The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  FEB. 1

  1790: the U.S. Supreme Court convenes for the first time, in New York.

  They came in the middle of the night and took him: four remarkably tall figures in black robes, black hoods. Their voices were disguised by electronics, and yet seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked them, unable to keep the shakiness out of his voice. They dragged him to a long gray sedan, sitting in the back seat two on each side of him. They stared straight ahead, saying nothing. A wall separated the back from the front seat, with no window, just a speaker grill in the middle of the padded panel. Soft music issued from the grill, a tune Cal was sure he’d never heard before. “I said, where are you taking me?”

  “To the court,” the speaker grill muttered in a tuneless voice. “To answer for your crimes.”

  “But what am I accused of?” he asked, but the speaker grill said no more.

  Cal didn’t attempt any more questions. Finally they arrived at a small shack in the mountains, set back against some trees on the upward slope, barely large enough for two people.

  “Here,” one of the guards said, pushing him toward the door.

  “But what is this place?”

  He stepped into a vast and ever-expanding courtroom. Nine figures in similar robes, but with bands of scarlet on their sleeves, sat at a table at the front of the room. The guards threw him down in front of the table.

  “What have I done?” he cried.

  “It will go easier on you,” the judge on the end said– a woman’s voice, “if you simply confess your crimes now. The crimes we already know about, and any others you think might be relevant.”

  “But I haven’t …”

  “Where are your children?” another judge asked, and the judges all nodded in unison.

  “So that’s it, is it? What I did? Well, I confess all right. I’m completely guilty. Do what you must.”

  “You glory too much in your guilt,” another judge accused.

  “Your sin has defined you, and that is a kind of security,” another told him.

  Cal looked away, uncomfortable. “So what do I do. Go back? I plan to go back. I plan to make it up.”

  “And if they will not have you back?”

  “That’s a distinct possibility, I guess. Is that my punishment? Are you using that to execute me?”

  But the dark judges had already left the bench, and however much Cal begged and pleaded they would not come back.

  The robed guards had to drag him out of the enormous courtroom to the place where the long gray sedan sat running, waiting, ready to take him back to the current life he had chosen, and which filled increasingly with his regrets.

  FEB. 2

  1536: Buenos Aires, Argentina, is founded.

  If he’d really wanted to run away, if he’d wanted to go so far away from his family that he might never return, he’d have gone to South America, Argentina perhaps. Not the Argentina of the real world, with its immense disparity of wealth. its desperate poor living under the feet of the carefree upper classes, but an Argentina of the imagination, a Buenos Aires of dream.

  Where it was always Festival, all traffic part of a celebratory parade, the shops overflowing with food and gifts that spilled over the sidewalks and out into the streets where anyone could take them who wanted to. But most of the time people– even the poor– were too busy dancing and singing to care about the free items in the streets. They sang with their hearts, they sang with their bodies, they sang with their souls. Only a song could adequately express their joy of being, their pleasure in themselves at this particular place and time.

  The children in this Buenos Aires would all be wanted, would be well-fed and cared for. Not that you would ever see any out in the streets. They would be up in their rooms, wrapped snugly in their blankets, sipping warm milk and dreaming of escapes of their own: to fantasy New Yorks, Tokyos, and Calcuttas, where the shadows were darker, the alleys far more dangerous, and the wrong turn might bring endless and deadly adventure.

  FEB. 3

  1959: “The Day the Music Died”– Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson die in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.

  “Who makes the music, Dad?”

  “Musicians, sweetie. They train a long time to get that good.”

  “No, I mean where do they get it? Where does all the music come from?”

  Hiding in the woods and valleys around his cabin was a music that had never been heard, a lost music created by no musicians, because the musicians had not lived long enough to create it.

  In the woods that spread like a long and graceful horn up the hillside behind the cabin, Cal heard one note and then another. At first he thought they were the stray notes of some unknown bird’s call, but as they were joined by other notes a definite melodic pattern began to form, although they still hardly seemed human-made, certainly made with no musical instrument he could readily identify. A cross between string and wind, perhaps, air trapped then blown across a filament, manipulated, held. A kind of singing, but from what sort of throat?

  He finally reached a part of the woods where the music seemed the loudest. It came down on him both in trickles and in waves. He searched for a source, then saw the stirring of air in the treetops, lost notes nesting, gathering with others, combusting spontaneously into tunes accessible to human ears.

  The nesting song appeared to be aware of him, for it broke up suddenly into a cacophonous explosion, notes falling off the branches and plummeting whistling to the ground like incompetent acrobats. Despite himself, Cal started laughing, and when he had his mouth wide open, thrown back and howling, the notes dove from the boughs and entered him.

  He suddenly fell grim and silent, feeling an enormity inside him, feeling a need to speak it and to sing it. But he knew he could force himself to suppress it, to contain it until he brought it home to take out and show to his children, demonstrating where it all comes from.

  FEB. 4

  1983: Singer Karen Carpenter, suffering from anorexia nervosa, dies of cardiac arrest.

  He drove into town for groceries that day, and found himself considering each can, each package, each pound of meat more carefully than normal, imagining it in his body, trying to imagine how he could eat. Suddenly eating seemed a magic trick, an impossible feat. He came away with cereal and juices, a few pounds of fruit.

  Outside the front door of the grocery store a tall young girl stood waiting. Thin. Very thin. Cal couldn’t understand how she managed to stand. She leaned back and fortb as if the slight breeze was moving her. Her enormous eyes watched the door: the people coming out with bags full of groceries, the people coming out eating sandwiches and candy bars, the people going in with long lists in their hands.

  He turned to go to his car and saw another thin child, and another, and another. Thin children scattered all around the parking lot of the grocery story. Standing, and waiting. Watching the door.

  He found himself turning back, trying to look at the door the way the children did. He tried to see what they must be seeing.

  It was the smell that hit him first. Rotten meat, vegetables melting with decay. Tons of it. Insects carrying the spoiled food bits at a time out the front door. Shoppers chewing on roach-infested sandwiches, maggot-ridden candy bars. Each time the door opened more of the foul air escaped.

  Finally the thin children started moving, leaving the parking lot. The air became fresh again. And Cal got in his car and brought his groceries home.

  FEB. 5

  1914: William Burroughs is born in St. Louis, Missouri.

  Cal sat in his kitchen alone, thinking about the addicts he had known, the stories they had told him. He thought about Burroughs, and Burroughs’ imagination, and cut-ups and foldins. And where these might have taken him.

  He sat in a very strange kitchen his addiction a parrot clawing his arm kissing him shredding his ears with all this parrot talk of dos and don’ts and children need their fathers
the stories of their lives are too damn grim without them.

  The parrot jumped off melted into the linoleum tales of another undersea world where children travel in schools don’t bother their parents born independent as they are – rays blasted through the walls from aliens who know where all the deadbeat dads are hiding and oh yes he is too – parrot comes floating up like the corpse of a drag queen so pretty in her red and green shift bananas on her head – all children need certain minimum daily requirements – soul of the drag queen parrot flying like she’s never flown before leaving iridescent bird doo doo doo on the floors and cabinetry – only orgasm she ever had was from hanging – upside down with her tailfeathers in the air.

  This day – this day in history Sweden recognizes the independence of the United States – De Gaulle calls for Algerian independence – Nazi Klaus Barbie brought to trial – Phoenix, Arizona, is incorporated. Not much there to interest an addicted gay/lesbian parrot cross-dresser. All these intrusions – all these terrible intrusions made it hard for him to remember exactly what his kids’ faces looked like – what kind of father was he with a memory like that? Nazis abroad – we discover new ones everyday – now why wasn’t he out there protecting his children from that? Cut-out intolerance and fold in a little compassion from some other part of the world. Independence – independence is the thing unless your children aren’t incorporated – a trial would settle the whole damn thing – finally found the right punishment but it wouldn’t be hanging cause you might enjoy it just like that parrot’s transvestite corpse floating down there inside the linoleum – talking nonsense to the ceiling and the ceiling didn’t like it – it was all gonna fall in some day.

  So he sat in this very strange kitchen because junk is a way of life, my friend – don’t have many but you’re the one. Bang bang – the floors covered with the guts of used TVs and radios – bang bang – the walls crawling with garbage and discarded cables and wires – bang bang – in the other room a very nasty man was melting Cal’s children down inside a great black kettle, melting them down for their Essence and he would take that Essence and shoot it into Cal’s veins for the absolutely highest high a man had ever felt.

  FEB. 6

  1895: Babe Ruth is born in Baltimore.

  In the woods that morning, jammed up in a forking branch of a tree, he found an ancient baseball, its cover hard and cracked, the Babe’s signature still visible, but barely, the “Ruth” mostly a gray smudge. It would make a great coming home present for Parker, or maybe even Jenny, if her interests had shifted in the time he had been gone (and wouldn’t he have mixed feelings about that!).

  Baseball linked kids and fathers– it always had. A kid’s game played by adults. It was almost embarrassingly traditional.

  He climbed up into the tree to retrieve the ball, reaching out precariously, the thin branches swaying dangerously, thinking how stupid it would be to die because of this, when the baseball suddenly lifted itself out of the forked branch and hovered a few feet away in mid air.

  “Behave yourself,” Cal muttered to the ball.

  The baseball spun rapidly on its axis, a loose flap of stiff leather making a staccato slapping sound against its side.

  “My kids would love you,” he said, and reached, and started to fall.

  At the last minute he grabbed the ball, not sure what he was thinking of, perhaps that if they found him dead someone might deduce that at least he’d been trying to retrieve something for his kids.

  But instead of falling, Cal hung in mid-air with his hand gripping the flying baseball tightly, the baseball supporting him.

  He could barely control his breathing, which became worse when the ball started moving, and he was picking up speed, trying to maneuver for a better grip on the torn and slipping cover as the ball swerved around large trunks, slamming him against high branches, tearing at him with passing, outstretched twigs.

  Finally it dipped a little lower on its approach straight for the biggest tree Cal had ever seen, and he let go, dropping into bushes and brittle deadfall, scraped up quite a bit but at least nothing was broken.

  He got up slowly. The baseball had settled into a pocket formed by intersecting branches, as if the tree had caught it in its glove. The ball was completely still again.

  Cal brushed himself off and headed back for the cabin, determined to keep the Babe’s ultimate secret to himself.

  FEB. 7

  1812: Charles Dickens is born in Portsmouth, England.

  1943: the U.S. government announces shoe rationing.

  Normally, he wore shoes until they wore completely out. That meant not just having a few holes in them– the tops of tennis shoes might look like Swiss cheese and he would still wear them– but the soles had to be coming off, flapping half the length of his foot with each step, or the sides had to be splitting, showing the holes in his socks underneath.

  He liked worn shoes. “Dickens shoes” he called them, like the shoes a David Copperfield might wear.

  Well-worn shoes meant that you’d spent some time on your feet. You’d been places, done things. You didn’t sit around all day. It also meant that you valued substance over appearance. You weren’t about to spend good money on shoes just to impress someone.

  It used to drive Linda crazy. She said that sometimes she hated to be seen with him, with shoes like that. Sometimes she did refuse to be seen with him, and wouldn’t leave the house with him until he’d changed them. For just such emergencies. he’d kept an almost new pair of shiny leather shoes in the back of his closet.

  But during his exile he’d bought a new pair of shoes every other week. At first he just hadn’t felt comfortable in the ones he’d worn around the house, the ones Linda and the kids just couldn’t help but comment on. So he’d bought a couple of replacement pairs.

  But then he found he wasn’t comfortable in the replacement shoes, and thought it might be the terrain– surely different terrain required different shoes– and he tried to remember what sorts of shoes he had worn as a boy here but the shops didn’t have any that looked close to what he remembered, so he just matched them the best that he could.

  During his few months he’d bought a dozen or more pairs of tennis shoes, black leather and brown leather shoes, canvas shoes and suede and even boots of all sorts. None of them had felt right on his feet. Most of them were piled in the bottom of one of his closets, three feet deep he figured by now.

  He went into town and got two more pairs: a pair of bright red tennis shoes (“red wagons” was the way he thought of them), and a pair of soft leather high-top hiking boots. First he put on the red tennis shoes and walked around the cabin and out the door and he thought they made his feet burn so he took them off and took his socks off and found that his feet were a fiery, beet red.

  So then he put on the hiking boots with the thickest pair of socks he had and they seemed to work quite well for a time so he walked farther and farther away from the cabin until he reached the top of a small hill. He knew something was wrong but he didn’t know what it was.

  He sat down and took off the boots and the socks and found that the feet inside weren’t his feet at all. They were a stranger’s feet, an old man’s feet with white hair on the toes and a couple of twisted and deformed toenails and calluses on the sides of the feet he’d never seen before.

  It was hard and painful, but Cal walked back to the cabin barefoot, until by the time he got there his feet were recognizably his again, however bloody.

  FEB. 8

  1911: Poet Elizabeth Bishop is born in Worcester, Mass.

  Cal loved volcanoes. When he’d told Cora about it, she’d gone out and bought him books on volcanoes, large picture books and even scientific books written far over his head. Her response had nearly overwhelmed him. She thought she’d discovered this marvelous new aptitude in him which demanded to be nourished, when all he had was a series of bad dreams, a nervous obsession. Cal considered himself a dream volcanologist.

  Like Bishop’s, Cal�
�s countless small volcanoes existed on undiscovered islands which might only be visited through dreams or poetry.

  Like Bishop’s, Cal’s volcanoes had names. Names like Wounds, Anxiety, Despair.

  During successive eruptions the solid materials from inside the earth fall around the vent onto the slopes of the volcano, and lava streams from the crater. Sometimes these materials leave the confines of the dream itself and enter the waking world, where they cause disruptions in the dreamer’s everyday life.

  Sometimes the craterlike basins– calderas– of dead volcanoes fill with water and become great lakes. If you could only gaze into the water-filled caldera of a dream volcano then all your innermost secrets would be revealed.

  Ancient peoples developed numerous rituals to deal with their volcanoes. Sacrificing animals. Slitting babies’ throats.

  On the dreamed island of his personal exile were so many volcanoes that the ground was completely covered with fine ash and hardened lava. He walked barefoot, and his feet felt comfortable.

  His dreamed island was populated by numerous goats, mice, and birds unlike those found anywhere else.

  Somewhere on his dreamed island his children were hiding from him, pretending to be small animals indigenous to the terrain. Maybe they were afraid they would be sacrificed to his personal volcanoes if he ever found them.

  That wasn’t the way he dealt with volcanoes: the lava, the smoke, the eventual hardening and collapsing inward.When his eruptions became too severe, he simply moved to another island with gentler volcanoes. There he would wait things out, listening to the distant cries of his children as they called to him from within their own dreams.

  Eventually, he knew, he would have to live on all the islands. But none of them brought him any closer to the beds in which his children slept, and dreamed.

  FEB. 9

  1893: the world’s first striptease takes place at the Moulin Rouge.

  It surprised him how little he’d thought about sex during his exile. Especially considering how important it had been in his marriage. Sex for him had always been a way to feel as if he might live forever. It was also a distraction from his endless thinking about the kids, the issue of their mortality in particular.