Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

  I read everything that I can get my hands on covering a variety of subjects ranging (this morning) from: insect predation in the Amazon, to mountain erosion and deposition rates around the world, to trends in violent crime around the US (looked at both geographically and from a population density standpoint). The PDF articles were a mix of inter-library loans [ILL], some from Cynthia or other library/research geeks that I know, and some from me; I either found/sent them, or emailed the authors for copies based on references I found to the articles in other stuff that I read. While I took notes, other lines of research/interest occurred to me, and by the time I had finished the last article, I was ready for the Library. I grabbed another coke from the coke-fridge, fed the fish in my saltwater tank, and headed down the stairs to the almost invisible door that led onto Main Street.

  I like to think that the world is my classroom, but my local base of operations is the Saranac Lake Free Public Library [SLFPL]. Primarily they keep me in paper books, fiction and non-fiction of all sorts. While I love learning online, I'll never lose my bias for printed paper. For a small town library, they maintain a wonderful collection, and seem to exist solely to order what books they don't have for me through ILL. I discovered the Adirondack Research Center, housed in their basement, a few years ago, and found that the more I learn about the Adirondack Park, the more I want to know about the place and the people. Besides the physical books and journals that they have on-hand, or can acquire for me, the SLFPL gives me access to all sorts of databases as well as help from my personal (and unpaid) research assistant, Cynthia.

  I first met Cynthia Windmere on December 9, of 2001, a few days after I had decided on Saranac Lake as my new base of operations; and, if I was the kind of person who had friends, she would be my friend. I walked into the SLFPL with a few bizarrely diverse topics of interest/research, and she cleared her desk and invited me to join her behind the counter. Three and half hours later, I walked out with my library card, 26 articles printed from various databases, 11 books (2 pleasure reading, 9 ‘schoolwork’), and an appointment with the curator of the Adirondack Research Center for the following day (to start my immersion in their collection). I know, and am known by, all of the people working in the library, but it is most often Cynthia that I work with, especially when trying to explore new or tricky research sources or materials.

  On the too-dark afternoon of March 26, 2002, Cynthia told me to ask her out for coffee at the end of a particularly long session digging through some databases for information on drug use in the US and abroad. She invested herself more than usual in her work whenever we were looking at anything having to do with the world of illicit drugs, and this day was no exception. I now think that she perceived a growing common bond between us, beyond my studies, and wanted to expand on it outside of her workplace; a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but that's exactly the sort of social nuance that I don't understand. “I don't drink coffee or other hot beverages.” was my standard response, and it initially worked, but then she suggested an early supper. I mentioned that I had some leftover pizza up in the Smart Pig office fridge that I planned to nuke; and at that point she left it, and me, alone.

  I was reading a murder mystery later that night, and came across a passage strangely reminiscent of the scene that Cynthia and I had played out in the library that afternoon, and I had a 20-watt revelation. I stayed away from Cynthia and the library for weeks out of a combination of shame and fear and lack of understanding. I relied on the information that I could harvest for myself online, buying books at a used bookstore in Lake Placid, and twice sneaking into the library when I knew that Cynthia wasn't working. Growing up in New York City, it was relatively easy to avoid or ignore people, based on the size and impermanence of the population, but the same was not true of Saranac Lake.

  She tracked me down one evening upstairs in Smart Pig, saying, “I saw the light on, and hoped that I could catch you.” I just looked at her, until after an interval of 11 seconds she spoke again, “I don't want you to avoid me or the library anymore. I don't know if you've got a girlfriend or are gay or just aren't interested, but I miss you and your 'studies', and the way you jump from topic to topic. I was going to leave it alone for a while longer, but one of the database admins got in touch with me to find out why our traffic has halved in the last month, and it pushed me into coming here tonight.” she admitted with a slight grin.

  I looked at a spot on the wall behind her, “I'm not gay, and I don't have a girlfriend. I'm interested in you, but not in the way you mean, or maybe want. I like working with you at the library, and was comfortable knowing the way you think and sit and talk and type, and access information and guess related subjects that I might want to check out next, but I don't really have friends, and I don't kiss, and I'm not interested in sex.” I got this last bit out as a wheeze, my breath running out with the final syllable. “I don't know what I did, or how I broke our relationship, how we relate, but I want it to be like it was before, and I don't want you to be gone from my life, or be sad or be angry with me.” The final thought was a drop-in at the last moment, based on a memory of previous relationships that had changed for reasons that I didn't understand, and how the people looked like they felt when it happened.

  “Oh...” she said, and took a half step forward, stopped, and cocked her head as if she could see me better at an angle, “Ok... well... I've got some good stuff to show you, based on what we were working on last time, and what you've been working on in the Adirondack Research Center with Tim. I hope to see you tomorrow.” she said and then left.

  I was in the library when it opened at 10a.m. the next morning, with a coffee for her and my usual coke. We took turns feeling awkward for a couple of days until we got our work back on track, and we even got together for a separate-checks dinner at the Chinese place on Main Street a week later, something that grew into a weekly event over the years. Sometimes she has a boyfriend, sometimes she doesn't; but to the extent that I relate to/with other people, we have each other for work and talk and weekly dumplings and orange chicken with broccoli.

  The background on our relationship was so that you would understand my state when a newish library intern handed me a stack of books and printed articles from a shelf behind the desk that they added for me 38 months ago, and mentioned casually that Cynthia hadn't been in so far this morning or yesterday; and hadn't answered her phone when Beth, the intern, had called with questions about a book club that they were in together. I asked Beth to get Ben, the director of the library, for me, and I sat down to wait.

  “She spoke to me last week about some personal stuff that she was dealing with. She said that she needed to take Friday and Monday off and might need to take some more time off or work a reduced schedule for a while if things got complicated.” Ben said to me, by way of explanation for his state of calm with Cynthia being absent from work. I'm not great with facial or tonal expressiveness, so I asked Ben if 'complicated' was his word or Cynthia's; it was hers.

  “I expect that someone in her family is sick or dying or dead, and she had to leave in a hurry. I'm assuming that whatever took her away for Friday and yesterday stretched into today... we can cover her time and duties. She's never missed much work before, so it's no big deal. I expect that she'll answer my email in a day or so, with an update and explanation... you know... family” he ended with an expressive shrug of his shoulders that conveyed nothing of use to me.

  I had no response to his statement, or shrug, and no reason to talk anymore with Ben. So, I grabbed my books and articles, went back to Smart Pig to drop them off, and headed over to Cynthia's home to see if she was in.

  Whispers, still 9/4/2012

  As a boy, I wandered the streets in our neighborhood on the Upper West Side in concentric circles with our apartment as the point of origin. I wasn't comfortable/ happy until I had a map in my head a mile on each side with our home as the center. From there, I worked my way out through Manhattan and the boroughs, enlarging my 'familiarit
y map' along lines of customary travel and utility. I knew where there were movie theaters, and branches of the New York Public Library, and playgrounds/parks. The map extended for miles in every direction along the easy to access subway lines and bus routes, but there were blank spots in places that were difficult to reach or that held no appeal to me. My map essentially ended at 96th street on both sides of Central Park, except for an island of known territory near Columbia University. I crossed an ocean of “empty space” on a regular basis to get to that area known both for their spectacular library, and for the best BBQ place in New York.

  When I lost New York City, I drove north until I found a sizable trio of towns in a boundless ocean of trees--Tupper Lake, Saranac Lake, and Lake Placid. The wilderness, and its lack of definition, kept me awake and on edge for weeks after I moved to Saranac Lake; then I started over the same procedures that I had used as a boy to find my place in the world. I walked, and then drove, in circles, exploring Saranac Lake and Lake Placid and Tupper Lake. I got to know the main streets, and the back streets, and the places in between the towns where houses became scarce, and the roads on the way to nowhere where houses hid.

  Once I had a map in my head of my new world, I looked at physical maps of the “empty” spaces between the towns and outposts; the Adirondack Park covers more than 6 million acres, some of it little towns and roads and such, but much of it simply trees and lakes and mountains and swamps and bugs and beasts. Early on, I found that people up here all had maps of the Adirondacks in their heads, most of them entirely devoid of detail for the majority of the Park; the space between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid is, to most people, made up of a road going from the former to the latter, with trees by the side of the road, but nothing else.

  The map in my head reminded me a model of a carbon atom, a moderately densely packed nucleus (Saranac Lake) with clusters of electrons (Lake Placid or Tupper Lake) orbiting at a distance along tiny paths; with vast amounts of empty space between each component. The difference being that some cool forests and lakes and mountains and swamps actually took up the space between the towns (and to an even greater extent between my three towns and the rest of the world). I made it my goal to learn about the Adirondack wilderness, to find the great places and add them to my mental map. I added great walks and mountain climbs, and camping spots, and canoe trips. Then a few years into my discovery and mapping project, I discovered that the map of the woods was entirely different in the winter; I redrew the map with parenthetical winter notes as I learned to enjoy the wilderness in the cold months (skiing, snowshoeing, camping, ice-climbing, and so on). The mapping process allowed me to familiarize myself with the place I was living without ever having to get to know (or map) the people living around me (a deficit that I was both used to, and untroubled by).

  I found myself thinking of the unfamiliar ocean of people that I swam in every day as another unmapped wilderness. Once I had processed that, and tried to knock it apart, I grudgingly started to map a few of the people in my world. I've never been very good with people, I don't understand why they do the things they do, and why they cannot spend time alone or quiet. My people-mapping project is going slowly, and the map is still limited to those I have to interact with most frequently, with vast emptiness all around these lines radiating out from me to those few that I know, like Frank and Gregory and Dorothy and Mickey and... Cynthia.

  Cynthia's house is, as is too often the case to be coincidence, very much its occupant—Cynthia... small, neat and businesslike. This occurs to me every time I pull into the driveway (and every time it makes me wonder what that truism says about me). I heard someone else describe her house as a red brick shoebox, with a too-flat roof and too many windows. But, they likely never hid from a Nor'easter in it, watching Cynthia gleefully run between front and back windows at the sound of snow dumping off of the metal roofing (I don't emote much myself, but learning human emotions has been a lifelong pursuit, and Cynthia is a superb subject). I stepped up onto the big fieldstone by the front door, and squashed the bell with my thumb for five seconds before listening for a response.

  I moved my head closer to the left side of the entry, where I had helped Cynthia replace a broken security inset with a piece of single pane glass after we had to break in one cold night. Turning my ear in towards the house, I looked back up the street to see if anyone had noted my time on the entry porch. I could hear nothing but the grandfather clock just inside the door and that generic hum that electrical current seems to give a house. I couldn't see anyone on the street or in windows of any of the houses facing me, so I grabbed the key from Cynthia's hide-a-key stone, and let myself in. I was a bit surprised that the bolt was engaged, but figured that maybe she locked up more seriously when going away for a death in the family, went inside and closed the door behind me.

  People have secrets. People trust in their houses to keep all sorts secrets, but a house is just a box to keep the rain out; the secrets are still there, and everyone hides them in the same places. I'm really good at getting people, and houses, to give up their secrets; but I wasn't going to give Cynthia's a truly thorough going over... I had neither the time, nor did I wish to invade her personal space to that degree.

  I checked the front hall closet and noted that Cynthia's raincoat was gone, but her running shoes weren't. There was an odd smell in the kitchen, so I looked under the sink and found she hadn't taken a day or two's worth of garbage with her when/if she went. She had washed, but not put away the last meal's dishes, looked like supper. Her bathroom held no surprises (I look in other peoples' cabinets/drawers whenever I get a chance, and also read the PDR whenever a new edition comes out). It looked as though she had taken a couple of prescription bottles (from the empty space on that shelf in her cabinet), but not her contact lens stuff. There was a hamper full of clean clothes on the bed, but that doesn't mean much (I have two hampers, one for clean clothes that gets emptier as time passes, and one for dirty clothes that gets more full as time passes... when clean is empty, dirty full, I go to the laundry place).

  She hadn't put a vacation feeder (which I am certain are a scam, but she fervently believes keep her fish happy and healthy) in the ten gallon tank in her living room. I feel odd doing it, but unwrap and drop one of the things into the tank, because she'd want it for her fish. Her car was not in the garage. I found $850 in the freezer, a loaded pump-action shotgun in the front hall closet (a Remington 870 in 12 gauge), some items I won't discuss in a bedside table, and a picture of me and Cynthia that I don't remember anyone taking. I found the picture about halfway down through a stack of pictures that included shots of old people that might have been grandparents, a very young Cynthia with a nearly identical sister, a succession of boyfriends posing with Cynthia, and a picture of Cynthia and two people that must have been her parents at what I assume was Cynthia's college graduation. None of what I found helped me decide where she was, but the picture made me feel nervous/uncomfortable... I hadn't thought that anybody had pictures of me, and wondered if it implied/represented some social contract between Cynthia and me.

  I was certain that Cynthia was out of town, but found myself oddly uncomfortable with some of the findings of my search (running shoes, garbage, dishes, contacts, and the unfed fish). Cynthia had gone out of town before in a rush, and forgotten things, but I have learned over the years to trust the grumblings of my sub-conscious, as it generally takes more information into account than is available to my forebrain. Determined to both push a bit, and give the lizard bits in the back of my head time to figure things out, I backed my car out of the driveway and drove back to my parking spot behind Smart Pig. I went upstairs to try and think and take a nap before I had to meet Frank in a couple of hours.

  Smart Pig, still 9/4/2012

  Smart Pig Thneedery is my base of operations, my office, my bat-cave, my studio, my bolt-hole, and my place from which to watch the Winter Carnival Parade on Main Street each February. I can walk to almost everything I ever need in town, and
sometimes go a week without seeing my Honda Element in the parking lot behind the building. “Smart Pig” is from a play-on-words game that my Dad used to play with me about our last name, Cunningham. He would come up with variations on the theme in different languages as I grew older, but Smart Pig (from when I was four) was always our favorite. The concept of a Thneed, an item that can be anything to anyone, came from a duck-squeezer book my Mom read to me when I was a kid. I loved the idea of a Thneed, if not the transparent agenda of a children’s' ecologist with questionable credentials. I am seldom whimsical, but when the landlord asked me what should go on the nameplate and mailbox, I told him, “Smart Pig Thneedery”.

  As the name suggests, I provide all sorts of things to all sorts of people; most of it entirely legal, some of it a bit less so. I do charcoal drawings, carve wooden decoys and fishing lures, mess around with digital photography, make a few bits of camping gear, investigate and solve mysteries, work at watercolor landscapes (I use more cerulean blue than I should, but it's coming along), split and stack wood, deliver Adirondack/regional documents, and also make dog and cat treats. Your eye likely skipped through the list, and then jumped back to the one in the middle about investigations and mysteries; mine does also, but it's the one that's most problematic and that I understand the least. All of the other things, along with a dozen more that take up the majority of my time as a thneed-tician, I learned by reading about and reverse-engineering samples and talking to experts in the field; the only explanation that I have for the sleuthing is that I read a lot.