt like I could stare at it for hours, like a childhood memory, the endless details of the park and the rides, the games and concessions, the people gaping at the towering toy dinosaur, holding cotton candy and pointing up with their free hands, the watercolor lake tapering off into yellow paper nothingness, the pastel boats floating aimlessly.  I felt like I was poised at the edge of an adventure or closing the book at the end of a long rainy day. 

From Childhood Playmates

I grew up next door to a young girl named Alisa Rosenbaum, who would later write under the name "Ayn Rand" as a adult.  She lived in a grand old house on a shady piece of property.  From my window I could often see her playing in the yard with this little blond-haired boy.  He had a beaming smile, sublime and bright under the sun.  They were best friends, always conspiring and scheming, scratching at the dirt under the bush, dodging between the sheets hung out on the clothes line.  The boy's name was John Galt, and some day Ayn would base a character on him.

But the real boy's life was cut short by a pointless accident involving a rotted porch railing.  The railing had given way beneath John's weight as he leaned against it, and he had fallen and hit his head in a rather unfortunate way on a rock in the garden below.  Young Alissa blamed her parents for neglecting to fix the railing.  And she blamed everyone for not grasping the magnitude of the light that had gone out of her life.  She became dark, sullen, brooding.  Autumn swept the leaves from the shade trees and she spent long hours sitting alone on a plank swing that hung from a bare branch.  I woke so many mornings to that slow, awful, creaking of the rope.

She kept a journal.  She made up her mind.  She would tell the world about John.  She would tell them what she had lost, what the world had lost, when he died.  She would keep him alive in some small way.  She would find the words and the ideas, the principles and premises, that made him what he was.  She would refashion him from the clay!  But it never quite came off.  She would never quite capture that spark, that essence, that boy smiling confidently against the railing in the August haze.  She would never quite get it right.          

Dramatis Personae

I had discovered a glitch in the working of things.  It all started with an accident.  Someone slipped up.  I had been lost in the forest.  I came to the base of this large mountain that had a vast network of tunnels and caves hollowed out in the inside of it.  One of these tunnels terminated in an opening several feet above the ground, high above where I was standing.  As I stood there, staring up at the granite face of the mountain, I saw a man in a marching band uniform fall from the opening.  He stood up, dusted the burrs and dried leaves of the forest floor from his sleeves, cast a wary glance back at me, and then he took off through the trees and he was gone.

I didn't think anything of the incident until I happened to stumble upon a parade the next day.  There were floats and baton twirlers, and of course, a marching band.  As the band passed, someone stepped on someone else's shoe or something, and one of the band members tripped and fell.  I watched as he got back to his feet and dusted the dirt from the street from his sleeves.  And then he spotted me looking at him.  He shot me that same wary glance, and then he pushed the other band members out of the way and took off through the crowd before I could pursue him.

I returned to the mountain in the woods.  In one of the tunnels, I found a stage that was set up to look like a restaurant in my neighborhood.  I had stumbled across some sort of rehearsal space.  I took up a hiding place and I watched as these two women had the same lunch over and over again, reading all the same lines, trying to get it right.  Like the marching band member tripping and falling, it was an event that wouldn't happen until the next day.  This was where they rehearsed life before it happened, making sure it all came off normal and natural.

After about their fifth or six run-through, I began to notice something.  I saw that one of the women kept reproducing a twenty dollar bill from her wallet every time the bill came.  There was no resetting of the props between each scene.  It was a fresh bill every time.  An idea came to me.  I stood up and revealed my position.  They were startled to see me, but I launched right in, asking about the money.  I wanted to know where it all came from.  Was a new twenty created from thin air every time?  Had I found an unlimited source of funds?  A loophole in the economics of existence?

Unfortunately, once we started piecing it all together, we discovered that these funds were being generated from tiny changes out in the world, changes that normally no one would notice, things no one would miss.  But when we traced where the money that had paid for these lunches had come from, it all led back to this young bride-to-be.  Her wedding dress, which she had dreamed of since childhood, had been traded for a cheaper one to pay for the meals.  This would lead to a grave misunderstanding between her and her fiance', as the dress was the same one which an old girlfriend of his had worn for her wedding the previous spring.  And this suspicion, in turn, would break the engagement and derail this poor bride's entire life. 

We couldn't let that happen.  I sat down to figure it all out.  I took account of all of the different scenes being rehearsed in those caves.  We had to juggle the money around from one scene to the other.  We had to set things right and get this bride her dress back.  It was a vast undertaking, pennies from one life, dimes from another, but at last I managed to do it.  The world was back on course, and no one would miss a thing.           

The Night Eyes

I was asleep in a twin bed with a wooden frame and headboard, and the bed was outside in the night air.  It was down at the end of a long residential street, down past the last house, past the pools of light and shadow cast by the streetlamps, down where the sidewalk abruptly ends with a few trees and some tangled underbrush.

In a bush tucked away on the unlit side of the neighbor's house, I thought I saw something.  I could just make out the curving shape of the eye, and then the pupil and the iris, as though it had been sketched by pencil.  Then, having seen one, I began to see others, more and more, until the night seemed filled with eyes watching me from every corner.

I felt oddly untroubled by these eyes.  I just counted each new one that I noticed from my bed, as my own eye adjusted to all the nocturnal corners and crevices.  And having counted and cataloged all these eyes, as numerous as dew drops on every surface in the dark morning hours, I gathered up my blankets and rolled back over.  

Our Plastic Apocalypse

I was on a shuttle, returning to Earth with a small group of astronauts.  As we circled the planet, I had the uncanny feeling that we were in a little toy ship in a pitch black room circling a plastic globe with a bright reading lamp shining down on it.  I could even see all the names and borders drawn on all the different countries.  There was a stillness over it all.

We were over the United States when the first mushroom cloud appeared.  It burst like a puff of dirt off the surface of the globe without making a sound, but it did nothing to disturb the glossy surface or the inscriptions or the lines of topography.  It was like witnessing a strategy for ending the world in someone's war room, rather than seeing the actual thing.  Europe rolled away under us, and then on to Russia and the East, the mushroom clouds popping randomly in the landscape ahead of us.  There would be nowhere to land, no home to return to.      

Eventide

Late one evening, as I was walking along a dirt road, I came across a young man sitting under a tree by the wayside.  He sat facing the last flickers of sunlight and in the gathering darkness I could just make out a peaceful smile on his face.  Fireflies lit and then expired randomly in the tree above him, and I could hear the far off sounds of workers laughing as they were coming in from the fields somewhere, a gate unlatched and creaking on its hinges, the wide world opening up on the edge of night.

The young man just sat there taking it all in.  He told me that he had been a prince, but he had left behind his crown and his castle and his jewels.  He had abandoned it all in exchange for what he called "all the treasures of the world" with a sweep of his arm towards the horizon.  He seemed perfectly content to go on sitting there, so I continued on my way as the sky faded to reveal a wealth of stars.  But every now and then I stopped to think of the smile I had seen on the prince's face.         

A Liability Issue

My daughter was still little at the time, maybe around five or six years old.  We were having a birthday party for her.  A bunch of kids from the neighborhood had come, too many for me to count.  The house seemed overrun with them and they were ransacking the place from top to bottom, tearing up couch cushions and putting long gouges in the walls.  The whole thing was starting to give me a bit of a headache.

There was a toy train set up in my daughter’s play room.  It was large enough for kids to ride on and the track was laid out in a simple wedge shape that took up most of the corner of the room.  My daughter wanted to know if she could take everyone for a ride on her train.  I had to tell her no.  My wife started to object, but I pulled her aside and explained that we were responsible for anything that might happen to these kids and that they all seemed a little too rambunctious to handle playing with this train without one of them getting hurt.

My wife reluctantly agreed.  I hated to disappoint my daughter.  I knew how much she wanted to show the other kids her train and have them play with her on it, how much she had thought about it in the weeks leading up to the party, and how much I was letting her down.  I could see it in her face.  But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head of one of those kids putting their hands on the track and the sharp wheels of the train coming along and slicing off their fingers.

Cityscape

I lived in this apartment building.  The mother of the family next door was a rather nervous, quiet, woman.  I met her one night in her dreams.  She said she wanted to show me something.  It was just getting light out and the rest of her family was still asleep, having dreams of their own.  She put a finger to her lips and then brushed aside the clothes hung up in her closet to reveal a secret panel in the wall.

The panel opened onto a passageway that led down several winding flights of stairs.  We passed a room where some old grey-haired accountants seemed to be working.  One of them stared after us sourly with his bottom lip stuck out.  I turned back, out of curiosity, but the woman took my hand and led me on, eager to show me something.  There was a giddiness in her eyes, and something in the way that she was tiptoeing down the stairs in her white nightgown made her seem younger despite her lined face and wrinkled hands.

At the bottom of the stairs we came to a balcony.  The fresh air and the view hit me all at one.  It was a futuristic cityscape, although it seemed as though it were made out of plastic toys.  There were brightly colored gizmos and gyros that seemed to operate everything.  There were all sorts of sleek vehicles and humming electronic and mechanical noises.  It was like a vast living machine or an organism, endlessly interlocking motion and energy.

In the air around us there hung solid blocks of letters forming words that felt like they were attacking us, bearing down threateningly from the sky. Apparently, I wasn't the only who felt this way.  I looked over and noticed the neighbor woman curled up on floor of the balcony.  She was shaking and half-hysterical.   She told me that it absolute torture for her to keep coming here, but somehow she couldn't stop.  She brought me along because she needed someone else to see it.  

My Bad Hair Day

An old boss of mine was cutting my hair.  He had a barber's chair set up in the middle of a store for some reason.  Shoppers stared at me as they went by.  One kid stopped to gawk with his finger in his mouth.  I slipped my hand out from under the cape and gave him a little smile and a wave.  When he was done, my boss removed the cape with a flourish, brushed some powder on my neck, and rang me up on an old cash register that he had sitting off to the side, the kind with the numbered cards that pop up in the window and the lever you crank to ring the bill and open the cash drawer.  He charged me twenty bucks, which seemed a little steep.

I stopped in the restroom to inspect my haircut in the mirror, as I often used to do.  It was awful.  A total mess.  It was all patchy and uneven and not even trimmed close and neat the way I like it, just sparse clumps of hair and some sloppy manipulation with a comb.  I would have been better off trimming it myself with the clippers like I normally do.  I was going to have to do that anyway.  What a disappointment. 

Smoke Shop

My dad was buying a couple packs of cigarettes.  He flopped two red packs down on the counter, his normal brand.  He said that he had promised someone that he was going to quit, but he didn't really see the point since he already had cancer.  He leaned against the car in the parking-lot and cupped his hand over the lighter as he lit up one of the cigarettes.  

I understood how he felt, but I reminded him that he had had such a close brush with a death already, that everyone had thought he was gone.  I remembered it so clearly, making the trip out there to Phoenix, leaving thinking that he had died. I remembered being there by the bed, the doors closing behind me, everyone's faces.  But then I remembered getting the call later back home in Ohio telling me that it had all been a mistake and that he was still alive somehow.  I remembered that cloud burst of relief, the ecstatic voices on the line.

So I turned to him there in the parking-lot and told him that no one had expected him to make it this far, that it was incredible that he was even here, that he shouldn't give up hope, that every day after was a genuine miracle.  I told him these things, and yet thought of telling him these things as it all began to fade.  I wanted to call him up and tell him about this dream, but then I remembered that he really was gone.  There had been no call.  There were no more days, no more miracles.

The Tunnel Creature

There was an old unused fireplace in my childhood bedroom.  The opening of the fireplace was covered with clear plastic - for safety reasons I suppose.  Looking through the plastic I could see that there was no back wall to the fireplace.  There was just a brick tunnel that seemed to go off forever, receding to the vanishing point in the darkness. 

Oh, the terrors and trouble this fireplace gave me!  I spent many sleepless nights staring deeply into this tunnel, trying to picture the worst, most hideous, creature I could imagine crawling up out of it.  I kept the light on in my room, but that didn't help.  It just made the darkness of the tunnel all the more sinister and foreboding.  I stared so long that I was sure that the thing would appear, all tentacles and gnashing teeth with those wild red and white eyes, manifested by the sheer intensity with which I had feared and imagined it.

And then one night I was there, staring into the fireplace with my face practically pressed against the plastic.  My breathing grew heavier as my apprehension increased, and my breath began to fog up the plastic.  That's when I saw it.  The fog on the plastic revealed the outline of the creature's face where it had pressed against the plastic from the inside, trying the gnaw its way out.  I knew then that it was all real. 

Strange Hospitality

I was traveling around the country on foot, and naturally, I had grown a bit tired.  Somewhere in Indiana, a family named Cooper took me in and let me stay in their home.  They had the air of a church-going family, and little plaques and decorations around the house supported that conclusion.  The father, Bob Cooper, was a big robust man with white hair.  He smiled often, as though he were constantly preparing to pose for a portrait with his family.  He wore these yellow polo shirts that offset his imposing physiognomy by suggesting that he was harmless.

The family had a nice pool in the back yard, and after a nice long nap I went for a invigorating swim to clear my head and shake off the funk from the road.  Afterwards, when I went to get dressed in the clothes that I had left in the downstairs bathroom, I found a bunch of folded up scraps of paper in my pocket.  Apparently they had been left there by some mystery person who bore a grudge against the Cooper family or had been wronged by them in some way.  One scrap told me that I was in danger.  Another informed me that Bob Cooper was a disgusting, evil, human being.

Yet another scrap actually played a video when I unfolded it, giving me some background on the situation.  Unfortunately, the video came off more like a propaganda piece, short on information and long on invective.  It certainly gave the impression that there was a sinister and ugly underside to the Cooper's middle-class lifestyle.  The upshot of the video seemed to be that Bob Cooper had been brought up on some sort of criminal charges which he had been found innocent of.  The brother of the victim, however, was convinced of the Coopers' guilt, and he was trying to get the word out.  He must have been the one who left the papers in my pocket.  The video ended with this brother singing "God Bless America" in a whiny, grating, voice.  I started to worry that someone in the house would overhear.  I tried to tear up the paper that the video was on, but the singing wouldn't stop until the song was done and the video was over.

I wanted to know more about these criminal charges.  I dug in my pocket for my phone so that I could search for the information online, but my phone was gone.  The Coopers must have taken it.  Now I was getting worried.  I needed to slip out of the house as casually as possible and get away.  I passed by Mrs. Cooper in the kitchen.  She was preparing dinner over the sink.  She had her back to me.  I turned the corner and started down the stairs to the door.  I started to think about the laugh I would have about all of this later and the piece I would write about it, although I regretted not having my phone so that I could call someone or post a video online telling people where I was, in case something happened.

But that didn't matter now.  I just need to get in the clear.  Then I could call someone from a neighbor's house or a gas station or something.  I opened the door that led out to the attached garage, turning the knob slowly so as not to make too much noise.  Once I was through the door, I would make a run for it.  But as I swung the door open, I found Mr. Cooper standing on the other side.  He stared at me blankly, but his chest heaved with anger.  I tried to dart past him, but he snatched me by the belt and pulled me back.  As I struggled, he slammed me hard against the wall of the garage, and I knew then with horrible certainty that I was never going to leave this house alive, and no one would ever know what happened to me.       

White House Dinner

My brother and I were invited to some kind of dinner at the White House.  Ronald Reagan was still President then.  He came out from his office in a bit of a huff.  There were two men standing off by themselves having a conversation.  The President apparently had some kind of grudge against them.  He pointed them out as he yelled at his son, "Get them the Hell out of here!", and then he stormed off and we didn't see him again.

Afterwards we all sat around the long table, and everyone talked about what a "crazy character" the President was, what a loose cannon.  But there was a nervousness in their voices and it was clear they were covering for him.  A wide tear streamed down his son's face as he tried to smile and explain, and I must confess that I found a peculiar fascination in seeing the most powerful man in the country's son doing something as intimate as crying in front of us, sincerely and openly. 

Musical Fences

I saw a commercial for it on TV.  It was this backyard fence that you could play the piano on.  The slats of the fence looked like alternating black and white piano keys, and they functioned as piano keys as well.  The woman in the commercial demonstrated the fence by playing this haunting piece of music, every note dropped like a soft star in an inky ocean of melancholy.

So I installed this fence in my own yard, hoping to compose my own masterpiece out of lazy days lounging around in the rain.  I lay back and let my toes play against the keys as my mind chased memories, ruminations.  I tried to channel all of this into the music and it began to build into a slow and insistent gallop.   The music reflected the chase itself, more than the things chased.  It built towards a crescendo.  But then it broke abruptly, like life.  I had been distracted, frustrated, and it was all lost.