OCT. 1
1936: Franco comes to power in Spain.
It was one of those bothersome autumn days. Hotter than it should have been, clearer, so that he was thinking of springtime, but the vegetation had yellowed, browned, as if there had been an enormous fire nearby, killing everything. The sky had that red cast of distant fires, and sometimes he could smell the vaguest trace of smoke. Spanish skies, he thought, like during the civil war there. The world looking vaguely normal: the trees standing, buildings standing, but fires were blazing underneath, creating smoky shadows that spotted the land.
He decided to take a walk by the creek, which he followed until the dead leaves had covered it, and then until these were gradually replaced with sand, and it was a mix of shallow water and gray sands he was chasing, and then the creek was all sand, a narrow ribbon of brilliant bleached grit winding between the trees and steep red clay embankments.
Where he eventually found the generalissimo, sitting by the sand with his shoulders hunched, his ancient hands fluttering in the red air.
“You’re here alone,” he said to the dictator.
He couldn’t keep his eyes off the man’s red, fluttering hands. In pictures, the generalissimo had worn gloves, and seemed so dignified, so serene.
“My children are all gone,” the generalissimo said. “Most have died, which is the unjust way of things - the others have gone on with their lives.” He gazed further down the stream of sand where it turned off into the dark green shadows. A lizard crawled across his bald pate leaving scratches in the glistening pink.
“How do I keep them with me?” he asked the generalissimo. “How do I make sure I am always with them?”
When the old man laughed, a beetle slipped out of his lips and became tangled in his skimpy moustache. “I took advantage of their disorder to centralize my power. I ruled them with an iron fist. I told them whom they could see and what they could be. I tapped their phones so that I might limit what went into their little ears, and I spoke to them constantly and at length concerning all subjects imaginable. I tried to be their conscience. I tried to be their religion.”
“And still they left you behind?”
“Fathers are the hands that embrace you, and then hold you too firmly. Then they become merely the landscape you walk through on your way to somewhere else.”
Cracks had begun to form in the top of the generalissimo’s head. Roaches and scorpions pried their way out from between the thin layers of skin and spilled to the sand below. Still his hands moved constantly, as if to stir the redness out of the air.
“The ones that died …”
“They all die. They are not really part of you. You are the landscape,” He began walking away from the generalissimo. “It’s not fair. Where is the justice?”
The dry laugh behind him. “There is no justice. I should know.”
He turned around. The generalissimo’s head was a cascade of dry, dead flakes which, once beginning their tumble, fractured and brought the rest of his body with them.
The red air picked them up, mixed them with the leaves and sand, and sent them down the winding ribbon of white. Cal started on his way back to the cabin, anxious to get away from the smell of smoke.
OCT. 2
1879: Wallace Stevens is born in Reading, Pa.
1985: Rock Hudson dies of AIDS in Paris.
Autumn Refrain. … grackles gone …
He’d had this gay friend, Leon. They’d been friends for years. A gigantic drama of a man, a splendid disaster, always in love. They talked very little about AIDS, because Leon didn’t want to, and he felt silly being more concerned about the disease than Leon was.
Leon was a kisser. He kissed everybody. Sloppy wet kisses from enormous neon Leon lips. When Leon kissed you, you stayed kissed. When Leon kissed him, he didn’t feel threatened– even though being from a small rural area he was generally self-conscious about such things. But Leon wasn’t trying to seduce him– Leon just loved him. And he loved Leon.
Every time Leon came over it was a party. Linda and the kids loved the man, too. He’d throw open the door wearing this huge chartreuse cape, and then there would be Leon hugs and kisses for everyone.
Skreak and skritter …
Leon’s visits became less frequent. He appeared more and more life-size. A shrunken tragedy: sweaty, worried-looking, his lips dry, peeling. They still would not speak of it. Leon still kissed them all, laid those cracking lips against their upturned faces. Dried mushrooms against their cheeks, a brittle scrabble of insect wings. Skreak and skritter.
When Leon died he had not seen his friend in weeks. He died alone, with the disease unvoiced. He would never forgive Leon for that.
… and sorrows of the sun …
He was ashamed even now to think of it, but after Leon died he visualized often those dry kisses on his cheeks, Linda’s cheeks, his children’s cheeks, and felt repulsed. No reason to be afraid, but when had he ever needed a reason? No reason for nightmares. But love and kisses had killed Leon. Might not love and kisses kill his own family?
In his dreams he heard the skreak and skritter, Leon’s kisses crawling over his children’s bodies.
Then late one night in his office at home, a dry rubbing against the pane. A press and the smack of lips. He’d looked up and Leon’s kiss was at the window, open to him and all dark to the bottom.
He jumped away from his desk and looked again. Nothing adhered to the glass but a residue of sorrows and moonlight. He walked to the door of his office and looked down the hall. He walked down the hall and checked each room: in their bedroom his children curled asleep, safe among the shadows.
But when he went back to his office he found the window open, the light fixture shattered, and a skreak and skritter in some dark corner of the room.
He stumbled around the room blindly, his arms hanging down apelike to the floor, his hands open and anxious to catch Leon’s crawling and scuttling kiss. But the kiss stayed always one dry scrape ahead of him, even though he could not see it, could only hear the smack and the nibble of it against the wooden floor, the skreak and skritter of it as its unseen appendages provided locomotion through the dark.
You’ll smother them. Linda had always told him that. There’s such a thing as loving your kids too much.
But he could not push them out of his embrace, nor keep his own kisses away from their precious and timeless skin.
That night he’d gone madly chasing through their darkened home, hands frantic and spasming to grasp the love that kills.
He stumbled through the kitchen, hearing the skritter over the counters, the illuminated surfaces catching brittle reflections of Leon’s kiss as Leon’s kiss swept Formica and linoleum, white enamel and chrome and stainless steel. Hearing the skreak as the door eased open, and Leon’s kiss scrambled through the dining room and living room, then back around to the hallway, and the few feet remaining before the children’s bedroom.
The stillness of everything as he raced into the bedroom, and found Leon’s kiss perched on Jennie’s pillow. Whispering into her ear.
Telling her a story.
Skreak and skritter when the kiss’s tale was finally told. And dropped off the pillow, curled itself up on the floor like a brilliant dried pod.
Which he swept into a dustpan and carefully, sorrowfully, buried in their back yard.
OCT. 3
1900: Thomas Wolfe is born in Asheville, NC.
1990: East and West Germany are reunited.
a stone, a leaf, an unfound door … Like many boys, especially those raised alone, he would have loved to have known the look of his mother’s face before he came to be in her womb. This look, of course, was forever beyond him. Just as a true knowledge of his father or anyone else in his life for that matter was beyond him. Even the hearts of his children were beyond him. These were doors he would forever be denied.
It was not simply that you could not go home again. Home was the place you’d dreamed of, but where you�
��d never lived.
He used to study those few pictures of his mother taken before his birth as if they were cultural icons. She looked nothing like the way he remembered her. But the study of those pictures was always oddly satisfying– as if a barrier between them had evaporated, and a horde of lies, wishes, and dreams had crossed over from the life that came before him.
So he found that walking these woods which surrounded the cabin in which she’d raised him he could not help but think of her, how she had walked these same paths, smelled similar smells, and perhaps felt some of the same wistfulness he himself was now feeling. For wherever her heart’s home might have been– and however welcome Cora might have made her feel– it could not possibly have been here where she had lain awake in fear. She, too, had been in exile, wandering through this prison of earth, denied the secret language which might express how she truly felt.
A stone, a leaf … these were everywhere, charred and burning under the autumnal sun. He looked past the thin trees that bordered the creek and saw an angel walking out of the brown fields beyond, out of a doorway he would never be able to find again.
The angel was a miniature: only five feet or so, with pale skin and mousy brown hair. The edges of her ivory wings had yellowed, as if kept pressed too long between the leaves of an album.
Once she was close enough to touch she stopped, as if waiting for his hand. But he found he couldn’t move, because whatever the rules might be in this particular story he knew that one of them, surely, was that a living human being dare not touch an angel.
This was the way. This was the way she had looked on the other side of that wall of time and generation which had separated them. This was the way she had looked beyond that unfound door.
Angels never age– this appeared to be another rule. For now she was the same age as he, perhaps even a bit younger.
She leaned forward as if to speak. He leaned to meet her and suddenly knew he was going to kiss her.
But then she opened her mouth and he saw that her tongue was gone. His father had finally caught up with her and chiseled it out.
It was yet another rule, he thought. Angels are always mute. They can never tell you how they feel about you. You may assume they love you, but you will never know for sure.
OCT. 4
1862: Edward L. Stratemeyer– creator of the Rover Boys, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Nancy Drew– is born.
1957: The Soviet Union puts Sputnik I into orbit.
For my son Parker on the occasion of his thirteenth birthday. I’m sorry I won’t be there with you.
Parker and his buddy Nathan had had many strange adventures together. The Mystery of the Albino Mule. The Adventure of the Runaway Robot Tractor. The Case of the Missing Social Studies Notes. The Dilemma of the Dented Toaster. But none to compare with the time they found the space vessel out beyond Hobson’s barn. They should have known something special was liable to happen that night, what with Nathan wearing his lucky shorts and Parker carrying the mummified cat’s paw his Uncle Andrew had given him last Christmas.
They’d been camping out by the creek when the thing came down. Parker saw it first: the long winding trail of smoke. When they got there it was still hot, but approachable. It had a triangular hole in its surface like a keyhole, and of course Nathan wanted to get the “ship” (Nathan was already calling it that) opened right away. Nathan was always in a hurry.
Luckily Parker had the utility knife his dad had given him for his birthday. It had one of those triangular can opener thingies on it. His dad had always kidded Parker that he better not be opening any beer cans with that thing. His dad told that joke so many times it wasn’t funny anymore, just annoying.
But the opener fit the triangular keyhole exactly and a curved panel slid back. Then they both jumped away because a thick white mass of stuff– it looked like toothpaste but it wasn’t– came oozing out.
Before they could do anything else, the ooze had divided into two streams which suddenly piled up on the ground in front of them into two white columns which pulsed and faded, and then a copy of Nathan and a copy of Parker were staring down at them.
And before they could do anything the pretend Parker and the pretend Nathan ran away.
They should have called somebody for help, but they didn’t. They didn’t know why they didn’t– maybe they were afraid nobody would believe them. But later they knew for sure they should have called for help because people started disappearing all over town and once they started following the pretend Parker and the pretend Nathan they found out that these two were melting people down into more of this toothpaste stuff and storing them in Mason jars in the high school basement. Even their own parents were melted.
Pretty soon new versions of the people who had disappeared were showing up– the pretend Nathan and Parker would just vomit some of this stuff out and a perfect replica would appear. After awhile there were perfect replicas of the mayor and the city council people and the school crossing guard and all their teachers and their parents as well.
And the sad thing, the upsetting thing, was that they thought they liked these fake parents better than their real parents.
But they found the machine the aliens had used to melt everybody and Parker figured out how to reverse the effects (with a little help from his utility knife). So they went down to the high school basement and started restoring people. The people all came out naked, and Nathan and Parker looked at them, but only for a little while.
The bad thing, though, was that some of the Mason jars were accidentally broken so some of the people weren’t restored but they couldn’t tell who got restored and who didn’t because people were spilling out of the building in all directions and fighting their duplicates and pretty soon you couldn’t tell which from what and who from who.
Somebody finally called the National Guard and then they were there and people and buildings were locked up tight until the commanding officers could get things sorted out.
Which they did, pretty much to everybody’s satisfaction. Even Nathan seemed relieved.
But not Parker. Because Parker knew that there was no way to tell if the people you thought you loved were in fact the people you thought they were. There was no way to tell if his parents were dead or not. There was no way to tell what was going on inside other people’s heads.
Parker’s real father, if it was his real father, would have told him that this new perception of his was one of the first signs of maturity.
And if he were any kind of father, he would tell Parker that he knew that sometimes the boy said to himself that he wished his father were dead. And that this feeling was perfectly normal, perfectly normal, and his father forgave him for it.
And if his father did die it would just be a coincidence. It wouldn’t be Parker’s fault at all.
He would tell him that it is the son’s task in life to feel such transient resentments and hatreds, and it is the good father’s job to forgive him these feelings.
OCT. 5
1915: the pulp Detective Story Magazine appears.
1982: Johnson & Johnson remove Tylenol from the market
after eight people die from strychnine poisoning.
For any particular cruelty, there will always be at least one perpetrator who will derive pleasure from it. Spiritual pleasure or sexual pleasure, sometimes both. That was something he wanted his children to someday understand, if he could figure out a way to teach them without also traumatizing them, as he himself felt traumatized. There were evil people in the world, people who were capable of anything. The challenge of modern life was that in order to protect yourself you had to become a kind of psychological detective. You had to learn to predict what other people were capable of, and base your decisions accordingly.
Parker was only three years old at the time of the Tylenol scare. This was, of course, in the days before tamper-proof packaging, and he’d felt compelled to examine every food item, every medicine, before anyone in the family could touch it
. Grocery shopping required hours longer while he examined the shelves for the safest-looking product. He wasn’t even sure you could trust canned foods– something could have been done to them at the factory. And he drove Linda crazy in the kitchen with his insistence on inspecting every ingredient she used.
But medicines were the worst. He’d examine each pill for irregularities and discolorations. Sometimes he let the children’s colds go untreated rather than take a risk. He would seek out suspicious faces out in the streets, anxious to figure out which were the poisoners, trying to imagine what they felt.
The man in the plastic jacket didn’t know how many he had killed, didn’t know who, didn’t even know for sure if he had killed anyone at all. Nor did he really like this term, “kill.” Or at least he didn’t think it applied to him. There needed to be another word. The whole world was poisoned– his achievement was in isolating, encapsulating, and redistributing that poison.
There was an irony in his hobby he found genuinely moving. We have been poisoning the rest of the world with our wastes, our failed drugs and pesticides, for decades. But the average consumer never thought about that, even though most of what he or she purchased was poisoned in some secret way.
Now he had succeeded in getting consumers to think about poisons in the most personal way.
Pills tended to look uniform, whether legal or illegal, safe or unsafe. It was a delicious gamble each time you swallowed one dry or with your drink of choice. Headache or paralysis. A stuffy nose or death. The risks had always been great– he’d lost half his own family before he’d reached middle age. He had simply turned those risks into dramatic art.
He liked holding the doctored pills in the palm of his hand. Tiny capsules of justice and destiny. Feeling lucky? Feeling guilty? Sometimes feeling one or the other, or both, he would mix them randomly into a bottle of virgin medicine, and take one himself, permitting destiny to decide his fate.
The pharmaceutical companies should really consider trying that. It could be advertised … one chance in a million for a quiet, peaceful death … and who knows what might happen to sales? They’d be pleasantly surprised.
The Book of Days Page 5
