Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (15 page)

He felt too drained to run, and too anxious to collapse. So he made his way to his car. Teachers weren’t supposed to leave until half an hour after the last bell, but given his recent bereavement, he knew no one would stop him. Some of the para-professionals were putting up cardboard snowmen, others symbols of a New England Thanksgiving. It was a warm afternoon; he wondered how long the decorations made for school would take to catch up with global warming. None of his students had ever seen more than a half-inch of snow—they had no reference to a world covered in pristine white.

He had taught middle school too long, he decided as he drove north into Austin. He had given a middle school excuse. Probably the ecstasy has fucked his mind. He was having some mid-life crisis. It was probably the girl’s fault. Oh, great, another middle school response. He hadn’t planned to go to Austin for Halloween, at least not be in the city after nightfall. Austin had a huge drunk party on Sixth Street fueled by revealing costumes, live music, and cheap drinks. There were over forty thousand students in attendance at the University of Texas. He had stopped at a used music store. This amazingly tall bronze woman in a deep purple miniskirt disrupted his thumbing through jazz CDs by bending over to look at psychedelic vinyl. With her white go-go boots and long raven hair, she looked as though she belonged to the psychedelic era. She stamped her boots and sighed loudly, inviting comment. Despite the twenty-year difference in their ages, Larry played along.

“Can’t find something?” he asked.

“My girlfriend told me that she had seen an Electric Commode album here today. I’ve been hunting it for years.”

“I take it that it hasn’t made iTunes yet.”

She smiled, and he was lost in her liquid brown eyes.

“It was an obscure band even then. Part of the Arkham sound. They did some work with a theremin-like device I am trying to rebuild.”

“Like in that documentary . . . who was she? Clara Rockmore?” asked Larry.

The woman’s face lit up. “Oh, cool. Yes, Clara was a lover and student of Leon Theremin. Are you interested in alternative electronica?”

Larry had never heard the phrase “alternative electronica” in his life, but he hadn’t been laid in three years. So his agreement sounded genuine and enthusiastic.

Larry pulled up at the Machen Assisted Living Center. A bright yellow-green ambulance was parked in front of the light gray one-story building. But that was nothing new. He swallowed as much guilt as he could and then headed inside. It didn’t smell as strongly as the place his grandfather had died in twenty years ago. Maybe there had been breakthroughs in anti-death-smell chemistry. The administrator at reception looked professionally sad.

“Mr. Ellison, when your mother began living here, we talked about the stages of our process. Your mom won’t have her own room anymore. We’re going to have to watch her a little more closely. Would you like to see her?”

Mom’s hair was white as snow, her skin translucent. She had shrunk so over the last three years. She wore a faded Sears housedress, no doubt older than any of his students. Her eyes had faded from a rich brown to the color of weak tea, and they looked angry. She sat in the “sun room” in a gerry chair, the restraining wheelchair that kept mindless patients from roaming the halls on their own. She smelled of piss. Someone had given her a plush Cthulhu doll. She clutched the little green monstrosity fiercely. It was an odd gift. Mom had never been much of a reader and preferred Danielle Steel to Stephen King and certainly to Lovecraft. It was a silly, stupid toy, dark green plush with a lighter green underbelly, as though Cthulhu were a relation of Kermit. It soft blunted tentacles and soft wings removed any sense of cosmic evil, and its brown eyes were almost shy. It tore at Larry’s heart; the toy’s eyes were more alive than his momma’s.

She looked at Larry.

She didn’t know him.

He actually heard his heart break. Well, not his heart, but the emotional break had a sound accompanying it—it sounded as if a hollow reed had been snapped behind his neck.

Larry walked over to where she was and sank on his knees. He looked at her and nothing really looked back. He said “Momma” six or seven times. No change in her face. He tried to take Cthulhu away from her. She resisted, but it was easy to deprive her of the toy. She made a sad sound and tried to get the doll back. The other seniors looked at him with the same horror one would give to the thief of an infant’s candy. He gave her the doll back. He had a hard time standing. His face was wet. He hadn’t cried in a very long time.

“Did you step on a crack?”

He wheeled on the administrator. “What did you say?” he asked.

“I said it’s so hard the first time they don’t know us. I remember how it was with my own mother.”

The room seemed very unstable. Larry opened his mouth and couldn’t maker a sound. He tried again and managed, “I know you are trying to share a helpful story, but I can’t really hear anything right now. I’ve got to go, I’ll talk to her doctor tomorrow.”

He made it to the parking lot. This was Momma. Momma who had helped through a bad marriage, Momma who had worked two jobs so that he could get his English degree at UT. Momma who had rocked him when he had those terrible earaches as a kid. He was going to have to tell his boss the truth. Surely she was about to die. It was all wrong. All fucked up.

He had heard that sound before. At Chandra’s apartment.

Her apartment was over a Mexican import shop on South Congress. It was jam-packed with books, CDs, old vinyl, and strange-looking electronic instruments. She told him some of the names: the Persephone, the Electronode, the Tepaphone, the Haken Continuum, the Trautonium, the Sonorous Cross, the Shaggaipolyphonic.

She had painted a slogan on the ceiling in purple, “Music is divided for Love’s sake.”

She had slipped into the bathroom, slipping into something more comfortable. Larry spotted a framed page from a children’s book:

There was once a poor woodcutter who lived in front of a great forest. He fared so miserably, that he could scarcely feed his wife and his two children. Once he had no bread any longer and suffered great anxiety, then his wife said to him in the evening in bed: Take the two children tomorrow morning and take them into the great forest, give them the bread we have left, and make a large fire for them and after that go away and leave them alone. The husband did not want to for a long time, but the wife left him no peace, until he finally agreed.

“‘Hansel and Gretel’?” he asked as she returned in a short purple nightgown that matched the color of the quotation. “Why?”

She smiled. “It’s about splitting. Freud studied fairy tales for this. The young child has to split the image of the Good Mother and the Bad Mother. The kid’s tiny brain can’t deal with the Good Mother who gives him the tit and the Bad Mother who is angry when he poops himself. So he makes up two mothers. The witch in the gingerbread house is actually the regular mom. That is where humans get good and evil.”

“OK, but why frame it?” Larry was split between curiosity and horniness at that moment.

“Music is all about splitting. Rhythm is about breaks, notes are about breaks, and noise and sound are about breaks. All my lifework is about splitting things and putting them back together. You ever done X? It can help you see beyond splits. That can take you beyond Love and Fear. That’s my work; besides, it makes sex better.”

Larry, attempting to be cool, just smiled.

The sex was great. Supernova great. Hallucinogenic motherfucking awesome great. Mythic volcano erupting beyond Good and Evil great. She played weird music, and the drugs kicked in, and he had a million weird flashes like screwing atop a pyramid altar, or having sex with hundreds of women and men and fauns, or making love to his ex-wife, or having an erotic frolic with mermaids, or seeing stars explode. At some point they left the flat and walked to Sixth Street and milled among the costumed and the drunk and the horny—or maybe they had gone to a Black Mass in Hell or some mixture of both and the one clear memory was a snapping sound behind his neck and Chandra saying, “Well, Cinderella, your ball is over now.”

The next thing he knew was that he was lying in her narrow bed and was staring at the quotation on her ceiling. It was not the Sunday morning he had been expecting. It turned out to be Monday morning. Chandra had split, and he was famished. He went to his car and dove back to Doublesign. He got there about noon, and he was sure that he didn’t want to face his classes. Every now and again he seemed to see green or yellow lights shimmer at the corners of his vision. Doublesign had two stoplights and one actual apartment building, but Larry lived in a garage apartment belonging to Mrs. Irma Johnson, who also ran the FedEx store. He crawled up the stairs to his apartment, ate three bologna sandwiches, and crashed. Somehow he would make it right.

It was getting dark. He needed to drive home from the home. He would have to call his sister in Florida and tell her, but he couldn’t think of the words. He knew the guilt that filled him was irrational. Momma didn’t have a stroke because he had lied to his boss. He tried calling Chandra. When she answered he hung up and turned his cell phone off. No words for that either.

He didn’t remember the first nightmares. Suddenly it was 6:30 and his alarm was going off and he was scared. His bed was dank with sweat and his stomach too upset and it was Wednesday morning. Frost silvered everything; a front had come in during the night. He couldn’t remember what his lesson plans were. He remembered telling his principal that he was taking some time off for the funeral. Was it Thursday and Friday? Or just Friday? Were his actions too shitty to tell his friends? It was going to be a great day, he could tell.

Someone had told the kids. They kept their heads down. No joking around. Many of the girls made him little cards out of folded notebook paper and colored pencils. The para-professionals told him that they would remember his
Mamacita
in their prayers this Sunday. What was her name? The football coach bought his lunch. Someone left a white rose in a vase on his desk. Students whispered outside of his room.

His cell phone vibrated with messages of consolation. E-mail came from HR, Dr. Simms (the superintendent), the English department of the high school.

He remembered his nightmare that night.

He was sleeping in his childhood home in Amarillo, Texas. He was wearing pajamas, his blue fuzzy pajamas so it would be when he was in junior high, and Momma had been so ill from her hysterectomy. She was calling from her bedroom. “Larry darling, I need you! I need you!”

He ran down the hall. She stood by her bed. Well,
something
stood there in the dark. A column of some thick liquid that kept re-forming itself. It seemed to have tiny feelers. Its mouth was vagina-shaped, near the center of its body. Some of the feelers, near where a human’s hip should be, held onto something, possibly the Cthulhu doll. “Larry, you can’t shut me out. You have to love me.”

He must have been thrashing about on the bed. The dank sheets held him. He was so confused by their wet restraint that he couldn’t tell when he passed from nightmare into the waking world. His room stank. He thought for a moment that he might have shit himself. The alarm clock read 4:32. It was Thursday morning. In theory he was flying to the funeral.

He would have to leave town. Doublesign was small; if he were out and about this weekend, everyone would know. He got up, got dressed, and drove into Austin. He would stay at the Motel 6 near his mother’s nursing home. Maybe if he spent some time with her—serious, focused,
loving
time—it might help her. And he didn’t care how she felt about the damn stuffed toy—it was headed for the trash. He didn’t even turn the sheets back in his hotel room; just lay his dressed sweaty self on top.

His phone woke him at noon.

His mother had passed away. He was horrified at the relief he felt.

She had a prepaid funeral policy with Blackwell Brothers in Amarillo; the home was going to make the call. Did he want to view her body before they arranged for transportation?

With the sick thought that
everything would work out now
he drove off to the home.

“She’s at the end of the hall.”

Music, sort of spacey Muzak, came from the end of the hall. Larry heard one of the old men reading poetry. They probably have to have these little impromptu services all the time. It wouldn’t be like a hospital where the scandal of death had to be hidden.

The poem was ending as he entered:

“The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Yeats’s “The Second Coming” seemed the most inappropriate poem that could possibly uttered at a mother’s funeral, but Larry’s revulsion was held in check by the sight of Chandra playing some sort of electric lyre strumming something complicated—some twelve-tone melody with angular tonalities.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

His mom lay on the bed, dressed in the pants suit she wore when he moved to Austin three years ago. She held the Cthulhu toy like a baby. The old people were shocked by the profanity and began to shuffle out. He was unsure which of the men had been reciting the poem.

“I do volunteer work here on Thursdays,” said Chandra.

“What are you doing?” Larry asked.

“Hey, a little respect:
this
is your mom.”

“That
was
my mom, and where do you go on Monday morning?”

“I work for a living. I tried to wake you up.”

“Why are you here? Why were you with me?”