Spider on My Tongue (8 page)

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice said again,
and I tried
to gauge the proximity of whatever was speaking—was it above me, was it to my right or left, at the foot of the bed, on the bed itself?

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"

"For Christ's sake, who
are
you?" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice repeated.

"Who in the name of heaven
are
you?" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" it repeated, but with greater insistence and urgency, as if making some point, though I had no idea what point it could be.

"Tell me your goddamned name!" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice repeated.

Silence followed.

And I became aware, once more, of the murky and intrusive presences, the shadows that exist with me in my little house in the dim woods.

~ * ~

If you ask me about "evil," I'll tell you I don't know anything about it. I'll tell you, also, that I don't believe in it as a force in the universe (like gravity, or solar radiation).

But
they
talk about it sometimes, though they string their words together as if the links between their brains and tongues disintegrate and reintegrate second by second:

For instance:

He
is
an evil man, dunce at a word, completely unknown to
his particulars
and their benefactors, living that way by no one.

And:

Murdered therefore I was, brought up in grime and no matter, lies and resurrections gathered about me, evil creatures unadorned by sensitivities, slouching about from everywhere to everywhere, hands lowered.

And:

He, named Baldhawlin, big man, like his name, coming out that door as a bear would, impossible and tall and full of power, mouthing large annoyances and transgressions much as the small and weeping dead do.

You cannot tell them to be quiet. I've tried. They either don't hear, or they don't care (it can't be both; how could it be both?).

~ * ~

I awoke very early this morning from a dream of Phyllis, resplendent in blue chenille, and I knew at once that I had to leave my little house. I didn't want to leave it at night—the woods aren't beautiful at night, they're dense and unknowable.

But I had a great hunger for other places, some place other than this place, the quiet village, for instance, where I buy my food and have meaningless conversations with the tall bald man whose name, for the moment, I forget.

”I really like a clear blue sky, don't you, Mr. Cray? No clouds at all. Not even the hint of clouds."

"Yes, I like that, too, though I have no problem with an overcast sky."

"Overcast makes me sad. I think it makes everyone sad, don't you?"

“It doesn't make
me
sad"

“Perhaps, Mr. Cray, but you may not even realize your sadness."

“I doubt that."

"You prefer the extra large eggs, am I right, Mr. Cray?"

But how I could walk there at night? I don't even have a flashlight: I bought three of those large, gray ugly things that take huge batteries and cast copious amounts of light, but they disappeared one by one, and I know that these
departed
hid them somewhere.

I do have candles. I love candles. They cast a comforting glow. My grandmother used them instead of light bulbs because, she said, "They're so very comforting. A small flickering glow that shows us only what we need to see, so we can make our way in the darkness and
know
we're in darkness." But I have no matches. I could get them at the country store in the village, but these departed would simply hide them, too, just as they've hidden the luggable flashlights (they don't hide the candles. I know precisely where they are. They're in the second drawer in the kitchen, next to the sink. Tall blue candles that smell of raspberries).

But, minus candles or a flashlight, I left the house early this morning, well before the sunrise, made my way through the woods I could not see, and came upon a clearing I did not recall. I knew it was a clearing because, when I looked up, I found a spray of faint stars—the Milky Way.

The passing misery stood by in this clearing in great numbers, arms at their sides, mouths agape, eyes—mere dark ovals—open wide.

They spoke to me: "AAHHHHHBBBBNNNNEERRRR!" they said, as one. "AAHHHHHBBBBNNNNEERRRR!"

I said nothing to them.

I came back here at once, to my little house, climbed into my comfortable bed, and dreamt of Phyllis in blue chenille.

~ * ~

After Phyllis's departure in Manhattan, long ago, I took an apartment in Soho (this is history, so it exists). It was early autumn when I moved to the apartment, but the weather was still unbearably hot, so I set up a couple of fans around the place to cool it off.

One of those fans stood in the apartment's small living room, close to the chair I sat in to watch my 19" Sony television ("Murder, She Wrote," "Newhart," "Highway to Heaven" were my favorites): it was a floor-standing fan with large blades, and, because of the room's size, its upper right corner blocked my view of the TV screen by an inch or so. That was all right. Nothing much happens in that area of a screen anyway. Sky appears there, or clouds, or hair, but never anything important. So I kept the fan where it was.

One evening in late September, I was watching something like Benny Hill, I think
(I
remember there were lots of scantily clad, nicely built women running around with baseball bats and badminton rackets), and I saw that the small, upper section of the fan blades blocking the TV picture seemed to be moving at a snail's pace, while the rest of the blades—the parts not blocking the television screen—were simply a blur.

I was riveted by this: it seemed to be a physical parallel to my truly awful ability to see the dead (an ability I was certain had been bestowed upon me by the woman on the train, Barbara W. Barber), and I sought to explain it.

This was, of course, before the days of the Internet and long before personal computers had become an integral part of most households; there were no books in the apartment—other than novels by dead existentialists, volumes of poetry by Whitman, Eliot, Plath, Galway Kinnell, and a few others—and the library wasn't open (I remembered a sign in the public library in Bangor: "Ask a librarian."), so I was baffled as to how to immediately address the phenomenon of the television and the slowly moving fan blades (and, in those years, I needed an immediate response to
everything).

Then I thought of my friend, Beverly, from high school, whose ambition was to grow up and "be a scientist, someone who makes a
difference."
Christ, she could explain every phenomenon of the natural world, from why the sky was blue, to why eggs were almost impossible to break if held lengthwise in the hand, to sonic booms. I thought she was terrific, and we hung around together throughout high school. (There was never a romance. She wasn't my romantic ideal, and I wasn't hers. [She told me once: "Abner, I love the way you think, but if you believe this friendship is going anywhere beyond the dining room table, you're mistaken. Tall, gawky boys with large hands simply don't turn me on. You know this, Abner—my brothers are tall and have large hands. It would be too much like incest.] She went out with Sam Feary for a while, until he told her he planned on joining the army, and she told him it was a "shitass thing to do. Those assholes in Washington will simply send you to 'Nam and you'll die. Where's the future in that?" He didn't die there. He died somewhere else. I don't know where. But I know it wasn't 'Nam.)

Here's the thing: as stupid as it sounds—because, after all, we hung out together for nearly four years—I couldn't remember her last name. So if I wanted to telephone her and talk about the
slowly- moving-fan-blades-against-the-TV-screen
phenomenon, I couldn't. Also, it was very unlikely she'd still be in Bangor. The last time I'd heard from her, she was about to head off to college somewhere in downstate New York. But, shit, if I could telephone, I'd get one of her parents, or her younger brother, Marvin, and they'd tell me where she was, I'd call her directly, and the mystery of the fan blades would be solved.

But, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember her last name. I felt like an idiot.

I looked at the slowly spinning fan blades.

I looked at the TV.

The fan blades again.

The TV.

Her phone number, from years earlier, came back to me all at once, like someone knocking at the door.

I said this: "Shit, I'm a genius!"

I called her number and got her dad, whose name was Clifford, told him who I was, asked if he remembered me. “Bev's friend, right?" he said, and paused a moment. "The tall guy?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "I'm trying to locate her. I need to ask her a question."

Silence.

I added, "I need to ask her a question about fan blades."

"Fan blades'?" he said, as if he had no idea what fan blades were.

"It's a sort of a science question," I said, and went on, "So I thought..."

He cut in, “Bev died two years ago."

"Died?" I said.

"Yes. A boating accident," he said.

"Jesus, I didn't know. Jesus, I'm so sorry..."

He hung up.

~ * ~

They told me this not too long ago:

You do not see us or hear us or experience us or run from us or speak to us. You can not. Just as one current flowing in a river cannot embrace another.

I thought it was fucking lucid, though I had no idea what they were talking about.

I told them so.

They said nothing.

~ * ~

I've learned about a phenomenon called resonance frequency, and it's the speed at which substances vibrate naturally. Speaker cones have a built-in natural resonance frequency. So does water. Air. Pine trees. Labrador retrievers. And, presumably, you and me and a keg of beer. Even
reality
itself. Or what passes for it
(reality). And
them,
too
(the wraiths, things, spirits).
These resonance frequencies vary from person to person and from object to object, and when they happen, naturally and unnaturally, between this reality and another
(Their reality,
the reality in which
they
exist), it's much like the fan blades and the TV screen (a phenomenon known as the "strobe effect": in a way, the TV picture "resonates" 30 times a second: the fan blade, moving at similar, but not exactly equal speeds, allows the light of the TV picture through at approximately the same rate, so the fan blades look as if they've slowed down: they become visible in front of the TV screen, although the other parts of the fan blades remain only a blur. I learned all this from my friend Bev herself (for whom I never lusted, although I loved her in that warm, friendly and incautious way we find ourselves loving bright, vivacious, good people who don't turn us on sexually), who died in a boating accident in her 29
^th
year.

I'll never forget it," she said “I wouldn't even want to forget it. Do you mind if tell you about it, Abner?"

That was moments ago, here, in my little house in the dim woods.

I told her yes, I wanted her to tell me about the boating accident, I wanted to hear about her death.

She told me about the fan blades and the TV and the resonance frequencies instead. Then she added,
“And that's sort of the reason you can
see
us, in the obtuse way that you see us, Abner, and how you can talk to us, and how we can communicate with you. Your resonance frequency approximates ours, just like the movement of the fan blades approximates the frequency of the TV. Capisce?"