by Oisín Curran
an old building at night muffling strange music that
trickles out through the dark trees outside and the bright lanterns strung between them
car skidding out of control on a broad highway lined by a leafless forest
a grey-green waiting room full of people quietly waiting to find out when they are going to die
a room shaped like a giant beach ball lit from the outside—the interior of a hollow, glass planet
a man with frightened eyes in need of refuge
a stump, an axe, a dead bird, feather, guts, blood
piles of silver coins glimmering in a small wooden box
a boat sinking under two people rowing to shore through cold water…
Once a day the trap door blows light and Rook’s hand comes down with a plate of bread and butter or boiled potatoes or beets. Once sausages. I ask him to let me out—it’s too dark and the little metal room burns me. He says to be patient and tells me that in his hobo days he was locked for a week in a boxcar maintenance cabinet the size of a coffin. No food and only leaking rainwater to drink. So he almost died before another tramp heard and freed him. Coming out, he stretched in the raw air and saw through the boxcar’s open door that the train rode the back of a snowy mountain range. He looked down on wild goats and flying eagles and ate the hard, green crust of bread that he was given.
Your circumstances are infinitely more luxurious, he says.
The door closes again and later my room cools and I sleep.
I wake shivering and put my clothes back on. The steel walls and floor freeze me fast. We’re going in the wrong direction.
The trap door opens, and from the crash of light I hear Rook’s voice warning me of frostbite—he says he lost three toes to a snowbank when a plough accidentally buried him while he was sleeping off a bender. He was frozen there for months before a thaw freed him. Accustom yourself to this, he says. This is the life of a drifter—wretched and free.
Blankets fall on me, and hats, all moth-eaten. We’re plying the Northern Seas, he says.
Let me out! I yell. We’re going the wrong way.
He’s sorry but it’s impossible—the people on this boat are lunatics. They belong to a society, he says. The Silver Apple, or maybe it’s the Gilded Branch... The Order of the Knotty Pine? Anyway, they’re nuts about this island. But we have to go north before we can go south. A matter of geography.
He reaches down a cigarette, places it in my mouth, and lights it, but I choke. I’ve never smoked. He lies down on the floor above me, props his head on his hand, and lights a cigarette for himself.
By the time I was your age, he says, I was hacking twenty butts a day.
Cigarettes?! My mother groaned in a confusion of longing and disapproval, which brought me from my story. She opined that this Rook was a terrible influence to be pressing tobacco on a child—she didn’t like him. Reproving her for interrupting me, my father said that Rook was but a young man after all, raised rough and following the hobo’s code of honour to help a fellow drifter in need and share what little he had. Myles liked him, cigarettes or no. After all, had not Iris chain-smoked menthols from the age of sixteen until she met him?
It was night. I lay on my bed, Iris perched on a chair with her Olivetti on her knees, and Myles sat on a brown mat on the floor, legs crossed in the half-lotus position, a blanket draped over his head and shoulders for warmth. His red plastic fountain pen was poised over a yellow legal pad. My head throbbed from what was evidently a hangover, for I remembered that earlier that night I had surreptitiously downed a bottle of homebrew.
We had been to dinner at the Krimgold-Gragnolatis’ after a long Sunday of salvaging lumber from a condemned nunnery. We needed the salvage to finish our house. The K-Gs needed it to build one. At the beginning of the day, the grown-ups set me and the younger Krimgold-Gragnolati siblings, Artemis and Apollo, to work pulling nails from old boards while Myles and Bill Krimgold eased windows from their frames and floorboards from their joists. Iris and Bernadette Gragnolati toiled over the plumbing, with Bernadette’s eldest daughter, Athena, releasing two bathtubs and three sinks from the mineralized shackles of century-old pipe fittings. Later, the roof of the station wagon weighted down with timber and porcelain, we drove to their tiny cabin to recuperate.
Bill and Myles considered the virtues of hops and malt as they sampled each other’s homebrew, while Iris and Bernadette parsed the weather and the weeds and their gardens and the farcical campaign for president of Ronald Reagan. Artemis and Apollo and I played Parcheesi. Artemis was a year older than me—jutting chin, long black hair in braids, bell-bottomed overalls. Apollo was a year younger, a year softer too, with a sweet-natured moon face under a page-boy head of straight red hair. Their sister, Athena, sat in a corner reading Anna Karenina. She was in Grade 12. A serene, flash-eyed girl of terrible beauty. When she walked it was as though she floated, a demi-goddess from another world. She was seven years older than me, and if she smiled at my gaping face, the brilliance of her teeth between plum-coloured lips made me shiver.
Myles dilated on the subject of etymology and the surprising, yet inexorable path that led to the root of all language and culture, which turned out to be Old Gaelic, or rather Gaeilge, as he corrected himself, the word Gaelic being no more than another anglicization inflicted on the mother tongue of poets by perfidious Albion, and he paused momentarily to swallow the buildup of phlegm in the back of his throat, for one can’t talk for so long without needing to spit unless otherwise trained, and in that pause he smiled uncomfortably for an instant, as though aware of his own loquacity, and, mildly embarrassed yet incapable of stopping himself, or at least unwilling, he launched awkwardly but swiftly out of the pause by swallowing fast and picking up where he’d left off while the swallowing action was still descending, because if he paused for an instant longer…
But it was too late, Bill had already seized the opening to say, only half-jokingly, Do you know what you are, Myles? You’re a Celt-supremacist! But hey! he went on before Myles could protest, It’s OK, I like those Celts. Crazy bastards. You ever read Caesar’s Gallic Wars? Vercingetorix and his crew? Anybody who runs screaming into battle wearing nothing but some paint deserves respect. Speaking of French Celts, speaking of Gaul, guess what kind of car de Gaulle was in when the OAS tried to assassinate him? A ’55 Citroën DS! Just like the one I’ve got out back. They say it was the superior suspension system that saved him. Even though the tires were shot out, the driver was able to accelerate out of a skid and get away. Funny, because my suspension is in trouble—cracked strut, but I’ve got a line on a good welder. Hard to believe I got the Goddess for three and a half bucks back in grad school. Mind you, her engine was shot at the time…
All this while I was quietly working away at a bottle of stout that I’d purloined from the table and soon I passed out on the ox hide that covered the piano bench. Sometime later I dimly heard exclamations at the empty bottle discovered in my clutches. And later still I came to in my bedroom at home.
Above and around me, planks of unfinished spruce were attached to the walls with infrequent brackets, and they swayed under the weight of books. In my line of sight, the red spine of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was compressed between Adrift and The Jataka Tales. I turned my head on my pillow and saw, as usual, Journey to the Interior of the Earth, The Demigods, Building the Energy-Efficient Home, The Three Pillars of Zen, The Viking Portable Jung, The Voyage of Maeldun, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Finnegans Wake. The long sagging lines of volumes had the upright disorder of teeth. They comforted me; they oppressed me. They were backed by pink fibreglass insulation caught in a Jupiter storm behind stapled sheets of cloudy plastic. My eye fell on the bench next to my bed and, taking in the luminous pair of new tube socks and the freshly patched corduroy jeans and the carefully folded velour sweater, I recalled the source of the misery that had driven me to drink: school.
Claude O. Cote Elementary School squatted on a concrete pad in a hollow just north of the town’s two rival general stores and just south of the gravel pit. It was a box sided with grey asphalt shingles, the lower rows of which had been gnawed away by generations of bored, malnourished children. In its dark interior hallway, a portrait of Mr. Cote gravely surveyed his beneficiaries as they shot from the classrooms at the close of the day and slunk back to them at 8:00 a.m. Each morning, we endured hour-long captivities in stinking yellow buses wherein the young, the small, and the weak sought front seats within the radius of the driver, while the violent and the pubescent sprawled across its back rows, and a crescendo of insults, threats, and seductions was snuffed out by the driver’s roar, only to bubble up again in a repeating cycle.
The bedlam of the bus, ejected into the parking lot, was reconstituted in subtler, age-segregated hierarchies within the carpeted, high-ceilinged classrooms. There, the dispirited teachers sought vainly or sternly or ingratiatingly to quell the flames with which we burned, for we were alight and knew it and saw these creaky humanoids as messengers from an empty future. Their classes were nothing more than preparation for the purgatory of adulthood. Or something like that. Really what I remember are the buckets placed under leaking ceilings and the bad kids zigzagging to catch the droplets on their tongues. In the meantime, we must suffer the shrilling of bells, pedagogical droning, and ritualized pledges while the hours in their thousands ground by as we progressed glacially, imperceptibly toward that clear, impossible light of late June.
I waited for September with predictable dread. Ripening tomatoes, lowering sun, lengthening shadows, first crimson leaf hidden in green—all auguries portending the Bus, on board which I endured the Top 40 radio babbling at low volume, the nausea induced by the endless stop and start and the diesel exhaust farting through the windows with each rattling hammer blow when the back wheels hit another prodigious frost heave. Outside, the tracts of blueberry barrens scanning by were nothing more than external manifestations of the Bus’s psychic landscape. Inside was the filthy banter of children recently overwhelmed by the idea of copulation. Further inside, in my interior, was the now familiar sideways pull of alien gravity, which brought me floating into a dark metal box within which I sat, listening for the sound of hawsers, hoarse shouts of sailors, the swallowing sea.
In my metal box I wait. Rook comes and goes with food and my toilet, a dented tin pot with an old plate to cover it. No light but the sudden rush of sun with Rook’s visits. In the dark with nothing to see, nothing to do but shit and eat and read with the flashlight that Rook lowers to me, a copy of You Can’t Win. He says it’s the only book he owns.
I sit wrapped in layers of blankets, only my face and hands touch the bitter air. I need my hands free—one to hold the flashlight and the other for the book. My breath steams in the thin tunnel of electric light, which bounces off the page and lights up my little box.
The room is ten books long, six high, and five wide. Big for a coffin. Darkness and fear give me bat ears. Or I am crazy because I start hearing hollow, faraway talk from around the ship. Voices thinking about navigation, a chorus practising opera, piano tuning, some yelling, happy or sad? And also the hammering engine. Radio signals come and go, plumbed fathoms ping under us. If the ship goes down, I go with it.
Potatoes! somebody shouts. Have you seen them? The voice is close.
Then Rook yells, Not there, NOT THERE!
But it’s too late, the trap door is hauled off and a whole sun thuds down on top of me.
Dark eyes stare down at me. The woman with the eyes pulls me into blinking sun. She’s young, smooth hair and skin, not much older than Rook, but the steep wing pattern of her eyes makes her seem more grown-up. She thinks I’m a prisoner, she’s worried about my health. Her name, she says, is Quill. She’s the cook and she was looking for potatoes. I tell her I’m not a prisoner, I stowed away and nobody knew.
I knew, Rook says.
Rook, it turns out, can’t lie, even if he gets in trouble. This is either a virtue or a weakness, depending on circumstance. Right now the former, in my opinion.
Quill calls over Severn, the captain. Captain Severn is tall, sinewy, yellow hair a flag in the breeze. I figure he’s in his forties although his face is lined from facing down gales, or maybe from smoking, which he does non-stop. Quill puts her hand on his arm as she explains what happened and he doesn’t move away. He turns his hard hawk nose toward her and his hard blue eyes focus and soften when they meet her dark gaze. I see an angry man who hates his own anger and wants to shake it. Maybe Quill has something to do with that. In any case, he’s kind, but it’s hard for him. And he punishes Rook with extra work anyway.
Somebody shouts, Squall!
In the west a dark wall with lightning. Severn orders me below deck and then turns and shouts commands.
I curl on an empty bunk to avoid the crew. Footsteps above me, hatches hammer down, the ship shakes. Through a porthole, I watch the sky go black.
The storm is coming for me, hot, thick, wild animal smell just like when I saw the creature entering my old cave—it’s following me. The back of my scalp burns again.
I turn from the view, close my eyes, and unshelve my pictures.
car accident
green waiting room
planet-room
refugee
axe, bird, feathers, guts
silver coins
sinking boat
That’s not a good image to think of. And worse, as I run through them, there’s one missing. Which one? Desperately, I claw through my brain for it. What was it, what was it?
The sea blows open.
We dive with lightning and the whole screeching sky to the bottom. But the screeching might be me. Hard to hear anything over thunder pounding all around.
Lurch of the bus rounding a sharp bend returned me to the end of my ride.
Then I was walking down the steep dirt road, kicking stones and trying to catch falling yellow poplar leaves for luck, but no luck—and then the little bridge over the mouth of the bay where I stopped and stared out across the water for some time and burned my eyes on the brilliant wave tops, then turned in the other direction toward the marsh whose creek ran through the giant culvert under me to the bay and on to the open ocean. In the marsh, fat rosehips formed and a great blue heron unfolded its wings and drifted into the sky.
Now I hurried past the empty farmhouse where blank windows mirrored the sun and trembled in the wind, adding to an atmosphere of muted horror that trailed me up the long narrow corridor of road hemmed by snarling woods. Deep in the trees someone tried to start an engine, which, though it thudded bravely, failed to cough into life, so the sound diminished and died away. Into adolescence I would remain convinced of the mechanical origin of this noise, admiring, pitying, resenting the persistence of the mysteriously inept owner of the engine that could never start. Then one day, while peeing in the woods I saw a bird, a grouse beating the ground with its wings, and the sound it made was the noise of that reluctant motor.
I was distracted by a dark shape in the bushes and, for an instant, I thought it was my cat, Shadow. But just as quickly I remembered she was dead and tamped down the pang that followed.
I turned in the driveway and heard yelling from the house. My mother’s voice, raging. Walking as quietly as possible to the open kitchen window, I stayed out of sight and listened.
I’m not going to die! she shouted.
I didn’t say you were, said Myles quietly.
I have a son! An eleven-year-old son—I can’t die!
The doctor didn’t say you were dying. He said it was serious—very serious—and we need to think about all the possibilities.
I have a child to raise, said Iris, and her voice was murderous. I’m not dying.
She stomped out of the house, slammed the door behind h
er, and headed for the garden.
I snuck off to the outhouse even though I didn’t have to use it. A tiny, shed-roofed collection of old boards and posts, it stood about fifty feet from our house with a doorless opening facing the woods. I sat on the closed seat and contemplated the bushes and trees. Where forests are newly cut, the borders look gapped and raw, wrongly exposed like a layer of ripped skin. Still, the chickadees and finches and red squirrels seemed to enjoy it—hopping from root to branch in their war over pine cones. Artemis told me she once saw a squirrel eat the head off a living baby chickadee while its mother attacked from above in vain. There was no such carnage on view now, just chirping and hopping, scrambling. A few mosquitoes made desultory, whining passes through the chilling air, in search of a last blood meal before they frosted to oblivion.
A deep grunt and sudden crashing to my right startled me upright to see the antlers and rump of a white-tailed buck vanishing into the bushes. What was I thinking? I didn’t know what to think. I was trying not to. Would Iris vanish like Shadow? And if so, what would I do then? Now, there was an empty grey hole in my stomach and all my thoughts were sliding into it along with the rest of my life. I felt pressure in my chest—the old sob for Shadow swelling. I was either going to blow apart or collapse into the grey hole. Maybe explode first, then implode. To dodge either disaster, I jumped up, hoisted my backpack onto one shoulder, and made my way to the garden.
Iris knelt among her tomato plants, weeding furiously, weeping silently, and so I sat down beside her.
I know you’re sick, I said matter-of-factly, I heard you before.
She looked at me intently and then leaned forward and pulled me to her.
I’m not leaving you, she said in my ear, and her voice sounded so ferocious I believed her.
She wanted me to tell her about school but instead I told her of my latest vision. She wiped her dirt-encrusted hands on the grass, unpacked the Olivetti that she now carried with her at all times for just this reason, and began to type.
