Time has accelerated and I've done nothing to mark its passage. Yesterday seemed like the beginning of July but somehow today finds me mid-way through August. When I went to work everyone got incredibly uncomfortable and drifted away. My boss looked stunned. He finally asked me what I was doing and I just shrugged and told him I was about to start building needles. "Johnny, are you alright?" he said in a very sincere and concerned tone, without even a note of sarcasm, which was probably the weirdest part. "Sort of, I guess," I replied. "I had to hire someone else, Johnny," he said very quietly, pointing over to a young blonde woman already in the process of cleaning out the back storeroom. "You've been gone for three weeks." I heard myself mutter "I have?" even though I knew I'd been away, it just hadn't seemed that long, but of course it had been that long, I just hadn't been able to make it in or even call. I hadn't been able to make it anywhere for that matter and I pretty much kept the phone unplugged. "I'm so sorry," I blurted, suddenly feeling very bad, because I'd let my boss down and I could see he was a pretty decent guy after all, though at the same time feeling also a little relieved about the news of my replacement. It made everything seem a little lighter. My boss handed me my last check and then wrote down a number. "Get yourself in a program man. You look like shit." He didn't even ask if I was strung out, he just assumed it and somehow that struck me as funny, although I held off from laughing until I got outside. A hooker in silver slippers quickened by me. Back in my studio, I discovered a message from Kyrie. I'd thrown her number out weeks ago. I'd thrown everyone's number out. Nothing could be done. I was gone from everyone. I erased her message and returned to the house. In the back of my mind, I understood I would need money soon, but for some reason that didn't bother me. I still had my Visa card, and since selling my CD player, I'd further improved on that resulting silence by insulating my room with egg cartons and limiting the sun's glare with strips of tinfoil stapled to pieces of cardboard placed over my windows, all of which helps me feel a little safer. Mostly the clock tells me the time, though I suspect the hands run intermittently fast and slow, so I'm never sure of the exact hour. It doesn't matter. I'm no longer tied to anyone's schedule. As a precaution, I've also nailed a number of measuring tapes along the floor and crisscrossed a few of them up and down the walls. That way I can tell for sure if there are any shifts. So far the dimensions of my room remain true to the mark. Sadly enough, despite all this—even six weeks without alcohol, drugs or sex—the attacks persist. Mostly now when I'm sleeping. I suddenly jerk awake, unable to breathe, bound in ribbons of darkness, drenched in sweat, my heart dying to top two hundred. I've no recollection what vision has made me so apoplectic, but it feels like the hinges must have finally failed, whatever was trying to get in, at last succeeding, instantly tearing into me, and though I'm still conscious, slashing my throat with those long fingers and ripping my ribs out one by one with its brutal jaws. On a few occasions, these episodes have caused me to dry heave, my system wrenching up stomach acid in response to all the fear and confusion. Maybe I have an ulcer. Maybe I have a tumor. Right now the only thing that keeps me going is some misunderstood desire to finish The Navidson Record. It's almost as if I believe questions about the house will eventually return answers about myself, though if this is true, and it may very well not be, when the answers arrive the questions are already lost. For example, on my way back from the Shop, something strange surfaced. I say "strange" because it doesn't seem connected to anything nothing my boss said or Navidson did or anything else immediately on my mind. I was just driving towards my place and all of a sudden I realized I was wrong. I'd been to Texas though not the state. And what's more the memory came back to me with extraordinary vividness, as clean and crisp as a rare LA day, which usually happens in winter, when the wind's high and the haze loosens its hold on the hills so the line between earth and sky suddenly comes alive with the shape of leaves, thousands of them on a thousand branches, flung up against an opaline sky— —An eccentric gay millionaire from Norway who owned a colonial house in a Cleveland suburb and a tea shop in Kent. Mr. Tex Geisa. A friend of a friend of a passing someone I knew having passed along an invitation: come to Tex's for an English tea, four sharp, on one unremarkable Saturday in April. I was almost eighteen.
The someone had flaked at the last minute but having nothing better to do I'd gone on alone, only to find there, seated in a wicker chair, listening to Tex, nibbling on her scone . . . Strange how clarity can come at such a time and place, so unexpectedly, so out of the blue, though who's firing the bolt?, a memory in this case, shot out of the August sun, Apollo invisible in all that light, unless you have a smoked glass which I didn't, having only those weird sea stories, Tex delivering one after another in his equally strange monotone, strangely reminiscent of something else, whirlpools, polar bears, storms and sinking ships, one sinking ship after another, in fact that was the conclusion to every single story he told, so that we, his strange audience, learned not to wonder about the end but paid more attention to the tale preceding the end, those distinguishing events before the inevitable rush of icy water, whirlpools, polar bears and good ol' ianis fatuus. perilous to chase, ideal to incarnate, especially when you're the one pursued by the inevitable ending, an ending Tex had at that moment been relating—deckwood on fire, the ship tilting, giving way to the pursuit of the sea, water extinguishing the flames in a burst of steam, an unnoticed hiss, especially in that sounding out of death, a grinding relentless roar, which like a growl in fact, overwhelms the pumps, fills up deck after deck with the Indian Ocean, leaving those on board with no place else to go, I remember, no I don't remember any of it anymore, I never heard the rest, I had gone off to piss, flushing the toilet, a roar there too, grinding, taking everything down in what could, yes it really could be described as a growl, but leaving Tex's sinking ship and that sound for the garden where who should I find but . . . my memory, except I realize now my ship, isn't Tex's ship, the one I'm seeing now, not remembering but something else, resembling icy meadows and scrambles for a raft and loss . . . though not the same, a completely different story after all, built upon story after story, so many, how many?, stories high, but building what? and why?—like for instance, why—the approaching "it" proving momentarily vague—did it have to leave Longyearbyen, Norway and head North in the dead of summer? Up there summer means day, a constant ebb of days flowing into more days, nothing but constant light washing over all that ice and water, creating strange ice blinks on the horizon, flashing out a code, a distress signal?—maybe; or some other prehistoric meaning?—maybe; or nothing at all?—also maybe; nothing's all; where monoliths of ice cloaked in the haar, suddenly rise up from the water, threatening to smash through the reinforced steel hull, until an instant before impact the monstrous ice vanishes and those who feared it become yet another victim to a looming mirage, caused by temperature changes frequent in summer, not to mention the chiding of the more experienced hands drunk on cold air and Bokkol beer . . . Welcome to The Atrocity, a 412ft, 13,692 ton vessel carrying two cargoes within its holds, one secret, the other extremely flammable, like TNT, and though the sailors are pleasant enough and some married and with children and though the captain turns out to be a kind agent of art history, especially where the works of Turner, de Vos and Goya are concerned, that strange cargo could have cared less when towards the bow, in the first engine room, sparks from a blown fuse suddenly
This is not for you.
“Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind.”