by Mark Frost
July 30, 10 A.M.
Have traveled six miles on foot so far, 170 to go. Have had no experiences to speak of yet. Believe it is about to rain.
July 30, 12 P.M.
I was right about the rain. Still waiting for first experience.
July 30, 2:30 P.M.
Am at the Post and Beam restaurant on Route 487. Cannot describe the taste of warm cherry pie to a wet and weary traveler. Have also had my very first cup of coffee, and my second. My feet seem to tingle and are very agitated. I feel like running very fast while screaming like an Indian. I believe I will consider this my first experience.
July 30, 4 P.M.
Have met a couple named Star and April, both in their early twenties, traveling in a VW bus. I am sitting in the back under a small crystal pyramid glued to the ceiling, which according to April increases the electric field as they are making love. Do not remember this being covered in health class. Star and April are on their way to Washington to chain themselves to the doors of the Pentagon. Think I will ride along for as long as I am welcome, which they seem agreeable to since neither has ever met a real Boy Scout before. I told them about why I am traveling by myself and April promised they will do their best to provide as many new experiences as they can. Then they both began to laugh and took some small white pills.
July 30, 6 P.M.
I am driving. I do not have a license, I have never driven before, and am in a vehicle that I believe could put a drugstore out of business. April said I would do just fine and kissed me very long and hard. If caught will probably spend most of my life in jail. Strangely, I do not seem to care. It has stopped raining. April and Star are under the pyramid in a sleeping bag making love. In a few hours we will stop and put up the tepee for the night.
July 30, 11 P.M.
We are camped in a large field on the edge of a forest. I am in a tepee. Star is outside asleep on a rock. Was going to tell April that I am a virgin and that any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated, but before I could she took off all her clothes and went outside to chase fireflies. I attempted to follow but stepped on a stick and cut my foot several steps from the tepee. Could do nothing but watch as her naked body ran off into the field, chasing bugs. Lost sight of her as she caught her first fly. Have dressed and cleaned the foot wound. Expect full recovery. Do not know when or if April will return. Have found a bottle of raspberry brandy in the van and have filled my camp cup. Believe Star just fell off the rock.
July 31, 9 A.M.
Have said good-bye to Star and April as they turned south toward the Pentagon and I do not think chaining myself to the front door would help my chances of becoming a special agent.
My head feels very bad. Last night I drank three cups full of brandy and threw up when April came back into the tepee with a firefly. I lay there unable to move, watching the little light fly around above my head. Wanted to tell April that I was a virgin but could not seem to make my mouth move. Then the ground began to spin around in circles and I think I began to cry. Am not sure, but I think April held my head in her lap. I seem to remember opening my eyes and seeing breasts spinning around the tepee. When I woke this morning Star and April were in the van eating Rice Krispies and chaining themselves to the van's door handle. I told them that I thought it was time for me to head home and April said she wanted to give me something before I left and took me by the hand into the tepee. She then gave me a tiny pyramid and told me to keep it near me anytime I make love. Then we kissed and she pressed my face into her breasts, where I would have stayed all day if she hadn't let go. It is just a suspicion, but I think April knew that I had never had sex.
July 31, 3 P.M.
* * *
The following is a conversation with an Allen K. Boyle, who picked Dale up outside of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.
* * *
DALE: Speak right into there.
ALLEN: The sun is dying. I travel all over this state and not one person realizes that the sun is dying and that time as we know it is coming to an end, everything we do is of no importance, and not one person seems to want to do a goddamn thing about it. Art, books, television, religion - none of it matters. What we need to start doing is planning to live without our bodies once the sun craps out on us. But no one wants to talk about it. I've got a plan, but no one wants to listen. They would rather just walk around and pretend the sun is going to come up tomorrow just like it did today. And where do you think all those people are going to be when Mr. Sun doesn't come up? In trouble, that's where they are going to be, but not me. Not Allen K. Boyle. I got a plan. . . .
DALE: What do you do?
ALLEN: I sell men's hairpieces. Notice I don't use the word wig.
July 31, 8 P.M.
* * *
Camped outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, Dale met a man named Sparks.
* * *
DALE: Talk into this.
SPARKS: You're making some kind of a record, aren't ya? Goddamn, goddamn. Ya know, I was a Boy Scout. Goddamn right I was. That was a long time ago. . . . I'm forty-nine, be fifty next, goddamn right, if I don't git killed by a goddamn train or thief. . . . What do ya want me to say? Got sunk on two goddamn boats in the war. One right after the other. Ain't had a good job since. No goddamn way. Had one wife till she got sick of me and threw me out. Don't blame her. I've been a shit most of my life. She had a kid. Don't even know its name, though I saw it once when I needed some money. It was riding around in circles on a red bicycle. Don't remember if it was a boy or a girl. Never did get any money. Think it was a girl. Just move on all the time, all the time. Don't blame no one. No sir. I ain't got noth'n' else to say.
August 1, 9 P.M.
Arrived home this afternoon. Am glad to be back in my room. Mom made smothered chicken and mashed potatoes, and said if I ever did anything foolish like this again, she would beat me within an inch of my life. Dad just seemed to sit and watch me at dinner, then afterward asked me if I saw anything interesting. I said I thought I had. He said good, then grounded me for a week. The moon landing seems to have had quite an effect on him, has an idea that he thinks will make a lot of money, printing maps of the moon. Good to be home. Nothing on the news about the Pentagon. The sun is expected to rise at 6:55. Have glued the pyramid above the bed on the ceiling. Good-bye, April.
* * *
Chapter 4
"I remember that Dale had this rock glued on the ceiling above his bed. Something to do with sex or magnetic fields or something. I don't think it helped in either way. Came unglued once and he had this big bump on his forehead. Went around for a week wearing a hat.
"It was in the fall of '69 that his mother started having these terrible dreams. I remember because we were camping out back one time and we woke up, hearing his mother screaming. Dale knew something was wrong before anyone else did. I don't know how, but I remember him telling me one night that something was going to happen. And it did."
Carl Engler
Friend
Electrician
November 1, 7 P.M.
Have felt for a while that something was wrong. Do not know what. Mom had another dream last night. She said that he almost got in the door. Dad has been very busy printing maps of the moon. I asked him about the dreams and he said it was something I probably understood better than he did. I don't, and am worried. Mom says that everything is fine, but I know that she is not telling the truth.
November 15, 5 A.M.
St. Joseph's Hospital. Mom went to bed early last night after dinner. She seemed fine, told me to finish my civics homework and then went upstairs. At midnight Dad woke me and told me we were going to the hospital, that Mom was unconscious. The doctors said it was a brain aneurysm. They operated to relieve the pressure and now we are just waiting to find out what happens.
Dad said that she had gotten up about eleven-thirty to get a glass of water and take an aspirin. He asked her if she was feeling all right and she said, "Oh, you know." She didn't say anything else, just that.
"Oh, you know." I don't understand, and I hate hospitals.
November 15, 6 A.M.
An aneurysm is a permanent abnormal blood-filled dilatation of a blood vessel resulting from disease of the vessel wall. It isn't that bad.
November 15, 8:20 A.M.
Around seven this morning Mom began to bleed in her brain. The doctors operated again but she stopped breathing at around 7:30. . . . They took her back to her room and we saw her. Her head was wrapped in a bandage. . . . Dad held her hand and whispered something in her ear, then put my hand between his and hers. . . . I need her still, and I don't know what to do. She was just here.
November 16, 3 P.M.
Uncle Al has come to help out. The Schlurmans are helping. The refrigerator is full of ham and chicken that people have brought over. Dad is going to have her cremated. I never finished my civics paper. Marie came over. Started to tell me something about Mom being with God and I told her if she said one more word I'd knock her goddamn teeth out. I want to get out of here.
November 17, 10 P.M.
There was a service today. Everyone said good-bye. A Unitarian minister said something about the spirit living on. I don't think he had any idea what he was talking about. Many people came over to the house afterward, drank punch and ate Jell-O salad and ham. Tomorrow Dad and I will take her ashes north of Philadelphia to a small river where they went to before I was born.
I wish my brother Emmet could come, but if he crosses the border he will be arrested. Dad talked to Emmet on the phone and told him he understood why he couldn't come back. I wish I understood. Bradley said Emmet was a coward and that was why he was in Canada. I smacked Bradley . . . I wonder if he's right, though.
November 18, 6 P.M.
Mom is on her way to the ocean. Small grayish pebbles. We each took a handful and tossed them into the water. They sank and then the current started to take them along, bouncing across the bottom. Saw a small perch eat one and then spit it out. A crayfish picked up another one in its claw and walked away with it into the deep water.
For a long time we just stood and watched and listened to the water. Then Dad said that in a few weeks ice will start to form on the banks, and in a month or so after that, the stream will freeze all the way across, and if we stood in the same place then, we wouldn't hear a whisper.
* * *
No tapes exist for the remainder of 1969.
* * *
February 25, 1970, 8 P.M.
Have not talked for a very long time. Didn't seem to be much point. Mom has been gone for over three months now. Don't know what Dad would have done without the moon map business. He talks of little else but the moon now. Spends each night before going to bed on the roof with a telescope looking into the sky, drawing pictures of craters. I feel different now. Nothing seems to be the same as it was before she died. Not my friends, not the neighborhood, school, anything. I would very much like to go away where no one knows who I am or anything about me.
April 19, 7 P.M.
Turned sixteen. Dad gave me some aftershave. Marie came by and gave me a card with a dog on it. Something must happen soon or I will go crazy.
April 20, 9 P.M.
Dad has found and named a new crater on the moon. He seems very happy.
April 21, 4 P.M.
Sat down in English class today and Mrs. Peale introduced our new student teacher, Miss Larken. It was April. Her hair was back in a ponytail. Her breasts were in the same place as I last left them. We saw each other after class and I asked her how Star was and she said that they had had a fight at the Pentagon and have not seen each other since. She also suggested that it would be a good idea if the Quakers didn't find out about us meeting each other before, and asked me if I had had any success with the pyramid. Not wanting to give the wrong impression, I said, "Some."
Then she said it was good to see me and that I better be ready to learn because she was a very strict teacher. Our first assignment is to write a sonnet. I told her that I have never liked or understood poetry. She said that she would do her best to change that, then she walked away. I believe I have rounded a corner.
April 23, 8 P.M.
In English today April told the class that poetry was much more than what we have ever thought it to be. She then read a D. H. Lawrence poem, "Gloire de Dijon," to the class, and kept her eyes on me the whole time. Unfortunately, I only remember the last few lines:
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
Had an erection throughout Mr. Hord's early American history class.
May 2, 11 P.M.
Have finished my first poem. Am seeking a balance between the erotic and the sublime.
Alone in a tepee full of breasts
hovering above him like angels
He dreams of fireflies and pyramids
and stars sleeping on rocks.
Think this does the trick.
May 3, 4 P.M.
April suggested that poetry may not be my field of expertise.
May 17, 6 P.M.
The end of the year is fast approaching. Believe my chances of ever being alone with April again are slipping away. She gave me a D on my middterm exam. Am beginning to believe that she is only interested in sleeping with dead poets.
May 25, 3 A.M.
Just awoke from a dream where I was visited by Mom. She was not the same as I remember her. She seemed to be younger, barely a woman. Her face was smooth and pale, her hair was long and fell onto her shoulders. She was trying to tell me something, but I was not able to hear her. She reached out, touched my hand, and then was gone.
I woke to find myself clutching a small gold ring in my hand. I do not know where it came from, and am sure it was not there when I went to sleep. I believe she was here, and at the same time I cannot believe it. These things do not happen, there is an explanation for this as there must be for everything. The ring is now locked in the drawer of my desk. Mom is dead, and it was only a dream. I will not believe this.
May 25, 7 A.M.
The ring fits on my small finger as if it was made for it. However, it will remain in the desk until I remember where it came from.
May 26, 9 P.M.
Found an old photograph in an album of Mom when she was a teenager. On her finger was the ring I found in my hand the other night. I asked Dad about it and he said that when they were first dating he remembers Mom wearing it. That it had been her father's and that her mother had given it to her when he died.
I asked Dad what happened to the ring and he said that he had not seen it for years, that she had stopped wearing it when they got married. I do not know what to think.
June 3, 5 P.M.
Told April today that I must talk to her about something that was troubling me. She told me to come to her apartment. Am due there in one hour. Have drunk seven cups of coffee. Feel somewhat sick to my stomach. Am trying very hard not to think about raspberry brandy.
June 3, 5:30 P.M.
Started to yawn one time after another. Drank three more cups of coffee to perk me up. Feel like my feet want to crawl out of my ears.
June 3, 11:30 P.M.
Arrived at April's apartment several minutes early, so I began counting cracks in the sidewalk. Was up to 207 when April leaned out of the window and asked me what I was doing. I said that I was counting cracks in the sidewalk. She asked why. I said that I was not sure, that I was not sure of anything anymore. Then before I could stop myself I said that if she preferred that I remain outside, and talk through the window, that was all right with me. She then came downstairs and opened the door and invited me in. I told her that I thought there were more than 207 cracks in her sidewalk, but that was as far as I'd gotten, but if she wanted a complete count, I would be glad to finish. She said thanks, but that it was not necessary. I said fine, and she said fine. And then we went inside and she closed the door.
The apartment was small: a living room, bedro
om, bathroom, and kitchen with a small eating area. We sat down in the living room around a small table and she looked me in the eye and asked me what I wanted. I told her about the dream, and the ring. And that I thought she was the only person who could help me find the answer. She looked at me for a long moment, then got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with a bottle of wine and Mr. Hord, the American history teacher, who had been cutting up cheese. "You have an interesting problem," said Mr. Hord.