The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (22 page)

Drank
one
two
three scotches after talking with Scott. Sorry. To do list: drink more scotch, fuck waiting around, call publisher, arrange a drop and pick up, supplies supplies supplies, more scotch
21

july 3

Stephens dropped me at the bush line on a stretch of the Trans-Labrador Highway at one of the many snowmobile/ATV trails. I set the GPS for my rendezvous point with Stephens in seven days. Two-days hike in, two-days out, three at the Barn. Left a message for Scott (he wouldn’t answer his phone) and told him that I’d have a guide with me in the bush. It’s not full on lie. I have
The Black Guide
22
.
Supplies enough for more than a week. The weather is supposed to be good (always subject to change in these parts, so I’m told). Feels good having a pack on my back again. I think Tommy and I probably had a lot in common. Maybe Tommy shares my pop-psych byline: overachieving and overbearing father who had mapped out his life for him from birth, and after reading Vonnegut, the beats, and Hunter S. Thompson, he rebelled. Right? Scott asks why do I keep doing this. This: dropping out of college to backpack in the US, Europe, South America, collecting friends and experiences and stories, and then all the mountains, collecting craggy peaks like coins, each more dangerous and extreme than the last, falling into a crevasse at McKinley and being airlifted out didn’t stop me, then there was Everest and everyone who died around me. I’m 45 and that was supposed to be the last adventure for me
23
.

Night. Tent. Another nightmare. Still shaking. In the barn with Tommy. He was all curled up around a weak fire. Tried to help him, brushed snow off his face, and it was the dead Everest climber, German, from another party, met him briefly at base camp, I said his name, Karl Sidenberg
24
, kept saying it until his name sounded like something else, it was something else, couldn’t control my tongue, horrible sounds, hard and then slithery, his frozen mouth opened and kept opening until it was as wide as the world.

july 4

Where are all the fireworks? Dreary morning. Trouble shaking off the night before. Mood improved after I found the clearing of yellowing grass, prickly weeds, and dandelions as tall as corn stalks. The clearing pitches up a small hill and the barn is on the top with more hills behind it. It’s bigger than I expected. Strange to find such a large building out in the middle of the bush. I approached from its side. Had to resist the urge to call out “hello,” make sure I wasn’t trespassing on someone’s property. The wooden planks are a bleached-out gray but it’s in damn good shape given the number of Northern Canadian winters it has endured. The roof has a few dips and waves in it, like ripples in a lazy pond, but from what I can see, there are only a handful of slate shingles cracked or missing. The barn is beautiful except for the carving over the front double doors. The carving is a monstrosity. The v-shaped head has a deep indentation that could be a mouth, but whatever else might’ve been its original features have been obliterated by woodpecker holes. A long, girthy, and frankly lewd wooden neck holds the head out away from the barn.

Inside: As much evident care went into a sturdy, weather-proof exterior, it’s bare bones on the inside. No loft. No stalls. No rooms. Just a vast enclosed space. Looking up at the roof with all its beams it looks like a chest cavity, belly of the beast. White Whale and Melville again, right? Is my life becoming that obviously a literary trope? Fuck. Thick support posts line the perimeter.
Fells
Feels like a big top, a circus tent, less a barn. The floor is hard-packed dirt with only the occasional dry weed poking through. Evidence of the barn being used as a temporary shelter abounds. Empty coolers and beer cans, tarps, bags, rusted traps, shotgun shell casings, torn up blankets and socks. Evidence of its last occupant: the rock outline of Tommy’s campfire in the middle of the floor, a black stain, a hole.

Back wall is covered in graffiti and names and dates gouged into the wood. The older markings look like gibberish, a combination of swooping marks and hard slashes, fist-sized circles dot the walls everywhere, some of them colored in or gouged out so they look like holes in the walls, and there are broken rings that look like the one on the cover of
The Black Guide
. Quotes from Vonnegut (“so it goes”), Hemmingway, Plath, an ode to Jack London
25
, this bit from the book of Job: “Can you pull in Leviathan… tie down its tongue with a rope? Will it keep beging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentel words?” (sic)

In big block letters: “Tommy H. walked into the wild, June 2013 and forever.”

Fire started. Tired. An hour of sunlight left. Hopefully sleep will follow. Will explore the surrounding area more fully tomorrow. I’ll search for wild edibles Tommy might’ve eaten (or non-edibles), try to think like Tommy instead of dwelling on all my stuff. Keep busy. When alone like this, the trick is to not get hopelessly lost in your own headspace. Find another place. Looks like the BLUE notebook
26
has turned into a diary too…. Man, I’m such a pathetic, angsty teenager still. FUCK THE MAN! DON’T TRUST ANYONE OLDER THAN
30
50! Cooler night than anticipated. Outside is a symphony of insect calls. It’s beautiful. It’s always been beautiful to me.

july 5

Up with the sun. Done the rounds on the grounds. Cool and cloudy. Nothing out of the ordinary. No trouble finding wild edibles, but it’s July. Finding food a few months from now would be a vastly different story.

intro paragraph? Tommy Hovsepian and I both made promises to our loved ones. We were not lying and we both meant them with all of our hearts and souls at the time we said them. How could I know that? All promises of “I’m staying” are the same and are made to be broken. We’ve already been promised to (illegible)

Probably should knock this shit off. Publisher won’t be happy with memoir/non-fiction hybrid.

Considered setting up some small game traps, trip wires and the like, if for nothing else to keep my mind occupied. But I have enough food. No need to kill any critters just for the hell of it. Spent afternoon reading
The Black Guide
instead. As one of my favorite foul-mouthed lit professors used to say, “Man, that’s some fucked up shit right there.” Looking forward to hearing from Tracy when I get back, see what she dug up on this crazy book.

Okay. Fuck. I’m spooked and rattled. Last light fading and I flipped through old BLUE here and found a bunch of notes that I didn’t write. They’re not mine. Not my handwriting. Fuck. Can’t remember leaving my notebook out lying around in Happy Valley. Hotel maid with a weird sense of humor? No. No, there’s some of those same fucked up symbols, dark circles, broken rings from the barn’s back wall, and “he’s so hungry” is written between the lines of the July 3rd entry. I wrote that entry in the tent. Out here. I mean, what, I’m writing shit in my sleep now? Creepy ass shit too. Has to be what it is. No one’s out here, no one’s following me. Right? I’m sleep writing, or something. Using my left hand, even?
This is my left hand
. Looks like the other notes, yeah? It does. It does. Fuck! Scott was right. Shouldn’t be out here by myself anymore. I thought I could still do this. Will pack up and leave a day early. If I can’t get Stephens to come out a day early, I’ll thumb it back to Happy Valley. Fuck fuck fuck.

Asleep next to the fire, and those slithery sounds from earlier dreams woke me up, they filled the barn. Wet things wiggling and dragging through the dirt. Filled my head. Puked on myself. I pulled my little camper’s hatchet out of my pack and called out. Movement. Shadows were alive. I circled around the fire, trying to see what was out there and where I could run. I could always run. I ran at Everest. I crouched down next to my pack, started emptying it out, keeping only what I’d need after making a break for the doors. Two thick, albino white appendages wrapped around my ankles and pulled me off my feet, dragged me away from the fire. Light and heat were gone and I was so cold, I was on the white mountain again. I thrashed and punched, then my arms were pinned down too. I couldn’t move. The dying fire threw flickering images, albino white monsters writhing all around me, their arms, legs, necks, intertwined, a mass of worms. Tommy’s melted rounded distorted transformed face hovered over my legs. My right hand was held out above my chest and close to my face, and another face telescoped from the writhing mass to me, and the face was no longer a face. The face, it was stupidly blind and all mouth, a wide, black hole that would never be filled. The face, it once belonged to the dead climber I left on Everest. I screamed I said his name Karl I said that I was sorry that I left him there all alone to die I was sorry that I didn’t help him when he asked for help his frozen lips couldn’t really move but he asked me for help. He put my fingers in his mouth slowly, fingertips passed through an impossibly cold membrane. I screamed I was sorry again and that if I’d stopped and tried to help him both us of would’ve died that he was too far gone I wasn’t strong enough to help him down there was no way he could’ve made it no way he could’ve survived I had no choice. The mouth slid over my fingers down to the knuckle and then suddenly in the soft, wet, cold mouth, there were teeth, and it was wonderful.

july 25

At Labrador Grenfell-Health
27
.

Rescue team led by Stephens came out to the barn two days after we missed our rendezvous date. I was airlifted out. Vaguely remember bright sunlight, the sound of rotors, and their mechanical wind on my face. Don’t remember anything else of the rescue. Stephens said he found me with my right hand badly burnt, so badly burnt that my fingers were blackened stubs, smoking embers, like I’d fallen asleep with my hand in the fire all night long. Infection was already raging, so was a fever, and I spoke nothing but gibberish. The doctors had to amputate the hand at the wrist. I still feel the hand that isn’t there.

I didn’t answer Stephens’ or anyone else’s questions. Told them I couldn’t remember what happened or how I burnt myself, and I certainly don’t remember writing that last entry in the BLUE notebook. I don’t think Stephens and friends believed me and I don’t care. They finally gave me back my BLUE notebook this morning. Stephens claimed he didn’t find
The Black Guide
in my belongings. I think Stephens pocketed it. I do.

No matter. My old book, the one about Tommy and me is dead. I’m not going to write it. This BLUE notebook will now become something else. A new kind of guide perhaps.

My lovely Scott is asleep in the chair next to my hospital bed. He looks ten years older than he did when I left him in June. I’ve promised Scott that I’ll never leave him again. Planning a new backyard project to keep me home. We’ll use it to host parties, local author readings, spoken word, folk artists, maybe even some off-off-off Broadway-style performances.

(note from the editors: The notebook ends with a rough map of Nick Brach’s home and expansive land, and includes a schematic/outline of a rectangular building that would be twenty feet wide, fifty feet long. It is labeled, simply, BARN. )

Firedancing

Michael Griffin

1.

B
ay wakes on the living room floor amid mounded clothing pulled from the bedroom closet. The house stripped of furniture, the kitchen lacks food. Even after a night spent endlessly slow-falling through black tar, Bay aches to retreat into sleep, to face the intolerable panic moment before death.

The new reality won’t be blinked away. Sunlight blazes through bare windows, reflects on glossy hardwoods. Everything Bay owns, aside from the pile of shirts and jeans on which he slept, leans against the wall. Twenty large canvases, tortured visions in black, umber and gray. Bins of crushed and depleted tubes of oil paint. Jars of solvent, thinner, a few brushes. The room in which he painted, until yesterday, stands empty as the rest.

He contemplates a fresh canvas, mixing pigments, trying to organize color into some sort of clarification. Lately his painting’s been work-for-hire, no time left for himself. The job’s finished. Annie’s gone. His future is nothing, a vacant expanse.

Taking everything, shutting off power, that’s Annie’s message. He hears her voice.

All you need is art, so I’ll take the rest. See how you do, just you, your ratty jeans and boots, and your fucking art.

She’s right. He’s stuck. A house he can’t pay for, a wardrobe more suited to a college kid than a man almost forty, and a pile of what Annie calls
your primal scream paintings
. The only thing left is her note.

Just go. Our accounts are all closed. I’m with him now.

Art always trumped everything, an all-important matter of depth and complexity amid life’s shallower trivialities. Now Bay feels embarrassment at this self-indulgent conceit. Art, a child’s game. What’s it ever gotten him? Three gallery shows, twelve canvasses sold. No options, no hirable skills, no money for a new place. Nothing to eat. Worse than hunger is the shame. Even if he had somewhere to land, he can’t drive. Collecting the money owed him by the theater would mean facing the man who took his wife.