by Mike Barnes
How the mind mourns—the greedy whining child in it—but the chest expands, the spirit rinses off its crud, with each thing you break, lose, give away, dump overboard. The boat rises just that fraction. Divest, divest! And the practical proofs, every time. Feeling myself become a better reader without the fallback of books at hand, knowing I know only what I carry in my head. So many proofs, so few solutions.
And wanting to vaporize everything I see.
A half hour before Jared and Lucy arrive, I spend some time in Big Empty. I don’t know what they make of the door that’s always closed during their visit. I don’t care, I wouldn’t open it for the Chief of Police. It belonged to Megan, it belongs to me. Jared’s never asked about it, which says a lot for a curious kid with poor impulse control. The mystery door is probably one of the reasons Lucy stays close by during the lesson, humming Andean melodies while she spices her stew.
I take a walk around Maude’s talismans, but I don’t need to sit or lie among them to know they’re still mute, they haven’t found their voice, or maybe their alphabet, their language, yet. Or they’re chattering like magpies and I haven’t grown ears to hear them.
Dumb objects.
Dumb animal staring at them.
It’s weird, but even Big Empty feels cluttered tonight. Like the air isn’t molecules of innocent gases, but a million cheesy hotel paintings, the contents of the world’s Walmarts and Dollaramas, miniaturized and hanging in space, filling it without a crack to slide a hair through.
I can’t make it empty enough to speak to me.
A thought that makes me weary to the bone, worse than a dozen sleepless nights. And makes my stomach coil around samosa vapours, a queasy wrench that has nothing to do with hunger.
I know—roughly—what happens next. That sense, as hyper-black accelerates and the window smears to close, of being pushed from room to room in search of progressively emptier space. From bedroom to couch—that’s already happened. From couch to sleeping bag in Big Empty. Finally, to the place I give no name. Which is the final destination, but is by invitation only.
Terrible to know almost all of a trip. Better to know some, or little, or nothing. But to know the path to an inn, the inn, the innkeeper—everything but the innkeeper’s face, which until the last second remains a fizzing white oval. No voice—since he has no mouth yet—just the possibility of sound, a spectrum from silence to screech. Until the lips begin to form.
“Is it… do you want to kill yourself?” An early psychiatrist—no, a school psychologist. One of the last, not long before you quit. Two chairs, a room behind Counselling.
A good question and you wanted to answer it, answer him, where seconds ago you’d burned to smash his face, your fists tingling with it. Thinking a long time with your head down, which must have primed him for the whispered yes.
“No. It’s not nothing I want. It’s just less. Much less.”
“Less. I’m sorry, I’m not following. Less than… Can you…?” The poor bastard couldn’t have looked more lost if they’d handed him the wrong exam and a broken pencil.
And no answer for him then. Not even the start of one for myself.
You reach a certain point where vagrancy is required. Since only a certain limited amount can be accomplished from a home. A fixed address.
But there’s that tricky period before you can cancel your mail, dump your gear and shove off.
Isn’t there, though?
§
Lucy squeezes past me with her bag of ingredients and the big, brown-stained pot she always cooks in. Says it’s part of every recipe and “adds to the flavour.” I hear her running water. Jared sets up his things—books and dictionary, notebook, pencils. We had a tense moment early on, which felt like it could go either way, when I told him I wouldn’t read with him without a dictionary. He dug in his heels, ended up shedding a few tears. Later, Lucy came to my door to thank me. Her eyes were misty too. What the hell just happened? I thought as I closed the door.
Lucius has come too, for some reason. He stands outside the door, looking uneasy. Making no move to enter, though I stand aside. A very meek, infinitely capable man who makes me wonder about the soul of a gardener. Merging through sundial hours with the plants he raises, transplants, and cuts. He must get short-changed a lot—soft fingers sliding late, light envelopes out back doors, along with another demand and Thanks so much! How much, exactly? When thank you bloats, look out.
“Is it 305?”
“No, no problem. Some bumps and bangs. Getting ready to move, I think. I’m just wonder… how is your car?”
My car. From the blank in my head, I realize I’ve been driving without being aware of it. It might be sluggish or it might not, I haven’t paid any attention to it. It’s still moving is all.
“No worse. About the same, I’d say. I’ll keep a closer eye on it tomorrow.”
Lucius frowns, the prelude to an apology. Today’s gray chill has brought more calls for burlap. Wasp nest removals.
“Take your time.”
§
Jared’s a wonder reader. Same as I was. Maybe all kids are. I never felt enough connection to my peers to learn their normal, except to know it wasn’t mine. But when I turned, early on, from kid to adult books, I skimmed to find the passages that would pummel me with awe. The sensation of being stunned, my head socked with disbelief as it would later be by fists, was my earliest delight. Delight, and the search for it, were divorced from moral judgement, from any judgement whatsoever. My foster-father when I became a serious reader was a history buff, at least in the rich field of World War II. And my first impression of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was a squirmy relish at its sheer preposterousness. The homeless vet and ex-con clawing his way up to become absolute ruler in ten years. The idea of exterminating millions, drawing up the plans and carrying them out—the stupefying sickness of it, like a banquet of vomit, made my head swim. And the Bunker scenes: issuing crazed orders while Zhukov’s giant guns pulverized Berlin, tantrums in the diesel-rank air, his appalling breath, single-vegetable dinners, unsleeping monologues on King Kong while even the faithful slipped away or discreetly dozed… What a fantastic story! Ringworld, a million miles wide and the area of three million Earths, was the natural next phase in my search for the incredible, and for several years I was a sci-fi freak. Then happened upon The Mind of a Mnemonist and came home to human beings who yielded nothing to the fantasists in the realms of the stupendous.
Jared, too, asks only to be thunderstruck. He’s still got last week’s Planet Danger, renewed a second time, along with Extinct and The Amazing Body, all of which deliver precisely what their titles promise. He flips to whatever’s currently blowing his mind and we read the passage together, him stopping frequently to ask me questions. What I can’t answer, he takes home as a research project, bringing back next week what he’s found online. Lucy raises her eyebrows at some of the titles, but this haphazard tour of the spectacular has gone much better than Charlotte’s Web or Tuck Everlasting, which only made him surly and wilfully obtuse.
“Mosquitoes!” he announces gleefully, when I fail several times to guess the world’s deadliest animal. The omnipresent little shits carry off two million people a year, making sharks and cobras and tigers look like dilettantes.
Sitting side by side on the couch, bent over the coffee table studying a blow-up of the Ebola virus, we present almost comically contrasting body types to the casual eye. Jared short and slight for his age, with a little pot belly from the snack-food bingeing he does after bullying sessions, a child’s smooth skin and careless flop of hair—and me, stretched and hollowed and inscribed by a Torquemada-Kafka machine. But look a little closer—Jared’s worry creases, premature etchings around his eyes and down his forehead, and his small ears, pointed as if snipped at the vet’s—and someone might get a sense they couldn’t quite name, some shadow of shared deformity, o
ddness at least, deviation from the norm.
And shared orientations, similar skews of thought, would make the likeness sharper. With the passenger pigeon chapter in Extinct, Jared went, as I would, past the mass murder itself, or else inside it, to more speaking details. Miracle hunting. Audobon in 1813, riding through western Kentucky, recording a migrating flock that darkened the sky like an eclipse, dung falling from it like snow, and did not stop for three days—which the naturalist calculated at 1.1 billion members. “It passeth credit,” a New Englander had written two hundred years earlier, “but the truth should be written.” “Passeth” gives Jared no pause—to the stumbling reader, the alien-archaic no harder than the alien-contemporary. Other scenes he fastens on are of Martha, the last of her kind, trembling with old age in a zoo in Cincinnati. Zoogoers tossing sand at her to make her move. After her death, roughly coincident with the start of World War I, her fifteen-inch-long body frozen into a three-hundred-pound block of ice for shipment to the Smithsonian.
“Wow.” It could be Jared. It could be me. Wow the essence of our hunt.
Lately he has begun touching me gently. With a glance back to make sure his mom is occupied, he puts out fingertips—so light I barely feel them—to the large, zigzagging veins on my hand and forearm. “Like snakes,” he says. “I can feel something moving.” And draws his fingers back. I search, but can’t find a reason to oppose it. It is more than a child’s appalled wonder at the aging body, turning itself inside out with such garish drama, all its inner workings rising to the surface to declare themselves. I sense he is also worried—a worry he can’t name or acknowledge—that I will pass away. That I will be encased in a block of ice and shipped somewhere, his knocks on my door unanswered. When a recent digression led us to haemophilia—a paper cut that never stops bleeding, imagine!—he looked everywhere but at my face.
The writing part starts poorly. I pick up the pen, rest it on the Hilroy notebook. Jared perches on the edge of the couch, his body tense, almost quivering. Excited to think his weightless thoughts have a secretary waiting, an adult with no other purpose but to scribe his musings in blue ink.
“How was school?” I start—as per usual, probably stupidly. And listen to the usual misery chant: wanting to burn it down, wishing for a flood that would engulf it, overflowing toilets…”I’d like to put some people in a dungeon.” His eyes intent, focused on something far away.
I open the book. “What kind of dungeon would it be?”
I perk up, we both perk up, an energy has entered the room, as the phrases come, slowly at first, born in funk but veering from it, making something of it. There’s a “hollow tube,” some kind of entrance below the roots of a “giant tree… so high it has leaves in space.”
Something has definitely entered the room. Something real, something genuine. You know it because you do—there’s no mistaking it—and because it speaks haltingly. It gulps, gasps, belches—testing its lungs (if it has any), trying to find a way to breathe. I feel a tingling in my stomach as something comes into being that didn’t exist five seconds ago.
And then—poof! like that!—it’s gone. The dungeon that was forming degenerates into borrowed trash, game-fed stuff about aliens, zombies, mutants, lasers, hit points, nuclears. It spools out of him so fast he doesn’t even notice I’ve stopped writing and have closed the book over my thumb.
I feel sick. And pissed. In a split second, Jared’s fantasy has left the room. Jared has left the room, leaving me to watch this jizzfest by a kid in Tokyo or Seattle.
“Jared, that’s not your dungeon.”
“Yes it is.”
“It’s from a game you played. Or watched. Or maybe a TV show.”
“No, it isn’t. I made it up.”
Stalemate.
I give it some time, then say, “Jared, the tree with its top in space was interesting. And I’d like to know where the hollow tube goes.”
“That was stupid.”
“Well, I liked it. And you could always start another.”
For a nervous little elf, he can sulk like a trucker at closing time. I have no idea whether I’m being a responsible teacher or a sadist. He could learn better sentence structure by punctuating his first-person-shooter scenario. But I’m simply unwilling to transcribe something so zillionthhand lame.
Looking away, chin pushed out sullenly—behind us, Lucy has stopped cooking, there’s no sound from the kitchen. After a time, he starts. Tonelessly, letting me know that what he’s describing might be a dungeon meant for me. But at least it’s his own.
There’s a shack in the desert. Nothing else around. Sign on the front: For Bullies. It’s a little thin shack with a pointed roof. “Like a poop shack.” A single chair inside. I think of school when he says that. When the bully sits down, the chair flips over instantly, sending him down a chute. Then rights itself as if nothing has happened. If you blink you miss it.
“What’s down the chute?”
But that’s it. All I’m getting today. As we wrap up, I encourage him to bring more ideas Wednesday. What awaits the bully at the bottom of the chute? Is there any way out? How?
I might be advising myself, I think as I shut the door. But that is what teaching is, or what I take it to be: helping someone to go where you’ve gone, should go, will soon go, are still going…
§
After they leave, I do a drive-about. But know, before the garage door has quite rolled up to the ceiling, that it’s hopeless. Not only do I know there’ll be no sign of her, but I’m lacking any sense she even could appear. Not fear of failure: certainty of it. And on top of that: a confusion about whether I’m looking for Megan, or Lois, or someone else entirely. When there’s no someone to find, you can only find everyone.
Down Avenue to St. Clair. East to Mt. Pleasant and down the hill. Turning east again above Branksome Hall, then up and down streets in the Rosedale maze. Lois’s home turf.
Confusions spill from the first one, miniature spiders scattering from a split egg sac.
Why have you always assumed they’d still be in Toronto? That she was never more than a lucky car ride away?
The family would try to keep them close, no question. And would have succeeded in the short run, the safe nest needed. But Lois restless, strong-willed. And would meet someone, not right away, but before very long—that was easy, strangely comforting, to accept. And all the things that could take the new trio anywhere. Jobs. Exhibitions. Medical procedures. Christ, university by now. It’s not 1813. The odds are powerfully against anyone staying where they begin.
Dandelion world. Filaments hanging by a thread, the winds gusty.
You just couldn’t bear to think of them scattered by sheer chance. Blown beyond even the unlikeliest stroke of luck.
Not only can I not hear if the engine’s sludgy, even the wheel beneath my hands feels like test pattern dots. The lawns beyond my headlights a mirage seen through binoculars.
Nothing. Nothing out here.
I stop beneath a shade tree, a big one still with its leaves, and turn everything off.
Silence. And then the something always there, behind it. A kind of whispering.
Wealth has locked its doors and turned off its lights but I seem to hear it all around me, a barely audible rustling like the quiet munching of silkworms in the dark.
7
Prologue: The Stairs
The dreams come on schedule.
(The dreams are the schedule.)
The dreams lead down.
(The dreams lead to Stone.)
First, the Ugly Dreams. Lurid loops of filth and savagery. Burst sewers in a human abbatoir. Severed heads and limbs in watery sludge bobbing with turds. Not snapshots of carnage but endless coiling chases through it. Through corridors and up and down stairs in a house riddled with grimed passageways clogged with smashed belongings. A sense hanging in the fetid air
of endless years of neglect, endless abandonment. Isolate decay.
Yet—something is moving. In the stillness of the ruined architecture, something moves without pause, wrecking all it finds. You sense it, always. Pursue it, flee it. It is just ahead and just behind. It needs no rest, so you can take none.
Finally, in a room fogged and reeking, you meet. The putrid chase ends abruptly. You see his back, hunched over his work, and feel the weight of steel in your hand. You’ve always known this. He won’t pause to turn, now. Neither will you.
This is the bottom.
And yet—it isn’t.
Incredibly, all the panting pursuit and stomach-churning finds, all the grinding repetitions of terror—they amount to a barrier you must cross. A shell, a membrane, you must tear through to reach a threshold. It is there, on the other side of the Ugly Dreams, that the stairs start.
They are—the Ugly Dreams—a passage through to the landing.
And a message, too. Stone’s reminder that hyper-black is far along and won’t hold much longer. Descend the stairs to learn what must be done. Descend the stairs to find Stone.
The job is on the stairs, and Stone waits at the bottom.
The dreams come on schedule.
(The dreams are the schedule.)
The dreams lead down.
(The dreams lead to Stone.)
§
Amazing how little has changed. Twenty-three years since the page was typed on Lois’s Smith-Corona, yet it captures perfectly what just jolted me awake on the couch. Bolt upright, shaking with terror and disgust. 3 a.m.? 4? Sooty gray through the uncurtained window, but the street dead silent.