“Goodnight, Sweetheart. Goodnight, my sweet. Goodnight, my bravest boy. Goodnight,” he whispered, as the cold settled around the cabin walls, as violins floated over the snow-wrapped roads and fields, well on their journey out of his life, their sweet voices fading.
DEC. 19
1843: Charles Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol.
1972: Apollo 17 completes the last mission to visit the moon.
The moon would not be there forever. The pale perfection of it had been there for human beings since the beginning, but some day it would not be there, just as Christmas would not be there.
In the Christmas of the present the moon comes down and walks these streets as a man with no home. His children open their presents without him. Despite his absence his wife has put his name on the labels as the giver of some of these gifts, because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. There is nothing he can do to stop her, even though he knows it will only confuse and upset his children. She might as well have said they were from Santa Claus, another mythical figure his children no longer believe in. His children are terribly disappointed because these gifts are not the ones they wanted.
In the Christmas of the past the moon comes down and becomes a star on top of the highest tree they ever had when he still lived with his mother. She couldn’t find one in town she could afford so she just cut down the evergreen in the front yard of the cabin and dragged it into the front room an inch at a time. Its top bent sideways against the ceiling, then dropped down in front of the window so that the moon could become its star. They decorated it with bird’s nests and acorns and dried vines and his mother’s good intentions. She’d always felt like a failure as a parent but at least she stayed around.
In the Christmas of the future the moon comes down and turns the world a silver blue. The ground is silver blue and the plants and animals are silver blue and the people walk about as if they’re sleep-walking in their vague, silver blue bodies. When they attempt to speak to one another, smoke issues from their silver blue mouths, and there is no difference between adults and children. The adults no longer even know their children. All are equally disappointed. All are equally insubstantial.
There’s a man in the moon but being what he is he lives there alone.
Dec. 20
1860: South Carolina becomes the first state to secede from the Union.
1879: Thomas A. Edison demonstrates his incandescent light at Menlo Park, NJ.
The worst thing about winter was that people had to stay inside so much of the time, resulting in a near-constant exposure to electric light bulbs. Light, natural light, was life-giving: standing out under the sun he could feel it entering his flesh, healing it, filling it, warming it to a deep pink, almost red, a fire color. Artificial light might warm you a bit, might turn your skin a little yellow, but it was a ghost of the real thing.
He thought of his kids inside, trapped within that artificial light, and briefly considered sending presents to his kids for Christmas. How could he not send them something, even though it might not be what they wanted? He even went so far as make a list of things: a train set for Parker, a Barbie Dream House for Jenny. It would take a big bite out of his modest food budget, but he would do it anyway. Then he started thinking that the presents he sent should be emblematic somehow of his current situation. A bottle of self-pitying tears for Jenny. A box of useless regrets for Parker. They should be presents which didn’t come easily for him, presents which he would have to think long and hard about. A bottle of blood for Parker. For Jenny an envelope crammed with her father’s bad dreams.
But he gave up on the idea. There wasn’t enough time left to mail anything and besides, Linda wouldn’t let her children have such gifts.
He thought he felt okay with the decision, but that final conclusion that he would not send any gifts to his kids apparently wrecked havoc with his body. He was up most of the night with sweats and a stomach ache, collapsing into sleep about four AM.
A short time later he awoke feeling something tugging at his left arm. He looked down to see that it was his left hand, finally shaking itself off his wrist and dropping to the rug to scuttle spider-like across the floor toward the front door. It was leaving him, abandoning ship, seceding from the body of state to go to his children so many miles away. Giving of himself.
He sat up in panic only to have his left arm lever itself off his shoulder and join the hand on its way out of his life.
He screamed, or tried to scream, discovering that his tongue and teeth and who knew what else had already left sometime during his sleep.
His left foot, his right foot, his legs all disconnected, disassembled and made their way across the floor and out the door into the dark winter night.
Cal fell back onto the bed and sighed, hoping that sleep would return soon. That was when he saw the light leaving his body, the warm natural light, gathering itself into a vaguely mocking ghost over his head before drifting away.
DEC. 21
1898: Pierre and Marie Curie discover radium.
He woke up to discover that his body parts had returned to him. He supposed they might have found they could not survive without him, that they were nothing away from his guilt. Or perhaps they’d realized there was no way they could reach his children without his directed intent.
But the natural light from his body had not returned. Somehow he could feel its absence. And in the mirror his skin looked yellow.
He searched all day and half the night for his light, thinking that perhaps it hadn’t wandered too far away. Finally he found the trace of a green glow in a dark corner of his bedroom. It wasn’t his light, he knew, the healing warmth that had always been his, but he would have to make do if he meant to survive.
He lay down in the corner and the green light slipped inside him. There he fell asleep and glowed like a watch dial on the arm of the night.
DEC. 22
1869: Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson is born in Head Tide, Maine.
Miniver coughed, and called it fate, and kept on drinking.
The green light was a poison– he should have guessed. It had probably been hiding in the cabin since the first day he arrived. His despair had fed it, and it had grown. He went into town that morning– driving erratically, a menace– and bought a bottle of rum at the liquor store. He’d never been much of a drinker, and he couldn’t remember a time he’d actually owned a bottle of any alcohol. But now he started drinking, hoping to kill the poison with poison. He didn’t know how he might keep from poisoning himself, and he didn’t care.
I cannot find my way: there is no star …
By the time night arrived he was quite drunk. The field mice, who had come out of the cold and had been hiding in the cabin’s warmth, were staring at him.
The black and awful chaos of the night …
He could sense their astonishment. The field mice had never seen skin that color before.
DEC. 23
1823: Clement Moore publishes “The Night Before Christmas” in the Troy, New York, Sentinel.
During the night the poisonous green glow of his despair seeped out of his skin, and he could sense the cumulative red panic of the thoughts of all the field mice who had sought refuge in his warm cabin.
By morning, not a creature was stirring.
DEC. 24
Christmas Eve
So he wasn’t surprised when Old Red Nick arrived. He’d spent most of the day drunk and dozing in his chair before a blackened, cold fireplace, imagining and reimagining Christmases past and Christmases to come. In some he lived with his family and in some he did not. But he got confused as to which belonged to each category.
As the dark descended that night he became a kind of philosopher of Christmas, reinventing the reasons for the holiday, the secret imperatives which made it such an emotional time of year for many people. It was the anniversary, perhaps, of major upheavals in the earth’s magnetic core which had led to certain evolutionary changes in the human brain. Or
it might have been emblematic of some hidden, yet crucial aspect of winter, perhaps that day in which exterior climate and internal psychological weather became somehow synchronized, the shifting balance between dark and light, the solstice. Or perhaps it was of a spiritual significance as yet unrecognized.
At some point during that long night he made some vague determination that Christmas, coming near the end of the year as it did, was a recognition of desires fulfilled and desires unfulfilled, the balance of the two leading into a celebration of abundance or despair, a final assessment in preparation for a New Year’s Day of resolutions. So there was Christmas Despair and Christmas Abundance, and Cal had no questions as to which holiday he would be celebrating this year.
Old Red Nick came out of the chimney in his cheap red cloth coat and his rusty beard dripping blood down onto the floor. Cal had heard the low grumble of laughter as Nick dropped down the chimney, followed by a stream of cursing cut off sharply as
Old Red Nick bit completely through his tongue filling the dark cavern of his mouth with gouts of blood.
Red Nick scratched at his groin with razor sharp nails, shredding the cloth and leading to a renewed round of cursing.
Cal tried to get out of his chair but Nick pushed him back, putting five small puncture wounds in Cal’s chest which rapidly welled with blood. Siiidddowwwwnnnn! Red Nick thundered, unzipped his pants and urinated on the floor. When he turned his back Cal could see his sack full of small children’s corpses, their mouths and eyes sewn shut.
Cal vaulted out of his chair and ran for the door, throwing it open. Night had pushed its way halfway to the top of the opening, its midnight hands reaching for him. He slammed the door and could hear those disappointed hands scratching at the wood on the other side.
When Cal turned back Red Nick was reaching into his enormous heavy bag. “Somethin’ fer ya,” he said, and threw a tiny corpse which rolled and bounced before finally settling at Cal’s feet. Cal jumped back and screamed. Red Nick looked genuinely surprised. “Whassamatter? Just a doll. All the little kiddies, they’s all just dolls. An’ you don’t think boys play with dolls? Boys have always played with dolls. Maybe they get a little too rough with ’em sometimes, but they’s just playing, right? Just playing is all.”
Cal picked up his doll and cradled it in his arms, telling Christmas tales for which it seemed to be all anxious ears.
DEC. 25
Christmas Day
And the sun came out over the endless snow, and the cold was of the kind that froze the world all the way back to the previous year, and everywhere things held their breath waiting for something to happen, and there were a thousand moments waiting to be born, and a thousand decisions which would have to be made once the thaw began, and Cal sat in his cold bedroom by the open window saying his children’s names over and over again like a prayer.
DEC. 26
1891: Henry Miller is born in New York City.
1893: Mao Tse-tung is born in Hunan province.
Annually: millions are born.
On the news were pictures of Somali children, still dying, looking little better than before the troops came. Large masses of children: he had had visions of them since his teen years. Back then, it had been Chinese babies, produced at a prodigious rate in order to satisfy the political appetite of their Chairman.
When so many children are born, great numbers of them die. Cal had always suffered from nightmares of fecundity.
He couldn’t understand, emotionally, how any babies survived at all. They were so small, so fragile, their heads dangerously large, swollen like hydrocephalics with both possibilities and dangers. When Linda had first started talking about children he had done his best to dissuade her, without confessing the true depths of his fear because he was afraid of losing her.
Babies were born broken and imperfect. Babies suffered from hidden diseases and conditions. Babies might be bumped or even dropped and their tiny hearts might give up trying.
Cal had difficulty connecting the long nights of making love with his wife, both frenzied and languorous, with these fragile results. Babies seemed like satirical comments on the human body: the bloated belly and the moronic look of the breasts, the wrinkled buttocks and shrunken penis, the wandering and unfocused eyes, the head which could not remain upright unaided, the tiny organs prone to dysfunction.
But then when each of his own children had come he had been amazed by the sheer perfection, the way limbs and joints blended, the way facial expressions were reflected everywhere in the small body parts. Cal would sometimes insist on bathing his babies himself, simply to glory in the wonders of their small bodies.
But other babies still contained the seeds of death, and he was reluctant to permit his children to have contact with them, although he never explained his concerns to Linda directly. Linda, of course, overruled him, and his babies played with other babies every day.
Every day out among the masses of people impostors were born, creatures who looked healthy but who contained death in their eyes, hands, and tongues. As long as these babies were born other babies would have to die.
DEC. 27
1831: Charles Darwin sets out on the H.M.S. Beagle to voyage the Pacific. His discoveries on this trip will form the basis of his theory of evolution.
1985: Gorilla specialist Dian Fossey is found hacked to death in Africa.
It came out of the snow in the middle of the night. Cal knew it was there before he saw it, because first it came out of his dream. In the middle of a dream of his children it came out of a distant cloud, and soon it was tearing the memories of his children away. So he woke up out of the dream but could still feel it coming, and he went to his window and he saw it there, coming out of the shadows beyond the drifting snow.
Like all of us, it was driven by loss. Somehow Cal knew that this huge, shambling throw-back (or throw-forward) of a creature was still driven by loss. A loss of innocence, a loss of the others of its kind, a loss of its position in the animal kingdom.
Of course, it was angry about the things which had been taken away from it. It was enraged. That’s why it had murdered Dian Fossey. That’s why it had come into the dreams of the old man Darwin every night for months, chewing on the edges of his dreams until it was inevitable that he would die.
Out just beyond the window in the snow in the middle of the night it roared, and Cal trembled in his bed. It roared because it no longer had a place to return to. And Cal, whose heaven and home were no more tangible than those of this creature, wept, and could not care if it heard him, or smelled him, or chose him for its dinner of human dreams and flesh.
DEC. 28
1973: Alexander Solzhenitsyn publishes Gulag Archipelago.
1987: After a shooting spree, the bodies of 14 relatives of R. Gene Simmons are found at his home near Dover, Ark.
Sometimes he had fantasies– disturbingly real fantasies– in which he created a benevolent prison for his children to live in. A pleasant jail. A gulag of love. Cotton batting would fill this prison to a depth of six inches, and in every room there would be the aroma of warm tea. Soft music would play constantly. And the walls would move in and out, breathing like the walls of the lungs, or the walls of the womb.
When his children were first dropped into this prison of love it would no doubt confuse them. They would howl and scream and beat against the soft, pliant walls. They would scream their rage against him.
After years the environment would seem natural to them, however, and only in their dreams would they torture their father. Only in their dreams would they tear him limb from limb.
DEC. 29
1940: During World War II Germany begins dropping incendiary bombs on London.
After the first bomb fell the parents gathered their children together and they all sang confidently of the better days to come.
After the second bomb fell the parents with dead children moved to the homes of relatives in the country, finding unbearable the company of those whose child
ren still lived.
After the third bomb fell mothers and fathers went crazy, wandering the bombed-out streets at night, singing lullabies to dead children whose eyes still gazed up at theirs.
After the fourth bomb fell few were left with children, and the few children who remained grew quite uncomfortable at the stares of those parents who were parents no longer.
After the fifth bomb fell there were no more children left to kill, and the ex-parents waited in their bombed-out homes, waited for tears which would no longer come, no matter how long they begged.
DEC. 30
1963: The game show “Let’s Make A Deal” debuts on NBC. Monty Hall is host.
He would trade all he had for what was behind Door Number One.
Behind Door Number One his absent father sat, with nothing to say to him. He didn’t even recognize his son’s adult face.
He would trade all he had for what was behind Door Number Two.
Behind Door Number Two the corpse of his mother rotted, drawing curtains of flies which dropped onto the floor, and threatened the safety of Door Number Three.
He would trade all he had for what was behind Door Number Three.
Behind Door Number Three his children had left their absence. It was sweet, and bitter, and there was just enough of it to flavor his morning coffee.
DEC. 31
1946: President Truman officially proclaims the end of World War II.
It seemed they had waited forever for it to happen: the guns put away, the tank battalions receding like a tide of metal, the planeload after planeload of flag-draped coffins being unloaded. The final accounting. The listing of losses and gains.
Sometime in the night the world had changed, and old men had been put in charge of the daytime. Now the young men were back, but they too had changed, and wanted the nights the old men had abandoned.
The dead wanted whatever they could get, even a stolen minute or two of memory. But many of them couldn’t even get that much.
The Book of Days Page 16
