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And Make Up Stories
Patrick Redding I wake at six o'clock, too early to get up, too dark. My head aches, wakes up the little bird who reminds me to take some more pills. They never run out all at the same time. Always I'm left with one lingering symptom or another, nothing ever coming out even. Everything coming out odd. I take more pills to complement the ones still in my system, go back to bed and hope everything comes out right the next time I wake. It doesn't; the ones I took merely slowed down the release of the others, so I wake up stoned. We talk about the movie we saw yesterday, a surreal wash of free-associating forms that slipped from one reality to another as easily as a dream. A shared vision, a way of seeing invisible things, a lucid dream extending beyond the rectangle of canvas, encroaching so subtly that my own reality shifts and becomes questionable. Hubcaps become dinner plates. A birthday candle, cloned and copied, becomes a torchlight parade. The boundaries of reality are mostly imaginary anyway, cosmic longitude and latitude lines. We keep them there for comfort. Suppose everyone is an artist, capable of altering the focus, shifting the view, in such a way that the viewer will question their own perceptions for months, years, afterward. Suppose we are all simultaneously artist and viewer, audience and participant. Not everyone would be cut out for such an art show, of course; some would go mad, blathering on about angels and fire, having to be sedated, medicated, quarantined before they infected the others. Some would be disappointed because they expected a picture of melting watches and instead got their own house full of clocks mangled into shapes so bizarre they'll never be able to explain to the cleaning lady. They'll require plastic surgery to remove the dripping Timex from their arm. None of them will ever be able to tell time again, and why would they want to? I have no idea what time it is. Time for breakfast, she says, listening to the yowling of my stomach. Wasn't it sick last night? Was that where all this started? It's empty now. The sun is out, and I'm warm, and there is a sparrow nesting in the bed beside me but we must get up, get dressed. Was I supposed to be at work today? No? No school either? Then let us nest, let us rest awhile longer. Let us lie among the fresh white sheets and make up stories and flirt with words. But the growling drives us out, and she forages in the kitchen and comes flittering through the hallway with bottles of juice and cherry cheese bear claws. She comments on a preview we saw at the movies, something with Donald Sutherland. She isn't talking about the preview itself so much as about Donald Sutherland, who, she informs me, is incredibly hot, now that he's old enough to be interesting. She isn't old enough to have seen him when he was younger except in late-night movies rerun on Channel 17 when she was in grade school. This is how she entertains me while I brush my teeth and take inventory of my bones and do a system check to see which joints might function properly today and which ones won't. I'm stuck at the sink; my head feels fine but my back feels twice its age (done got old, can't do the things I used to do, at least not without help straightening out the next morning) so she slathers it in menthol and pops it back into a standing position so I don't feel quite so much like Darwin's unmentioned ape-cousin. It will stick again when I sit down in the study, but as the day grows older my bones grow younger and by late afternoon I'll be doing things I ought to know better than doing again. She reads my scribbled notes from a dream in the middle of the night and promptly diagnoses it as unresolved frustration with my mother. "How very Freudian," I remark, watching her drain the last drop of juice from my bottle. She shrugs, grins, elaborates as she reads my notes aloud: I received a text message on my phone but it was in the form of a crossword puzzle; it was from Mrs. Pitts, an elderly lady who lived across the way when I lived on the other side of town, and Mrs. Pitts wanted me to call so she could tell me all about the terrible things going on in the neighborhood. Cross words from an old lady, the little bird chirps, perching on the arm of my chair. She dissects the pun of Mrs. Pitts; her name a sardonic metaphor for a peach of a woman, the hard, bitter, poisonous core hidden under fuzzy, saccharine platitudes. My mother always calls to tell me who's sick or dying or dead back home, bless their hearts. I don't know most of them; I moved away more than half a lifetime ago. The roll call of the dead never ends. It's a small town; you'd think they'd eventually run out of people. The implication--in the dream--is that it's all my fault, that none of these terrible things would ever have happened if I hadn't left. Displaced guilt, the little bird coos, grooming my disheveled hair. Don't let them impose their reality on yours. The sun is out and the sky is blue--let us lie in the cool green grass and burrow in the colored leaves and formulate a theory of clouds as continents in some other more mutable reality. Let us adopt some acorns as our children and give them the names of gods and watch them grow and stretch their roots in the good, dark earth and wave their branches in the free, clear air--conductors of a magnificent neo-transcendental symphony. The little bird flits away and I hear her tinkering with the stereo, putting on a Randy Newman song I haven't heard in years, "In Germany Before the War." I don't have this on disc--or on tape or vinyl or anything, for that matter; I lost it years ago and never got around to replacing it. But realities blur and bend and fold themselves over, sometimes they do, and she plays the song straight from the memory in my head (an unreliable media, to be sure--not nearly as secure as a CD and far less convenient than a USB drive). "We lie beneath the autumn sky, my little golden girl and I." Forlorn piano, haunting voice. "I'm looking at the river but I'm thinking of the sea." Thinking of the sea. Thinking of the sea. Thinking I can see. I close my eyes and we are lying on the crunchy frost-bitten heather of the bald on Ragged Mountain, underneath the wide open sky. A huge white bird circles overhead, sweeping spirals as its feathers catch the sunlight, shifting from white to silver and gray, back to white. It circles, predatory, waiting. Could it pick me up, bear me away like so much carrion? I feel her clasp my hand. No--it couldn't. It doesn't even look real, I think. As I watch, it flies higher and higher until it disappears. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of mind, out of being. What is real? The afternoon sun is warm, and my bones breathe fire and drink electricity. That is real. I half-close my eyes and drift into shimmering dreams of golden birds. I am born again, a new man. Let us lie here awhile and make up stories. © Copyright 2005 by Patrick Redding |