1935

     It was 1982 and I was twelve years old when the year 1935 began to push slowly up, through the floor of our home. It was first felt as a dusty, tired silence. It was the silence, which settles in the corners of the homes of the elderly.

Invisible grey piles of the echoes from ticking clocks.

1935 passed slowly up through the legs of our cheap furniture, leaving clawed feet and ornate scrollwork, easily missed in passing.

It seeped into picture frames, leaching colors and lending a sepia cast to the chemical vibrancy of the computer age.

It left behind dark fedoras and flowered hats. Photos from the beach or that day at the lake became seas of black and white faces, smiling from dance floors long buried and broken.

     Outside our house, 1982 pressed close. Forty-seven years of progress and reality surrounded us.

Solid, shallow and unconcerned about the potential for ages past to reassert themselves.

But once in a while, if the late-day sun was just so, I could see thin lace curtains, like the ones which haunted our windows, being exhaled into the evening air, from the homes of neighbors. Or sometimes, while passing their opens doors, could hear the sound of a record player needle skipping, buried within the audio litter of an Atari game.

The massive console television, which squatted in the corner of our own living room, would often trade its heavy screen for a dimly lit window and an endless array of layered frequencies. Tin colored voices drifted through the air.

Eddie Cantor, The Happiness Boys and the Fleischman’s Yeast Hour were broadcasting, muffled and thin, through the heavy decades.

    Standing by a window, on carpet, which creaked, I often looked out at the houses nearby and wondered what years might be pressing up through their floors. But that wasn’t a question a twelve year old could ask.

Or maybe it was a question only a twelve year old could. Either way, I never did.

We moved and the presence of 1935 was left behind and never mentioned, but not forgotten.

In the many homes that followed I would often stand listening, or watching the picture frames, for any signs that whatever year it was, it was just the surface.

November

She'd come there, to that forlorn spot, once a year, for the twenty since he'd been lowered beneath that tree, not then planted, and whatever message drove him up, for a shutters blink, broke her mind and her camera, which never worked again.

An ordinary man stands in front of an ordinary house.
He is still in the autumn afternoon.
Except for a calloused thumb, which worries the shaft of a long brass key, in his long leathered palm.
As a child he’d stood here, with the rumors of this house flickering behind his eyes.
Haunted. Abandoned. The lair of cannibals.
And then he’d found the key, propelled by a dare, beneath the cannibal’s doormat.
On that night the porch-lights guttered as the lightning threatened, and he’d run home faster than the wind, which had brought the following the storm.

Twelve springs later, when childhood fears were put to bed by logic and bureaucracy had caged his questions, he’d used the key.
He was 22.




All these years later, as he watches the dusk gather itself in the right angles of the house, he can remember that moment as if it were seconds ago.
The heavy front door opened silently.
A waft of lemon verbena and time.
Mahogany floorboards the length of the hall, glowing with polish and…
Was it music from an old Victrola?
His weight on the lintel.

His first time in the house, his second step along what should have been an entry- hall, had landed on the rough stonework of a narrow lane, deep in the heart of a bleak, Russian farming town.
When his ravings had subsided he’d learned that he was six years older, with no personal effects, but for a long brass key.
Hospitals, begging, nights beneath hedgerows, trains and the cramped lower decks of ocean going vessels had brought him home eight years after the key had turned.
Fear and fatigue should have razed all interest in the house, should have buried every question.
And yet…

Each time, time after time, he has returned to the same spot, in which he now considers.
At times he is older by minutes and at others by years.
The number of his steps along the hallway varies, before he inevitably steps on the stone, or dirt or dead brown leaves of someplace else, sometimes near and sometimes half the world away.
And always is the loss of time and possessions, except the key.
As what had been his life fades with lost years, he has gathered a new one, filled with precautions, habits and measures. And at its’ heart is this house.
Always later than sooner, he returns to his heart.

So now he stands in the cobalt air, as the porch-lights come to life.
His mental fingers are moving memories, like abacus beads, and adding up pieces of time. In his heart and mind he wears the freshly washed age of twenty- seven years.
But the calendars tell him it is 1956 and that forty-four years have passed since his first glimpse of the hallway.
He is sixty-six years old by all measures but his own.

He is moving towards the porch.
He is wondering if his next steps inside the house will carry his years beyond the limits of his body.
What then?
He is smiling as he reaches for the door.
Yes, he sighs to himself, what then?

He steps across the threshold.
One, two, three, four…
And the door closes softly behind him.

In the front row, second from the right, is Sister Shin.
The Yongsan Catholic Seminary observes morning prayers from 7 am to 8am.
It is 8:25am and Sister Shin is pregnant.
She is also an agnostic, resting in routine.
Her smile is not for the camera.
In the back row, first on the right, is Sister Gi.
Sister Gi joined the convent to escape what he is, but couldn’t escape Sister Shin.
It is 1963 and they offer identical smiles, to a mechanical eye, as a metaphor for a moment which they they can feel flashing bright and fading.
Ahead of them... there be monsters.

The little girls fingers twine and untwine.
The photographer moves things on the surface of the camera and smiles instructions at her.
She always does what grown-ups tell her to do.
But today she’ll be extra good, because it’s her birthday photograph.
She wants only for father and mother to tell her how pretty she looks.
Amelia King will soon be six years old. It is 1933, or maybe ’34, but she can’t remember.

Mr. Arlo fondles his camera, getting her to smile more.
In just a moment he will take her photograph.
But her dolly has begun to whisper again.
Amelias’ eyes slide towards the plastic infant.
Mr. Arlo clucks softly and she is facing him again, with a big bright smile and her chin held high.
Twine and untwine.
The doll is speaking with more urgency, even though it’s against the rules.
One of it’s eyelids is frozen half open, in a conspiratorial expression.
Twine, pinch and untwine.

Mr. Arlos’ long fingers freeze in place over knobs and buttons.

The doll is speaking louder now.
Why doesn’t Mr. Arlo hear her and tell her to stop?
Amelia is afraid that the doll will move.
The doll knows more about Amelias’ father and his factory than she does. It knows what a factory is and what high, grey walls, which block the sun out, look like.
Amelia has never seen a smokestack, a transmission gear or a boiler.
She doesn’t understand what a catwalk is, or anything else her dolly says for the remaining unbearable seconds.

Snick, pop, flash, crackle and the blackened bulb cools.

“Mr. Arlo, what does mangled mean?”
His smile slips, hung on a hook and waiting.
“And what’s an incinerator?”

Pressed low and modern between an endless sky and high desert emptiness, are the Ramada “Twin” Inns.

Five miles to the west, El Paso Texas shimmers across the hard-pack of west Texas and thirsts for the well watered patrons of the inns.

Arleen Daley is about to take a dip, but a man with a camera has called her beautiful and asked her to wave.

 Strong sunlight freezes the motion onto film.

One hour later, the photographer will head west on highway 62, the last image of Mrs. Daley waiting within his Kodak.

Arleen will drive east onto highway 180, a Styrofoam cup of Sanka, from the Inns 24 hour coffee shop, as her final companion.

A year down the road, in 1972, Arleens’ husband will enter the Ramadas’ new gift shop and see his missing wife.

The photographer had worked for Ramada.

Arleens’ image waves to passers by from the postcard rack, beside desert sunsets, above aerial shots of El Paso and from beside close-ups of Texas wildlife.

Robert Daley will buy the postcard and drift to the pool.

He will sit in the chair where a year before the “person of interest” had sat reading Life magazine.

He’ll look to where his wife had stood, waving goodbye, and will wait till the shadows match the photo.

When the scene is set and everything is the same, her absence will invert itself within him and he’ll feel, for a moment, like she’s right over there.

It was during his weekly Thursday luncheon, with Doctors H. and J., when Sir Edmund Suffer suddenly realized his mounting distaste for the company of other humans.
“ Phaw”, he blurted, through a mouthful of garlic potatoes.
The good doctors lowered their daily newspapers simultaneously.
Dr. H. raised his right eyebrow slightly.
Dr. J. raised his left.
Sir Edmund responded to the eyebrows with a forkful of Beef Wellington each.
“I say…”, exclaimed Dr. H.
“Really old man”, spluttered Dr. J.
“Pppphhhlllbbtt”, Sir Edmund spat, delivering his most fervent raspberry to date.
Sir Edmunds exit was abrupt.
The doctors were more than a little flustered.
Dr. H. retrieved his monocle from a bowl of lobster bisque and issued a loud “harrumph”.
Dr. J. declared the entire event indecent and publicly distasteful.

The following Thursday came and went, as did the next and the one after that as well, with nary a sign of Sir Edmund Suffer. Inquires were discreetly made, by acquaintances at the club, with no results.
Still more discreet, were efforts to contact Mrs. Suffer, regarding her husbands behavior.
The good doctors raised all four eyebrows in unison upon receiving a telegram, some weeks later.
“Mrs. Suffer no longer in residence 112 Bow truckle Lane stop Last seen fleeing premises in dressing gown and with a modicum of luggage stop Sir Edmund witnessed on front stoop hurling liquor bottles and live chickens stop Fear the worst stop”

Yet another Thursday came and went with no signs of Sir Edmund. He did not return to the prestigious Shropshire Men’s Club, nor to any of his other usual haunts.
His absence was noted at the Foundation for Block and Tackle Research, at the Friends of Asians Association meetings and the Metropolitan Museum of Unusual Haberdashery, as well.
It became the consensus that Sir Edmund Suffer was wandering the Americas dressed in women’s clothing.
The truth of Sir Edmund was somewhat less scandalous, yet more… irrational. Having shunned the company of humans entirely, he had spent the recent weeks drinking cherry beneath his billiard table and plotting.
Whether it was from the cherry, or the sub-billiard and cramped confines, or Sir Edmunds refusal to eat anything other than blood pudding, he passed into unconsciousness on a Friday morning.
While in this state, he had a vision in which he cavorted across a shallow pool, hand in hand, with and ambulatory pickle.
A sentient vegetable graced with a singular and disarming disposition.
Monday morning arrived and brought with it several local barristers, with concerns about Sir Edmunds considerable holdings.
They found his home deserted.
The only evidence they found of the man himself was a brief list, written in his own hand, on the floor of the upstairs lavatory.
It read: “No.1 – Liquidate all holdings. No.2- Locate scientist with flexible moral fiber and love of drink. No. 3- Purchase farm land.”

One likes to think, whatever his actual plans and their outcome, that Sir Edmund Suffer found happiness, with a pickle of some sort.

For the third time, in two long years, a road ravaged Ford Rambler wagon grinds it’s way along highway 89, outside Prescott Arizona. It will turn right, off the highway, onto an unmarked track, before reaching the branch to Oak Creek Canyon.
Just after sunset the Ford rolls to a halt.
A lanky shadow-figure removes its’ straw hat and separates itself from the car.
Save for the hunched, blasted shed, built by the shadows own two hands, near a large boulder, there is nothing but sand, stone and tortured scrub for five miles in every direction.
Still… Abram Barlow will wait until the deep night to move the device.
It is May 8th, 1967 and in the morning Abram will vanish again beneath the smooth surface of polite society and the anonymity of the masses.
But for the moment he is unique.
He is redeemed.
He is turning his back on wealth, on fame and on bookish immortality.
He is placing a heavy metal crate in a shallow grave.
He caresses a valve, on the side of the dark rectangle, and there’s the sound of air, like a tired sigh.
From deep within the box comes a muffled click and the desert silence resettles its’ head beneath its’ black wing.
Enshrouded and buried, the box will sleep.
Abram places a carefully rusted padlock on the door.
He cleans black-rimmed glasses on a crisp, white shirt; knocks sand from the tops of black leather shoes.
The first rumor of daylight appears above the bluffs.
Abram replaces the straw cowboy hat over his close-cropped hair.
He steps into the Rambler and into null history.

Each year, late in the fall, lake Michigan turns it’s gunmetal face towards Milwaukee and attempts to kill the city.

The year is 1963 and a shapeless, dreamless man takes refuge in the orange warmth of the new Schiltz Guest Hall.

He works for Pabst.

His life revolves around a certain lever, on a certain machine, beneath an endlessly turning flywheel.

As the wind outside hisses threats and throws ice, the man is thinking that this year the lake will succeed.

He drinks from the new brown bottle.

Winter thunder falls from somewhere above the 9th ward.

The trophy hunter chandeliers dim, flicker and then flare.

Antler shadows darken the hall and every face but his turns to the windows as the wind screams them loose.

The man is watching the dark cage of shadows and instead sees levers all around him.

It is 11am and he is late for work.

He drinks again and sweats.

Remodeling in progress

After much nothing and and more than a little shrugging, I believe I finally know what to do with venue. New content is on the way.