Interfictions 2

by Delia Sherman

  "My father was one of the jewelers. Yes. That's right. How do you think I know so much? My father used to sneak home to see us. The last time he did, he told us about the Lotus Eater. We never saw my father again, though my mother says she sees him standing on the hill, but my mother is old and who knows if she sees what is true or what is desired?

  "The Lotus Eater, my father said, was shot out of the sky into the lake, and when the people pulled him onto the land, he already had lotus blossoms in his mouth. His body was broken, and they tried to break his spirit. Some said his spirit was never broken because his mind was. Others said his spirit hadn't been broken because he walked through death's door and came back. Not ghost. Not alive. Someone who exists in both places.

  "My father was given the special duty of guarding him. He told us how the American ate nothing but lotus and emitted a sweet perfume. No one knew where the lotus came from. Put him in a cave, put him in a box, tie him down, still he was found with lotus. One of the guards told my father that he had observed the prisoner pacing the small yard, lotus blooming beneath his feet. When this same guard suffered a terrible snake bite, he approached the Lotus Eater, who touched his finger to the wound and healed it. Yet another time, the group came upon a dying water buffalo; the Lotus Eater touched it, and wept over it, but it died anyway. The guard said that proved his theory that the Lotus Eater existed in both worlds, a creature of heaven, with all its miracles, and a creature of the earth, with its terrible limitations.

  "This guard insisted that the Lotus Eater was Buddha and began to include him in their circle at the end of the day. One evening, he gently tapped the Lotus Eater on his arm, the way friends do. The Lotus Eater shook, trembled, and with a roar turned into a tiger and ate the man. After this, my father became a fugitive. He snuck home one more time and promised he would come back, but as I've said, we never saw him again. Except my mother.

  "They say the Lotus Eater roams the jungle. Some say he's holy. Some say he is a demon. Some say he's not real at all, just the dream of men like my father who lost their minds to the war. War is a terrible monster. You and I are the sons of this monster, but we do not have to be its victims. Let's sleep and in the morning return to the village. My wife will make us a good meal. She said it was foolish of me to take this trip, and she was right. Sometimes I do unreasonable things because I want to find my father, but let's leave our fathers to the world of dreams. Let us return to the land of the living. That is where we belong. No good can come of trying to find them. Even if we find them, they no longer belong to us, my friend. We have made a terrible mistake. What is it that you Americans say? Life is too little? Life is too little for us to spend our days like this."

  Johnny didn't come all this way for a bedtime story, or a lecture, but to be respectful, he lies in silence when Phi Nuc Than is finished.

  Later that night, a tiger comes to the edge of their camp. Johnny's heart beats wildly. Beside him, he hears his friend wake with a start. Both men hold their breath as the beast slinks past. Johnny whispers, “Was that him?” Phi Nuc Than answers with a shush. Eventually, Johnny falls asleep. When he wakes up, his friend is gone.

  When?

  He wanders the jungle in the rain, the mud, the heat. Is this how it's been? All these years, so many days and nights, hours and minutes filled with hunger and loss? Why not eat the Lotus and forget everything and everyone? How long? How long can a man survive on the memory of love when all around him the jungle threatens? How long before the autumn leaves fall around him and he lies dead in the grass, breathing the sweet scent of dirt, end of summer, end of everything? How long before he asks, what is my measure? If not time, or skin, or place, what? How long before he pulls the Lotus to his mouth, the soft, velvety texture against his tongue, the terrible taste of forgetting, the succor it brings. Not sated, exactly, but satisfied, he lies beside the water. When the old man comes to stand there, dressed in Lotus blossoms and teeth strung like jewels, they watch each other before the elder begins scavenging for what the younger has not taken, a scarce feast of Lotus, but this is a dream, of course, this is all the dream of a boy shot dead on the grass by the falling golden leaves, or a dream that comes later than that, the dream of a boy who listens to relatives mourning his missing father, a boy who falls asleep hungry, and alone in his bedroom, or later still.

  When the waiting tiger pounces, Johnny opens his eyes. He sees a flash! Oh! He thought it was a beast, but it is fire. All is red, all is pain, all is falling leaves, golden, like rain. This is not happening. He reaches for the doorknob, opens the door, walks into the room where his father waits at the table, beckoning. Johnny takes serious steps across the room, like one returned from a terrible mission. He has seen terrible things. He sits at the table across from his father. The steaming plates set before them emit the sweet scent of Lotus blossoms, and for a moment, this singular moment in all the years, months, hours, and days of his life, Johnny remembers this feeling and he thinks his friend was right, what had he said, the words are gone, here is his childhood home, here is the promise of his life. Johnny is spinning, spinning, wildly spinning even as he forgets everything, he remembers how beautiful, how tender, how delicate the taste of breath, and when the feast is over, he stalks away, languid almost, to drink from the lake. Startled at first by the reflection there, he drinks.

  * * * *

  I went through a period in my life of reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance every so many years. Each time it was a different book. A road story. A father/son tale. An exploration of quality. But there came a time when, possibly because of the rootless nature of my life then, I came dangerously close to understanding the Zen in the book. There is a reason why the Zen tradition is a teacher/student one, but I was alone when I had this experience, which was basically the sense of falling off the world. This is not as fun as it may sound. It can actually be quite frightening to recognize that life is not bound the way we bind it. The question is, if it isn't reality, what are we living? Luckily, I was able to reel myself in from the precipice, and once recovered from the shock, have been trying to define that sensation of transcendence ever since. How to describe the limitation of words while using words to describe it? How to translate the freedom of transcendence while remaining safe in the shared world? Likely, it can't be done, but most of my work seeks to do it. Who knows why? Doomed to fail, I just keep trying and have discovered that failure, in itself, carries an element of transcendence. “The Beautiful Feast” is a continuation of my search for the transcendental. It is also an exploration of failure. This is true for both Johnny and me. Some people might think this is a sad account. Only those of us who roam the jungle of fail know the secret beauty there, which, to be clear, doesn't mean that it is an easy journey. Failure is a hungry tiger, it hurts every time. And yet...

  M. Rickert

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  Remembrance Is

  Something Like a House

  Will Ludwigsen

  Every day for three decades, the abandoned house strains against its galling anchors, hoping to pull free. It has waited thirty years for its pipes and pilings to finally decay so it can leave for Florida to find the Macek family.

  Nobody in its Milford neighborhood will likely miss the house or even notice its absence; it has hidden for decades behind overgrown bushes, weeds, and legends. When they talk about the house at all, the neighbors whisper about the child killer who lived there long ago with his family: a wife and five children who never knew their father kept his rotting playmate in the crawl space until the police came.

  The house, however, knows the truth and wants to confess it, even if it has to crawl eight hundred miles.

  The house isn't stupid, of course. It knows that leaving in the morning when that middle-aged lady strolls across its overgrown lot would attract attention. So, too, would leaving at any other daylight hour, even though by then most of the neighbors have gone to work. A beginning is the most noticeable ti
me of a secret journey.

  The house is patient. It's waited three decades and it could probably wait another three, though it isn't sure if people live that long, especially its people. They seemed upset and harried when they left everything behind but what fit in their arms, and that can't be a healthy way to live. The Maceks could well be dead, but the house doesn't think so. It doesn't feel so, either.

  At dusk the house decides to leave. Shadows from the rotting trees conceal its departure, though it isn't auspicious: the house shudders its frame and groans forward two inches. Afterward, exhausted, it sighs through its yawning windows and leaking attic with a wood-filtered moan.

  Then it tries another two inches, and another two after that. They get easier, once the house gets some practice and learns just how to tighten the posts and shuffle forward.

  In the coming weeks, the walking lady doesn't notice the house is moving. She just changes her path to compensate, not even realizing she's doing it, until one day she stops coming around at all. Maybe she goes back to work or finds a brighter place to walk. Maybe she just gets a bad feeling about the lonely house in the woods, some chill that it was almost alive. The house gets that a lot.

  With no witnesses, the house picks up speed and moves ten feet an hour on level ground during the daytime and even faster at night. The breeze passing through its dormers and eaves exhilarates the house, and sometimes it doesn't care if anybody sees its shadow crossing the rising moon.

  The house keeps to the woods and meadows between properties, because it wouldn't do to be found and restored. You can't go all the way to Florida with a family of four living in you, the house likes to say to itself. The house has lots of wisdom to impart but nobody to whom it can impart it, like a newer house or even a shed.

  For instance, it would like to tell someone that traveling in the wilderness is risky. Sometimes the weather is bad and you slip down a hillside in the mud. Sometimes your shingles get scraped away by low-hanging brambles. More than once, raccoons tumble down the chimney or through a window to nose through food the Maceks left behind. The house tries to shimmy in a scary way, thumping the old black-and-white framed photos on the wall, but the raccoons don't seem to care. They pull away a fuzzy rotten chicken bone or a green roll while the house glowers.

  When it rains, water seeps through the grey insulation and bulges in big lumps in the ceiling. Sometimes one will burst, splattering plaster and moldy water across the carpet. The house winces when this happens and tries to stick closer to the trees for shelter.

  * * * *

  The house waits beside Highway 61, wondering how it will ever get across. A car passes every few minutes, just enough to make a foot-by-foot march across the pavement risky.

  The house squats by the side of the road, watching for the darkness to come. When it finally does, the house crosses the first two lanes of the road as best it can, rattling its windows and cracking its siding to all but gallop to the median. There it rests, hoping to look inconspicuous—like someone just built a house in the middle of the road, or like the state is preserving a historic building by running the highway around it.

  After the house has caught its second wind, it begins to cross the other lanes. Just when the dotted white line exactly bisects it, light fills all its easterly windows.

  The house panics, though it isn't easy to tell: only an architect could see the corners go out of plumb and the walls buckle like that, though he or she wouldn't believe it.

  Behind the windshield, the truck driver doesn't seem to believe it either. He blinks, screams, and veers the truck into the other lane. The steering wheel shudders in his hands as the trailer skids.

  The house, not ready for sixty thousand pounds of truck to crash through its timbers, shuffles as best it can to the other side. There it watches the wheels catch, lock, and then thump back onto the highway as the driver gains control again. The trailer totters left and then right, but the only likely casualty is the driver's heart rate. Probably the house's too, if it had one.

  The house hates fences, especially the barbed wire ones. It has broken through many a wooden rail fence with relative ease, but the barbed wire ones drag behind the house for hundreds of yards. The house then has to gingerly slither across the wire to leave it behind, losing sometimes minutes or hours.

  Probably fifty or sixty people have broken into the house since it left the foundation. The house grumbles at the lost time, but sometimes visitors are nice, especially when they leave. Some of the kids break bottles and light bulbs, and the house doesn't appreciate that. Sometimes they take things, a couple of portraits or an old fork or some other souvenir of that “creepy shack in the woods.” The house wishes it could stop them, but it already has one big job to finish.

  Bums rarely stay the whole night. They'll nap a few hours on a bed and root around for some liquor, but then something calls them back outside—maybe a train whistle or an unfinished mission or an unpaid debt. Whatever it is, the last thing those guys seem to want is a house. Which is good, because the last thing the house wants is a bum.

  Nine couples have made out on the old moldy couch, green water squishing between their fingers from the cushions as they press together. The house remembers when Mr. and Mrs. Macek did that once when the couch was clean. They both were drunk on gin-and-tonics, and she started it by unclasping the right shoulder of his overalls. The kissing kids aren't as smooth—they just shove each other on the couch, grope awhile, and then go straight to the thrusting.

  * * * *

  Rivers and creeks are a mixed blessing. They're difficult to cross, but the current can take days or even weeks off the journey if the house navigates them right. It still floats more or less, though water washes in through the front door to the back, leaving behind silt and weeds and even flopping fish.

  The house has never seen a waterfall, but it imagines one would be bad news.

  * * * *

  In North Carolina, the house has interesting visitors: two boys and a girl, early teenagers, sweaty and sunburned from a summer vacation spent running all over the wooded mountains.

  The house can tell they're adventurous, like the Macek children were before Mrs. Macek took them away. Still, they're respectful—climbing in through the kitchen window, yes, but only one already shot out by a drunken hunter.

  They walk around, peeking into the stove at Mrs. Macek's forgotten roast and flipping through the stack of brittle newspapers by the green chair. They talk about the big mystery, what had happened to the people inside.

  "They left so much behind,” says the girl. They call her Amanda, the house discovers.

  "Look at this,” says the bigger boy, Michael. “There's still food on the table."

  Not much after so long, of course, just scattered pebbles of dried corn and black circles where rolls used to be. Muddy animal tracks speckle the table.

  "It's like the Marie Celeste,” says the smaller boy with the big eyes, Jeremy. “Lost at sea, adrift for months."

  You don't know the half of it, rues the house to itself.

  "You think they got killed?” asks Michael, the one who keeps looking at the girl when she bends over the tables and shelves. The house doesn't appreciate him at all.

  Neither does Amanda, it seems. She catches him staring and says, “Stop it.” Then she turns to the smaller boy. “There's no sign of it. No blood or anything, at least."

  "Maybe they were poisoned and they crawled outside, choking on arsenic to die in the yard or something,” says the smaller boy. The house likes his insight: yes, the Maceks had been poisoned and crawled out all right. Just not by arsenic.

  "Good theory,” says Michael, punching him on the arm.

  Amanda spreads out the newspapers on the table, the ones Mrs. Macek saved after Mr. Macek's arrest. After half a century, those lurid headlines crackle on the yellowed paper as the kids gingerly turn the pages with pinched fingers. Amanda reads them aloud, probably because Michael can't read. He looks the type.

&n
bsp; "Local Girl Missing for Three Days,” reads Amanda. The house remembers that, all right. Policemen walking the streets, swinging their lights from one side to the other, calling out her name. Women gathering in clots on each corner, whispering with their hands held to their mouths. Cub Scouts crawling in the bushes. Teenagers in trucks rumbling by late at night, chuckling over their dark jokes.

  The house, of course, could do nothing to help.

  Jeremy reads the next: “Body Found in Crawl Space by Detectives.” That actually wasn't true. A police bloodhound named Jenny dragged Kathy Henderson's bludgeoned body out from under the house while the detectives gaped. The dog pulled and pulled, and the house wished someone would just help, would just break through the rest of the rotten lattice to get her out. But they all just stared, and of course the house could do nothing.

  Mrs. Macek fainted on the porch. Mr. Macek had a lot of questions for the police, but they didn't speak Polish. Not that they were listening anyway.

  "Foreign Handyman Arrested,” says Michael. He would pick that one, wouldn't he, the article with the picture of Mr. Macek being dragged from the house in his grey overalls, squinting in the flash bulbs, wincing as cops twisted his arm more sharply than they had to? There were lots of boys like him back then, too. They just happened to be wearing uniforms.

  The house remembers the casseroles brought for Mrs. Macek and her children right after the arrest, the offerings of neighbors who didn't believe her husband could do such a horrible thing.

  "Immigrant Pleads Not Guilty to Child Murder,” crows the next headline in Michael's voice. “Dude looks crazy.” He sidles closer to Amanda, but she sidles just as far away. “The kind of guy who'd kill a girl and stuff her under the house."

  "Crazed Handyman Offers Garbled Defense at Trial,” whispers Jeremy.

  The house remembers, too, how the casseroles came fewer and fewer, stopping altogether when the autopsy photos were shown. The Macek daughters came home from the park crying, and the Macek boys came home from the baseball diamond angry.