TAPE THIRTEEN 3/9/86

After my mother told me all that, what I did was I went back to the dorm and told everyone that I'd have to take off the next day very unexpectedly. Frank seemed like he already knew. I packed all my things and said the usual stuff and everyone put on the usual sad face. The next morning I took off in the direction of the cabin, but when I was out of sight I went up to the top of the hill instead.
There were some boulders there that had spaces between them, sort of like caves. I shoved my suitcase into one of them and covered it with some pine needles. Then I crawled down into another one. For the rest of the day I did a kind of self-hypnosis against the hunger and the wait and the cramped position and sort of dozed away the time.
When it got dark I crawled out. I was stiff as hell, but managed to work my way very carefully over to the cabin. I was worried my mother'd told Frank and that he'd set a watch for me, but as it turned out, she hadn't. What she had done was to have a hinged hasp and a big padlock installed on the front door. I went down to Grandpa's room to think about that for a while, but I knew I couldn't stay there. What I wanted was upstairs, if it was there at all.
Then I remembered my father had built a small cabinet under the back porch where he left some emergency tools. My mother 'd forgotten to clean them out, so what I did was I took a big old rock hammer, went back to the front door and just beat hell out of the lock. It never broke, but the hasp finally fell off. I waited under the porch for a while to see if anyone would come check about the noise. When they didn't, I went in.
I was hungry. The night before I'd raided the main kitchen for a few things I thought wouldn't be missed. In my hurry I only got some Oreo cookies and a few canned things. Now I saw that the cans were all fruit cocktail. Still, it tasted good at the time.
After my forced rest all day, I didn't want to go to bed, but I couldn't take a chance on putting on lights. So I turned on the big old radio console very low, lay down on the coiled rope rug in the living room and eventually fell asleep listening to mountain news and country ballads.
The next day I really started to search that place. My idea was that somehow my father, using his special skills had tapped into some kind of hole in the universe, a place where you could see not only through space but through time forever - a place where you could know everything.
I remembered pretty well where I'd seen the ladder on the platform in my vision. It was close to the edge on the lake side, where the three bay windows were now. But my father and grandfather were standing on the ladder, pretty high up, when they saw whatever it was. I figured that would put their heads about the height of the present ceiling, or maybe above it.
For the next couple days I tried moving a chair all around the first floor, standing on it a different heights, but nothing happened. Then I tried crawling all around the floor on the west side of the attic, but although there was a window there, it was much higher than a ladder could reach from the first floor, and the only visions I got staring at the base of the wall were of dust balls.
One day when it was pretty cloudy and blustery with the feel of fall and a hint of snows to come, I even crawled out the window and, half-panicked, braced myself on the steep, five-sided roof that covered the bay end of the living room. I felt a few twinges of something, but that could have been plain terror at hanging thirty feet above scrub oaks and boulders. I got back in quick.
One thing I did notice during those days was the construction of the cabin. My father was well-known for what he could do with wood, especially knotty pine, the major construction material of the mountains. Some of the most ornate buildings in the area had been done by him and filled with fancy moldings or gingerbread - whatever the owner wanted. Yet when he did his own cabin, although he could have scrounged all the luxury he wanted, he did it with the greatest simplicity. There wasn't an extra line in the place; everything had its function. In stark contrast to the disciplined opulence of Barzani's place, simplicity seemed all, but was it? Or was there another purpose?
In the year after Grandpa's death my father had finished all the paneling of the cabin. The selection of boards for the lining was immaculate. I studied everything. Although the boards stood vertically, their grains blended perfectly across the rooms - dark bands swirling into light, knots dancing abstractly to some hidden rhythm, the walls tied invisibly into the ceiling, and the whole almost hermetically sealed against other elements so that only the strongest blasts of wind or storm could be heard when all the doors and windows were closed.
Lines gradually caught my attention, lines of grain, knots, paneling. They carried the eye to a convergence. Where? It seemed to be in the bay windows, but for all my staring and probing and wishing beyond what any kid ever wished for happiness lost or glory to be found, there was nothing. No feelings or emotions or even twinges, certainly no visions. I only thought of one thing, only one idea moved me. When I slept, I didn't dream. I was becoming as closed and void and sealed off as the cabin itself.
A couple of times I left the house in the evening to buy some goods at a little store on the main highway. I stayed off paths, but no one who knew me saw me. I'd been in the cabin about a week, and a lot of the summer crew had gone home during that time. The girl at the store didn't know me because I hadn't gone in there much.
I guess I didn't buy very good food - nothing that had to be cooked and I was losing some weight. Still I stayed at the cabin. I didn't know what else to do. I'd given up looking much. I was sleeping a lot, and I started to have dreams. There was one of a comet or some burning ball that streaked through space and then exploded against something. I saw that one several times.
Then early one morning I woke up in a dead sweat. I'd seen the flaming ball again, but this time it turned slightly; the comet's tail shifted behind the ball, and it came straight at me until I could see it had a face: my father's. Before it reached me, though, a huge concrete post loomed up, and the fireball crashed into it.
Gradually I calmed down. I pulled off my T-shirt and mopped my face and arms. I'd been sleeping in the attic, and through the window I could see tree tops against the first light of dawn. Going down to the kitchen, I poured some cereal and sat at a little table that was there in the corner.
I was still shaken by the dream, but the fear was being replaced by a growing anger. We'd always eaten at the big round oak table in the bay, but my mother's one contribution that summer was to sell it to that asshole antique dealer who you knew just sanded it and varnished it a little and sold it for ten times what he paid my mother. Fuckin' scavenger. Ransoming one generation to the next. Bloodsucker!
I raged around the kitchen screaming at the cupboards, insulting the stove, pounding the refrigerator. Finally I grabbed the little table and carried it into the living room and installed us both square in the middle of the bay. Gradually, the fear driven out, the rage drained away. I returned to the corn flakes which tasted a little better for all that
For some reason, though, there was a smell of burnt firecrackers in the front room. I thought maybe it came from the old wood stove that needed cleaning. Then I began to hear something, a shimmery, shattery sort of thing, like slivers of glass sliding down a polished plane and piling up at the bottom. I'd closed all the curtains, sick of searching for nothing, but through a slight crack in the one on the left third of the bay there appeared to be some strange light. I got up and pulled it open. Only the lake showed black in the gathering greys of dawn.
I went back to the table, but again the sound came. This time, still seated, when I looked out the window the sun had broken over the hills behind the house. Its rays were falling on the lake, but they were actually moving down in a stream, like I could see the photons moving in slow motion drop by drop - millions of small suns moving as dewdrops down spider silk into the lake which soaked all up in its shining mass, more mercury than water. There were no mountains holding in the lake now. It flowed out to the horizon, and there a huge red moon, covering half the black sky, was slowly setting.
I guess it was over an hour that I sat there watching the scene develop - maybe it was longer. All the walls faded, and I floated alone over a world never seen by man. Then, gradually, the walls came back until I was at the table again. Outside it was mid-morning on a bright, late-summer day.
At first I was disappointed to be back. I jumped up and ran to the window trying to recapture the vision. Finally I calmed down, but the next second I was up again, this time on a total high. Everything I'd always felt inside about my father was vindicated. It was all true. I jumped around. I rolled around. I giggled. I cried. I hugged myself. I hugged the ugly little table. And then I just sat, drained and delighted.
When finally I could think again, my first thought was how it could have been so simple and never have been discovered before. I began to measure with an old yardstick. I figured out that if you made a line at right angles from the center of each of the three large windows, the three lines crossed at an apex exactly where I'd put my chair. But why had it never been noticed? Even if I were the only one with the ability, I'd sat in that bay plenty of times.
Then I remembered the old oak table. Grandpa had found it at some sale and had installed it there almost as soon as the cabin was finished, even though Grandma had always said it was too homely and too big. It took up most all of the bay and stuck out into the living room. With it there it was impossible to sit at the apex of the windows' triangle. I'd sat around that table countless times and had no idea.
I wondered why, though, I could see the visions sitting down when Grandpa and my father had clearly been on a ladder, at least in my vision. Then one night, as I was coming back from a run to the market, I saw the reason. In my vision, there had been a large boulder between me and the platform of the house. The floor, as my father first built it, was farther down the slope of the hill. During that winter he must have torn the whole thing down and rebuilt it over the boulder, at least six feet higher.
Slowly I realized that all the details of the house's construction were driven at one goal, the one purpose I was using it for now. It was a huge collector of images, a camera on the universe, a viewing station through time and space. The solid construction contained it all, and the bay windows were its lenses.
For the next few days I hardly slept unless I passed out for a while over the table. I couldn't take the chance of missing something. But there was no way to force the visions. I knew that. They happened or they didn't.
The next one came the day after the first, but-a little after noon instead of at daybreak. And it came through the right window instead of the left. I was leaving all the curtains open at all times now and hoping no one would notice.
This vision came like the other. First the sulfury smell, then a low sound - this time a humming - then a view through the window, then a fading away of the house so that I floated into and through the thing itself. It wasn't as thrilling as the first. I moved over a dead planet, only rocks except for areas of tremendous volcanoes and lava flows, no water, no plants, only burning heat from the planet itself and from its sun.
When it finally ended and I came back to myself I was drenched, and the parts of my arms and legs that weren't covered by my T-shirt or shorts were badly sunburned. I stripped and showered and rubbed cream on the burns and decided I'd dress better the next time.
A pattern developed. The visions never happened at night, so I brought a bed into the living room and slept more. The rest of the day was pretty boring for a kid - just sitting and waiting, but when the visions came they were worth it. There was no set time when they happened and some days went by with nothing. The visions never came from the middle window, and I came to believe it wasn't one of the lenses. For the other two windows, though, I began to sense a rhythm. The one on the left was growing more and more chaotic to the point where it scared me to see something start there. The trips through that lens were always cosmic - giant slides through space with no time evident. The places were unbelievable, and at times the violence of star collisions and explosions was so wild, so far beyond anything conceived on earth that I always felt, when I found myself in the chair once again, that I'd returned from death itself.
The right window was different. It seemed to be an opening on the earth. Maybe it was a view of the same place where I was, but as it had been at different times. As I traveled over it, gradually the burned rocks rose and fell and softened and water appeared, then life forms - small plants, then trees, then animals. Each time the life was more complex and more varied. There were jungles and enormous flowers and animals I'd never seen.
Finally one day, about three weeks after it had all started, I could feel something forming on that side. There was a lake. I could see it was Tahoe, but there were no roads or houses or casinos. It was all wild and natural, but recognizeable. I moved over the lake to a little cove I knew. It was about two miles north of us and had about the clearest water I'd ever seen. If you were in a boat you seemed to float in air above the lake bottom. Sometimes a bunch of us boys would take a motorboat there and skinny dip or fish or explore an old camp no one used anymore.
In the vision an Indian couple came down to the cove and sat for a while talking. Then they took off their leather clothes and swam. The man was thin, but strong looking. The woman reminded me a little of Marlene. They looked so graceful turning and circling around each other and playing. They moved together and had sex in the water and then again on the beach, and then I was back in the room.
One the one hand it was really beautiful and all. On the other, I didn't feel very good. In fact, I felt like crying, and I couldn't say why. For some reason what I'd seen was almost worse than the chaos of the other window.
For the first time I left the house during the.daytime and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the woods.
The next day was bad from the start. During the night, winds howled around the cabin, and I slept fitfully. The morning never saw sun, and the overcast grew gloomier by midday. Apprehensive, I didn't sit at the table all morning, but sometime in the afternoon I made a sandwich and sat there to eat it.
The storm was growing. A couple of times lightning hit the lake. The wind whipped up large waves and whitecaps covered everything. The room darkened. Then through the middle window I noticed something strange. There were a couple of two-story houses on the point, right next to the lake, but I could only see their top floors; the lake was rising. As I watched, the water covered the houses completely, swallowed up huge pines and began rising up the hill, claiming cabins below ours, showing no sign of peaking out.
Panicked, I broke out of the apex and ran to the window hoping it was just a vision and that my movement would stop it. But it was really happening; the house was completely surrounded by water. Only a few tree tops from the hill below us still showed. Then I noticed something that chilled me totally. The boulders that lay under the water around the point were also rising with the lake. But, as I had feared as a kid, they weren't exactly rocks. They seemed to be the slimy backs of animals: great ponderous bifurcated globes that roiled and bumbled and bumped against each other. Their scrawny, naked necks were visible, rising from below, writhing like snakes, striving to break the water. Finally, there in the depths, among the awakening, monstrous forms, a yellow eye opened and looked back at me, and I could see the reptile grin.
The waves broke now around the base of our cabin. I could feel their pounding shake the place. I could hear the moans and shrieks of the beasts. Terrified, I backed from the window. Somehow I got to the curtain cords and closed them all. Still the pounding continued, still the groans and roars, and then the screech of batting boards being wrenched from the outside wall of the basement, the trembling of the floorboards as the huge bodies crowded in and pounded with their stiffening necks, trying to break through. Any minute the floor boards would give.
I turned and turned, but there was no way out. Even my insides wanted escape, and in my helplessness everything rose up. I vomited all over. Still the floor buckled up from the pressure below. I ran to my mother's room and crawled under the blankets to the bottom of the bed, as I had when I was a little kid. Then she'd told me I'd suffocate. Now I wanted to. Still the pounding - now muffled - continued. Still I hid in terror.
It went on for hours. Maybe I passed out. When I came out, the living room was dark. I found the light and saw that everything was still there. Everything was calm. Timidly I cracked the front door. A waning moon hung over the forest, and there was the wet cardboardy smell of pine trees and granite sand after rain. I went out on the porch a while. It scared me to look at the lake, but it was in the same place as always and very calm now.
When I went back, I could smell the mess I'd made and started to get something to clean it up. Then I realized most of the smell was from me. My T-shirt was vomited, my jeans were soaked, and I could feel that I'd shit my shorts totally. In a rage I tore them all off.
"You mad bastard!" I screamed. "You crazy son of a bitch! So this is your window on the universe! Your great time camera! It's just another fuckin' house of mirrors. That's all you bastards can do. All your science. All your fuckin’ genius. Just mirror tricks. It's all reflections. You cocksuckin' bastard. Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! God damn you! God damn your fuckin' ass! At least Barzani's mirrors just showed me my skin. You miserable, miserable, miserable asshole! I hope you rot. I hope you burn forever! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!"
And then, to my horror, a ripple passed across the closed curtains, as though something was moving behind them, and there came a low, hopeless moan. Everything that had ever thought of being a hair on my body stood up and began shooting electric charges at all the others. My skin crackled and burned. I broke from the house and ran as hard as I could. I fell over some boulders and landed in a pile of scrub oak. It cut my legs up pretty badly, but I got up and just kept going. Finally I found myself at the top of the hill between the same two boulders as the first day. I fell between them and prayed every formula I could remember, but when I stopped, there was no absolution. There was only a vast black lake and two dead rocks sending out streamers of cold to bind me to them.
I stumbled back to the house and fumbled under the back porch until I found Grandpa's keys. To my amazement his room really had withstood the beasts. It was still warm. His shower cleaned me. His bed folded me in.
When I woke up the next morning I was hungry. The problem was that all the food and money were upstairs. I thought about that quite a while. At last I figured I had to try. My clothes were all upstairs, but I made do with some more of Danny's old stuff. I went to the back door, planning to get in and out fast. Even from the kitchen the smell was bad. There seemed to be some buzzing from the living room, like flies, and - worse -something in there was pulling at me, trying to draw me in. Very fast, I grabbed what food I could and got out.
After eating, I thought a lot about what to do; then I slept some more.
When I woke up, I still didn't have a plan. I guessed I'd have to talk to Frank, but then he'd probably check the house, and that would be hard to explain.
A glint caught my eye. Sun, shining through a crack in the curtains, was reflecting off Grandpa's keys, which I'd thrown on the desk. In particular, it was shining off a little gold key I'd never noticed before.
When I checked it out, it looked like something that would fit a desk, and when I tried it on Grandpa's desk, the drawers opened. I guess the desk hadn't been opened since Grandpa died. Some drawers were empty, and there was the usual desk stuff. But laid neatly on top of everything in the top drawer was a group of papers stapled together. It was one of his sermons. The date was when I was eight years old. When I began to read it, I even remembered him giving it.
It started with a story. Grandpa usually did that. He called his jokes or stories "hookers," because they hooked the audience and made them listen. This was a story taken from some Spanish fables, he said. It was about an old couple who helped a guy who turned out to be a wizard. The wizard gave them three wishes (of course), one for him, one for her, and one to be wished together.
They were really poor people and had never thought much about things outside their daily routine. The old lady finally came up with the idea that she could wish for a sewing machine to earn some extra money. The old man pointed out that they didn't have electricity to run the machine. Then he thought that if he wished for a mule he could get more work done, but the old lady said they didn't have anything to feed an animal.
After sitting quiet for a while, the old man finally took the mental leap of his life. "Why are we talking about sewing machines and mules," he cried. "We could know the secrets of the universe, we could see it all, we could be masters of everything." Then he fell back in his chair, exhausted and suffering a monster headache he usually got when he thought for any length of time.
He remembered that food usually helped his headaches, and, without thinking, he said, "I wish I had a big chorizo right now." Immediately a thick, beautiful chorizo (which is a Spanish sausage) was on the table in front of him.
His wife was pissed as hell that he could be so selfish with his wish, and she screamed, "I wish that damned thing was stuck up your nose." So the chorizo started flying around the room after the old man who was trying like crazy to escape out the door, his hands over his nose. He tripped, and the monster chorizo stuck itself halfway up his right nostril.
Grandpa went on about the moral predicament in all this, plus the fact that an embedded chorizo is damned painful. Finally, of course, they had to accept that they were what they'd always been - bound to each other and they had to use the last wish to get rid of the thing.
The way Grandpa told all this was a little racy, and I remember people looking around like someone had farted, like this wasn't such a good church story. It had embarrassed me a little, but he went on about life selecting life, rather than material things or unachievable dreams. He said God was known best by man if he was met in his creations, especially in other humans, even though this was often very frustrating because humans were so imperfect, like the story showed. Then he threw in some Bible passages to make it all sound respectable.
There was a lot in there about the beauty of the relationship between a man and a woman and how if this holds on and matures it comes out to more than just one plus one equal two. I thought about the Indian couple and what I could sense between them and how it was a lot more than I could ever feel about Brigitta but maybe could have found with Marlene.
Then I began to wonder why that particular sermon happened to be right there, like it had been waiting for me for eight years. It wasn't Grandpa's last sermon - like he just put it down and died. And why had I never noticed that desk key before then? The cabin had become a den of spirits fighting for my head. I didn't like it.
I suppose Grandpa could lecture me if he felt like it. He'd let me use his room all summer for immoral purposes, and he was protecting me now. It was a pretty good sermon, but I guess what I wondered about Grandpa - about all ministers - was whether he really knew what the alternatives were to his remedies.
And then it hit me. Then I knew what was really wrong about my vision of him and my father. It wasn't that my father went and jacked up the floor; it was that Grandpa hadn't looked. Most of the time they were on the ladder Grandpa was looking back - in my direction - rather than toward the lake. He'd looked quickly, then, almost immediately, had turned away. My father had never noticed, he was so excited.
"Oh, Grandpa, don't you see that what you say would mean so much more if it matched what you did? How do you overcome temptation if you never face it? If you'd faced it, if you just knew what it was and could still preach to me - that would mean everything. I know you were loyal to my father; you took care of him, but you didn't know him. He was your burden, but did you love him? He may have been mad, but he was human, too. Why did you carry that cross if you didn't love it - just for the world to see?
"I did face it, Grandpa. I know what it is, and I know its price, and I may have to pay it."
I looked around that little room - a box already halfway under the hillside. Only a few more feet down lay the end of the trip. I looked at the food - some soggy vanilla wafers, a few cans, no can opener. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Danny's clothes hung on me more than ever. I took them off. All that summer of building up, and in a few weeks I was down to bones. A few pounds less, a few feet down, what was the alternative - to go like my father did? I turned off the lights and got back in bed.

Sometime later the bed moved a little. How much later, I don't know. I'd been drifting in and out of dreams for a long time - probably a couple of days. I tried to lift my head, but it was hard to do. Finally, I looked around. Frank was sitting on the foot of the bed. I smiled a little.
"Hey, Frank," I thought, "old friend come to lighten my day. Tell me something happy, Frank, a joke about Grandpa, a story about the old days. Whatcha say, Frank?"
But he said nothing. He just sat there with eyes that showed he'd seen it before. I didn't have time for that, so I rolled back to the wall.
Somehow he got me to his house - picked me up, blankets and all, and carried me, I guess. His wife squawked and screamed and insisted Frank call the doctor, but he said no, no hospital. He brought a cot into their front room, which was right over the lake, put me down on it and began to force me to drink tea and soup and stuff like that.
For the first few days he watched me pretty carefully, so I wouldn't do weird things, I guess, but then he left me more to his wife and went back to his jobs of getting the grounds ready for winter. Helen Harmon was short, which always looked funny next to Frank's height, and she was nervous next to his calm, but she was as tough as he was. When she told me to eat, I ate.
I stayed with them a few weeks. Helen made about every kind of fattening food she could think of, and I ate most of it. After a few days I felt stronger and began to walk around. Mainly, I was sick of the noise of the lake so close to the house, and I didn't like being so near the rocks.
After a week or so, Frank let me help him on some projects, but I could sense him watching me closely. Sometimes it seemed he was watching a ghost. It wasn't like we'd been during the summer. I wondered if there was some hope for my idea of going to school in Bijou, but I didn't find a good time to bring it up.
Then one day I found my suitcase in the spare bedroom they'd let me use once they were convinced I wouldn't slit my throat with the silverware. Frank said that Helen had washed and folded all my clothes. He said it was time to go home and get on with school and the rest of my life. He would call the bus to stop the next day, and I should pack. All my things were there. We never talked about how he got them.

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