Article 191192 of talk.bizarre: Path: chaph.usc.edu!usc!phakt.usc.edu!not-for-mail From: pechever@phakt.usc.edu (Heckler) Newsgroups: talk.bizarre Subject: Harrower Followup-To: poster Date: 1 Mar 1994 09:03:06 -0800 Organization: Mayor's Office, Blessings Exchange, Indiana Lines: 487 Sender: pechever@phakt.usc.edu Distribution: world,elsewhere Message-ID: <2kvsga$ku1@phakt.usc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: phakt.usc.edu Summary: i stayed up all night writing this. i BETTER get some horndog email. Keywords: weird angst X-Dedication-To: for Jade, who midwived, and Austin, who godfathered At four in the morning, Blessings Exchange, Indiana, can be the coldest place in the world. The sky is as empty and black as a magician's sleeve after the last dove has flown into the rafters; the moon and stars' tiny silver accents only heighten that vast emptiness. Daniel Linders is shivering in his dead fatherŐs barn, looking over the tractor. He's going to plant today. The tractor is twenty years old, but well maintained; the late Howard Linders took care of his machinery. The seat's upholstery smells of fertilizer and has a small tear in the seat where it meets the back. Daniel climbs reluctantly into the seat, fighting off drowsiness and a bone-deep aversion to the task at hand, and starts the tractor. The engine starts immediately, of course. Daniel drives the tractor out of the barn and turns it towards the carefully prepared land. It's not a good day for Daniel. Very few days are; Daniel himself would probably go so far as to say that he has no good days, only some less unbearable than others. But he has to do this thing for his father. The weight in his pocket won't speak to him otherwise. And he wants to hear the word the weight has to say. As the seed corn goes into the furrows, and the tractor's engine roars under the cold Indiana sky, Daniel remembers death. * * * Daniel tried to die when he was ten. This is the first time he remembers, but even before that there was a feeling of being ephemeral, of not being real. He didn't have the words to describe that feeling then, and as he grew the words he found only skated around the truth without approaching it, but the feeling was always with him, undeniable. He was swimming with Jimmy Mathers and Rob Jackson at the pond outside town. The water was green with algae; the bottom's silt sucked at the boys' toes as they waded in. Sometimes herons nested there. It was an untidy place, full of rocks to hit a head on and roots to snag an ankle on, and it was this danger that called to Daniel, whispering here, here, this is how you can leave -- He tried. Honestly, he did. But all he got for his efforts was a lungful of brackish pond water and a sore back from Rob's panicked thumping. He remembered Rob's freckled, narrow face hovering over him, looking pale and strangely possessive. "Now why'd you go and get yourself in a jam like that, Dan? Had me fair scared for a bit. You okay?" "I'll be all right, I guess," wheezed Daniel, wondering at the mixture of gratitude and resentment he felt at being dragged from the water. A pebble was digging into his left shoulderblade, and he sat up, coughing weakly as he did so. "Yeah, he'll be okay. Let's go get something to drink at Uncle Rick's, guys; it's getting kind of cold out." Jimmy stood next to Rob, his straw-colored hair darkened by the water and outlining his elongated skull in the brisk April air. Daniel, going over this memory later, would be struck by how they both seemed to be deliberately keeping themselves between him and the lake, as if to forestall any repetition of what he'd almost convinced himself was an accident. They walked and trotted and ran down the dirt road to Jimmy's Uncle Rick's house, where they drank Coke and watched Family Ties while Daniel felt the death he'd come so close to reluctantly edge away. Six years later, there was The Dance. It had a name, but in Daniel's mind it was always The Dance, spinning alone in time, resonating with what he'd learned that night. The floor was hardwood, the music bland and parentally approved, the dancing slow and mechanical. Lindy was a warm pile of laundry in his arms, a soft meat puppet in pink chiffon. His wrists hurt under the bandages, and when he tried to kiss her good night, she deftly turned her head to present her cheek, and even then he felt her shudder just a bit. He walked under those bitter stars for a while, trying to think around the static buzzing in his brain. This place scoured him, muffled him, beat at him with cotton-wrapped cattle prods. All these games he didn't know the rules to, all the codes he hadn't broken, all the frustrations he'd buried under Dairy Queen sodas and loud music surged up in him and he ran down the asphalt to where the asphalt gave way to Indiana dirt and then he ran some more until the cats made him skid to a stop. They were both black, they were cat-shaped holes slipping out of the underbrush, and the first one ran in front of him, not crossing his path but running straight ahead, down the road, while the other one hissed at him and slipped between his legs, heading up the road to the wooden houses under the sodium street lights. He stood very still for a few seconds, breathing quietly in the dark, and kept on walking. After a while he came to the quarry, and stared into its rocky depths as he listened to it whisper the same promises every razorblade promised, as it raised the same dull lust every gun raised. Maybe this time, he thought as he listened to the ravine. Maybe there aren't any politely concerned townsfolk around to take care of me and sew me up,or knock the gun away. Maybe this time I won't have to watch them avert their eyes in pity as they stifle a smile (why do they smile, creaked another voice in his head). Maybe this time for sure. He walked to the edge, and fell faster than he'd ever thought. He woke up to false dawn, chilled and screamingly alive. His wrists wore yellow garlands of barbed wire where he'd ripped the stitches open, and there was a disappointingly small pool of blood where he'd fallen on his hands. Far above, the lip of the quarry mocked him with empty promises. He walked home, and stopped trying to kill himself. For whatever reasons hid in its copper and quicksilver heart, Blessings Exchange would not let him die. So he stopped trying. Graduated high school. Lost his virginity with his prom date in the back of his father's Impala while the loudest crickets in years sang outside in chitinous desperation. After he'd saved enough money from working the Dairy Queen counter, he drove the Impala to Harding and bought a Greyhound ticket to Los Angeles. He left the car in the Greyhound terminal's parking lot with his father's telephone number under the right windshield wiper. * * * Los Angeles was the madness that kept him sane for the next four years. Concrete, smog, coffee and butane were the elements of his magic, and not a dirt track or cornfield for miles in any direction. The city sang, it hummed with anger; and anger was something Daniel could latch on to, feed off of. The songs rattled in his skull and came out his hands; soon he was playing a secondhand twelve string in almost every coffeehouse, and writing songs for others. He wrote angry songs of betrayed love for womyn with nose rings wearing cotton sundresses; he wrote angry songs of knives and oppression for dreadlocked Indians in faded denim and bone necklaces. He wrote angry songs of drugs and pain for pale children in chrome-studded leather and he wrote angry songs of evil old men and ancient demons for evil young men with switchblades and steeltoed boots. He was a faucet Los Angeles' anger ran through, and he understood that anger as he would understand a lover, but he was never angry himself. He was too busy wanting to die and knowing himself unable to do so, too cold from the breath of Indiana on his neck. He had some minor success; there was money for quiet weeping at a table across from empty bottles, money for screaming out the window with a needle hanging out of his arm, money for tattoos and scars and high-speed motorcycle crashes. There were women, black haired chain smokers who shared his heroin or cocaine or tequila or whatever and talked about the abyss and held their overpriced coffee with bitten-nailed fingers. They didn't stay long. Some cried, black mascara tracing cracks in their pale faces as they threw whatever belongings they'd brought over into a backpack. And then there was Kiva. She walked up to him with her mannish gait, her black hair shinier than the smoking girls' hair, more alive. Her skin smelled of cinnamon and (as he'd find out later) tasted of lightly salted chocolate. Her eyes were steel ball bearings that somehow came to a point; he felt the twin pricks on his face as she thrust a cup of coffee in his hand and said, "Kiva Gonza'lez. You want to sit down, talk a while?" He was too startled to do more than nod; she led him to a table in the corner of the coffeeshop, away from the grasping eyes of the raven-haired eaters of tobacco that clustered around the stage. As Daniel gulped at the coffee for something to do, he felt Kiva buzzing, humming with the song that was Los Angeles' anger, and listened to the way she sang it. It was more complex than his own singing, mixed with other emotions he didn't know and couldnŐt name. And over it all, she was talking: "Been following your gigs for about a month now, and I wanted to ask you a question." Without waiting for his permission, she plowed on, her voice equal parts resentment and curiosity, "Who the hell are you? I mean, you get on the stage, and you sound mighty pissed off, and the songs sound mighty pissed off, and then you get off stage and it's the Joe Cool hour. How can you turn that anger off? Is it real, or are you just another fucking poseur?" While her eyes rested their sharp points on his black eyes, demanding not to be disappointed. "I -- I don't know. It's just that -- " He tried to find the words that would make her understand that singing made Indiana go away for thirty or forty-five minutes without sounding like a lunatic. "When I sing, I feel like I deserve to be alive, like I deserve to exist. When I'm not writing a song, or performing, I'm just a body again, just some contraption that feels like corncobs and leaves held together with a shoelace, and I mark time until the next show, or until I die. They're about the same." As he closed his mouth he wondered why he cared whether she understood or not. She pried the answer she wanted out of me with those icepick eyes, he thought, and felt a grudging respect for her that no one in Los Angeles (or Blessings Exchange, for that matter) had earned from him before. * * * Of course they were living together within a month, wrapped up in a storm of pale flesh on olive and songs, songs, songs. She drove Indiana away and made him feel something deeper than lust, something he tried to write songs about. Their lyrics were trite, and the music had none of the power that his other songs were filled with, but he tried. He cared for her as much as he cared for himself, maybe a little more; after all, he never tried to kill her. Which is part of the reason why he was so surprised to come home and see Kiva hunched over the kitchen table crying. The other part of the reason was that he'd never seen her cry before; grief was so contrary to her nature it looked like a hallucination at first. Holding her shaking shoulders, he asked what the matter was. "Nothing." "Won't you please tell me about it?" The vague sense of unease that struck him when he walked into the apartment became more restless, pacing in his gut on nervous, scaled feet. "All right, dammit, I'll tell you. Sit down." She would not meet his eyes as she spoke. "You've got to stop shutting me out, Daniel. We've been living together for almost three months, and I still don't know what's inside you, what you're really like. You're hiding something, and I want to know what it is." "But this is what I'm really like, Kiva. I mean, what more could there be?" "Some real fucking emotion, for one! You can be damn pleasant when you try, but that's as far as it goes. Nothing gets you worked up, not even your fucking songs --" "I care about my songs." Daniel's voice was quiet and earnest. "That's crap. You like songwriting, like it more than anything else, but you don't love your songs, they're not your children, you just write them and hand them out to anyone who'll pay. You don't love anything, not yourself, not -- me." Too quickly, he said, "I do love you." She skewered him with her sharp steel eyes, the song of Los Angeles crashing from her body, and spat, "Bullshit." She slept in the living room that night, and moved out the following day. He wrote a few songs that would later take a local band to an all-too- brief national stardom. He rearranged the furniture so the apartment wouldn't remind him of her. The songs kept coming, and eventually he used them to fill the hole she'd left him. * * * One day a dark man with a neat mustache and sad eyes harangued Daniel as he walked down Melrose. The man's skin was wrinkled with hard middle age, and bracelets raced up his forearms in gold and silver bands. His clothes were motley but clean, and his sad eyes never left Daniel's face as his scared and angry mouth yelled. "Eh, demonio! Why jou walk around the real people, eh? Oye fantasma! I'm talking to jou, jou better leesten. Jou got no place wit' the living. Stop trying to fill jour cup with us, ghost-man; jour cup has no bottom. Vayase! Largo!" Daniel walked a little faster, leaving the man behind; he pushed his bracelets up dark chestnut arms and forked his index and little finger at Daniel's retreating back in the old warding gesture. * * * He tried to write a sad song once he came to realize that Los Angeles' anger was corrosive. He'd spent six hours chasing fragments through his brain and had nothing to show for it but a first stanza, with no music. You know something I'm not hearing You live lies I'm not believing Walk through glass I can't break or burn And point at doorknobs I can't turn This song wanted to be written. He wanted to write it. And still it felt like scraping broken glass over his brain; there was no chord, no adjective, no enjambment that fit with that first stanza. Sometimes music danced through his head, leering and stepping out of reach before his thoughts could encompass it. Late at night, half a line would tiptoe into the room, bringing him crashingly awake. He took to keeping a notebook by the bed for these occasions. Like a slow fire, desire kindled in him; he began to want as opposed to need. The song that was not Los Angeles' song, the song that was nothing but itself and complete unto itself filled him with an ascetic lust. No other songs were written; there was only The Song, always out of reach. Money went more often than it came, and he found himself selling bits and pieces of the moss he'd gathered after rolling to Los Angeles. He stopped playing at the clubs; the too-thin, black haired smokers found a different flavor of blood to suck. He started masturbating for the first time in a year, resenting the time his hormones demanded he spend away from The Song. But nothing ever happened. The Song remained incomplete, and Daniel began to suspect that some of the parts he'd managed to finish were flawed. He was gaunt; time eating was time wasted, and money saved on food could mean another month's rent. The savings weren't enough, of course, and eventually he was evicted. He managed to keep one change of clothes and a backpack to keep it in, along with his notes for The Song. The landlord cleaned out his mailbox and gave him the last several months' mail held together with a rubberband. The rubberband broke as Daniel reached for the package; when he knelt to pick the letters up (paper, after all, could be used to write bits of Song on) his hand came to rest on a cream-yellow envelope with a black border around it. The return address was in Blessings Exchange, Indiana; his own address, actually. His father was dead, and would he come home for the funeral? Tickets were enclosed. The Song flared as he finished reading his mother's distant, dignified little note, dazzling him with almost a whole bridge before dancing away again. As he scribbled frantically on the back of the nearest envelope, Los Angeles' anger left the background of his mind and said goodbye through the landlords' resentful eyes. * * * When he got off the bus in Blessings Exchange, all the music died. When his shoe touched the tarmac, empty surged up through the sole into him, scouring him clean of concrete, smog, coffee and butane. He was eighteen again, only much more tired, and all the songs were quiet. * * * He sat across the weatherbeaten desk from his mother as she read his father's will. The grey in her hair hadn't advanced much in four years, but her eyes had aged that full measure and more. She wore a black armband over the lavender print dress Daniel had seen her wear for 'serious business' like parents' conferences and town meetings (and apparently, he thought, will readings) since he was in grade school. The will was concise and straightforward, leaving the farm to Daniel's mother ("my beloved Josephine") and a thousand dollars to Daniel ("my musical Daniel Joshua;" he cringed inside at the middle name). Daniel wasn't surprised at the bequests; his father had been a quiet, orderly man given to occasional bursts of near-fanatical obsession for some hobby or other. He probably figured I won't need to legally own the farm until Mom passes on, and he was probably right, thought Daniel. And he also thought Maybe I can go back to LA, use the thousand to start over. But at that thought his mind grew numb, because Los Angeles was about the music, and the music was dead. Something long denied awoke in him then, and he wept for the music, for its making and giving and dying, and for the fragile little tobacco- eaters whose white masks he'd shattered with black mascara cracks, and most of all for Kiva, olive skinned Kiva whose sharp steel eyes had glazed over with pain and fury when he lied to her without even knowing. All the pain he'd never felt before crashed over his numbness, a blood-red stiletto ripping up his spinal cord to his brain, and he howled as his dry- eyed mother hugged him awkwardly, looking concerned and a little frightened. * * * He found a sealed package with his name on it on the desk in his room, which had stored four years' worth of cold in its corners just for him. Shivering from the room's homecoming gift, he opened the package, which contained a letter from his father and a book. He sat at his desk and read the letter in the bright November afternoon light as dust sparkled wanly in the air: Son, I guess I'm dead now. I haven't had a lot of practice at writing these kinds of letters, as I'm sure you can guess, but there are things I didn't want to tell you while I was still alive. Cowardice, I guess. Mainly, I want to say I'm sorry. I'm sorry I seemed so distant at times, and I'm sorry I didn't raise you to be happier than you are. Children are a lot harder to raise than corn, and I did the best I could. I'm sorry it wasn't good enough. I'm a pretty sorry fellow now, I suppose, Daniel. Dead's about as sorry as it can get. But I still haven't told you what I actually wrote the letter for. Daniel -- (Here two or three words were scratched out with heavy strokes of black ink, completely covering the letters even when Daniel held the letter up to a light) I can't tell you. I can't make myself write this down. I'm scared, Daniel. Please forgive me. Read the first ten pages of the book, and the eleventh chapter. I hope you understand that I only meant the best, and can forgive me. Howard Linders Daniel eyed the book warily. It had no title, was moderately thick, and bound in black leather. The uncertainty and intense feeling shown in the letter were nothing he would have expected from his father; what did the old man think he was to blame for? Reading the first part of the book, he was actually shocked for the first time in his life; Howard Linders, farmer, dutiful husband, and distant father was entirely the wrong kind of picture to associate with magic. In Los Angeles (here the stiletto jabbed him again, but only briefly) he'd met all sort of magicians, charlatans, pagans and heathens; there was nothing in the smattering of lore he'd picked up from them that related to what the book talked about. The eleventh chapter was titled "On Homunculi," and dealt with the creation of life through bizarre rituals and invocations. Daniel could not see why his father had gotten so worked up about this, unless it was an excess of Baptist guilt coming back to haunt him years after giving up the faith. It is only at nightfall that he understood his father's last message. The book's homunculi were flawed, emotionless, and eventually had to be destroyed by their maker since they could not destroy themselves. Howard Linders grew to see himself as a bungling magician whose lack of affection was responsible for his son's unhappiness, and at the end of his life wanted only forgiveness. Sleep, when it came, was a blessing, as it had been all his life. * * * Daniel seeds his dead father's land with life. He has harrowed, he has plowed; the earth is ready. He did a poor job at first; four years of trying to forget Indiana have blurred the sequence of chores and dimmed his never considerable skill at driving the tractor. But soon enough the patterns return, if not perfectly then at least well enough to get the task accomplished. The seed is driven into the opened soil as dawn breaks over the Linders farm, and with each seed Daniel forgives his father for making him badly, for making him empty. As the sun rises higher, the seeds thump into the soil and the forgivenesses come with a regular rhythm that builds until it bursts into song, and that song bursts from Daniel's throat and shatters the cold Blessings Exchange air into slivers of nothingness and scrapes David's throat raw and grants him a few moments of pure happiness before he remembers Kiva and the wounded weapons of her eyes. Daniel Linders closes the barn door on the cooling tractor and stretches in the midmorning sun. He goes into the house to get a cold Coke, giving his mother a subdued smile as she sorts through his father's belongings. Taking a pad of paper and a Mont Blanc pen -- the only fine thing he kept from his prosperity -- from his knapsack, begins to write The Song, and it comes clear as well water to his hands as he sits with his back against the barn. You know something I'm not hearing You live lies I'm not believing Walk through glass I can't break or burn And point at doorknobs I can't turn And though my blood stains the glass And though my tears make mud for my feet You'll laugh and live at your forever party I might grant that my crimes should exclude me If I didn't see greater atrocities Dancing at your forever party You locked us out and said it was an accident But after that you went right back To your forever party Out here we don't do more than bleeding And try to break the glass with weeping We empty people cannot learn The peace we crave we cannot earn The music is sweet in his head, and he quickly scribbles down the main chords and bridges. Then the Song is done, and he sets it down on the grass beside him. He looks over the fields -- brown, fertile, his covenant with it consummated -- and knows that it's time to listen to whatever wisdom the weight in his pocket has for him. He reaches into his pocket and draws the gun out, spins the cylinder to check the loads, takes the safety off. The gun is warm from his body, and the friendly scent of gun oil fills his mouth and nostrils as steel the temperature of flesh nuzzles the roof of his smiling mouth. The hammer rises and falls, producing what are from Daniel's viewpoint excellent results. No blood stains the Song, and Daniel's body slumps back against the barn door. In the November sunlight, Daniel's body deliquesces, outlines shifting, clothes rotting to dust in seconds, flesh melting into the ground, until only a skeleton remains. The wind runs from the east, flicking its tail north on occasion; it whistles through Daniel's ribs, taking a bit of bone with every whistling note, and the notes are The Song being played the way Daniel heard it in his head, and it's loud because this is a strong wind. The Song howls with the wind over Blessings Exchange, and Rob Jackson looks up from the counter of his convenience store at the same time Jimmy Mathers pounds his thumb with a hammer at the same time that pretty much everyone in town stops and listens. One by one, the words fade from the yellow paper as the east wind whispers them down gutters and around corners. The wind snatches up more bone to play The Song with, and takes more and more until The Song is over and Daniel's bones are scattered dust. Next to a blank sheet of paper there is a curious bundle of two corncobs wrapped in a whole tobacco leaf, bound with a brown shoelace and stuffed with cornsilk. But soon this, too, fades to dust and is scattered, and the sheet of paper is snatched up and blown far enough to deserve a legend of its very own. It is noon in Blessings Exchange, Indiana, and the sun is cold. heckler -- now it's over i'm dead and i didn't do anything that i want or i'm still alive and there's nothing i want to do