CHAPTER 3

Michael’s Journal:

There were few light poles in my earliest youth, and given soybeans, rice, and cotton hug the Earth low in Arkansas, the space for stars was effectively doubled. I used to see that sky out our screen door on muggy August nights just beyond where my mother and aunts sat around a kitchen table telling ghosts stories. It also covered the dusty trees, where bats hung like black fruit, and shrouded the rickety wooden bridges that stitched together the rural landscape. I have encountered that shade of dark little in adulthood, although it still colors my dreams.

The most horrifying of my dreams revolve around the heavens. In them I often lie on the ground and look up into the night sky. I am aware I am being pressed into the cool grass by the force of gravity, and like Pascal my spirit recoils from the touch of infinite darkness. Yet I am powerless to resist the sensation I am falling into it. I am falling with no destination in view, and everything is falling relative to everything else around me. The stars and galaxies barely flicker from the gentle disturbance as we move together in lockstep: the blind following the blind.

Lights abruptly break against the cosmic drift. Their motion shows intelligence and intent; my fear of falling is replaced by my fear of the unknown.

We are not alone.

The lights descend as the distant torches of advancing conquerors; no greeting, warning, or ceremony precedes them. I awake terrified, but the darkness is too quick to settle into something familiar around my bed. I turn over to go back to sleep in the subtler shade, but sense the blackest betrayal lurking in it.

STONESTHROW

Graduate school seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was with a half-formed scheme the painter entered into the arrangement. To the extent Michael ever thought about the particulars of his life, with regard to stratagems and long-term goals, was incidental. His life was primarily one of art, and most everything else was shaded in degrees of inconvenience. Resultantly, he was forever falling backwards through doors others walked through willingly, and this education was as costly as it was accidental.

He had attended a commuter college as an undergraduate, where at any given time half the student population was in transition. The changeable composition of classmates afforded him greater anonymity in his painting and drawing classes, although he did not go unnoticed by professors, who thought highly enough of his work to set aside studio space for him in the graduate facility; he was embarrassed by the gesture and never took advantage of it. One of his undergrad professors was instrumental in getting him into a top tier graduate painting program, which required a move to another state. Michael lived in his parents’ house until he was twenty-eight, and seldom left his bedroom. The move marked the most frightful day of his life. Yet once settled, he was determined to break with the past and to be more socially engaged. What he found in his new artistic environment was a privileged, insular community that viewed his art as kitsch; the self-taught painter never heard the term before. During this period of awakenings, ruder ones awaited him on his first forays into the realm of dating. He was more productive at making friends at his dormitory. Several were in the Masters of Fine Art program, though none initially were in the painting department. He necessarily floundered that first year and was on track to receive no funding for his second year until he rallied at the term’s end with an impressive pre-oral exam. Over that first summer he resolved to turn things around by absorbing as much of the program’s aesthetic as he could accommodate. He was the only graduate student to paint during the break, and on returning to school with ten new canvases, professors and peers were amazed by the radical transformation of his work. This notwithstanding, the painter remained an outsider. Though he was not confrontational about it, or arrogant, his continuing invisibility around his fellow grads was seen for what it really was: a blind to conceal his contempt for their less imaginative artwork. It would have been easy to be disdainful of him if not for his genuine likeability. Being Southern, Michael believed if you could not say anything nice about something then it was better to say nothing at all, which he did for two years. He left graduate school with a diploma, serviceably polite references, and a mountain of debt. The only practical application of his advanced degree was teaching at the college level, but given his eclectic résumé, his disinclination to exhibit, and lack of political connection, his talent gave him no leverage. The head of his undergraduate program framed his dilemma early on when he told Michael, in all candor, he was a genius; but then geniuses and institutions of higher learning do not traditionally get along.

It was against this mixed history the MFA graduate thought about the place he would soon call his new home.

He was so preoccupied with details that last day in Chicago he nearly forgot about telling his sister of his impending move. Even though he knew she would not be at home, he deemed it less emotionally disruptive to walk over to her house and leave a note with his new phone number. Michael maintained a minimal profile on crossing into her yard, and nimbly navigated his nephew’s toys and one realty sign to reach the porch. A spare house key was hidden under a flowerpot, and on using it to enter the foyer he tucked his hasty scribble under a paperweight on the bureau. He was about to turn back to the door when a woman’s voice sprang from somewhere upstairs. At first he thought it was his sister, but perhaps it was realty agent showing the house to a prospective buyer. He closed the front door quietly behind him.

Michael returned to his apartment after getting a rental trailer hitched to his car. Everything but a few loose ends were packed up, so he started loading his belongings at the curb. He was mindful of his evil neighbor’s movements down the hall, making sure to lock the apartment door and trailer with each trip in and out of the house. Near the end, he noticed another box (not his) around the corner at the vacant apartment. Someone was moving in as he was moving out. No one was seen inside the dark entryway, and no nametag was on the mailbox.

He stepped up to toss in a greeting. “Hello?”

Light around the bathroom door threw the shadow of another larger box up onto the wall. With incorrigible curiosity, Michael moved forward to peek into its open flaps. The strange object inside resembled a giant piñata, or something boulder-like made of papier mâché.

“Hello?” came the soft reply from the bathroom.

Michael shot to his feet, but it was too late to undo the trespass. A young Hispanic woman, with a little girl clinging to her skirt, stepped forthrightly into view. He apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see anyone.”

“Neighbor?” she asked.

“Yes. I mean no. Not anymore.”

Her nervous laugh was gentle. “English not good.”

“No. It isn’t. I mean my English isn’t good, either.”

She was confused.

The shy child darted off under a shadowy black velvet painting of Jesus praying at Gethsemane.

Getting to his point, Michael gestured at the nailed-to door. “Man,” he began, “not good.” He thrust a finger at the exposed keyhole, and then two back at his eyes. “He spy on you.”

The pretty young mother registered proper alarm. “No.”

“Yes,” he said.

She too pointed, only at the refrigerator. “Drink? Something for drink?”

Her finger glittered in the light of a jostled window curtain. The ring might have been a wedding band, or some other ring. He demurred. “No. I’m moving.”

The little girl was now hiding behind drapes, mimicking his facial expressions and mouth movements through the thin weave of the fabric. Distracted, Michael glanced at the only bed in the one room apartment and wondered where the child would sleep.

The mother pushed a box aside, ready to entertain company.

Michael pawed the floor, turning at last to leave. He surveyed the boxes once more, yet could not say what he expected to see in them. His goodbye was awkward; the pretty woman’s goodbye was air under his shoes. When he looked back from the stoop, the window curtain swayed from where the little girl quit her hiding place.

One of the many ironies of the painter’s life was, in spite of having an affinity for maps, he hated traveling. Sedatives were not needed when he drove, although the first occasion of a new route was stressful. Stonesthrow was admittedly close, and small, yet the anxious man was determined to map out every mile marker and exit ramp along the way before setting out. His great fear was being in a wreck or becoming stranded, and having knowledge about where he would be at any given juncture in his trip gave him a semblance of control. He also struggled with short-term memory problems and needed to write things out in advance to avoid confusion and panic attacks. It was customary for him to walk around his apartment before departing and perform little traveling rituals, such as knocking on wood or leaving a dirty dish in the sink. Because he was moving, the latter was not an option on this occasion.

His knuckles were white on the steering wheel once he ran out of avenues with presidential names. Road construction greeted him on the Dan Ryan, and he was quickly sandwiched between a line of semis and a concrete barrier. Construction work came to an end before the expressway turned to potholed interstate. Lake Calumet shortly slunk into view with its industrial mound rising from the foul air like a cyst. He was paying diligent attention to his mile markers, and almost missed the mangled dog in the median strip. It resided at the end of a bloody trail from where it had been dragged under a car or truck. Signs advertising fireworks and adult movies marked the unofficial end of the burbs, although the easing terrain did not necessarily calm the driver.

Further south than he was going, over the Indiana state line, was the flattest, windiest land known to him from his school days. It was out there in The Region where, in Nineteen Ninety-four, a twin engine, French-built prop plane went down on Halloween night near Roselawn, killing everyone aboard. Not too far away, along the old Forty-one route, was where Cary Grant was buzzed by a crop-duster in a cornfield in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

For a moment, he thought another dead animal was coming into view on the shoulder, but it was a scuffed paper grocery sack blowing toward him. It first took on the form of a somersaulting man, and then a skittering crab as it passed under his wheel. It blew out the backend of the car in a shot, though before it was seen to taunt the next car Michael exited the interstate to begin the last leg of his trip. He was promptly on a narrow, winding two-lane road and stuck, inconveniently, behind a house on a flatbed trailer. The obstacle was wide and impassable, and nothing was visible of the rig hauling it. The traveler saw virtue in trying to acclimate to the slower rural pace, if only for the next few miles. A dust cloud kept pace over cornstalks, and when the highway split, house and car went their separate ways. Michael glanced across the widening divide to see tattered curtains blowing from a pane-less window. The house disappeared over the horizon, taking the dust cloud with it.

Chapter Three, Section Two/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.