Celestial Inventories (11 page)

There is no real comfort for the victims. I try not to let it get me down, but I wish they
’d just leave us to the air and sunlight. I do appreciate the sunlight now, far beyond anything I felt
before.

As the darkness rises out of the streets I steel myself. I sense the vermin rise with the dark, the roaches and the rats still trying to figure out what they can do with me and my altered head. Am I now more edible? I do not wish to know.

Our government has condemned these acts of terrorism, pledged to use troops as needed, and curtailed the rights of all its citizens for their own protection.

I see that one of my kind is on the television screen. I keep the television on all the time now, not because I’m anxious about the terrorists (what more could they do to me?), but for moments like this, when one of us appears before the cameras. I’m amused by the way the networks have placed their microphones, hanging at all angles around him? her? I turn up the volume.

“Why, there’s no question the government itself is behind these attacks. Open your eyes, unclog your ears! Do you need your heads exploded before your senses will perceive the truth? Only the government has the resources to come up with such an advanced technological terrorism! This is surely the first of many experiments in surreal crowd manipulation!”

He’s obviously insane. Wouldn’t you be, undergoing such a traumatic change? It’s simply an absurd response to an absurd world. But these are the times we live in. People are willing to believe any damn thing, because people feel, perhaps rightly, that nothing and no one can be trusted. Particularly the government which is supposed to serve at our will.

A few months ago a team consisting of a doctor, a social worker, and two police officers showed up at my door. They were ready to take me directly to a support group, they said. “It’s for your own good,” the doctor reassured me. “I understand how you feel. I’ve recently received special training in your problem.”

Countless public service announcements have been made concerning my special “problem.” Talk shows and news specials have covered the topic ad nauseum. Books have been written. Movies have been rushed into production. A twenty-four-hour hotline has been established to report, and support, new victims.

No one knows anything, really. The terrorists, if they do exist, have made no demands. There are ten thousand suspects, someone said. Someone else said a million, maybe more. A few people have been arrested, but for “informational purposes only.” Whatever that means. The complete lack of information has become its own nihilistic art form.

No one likes looking into our new “faces.” They don’t know where to look.

Now they have that stupid political science professor on the screen. Why do they keep interviewing him? If anyone could use a healthy head explosion it would be him. “Perhaps these victims deserved their fate. Anyone who is a passive supporter of a corrupt government is hardly innocent of blame.” People have demanded his firing or resignation. A minority group has gathered a defense, preaching academic freedom. The ACLU is involved.

I don’t think I deserve this, at least no more than anyone else. But when I think about how I was as a father, how I was as a husband, I can’t really say that I deserve better. In a sense, I suppose, I’m lucky. And I don’t mean just because I’m alive, or that without an artistic bone in my body I became art. Even though that
is
a helluva thing.

I’m lucky because something finally happened to me. Something life-shattering finally has occurred.

I fall asleep in front of the TV as I do almost every night. I wake up with the sun coming through the window again, warming my leaves. There is a comfort in the sameness of this routine—it reminds me of the days before my head exploded, when I was a father, a husband.

This morning I think about what I want to do for my next step. I start by cleaning the apartment, paying particular attention to the bathroom where this change occurred. I find bits of blasted tooth in one corner by the sink. I stick them inside a padded envelope in a bottom drawer beneath my old jeans.

I spend most of the morning gazing at myself in the mirror. I believe that wide, convoluted blossom on the left-hand side, the one that resembles a bit of cauliflower, was once my cerebellum. The cerebrum, I think, forms the four leaf-like clumps around it. My medulla oblongata stands flush and proud near the centre of the new structure. And bits of spinal cord curl like snails around a pale stalk of esophagus.

This afternoon I sit at the open window, letting the sun warm my narrow spiral of temporal lobe, a passing breeze setting these other delicate parts into gentle, humming vibration. I, what’s the word,
vegetate
? My life has changed, I think, but ultimately it has changed very little.

Friday, 10 AM

For you the world has always been shaky and hand-held. Focus, more often than not, is problematic. You’ve never understood how people can pick the most important thing out of a selection of too many.

Everything begs for your attention. Every object contains its own mating call. That peculiar rock, shaped like a bell. That half-dead tree miming its final fall. The sun, always present and hurtful, and always too low. The severe network of rips up and down the hillside, erosion from the recent torrential rains. Unidentifiable twists of rusted metal lying alongside the cracked and weathered road. And just ahead of you, in the back of that brown 1974 Buick Estate station wagon, the longest and heaviest station wagon ever made, sit the three children from Hell, illegally without seat belts, the Devil’s own hounds, who have poked fun and made faces at you throughout the past thirty miles. But because the trucking company that owns you and your Peterbilt insists on a highly unlikely level of courtesy, their corporate phone number emblazoned all over your vehicle, demanding that they be contacted regarding any lapse in said please-let-me-kiss-your-ass civility, you have smiled at these brats until your lips have started cracking.

You have grown to hate the driver of that monstrosity, not only because of his ineffectiveness as a parent, but because he is irresponsible enough to own and drive such a vehicle, a dinosaur which should have been outlawed years ago. Everything in life has become so crowded, but the highways most of all. You can feel your throat, your chest, tighten.
How does he keep that thing even alive?
you wonder, convinced there must be blood and human body parts involved.

You cannot believe things were always this bad. You’re convinced that once upon a time cars were built better, roads were built better, people were built better. What you see today are networks of stupidity. You are forced to take your big rig over narrow mountain roads not much better than cattle trails. The state doesn’t know how to take care of the roads anymore. Up on the embankment above you can see the bright yellow graders and bulldozers making repairs that should have been done years ago. And the way they’re being driven, their wild swings sending gravel and stones tumbling onto the road below, you expect to see one of those huge steel beasties somersault down the slope any second now.

No wonder you’re shaky. “Jittery!” you shout, punching the roof of the cab. As in
jitterbug
, as in your nerves dancing, wrapping around your throat until you can hardly breathe. “Jitter jitter jitter!” you shout, punctuating each word with a roof punch. As if in response the world takes a quick turn to the left, and you overcompensate, your right wheels throwing gravel into a row of windshields behind you. A scream of horns and you give a barking horn right back at them. Not your fault, you did nothing wrong. Guys like that Buick, they have no right to be on the road.

Red highlights are a razor blade across the eyeball. You scream louder than the pain warrants, but you’ve found that sometimes it feels good just to scream. You reach into the passenger seat for your pills, the cab jerks after hitting god-knows-what, and your hand hits your iPod, knocking it loose of its cord. The player hits the floorboard and you fear the worst. You barely notice the abrupt stop of music—lately everything is just so much noise.

“Dammit!” you slap the horn just for emphasis. Somewhere back in the line of cars someone answers with an annoyed horn of their own, and you seriously consider slamming on the brakes just to see who back there is paying attention.

You fumble with the pill bottle and snap the cap, get a green one, a yellow, and a red. The yellow is for wimps and cowards, but you swallow it anyway, thinking the red and green will cancel it out. You don’t remember, exactly, what any of these pills do, but you know they do the trick, and tricks are what you need right now with so many assholes out on the road.

“They just level things out,” is what you told Gena. “Like taking a plane to a rough board.
Smooth
.” Which is as much poetry as you can stand. Gena always wants poetry, which means she likes being lied to.

“Smooth!” you shout, punching roof, punching windshield, and seeing with a smile that you made a little crack. You’ll tell them back at the office that you spit up a rock.

Then the Buick wagon slows down and you have to slam those brakes after all. “Goddammit!” You know he did it just to get to you, thinking that he owns the road. Horns all around you screaming like it was the end of the world. Red light stabbing your eyes again. So you just jerk the wheel hard right to make them all stop, front end going right into that eroded embankment. But the back end gets away from you, swings wide across the road, jerking the cab out of the bank, turning you around with it, dragging you, so that now you’re looking back down the highway behind you, the windshields bright and staring like a feast of insects, and your truck keeps spinning, so that you can hear the crunch and grind and smash of it all, but you can’t see anything that you’re hitting. And that’s when you see the entire embankment give way, and the cars disappearing all around you as if they had been hallucinations, and now at last you’re waking up.

Friday, 10:20 AM

Yellow blast of light and sound. Skies of dirt and stone. Random, brightly-painted metal, glass, bits and parts passing impossibly one through another. The backwards screaming thunder of the world’s pain.

Friday, 1 PM

At last you climb over the edge of the world. The torn rim of it digs into your abdomen as you pull yourself onto the scattered roadbed. You hear crying, a release of steam, and overhead: voices, equipment.

You pull yourself to your feet. The vehicles in front of you lie half-buried in rock spill that extends in ridges up over the edge of the slopes.

“It’s going to take some time!” you hear above your head. A voice electrically amplified. “Everything’s too unstable! We’ll cut a new path going down, shoring as we go, and pull you up that!” You fight the sun in order to raise your eyes high. Against the glare, leaning over the edge, stands a man in a construction helmet, a shadow growth from his face as if his mouth exploded: an electric megaphone. “I said it’s
too windy
to bring a helicopter up here! Stay away from the edges! You, sir!” You think maybe he is pointing at you. “Stay away from the edge!”

Angry, stubborn, but you try to do what he says. Your legs don’t seem to be working too well. But nothing ahead of you except a bunch of old wrecks. You turn back around, walk closer to where you climbed up from. The man’
s electric shouting is a bee in your ear and you wave it away. You look out over the edge. The road is gone. You keep looking, out to where the road wrapped around the bend in the mountain, and there is the bend, or at least the jittered margins of it. But there is no road. There is nothing between here and there but sky.

You try to look down into the hole, but you can’t make yourself. You start walking toward all those old wrecks covered in broken stone and great arms of sand. The man’s voice stops buzzing your ear.

Maybe you’ll just walk back down the road. You’ll walk back down this road all the way to Denver. If you see anybody else, you’ll suggest that they do the same. You wonder why the man with the electric megaphone didn’t suggest something like that. He didn’t know what he was talking about. He was just trying to cover his ass. These stupid people. They didn’t even know enough to walk away, to walk on down the road.

Then you see it: the jagged edge on the other side. The big empty. And between the two big nothings this flimsy shelf you’re standing on, with these old wrecks, and with whoever is inside these old wrecks.

Friday, 1:15 PM

1985 Mk V Mini, Dark Blue (restored)

The front end is squeezed like a giant juice box for its last drops. Large stones, a couple of boulders, gather there. You can’t stop staring at them. One looks like a dog. Another looks like a giant grey bird, landed and now feeding on the car.

The torn metal prevents you from getting all the way into the passenger seat, but by standing on the shoulders of the boulder dog you can lean through one of the windows.

You shove your jittery hands inside to check the female driver’s pulse. Your palsied fingers flail inexpertly at her wrist.

“I’m sorry. Did that hurt? I’m so sorry. I’m just stupid about this.”

Finally you detect a beat, unless it’s some other vibration, the ground shifting under the roadbed. Beside your feet the gravel moves. You hold your breath.

“I guess it’s holding my feet,” she says. You jump, pull your hands back. She groans. Her head rotates against the rest, staring at you, small pupils swimming in twin pools of milk. “It’s like a tight embrace, a hug, you know? If my ex-husband had held me like this we’d still be together.”

She grins, then, her upper lip split, starting to bleed again.

“Try to stay calm,” you say, automatically, even though she is perfectly calm.

“I won’t be a problem,” she says, “I promise. I know you don’t want a hysterical woman on your hands, right? Well, despite all the things Frank used to say about me, I’m not hysterical.”

She grins again, bloody drool slipping down her chin.

“You’re okay. Help will be here soon. Did you hear the announcement? I can hear them up there working. They know what they’re doing—they’ll be here soon.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure. A lot of people hurt?”

“A few,” you say, although you have no idea.

“Anyone dead?”

You shrug. But it embarrasses you, makes you feel stupid. You don’t know if she can even see you shrug. “A couple that I’m sure of,” you lie.

“But a few more you’re kind of sure of?”

You look at her head, the blood caked there. “I don’t really know.”

“Right. You never can tell.”

She sighs, closes her eyes, but her chest continues to rise and fall in ragged rhythm. You keep one hand on her arm, but you can no longer look at her. Instead you look out beyond the car: mist floating above the vehicles, and above that the rescuers up on the ridge, doing nothing as far as you can tell.

Your attention swings back. She sits perfectly still. Your fingers probe her wrist, shaking. You lean over with your left ear just above her nostrils. You let go of her wrist. You back out of the car.

A man’s voice, yelling. You can’t tell if it’s pain, anger, or urgency.

Panic fills yours throat. You quickly glance over the wrecked vehicles in a desperate, manic inventory, searching for the big brown Buick station wagon with the three kids in the back. The heaviest, longest station wagon ever made. It is impossible to miss. It really stands out in a crowd.

You can find no sign of it.

Friday, 1:40 PM

Honda C100 Cub Motorcycle (year unknown)

The yelling continues, animal-like growls, punctuated by barks and quite human curses. Turning in that direction—a distant form, a highly animated stick figure, throwing its arms up and around with each shout, as if exercising, exorcising demons, but the legs are strangely still, fixed in place, glued to its display stand.

Closer, passing dented, colourful metal, the voice screaming, scattered, shattered rock on each side, faster, spurred on by the increasing volume of the scream, the torn world passing, passing, until at last face-to-face with this noisy animal, upright, his backside wedged against the unhappy front grille of the green pickup. Face filling your eyes, mouth stretched, spitting anger.

“Dammit it to Hell get me outta here ain’t no sonovabitch gonna lend a feller a hand, damn!” the face caterwaulers on. Following the torso, the bloodied leg, down into the rock, the broken world, surrounding the legs, and here and there bits of the shattered motorcycle, the yellow frame swallowed up, pulled under, when the world exploded and the sky came down.
“Damn! Ain’t you gonna
do
something?! This goddamn mountain done half swallered my leg! Why don’t you do something you goddamn stupid son of a bitch!”

Arms raised to the heavens now, screaming a prayer of rage. Somewhere back in the line of broken vehicles a horn sounds in agreement or complaint, so hard to tell in this nervous jumble of metal and stone discards, and then another, and another, punctuated by the repetitive phrase “Shut up! Can’t you shut up?” making their meaning clear.

The exposed, broken figure, though still compelled to stay upright, lapses into silence then, tears streaming down his face, “Ain’t nobody care for a feller in pain, a feller what got its leg caught like a rabbit in a steel trap, feeling bad enough he’d cut his own leg off if he . . .” He looks up, the brilliant whites of his eyes blazing through dirt and black grease. “Say, you ain’t got a saw, now, do you? Hacksaw’ll do. Hell, even a knife. Slide took me right off my bike, ate the bike and left me standin’ here, tight against this old truck, now every time some body or some thing moves, anywhere on this god-blessed
earth
, that fallen mountain chews a little more into that leg, like now it’s got its last meal, and it’s gonna hang on to it for awhile, chew on it, you know? But I’ve got a knack for doing what needs doing, so you get me that saw, and I’ll get to doing. We gotta deal? Oh, I’ll do it, you betcher. Ask the folks in the truck, they know me, they’re neighbours a mine. We’re all up here together, for the grannie’s birthday picnic.”

You climb over the hood of the green truck to get to the inside, leaving behind the desperate figure punching the air with its screams and curses. He makes you embarrassed for yourself.

Friday, 1:50 PM

1980 Ford F-100 Army Green Pickup Truck

The old woman behind the steering wheel lies slumped against the driver’s side window, a dark brown smear gluing her dirty grey hair to the glass. Her tongue protrudes slightly between almost nonexistent lips.

Three women in their early twenties lie in the truck bed, covered with blankets and propped up on pillows. They murmur to one another constantly, adding emphasis to their monologues with slightly louder, clearer statements. They appear dazed, confused, but largely unhurt. Scattered rock debris covers the blankets, with a few larger stones piled up behind the tail gate.