The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

Two Muppet children come in close to the camera. One is a female: bright green face, and orange hair in little-girl curls. One is a male: red face, sad eyes, a baseball cap. Both show off their broad, exaggerated frowns.

  T. T is for Tears. See the Tears on Cal’s children’s faces?

  The Muppet children begin to cry. Huge tears like soap bubbles ooze out of the corners of their huge Muppet eyes. The tears drift slowly to the bottom of the screen where they become animated, part of a cartoon. There is a boy tear and a girl tear, and they act out a story about how they’d love to lose weight, how they’d love to dry up and be only a memory, but the little boy and the little girl have lost their daddy, and they don’t know why. And as long as they have lost their daddy these tears must remain big and round, wet and sassy.

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I count six big fat tears!

  1, 2, 3, 4. I count four more! 6 plus 4 is 10 big fat tears in all!

  The tears all stretch out in a chorus line, white-gloved hands joined, blue-booted feet kicking high as they begin to sing.

  Oh where oh where has my dad-dy gone?

  Oh where oh where can he be?

  I’ve cried ten tears ’cause my dad-dy’s gone!

  My dad-dy must not love me!

  Cal pounds on the top of the antique TV set that was in the cabin when he moved in. The tears collide into each other as if in an earthquake. Their googly eyes blur.

  Okay! Okay! they shout in chorus before leaping into the air to be sucked back into the Muppet childrens huge tear ducts.

  The Muppet children stare at the screen. They’ve grown long tails and they’re leaping from painted tree to painted tree.

  Do you know how to make a monkey cry?

  Do you know if monkeys cry at all?

  Do you know if monkeys know their fathers?

  Do you know if monkeys even care?

  Do you know if monkeys are like children?

  Do you know? Do you even care?

  1, 2, 3, 4, do you care?

  1, 2, 3, 4, do you know what you’re doing?

  A is a lonely letter. T is a lonely letter. But I is the loneliest letter of all.

  How many lonely letters do you know?

  NOV. 11

  Veterans’ Day.

  At noon all the people who lived in town, plus most of those from the outlying farms, gathered at one end of main street. Here and there was someone in a wheelchair, someone waving a prosthesis, someone wearing a patch. It was the largest crowd he’d ever seen in the town, and it was quiet. People talked in whispers, as if passing a secret amongst them.

  One by one individuals peeled out of the crowd, Cal among them, and walked slowly up the street. Each person carried a piece of paper. On these pieces of paper were the names of those who had died in the wars.

  After a few minutes people would catch up to one another, walking solemnly in pairs and in groups, sharing their pieces of paper, and adding old letters, pictures, testimonials by those who had been wounded (physically, mentally) to the mix. Documents would be passed up and down the line, people would smile, people would weep, but nothing above a whisper as the crowd moved a bit at a time down the street this Veteran’s Day: people who Cal knew and didn’t know, people from neighboring towns, his old friend Tim in his wheelchair, and ex-mayor Jack Flyer, walking quietly with the rest of them.

  And then it was over, and they all moved silently toward their homes, and the lives they had managed to make for themselves.

  NOV. 12

  1954: Ellis Island closes.

  Jacob had arrived in America from his native Hungary on the day of his twelfth birthday. Cal had asked him again and again to tell him the hopes, the dreams he’d had for America, and finally the old man had relented.

  “I tell you once, that’s all,” Jacob said, looking as if he were about to spit. “Then you go home, leave me alone.” Then he cracked a yellow-toothed smile, just to let Cal know he actually wanted to tell him the story.

  “In America, they tell me, everybody wears shoes. Everybody buys shoes, everybody loves shoes, everybody judge a man by his shoes. You don’t have no good shoes, you don’t make it very far in America they say.

  “I nod. I say, ‘This is true,’ even though I know nothing of America. I am very young, and my eyes are filled with shoes, all the beautiful shoes in America. My father, my grandfather, they make shoes and they teach me everything. What better place than America to be a young shoemaker?

  “So on the boat to America I look at the people’s shoes, all the poor people’s shoes and I think about the beautiful shoes of America. I think of shoes with wings to make the feet an angel. I think of shoes made of glass and wood and the finest metal. I think of shoes with wheels so the business man goes very fast to his stock market. I lie back and I dream about the beautiful shoes of America.

  “And in my dream I get off the boat and step on the soft streets of America. By law the streets are soft to protect their beautiful shoes. I walk these soft streets and I am ashamed of my poor shoes and I a shoemaker who must show his talent. So I throw my poor Hungarian shoes away.

  “I walk with bare feet the soft streets of America. In the garbage cans I find silks and fine woods and metals waiting for my hands to work them. These things thrown away in America. I take these things and I make my first American shoes. I wear my first American shoes and they are like coffins on my feet they are so fine. They have long silver handles and silk lining and when I walk in these shoes a thousand mourners pass by me to pay their respects. Such respectful people in America.

  “I meet a tall police man in my walk who stops me to admire my beautiful shoes.

  “‘Excuse me, sir,’ he says to me because all the policemen in America speak so politely, ‘excuse me, sir, but those shoes you wear? The finest I have ever seen!’ He says this to me and my face is red I am so proud of this thing he says.

  “ ‘I make them myself,’ I say to the police officer and his mouth makes this ‘o’ he is so surprised.

  ‘That is wonderful,’ he says, ‘for the mayor of our fine American city has been seeking an official shoemaker and perhaps you might apply?’

  “This makes me very excited of course and I spend my days making more shoes to show this fine American mayor. I make shoes like couches and shoes like chairs and shoes like Cinderella would wear if her fairy godmother had been nicer.

  “Finally I take these shoes to the tallest building in the city, the tallest building in all America I think, and the hundreds of policemen who are there they admire my shoes and send me to the next level of the building.

  “After weeks I reach the top (it is a very tall building, this American building) and I am taken inside a room where a very small man is sitting. But when the small man stands and walks to me I see that he wears no shoes and he has the biggest, the squarest feet I have ever seen.

  “He tells me to put some shoes on him.

  “I have no shoes his size but I am frightened to disobey such an important man in America so I take two shoes and I push and I twist them until they go on to the little man’s big feet.

  “At first I think he will scream from the pain but he laughs and he dances and he tells me that I will be the city shoemaker and that first I will make new shoes for all the policemen in this building. Perhaps someday he says I will make shoes for all the mayors in America. I will become a very rich man in America.

  “Of course when I get to America it is nothing like my dream at all.”

  NOV. 13

  1940: Walt Disney’s Fantasia premieres.

  1985: 23,000 residents of Armero, Colombia, die in a gigantic mudslide.

  The rain began some time in the middle of the night. Cal got up and stared into the darkness filling the back yard, the darkness streaked and transformed by moon-illumined rain. Jenny had got caught out in a heavy rainstorm once when she was five: it had beaten her down and then filled her ears with its thunder. She’d been frightened of any amount of rain since then, and sometimes he would catch
her watching the skies apprehensively. It wasn’t a good way for her to be, and he’d always felt he should have done something to get her through it, but he had no idea what that might be.

  Come morning it was raining just as hard. The yard around the cabin had turned to a soupy chocolate mud. Here and there lumps of mud had broken away and floated, sometimes rolling over in the torrent. The mud looked uncomfortably like drowned, discolored bodies.

  As a child he’d found this sort of mud disgusting, because it reminded him of poop. And poop had always made him think of dead bodies. For a while he’d had this strange notion that when human bodies decayed they became feces, and that bowel movements reminded us not only of where we came from (the exertions of birth), but where we were eventually going as well.

  Around mid day he was still watching the rain coming down, the sky looking as if it had been permanently stained gray. Splattered mud dirtied his windows. A ball of mud suddenly exploded out of the water in front of the window, grew legs, and landed on the outside window sill. It was a huge frog, looking right at him, its head split by its smile.

  Then other frogs came leaping out of the mud and water, huge brown frogs with pale underbellies and mysterious expressions on their faces. The rain came down harder, but that sound was obscured by the plop and splash of frogs erupting from every square foot of his yard.

  He watched the frogs for hours as they performed their crude ballet: high-kicking, waltzing, rumbling an ancient tune he almost, but could not quite, recognize. They all resembled each other and yet in their movements and facial expressions remained individuals.

  Then it grew darker again, and the frogs sank back into his yard and disappeared. He realized he had been smiling, and felt the smile go away.

  And he could see no dancing frogs anymore. He saw the feces, and the dead bodies, and the rain that seemingly would last forever, and Jenny’s frightened face.

  NOV. 14

  1889: New York World reporter Nellie Bly travels around the world in a little over 72 days, surpassing the record of Jules Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg.

  By the time he was a teenager Cal had circled the world lots of times.

  His mother had started him on his journeys, picking up a globe one time and initiating Cal’s first counting game:

  1, you’re in Texas,

  2, you’re flying over New York,

  3, you’re swimming the Atlantic,

  4, you step off a boat into Spain …

  After that first time Cal would use the counting game to calm himself, as an aid to concentration, to help him sleep. The game became more and more elaborate, sometimes taking hours to complete his travels. Other times the trips had the brevity and the sense of all-of-a-piece a vision might have, requiring only seconds to experience.

  In New York City Cal is about to be run over by a taxi cab when he lifts his arms and rises to float high above the city and out over the Atlantic where fish sing their open-mouthed songs and rain rings off the Bermuda triangle and birds fly up from the Azores to pick his hair for their nests and then the Spanish girls throw their kisses up to him and the fog over London grounds him so that he must take a boat over to France and a train through the picture book histories flickering by in Italy, Yugoslavia, Russia where a great wind lifts him out of the train again and wraps him in ice and snow so like a Sputnik he launches over Mongolia where the Lama priests send their prayers after him, clinging to his shirt tails as he sails over people marching all over China above Korea and Japan and the long cool Pacific ride until Mount Pelei sends him higher with her hot kiss until he is over the Golden Gate bridge scraping his hand through snow atop the Rockies until he lands, tired and sleepy, in the endless miles of Kansas wheat which go to the edges of his dream and beyond.

  And he thinks about all the places he never took his children, not even with whispers into their precious ears.

  NOV. 15

  1887: Poet Marianne Moore is born.

  1926: The first radio network, NBC, begins broadcasting.

  People were like radios, he thought, their enchanted minds picking up signals from everywhere. Whether they came from other minds, other times, forgotten lives, or the dead, it was impossible to know, and probably made no difference. The deepest signals perhaps came out of silence.

  As a boy they’d had no TV, just an enormous antique Philco radio which Cal would listen to constantly, even when there was nothing on, or at least nothing he could pick up. He would spend hours listening to just static and interference.

  Which sounded like the sea to him, or what the brain must sound like when there are no thoughts residing there, not silent but restrained.

  The static generated pictures in his head of things he had never seen before. Some of them appeared to be pictures of his mother’s childhood. Others were pictures of a life with his father he had never had. New and new and new, each day.

  Sometimes on cold days he would use the static emitted by the radio to warm his cold rooms.

  And on even colder, lonelier days, the static would be the voice of his only friend, telling him that everything was going to be okay, that he was normal, and that there was nothing at all to worry about.

  Since he had moved back into the cabin he had again become a radio addict, finding the television almost unbearable to experience. But this time the voices that came to him over the speaker grill were the voices of his children, after their deaths. Or at least after their childhoods had ended, and he wasn’t there.

  And he listened, listened to his children’s voices as he had never listened before, wishing he could net them.

  And heard their stories of what it was like to grow up without him there, dropping, bound to sink.

  NOV. 16

  1907: Oklahoma becomes the 46th state.

  Someone was following him. His father had been half Cherokee. His father’s mother was full-blood. His father had spent a great deal of time in woods such as these. But it couldn’t be his father following him– his father had been dead for years.

  Cherokee. A rich tradition, a history. After his mother had finally broken down and told him about his father’s background– at Cora’s insistence, he found out later– thinking about it had practically taken his breath away, unsettling him even now.

  Someone was in the woods with him. Someone weeping. Someone wailing as if in pain. But he could not see who it was.

  In 1817 the Federal government started removing the five “civilized” tribes from their lands in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi to Indian Territory, which would later become Oklahoma. His people, the Cherokee, had been among them.

  Another voice joined that of the first. Then another. Another. A ghostly weeping and a gnashing of teeth. Anguish, and anger.

  Their own lands. “Out of there! Out of there now! This is my land now!” The white man grabbed the children by the hair and pulled them away from their still steaming food. The old man stood up and raised his fist against them and was beaten down, kicked, spit on. The white men swept them out like garbage for the dogs. They were allowed to take nothing.

  A high, keening wail made Cal want to scream in response.

  So many died on “The Trail Where They Cried.” It had been such a revelation. What if a Jew had just discovered that he was a Jew, and then read about the holocaust for the first time? So many had died, and his government had done this. Had let the poor white trash wandering the edges of these Indian properties to just come in and take it all once the Cherokee were sent away.

  So many had died.

  In another time and place his own children might have been numbered among the dead.

  A woman’s face appeared in the bark of a tree. She looked like pictures of his father, pictures of his grandmother. She opened her mouth and wailed.

  Could he have protected his own children back then? He didn’t think so.

  The woods were full of movement. The trees all cried. Something, someone was creeping up on him. But he could not see
them.

  Something is always creeping up, he knew, even if you can’t see it.

  What did the woman in the tree want from him? What did anyone want from him?

  He knew it must have something to do with her great-grandchildren. Grandmothers always just wanted you to do the right thing.

  So many had died. So many children and old people. He could see their faces in the bark of the trees, in the rugged features of the rocks and the heavy undergrowth.

  So many had died. And now there wasn’t a thing he could do. If he could only believe that.

  NOV. 17

  1917: sculptor Auguste Rodin dies in France.

  His daughter’s laughter hardens, becomes more brittle, solidifies into a shape he does not recognize. His son’s arms and legs, once so strong and fluid, become a series of twisted armatures. His daughter’s head tilts, becomes an interesting outcropping. His son’s sweet smile is a shallow wrinkle in stone. His wife’s body rolls and rolls, collecting material in the twisting of her dreams, until her form lies obscured in bedrock.

  The sculptures of his family grow in his imagination, grow in his back yard. Like plants, watered and nurtured by his sadness. They look like his wife, his children, but not completely. Their faces are distorted, their feelings exaggerated.

  The sculptures fill in, one regret at a time, round and build into blocks, hills, mountain ranges. And fade into background.

  He searches for them in the planes of exposed stone in the distant hills. And he ponders the weight of memory, the solidity of stone.

  NOV. 18

  1820: Captain Nathaniel B. Palmer discovers Antarctica.

  Last night the town had had its first snowfall of the season, and this morning the thick white covered everything, including all sound. He’d forgotten how quiet snow made things out here. It was like looking at an unfinished painting, showing just the basic lines, the curves and shadows.

  He’d never liked the icy winters here, but he always did like the first few days of cold each year. Unlike so much pleasant weather, those first days had a satisfying sort of definiteness about them. As if a decision had finally been made. As if clarity had become the quality of greatest value.