29 Apr Some Day, I Will Find It

“What shall I love if not the enigma?”
―Giorgio de Chirico

Part One

The yellowed scrap might once have been printer paper, the cheap kind you pay five dollars for in some overly bright big-box palace of soulless depravity. I halted, stooped, and plucked it from the ground.

Where is this?

Three words, scrawled in thickly black ink, as if from some old fountain pen.

I squinted in the dim light, but could not determine whether the message had been lost hours or years ago. Holding it up to my nose, I sniffed―grimaced at a briny reek akin to battery acid, or something dead white glaring from a jar of cloudy formaldehyde.

Bad enough my hands still trembled from the medication, though I’d been off it for a month. Now this…whatever it was. Already the crazed wheels of obsession whirled in my mind. “Don’t sink,” I told myself. “Let it go.”

Swallowing hard, I crumpled the scrap and fed it to the wind.

Some bitter residue soured my tongue, but I ignored it. Probably another of Dr. Wagner’s “phantoms,” an echo of last year’s gray vacation in Room 310 beneath the starling-scratched eaves.

I wondered whether I could ever forgive myself for what I’d done to Emily.

The goddamned wind shocked a willow looming over the path, scoured my face with ice pellets. Something skittered past my boot―wedged itself between a frosty twig and a stone. I crouched to retrieve it until I realized the crumpled message had followed me, its inky question mark isolated by a crease. Don’t sink…let it go….

Wagner’s mantra, or chant, against all melancholy, anguish, and black spiders of paranoia. “You’re much too hard on yourself,” he’d told me with grating buoyancy. “Can’t you see that? You’re out of the clinic, but still tormenting yourself for something we both know never happened.”

Oh yes it did. I was there. Saw her terror, her pretty face in that lightless place―

“Don’t sink!” I yelled.

Fuck. Hope no one heard that―get me sent back to the House of Despair.

I would not cry, either. Her name surged through me…cold creeping horror as if the trees had eyes.

Quickening my step helped silence the urge to rhyme (face place space), and I headed for Drake’s neon Heineken sign glowing green through branches clawing empty air.

My boot crunched ice and slid left―I toppled, thrusting out a hand to break the fall.

The impact sledgehammered my shoulder, palm grinding jagged ice and leaves like parchment.

After a few seconds, I sat straight, breath gushing white into the gloom. Nothing broken…lucky break, ha-fucking-ha.

I peeled a leaf from my palm, and saw I held another paper scrap.

Night’s gusty invasion webbed the thing in shifting shadow, more snow on the way. Hands stinging, I stood and moved on.

Finally, the path opened onto the sidewalk. Pausing, I brushed pine needles and dirty snow from my jeans and jacket, lumbered toward a streetlight arcing over the bus stop. I must have looked like some tweaking twit trying to decipher a grocery list.

You deserve it.

I tossed the message and it drifted along the sidewalk. Nothing. It was nothing.

Time for a drink.

For Emily.

Part Two

A hushed room; institutional bed…her black hair adorned with fish bones stolen from dinner…green buttons threaded there too, so when the others come looking…looking for things in the night, they’ll recognize her…white as the moon, delicate hand clutching spikes swiped from the maintenance room―one for each limb…jasmine aura a haunt of misery…rain ticking the window…each peck a dead star spat from oblivion…her awful cry, hearing the magnitude of her exile…lavender lips whispering how did this happen―how―take me back how how how how how how how….

She doesn’t know where she is, doctor. Why don’t you believe that?

You’re a very sick man…these sessions aren’t helping the obsessive behavior―don’t sink, let it go…torturing yourself―you deserve better.

No. No. She ran out of her room. She’s in the attic. Right now. TALK to her! Look. Enough. Just go back to your room. Try to sleep.

Part Three

Drake’s was a letdown, but it beat the piss out of trudging through cold darkness back to the apartment. There, a relentless subsonic drone stalked me like some invisible machine, ever since…well. Worse, every time I ran water its hissing rush carried Emily’s voice. When I wanted to hear Eclectopia or World Cafe on the radio, I must be vigilant as hell to squelch any intruding static, for white noise too is a carrier. Jesus Christ, the stuff I heard whispered…things in the night keep looking…things…my luminous…music in trees in…black snow and…bones of home…

That’s what it sounds like to me. As if something’s tapping Emily’s dreams, or nightmares. I write down everything I hear.

It’s real. Fuck what doctor Wagner says.

It’s real. As real as my love for Emily. She’ll start saying the right things, and tell me our love is infinite. I just know it. As soon as I find the proper frequency, or some other way to communicate. She has that kind of mind, churning with energy. A “sender.” I learned a lot at Duke, working with Hansen. When I find out where Wagner (“former” CIA mind-control monster) and his spooky pals in defense intelligence stashed her, I will rain unholy hell onto them.

A real ego-freak, that Wagner. When I was locked up in the House of Despair (Willow Acres to all you stark-raving-sane types), I boosted someone’s laptop from the employee lounge and spent all of 10 minutes finding the shit on Herr Wagner. Youngest German genius, slicing brains and freezing alive old and young alike at Ye Olde Dachau Inn. Pushing 90 now, and barely a limp! Those merciless gray eyes. I wonder how long it took CIA linguists to neutralize the accent.

Not drunk enough (ever since the heavy meds my alcohol tolerance is amazing, for what that’s worth), and tired of catching weird looks from a few people at the bar, I ended up in my place after one ayem. Weepy and afraid of even being alive; the lacerating enigma of Emily turning in my mind like a dark galaxy.

I opened a bottle of Mata Hari absinthe, and took a few hits. The dark galaxy fizzed green.

My one loyal friend might be awake, so I called him. “Martin can’t come to the phone right now,”

said his answering-deal, “he’s too busy not earning out. You know what to do…” Beeep.

“Marty, it’s me. Pick up, please. You have seven lucky seconds… Like to talk to you―duh. You now have none seconds. Call me.”

And that was that.

My other so-called friends had demonstrated their social integrity by clicking the Can’t-Have-My- Hipster-Cred-Menaced-By-Appearing-In-Public-With-Emotionally-Disturbed-Acquaintances option. So I read a lot, watched too many movies, and avoided thinking about having to find a job when my benefits ran out in eight months.

I snatched an old Cure cassette―Pornography―from my rack, and slotted it into the deck. The cassette slid only part way, and when I yanked it out a yellowed scrap of paper followed, flitted to the carpet like a jaundiced butterfly. “The fuck…” I said, probably.

Rising dread chilled me, and I immediately forced myself to read the thing.

Found a way back in. 10:10. 11:11. 12:12. 1:11. 2:22. 3:33. 4:44. 5:55. Times to watch. Others might have followed.

Part Four

After that message, I killed about half the Mata Hari. I had to sleep, but the old spiders of paranoia pricked my mind with dreadful ideas.

The worst among them: Emily wasn’t real…had emerged from my haunted, wild unconscious.

Wagner had hinted at this. Anima. The woman within all men. Your obsessions and personality disintegration needed to create Emily, you see. A not unheard-of phenomenon. Carl Jung, I believe, first identified this.

Yeah. Sure. Talking major hallucinatory scenario here, and the tests showed I was not schizophrenic―simply “normal” up-fucked. If that was the case, well, who wrote the messages?

And―excepting the one shoved into my ancient cassette player―how did this “anima” make certain they’d fall into my hands? (Or my hand fall onto them.)

Wagner knew nothing of these, even though I found the first on my way back from our weekly “evening counsel” in his lavish home study. Aware of my office phobia, Wagner offered this fussy service solely for my benefit. Fine with me, but I’d wager he’s recording the sessions in pursuit of some arcane agenda. Why do I see a head-shrinker whose past deeds are utterly reprehensible? Talk to my goddamned insurance company about that. Plus, I have my own covert agenda regarding Herr Wagner….

In the early afternoon, I woke with an absinthe hangover which did nothing to improve the effect of the subsonic droning that once in a while rattled glasses in my kitchen cabinet.

Heating milk in the microwave for coffee, I noticed the time: 2:22.

My landline rang and I flinched. Probably Marty. No one―not counting Wagner―called here but Marty. “Hello?”

A vast, rushing wash, as if the caller stood near an ocean, or inside some cavernous structure.

“Hello?”

What the hell?

After a few moments, I realized the sound was not coming from any beach. My shy caller breathed with some difficulty, or affectation. “Where is this?” Jesus Christ! A guttural male voice, profoundly deep.

My heart thumped in my ears, agonized my head. “Where is what?”

A low throbbing beat quick as my heart…then a cloggy drain’s sucking―or something. “―my luminous music…”

―And gone.

Not even a dial tone.

I stood there dizzy, breath gushing…slammed down the handset.

The toilet was light-years distant, and I made it there in time to hunch and convulse―choke out a hot green ribbon reeking of anise and alcohol.

I hugged the porcelain goddess for a few minutes…slowed my heart and breathing.

Leaning over the sink, I rinsed and spat, rinsed and spat. Forget mouthwash; too much like absinthe. Cold water shocked my face, and in that gurgling swish I heard Emily.

―minous music my luminous music my luminous music my luminous music my luminous music my luminous music myluminous music myluminous music myluminous music myluminousmusic myluminousmusicmyluminousmusicmyluminousmusicmyluminousmusicmyluminousmusicmyluminousm usicmyluminousmusicmy―

“Emily!”

I twisted the tap…gazed blankly while seven grudging drips christened the scarred drain flange, which some past renter had brutalized with a screwdriver or a knife, stigmata of rage and futility….

Fright tangled my hung-over nerves, and I cleansed my lips and hands with gel sanitizer. No way would I run water again.

Coffee saturated the kitchen air, such as it was. Pouring a cup, I could feel the subsonic tone in my heels. Muted behind the cabinet door, glasses vibrated against each other. Feigning indifference, I counted the drone’s duration and sipped coffee.

After 88 seconds, the assault ended.

Somehow, during the intense concentration of the counting, I’d emptied my cup.

The chipped relic from my college days would sit unwashed. No tap could be opened, for I feared hearing Emily’s voice. If I needed to flush the toilet, I must make sure music blasted from my stereo to cover the agonizing sigh as the tank refilled.

Peering into the refrigerator for bottled water, I ran numbers through my head.

The awful voice had called the landline at 2:22. The subsonic attack vibrated my heels and thrift- store glasses for 88 seconds. 2:22 + 88 = 310.

My cloistered, disinfectant-stinking room with brown blood-spatter on the ceiling in the House of Despair, was numbered 310.

Then I knew.

Anyone could see the pattern. Even me.

The yellowed paper scraps were gathered, concealed, and by way of some found or stolen fountain pen, inscribed by Emily’s pale, green-veined hand.

The underlying oneness in all confusions. That blurted into my mind. Leftovers from the old job, looking for ghosts in over-fed houses. Please.

Fuck off, Charles Fort. I regret ever reading your books.

I had no idea how Emily had conspired to deliver the messages to me, the one responsible for her abduction by Wagner and his cult of atrocity.

Part Five

Marty rang my annoying buzzer while I sat watching Chelsea Wolfe singing “Feral Love,” her eyes blank black ovals like oil.

“The hell, man,” Marty said, thumping his boots on my mat. “You look like shit.” “If the look fits…”

He dropped a brown paper grocery bag on the kitchen counter. “What’s up? Interest you in a Yuengling beer product?”

“Yeah.”

His green army jacket emanated fried food. “How’s biz at Flying Saucers?” I asked as he shoved cans into the fridge. “Moody still ogling that Russian woman who makes the killer pizza?”

Marty snapped one open, sipped, and nodded. “Ha! You know it. Can’t blame him―Kat’s hot.” “I know. More legs than a bucket of chicken.”

We both laughed, and stepped into the “living room.” “Goddamn,” Marty said staring at the TV. “Who’s she?” “Chelsea Wolfe…new to me, but I can’t stop looking at her.” “Weird…like alien DNA or something. Wow!”

He slumped onto the couch. I felt strange him seeing my sort-of Emily projection, so I killed the video and slotted a Bad Religion DVD.

Marty stood, removed his reeking coat and slung it across the couch back. “So…how’s it goin’ with Herr Wagner?”

I sipped beer, my stomach rebelling. Liquid Valium. “Same Nazi, different day. I think he’s secretly recording our sessions.”

“Really? Is that not cool? Don’t they all?”

I regretted the admission. “I don’t know. If he is, I ‘m not crazy about it―hahaha.” “Aw, hell with him. How are you?”

I took a good hit, clunked my beer onto the coffee table. “Better than last month, but going outside is still a problem.”

Marty smacked my knee. “Hey, I know you. I do. You’ll get back to the old pain-in-the-ass wisenheimer we all know and love. Don’t sweat it, man.” Sure. “Fuck. Thanks for saying that. Need another one?”

“Yep. Thought much about work? I mean, what you might do? I know you’re not down with going back to Duke and the lab. North Carolina…can’t blame you.”

Back with beers, I sat. “I’ve been thinking I might approach Moody―”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I can handle the line. And Moody sure as shit can handle a Culinary Institute drop-out.”

Marty nodded, a bit aggressively. Sipped. “Uh, sure you can. I can see it. But the pay…”

“Fuck the pay. I’ll get by.”

Marty watched Greg Graffin yank the microphone from its stand. “Moody has, uh, high expectations. Sure the physical effort won’t nail you?”

I wanted him to leave. A sensation of false hope fluttered in my chest, and a depressive gravity. “I’ll start running again…whatever it takes. I know he’s got major turn-over with the line cooks.”

“That he does. Want me to drop a ref for you?”

Now it felt real. “You’ve only been working there―what?―six months?”

“Eight, but I’m on his good side. Ever since beating Johnny in that egg-frying contest last month.”

“Okay. Yeah. Let him know I’m interested.” God.

Marty nodded again. “Hey, you wanna hit Drake’s? I’ll buy…”

“Nope. I’m putting together resumes later.”

A shrug. “Yeah. Cool.” He turned and looked at me. “Rob, man…is it okay that I’m here? You can tell me anything. I won’t be pissed or get all ass-holiness on you.”

For a moment I considered telling him about the yellowed messages…the pursuing subsonic drone that rattled my drinking-glasses. “No…it’s good to see you. The others…well. You know how they feel.”

He slammed his beer onto the table. “Fuck them! Rob, man, they are assholes of the purest sort.

They always were. They come into Saucers and look at me like I’m a third-class loser, they―” “Okay! You’re right. They suck. I don’t miss ’em.”

That was too loud.

Marty mashed his lips as if he’d said the wrong thing. “Fuckin’ Greensburg, man. You’re in or you’re out with the New Cool. Fucking hate it. You’ve got a mind. I just think you might be wasting it sweating over Moody’s grill.”

At that moment, I could have hugged Marty. “Maybe. But I gotta get off my ass and do something physical and get paid for it…”

“See? I hear the old defiant dude there, and I like it. The physical shit will help―that I know. You need to get outta this bunker, get used to outdoors. Nothing out there can hurt you.”

My turn to nod…however falsely.

We drank a few more, and around midnight Marty stood. “Gotta be back for breakfast service in the ol’ golden morning. Keep the Yingies, man. They’ll help with resume-writing.”

I stood. “They always do. Thanks for hanging out…”

Marty pulled on his jacket. “You got it. I’m already thinking how fun it’ll be if Moody schedules us together. Think of it. Bad jokes. Rude comments about Billy McKee’s body odor―we’ll rock!”

We climbed the salt-crunchy steps, and stood in snowy night by Marty’s dented Camry. Freezing air blessed my burning face. “Rob, hey. You’re gonna be fine.” He dug jingling keys from a pocket, poked one into the door. “I got the faith, my brotha.”

He pulled open the door and climbed in. “Thanks for the brewshinskis,” I said.

He grinned, fired up the engine. “No problem. Hey. Think about going out to Clem’s for ribs sometime soon, huh?”

“That’d be great. Later.” “Okay.”

And that was that.

Part Six

Easy for me to say, I guess. And that was that. Now I was getting tempted, in Marty’s exit, to start the OCD rhyming shit. A sure indicator of a troubling night, assuring me with casual ease how far away I remained from “normal.”

This alone is an example of just how quickly you can slip from “sane” into the chattering gears of neurosis. Make no mistake, the passage is deceptively smooth, and mercilessly definite. An hour ago you were fearful, yet “fine.” Now, left alone, you feel insects creep across vibrating neuronic plates plugging holes between old mania and new stability, uninvited guests rifling your brain-box cooler for final drinks, something to devour.

You give in, and the motherfucker will own you.

Sweetest memories become curses…plots designed to seduce, love, and tear apart your soul. Because you’re so special…so vital…even a stranger’s smile is there to escalate your ruin. You know it. You know.

Part Seven

Oh god oh god oh god…I think I just decided to quit sleeping―forever.

Woke thrashing for breath―damp with rank sweat and heart thumping out nightmare venom.

Worse, for some reason I’d crashed fully clothed on the couch; not my usual method of “approaching” rest. Why was the clapped-out carpet marked with a wet spot?

No fucking way!

I rolled off the couch and sniffed the floor.

Good news. Only the haunting aroma of beers past. No piss or puke. Only water, peppered with dirt specks.

Struggling to my feet, I padded over to the work station where I’d left my camo Chucks, dropped into the chair’s chronic squeak, and pulled on my sopping shoes. What the hell?

The canvas was thoroughly soaked, as though I’d bathed in my Converse, or worn them outside― which I never do in winter. That’s what Jesus made boots for.

I pulled them off, and did what the manufacturer advised for such traumatic situations: stuffed my shoes with newspaper. This method, I had found after a camping trip, worked better than anything― extracted moisture as if designed for that purpose. The news always sucked anyway.

For the first time in my life, I craved a fresh-out-of-bed beer. Anything, anything to obliterate the dreadful fucking images lingering in my mind, dull my ringing ears. I’d have murdered for a couple Valium.

The more I turned it over, the less sure I felt…had it been a nightmare?

I had found myself lost and cold and afraid, plodding through dense evergreens dusted with snow. An iron sky menaced the day with rushing dark clouds, and a profound sense of threat surged through me. No distant traffic could be heard, and I knew I must be deep within this alien forest.

Which way to go? So far as I could tell, nothing existed but trees, sky, wind, and immense silence.

―A shriek, godawful, tore the air…echoed for a few seconds. What the fuck.

Was that a woman? Some animal?

I sure as hell didn’t want ever to hear it again. It had sounded way too close. Was something coming for me?

―Another shriek.

Jesus Christ.

Something in pain. That was all too clear.

My terror eased to low fright. Already lost, now I felt as if I might help someone―human or beast― from their own misery, and trotted over crisp pine needles toward what I thought was the general direction of the sound.

Here the pines gathered in crowded ranks, real beauties at least 80- or 90-feet tall and wide as houses. The snow bright on their branches confused me, as did the turpentine tang of resin in the air. More real than real. Searing my eyes.

Something snapped behind me―I turned.

A rustling, chaotic with multiple snaps like twigs, came from behind one tree cloaked in white. This sounded like two or more animals struggling. I’d better be careful.

Slowing to avoid crunchy footfalls, I hunched, and edged around the fat evergreen. A naked woman with long black hair stood in the snow.

My shocked breath-blast alerted her, and she glared with fierce green eyes like stars. Blood spatted her breasts and ran down her form, vivid against that white flesh, the delta of her furred muff.

Far, far worse than blood was its source.

The woman gripped the neck of a plump white swan, one wing wrenched off and discarded. Its splintered nub bled, steamed in the snow.

My heart raced so I could hear it―I backed away. She grinned, revealing perfect white teeth stained red.

The swan twitched, and she tore off its remaining wing with a wet crack.

“Emily,” I managed.

A blare from a horn the size of a city shattered the sky and I woke.

Part Eight

Spent the day trying to exorcise the nightmare by cleaning the apartment, putting on a pot of chili incorporating the Trinidad scorpion peppers Marty had given me a week ago (insanely hot, like flowery embers), and watching Vasil Gorkowski’s The Empty Place, a 1962 black-and-white film about a crazy painter obsessed with a mysterious woman he sees wherever he goes… It’s the most incredibly eerie movie I’ve ever seen, and I hate watching it. But I can’t stop. Probably watched it over 100 times, and know its every bleak gray sky, wind-haunted trees, café cellar, shadows, and brush-stroke of the doomed artist―a dead-ringer for Peter Murphy in his Bauhaus days (he never gets a clear view of the woman’s face, so fills the vacuum with a series of anguished paintings…which become more disturbing the closer he gets to completion, actually encountering the woman, and cosmic insanity).

The huge encyclopedia of Euro films on my paltry shelf tells me that Gorkowski, after a September 1963 arrest for assaulting a young woman in Tripoli, died of poisoning. On November 22, 1963 (date of the JFK assassination) he drank a tin of mineral spirits in the studio of abstract expressionist Ulrik Torsson; aspirated, and choked on his vomit (rumored to be composed of partially digested photos of the woman he’d assaulted). My big book also claims Gorkowski’s home-editing studio was found to be stacked with film cans labeled Wahn. More than 700 hours of footage the director’s long-suffering wife refused to release to authorities. “I burned it all…every moment of empty black obscenity.” One month later, she vanished, and was never heard from again.

Turns out Wahn is a German word, meaning mania, or delirium.

There were no cans of mineral spirits available in my newly ordered place.

At 7:00 PM, precisely, my kitchen floor started vibrating. The tall glasses in my well-arranged cabinet rattled. Seven o’clock can be noted in numerals as 700, the hours of Gorkowski’s unseen Wahn footage, forever lost because of a melancholic wife, herself assigned to oblivion. Shouldn’t that count for something? I’m close to giving up. Getting that job on Moody’s sizzling grill.

Part Nine

Just back from seeing Herr Wagner. Pills. I am a liar. Emily is a ghost, lost hope of my life. I will pay attention now. I will. I will obey. I will obey the black surge of time, the lies of my soul, the empty promise of Tuesdays, and shadows at noon. Kneel before the altar of nothingness, the only reality.

Emily never was real, you see. How could she be? It isn’t allowed. Such fierce life is forbidden, met only in dreams of sad, corrosive souls. In minds seething with insanity and dread and futility.

I will have my say. No one controls me. No one has the right. But I see now…I see.

Marty is a phantom, a telephone number to nowhere, and nothing. A friend in my anguished craving for friends…too good to exist. Wagner proved it, even with the police standing there, in my private home. My private home. They could not hear Emily’s luminous music, her taunting whisper, nor decipher the notes she wrote only for my eyes. Grocery store receipts, and nothing more. I was out of my mind. The professionals know this.

But they haven’t seen Emily dance through flurries of black snow, nor heard the droning approach of her sentinels and their terrible forms…their slaughtering touch…the impossible code of their numbers… and no Marty in the phone book―they made me look.

What happened? What did I love? Where is she? I am the only one. The only.

I would not give her back, but it was impossible to stop the green wave, the sweeping black hurt of her sweet voice…all I ever wanted. Just to matter…just to be. To kiss the sweet mouth of the unknown, come for me. I smelled her, tasted her, heard the forbidden diaries from a world beyond rationality and all that is bearable. In my room, when we were together during free time, she showed me the way. I held her sweet soft hand, goddammit. Heard tales from another place without war and death and uncertainty, where nothing ever changed. And colossal structures webbed with emotions plucked from worlds with seas and suns.

Fuck them.

I despaired. Shoved her back into it…

At the end of that dark hall Emily opened a door I had never seen. “You deserve this,” she said.

And opened that door.

Whether the black spidery forms waiting, clothed in stars, were gods or not, I can’t say. But they wanted me too, and I couldn’t bear the sight of them.

Is it because of my love, my obsession, that Wagner was found in a scatter of shredded dead meat?

He who had murdered thousands, because he could not find their souls? The ripper of essence? Fucking eater of the hearts of starving children?

They took her back, because I could not long bear her presence. A being beyond good and evil, beyond the god-fuckers and their soulless search. My true love, too real to exist.

* * * * * *

“Welcome back,” said Doctor Smythe, my tense watcher.

A new room, but this one has cameras. They’re looking for something. But what? A visit from Marty? Conspirators in Wagner’s slaughter?

I don’t know.

But I will always remember, especially when it rains, to stand at my caged window and watch for the luminous music, the black snow, to keep it together.

Because there must be a meaning to life, right? Some day, I will find it.