The Good Book

On a neglected shelf in the back of a store, I spotted a thick book with an unpolished wooden cover and a black silk bookmark hanging from the middle of its pages.  I thought that the book was an empty journal, and I was already coming up with thoughts and schemes to fill it with as I brushed past a large woman who stood rooted in place between me and the shelf.  But when I got to the book and picked it up, I was disappointed to discover that its pages were already filled, printed in a rough typeface that filled every page with no room for margins and no breaks for paragraphs, not even spaces between the words.  I couldn't make out what any of it said.  It just looked like random letters stamped to the paper with ink and madness.

 

But then I looked back at the woman that had blocked my way.  She was dressed in her Sunday best, a dress of blue with white polka dots and a pair of long white satin gloves.  And there were men standing behind the shelf where I had found the book.  They wore suits and their grey beards were trimmed and their hair was combed back.  They all stood still and they all faced towards the front of the store like they were listening to someone, and it was then that I finally heard the preacher speaking from far in the front.  I flipped again through the book and realized now that it was a Bible, printed by the unskilled hands of an amateur on some backwoods home press.  This amateur had probably even cut down the tree that had provided the wood for the cover.  I looked around, wanting to slip out.  But I had the book in my hand now.  I couldn't seem to put it down.  I couldn't seem to leave.  They had drawn me back into religion.

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.