Chapter 13: Red's House

The odor of corruption is thickening. Red's been dead for almost sixteen hours now and there's only two places in the house that I can go where the smell can't reach me--and I hate both of them.

The first is the furnace area in the basement where Red had set up his grow op.

It's not the neatly organized trays of "magic" mushrooms that I mind. At least their smell is not particularly offensive, although I find them rather discomfiting to look at. It's hard to say what it is about them. It's not quite the alien smoothness of their flesh. It's not quite their phallic shape--although they do look precisely like hard-ons--the really raging hard-ons of eighteen year old drunken frat boys on Viagra. No, it's more like their aggressiveness. They look mean. And indeed, having seen Red on them I don't know how many times, I'd have to say that their meanness is not just in the eye of this easily scared beholder. Red would always tell his friends that the mushrooms are not mere fungi but alien intelligences disguised in fungal form. I half believed him to be right. But if they contain or embody an alien intelligence, it's the intelligence of an alien bully. Red would take pride in his wrestling matches with the mushrooms, but why pick a fight with a bully if you don't have to? Especially if you don't quite know what that bully is capable of doing to you--in the short run, and in the long run. No, when it comes to the mushrooms I just avert my eyes. Besides, they're high up on a table so it's hard for me to see them anyway.

What repulses me most about the furnace-room-cum-grow-op is the smell of the pot. It's a small op, mind you. Red was not out to make money. He really was in it for the spiritual gambling of the actual drug taking. Anyway he had about eight to ten big planters, each with one huge, obscenely thriving plant. Pot's a different kind of disguised alien intelligence, to be sure. But the strains Red was so keen on hybridizing were all bullies in their own way too. Even in mere close proximity, I can feel them aggressing. I don't know. It's not even that they want to beat me up. It's more like they're constantly trying to push me into doing something that I shouldn't. It's all very serpent-in-the-garden-tempting-to-forbidden knowledge... Just what kind of knowledge the drug promises to provide if you ingest it, I can't say. From the contact high I'd get every goddamn day these last six months as Red smoked himself crazy, I'd have to explain it as a kind of knowledge of consciousness. That's poorly expressed. What I mean is that it felt like I was becoming too conscious of my own existence. The fright was that maybe we earthly animals half-sleepwalk through our lives for a reason... and that if we were truly to wake up, the sheer completeness of the self-reflection would be annihilating. Is that crazy? Give me a break. I'm a dog beside myself trapped in a house with a corpse. I'm trying my best to keep it together.

The other place that the odor of Red's corruption hasn't thoroughly penetrated is his bedroom upstairs. Well, it's kind of a misnomer to call it a bedroom. There was no bed in it. No dresser either. The only furniture-like thing was Red's hammock, which hung in the middle of the room. Red had apparently slept in a hammock for the last ten years of his life. Probably one of the reasons why his wife left him last year. (In their old house, apparently, she slept in a bed upstairs and he in a hammock in the basement.) It's not the hammock that bugs me, though. It's the creepy stringed instrument hanging on the wall. Red apparently picked the thing up at his favorite "metaphysical" bookstore. The owner had had two of them. She said they belonged to a real Mongolian shaman. (Are there fake ones?) Anyway, she told Red the instrument had chosen him. (The other instrument had apparently chosen her.) Sounds kinda like a scam, yeah? Well, Red didn't think so. And once again, I half believed he was right. That instrument gives off a very strange vibe. It could be the darkness of the wood. Or the two frayed catgut strings. I don't think I heard Red pluck them more than two or three times--and each time he did so with a childish tentativeness. He was scared of it, and wasn't ashamed to say so. Yet he hung it in his room, in the place where he slept. Sometimes I think for the whole time I lived with him, he was begging the universe to find some way to snuff him out. In the end, he couldn't wait for the universe anymore. But that's an event too fresh of a story to really dwell on.

I'd give anything to be back on the Scholten farm. There were a thousand places to hide from the things you didn't want to see or smell or deal with and there were a thousand places to hide to do the things you didn't want others to see you do. Not only around the farm, but in the family house too. In the end Dick's downfall may have been a simple consequence of the house's labyrinthine layout. I guess now is the time I should be making my way to the telling of the big event.