[Rabbit Hole Day] Further Disappointments

Gentle Readers, I ask you: what is it with me and the 27th of January? You'd think my cognitive biases would have picked a different day to fixate on as my special "rotten day".

I'm really sorry I didn't mention this before...I got a little preoccupied and decided to try to just put it behind me, but then I was reminded of the date.

Last year, on the evening of January 27th, I was hit by a car. It was traumatic, but given how little damage I took (and given that the girlfriend who constantly reminded me of it is gone), I more or less forgot about it. Which is odd in and of itself, really; but rather than reflect on that right now, the important part is that forgetting meant I was doomed to repeat.

So January 27th rolled around yet again, and I treated it like any other morning. I cocked my head at how little coffee my machine made this time around, but otherwise it was a grey winter morning with very few complaints. I walked down the bleak-chic street between me and downtown Mountain View, coffee in one hand, lunch in the other, and contemplated the little pleasures of annoyances of my world.

Do you see what's coming?

Yeah, so I stepped into the intersection, forgetting (there's that word again) how cars love to not check what's happening in the crosswalk before making the right off Shoreline.

They didn't hit me; thank God, they didn't me. I really do not want to know what would have happened if I'd taken an Expedition to the chest. They honked; I jumped back; and when I slammed ass-first into the edge of the curb, my vision went white.

I'd forgotten about most of this, but I did remember the sky; it wasn't so much polluted as it was a normal sky repainted gray. My mouth tasted sour, my whole body felt sunburnt, and an invisible hook was stabbing into my chest; and a familiar, black-haired man was staring into my face and throttling me.

"What the fuck?" These dreams seem to make me say that a lot.

"You're back." The man—his name was Dick, but we didn't use it the entire time I was there—looked utterly shocked. "You're back again."

"Probably?" My mind felt greased.

I sat up, took stock. We were sitting in the shadow of a huge gray block, a giant rectangle some hundred or two feet high. The building was the terminus of a brown earth street; stubbier, uglier buildings flanked us on either side, and those disappeared about two blocks down into a huge green-stone plaza, empty except for the ugly brass fence surrounding it. Everything was dark and wet; the street around me smelled like fresh rain.

Years of watching movies like this came back to me. "How long have I been gone?"

Dick smiled at me, the kind of smile you expect from a grandpa in a whole lot of pain. "Month. Maybe two."

"Okay." I wiped my face off, tried to make nonsense make sense. "Weren't there like five other guys with you?"

"Gone," Dick told me, sad all over again. "The things they left took them."

"The things the other guys left?"

Dick shook his head. "The things the ones in charge left."

He was standing a good distance away from me now, then a little closer, looking and then pointing up at the block behind me. I stood up and gave it a serious look. It was just a piece of stone thrust down into the dirt; it might have been a building if it had doors, windows, or any sense of having been worked. There were indentations, little cracks here and there, but it seemed more like weather than deliberation. And yet, somehow I could tell it wasn't always that way.

"What, was that where they lived?" I asked.

Dick didn't look away from the building. "It's where we burned."

Lightning flashed, or else I just blinked very quickly in a bright light. We moved in jump-cuts down the empty street, over to the brass fence and the plaza. Up close I could see the wire strung between the brass poles, clean, shiny concertina loops like you'd see in World War II trenches. I peered through the wire and the brass at the green stone: dulled from what clearly used to be a sheen, streaked with mud and piles of dirt...as I looked I thought I could hear screaming, and what might have been attempts at prayer.

"A prison," I said. "A prison." Not sure why I said it twice.

"That was before."

"Prison for dead people?" I asked.

Dick perked, straightened up; his eyes bulged as he stared away from me down a side street. I started to ask another question, but then my ears pricked too. Footsteps were echoing off the buildings.

It was just one or two sets of footsteps, nothing big or impressive; but something in the way they resonated sent chills down my spine. I looked at Dick, and he was frozen in the same position; dream-people aren't known for their reliability.

Then the shadow spread out along the wall, and the footsteps were joined by a rattling; and around the corner came three men moving in formation, bowed under the weight of a huge iron kiln, five feet across, its lid open and the inside already belching fire.

"No," Dick said. "No, no, no—"

"We're here to be punished!" the three men said, running right for us. "We're here to burn!"

Dick's big "No" stretched out and distorted, becoming this awful bass soundtrack under the charging men. He put out one arm that he just kept flailing, and I started to think the guy was locked in place.

A voice whispered in my ear: "This isn't how it's supposed to be."

Then the hook in my chest gave a yank; and air whooshed by my ears; and I was sitting back on the curb. The Expedition hadn't even checked to see if I was alright.

I was shaken, of course; it didn't help that I had to sprint to make my train. But after someone else brought up January 27th and that weird post about being hit by a car, I have to wonder, was there some weird causality that made me walk out in front of a brainless SUV driver today? Is there a reason that the block of stone I saw kind of looked like the building I work in made out of plasticine? Also, why did I forget about this until today?

I'm guessing I'll have to wait a year or so for answers. And I hate the idea that that's all I could have to say.

[Rabbit Hole Day] Sorry to disappoint...

I'm sure at least one of you scanned your friends' list and wondered why I didn't make a post for Rabbit Hole Day. Unfortunately, my dedication to Carroll wound up a little up-close and personal.

See, yesterday I got hit by a car.

I'm fine now, I mean, nothing broken or anything. I'm a little stiff on one side, and my face looks a rotten eggplant, but I'll recover alright. The fun part came right after the sudden smack and the full body jerk of the impact, and then the white flash and me feeling like someone hooked a bungee cord to my sternum and strung it out through my back.

The place I wound up had a sky the color of a cigarette filter and red earth packed so tight you'd call it concrete, hemmed in by four gray buildings. It was me and about six other people, talking in about four different languages. Half of them didn't seem to care that I was there; only one of them bothered to talk to me. He looked like Nick Nolte's character in Mother Night.

I, of course, asked the brilliant question that proved my wit and mental acuity: "Where am I?" He shrugged, and smiled the way you smile to a cancer patient. "We're sitting in whatever's left."

I joke all the time about how the world seems like it's being directed by this or that person. Whatever weird pain-dream I was having, it was clearly based on something by Sartre.

The man's named turned out to be Dick. He'd died from blood loss after taking an entire sheet of blotter acid and attempting to fuck a lawnmower. His last word was "Beethoven" and his last memories were fluorescent lights, crying, and people trying not to laugh. He was sad, but he made it pretty clear that had nothing to do with death; he'd been dead for a decade, which apparently is enough to get over the whole thing.

Dick's good people, one of those few who I can always count on for a relaxing and engaging conversation; as long as I didn't shift from leaning against the wall I forgot about the tugging in my chest. Which of course meant that it was time for someone to go apeshit.

One of the other five guys lost his mind; he kept pointing at me and screaming in what I think was French, maybe some sort of creole. He tried to explain something rapid-fire to one of his friends, then to another; when I stood up he let out this one syllable yelp and just charged me head-on. It's happened three times in my life and I still haven't learned to brace for impact.

He screamed in my face, jump-cuts of anger; punched at my clavicles, shook my shoulders. He demanded, then he begged, but he never listened, and when he finally got that whatever I was saying meant that I didn't understand, he staggered back, started crying, hit himself in the temple as hard as he could, and bull-rushed one of the walls.

That, for some reason, was worse than him committing assault. Dick and the other four people charged after him, grabbed him by the arms, hissing like a bag of angry snakes and trying to clap their hands over his mouth. He punched one of them, kicked someone else, and he just kept shouting, and every time he yelled I felt the cord in my chest vibrate. Then my spine iced over, and my brain exploded, and my whole body became one nauseating post-morphine chill.

I realize everything scary looks kind of like a man, but seriously, this guy looked kind of like a man, an athlete rolled in gray African river mud and then left to starve into muscles and twigs. His head was gone, or stretched, or something; his mouth and nose were stretched taut into a hooked beak, and I tried to tell myself it was like the female lead in Beetlejuice but it wasn't really helping. It looked down at the five men as they scrambled, and talked in a voice that sounded like reel-to-reel tape rewinding, a gummy sound-loopy mess that only occasionally sounded like a person with laryngitis. All I could tell was that the thing was agitated. The five men prostrated themselves and begged; Dick yelled at me to kneel down.

Again, I was witty. "What the fuck is that?" Talking almost made me vomit.

"It's the thing they left behind!" Dick yelled.

It looked at me, and it started screaming; and the cord in my stomach snapped, and my world went brown, smoky black, too white and painful; and then LH was jumping up and running over to my side and wishing me a good morning through her happy tears. I think I made a joke about hating IVs before I fell asleep.

I still feel raw inside my chest, even though X-rays say nothing is there. Which of course is standard, and it kind of annoys me that my one real experience with this stuff has to be so pedestrian, which I guess is why I haven't gone looking for information on Dick--no need to be yet another Fox Mulder.

I'm going to try to go back. I just hope the next trip doesn't take me getting hit by a car.

And We're Off!

It looks like all of you can read this now; and in celebration of my electronic child winging its way into the ether, I have for you a snippet of that which is at the heart of this site: my writing. The work is, naturally, Copyright 2008 Tyler Hayes; but that doesn't mean I don't want you to enjoy it.

I asked an old man where the magic had gone, as soon as I had said hello. He was a proud, thin man with a weathered bearing, a royal air ground down by a common world; he scratched at his beard, cut short for the summer heat, and he told me, with the patter of a weary, snarling schoolteacher:

You can see them out in cities, after the roar of rush hour has passed and the people have moved inside to ignore the sunset. They appear where the world bottoms out and holes start to show in our perfect blanket of order: cold spots, humming wires, pavement cracked wide and spidery by roots. If you stop, and you watch, you'll see castoffs dance into your view, broken glass and loose leaves and papers for concerts long past. They'll draw close to you, their movements disguised in the dance of chaos but apparent to those who are watching for it. If you look at them, and if you do not hold your breath, you will see.
They'll touch before they show; you'll know they've arrived by the hairs on the backs of your arms, or the idiot feeling of someone staring at your neck. Then comes the heat, or the cold, and the electric vertigo that pulls all your muscles loose. Your vision will darken, and it will blur, but that means that it is really, truly time.
The detritus will scatter, and the ground will seem to bubble, to toss and play with the snaky distortions you see on your ceiling after a sudden wakening. Do not rub your eyes. Do not look away. They are here.
The distortions will grow, fatter and more frightening, and details will reach out to you, coarse heads and crude fingers like a child's sketch. You will think of things and people you have lost, and it is here that your road curves upward: do not think of your lovers. The ones you let in the furthest are the spies inside your heart; you can never open that part of yourself to them.
The distortions will mate and meld, and your thoughts will be a jumbled panic. You'll find hurts dredging up from the lakes of memory, monsters crawling toward your forebrain from nightmares left abandoned in your past. Do not be afraid; and do not look away.
The figures form a haze, the liquid bubbling of a steam vent, and from out of the haze will step their new forms. They'll be crude at first, stained glass images of your thoughts rendered in blacks and sunset reds. They'll look at you with heads like shriveled gourds, and their words will be the dried-up thoughts of your grandfather, telling you how his people feared the dark. They'll talk until you nod, and gesture if you shake your head, their fingers like the bones of birds, bladed and gracile; and they'll ask you a question that only your soul understands.
Sometimes, the answer is yes; sometimes, it is no. But whatever the answer , do not let it out. They do not ask so you will converse; they ask so you will open your mouth.
They hunger for breath, the warmth and the cycle inside, the fuel that burns out the quickest when it is gone. They will take it if they can and they will go out into the world, stopped people with sunburnt skin, watching the world with hollow, glassy eyes and talking in grunts that make the locals shake their heads.
If the question does not suffice, however, that is when they will bring you gifts: golden, bladed flowers, and taurine creatures that scamper in their palms, and two-dimensional jars with the thoughts of old philosophers stored beneath their lids. They'll offer them with love and silence, and when you look at them, you'll think of someone whose smile would come roaring forward if they were given some of these wares. Do not remember them; the one who gives the gift would not be you.
They will stop then, and watch you, and their number will be greater than you had thought. Their stares will be cold and compelling, and you'll sense even more of them behind you. The smell of your sweat will be unbearable. They'll shift then, and shatter, their pieces forming new shapes you had only seen on the canvas of your mind, naked lovers and yoked sphinxes and the looming, cyclopean Tower. Watch them go by, primitive and primal, crude but terrifying. Bow your head to the Emperor; avert your eyes from the Devil; and when the World dances past you, never let her see you blush.
When it is over, the images will scatter, and they will be nothing but scraps of dust, brown stains born from bad light or bits of eyelash on your cornea. And when you close your eyes you'll see them as crawling blue lightning against the grey, and before a minute has passed they'll be swirling down toward some common spot, and then, eyes closed, that is where you must look.
On the outside you'll see nothing, feel only a rush of blood to your head as the fevered perspective rights itself; but if you watch from within, you'll see the point at the center of it all, the psychic whirlpool to which they all are drawn.
Your answer is in there, if you want it; but understand that the price is all the questions you were planning to ask, and that the truth may not be the beacon you would like to think. Magic is and has always been on the edge, the cliff beneath the feet of the Fool; but now, and today, it is angry.