by Bennett Sims
The mountain contains the forest; the forest contains the weed field; the weed field contains the enclosure, which contains the shadows, and it also contains the cabin, which is coextensive with the thought structure; the cabin and the thought structure both contain the dining room, whose walls contain the table at which you are sitting. Each container smaller than the last, and embedded inside it, like a series of nested parentheses. And at the center of this series is you. Every layer presses inward to where you sit. The mechanism is trying to crush your mind from all sides. But you are not worried, because you will never be driven mad. You sit calmly in the smallest chamber of all, your skull, impervious to the currents rippling against you: wall, wall, shadow, field. You are the one sane sentence at the heart of the parenthetical. You cannot be erased.
By midnight you can no longer endure staying inside the cabin. You pace from room to room. You can see now all the ways in which the owner is trying to drive you mad. You see how the cabin has been laid for you like a trap.
There is no question that the rooms have been scrupulously arranged to make you lose your mind: the dreamcatchers in the windows, the bareness of the walls, even the placement of the furniture—it is all rich with significance. Each detail is specifically designed to catch your attention and invite interpretation. You are meant to wonder what the owner must have been thinking when he arranged these things and, in this manner, to think your way into the owner’s thoughts.
For instance, that chair in the living room. Tonight you notice, as if for the first time, how strange it is that one chair has been removed from the coffee table in the room’s center and positioned in the northeast corner. The three other chairs remain around the coffee table, identical to one another and to the missing chair: beige, unpainted, the wood of their railings splintered. But the fourth chair has been conspicuously set apart from the others. Its seat faces the corner, opposite the vertical crease where the northern and eastern walls meet, with its scalloped back to the room, such that anyone seated in it would see nothing but wall. The chair is positioned like the stool of a dunce.
Why would the owner position a chair like the stool of a dunce? What would have possessed him, not only to remove the chair from the coffee table, but also to set it in this eccentric position? He must have needed the extra elevation of the chair’s seat, perhaps standing on it to replace a lightbulb. Except that there is no light socket above the chair. The only light in the room is the bare bulb dangling from an exposed wire above the coffee table. No, if the owner had decided impulsively to move the chair, it must have been motivated—like everything else—by his madness. The chair, too, you realize—even the chair—must be playing some role in his thought structure.
What must the owner have been thinking? What thoughts must have been passing through his mind? But this thought, you understand, is exactly what the chair wants you to think! The chair has been placed in the corner for no other reason than to elicit this thought in you. And that, that exactly, is what you loathe about the chair: that it coerces you into wondering what the owner must have been thinking, that it forces you to imagine all the thoughts passing through that madman’s mind. Now you cannot help thinking his thoughts. I should like to punish my nightmare, the owner must have thought, you think. I should like to banish my nightmare to the corner. I will make it sit in time-out, facing the wall. He must have hallucinated one of his own nightmares sitting in that chair: a paper-thin silhouette or incubus, facing the corner like a dunce. The man is absolutely mad!
You can no longer even bear it, staring at the chair. The sight of it there in the corner forces you to reconstruct the line of the madman’s reasoning. And to think the thoughts that a madman must have thought is, you know, only another way of going mad. It would not be an exaggeration to say that when you think the thoughts that the owner must have thought, the owner is thereby invading your mind. He is possessing you via these thoughts about the chair—he is haunting the chair. Indeed, if the cabin is haunted by anything, it is not by ghosts of the owner’s nightmares—it is by ghosts of the owner’s madness. You can sense, sitting invisibly in the chair, all the thoughts that the owner must have thought about it. They haunt the chair. You, in turn, are haunted by that chair.
You stare at the chair. If you were ever to actually sit in it, you know, oh, it would be just like sitting in an electric chair: the owner’s thoughts would course into your body, flowing through you in currents. Your body would absolutely surge with the owner’s thoughts. They would be all that you could ever think.
You do not sleep that night. At first light of morning you stalk to the edge of the backyard to retrieve the push mower. The owner wants you to unghost the site? You will show him exactly how you go about unghosting sites.
You find the push mower still leaning against the side of the toolshed. A rusted contraption not much larger than a vacuum cleaner, it must have been left out in all weather: the red paint of its chassis is chipping badly, and the tips of its blades—lining the denticulate cylinder in its casing—are dull. It barely cuts grass anymore. You test it on the fringe of weeds where it stands, which rise as high as halfway up its steel handlebar. Setting the mower down in a patch and gripping that handlebar, you struggle for fifteen minutes, ramming the chassis back and forth over the grass stems. Each glossy green stalk just spools itself around the rotating cylinder, catching between its blades like floss. This causes the mower to halt, and you have to shove on it to uproot the recalcitrant grasses. Only then—after making multiple passes over that same fringe of weeds—can you effortfully shred them to confetti. It takes you half a dozen passes. When you are finished, the tendons in your arms burn with strain. Your skin is covered in a fine sheen of sweat and plastered over with little green flecks of grass shrapnel.
It will take entirely too long to trim the yard this way. You simply carry the mower to the enclosure in the middle. If nothing else, you will mow the silhouettes. Now you stand over the leftmost shadow, the chassis positioned atop its feet. You should be able to make quick work of them all. Their grass blades, already trimmed once by the owner, are shorter and more manageable, and probably brittle from the paint.
Starting from the bottom, you work your way up the shadow’s body. The mower practically glides over the ground. Its rotating cylinder rakes its blades through the legs, torso, head, meeting little resistance from the bristly grass. The soil churns up in friable clods. And as the mower masticates the shadow, it spits out bits of it backward, strewing a trail of the silhouette’s confetti. Whatever the silhouette is, the mower pulverizes it. If it is a hypostatized nightmare, then the mower is shredding that nightmare. And if it is a hypostatized madness, then the mower is shredding that madness. This morning, however, you think of the silhouettes neither as hypostatized nightmares nor as madnesses. You think of them as load-bearing columns in the owner’s thought structure: if you demolish them, it will collapse.
You mow the first silhouette in just two passes, once forward and once back. What is left in its place is a piebald pile of green and black grass blades. To the pile’s right, the five remaining silhouettes patiently await their fates. Together, they really do resemble prey in a spider’s web: wrapped tight in their cocoons of silk, in these black shrouds of spray paint. Incubus husks. You ready the mower to unghost them.
After returning the push mower to its place beside the toolshed, you spend the rest of the morning tearing down the dreamcatchers and packing your duffel bag. You pack the dreamcatchers, too. You have decided to take your half of the stipend and leave first thing tomorrow. As for the other half, your compensation will just have to be imagining the look on the owner’s face: the expression he will have on entering the cabin, when he realizes not only that you have not been driven mad but also that you have mercilessly—and, indeed, perfectly sanely—dismantled his prophylactic apparatus, stripping the windowpanes and trimming the silhouettes.
Now it is night, your last in the cabin, and you have been standing a
t the bedroom window, staring out at the backyard. Beyond the pane, the grass merges into a single sealike mass, and all that can be distinguished in the darkness is the far figure of the toolshed: a shack of corrugated tin lit up by the orange haze of its safety lamp, the push mower visible in silhouette. The only object in the frame, the shed is what you have been focusing on tonight, and what you imagine the owner must have focused on, too, those nights when he stood here staring out the window. The shed stands at the edge of the yard, appearing in the lower left-hand corner of the windowpane. Its roof slants over the entryway in a slight lip, sheltering it, and affixed to this soffit is the safety lamp: a single bulb burning in a casing of translucent plastic. The casing casts a widening cone of rust-toned light before the shed, washing it a granular red. Because the shed emerges from the black grasses and from the window frame stained this blood-orange color, it recalls the horizon rutilance of a rising moon. In the sky tonight there is no moon. The only source of light is the shed itself, glowing alone in the broader darkness.
There is something eerie about the quality of that lamplight. How thin it is and full of shadows, like the lighting of a long hallway in a dream. You can see where the doorless entryway to the shed gapes black. The lamp hangs directly above it, casting its cone of light downward: there the grainy haze creates a nightmare space, a space of expectancy. If it were the owner standing here tonight, he would almost certainly be waiting for something to step out into that cone of light. He would be bracing himself to see something emerge from the shed. And every second that something did not exit the shed and enter the cone of light, it would only become more certain, and more dreadful, that some vague, dark shape was about to exit the toolshed and enter the light.
Then there actually is the vague, dark shape to consider: the push mower. Leaning against the toolshed where you left it, just inside that cone of light, even the push mower takes on a sinister aspect. At this distance, its silhouette is easily mistaken for a man’s, for example. Whole seconds at a time, you can convince yourself that it is not a push mower at all. This is surely what the owner would be convincing himself, you understand. Even as he recognized, deep down, that the silhouette is merely the push mower, he would see in it nevertheless a man’s shape. He would convince himself that it is not just any silhouette, but one of his silhouettes: one of the backyard shadows risen from the ground of the enclosure. Staring longer and longer at its vague, dark shape, there in the grainy haze of the cone of light, he would whip himself into a frenzy, convincing himself of everything that the silhouette is: not a push mower, but an incubus, stockstill before the toolshed. Something malevolent, staring back at him. Looking straight through the bedroom window.
At this thought the owner would—as an hour ago you did—turn off the bedroom’s light, so that he could peer surreptitiously through the darkened pane. And invisible now he would—as all night you have been doing—stand sentry at the window.
The safety lamp’s bulb does not burn constantly. Activated by a timer, it burns for fifteen minutes and then blinks out, to prevent overheating. In this way, the shed gets bathed in its orange aureole only for quarter-hour intervals. Then, whenever the bulb blinks out, the shed is plunged into a vanishing darkness. Right now, for instance—even as you watch—the bulb snaps off, causing the shed to disappear. The windowpane goes instantly flat and black, and for a moment you see nothing. Your eyes adjust slowly, until you can descry the outline of the shed: a frame of slightly purer darkness carved into the night, like a trapdoor of blackness. Glowing faintly inside this outline is the safety lamp’s casing. Although the bulb is off, you can still make out an orange remnant where its coils cool. You see it suspended in the emptiness of the blackened windowpane, a wisp of ember. You can no longer distinguish the push mower at all.
It takes seven minutes for the coils to finish cooling and warm back up again. You have watched the lamp reignite approximately a dozen times tonight. The buildup leading to its combustion is always a minor drama. As the coils warm, the wisp of ember expands, so gradually that you barely notice. Its orange core keeps on thickening in diameter, pushing out through the plastic casing, until every inch of it is filled. Before the lamp snaps back on, the casing simply smolders there awhile, a redhot block in the blackness. It looks like a brick being baked in midnight’s kiln. It throbs orange. Then, just as unexpectedly as it snapped off, the bulb reignites. A starburst explodes outward from the lamp, sharp spokes of light that asterisk the air.
Every time the lamp combusts like this, the push mower’s silhouette is thrown into relief, a jag of shadow beside the shed entrance. All night it has not moved. Now, if you were the owner, and if you believed that that silhouette actually was an incubus, and if hour after hour you watched the lamp flash on to reveal that it had not budged, you would find this tremendously unsettling. Not only that the silhouette has not changed positions but also that, during the fifteen-minute intervals when it is lit, the silhouette does not even flinch. It does not so much as turn its head or shift its weight to a different leg. With a statue’s poise, or a push mower’s, it remains fixed there, inhuman and unmoving.
That is what would unsettle you about the silhouette, if you were the owner: the lengths to which it is willing to go to convince you that it is a push mower. How it stands precisely in the push mower’s place. How it keeps its arms folded at its sides and its legs pressed together, the better to simulate the push mower’s shape. How it will go on standing there as still, and for as long, as it takes to be mistaken for an inanimate object, and how only then—when you have finally mistaken it for a push mower and reassured yourself, After all, it is only the push mower—only when you have turned your back on the so-called push mower and abandoned your vigil before the bedroom window, how only then will the silhouette, taking advantage of your negligence, reveal itself for what it truly is: from the straight black line it makes, its arms will unfold liquidly at its sides, and the lower half of the silhouette’s body scissor apart into two dark legs. This, this, is what unsettles you: how in one second, after hours of ruthless patience, the silhouette will finally transform itself, shifting from a push mower into a man.
There is something unsettling about the sight of it, when the lamp is lit. A dark shape in an orange haze. It really does look human. It really does look as if it is looking back at you, right through the bedroom window. And even more unsettling than this, you find, are those periodic seven-minute intervals—such as now—when the lamp is not lit. For then the silhouette merges completely with the darkness, and you cannot see it. During this time, for all you know, it could be anywhere: not in its usual position beside the entryway, but halfway across the yard, lurching toward the cabin. While you have kept your eyes trained on the toolshed’s outline—as you do now—waiting impatiently for the safety lamp to reignite, the incubus could already be cutting across the weeds. Then, when the lamp finally does flash on, you might see only the awful emptiness of that cone of light, untenanted at last. For if suddenly, for the first time in hours, the cone of light were empty? Then you would know for certain. You would know—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that it is not and never has been a push mower, that it has always been a nightmare, merely biding its time. And at the sight of the vacant cone your mind would jam with panic, trying to calculate where, by now, this incubus could be.
Right now, as it so happens, only a minute remains before the lamp flashes back on. And if the silhouette is not there? You reject this thought out of hand. It is impossible. The silhouette cannot be one of the enclosure’s shadows, because you have mowed the enclosure’s shadows. Not the shadow, but the mower that has masticated the shadow: that is the only thing the silhouette could be.
Of course, if you were the owner, you might find ways of believing otherwise. Say, for instance, that by mowing the shadows you have simply freed them: that you liberated each nightmare from the cage that the thought structure made around it, or the cocoon that the spray paint made around it. If you were th
e owner, you might grow to rue right now, with ramping horror, the magnitude of your error. For you have accomplished nothing, or worse than nothing, by mowing the black shadows, you would think. You have simply unleashed their nightmares, disseminating their energies freely. So far from unghosting the site, you have unleashed the very ghosts upon the site. This is the thought that would cause you to bite the inside of your cheek right now, until it bled, and pound on your thigh with a panicked fist, internally cursing the lamplight to hurry, if you were the owner and thought as the owner thinks, and if you believed what he believes about the silhouette. If you believed every last thing that madman believes.
In the darkness of the yard, hanging inside the toolshed’s darker outline, the casing of the safety lamp is radiating orange warmth like a baking brick. If you were the owner, you would not be able to pry your eyes away. Because you would know what that cone of light is about to reveal: no silhouette beside the entryway, only a heart-stopping emptiness. For deep down you would also know—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that it is not and never was a push mower. It is a nightmare, and you have freed it. When the lamp flashes on, you will see this. The lamp flashes on.
