Bird-Self Accumulated. Don Judson
to the basement where the party had been held.
At the mouth of the cellar stairwell I hesitated, unsure—what if my parents were gone, If no one were in the house and I was there alone? I bent to peer down the stairs searching out partway along the cellar’s back-wall a lampbase, and in its thin shadow of light, set on several books, an old, black, extension phone.
I was terrified it might begin to ring.
All of this went on just as if it were in my sleep because I can recall now a faint mist beginning to cover everything inside the house. It was soft against the floor and wallboards. Against feet, hair, eyes. I could taste it along my tongue. Everything stood out.
Listen, it said.
Listen.
I went to the doorway and then out into the yard. The hedges, trees, driveways and homes of my neighborhood were there just as they’d been before but I couldn’t find a name for a single one of them.
All of it had been set off balance.
The borders erased.
There was no way of understanding even where my body ended and the rest picked up. Can you imagine such a thing? How a person can step outside their own life? That’s how I began to feel driving the security guard’s car around and around on that street. I began to feel as if I might be taking place inside a television movie.
Finally, in desperation, I found a new turn and went along until it brought me out beneath a highway underpass which I recognized as being on the complete wrong side of the bay from where the park was. Factories appeared everywhere. They lit up into the sky like a carnival. I felt about them as a person who had been strangled and thrown away to be forgotten. But something happened then. In the distance I could see the black line of water. Clouds seemed to come down all at once over it. They were across the bay. Then snow began.
Our first snowfall of the season!
It fell in large, steady flakes which thickened against the windshield and road, and filled me, stupidly, with a vague sexual desire—I believe I’ve woken from wet dreams in just such a way, apprehensive, as if some undeniable truth about myself had been carefully and irretrievably made known; yet now I’d not even been asleep, and, humiliated, needing as much to move as sensing in the snow an opportunity, I dimmed the car’s lights and made my way unnoticed between two lines of razor-topped fencing and a guardshack, and snuck this way in surrounding darkness down an access lane. . . . Heading, I knew, toward water, past walls of what appeared to be coal, and wide scars of land gouged flat where pipes sprouted and intersected at random—far off behind or to one side, smokestacks, ghostly, looming wraithdrab; and then to a place where these as well ended and there seemed to be nothing but vast skeletal night, and through it or up into and stamped upon, a constant falling, falling, and so without chance to see or react, unable to stop in time, found myself run out of road and driving headlong, axledeep out onto the tide-flats of the back end of the bay.
The car coughed and died.
There was no other sound at all.
Off to the right I could see a series of concrete breakwalls where rats the size of poodles romped like hungry children. Beyond them was a ruined liftbridge. Snow fell softly against it, and fell and softly settled on the water, and mudflats and road, erasing, and traffic in the distance—
I seemed to be very far away.
Out in the harbor itself, about two hundred yards offshore, lay on its side the immense hull of an oilboat sunk just that summer past.
It raised up as if it were God. And I think now that maybe it was. I pushed open the door and made my way toward it through the thin lights of the security guard’s car and along the stand of mud and broken stone strewn with bottles and slender fishline, and down then to the oily black and cold water which was completely still, and heavy, and not so much reached up as shifted to accept my falling into: first ankle . . . then thigh, and waist; until I bent forward to it fully.
Y-CITY
Cheech suggested we burgle a house.
“We can stab the walls again,” he said. “Shit in the refrigerator.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But our Marlboros had run out and the sun was beginning to make my teeth ache and all around us objects continued moving in ways they weren’t supposed to. The street especially, it was up in my face, and then down. Which isn’t the worst. The worst is like what happened in June when I’d been tripping for several days and then decided to do a hit of speed and hitchhike to the lake. Beaner said: Whoa man, you don’t look so good. Yet the way all of it had been going, for the first time I’d felt entirely scraped clean. Everything in town had sat boxed up close looking bright and plastic as if it had just been washed. A shutter kept clicking across my eyes. I saw Beaner right in front of me at about sixty frames per minute. She was small and beautiful and all strung out. For one profound moment secrets popped between us in our blood and brain cells and then I woke up on a hospital room emergency cot. My hands had been tied to the railings. Some allergy pills from a back pocket were arrayed across my chest.
“How long have I been here,” I asked.
“You’ve had a seizure,” someone told me. “You’re doing fine . . . you talked all the way over here in the ambulance.”
“You’ve been sitting up,” they said.
The room had been filled with people I couldn’t even remember.
“I thought I was still hitching to the beach,” I informed them.
Today was different. Not necessarily better. I’d drunk some cough medicine to get the codeine. On Sunday. At first it was okay, we were at the bowling alleys, but then I kept getting higher. I sat down outside by myself for a while to see if it would stop. But it has ended with me unable to attend work for three days.
I mean, how can I?
At night I dream faces at my window. I sit up with my insides in my mouth from fear and see nothing and finally say, “Whew, it was just a dream.” Then, as soon as I relax, a face comes right back into the room saying my name and I’m up yelling, stuck inside a dream I’ve already dreamt is over. It has become a problem to the point that whenever I lay down I begin to hallucinate. At least when I’m up and around I feel like a piece of shit but it is a feeling I can relate to.
Only, now, Cheech wanted to ask me such a question—
“Burgle,” I said to him. “Do I look like a person who would care to burgle a house?”
We’d come by this time to find ourselves in the front parking lot of the dry cleaning place. Cars kept driving in and out. There was a noise like the ocean ascendant inside my head and Cheech sat beside me during all of it as if he had an ability never to be fooled. “Check it out,” he explained, “this place—we don’t even have to break, we only just got to enter.”
The house belonged to a doctor. We drove a long way from the road to even see it back there in the trees. Cheech finally shut the car off next to a stone wall. Although he was smiling he’d done a lousy job. There were leaves in the windshield wipers and a willow branch from his having nodded off and run us into some bushes just as we’d left the main road.
Right before that the radio had been playing my favorite song.
“Hurry,” I’d warned him already knowing it was too late, “wake up.”
“I think I took the wrong turn,” he said.
Where had he gotten such an idea? I wanted to point out that we’d already driven right across a stream. By the time it was over, besides a broken windshield and fenders left behind, the car had gotten part way up a fallen tree.
“You push,” Cheech suggested. “I’ll steer.”
I had sat staring in amazement at the fact we were still alive.
“One, two; one, two,”