Spider on My Tongue (3 page)

These
things
all about me, in the house and in the countryside and in the woods, even insert themselves into my food. I used to enjoy eating (and obviously still do), but now I find unwanted entities in my squash.

~ * ~

The trick is to keep moving, not just around the block, or from one side of the room to the other (though it helps), but mentally, too, intellectually, emotionally, too. Don't alight on one thought or memory for too long because that's when
they
insinuate themselves on you.

Of course, you're not aware of any of this. In reality,
you
have lived what I've lived, but you don't know it. I'm telling you, now.

~ * ~

It looks like a trick, like an evasion—changing the subject. I'll write about tires, for instance. Stoves, too. And mortal lovemaking on a sunny afternoon. I'll flit about from one thing to another. I'll throw myself into the kitchen and then into the living room. These
things
are not very quick to react (and why not?).

If I slow down, I don't know what will happen.

I dream of friends and acquaintances who've become vapors, less shadow than shadow, and in these dreams, I recognize them and interact with them. On a particular evening not long ago, one of these acquaintances took me to an amusement park, then to a carnival, where we played games of chance. He was very good at these games and the carnival barker was full of loud and hearty talk about my acquaintance's luck and skill. My acquaintance, whom I once called Mitch, got puffed up by all this hearty talk. His face became red and his smile became huge and, at last, his luck ended all at once and I was alone at the carnival.

Do you like carnivals? I do. They're seamy. I like seamy. I think it gets appetizingly close to the
what
of us.

~ * ~

About the skin of these
things:

Go to a car graveyard. Make sure it's an ancient car graveyard, one that hasn't been used for decades, which would mean that it couldn't be sold because the owners would have to drag all those old cars out, first, and then reclaim the land by cleaning up oil spills, gasoline spills, anti-freeze spills.

In this ancient car graveyard, find the oldest car and touch it. Assumedly, that car is, by now, completely
golden
brown with rust. But it's beyond that, you see. It's beyond being simply "brown with rust." The rust has become so pervasive, so earnest, so destructive that the sheet metal of that car (a '57 Desoto, a '61 Falcon, who knows?) has been reduced to nothing more than a patina, no thicker, really, than the bright new paint that once covered it. So when you touch it (that skin, that patina), your finger goes through it at once. But that's not the whole story. Stake out the car, that Desoto, that Falcon, and return to it in ten years. And go there on a day when a good breeze has been forecast
(Look for a cold and windy day today, folks!)
then stand back from the car and watch as the wind blows the car's skin (its patina) into dust, leaving only the frame.

Now, as you watch that car disintegrate in the brisk wind, think of skin a thousand times as thin.
That's
the skin that covers these
acquaintances
who populate my dreams.

That's the skin of these
things
all around me, too—inside and outside my little house.

But there is, you see, no wind to blow that skin away, because no heat and cold exists in their world to produce wind, and, as well, no air (nitrogen, oxygen, argon). It is a world as still as a snapshot.

~ * ~

How often do you (you, reading this) hear daily the chatter of neighbors? It's usually unintelligible; we hear it through walls and windows and floors (if the neighbors live below us), and, if we have animals (dogs especially), their ears perk up, and they look attentive, interested in this new set of untranslatable but surely human noises.

Through floors or walls, it's usually less human sounding than through windows. But, more often than not, it is quick and meaningless, except in pitch, and it is devoid of music or rhythm. It sounds as if it's not connected to our world at all.

~ * ~

Before she left not too long ago, my wife began to sense what was going on here, in this house, and around it. One afternoon, she said, "I hear people talking."

"No you don't," I said, and she looked at me with great suspicion. "Abner," she said,
"I know
what I hear. How can you tell me I don't?"

"I'm not," I said. "I'm not doing that. I'm just saying that there's no way you can hear people talking because
we're
the only people in the house."

"Clearly, that's not true," she said. Her eyes were pale green, very expressive, and, at that moment, they were expressive of rebuke, which was not uncommon. She paused, looked slowly right, left. "My God!" She held her hand up, palm out, as if to stop me from speaking, though I wasn't about to speak. "My God," she repeated, "I can hear them even now. I can hear them
talking."

"Lorraine," I said, "you have to be wrong because
I
can't hear anything."

She cocked her head at me. It was a pretty head and I enjoyed looking at it. "You're trying to infer that I'm going crazy, aren't you?"

"Not 'infer,’" I said. "Imply."

She looked silently at me a moment. "Don't do that, Abner. Don't correct my English. You always do that. Why?" Brief pause. "Never mind." She took a quick glance left, right, then her eyes were on me again. "Jesus, Abner, they're talking about
us!”

I said nothing. I think I sighed. I wanted to say, "Of course they are."

She was gone from the house two days later.

I had a friend in Bangor who had a nice, dirty blond beard and a
round, gentle face, and whenever he went into a laundry near his
home, the proprietors—two aged Chinese men named Lu and
Yang—smiled at him when he came through the doorway and
shouted,
“Hey,
Jesus Christ, how are you doing?" My friend told
me that story quite a lot, and I always enjoyed it; it tickled me.
His name was Sam Feary. He was two years older than I, a bit
chunky, with a splash offreckles across the bridge of his nose. He
looked like one of the Campbell Soup kids grown up and a few
pounds lighter.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

Can't you see I'm trying to be logical about this! Can't you allow me at least that much! And if I can't be
logical,
then at least let me be orderly. Let me, at the very least, assign parameters—if only in the form of numbers, spacing, categorization. Certainly you understand that need.

When I was younger, and in a very different situation, and the world became too much for me, or I was sad because of a failed test, or the sickness of a pet, or a death, I went around
polishing
things—doorknobs, faucets, silverware. Then I looked at my face or my hand or the room in the surface of what I'd polished and it made me momentarily happy. I don't do that anymore. I don't run around polishing things. Now I put words down on paper—word after word after word—in order to tell my stories, in order to give you an idea of the life I've led and the life I'm leading, what may be in store for me, and what in the name of heaven I think it all means, as if it's supposed to
mean
anything at all.

Now I simply write.

~ * ~

And so, "
FOUR
."

~ * ~

Thank you.

~ * ~

Yes, Lorraine left and hasn't returned. That was some weeks ago. She didn't say goodbye, didn't leave a note, didn't give me any warning whatever. Was I happy to see her go? Yes. She desired it, obviously. Desired to leave. Needed it.
I
can't leave, however. Where would I go? There's no place to go. It's all the same place; it's all
this
place.

~ * ~

You don't need to sleep anymore. I do. Remember that. It's important. (Or maybe you do sleep. Maybe you need it as much as I, perhaps more. I have no real idea unless you tell me. I have no way to judge otherwise. There are people nearby, within a mile or two, in a little village whose name escapes me. I go to that village now and again for food. I walk there, with my little tote bags flung over my shoulder (both tote bags sport a graphic of beagle puppies; I had half a dozen beagles when I was a kid, and their pleasant, affectionate and intelligent faces still charm me), and, after doing my shopping, I talk with the man behind the counter for a minute—he's tall and bald and very thin, and he loves to talk, though his conversation is banal, which is okay, sometimes, almost comforting. But then I feel the tug of my little house, and when I leave the store, I often encounter people walking on the village's only street and I nod and smile, and they nod and smile back at me, but I don't know any of them, I don't live with them, I live with these
others),
I trudge back with my bread and eggs and cider and peanut butter, et cetera, et cetera, in my beagle puppy tote bags.

When I walk back from the village and I see this little stand of woods, I'm always ambivalent about it. These woods shelter my home, this little house, which gave
me
good shelter for a time, though, now, it shelters these others, too, the ones who follow me on my way out, down a narrow path that winds through the woods to a clearing, where I can see the village not far off (it's almost a picture-postcard; church steeple, red and green roofs, a farmer's windmill and two tall silos further off). And when I reach the edge of the woods, on my way to that village, I can feel
them
drop away. A few trudge after me for a while, yes, but, after a couple of minutes, I turn and see that they've dropped away, as well. I don't think it's sunlight or, beneath a sky filled with clouds, the daylight that draws them back. I can't say what draws them back. Perhaps they realize I have nowhere else to go, that, before long, I'll return to the little house in the dim woods and, so, to them.

~ * ~

And thank you for the spacing, the asterisks and chapter numbers.

~ * ~

I don't know whose story I'm telling, really—my own or theirs (yours). It would have to be both, of course, since there really is no difference between them (you) and me. How could there be? Is there any real difference between the soil in Montana and the soil in Palermo? Is there any real difference between time that's passed and time that's being measured?

~ * ~

I do not thank the now-late (I assume) Barbara W. Barber for her gift, so long ago. A kiss, a curse, a legacy of nightmare. If only I hadn't boarded that train. If only I'd had the good sense to sit in a different car. If only I hadn't caught her eye. I would have remained blissfully ignorant and unaware. Now I exist at the center of chaos. Now I cannot say that I am one of the dead or one of the living because I can define neither, because it's become so abundantly and horrifyingly clear to me that no one can. Neither they (you), nor I.

I can not say that
I
am not a part of the passing misery.

I can only say that I really do shop for peanut butter and eggs in a tiny village whose name I forget, and that I talk there with a tall, thin, bald man whose conversation is meaningless.

I can only say that I wake every morning at precisely 5:45 with an oddly dull pain moving through my entire body (and sometimes it doesn't feel like physical pain at all but merely the
memory
of pain) which subsides, but never vanishes, as the morning progresses, and that these
others
around me in my little house, and in the dim woods beyond, are as present as air and as visible as darkness.