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CHAPTER 14

Michael’s Journal:

In my earliest years I lived among giants. Like the finger of God, they occasionally stooped into my sphere to interact with me in some profound way, most notably in the form of my mother or grandmother. I have few specific recollections of my grandmother beyond a saintly impression formed in my youth and left unfinished on her death when I was still a boy. My recollections of my mother from the same time are almost as vague, though more material by definition.

One of my most vivid memories from this formative time was a day when I committed some infraction in my potty training that I, as a child, could scarcely comprehend. My mother made me go out in the yard and find a switch—one neither too big nor too small. (An ineffective switch would have only further provoked her ire.)

My grandmother left the room in disapproval of her rough treatment, but was otherwise powerless to intervene on behalf of my pitiful pleas. My mother’s hand was firm, making it impossible to escape the object of my torment. I recall crying for a time afterwards and not able to sit down. The late afternoon light crept from one window to the next as it slowly ebbed away, and took my ache with it. I moved around the darkening house after a while to forget the hurt and my mother’s rage, as only a child can. Another warm light, one that did not move, was situated over my grandmother while she cooked at the stove. She looked down with a smile where I played underfoot.

Somehow I suspected, even then, the world of giants was shrinking. Everyday the Sun stole away a little of their domain, but not so much that anyone but I would notice. Whatever it was they hid from me in those little patches of blocked-out sky, it would soon be down on my eye-level. Yet each day the world was becoming less real to me, not more, and the little patch of sky I pondered never shrank down to meet me. It was only much later I understood it.

The heaven I glimpsed between the shadows of giants was not a window looking out onto my future, but the disappearing window that bore me into the world.

 

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, Part Two

Among the many contrasts between the two friends were their attitudes toward women. Whereas Michael was a romantic idealist, Omar saw women as means to an end. The philosopher regarded the painter’s views on the female sex as willful distortions arising from not living in close quarters with his specimens. Given his disdainful view of women on the whole, Omar was less exacting with intangibles in partners. What he wanted was very particular, and it required directness and little finesse in getting it. Michael, for his part, so over-thought every aspect of the female psyche he rarely acted on any impulse. Omar was by nature a “big picture” person, and resultantly was both blinded to and blindsided by details. But it was always water off the back of a duck for him, either way. The painter, to his regret, lacked that constitution. Michael could see, where his friend could not, the inevitable outcomes of personal entanglements: how prolonged intimacy would run afoul of diverging interests. Omar would argue (rightly so) all relationships might be destined to end as a result of over-familiarity, but life must be filled with something, even happiness derived from short-term self-deception. Michael could not dispute the point, but there was something in his character that ruined him for even his fair share of self-deception.

The lawyer’s penthouse apartment in the crumbling hotel was his home-away-from-home when he was in Chicago, although Michael, with his fear of heights, was reluctant to visit him there. This time at least they would not only be on the same floor but also in neighboring rooms. Omar had his guest’s charges removed from the register before the two braved the elevator together. The hotel’s resident was a late sleeper, so on splitting up in the hallway he reiterated to his under-siege friend that he would be by Stonesthrow in a few days to clear up his troubles.

By the time the woozy guest put his key in the room door, he could barely string together the evening’s events that led him to it. He latched onto the doorknob with the thought of turning it, but on hearing a squeak glanced up to see the shapely form of a woman going into his friend’s apartment. He presumed she was a room maid by the pushcart left in the hall. With fading steps, Michael toddled over the dark threshold to knock a videocassette box off the top of a television. A throbbing blue light ebbing back and forth over the windowsill illuminated the film’s unpromising title in the floor: Invasion of the Bodily Snatch. He stepped over it and into the bathroom to flush out some of the libation he cavalierly consumed over the course of the evening. After a few turnarounds between the towel bar and sink, his jacket and he parted company, whereupon his attention turned agreeably to the bed. It appeared solid enough, so he promptly fell on it to arrest things still spinning in the dark. The delayed effect of the alcohol laid bare the true object of his unsettled state.

Perhaps he only drove away to miss her—to feel her like nails in his chest.

A pair of beady eyes emerged out of the shadows to intrude on his self-pity. Grasping they were attached to an unlikely stuffed horse head mounted on the wall, a crinkle worked its way down his spine. Michael pried himself from the bed and stripped off the bedspread, draping it over the offending beast. Having rectified the problem, his body wasted little time in burrowing down into the lowest spot in the mattress. After a minute or two it would neither budge nor descend further. It was not like sleep, however. It was eerily something else: something raw and closer to the surface of his anxiousness. He cracked an eye on hearing more muffled squeaking in the hallway. It was probably the maid’s cart once more on the move, although it seemed to echo out of the bowels of a catacomb. It grew gradually louder in his ear until it stopped short of the bed.

THUMP!

Michael propped open a leaden lid. The inconstant bar light across the street revealed that the heavy spread brought the horse head down off the wall. It was now lying covered in a heap on the floor. The man wanted to leave it where it was, but the creature’s snout was sticking out in a threat. With grudging effort he got up to not only re-cover the odious monster but also to use the occasion to scoot as much of it under the high bed as would go. The light in the window surged with the last nudge, illuminating the bare wall where the head had hung. An impression was already full in his mind before the outline was half-seen. He turned to face the discolored wallpaper, noting with interest how the ghost image of the pulled-down mounting mirrored what he found in the corridors of Nadir Hall. Before venturing another pass at the mattress, a blanket was stripped to blot out the annoying light in the window: Darkness, the tired man reasoned, was surely conducive to sleep. On hooking the cover over the curtain rod, a bleary peek out the curtains revealed the light he supposed to be from a bar was in fact coming from another hotel room window. A guest of the establishment was watching one of the films from the “gentlemen’s library” on a large flat-panel screen, and though nothing of it could be heard, the female lover on exhibit, with breathy exclamation in a tight headshot, was concentrating more on the camera than her partner. Michael was never skittish where eye contact emanated from two-dimensional media, so paused to savor the woman’s pleasing look. Returning to bed, he closed his eyes with greater resolve, but the noisy cart was soon on the move again. Its last few inches to the bedside were excruciating to endure. He clinched his lids tighter, refusing to relinquish, if only in theory, he was asleep. The squeaking abruptly stopped, although the silence that followed was pricklier than the noise. Michael was regardless dead to the world, or as dead as he could make himself…

He was back in the restroom at the filling station, fussing with the busted tap where he could get no water to wash his hands. Giving up, he stepped away to the noisy hand blower and stared at its half-painted-over graffiti:

333-6152

The blower started clanging loudly, and the noise ricocheted off the tile walls to deafening effect. Michael banged its loose cover, whereupon a key was coughed out of the whirling blades to land at his feet. The blower stopped, and the patron reached down to snatch the key. Instinctively, he scraped the top of the blower cover with it; characters inched their way through shaved slivers of enamel paint:

333-6152 -M-KCU-OT---Y-TN-W-I

Michael yanked on the cover. When it gave from the wall, he held it up to the sink mirror:

I-W-NT-Y---TO--UCK-M- 251-6333

“I’m asleep,” he told himself.

Returning to the front of the station, the dreamer timidly eyed the TV screen behind the counter; it was a black curtain drawn over something. At the double doors, a smudge on the glass measuring the rough dimensions of a forehead greeted him. It marked the spot where someone leaned in for a view… and a kiss…

An impression of lipstick was left, as well.

Beyond the glass, the bright interstate beckoned to the left; however, it was the darker way that pulled him right. He drove a mere quarter mile when his headlights picked up pale buttocks along the dark shoulder opposite his lane. The nude woman’s pace was slow and steady, and she showed no reaction to being caught in the glare. He eased off the gas and rolled down his window; little of her face was seen beyond the beaded string of her lips.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?” he asked.

She did not look over.

“It’s not safe out here,” he continued, “to be seen like this.”

Still no reaction.

Unsure what to do, Michael pulled ahead. He drove slowly to maintain visual contact with the woman in the side view mirror, although she was quickly shrinking on her steps. Her mouth began to move, as though speaking, but her blank, unreadable expression drew away like blood in a syringe. On reaching a mailbox reflector, he swung the car around to face her.

She was gone.

Rolling his window up, the frightened man crossed over his tracks on the woman’s side of the highway. He kept glimpsing in the mirror thinking she might be hunkered down in the weeds. An unearthly hush pushed under the car; he reached for his radio. Abruptly, a dark Cadillac ambulance overtook him in the opposite lane with flashing lights. The driver watched in horror as the mute emergency vehicle tore away in a long, dripping line; the carcass of a headless horse was being dragged behind it. The shadowy form scuffed and tumbled indignantly over hard pavement. Chunks of cartilage and bone flew off to roll under Michael’s tires; they rapped like knuckles on the floorboard wanting to be let in.

Thump. Thump… Thump. Thump…

With sudden elucidation, the dreamer realized the disturbance was rising from underneath the bed. He bolted off the mattress and staggered over to slap the knob on the room door; the suffocating Victorian wallpaper in the hallway all but wrapped around him. An exit ripped through it with a way out. He barreled down the first half-flight of stairs to smack into a window at the turn. Two slithering nipples peeked in through frosted glass, running down the pane like watercolor; their animal bluntness hardly caught up with him before he flew down the second, darker half-flight. Another turn and another window: Blacker nipples—a bestial stare—watched him trip and bang down the next flight of cement steps. His limbs, yanked from their sockets by centrifugal force, were little more than flightless wings. The vertigo and stinging blows persisted long after he came to rest on his back. He gazed up at the dark stairs above him, assuming it was his falling body, like a pair of scissors, that made the tears of light separating one flight from another.

A voice echoed down the stairwell. “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again.”

There was a pause, as if waiting for a response. Michael’s eyes navigated the twist of handrails to spy a woman’s bleary face peering down from the top of the stairs. Her expression seemed unnaturally wide.

“If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again,” she repeated.

The address was clearly directed at him, but the words crept down the steps with spidery mischief…

It was the voice of a man mockingly imitating a woman.

The injured man focused his sights on several strange lines running parallel with the woman’s mouth. They were fingers—fingers of another person making her lower jaw open and shut. Her head appeared to have no body.

Michael managed to sit up. But it must have been minutes later. A fierce headache followed him to his feet. He trudged back up the steps to retrace his out-of-time fall and found the maid’s cart still in the hallway; Omar’s door was ajar. His friend, lost in his dark library-of-a-room, sat in a chair drinking coffee and reading Parmenides by a small, insufficient lamp. He looked up only half-surprised to see his friend swaying in the doorway.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I fell.”

A woman emerged halfway out of a dark passageway. She hugged the shadow on the wall, but even still Michael could tell she wore a skimpy maid’s uniform.

“My friend said you scared her half to death.” Omar gestured for the woman to come over, but she preferred to remain where she was. “I told you I would send something by your room to help you sleep,” he explained.

The blushing hotel guest averted his gaze to the unraveling edge of a Persian carpet under his bare feet.

The friend sighed, “Don’t you remember her coming by?”

Michael’s hurt feelings were slow to emerge. “You shouldn’t have, Ommie.”

“You need help with your little problem.”

Michael shrank into the hallway. “Not that kind of help.”

Omar yelled to his friend before he disappeared from view. “Lock the door, so you don’t go wandering off to tumble down stairs!”

Chapter Fourteen, Section Two/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.