Author: Brad Zellar

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

–Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

‘You must journey down another road,’ he answered, when he saw me lost in tears, ‘if ever you hope to leave this wilderness.’

–Dante, Paradisio

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

–Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Never before had a mind come to a more majestic halt.

–Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

The summer is fading. The moon is easing down to sleep in the trees, even as the stars step back into the dark country of heaven. They look like a small cluster of island villages in the North Sea, seen from an airplane at night.

A fox, interloper here in the middle of a city overrun by the swelling chorus of cicadas singing summer’s requiem, does its solitary, long-legged Mardi Gras dance down an empty street.

These are, I suppose, precious days in the middle of a man’s life. If you’re going to find yourself at the crossroads it’s nice to have such pleasant diversions while you mull your options, nice to still have options, to still sense the road forking off in so many directions wherever you happen to find yourself.

Take your time, the night says, it’s yours, even if there’s less of it now than there was yesterday, than there was last September. Take your sweet fucking time.

It’s hard to imagine, on an evening like this, that there’s a single thing out there to be afraid of, or that all your failures add up to anything but a series of minor follies. It’s all frankly hard to imagine, this life, this world, the world stretching to the horizon in the darkness and out into space beyond even the most distant stars.

I’ve had one too many fucking nickels pulled out of my ear, the younger of the two men said.

He was sitting on the floor, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and badly worn bedroom slippers. He had declined the offer of a seat on the sofa, choosing instead to slump down against the wall and cross one leg over the other at the knee. He was nervously jostling the slipper on his left foot, slipping it on and off and tapping along to some beat in his head or blood.

Butterflies walk, he said.

They fly, the older man said.

But they must also sometimes walk. Some of them probably spend a good deal of time walking.

The older man shrugged, removed his glasses, and placed them upside down on his desk.

This shit wears you out, the younger man said.

What shit is that?

This query was followed by a prolonged silence. The older man eventually repeated the question. What shit is that? he asked.

Oh, the younger man said, I think you know what shit I’m talking about.

Why don’t we make an attempt to narrow it down, the older man said. Perhaps we could isolate some specific things that are wearing you out.

Shit, the younger man said. The shit. This shit. We’ve been over this before.

Well, the older man said, the problem as I see it is that we never seem to get beyond this same general complaint. I think you need to dig a bit deeper into things.

Into the shit? the younger man asked.

If that’s how you choose to think about it, yes.

What is this music? the younger man asked.

It’s Chopin. The Nocturnes.

Please turn it the fuck up, the younger man said.

 

 

The way you throw your head

back and show your broken

teeth to the stars.

How you laugh laugh laugh,

nodding, your eyes pinned

back to your perfect ears.

I love that.

The places you take me

and the way you allow

yourself to be taken,

wherever you might be,

so suddenly by sleep–

I love that.

Especially that.

Early Berleson had long since grown accustomed to the static routine of his middle years. He would sleepwalk through the day at work, make his way home in a sort of empirical blackout, and then, eventually, the night would just fall out from under him and leave him floating in murky space, listening to the strains of Mahler from someplace far off. It sounded almost like a transmission from a ghost satellite.

The planet felt frozen in his skull like a starfish paralyzed in amber. He could sometimes convince himself that his bones were locked up in his skin, and he supposed he would never again shimmy to an ecstatic piece of music.

As a younger man, life had rolled through his veins like a carnival ride, and he had found great and simple pleasure in those moments alone in his bachelor apartment, lunging around –often enough naked– to his old records. It frequently depressed him to recognize that he would in all likelihood die from shame if he were ever subjected to a videotape of himself in the midst of his happiest moments.

Now, outside his windows in the night there was a humid scrim crouched on the neighborhood and he could hear the dense rattle of bugs and the sound of idling air conditioners and sprinklers shaking their sand maracas up and down the block. Beyond that, the city, a wash of white noise interupted by the occasional burst of something sleepless.

It would likely be fair to say that people who wrote about concrete for a living couldn’t write for squat, and Early had made his peace with the fact that it wouldn’t do him any good to try to sprinkle a little fairy dust on the copy. Who really gave a rat’s ass?

Even after editing the damn magazine for almost ten years he still didn’t have the foggiest idea who read the thing, but assumed increasingly that no one did or could. It was clearly just one of those things that people in the trade received and threw on the coffee table at the office.

The journal had a peer review process that essentially made Berleson’s job unnecessary; he was supposed to edit the thing for grammar and style. If he was feeling particularly bored or ambitious he might go through the copy and clean up obvious messes, but lately it took more gumption than he could muster to read through most of the stuff even once.

Every once in a great while he’d receive a letter from someone complaining about the virtually unreadable nature of the journal, and these letters gave him immense pleasure. Berleson relished one letter in particular, so much so that it was hanging in a frame above his desk. “I realize it’s only a concrete magazine,” this person had written, “but, Jesus Christ, I’d think you could at least find some better writers.”

Only once it happened, only the one time, that once upon a time, the only memory I have left that inspires anything for the man but disgust.

And even so, it wasn’t love I was feeling that day, but a sort of plain pity and cruel fascination, but, Jesus, it was a great moment, almost like something from Shakespeare, if Shakespeare is as great as everyone says he is.

And that day is one thing that can make me look back, into that sad, lost territory of forever gone, where the only family I ever had still lives.

We were never a clan that had a very generous interpretation of the whole concept of a family.

My dad had a brother (this also I guess I remember), and one night the two of them stood in the shadows of the entryway to our house, arguing as they often did, and I heard the brother say something about blood, maybe “blood is thicker than water,” and the old man hissed, “That doesn’t mean shit to me,” and that was the last time I ever saw that particular uncle.

Yet whatever else you can find to say about my father, he loved my mother in apparently the only way he knew how. She was a nervous, harried woman, a dramatic smoker who could get loud in a hurry and make spectacular messes, and I suppose I can say this now: I don’t believe I was ever inspired to really love either of them.

This one time, though, I was young, but already at an age where I could see my way out, or imagine it, and was thinking pretty obsessively of someplace beyond all that then.

My mother had left us, gone a few towns over to live with her sister, and I can tell you now that it was permanent and had, I think, something to do with poverty.

This was after the war, and my father had not gone (asthma), but had stayed home and did what I cannot honestly tell you, but we had never owned anything. After my mother left, my father went through this long stretch where he saved every penny he could get his hands on, and after moving down a long post-war waiting list he had finally taken possession of a gleaming black Impala –or something that looked kind of like an Impala– and that day, I remember, he came home actually trembling with excitement and laughing in a strange and almost nervous way, and he said, “C’mon, kid, let’s go say hello to your ma and just see what she says now.”

So off we went and it was rough country and the old man was taking the long way so as to avoid gravel.

I can still see it all clearly even now: the black clouds boiling and moving fast, almost like time-lapse photography, this swift, spectacular production of weather, what weather can do when it’s in a hurry and it’s July and humid in the middle of the country.

The windows were open and you could smell the wind, the way it is before a big storm moves in, wet, suddenly cool, and sweeping along with it all the smells of the country.

The old man was really rocketing along in that Impala, leaning and squinting over the steering wheel, muttering something not yet angry, but more pleading: Go, go, go, you sonofabitch, go.

The rain came hard when it came, chopping rain, and the wind rose up and drove the rain across the road in rippling sheets, and there was hail right behind it, hail growing right before our eyes until it was the biggest hail I’d ever seen. Hail that was loud, deafening, banging off the roof of the Impala and richocheting off the hood and careening at wicked angles into the ditches.

The place he finally found was closed, a truckstop long since vacant, with a big, empty parking lot. The old man beached the Impala there, beneath a pump shelter that was cluttered with trash.

And there we stood, the old man hunched and incredulous, his face gray and screwed into a squint of absolute disbelief, his bottom lip clamped in his front teeth, a cigarette burning in his trembling and stained fingers.

That one time I think I saw tears.

I’m sure I did.

He tossed his cigarette out into the rain and clenched his fists and he cried. Then he seemed to be leaning, almost like he was going to pitch over, and rocking on his heels, and cursing under his breath as he stared at his new car, which was gleaming even then, even as hailstones were still puddled and melting in the rooftop dents.

Those days were an iron wagon loaded with rocks that we dragged through muddy fields with our teeth.

You were a magnificent burning boat that would not sink.

We were as prepared as anyone could be who was facing a long night like that. We had, at any rate, been preparing for it for decades. There had been tests –test after test, many of them grueling and sprung on us almost completely unawares– and drills and close calls and false alarms.

We were all familiar –achingly familiar– with that urgent walk through the darkness and humidity of nights just like this one, from which we’d finally emerge, perpetually stunned and blinking, into those long hallways of brutal light and blinding white walls, into the maze of that place, a maze that seemed constantly to be shifting and expanding and spiraling ever higher.

On nights like that, that building, that complex, would feel as vast and silent as a library in the worst and most inscrutable sort of nightmare, yet there were reminders everywhere of what the place was up to and how crowded it was with battered pilgrims in all manner of distress.

It was always astonishing to me how a place so full of suffering could be so hushed. The rising and falling of helicopters was a dull thrumming that you felt mostly in your feet. The hallways were zealously lacquered to such a sheen that you’d find yourself almost tip-toeing like a cat burglar to avoid the squeak of rubber or the clatter of heels.

Sometimes, like that night, that morning, it felt like a holy place. There were saints everywhere, plaster mostly, with disturbingly abject or imploring looks on their faces. The image of Jesus strung up on the cross repeated itself again and again; again and again you encountered the grief of Mary.

Most of the sufferers, hidden away behind white doors with whispering pneumatic releases, were in the hands of the most reprehensibly competent sort of unbelievers.

That night, that morning, you were somewhere in that maze, wired and plumbed like a man who was going to be electrocuted and saved in the same instant.

We knew when we once again retraced our steps that morning that this time we would not be coming back for you. We knew that you were ready, even if we were not, for a long journey for which you would require no shoes, no wallet or driver’s license, no comb, razor, or shaving cream, none of the things, in fact, that we would carry away with us in plastic bags.

You and I had driven across the country together, east and west, and across Canada. We’d sat in the bleachers at spring training ballparks. You were always so happy, so eager, so utterly prepared to be amazed.

Now that’s a pretty swing.

That is one beautiful bird.

Isn’t that something?

We stood together one night on a dark beach in Florida, where astronauts had recently been blown from the sky. We saw the lights of boats in the distance, trolling still for wreckage. You shook your head and said, “It’s hard to even imagine,” but you were already a marked man, and the way you said it I could tell that it wasn’t, in fact, so hard for you to imagine at all.

If you could see me now –and I like to think that you can– you’d know that I’ve already lost so much of what you gave me.

(Four short years.)

(Four long years.)

And you’d know –I know you know– that I’m going to get it all back.

I hope that your voyage, wherever it has taken you and whatever it has entailed, has been as eventful and full of wonder as the life you lived, and that the muffled clanging of that battered bell you lugged around, rattling behind your ribcage all those years, is now just a receding memory. I like to imagine you’ve seen some astonishing things, and that you are living now in some version of one of the old comfortable stories that you believed in so passionately.

It gives me pleasure to think that you are at peace, and even greater pleasure to know that you lived, so fiercely, so gently, and that you were mine and ours, and that I belong to you still, and always.

–Image copyright Rocky Schenck

Right now, right this moment, you’d like nothing better than to sit staring at the splendid moon floating in a shallow cloud-saucer of skim milk right outside your window. There’s a nice breeze, and surely memories are moving on it. Pleasant memories, I’ve no doubt, if you could manage to sit still long enough to investigate them.

You don’t have time to sit still, but you should find the time. Because you should know this: it’s creeping up on you. One day in the hardly distant future you’ll go to sleep or you’ll fall down and you’ll never get up.

If you’re lucky, you’ll end up aboard a slow boat going up some fog-swept river in light that looks like late autumn dawn. It’s just that there won’t be any sun rising, no moon, no planet beneath your boat, no bottom to the river.

You’ll get used to it. Trust me: You’ll be in a better place. Your days in front of the television will be over, but you won’t even notice that. So many of the things you think you’d miss you won’t even remember.

I have it on good authority, though, that you’ll still remember plenty of good things; it’s just that for the most part they won’t be anything full-blown or fleshed out.

You’ll get little touches and taps from that old place you once inhabited with so much desperation, joy, confusion, or whatever; the feel of someone’s hand touching the small of your back or brushing the hair from your forehead; a finger tracing your closed eyelids or your lips; your legs tangled up with those of another; a whisper at your ear, the bark of an almost recognizable laugh, and the sensation of your nose right up against the back of a sleeping dog’s ear.

Once a year, on a fine day in the spring, you’ll see clearly something or someone precious, and you’ll be allowed to shed real tears for the life you left behind. It’s a sort of holiday in that place, and most people learn to look forward to it.

The rest of the time, I’m pretty sure, you’ll feel perfectly contented.

The night doesn’t move at all. It doesn’t budge. It’s like it drops from out of nowhere, and all of a sudden I’m splayed in total darkness on the floor thinking about goats. And I know that it’s going to just squat there over me, to the point where I can’t move and can barely breath until the light makes its appearance.

I understand, believe me, that it’s a seriously disordered state of affairs.

Night falls, and I’m paralyzed, and once it rises up off me I’m for damn sure going to be trapped in a worthless stupor all day long. It’s what happens, I guess, when a man loses his grip on the planet and ends up on the floor.

That part of the whole thing is harder to understand, how something like that can happen to a man. It does, though. People let go, and no matter what anyone tries to tell you, gravity and the solid earth will only allow a man to fall so far.

If things were the way they should be, a man would fall not down, but up, and would drift right off the planet and into darkest space. As it is, though, they eventually have to dig a hole to allow you to go where life wouldn’t allow you to go except by way of manual labor or tired metaphor.

Or the better way: they put you in an oven and let you go up in smoke. Have you ever seen the smokestacks of a crematorium? That gray smoke rising into the sky is men falling up out of this world.