5. Channel 9

I’m thinking about this book… and the other night when Dad gave it to me. It’s doing my head in. Last Friday if I remember correctly. After a 3-hour reading stint I could no longer take it and shuffled downstairs, chewed up a couple of aspirin and fell down into the groove I’ve carved out for myself on the couch.

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The contrast between the interior of the living-room (dark, cool, silent), and the interior of my skull (bright, hot, raucous), was not lost on me and the shadow of something remotely resembling a slender smile passed over my mouth. Suddenly overcome by a premonition of imminent death, I struggled against the sinking feeling that any minute now a hand would fold over mine, tug me out into the night, lead and feed me into the hungry mouth of a Blackhole where you forever disappear falling down spiralling into the pit of its belly, sucked backwards spinning into its annihilating womb. Never to escape from its tomb.

Boom boom.Many dead.Tonight it could be you.

The Mother of Blackholes.

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In search of distraction I felt around the coffee table for the Universal remote control, sky of my mind turning coalblack, riddled with thoughts descending like a murder of crows inking out light. Thoughts wanting entertaining - like unwanted guests at a wake. Feel of remote against fingers pulled me back into body and the here and now. Fumbled to turn TV on. Flicked through countless channels, finally settling on a black and white movie on Channel 9. Fingered the mute button: wished I could find and punch the mute button in my head. Apparently, it was going to take more than two lousy aspirin to stop the cacophony exploding in the amphitheatre of my skull.

Aimed remote at stereo and the radio came on, playing something… Turned it up. Sang along. Reached under couch and pulled out an upside down Frisbee that held all the makings of a ‘doobidge’ – as Mikey, my bespectacled friend likes to say. Yeah, I thought, that’s the ticket! A big, fat doobidge just might be what the doctor ordered. Paper. Tobacco. Lighter. A small bunch of greenleafflakes. Flame and smoke. Slicked lips and tip of tongue wetting line of gum. Rolling and sticking. Sucking and filling lungs deep and wide. Just like that church song – deep and wide, deep and wide… And it was.

Just what the old doc ordered!

Thoughts – like scared crows - scattered and hid in distant corners.

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A gangster in the movie took a slug in the gut. With his back to a brick wall, he slid melodramatically to the concrete, to his long, drawn-out death.
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The sense Death is closer than ever keeps growing. Creeping nearer.

1. Sad Mr Stevens

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Awake again. No idea what time it is. Clock flashes. Accidentally unplugged it when tripping over it earlier. Didn’t reset it as I can’t be bothered. What’d be the point?

Dark and silent inside. Outside, too, no traffic (not even a barking dog – out there, or in here), so it must be very late. Or very early. Same thing. See, Time can be tricky when it’s dark outside. And I’m beside myself again. Above, actually.

high up

Me-Above
looking down
at Me-Below on bed. Gazing down at shadowy lump sitting hunched over the bright burst of a circle of light punched like a hole in the surrounding darkness, scribbling in the journal. Gone word-fishing.
Not knowing how or when or why I got here.
There.
Now, then.
I’m getting a bite here and there. Words are nibbling.

Hello down there! Could you reach up a hand and help me down please, a little help?

Me-Below, wrapped in blanket, swaddled in night, drowning in a waterfall of words, witnessing. Watersurge more like – coming up fast… a fountain (pen) spraying linked-letters from unknown depths. Words surfacing so fast they’re suffering from the bends. 

Slow down. Calm down. Count down.

999. 998. 997…

Deeeeep breath.

Come down.

Is this what Judy was talking about? Am I travelling astrally? Has spirit separated from flesh and left my body behind? If so, how did I do it? And scarier still, how do I get back in?

Gather thoughts.

Is this what being dead will be like? Floating about like an idea in the ether, waiting to enter the neural-network of a passing-by head?

Sink like a stone. 

Can you feel the silence… 

Damn that dog. Barking again. Oh for a gun – I could shoot it out of my misery. What time is it? The digits 03:49 glow in the dark. I should be fast asleep inhaling sweet dreams not suffocating in clammy crawling humidity thinking how strange it is, the way it envelops you in its sweaty leather glove and grabs hold of Time like a sponge, squeezing each and every second out of it.

Swapped sweating in bed for staring out open bedroom window and playing I Spy.
I spy with my little eye… something beginning with… S.

My next-door neighbor, Mr Stevens. What’s he doing up so late? The damn barking, probably. And why is he standing perfectly still in the middle of his backyard in boxershorts and flipflops? Squinting to I see, I think I make out a Frisbee in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Behind him, a long, skinny shadow stretches across the lawn like a narrow grave: above, a fingernail moon looking like an incomplete question mark hangs over his bowed head.

Now he’s bending an arm, saying a word - (straining to listen)… I can’t… quite… make out… (but guess to be: Ready) - tossing the disc gently into empty space.

A quick glance over shoulder at bed makes sure I’m not in it and dreaming all this. I mean, come on, what’s going on? What’s the story with Mr Stevens thesedays? I suppose that’s the question on everyone’s lips. Who really knows? I sure as hell don’t.

Gossip around town (tunes on the Devil’s Radio) has it that he’s ‘gone off the deep end’ ever since his beautiful young wife of five years just up and hit the road one day last Christmas, without hint or warning, reason or trace. Made like a banana and split, is how Jack put it. Sadder still, she took their one and only child. A pretty blonde-headed girl of four - four and half maybe. The light of her daddy’s life: the apple of his eye.

Stevens’ moving again, walking dazedly towards the spot where the Frisbee lays, bends over with a grunt, spilling a splash of suds on his feet, picks it up, gazes at it dumbly.

A conspicuously quiet couple were the Stevens’, kind of hard to get to know you could say. Kept themselves pretty much to themselves most of the time. Now that he’s alone, he keeps pretty much to himself all of the time, practically a recluse. Works from home, it’s whispered. Internet related activities, some voices say: drug-running, others counter. There’s a lot of traffic at his door, I suppose - he gets all his groceries and beer and videos and pizzas delivered. He used to be a manager in some bank down the mall. He used to be a husband and a father. I wonder if he knows who he is now.

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Look: He’s putting the bottle down, throwing the plastic saucer again. Soft. Low. Its sailing steady on the still night air… soaring… 10, 12, 14 feet… hitting the grass like a pebble on water… skipping three times. Coming to a halt.

‘Great catch!’ he calls aloud, clapping with a delighted and approving smile.

What’s that? Run that by me again. A sad, strange idea bubbles up and surfaces while a shuddery feeling like a feather-duster brushes my insides as I watch him retrace his steps.

‘Who’s favorite little girl are you?’ he seems to be asking the Frisbee. ‘Daddy’s. Yes, that’s right. And who loves you the most in the whole wide world?’ He smiles and nods his head. ‘Yes. Daddy does. Daddy loves his little girl so very much.’

A neurological pathway lights up, drawing a line that connects my idea to my intuition to what I’ve just seen and heard and Understanding, like a jet, comes in to land. I understand now. Take a nauseating turn for the worse and feel so bad for him. So very sad. Poor sod. He’s playing make-believe, the way a child does, making out as if it’s not today but another, a happier one from the recent past: his little girl on the lawn with him, tossing the Frisbee back and forth, laughing and clapping and being silly. Just like a children’s game.

On knees now. Shoulders rising and falling, head slumping, face falling into cradled hands. Skin on back slides up and down ribcage.

Can’t hear him but I know he’s crying. A shiver runs through me, leaving a trail of deeper feelings: helplessness, horrible hopelessness. But are those my feelings, or am I somehow picking up on his, like a radio picking up soundwaves?

As though receiving orders from outer space, my hands go into motion, tear a page from the back of this book, and on it print ten simple words in purple magic-marker. Folding it quickly into an airplane, my right hand pushes the window open wider. My left, taking care to get the aim right, like a master darts player propels it

… and just look at her go…

                                        on a mission to deliver a spur of the moment message that I hope will help Sad Mr Stevens as it has me in recent times:

TO WEEP IS TO MAKE LESS THE DEPTH OF GRIEF.

Shit!

Aim’s a little off. The plane is going to hit him square on the back of his conk…

but no… wait - 
                      a gust of breeze picks it up, steers it with an invisible hand over the fence and – plonk - into next yard’s swimming pool. Stevens doesn’t notice a thing. I go to make another, but stop before I start. It was a spontaneous action, an off-the-cuff gesture. Doing it again, I feel, somehow, wouldn’t be sincere.

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Try to sleep now… let mind wander…

Wonder if the plane will eventually become sodden and sink to the bottom of the pool, ink trailing behind like purple smoke. And what if it somehow survived and Old Ms Izzard (a skinny, 70-year old spinster who used to be my kindergarten teacher and taught me how to remember the colors of the rainbow in the correct order) found it there in the morning – what would she make of those words?