Nocturne
Nocturne
a
Shorting the Undead
title
by Saul Tanpepper
Nocturne
a
Shorting the Undead
title
by Saul Tanpepper
Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Saul Tanpepper
All rights reserved.
1
st
Published December 12, 2011 by Brinestone Press, San Martin, CA 95046
Cover design Brinestone Press Copyright © 2011
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Tanpepper, Saul (2011-12-12). Nocturne
Brinestone Press Kindle Edition
Nocturne
is a selected title from
Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors: a Menagerie of Macabre Mini-Fiction
(Dec 2011)
For more information about this and other titles by this author:
Nocturne
When the Mayfly Nymph sheds his lacquered skin and spreads his nascent wings, so recommences the Imago’s frantic dance. But the Nocturne’s reel is quickly run. Dawn whispers upon the freshened World and, like sun-kissed wind on honeyed Dew, evaporates his mating song. Thereafter shall He falter, worn and tattered, nearly spent. He makes one last midflight conjugal stab, then flutters to the ground, to settle on winters’ past rotting leaves. And there, amongst the anonymous shells of those who danced before him, He dies.
—from
La Danse Éphémères
by Jacobin G. de Bessieres, 1842
† † †
The Man had already cheated Death once this morning
, so when he turned away from the radiant face of his wife and stepped off the porch and into the busy-bright flow of the September day, the crisp, loud
clack
of the hard rubber soles of his shoes on the sidewalk sounded to him like an affirmation of life and living and all things that are vibrant. The breathless air was crisp and clear. He held his gaze determinedly forward, in front of himself. A sort of a smile touched the corners of his face. Today will be different, he assured himself, even though he knew it wouldn’t be. Before he had even reached the front sidewalk, his footsteps sounded to him like the ceaseless ticking of a clock.
He cheated Death like a man cheats at poker, by knowing he will someday be caught; a man who plays at the game long enough and cheats often enough knows it is inevitable. Maybe not this hand or the next, but eventually. Sooner. Later. The game must end: win, lose or draw; whether by fair or by foul.
He didn’t fear the end of the game—not really—only the waiting, and the form it might take.
You don’t get to choose.
That he’d even woken up at all that morning, that he’d become aware that the night had ended and he himself was still alive and in apparent excellent health, had been a cause for some personal distress. But then again, just the idea of dying in his bed so ignominiously splayed was enough to propel him out of it, away from his still-beautiful wife and her tranquil face, away from her gently rising and falling breast. He slipped from beneath the suffocating blankets and out into the brittleness of a morning so frigid that it foretold what was sure to be a bitterly cold winter.
The temperature hadn’t fallen quite enough overnight to trigger the heater at six o’clock, but it was nonetheless cold enough. The thought crossed his mind that maybe he’d go ahead and bump the thermostat up anyway, but when he remembered that he hadn’t been down in the cellar to clean the filter since last fall, images of the accumulated dust flowing into the vents and carrying diseased mold spores made him stop. Besides, attempting to navigate the rickety cellar stairs in such a state—the inebriation of sleep still upon him, his muscles stiff and tremulous—would be foolhardy. Is that how he imagined his death? Lying on the clay earth at the bottom of a set of narrow wooden steps?
He’d clean the filter tonight, after a full meal, if he was in such a capable state and so inclined. He made a mental note to stop and pick up a face mask at the hardware store.
Arms held close across his chest, he hurried into the bathroom, naked but for his underwear and tee shirt. His hard, pale, bony feet resented the hard, bare, cold floor. He walked on the sides and balls of his heels, his toes curling up. The toilet seat was just as unforgivingly cold and hard.
After the usual morning ritual, which he always carefully inspected for blood that was perpetually never there, he was overcome with an almost manic sense of urgency. He’d tried masturbating, finishing what he hadn’t been able to the night before in bed. But the effort was barely worth it, hardly satisfying and laden with guilt. It was a waste of another precious five minutes, self-indulgent minutes that he’d have to hurry to make up. He hated hurrying; it made one careless, take reckless chances. It invited risks.
Using his underwear, he meticulously cleaned up the spend from the floor, then carefully folded and disposed of it far into the depths of the laundry hamper. He shaved at the sink using a fresh disposable razor. In the middle of his shower, finding himself still in an aroused state, he considered having another go of it. He gazed at the soap in his hands, but the thought of slipping on the wet floor quickly resurrected thoughts of hospital stays and beeping instruments with wires and tubes that intruded upon the body. The urge passed. By the time he was finished with the shower and dried, the bedroom was empty. He could smell fresh coffee drifting in from the kitchen. He dressed quickly, but carefully.
The couple passed a wordless breakfast. The empty highchair between them made it impossible to talk comfortably.
When he reached the end of the front walk, he decided he’d rather drive to work this morning, instead of taking the subway. He told himself it was half a dozen in one hand, six in the other, but that wasn’t exactly true. On good days, when the traffic was light, the car was faster. But there were always so many accidents. Still, he’d lost that five minutes; he’d be lucky to get to the station in time for his train.
The car was in the garage. He preferred to keep the rolling door open. Carbon monoxide could kill without warning. And there was also the risk of gas fumes evaporating off of the lawnmower. It had been a couple weekends since he’d spilled some onto the clippings bag while filling the tank, and the reek of the gas still permeated the air. One couldn’t be cautious enough, not when the fumes could accumulate in closed spaces such as the garage. A spark from the engine was all the fumes would need to ignite. So he kept the door open, even though, in this neighborhood, it meant inviting other risks.
The car was a modest, gray Nissan sedan, four-door, equipped with power steering and brakes but with manual windows and locks. One never knew when an electrical failure might occur, trapping the driver inside. He’d read about cars rolling into lakes, the water pressure sealing the passengers inside to slowly die of suffocation.
He checked the backseat through the window before unlocking the door and throwing in his jacket. He pulled his seatbelt tight, adjusted the mirrors. He inserted the key into the ignition, turned it, put the car into gear, backed slowly out onto the road. These were acts he’d performed a thousand thousand times before, but he was just as careful, just as attentive, this time as any other.
He was surprised by how little traffic there was on the road this morning, and so he decided to go ahead and take the highway. Usually, there were too many cars, too many of them moving in too many directions. Too little road. But today there were far fewer vehicles and the thought crossed his mind that maybe he’d forgotten a holiday or something. He wracked his brain trying to think what was special about this particular date, or this day of the month, or this day of the week. But nothing came to him. It was going to torment him the rest of the way to work unless he satisfied the question with some sort of answer.
There was no mention of a holiday anywhere on the radio.
His cell phone was in the inside breast pocket of his jacket, and the jacket was on the seat behind him. He reached over, still keeping his eyes on the road, felt for the jacket, found it. He flipped it over to find the pocket, felt it sliding off the seat. He brought the jacket up to the front with him, but it was no easier. The jacket was a tangled mess, the pocket lost somewhere in the middle of it.
He had to take his eyes off the road just for a moment. He didn’t like doing it, but the traffic was light, and there were no other cars within a hundred feet of him. He could feel the damn thing wrapped up somewhere in there, but where the hell was the pocket? His fingers fumbled. Ah, there! Finally his hand found it, slipped in and there was the familiar hard rectangle of the phone. He pulled it out, flipped it open, held the screen before him. The sun behind him was too bright; the screen was washed out, unreadable. He lowered the phone to finish punching in the numbers.
It was only a fraction of a second, maybe two, that his eyes were off the road, but it was just long enough and just at the wrong moment that he missed seeing the red pickup cut in front of him and slam on its brakes. A fraction of a second. A premonitory image passed through his mind, and he rammed his foot on his own brake, but even without seeing he knew he was too late. The gray Nissan slammed into the back of the truck, the front end diving underneath, the back end lifting up. The car catapulted through the air, up and over the pickup, shearing the truck’s cab off as it went.
This is what the man saw and thought and felt, almost as if he was watching from somewhere outside of himself:
The car twisted. It began to flip, rolling side to side: passenger, roof, driver, wheels, over and over again. And finally the car came to a rest on four flat tires, the hood popped open and steam gushing from a ruptured hose. The smell of gasoline filled the air. He could see himself, his face bloody, his glasses lost in the wreckage. Other than a bunch of cuts and bruises, he seemed to be all right. He somehow managed to release the seatbelt, kicked open the door—thank God for manual locks—and stumbled out into the flow of traffic.
He tried to yell at himself, to tell him to get back in the car. Traffic sped past him, blurs of color, horns blaring and tires screeching. He wanted to tell the man that was himself that it was unsafe to stand on the road like that. And then he was suddenly inside of himself again, realizing the foolishness of his mistake. As he looked up, a semi loaded down with logs barreled toward him.
They had had a son. He remembered this as the shiny silver grill of the truck grew large in his vision, blinding him in a white flash. They had had a son.
He began to weep.
“Honey?”
The sound of his wife’s voice in his ear startled him from the images passing through his mind. He blinked, saw that he was still on the highway. His exit was approaching. He was almost at work.
“Honey, is something wrong?”
He cleared his throat. “No…dear.” He decided that there wasn’t a holiday after all. “I just wanted to… I wanted to say I’ll see you tonight.”
He could almost see the look on her face, the confusion. He never called while on the road.
The line was silent for a moment, then: “Pick up a steak, would you, on your way home? I’ll barbecue it for dinner.”
The cancer warning on the side of the bottle of lighter fluid flashed through his mind. “’Kay, hon,” he said.
They had had a son and had given him a good, strong name.
He lifted his hand to wipe his face, but he knew his cheeks would be dry. He signaled for his exit instead, looking for a red pickup in his mirror. There wasn’t one.
† † †
On a normal day, the Man would process over a hundred claims. But it wasn’t a normal day. He spent the majority of the morning away from his desk, away from his computer. There were meetings of all sorts, tiring, redundant, useless meetings, during which his boss recited figures of little significance to him and which ultimately held no meaning anyway. Why was he here? His mind drifted.
It took him back to his office, which was on the thirty-fifth floor, just four stories from the top of the building. The window afforded a decent view of the city below, but there was nothing decent to see there. The iron tangle of the train yards far below him, the tracks knotted into an incoherent pattern of ins and outs, comings and goings. The thick muddy ribbon of river. And, in the distance, a wood which seemed to him overly dark and oppressive. The whole town, in fact, depressed him to his core; so deeply, in fact, that he was scarcely even aware of it. All he knew was that he was glad he didn’t live in this horrid town anymore. He had to work here, and that was enough.
The conference room was on the opposite side of the building. It was through this window that he now gazed, at that wretched, solitary hill in the distance, its bald crown reaching nearly level with his eye. There was a cemetery there; he could see the white stones shining there like stubble on a green chin, and he reflected that this was a town built around a shrine for the dead, and that the whole of it was sliced into halves by a river, and then haphazardly stitched together by train tracks, like some Frankensteinian monster clothed in the fabric of that melancholy wood. If there was a pattern to this, he was at a loss to explain it.
He contemplated the risks of spending his days in such a tall building as this, the tallest in this city. There were the obvious dangers: fires, lightning strikes, earthquakes. Although, if he was honest with himself, the last time an earthquake had struck the area, Truman had been president. But rather than reassuring him, this knowledge only made him more anxious. Did the intervening years of quiescence increase the risk of another trembler? He thought about the quakes they’d been having lately in other parts of the country: Oklahoma, New Jersey, Wisconsin. It was unusual to hear about them. Maybe the world was falling apart.
