Chapter 12: Wavering/Resolution

Between the sentence previous and this one here, how much time has passed?

For the past I don't know how many hours I have been barking, crying, howling my throat into raw ribbons. Is there seriously no one among the bipedal orders outside that has heard me? No one even remotely curious as to why that normally civil and impeccably behaved dog is going crazy in the house with the jeep parked in the drive out front and the blinds of the living room window drawn? Not a sensitive soul in the whole surrounding neighborhood who can feel the subtle ripples of energy released through a violent death?

At this stage of desperation, the thought of continuing this history repulses me. The dog who inscribed the previous entry, let alone the dog who conceived and began the process, doesn't live here anymore. I know, I know. Who else am I but that dog? Maybe I just don't want to be reminded that I am tied to this I, this dogsbody, and this situation, with no current possibility of flight. Once upon a time, I wanted nothing more than to wake up from a night's sleep, or a morning, afternoon, or evening nap and KNOW that I was the continuation of the self who laid down and closed his eyes--that I was he, that his projects were mine, that his promise was my fulfillment. Now I know that such sameness of self is predicated on the absence of violent and frightening events. Because after violence and fright, your I is always othered. You go into the event as clay and you come out a kiln-dried urn containing the ashes of who you'll never be again.

So I guess I realize now that there's always something missed in reading a completed work. Seen from the point of view of its genesis, a book is a work of multiple authorship, written at varying speeds, under shifting conditions, and for utterly different purposes. It seems the real factor in finishing something that "one" has begun is the capriciousness of the "other" who finishes it.

Anyway, there's probably two reasons why for now I'll continue. The first is that for the time being I have no heart left for barking for help. It just makes me bitter, and in my bitterness I imagine there are people around who know about my situation and who could help but who really just love to see me suffer. Of course, rationally, I know there are no such people, but bitterness is not guided by rationality or the reality principle.

The second reason is that in my pointless question to the deafness of my circumstances--why won't they come for me?--I remembered something that brought me back to a happy period of my life. It was when I lived with Dick in Edmonton during his college--well, university--days. He lived in a house with four other guys--his friend Brian from Lethbridge, two guys from Edmonton and one from Calgary. The guy from Calgary, Kenneth Brandsma, was a tall skinny dork preformed for a life in business and politics who undoubtedly went on to become a father of ten and a lobbyist for a TASER company or some such insignificant, but widely destructive fate. The Edmontonians were a couple of brothers, Richard and Frank Huisman.

God was up to His old tricks putting the Huisman family together. Frank and Richard never should have been brothers, because, really, when it came right down it, they were born spiritual enemies, like me and Oliver. In fact Richard really should have been Kenneth's brother, not just because, positively speaking, the two were so alike in taste and in their instinct for vengeful conformity, but also because, negatively speaking, he (Rich) was so unlike Frank. Richard and Kenneth would always be double-teaming Frank, calling him crazy and cynical. The truth is they just didn't know what to make of what he did or said. Or maybe the truth is he made them feel ashamed and naturally of less cosmic importance. But I loved Frank. I probably loved him more than Dick by then, because by then Dick had become really twisted and self-hating.

Anyway, in the second year of this group's four year residence together, Frank picked up the guitar that he used to play when he was a kid and began to write songs. At first I was afraid, and I would slink ignobly upstairs, looking behind me as I climbed, whenever Frank began. But after a while the music began pulling me down. At some point I realized that there was no malice in it whatsoever. Frank's voice was sweet, if somewhat monotonous and lacking in expression. He should have taken voice lessons. But his songs were surprisingly solid, craft-wise, from the very start. The song that just flashed into my brain a moment ago was called "Visitation." I'm certain I remember it word for word.

"Visitation"

It was the early start of spring
I hadn't seen a soul in months
Laid up in bed so long
Deadened with disgust

Then they came for me
Unshriven as I was
Just as I was
As I had always been
Low and small and mean and
In bed with my own sin...

*
They came in an old school bus
Like on a field trip to the zoo
I was their cornered badger
My razor teeth on show

When they came for me
There was nothing I could do
Nothing I could say
To make them go away
To make them discontinue
Scrutinizing my decay...

*
With a fiendish pleasure
They taped antlers to my head
They put me in a pale blue dress
And they painted my lips red

When they came for me
Such promises they made
That I could hardly wait
That I began to drool
The money and the car and the girl and the job
And the cleansing of my soul...

*
They told me that they'd return
Just in time for my birthday
I tossed out all of my porn
And I threw my drugs away

So when they came for me
I would be just like new
I would be so pure
They'd take me in for sure
I would feel no shame no more
In having been their whore...

*
Now I look for them everywhere
In the street and on TV
But there's no-one coming clean
On what was done to me

Oh they came for me
I know it was no dream
I know they did
They know they did too
I know that there's no use to it
But I just can't let it go, let it go, let it go...

*
Of course, shorn of their music the lyrics lose most of their power. You'll just have to take my word for it. It was priceless--the looks on his friends' faces whenever he would sing this song. Even Dick, who should have understood it, seemed to think it senseless. Richard always would say that Frank shouldn't reveal so much of his dark side. Frank would smile and shrug. I knew he was withholding the truth. I knew that he wasn't revealing anything about himself. He was clean and, if not pure, he was good. He had a dog's spirit. No, his songs were not about him, at least not as he was then, when I knew him. By that time, they had already become about his friends, probably especially about Dick, with whom he sympathized but at the same time always kept a certain distance from. No, Frank just put his songs in the first person to save his friends from having to confront the horrible trashheap of their own lives.