Hieroglyphs_of_Blood_and_Bone

by Michael Griffin

  So I continue to study, to recollect details from a book I no longer possess. I visualize colorful drawings, intuit understanding of blocks of text previously incomprehensible. Gradually I come to understand more clearly than when I held the book in my hands. I realize what Lily intended. She meant to create life, to decide within her pages what I might become. I don't know when she began, or where, and have no way of knowing if she ever stopped. She's gone from my life, out of sight, but not mind. Maybe she continues her work, creating days as I perceive them, breathing sounds and smells out of dreams, an entire milieu gusted into existence for no purpose but to serve as backdrop for all my interactions, relationships, my entire impact upon this world. Even my death. All of it, contained in Lily's book.

  What does that make her? Some deranged, fallen goddess, spinning a story into being then vanishing?

  If I can only remember.

  I sift through my remaining books, look between and behind the twenty-one ordinary volumes, just in case Lily's book somehow slipped between the others and was momentarily concealed. But nothing's hidden. No salvation.

  I take the pile, all twenty-one, out to the dock, all the way to the end. I sit on the edge, dangle my feet into cold green water. At one time, these books seemed like the beginning of something. A new start. Desperate and sad, that's how I was, clinging to any hope.

  Flipping through a shelf-worn Look Homeward, Angel, I seek any spark of interest. Why did I select these items to keep? None of these words make sense. The language is odd, distant, irrelevant to what I've become. The words are too small. They seek to make up in quantity what they lack in mass. What does any of it matter?

  I stop at page seventy-one, trying to exert my will upon the words on the page. Come to life. Speak to me.

  Nothing.

  I tear out the page, flip it over. Seventy-two, no better. Nothing here but a waste of ink and paper.

  I crumple the page, crush it into a tight ball, toss it in the water. The paper floats on the surface as if it weighs nothing. More pages, tear them all. A handful, whole chapters. Once they're loose, I separate each one, crumple every page into its own individual sphere and let it go down the river. The spine cracks, the brittle yellow glue no longer supported by the block of pages. I throw the remainder into the water. The only Thomas Wolfe book I ever owned now floats toward the Pacific Ocean.

  There's only one story, a new one. I have no use for a job, a car, friends, an ex-wife.

  Leaving the rest of the books on the edge of the dock, I slip inside for my paper shopping bag from Parfum de Nuit, and return to sort my candles, incense and matches outside. I burn a cone of incense in my palm, watch it become ash. I lick my thumb and forefinger, pinch the brown ash between them, place it in my mouth. Taste and smell of burned spice, exotic smoke. So insubstantial, I swallow it. Nothing left.

  When I'm gone, I'll still be in the book. If I possess a body, it will continue some other place, a different existence. Not solid matter, but intangible. Safer that way. After I lost Michelle, I fell apart. I kept expecting to recover, but never could. With Lily, someone I barely knew, my breakdown was worse. I can't lose someone I never possessed, can't have fallen in love with a stranger. Maybe I was still wounded by Michelle, and managed to superimpose onto Lily all my sad desire for reconciliation. Hunger and need, so pathetically doomed. Lily might have given something, but not what I wanted. I'm the only one who can rescue myself, confront my ghost wife, shed my joyless, sleepless frailty and confusion, and float away. Measurements, durations, the way sizes fail to match, these breakdowns are unimportant. Leave them behind.

  I light a match, shield the wind-sputtering flame behind a cupped palm, and hold it to the candle's wick. Inhale the flame, the smoke. Rest the cardamom-scented candle on the cover of a book of Wordsworth poems, place it flat on the surface of the water. A small raft bearing flame. I set it loose.

  As the first moves downstream, I light the second candle and pair it with a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal. It follows, as if drawn after what went before.

  The third candle, the last I own, smokes and sputters from an oily wick. I'm afraid it's too heavy to be supported by the thin paperback of Hemingway's In Our Time, but it stands. The river bears it away. Give us peace in our time.

  Three candles disappearing.

  "Keep." I speak the word. Open another book, write the word on a random page, and set the book loose.

  "Hold." I write this in another book. It goes after the one before.

  "Stay."

  "Wait."

  Keep writing, setting loose. So many words, not enough books.

  Anyway, I can't stay here. Nothing is left inside. Everything trails off, slips too far away to retrieve. Here or there doesn't matter. Lily said all rivers connect. Every river is the same river.

  After midnight, I drive my car. It's been so long, I can't remember the last time.

  The graveyard shift crew at Constant Marine is only five men, working close to the water within a lighted, open-walled steel structure. They only return to the main office building at lunchtime, which won't be until four o'clock. Behind that building where I worked for so many years, I find what I need. Nobody below hears or sees. I wheel it to my car, load it in. The hatchback deck gets scraped up, but I don't care. I disappear, driving quiet, headlights dark.

  I consider turning on my lights when I hit Marine Drive, decide not to bother.

  The wheeled cart of the torch is unwieldy, difficult to get down the ramps to the dock. I take it slow. Though I've never used the torch myself, I've seen it done. It's simple, just a mix of two gases. The acetylene hisses, makes a sharp, identifiable smell until the spark from the igniter catches. The hiss changes, refines. I adjust the mix, add oxygen, turn both knobs until the blue flame sharpens enough to cut. Even in the dark, it's easy.

  I lean over the edge to where the first mooring cable connects Karl's house to the dock. The edge of the stranded metal cable heats red, goes orange then yellow. The flame cuts through, molten metal spits. Drops of steel hit the water and steam, while all around, everyone sleeps. Someone might stop me if they recognized what I'm doing. I keep quiet. It's nobody else's business, pertains to no one but myself.

  One cable, the next. I step lightly on the dock, careful when I roll the cart between stages. When the last is severed, all that tethers the house to the marina is utility conduit, thicker than the cables. Inside is mostly hollow pipe, water, sewer and electricity. Cutting takes time. I smell a different burn, melting plastic. Flames rise from the conduit, lick the side of the house. Smoke stings my eyes. The fire burns low, rises slowly, so I ignore it, keep cutting. Finally the electric lights inside blink out. When the last pipe gives, water sprays, drenches my face and spews into the river.

  Rain falls, transforms the smell of burning. Eventually, rain should stop the fire. The smoke reminds me of Lily.

  I leave the cutting rig on the dock and step inside the house. It shifts, cracks. The whole world moves. Water splashes up, as if compressed in a narrowing gap. The house shudders, comes up against the neighboring house, rebounds and scrapes away along the dock. Finally disconnected, floating free, I slip downstream. I know where I'm going, can see what I leave behind, the marina falling away. I stand in the doorway of an empty house, adrift. No connection remains. The first step out, where normally the dock would be, is now open water. Oregon to one side, Washington to the other.

  I can't guess how far I might descend this river before some obstacle or dam stops me. If not this river, some other, where the measure of land exposed to sky keeps expanding. I keep promising not to return, but maybe I'll go back some Saturday in June when new grass has grown in to eradicate the black rectangle of mud. Where Lily once lived, I'll walk the perimeter, look for traces of her passage, find none. I'll make my way to the canyon where I caught my first fish. I won't climb down. From above I'll be able to see, through water clear as glass, that no steelhead remain in the pools. It may be passing of time, or cha
nging seasons. Maybe they'll return.

  Maybe Lily will be there.

  I have to forget all that came before. Too many changes, too fast. Nothing remains but entropy. Broken time.

  The fire spreads to all four walls and climbs the roof, casting light across the river. Smoke spins over the water's surface. The heat is almost too much to bear. Raindrops spit into the flames. Upon the night banks of the Columbia, dimly lit orange, are adornments such as I saw on the Kalama before, arrayed in familiar configurations. Though smoke burns my eyes, still I see clearly enough to recognize the hideous displays from the forest near Lily's field and the Kalama's banks.

  Not only there. Here as well. So the truth is revealed. I finally understand.

  All this is made in my form, designed to resemble me. These dangling structures of bone, leaf and sinew, like mobiles swaying in the wind, gestural artworks of spattered viscera imprinted on canvases of skin, constructs of dead and living parts intermingled in a unified state of decay. Charred fragments, crushed into dirt, to be washed away by rain. The frantic gestures of a doomed man. A life story penned in slashes of blood.

  Tangled bits of mortality along a river, all part of me. These are the remains I will become after I burn.

  THE END

  Michael Griffin's collection, The Lure of Devouring Light, was published by Word Horde in 2016, and his novella, An Ideal Retreat, came out from Dim Shores at the end of 2016.

  His short stories have appeared in magazines like Apex, Black Static, Lovecraft eZine and Strange Aeons, and such anthologies as The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Autumn Cthulhu, the Shirley Jackson Award winner, The Grimscribe's Puppets, The Children of Old Leech and Eternal Frankenstein. Upcoming stories will appear in the Ramsey Campbell tribute, Darker Companions, and Leaves of Necronomicon.

  He's an ambient musician and founder of Hypnos Recordings, an ambient record label he operates with his wife in Portland, Oregon. Michael blogs at griffinwords.com. On Twitter, he posts as @mgsoundvisions.