The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The chairs are too small for them. They are trapped inside their chairs and cannot get free.

  At that moment the teacher walks in. She has a wide head and a wide body. Her mouth flips open like a trashcan lid. She gives them a test with no questions, just blank lines for the answers. When challenged on this she replies, “Haven’t you heard? Knowing the questions is far more important than the answers.”

  The students begin by writing down their life stories, then they write down the lives they would have liked to have had. The teacher collects the papers, dumps them into her wide mouth, and eats them.

  The teacher takes roll but the students have all forgotten their names.

  The teacher asks for the capitol of Brazil and everyone gives a different answer.

  When recess time comes the students remain in their seats, waiting, waiting, waiting for the next lesson to begin.

  OCT. 21

  1797: “Old Ironsides” is launched in Boston Harbor.

  1879: Thomas Edison invents the electric light.

  1959: The Guggenheim Museum opens in New York.

  1966: 140 people, most of them children, are killed when a coal waste landslide engulfs a school in south Wales.

  His favorite thing when travelling was to visit the local art museums. He especially enjoyed abstract work although he didn’t think he really had the background to understand it. He’d been told that abstract artists, non-objective artists, attempted to distort, suppress, and eliminate the representational element from their work. He didn’t think it was possible. He thought it was a wonderful thing that these artists were bringing previously inaccessible realities into consciousness.

  He was always impressed by Kandinsky’s work, and visited the Guggenheim every time he was in New York. Kandinsky viewed art as an expression of the artist’s inner life, the spirituality in man. Choices of color, form, and composition were to be decided only by a corresponding vibration in the human soul.

  Kandinsky classified his works as impressions, improvisations, and compositions. Cal had always preferred Kandinsky’s improvisations: “largely unconscious spontaneous expressions of inner character.”

  Improvisation 28. The embracing couple on the right edge of the canvas is unaware of the way the earth can turn upside down, inside out. Their hair is heavy with water and kisses so they cannot think clearly. Even the serpent in the water below them thinks more clearly than they, even though the serpent has turned from the cataclysm on the land behind them and is headed out to sea. Above them, the new light blazes down, warming their backs so that they can dream they are on a South Sea island and in love. While behind them the mountain roars like a cannon and the world turns inside out casting up Old Ironsides, her skeletons spilling out of the broken hull for the children to play with. But the world still turns upside down and children die, they die all the time, buried so deeply their singing mouths fill with stone and mud and the couple continues to embrace and kiss, blissfully unaware.

  Painting with White Form, 1913. Blissfully unaware, the spirit walks in from the left side, not understanding the distress it causes among lovers who dare not think of death. Flashbulbs explode and the theosophists and spirit photographers gather around the ghost who is blissfully unaware. In the distance they can hear the cries of dead children trapped within the hull of the ghost ship Old Ironsides. But there is nothing they can do for them now. So they content themselves with taking pictures. There is nothing any of us can do.

  Landscape With Rain. There is nothing any of us can do. The rain comes down and tears our vision into vertical stripes. The rain comes down and splits the mountainside. Year after year the rain comes down and sculpts the mountains with steady erosion. The children are buried inside the mountain and we cannot protect even their dead bodies. The rain comes down and waters the gravestones.

  Landscape with Red Spots II. The rain comes down and waters the gravestones. They grow until they threaten to fill the canvas. Our vision becomes spotted with red from staring at them so long. They grow until they become the mountains themselves. They even grow their own church. The church and the mountains and the headstones become our children. They are all that we have.

  Improvisation 33. They are all that we have. The restful blue and the blue-black of grief. And the red that tells us that passion is still possible. A naked woman in a field of flowers. And yet colors are all that we have to embrace.

  Painting with White Border. Colors are all that we have to embrace. The light bulb tries to deceive us but our hearts know the colors by feel. The pregnant silence of white. The dead silence of black. The violet echoes of grief. The dead children speak with mouths full of black. At the center of the canvas the knight on horseback kills the dragon with his spear, the dragon who has eaten all his children, the dragon who is everything, the dragon who is the world. But the world is surrounded by white, and can only be defeated in dreams, and will eat all our children before it is done, without fear of reprisal.

  OCT. 22

  1962: President Kennedy orders the blockade of Cuba. Many Americans fear that a nuclear war is imminent.

  “My daddy built it for tornadoes,” the old man said, gazing around the shelter with pride. “Back in ’62 I upgraded, put in a generator and some furniture, been modernizing the place ever since.”

  Cal looked at the Home Sweet Home embroidery on the wall, the polished rocker that made him think of both Kennedy and Whistler’s mother. The shelter was furnished like a Victorian parlor. “But you’ve never had to use it,” he said.

  “Not for tornadoes, though one set down sixty miles away back in ’59. Not for A-bombs, neither.” He chuckled. “Now my daughter, she had her some fine sleepovers and birthday parties when she was little. Now I come down to read in that rocker, when the house gets too hot and the wife gets too ornery.” He laughed, too loudly.

  Cal had gone to school with the daughter. “How is Phyllis?”

  The smile went out of the father’s eyes and he looked away, staring at the rocker. “I wouldn’t know,” he said softly. Then he looked back. “You have children of your own, I hear. How is it ever with a man’s children? How is a father supposed to know– especially when she won’t talk to him anymore?”

  The man’s question was like a bomb going off in Cal’s face. He could feel his skin burn, then die in the outside layers, the deadness probing deeper, as if seeking his fatality. “A lot can happen,” he said. “So much can happen.”

  The wind picked up and Cal’s hair began to burn. He ran to the back wall of the shelter. The old man shouted something garbled behind him, and Cal turned and stared as the man’s polyester shirt melted off his skin, exposing gray chest hair, drooping nipples like worried eyes. He slammed the door of the shelter shut as a series of distant explosions shook the ground. Both men tumbled as the shelter itself seemed to tumble, seemed to twist and writhe as if desperate to pull itself out of the ground.

  The ground stilled. Dust drifted like ash from the ceiling. The only sound was their ragged breathing edged with tears.

  And then the voices of their children, playful, calling, wanting to get into the shelter, then growing more strident when the fathers would not reply.

  Cal and the old man grabbed on to the furniture, preparing themselves for their children’s next assault.

  OCT. 23

  1991: Euthanasia advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian assists in the deaths of two women in Michigan.

  Cal had heard again from a neighbor that someone had been asking about him in town. It would have been easy, he knew, for them to find his cabin– everyone knew where he lived. But no one had been by, at least as far as he could tell. So what did they want? Maybe Linda just wanted to know where he was– he’d sent her all those notes along the way to let her know he was okay. So he could have easily been traced. Was that what he’d wanted all along?

  Maybe one of the kids was sick. So why didn’t the messenger reveal himself? None of it made any sense. Cal tried not to think about one o
f his kids being sick.

  He was spending more time in town than usual, hoping that the messenger would show himself and tell him what was wrong. Cal sat on various benches, stoops, fallen logs, and watched the local businesses.

  There was only the one funeral parlor, but it seemed to be doing a great deal of business for a town this small.This particular day Cal had seen at least three funerals depart from the small storefront.

  In his head he’d practiced going to his own children’s funerals almost since the day they were born. He knew it wasn’t healthy, but it was a compulsion. Imagination could get you in trouble. Imagination complicated things.

  He didn’t know how he felt about Kevorkian, and the philosophical arguments he’d read both pro or con seemed suspect. Euthanasia, abortion: people seldom really argued philosophy on such issues. They argued imagination. They imagined themselves dying. They imagined children dying. Their own children dying. Or suffering. And they could not tolerate such imaginings. It was their imaginings they supported or condemned.

  How could he imagine his own children having a right to die when their lives meant so much to him? The worst thing about being a parent was that he was forced to allow them to have their own lives, make their own mistakes. Forced because ultimately there was nothing he could do about it. But it was intolerable, because they risked their own deaths. Every day they risked their own deaths, risked taking themselves away from him. It was intolerable.

  “Would you like to come inside?”

  Cal looked up into the bright green eyes of the man he recognized as the local undertaker. Later he would wonder why, but he said, “yes,” without hesitation. And the man touched him in the small of his back, and with that one gesture it felt as if he controlled him completely.

  The man guided Cal through the various rooms with comment that was minimal, but rehearsed– as if he had guided people through this tour many times before, but also understood that words were not what the people wanted, especially when they observed the embalming room, the tables with their built-in drains, the equipment with pumps and tubes attached.

  In a room whose walls were hidden by curtains, there was a lone coffin with an elderly man lying inside. “Occupied,” the undertaker said with a slight smile. He guided Cal into another, similarly curtained room, with another almost identical coffin. “Would you like to try it out? Some people just have to know how it feels.”

  Again with very little hesitation, Cal accepted the offer.

  It was a snug fit, and he found he couldn’t put his feet into any position that felt comfortable. But after a while he fell asleep.

  And woke up with the sensation of someone watching him. He opened his eyes, saw that a woman was weeping over him with her eyes closed. He closed his eyes immediately. After a half hour of having people standing over him, the undertaker came and helped him out of the coffin. He invited him into the basement for tea and cake, and Cal accepted.

  In the basement he saw the old man who had been in the coffin in the room next to his. The man stuffed slice after slice of the cake into his mouth, seemingly unaware of the gooey yellow icing smearing over his face.

  There were a dozen or so other people in the room, all dressed in their Sunday best. Most were wearing makeup– their cheeks colored, their lips unnaturally red– even the men.

  Cal walked into an adjacent room where a little boy in similar makeup, and suit and tie, stared at cartoons on an ancient black and white TV. His face bored, vacuous.

  Cal opened another door, and found there row after row of bunks, and a half-open garage door with a van waiting.

  “Sometimes people want a change,” the undertaker said behind him. “Sometimes their imaginations take them away. People have a right, you know? Even the children. You believe that, don’t you? That it is their life?”

  Cal turned and started for the stairs.

  “I can arrange everything …” the undertaker was saying behind him.

  But Cal was running by then.

  OCT. 24

  1939: nylon stockings go on sale for the first time, in Wilmington, Del.

  Several little girls were playing around in the trash cans in the alley by the local lingerie shop. They pulled streamers of pantyhose out of the mix of packing materials and paper trash. They ran around the front of the store with the hosiery trailing behind them like wind socks made from human skin.

  Then they started pulling the stockings over their heads: slanting their eyes, flattening their noses, distorting their lips, elongating the tops of their heads. They ran around in circles, chasing each other, crying “Boo!” Cal stood up, afraid one of them was going to stumble out into traffic, kill themselves because of panty hose.

  Two girls ran up to him. Their faces looked alien beneath the sheer tan mesh. “Boo! Boo!” they cried.

  He smiled, reached out to pat one on the head, but held back, thinking if someone on the street saw him the gesture might be misinterpreted.

  The panty hose looked like a second skin, warped away from the underlying layers. Old, diseased. It looked sickly, repulsive, and he suddenly realized it made all the little girls look exactly the same.

  “Boo! Boo!” they cried, and both started screeching, and he moved forward to tear the pantyhose off them, afraid maybe they were suffocating, or they were panicking. But he paused, afraid of what an onlooker might think.

  But then it became clear: the little girls were in fact laughing. Looking at him and laughing. And their mothers were crowding into the open shop door, staring at him and no doubt wondering what he had done to their precious little girls.

  OCT. 25

  1400: Geoffrey Chaucer dies in London.

  Sitting by the main street, remaining still and unobtrusive as the gray bench underneath him, Cal heard stories and snippets of stories.

  From the local dentist, still wearing his white smock, talking to a local lawyer, “So Levi comes in with this set of dog teeth, jaw bone and everything, still warm from the boiling water, and he’s wanting me to make a set of false teeth out of them. He’s been having terrible trouble chewing, he said, and he figured these would help. He told me he would have had them to me sooner, but the first dog he caught ran away, then he remembered that Mayor Clemmons had this big Doberman …”

  And from the lawyer, “… then Willy bribed the assistant undertaker to stage his own funeral to show Ellen Mays how much he’d really loved her, killing himself for her and everything, and right after Ellen cries and cries over him and tells his dead body how sorry she was old Willy sits up in that coffin and asks her to marry him and Ellen drops dead right there with a heart attack and Ellen’s brother Jimmy who was standing beside her pulls out his pistol and shoots Willy in the head. There’s five lawyers involved now and somebody’s even suing the town council for not having an ordinance specifically prohibiting fire arms in funeral parlors.”

  From the local sheriff, “So the feller had this little spy glass thing, this little telescope, up on the mantle, and I don’t know why just an impulse I guess, but I picked up that thing and looked through it and there was another eye staring right at me, scared the bejessus out of me so’s I dropped the thing and the end of it pops out and that traveling salesman’s missing eyeballs come rolling out. And do you know what that feller tells me, you know what he says? ‘Oops,’ he says to me, like I’d just spilt some grape juice on his rug.”

  From a little woman, the volunteer evangelist who’d preached to Cal in his cabin one afternoon earlier that month, “Now most of them, they believe He rose up on the third day, but our group has proof, I mean real proof it was on the fourth. Cal? Cal, is that you on that bench? Cal, I have a story to tell you about you know who …”

  OCT. 26

  1984: Baby Fae, born with a severe heart defect, is given the heart of a baboon.

  The local woods were a vigorous remnant of one of those great eastern forests, full of ancient trees with undergrowth and deadfall that hadn’t been cleared out in decades
. The days had remained unseasonably warm approaching November, and the forest floor was a riot of warm yellows, reds, purples. The sight of partially naked trees against the bright, clear sky was a bit disorienting, and it seemed to Cal that the forest hid things more effectively now than it had when the trees were at their fullest. Deep green shade had been supplanted by a brilliant, glowing vacancy highlighted with all the colors of dying. He felt vaguely misplaced.

  Animals still moved here, out in plain view as if they’d given up on secrecy. Now and then they would stop and stare at him rudely, as if he had just moved on the block and they were refusing to welcome him, too suspicious even to say hello.

  A squirrel stared at him with shining black eyes. A fox moved back and forth across the path, restless as a stray thought.

  The squirrel went away and a deer took its place. He hadn’t seen the deer coming– suddenly it just materialized. It too stared at him, as if continuing the watch.

  One of his mother’s boyfriends took him hunting as a boy, but he’d refused to shoot. The animals were all looking at him, and he couldn’t shoot something that was looking right at him. Later when the boyfriend broke up with his mother she’d seemed resentful, and he’d felt guilty about it, that maybe he’d taken away one of her few chances.

  He wondered sometimes if animals had truly individualized thoughts, or if it was instead a collective sort of experience. Perhaps two animals together had the same pattern of thought. Or perhaps for animals breathing, eating, defecating were all a part of thought.

  He wondered if Baby Fae’s baboon heart had changed her in any significant way.

  He didn’t really have a problem with medical experimentation using animals per se (although perhaps it was overused), nor did he oppose a woman’s right to choose abortion. A choice of one form of life over another form of life was always being made, had always been made in this world. What bothered him profoundly, however, was the lack of reverence, the lack of ceremony when such potentials were terminated. People must view ceremony as a potentially dangerous thing, he thought.