The Right Bar

My daughter called me one night from the bar. I could tell from her drawn out words and the insistent way that she was talking that she'd had a couple of drinks. I could almost hear her leaning in and poking at the air with her finger to punctuate her sentences. Luckily, I could hear her boyfriend in the background, the more sober and calmer of the two, and I knew that he'd be there to drive them home. She wanted me to come hang out with them at the bar. She tried to give me the address, but I could hardly hear her over the noise and the music, and the call started breaking up and the line dropped and went dead before I could ask her to repeat what she had told me.

I knew that the bar was in one of the small little towns to the east that were scattered among the mountain passes, little towns with roads that go nowhere and dead end in the night under sad streetlights swirling with moths and gnats. I drove up and down the same streets, looking for the right bar, bumping along over the ruts in my old pickup truck. I went into bar after bar, pumping quarters into their jukeboxes, trying to find the song that I'd heard in the background, trying to match the chatter and noise of the bar room to what I had heard over the phone, looking around at the faces huddled over the candles in the middle of the tables, their smiling eyes and laughing teeth dancing in the dark.

But the song eluded me, and the faces were all those of strangers. I had to stop at a gas station along the highway before heading to the next town. There was an old man sitting on a stool behind the counter slumped in the occasional breeze of an occillating fan. We consulted over the dog-eared pages of an old map. He apologized that the map was out of date, and he explained that some of the roads shown on it had been gone for years, replaced by other roads not shown that he cut into the empty space on the paper with the edge of his thumbnail. I studied the marks he'd made on the map. I thought to hum a little of the song I was looking for, to see if he knew it. He said he remembered it, but it had been years since he had heard it. He held up a divining finger, casting about, north, east, south, and west for the direction of the town where he might have heard it in his younger days. Finally he settled on the road ahead, the way that he'd showed me on the map. He seemed to have definitely made up him mind, grunting and nodding and tapping his finger on the paper. I thanked him for his time, and I went out and got back into my truck and headed back out onto the dark highway.

Hidden Track

Late one night, I stayed up listening to some music. I was leaning my elbows against the upstairs railing, looking down into the lamplit study in the open area below me. The album was playing on the stereo in the study, but I liked to listen from up above, because I liked the acoustics and the way the music reverberated off of the vaulted ceiling up there. The music was loud enough to fill the house, even though I had the volume softened because my wife was sleeping in the bedroom. There was an interval of silence after the last song on the album, and then a bonus hidden track began to play. I had never heard this hidden track before, and I was completely unaware that it even existed. There was a song on the album that I really liked, this soft, melancholy song about a ghost and all the years that passed by as it lurked through the dark nights alone, and this hidden track appeared to be a reprise of that same song, but it was only an instrumental version. I kept waiting for the lyrics to come in, but they never did, and the song seemed even more unnervingly ghostly in their absence.

As I stood there, listening to the music, humming out the tune, trying to remember the missing lyrics, I noticed a man standing beside me, leaning against the railing in the same manner that I was. I wasn't startled at all by the man; in fact, I felt like I had suddenly gone strangely numb and submissive. The music grew warped and distorted along the edges of my awareness, and I lost all interest in it, other than a nagging sense that I now recognized and remembered this hidden track. Somehow I knew that the track itself had summoned the man's presence and that it had heralded similar interactions between us in the past, and I knew that when it was all over and the man was gone, both the memory of the track and the man would return to a vault deep within the recesses of my mind where they had both been kept locked away.

The man tilted his head and studied me as though he were watching the cognitive gears in my head crank into the proper position where I would be ready and open for instructions. He was an older man, considerably shorter than me. He wore little round spectacles with beady eyes and narrow hawkish white eyebrows behind them. His nose had a gnarled bluntness about it, and his balding white hair was scattered about his scalp in patches like knots of cotton padding sticking out from the holes in the worn out cushion of an old chair. As he assessed the manner in which I stood there regarding him blankly, an approving smile spread on his face, revealing the small handful of rotted brown teeth that had been tossed haphazardly into his festering mouth. He put a finger to his cracked lips, silently admonishing me to be quiet, and he directed me to follow him with a quick notching of two of his fingers. There was a giddiness about the way he crept along in front of me, like an exaggerated pantomime of someone covertly skulking through a house at night, that same long slow extending of the leg with the tippy toe feeling for the floor ahead, the arms drawn in close, the hands like skeevy little claws feeling their way through the darkness. None of it was necessary. No one would hear our steps over the sound of the music that was still playing. But it was clear to see that he was enjoying himself.

He brought me to the front door of the house. He told me that he had a new protocol in "Operation Bright Light" that he needed to show me. He took me into the narrow alleyway that ran along the side of the house just outside the door. There was a hedge there just behind the stone path that led away from the doorway. He showed me that there was a floodlight planted inside this hedge. In my normal life in my normal waking hours, I would never notice it there. Whenever I came out the door, I would always turn to the right and follow the stone path down to the driveway. I would never turn to the left to see the floodlight that was plainly there in the hedge. He told me that if I came out my front door and "saw that the sky was white", meaning that the floodlight would be on and shining from behind me, then I would know that it was time to start ending the world.

I nodded as passively to this instruction as I had to all the others. I stood there, mouth gaping, expecting nothing else, not knowing if he was finished with me. He seemed to read this in my face, and he shook his head and grinned his rotten grin again. He said, "Oh, no, no, no. I have so much more to show you." He brought his hand up with two fingers forked and extended, reaching for my face. It felt as though these two fingers had reached up and plucked both of my eyeballs out of their sockets. He drew his hand away, and it seemed now that each of my eyeballs were now mounted on the tips of his fingers, and he was taking me off somewhere to observe things as a passive witness separated from my body.

He took me to a neighborhood picnic where a long table had been set up and laid out under the shade of a blue canopy. The other people at the picnic were sleepers like me, programmed and triggered whenever he needed to have control over them. At the far end of the table there were two men with dark beards that looked like twins. They kept repeating these incomprehensible phrases back and forth to each other, phrases that sounded Russian or at least vaguely Eastern European, but which actually meant nothing at all. The little man explained that he had set the twins to this automated task, leaving them to it for days, because he simply wanted to see if it was possible to generate a new language from this sort of verbal call and response repetition. He wasn't sure if meaning could be born from the very effort of communication itself, or whether their minds would devolve into empty storehouses of composted gibberish. He shrugged, not really seeming to care which outcome occurred, and he took his place at the head of the picnic table with the sunny day to his back. He tied a plastic bib with a picture of two crossed chicken drumsticks on the front of it around his neck, and he grabbed the silverware on either side of his plate and planted his fists on the table with the blade and the tines sticking up in the air, grinning around at everyone as though he was waiting for someone to serve him a bountiful feast.

The other people around the table just sat with their arms limply hanging at their sides staring down at the empty paper plates placed before them. Everyone sat there in silence, except for the murmur of meaningless phrases still issuing from the far end of the table. Flies buzzed in the stillness, landing here and there on the tablecloth, but no one bothered to try to shoo them away. A man with a red baseball cap lifted his head and blinked his eyes, as though he had momentarily emerged from his stupor. He looked around the table and asked, "Oughtn't we to say grace or something?" The little man's eyes narrowed on him, smoldering and dark. He slowly laid his knife down in his empty plate, and then he held up his hand and gave his fingers a nice hard snap. The eyes of the man in the red cap glazed over and his body went limp. The little man stared at him for a long time, holding eye contact, until finally making a quick jerk of his head motioning for the man to stand up.

The man in the red cap slid his chair back from the table and stood to his feet as he processed the instruction he had been given. There was a smaller table bearing packages of hot dog buns, condiments, and other items that was set up near the picnic table. The was an empty glass pitcher on this table, and the man in the red cap went over and put his arm into this pitcher with his hand balled into a fist at the bottom. With his other hand, he produced a pocket knife from the pocket of his jeans. He snapped open the knife, and then without flinching or showing the slightest misgivings of any kind, he began carve the knife around the bicep of the arm in the pitcher, cutting deep down into the flesh, all the way down to the bone, just below the shoulder. Blood poured loose and copiously into the pitcher, as the man began to shake from blood loss and his eyes rolled back white. A woman at the table seemed to come to for a moment as she looked up and said, "Good lord! We're not going to have to drink that, are we?" The little man threw back his head and howled with laughter, spit and crumbs flying from his vile mouth. He doubled forward, turning red and biting his fist between his teeth, reveling in the fact that his playthings were still capable of such sharp wit. "Bravo, Irene! Bravo!" he exclaimed.

And then my disembodied eyes drifted up and away to another scene on the other side of town. Here a group of teenage boys were sitting around in a cluster of armchairs that had been taken out of the house and set up in the yard. One of the boys began talking about some place that they had all been the night before, but none of the rest of the them could remember the place or what had happened there. The boy grew more and more flustered as he tried to explain it to them, and the other boys grew more and more hostile to the whole idea, and they kept trying to tell him to shut up. They had all been programmed by the little man as well, and they had been instructed to forget something from the night before. But the boy who was struggling to talk was an epileptic, and this had kept the little man's programming from taking properly. His eyes grew glassy and moist as he tried to explain that they had all been standing there in the road in the glare of the headlights. He could see it in front of him. His armchair rocked in the dirt as he leaned forward, desperately trying to grab at the memory.

His words grew slurred and his tongue knotted and he seemed on the verge of a seizure. The names of people and places in his sentences began to be replaced by the numbers that the little man had designated for them in his programming. "Fifteen, we were all at twenty-two. The seven? The seven!?" The other boys grew alarmed and their eyes went wide. The epileptic boy gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles were white, and then he hoisted himself up with a quick bolt, like an animal that has just heard a twig snap somewhere. He stared past his friends, his glassy eyes blinking a steady, even metric. He got up and started towards the house. His friends followed him, trying to get him to respond.  They followed him up the winding stairs of his house as he kept spilling out sentences filled with random numbers. "C'mon, Billy, where are you going? What is this?", one of the boys asked as they rounded another close turn in the stairwell. When they got to the epileptic boy's room at the top of the stairs on the third floor of the house, he immediately crossed to the far side of the room, unlatched the window, turned back to give one last blank look at his friends, and then he stepped over the ledge and fell to the concrete patio below with a hard crack, and his friends rushed to the window and looked down to see the bloody heap of his broken body below.

Then everything began to rewind, and I found my disembodied eyes backing out of the room, and winding back down the stairwell and leaving the house. I started to make my way through the suburban streets, as though I were being drawn somewhere, carried again on the tips of those two ubiquitous fingers. I cut through the yards between the houses, and there were heaps of junk and debris piled in the yards. It appeared that everyone had been instructed to clear all of their belongings out of their houses. A few people had already set fire to their piles, and there were streams of black smoke rising here and there between the houses. I started to wonder how far and how deep this went, and how many people had already been programmed by the little man.

Finally, I arrived at a warehouse filled with dusty old broken furniture and assorted junk from stores that had gone out of business. I found the little man sitting at a banquet table that was set up for a tea party. There were several store mannequins seated at different spots around the table. The mannequins were undressed and bare white, some without arms and even heads. Near the table, standing at the right hand of the little man, there was a pretty blonde figure in a blue negligee. Looking closer, I realized that this was an actual human woman who was just standing perfectly still, not even blinking. The little man just waved his hand at the figure and grunted, "my wife," by way of an explanation. Apparently, this was a punishment for some menial infraction. He planned to just leave her standing like that until she died of thirst or her heart gave out.

The little man wiped a few drops of tea from the corner of his mouth with his napkin, and then he got up and crossed the room to me. He patted my arm in an almost affectionate gesture, and this acknowledgment returned my body to me. The little man waved his hand broadly at all the junk piled up in the warehouse as though it all represented the machinations of some grand master design. He told me that he was going to bump me up a few notches and that it was time that I knew more about the ultimate extent of his plans. He led me back over to the table, and as we sat down, he explained that he was in the process of maneuvering pieces into place that would allow him to become Vice President. Given what I had witnessed of the magnitude of his ability to control people, this seemed like an absurdly modest goal. I asked him what he planned to do with that kind of power, and he blinked in surprise that I even needed to ask such a question, although I suspected that even he didn't quite have the answer.

He set his teacup back in it saucer and held his finger up, as though he'd just thought of something. "There's one more thing you need to see," he told me, barely restraining his excitement. He took me across the room to where there was a big heavy sliding wooden door that opened onto another section of the warehouse. He undid the latch and rolled back the door with a theatrical flourish. In the middle of the room, I saw myself, my younger self, tied to a chair, eyes bulging, struggling at the duct tape wrapped around my wrists and the arms of the chair. There was a TV in front of this chair and the light from the images rapidly flashing on the screen flickered across my frantic face. There were speakers all around the chair and there were several audio clips of different voices playing all at once, overlapping each other. The voices kept saying something about men this and men that. I couldn’t distinguish the separate phrases from each other in the overlap, but the word "men" stuck out, recited over and over again like a mantra being drilled into my psyche.

This was how I had been programmed. He was showing me. And suddenly I was seeing it. I was seeing from the vantage point of the chair. I was watching the images firing from the screen. I was hearing the incessant repeating of the voices until I wasn't clear where my own thoughts ended and the voices began. The voices were my thoughts. I just had to surrender to them and relinquish the effort involved in thinking them to their undeniable authority. I began to realize that this had all really happened. They had done this to all of us, through the TV, through the radio, through the faces staring down at us from the billboard advertisements. I had to shake myself loose and get clear. I had to somehow retain my memory of all of this and take it with me. I had to warn everyone.

Again the little man was close, right at my ear. He held up a little wafer that looked about the size of a chalky antacid. He told me that he could let me go, but he was going to keep part of my mind right there in the pocket of his shirt, where he swiftly deposited the antacid. He said that I would only be left with an I.Q. of about sixty with the potion of my brain that he would allow me to keep. He seemed so close at my ear that he could almost bite it. I grit my fists and agreed to his terms. Anything to get out of that chair. And the laughter and the flickering images and voices began to subside until there was only the sound of the music as it faded off at the end of that hidden track, and I stood there with my hand on the knob of my front door, feeling like there was something out there that I didn't want to see. Finally, I let go of the knob and the house went quiet and in the bedroom my wife was still asleep.  

The Ruins

I was wandering around an abandoned neighborhood. There were whole streets lined with empty houses, the rotten boards cracked and splintered and caved in on sagging porches, the glass broken out in front windows that showed nothing but blackness inside. There was a gas station with weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement around the broken pumps and a little grocery store with cleared out shelves and cobwebs around the cash registers. In the streets, there were random items scattered around, rusted pieces of silverware and a jack in the box that had been smashed under the wheel of a fleeing car, the deflated clown laying on its back with its arms outstretched and its frowning rubber face baking into the asphalt.

As the afternoon wore on, I got turned around trying to find my way back out of the neighborhood. I kept finding myself turning down the same streets over and over, going in circles. I got it into my head that it was like this everywhere, that all of civilization had fallen. I started to think about the supplies I would need to gather to stay alive, and I started to think about the things I would need to get to defend those supplies from the other desperate people who might be out there wandering the ruined landscape. I wondered where I could go to be safe from them all, where I could live in peace. And then, having lost track of the world, I started to lose track of myself. I completely forgot my name and who I was. I just stood there in the middle of the street devoid of any past or memories, my mind empty of everything except for the humming of the cicadas in the summer heat.

The hours rolled by as I stood there in a stupor, rooted to the spot, lacking any motivation to move and unable to gather enough of my wits together to head off to somewhere else. I just stood there broiling in the sun until I heard the sound of voices coming from somewhere far off. I looked up and saw a few people in white scrubs appear from around the side of a house down on the corner of the street. They shouted and pointed me out to one another and they hustled down the street in my direction. I decided that these were some of the desperate people I had been worried about, and I turned and tried to casually saunter off in the other direction, breaking into a full sprint after only taking a few short steps.

But another group of people in white scrubs emerged from around a brick building down at the corner at the other end of the street, and then even more of them poured out from behind the houses all around me, and they all converged on me and gathered around me until they had me tightly surrounded and there was nowhere for me to run. One of them grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and they herded me across town to where a white van was sitting in the back of a deserted parking lot under the shade of a tree. They loaded me into the back of the van and piled in after me and slid the door closed behind them.

They took me to a home for other strays like me who had been out wandering around and had forgotten who they were. We passed through a common area where a few of the residents sat staring out the windows, flies landing on their hanging lips and heavy eyelids, while others held puzzle pieces poised in their trembling hands, having no idea of where to put them and having lost all track of why they were even holding them. They just kept furrowing their brows and flipping the little jagged pieces of cardboard round and round between their fingers.

I was taken to the office of some head administrator where she asked me a long series of questions which I could only answer with slow, bewildered shakes of my head. Then they took me to the office of the entertainment director, a small little white-haired old man who worked out of what appeared to be a dim supply closet filled with endless racks of film cannisters. The old man explained that he was in charge of picking movies for the residents to watch on movie nights, and he warned me that he refused to show any movies with anything bad in them. "Movies about space really seem to be the best for our residents," he explained. "Good wholesome movies about space." I just nodded and continued to let them process me. I was really in no position to complain.

I was sitting in my room when a nurse came in, saying that I had visitors. A handful of people piled in behind her and she explained that these people were my family. They had a photo album with them, hoping that it would help me regain my memories. I flipped through the pages. I saw my daughter when she was a toddler, smiling big into the camera. I saw my aunt blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. But the pictures were all ugly, the faces grotesque, menacing. I began to regret that I hadn't been more careful documenting my life, that I hadn't taken better photographs, used better cameras, or at least put better film in the cameras. These grainy pictures with their drab colors and their glaring flashbulbs popping in dark windowless places were hard to look at, things long gone, grey and neglected, fragments of the past in their loneliest and most dismal manifestations.

But just as I was about to shove the photo album off of my lap and throw a fit and yell at everyone to leave the room and let me be, a set of photos on the last few pages of the album caught my eye. They were pictures of a snowy night, sparkling and clear. Looking closer, I saw that these pictures had been taken in the abandoned neighborhood. They were pictures of a garage with a bunch of junked cars piled up in the lot in front of it. Each picture seemed to advance closer to the cars and the garage, and in each picture the snow had gathered deeper on the hoods and windows of the cars. It started to make me uneasy, the way these pictures kept getting closer, like something was being stalked by the camera.

And as I got down to the last few photographs, a memory came back to me of a leather satchel that I had stashed in the back corner of this garage. I remembered the grip of the handle and the way the leather had always given off a strong scent of oil and stale soap. The satchel was filled with important papers and old mementos, bank statements, birth certificates, awards I'd won in school, letters from old friends, all sorts of irreplaceable things. My hand shook as I held it over the page. I was terrified that someone would find the satchel and take it, but at the same time I couldn't bear the thought of ever going back to that dark place again to retrieve it. I just slammed the photo album shut and pressed my hand against the cover to steady it.

A Tree Out Back

There was a massive tree in my back yard. The trunk was a good ten feet around, and the nobby knuckles of its roots filled almost the entire yard. The bark was smooth and white, hard like sinews of muscle and bleached bone, nicked here and there with deep black cuts and dark red notches. And most notable of all, the tree had made a strange twist as it had sprouted, as though tightening its grip on the soil, and the contours of this twist could be followed round and round the trunk and high up into the branches, determining the shape of its whole long tortured growth.

A rumor had spread that there was some sort of special enchantment about this tree, and people came from all around to see it and to reach out hesitating hands to touch its cool surface. In the early days, whole crowds had come to see the tree, coming day and night, and there had been a constant carnival of noise and excitement in the backyard. But over time, the rumors had subsided, and people just came every now and then, alone or in small groups. Touching the tree seemed to calm them, make them think, and they would leave quieted, stepping carefully over the roots in bare feet and treading off lightly across the lawn, taking the quiet away with them as they left.

One day I was having breakfast with my neighbor, and we were watching from the kitchen window as a family came to visit the tree. The shade was deep under the tree, and there was a glow of morning light in the grass beyond the shade. The mother had brought her three sons to the foot of the tree, pulling the smallest one up the driveway in a red wagon. We could see her explaining to them that it was okay to touch the tree and showing them by reaching her hand out and touching the tree herself, but we couldn't hear the words that she was saying.

I took a sip of my coffee and I leaned towards the window and looked up at where the higher branches of the tree got tangled in the sun. I turned to my neighbor and I told her that the real miracle in all of this was that while I knew that the tree was here for everyone's sake, disseminating its peace and its peculiar wisdom on Earth, I also somehow knew that it had grown here only for me, that it was the capstone of my life, the thing that would lull me quietly to sleep in the end. I couldn't reconcile these things, but I felt it, I knew it, every time I looked out the window at the tree, and it was almost more than my heart could take. I asked her if she understood. She shook her head no, but she smiled and reached out her hand.

Grace Note

I was working on a large memoir, trying to recount every little significant detail that I could remember, trying to put it all down on paper, and there was one moment in particular that I wanted to capture as vividly as I could. It was a morning many years ago when I was returning home for the funeral of an old friend. It was just before dawn, and I was taking a ferry across a large open lake. The passengers were all standing there in silence lined up in a row along the railing, looking down into the water. I could just make out the shapes of mountains on the far shore against the dark blue backdrop of the stars. As we headed towards a narrow channel between two rocky cliff faces that separated this section of the lake from another broader portion of it, I saw the glow of the sunrise behind the rocks, and I knew that the sun was waiting there on the other side of the lake.

And it was that moment of passing through the channel that I wanted to capture, that anticipation of the sun on the other side and how it suddenly hit me with the full devestating impact of the loss of my friend, leaving me to feel completely alone on the Earth, even the way home navigated through strange dark waters. So I added an improvised flute player to the scene. As we passed into the channel, another passenger standing towards the back of the ferry took out a flute from his brown duffel bag and began to play a single soft note, high and mournful. And I thought that I could grab this note out of the air and use it. If I could establish the key that the note was in and the precise intervals at which it reverberated between one rock face and the other, I could place the exact dimensions of this narrow channel directly into the reader's mind through the use of a single onamonapoetic phrase. I could put them right there in the scene with the light and the loss and that lingering sound of the note fading on the air as we emerged on the other side of lake to the low mist, the huge sky, the land in the unobtainable distance, and someone standing far off on a dock across the water waving a lantern to guide our way.