The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The old man began jumping up and down. Strangers approached from all sides of him running, walking, skipping, all manner of erect objects in their hands. “I claim this in the name of all divorced fathers!” a businessman said while spearing a baby carriage with a harpoon gun and a flag of boxers, the mother running away with her baby in her arms screaming. “I claim this in the name of the anonymous!” a nondescript man cried while waving a broken-off car aerial, thrusting it repeatedly into the air. “I claim this in the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury!” a bum cried while attempting to jab his crutch into the middle of the street pavement. He was subsequently run over by an out-of-control taxi cab with stakes, fishing poles, pipes, and other straight objects projecting from it in semblance to a giant yellow porcupine, its surface covered with various clinging, quarreling claimants.

  “Hey hey hey!” the old man cried. “We’re all Americans here!” when the enormous lady from upstairs, the one who’d always had such a crush on him, threw him to the ground, slammed her heavy black shoe onto his chest, and jammed the handle of her tattered umbrella into his protesting mouth, the umbrella opening with a spray of moths.

  “You’re mine!” she cried, and grinned.

  OCT. 13

  1988: The Archbishop of Turin announces that scientific tests prove that the “Shroud of Turin’ cannot have been Christ’s.

  “If you have a problem,” adults told the young Cal, “take it to Jesus,” and Jesus would tell him what to do. Tempted by cigarettes and alcohol? Take it to Jesus. Worried about that test tomorrow? Take it to Jesus. Not sure which girl to choose? Take it to Jesus. Jesus was always available to solve your problems.

  For a long time he’d visualized that Jesus as some kind of superhero, flying around under that anti-grav halo, arms spread crucifix-style into the edge of the wind, white and purple robes flowing behind. Jesusman, protector of the meek, enemy of the money-changers. Funny how he looked just like a beatnik– Ralph Roop at school drew pictures of Jesus in a flat-top haircut to make him look “more fittin’– but Cal always thought you could be pretty sure that the son of God must have turned out okay.

  Then later– he must have been in seventh grade– he figured that Jesus would probably want to wear some sort of disguise just like the other superheroes, so that bad guys like Pontius Pilate couldn’t recognize him, and he’d learned about the shroud in Sunday school, so he drew up some of his own pictures of Jesusman all wrapped up kind of like the Mummy. but he made the cloth covering the face look more like a full head mask, and the cloth around the legs was pulled tight to show off Jesusman’s muscles (he gave Jesus big thighs and shoulders, since he had to carry the weight of all the world’s sins). And he had a few streamers of cloth hanging back from the shoulders just to make the costume look more aerodynamic. He never could decide whether he should put a big “JC” on his chest, or just a cross. He drew him both ways.

  He and Ralph used to argue about who was the most powerful: Jesusman or Superman. Ralph had some pretty good arguments that Superman was stronger, but all Cal had to do was remind him that this was the son of God they were talking about, and wouldn’t the son take after the father? That usually shut Ralph up, but Cal wasn’t so sure, remembering that he seemed to be nothing like his own father. But both agreed that Batman was even more interesting than the other two, Superman being so powerful and kind of dull and Jesusman talking so much and just ever now and then multiplying some loaves and fishes for some people at a picnic lunch or something.

  When he got into Junior High Cal stopped drawing pictures of Jesusman, but the dreams continued. He dreamed that he discovered that God was his real father– God looked a lot like Edward G. Robinson– and one day God appeared in a cloud of smoke and presented Cal with the Jesusman costume, which he was supposed to use responsibly. Cal promised he would, but even in the dream he felt guilty about that, because the whole time he was talking to God his father he’d been thinking about how being Jesusman might make the girls more interested in him.

  Jesusman had to be the luckiest guy in the world: he was smart and brave, everybody loved him, and he knew his father.

  OCT. 14

  1894: E.E. Cummings is born in Cambridge, Mass.

  1917: France executes Mata Hari.

  1944: German field marshal Rommel commits suicide.

  for Linda

  when i

  fell

  in love

  with you,

  mata hari,

  i took you

  from the arms of the desert fox

  who could not love you as i

  who could only bite and claw

  his way through beauty.

  we had our 2 kids,

  3 dogs, and

  4 secrets

  we never told:

  how you feared my nose

  when i loved your feet

  what you spend for clothes

  why i’m not discreet.

  i loved

  the nessss

  of you,

  mata hari

  the whys??, the Ups,

  the howwwws

  of you,

  mata hari.

  but i dreaded your sometimes,

  mata hari

  i loathed your whenevers

  mata hari.

  (tho leery of) your maybes,

  mata hari,

  these days,

  i wake up in

  complete.

  OCT. 15

  1783: Jean Pilatre de Rozier takes a five-minute balloon ride near Paris, becoming the first human being to fly.

  When the time finally arrived it was remarkably easy: he simply spread his arms at a backward angle and leaned forward and off the cliff. The air dropped him rapidly, then seemed to realize that the rules were to be different this time, caught him, and tossed him on his way at ever-increasing speed above the valley floor.

  He looked down, shakily at first, thinking that if someone down on the ground were to see him then it would all be over. He’d drop to the ground and die. He didn’t know how he could be so sure, but he was.

  But there were no signs of people down below. Even the tiny houses appeared to have left on vacation.

  Once he’d been in the air for a few minutes it became clear how flying was in fact humanity’s natural condition. The fact that most people could not fly under their own power seemed suddenly an aberration. Most human beings were like flightless birds. They should have a form of locomotion commensurate with the speed of their language, and their dreams, but they did not. No wonder most human beings felt chronically unfulfilled.

  He rolled himself over in the air until he was in more or less a sitting position, his legs stretched out before him as if he were driving in the soap box derby. He flew lower to the ground, lower still until he was only about a foot or so above the grass. He imagined it must look as if he were driving an invisible car.

  Or sitting in an invisible chair in his library, scenes from the various books he had read whizzing by so quickly they blurred one into the next.

  He couldn’t imagine why people walked when with only a modicum of effort they might fly.

  He rose higher into the air. It seemed now that the more he thought the higher he rose and the faster he traveled. Soon he was high above the tree tops again.

  Below him first one child and then the other waved to him. Suddenly dark-robed figures rose out of fissures in the ground and dragged his children below the surface. He cried out and tried to stop but his thoughts were too fanciful and he rose even higher into the air.

  Below him his wife waved before she too was taken underground. Again he tried to stop but he only rose higher above the ground.

  When the air became so thin he could not breathe words gathered in his throat and lungs to keep him conscious. Several miles higher and the earth was a shiny Christmas tree ornament below him.

  A few miles higher and angels came and flew around him. They guided him through a long dark tunnel like a vert
ical sewer pipe to a white hatch that glowed above his head. He opened up the hatch and climbed above.

  There he stood up in a field of amber-colored grasses and began to walk toward a distant gray city, thinking and wishing and dreaming he could fly, so that he might go anywhere he wanted in an instant.

  OCT. 16

  1758: Noah Webster is born in West Hartford, Connecticut.

  Cal had been interested in words since childhood. He remembered being seven or eight, and putting new vocabulary words his teacher had assigned him– phonetically related words like “itch,” “stretch,” “catch,” “reach,” “pinch”– on flashcards and reviewing them again and again, looking for similarities, thinking about how differently each tasted. Later, he became fascinated by what he called the “magnetic” quality of words. He would write a word down on a sheet of paper and find himself compelled to write certain words down beside it, then certain words around those. Certain words and phrases appeared to have an affinity for one another, they drew themselves together into phrases and sentences, even paragraphs, with seemingly no guidance from him. Sometimes they built stories as essential as the words themselves.

  gen: birth natural origin general genial spirit engine embryo miscegenation generation nature race kin kingdom gender indigent gently begotten progenitor origin heterogeneous native genial renaissance germane …

  general pregnant engines genius king free spirits kindergarten genocide families children general.

  The General was pregnant with engines of genius. Everyone knew this. They came to him with their problems, and even if he couldn’t do anything immediately, he promised he would attend to their difficulties soon.

  The King freed the spirits of the country’s kindergartens with genocide. He’d always been an insane king– he’d often said that every mother in his kingdom was guilty of the most bizarre forms of miscegenation, and that they’d given birth to a generation of monsters.

  The families were distraught over the deaths of their children, and went to the General. The General said the king was guilty of crimes against nature and a traitor to his race and therefore must be punished.

  The General disguised himself as Kris Kringle and traveled from village to village, convincing the remaining children that they should follow him if they wanted revenge for the murders of their young kin. There was wide-spread support for this mission both from indigents and those gainfully employed. The local psychics claimed that even embryos in their mothers’ wombs were in favor of the plan.

  When the General disguised as Kris Kringle and his army of children arrived at the palace of the king they began to sing, at first gently and then louder and louder until the king finally ran out of the palace to find out what had begotten such a noise. Once he was outside the walls the General commanded the children to set upon the sinister progenitor, malicious origin, and terrible father of their country. Which they did. And they tore him into thousands of heterogeneous, bloody bits. Every native of that kingdom was pleased, and even the gendarmes were seen to applaud.

  The General was installed as the new, more genial king, and although the people expected a renaissance of sorts, he proved to be an even worse sort of father and he too was killed during a broad-based revolution.

  But that last event is hardly germane to this story.

  OCT. 17

  1989: A 7.1 magnitude earthquake hits the San Francisco Bay Area.

  His mother used to drive him from town to town in her old Ford, to places where she wasn’t known, where she would go into bars while he slept in the back seat. More often than not he would wake up in the middle of the night because the springs were rocking, the car was shaking, and he’d sit up to discover his mother having sex with a strange man in the front seat or on the hood. A number of times there were fights out in the parking lot, drunken men being thrown up against the car, and once the windshield shattered from a thrown bottle.

  Then there was the night he saw his mother beaten up, her bloody face thrown up against the backseat window, her soft flesh sliding across the glass as Cal watched. The nameless man out there was bellowing, pounding on his mother, hefting his huge bulk up on the hood so that he could have sex with her after he’d beaten her, the whole car rocking, the whole car shaking, so that he was sure the whole car was going to sink into the ground or fly apart, his mother and the giant nameless man and Cal himself shaking and flying apart until there was nothing left.

  And there had been nothing Cal could do to stop it. He wanted to help his mother and he wanted to help himself but he could do nothing but curl up in the backseat and pretend he was asleep, pretend he had seen and heard nothing.

  The incident had been a fluke. They shouldn’t have even been there. Cal had picked Jenny up at a friend’s house. It was after dark and she was asleep as soon as she sat down. He’d taken a short cut through an alley and come upon two men fighting. The men were huge and crazed and bleeding. It was quite a fight: bricks, broken bottles, boards, each man staggering from the blows but not going down.

  Cal stopped the car and suddenly they were on it, slamming against the doors, the windows, the hood, the car shaking and rocking as the men screamed, Jenny screaming as she woke up and saw the blood stains on the glass.

  Cal should have started the car and gotten out of there. He should have done a lot of things. But he froze. As the car rocked and shook and as Jenny screamed he just sat there, afraid to do anything, just sat there and did not protect his daughter from any of it.

  And then the huge, bull-like face hit the windshield, and smeared across it, and collapsed like the front of a building in an earthquake.

  And Cal felt it again: his overwhelming inadequacy as a father, and the terrible weight of all he could not protect his children from.

  OCT. 18

  1865: Essayist Logan Pearsall Smith– who said “What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.”– is born in Millville, New Jersey.

  Cal was thirteen before he could sleep without the covers over his head. He kept telling his mother he wasn’t afraid of the dark, he was afraid of the things in the dark, the things that moved and changed the shadows, and touched. She never understood the distinction.

  Cal had thought the air itself had different voices. When his room was cold it spoke slowly, carefully, sometimes pausing whole minutes between syllables. But when the air was hot it practically chattered. Hot or cold, fast or slow, it spoke in whispers, with words he understood only intermittently, words which might have been any word, making him wonder what he’d actually heard.

  The air of each room seemed to have its own voice. The air in the living room, encircled by couches and overstuffed chairs, had one voice. The air in the kitchen, with its metal and steam, had quite another. The air in his mother’s bedroom, furnished with her one big bed almost filling it, was slow and warm and the voice of it would put him to sleep in minutes. But it was the air of his own bedroom, with its layers of clutter which alternately trapped and multiplied the shadows, which would not leave him alone, which nagged him into intollerable dream, which assaulted him with doubt, which told him again and again he was only a visitor in this world, and not long to be.

  One night he stirred from such a long, sibilant lecture, to find a man standing in the darkness by his open window. He could not see the man’s eyes or nose, only his thin-lipped mouth and huge chin. Cal opened his mouth to cry out but the man put a finger up to those lips and whispered against it and Cal suddenly could not speak.

  I cannot stay long, the man breathed, as he came to Cal, and put his arms around him, and held him there, in fact, a very long time. I cannot stay long, the cold air spoke, and the whisper moved around the room and brushed against Cal’s small body and went back into the air again, and despite what the man in the shadows had said, it never left.

  OCT. 19

  1977: the supersonic Concorde makes its first landing in New York City.

  He tried to think of planes as buses, or train
s, and that would work for a few minutes, but then he would get caught up in the speed of them, and he would close his eyes, and he would be convinced that this is the way it would feel at the end of his life: travelling beyond his body, to wherever it was he wanted to go.

  Or wherever it was he was scheduled for. Even in the afterlife, he supposed, you were only permitted to go where the higher-ups wanted you to go. So flying wasn’t necessarily the great freedom it might at first have seemed to be. Death might simply be another way to become defined, compartmentalized.

  In dreams he was a plane. All he had to do was stretch out his arms like a child, maybe make an engine noise with his lips, and suddenly he was leaving the house, sailing out of a window or chimney, and his wife and children were shouting amazement at what he had accomplished.

  Sometimes as he flew through the nights and the days and the skies of other worlds he would peek over his shoulder and see a dark form beyond a cloud or just peeking around the sun’s halo. Eventually he realized this was but a shadow of the death which would come for him some day, crashing him to the ground and ending his flying days forever.

  But for all its grim glory, that shadow was what had given him the ability to fly in the first place. It was what had first shown the way.

  He’d taken one plane trip with Linda and his children when they were small: a short hop to California. Parker had been amazed by the carpet of clouds stretched out beneath them. Then he’d become suddenly afraid, looked up at Cal and said, “But what if we get to like it too much? Maybe we’d never be able to come down again!”

  Cal had looked over at Linda. She’d reached out and held Parker’s hands a few minutes. That’s all it took. Cora had had such power. And his mother a bit of it. Women amazed Cal. Some men had it too, of course, but in his experience it had been the women. They made it possible for men like Cal to fly.

  OCT. 20

  1859: Educational philosopher John Dewey is born in Burlington, Vermont.

  The classroom fills slowly with its special adult students: the ones who have just realized there’s a test today and they haven’t studied, the ones who’ve come to class naked and are just now realizing it, the ones who have unsuccessfully tried to tell the teacher that they graduated years ago, that they don’t belong here at all.