The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Just before the car disappeared from sight, however, the rear window rolled down, the old man stuck his head out of the car and shouted, “See, I told you it would work!” Then the large arms pulled him back inside.

  FEB. 18

  1564: Michaelangelo dies in Rome.

  As Cal made his way home he thought about why he had left and why he was coming back, what he owed his children, and especially what he owed Linda whom he had put through hell, all because of this obsession he had with their children.

  He had always worried about how his children were going “to end up,” what the final result of their lives was going to be.

  As if he could ever really know. As if they could be statues, perfection frozen in time.

  “Take it a day at a time,” Linda had always told him. “Enjoy them each day.” But he’d never really tried.

  Along four or five miles of empty road Cal found dozens of statues, beautiful statues of men, women, children, which appeared to have been dumped. As he was walking a pickup truck stopped by the side of the road. An older man with long hair got out, climbed into the bed, and discarded a gorgeous figure of a woman nursing her baby into the grass by the side of the road.

  Cal couldn’t stand it. “That’s beautiful!” he shouted. “Why are you throwing it away?”

  “I finished it yesterday,” the artist replied, climbing down to the road. “I enjoyed it, but I have another I want to start today. It’ll even be better, I think.” He got back in the cab, then stuck his head out and waved. “It’s the process, you see. That’s the important thing.”

  Then the artist drove off, leaving the beautiful statue to be picked up by someone else, or to collect dirt and mold, to be overgrown, to watch over the crickets. To be what it was to be, for even creating a statue was not an exact science. And how much less precise the molding of children.

  Cal sat with the statues a while so that he might enjoy them for this moment, and then he went on.

  FEB. 19

  1878: Thomas Edison receives a patent for the phonograph.

  1942: President Roosevelt signs the Japanese relocation and internment order.

  One stretch of road was bordered by a collection of decaying buildings.

  Cal could hear old records playing: the crackle and static, the old singing voices, the big bands, the way it all sounded so melancholy, no matter how happy the song was originally intended to be.

  There was no one around to play these songs. And if he looked at the ruined buidings just right, they disappeared, became shadows and morning mist.

  But the old songs continued to play.

  He imagined the old man sitting in the Japanese internment camp, playing these oh-so-American songs, his young granddaughter on his lap.

  The melancholy crackle of records whose original owners are long dead.

  The granddaughter listening to the old-fashioned music which magically puts a smile on her grandfather’s face.

  The weeping in a nearby cot. Someone else missing home, or maybe it’s the music making them sad.

  FEB. 20

  1792: President Washington signs the act creating the U.S. Post Office.

  1965: the Ranger 8 spacecraft crashes on the moon after sending back thousands of pictures of the moon’s surface.

  Letters drifted out of the sky. Each one was postmarked “the moon.”

  Cal tried to collect as many as possible, but there were so many eventually he gave up trying. He opened a few: protestations of love, apologies, pleadings, confessions, all of them never sent or received, suitable only to be dreamed and then delivered to the moon.

  He saw a number of his own letters, which he had intended to send Linda and his children but never had, letters telling them how he felt about them, why he had left, what he had been afraid of, how very sorry he was.

  The letters piled up all the way up and down the roadway like paper snow.

  So many people afraid to finally tell their secrets, finally reveal the truth. It must be why the moon never seemed to smile.

  FEB. 21

  1878: the first telephone directory is issued.

  Someone had dropped a telephone directory in the road. Cal tried to pull it together, but it had been struck by too many cars: the bindng had disintegrated, hundreds of pages were scattered all over the highway.

  A telephone directory was the closest thing to a portrait of an entire city: the people who lived there, and the businesses. They had to change it every year because so many people died, moved away, moved in, so many businesses started up, or went bankrupt.

  The telephone directory of his home town had been small, and they hadn’t bothered to change it every year. Most people just kept their old copy, crossing off the names of those who died.

  He watched for a while as the directory disintegrated even further, the pages rippling, ripping, floating away on the wind, the lives it contained impossible to trace.

  He picked up his pace, heading toward home.

  FEB. 22

  1925: author and artist Edward Gorey is born in New York City.

  A is for the Apples that gave him terrible cramps.

  B is for Babs: homicidal, hermaphroditic tramp.

  C is for the Cadillac that ran him off the road.

  D is for the Dog that ate the fat and sassy toad.

  E is for the Etch-a-Sketch and its portrait of the pope.

  F is for Fish, dragged behind the Ford from a rope.

  G is for Gangrene and the hitcher who had it bad.

  H is for Highway, so dark, distant, and sad.

  I is for Illinois, home of John Wayne Gacy.

  J is for Jackrabbit, so red, flat, and lacy.

  K is for Kleenix, scattered for miles along the way.

  L is for the Lovers, lying murdered in the hay.

  M is for Map, and its confusing veins and arteries.

  N is for Nathan, and his tales of countless miseries.

  O is for the Oil, that sent the sportscar skidding.

  P is for the Passenger, whose screams were like singing.

  Q is for the Quagmire, a dirt road filled by rain.

  R is for the Roadkill, its eyes the color of pain.

  S is for the Snowstorm through which he had to wade.

  T is for the Tracks something warped and shadowed made.

  U is for the Underpass where the nameless creature waited.

  V is for the Vanishing that made the creature sated.

  W is for the Windows of a bus ridden by the dead.

  X is for the Xenophobe with plastic bags over his head.

  Y is for Yellow, which tells you to be careful.

  Z is for Zealot, whose bombs just killed a town full.

  FEB. 23

  1954: the first mass inoculation of children against Polio with the Salk vaccine begins in Pittsburgh.

  The man in the pickup dropped him off on the edge of the small town. Cal was hungry anyway, and thought splurging on a real motel room might be a good idea. He’d actually found it strangely satisfying to sleep in people’s barns and garages, but he couldn’t achieve a deep sleep that way– it felt more like waiting for a dimly-lit dream to end.

  He was standing outside a small health clinic. The temporary cardboard sign said: WISE COUNTY IMMUNIZATION PROGRAM. Parents were leading, sometimes dragging, their small children through the doors.

  A worried-looking woman with her dark hair up in curlers was ineffectually lecturing her young son. “Do you want to catch something awful? Is that what you want, young man?”

  The clinic parking lot and surrounding sidewalks gradually came to fill with desperate, sad-looking parents, some of them pushing along children as old as twenty, as old as thirty, through the glass doors for their Suicide Prevention shots, their Anti-disaster pills, their Death Extraction operations (a simple office procedure, in and out in a half-hour).

  Soon there were so many they jammed the doorway, and mothers punched mothers and fathers strangled fathers in their attempts
to get a better place in line. Their children stood by, frightened and bewildered, anxious to get out on their own where they wouldn’t be subject to such displays (although they’d be doing the same with their own kids someday).

  On the other side of the clinic was surely an exit where smiling parents left with their puzzled, often sore children. On the way home they would remember some new precaution they’d forgotten to ask the doctors and nurses about, and they’d have to come back tomorrow.

  FEB. 24

  1909: August Derleth, leading promoter of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, is born in Sauk City, Wisconsin.

  Cal spent the night in a small, virtually empty motel in the middle of town. He kept waking up, hearing voices, fragments of words, odd articulations which filled him with inexplicable anxiety. He would have slept better in one of those barns, he thought, however cold it might be.

  During the morning hours he walked around the town a bit. The sights were little different, of course, than those of any other small town. There was a comfort in the sameness. Small town folk were small town folk the world over. He would have much in common with these people.

  He could stay in a place like this, fit right in, and never leave.

  The man behind the post office counter might have been the twin of the postmaster where Cal had just come from. The police officer watching the traffic by the elementary school had the same moustache and nose as Officer Dill from his home town. People here walked, talked, smiled, and gestured in ways which were eerily familiar. They resembled the small town people he had known, and what’s more they resembled each other.

  Staring at his own reflection in the local barber shop mirror (twin brothers manning the chairs, whom he was sure he had met before), Cal saw that he was coming to resemble them as well. The same forehead, the same cheekbones, the peculiar oiliness of the skin, as if impurities had suddenly loosened, and were now floating to the top.

  He could stay here forever. He could fit right in. He had no other pressing business to attend to, did he?

  Without making a conscious decision Cal shouldered his pack and began walking back toward the edge of town. Passersby called to him by name, gestured his way; one or two even tried to grab his arm in order to delay him. But he shook them off, rather easily since they seemed unable to move other than in amphibious motion, and he kept on walking, the town limits in sight.

  As soon as he reached the edge of town he was able to pick up his pace, and in a few minutes was stretching his distance from the town, gradually feeling better, feeling more and more clear-headed, thinking of his family again, and wondering why he had waited so long to get going this day.

  FEB. 25

  1907: Playwright Mary Coyle Chase, author of Harvey, is born in Denver, Co.

  Cal must have been a good thirty miles away from the last town when he concluded that the presence he had felt for most of that time was not his own paranoia, but something concrete, something real.

  Still he pretended that there was nothing there. He had no way of verifying it in any case– he’d looked into bushes and behind trees along the road, at first surreptitiously and later openly and boldly. With no results. Eventually he just stopped looking.

  He had more important things to consider, like if he should be bringing home a present for each of his kids. He’d always done that before, upon returning from a long trip, given some small trinket to each of them– they were satisfied easily. Of course this had not been the usual trip. But maybe that made it even more important to bring them something back, maybe something even larger and more elaborate than before. Something that related to the strange place he had been during the last few months.

  He came up over a rise in the road, the sun behind him, and saw the shadow of the giant invisible rabbit, the phouka, stretched out beside his own. Its ears were enormous, generous almost to the point of frightening, or maybe even obscene.

  He should have known. He’d be bringing a gift back for his children whether he wanted to or not.

  FEB. 26

  1870: New York City’s first pneumatic-powered subway opens.

  The day had grown unseasonably warm– hot, he’d say, for February. By early afternoon he’d had to remove his coat and outer shirt, leaving him in T-shirt and jeans. He would have stripped down to his underwear if he’d thought he could get away with it.

  A little man in a bright red, uniform-type cap stood beside the road. “It’s a hot day to be walking!” he called.

  “That it is, but I don’t really have much choice.”

  “We’re testing out a new ‘commuter’s line’ for the county, free of charge. Old man Reynolds, the millionaire, he’s funding the thing. Guess he didn’t have enough to spend his money on.

  But this is one of the stops right here. You’re welcome to try it out!”

  “Why not?” Cal said. “Do we wait here? I don’t see a bench, and there’s no bus in sight.”

  “Who said anything about a bus?” The little man gestured behind him. A wooden ladder led down into a hole in the ground. The little man started down the ladder. After some confusion, Cal followed him.

  The tiny car that arrived at the cramped, underground platform looked put together with glue and baling wire. The sides were wood, with ordinary looking windows, the kind you might have in your home. They even had window shades and curtains, which were open.

  Cal stepped in by himself. It was like standing inside a closet. He found himself sucking in his belly to give himself more space. The doors snapped shut like shutters, and the dark closet tilted, then rocked back and forth as the car pulled away from the platform. As the car entered the small tunnel Cal could see that its sides were plain dirt, with no support. He held on tightly to a railing full of splinters. The car rocketed into the tunnel like a coffin dropped into a freshly-dug grave.

  A dim bulb casting a yellowish glow came on overhead as they entered the tunnel. Cal stared out the window as layers of soil and rock rippled by in irregular waves. Here and there a human-made object was revealed: a rusted metal bucket, a horseshoe, part of a wagon, a doll with empty eyesockets buried under the ground.

  Then he began seeing parts of coffins: intact ones, splintered and broken ones. Some of them quite ancient. Then some in which a mummifed corpse or a skeleton was revealed by a hole or a panel missing. Then pieces of bodies with no container in evidence at all.

  Then the garbage showed up: bales of discarded newspapers, magazines, old clothing, shoes, books, antique appliances, furniture. If they just moved some of this stuff further back the line then the dead would have some place to sit, he thought.

  As if to confirm his suggestion, the car slowed a bit and he found himself staring face-to-face with a corpse in a bathrobe, sitting in his easy chair, his skeletal feet propped up on a floral pattern ottoman. A newspaper lay open in his lap, the skeleton of a dog or a large cat stretched out beside the chair.

  A few minutes later the wooden car stopped and the same little man was there to let him out. Cal wondered, then, if this was a test line that ran in circles, but when he climbed the ladder back up to the surface he discovered that his starting point was nowhere in sight.

  As if to answer his unspoken question the little man said, “Here you be, twenty miles down the road.”

  “That’s pretty amazing.”

  “Thank you much,” the little man said. Cal started down the road. “So where you heading?” the little man called.

  “Home.” Cal enjoyed the feel of the word in his mouth. “Home … home,” he repeated.

  “That’s a good place to be, my man,” the little man said, “especially considering the alternative.”

  FEB. 27

  1902: John Steinbeck is born in Salinas, Ca.

  1939: the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws sit-down strikes.

  Falling-down shacks lined the road. Window glass had been replaced by cardboard squares. The clothes hanging out on the lines looked as if they were ready to be thrown away.

 
; Everywhere he looked, people were sitting down. On the ground by the road. On the bare mud that served as front lawns for these homes. On the edges of the road itself. Men, women, and countless, countless children. The people stared at Cal as if he were a being from another planet.

  He stopped and gazed back at them, tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. It was an embarrassing question, but he had to ask. “Why are you all sitting down like this?”

  There was an uncomfortably long silence for an uncomfortable length of time. Finally, one man close to him, his body so slumped he appeared to be sinking into the ground, spoke up. “It just don’t work no more,” he said. “None of it.”

  FEB. 28

  1983: the final episode of “M*A*S*H” airs.

  After he left the last decaying shack and its equally decaying inhabitants behind him, Cal found it difficult to think about walking. Thinking of all those children and their distant stares, he also found he could not make himself think about his own children.

  A half hour out he stopped and made a bed for himself on the edge of the woods by the road.

  This morning he was awakened by the sounds of engines. He looked up in time to see a number of ambulances roaring up the road, passing him, heading in the direction of that desperate community. In the distance he heard men and women shouting, and much crying.

  He got up and walked some more, but he couldn’t get the vision of those ambulances out of his head, the sound of those sirens, the sound of those men and women crying. Those parents. Those children.

  An hour or so later he heard the labored noise of an engine coming up behind him. He turned and saw one of the ambulances creeping slowly up the road, siren and flasher off but headlights burning like twin pots of yellow flame in the early morning fog. The ambulance came up beside him, slowing even further, so that he easily kept pace with it as it crept along.

  The ambulance pulled slightly ahead. He could see that the rear door had swung open a few inches. He moved to touch the handle, to shut it or to peek in.

  The ambulance driver’s head stuck out the window and shook no no no.

  Cal stepped closer to the door.

  The ambulance driver’s head stuck out the window and shook no no no.