Want to read from the start? Click here.
MAYBE AN HOUR LATER
It’s tough, to say the least, just being stuck in here with nothing to do but type and read.
I guess it’s funny, you strip everything away from a man but his ability to consume and create. A fundamental hurricane of human existence. Expression, in every particle of ink on these pages. But we’re human, we need inspiration, we need art to fuel us.
Ha, art, like that painting? That god-damn-good-for-nothing-stained-canvas piece of shit? That airplane? Is it even a jet, I wonder? Tell me Oliver, oh please tell me, what is that horrible black shape?
What monstrosity could have conceived of a shape so sinister, so angular and aggressive, and utterly irrefutably volatile? That arrow, that dart, that hideous anchor. It wasn’t a jet, surely it couldn’t have been a jet. And to think I sat there admiring that putrid blood which stains the canvas, behind that ravenous black shape. To think I believed it to be a sunset, some kind of peaceful horizon, surely it must have been the light, how dim my only bulb here is. There is no horizon, only this terrible black on red. Like a hole punched out of the universe, clawed out from the bloody flesh behind it. Surely that must be the answer. This painting represents void, void in everything, void in our very mortality, our body; who we are.
But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because I’m still sitting in this chair, clickity-clacking away, and you’re still sitting here listening to me bitch, so that must not be the answer.
The door is still locked, I checked twice.
A FEW MINUTES LATER
I don’t really know what to say at times like this. Not that I’ve ever been in a similar situation to the one I seem to have been locked up in--locked up, like a bird in a cage, only worse, because instead of a cage I could peer out at the world around me from, I was dumped with 6 solid walls, can’t see shit through hardwood. Ha, if this room were just as long as it is wide, I may as well be trapped inside a die; an unlucky one at that.
And if I get out? God I hate that I have to say if, but it’s been quite a while, and I haven’t seen a damn person come to rescue my damsel-in-distress ass. Just stuck, like a god damn bug on flypaper.
Who am I kidding, what was I doing before? Sitting at home, reading mountains of books, teaching the occasional course at Clark, kicking myself for not leaving earlier, leaving when I could have left.
Well, looks like I’ve left now, but certainly not of my own accord. But damn what I wouldn’t give to get out of here. I long to smell the crisp San Diego air, the red woods, the cool coasts and their wild waves. I’d love for all of this to disappear and when I open my eyes I want to be there. Where the sun sets on America.
SOME HOURS LATER
You know, just a handful of ‘em, who can even keep track these days.
I’ve been scouring this room for hours trying to find anything made of sturdy metal that I could use to try to dig my way out through the wooden door. This door, and these walls and ceiling and floor, they’re all so very old, the wood is cracking and even though I know the door is thick, I’m pretty sure I can carve my way out.
I started with the drawers, those drawers I’ve scanned so many times before, nothing new, just these endless reams of paper, endless lines to be written, and the ink never seems to run out. Hell, I haven’t needed to replace it yet, can’t imagine I will any time soon from the looks of things. Something isn’t right here, I can tell that. I can tell. But I can’t put a finger on it, it’s on the tip of my tongue, but it seems to have no name. I’m not sure what I would do if this was to be the rest of my life.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure of anything. Doesn’t matter anyway, there really weren’t that many places to search, go figure, and sure enough there was nothing metal to be found, except you, Oliver. My voice, my memories, my thoughts, everything I am in here. And I couldn’t rip apart this typewriter on the off chance I’d even be able to get out; because what if I couldn’t escape? What if these keys and this contraption in front of me are just too fragile?
Tell me Olly, tell me how to get out of here. You cannot imagine the isolation of knowing every square inch of the only place you’re allowed to see. Knowing every particle of dust, every crack in all the wooden panels, everything; every spacial facet of this room is engrained in my head. I don’t know why, and I don’t think I want to know; but something about this is reminiscent of those dark windowless rooms in that house, somewhere in Virginia…
That book told me about the dark hallways, the even darker rooms, the generic furniture. But none of it was brown wood, it was all black as the void itself; or rather a deep grey, but that doesn’t carry the same effect, does it?
00:00
Figured I should reset the watch if I’m going to be here a while. I’m going to use army time, and do my best to keep track of the hours from now on. I don’t care if it isn’t really midnight, I just need a frame of reference.
Staring at those digits above reminds me of all the digital clocks when the power went out. The VCR, the microwave, the oven, you name it, they all reset back to zero when the power was cut (usually because of a storm).
When I was a kid, the power went out more than a few times. I guess it happened almost every month; at the time I didn’t think anything of it, just figured it was one of those things, like the Tornado sirens every first Wednesday of every month at 1:00pm sharp. Sorry, 13:00.
I was watching TV with my dad and Ches, and suddenly we were sitting in the dark. It was late in the evening, the sun was just a memory, and the late night horror movie was playing. I was laying on the couch, resting my head because for some reason I had woken up that morning with an earsplitting headache. Ches was sitting on the other end of the couch, underneath my legs, and was gripping a green blanket as the music in the movie began to elevate in pitch, and get faster and faster and faster until suddenly--right before the woman on TV opened the closet door--the lights went out.
“Shit--hang on I’ll grab the flashlight,” I heard my dad say as he got up from his chair and felt his way into the spare room. A few seconds later and after some considerable rummaging, the flashlight came on with a click and he strolled back into the living room. “Found it!”
At this point, Chester had covered himself with the blanket and was curled up against my legs. I shook him off and got off the couch. My dad started heading to the basement door, to try and find the breaker.
He was a big man, before the ALS, and his footfalls were heavy, remarkably heavy to a boy no more than six years old. The wooden steps creaked under his weight, as he made his way into the basement. I stood watching from the doorway, when Chester gasped abruptly. I turned around and walked over to him, he had taken the blanket off and was gripping it tightly.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered, hoping he would say he was afraid of the dark.
“I heard something upstairs, sounded like--“ footsteps “--footsteps,” he said in a small voice.
“Ches, those were probably dad’s footsteps, he just went downstairs,” I reassured him.
“No!" he whisper-hissed, "Chuck, the ones I heard were definitely--“ Just then I heard it too, a few very light steps over the carpet in dad’s room. I could still hear my father downstairs, moving boxes out of the way as he tried to squeeze his way past the water heater and flip the breaker.
For a moment, it was completely silent. My dad stopped moving, and the noises upstairs ceased as well. In that moment, I saw the fear in Chester’s eyes, and when we suddenly heard the footsteps from above us again, we both started screaming, “Dad!” hoping he would swoop in and save the day. In that same instant, the lights came back on, and the malicious footsteps above were muffled once more by dad’s own as he raced back up the stairs.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” he said, turning on the kitchen light (which was off before the power outage).
I ran over to him and grabbed his legs. “Dad, there were noises upstairs, footsteps, I’m sure of it!” I looked back over at the couch where Chester had covered himself again in the blanket and was sobbing quietly.
“Noises? I didn’t hear anything--“
“They were coming from your room, someone was walking around up there,” my voice began to break into soft tears, echoing my brother.
“Okay, okay honey, I’ll go check it out.” He always had this way of reassuring us, his voice was soft and calm, sometimes I thought he believed we were making it up. Nonetheless, he always followed through, and so I watched him walk up the stairs leading to the upper level hallway where his room sat, connected to our room. I watched him round the corner into his room, the door already open. Hadn’t it been closed before? No, he must have left it open when he came down earlier. He disappeared behind the wall, and I could only listen from the bottom step, not having the courage to climb any higher. “Nothing up here, Chuck,” his voice called from above. But it sounded wrong, all wrong, too calm and not at all alert. Was that dad’s voice?
“Are you coming down?” I hollered up the staircase.
“Sure thing,” he said, and then he reappeared in the doorway, turned around and shut the door behind him. Wasn’t that routine? “Let’s head back to the living room, and finish that movie.”
Yeah sure, let’s go back to sitting in the dark, watching a horror film after that. “Sure,” I said fruitlessly.
I sat back on the couch, Chester had run off somewhere, probably to the basement to watch Fraggle Rock or Thundercats on the old tube that my dad kept down there. I should have joined him I suppose. Would have been better than suffering through that feeling of something is up there. I just didn’t know what to do.
In the end, it turned out to be nothing, I guess. Dad chalked it up to mice, and made a note to call the exterminator. He never did.
Sometimes you hear things when you’re a kid, and it doesn’t matter if they were really dangerous or not, they still scare you when you’re that young.
Sometimes I heard voices too, laying in my bed late at night, every once in a while I would hear these whispering voices and scratching noises coming from inside or maybe behind my wall. It was really quiet, but I swear I could hear it, it happened almost every week until I was about twelve. Come to think of it, I don’t really remember it happening before that night with the noise upstairs.