At last the medics burst through the doors, their eyes wide, mouths chattering eagerly. Better hurry; they’re leakin’ outta his ears! one of them cries.
The staff gathers around each of the tables, cutting, scraping, taking apart and releasing vital fluids and vapors. The surgeon sweats profusely, his hands shaking.
At last the transplant is completed; there are shouts of triumph. The gallery applauds.
The patient floats off the table, turns somersaults in mid-air, turns blue and explodes.
The surgeon spends hours scrubbing at his skin, trying to remove ballerinas, psychotic dwarves, lizards in double-breasted suits, and razor-toothed rabbits. The surgeon babbles incoherently, pleasuring in his new-found disease.
He took the notebook away from Alice immediately, of course, and hid it where none of his family could possibly find it. He also talked to Alice for a long time; long enough to satisfy himself that she had been unable to read the notebook, that her verbal skills were still far too primitive to recognize more than a few basic words.
But at night, Alice began to talk to herself, singing sweet songs to no one. When she saw the worry and concern on her father’s face, she simply smiled, with an odd eagerness in her eyes. Sometimes when Jack would enter a room, Alice and Joey and Tom would look up suddenly from some secret conversation, and would not speak again until he had left the room.
After a few weeks Jack began seeing small changes in the play of the twin boys. A dark, dangerous element had become a part of their games. More and more frequently they donned old Halloween masks, wrapped themselves in dark cloth, pretended to be wizards and gnomes, demons and lizards and the most poisonous of spiders. They tied Alice to a tree and pretended they were going to burn her “at the stake!”—spoken in childish piping. Alice hadn’t seemed bothered at all, but Jack was increasingly agitated.
Jack was finding it more and more difficult to get up in the morning. He would dream all night, and then, on the verge of awakening, his consciousness vaguely aware of the sun beginning to peek beneath the bedroom window shade, a new dream—as if watching, waiting for this moment—would sink its claws into his eyelids and drag him back down into sleep.
NIGHTMARE
By
Jack Johannsen
A man who has never accomplished anything goes to bed depressed. He sleeps for days.
A nightmare crawls up onto a man’s chest and tries to eat a hole in it. A man knocks it away crying, Haven’t I suffered enough?
A nightmare flies around a man’s room, lands on his chest, and tries to peck a hole in it. A man shoos it away whimpering, Leave me alone, I’ve never accomplished anything …
A nightmare rips out walls and bashes down doors trying to get into a man’s rooms. It finally discovers the man hiding beneath his bed.
A nightmare rips out a hole in a man’s chest with its claws, and then crawls into the hole making a snug and comfortable fit. A man is speechless with terror, but for some reason feels no discomfort.
A man builds cathedrals, assembly halls, and government buildings, and finds himself loved by almost everyone. He seems not to notice the nightmare smiling inside.
Week after week, Jack’s sleeping patterns changed. Sometimes he would sleep the night; sometimes he would stay up until dawn and sleep until lunchtime. Sometimes he would go to bed at lunchtime, sometimes he wouldn’t go to bed at all. He had stopped work on most of his contracted projects; each day he spent more and more time scribbling tales into his secret notebook, like some desperate recorder at the end of time, trying to get the last human sentence onto paper.
Sometimes his children would also rise in the middle of the night. To play, to dance, to sing—Jack was never quite sure what it was they did, and he was always unaccountably afraid to interrupt them. Jack’s wife slept through it all.
But Jack did watch them, and record: sweet Alice dressed in leaves, eating dead flies off the windowsill. Brave Tom sitting naked in the corner, rocking, making humming noises deep in his throat. Strong Joey smacking himself hard in the chest, throwing his head back as if to howl, but no sound coming out, however bright and red his face became.
Jack sometimes believed that the so-called common bonds which held families together were largely illusory. There were just too many separate, conflicting needs involved. Children needed to emancipate; parents needed to hold on. Fathers and mothers needed to accept their forthcoming deaths; children needed to believe they would live forever, and fathers and mothers, indeed, needed them to believe this. Husbands and wives needed to pretend that they knew what was going on inside their spouse’s head. Husbands and wives needed to pretend we don’t all die alone.
SLICING THE HOUSE
By
Jack Johannsen
The young married couple was still learning the best way to slice the house.
Chainsaws in hand, they attacked the front door frame at a line parallel with the windows. Wood sputtered from the blades as they sang through doorframe, wall, window frame, pane, and flower boxes.
And all the time the house screamed I LOVE IT! I LOVE IT! as loud as it could.
Practice brought new and innovative methods to their marriage. Unusual angles and sawing stances found their way into the nuptial repertoire. Sometimes they sawed from the chimney line down. Sometimes they began at the eaves.
And all the time the house screamed its blood scream, I LOVE IT! I LOVE IT! as loud as it could.
WE LOVE IT! WE LOVE IT! the maturing couple screamed in reply.
Children eventually came into the marriage, and they too were well-sliced and diced, with as much care and craft as had been taken with the house.
The old married couple debated and studied long hours on the best way to slice a child.
Tradition is to be cherished, the extended family to be valued. Even today you can walk by this little house at the edge of our town. The married couple slicing the house, the married couple slicing their eight children, the children slicing their eight spouses, the children and their spouses slicing their own twenty-three children.
And the twenty-three grandchildren in turn, slicing away at the old home place.
And all screaming in unison, their throats raw and bleeding, WE LOVE IT! WE LOVE IT! WE LOVE IT!
In the books Jack Johannsen published, fathers and mothers were heroes, children lived forever, and houses were all the bright colors of a rainbow that possessed two hundred shades. In the notebooks Jack Johannsen hid away behind a hidden panel in his study, parents and children were afraid of one another, pursued by the strange dark animals who wore their faces.
THE DISASTER
By
Jack Johannsen
Why does he test himself so? What began as a nightmare has now become an active, daylight fantasy. Some vaguely-defined disaster has struck his part of the globe; characterized by landslides, floods, tremors, great upheavals of earth, it resembles most those nineteenth century fantasies of straying asteroids and comets upsetting the world-as-we’ve-known-it. But the specific disaster is hidden from him. All he knows is that his three children are in the other city, the one fifty miles away, and he can’t reach them.
The fantasy is quite detailed. His children are trapped in a burning house; they are on the top floor, the corner room by the stairwell. But the stairwell is in flames. Or they’re trapped with his wife beneath the rubble in the city’s ancient sewer system. He stretches and prepares muscles, contemplating what he might do. There’s always the question: who does he save first, his children or his wife? Is there time to save all four? Is there time to save but one? How might the survivors feel, if even after his most desperate attempts, one of them is swept away by the rampaging waters? How will he feel?
Inevitably, the terrible, realistic part of the fantasy sweeps over him. For in a true cataclysm, all available routes to the other city would be destroyed. There would be no opportunities for his imagined heroics. The police would stop his vehicle. And there are the widesp
read effects of the disaster itself—mightn’t he be killed, before any rescue attempt even got off the ground?
Why does he test himself so? The fantasy allows him to ask: what would I really do, if my fantasy actually occurred? He can satisfy himself with the knowledge that he would indeed attempt exactly those things he’s fantasized doing. He would weep, scream, rend his hair, and make every possible attempt to reach his children in the doomed, other city. And he would rage at the authorities’ need to dissuade him.
He can prove something quite difficult for him to express—that he does love them, for why else would he feel so desperate? But who created this disaster, orchestrated all the elements of this holocaust to provide the maximum destruction?
Who has set fire to his children’s hair?
He thinks himself a child. He’s been asleep, part of … what? The darkness, some mysterious sound, something … absorbing him? He wakes up. He’s alone in his crib, a part of
… nothing. He tears the crib apart. He rips up his stuffed toys. He howls like a small wolf into the darkness.
Suddenly he is quiet. He waits for any abrupt change.
Early one morning Jack Johannsen found the corpse of his daughter Alice in the hallway outside her bedroom. He picked up the body and held it in his arms, amazed at how light it was, amazed that he should be able to hold such a precious thing anywhere outside a fairy tale.
Her lips were blue, her eyes dark and shuttered. Her skin as white as milk or clouds or snow. When he started to cry she opened her eyes and said, “Don’t be scared, Daddy. I’m not.” And then she began wiping off her makeup, grinning.
And then Tom and Joey ran out into the hallway laughing, Joey’s arm severed at the elbow, Tom’s face battered almost beyond recognition, and yet he was still grinning through the dark, bloody bruises.
“We’re all going to die someday, Daddy,” they said, and laughed, and fell down dead, and got up and laughed some more.
And Jack embraced them, kissing the blood and gore away, getting it on his own lips and cheeks, smearing his eyelids with it, and looking at his new horror face in the mirror and laughing with them.
THRUMM
Are you feelin’ sick?
He used to dream of a music that would set him free.
Are you feelin’ mad?
Sometimes it began as a thrumm in the background of a dream, and exploded into flying birds’ wings, soldiers crying as they shot their muzzles full of fragmented insect parts into the wide-open mouths of dead infants.
Are you feelin’ anything?
Sometimes he knew there was another self in him, a monster hiding there, that could be tamed only by acknowledging its existence, which most of the time he wasn’t willing to do. But every time he ran away from it, every time he stopped looking at it, it took over.
Even in his most coherent dreams the sound was just out of reach, awash in a cascade of chords or obscured by the background noise of his own voice complaining of some pain or fear. In fact it often seemed that his favorite music—and the favorite music of so many—was simply amplified complaints. He was convinced that if he could but isolate that music and hear it clearly, such complaints would no longer be relevant, pain would no longer be relevant, because the resultant vibration would bring him so deeply down into his secret self that even the pain might be celebrated, because it was so very much his own.
Then put a knife into dad dad dad …
He never really knew his father, who had been a man of infrequent, and violent visitations.
“Don’t let me catch you with that music, boy! Don’t let me catch you!”
His father was in charge of the rules, no matter where he was. He didn’t allow music in the house, and Rex’s mother, out of fear or habit or indifference to the melodies, followed through with the stricture.
Tell them what you think! Tell them what you feel! “Where’d you get that radio? You know what your father would say!” Tell them every one what’s real!
“What’d I tell you? What’d I tell you!” His father’s face in his face, but his father’s face so red and enormous it seemed to have no clear boundaries. “You know what that music will do to you, boy? Can you even guess?” Tell them tell them tell them.
His last memory of his father was of an official-looking car parked out in front of the house, men in uniform milling around and leading his father out to the car all bound up in canvas and straps. Then his father looking up at Rex’s upstairs window, staring at Rex, screaming “Tell them!” over and over.
Much later he would find out that his father spent the last years of his life in one of those “facilities.” Tell them! He would hear scattered rumors of murders, and worse, over the years, but nothing conclusive. Tell them! Sometimes when his mother was unhappy with Rex, she’d tell him that he was beginning to act just like his father. Tell them your secret name!
“Don’t lock me in the closet, ma! There’s no food in here! You’ll go off drinkin’ and forget about me! I just know it!”
“You talk to me with respect! You talk to me with that mad in your voice and I ain’t got no choice but to lock you in there!”
“Ma! Ma, I gotta use the bathroom!”
“You should’ve thought of that before. The way you been talkin’ to me. You must think you’re somethin’ else!”
The way you love me really makes me wanna scream …
With some songs you’ll always remember where you were when you first heard them. “I Need Your Loving,” “Strawberry Fields,” “Purple Haze,” “My Girl.” Sometimes the words or maybe the tune, or more often both, were such a perfect match to what it was you were going through that you started thinking that the song had made it happen. The song made you fall in love or out of love or made you beat up that guy that time at the dance after homecoming. It wasn’t just the words—sometimes the tunes themselves seemed to say things to you that weren’t in the words of the songs at all. The Stones, the Beatles, Wilson Pickett and Stevie Ray Vaughn all had this direct line into your head and they were just pumping the voltage on through, raising the volume until your hands and feet were jumping.
Tear this whole place down!
It was while his momma had him locked in the closet, all those years ago, that he’d first heard the thrumm in his head, in his heart, and in the music that filtered down through the cracked and peeling ceiling.
He used to think the music had put the thrumm into his head. Don’t you know I’d never lie to you? But now he knew the music was an echo, a litmus test, a reflection, a Xerox copy, a microphone slipped down into the center of the soul. It reverberated with what it found, amplified, and broadcast it for everybody else to hear and see.
The Rolling Stones playing “Sympathy for the Devil” hadn’t caused the violence at Altamont, any more than “Helter Skelter” had sent Manson’s groupies out the door with knives in their hands. Something else had, and the music had pointed it out.
That was why it was so important to listen to the music. For those all important dispatches straight from the secret self.
What you need … what you see … is something else!
The music had something to point out in Rex, too, something scary. He thought he’d better find it before he did something that made Altamont and the Manson murders look like sweetness and light. Something else was in him, all right, some kind of big bad thrumm, and he had to find that thrumm something before it was too late.
Sometimes in his dreams Screamin’ Jay Hawkins sang and danced naked holding his dick in his hand.
July, 1952: He was twelve years old and locked in his room and the old guy in the apartment above theirs had been playing this funky old beat-up guitar about six hours straight.
“I’m gonna kill that old fucker!” his momma had screamed outside his door.
“You like the music?” he had whispered to himself. “Yeah, it’s food.”
Years later Rex would recognize some Otis Rush, John Lee Hooker, and T-Bone Walker in what th
e old man had been playing, but back then it was just the way the sounds seemed to reach down into his belly and rasp against his bones, and the way a certain vague sound, a shadow note that floated behind the blues riffs, a thrumm down his backbone that made him feel the closest he’d ever been to outright, uncontrolled craziness.
There had been good in that feeling, energy and life and a jitterbug in the feet, but also this: a quick fantasy of bashing his mother over the head with that old guitar and then strangling her with the strings.
Yah-yak-year-yayayaya-yeah!
The power of that fantasy, the sense that he had it in him to do such things, got him to listen to every song, new and old, coming out of the radio. Listening for the sound, listening for the thrumm that would bring on the fantasy, and the presence of something else. Preventive medicine. As long as he couldn’t get to that something else there wasn’t much he could do to change it. Over the years he would sharpen his listening skills considerably, but the trail of those notes would remain subtle and elusive. Tell them! Tell them that you bleed!
One morning when he was in the closet Rex realized that something must have happened to the old man who lived upstairs, because he wasn’t hearing the music anymore.
When you can’t hear the notes … when you can’t hear the song …
“Ma! What’d you do, ma? I can’t hear the music, ma!”
But there was no voice on the other side of the door. He found himself straining to hear even the hoarse, alcoholic snores his mother made two-thirds of every day, but there was nothing, no sound, no voice, no music. Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear it?
What he could hear, instead, after hours alone in the dark, was a distant thrumm, a discordant series of notes, a harsh semblance of a voice painful to hear and terribly familiar.
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