The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  During orgasm they had no children. They’d wanted just to concentrate on each other, with no diversions. In orgasm the rest of the world went away.

  The woman in his front yard stepped slowly out of the shadows. At first Cal thought he recognized her, thought she might be a clerk at the Five and Dime in town. But as she stepped closer to the front windows of the cabin he realized there were no women in this town like this: so quiet, so self-contained, so powerful and exotic. She wore a cream-colored dress that blended with her flesh, as if she were all of one piece. The way she stared at the window she obviously knew he was watching her. That was the purpose, wasn’t it? To put on this show for him?

  Linda had always been modest, insisting that the lights be out when she took off her clothes, when they made love. Most of the time Cal found it a charming quality in her. There were moments, however, when it made him anxious. He had fantasies of making love to the wrong woman, thinking she was his wife, to some awful woman who would kill him once she was done with him. Linda would come into the bedroom and flip on the lights and catch Cal with this other woman, and of course he wouldn’t be able to explain and his marriage would be destroyed.

  Or he worried that Linda was trying to keep something from him. That she was dying of some terrible condition and she insisted that they make love in the dark so that he would not see the cancer, or the bright rash, or the flesh missing from her body.

  The woman in his yard loosened the top of her dress. It slid slowly off one shoulder and then the other. Her bare shoulders gleamed in the moonlight. Her lips spread into a smile, exposing brilliant teeth. Then the dress fell the rest of the way, showing the lacy bustier, the narrow panties.

  She moved closer, gliding, almost dancing. He used to have fantasies about Linda dancing for him in her underwear, but she never had. Still, the love making had been exquisite, had lifted him out of the world and into the rarefied realm of immortals. Yet in the back of his mind had always been the notion the body could not sustain such passion, that the body eventually grew tired and old.

  The woman removed the bustier. Her full breasts were still trapped by a silver spiderweb of brassiere. She loosened the brassiere and her breasts suddenly spilled into the moonlight. Then her panties were gone, although Cal hadn’t seen her remove them.

  Her pubic hair was a shadow as black as the surrounding darkness. He breathed slowly, wondering what she might do next. And felt guilty, thinking of Linda, remembering.

  Sometimes as he made love to Linda he would lose concentration. All it required was that momentary slip for him to be thinking about the problems of the day again: money, repairs, his children’s lives. At those moments Linda’s breath suddenly seemed rank to him, her flesh sour and cheesy, and when she pulled him closer for a kiss it was like nibbling a bowl of bad meat, hating it but unable to stop.

  The woman smiled more broadly for just a moment. Then she reached up and removed her hair to expose the scarred and warped scalp. She took out her teeth, flipped away her ears one at a time, peeled away lower and upper lips, twisted off nose and chin, scooped out her eyes and threw them away.

  There followed a wet, sloppy laugh as in a frenzy she kicked and jumped and tore her skin off in strips and foot-square patches. Internal organs dropped and flew and dissolved in the night air.

  Her skeleton stood there shaky and grinning at Cal for a moment until it, too, began to dismantle itself. But before the last bone had been disconnected and thrown away the bony fingers began tearing at the night sky itself, scratching a hole in it where the woman’s form had been.

  To reveal his children in that empty space, grown up and old and their deaths approaching, and in their large eyes Cal imagined he could see the deaths of their own children, and the children after that, as each generation did its dance with death, teasing with love and forevers before stripping down to layer after layer of gone.

  FEB. 10

  1981: An arson fire kills eight people in Las Vegas’s Hilton Hotel, only weeks after a similar fire at the MGM Grand.

  Someone was burning houses and barns in the county.

  Cal thought of Parker, and his recent fascination with fire. He hoped Linda was keeping matches out of their son’s hands.

  Looking into the fire so intently, a person might begin to see with the eyes of fire.

  Through the eyes of fire people scream at your approach. They do everything they can think of to escape you, but still you manage to catch up to them.

  Two children died in a farm house not five miles away from Cal. When he read the story he saw his own children in the flames.

  Through the eyes of fire the air changes color, fills with a smoke that hides everything but the heat, and your beautiful flame.

  Parker was always curious about things. The ideal boy to have a problem with drugs someday. Cal knew he should point that out to Linda, so maybe she’d watch out for it as he grew older. The ideal boy to play with matches.

  Through the eyes of fire skin changes color, and the darkness of night follows you.

  Sometimes Parker would get up in the middle of the night and come to Cal’s side of the bed. He’d wake him up and ask him questions like, “What’s out there in the dark that I can’t see?” And Cal never knew quite how to answer.

  Through the eyes of fire no one can stop you.

  When Parker really got going, Cal couldn’t keep up with him.

  Through the eyes of fire nothing can stop you.

  When Parker really got going, he could run faster and jump higher than any boy Cal had ever seen.

  Through the eyes of fire you are as large as you can see.

  Sometimes Parker acted as if he was far older than Cal, far more responsible, and so it was ridiculous for Cal to tell him what to do.

  Through the eyes of fire the world becomes your fuel, and your destination.

  In Parker’s eyes, Cal could see himself burning away to ash, and nothing.

  FEB. 11

  1963: the poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide in London.

  That morning Cal began packing. He wasn’t aware of making the final decision to go, but here he was packing, so he must have decided at some point, perhaps during the night, perhaps during a dream and his body had remembered that decision and began packing as soon as he awakened.

  The night before he’d been looking at the calendars, putting them away, tearing some of them into little pieces and trashing them. Killing the days. He saw that today would be the anniversary of Plath’s death, and that night had a dream about her: a crazy woman after him, but all she was trying to do was to deliver his just punishment. The woman had come back, become the poet she’d wanted to be, then killed herself, as if to say it all meant nothing.

  It all meant nothing. How dare she?

  His mother had committed suicide while Cal was away at college. He at least appreciated that he hadn’t been around to find the body. He didn’t know how long she’d been planning it, so maybe his presence or absence wasn’t relevant to her. But he would always prefer to think otherwise.

  He couldn’t say it had been a surprise. She’d battled depression for years. And she always chose the worst possible men for her. Always.

  “I enjoy being miserable,” she said, and she meant it.

  And here he was packing, placing his exile a piece at a time into boxes in preparation for the long trip home. And not knowing if he’d be welcomed, if he’d be good for his family, or if he’d be the one to encourage the impulse to suicide in one of those he loved. His grim face. His grim shoes.

  He was going to be “Daddy” again. Sad-faced Daddy, watching his children grow up. A Daddy like his own Daddy, perhaps. Grim black shoe. Ich, ich, ich. I, I, I. He prayed he would not become the nazi in his children’s hearts his own Daddy had been.

  “Dachau! Belsen!” Cal’s mother shouted in his imagination, like sneezes, although he seriously doubted she’d even heard of those places. She would have looked terrible. Staring, red-rimmed eyes and sallow fac
e.

  “Ich, ich, ich …” she would say, a Germanic stutter, as Cal’s father appeared in the front door of the cabin wearing his black SS uniform. “Ich, ich, ich!” as she pulled the trigger on his shotgun to blow him away, the shotgun he’d threatened to kill her with a hundred times or more. Only to discover that she’d aimed the gun at herself instead, and that it was her own nazi that she blasted into bits of gray and red.

  Of course some people played out their suicides a little bit at a time, one small act each day. Intense moments of despair and depression, a morning spent in bed, a harsh word uttered passionately against oneself: these were their shotguns.

  What Cal had done in coming here, he realized, was a kind of suicide. So he put things away into boxes with his dead hands. His shotguns, his nazi uniforms. And gazed about him with dead eyes, seeking more things to put away and carry on into his next life.

  FEB. 12

  1809: Abraham Lincoln is born in a log cabin in Kentucky.

  “What do you need the boxes for, Cal?”

  Cal had just looked at the grocery clerk, not knowing what to say. “I have a lot of stuff,” he said finally.

  He taped each box neatly after filling it to the top. He stacked one box on top the other, no more than two high, trying to keep the edges straight, as if he were creating a piece of art.

  He had the urge, of course, to just drop all his things into containers haphazardly, but he resisted it. Order and patience seemed called for here, to at least do his leaving right, whatever faults there might have been in his coming.

  He had most of his things boxed up when it occurred to him he should take one last walk around the surrounding countryside. It would be the last time he had the chance– he planned to leave for home in the morning.

  He was struggling to the top of a trail on a wooded slope when he saw a dark figure leaving a nearby cabin that was mostly obscured by several evergreens. The man came out of the woods and walked for a time beside him. He was tall, emaciated, with a dark beard outlining his jaw. He wore a dusty black suit and top hat.

  “G’day to you,” the man said, tipping his enormous hat without breaking stride.

  Cal struggled to keep up with the broad stride. “Hello, I … I didn’t know … there was a cabin there.”

  “Cabin’s been here, been there. Many cabins in one man’s life, I reckon.”

  “I … suppose.”

  “What’s important is how you live in each one.”

  “In each cabin …” Cal had no idea what the man was talking about.

  “I see you get my meaning. I can see you’re a man who knows his cabins.”

  “Well, I’m leaving today.”

  “It’s a wise man who knows when it’s time to leave.”

  “I suppose I’ve been here too long as it is.”

  “It’s a wise man who knows when he’s outstayed his welcome.”

  “My family will be waiting for me.”

  “A family isn’t much like a cabin,” the tall man said.

  Cal wanted to stop and think about that one, but the man hadn’t slackened his pace a bit. “I suppose not.”

  “A cabin gets run down, you fix it. A family isn’t easy to fix.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “A cabin just takes some money to hire a fix-up man. A family takes time and a good effort, and you just can’t buy those things.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Get your cabin in order, I always say. Love it, and it’ll take care of you when you’re old.”

  “It’s been nice talking to you,” Cal said, stopping in the middle of the trail.

  “My pleasure,” the tall man said over his shoulder as he walked briskly down the trail, in seconds disappearing into a tangle of trees.

  FEB. 13

  1633: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for trial before the Inquisition.

  Cal didn’t get away the next morning as he had planned. He did get the car loaded. And he actually got into the car and started it, taking one last look at the cabin he was sure he would never see again, which had been his home for the past six months. But then he started thinking of the tall, bearded man from the day before, the way he had been walking, the driven pace he had maintained on his way to his nameless destination. Cal turned off the engine and sat there an hour, then two, then three, thinking about what he needed to do.

  Around the middle of the afternoon he drove into town, first going to the post office to mail all his carefully-packed boxes to Linda. He opened one of the boxes and thought about slipping in a letter of explanation, but then sealed it again without doing so.

  Then he drove to Boomer’s Garage, where he sold the car to Amos Boomer for sixty-five dollars and thirty-three cents, all the money Amos had in the cash register at the time. Then, with back pack lightly loaded with clothing, a little food, and his remaining cash, Cal started walking up the one road out of town leading vaguely Northwest. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that was the right direction.

  An hour after dark he was somewhere out in the countryside, with no lights, no houses to be seen. He looked up into the sky where stars appeared one by one, creating patterns which turned and twisted into other patterns, where he could read the story of his exile, his family’s life without him, and then the story of his long trip home. He spent the rest of the night walking, renaming the constellations according to the events of his own life, learning how to dream while awake, to dream while walking.

  FEB. 14

  Valentine’s Day.

  1929: the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” takes place in Chicago.

  Cal got a ride from an elderly farmer and his wife on the way to church that morning. They were kind enough to drive thirty miles out of their way in order to drop him off near a major highway. It was Sunday, however, and this was still a rural area, so he couldn’t count on any more rides the rest of the day.

  The wife had been talking about it being Valentine’s Day, and how excited their grandkids were about it. Cal had thought about a week ago that he would be sending valentines to the family this year, but with the sudden decision to end his stay at the cabin he’d forgotten all about it.

  Now he’d walked about ten miles along the highway on this sunny Valentine’s Day, and he hadn’t seen a soul. Until the old Ford came along.

  It was a rusty red, beat-up old jalopy, a teenager with a crew cut behind the wheel. As the kid passed him Cal could hear him crying inside. Several envelopes came fluttering out. Cal stooped and picked them up: valentines, each addressed to a different girl. The car sped up and disappeared around a bend.

  A few minutes later more cars came roaring up the road. He heard more crying. And still more valentines came fluttering out of the windows, some from the drivers’ sides, some from the front passengers’ sides, some from the backs. Many of these valentines had been defaced. A few had been shredded, perhaps with a razor blade.

  A while after that a huge truck came roaring up the road, slowing down as it passed Cal. He smelled them before he saw them. The hearts. The raw meat hearts taken out of the corpses. Someone inside the truck bed started throwing the butchered hearts out onto the road. Dozens of them at a time. They hit the pavement with a soft, wet sound. Some of them were far from fresh. This went on for miles. Cal tried to ignore it.

  FEB. 15

  1992: a Milwaukee jury finds serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer sane.

  A naked, blood-splattered man sat in the cab of the truck, chewing on one of the hearts. Portions of three or four partially-eaten hearts were on the seat beside him.

  “Ain’t love grand?” he asked genially.

  Cal was stunned. “Love?”

  The man smiled at him with red-stained teeth. “Sure. I’m in love all the time. I fall in love a dozen times a day. But I never can find enough lovers!”

  “I’m going now,” Cal said, carefully backing away.

  “Your loss,” the naked man said. “You keep passing up love, you’ll d
ie alone. Me, I’ll always be with my lovers. They’ll always have me.”

  The man ate love, chewed it, and groaned with pleasure.

  FEB. 16

  1968: the country’s first 911 emergency telephone system is started in Haleyville, Alabama.

  Dozens of ambulances roared past and disappeared into the distance. They made a sound like a thousand birds singing an abstract love song.

  When he finally reached the ambulances they were parked around a series of wrecks: the cars bearing lovelorn teenagers who had passed him earlier had crashed here. The highway and grass median were littered with bodies. Paramedics and doctors labored intensively over the bodies. Stuffing the chest cavities with rotting animal hearts. And thousands upon thousands of cheap, garish, paper valentines.

  FEB. 17

  1988: Lt. Col. William Higgins is kidnapped in southern Lebanon.

  He met an old man who was also hitchhiking, and who explained to Cal why he hadn’t gotten many rides.

  “You’re doin’ it all wrong!” he exclaimed. “You can’t just stick your thunb out! You’ll never get a ride that way! You’ve got to be more aggressive!”

  The old man took off his shoes and bounced them off the windshield of the next passing car. The car picked up speed, the driver motioning frantically.

  “Well, that was impressive,” Cal said.

  “If somebody’s a hard sell, you just have to sell even harder.” With a board he smashed the taillight on the next passing car. The car stopped a few yards away, as if considering, then sped away.

  Cal started walking briskly up the road, trying to put some distance between him and the old man, praying no one would connect the two of them. “Well, good luck …” he mumbled.

  “Wait, wait!” He picked up a large stone and shattered the windshield of an oncoming car.

  Which stopped immediately. The rear door opened, two massive arms emerged and pulled the old man into the car, the door slamming shut behind him. The car roared up the highway in a cloud of blue-black smoke.