Author: Brad Zellar

A man finds himself stranded halfway across a bridge that he suddenly realizes is taking him nowhere.

He pauses for a moment in the darkness to catch his breath and notices, for the first time, a river rolling along far below him.

The river is alive. It is moving, going unimaginable places, traveling ultimately to the sea, to which, after its long journey, it will be married. It will give itself away while at the same time becoming a part of something even greater and deeper and more mysterious and tethered to the moon.

In such an instance, faced with such a choice, what kind of fool would not choose the river?

Come on: Jump.

How long, I wonder, was the world’s longest suicide note?

And, however long it was, do you suppose it was long enough?

It was January, a Friday night just like this one.

It got dark early, and it got so dark.

The darkness didn’t even fall; it just seemed to spend half the day creeping slowly in and settling and swallowing up the city. It might have been a grim state of affairs. He could see how it might drive people to despair, or push them into dark hiding places; how it might lead them to will the telephone to ring, and then to recoil from its ringing.

What would they say if they did answer the phone, and could find their voice?

“Come over,” he supposed, or, “Come here.”

The darkness could easily shove people so far into themselves that they would never find their way back out. He saw it in the faces of the people around him –this fear, this process of retreat already well advanced– and tried hard to avoid the suspicion that he caught the occasional glimpse of it in his own reflection in the mirror.

He was lonely, but he didn’t yet wish to be left alone, though alone he so often was. He wasn’t yet ready to renounce human companionship or its possibility, the prospect that his life might still yield surprises, although he had no idea what they would be or even what he would hope them to be. Actually, he did have some idea, at least regarding the first question.

He believed he had a spirit, a soul, some purpose to his life that he had not yet fulfilled. His life, he had long imagined, was a long road that rolled toward him from some unseen place in the future and carried his destiny to him in halting and unpredictable installments.

He believed he was a decent man.

He could not, unfortunately, believe in angels.

All of these thoughts went through his head –very orderly– right up until the moment when he turned his back on the bridge and gently pushed his hands free of the railing.

He drifted out of the reach of common sense early and from then on he could barely be trusted to properly dress himself and was interested in nothing but what he called sonics.

Some days he referred to it as sonus.

He’d be down in the basement and from the top of the stairs you’d hear things, everything from the tinkling of one or two piano keys to what sounded like radio interference, pure bubbling static. There’d also be the occasional burst of some disembodied voice gargling words and belching. Electronic things, you know, squawks and blips and modulated droning.

He would insist that he was not making music.

He was discovering sound, or so he claimed.

“You are making fucking noise, is what you are doing,” the old man would say. “Why don’t we just call a spade a spade?”

Which of course only drove him right back down into the basement, back to his racket.

I guess he became somewhat famous in certain circles where the dicking around of obsessive weirdos was embraced and celebrated in a vacuum of obscurity. A prominent magazine once wrote a profile of him in which he was quoted as saying that he was assembling “a living museum of all the sounds that ever were or ever will be. All sonic possibilities will eventually be explored and discovered, or rediscovered, as the case may be. Sound is still the great neglected frontier. There are sounds from the Middle Ages that have not been heard in centuries. Or consider the cries and murmurs of extinct creatures, or an unmistakable or inimitable voice that was dead, buried, and silenced before any of us were even born. All of these things –every last one– must be recreated.”

Despite the fact that he regularly received increasingly unconscionable sums of money from foundations, we were all prepared to pronounce him a complete failure.

Dead, the slender bug astonished with its complexity of sprung parts and the volume of its viscosity, the evidence of a supreme and comically-mad engineer’s attention to detail.

One of God’s little basement projects.

The poor little dude.

What did this skittering mystery hope to find on the other side of the room? Perhaps the bug was an adventurer or explorer from a moist, subterranean world, this thwarted expedition long planned and invested with ancient dreams.

By now the creature’s community had likely surmised that the explorer was dead; who knows how such information might be conveyed among such mysterious beings. Those antennae –those quivering tendrils– likely served some highly sophisticated function for inter-species communication that humans could not even begin to surmise or understand.

Surely the bug had some sense of the dangerousness of its mission and recognized its position as unwelcome interloper; how else to explain its mad, breakneck dash from the corner, the audacious and risky traverse of the bedroom rug, in the middle of which it found itself so hopelessly exposed and ultimately doomed?

It surely imagined it was going somewhere, perhaps even to an unknown, undiscovered somewhere that had been the dream of generations of myriapods –chilopods and diplopods, centipedes and millipedes: who was to say arthropod didn’t dream of extraterritorial exploration and conquest?

After the boy smashed the bug with a tennis shoe he went back to smoking marijuana out of an apple lined with tinfoil.

He was super rushed out by the whole bug thing.

And Pink Floyd, he had discovered to his maximum satisfaction, sounded most excellent through headphones.

He’d sit up in the darkness staring across the inlet at the lighthouse on its pile of rocks, tossing its feeble light out into the fog rolling in off the lake. It was a ridiculous and hokey metaphor for exactly where he was in his life, but, what the hell, it was oddly comforting.

The Charley Patton, the Robert Johnson, the Skip James records, they sort of cancelled out the lighthouse, but that was the way he lived in the world; that was how he did things and tried to keep the darkness and light of the world in proper proportion.

For at least twenty years, since the first from his ever shrinking circle of friends and acquaintances started dropping dead from cancer, he fretted his way to the butt-end of every cigarette. Something was growing in his lungs; there was some persistent corrosion in his throat, a tightness in his chest. That nonetheless didn’t stop him from working nervously through his pack a day.

There was nothing wrong with his life, really. The things that had happened to him and the things that would happen to his body were things that happened to all sorts of people all the time. Plenty of people had it a whole lot worse, he knew that.

Yet it was an American’s particular prerogative to be miserable when there was really not that much to be miserable about. There was no form of self-pity that could not be romanticized, justified, and otherwise celebrated. That was why he loved the blues; it was so thoroughly American. European music might be tragic, might be romantically tragic, but the blues were full of the vaguest, most saturated sorrow, full of fear and pure, plain, fucked-up self-pity. They made that lighthouse feel like nothing more than the sad, distant metaphor it was, and most nights he could imagine himself crawling through the darkness for days, for months, fumbling his way toward that light, or praying for that light to find him, but somehow never quite managing to get there.

And there was no getting around it: he loved that warm, woozy feeling of drifting in the darkness, just as he loved knowing that the light was out there across the way, vigilant, there not as welcome but warning, a beacon whose job was to push him further out to sea.

Ruckert lived across a pasture from an order of monks who were famous for their gingerbread, their honey, and their singing. They’d supposedly sung at the White House once upon a time, and had made a few records. The had an orchard out behind the monastery, where they kept their bees, and Ruckert often saw the monks over there wandering around in slow motion in their bee outfits.

Summer evenings Ruckert would sit out on his porch drinking beer and watching fireflies drifting around out in his pasture. On many such evenings the monks would throw open their doors and windows and the sound of their singing would travel for great distances in the countryside.

Tormented as he routinely was in those days, the singing of the monks experienced in this manner never failed to give Ruckert a warm burst of uncommon pleasure.

The autumn changing of his storm windows was always a harbinger of Ruckert’s annual onslaught of severe melancholy. He knew that from that day forward, until traditionally the first warm day of spring, he would be locked away from the music of the monks and their languid dance with the bees.

On very rare occasions in the dead of winter, however, Ruckert would hear the faint murmur of the singing monks as he dashed back and forth from his car in the driveway.

In the almost ten years he had lived across the pasture from the monks, Ruckert had never exchanged so much as a word with a single one of them, even as he lived with the constant fear that one of them would someday escape from the monastery and show up at his door seeking asylum.

–Illustration by James Dankert

Here’s a new wrinkle in the gray, clanging days before Christmas: Uncle Jumbo has been playing miserable pet store Santa Claus, wrestling squirming cats and dogs and even the occasional bird or lizard in my lap while a wrinkled and alcoholic little temp-pool elf tries to snap photos for somebody’s sad little Christmas card. Pity the poor bastard who finds himself on one of these people’s mailing lists.

What a way to ruin somebody’s holiday season. Last weekend I spent forty-five minutes trying to balance two very confused greyhounds on my lap. Try it sometime.

It’s all a sad story, but here’s the short version: I got fired from my hotel van gig for general off-season misery and an attitude unbecoming of a shuttle stooge. It’s the third time I’ve been canned from the same job, and they’ll eventually come calling again when they realize once more that this world is not exactly full of people who A) have a valid drivers license, B) a clean driving record, and C) actually want to drive a hotel van. Ninety-nine out of a hundred applicants cannot put an honest check in any of those boxes, and I will eventually get my job back, attitude or no attitude.

Meanwhile, I toil and suffer through the baseball off-season, muttering through every day and nurturing a tator tot addiction that has reached alarming proportions. Or maybe that should be portions. I am putting away a pound of tator tots a day, and last weekend found myself driving to the Rainbow at two in the morning for a new bag. I’m not proud of myself.

The Santa Claus thing is of course a very temporary mistake, but I have very little patience for job hunting, involving as it does initiative and ambition, qualities of which I am in very short supply. Until of course it reaches the point where it involves desperation, something which I can generally muster in spades, and at which point I will very reluctantly agree to wash dishes at Old Country Buffet.

I would love to be a different person, I really would.

God don’t make no junk, my mother likes to say, which is of course nonsense.

Oh well. One of my goals for this off-season was to find a bowling alley I can depend on, which is not as easy as it might seem. I enjoy bowling, but the problem is that I don’t like to have people watching me while I bowl. That, and the fact that I like to have access to a good hamburger while I bowl, has made it difficult to find an alley suitable to my needs. Plenty of the bowling alleys around town serve up a good hamburger, but most of them are crowded with people who are either good bowlers or loud bowlers. I can’t stand either type, and because I pose something of a spectacle when I do bowl and attract gawkers, I am forced to either stay home, or to venture out to one of the mammoth lanes in the middle of the night when the kitchen is closed, and I am unable to get a hamburger. The only thing I ever envied about Elvis Presley was that he had his own bowling alley and a cook at his disposal.

This morning I’ll be going down to Blooming Void to spend Christmas with my mother, staring at her creepy little fake tree bleached blue by the years and strung with patchy tinsel. My brother has a family now, and every year they find something better to do, so it’ll once again just be me sitting there on the couch eating peanut brittle and listening to my mother wheezing through Christmas carols on her Lowry Genie organ. When she goes to bed I’ll sit up half the night watching videos and beach volleyball and horror movies and whatever else the third-rate little cable system they have down there manages to suck out of space.

Down there in Blooming Void they still show David Lee Roth and Billy Idol videos late at night. “David Lee Roth,” I’ll think to myself while nursing an egg nog, “The kind of guy who wears a silk scarf swimming in the ocean, that lucky, shitty bastard.” If tradition holds I’ll fall asleep on the couch and drift into a recurring winter dream: I’m in a large abandoned office building, standing at a urinal in the dark, my forehead resting against the cool tiles on the wall.

Through the giant windows on all sides of me a city stretches away in darkness, punctuated here and there with random displays of blue Christmas lights. Stringers of blue lights dully glowing from the eaves of dark houses and the skeletal trees along the boulevard. Hardly a moon over the world, and not a star in the sky. Nothing moving anywhere. Clouds of gray heat boiling from chimneys and squatting on the neighborhoods.

Then, from somewhere far below me, I hear a large choir singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” the most mournful version I have ever heard, or ever hope to hear. The singers sound like people trapped in the bowels of a sinking ship, holding hands, waiting for the water to find them.

And when I wake up it will be Christmas morning, and the world will have made its first turn out of winter, and my heart will begin its real straining out of the darkness, jogging towards the light, toward Spring Training.

And that, to me, is the real meaning of Christmas.

Those soft, colored lights that make such a comfortable compromise –almost a real peace– with the darkness. The shiny glass bulbs and talismans that have the power to both cradle light and build tiny fires from memories that are almost lost.

The warmth from those fires is powerful out of all proportion: a window, a door, a looking glass through which you can catch glimpses of the child you once were, rising each morning of this season, alive with wonder and anticipation.

The smell of that tree is another gift from and to your memory, one more reminder of how keenly you could once hope (and can still hope) and how much you were once willing (and are still willing) to invest in that hope. A happy smell that’s hard-wired and tangled up in your skull with all the damage and darkness and bands of still startling light.

There’s an empty corner now where that tree should be, yet it stands there glimmering all the same when you turn out the lights, and in the morning you could almost swear you can smell it. After forty-four years your head can still manufacture that smell, can still produce an almost comforting composite of all the predecessors of your invisible tree.

The stockings that are not hung from the mantle are still hanging from the mantle. The dog that is not curled up near the bottom of the tree is still paddling in his sleep near the bottom of the tree, under which there are still presents waiting to be opened. There is still a carton of eggnog in the empty refrigerator. There are Christmas cards in the mailbox that has received no Christmas cards.

All those church bells that no longer exist and no longer ring, tonight you will hear them ringing in the darkness, ringing out all over town. In your dreams, at least, the animals will still kneel, will still speak. A promise will be made and a gift acknowledged. In the darkness outside of town, along gravel roads beside snow-covered fields, you will still see stars tumbling down the sky.

And if there is no cake at midnight, so be it. You will still have your frosting, and still recognize it with gratitude.

You will eat your frosting out of a can, with a plastic spoon if need be, or with your fingers, and through some miracle that is as much a miracle as any other your heart will still feel full to the point of bursting.