The literature of doom has to exist, but if nothing else exists, it’s the end of literature.
-Roberto Bolaño
He heard the furnace burst before anything else. Before the screams from across the street, before the car alarms went off and before the explosion itself, he heard an extraordinarily loud pop. Who knows where to go from here, he thought, clutching one arm in the other and blinking dirt and ash from his eyes. The couch cushion smoldered in the center like a spilled coal in the grass, the edges burning around it, moving slowly away towards nothing. Fire rose up the drapes, racing towards the ceiling like living beings trying to win some race of destruction and he slumped against the frame of the door and coughed loudly, not thinking to shield his eyes or breathe through cloth. His ears rang with a sound unlike any he’d ever heard before. He stumbled forward and fell onto the floor, smashing two teeth against the wood. He coughed again expelling smoke and blood. His eyes welled with tears and he rolled onto his back hearing something like distant sleigh bells now. Who had masterminded his demise and how had they planned it so ruthlessly? He had no enemies. He coughed again, everything in his vision shifted from blurry to black and white and he considered surrender. But to whom? and to what? The wallpaper curled amidst the flames then smoldered and dripped onto the floor like wax. The appliances in the kitchen melted into unrecognizable shapes and crashed to the floor, sparking onto dishrags and paper towels igniting evermore disasters that would not be dealt with in time. He could hear sirens now just below the jingling bellows and insufferable hum. He was picturing blue lights though nothing but red was headed towards him. Clothes in the closet began to burn and he could smell their memories. He toasted to their nights worn out and the days of rolled up sleeves and spilled coffee. Shirts never again to be ironed and socks never to be balled up and stuffed in a drawer. The things burning all had lived lives now and like him were coming to regard peace with the flames. His head stuffed. His mouth was dry like he could spit out sawdust. He rolled onto his side and released bile which extinguished a small patch of flame inches away.
People stood outside and watched as the house burned. Wearing robes or blankets, some still in clothes from the day prior. Hands covering mouths and a few women still shrieking though they knew the eventual outcome. Cars shouldered the street to watch, sticking heads out windows asking what was going on as if the mass was looking at nothing more than the sky. Engines ran up on the curbs and men told everyone to make some room and get out of the way. Tragedy is hilarious in a way.
He could feel the fray from his shirt catch fire first followed by his hair. He tried to move but exhaustion overruled anything his synapse tried to communicate. He rolled from left to right in the stink of burning everything. He hated the smell of burnt hair. He cringed. He screamed for an instant then fell silent. He clenched his teeth so hard he split gums and he clutched his own palms so tightly he dug in with his nails. He screamed again and this time he didn’t stop. The house burned down and no amount of water or axes or wind could cease it. The back yard was filled with ash. A cat moved slowly across the soot, hopped the charred fence and into the next yard.
///
His face is hot and he wonders where the bathroom is in this house. A gold streak of scribbled light shoots across his eyes with a pain so sharp his knees buckle and his balance fails him. Wait, where was he before all this? He tries to remember his day leading up to the present. When his eyes finally adjust back to the air around him he stumbles around the walls searching for a light switch leaving greasy handprints of sweat streaking across the drywall. The light switch ends up at being on the wall a little lower than his midriff and he lifts it and the bulb in the center of the ceiling explodes.
“Shit.”
Nothing moves quite as quickly as the next few hours. He sits in the middle of the floor afraid to open the doors he groped around the room, in fear of what they contain. He has relieved himself in the corner twice and has stepped on the broken bulb both times upon returning to his spot, not realizing at some point he had been made shoeless. He asks the question over and over in his head and gets no response. I don’t know why i’m here, should I know? His shirt is wrapped around his head to keep the sweat from out of his eyes and he’s rolled his pant legs up to his knees.
He passes out. He wakes up and succumbs to his curiosity and all out last resorts and tries the doors which are both locked. He kicks and rams his shoulders into the wood until his feet and arms are sore and bloody, he collapses again in a heap rolling on the forgotten glass. He gives up. He asks again why he is there and receives no response from himself. He cries and rubs his face raw with his shirt. Screams fill the room and he pounds his chest like an animal. He gives up.
In his dreams the doors open and he walks into the tall grass and his feet are sewn up with invisible thread and his face is kissed by something like wind of warm ice. He walks from the field and onto the road and the gravel doesn’t even sting his bare feet and he begins to run. He is sweating and laughing and there’s a lake not too far off that he will swim in. The rain starts to pour and he strips into only his pants and yells towards the sky in thanks. He wonders where is mother is. He knows it is a dream but he wonders if his father is still dead and if maybe he’s dead too and if he’ll see him. The lake is shallow but the water is cool and he takes long drinks from it between every stroke. On the shore he lays on the short grass and sprawls out like the anatomy of man and listens to a tree collapse in the distance somewhere. There are no women in the place, he thinks to himself and the thought makes him curl up into a ball and pushes him towards the verge of tears but he coughs them away and rolls like a child back into the water. Giving nothing but dead weight he sinks to the bottom of the lake and lays flat on his stomach on the sand. Opening his eyes he sees a million people resting on the floor of the lake and they smile at him and he smiles back. He falls in love. He doesn’t ever want to wake up and he never does.
taos hum
(forty-five minute free write)
She’s at the end of her rope she says. And the rope isn’t even long enough to hang herself with. She’s being melodramatic he tells her. The winter wind blows casually around them and she stuffs her hand in his into the pocket of his coat and pulls the knot of her scarf tighter. The grass around the sidewalk is grey as a father’s hair and crunches and twitches as if it were alive and stretching. Their blood pumps and aches under their skin. Home is in sight and they stifle the urge to break into a run to the front door.
The cat is laying on top of the heating pump under the living room window and nonchalantly cranes his neck as the door opens. Once inside they strip themselves of jackets, scarves and boots, she goes into the bathroom and he collapses on the couch and turns on the television only to immediately turn it back off. Sighing, he lays back and stares at the ceiling following the shadows risen from the side table lamp. He sighs again impregnating the room with a lack of enthusiasm for anything. The cat jumps from the heater and walks slowly into the kitchen and collapses on the tile floor, his breathing slowed and his tongue dry.
In the bathroom she stares at the dark circles under her eyes she usually disguises beneath a fine coat of makeup. She feels like weeping but instead puts her glasses back on and lifts the toilet lid. She unravels a few squares of toilet paper and throws them in the bowl and flushes it. She hears the cat slump in the kitchen and she opens the bathroom door.
The kitchen hums with the running refrigerator and the ever ticking eyes of the stove and she sits on the tile next to the cat and strokes behinds his ears. The rattle in the cats throat churns and he keeps his eyes closed, reaching out his front paws towards the cabinets.
“Turn something on,” she says into the living room. He lifts himself from the couch and drops the arm of the record player and it breathes to life. He returns to the couch and scrunches his mouth from left to right in time with the music. Dear god, he thinks to himself, she is not comfortable. She is imagining some sound that is not there. There is some chord in hear head that doesn’t exist. He holds in a laugh at the thought of her searching the entire house for this enigmatic noise, opening the stove and standing in front of it for entire minutes, or staring at the wall while the cat does the same on the other side of the room.
“It’s there,” she says over the music and over his thoughts, as if she knew he was having them, “I know you don’t believe me, but it’s there. I hear it in bed. I hear it while i’m reading, while i’m cooking, when you’re here and especially when you’re not.” This last line she speaks like he’s behind it, playing some cruel joke on her. He relinquishes his laugh and can sense her scowl a room away.
“What is it?” He asks her again.
“It’s a Taos hum and it’s real. It’s driven entire cultures to madness!” He laughs again, knowing full well the repercussions. She doesn’t speak again. The cat lifts his head and looks in her eyes then rests again. She stands up and fills a cup with tap water from the sink and walks into the living room. He looks up at her from the couch just as she tips the cup over him. She throws the cup to the floor and it slides under the other couch and crashes against the baseboard of the opposite wall. Laying with his wet hair mopped to one side he stares into her face while her eyes look to the front door. The entire house is quiet for one of them. She turns and shuts the door of their bedroom behind her.
Chapter 9.
(Dated August 5, 2010)
Think of every book you’ve ever read. All the dog ears and drips of sweat or careless sips that stained each unfathomably labored page in pulp starbursts. After six hundred pages or so, your clammy hands will invariably eat into the front and back covers of any book and those truthful, undying pockmarks of fingerprints will let everyone know exactly what you’ve been reading. Do you remember who the first character in a novel that you really, honestly connected with? What were the fears and doubts of that player, were they your own or were you just simply happy to not be them? You can teach someone to read but you can’t teach everyone to understand. To be alone enough to comprehend every single sentence and every mood of every petty or monstrous character, well is that really being alone. Does your head speak to you sometimes? Take notes on those blank pages at the end of the book. The ones after the conclusion and once you get to know the author’s name, where he currently resides and how many dogs he has. The blank pages are called flyleaves and they can be your best friends in the whole world. Say you get to the middle of the fourth section in your illustrious novel of romance and squalor but are stopped dead in your tracks by a character who has reappeared and hasn’t been seen since the end of section one. You have your options at this point: you can continue reading and hope the author has very little respect for you and reminds you exactly who this character is and why they are such a heartless bastard/charming sweetheart or you can continue reading blindly till you reach the end of your piece and then stare into the sun for a while without having any impression on what just washed through you or you could simply flip to your flyleaves and reintroduce yourself to the character you so embarrassingly misconstrued as unimportant since they haven’t been heard from for four hundred and twelve pages. The flyleaf notes can also tie two ends together once you’ve finished your book. Why did the Doctor do what he did to the Patient and her Daughter? Was it his neurosis, his inability to cope with the loss of his young wife or was it the insistent moon light shining through his window at night causing him to writhe on his covers and sheets in agony and sexual frustration (or was that the Neighbor’s dilemma?) Check your notes, it’s in there. There was a time when books were scribed on wood and rock and folded into long cylinders like bamboo rolls, but sometime after all that the world went to hell and the writers all became drunks and part time derelicts and shot the whole thing to shit. Hemingway nearly died in two separate plane crashes in Africa and what did he do? Write an astounding novel of life and death and love and what it means to fear for life and lives of others and what it really means to weep? No, he wrote an unfinished novel about hunting. Not that I ever understood that goddamn thing, maybe he did cover all that stuff. Between the two facing pages in a book, any two facing pages, the opposite of the spine, is called the gutter. Which could be a very important and segue way into the very heart of everything, or it could just be white text. Either way, Gutenberg wouldn’t understand a single fucking thing he just read.
