ODD? (11 page)

Mother would think this a grandiose joke. Would laugh in her cigar-breath way, her ever-present stogie clenched between her molars in a manner that would make Clint Eastwood envious. Mother would enjoy this place to no end, but I am stricken. I am an urban rat, but I still recognise the forces of the sun, the moon, the patterns of wind that guide me. Albeit, through a film of pollution. These tragic children who are taught to play in an artificial world can only follow the route to an artificial death. Their spirits will be trapped forever with a shelf-life of an eternity.

I wander, dazed, dismayed, my dancer’s feet dragging heavily on the Astroturf. Some of the older, anemic children stop and stare, whisper to each other from behind covered mouths. I take no heed. I continue through the cultural maze of hyper-artificiality.

There is no hope, my mind mutters incessantly. My steps slow, motion stilled, all joie de vivre leached through the bottom of my feet.

Stone.

A toddler topples backward out of a chute. A millisecond of silence. Then she bawls like the world has ended. Red, yellow, and blue balls fly fitfully through the air. Children gulp from tubs of simulated Coke while waiting for their microwave-heated pizzas. A boy bends over and plat! Vomits a soft pink mound of hotdogs.

Horrible humanity. How can I bear this?

How can anyone bear it?

No! I must not waver from my calling. I will not follow the path of my father into woe and I won’t encrust my airy spirit within a coarse mantle like my mother. It is not enough to simply stand on the outside and gape, albeit with a closed mouth. It is not enough that only I fully understand the human mall condition. What if I
am
to overcome the shackles of social norms and thus, reach the outer limits of time and space? Do I want to survey the vista, alone? I must join the epicentre of humanity.

I must enter the maze.

“Watch your fat can,” I can hear my mother’s raspy voice all around me. “Don’t come crying to me. I’ll only say ‘I told you so,’ and kick you in the butt.”

Mother, oh Mother.

I circle the strange man-made maze, thinking to myself that a woman never would. Circle thrice before I spot a young child scurrying up a hot pink pipe, like a rabbit with a watch. I adjust my mental clipboard and squelch my body into the mouth of the tube, wishing for a ball of thread.

Fat rat in a sewer pipe. The thought bubbles hysterically to the surface of my mind, but I kick it in the can in the manner of my mother.

What is interesting is that instead of getting stuck like an egg in the throat of an over-greedy snake, my body elongates. Spreads towards the ends so that all I need to do is flutter my toes to initiate a forward motion.

I slide, glide smoothly through the twisting tubing. The only impediments are the large metal heads of bolts that are used to fasten the portions of pipe together. The friction of clothing against the plastic raises such electricity that I am periodically zapped with great sparks and frazzle. Definitely a design flaw. Children in neighbouring tubes pad, pad, twirl down spiral slides. Their small muffled noises are only broken with intermittent zaps and small exclamations of pain.

I have never cared for children although I’ve cared about them in theory. . .

Something pokes the bottom of my foot. Of course, I cannot turn around to look. A barely discernible voice squeaks in protest and the single voice is joined with another, another. For in my contemplation I’ve ceased my inching progress and I’ve blocked the tube like a clot of fat in an artery. Their small mouse-like rustlings unsettle my philosophical and scientific musings. I would wave them away if I could face them, but all I do is flap my foot in a discouraging manner.

Then I notice. A certain
something.
For the first time in my life, that which has always been with me yet never perceived seeps into my consciousness. I am so completely encased in plastic that it cannot be diluted by outer forces.

I can smell myself.

But the wonder!

Because my odour is not smell, but sound. . . .

The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds that emanate from my skin are so intense that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. Unable to bear hearing such unearthly sounds they transmute it into stench.

And my joy! Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and my smell/sound mix such dizzying intensity the plastic surrounding me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon.

I hover, twenty feet in the air.

The children who were stuck behind me tumble to the ground. They fall silently, too shocked to scream, but the pitch of sound that seeps from my skin intensifies, like beams of coloured light. The sound catches the children from their downward plummet and they bob, rise slowly up to where I float. I extend my hands and the children grab hold, hold each others’ hands, smile with wonder.

“Oh my god!” someone finally gasps, from far beneath us. Another person screams. Fathers faint and an enterprising teenager grabs a camera from a supine parent and begins to snap pictures. None of it matters. This moment. Tears drip from my eyes and the liquid jewels float alongside us like diamonds in outer space. I burst out laughing and the children laugh too. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow or the day that follows but the possibilities are immeasurable.

We float, the remaining plastic pipes shimmer, buckle beneath our voices, then burst into soft confetti.

LOGUES

Eric Basso

Eric Basso is an American poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, born in Baltimore, Maryland whose work has appeared in many literary journals. He is perhaps most famous for his experimental Gothic fictions, including the story reprinted herein. His “The Beak Doctor,” considered a cult classic, was published by the
Chicago Review
in 1977 and has recently been reprinted in
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
, covering one hundred years of weird fiction.

The Tower

Once again the unnamed man or woman has entered into our conversation. Fenton believes he or she no longer exists, though he wouldn’t admit this until we pressed him for an explanation of why the letters had suddenly stopped, for no apparent reason, while the certified checks continued to come in on their usual monthly basis.

At the beginning we looked on the letters as a kind of meaningless practical joke. The unnamed man or woman seemed to like nothing better than to harass us with lunatic accusations. We burned those early letters in the kiln by the side of the Tower. The smoke billowed out of the chimney and formed a white plume against the cloudless afternoon sky. It hung there, above the Tower, undisturbed by even so much as a breath of the cold autumn air for several days. One morning it vanished.

1

The parking lot is virtually deserted on Sundays. The shack at its far end looks away from the street to where the grassy hills begin—you can just see the upper part of the Tower dome gleaming behind them in the distance. There are no other buildings.

We’ve come to this shack by way of the letters to ferret out the unnamed man or woman. Fenton knocks at the door; when there is no answer, he enters through a broken window. But no one is there.

2

Some of us believed that the man or woman in question was one of our parents, but the more recent letters seem to indicate the workings of a younger mind. The handwriting has gradually changed from spidery hesitance to a few broad strokes, barely legible. In the final letters, words have been pasted in from newspapers and magazines with illustrations that appear, on the face of it, to have nothing in common with the text: a gloved hand, a burning candle lying on its side, a mathematical graph.

Fenton has not moved from his bed since that day in the shack. He turns his face to the wall and calmly waits for death. He shows no interest in the progress we have made with the letters.

3

There is a sealed room in the old theatre, quite high up near the rafters. You get to it by scaling one of the outer walls of the building (the stairway goes only as far as the balcony). From a certain part of the roof the view of the Tower is unobscured by trees and what few buildings remain.

The famous room lies directly below. We had to chop through slate, then pry loose the wooden slats. It is as we left it several years ago but for one detail: the skeleton of the rapist has been taken away. A good place to bury Fenton when he dies.

4

On the eve of Fenton’s death a visitor came to the Tower. A tall brown woman from another part of town claimed the letters and took them away.

We have emptied the kiln to read the ashes.

December 4, 1974

A Strange Juggler

There is a dying face in my dream, a face of mystery floating across the sky. Let him roll the dice again. His face and the face in the portrait are one. Begin with middle gray: swarming pitch-black specks. The dice cup rattles. I can just make out his eyes askew in the half-light. The rest of his face is lost in the shoulder of a headless man or the stump of a frock-coated tree. Whatever it is, he embraces it without emotion. Perhaps he, too, walked in his sleep. The artist was there and drew what we have of him. He also drew the black sun that hangs in the upper left like a second, extinguished face.

Since the day he lost the wager, I have been troubled by faces. It’s not so much where they appear
—
they are apt to turn up anywhere, I’ve often seen them riding the bus or sitting a few rows away at the opera
—
it’s who they might be. These silent disembodied faces, without expression, in the dust on the mirrors or rolling down the stairs. In bubbles that rise up the side of a glass.

1

He led me up the back stairs to his dingy room. Said he wanted to talk. These days he’s been sleeping on the floor. The bed is unmade. He says they come begging at night, bouncing up and down on the mattress. Sometimes weeks go by without even the trace of a nostril hair. Then, without warning, a stray lip or an eyelid will turn up stuck to the wall. The faces are often in need of sleep.

But when they come it’s always with the same heartrending plea for him to roll the dice again, to win back the wager.

2

He keeps a small snuffbox, and when he isn’t downstairs shooting dice, he practices his art with what lies inside. That mysterious box.

Returning drunk one morning a few hours before dawn, I mistook his door for mine. My key wouldn’t fit the lock. I kicked the door in and found him standing in the center of the room. The table and chairs had been pushed up against the wall. The snuffbox lay open at his feet. His arms and hands were a blur, as though he were trying to keep no less than four invisible objects in the air at any one time. His eyes, shifting rapidly from one imaginary ball, cube or ninepin to the other, had no time to acknowledge my unexpected presence. I don’t think he knew I was there. Before long, I passed out. When I awoke, I was alone.

3

A face returned tonight, one I could recognize—it was the toothless old man: “Why have you switched the dice? You’ve made it impossible for him to win back the wager!” I said nothing. The head faded. I hadn’t touched the dice. He had no reason to torment me with his senseless accusations.

4

It’s true. Some of the dots were painted white. Did he notice? The door to his room was locked from the inside. I knocked. An old man opened.

“He’s gone. He took the faces with him,” handing me the snuffbox. “He wants you to have this. Now you must carry on. You’re the juggler.”

December 11, 1974

Form and the Method

I might say the air here is less rarefied. I might, because I’ve been able to breathe, eat and sleep, at least a little, without the assistance of the machine. That’s all behind me now. The bodily functions are at work again.

In the beginning it was an effort just to get up. I had reached an impasse. My wrists and ankles, no longer strapped to the rug, were so drawn by the absent leather, so chafed and swollen by what had been its constant pressure, that I couldn’t, I didn’t even want to, move them or raise them up, even though the touch of the rug made my shoulder blades, the backs of my calves and my buttocks itch unbearably. The ceiling is too far off to be anything more than the idea of a ceiling lost behind light diffused through the lattice window, the window I could almost see if I tilted my head all the way back. The light breaks on swimming particles of dust. Light. Dust. The rug and the walls
—
so many watts! The only tangibles.

1

At first I made shadows on the wall with my hands. Elementary shadows: the traditional hare, the alligator, the rooster in profile. Then I tried a face, the face of a man with a low, rippling forehead, more like a cat without ears or lip antennae.

Before long I managed a full face. Two eyes, a nose, the mouth of a woman. The contours were rough, I admit—contrasted areas of black and the color of the wall. But soon I learned to use the walls to my advantage. At a certain time of day (I could take up my hobby only in those few hours when the daylight filtered in) the sun would strike one of the walls at a particularly good angle for soft, half-lit portraits. I learned which hours of the day, and which walls, were good for a Leonardo, a Titian, a Rembrandt or a Vermeer; in one I even succeeded in making the eyes roll. The lips moved as if the shadow-puppet were about to speak.

2

More and more I studied the walls. Sometimes I would go for days without making a single portrait. It became a question of varying the textures of a surface with the play of light. Without using my hands I saw skeleton landscapes in each of the bare walls—even a few ichthyological remains, high up where one wouldn’t expect to find them. No landscape was complete at any given time. As the sun moved, isolated tree fragments became the tributaries of a mountain lake, fence posts and rocks vanished; the grass pitched upward, thick with weeds and gnarled roots, to make the eaves of a depthless promontory.

3

The perspective from one object to another is never consistent. If I could calculate which elements in a wall have correspondence in lighting and depth, I might, by that selection, be able to reconstruct the successive views latent in it.

To fix the image if it is a leaf, a pebble, or even a blade of grass . . . Strands taken from the rug are stuck to the wall, assuming the negative form of the image desired. The wall is covered with strands; let the light pass over it day by day for close to a year, then peel the strands away—work from the earliest to the latest configurations to ensure a sameness in the overall image.

4

The strands of matted wool are a mossy negative between the wall and the sun. When the wall sheds its skin, the landscape will finally be there.

A way out behind shadows scarcely darker than the wall itself.

December 18, 1974

In the Evening

The same every evening. I stop under the archway to relight my cigarette, then I go on. The rain seems to have stopped. The last of it drips off the eaves to a noise of gurgling downspouts. The muddy cascade washes over the cobblestones, sweeping my match toward sunken gutters. An odor of wet stones beyond the gatehouse to the end of the street, the same corner I had turned with the match still in my pocket.

When the gutters fill there is just enough water on the streets to leave reflections quivering in the interstices of the cobblestones: gas lamps, tongues of blue flame until the lamplighter’s bell snuffs them out.

1

If the door opens . . . A clump of stray hair falls across her face to hide the eyes. “Yes, what is it? What do you want?” Her hands are red and swollen, they smooth her apron down in an absent way.

As usual, I make no answer. Then, if the door had opened, she slams it in my face.

2

Back in the vestibule darkness, she begins to wind the clock. She crawls upstairs, puts her ear to one of the bedroom doors and waits for him to ask about the visitor.

But he says nothing until after she falls asleep. Then: “When? When will he speak?”

3

He opens the drawer of his desk. He’s looking for something. Not the pencil. Not the street guide. Not the stapler. Not the hairbrush. Neither the candle nor the shoestrings.

“What is it?” he says. “What am I looking for?”

4

He goes to bed and dreams of the street as it is in the evening. The rain seems to have stopped, etc. He asks the lamplighter for a match . . .

February 25, 1975

The Barrier

Depending upon the point of view, a very slight inclination of the head one way or the other is apt to produce a second or even a third pair of hands from out of nowhere. This time the barrier takes shape as a small brass amphora stippled with a few specks of verdigris. A red shirt connects the upper pair of hands to the lower. The blotter appears at the top (upside down) and at the bottom, with a middle space of black between.

He spreads the fingers of his left hand. Raises them. The fingers expand, merging with another set of fingers that comes down to meet them at the tips. The game ends here for the time being. The operation was brief, painless. Yet he knows he will have to wait a while longer. It has ended badly, not in the way he would have expected it to end. He must begin again later at still another barrier.

1

He no longer recognizes any of the paintings on the walls. The mirror. Even the furniture has changed. A knotty-pine wardrobe replaces the bureau, and what was in the bureau drawers lies scattered over the floor. The mirror has left a pale stain in the wallpaper. The bed is in its proper place, but it isn’t his bed. Something is wrong.

As to the four walls, there’s nothing strange or unexpected. The dimensions of the room remain the same even if the wallpaper is wrong. But if the wallpaper is wrong, why that oval afterimage where the mirror used to hang? The view from the window is as it has always been—a nondescript street, completely deserted.

2

The second barrier, yes it’s the oval stain turning black. An opening. Call it a stain, it wasn’t that. It began as the lack of a stain or of any of the other signs of weathering that marked the aging wall.

A neutral space within the oval. He can put his hand through. His hand disappears. He sticks his head through. It disappears.

3

He’s been on the other side for close to twenty minutes, floating, afraid to open his eyes until he bumps his head against a blunt object, part of the ceiling of another, much larger room—mahogany coffers as far as the eye can see. He passes one then another until he finds the ingress, pressing with his hands until he feels his fingers slip through the woodwork.

Paddling like a blind swimmer, he rises through the third barrier.

4

The next person to rent the room finds the brass amphora in a bureau drawer. She turns it about in her hands, slowly tilting it until the double image, scarcely visible beneath its patina, breaks in two. Then she puts it back in the drawer. She is already late for her appointment.