The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  In those first cold days he felt himself moving with an unusual degree of purpose and direction. He made no wasted movements. He kept himself warm.

  That afternoon he found a wild goose in his back yard, frozen in place. Even the eyeballs seemed to have solidified. From its position the goose appeared to have been looking into his back bedroom window. What had attracted it? What does a frozen goose look for?

  He thought maybe it was looking in on him, wondering what he was about, why he was here. Maybe it was wondering why Cal was alone. So its curiosity had killed it. Good enough.

  But Cal couldn’t stop thinking about those frozen eyes. The forever, alltoosolid sadness in them.

  The day before Thanksgiving years ago there had been a terrible, deep snow, and Cal and Linda had carried the children on their backs to the grocery store. Cal had tripped, and tipped Parker headfirst into a three foot snow bank. Parker had cried over the cold all the way to the store and Cal, unhelpfully, had kept telling him it doesn’t do any good to cry over the cold.

  It never does any good to cry over the cold.

  He wondered if this very day his children were crying over the cold.

  That afternoon he napped before a blazing fireplace and saw Linda and his children out in enormous banks of snow. The day looked impossibly cold: even the clouds in the sky were solidifying, and in danger of becoming so heavy they would plummet to the ground.

  Linda and the children didn’t move, just stared at the house. He made them too cold. He didn’t adequately consider the effects of temperature when he abandoned them.

  He calls to them from the fire but they do not move.

  Now he sees their eyes more closely. The look of them hard and shiny. As if all they can see is cold.

  This cold, this Anarctica he brought into their lives.

  NOV. 19

  1969: Apollo 12 astronauts Conrad and Bean make man’s second landing on the moon.

  All day he slept in fits and starts, unable even to think about getting out of bed, until late afternoon when he first realized he had been in bed all day, and that he was sick. Some kind of head thing, his head like a broken sewer.

  In the middle of the night he sat up straight in bed, wide awake, with no memory of being sick, of being in bed all day. He got out of bed and walked to the window. He saw the crisp white over everything outside, the brilliance of it under the moon. He cracked the window and felt the cold. He heard the silence which seemed to go on forever.

  Death must be like this, he thought, shivering. He shut the window.

  He looked up at the moon which seemed impossibly large.

  When he was a kid watching the astronauts on TV he’d thought about how neat it would be going to the moon and walking around up there. But then he’d started thinking about how empty and lonely it would be– lonely as a snow-covered field in the middle of the night– and then he wasn’t sure it was something he wanted at all.

  People had looked up at the moon since there had been people, and what was the moon but this desolate, empty, dead place hanging over our heads. If you looked at it long enough you could tell how dead it was. If you looked at it long enough you could tell that the man in the moon, that face in the moon, was a death’s head. Two hollow eye sockets and an empty mouth with nothing good left to say.

  A figure stepped out of the trees into the snowy field in front of the cabin. Its face was blurred in the harsh light reflected off the snow.

  He wasn’t particularly disturbed by this presence. The countryside here was full of loners, old men and younger, who kept to themselves and took long walks in the middle of the night around other people’s properties. Men who spent most of their time gazing at the stars, and the moon. They knew these heavenly features better than they knew other human beings.

  The figure stepped closer to the house. Hollow eye sockets, hollow mouth. No death’s head grin, the mouth was permanently open, like the mouth in Edvard Munch’s The Shriek. It was the face of the man in the moon.

  NOV. 20

  1975: Franco dies in Madrid.

  The next day was brighter than Cal could bear. Having been up most of the night watching the man in the moon Cal had been in desperate need of sleep. But when dawn arrived the sun reflecting off crystalline snow and ice penetrated the shades and curtains effortlessly, even seemed to have passed through the solid walls to fill his cabin with a brilliance he could not possibly sleep through.

  The light made him feel as if winter had disappeared, as if in fact he was waking up in a room in some Mediterranean country. He sat up, blinded out of sleep, and rubbed his eyes for a time. Then he got dressed and crept carefully to his front door and opened it.

  The light outside seemed to have softened some, but it was still hard on his eyes. He looked around, saw ice draping the trees and bushes, snow piled into high hats over stumps and rock piles.

  And something else: a dark, damp pile of leaves and flaking debris which looked vaguely familiar. Which turned and looked at him with ancient eyes, like a grandfather coming out of a nap, his body still covered with a fluffy white blanket.

  Cal went out into the yard, the snow covering his shoes and soon soaking his knees. He wrapped his arms around the rank pile of leaf flakes and skin flakes, lifted, and carried the mess inside, pieces of it drifting down to make a trail through the snow.

  Once inside he set the old one down by the fireplace and busied himself making a fire to warm him. Once he had the kindling and logs blazing, and could feel the heat spreading through his numb face, he turned and stared at the shrunken figure and it stared back: vastly changed, but still recognizable as the generalissimo.

  “I haven’t seen you lately,” Cal began.

  “I took a trip,” the generalissimo replied, the words spat out in a series of chips from his fractured tongue.

  “It must have been a long trip, for someone in your condition, an ex-dictator and everything.”

  “The longest possible. I slept through my own decay– like most fathers, I did not even know it was happening.”

  “Did you learn things on your trip?”

  “I learned that everyone dies, then they become this pile of trash on someone’s lawn, and that is pretty much the end of it.”

  “But your children honor you? They visit the … the trash you have become?”

  “Once your children have their own lives they may visit you in body, but they do not visit you with their imaginations. What they imagine is elsewhere, with the lives they are going to live.”

  “So how do you deal with this?”

  “Those who decay do not deal,” the generalissimo replied, his words becoming more garbled as his tongue disintegrated.

  “Those who decay continue to decay, until there is nothing left and then it is the children’s turn to decay.”

  A spark exploded from the fireplace and landed on the vague shape of the generalissimo’s head. The flames quickly spread through the dry leaves, and soon reduced him to ash.

  Cal put the ash into a mason jar which he then placed high up on a shelf in the cabin’s storage cellar.

  The rest of the day it whispered broken, incoherent, fatherly advice to him.

  NOV. 21

  1877: Edison announces the invention of his “talking machine.”

  1893: Adolph “Harpo” Marx is born.

  Things had started melting around the cabin. The snow and ice, but then Cal noticed that the melting had spread to some of those things overlaid by the ice and snow: the trees and the lawn and the rough board fence and the edge of the roof. Trees grew squatter as they melted, becoming fat in the middle until they collapsed into a soft mound of green and brown. The lawn became soup as it melted, sloshing up onto the sides of the cabin, the rocks floating and bobbing before sinking well below the surface. The fence became a series of wrinkled lines as it melted, like gray spaghetti on top of the syrupy lawn. The edge of the roof became a long black strand as it melted, pooling at the corners of the house like oil
.

  There was a liquid knock at the door. Cal opened it and found Harpo Marx with one arm carrying a phonograph, the other stuck in the front of Cal’s melting door. Harpo had his bicycle horn in his mouth and was chewing on the bulb producing a series of desperate honks and squeals. Cal pulled Harpo’s arm out of the door, which closed up with a slurping sound, and showed him in.

  Harpo set the phonograph down on the floor and took his horn in his hand. Honkhonkhonkhonkhonk, he said excitedly. He reached into his oversized pants and pulled out a record which he slapped onto the turntable.

  Slapstick comedy had always made Cal nervous, for fear someone was really going to get hurt. There always seemed to be some real anger in slapstick that frightened him. It was like when his children rough-housed at home– he was always anxiously waiting for it to turn vicious.

  The record began playing. First there were several minutes of crackling static which was just like the sound of all the ice and snow melting and dripping outside, and the trees and the yard, too, bubbling and moving about.

  Then he heard voices, children’s voices, and Harpo was moving his mouth rapidly, as if it was him speaking and not the phonograph. Honk honk.

  It was his own children’s voices, warping and melting.

  Why did daddy cross the road?

  To get away from his kids.

  Cal tried to reach over and stop the record, but Harpo shoved the horn into his face and honked it so loud Cal’s teeth were rattling.

  How many daddies does it take to change a lightbulb?

  Only one, but you’ve got to find him first.

  Cal started screaming at Harpo, but only a series of honks came out of his mouth.

  Daddy, where are you?

  Honkhonkhonkhonkhonk.

  I hate you, Daddy. I hate youuuuuuuu … And the record melted all over the phonograph and onto the floor.

  Honkhonkhonkhonkhonk.

  Then Harpo turned his horn around and shoved the shiny bell opening into his mouth, squeezed hard, and the honk blew up his head, blond curls filling the air like goose down.

  Then the mess quickly melted away, leaving only a vague impression of heat.

  NOV. 22

  1718: “Blackbeard” the pirate is killed off the Virginia coast.

  1906: The SOS distress signal is adopted.

  1963: President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.

  All that day pools of melt steamed under the brilliant sun. Cal heard on the radio that another storm was on its way but for now the sun held its own, steaming the vegetation. Even the cabin appeared to wilt from the sudden change in temperature. Thanksgiving was on its way, but it certainly didn’t feel like Thanksgiving weather.

  A hundred yards or so past his front lawn and the surrounding trees Cal had a good view of a large, open field. From his window it looked as if that field had absorbed even more of the sun than the surrounding areas, had become a marsh in fact, sending up thick billowing clouds of steam which looked like fog. From the midst of that fog the great black prow of a pirate ship peeked, shipwrecked here in what once was a southern Tobacco field.

  Cal suddenly felt nauseated. Crazy. But he looked again, more carefully, and the ship was still there. He went into the bathroom and shaved, trying not to hurry. He splashed cool water on his face. He went to the refrigerator and got out the tomato juice, drank directly from the bottle. He returned to the window. The pirate ship was still there, run aground in the grassy field.

  Cal watched the pirate ship for a time, but there appeared to be no movement aboard. As the day wore on and the fog dissipated more and more of the ship was revealed, until eventually the whole thing was exposed, and the giant dark hole like a cave in its side.

  Cal went to make some tea and think. After two cups he realized that insanity was a fitting punishment for someone who had abandoned his kids, and he found this realization oddly comforting.

  Nothing’s too bad for my daddy …

  So he walked down to the field and climbed into the hole in the side of the ship, even though he never even left his cabin, just stared at this ship from his window. He did not know how this was possible but it worked just the same. He could even feel his shoes and socks getting soggy in the saturated grass and weeds.

  Inside the ship everything smelled of wet and rotting wood. Someone had written on the inside of the hull with reddish brown, desperate letters– perhaps in blood– SAVE OUR SKINS! As if in compliance, the skinned hides of several human beings had been nailed up beside this message.

  He climbed a narrow staircase to the deck above and there found a museum of sorts: knives and a gallows and bottles of poison and several guns, a neatly-typed card beside each one. One rifle was labeled “The gun that killed John F. Kennedy” and yet it looked so ordinary, so crude. For a moment he actually was convinced that this entire museum was made from his childhood toys of destruction.

  When Kennedy was shot Cal had been in study hall, and when the announcement went out over the loudspeaker (they simply put the radio on the PA system), he went into the back of the cloakroom to cry where no one could see him. Everybody else was crying, but he couldn’t bear for them to see him cry. He was crying because he’d just realized that the world was a very different place from what he’d thought it to be.

  Blackbeard staggered into the room, stinking with the sweat of the terminal alcoholic. Cal instantly thought of his father, although the pirate looked nothing like Cal’s father. “In my things!” he roared, and picked Cal up and threw him across the room. Cal floated upside down like a balloon and bounced off the wall. “In my things!” Blackbeard shouted again and grabbed Cal by the hair and pulled. And pulled. And pulled Cal’s hair off, his scalp and face with it.

  Cal settled down on the floor and saw his head in the shiny glass of a display case: it was his face at age seven, on his adult man’s body.

  “In my things!” Blackbeard screamed and kicked Cal as hard as he could. Cal sailed up and through the rotted boards of the ship, through bright air, past steaming trees into the soft mush of his front yard.

  The first thing he’d ever wanted to be was a pirate. Who sailed the oceans without a care, with no laws to bother him, with no family to hold him back, or bother the things of his heart.

  NOV. 23

  1859: Billy the Kid is born in New York City.

  1887: Actor Boris Karloff is born in London.

  Another snow storm hit that morning, far worse than the one before. Colder, the snow wetter, more difficult to keep ahead of. Within a few hours there was a three foot drift blocking the front door of the cabin. Which would have been fine– he had plenty of food and no plans to go anywhere.

  Except that he kept hearing a baby crying, the cries coming from somewhere outside the cabin.

  He pushed open the door and made his way through snow drifting up over his thighs. The cries were faint but steady, rising louder only as he came right up on the baby, who lay wrapped in assorted rags, a young man dressed like a cowboy crouched over it. The cowboy drew his gun as Cal crept closer.

  “Wait, I just want to help!”

  The young cowboy put down his gun. Cal peered inside the rags, at the most hideous creature he had ever seen. The baby was put together from a variety of hide, fur, and bone, crudely matched, and hardly looked human at all.

  The baby’s skin had a bluish hue and it was obviously suffering. Cal was thinking he should be picking the baby up right then, he should be running it inside in order to save it. He should be acting instinctively, helping the baby without even thinking about it.

  He hesitated, and he looked away from the baby. Just for a second. He was weak just for that second, a coward just for that second.

  But the cowboy had seen his look, had felt his hesitation.

  The cowboy turned his gun on the baby and shot it in the face. Then turned the gun around and shot himself in the head. The snow turned crimson red almost instantly, then bright white again– like the sun, like sudden knowledge�
�� the bodies having disappeared.

  NOV. 24

  1859: Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

  Because of the heavy snow he spent the day catching up on the local papers. In the next town a man had murdered his three children because he thought the world was going to hell and he wanted to save them the suffering that must surely come from living in such a world.

  In his own town two days ago a man was charged with the rape of his own four-year-old daughter.

  In the state capital a woman confessed that she had cut off, fried, and eaten the flesh of her baby’s left hand as a form of punishment, then had permitted the child to bleed to death.

  According to Darwin’s theory, those creatures with some advantageous quality in a particular environment will pass this advantage on to their offspring, over time compounding their advantages in the creation of an entirely new species.

  Sometimes at night, Cal thought he could hear these survivors, these fittest of all creatures, howling their insanities from the surrounding woods.

  NOV. 25

  1963: the body of President Kennedy is laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

  The snow in the dim morning is the flat white of crosses, blown into a series of mounds so like burial mounds, white mounds which do not require crosses as their color declares what they contain.

  The ground we walk on contains so many bodies, and yet only a small percentage are ever marked. The lucky ones are those we attempt to remember, but what of the ones we don’t?

  Both the ones we remember and the ones we don’t remember are fertilizer for blue grass, are the pale color in flower petals, are the grit from which pavements are made, are the absences filled by the air we need to breathe.

  The absences are what give buildings their shape, highways their directions, and our lives sufficient space to stretch out in.

  Sufficient space reminds us of everything we have lost, everything there is to be remembered yet cannot be remembered no matter how hard we try. The white space between the lines of type in our books is meant to signify all that we have forgotten.

  The white space fills his yard and laps over into other yards and fields as far as he can see, an erasure so enormous his mind grows cold with his attempts to comprehend.