That night I walked slowly down the center aisle, uncertain where to begin my excursion. When I finally set off, abandoning the token security of the firefly bulbs, I flashed my light across a desert of dust and piles of rotting lumber. Like toys scattered by the offspring of a monstrous alien or the exoskeletons of insects destined to rule the earth, huge casting molds littered the area. Similar to a spelunker exploring an abominable chasm, a balance of powers guided my steps: apprehension and prudence stalemated curiosity.
As I prepared to head to the opposite side, my light conjured something from the darkness. I jumped back and bested the urge to flee. Almost hidden between a haphazardly stacked pile of boards and an enormous polyhedral mold sat a wooden crate wrapped in a dense veil of cobwebs. Its carvings, too elaborate for a piano box, bespoke a treasure chest from the orient. After slashing through the silken wrap, I pushed the top an eighth of the way off. It had the warmth, the unmistakable tactility of a living being. I brandished my light, prepared for whatever secrets it contained.
Before I could investigate, a remembrance struck my head like an arrow. In the bottom drawer of the guards’ desk was a book titled The Year’s Best Horror Stories. One featured a watchman in an analogous predicament. Per the traditional disparagement, he spent his working hours in a schnapps-induced stupor. After becoming lost on one of his rounds he found a mysterious box and opened it. Human heads with “kiwi-green skin” opened their eyes when he screamed. In a breathtaking twist, he dropped his flashlight. Their eyes, however, “glowed like creatures from the deep.” The heads floated out of the box “wailing and snarling.” Per another wicked stereotype vilifying his brave calling, the watchman “waddled” down a long corridor with dozens of little lights in fast pursuit. “They cast a shadow of his head on the door while he sought the right key.” The story ended with “blunt bites from cold mouths.”
An original thesis of mine is that the storage space of the mind is finite. A man should always be on guard not to clutter his head with nonsense, or, if he cannot abstain, he should force himself to forget it soon afterwards. The theoretical framework of this wretched story offended me on so many levels I tried to banish it before an entire floor of my brain became cluttered with objections and criticisms. As it clung to my mental dumpster like a mound of dog excrement, a tremendous urge swelled up within me to return to the office and lash off a letter to the author posthaste, as though this could purge my fury and nullify the malign spell of the book. Perhaps all critiques are thus. Glaring at the dark opening, I composed a draft in seconds.
• • •
Sir,
If you were banking on your readers being too horrified by “Rent-a-Cop and the Mystery Box” to notice its incoherencies and defamation, your judgment was grievously flawed. I noticed. The following objections were written in the order in which they provoked a rational mind. They could perhaps be written in a different order. Re-arrange them if you like.
Your story ended with the implication that the floating heads devoured the watchman. Question: How on earth does a disembodied head digest its food? The secondary disadvantage to being a disembodied head (the primary being death) is the lack of a body and the deprivations this absence entails. Before you commit any further scribbling I suggest you observe an autopsy. Ask the coroner for a quick tour of the digestive system and make a note of its proximity to the head. In the same key, your story had the heads making all sorts of noises — in the absence of a respiratory system. Again, have the coroner explain the relationship between lungs and wailing.
Your rebuttal fails — miserably. You maintain that these disembodied heads can transgress the laws of biology (apparently physics too, given that they were floating). They are obviously endowed with evil supernatural powers. Very well, how could “supernaturally endowed” heads be constrained by a mere box? Could they not have conspired to hover together and lift the lid? Your story says nothing about any locks. Could they not have gnawed their way out? What were they doing for food prior to the watchman? Did they come out at night to hunt for insects? Was someone feeding them? Was someone keeping them as pets? Who would want such pets?
Your portrayal of the watchman as a bumbling, overweight dipsomaniac is unforgivable. As a practitioner of this noble calling I take personal offense. (Should you ever suffer from the suicidal melancholy so common to writers of fiction, I recommend you attempt to trespass on the property I defend.) In case you were not aware, this portrayal is known as a cliché: writers are supposed to avoid them. Likewise, having the watchman fumble with his keys was simply masterful. I suggest, for a future story, a nubile girl whose car will not start.
In conclusion, “Rent-a-Cop and the Mystery Box” is, beyond certainty, the most incongruous and preposterous horror story since Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Stylistically it is atrocious. Do not listen to the inbred parrots in your creative writing program. If I want “gritty realism” I will defecate or watch my brother feed goldfish to his Piranha. Readers turn to books for Beauty. In the tragic event that you paid $250,000 for a degree that taught you otherwise you should retain the services of an attorney who specializes in fraud.
Wrathfully,
Petronius Jablonski
• • •
This summed things up rather well, but in an instant I conceived of two new and even more damning objections. I decided against returning to the office. A proper refutation and healthful disposal would require nothing short of a Kantian critique and would have to wait. With a vow to abstain from all horror fiction, I returned to the edge of the cobweb-veiled crate, prepared to plunge my light into the darkness of the baroque chest like a saber.
The light flickered and died. It was second shift’s responsibility to check the batteries. Judging from the lascivious periodicals polluting the desk, he had become enslaved by the merciless tyrant of onanism. (Does the suicide of our culture not vindicate Plato? Sanctifying freedom of speech is akin to extolling small pox: “I do not approve of the pestilence you spread, but I shall defend to the death your right to spread it.”)
Upon my return to the warehouse I must have chosen a different spot to digress from the center aisle. My light revealed a staircase against the wall. Amber with rust like some remnant of the Titanic, it wound its way into the darkness above. Without making any conscious decision, I found myself on the steps, the metal groaning beneath my feet. I climbed and climbed but progress eluded me as though I were pulling some great chain out of a void. When I made the dubious choice of assessing my progress by shining the light at the ground, I found myself above an abyss whose evil gravity clawed at me, in the middle of outer space with no constellations for guidance or comfort. I clutched the railings and the flashlight hurtled away like a comet, making a crunching sound as it disappeared.
With an application of my excellent lessons in Quietude, I exiled all fears of my predicament. “It is not being trapped high upon a jagged staircase in the dark that disturbs me, but the opinions I form about it.” I then exchanged the toxic opinion for a salubrious one. “Indeed, this is a marvelous turn of events.”
Tiny lights twinkled in the distance, their parallelism demonstrating the propinquity of the ceiling. Reasoning from the inevitability of my return to earth, I approached the summit. My primary concern was striking the door and tumbling backward. Spurious concerns of sticking my hand into a silky web and struggling helplessly as a giant spider scurried down from the ceiling did not plague me. Nor was this scenario frightening when I read it in that execrable book.
A cool breeze whispered promises of liberation and my hand quickened its probe. The door had no handle and flapped open to another world. Anthills of rock rose and fell up to the edge of the cliff, beyond which the velvet blanket of the lake rustled beneath the nightlight in the sky. “No one is seeing this but me,” I said in awe, succumbing to a philosophic spasm, overwhelmed by the inexpressibility of things. Even if I exhaustively described what I saw, smelled, heard, and thought, something frustratingly int
egral would remain untouched. Standing on the edge of a warehouse looking out at the lake, I experienced something I could never communicate to another. Maddeningly more than the sum of my senses, it yearned to escape but could not be freed.
I chided myself. To some degree all experiences are like this; one simply does not notice or care most of the time. Yet the provocative contemplation persisted. I suspect a few of the major philosophers may have experienced something not unlike it. Whereas I have not encountered a proper label for it in the course of my prodigious studies, I hereby name it the Petronius Sensation (“Jablonski,” regrettably, does not have the ring or singularity of my first name). When a great philosopher (or a phenomenally gifted common man) experiences the Petronius Sensation, the natural inclination is to preserve and validate the intangible feature by sharing it, the way a scientist independently confirms his findings. And when its essence slips through all verbal nets, he begins to question its reality, to wonder if it ever happened at all.
With the regularity of the tide, another profound reflection supplanted the first. “Is my Bonneville the sum of its individual features or the base upon which they stand, the canvass where their beauty is displayed?”
By investing the time and cogitation proportionate to the prominence of this question, I expected a definite conclusion before the end of the summer, in time for my term paper. Realizing an analysis of the subject from a height could clinch things, I walked to the other side of the roof. Joyously prominent were my car’s length and rectangularity, displayed by the selective glare of the moon beaming down like the spotlight from a watchtower.
“I should have parked in front of the office in total darkness,” I whispered.
“Nonsense,” scolded Reason. “Who is going to see your car out here?”
My return to earth was time consuming but not as disagreeable as I had feared. My meditations elutriated my mind and I attained secure possession of the poise required when climbing down a long staircase in the dark, wholly exempt from vacuous fears of big claws grasping me by the ankles and ripping me away from my tenuous moorings.
Exhausted and looking forward to some edifying diversions, I returned to the office. Flanking the remains of a desk and an iron coat tree, two windows covered with plastic insulation served as an interminable reminder of the nightmarish landscapes that must have haunted Monet. On summer, fall, and spring nights I spent my free time outside in the company of a beloved friend.
When I stepped onto the patio my heart lodged in the back of my throat. On the windshield glared an eerie orb like the headlight of a locomotive or the cataractal eye of some superannuated deity or a pearl the size of a beach-ball. The moon’s reflection, rendered convex by the curvature of the glass, shone as though it were the cause and not the effect, as though it were a light casting an illusion in the heavens. (A serious author of fiction could deftly convert this into a fine story, wherein a protagonist in ancient times stumbles upon a wizard’s garden and discovers how the moon and stars are projections. His conflict: Should he destroy the bewitching devices in the name of Truth or tolerate their deceit out of empathy for his deluded fellow man?)
An expatriate of Time, I could have watched the birth and death of galaxies or placed winning bets at glacier races. Had the windshield been a millimeter less in width, had my car been parked at an angle one ten-thousandth of a degree differently, the giant celestial snail would have deviated from its trajectory. But with the determinism of a planetary alignment or like cross-thatched strands in the weave of Fate, the fit and crossing were perfect, as though they belonged together.
When it left the windshield I staggered inside, catatonic from my curious encounter. “What an astounding series of coincidences,” I said, reeling from the incredulity of a man who wins fifty coin tosses in a row. I gained repose by means of Lucretius’ sobering teaching regarding the far stranger feats performed by atoms swirling aimlessly in the void (the creation of the world, among others), compared to which the synchronisms I just experienced seemed modest indeed.
My return to the patio discharged all notions of coincidences like bullets from a gun. I ran to my car but stopped several feet away to maintain a safe distance. A rectangle of white light perfectly circumscribed its shape, suspended about two feet above the roof.
“The moon did this,” I said in awe and trembling. “But why?”
Engrossed by the halo, I skipped the rest of my rounds. Its light made the blue of my car come alive like the raging waters of an Amazon stream. Imposing and mystifying, it shone brighter than the fiery clouds billowing up from the aluminum recycling plant beyond the trees, and it attracted no bugs.
Toward the end of my shift I went to the edge of the cliff. The night’s proceedings afflicted me with uncertainties and trepidation, diminishing the likelihood of Quietude. The water splashed against the shore far below, bruising itself black and blue. For a blissful moment the cool breeze and the gentle applause from the waves overthrew the tyranny of my thoughts and I faded away, glimpsing the Eden from whence man was banished, the nullity to which he is destined to return.
On the way back I rehearsed a response to the next sentry. “The halo is an experimental accessory that will not be commercially available until my brother, Hieronymus, perfects and patents it.” Given that other guards had expressed rube-like awe at my stereo’s ability to shake the office long before my car appeared on the gravel road, an appeal to the inscrutable nature of technology could scarcely fail.
To my relief and surprise, the halo had vanished. As crimson guts spilled from the belly of the night, first shift approached, his 1974 Buick Electra stirring up clouds of dust like some chariot riding out of a whirlwind. Watchmen, sentinels of the remorseless hinterland between dusk and morn, priests of the rosary beading all the days, keepers of the promise that renewal comes with dawn, are we not warriors?
In subsequent weeks I discovered the halo only returned during a full moon when I was on duty. On those nights as I watched it bathe my car in its sparkling mist, a baritone of foreboding vanquished the lilting soprano of Reason. Fascinated yet apprehensive, I could not desist the impression that some predaceous force had designs on my car, designs I was powerless to foil.
Throughout the summer I spent all the time vouchsafed to me by Fate at the helm of my stately yacht. Our rudderless voyages, free from the dictates of a compass and map, where the sails were fanned by whims and the destinations existed only in retrospect, were in perfect conformity with Nature, whose pointless journey ought to be celebrated, not denied with vulgar myths.
Disquieting moments arose after the parade of a cruise. I parked in front of my house and emerged triumphant. Before leaving for work I went on the porch to fortify myself with a cigarette. After all the fantastic adventures on the concrete seas, the magnificent thunder of Beethoven, and the paralysis suffered by other drivers from sheer humility, there remained a big blue car parked on a quiet street and a man sitting in the dark. If there be gods, will they not feel the same haunting contrast when our world becomes vapor? Should they not be pitied?
Summer dissolved, leaving the skeletal remains of fall. At work I remained in the office between rounds, eschewing the lascivious periodicals hidden in the desk and listening to a transistor radio tuned to easy listening (opposed to the “agonizing listening” of most stations). It is a rancid scrap of conventional wisdom that no man is an island. Such nonsense stems from modernity’s ignorance of the path to wisdom, for which solitude is essential. In the dwindling twilight of civilization we forget that philosophy is a way of life, not an idle game to be performed over cappuccino. The muscles of the mind, far more important than those this vain age is obsessed with, require steady and progressive exercise to adapt and survive in their inhospitable environment.
In the days of the Stoics men of wisdom and decency graced our foolish planet with indefectible teachings and superlative examples. When their noble breed perished, when their doctrines were kidnapped and prostituted
by a noxious cult, a dreadful night consumed the earth. Rather than using the lantern of solitude to tread the narrow switchback of wisdom, to explore the humbling vastness above and the void within, modern man lobotomizes himself with an odious bric-a-brac of gadgets. As his mind atrophies, the ever-intrusive enemy, thought, is conquered. Darkness prevails.
Alone on third shift I was an island, hidden in an ocean of deep thoughts and surrounded by a steady rotation of sharks. From this I did not recoil. Quietude was not merely an acquaintance, but a mistress (with the exception of Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and occasionally Fridays when Sandy snuck in to visit). My spirit soared as I sought the Truth, a fearless explorer armed only with a map whose legend read HERE THERE BE MONSTERS.
And the halo? Though unable to study it with the detachment of a scientist, I gradually became inured to it. How? How could a man become inured to so extraordinary a phenomenon, to something so breathtakingly strange? With the shield of philosophy, of course. But this is too general an answer. For the particulars I must now unveil my pièce de résistance, the crown jewel of my contributions to philosophy: Petronius’ Shovel.
(The Reader is advised to bookmark this section, if not for purposes of edification then simply for monetary ones. This concept alone is worth his $10. He will soon recall the use of my Shovel in Part I. He should then return and study that section. Given our expeditious pace, I could not make a formal introduction.)
Just as William of Occam gave philosophy his Razor (undeniably useful but somewhat overrated), I hereby contribute my Shovel. This tool will prove to be as easy to use as its namesake. An example of it in action will serve as a good first approach to understanding it.
The Annals Page 3
