On canvas, Kurelek did what he could not do in life: he split his head open to reveal not a normal cranial cavity but an array of compartments. And in these compartments, a freak show of what today we would call dysfunction, trauma and humiliations from peers and a terrorizing father. He crowded his canvas with symbols of disillusionment: here, a merry-go-round of wooden puppet dancers on strings, smiles painted on; there, a portrait of a tiny man squeezed into a test tube, scrutinized by doctors like a lab specimen; elsewhere a lizard trapped and tormented by a flock of crows, as well as a schoolboy pinned to the street by a bully, nose bloodied, girls pointing and laughing--you may have seen this one on the cover of Van Halen's album Fair Warning.
And how about Hieronymous Bosch and his Garden Of Earthly Delights, like Dante's entire Divine Comedy splashed and crammed onto a single three-paneled slab? And for some sixty years, janitor Henry Darger worked out his secret evils on cheap butcher paper; one can see this eternal child's innocent, angelic side and violent side fighting it out on the ten-foot-long watercolor dioramas he kept in his one-room Chicago apartment. Many of them were illustrations for his epic war fantasy In The Realms Of The Unreal--at over fifteen thousand pages, possibly the longest novel ever written.
When I saw Kurelek's maze I just thought "how weird." But the memory floated off to the back of my mind, found a dark corner, and waited...until the right time.
###
The plumbing and the power still work. I'm not Howard Hughes: I shower and brush my teeth by candlelight and shave before my beard grows out too much. When I walk through the rooms I carry a candle with me. The tiny flames complement the darkness, casting shadows like in a dungeon. It seems better, somehow, for the purpose at hand.
I did a good of boarding up the place: I don't know day from night or how much time has passed. If I'd just nailed planks over the windows I might see slivers of daylight between them, but I slapped on three coats of pitch as well. Was it really necessary? I'll probably never know. It seems like a lifetime has passed since I started wishing for something to eat besides peanuts and dates and sunflower seeds. I have vivid and intense dreams of food--fried chicken, Italian sausage pizza, all the good stuff people haul out when it's time to celebrate.
I ache to call the whole thing off. I've had all the time in the world to think about how crazy this is. But there's something I intend to do when it's all over: I will contact Siss, and all the old bullies I can locate, and tell them from the bottom of my heart that I forgive them--which is another way of saying: Your hold over me is broken and your days of tormenting me, in any way, are over for good.
Just keep thinking of that.
I cannot be at ease around people. It wasn't always that way. Some are loners by nature, others by nurture. I'm probably some of both, but I do remember I romped with the crowd as much as any other boy, and had as many friends.
I suppose it's my spacey-ness that really did it. I tend toward dyslexia and absent-mindedness; I've blurted out things so stupid that I won't put them down here. I know I looked spacey, too, because sometimes people would come out and ask "Are you high?" or "Are you confused?" and I would jolt with surprise. By some error my face muscles warped themselves into such a look, eyes lapsing into the blankness of what today is called "mentally challenged," my mouth twisting into a dumb grin or hanging slack-jawed, all without my ever knowing it until some jeerer or howler brought it to my attention. Such an appearance always draws attention to the unwitting deviant.
How did I get my idea? I can't pinpoint the minute or even the day. Maybe it was when Gramp's will revealed that the house was mine alone. Siss and Twin were shocked. I should have been too, but somehow I wasn't: I think that something in my consciousness, battered by the years of hurtful memories, sent up an SOS--it's time. Now or never.
I let myself into the house and wondered how I could ever do this. Most of Gram and Gramp's possessions still remained. It wasn't like those abandoned places with empty rooms and sheets over the furniture. The familiar pictures on the walls, the cabinet with Gram's blue Chinese-patterned dishes, Gramp's quadraphonic stereo in the living room and ham radio set in the kitchen, even the bed I once occupied in the back bedroom--the years all rushed back...the good and the bad.
Now people have come knocking on the door. I've gotten someone's attention. Would they be back?
How much longer can this take?
Vague images, blobs of shadow are showing in almost every room now. Some run in ragged patterns from floor to ceiling. Sounds, too: a soft grinding, louder in some places than others, especially from the back bedroom where it comes from everywhere. I wondered at first if it was rats, but it's a steady sound almost like a machine, rising and falling.
I lie down on the sofa and sleep. When I wake up, three people are standing in a circle in the middle of the living room.
I yell and sit up. They don't move. They're statues, carved from wood like Kurelek's marionette dancers, facing each other with hinged jaws hanging open. Their faces have no eyes, noses or other features, although one has long hair made of strips of carpet.
These likenesses are covered with scars as if someone took chisel and power-sander to them. They sprouted and burst up through the floor, wood shavings and torn carpet and...something else, scattered around their feet.
I reach down. Something stings my forefinger and I pull it back, cursing. A bead of blood wells on the tip.
Shards of broken glass litter the floor. I peer down closer, sucking on my finger. The glass is not actually broken, but cut and sharpened into words. I read one, then another. Some words are printable, others not; I recognize most of them of course. Siss's. Twin's. My own. Some of them Twin had reserved for me, fragments of sentences now scattered, so that these bits of phrases and statements would have little meaning for me if I didn't remember them. But I do, and I shrink away.
Up by the ceiling--I hold up my flickering candle. Something has grown down, too, bursting the plaster and spiderwebbing it with cracks that spread to almost the corners. White dust rests on the heads and pointing arms of the three statues.
From the ceiling, a sign that was probably part of the attic frame: FAMILY.
I rub my eyes, squeeze them shut, open them again. I put out a hand and touch the blank faces, the planed surfaces now gouged, furrowed and whittled away.
There was this night when I had band practice at a friend's house. Siss, before driving me there, brought chicken home for dinner. Chicken and cole slaw. Did I eat my cole slaw? she asked. Yes, I said, though I hadn't; I'd never cared for the stuff. Why I didn't tell the truth, I don't remember. Nor do I remember how she found out; maybe I'd confessed, I don't know. But that night she was tense, as she was some nights, and had the hard look in her eyes that said Don't Mess With Me. Once we were crowded together in the car, she, myself and my guitar case, she began her growling and seething about it, staring straight ahead as she drove. I'd lied. I'd lied.
I apologized. It was a bonehead move, I was wrong, it was out of line. I was sorry. But she had gotten started, as I knew too well, and there was no stopping her. On and on she went about it as she drove, her eyes manic, hands moving the steering wheel. Her voice rose, and rose still louder into shouts drowning out my desperate groveling, apologies and promises to make amends that I threw out one after another, no longer thinking about what I was saying but just frantic to stop the barrage. But berating and the accusations did not stop. And as they went on, I felt my control start to slip.
I knew what was going to happen. She had to give me a chance to calm down or the unthinkable would happen. Heedless of it all, conscious of nothing but her own white rage, she shouted still louder. We had stopped at a red light, and I would not be surprised if the people in the next car heard her. My control was slipping very quickly now, but I was as powerless to stop it as a paralyzed man.
"YOU'RE A CHRONIC LIAR! YOU'RE NOT PRACTICING TONIGHT!"
That did it. Instinct took over, the need to vent, to do s
omething. It overrode my system, and I no longer ran myself. Feeling as if in a nightmare, I watched as my hand raised itself up and clenched itself into a fist and, dear God! struck my own sister on the cheek.
For a moment she sat in stunned silence. Then she screamed, and after that, started to cry. People in the other cars stared at us. "We're going to the police station," she sobbed.
I did then what I should have done a minute ago, instead of taking the violent option. Fumbling with my guitar case, I opened the door and climbed out. Thank God the light was still red.
My friend's house lay several blocks further up the road. I walked there. His mother answered the door, saw me and instantly assumed the look of someone discovering a bloodied man at her door. She bade me come in, and heard my confession.
Twin came to pick me up after practice. My friend's mother must have called the house, because on the drive home he asked, "How did she know we're having family problems?"
I just mumbled, muttered and didn't really answer. It was only long afterward when I thought of what I should have said. "Our family doesn't have problems. Our family is a problem."
Siss was sleeping by the time we got home.
Next morning, while I was in the bathroom, she stood outside the door and pronounced a single word of judgment: "Monster."
In the years since then, I've wondered: Didn't she ever consider how this thing got started? How senseless it was to throw a hurricane-tantrum over a lie--a lie, yes, but one that I'd owned up to and apologized over and over for? Never for a moment wondered what had driven me to do such a horrible thing? It was the one time, the only time, I ever did it.
Didn't she ever wonder why?
No. I was a monster, and it was something she'd remind me of every so often afterwards, and that was that.
Like the spitting incident at the pool, I never brought it up. You tell me and we'll both know why in the hell I didn't.
I just never did.
###
Dining room. Where we used to eat Thanksgiving dinner and watch Gramp's home movies on a clattering projector now stand pedestals of varying heights, holding sculptures of their own, all of wood, crashed up through the hardwood floor surrounded by splinters and dust.
One of them resembles Kurelek's painting exactly--the two wooden featureless dummies locked in a kiss. LOVE.
THE FUTURE is represented also, but not Kurelek's mushroom cloud. I was never that scared of nuclear war, even during the Seventies when I'd grown old enough to understand the danger we were in. For me it's a mirror-image frescoed on the wall, or rather images like you see in a mirror maze when your reflection replicates itself out to infinity, a thin balding man with oversized sad, pleading eyes--it's a pathetic sight, and I hope no one ever sees it--reproduced over and over again, smaller and smaller until he vanishes in the distance.
Is that how I've come to see life? Every January first, I already know that this new year will pass just like the one before it, and the one before it, and before that, and before that....
Kitchen. Here I find the biggest surprise yet.
Every inch of space on the walls not taken by window or curtains or refrigerator, as if painted there by a mad artist inspired by Kurelek and Bosch, is crowded with faces. Not blank like those of the FAMILY, but all too familiar--were there that many of them?--from past jobs, the Navy, the home fellowship group where I once led the singing, all the way back to the age of three when Siss claimed us, thus embroiling us in the family wars that would drag on until Twin escaped into the Air Force and myself into the Navy. I've never told anyone about these, I wouldn't dare. I can picture their reaction: You're still upset out about that? For crying out loud man, get over it! Life's too short!
Ah, yes. If it were only that easy. Sticks and stones, right? No physical abuse at least. But even broken bones heal. How do you heal memories? You can't cut them out like tumors or kill them with antibiotics. They're branded into your mind and you're condemned to feel their sting all your life, the memories boiling up unbidden with the regularity of a clock striking the hour. And as the years pass you discover, to your dismay, that no matter what you do or tell yourself, the hurt remains.
Every misshapen mouth is wide open. The words from five years, ten years, even decades ago drift up from my mind. I'd always craved attention, yet seemed incapable of normal interaction. I don't know how much humiliation I brought upon myself or how much was bullies seeing a good thing and taking advantage. Like the other exhibits, this one has its sign: SOCIETY.
Well-meaning people, like the fiftyish mother of three who manages my apartment building back in California, urge me to get out and be "social." I must be "social." Being "social" is what it's all about. I more or less waved her off, not bothering to explain. For some of us it seems, if you're programmed a certain way or unknowingly give off certain vibes or just seem to look at people wrong, your attempts to join the social game take on a new dynamic.
And when my fellow sailors raved about the "comraderie" in the radio shack--I just had to laugh. Grateful for that, actually. I can always use laughs.
Ship's Service Week in bootcamp, when your company puts in a seven grueling sixteen-hours day in the galley. One of the supervising Petty Officers singled me out, apparently for wearing the Wrong Look or sending the Wrong Vibes or something. There never seemed to be anything you could nail down as a definite reason. He confronted me, not angrily, but worse: face squeezed up with mirth, eyes twinkling with merry amusement, as the others stood around watching.
"Are you gay, sailor?"
"No sir."
"You sure you're not gay, sailor?"
"Yes sir, I'm sure."
"You sure?"
Gay? What in the hell brought that up? And why did these things always have to take place in front of everyone in the room? Okay, so he thought I was gay. Why not take me aside? For that matter, if he was convinced past all doubt and ignored all protests to the contrary, why even bother asking?
Those mysterious mannerisms or facial expressions, shyness or spacey-ness or whatever it was, was to continue into Radioman school, where the male students lived crowded into an open-bay barracks, bumping into each other. One night I had an exchange with another student, a fellow fond of calling me by a derisive nickname. (The nickname, I don't care to repeat.) I was coming out of the laundry room, carrying a box of powdered soap. For the second time in my life I reached the breaking point, but this time all at once, unexpectedly, and before I knew it I'd poured soap over his head.
He sprang up and struck me in the face. That was the only blow. But he fumed after that, stamped, cussed and threatened; he was on the warpath; he would stand and stare daggers at me as I was climbing into my rack and going to sleep.
It was one of those times, all too many of them, when I wished I had been a man about the whole thing. Ignore the bum. Turn the other cheek--but I could only turn it so many times. But as it was, when he hit me, I did not return the blow, but not out of any noble motives. My only thought was that I couldn't be written up for fighting. I dissolved, blubbering apologies, not out of any sincere regret; I just plain wimped out and couldn't fight and that was pretty much it. I quickly lost count of the number of "sorry's" I said to this man who maybe should have apologized to me, too, but again the other party would have none of it.
That wasn't quite the end. After graduating I was sent to a Western Australia communications station, where I was promptly assigned to a watch section that included another former student who'd been there that night. This guy, not so spacey, not so "gay" and radiating a brainpower that won him quick promotion up the ranks, wanted me to know that he'd "laughed his ass off" that night.
Social, indeed.
The trouble with this is, there's no set of rules you can follow. Everyone slips, makes embarrassing gaffes, carries memories they wish they could erase. I get that. But when you seem to draw the rotters, the bullies and the jerks somehow just by being yourself, like blood scented by sharks...
And before long, you get the message. People, especially guys, make you anxious. You're a sheep in a den of wolves. Your subconscious understanding is you're not one of them, and will never be one of them. Regardless of how you talk, dress or whatever, the bottom line that trumps everything is: "they're the wolves and you're the sheep."
And neither anything you tell yourself, nor what anyone else tells you, ever budges this thinking. It's hard-wired, branded into your brain.
Man is supposed to be intelligent, something special, but I wonder. Whatever genius he has to chart the heavens and split the atom, he chucks it the moment he sees someone who's "deficient" in his sight. It doesn't take much.
###
I return to the living room. The fireplace has stretched and spread like a cancer--this place is reminding me more and more of that disease--into a brick and plaster arch like a church door cut with swipes of a chainsaw, and the logs flattened into steps leading up and curving out of sight.
The back bedroom, where the grinding was the loudest. This has changed the most. A grove of trees like an orchard, but every tree withered and dry; and overhead, an expanse of twinkling lights. They're not stars. They're angels, the first and only beautiful thing to show up here, and without seeing them closely I already know that all my crushes are up there, from school, the Navy, jobs afterward, beauties I put up on pedestals. If they'd allowed me to, I would have demanded they complete my life and fill the void torn out by family and peers. Who could really do that? Still, I see them as celestial, something transcending mere humans.
I didn't think all these manifestations would equal Kurelek's vision on canvas. I was wrong. Looking at a painting, you're still in the outside world, in the fresh air and sunshine and civilization; the madness is safely confined to a small flat surface, or better yet, printed in a book like The Mind, and you can close the cover on it whenever you want. But here in this house, it's alive. You're surrounded by it, hemmed in. You close your eyes and it won't go away. The oppressiveness weighs on you, crushes you; the scenes of insanity are out now in all their glory, and they won't be put away again.
9 Tales Told in the Dark 11 Page 12
