Off the Record

Giant spiders had devastated the Earth. The first spider had actually originated as a toy from a cereal box, a rubber novelty item that grew and divided as soon as it was removed from the wrapper. The spiders had been allowed to multiply and grow beyond control until they had taken over everything everywhere entirely. There was a flimsy vinyl record that had been attached to the back of the cereal boxes. The record was supposed to be played to send out a signal that would cause the spiders to shrivel up and vanish once you were done playing with them. Someone had neglected to play the record that came with their box, and they had let their batch of spiders get completely out of control.

I hunted everywhere through the wreckage, looking for a cereal box that still had one of these records attached to it. In a pile of garbage left behind in the basement of a ruined building, I finally found one, coated in dust and dirt. I knew where I had to take it. I made my way across the city to the old stadium down by the bay, and I went up to the announcer's booth, where there was an amplifier that would broadcast the signal for miles around. I flipped the main breaker, set the record turning on the turntable, and flipped all switches to light up the board and send the signal out over the loudspeaker. Then I climbed up a ladder to a hatch that led up onto the roof of the announcer's booth. From there, as the first pops and cracks in the static began to issue from the speakers around the stadium, I had a view of the whole destroyed city around me.

The sky was dark and red like a stew of blood broiling in the air, and there was a mist that had settled over the landscape, penetrated by a glow from somewhere low to the ground to the west in the ruins of the city. The buildings were torn apart, only half their remains still standing, some of them leaning on their foundations about to topple, jagged ligaments and girders exposed against the skyline like splintered fragments of broken bone. And far off, I could see glimpses of those long terrible legs slowly moving here and there in the mist, their webs spun between the masts of the fallen buildings. And tangled up in the webs, I could see skulls separated from half-devoured carcasses that were dripping loose wet chunks onto the streets below.

But then this scratchy xylophone music began to play from the speakers. The signal that would shrivel up the spiders was embedded at a subsonic level, beneath the music. I looked up and there was a slight opening in the dark red clouds above me, and I began to see the high noon sun peek through. The hole in the clouds widened, and I could see that old amazing bright blue sky behind the clouds. As the clouds receded, things began to change on the ground as well. The water in the bay was so clear and blue again, you could see the sunlight playing off the rocks at the bottom. There were crowds on the beach with their red and white umbrellas and their towels laid out on the sand. There were crowds in the stands of the stadium around me, cheering a football game in progress down on the field below. There was traffic on all the streets and bridges that wound around the buildings, and the buildings were all restored. And on a piece of land where the city jutted out into the smooth waters, I watched this colossal statue reform before my eyes, stone upon stone, until the massive arm was extended again, holding a torch to light the way.

Not only was all the damage undone by playing the record, no one seemed to remember what had happened. It was like the whole experience had been reset in everyone's minds. I was the only one that still remembered. I tried to explain it to people sometimes, the buildings reshaped and clean, that beautiful blue sky showing through, all the life returned to the city and the crowds of people all around. But their heads would just wobble and nod and their eyes would drift and they would scratch their cheek and trace a finger around the edge of their ear as they tried their damnedest to understand. 

A Light in the Window

I was trudging along through a cold marsh. It was almost night, and I was straining my eyes and sweeping my hands out in front of me to find my way. I came to a clearing where there was a small cabin. There was a kerosene lamp in the window. As I approached, I almost stumbled over a huddled figure sitting on a tree stump a few yards away from the cabin. I caught the figure by the shoulder to break my fall and I felt the trembling under my hand. I came in close. It was a man with the hood of his filthy brown coat pulled up over his head. I couldn't make out the man's face, but I could see the mud and debris matted in his beard. I could see the mud on his hands and the dirt crusted around his fingernails as he balled one hand into a fist and crushed it with the other and then switched and crushed the other fist in his other hand, both of the hands shaking wildly until he brought them to his face and bit down on the knuckle of his thumb, the teeth showing in the dark.

The man didn't even seem to notice my hand resting on his shoulder. He didn't seem to notice me huddled in close to him, my breath steaming in the cold after the long slog through the marsh. I could hear him whimpering and gnashing and gnawing, and then his jaw would clench and he would go quiet and I could feel the tremors in his shoulder under my hand. Finally, he took a deep breath and sat up straighter, like he had resolved something and cleared his mind. He got up from the stump and started towards the door of the cabin. I slipped in behind him as he entered, still unnoticed. It was darker inside and the kerosene lamp provided the only light. The man's wife sat in a rocking chair across the room. The man grabbed the lamp off the window sill and brought it to the middle of the room and held it high. His wife didn't like the glare from the light and she turned away her head. There was an old shoebox lying on the floor under the shadow cast by the man's arm holding the lamp.

Then, from some unseen corner of the room, a doctor wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope came over and knelt there on the floor in front of the shoebox. He pulled back the lid, and I could see that there was a baby lying inside the shoebox on a blue quilt that had been folded and laid down beneath it. The baby's eyes were open and it didn't move, and I could see that it was dead, but the doctor proceeded to examine it and he placed the stethoscope against its chest to be sure. Everyone was quiet as the doctor worked, but the wife kept rocking her chair with a maddening regularity and she kept her head turned away and her face hard and her jaw set, as though she refused to see the truth of what was laid out in front of her.

The man explained to the doctor that the baby had been making this constant whining noise, like a whistling in the back of its throat. He said that his wife couldn't stand the noise. She couldn't eat. She couldn't sleep. Her hair was prematurely turning grey, and she was pulling at the knots, and clumps of it were coming loose in her hands. They didn't know what was wrong with the baby. They couldn't get it to stop making this noise. Every breath the baby took, there was that noise, like a hard wind driving through the cracks in the walls. Finally, the man had made the bed for the baby in the shoebox, and he had laid the baby in the box, and then he had held his hand over the baby's mouth and nose and he had kept it there until the noise was gone.

The doctor lifted his head and he stared off at a nail in the wall that was level with his line of sight. He let out a long breath. He looked back down at the baby, and he opened the baby's mouth and reached two fingers down the baby's throat. He did all this as gently as he could, even though the baby was gone. He felt around carefully, turning his head slightly, like he was listening for something. He pulled back his hand and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. He explained to the couple that the baby had only had a small defect, a deviation at the back of the throat that had caused the whistling noise that they had heard. It could have been easily fixed with surgery. The doctor wiped the handkerchief across his forehead and slipped it back into his pocket. 

The Pillowcase

I was climbing up to the sixth floor of this decrepit old apartment building in the city. I had to trudge up the stairs that spiraled around the large open stairwell in the center of the building. I had received some sort of mysterious summons to meet someone, and when I reached the landing on the sixth floor, I saw that the door to the first apartment at the top of the stairs was wide open. I crept into the apartment, and I saw that the place was empty. There was no furniture, just a few boxes and other discarded items left behind on the hardwood floors. Across the room, the double doors to the balcony were standing open, and out on the balcony I saw a woman with black hair standing at the railing. She stood with her back to me, and I could see the view beyond her as she stood looking out at the bay that the city had been build around, watching all the little boats with their white sails as they drifted into the harbor or sailed back out to the open water on the horizon.

I raised a finger, and I was just about to call out to her, but then I heard the sound of a car alarm going off down in the parking lot below. I knew it was my car. I knew someone was messing with it. This was a bad neighborhood, and I had taken a risk coming here. I wanted to get down there quickly and catch the person in the act of breaking into my car, but I knew I'd never get back down all those flights of stairs in time. But then I noticed a pillowcase sitting on a stack of boxes just beside the door to the apartment. The pillowcase was decorated with cartoon cows and sheep and other farm animals grazing in the rainbows and the clouds. I grabbed the pillowcase, and before giving the idea any real thought, I ran back out into the stairwell and jumped over the railing, holding the pillowcase over my head and hoping to use it as a makeshift parachute.

Luckily, the pillowcase popped open with a snap and it eased my descent as I dropped down the shaft in the middle of the spiraling flights of stairs. But I looked up and I saw that there was a small rip in the stitching along the seam of the pillowcase, just big enough to poke a finger through. The pillowcase deflated a little as some of the air escaped though this hole, and I felt myself dropping a little faster, but the pillowcase was still doing a pretty good job of catching the air. And I figured this would be even better. The landing might be kind of rough, but I would be alright, and I would get down to the parking lot even sooner, with even better hopes of catching the person breaking into my car.

I did a tumble and a roll to break my fall as I hit the ground, and then I flipped back onto my feet and I ran for the back door that led out to the parking lot. But I was too late. The thieves had already disassembled my car and they were scattering in all directions, carrying off different pieces of it, tires and fenders and rims and taillights. One of them hooted and hollered as he ran off waving the radio in the air, the wires hanging from it, music from the classic rock station still playing from the speakers that someone else was carrying off in the other direction. Another one was giggling hysterically as he made off with my steering wheel, holding it out in front of him and weaving in a zigzag pattern across the parking lot as he pretended to steer himself one way and then the other. There was nothing but a dented bumper and a few greasy nuts and bolts left sitting in the space where my car had been.

My shoulders slumped and my arms dropped to my sides, the deflated pillowcase still gripped in my fist. There was a little boy standing there next to me on the sidewalk. He had been watching the whole thing and just shaking his head. He turned to me and pointed at something on my shirt, and I looked down and noticed that there was a silver badge pinned there. I touched the badge with my finger and he nodded and looked away back out at the parking lot. He asked me why I never did anything about the crime in his neighborhood, why I just stood there and let things like this happen right in front of me. I started to say something, but I stopped and my shoulders slumped again. I had no idea what to tell him. 

On a Train

In a passage of an old book, I read about an encounter between a monk and Dostoevsky on a train. The two men had been seated together in the same section of the train on seats facing each other. In the book, the monk described Dostoevsky’s distracted demeanor and the preoccupied way that he nodded to the porter, never looking up from the papers that he was leafing through in his lap. He made a note of the way Dostoevsky's hand shook when the train unexpectedly lurched into motion and the way that the writer reached for a steady grip on the armrest of his seat. He said that once the train was clear of the city and rumbling along the open tracks, Dostoevsky finally looked up from his papers and glanced at the countryside passing out the window and blinked and squinted his eyes like someone who had just spent hours upon hours in a dark room, and it was only then that he heard him mutter a clipped sigh of relief.

As the miles and the hours went by, the two men engaged in a few halting moments of conversation that never went beyond a few awkward words or sentences, that never gained the momentum of the train carrying them along, conversations that died as quickly and as lifelessly as they began. The monk was eager to tell Dostoevsky that he recognized him. He wanted to tell him that he had read his books and he wanted to share his thoughts on them. But there never seemed to be a good place to inject this into the conversation, and every time they spoke and fell back into silence, it became harder and harder to bring it up. And the monk thought of all the reasons not to bring it up. He considered that Dostoevsky had no great reason to be impressed by the recognition; he was with himself everywhere that he went on Earth, and moreover, he was probably used to being recognized and being told that he was recognized and pestered with people's thoughts about his writing.

So the monk never brought it up. When the train reached the station, the two men traded a perfunctory handshake and grabbed their bags and went their ways. They got tangled up in the crowd out on the platform and separated from one another. But the monk spotted Dostoevsky a short while later. He saw him walking alone down a narrow passageway between the buildings. It was quiet there, away from the crowds, and there were puddles on the stones, and from some lonely place high above, the afternoon light shone down on the writer as he stopped and set down his trunk on the pavement and gathered the papers he had been working on into a neat sheaf and popped the latches on the trunk and set the stack of papers gently on top of the folded clothes inside and continued on his way. The monk knew that he would never see the man again, and he wished with all his heart that he would have told him that he knew who he was, that he would have pushed past the awkwardness and told him all the things he would never have the chance to say again. He decided then to pray for Dostoevsky, to fervently hope that he would find peace from the preoccupations and obsessions that seemed to be consuming him.

After I had finished reading this anecdote, I noticed a that there was a footnote at the bottom of the page that provided a date for this encounter, and I realized that it was only two days before Dostoevsky finished work on his novel The Possessed. I went to my bookshelf to grab one of my copies of the book. As I opened it up, I saw that the type on the pages had faded to the point that it was completely unreadable. There were a few places where the ink had been stamped heavy and I could still make out the letters, but the rest of the text looked like it was in the process of fading back into the page itself, receding into the weathered depths of the paper. It was as though the book had been left out in the sunlight and all the words had been bleached away in its sublime bliss. I had other copies of the book, but I was afraid to check them to see if they were in the same condition. 

The Golden Age

I was out on the west coast, wandering around the streets of the city, and I came across a beach where a famous scene from a historical epic had been filmed. I passed under a bridge where the echoes of the cars zipping by on the freeway overhead reverberated off the concrete walls, and on the other side there was the vast white beach, and further on was the ocean with the waves rolling in from the horizon, their swells tossing around blinding glints of light from the afternoon sun. In the scene, this empty beach had been filled with extras dressed in bright period costumes in striking shades of lavender and blue and orange. There had been giraffes and elephants and lions, golden trumpets and soldiers in bronze armor, statesman in robes unrolling parchments bearing official decrees.

There was a large flat stone that had been the centerpiece of the scene. The hero had stood in sweaty-faced defiance at the foot of the stone, his wrists shackled, glaring up at the centurion who stood on the top of the stone, huge and regal in the sun, his jaw set, his foot planted on an outcropping of rock, his iron hand resting on his knee. The trumpets and revelry had all abruptly stopped, and there had only been the sounds of the waves and the wind and the birds as the two men squared off entirely with their eyes, the camera flipping back and forth in a montage of menacing squints, the score finally punctuating the tension with a protracted buzz that stung like an insect born out of the sweat and the heat.

That was all gone now. The beach was deserted. The day was getting later. I walked along the sand. I knew that further down the shore there was a beach house that had belonged to the lead actress from the film, the one who had stood by the centurion in her clean white linen, secretly in love with the hero. Years later, the cast had all gotten back together to reshoot the scene for a reenactment that was being included in another film about the glory days of Hollywood. The cast had eagerly agreed to get back together to shoot the scene, because they had all wanted to spend the weekend hanging out at the beach house, reminiscing about old times and reclining by the pool in their light-weight summer shirts and sipping their margaritas to the smooth rippling notes of the piano playing up on the balcony as the cool breeze rolled in off the sea.

But it hadn't quite worked out. Nothing in the scene had really looked the way it was supposed to. All the same props and costumes were there, and everyone hit all their same marks, but all the traces of time were visible just beneath the surface. The lead actress had gotten older and the makeup didn't quite hide the lines around her eyes. The centurion's bearing wasn't quite as firm, and he had gotten fatter and the armor didn't quite fit him anymore. Even the film stock they used was a little different, making all the colors and costumes look like they had been transposed to some other time and place. Worst of all, they hadn't been able to get the lead actor back. There had been a falling out between him and the actor who had played the centurion. There had been some sort of scandal involving a traffic accident that had circulated in the Hollywood gossip columns for years. They had cast a replacement, but with someone else, shackled and trying to glare that same iconic glare in his place, the whole scene just fell apart.

The weekend at the beach house hadn't worked out either. The white-haired old actor who played the centurion had gotten drunk and mad and shoved the replacement lead actor into the pool. There had been an awkward scene between him and the actress who owned the beach house, and it had made everyone uncomfortable, and it ended up with her throwing him out. Afterwards, the piano had resumed its cool ripple, but there was something sad and even a little anxious between the notes. Guests started to slip away, offering a variety of hastily improvised excuses for why they had to go, blushing and smiling their awkward smiles, trying to say how great it had been for everyone to get back together, how it had all been just the same, so incredibly, wonderfully the same, leaving all the tables around the pool littered with half-finished margaritas until the last of them were gone.

But, of course, it hadn't been the same. I finally reached the beach house, and it was boarded up now. No one lived there anymore. The sun was going down out over the ocean and the house was latticed with deep shadows from the grove of untended trees that surrounded it. The waves rolled right up to the edge of the foundation beams of the crumbling wooden deck, provided with all the neglected ages that they needed to pick apart the whole property one piece at a time and pull it all back into the sea. I plucked a hot smoothed stone out of the sand and flipped it around between my fingers. No, things were never the same. 

All Fours

There was a documentary made about my childhood. Someone sent it to me on a film reel, and I projected it onto the wall of my basement and watched it in the dark. The documentary seemed to portray me as some sort of feral wonder child who spent all of his waking hours roaming the woods in misunderstood solitude, even though the only wooded area that I ever really played in was a patchy little spot out behind our garage where a worn out old tree presided over some overgrown brush that used to be a garden, and the only sparks of wonder that I ever remembered showing were purely accidental, sporadic and unremarkable.

There was a voiceover of me talking about how the teacher always liked to have me read the current passage from our reading book in front of the class, because she liked the cadence of my voice. She liked that I paused in all the appropriate ways in all the right places for the right commas and punctuation. Most of all, she liked that my reading showed genuine comprehension. This voiceover was played over footage of me roaming through the overgrown garden on a winter morning when it was still dark out, finding my way along the paths of hard frozen mud by spotting the places where the scattered patches of snow had settled into my previous footprints.

Still, I started getting into it, accepting the documentary’s conceits and embellishments, almost believing that this was a reflection of my actual childhood. But then something happened that ruined the illusion for me. The footage rolled on, later into the morning when the sun was up and the patches of snow were receding and a couple of early spring buds on the tangled weeds were starting to open. There were some railroad tracks that passed along the back of our property, and the footage showed me walking along the path by the tracks and then suddenly stopping when I heard something crunching around in the brush. The footage showed me standing still with my ears perked up, and then it showed me leaping forward with this tremendous bound and tearing along the path on all fours, propelling myself along at a ferocious pace with each stride.

This was just too much. I laughed and shook my head in complete disbelief. I look around in the dark for someone to explain it all to, to explain the logistics of the human spine and the inadequacy of a person trying to run that way, to point out the outright lie of the whole thing, to even got down on my hands and knees if necessary to demonstrate my own incapacity to perform such a feat, to confess all the long degradations of my lazy sedentary life. But there was no one there watching this thing with me. I was just alone in the dark with the steady rattle of the projector.

Night Parking

There was a spot that I used to like to take dates to when I was younger. I would turn down an alleyway between two tall buildings and then I would drive straight up into the sky, passing window after window as we climbed past the floors of the buildings, until we were up over the roof of one building and then the other and there was nothing but open space around us and the glitter of the city below. And I would keep on driving up until the front bumper of the car split through the clouds at the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere and we emerged to a view of the crescent moon drifting on an ocean of sky sprinkled with millions upon millions of stars.

There would always be a gentle little bump as I stopped and put the car into park, and then the car would just hang there in space as I pulled my hands from the gearshift and the steering wheel and took a deep breath. There was a very specific spot that I had to reach where the Earth's gravity and the car's gravity would balance each other out and the car would just float in place, pointing up into the night. The bump would always elicit a nervous laugh from my date and then a smile in the dark as the car settled and she realized that it was going to stay there, firm and floating, and she could lean comfortably back into her seat, the world turning calmly below miles and miles behind us.

Of course, it was never a completely perfect balance. And no matter how close to perfect I got it, it couldn't be maintained indefinitely. As the night would wear on, the car would gradually begin to slip backwards. At first we wouldn't notice it, and we would continue on in our drowsy enchantment with the cosmos, the dial on the radio turned low, catching faint signals off the atmosphere. But finally we'd start to get that dropping feeling in the pits of our stomachs, and then my date would bolt up straight in her seat with her eyes wide open, gripping the armrest or squeezing my arm, and I would laugh and tell her that it was all going to be fine.

And as we fell from the sky, gaining speed with every crucial second, I would reach for the lever for the handbrake, which I had rigged up to release a parachute. I would wait for just the right second, and then I would pull the parachute and it would catch on the air and slow our descent and the car would turn so that the wheels would be facing towards the Earth beneath us. And we would sway and swing and drift down between the buildings, the windows steamed over in the grey morning mist, the shadows of the car and the parachute scaling down the contours in the brick, until the wheels touched down on the pavement and the car would rock and compress on its shocks and find its hold again on solid ground. And we would look at each other and grin and shake our heads and breathe that long, long sigh of relief that can only come from finding that sure place on Earth once again.

Dropping the Needle

My wife figured out that if you synced up a certain album with a certain website, you would be able to physically enter and inhabit the internet. I walked through it as though it were the streets of my old hometown on a grey dismal evening. I could feel the air stir around me and I could feel the light patter of the drizzling rain on my shoulders. It was completely immersive and real. But right away, I noticed that something was a little off with the sound. When a car rounded a corner, the splash of its tires came a little too late. I walked past a house where a dog was penned up behind a chainlink gate in the back yard, and when the dog barked, it reverberated from the wrong side of the street, bouncing off the wrong walls of the wrong houses.

I decided to stop in and use the payphone at this neighborhood diner, so that I could call my wife out in the real world and let her know about the problem. There was a cacophony of misplaced noise as soon as I stepped in the door. The busboy dropped a dish and I heard the howl of a passing train blowing its horn in the night. I saw one of the diners wave his hand in the air and call to the server and point to the empty coffee cup sitting on the table in front of him, but the only thing I could hear was the intrusive crackles and beeps and buzzes of the emergency broadcast system breaking in to make an announcement.

The payphone was in a narrow hallway in the back by the restrooms. I picked up the phone and fed a quarter into the slot. I had to make a very deliberate effort to concentrate on what numbers I needed to dial, because I kept hearing the random beeps and clicks of the buttons just before I hit them or just a moment afterwards. My wife answered the phone and thankfully her voice was matched up with mine as we talked to one another. I explained to her that she hadn't quite synced everything up the right way. She told me that she had dropped the needle on the record at the exact moment when the lion logo was roaring for the third time, just like she was supposed to. I rubbed my hand over my eyes and shook my head. "Lion logo!? There's no lion logo. You're thinking of something completely different." I looked down at my watch and told her that I was heading back. I hung the phone up on the hook and I heard my coin dropping through miles of the payphone's inner mechanisms, clattering down through endless caverns of metal and machinery, until it finally landed with a wet plunk in a pool of water somewhere deep down in the dark. 

By the Dozen

I was walking through the countryside, carrying a box of donuts, headed for a meeting that was going to be held at the town hall that evening. I kept worrying because I had stopped by the side of the road along the way and eaten two of the donuts in a moment of a greedy hunger and now the box was short. There was nothing more embarrassing than showing up with a box that was missing donuts. I kept wiping at the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand as though the glaze and the custard would still be there for everyone to see as soon as I walked through the door.

Around dusk, I came across a meadow overgrown with soft grass. On a piece of high ground in the middle of this meadow, there were two large boulders which marked the gravesite of two twin boys that had recently died of a fever. The boulders were polished but roughly hewn. There was a flat area on the face of each boulder that had been smoothed and cleared for the inscriptions, and the boulders were turned so that the faces of the stones were angled slightly away from each other, giving the impression that the two boys were turned away from one another and sulking like they had just had a fight but still sitting together in peace and silence, still brothers after all.

Sitting on the back of the boulders, bridging the gap between them, someone had left a gift basket that was wrapped in rose-tinted cellophane and tied with a blue ribbon. The basket was filled with donuts. A crowd of black crows had gathered around the basket and they were picking at the cellophane, trying to get at the donuts inside. One particularly sharp crow had climbed on the back of another crow, and he had a piece of the ribbon in his beak and he was trying to pull the knot loose. This was all by design, of course. The donuts had been left there specifically for the crows to eat. By some process of transubstantiation, the nourishment provided by the morsels of dough and sugar would imbue the crows with the spirit of the twins, and they would carry that spirit across the sky and back to their nests as they flew back and forth from the basket until the basket would finally sit battered and empty, picked clean of every crumb.

I stepped forward to have a better look at the donuts. The crows dispersed in a protest of caws and a clatter of wings as I approached. They flew back to the trees and watched and waited. I picked at a loose fold of the cellophane and I stretched it out tight so that I could have a clear view inside. Sitting on top of the pile of donuts, there was a glazed donut and a custard donut, perfect to replace the ones that I had eaten. I set my box aside and I studied the knot in the ribbon, looking for a strand in the binding that I could slip free.

I almost had it loose when I noticed my long shadow stretched out across the rock and trailing off into the waving grass, and I felt the chill of a curse on me. And I knew that if I desecrated this burial site, the curse would be on whatever unsuspecting person ate these two replacement donuts as well. I pulled my fingers back from the knot and I gently bunched up the cellophane in my hands, trying to restore its disordered shape, trying to leave it all the way that I’d found it. I stepped back, treading lightly, barely breathing. I took a wide path around the stones, leaving them be. And when the calm settled back over the site and the crows felt comfortable, they flew back and continued their work on the basket.

Upstairs Room

The whole family slept in this big farm house. It was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the shapes of the house and the fence and the cars parked in the driveway and the tire swing that hung over the worn dirt patch in the back yard were all black against the first red hints of daylight. The family was scattered in beds around the house, my grandmother and grandfather snoring away on a king-sized bed in the master bedroom at the front of the house, and my aunts and uncles in various rooms above. There was a big bedroom in the back off the kitchen that I shared with three of my cousins, twin beds fitted every which way into the corners with my bed right under the open window and the curtains tickling at my ear as I dozed there still half-asleep.

There was a room that was in a kind of nest at the top of the house that I wished I could have had to myself, but my one uncle had claimed it already. I thought about this room as I laid there and heard the muffled ringing of his alarm clock bell going off two floors above. It was a great little room that rose up out of the roof of the house and it had windows that could look out over the land on nearly all sides. It was a cozy room with just enough space for the bed and the dresser where my uncle left his cigarettes and laid out a set of folded clothes for the next day. The alarm bell was cut off abruptly, followed by the crackle and buzz of an electric guitar amp being flipped on. This was what he had to get up for every morning. This was the basis of his claim to the room at the top of the house. I knew I would have to learn to play at least as good as him if I wanted that room, probably better. The first few licks peeled out, breaking the quiet, and I knew he was up there, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching out the windows at the sunrise creeping around the houses and into the fields and the roads for miles around. 

The Slightest Bit

It was late on a Friday night, and I was hanging out with some stand-up comedians that I was friends with. We were all sitting around in the dark, riffing on this terrible movie that we were watching, when we heard someone knocking at the front door. The owner of the house got up to see who it was. When he opened the door, his next door neighbor burst in, frantically waving around a torn envelope and a handful of handwritten pages. The neighbor explained that this woman comedian that we were all friends with had sent him a letter, claiming that he was the father of her illegitimate child and informing him that she was suing for child support. A photograph had been included with the letter. He handed it to the comedian that owned the house. As the comedian held it in his hands, the neighbor kept jabbing it with his finger to emphasize the patent absurdity of it.

The photograph was a picture of the female comedian holding her baby, and it had been very obviously and very crudely doctored. Someone had clearly just cut out a picture of the neighbor’s face and then pasted it over the face of the baby, mustache, glasses, bald head, and all. The comedian flipped the photograph around to show everyone, and the whole room broke out laughing. But the neighbor didn’t find the situation funny at all. He snatched the photograph back out of the comedian’s hand and shuffled it back into the pages of the letter, the paper rustling and trembling in his hands. He said that didn’t know this woman. He had never met this woman. He certainly wasn’t the father of her child.

The comedian pulled the neighbor aside and tried to calm him down and explain the situation to him. He told him that this was just part of a bit that the female comedian was doing. It was all just an elaborate joke. But the neighbor insisted that it was all very real. There were court documents included with the letter. She had really gone to a judge about all of this. There was a specific dollar amount that she was demanding from him. There was a monthly payment schedule. There were back payments. The neighbor said that he couldn’t see her going to such great lengths just to have a bit to perform on stage.

“But it isn’t for the stage,” the comedian explained to him. The neighbor was dumbfounded by this. He stared down at the photograph, as though it offered some further clarification. “She doesn’t do a stand up act on stage. She hasn’t done that in years,” the comedian continued. “This is a bit that she’s doing in her day to day life. That’s the kind of thing she does now. It’s kind of experimental, I guess. It’s like the world itself is the stage that she’s performing on.” He capped this off with a nod, ruminating on the audacity of the whole thing as he seemed to really admire it for the first time.

The neighbor didn’t like this at all. He began to enumerate the problems with the situation. Who was the actual father of the child? Did she have the baby just for the bit? What about the money that she was demanding from him? Most of all he was upset about the money. “Well, she needs to get paid somehow for the bit, right?” the comedian replied. “I mean, she’s got to make a living, doesn’t she? You get paid to do your job, right?” But the neighbor glumly hung his head. He didn’t see why he should have to be the one to finance her joke, especially since he didn’t find it remotely funny. The comedian’s face lit up with a warm grin. “Well of course you don’t find it funny. That’s why they say the joke is at your expense.”