The war was over; the new year would be starting soon, time to go home.
And find out if his children had survived that war. He could barely remember their faces. And he knew that without their names chiseled in stone, he would not remember what he had called them.
JAN. 1
New Year’s Day.
First day.
First breath of air. First drink of water.
First time standing. First time dizzy, sitting down.
First words spoken to oneself. First embarrassed looks in the mirror.
First bite of food you’ve forced yourself to eat. First stomach cramps, first illness of
the year.
First thoughts of the family you’ve abandoned.
First regrets. First headache. First angels’ wings beating in the head.
First realization that nothing ever changes. First changes when nothing is realized.
First hallucination: a huge baby consuming everything in the path of its crawl.
First despair.
First night.
JAN. 2
1920: Isaac Asimov is born in Petrovichi, Russia.
1935: Bruno Hauptmann goes on trial on charges of kidnapping and murdering the Lindbergh baby.
The robot did not know what to do with the baby it had found, so it kept it in a metal breadbox and pretended that was the baby’s house. Babies were just human beings to the robot, only smaller. And it had no use for bread.
When the baby died the robot gave it a sandwich and a canopener and welded the breadbox shut.
When after several days the baby had not yet escaped from its breadbox, the robot concluded there was no afterlife, and it need be depressed no longer that it could never be a human being. But it swallowed several can openers as a precaution.
JAN. 3
1967: Jack Ruby dies in a Dallas hospital.
The dying take secrets with them no one has the power to uncover.
The dying go out with quizzical smiles on their faces leaving behind the rest of us to ponder. How no one really knows what the loved one is thinking. How no one really knows the deepest secrets of the human heart.
If Cal were to die during this particular evening his wife and children would always wonder why he had left them, why he had done this unforgivable thing.
In the conspiracy of the heart the man wears a mask made of the dried carcasses of animals. He peers out of the empty eye holes of a bear and speaks from the empty mouth hole of a deer. A tapestry of birds’ wings caps his head. He moves through the inner night with his feet shoved into the dead bodies of squirrels. No one sees where he goes. No one can follow. He is alone here, for no one has families in the heart of the dark.
He comes upon a small animal– he doesn’t recognize the species, it’s one of the stranger breeds native here– and crushes it until the luster leaves its eyes and he can add it to his mask. He goes on with the strange animal across his nose, and smelling its rapid decay takes him even further down into the darkness here, where eyes without any light in them watch him from tall embankments of obsidian, and the only sounds are the soft whimpers of children crying in their dreams.
The man steps into damp and discovers that he has reached the shore of a vast inverted lake. The black waters rise like a mountain several hundred yards in depth.
He puts one foot up on the lake’s edge and begins to climb. The footing is slippery, but negotiable. Dollops of inky liquid scrape off with his climbing feet, rolling downward and spinning away like ricocheting marbles when they reach the shore.
Near the top of the inverted lake he imagines that the children’s cries are louder, so he looks all around him and although he believes he can see a great distance it all appears to be the same: great moving tides of darkness with small eddies of secrets swirling like eyes here and there at its heart.
Then he looks down at his feet and sees the children swimming inside, their small thin arms reaching up for the peak where he stands but their pale hands flapping like dying fish, unable to break the surface tension.
Then their faces loom closer and he imagines he can recognize some of them but he is at a loss for their names. They open and close their mouths in languorous Os like surprised cartoon characters, perhaps trying to tell him their names or perhaps speaking out their secrets one syllable at a time, thinking that if they just say their secrets out loud then they will be able to escape the confines of this vast upside-down lake.
Children have so few secrets, he thinks, so if a child were to unburden of those few then such a child would surely be the freest of creatures imaginable, capable of climbing the highest trees, leaping great distances, even swimming through the air much as these children swam through the shadows of their own hearts.
But then he realizes almost immediately that this is untrue. For children have the worst secrets of them all, and as long as they are children they will never tell.
So the man falls to his hands and knees atop this mountain of shadowy liquid and tries to dig his way down to the small yearning faces below. But the vague depressions he makes fill up quickly and the children look even more desperate.
The man begins to cry in frustration and his tears become shadows that creep slowly down his face like dripping ink to join the water below.
But a few of the children gather at one point directly below the surface and grab one of their number and thrust him against the dark membrane as hard as they can.
The young boy’s face appears briefly above the surface like a white mask lying on black velvet and he begins to sing. He sings songs of lies and secrets and hidden intentions and unspoken desire. The boy’s face suddenly fills with light and he rises out of the dark mountain, out of the inverted lake, black drips rolling off his naked back as he floats over the man’s head, smiling, before soaring off into the distance.
The man feels his face attempting a smile but the mask is so rigid now the smile must struggle. But after a few minutes of this the smile does come.
The birds soften and fly away from his hair. The deer backs away from his mouth and pads slowly off behind him and down the slope into a forest so dark it is invisible. The bear roars once and peels away from his eyes. It rolls down the wet slope accumulating dark liquid as it goes until it is a rolling mass of night thundering its way through the everted dark.
The now naked man sits down on the top of the inverted lake and pushes his hands inside to grasp the hands of the children trapped there. He hauls them out one by one, whispering to each one of his secrets theirs forever to take home.
JAN. 4
1809: Louis Braille, inventor of the Braille system for the blind, is born in Coupvray, France.
He woke up with an intense headache, his worst in years. A headache so severe he could not eat, or walk, could not sit could not lie down could not think of anything beyond the immediate pain. Could not even breathe, he thought, although somehow he still managed to, the breathing creating a pulse inside the headache, a steady beat of pain counting off each moment of living.
Around mid-day he collapsed onto the floor and closed his eyes, lids throbbing with pain. He reached out his hands and his very sense of touch was painful, his fingertips on fire as they brushed the rug, the smooth wood floors, the sharp and burning granules of dust. The pain in his head radiated throughout his extremities, until his senses were overburdened and he passed out on the floor.
He woke up in darkness, although perhaps waking was the wrong terminology. He still could not open his eyes, could not lift his burning lids against the pain. He reached out and felt the Braille of the world, and discovered it was a different language entirely.
His fingertips ached as they ran back and forth across the hidden irregularity of the world: the hidden pockets of despair, the cracks of longing, the roughness of love. All who had ever been through this cabin had lost bits of the language of the heart here, vague impressions and painful speculations.
And then he found it: the smooth cool of
unlimited devotion of which he had been in such short supply. A devotion without strings and oblivious to fear. Cal pressed it firmly to his forehead, the deep language of it radiating out as his skin read every measured line.
The pain in his head subsided beneath the force of such powerful poetry. He opened his eyes and began reading his children’s tales of devotion written so carefully in the language of the dark.
JAN. 5
1896: the Austrian newspaper Wiener Presse announces Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays.
1981: English police arrest Peter Sutcliffe, aka the “Yorkshire Ripper.”
In the morning, his eyes seemed filled with a special kind of light. This radiation, he thought, must be the light children give their parents: the light of having children, the light of giving life. And with this light he might see the world and the people in the world as only children can see them. He might see right through them, right into the luminous heart of things.
He went into town for the first time in days. There he saw trees with their bark suddenly transparent, the sap drifting inside them at glacial speed. He saw buildings with their framework, their plumbing and wiring visible. He saw people wearing their hearts, lungs, intestines. He saw the sewer pipes under the streets and he saw the dead tossing and turning inside their graves.
And he saw a young man with narrow, dark eyes who got his thrills killing children.
The young man had been strolling past and strayed into the path of Cal’s deep vision, and Cal had seen the young man’s heart dark and twisted. And when Cal looked up he saw that the young man was staring at him as if he knew what Cal was seeing, and then Cal was suddenly inside the young man’s head seeing the world the way he saw it: streets running with raw sewage, people stepping through the sewage like animated, butchered meat.
Then the vision was gone and Cal had suddenly lost his power of deep seeing and the young man was walking down the street again, talking to children, patting their heads and smiling at them and there was absolutely nothing Cal could do or say to stop him.
JAN. 6
1412: Joan of Arc is born in Domremy.
Cal got up in the middle of the night because of a light burning in his eyes, but when he opened them he discovered the light was not there.
Cal opened the door and went walking in the middle of the night to find a light he was convinced was just beyond the next hill.
Cal found a man burning in the middle of the night. The man did not seem to be in any pain, though the flame was as bright as the sun. “Mine is the fire of loneliness,” the man said, as loneliness burned the man into ash.
Cal walked farther on in the middle of the night in pursuit of another light burning as brightly as the sun. He found a woman burning in the middle of the night, a woman with long hair of flame and a gown of flame, and when she spoke the flames rolled off her tongue. “Mine is the fire of disappointment,” the woman said, as disappointment burned the woman into ash.
Cal walked farther still in search of the source of an even greater light, a light so bright it burned a hole through the trees and intervening hills, so that finding this light was no difficult task. He found a child burning in the middle of that greatest light. And the child said, “Mine is the fire of abandonment,’ as abandonment burned and burned and burned the child, without diminishing the child or the light.
JAN. 7
1989: Crown Prince Akihito of Japan succeeds to the throne when Emperor Hirohito dies.
In all those old movies when the patriarch dies, the young boy is told, “Now you’re the man of the house.” Even if the boy is four, five, six. The dawning unreality on those young faces, the affect of disbelief. Surely the adults in his life have gone crazy.
Parker would take up the challenge eagerly, of course. He had always been aggressive in that way. Once he decided Cal wouldn’t be coming back, Parker would move into his father’s office at home, rearrange the furniture to suit him, burning any documents he didn’t understand, perhaps maintaining a “museum file” of his father’s personal writings so that he could show friends and family someday: “See here? This is the profile of a man who would abandon his family!” Parker would forever be incapable of such abandonment: Cal’s negative example would make sure of that.
Prince Parker would quickly institute sweeping changes: setting new mealtimes (over Linda’s fruitless objections), TV viewing schedules, family vacation sites. These changes would be followed by more serious ones: new times for sunrise and sunset, new colors for the grass and sky, new faces on his sister and mother. With a bit more research his rulings would begin affecting the Periodic Table itself.
But late at night Parker would return to his boyhood: taking trucks and marbles and balsa wood models out of a battered trunk, making bombing noises and engine noises with his lips, cursing the absent father who had given him all this power.
JAN. 8
1935: Elvis Presley is born.
1982: AT&T agrees to divest itself of the 22 “baby” Bell System companies.
“South Southeast of the Moon Bell. May I help you?”
“Marsha, this is Cal, out at the cabin?”
“Why, hello, Cal. Did you get that pie my momma sent?”
“Yes, yes, I did. Thanks very much. Marsha, I need to make a long distance phone call.”
“Finally going to give a call to that family of yours? Well, I can’t say we all haven’t been wondering when you’d make this call, Cal, and we’re all sure glad you’ve gotten yourself together to do it. Although, we’re sure gonna miss you when you go.”
“I just need to make that call. I’m not … going anywhere …”
“Oh we all go somewhere, Cal. Haven’t you figured that out by now? We all go somewhere whether we want to or not.”
“Just connect me please. That number is …”
“Oh, I know the number! Half the town knows your family’s number. We know your number, too, even though there haven’t been too many calling you, I know. But we all figured you wanted that time to yourself, you know, to figure things out?”
“Marsha, please? This is an important call.”
“Oh, I know, sugar. I know. Couldn’t be more important. You just hold on, I’ll connect you right now.”
After a series of pops and whistles, a distant phone began to ring. After four rings there was a click. Someone picked up the receiver.
“Hello, this Elvis. Ah can’t come to the phone right now– shoot– ah don’t know if ahm ever comin’ to the phone again. But I shorlywood appreciate it if you’d live a message at the tone. Ah, hell, jus leave that little ol message whenever you feel like it. Thankyouverymuch.” Then Elvis sang a few bars of Are You Lonesome Tonight? until the beep. Cal hung up the phone.
It rang immediately. Marsha’s voice, frantic. “Cal, I’m so sorry. I’ve got strict instructions not to tell anybody about that number. Did he talk to you? What did he say? Did he sound like he’d finally gotten his life together? Did he …”
Cal hung up the phone again. He waited for a while, but it didn’t ring.
JAN. 9
1793: Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard makes the first manned balloon flight in the United States.
A small red dot floated in the distant hazy blue sky. He wasn’t sure what it was at first– in fact he thought it just might be a reflection, or a color spot on his eyeball. But then he could see it was travelling, coming closer at about the same speed as the day’s light breeze. And it appeared to bob and wiggle as well. And something small was wiggling just below the red oblong. He concluded, then, that the red dot was a runaway balloon.
He was so completely entranced by the balloon that he didn’t even notice how slowly it progressed, staring as he did at the red shape drifting through blue, through haze, through memories of a long ago summer day when his mother had held a birthday party for him but didn’t invite anyone because she was afraid her husband might find them if she did. Instead of guests he’d had a half-dozen chairs with balloo
ns tied to them. He remembered liking Mr. Blue and Miss Yellow, but little Johnny Red had been his favorite of them all, and he had played with Johnny Red every day until Johnny had grown quite small, and his mother had thrown Johnny away one night after Cal was in bed.
The balloon was overhead now. Cal looked up and saw the little boy hanging onto the string of the balloon with both hands. This must be a strong little boy indeed to hang onto a balloon string for such a long distance.
“Do you need any help?” he shouted up.
The little boy looked down with wide eyes. He had drifted quite low over Cal’s head, but not low enough for Cal to reach him. “I’m okay, I think. I can’t stop now, anyway.”
“What’s your name?”
“Johnny Red,” the little boy replied, and then Cal noticed the rusty red hair.
“Where are you going, Johnny Red?” Cal shouted, because the balloon was picking up altitude again.
“I’m on my way to tomorrow,” the little boy said.
The wind had picked up and was swiftly taking little Johnny Red away. Cal ran after him, but bushes and holes and fences and ditches were in the way. “Can’t you stay a little while?” Cal shouted. “Can’t you play? I had a little boy your size once. In fact, I was a little boy your size once.”
Little Johnny Red laughed as if that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Because of the distance his laughter broke up and sounded like bird calls. “I’m on my way to tomorrow,” Johnny Red called again, and just as Cal was giving up the chase, and the boy was almost too far away to hear, Johnny Red cried out, “And you should be, too, Daddy!”
JAN. 10
1887: Poet Robinson Jeffers is born in Pittsburgh.
Cal spent his day hiking through the woods and around the hills surrounding the cabin. Overhead, he could see a hawk flying and hear its hard cries.
The hawk flew alone, its solitude savage and intemperate. That’s the way it wanted it. On days like this Cal felt very close to death. But he felt no sadness in that closeness. Despite his regrets over his children. Despite his regrets over Linda. When Cora had neared death she had possessed a hawk’s fierceness, a hawk’s hard eye.
The Book of Days Page 17
