Author: Brad Zellar

I had this period in my early thirties when I would have what I guess for lack of a better word I’d have to call visions. I once saw a woman –a stout, elderly woman in a disturbingly translucent gown– levitating in the lovely chapel of a huge hospital in the Midwest.

This chapel was a spectacular and ornate place. It was bigger than many of the Catholic churches I’d attended in my childhood.

The place was entirely abandoned at the time I saw the levitating woman. It was very late at night, and the chapel was eerily silent and cloaked in shadows. I’m not even sure that what this woman was doing could properly be called levitating; she was actually floating, and hovering around up in the rafters high above the pews, her gown billowing around her and swollen with what appeared to be moonlight.

In the silence of the chapel I could clearly hear the labored, wheezing respiration of the old woman. She seemed to be having a tough time of it up there. She also seemed to be entirely oblivious to my presence. I wondered if perhaps what I was witnessing was an angel or a saint, although I could recall no instances where such beings had been portrayed as either quite so stout or so elderly.

I had some change in my pocket, which I proceeded to throw at the woman one coin at a time. I finally managed to hit her, but she didn’t seem to even flinch. Many of the coins I threw ricocheted back down to the marble floor, where they rattled around noisily. I recall listening as several of them rolled all the way down to the altar.

A short time later the woman disappeared, and I shrugged the whole thing off as an exhaustion-induced hallucination.

The next morning, however, the word was going around town that some nuns had discovered the body of an old woman on the floor of the hospital chapel, and the local newspaper later reported that the woman had a quarter embedded in her ribcage.

Out there in the country where I grew up there was once a pond that was said to be full of wonders.

People always referred to the pond as “brackish.” I don’t have a dictionary at hand –I am a refugee now, and am reclining in the backseat of my car at a fogbound rest area somewhere along the Mississippi in the American south– so I’ll have to take their word for it that the pond was brackish.

It was a brackish pond, then, and the country around it was rough country, made difficult by stones, boulders, and prickly scrub brush. There was a lot of what I think you’d call rubble as well, or perhaps detritus. There was also a lot of junk left over from the lives of the people who used to live out there and had long since fled.

Here and there you’d still encounter a weathered hut on stilts, and there were a bunch of ragged sheep wandering around in the rubble, most of them gone feral. I can tell you that a feral sheep is something to be avoided.

There wasn’t much else to recommend the community, such as it was, and it was a brutal place to be a child. There were only a handful of kids in those days, every one of us an accident born to people who were old enough to be our grandparents.

The men who remained had once been fishermen, before their lake evaporated from all the poisons pumped in there by the old munitions factory. The lake was long gone by the time I was a child, and the old fishermen would occasionally emerge from their homes and wobble along the lousy roads on bicycles. Most of the old men had long, flowing white beards.

I do still remember the pond, though, and as I said, this pond had once allegedly been full of wonderous things; teeming with wonders, was what we were always told: mermaids –a whole extended family or tribe of mermaids– and some sort of mutant creation that was said to be a cross between a dragon and a sea serpent. Pond dragons, these creatures were called by the locals.

The fishermen, bored by the loss of their livelihood, jigged every last one of those pond dragons out of the brackish pond and hauled them along the roads to be gutted and strung from clotheslines and rusty flag poles.

I never saw any of the pond dragons alive, but I do still have a vague memory of the mermaids. Old women used to go to the pond to throw stale bread and popcorn to the mermaids, which would flop up onto the ragged shore and fight among themselves for the offerings. Most of them I recall –or perhaps recall hearing– were horribly obese.

The idle fishermen, having exhausted the pond’s supply of dragons, and grown desperate and lonely from their spartan and solitary existence, turned their attention to capturing the mermaids, and began to trap, net, and wrestle them from the pond. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that these randy old bachelors made bathtub pets of most of the remaining mermaids.

The pond, like the lake before it, eventually dried up completely, and the government sent in soldiers and heavy equipment one morning to enforce the long-ago-ordered evacuation of the land. Those of us who remained were loaded into trucks with our belongings and carted away to a relocation camp in the desert of Nevada.

I escaped from that camp some years ago, but not before hearing the rumor that one of the original mermaids from that old brackish pond of my youth is now on display in a traveling carnival somewhere down south.

I remember a darkness, real, yet stirred with a thousand fireflies, perhaps my earliest recollected encounter with true wonder.

The mosquito trucks crawled through at dusk and left behind a moving cloud embroidered with the bright fragments of skreeing children.

Even then two people armed with nothing but sticks could have a good time, could make music, could poke out each other’s eyes, could destroy a hundred lives, could start either a fire or a war that would last a lifetime.

We didn’t exactly understand that, of course. There was no way we could know that there would come a day when one of us would find himself wandering the halls of a detox ward in hospital pajamas, shivering, his face a blister, a seemingly permanent grimace. Or that another of our old, happy neighborhood tribe, so afraid he would end up just like all the other people on the planet, would allow himself to become so different that he could no longer look even his closest friends in the eye.

Couldn’t we all try to remember how magical we once thought our time in this world was going to be? How magical it once was?

Do me a big favor: Take a good look around and tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?

I’ll sit right here and wait for the fog to burn off, for the music to work its way back in, and for the words to once again start moving in me like a dance, like a dance that doesn’t even know it’s dancing.

I wonder where you were going in such a hurry when I passed you walking on the opposite side of the street yesterday?

You always did have that purposeful look about you. Even as a little girl you seemed like you were in a hurry to get somewhere.

I knew how important it was for you to be on time. When you had no particular place to go you still kept to some tight and mysterious internal schedule. It was as if you feared being late for a vague appointment or assignation that was loaded with hypothetical possibility. I suspected that your constant movement was driven by the certainty that somewhere –someplace other than wherever you happened to find yourself– something was happening that you couldn’t bear to miss.

But what am I saying? I never understood what was going on in that pretty head of yours.

I sure did find you fascinating, though. There was always something happening in and behind your lovely eyes, and there were an awful lot of nights when I laid awake trying to imagine what you might be thinking. Every once in awhile I’d get a little glimpse –or, rather, you’d give me a glimpse; you’d choose to reveal something.

Those moments felt like offerings to me, and I used to collect them and try to piece together a portrait of who you might really be. Sometimes it felt like I was getting close, but then you’d give me some new fragment that didn’t fit. And you never did stop moving, which made it hard to keep you in focus for any length of time.

I had places to go myself eventually, of course. No place special, really, when all was said and done. My destination was ultimately the sort of bland constellation of compromises that is most people’s destination.

I can’t decide if you were lucky or not, but you were one of those people for whom all would never be said and done. You’d say so yourself, in fact, and I can still hear you say it: Never.

Never, never, you’d say.

Never, never, never.

So ain’t we all inanimate, George?

–Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

‘Je’ est un autre. (‘I’ is someone else.)

–Arthur Rimbaud

You might, you’re perhaps fond of saying, occasionally like something concrete from me, something in the way of true disclosure, painful confession, political opinion, or merely, now and again, a bit of honest biographical kibble.

You can’t love me, you say, if I won’t let you in. I can understand this, I guess. It might be nice if I could once in a while roll back the clouds and give you a glimpse of the actual flesh-and-blood man hunched over a sprawling jigsaw puzzle shot full of holes.

The truth –the unfortunate truth in a world full of unfortunate truths– is that I don’t honestly know who or what really is signified by the name Brad Zellar. I can sometimes manage to get far enough outside myself and above the world to get a clear look at the puzzle as it’s taking shape on the tabletop. I can see all the missing pieces, but that’s not much help to a man who doesn’t have any idea where those pieces might be found, particularly since the puzzle seems to be comprised of little but random patterns or, some days, a cloudless sky. Other times it resembles nothing so much as a giant abstract impressionist canvas, a riot of colors and textures that ultimately doesn’t add up to much beyond a series of vague urges and strange decisions utterly lacking in any apparent inner logic.

I fear that it will never add up to anything, never be finished, and never resemble anything that makes any sense or looks at all like what I wish I could think of as my life. Or perhaps the problem is that it looks entirely too much like what I think of as my life.

Mirrors, unfortunately, aren’t much help either. They’re not much help at all, and I avoid them at every opportunity. It scares me that I don’t recognize the face I see staring out at me from the mirror. I mean this quite literally; that man is no one I know, and I frankly don’t care for the way he looks, don’t like the cut of his jib. If I was half the man I wish I was I’d kick his keister halfway to Hibbing.

If that’s who or what I am, though, I apologize to myself, and to you, even though I don’t suppose there’s a damn thing I can do about it. It pains me to admit that my grandfather was a bit of a prophet when he told me long ago that I wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.

All of this admitted confusion aside, I’ve racked my wracked brain for a few moments and managed to cough up a few personal tidbits that will perhaps help you to know me a little bit better:

I can’t begin to tell you how meaty I feel. Considerably meaty, on a regular basis.

Remember that insensitive remark you once made about my haircut? I’m not going to lie to you, it smarted.

I once saw my grandmother, drunk and wearing nothing but a sombrero, dancing naked in the backyard of the house she shared with my grandfather and my uncle Slim.

I have a cousin Rueben who once lost an eyeball in a shower mishap. Or at least that was the official family version of events.

My father was a self-professed visionary, habitually unemployed, who spent most of his days wandering the streets of my little hometown wearing a sandwich board that begged God for –depending on his (my father’s) mood– revenge, forgiveness, or inspiration. The story my father liked to tell was that he took a lock of my barren mother’s hair, buried it in the yard, and gathered together his no-account brothers. The whole bunch of them then spent most of an afternoon and long evening drinking Budweiser, grilling and eating Italian sausage, and pissing into the patch of dirt in which they had buried the lock of hair. Nine months later my father dug me bawling from the ground.

That’s enough for now. I’m tired.

Now why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? I feel like we hardly know each other.

The most that anyone of us can seem to do is to fashion something –an object, or ourselves– and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.

–Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey.

–Wendell Berry, Standing By Words

Remember my earlier promise? Remember my surrender?

You’ve forgotten? That’s good. That’s merciful.

All that is abominable I will not eat. Shit is abominable. I will not eat it.

Come with me: Ascend the ladder. Bring your shadows. Or we could stay right here and you could make magic sounds, make music, tell stories, entertain us while the fire rages across the fields, the fields grown fallow after the people baked all the rain in their ovens.

“The carrion artist: Works at random, sneers at the people, makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things, works without care, defrauds peoples, is a thief.” (Aztec statement on art and artists.)

They are prostrate now, and mute or inconsolable, the great ones. They are buried in the earth or their ashes have been scattered in the streams.

What cow was that –or perhaps it was a goat– that floated away from the pasture with a bellyful of stars?

To whom am I speaking?

To whom should I speak?

The righteous are no more, the old man told me. The land is given over to evil-doers. If you sit still and listen I’ll tell you exactly what you’ll hear: the world going about its monkey business. Where the hell did these fuckers learn to drive? Why must we entrust the telling of our stories to complete strangers?

Why?

Because we have forgotten all the stories.

I have.

That gentle thing you did with your hand, how was I to know it wasn’t supposed to be a blessing?

Still, I cannot help myself: I love this world.

He had this hackneyed phrase in his head –“adrift in a sea of confusion”– that he couldn’t seem to get rid of.

Was this really the best he could do in describing how he felt? Yes, at least for the time being, he was forced to admit that it was. He wouldn’t be able to do any better until he somehow managed to banish that phrase.

He’d spend hours trying to shove those words from his head and could succeed for brief stretches in thinking of other things, things that were not his present situation, but he would always sense the troublesome phrase still loitering in the shadows and waiting to pounce the instant he let down his guard.

This business went on for several months. He eventually lost track, actually. At night the words would scroll again and again across his skull, and he would start to feel as if he were literally adrift on a sea of confusion, his bed a flooded boat or rolling raft.

He started to have episodes of intense seasickness, during which he would often vomit into a plastic ice cream bucket he took to placing alongside his night stand. He became addicted to Dramamine, which, taken in immoderate quantities, would induce in him powerful hallucinations and nightmares.

The medication did, however, seem to succeed in quelling his seasickness, but replaced it with terrifying visions of violent storms and hurricanes and sea serpents. Almost always in the midst of these visions he would find himself tossed from his boat into the endless roiling darkness of the sea.

One night, alone in his bed, after thrashing around in the usual fashion for a time, he felt himself sinking into a darker and darker place.

In his final moments he felt surprisingly calm.

The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as drowning.

Painting the word “Fuck” in fluorescent pink letters on the shell of a huge turtle would, I’m certain you’d agree, constitute a desecration. Such an act would be an affront to any definition of the sacred you could offer, and would thus be a grievous sin.

Releasing in a muddy creek a turtle that had been desecrated in such a fashion, and forcing it to go back to live among its fellows branded with a hot pink profanity would certainly only compound the already unpardonable sin.

I am feeling generally contrite today, and so wish to confess that once upon a time I did, in fact, desecrate a turtle –one of God’s most interesting and benign creatures– exactly as described above.

That long ago incident has come to me as a repressed memory, washed ashore on the waves of contrition that have been rolling in my skull all morning.

I can offer no reasonable defense for my actions, but I hope that I will be allowed to at least point out that I was at the time quite young, and I was bored and unconsciously cruel, a common enough combination, I suppose, in small town kids.

There was a creek not far from our house, and though my brother and I were not fishermen we did discover that during the summer months this creek was full of sluggish turtles. I’m not sure, really, what kind of turtles they were, but they were big, and surprisingly easy to catch. Sometimes we’d catch them with our bare hands; other times we’d use cheap nets we’d stolen from somewhere.

Often we’d take the turtles we captured back to our house, where we would deposit them in a plastic wading pool. They were fascinating things to look at.

I think the idea to use the shells of the turtles as profane billboards came to my brother and me as a sort of inspiration. I’m sure we thought it was funny at the time.

I hate to implicate my brother in this unpleasant business at all, but in the interest of fairness I feel the need to mention that he also painted a turtle. He was two years younger that I was, though, and not yet quite as confident or cavalier in his use of profanity.

My brother chose to name his turtle, and to paint that name on the turtle’s shell. The name my brother chose, and which he emblazoned across the poor creature’s shellacked and ornately detailed shell, was Mr. Poop.

Our parents were fine, upstanding people. They had raised us to know that the descration of turtles was wrong, even if they had never specifically proscribed such outrageous behavior.

They shouldn’t have had to, of course. We knew better. We both knew that one day we would be expected to answer for our sins.

I can only beg forgiveness, and pray that my sincere contrition will earn me dispensation, if not peace of mind.