The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  If he died here in this town, he would be buried in one of those graveyards. That was a strange thing to contemplate, and it made him feel even further separated from his family. Would his children be able to find his stone?

  Cal put down his blanket and spread it over the grass, careful not to get too close to a stone. Sitting out among the trees, so near to where other people did business, chatted about the day, embraced, gave him a peculiar sort of pleasure.

  The little boy was singing. It was a strange, atonal, meaningless yet beautiful song.

  Cora used to visit her parents in this graveyard, and every time she packed a picnic lunch. Cal had gone with her a number of times. “Like sittin’ down to dinner together again,” she’d say with the biggest smile.

  Of all the graveyards in town, this one, with its World War I era graves, interested him the most. A smallpox epidemic had passed through this part of the country during those years, leaving behind a hundred or so childrens gravestones.

  This day he arrived at the graveyard at noon, and was still there at dusk. He thought a great deal about the differences in the stones marking the graves of the various children. Some were merely small crosses, reflecting the size, or the length of those young lives. Others were the size of public monuments, perhaps built with a fortune once saved for college, but with no further use. Some were ornate and flowery, attempting to express some last bit of poetry concerning the significance of this dead child to his or her grieving parents. And others were plain, stark– “Died at 3 am.” “Dead after two weeks.”– with just a name attached, as if the cold fact of the matter was horror enough.

  The two small children had stopped playing, and now just sat there by the graves solemnly. As the sun lowered their flesh went pale, yellowed, like the finish on antique photographs. Cal wondered what they wanted here. It hardly seemed like the place for kids.

  Just thinking that seemed to draw the boy, the younger of the two, to his side. The boy held out a ball. When he rolled it to Cal, Cal rolled it back. This continued for a half hour or more.

  The girl was carrying a doll clutched tightly to her chest. It was an old-fashioned looking thing, with a pale blue bonnet and a pink frilly dress with large pockets. She seemed to want Cal to look at her baby, but at the same time she was quite protective of it, so he had to lean close to her. And in doing so discovered that her baby doll had no head.

  The girl looked up at him and smiled, and then he was seeing the gravestones through her body as if through a piece of yellowed film. The little boy walked toward him, and seemed to fragment, vanish, then reappear again in the fading light.

  They tried to get him to play with them some more, and although he wanted to help them, he could not move. He kept thinking how he had played with these dead children, and yet his own living children were over a thousand miles away, no doubt wondering if he even loved them.

  “I have two kids of my own,” he said. “I think you’d get along.” They listened politely, but said nothing. Trying to think of something else to say, Cal found himself telling them the story of his birth, the story of his first day, and why he had felt compelled to return to this town. And having heard this bedtime story from a father misplaced, they quietly lay down and went to bed.

  He watched them sleeping. He watched them fade away with the darkness. And then Cal went back to his cabin alone.

  NOV. 5

  1991: approximately 7,000 people are killed in floods in the Philippines.

  When Cal was fifteen years old his best friend drowned in the local river during a family picnic. He’d been swimming with a lot of other children, and for reasons Cal would never understand they hadn’t noticed him when he went under. No one had noticed the boy was even missing until at least an hour had passed. By that time Cal’s best friend was miles downstream. The body wasn’t recovered for days.

  Perhaps because of this event death by drowning had always been fascinating for Cal to contemplate. Over and over again, in dreams and daydreams, Cal reimagined the story of the journey of his best friend’s body.

  Initially, he thought, drowning would be so little like breathing the differences themselves would be terrifying. Breathing was about openness, about potential, about maintaining the ability to take in the world. Drowning was about closure, and being filled, about the end of potential, about the end.

  But there must come a point, he thought, after the mind has snuffed out, pushed out by the water rising inside the body, that drowning must seem quite natural. After all, the body is mostly water, and without the mind around to tell the body otherwise, the body must naturally feel quite content being swallowed up by water.

  To drown would be to fly through the substance out of which the body came. To drown would be to dream of a return to the beginning. To drown would be to fall asleep inside oneself, without the urgency to wake up again.

  After the body had filled and the mind had left, the body must have sunk a certain distance, down near the sediment where other things had made their homes. There the body would be another neighbor in the waters, and nothing unusual.

  The eyes would have been open, the water pressing back the lids. If there was a kind of seeing which took place in the body after death, this body would be seeing a great deal. Miles of shifting silt and debris, twisting vegetation, perhaps other bodies like floating bags of water themselves.

  At first slowly, and then with increasing speed the body was swept along the bottom of the stream. Unused to its new powers of mobility, however, the body struck the stream bottom from time to time, collecting rocks and bits of wood and trash in the pockets and folds of its swimming trunks. Eventually it became used to its mode of travel and the body straightened out, becoming more streamlined as the swimming trunks fell away, and the body flew through the stream a foot or so above the bottom.

  Hours passed, and then days, and the body communed with the fishes, sneaking past hooks and grapples which had been lowered into the stream in an attempt to find it, and the fish all laughed at its cleverness, and the underwater vegetation waved its approval and the body’s lips stretched and split into a self-satisfied smile.

  Animals gathered at the shoreline and batted at the body even though they couldn’t see it under the water, but sensed it in the way some animals have. The trees along the shore waved it gently by and the clouds overhead tracked its progress.

  At one point an ailing fish glided on top of the body, catching a much needed ride.

  After a week in the cold water the body began to fill with gas and drifted slowly to the surface with its head down as if in prayer. The skin had warped and wrinkled around the hands and feet, and was slowly peeling off the body like gloves and socks. This was the end of the body’s adventure, as it was found soon thereafter and taken to the morgue.

  Sometimes when it rained heavily, Cal would look into the hard gray damp of the air and imagine that he saw his best friend’s body, floating through the air, waving listlessly to all the passersby, no doubt knowing this was its final trip, and intent on making the most of it.

  NOV. 6

  1913: Mohandas K. Gandhi is arrested leading a march of Indian miners in South Africa.

  Cal knew what happened to saints because of Frank Jenkins. Frank Jenkins liked doing things for other people. In fact, his only job was doing things for other people.

  Frank would be walking by, see you cleaning up your yard, and without a word he’d be there right beside you, taking the hardest part of the chore. The same would happen if you were digging a ditch, roofing a house, plowing a field, whatever.

  And what little money Frank had he was always spending on other people. You’d be standing in line at the diner, waiting to pay your check, when Frank would walk up and without a word plop down the money to cover it on the counter. Then he’d just walk away.

  And he’d take the blame for everything. If you ran over his dog, he’d be the one apologizing to you for having a dog that ruined your nice day.

  And
sometimes when you were mad he would stick his face right in front of you, actually asking you to hit him in the face and let off some steam because it just wasn’t good to keep it all bottled in.

  Naturally, folks hated Frank. He was the worst nuisance in town.

  When they took up the collection for his bus ticket, some people contributed four and five times.

  When the bus pulled away from the station, Frank handcuffed to a seat inside (the sheriff was happy to donate a pair) and looking sad, some people were seen to weep at his departure. Afterward they all went to the local bar for a drink.

  NOV. 7

  1917: Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution begins.

  When Cal was a teenager some college kids– hippies, the people in town called them– bought a small farm up on the mountainside. Of course almost immediately some people thought they must be some sort of radical group, a bunch of revolutionaries.

  He had never really understood that. The country had started with a revolution, hadn’t it? And each new generation was supposed to find its own way, its own concerns, its own heroes, wasn’t it? So it seemed to him revolution was the natural way of things– if there wasn’t an ongoing revolution something was terribly wrong, wasn’t it?

  The idea of the commune up on the hill excited him. Living in that small town it was hard to take the outside world too seriously. The same things happened over and over again, with very little change. But after the hippies came to town it was hard for Cal to think of anything but the outside world.

  He’d visited them several times the first summer they were there, and was disappointed to find just simple folk, interested in farming, weaving, and macrobiotic diets. In fact to a teenager they were a thoroughly boring group. The revolutionary story he’d imagined was quite a different affair:

  The leader of the group, who resembles Fidel Castro, steps out one morning beneath a bright yellow sun. He is dissatisfied with what he sees. The sun immediately turns into the moon. The ground is illuminated with a silver glow. Fidel frowns. A greenish glow, as if a phosphorescent growth covers everything. A beautiful dark-haired woman walks up and kisses him on the lips, or rather, the cheeks.

  “Fidel,” she sighs.

  “My name is John,” he says.

  “John,” she sighs. “It’s all so boring.”

  “I know,” William replies. “Time for another revolution, I suppose.”

  Then, as if given a call to arms, the doors to the small Spanish-style bungalow open up wide and fall off their hinges. Windows shatter, and every stick of furniture in the small house strides through the empty doorway and quickly disappears in the distance. Trees pull out their roots, grow wings, and fly away. Dogs and cats dance together to a rumba beat, jump into the river and swim to the whale lying beached in the middle of the stream. Lunch.

  The beautiful woman’s head falls off, her tongue splits into two legs and carries her screaming head away. The rest of her melts like a candle.

  Fidel/John/William begins to smile, and the smile takes on a life of its own, splitting his face wider and wider, then becoming a crack that spirals down his body, until he peels and splits into a dozen pieces.

  A baby comes along and looks at the pieces of the revolutionary leader writhing on the ground. The baby yawns widely, then says, “Wasn’t it Georg Buchner who said, ‘The Revolution is like Saturn– it eats its own children’?”

  Then the baby eats the revolutionary leader, one squirming piece at a time.

  NOV. 8

  1923: Adolf Hitler attempts to seize power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich.

  Some people in the town were again thinking “revolution” the very next year when vice-mayor Jim Wynn had Mayor Ed Wriggly declared mentally incompetent.

  The job of vice-mayor had not been a highly thought of position before that year. Basically, the vice-mayor’s job was to manage the town-owned swimming pool and snack bar out at the park. He didn’t even get to make up the schedule or the menu– the mayor did all that. And “to perform the duties of the mayor if the mayor should have to step down for any reason.” Which was unlikely, at least historically. Being vice-mayor was a little like being runner-up at the Miss America pageant.

  Until Jim Wynn decided he wanted to be mayor.

  He was nice enough about it at first. He asked Ed Wriggly politely if he’d step down and let him take the reins for a while. Jim thought it might be fun being mayor– that’s what he told Ed. Deciding what hours the swimming pool and snack bar were going to be open. Deciding whether they were going to serve pizza or not. Deciding who was going to come speak on Founder’s Day. Deciding the carpet color in city hall. Deciding who to hire for snow plowing in the winter. Sitting in the mayor’s gen-u-ine leather chair (his desk was just a sheet of plywood, really, but at least it was big). Sitting on the lead float during the Tobacco Festival parade.

  But Mayor Ed wouldn’t hear of it. “Why, Jim, you can’t even read or write!” he said, and then he brayed like a big old mule.

  That’s when Vice-mayor Jim started thinking about that clause about “if the mayor should be unable to perform his duties.” Jim had been thinking for a long time that Ed was a little crazy– he owned a pair of water skis and he’d voted Republican in the last election. Jim guessed it was just the right time to make it official.

  He couldn’t read up on the subject so he asked his cousin Emma, the school teacher, about it and she said “delusions” were the key. He asked her what that meant and she said it was like a fantasy that you believe is real, usually something you’re scared of.

  Well, Mayor Ed was scared to death of insects and Jim was lucky there because he had about two dozen bucketfuls down in the cellar under the snack bar that he hardly ever showed to company. Jim loved insects, but he didn’t think folks would understand.

  So one night he snuck into the mayor’s house while Ed was sleeping and dumped about three bucketfuls of crickets, roaches, beetles, and miscellaneous creepers and hoppers on the rug outside the mayor’s bedroom. Then he ran outside and around to the partly open bedroom window where he “called” his critters with a little thing he’d made out of paper and rubber bands and trained them with.

  They went hopping and crawling all right, right over Mayor Ed’s bed. Mayor Ed woke up screaming and jumping and ran out of the room. In the meantime, Jim called his bugs up the windowsill and out into the three waiting buckets. By the time the mayor got back in with his brother Paul from down the street there wasn’t a trace of them.

  Over the next few days he played similar tricks on Mayor Ed: leaving a bucketful of his pets in the mayor’s file drawer, sticking a couple into his phone receiver so just their little legs stuck out wiggling, and finally planting three or four in the tuna sandwich the mayor ordered for lunch every day out at the snack-bar.

  Pretty soon everybody knew about it and it didn’t take more than a couple of phone calls to get some doctors out to the mayor’s office for certification purposes. Mayor Ed seemed almost relieved as they led him away.

  Mayor Jim did just fine for awhile, except he forgot to get those buckets full of critters out of the snack-bar basement. The new vice-mayor (Bobby Simms, ex postal carrier) found them and took them out to the parking lot, doused them with gasoline, and burned the lot. Quite a few people watched, Mayor Jim found out later, and the snack-bar sold a lot of hotdogs and pop that day.

  Which permitted Bobby Simms to win the next election pretty handily. Mayor Jim Wynn didn’t campaign much. His heart just wasn’t in it.

  NOV. 9

  1938: Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria, as bands of Nazis roam the streets, looting and burning synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and houses.

  1965: A series of power failures occur, resulting in the thirteen and a half hour Northeast blackout.

  People in this community were used to the darkness. There were only three streetlights in the town: by city hall, the police station, and the swimming pool. And those were switched off periodically when
ever the mayor decided the town needed to save some money. Most people went to bed early, and they didn’t like wasting money keeping the lights on all night. A couple of people had security lights strung around their farms, but the others made fun of them.

  Night in the country was about as dark a night as you could get on the planet.

  The year Cal graduated from high school there was a night as dark as any the town had ever seen. A gay man, although back then in that place they called them “queers” (still did, probably), ran from one end of the town to the other, beating on darkened doors, begging for help in this high-pitched voice that some people later on would laugh about as they told the story, even if they were basically ashamed about what eventually happened to him.

  Everyone in town knew him. His name was Clarence Roberts and he’d lived there all his life. His mother Nancy Roberts had never raised him right, people said, letting him dress the way he did, letting him use her lipstick and makeup from an early age. After she died he lived on his own off her inheritance, and people didn’t see him much in town anymore. But everyone still remembered that funny little sissy boy they all called Clarabelle.

  So when he came beating at the door to their dark houses that night, screaming, “I’m Clarence Roberts– you know me! They’re killing me! Let me in I’m dying, God, I’m dying!” they surely knew who he was. He was one of them. And in the background there were others, shouting, cursing, and these others were after him.

  And yet that night they decided he really wasn’t one of them. And they wouldn’t open their doors for him. And they let him die out there in the dark night.

  The funeral was out of town, at Nancy’s sister’s house. No one from this town went.

  That was a long time ago. But ever since that night, a lot of people in that town leave a porch light, or a yard light, on all night, every night.

  And no one laughs at them for it. And no one asks why.

  NOV. 10

  1969: Sesame Street debuts on PBS.

  A. A is for Abandon. Cal abandoned his children!