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The sun was bearing down on us both. Me without my shadow, my shadow without me.
A huge black net of sleep that had been poised in ambush fell over me.
I love Lauren Bacall in Key Largo.
I got some ice out of the refrigerator and poured myself an Old Crow.
“Gastric dilation,” she confessed. “It doesn’t matter how much I eat. I don’t gain weight.”
“You have to endure. If you endure, everything will be fine. No worry, no suffering. It all disappears. Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This is where the world ends. Nowhere further to go.”
Thus was my conscious mind completely restructured. First there was the overall chaos of my conscious mind, then inside that, a distinct plum pit of condensed chaos as the center.
The scene is a picture of deceptive repose.
Somebody had drilled a hole in my head and was stuffing it full of something like string. An awfully long string apparently, because the reel kept unwinding into my head. I was flailing my arms, yanking at it, but try as I might the string kept coming in.
I wanted sleep. Was that too much to ask? First unicorns, now INKlings—why me?
Not because of the cold autumn scene. I always get the chills when I see tall, sharp spires.
Had he bought the whole outfit at a nouveau riche children’s haberdashery? A gold Rolex gleamed on his wrist, a normal adult model—guess they didn’t make kiddie Rolexes—so it looked disproportionately big, like a communicator from Star Trek.
Junior didn’t say a word, choosing instead to contemplate the lit end of his cigarette. This was where the Jean-Luc Godard scene would have been titled Il regardait le feu de son tabac. My luck that Godard films were no longer fashionable.
“Can’t say I capisce,” he spoke, measuredly. “Surely you must be mistaken. We don’t want nothing.
“Average body types don’t run in your family?” I queried. “Care to say that again?” said Junior, glaring at me. “Just chatting,” I said.
The cloud on the Northern Ridge poses, lifting its wings, leaning forward as if to sail out over the Town.
With great pain and difficulty, I propped the door up in place, then, as per doctor’s orders, I climbed into what there was of my bed with Turgenev’s Rudin. Actually, I’d wanted to read Spring Torrents, but I would never have found it in my shambles of an apartment.
Near the bottom of the heap I spied a scant shot of Jack Daniel’s, which I coaxed out and took back to bed, together with Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.
I wouldn’t have noticed that the day was over were it not for the Turgenevo-Stendhalian gloom that had crept in around me.
Embryonic amid devastation.
“Either way, we have to help Grandfather.” “Because all three of us are good people?” “Of course,” said the chubby girl.
“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams.”
The voice of the light remains ever so faint; images quiet as ancient constellations float across the dome of my dawning mind. They are indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture.
ken.
Like a ship sailing past a window, they appear only to disappear without a trace.
“I don’t know,” I say. “There are times when the understanding does not come until later, when it no longer matters.
Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.
“That’s the way it is with the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain.”
valises,
portmanteau
I look behind me to find the moon hovering half-obscured over the Clocktower, the heavens boiling thick with cloud matter. In the less than lunar light, the River recedes black as tar.
I was poetry in motion when she screamed out a warning, which I didn’t hear.
As awareness spliced together, I noted the nylon rope. I was a piece of laundry blown off the line by gale winds. I had developed a habit of transposing my circumstances into all sorts of convenient analogues.
cantilevered
For anyone not accustomed to this sort of thing, stepping on thirty-centimeter-wide sections of slick rock crawling with leeches in the dark is an experience likely to be memorable.
“It happens to everyone. I know it’s horrible, but it’s got to end sometime. Trust me,” she said with irrepressible optimism.
“No,” I admitted. That’s me, dumb as the anchor under a buoy.
After thirty-six steps—I’m a habitual step counter—we were met by the sound of a loud slap, as if a huge cut of roast beef had been flung against a stone wall. Followed by a tentative half beat of quiet. The something was coming.
sluicing
My shadow stays on screen, a figure in the distance, unsteady through the shimmering heat. The shadow cannot speak, knows no sign language, is helpless, like me. The shadow knows I am sitting here, watching. The shadow is trying to tell me something.
There ended the memory. Though I couldn’t be sure any of it had really happened to me. I had no recollection. Perhaps this was a hallucination induced by the sounds of the water in the darkness, a daydream dredged up in the face of extreme circumstances. But the image was too vivid. It had the smell of memory, real memory. This had happened to me, it came to me with a jolt.
Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn’t care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self.
I thought about having a drink instead. A quiet bar, MJQ’S Vendome playing low, a bowl of nuts, a double whiskey on the rocks. The glass is sitting on the counter, untouched for a moment, just looked at. Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.
“You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less. You get my meaning?”
I look up at the elm tree overhead. A mosaic of winter sky shows between the branches.
He digs his heel into the ground again. “I repeat what I said at the very beginning: this place is wrong. I know it. More than ever. The problem is, the Town is perfectly wrong. Every last thing is skewed, so that the total distortion is seamless. It’s a whole. Like this—”
My shadow draws a circle on the ground with his boot. “The Town is sealed,” he states, “like this. That’s why the longer you stay in here, the more you get to thinking that things are normal. You begin to doubt your judgment. You get what I’m saying?” “Yes, I’ve felt that myself. I get so confused. Sometimes it seems I’m the cause of a lot of trouble.” “It’s not that way at all,” says my shadow, scratching a meandering pattern next to the circle. “We’re the ones who are right. They’re the ones who are wrong, absolutely. You have to believe that, while you still have the strength to believe. Or
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“Look at the birds,” he says. “Nothing can hold them. Not the Wall, nor the Gate, nor the sounding of the horn. It does good to watch the birds.”
I just kept climbing, and my gut wound kept throbbing. The bump on my head wasn’t doing bad either.
“Yessir, that hit the spot,” the Professor thanked me. “I usually keep two or three days’ emergency rations here, but this time it so happened I hadn’t replenished supplies. Unforgivable. Get accustomed to carefree days and you drop your guard. You know the old saying: When the sun leaks through again, patch the roof for rain. Ho-ho-ho.” “Now
