Spider on My Tongue (7 page)

It didn't happen here.

It did happen here.

~ * ~

I want so desperately to believe only in shadows.

~ * ~

They, the shadows that exist here, have told me such things as this:

There are people who wear stripes with polka dots, but I am not one of them. And there are people who chew their thin soup and let their noses drip in public places—restaurants and barrooms, fields and wicker hammocks, but I am not one of them. And there are people who dream of the prefect lover and have orgasms on hand daily. But Jesus, lovely Jesus of the glowing hole, I am not one of them. And listen, listen--there are people, too, who count themselves unique because of deformation or impediment. But, shit, Dude and Dudess, I am not one of them. And people, as well, everywhere—like flies on a summer window--who whine interminably about the heat and proclaim that it's the humidity, really, and not the heat so much, that makes them fucking uncomfortable. (They should live
here
and wear
my
shoes.).

And:

I come and go daily, hourly through my nostrils and make a cozy red home in my scrotum and vagina, which I have several of; no, you may not borrow.

And:

Picnics and ants fill up my pants and oh the joys of joyful summers and mooing sarsaparilla and the dead white white legs that spread the rivers wide, like Moses, oh these hands, these hands, and these large hands!

And:

I yearn only for the yarning, which has gone, which is gone—I yarn to see the breasts, the pubes, the round firm ass and be, thus, moved, moved, moved to move.

And:

He is staring at my moist staff his open pants, his lips and eyes aglitter, and he takes, then, his stiff organ out to give me his food in one bitter mouthful and goes off slowly as a life—and I see, then, the shoes, his shoes, and I smell his smell, and then I smell nothing, and I see no shoes, and his big laugh is in some place that is other.

~ * ~

I had so much more, dammit, with Phyllis long ago, in Manhattan, during those first few months, and I hardly knew it. I had a nasty and unpredictable and sometimes beautiful reality (or non-reality), with her—with whatever she was, then. When we walked together in the West Village, or made loud and untidy love in the little apartment I'd borrowed from my friend, Art DeGraff (who was also her murderer, which I did not know), or sat down to a meal, I had her unique odor, and her presence, too, her formidable sexuality, her eyes (everywhere), and I had my love for her, which I knew, then, would exist through all time, through any change or transition either of us would endure. But now, in my dim house in the dim woods, I have the suffocating claustrophobia of shadows that do not fade but which speak to me, and speak among themselves, and to themselves, as if they're a rare species of bird mouthing the desperate and short, meaningless sentences and atonal music of the dead, and there's nothing of reality or non-reality in any of it, nothing beautiful or challenging or fascinating (anymore). Only air without warmth, earth without substance.

And no love at all.

~ * ~

So, there it is—I have no idea if my friend Sam Feary is actually here. And I have no idea if Phyllis Pellaprat is here, either. Maybe I desperately want both of them to be here. Maybe I
need
them to be here because they could help me survive this...
thing
that's happening, because, after all, who in the name of God
are
these others who have crowded into my little house?

Not too long ago, after I tried, in vain, to enjoy a dinner of seared salmon and brown rice, I called out to them, by name. It was a stupid thing to do, yes—because I know none of their names, and none of their faces (which come and go as fleetingly from my field of view as the waking memory of a dream).

"Timothy!" I called out. "Robert! Joanna! Why are you here? Why have you come to this house?"

No one answered.

I was remembering, I think, two years of utter foolishness from decades ago, before I went to Manhattan to do my book, and, instead, met Phyllis and the others, which changed the course of my life.

~ * ~

That foolishness was a séance in a house that was allegedly haunted, where we—Sam Feary and my beautiful cousin Stacey, Art DeGraff, and several others our age—gathered, laid candles out, drew a pentagram in white chalk on the bare oak floors, set up our Ouija board, and then, after gathering into a ragged circle around it, and interlocking hands, made entreaties to the departed to speak with us.

We had the names of the departed; everyone in Bangor did—their deaths in a drowning accident a year earlier had been well-publicized: they were Reginald Pyle, his wife, Shirley, and their eleven-year-old twin daughters, Erin and Becky. A photograph of this sweet family stood on a Queen Anne table in the room we were using for our séance (the living room), and each of us had taken turns staring at it and muttering inanities about the tragic and untimely loss of such a beautiful family. We all felt (we decided before coming to the house) that we needed to appear sympathetic to them, even empathetic, friendly and caring, and, said Sam Feary, "Like we're there to help them move on."

"Yeah," said my beautiful cousin Stacey, "move on. I mean, it's obvious, right? If they're actually still in that house, then
something's
keeping them from moving on."

"Moving on?" asked Art DeGraff. "To where?"

"To another realm," I said, as if I actually knew what I was talking about. "Maybe not to heaven, or hell, or whatever. But another place like Earth. You know, another realm, another dimension, where they can all live again."

"Uh-huh," Art said, clearly unconvinced.

So we had our séance, and the curtains fluttered suggestively, the doors throughout the large house grumbled on their hinges, something on the second floor moved "stealthily" (Tom Quivers said), and Janice Redwig proclaimed, "My cheeks are cold! Something's touching my cheeks!" which we thought was very cool, so cool, in fact, that Stacey said something was touching
her
cheeks, too, and Tom Quivers said, "It's as cold as Pluto in here. Can't you feel it?" to which I and Art DeGraff said, almost in unison, "I think you're right."

And, later that night, someone spoke to us.

He or she said, through the Ouija board (and, thus, through
our own
forgers), “Be gone! You are not welcome here!"

We left the house five minutes later, at a run.

But we repeated the séance a half dozen times in the next eighteen months, until one of us was killed in a bicycling accident (Tom Quivers, who pulled out in front of a UPS truck in his cherry red Corvair) and another, an always-smiling, and very thin girl named Gwen, went off to live in the Midwest with her boyfriend (she was widely rumored to be pregnant), and another (Janice Redwig), confessed, at the Pyle house, after what turned out to be the final séance, that she had been moving the Ouija Board's pointer all along, for the past eighteen months, and that she and her friends had rigged the house. Then she laughed derisively, started for the door, looked back, and gave us a malodorous grin. "Gullible fools!" she said. "You're all just gullible fools! It was
so
enter
taining
to watch you fall for all of our fucking bullshit!"

When she was gone, we talked with great agitation and annoyance about how poorly we actually knew her, that we should have guessed—from rumors we'd heard, but had dismissed because she always seemed so sincere—that she was a liar, and finished with a consensus that even though she'd manufactured a nearly two-year-long hoax we'd all fallen for, it would still not explain some of the creepier goings-on at the Pyle house.

But we were wrong.

~ * ~

I awoke in the small hours of the morning and saw that the passing misery crowded around my bed, and I watched as they reached for me, cocked their heads at me like small dogs, and I screamed—perhaps a word, perhaps something guttural, unintelligible; I can't remember—and they vanished at once, as if my scream gave them great pain. But I decided, then (and still believe, four or five sleepless hours later), that I had merely awakened from a dream into another dream. Because
this,
I told myself, is not the way these
things
behave. I knew it. I know it. I have, after all, experienced them for many months, now. I don't know
them,
but I know their movements in this house and in the dim woods beyond (though only as well, perhaps, as I can know the movements of underground rivers, or the movements of the atmosphere; I know their breathing, too, and sometimes I know even their dreams; I know their voices; and the detritus of the lives they've left behind.

But here it is: I don't know
them.

I live among them. They surround me, suffocate me, bring me nightmares. But I
don't know them.

They're strangers to me, and, perhaps, I am a stranger to them. My fear is that I'm not. My fear is that they know me very well.

~ * ~

They are not merely what they appear to be. They're made of stone, shadow, sunlight. They lie and beguile, whisper, scream, chat, cajole, grin, persuade.

Wimbly go the dire jibble, into each minipont a little bare
must fall.

And:

I see them pass within the crowds who pass we where I sit among the others all around me selling their precious pink collectibles, their comic books and flatulent toaster ovens, distressed gold and yellow furniture, their wildly curvaceous Barbie dolls old enough to vote, and I scream to them, "Oh look, please, at me! Oh look, please at ME!" And they look and see the chair I sit in. They look and see the grass the chair sits on. They look and see my startlingly rusted Desoto behind the chair, and the other cars, too, whose paint and metal, unlike my Desoto's, are thick enough to withstand a stiff breeze.

“Buy my soaps," I shout at them. Please look at me and buy my soaps!" And they dig into their pockets, come up with nothing, trudge forward, into the gathering heat, the sun—using the strength gained from repetition—and rise into the softy swaying honey locusts.

"Sniff them, then," I shout. “Sniff my soaps and buy them. Then look at ME, oh look at ME!"

But they merely trudge forward, some east, some west, some in other directions, all in their rural finery, breasts and bellies flopping, mouths agape, mouths closed softly,
 
eyes caught by bright colors and bouncy doo dads.

“Buy my soaps!" I shout at them.

I hear a door slam, the rasping noise of old hinges, a door slam, the rasping noise of old hinges.

I bend way over and sniff my soaps.

They smell of stagnant water and old pipes

It’s a smell I've grown to adore.

~ * ~

I try to estimate them because I need to. Wouldn't you? If you lived here. If you lived in this place, if you lived among them. Wouldn't you?

Dammit!
Wouldn't
you?

~ * ~

Darker than the space between stars tonight.

I was awakened minutes ago by this:

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"

I opened my eyes, looked quickly right, left, thought I'd gone blind—there was no light anywhere and, so, no shadows. I sensed no presence nearby, either, something that might have said, "AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"— nothing beyond the murky and intrusive presences in my little house, but these presences seemed, at any rate, to have retreated to some other place.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" I heard again, and I said, "Phyllis?" though the voice was neither male nor female. "Phyllis?" I said again, and glanced about desperately, and in vain, for some point of light. "Am I blind?" I said. "Have I gone blind?"