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.
21 January 2008
15 January 2008
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.
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.
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