I woke up this morning from a dream of a kind of monastery in a snowy wood. I think a monastery is a place where monks live, but this place had Catholic priests living in it. Lynn and I came to it after slogging through swamps and through a snow-covered forest. We were totally lost. The place was built from the most marvelous-smelling rosewood, and it seemed to have been carved from enormous blocks of it rather than put together with nails and screws. The trees came right up to the sides of the walls as if the monastery had been there for a very long time and they had grown up next to where it was built. There were a number of larger buildings linked to each other by screened hallways. Some of these buildings were more than one story and were decorated with gargoyles in the shapes of demons and angels.
We were met by a priest out in the yard behind the open gates at sundown. We were weary and hungry. He told us to hurry if we wanted to eat. We followed him through the winding, dark hallways of the place. The shadows were kept at bay only by lit candles. We were led to a small kitchen and given a piece of stale bread and a bowl of onion soup. The priest introduced himself as Father Heems. He was a very downtrodden-looking fellow, his face filled with worry lines and his hands shaking slightly. He told us the place was haunted by the Holy Ghost, and that the spirit was angry. Just the night before we arrived it had strangled the caretaker, whose body he pointed out to us lying next to the stove wrapped in black plastic and tied at the feet and head. “You've got to keep moving. You can't sleep till dawn. If you doze off, the Ghost will strangle you through your dreams. A breeze will pass over you, and you will feel it tightening its fingers around your throat."
We got up from the table and started walking. “That's it,” cried Heems, “keep moving.” Three other priests, two very old ones and a slow heavy one, and Lynn and I, along with Heems, moved through the corridors of the place—up stairs, down stairs, through catacombs, along balconies. When we passed through the dungeon, there was a cell with straw on the floor with about a dozen young children milling about behind the bars. The heavy priest told us that the children were safe from the Ghost at night behind the bars. I asked, “Why don't we go in there too?” And Heems yelled, “Pipe down and keep moving.” Every time I'd begin to feel tired and slow down, I'd hear the wind blow outside and feel a breeze creeping down the hallway.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, Father Heems called out to one of the other old priests, as we made our way along, “Where is Father Shaw?” This almost made me stop in my tracks, because Father Shaw was the head priest at the church I went to as a kid. He was stern to the verge of cruelty and looked like an emaciated Samuel Beckett. We all hated him. Even the parents hated him. When we kids went to the church for any kind of instruction, like before First Communion or for confirmation training, he'd appear and spew rants about how we were a bunch of little sinners and he wished we could feel Christ's pain from the crucifixion. Any time I ever went to confession and that little door in the dark confessional would slam back and I'd see his profile through the grating, I'd nearly crap my pants. The prayers he'd give you to say for even some minor infraction of disobedience would be an onerous weight.
Soon after the mention of Father Shaw, daylight came and we could finally stop walking. In some kind of weird chain of events and reasoning, Heems made me the new caretaker for the time Lynn and I would stay there, which if I had my preference was not going to be very long. First, though, we had to figure out where we were. Once the other priests left us alone for a few minutes, Lynn asked me, “What's with the kids in the dungeon?” “That's not cool,” I said. But then Heems was back with a canvas bag for me with a shoulder strap on it and a long stick with a nail poking out the end. I got the idea that I was meant to police the grounds. So I started around the outside of the building, poking candy wrappers (there were a lot of candy wrappers for some reason). When I made my way around half the building, I came to a little alcove, and lying in the middle of it on the snow was Father Shaw—dead. He was leaking from somewhere onto the snow, and the snow had turned the color of Mountain Dew. His flesh was rotted and yellow. The second I saw him I started breathing through my mouth as to avoid smelling him. I thought to myself, “Do I have to clean this shit up all by myself?” Time skipped here, and I was tying a string around the plastic that covered his legs. I woke up.
While eating breakfast, I realized why Father Shaw had appeared in this dream. I'd mentioned him to Lynn not two days earlier. We were at a wedding in South Jersey, staying in a place called the Seaview in Absecon. It's a really old hotel and golf resort. That's where the wedding reception was being held. Lynn had stayed there once for a conference she was participating in, and she told me that the hallways of the place reminded her of the hotel in The Shining.
After the reception was over, we went and got our room, hung out for a while, and then headed downstairs to the bar to have a drink. On the way, we passed a room like a study, with wooden paneling and stuffed chairs and glassed bookcases with a plaque over the door on the outside that read “Shaw.” I immediately thought of Father Shaw and told Lynn about him. The memory of his face prompted me to recall that my father was in the hospital to have a cyst removed once when we were kids, and when he returned from his stay, I'd overheard him say to my mother that Shaw had been in there at the same time, dying of cancer. “All of his great solace in God went right out the window,” my father said. “Shaw wailed just as loud as the rest of the sinners.” At the moment he said this, he was eating a cracker with a sardine on it. He gulped down the cracker in one bite, licked his forefinger, his thumb, and then smiled, giving the advantage to either Heaven or Hell. I'm still not sure which.
* * * *
"The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” is a completely true story. I saw the wallpaper in my mind as I dozed off, I woke up and told Lynn, I tried to confabulate a story for it, I fell asleep and had a real dream, and then the next day I remembered something that had happened to me that might have initiated the chain of events. I have a feeling these kinds of incident/experience/thought trains happen to us frequently, but usually we are too distracted by life to notice the connections. The wallpaper vision was probably only a portal into this chain of events and dreams, which stretches way back to when I was a kid encountering the church and will more than likely move forward as my life progresses. It could be that our lives are woven from these long thematic threads and only at certain magical times like in the twilight between consciousness and sleep they are momentarily revealed to us. I don't really know enough about the concept of Interstitial to say how this story qualifies. What I do know is that I could feel when I was writing this piece that it was different in some fundamental way from other stories I'd written. The whole idea of it seemed kooky as hell, but it felt good to follow it, so I did.
Jeffrey Ford
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The Beautiful Feast
M. Rickert
October evening, 1969. Golden leaves spiral down. Johnny tries to catch one. His fingers touch the whisper of leaf but close on air. It doesn't matter. He spins across the yard, dodging gold bullets. He's hit! He's hit! He falls to the ground, rolling in leaf, grass, sticks, and dirt. In the distance, a dog barks. The boy lies still, arms spread, legs at odd angles. Dead. He is dead when the car pulls up in front of his house. Heart beating wild from all his spinning, he is dead, trying to still his breath when the doors slam shut and shoes click up the sidewalk, dead when a man's voice says, “Mrs. Harlyle?” dead when his mother screams, a siren-sound that falls to the ground like leaves. The boy is dead when he opens his eyes, looks at the sky, darkly now. Dead as he lies there, waiting for God, angel, or ghost. Dead as one leaf spiral-lands on his cheek. He sits up slowly. Stands to brush the leaves, sticks, dirt, grass from his clothes before he takes serious steps across the lawn and up the cracked sidewalk, like one returned from a terrible mission. He has seen terrible things. He reaches for the doorknob, opens the door, walks into the room where his mother sits w
eeping on the couch between the two soldiers. Gone are the golden leaves, gone the innocent dream. She looks at him, and for a moment he is worried that she is gone, too, lost somewhere inside herself, but she pulls him close, smashes his face against her collarbone. She is holding him too tight, he can hardly breathe, though he will not struggle for breath. He will give her everything. Gone is the selfish little boy. “Oh, Johnny,” she rocks him, “pray for your father.” She releases him just enough that he can nod, before she presses him close again.
Later, he will lie in his room, on his twin bed, listening to the neighbors, his aunts, uncles, cousins, people from the church. He will lie there in his clothes, right on top of the covers, and he will smell the food they bring but forget to offer him. He will stare at the simple walls of his childhood, the window with the drawn blind. He will try to pray for his father but he will find it, too, gone, this belief in God, fallen from him as if he were the tree and God the leaves, fallen in the yard where he has left his childhood, where he was shot down, where he died and no one noticed, no one at all. That boy is a ghost. He rolls on his side. Stares at the wall until sleep comes for him on her silent feet and enfolds him in her dark wings, takes him to that magical place of forgetting. Too soon, morning arrives and he is returned to his little room where, at last, he weeps.
The Time Between
They call Johnny “that poor boy.” Teachers whisper his story to each other, and he develops an ability to hear it even at some distance. He likes to swing, he likes to run, but gone is the desire to play war, though sometimes, over the years, when the leaves spiral down around him, he hears gunfire.
Johnny kicks cherry blossoms while his mother finds his father's name on the wall. “Here is your father,” she says.
My father is not a stone, he thinks.
They are in a Chinese restaurant with “a man from Washington,” as Johnny's mother puts it. When the man leaves to use the bathroom, Johnny's mother applies red lipstick and neatens it with her fingernail. She leans across the table to whisper to Johnny, “He's going to help us find your father.” Johnny holds his breath against the terrible scent of his mother's perfume, the plastic smell of her lips, the pork and alcohol. When she leans back, looking pleased as a cat with an overturned fishbowl, Johnny says, “Mom, he's dead.” She slaps him so hard his cheeks burn red for years.
On her deathbed, Johnny's mother hands him the incriminating evidence. “What do you want me to do with this?” he says.
"You've always been too timid,” she replies. It's the last thing she says to him before she dies.
2005
Johnny is a man on a mission. Every Monday he sends another letter. About once a month he gets a reply. “I am sorry about the loss of your father. He has given everything a man could give to his country. Please accept my condolences.” It is a form letter. Johnny knows this, because on occasion he rents a mailbox under a different name, and the letters he receives there are exactly the same as the ones sent to his house. Sometimes he changes the details, but no matter what he says, he always gets the same reply. It irritates him. One Monday the variation of his letter alludes to that irritation, and a week later, two men with badges come to his office.
He has only one chair, but they are not interested in sitting so Johnny retains it for himself. They ask a lot of irrelevant questions. Does Johnny own a gun? Does he expect to travel any time soon? What political groups does he belong to? Johnny answers shortly. Yes. No. None. What does any of this have to do with the issue?
The men look at him as if he has said something inscrutable. “What issue would that be?"
Johnny reaches for the file drawer. At last he has their interest. He pulls out the photograph and hands it into the long fingers of the chief interrogator. The man hardly looks at it before he passes it on to his partner, who laughs. “It's grass!"
Johnny waits for the other one to explain, but when he doesn't, Johnny peers over the man's knuckles at the photograph. “Look closer; see how the grass forms numbers?"
The man nods, slowly.
"That's my father's secret code. For if he was captured. He was shot down in 1969. That picture was taken in 1982. He's still alive. Well, at least he was then, and I have seen nothing since to make me believe he's dead."
They look at him with new appreciation. Their expressions remind Johnny of all those years ago, the faces of the soldiers when he walked across the room to his mother.
Johnny objects when the man tucks the photograph into his pocket, but they tell him that they'll make sure the right people see it.
Johnny shakes their hands. Only later does he realize he should have gotten their names.
He waits.
Eventually Johnny takes the American flag down from his front porch and doesn't put it up again. No one is going to do what he should have done years ago.
Vietnam
Time has fallen into a turbine, wildly spun into strange green days and purple nights. Johnny is a friendly giant. He greets the villagers, using the phrase from his tourist book, but sadly retains nothing more of the language. What is spoken by these small people remains mysterious until the day Phi Nuc Than enters the noodle shop, and comes to stand by Johnny's table. “I have been told you need a guide."
At the sound of such clear English, Johnny feels as though woken from a long coma. He concentrates, blinks, frowns, smiles, nods, shakes the small man's hand, insists he sit, orders more noodles. Only then does Johnny explain how he has come in search of his father.
"They say there is one American, but we would be foolish to try to find him. He doesn't want to go home."
"Not wanna come home? Are you saying he's crazy?” And when Phi Nuc Than looks at Johnny with a frown, he repeats “crazy,” rolls his eyes, sticks out his tongue, shakes his head, doing his best pantomime of the word, all of which is unnecessary. Phi Nuc Than's English is excellent.
"Not crazy, a Lotus Eater."
"A Lotus Eater?"
"It is probably just a legend."
"Why wouldn't he wanna come home?"
Phi Nuc Than is concentrating on his noodles and does not look up as he shrugs.
Johnny sits back. It never occurred to him that his father might not want to be found. “Wait,” he says, though Phi Nuc Than has made no move to go. “He left his secret code in the grass, the way he was taught. I had a photograph of it, snuck to my mother by a friend of hers."
"When was that?"
"It was a long time ago, but why should I believe he's dead? The only proof I have is that he's still out there, waiting. I'm going to bring him home. Will you help?"
Phi Nuc Than is hard to convince. He has a wife. Kids. He doesn't like the jungle. At each objection, Johnny raises the price he's willing to pay. Eventually, Phi Nuc Than agrees. Johnny pays him handsomely but promises double upon their safe return.
They meet the next morning, leaving the village together; Johnny dressed like a soldier, carrying a backpack of supplies, and Phi Nuc Than dressed in the simple clothes of a peasant farmer. “I wasn't sure you'd actually come,” Johnny says (and, in fact, Phi Nuc Than had been more than an hour late, which Johnny decides not to mention).
Phi Nuc Than nods. “My father, too, is missing. I know your heart."
This is the nicest thing anyone has said to Johnny in a long time. He rests his hand on Phi Nuc Than's shoulder and when the small man looks up, Johnny calls him “friend.” Phi Nuc Than doesn't seem to know how to respond to this, but later that day, when Johnny loses Phi Nuc Than, then finds him again, the small man smiles broadly and says, “There you are, my friend."
Over the following days, Johnny is surprised to discover that his companion is a terrible guide. He walks too far ahead and frequently loses Johnny. It is a miracle every time Johnny finds him. Both men are bitten by insects, but Johnny is clearly the one who suffers the worst, and when he comments on it, his friend shrugs and says, “This is my country,” as if that explains the insects’ preference. Neither man
is skilled at making the small fires necessary for heating the food, and neither is very good at rationing. Both can see that they are exhausting their supplies much too quickly. As for searching for the American, who may or may not be Johnny's father, who may or may not truly exist, both men seem equally at a loss as how to go about it, pretending (Johnny is fairly certain Phi Nuc Than is pretending) to read clues in the strange markings on trees, or the various leavings of scat. Johnny and Phi Nuc Than begin fighting. At first they are mild spats, “You walk too fast,” “Well, you walk too slow,” “Your breath stinks like a goat,” “Well, your breath smells like farts,” but then they become pointed: “This is a stupid idea,” “Maybe it wouldn't be so stupid if I didn't have such a stupid guide."
The night comes when they make camp with broad leaves and bamboo, sharing the almost empty backpack as a harsh pillow, and Phi Nuc Than tells his story.
"We did the same thing with the French, years before the American war. We called them pearls. My country was willing to keep their end of the bargain. Pay us for the pearl, we bring him to you. We need the money, you understand? America measures time like a child, but we are very patient. We waited. All we wanted was the money that your president promised, but the Americans refused to pay. What can I say? Our officials did not believe Americans would leave their own soldiers behind. Our officials thought they were bargaining.
"The soldiers guarding the prisoners grew tired of their duty, but if any of them left his post, he was punished with death. Either stay with the pearls or die. No choice.
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