Lessons in Lunacy

I was taking a night class.  The classroom was full of chattering students, but only half of it was lit, seeming to signify the lateness of the hour.  There was no teacher there to instruct us.  Instead, a tall cart bearing an old television had been wheeled into the room by some unknown person and set up by the chalk board under the lit portion of the room.  On the television there was a black and white image of a man in a lab coat wearing horn rimmed glasses.  He was giving a lecture about the moon, which barely anyone was paying attention to.  But at one point he paused in his lecture and lifted his right hand and pointed his finger upwards, as if to indicate something above the frame of the TV.  He had a smirk on his face as he did this, as though he were divulging some wicked secret.  Everyone followed the direction of his finger and looked up towards the ceiling of the classroom.  There we could see the moon in the sky above us, glowing unbearably huge and full as though it were only a few feet away, every crater, crack, and crevice sharp and clear.

This sight caused a stir among the students that threatened to break out into pockets of full blown hysteria.  But one girl in a brown sweater, who I recognized as the top student in the class, stood up and managed to restore order.  She proposed that we all go down to the administration office and complain about this outrage.  None of us were sure what the administration office was supposed to do, or even quite what the nature of the problem was, but it seemed to be as reasonable a course of action as any other.  We rallied behind this girl and we all marched out as a group into the hall behind her.

The lights were on throughout the school, but all of the other classrooms were deserted.  There were papers and notebooks strewn about the floors in the classrooms and the hallways, giving the impression that everyone had just up and fled the building in a tremendous hurry.  As we navigated the hallways, I made my way up to the front of the group next to the girl in the brown sweater.  I tried to ask her exactly what the plan was, but she stared resolutely ahead, determined to give the administration office a piece of her mind.  She barreled ahead, bent towards her goal.

But then we came to an impasse.  The hallway we were following suddenly came to a dead end and we were confronted with a bank of vending machines.  The girl just nodded and scrunched her nose at this.  She turned back to the group and told us that this wouldn't be a problem.  She said that a certain combination of coins placed in each machine would cause them to slide apart and reveal a secret passage behind them.  She collected all the spare change from the class.  Everyone counted the coins out in their palms and then passed them forward.  We put thirty five cents in one machine and sixty five in the other, and they pulled back and swung open like a set of secret doors, just as the girl had promised.

The passageway behind the machines was dark and impenetrable.  The class hesitated go on, but the girl stirred them all to action just as she had before, and everyone followed her into the darkness.  We stumbled around a bit, but there was a light from the open door of a room somewhere up ahead, drawing us all forward.  We crowded in the doorway of this room, the girl at the head of the group and a few people behind her, straining to see over her shoulders.  The room was set up like a studio of some sort.  There were maps and charts of the planets on the walls, and in the middle of the room there was a television camera.  There was a mannequin set up in front of this camera.  It was only the upper torso of the mannequin, supported on a brass pole.  It was dressed in a lab coat and horned rimmed glasses, and we could see that it was the same man that had been on the television back in the classroom.  It still had that same smirk carefully painted on its face, and its finger was still pointing skyward.  The significance of this pointed finger suddenly dawned on me, and I turned to warn the rest of the class, but it was too late.  I could already see their eyes drifting upwards.

My Private Junkyard

Every car that I had ever owned was parked in my driveway.  I kept having to pull them out and rearrange them, trying to get them all to fit, getting entangled with the busy traffic out on the street in front of the house.  I had to get behind the wheel of each car one by one and find the right key on my key chain and start them up, some of them having sat for years collecting dirt and dry leaves.  They carried different scents from different seasons in my life, forgotten debris, scraps of paper stuffed into the seats, all of them dense with memories.  I got to where I almost forgot when and where I was, looking out the dirty windshield on some hazy Friday afternoon of time itself, cars gridlocked everywhere. 

I ended up pulling some of the cars into the fenced in back yard.  I knew that the tires would tear up the grass and wear muddy ruts into the ground, but I wanted to keep them all, now that they'd come into my possession again, now that they'd all been so vividly recalled.  I got them all to fit to where I could close the wooden gate and lock them in.  It took me hours.  I was sweating from the effort and my t-shirt was dirty from climbing in and out of the vehicles.  I went in to take a shower and I glanced down from the upstairs window, and I could see all the cars packed in tight around the house.     

Old School

I was driving along the back roads of our town. I had a passenger in the car with me, a ninety year old woman hunched under a dark hood, only her jaw and the hook of her nose visible.  As we passed by an elementary school, she suddenly spoke up in a voice that creaked like a door that hadn't been opened in years.  She said that she had been a teacher at that school a long time ago.  I nodded and looked over at the school.  It was just a small, one story, brick building.  Across the school yard, on the far side of the building, there was a road which led directly off from the school property.  I could read the sign that was fixed in the ground at the start of the road.  It said "Lathymore."  Something struck me as cold and sinister about this road and the dark leafless branches of the trees which formed an arch at its entrance, like claws with long scratching nails.

My passenger explained the source of my misgivings.  She said that there used to be a facility down that road where they would take the children who habitually misbehaved and they would perform lobotomies on them in order to make them a bit more manageable.  She told me that the rest of the children didn't know the exact nature of what went on down that road, but there were rumors.  At recess they would stay far away from the entrance to the road and play their games on the other side of the school yard.  So the road became a forbidding place, overcast with the stale air of suspicion and neglect.

The woman spoke again and I could hear the emotion in her voice from somewhere cold and far off.  She said, "I remember that first day of school every year.  I would stand at the window of my classroom and watch as the mothers brought their children across the yard.  They would be smiling.  The children would be smiling.  None of them knew that before the day was out I would be sending at least eight or nine of the children down Lathymore."  And then she was done and her head fell forward.  I could see that beyond the scratching branches there were houses on Lathymore now, and I had to assume that the facility that she spoke of had either been abandoned long ago or had probably even been torn down.  Those dark days were far behind.  But I had to wonder if there were ever nights when the wind blew a certain way, and the people in those houses would have that sudden chill and that same hint in the air of something terribly wrong.

Grains of Sand

I lived down on the ocean that summer.  The sun seemed fixed far out and low over the waves in the afternoon sky, never moving.  A thin veil of haze passed across its surface, dimming it to a pale white that was softer on the eyes, and yet everything under its light was drained of color like an old foreign movie.  I was staying in a high rise apartment building that was right down on the waterfront.  A tall monument rising out of the sand with walls made entirely of glass, you could see every floor, layer upon layer, and the people within, silent marionettes performing all the endless variations of the waltz of life.

A blonde girl that I had gone to school with lived a few floors above me.  I dropped by to see her.  She lay on a lounge chair in the middle of the living room, wearing a black bikini and basking in the sun.  There was no need to leave the apartment; the sunlight came right through the glass.  She looked just the same to me.  She lifted her sunglasses and smiled up at me and spoke in french with subtitles.  She told me that she had been here all the while, staying fit, eating healthy, the hour never advancing.  I took this in as I looked out at the sun and at the long, deep shadows cast by every object in the grey room.

Falling Stars

There was a carnival down on the town's square with games and concessions set up all along the street.  I went down there on a Saturday morning.  There was a booth where a man did amazing things with soap bubbles.  I stopped and watched as he blew a bubble for a little girl in a brown coat who stood before the booth in rapt anticipation.  He blew the bubble in the shape of a toy soldier.  I could make out the shape of the tall hat and the bayonet slung over its shoulder.  He just kept blowing the bubble bigger and bigger.  It grew up higher than the surrounding buildings on the square.  It grew up higher than the ferris wheel spinning across the way.  It stretched high into the sky and the little girl strained to look up, but it grew higher than she could see.  It grew to fifty thousand feet or more.  It grew beyond the blue sky, out into space, towering over our tiny little planet.  Then, unable to keep its shape in the void of space, it finally burst, raining down in droplets of flickering light.  The little girl giggled ecstatically as she raced around in circles, trying to catch the falling stars.

The Bugs

Some men in suits and sunglasses showed up on my doorstep one day.  They took me to a secluded compound out in the wilderness, where they had me working long days in a lab, providing only occasional breaks for walks around the property trailed by armed escorts that kept their distance.  There was this one big, old tree that I liked, out at the far corner of the fence line.  I always passed by it on my walks.  It was a great place to stop and rest and think.  Somehow staring at the tree and its gnarled roots helped me focus my mind and sort out the problems I was working on.

In the few months that I had been working in the lab, I had helped create a system that would allow all the governments of the world to monitor everyone on Earth, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, twenty four hours a day.  I had developed the system by reverse engineering software from an exterminating company that combined motion tracking with surveillance technology.  The system gathered a database by marking, coding, and cataloging everything that moved.  It had been designed to track cockroaches; now it would track humans.  As far as implementation was concerned, there was little difference.

I had misgivings about my role on all of this, of course.  I didn't want to see everyone constantly monitored any more than anyone else did.  But I felt better somehow, being involved.  Someone was going to do this, and at least I could be there to make sure it was done right.  Plus, being on the inside of the project had given me the chance to design a glitch into the software that would be accessible through a back door in the program.  That way I could crash the whole thing if it started getting out of control.  I just had to keep this glitch a secret, and pass it on to my successor, and they could pass it along to someone, and they would have to safeguard it though the generations, until it came time to bring the system down.  I turned from the tree and nodded to the guards.  I was ready to get back to work.

Late Night Television

I found a brittle newspaper clipping tucked away in the pages of an old book.  It was a news article about a tragedy that had occurred on set during the filming of an episode of a popular black and white science fiction show from the 1950's.  The episode was called "The Last Race."  The exact details of the tragedy were extremely vague and enigmatic.  The article just mentioned that something had happened in the background of a shot.  It didn't say how or when or what.  But I was quite familiar with the show, and I watched reruns of it nearly every night before I went to bed.

One night as I was brushing my teeth, the episode in question aired.  I sat down on the corner of the bed and leaned towards the TV to better scrutinize the screen.  "The Last Race" was one of the later episodes in the show's run, and the show's failing budget was apparent in the episode's extremely simple composition.  The episode consisted almost entirely of a wide shot of a small winding race track lit up with flood lights at night as race cars zipped around the tight turns.  The story was supposed to be set some time in the future, involving a final race for the fate of humanity.

At one point in the story one of the drivers wrecked his car.  The episode cut to shots of him leaning against a rail at the side of the track where he had crawled away from the wreckage.  These shots were the only other shots in the episode besides those of the race track.  At one point, near the end of the episode, the driver delivered a climatic monologue grasping at all the potentials of mankind lost to trivial and barbaric spectacles, establishing the rather labored twist that the last race was actually the human race.  And that's when I saw it.

In the background of the monologue shot, just beyond the floodlights that shone on the injured driver, there was a crowd of extras gathered behind the track's railing.  These people were there to represent the audience watching the race.  In the middle of the driver's monologue, just at the very edge of the frame, I saw a distraught woman that seemed to stand out from the crowd.  Rather than cheering on the racers, as the extras were presumably instructed to do, she looked about frantically, clutching at a handkerchief.  Then she looked directly at the camera with tormented eyes.  It was the way that she stared at the camera that really caught my attention and made her stand out.  I could see that something was horribly wrong.

Then, driven by who knows what inner turmoil, the woman unexpectedly climbed the rail and ran out onto the track.  All of this transpired in soft focus at the corner of the screen.  I might never have noticed it if I hadn't been looking.  As the woman ran out of the shot, I could see the flicker of the headlights of the cars zipping by out of frame.  Then an arm from the crowd reached out frantically after the woman and the fingers of the hand curled into a claw as though something had slipped beyond their reach.  I could only see the arm and the hand, but it wasn't difficult to piece together what had happened.

The episode continued with no acknowledgement of what had transpired in the background.  After the driver had delivered his speech, he slumped limply against the railing, having apparently expired.  Just at the moment that he died, just at the exact moment, the woman appeared again in the background behind the rail, standing still and staring towards the camera with those same tormented eyes.  And then in a blink she was gone.  It was as though her image had been inserted into a single frame, just as the driver was dying.  Maybe an editor had grabbed a shot of the woman from the earlier footage in a clumsy attempt to try to smooth over what had happened and to maintain continuity.  Maybe it was from a different take, one where she contemplated running out onto the track but never did.  Maybe the camera had captured some lingering regret, after the fact.  I had no idea.  I turned off the TV and the lamp and climbed under the blankets, trying to put the whole thing out of my head.

Cigarette Butts

I went to work on a farm that fall.  I was sixteen, young and full of energy.  It was a cool and cloudy afternoon, and I had on my blue jean jacket.  There was a lively bustle about the place.  From the barn I could hear the hiss of steaming water through the screen door of the kitchen up at the house as they washed the dishes dirtied from lunch.  I could hear the machinery out in the fields.  I was hanging up a pitchfork on a peg when I saw a long black car come down the gravel driveway.  It was my uncle, stopping by to see me.  It was break time just then and everyone came up from the fields to smoke and sit by the trees around the house. 

My uncle had borrowed my cigarettes and he tossed the pack to me.  I fumbled the pack trying to catch it and spilled about half the cigarettes out on the ground.  I went to pick one up and light it, but it broke in my hand.  The workers around me all laughed.  I tried to pick up another and suffered the same result.  As I kept trying to pick them up, the cigarettes grew older and stale and dirty, no longer freshly fallen from the pack, until finally I found myself picking up nothing but the crushed and spent butts that had been long scattered around the yard.

The laughter around me dispersed as though carried off on the wind.  I raised myself up on old, tired, and cracked joints and there was no one around me.  My uncle and the workers were gone like ghosts.  The barn and the house were empty, long deserted and collapsing into ruin.  The sun poked through a cloud and shone in a cracked upstairs window of the house in diminished radiance as the day went cold and wasted silence prevailed.  The cigarette butt in my hand had been extinguished ages ago, in completely different days gone by.  I tossed it back to the ground.

The Landlady's Son

I rented out a room in the last house at the end of the street.  A tired older woman with deep lines on her face lived there with her only son, a chubby little boy who was about six years old.  His brown hair was always slick and smoothed to the side as though his mother was constantly combing it.  He would often stare up at me as I climbed the creaky stairs to my room.  Whenever I was late with the rent, whenever I had rowdy friends over making too much noise, whenever I came stumbling in at two in the morning and woke this woman up, she would take her anger out on her son.  She would hit him and beat him for anything that I did.
 
Once, she burst in on a poker game that I was having with my friends and found us all puffing away on cigars, which she had strictly forbidden.  She marched the boy into the room in front us and made him hold out his right hand.  She made us watch as she took his fingers and broke them one by one.  We could see the boy trembling as she started with the thumb.  There was a loud snap and he cried out in pain and fidgeted all about, but he didn't even try to run off.  She held him firmly by the wrist and moved on to the index finger.  She took each finger systematically in turn.  The boy's lip quivered as she took his pinky and scowled at us.  We sat there still.  Even the cigar smoke didn't seem to stir.

It went on like this for weeks.  She hurt the boy in nearly every possible way.  Finally, I came down the stairs one day and she brought him in from the dining room in a wheelchair.  She had crippled him for life for the things that I'd done.  The boy sat crumpled and broken in the chair.  I looked up at the mother through my tears.  "How can you do this?  He never did anything.  I did all of it.  Why does he have to pay for it?"  Her face went red.  She didn't say a word.  She just slapped the boy as hard as she could across his cheek.  His head rolled from the blow but he didn't even seem to hardly feel it.  He slumped in the chair and stared off blankly at the wall.

I knew then that I had to leave.  I went to my room and got my things.  I made up the bed and put everything just as it was when I had moved in.  I straightened the table and chairs and fastened the window latch.  I wanted to leave this woman no cause to complain.  On the walk out front, I took a long deep breath of fresh air.  The woman had wheeled the boy to the front window and I could see him there, watching the rain drip from the tree in the yard, watching me as I went.        

Routes to Work

I was working a new job, and on my coffee break I got to talking to this woman I worked with about different routes we took to get to the office in the morning.  I hissed and made a face when she mentioned the way that she went, because I knew that it involved driving down a very steep incline along a narrow set of metal pipes and there was a sharp turn at an elbow pipe junction just at the bottom of this incline.  I told her about the way I took, which was a little less tricky, although you had to go all the way around a complete vertical loop and you could fall at the top if you didn't have enough momentum.

As we were having this conversation, I was picturing all these different ways and routes in my head.  I could see it clearly, but then in my mind's eye I pulled back from the scene and I could see that it was all just a lonely little playground with scattered patches of thawed snow among the wet leaves.  The pipes and rusted bars that made up our routes were part of the swing set and the merry-go-round and the rest of the playground equipment.  The cars that we had driven to work were just diecast toys in the hands of little kids in woolen winter hats, their noses running as they made revving noises with their lips and pushed the cars along.

Gameplay

I was walking along a mountain path in some mythical realm.  I came to a place where the path turned just at the edge of a high rocky point that looked out over an expansive view of faintly whispered mountains far in the distance illuminated by those few shafts of eastern light that managed to penetrate the smoky atmosphere.  Just past the edge, I could see the sheer drop into a fathomless, terrifying pit below.  The tip of my shoe knocked a pebble loose and I watched it tumble away, bouncing here and there against the faces of the rock in its descent, and even when it was gone from sight, I could hear the reverberations of it echoing throughout the entire valley.

As I took the turn in the path and continued on my way, I came across a squat little creature, shaped like a red mushroom with big blinking eyes.  It stood a few inches tall and was about twice as wide.  The thing moved by making short little hops in front of me.  It seemed to be entreating me with those big eyes, perhaps begging me for food or a novelty of some sort, but I had nothing in my empty pockets to give it.  I tried to step around it, but it just hopped back in front of me.  Finally, I tried to sweep it away with the side of my shoe.

That was a mistake.  The whole countenance and demeanor of the thing changed immediately.  Its body turned a charcoal grey, its eyes narrowed in anger, and sharp fangs spread from the corners of its mouth.  It began aggressively nipping at my ankles.  I backed away, while jabbing at it with my foot, but the thing kept at me.  Then it dawned on me that I was inside of a game zone and that there was a specific set of moves or rules by which I had to defeat this enemy.  I pleaded with the turbulent sky above for guidance, but no one answered.   The mushroom creature just kept nipping its fangs at me, and driving me back, and before I'd even realized what had happened, the loose ground at the edge gave way and I grasped in vain for a hold in the rock as I fell into the pit below.

Luckily, the game immediately dispatched a full military unit to rescue me.  Several troops repelled down the side of the mountain with ropes.  Generals and commanders rode up to the edge in jeeps and coordinated the teams with radios from the mountain top above.  But none of them could match the speed of my free falling descent.  I could see them up there, and I reached out my hands, but I just fell further and further away from them.  But then a helicopter came along, and it dove straight down and flew past me to get up underneath me.  The pilot turned the helicopter on its side so that they could catch me as I fell into the open door.  I fell into the arms of two soldiers.  They wrapped me in a brown blanket and sat me on a bench in the back of the helicopter as the pilot righted the craft and began to fly back up to the top of the mountain.

But just then, something smashed hard through the windshield of the helicopter.  We began to spin out of control.  The pilots lay slumped over, unconscious.  The two soldiers in the back with me tried to scramble up front to get to the controls before we crashed.  They had forgotten about me for the moment, and when they weren't looking, I opened another door which had somehow appeared in the wall next to me.  This was a simple wooden door, and it had a screen door beyond it, and I stepped out through this back door into the backyard of my childhood home.

It was a starry Friday night.  I was a kid again, and I could see my mother in the light of the kitchen window, washing dishes.  I snuck across the yard to go visit the girl next door.  We were friends.  She was waiting for me and she had this board game already set up on the table for us to play.  The board consisted of a comb of hexagons laid out in a grid against a background of stars, and the game pieces were little spaceships on pedestals.  We took turns rolling the red and white die to see who would go first.

Where It Never Snows

I went down in early December to visit my family in Arizona.  I accompanied them to a midnight pageant at their church.  I basked in the glow of the Nativity, sat in the warm dark enveloped by voices raised in song, endured the firm handshakes in the lobby from men in gray suits.  When it was all over, we stepped out into the winter night and found that it was snowing outside.  The snow drifted heavy through the brown lights of the street lamps and it was already thick across the desert floor and on the arms of a nearby cactus and across the clay roof of the old Spanish church.  Everyone grinned as the snow flakes sparkled in their eyelashes, and they reached out their cupped palms to gather the flakes as they fell right into their hands.

My cousin asked me to drive his car, since he had no experience driving in the snow.  We all piled in and I cranked up the heat and the defroster as the wipers brushed aside the snow that had gathered on the windshield.  As the car warmed up, we sat listening to the radio and the news reporter said that it was snowing all over the state, far out into the desert, far out into the dark beyond the lights.  They were calling for several inches of accumulation.  By morning they were going to have to bring in plows from up north.  They'd never seen anything like it.

I slowly made my way through the empty streets, the colored lights and huddled figures blurred and indistinguishable beyond the swirling shrouds of white.  There was a party going when we got back to the house, the cars all parked this way and that in the driveway and out along the curb.  There were shadows of people at the windows, marveling at the falling snow.  Inside they greeted me warmly with pats on the back, and my aunt was telling everybody how I'd driven them all home.  I got to talking to one of my uncles and he took me to a room in the back where he kept tapes of every phone call he'd ever made.  He played some of the more amusing ones.  I just laughed along.  Everything was alright.  It was a snowy night, and we were all here together.

Execution Day

My friend and I were living in a ranch house out in the country.  We were roommates.  Everything was going along great until he came home one night with an old girlfriend of mine.  I was sitting in my recliner watching TV, and I heard voices in the kitchen and someone clanging around in the refrigerator, and then they came cutting through the living room right in front of me.  They both had bottles of beer, and my friend casually tipped his bottle towards me as a greeting before he led my old girlfriend by the hand down the hall to his bedroom.  I just sat there gaping.  This went on for a few weeks until one night, just as they passed in front of the TV, I finally said, "You know what?  I've had it with this.  Why don't you just go ahead and kill me?"

Rather than recognize this as the bitter cry of exasperation that it was, my friend took this as a magnanimous gesture on my part to remove myself from the situation.  He'd always been a little dense that way.  He told me what a relief it was and how awkward it had been to keep bringing my old girlfriend through the room while I was sitting there like that.  My eyes went wide and I tilted my head.  So we decided on a day, a week or so from then.  We would head out south first thing in the morning to some secluded area deeper out in the country, some open field out in the middle of nowhere, the black birds taking flight from the bare branches all around, and I would kneel down on the faded grass and he would fulfill my request.

I stayed up all night the night before.  A few of our other friends dropped by, but I really had nothing to say to any of them.  I was too preoccupied with my impending appointment.  I stared out the window while they sat around and flicked the ash from their cigarettes and talked and joked with each other.  The smoke was thick in the air as the hours dragged on.  I was still there at the window at daybreak, watching the first hint of light on the edge of the sky.  It was quiet now.  These other friends had gone home, and it was just me and my thoughts.  It wondered how it would be when I was gone and this all went on without me.

My friend came out from his bedroom.  He took his time over his breakfast and his coffee.  I'd almost thought he'd forgotten until I heard the rattle of his dishes and silverware in the sink and he turned to me, still working on his last bite of food, and asked, "You ready?"  I swallowed hard and nodded.  We went out to the driveway and he popped the trunk of my car and he loaded it with a couple of muddy shovels and an old brown shotgun.  I took a deep breath of the morning air and had a good last look around.  There was fog hanging low over the road, curling around the wooden posts of the fence that ran along the roadside.

But as I backed out of the driveway, I swung the car north instead of south, and headed up towards town.  There was no way I was going to go through with this.  The pale numbness of resignation passed and I felt suddenly engaged, hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it in my hands, alive again. I decided I'd be safer if we went to a more populated area.  My friend began to figure out that we'd gone the wrong way.  As we rolled up the residential streets with their closely packed houses and cleanly clipped yards, his head darted all around.  Before the objections could leave his mouth, I told him that I needed to stop by my mother's house to pick something up.

I pulled up at the house, and he followed me inside.  We went in through the back way, out behind the garage.  I undid the latch on the gate to the backyard and let him in ahead of me.  We came in through the utility room, and just as we were passing by the hot water heater, I noticed a pair of handcuffs sitting on a nearby shelf.  I acted fast, grabbing the handcuffs and clipping one end to one of the brown water pipes and the other end to my friend's wrist.

He looked back at me confused as he tried to jerk his hand free.  I told him, "Did you really think I was going to drive out somewhere and let you kill me?  You stupid sick son of a bitch.  Haven't you ever heard of a saying?"  He just struggled and stared at me and said nothing.  I wasn't sure what to do with him.  I left him there and headed out through the kitchen to the front room.  My mother was coming down the stairs, just about to leave for work.  She was just about to ask me what I was doing there when a violent metallic rattle rang out from the back of the house.  She looked past me, perplexed.  I just shrugged.            

Looking in the Window

It was early morning, very dim and grey.  There was this condo that my wife and I were interested in, and I rode over on my bicycle to have a look at it.  The place was situated on nicely landscaped grounds with ponds and neatly manicured hedges, the buildings were painted in earth tones, and there was a quiet relaxed atmosphere, softened by the misty air and the glow of the carriage lamps that lined the walkways.  I had been back several times over the past few weeks to crouch down and look into the windows at the empty rooms of the available unit, imaging our furniture arranged on the beige carpeted floors and deciding whether I really wanted to buy the place.

But when I rode up the lane that led to the unit and dismounted from my bike, I noticed that there was a light on in one of the windows of the recessed living room.  I could hear the muffled thumping of music, indicating that someone had set up a stereo inside, and I noticed that the garage door wasn't quite closed all the way and I could see the silver bumper of a car parked within.  The empty condo was suddenly occupied, and I felt very self-conscious and paranoid about being there and wanting to look into the windows.  I got back on my bike and tried to ride away as casually as possible.

Already I could hear voices behind me, even before I got to the end of the lane and rounded the corner.  They had seen me standing outside the condo, staring at the light in the window.  They were coming after me.  I ditched the bike on the grass and I hid in a narrow space between the walls of two of the buildings.  But it didn't matter.  They walked right up to where I was hiding.  There was a blonde woman with her blonde daughter.  They told me that they'd come home and found blood everywhere, sprayed on the floors and the walls of their condo, and then they'd seen me lurking around outside.  They wanted to know what I knew about the blood on the walls.

I explained to them that I had only come to look into the windows because I was under the impression that the place was for sale and sitting empty, and my wife and I were thinking of buying it.  I told them that I had a long established habit of returning again and again to look at something that I was thinking of buying.  It was just part of my buying process.  I assured them that I hadn't been inside, and I had only looked in at the windows, and I knew absolutely nothing about any blood.  The place had been immaculate the last time I'd seen it.  I promised them that I would do anything I could to help them figure out what had happened.  The mother and daughter nodded to one another and seemed satisfied with this, but as soon as the words had left my mouth, I wondered what I was getting myself involved in.            

The Chess Problem

I was eating my lunch in a crowded cafeteria.  The diners sat elbow to elbow on long benches at polished metal tables arranged in rows.  This kid next to me had a bunch of large wooden chess pieces on the table in front of him, laid out in the configuration of a chess problem which he appeared to be intensely contemplating.  I leaned over to study the problem for myself when I noticed something curious.  "There's no board!", I observed.  The kid just nodded, still concentrating on the problem.  I was impressed.  Not only could he analyze all the complex movements and interactions of all the different pieces; he could do it all while visualizing where the pieces belonged on the board entirely in his head.

Overnight Shift

It was in the middle of the night and I was left alone in this brightly lit corner bedroom that had hardwood floors and yellow walls, badly painted with flecks of yellow paint spattered along the baseboards.  One of the plastic injection mold machines from the factory I used to work at was installed in the room with me, taking up most of its space and continually, constantly pumping out those blue jar lids we used to make.  There was nothing else in the room except for a red striped lumpy mattress flopped down on the floor and a rickety table beside it with an ashtray on it and a couple of paperback books propping up one of its uneven legs.  

I was supposed to keep an eye on the machine and sort through the parts as they came down the conveyor, but I just wanted to lie on the bed and read the books and explore all the bundles of clothes and discarded junk and old mementos that were stuffed into the dark recesses of the bedroom's closet.  But the machine kept seizing up and the parts kept sticking in the mold and I'd miss it because I was busy fooling with something else.  Then the foreman would burst through the bedroom door, grumbling and banging on the machine with a wrench until he got it running again.  I'd have to sit down at the conveyor and make like I was working and stutter out some excuse as to why I didn't catch the machine when it seized up. He'd just shake his head and go away and the whole farce would repeat itself over and over until this eternal shift was done.   

For the Wedding

I shook my father by the shoulder to wake him.  He had fallen asleep on a worn out couch in an unlit, unheated house that looked like it had sat abandoned for a long time.  Grey dust coated every surface, thick enough to trace through with a finger, and the air itself seemed pale and colorless.  My father sat up grumbling and groggy, as he usually did when he woke up, and I handed him his brown shoes that he had left neatly paired on the floor beside the couch.  We sat there talking about meaningless things and I ran him a glass of cold water from the tap while he cleared his throat and collected his thoughts and held the weight of his head in his hands.

We headed out the door and it was just around dawn on a cold winter morning, crisp and clear, the snow thickly crusted and frozen hard.  The abandoned house that my father had slept in was actually just a small guest house that sat at a fork where the dirt driveway diverged into two driveways which both continued on up to the main house up on the hill.  I had parked my pickup truck behind the guest house in a turnaround which connected the two diverging driveways.  I could see from the grey smoke curling from the tailpipe that I had left the truck running this whole time.  I figured that I had been in there waking my father up and talking him back into coherence for at least an hour.  I couldn't believe that I had left the truck sitting there running for so long.  I kicked myself for the gas I was wasting.

But my father just patted me on the shoulder and told me, "Are you kidding?  These people around here have been known to steal batteries and parts off of any car that's not running.  You never want to turn your truck off around here."  And then I looked and saw a car sitting under a tree across the other side of the driveway.  The hood was popped open and there were pipes and hoses pulled out and hanging every which way over the sides of the fenders.  The car had been gutted and the remaining heap had turned completely brown with rust.  And farther off, half obscured in the tall weeds, I saw other cars in similar conditions, discarded relics crumbling into the snowy landscape.

This got my father talking about the country family who owned this property.  He chuckled and waved his hand towards the main house as we started up the hill.  The family had two wild twin boys in their twenties that loved to go for raucous shirtless joyrides down dusty back roads on summer evenings, climbing half out of the door and howling in the corn.  Their older sister had a husband who was always in and out of prison.  And whenever he was home, he mostly occupied his time by stealing cars and bringing them home for the boys, and after the boys had beat the cars all to hell and run them into the ground, they would dump them off around the property and part them out.  They were crazy, trashy people.  The terror of the whole countryside.

I wondered what we were doing here among these people, why my father was sleeping in their dusty guest house, why I was there to wake him on that frigid morning.  It turned out my brother had been dating this older sister while her husband was off serving another sentence in prison.  These didn't seem like the kind of people my brother would get involved with, but I guess he was in love, and she had managed to get a divorce from her incarcerated husband, and now my brother was getting married to her, and my father and I had come here for the wedding.

So we climbed the hill, and I took my father's arm as the slope grew steeper.  And as we climbed, the day wore on with each step.  It was late afternoon now and spring.  The snow had melted away and there was green grass and blossoms on the trees and the tall weeds along the edge of the property had grown thicker, hiding all the rusted old wrecks from sight, and the sun lingered longer, lazier in the sky.  When we got up into the shaded yard of the main house, we saw that the field out back behind the house had been set up for the wedding.  There were rows of white chairs and the arbor was decked out with pink and blue flowers.

The twin boys wore matching light blue suits.  They sat in the front row, wrestling and punching at one another, almost knocking over the chairs around them.  They both had the same loose mops of brown hair that whipped about in their struggles.  The sister had a blonde-haired son from her first marriage, and he sat in the back row, dressed up in a clean shirt and tie, staring down at his dangling shoes that didn't quite touch the ground.  My brother stood up by the arbor, hands folded before him, grinning and waiting for his bride.

And as someone began to play at an organ that had been wheeled out onto the grass, there she was, wearing a white dress slightly discolored that had been passed down through the generations of someone else's family and lent to her for the occasion.  She had the same loose brown hair as her brothers, but longer and tied up with a ribbon in the back.  She could have been described as homely in the distribution of her features, the smallness of her brown eyes, the almost bulbous tip to her nose, and her wide thin lips.  But there was also something radiantly adorable about her and the pink flush of her cheeks.  She was a bride, in love, thrilled to be getting married.

Just Offstage

This blonde actress and I were on a sound stage, sitting in the front seat of long '63 Chevy hard top.  We were shooting a scene for a movie.  The stage hands kept running about, switching the plywood backdrops that were arranged around the car, reflecting different backgrounds and locales.  They switched from desert scenes to city streets to dense tropical jungles.  There was the Eiffel Tower on my left, and then the Aztec Pyramids on my right.  Confetti showered on us as we made our way through a parade of extras inflated by stagecraft and camera trickery to look five times their number.

Wardrobe continually changed our costumes in a flurry of colored fabric to match these backdrops.  They tossed an Hawaiian shirt on me, and then a cowboy hat, then a fedora, then some other hat besides.  They wrapped a scarf around the blonde's head and put her in sunglasses as she dragged on a long black cigarette holder, so blaise' as everyone fussed with her.  I pretended to drive the car and wave to the crowds and gawk at all the sights.  We traveled the world in minutes and never moved an inch.  It was all arranged and rearranged around us.

When the scene was done, I got out of the car to go make a phone call.  The backdrops were pulled away, and the car was left sitting in a dingy grey concrete warehouse.  The blonde stayed in the passenger seat, powdering her cheeks and checking her makeup in a pocket mirror, still in character, still in the illusion of the scene.  I went through a door that opened onto someone's apartment with plush orange carpet and darkly papered walls.  I spotted a rotary phone on a table across the room, but as I crossed over to it, the stage hands pulled away the walls and took the phone and the table, revealing them to be fake flimsy props.  I went through another door and passed into the bedroom of the apartment, but again the walls were pulled away, and then again through another door, and then another, and every time the walls were pulled away.  I just wanted to get to a phone and call someone out there in real life.

The Late Fees

One night, in the middle of a loud party with blasting music and bottled beers and people all crammed into this small house, I suddenly remembered that I had a movie that I needed to return to the video store.  I went to the bedroom, and on the nightstand beside the alarm clock I found the sleeve that the movie had come in, but the VHS tape itself was no where to be found.  I looked under the table and under the bed, but there was nothing.  The bedroom was full of people too, and I shouted over the music to ask them about the movie.  They shook their heads and swigged their beers and just grinned at me.

I think it was those grins that really got to me.  Like they knew something and weren't saying.  I started yelling at other people.  Someone had to know where this movie was.  Someone had to have done something with it.  I dreaded having to pay the fine, or even worse, the exorbitant fee that the store would charge to replace the movie altogether.  The party kept on, heedless of my desperate frustrations.  It felt like the whole of my life hinged on finding this movie and returning it.  Otherwise it would be that thing forgotten, coming back to taunt me years later in sudden recollections, that one last piece of never finished business, that one drop of corrosive acid falling down the bottomless pit of my stomach, my head swimming, caught in the endless vertigo of that dark descent.

No, that movie had to be somewhere.  In the kitchen I confronted a man with a moustache and a dark complexion.  I was certain that he knew something; I don't know why.  He began to get violently angry at my accusations.  I felt people crowding in behind me, and I knew that I was pushing the matter too far.  I was going to end up getting hurt.  But someone knew where that movie was.  They had to know.  I kept at the man with the moustache, agitating him to the point that his beer bottle shattered in his fist.  His nostrils flared as he clutched the brown shards of glass.  The suds dripped from his hand.

Still, despite myself I kept yelling.  I felt the people all pressing in behind me, and I turned and saw that they were all friends and family of the man with the moustache.  This was his house and his party.  I didn't know any of these people.  I was a stranger here, making wild threats at the host.  Hostile faces bore down on me in all directions, growling, seething, drawing ever closer.  I would never find that movie.

Expose'

I was watching a news piece about this famous white-haired old millionaire.  They showed snapshots of him in a suit, laughing as he popped the cork on bottles of champagne in light-festooned ballrooms of the late 1970's.  They showed his boat on the ocean under clear blue skies, and he was standing at the deck in a sailor's cap waving his cigar in the air, blonde beauties in swimsuits lining the rail to either side of him.  They showed his secluded mountain estate atop a long road that climbed through the pines.

They spoke about his love life in that typical way with just a hint of scandal and a patronizing indulgence for the weaknesses of rich old men.  At the height of his fortune, he had met his third wife, a young brunette with curled and feathered hair.  They showed her smiling photograph, and they mentioned something about her teeth, and it was then that I noticed that something looked a bit odd about them, like there were too many or they gleamed too brightly or extended back too far beyond the bright red lips.

They cut to an old clip of an interview with this woman.  She was explaining that she'd had her lower jaw removed due to cancer, and now she wore a facial prosthetic.  To demonstrate, she unhooked the prosthetic jaw and removed it.  The woman interviewing her then revealed that she too had a prosthesis.  She had a plate in her face that extended from a dental bridge on the upper left side of her mouth on up to her left eye.  She popped the glass eye inward, and then slipped the prosthesis out through her mouth, leaving her face drooping on the left side and a dark hole where the eye had been.  And then they cut to the cameraman, already in the process of removing his prosthesis, and on it went until I felt like they'd set off a chain that would end with everyone everywhere having a facial prosthesis, the whole world turned upside down.                      

Leaving the Park

My family had all spent the day together at the park, having a picnic.  At twilight, when the sun had dropped below the hill that overlooked the park and it was getting too dark to keep pitching horseshoes, we began loading everything into our cars.  The table cloths and folding lawn chairs and foil pans of chicken were all shuffled and packed away in the dim yellow dome lights.  Once we had everything squared, I started my car and swung it around, and there was one of my nephews, a little boy of about three, standing in the beam of the headlights, standing out there in the open, giggling.  I was so startled that I jerked the wheel and went off the pavement into the grass.

This caused a great deal of commotion, and the boy was pulled aside and scolded for getting in the way, and I found my tires spinning in ruts in the muddy grass, and a bunch of us had to get up under the front bumper and heave and push until the car was free.  And then we were on our way again, following one another's taillights in a long procession, until we merged with the whole streaming sea of lights out on the freeway.  The nephew looked back at me from the rear window of the car ahead, his wet eyes red and sorrowful and sad.

Sick Day

I had stayed home sick from elementary school.  It was a frigid winter day with ice crusted on the windows.  My bedroom was at the back of the house, far from the furnace and slightly colder than the rest of the rooms, and I was sick in bed, dreaming all the stale dreams of a day in bed underneath all the layers of blankets, huddled within, pretending to be deep in a cave, leaving that one little hole for light and air.

In the afternoon I watched my cartoons on the black and white TV that sat over on the dresser at the foot of the bed.  In my excitement over whatever show I was watching, I started bouncing on the bed and I made a gesture like I was about to throw something at the TV.  Just as I did this, I noticed one of the kids from school peering in at me through the frosted window across the room.  He had his red gloves cupped around his eyes, and his face pressed to the glass.  I could just make out the shape of him through the ice.  I didn't think anything of it.  I just gathered up my thick bundle of blankets and wound them around me and rolled back over facing the other way.

But later on in the evening, as I got out of bed and crept out into the hallway, I heard the voices of my classmates coming from the living room.  I came down the hall to find them gathered around messing with our old stereo cabinet, the type with the wooden lid that lifts up to reveal a turntable and radio dial.  My father sat in an armchair among them, a darkened silhouette shape against the rosy light of the winter evening window over his shoulder.  I couldn't see his face, couldn't see what he thought of all of this.  My classmates just kept fiddling with the stereo knobs and laughing and telling my father how the kid had peeked in at the window and seen that I wasn't really sick.

I got mad, listening to them go on about it.  I had come out from the bedroom still wrapped in one of my blankets, and I let this fall to the floor as I gathered an outraged breath and prepared to tell them all that they had no business staring in my windows and that the gesture that they'd seen had proven nothing and that they were all just looking to start trouble.  But then my father was there behind me, still dark and unseen, and he told me over my shoulder to calm down, to let it go, that none if it mattered as long as I knew the truth.

A Big Disappointment

I had taken up smoking again.  And not only was I smoking again, I was caught smoking in the middle of the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital.  The nurse came in shouting at me with half my family trailing scornfully behind her.  There was even talk about a lawsuit and charges being pressed for smoking in a restricted area.  My mother, uncles, aunts, brothers, cousins, everybody glared and shook their heads at me.  I tried to stamp the cigarette out under my heel on the white tile floor.  I tried to explain myself.  I tried to tell them that it was just the one pack, and that once it was gone, I could quit just as easily as I did before.  But every word came out like the feeble excuse that it was.

I slipped away from them and out into the parking-garage that adjoined the building.  It was evening, just beginning to get dark out.  I knew there was nothing waiting for me at home but long lectures, distressed sighs, and bitter recriminations.  Down at the curb in front of the hospital, there was a black-haired girl in a light blue 65 Mustang convertible.  She offered me a ride away from all of this.  I accepted eagerly, and we were off down country roads that unwound in the headlights and sharp lashes of wind in the open air.  I clicked on the radio and the dial glowed gold and there was a warm hum and then all the old songs were there.      

Instant Replay

I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and we were listening to the baseball game on the radio.  It was a hot July afternoon in the city, and we were sitting on the back stoop in the narrow alleyway that ran behind the apartment building.  My friend started going on about how the instant replay feature had ruined half the fun of listening to these games.  In the old days, he said, a close call would lead to disputes of passion and imagination, marvels of improvisation.  Now they just waited for the replay to settle everything.

He said that his old uncle was a master at this peculiar craft.  He would set up the whole play and go through it beat by beat.  My friend proceeded to demonstrate.  He stepped up to an imaginary home plate and swung away.  He cracked a fly ball into the outfield and barreled down the first base line.  Then he was the outfielder, scrambling for the ball at the fence and then whipping it to the shortstop.  And there he was the runner again, headed for second, and now the shortstop, and again the runner, and then back again.

"Safe," he pronounced quietly, showing that the shortstop never touched the bag, that he had missed it by just the slightest inch, indisputable proof informed by physics, stats, and simple geometry. The play was over.  The pantomime had stopped.  The spell was broken.  It was just a back alley again on a sweltering day.  My friend nodded his head and tossed the nonexistent ball to me, and as a matter or reflex, I reached out to catch it in my nonexistent glove.

On Higher Branches

Back doing factory work again.  I had my old job as a material handler, running to and fro, making sure the machines didn't run out of dye or material.  But now all the presses were out in the open air of a summer night in amongst a small grove of chestnut trees, and each tree was inextricably bound up with the workings of a different press; the cogs and gears, the pistons and valves, all inter-meshed with the bark and twisting sinews of the tree trunk until it was impossible to distinguish the two.  I scrambled around from press to press, making sure this one had the right dye, hearing that telltale suction noise that warned me that this other one was nearly out of material, stopping just long enough to wipe away the sweat with my sleeve.

Our work involved feeding these trees and helping them grow.  Each fresh load of material brought a wooden crackle from each one of the trees and I could see the branches reach out just a little further in the dark, twisting in new directions, sprouting new leaves at their tips.  On the ground we all bustled along.  There were lights clustered around the press at the base of each tree, and the clink of metal on metal and the rumble of machinery and the abrasive edge of rough voices continued through the night.  But from time to time, I had to climb the trees to fill the dye loaders, and this took me up above the noise and the hot, busy air.  From my perch on a high branch there was a nice breeze and I could see the full moon high above and the yellow blossoms of soft lamplights somewhere below.

My Brother and Me

I was a young boy.  It was just me and my mother and my little baby brother.  We had fallen on hard times.  We had taken to living in the hollow of a large boulder at the local park.  There were small holes to climb up into this hollow on either side of the boulder, and it was comfortably snug within.  Once ensconced, we were safe inside the boulder, but we had to be discreet in our comings and goings, so that the other patrons of the park wouldn't notice that we were living in there.  To that end, my mother took some of the sand that lay on the ground around the boulder and molded it in such a way that the openings were recessed into two pitted grooves.  That way the folks power walking in the parking-lot down the hill wouldn't see us slip in and out.  My mother demonstrated, wiggling in feet first.  Her smiling face slipped up under the boulder and she was inside.  The people down the hill went about their picnics and their brisk strides, never noticing a thing.

But then I just had to go and point out a problem with this idea.  I climbed in after her, and once inside the cool, damp hollow, I whispered that there was a winding stone walkway that passed right by the boulder.  Certainly these hidden entrances would be visible to anyone walking along this path.  My mother stuck her head out to see what I was talking about, and just then a cop happened to be coming down this walkway.  He spotted her before she could duck back in.  So she slipped out the rest of the way, and made like she was just resting against the boulder in its shade.  She assumed as casual an air as she could with a smear of subterranean dirt across her cheek.

I sat inside the boulder, trying to hold my breath, trying not to make a noise.  My baby brother rocked back and forth, shirtless, nibbling at his fingers.  I could hear the cop's muffled interrogation outside.  He seemed to be buying my mother's story.  He seemed like he was about to move on.  Unfortunately just then, I bumped into one of my brother's toys, a plastic phone for toddlers,  and it let out the briefest clipped ring. The noise echoed off the concave ceiling of the hollow.  This perked the cop's attention, but it wasn't until my baby brother suddenly started wailing from all the tension and confusion that the game was truly up.  I snatched up my brother and slipped out the hole on the other side of the boulder.  I took off running across the park with my brother tucked up under my arm, never looking back.

The two of us started making our way across town, somehow growing older as we cut along the back streets and crossed the busy intersections.  I figured that we could go stay with my grandmother.  I was nearly a teenager and my brother was just starting to walk and talk, coming out of stores marveling at everything he saw, fascinated by the bell that jingled whenever the door opened, the candy and chips and cans of soups that would sustain us smuggled under both our coats.  We sat at the curb eating, while I consulted the pieces of a weathered old map, figuring which routes we had to take.  My brother's little shoelaces were loose and dirty from being dragged along in the mud.  I tied them into bows and promised I'd show him how to do it himself some day, and then we got to our feet and kept moving.

I was a grown man by the time we reached my grandmother's house.  My brother was the teenager now, raised in the wild.  He tossed pebbles across the yard as we waited for my grandmother to appear at the screen door around the side of the house.  I told her that I would pay her rent for whatever rooms she could spare.  I insisted.  I wanted more than anything to settle into the comforts of working a steady job and living a daily life and paying my own way and finding myself in a chair in front of the TV at the end of the day in crusty old work shoes.  She told me that we could have two of the bedrooms in the back, upstairs.  They had been closed off for years, but we just needed to dust and take down the cobwebs and it would be just fine.  It would be so nice to live in a real house again, to sleep in real beds, to sit snugly under a roof on stormy nights.

The clouds were even gathering as we spoke and I could feel those first few drops of hard rain.  It seemed that we had arrived just in time.  My grandmother held the screen door open and my brother and I ducked inside.  Sitting on a cabinet across the room was a stack of letters that my mother had written from jail.  My grandmother had kept them for me, waiting for me to arrive.  The ones at the bottom of the stack were discolored with age.  I considered the weight of the stack in my hand.  The whole story of all those years in a handful of envelopes.                         

Wrong Beach

When I went back there, I found our local beach was worse than I remembered.  It had become a dumping ground for people's old junked appliances.  Industrial washing machines and dryers and electric stoves lay cock-eyed in the sand, littering the landscape, and there was always a chance of stepping on some broken piece of glass or rusted metal if one were unwise enough to venture out in bare feet.  The water had a thick red hue to it and the sky above was always dark, full of churning, turbulent clouds.  Determining day and night had become impossible, as even the sand itself was lighter than the sky, lit terrestrially as it was by a row of streetlamps planted along the edge of where the beach and the parking-lot met.  The sky's only illumination was the occasional flash of lighting rumbling in the cracks between the clouds.

No one ever swam out into the water, for fear of what it was, and whatever had given it its color, and whatever might have been lurking out there.  Instead, a large inflatable pool had been set up on the beach for whoever wanted to swim.  But the standing water in this pool was murky and foul, and it gave off a rank odor.  Swimming in this pool was almost certain to leave one bedridden with fever and chills the next day.  An air of sickness lingered about it.  It was rumored that there were drowned bodies that lay unretrieved at the bottom of this pool, and some claimed that you could feel the rotting flesh against the tips of your toes, while others insisted that these were merely spots where the pool's canvas liner bulged against the sand.  The water in the pool was so clouded that these debates remained unsettled.

And yet, despite all this, as I stood there, people still poured onto the beach as gamely as ever, with all the cheerfulness of the damned, carrying towels and coolers, all ready for a fun day at the shore, their smiles and laughter only occasionally punctuated by someone cursing as they stepped on a used syringe or a broken bottle.  They wandered right down to the water's edge and dumped their stuff and took their place, as though tempting fate itself to reach its great red hand from the waves and drag them out to oblivion.  They lay out, as if basking in a sun that wasn't there.  They set up chairs under umbrellas, as if enjoying the infernal view.  They left their children to make castles that would rot and stink and decompose rather than simply wash away.  And all the while I just stood there and shook my head.