Scale, page 18
A circular shelter poised along the bank of the freshwater creek running through the woods near my parents house appeared before me when my eyes finally opened. I had spent countless evenings foraging through those woods as a child yet I could not for the life of me recall having any awareness of the structure, though there it stood, as if it had been there forever. It was about twelve feet in circumference and its walls were made of thick branches cemented together with mud. There was a doorway, but no roof to protect it other than a canopy of leaves that the trees above provided. In my hands I held two pieces of fruit and a handkerchief. My mother, the healer, appeared at the entrance and waved for me to come inside.
“I can’t leave,” she said. “You have to come in.”
“I forgot to bring the flowers,”
She smiled. “No you didn’t.” My mother took the apples out of my hand and led me across the threshold of the structure, above which was positioned the dead body of a small bird. Its wings were outstretched, its head turned to the side, its beak open, its lifeless tongue out. “My apartment. Now I remember.”
Inside the hut was the living room of my apartment on Bollinger Road, except this version lacked all color. There was no paint on the walls, no stain on the wooden floor, no pictures hanging, and no furniture save for a table in the middle of the room upon which was an urn and a large ceramic bowl. All was grey and white, like the reverse image of a photograph I had taken. My mother placed the apples in the bowl and covered them with the thin cotton handkerchief. Then she lit a candle, kneeled down, and began to pray. I tried to listen but could make out no actual words. I kneeled down too and closed my eyes. All hushed.
When I opened my eyes, Claire was kneeling beside me in my mother’s stead, but I was not scared by this transmutation. In fact, I somehow expected it, as if it were the next stage in a logical evolution of form.
“You will see Frank soon,” she said. This news distressed me but Claire was reassuring, her voice without limits in its tranquility. It jostled awake a discarded archetype of love, one that springs forth when seen by the heart of another.
“Where is Lillian?”
“She was here long ago. Before any of us were even born. Do you understand that?”
I nodded. “And Evan? He lived in here, too.”
“Evan couldn’t wait for you any more, Raymond. You know that. He couldn’t hold the door forever.” She took my hand and we stood up. The old familiar table next to us reeked of varnish and was now littered with brass bells, hundreds of them, all varying in size and shape and heft and hue and smattered between them were small silver plates containing tiny piles of dust. Claire pulled a silk veil down over her face—it was red, the only thing of color—and struck a match, then put the match to a pile of powder and rang a bell at random. The powder burst silently but vividly out of existence like mute gunpowder, leaving behind a stench of formaldehyde and as the air around the bell oscillated, Claire tilted her head to listen for a specific voice to reveal a long-awaited instruction. For a while none of them seemed to appease her or to bring her what she needed, but when she grabbed the handle of the largest golden bell and shook it, I felt the air that vibrated in its wake coil around my loins and I was immediately summoned to holy spasm.
Initially, I was humiliated and afraid, but the sensation was so powerful that there was no hope of disguising the act in secrecy as I had done for so many years. It stimulated entire planes of uncharted elation. The divine strength of the echo that trembled my bones was undiminished by time, growing even more fierce as it persisted. It was, after all, the sum of all human ecstasy and it knew not how to be denied. I attempted to internalize the personal rapture, to bite my tongue, to refuse to reveal my disgraceful addiction to forbidden joys, but it was too much. Without consent, I howled in utter euphoria.
Claire paused, nodded to herself, and put the bell down on the table.
As her body turned slowly toward me, the fear of being caught in the act of something so grotesquely human overwhelmed the orgasmic glory and my heart suspended its beating. I teetered on that intoxicating brink of darkness and light. Would she disown me? Would she expose me for the infant brute I was in my weakest moments? She lifted the red veil only slightly, just enough to see the bottom half of her face. It was the half kept from me the first time our eyes met.
Hannah.
Her mouth was open but as the deafening tone transmitted through her, her features stayed regal and composed. It was Hannah who made the sound that Claire had been listening for. Hannah herself was the instrument through which the music emerged. Hannah, my first and only truth, was the objective conductor of all harmonies. The wave guide.
She closed her mouth and the noise ceased. “Where you go, I will go.” She said. Then she turned and walked away, a small white dog tagging along at her feet, bearing upon the horizon until their illumination became a pinpoint.
The den was dark now. I sensed I was no longer in my apartment, though I couldn’t make out the details of anything particular as no light shone in from the sky above. There was a chair under me and it reclined the instant I named it as such. A distant but familiar voice passed through my head. Yes, I knew this place too. Dr. Singers office. Another hypnotherapy session.
Goddamit.
Resentment descended. I was back at the beginning of a long journey to nowhere. Hannah, Evan, Claire, even my own mother—all plants in a wicked joke to make me believe I had freed myself of the decaying rotation around the same horrible core. But I had not. I never would. After all, life was trivial and indifferent to men. I wanted to die. I was such a fool. There was no path away, there was just an enormous orbit that felt like a departure until it became an arrival again. Walking into that therapists office all those years ago was another foolish step along the same orbit that began when my life was shattered by Professor Tiller—that unexpected deviation which steered me off of my course and into a spiraling pattern of perpetual loss funneling us from prison city to prison city. I drag behind me into this world centuries of guilt and shame and the length of that tail only multiplies with every sick thought of escaping its burden. No therapy could extract me. How could a discarnate voice coming to me from outside of myself haul such misery off of my bones? It could not. Nothing from without could save me. Only something from within.
From within, rather than from without.
Could a small alteration in wording alter the world?
What if?
Here, at the fringe of my abyss, I had no other option but to start anew. I turned my back to the voracious two-headed animal of self-pity and doubt that snarled in those claustrophobic depths within me and began to silently hum Hannah’s mantra as if clutching a life raft. I exiled all thought and memory and expectation, maintaining only the sound Hannah wrote for me, binding the tones to my inward breaths of damp air and passing it through myself in all directions. Stoic pillars of tranquility called down from their place in time by the focused vibration of one simple tone.
Unable to maintain grip for more than a few seconds, I was throttled back into my dream self at the bottom of the chasm by a soft pressure in the middle of my forehead, a tingling sensation as if a large bug had landed between my eyes. Attempting to swat it away, however, I found my hands were incapable of moving. My arms were pinned against the chair by several tons. My eyes too would not open. Sheer hysteria engulfed me as the mystic hum Hannah had planted in me swelled above a fault line to a volume that made it impossible for my body to hear the orders of my brain. It was another episode of sleep death, only this time I was not being kept from reentering the waking life of the world, I was excommunicated from my own dream, held captive in the limbo between two levels of my own subconscience. As I vigorously tried to shift the disconnected husk I was given in the trance, Hannah’s once gorgeous harmony swept away from me like a cloud of atomic heat until its primal fury could carry it no further. When it finally toppled underneath its own magnitude, it buried the “I” beneath innumerable, simultaneous cries, and I could fight no more.
My awareness was too submerged to hope even for a return to a dream inspired by a life in the material world, let alone that profane world itself looming one story above it. Lungs refused to draw air and limbs vehemently denied the wishes of my tyrant mind. There was nothing left for me to do but accept my fate as it was and surrender myself to it. To trust its intelligence entirely. So I let it all go. I let go of all my wishes for something other than what I was given, for a deeper knowledge, for a better word, for a catchier song, for a truer love. The tension in my tired muscles began to disappear and I could feel pressure draining from me as if the ego were trickling out through a crack in the concrete.
Laying patiently in my new grave awaiting the inevitable opening of the exit—the very exit I had once thought to pry open with blade or poison or hasty leap down into the night—I again became acutely aware of a feint pressure against the skin between my eyes, as if someone was pressing their finger into my skull above the bridge of my nose. What began as a localized discomfort spread quickly across my face, radiating in concentric circles up to the crown of my head and down to my throat and my chest and my solar plexus and my spleen and my exhausted genitals and, with a pain unknown to any man a seedling appeared.
Though fragile, the new appendage tore mercilessly through my flesh, driven with the insatiable force of meaning, overcoming anything keeping it dormant, barreling into the ground above me like a diamond drill toward the center of the universe, past the worms and souvenirs of tragic ends. It grew upward from the fertile embryo of my dead self, producing and reproducing its own dimensions ad infinitum, effortlessly advancing toward the sun and the air where it knew it was destined to be before it ever was. It did not question itself, nor fear what was not itself. Then, dutifully and without pomp, the tip of the seedling breached the surface of the world in a morphogenetic field between soil and space, uttered its own arrival, and was known. Through that fledgling pinnacle I was given remote sight, a vision of what lay beyond the all. Pure love. Whole truth. Real beauty. Then a hunter.
You will see Frank soon.
Frank. The giver of names. The end-bringer.
He cackles. His shriek drowns out Hannah’s voice.
There is no center. Black torrents of raw thought.
The hyena smells the air. Faith rots and Frank follows.
Hannah’s voice. Where there is lack, you will find him.
So how do I keep him out?
Lack nothing. Love him.
No. Certain death.
Life is death. Forgive.
The flower awakens and opens.
Hannah is there. She is crying. I squeeze her hand and she is startled.
The doctors told me that two and a half months had passed since the crash, but I knew differently. Ages has gone by since I last visited this unnatural world of deceitful reflections, flashing in and out like burning embers of paper aloft hot air. I had seen more. What had been mine was mine no longer.
Both of my legs had been shattered, a lung punctured and my right arm broken. My head had been shaved in order to stitch together the part of my scalp that was ripped open by broken glass. It would take months of physical therapy to stand again, but it was only when I was told that Chet and Cube did not survive that I cried, though, because I am human and I am terrible, and so I cried not for them. I cried for myself who was unfairly detained in this maze of anguish by the miserable deeds of flesh. I cried out of frustration over the inabilities of my calloused hands to create goodness. I cried for the ineptitude of my voice to praise the divinity I required knowledge of in order to be just. I cried for the incapacity of my heart to ever know heaven. My human eyes had been teased with momentary glimpses of the glorious infinite that lay beyond this sphere. Chet and Cube had moved into the absolute without me. And so I cried. I had seen the garden in which they now flourished, the paradise that life on this earth had kept me out of. I offered myself to the grave, and it passed me by. There is nothing more wretched than a man refused by death.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I put touring on hold for about nine months in 2011 in order to work on a third record. Chet and Cube would go back to their jobs as local sound engineer and bouncer for a few weeks while Frank would get back on the road as a guitar tech for The Killers thanks to a mutual friend at their management company who thought to call Frank when a job position unexpectedly opened up. When Frank informed me of this opportunity, he assured me that it was in my best interest, that the bands younger fan base was a new and naive demographic that his internet notoriety could entice into the venues I played when he eventually came back to work for me, as if he were some cyber pied piper leading the innocent children to a salvation they didn’t know they wanted. Of course it went to serve his ego as much as it did my career, but it was harmless and when presented as such, again, what could I say that didn’t sound completely unappreciative? Eddie, however, saw something wicked.
“I told you that pudsucker was not to be trusted.” He said as we drank at Father Baker’s on a cold April evening.
“What?”
“He fucking used you.”
“No, he did not. He’s my friend. We’re partners.”
“Bullshit. He’s an opportunist. He owes everything he has to your music and he doesn’t even acknowledge that.”
“Eddie,” I said. “I don’t care what Frank does in our off time. If he wants to make some money while I take time off the road, it’s his life. He works hard. More power to him.”
Eddie turned his barstool toward me and I could see now a thin patina of intoxication draped over his eyes. He dug his pointer finger into my chest.
“The need Frank has for validation and for some sense of perverse immortality is very fucking real and it is very fucking dangerous. He will cut you down if given the chance. How do you not see this yet? How does nobody fucking see this?” He slammed his hand on the bar with each syllable out of sheer frustration with having a vision he could not describe to me. “I’ve been warning you not to trust him since day one.” I winced and rubbed the spot on my chest where his finger had dug in.
“This is just your new ‘9/11 was an inside job’ thing. You say shit all the time that isn’t true to get a reaction out of people. I know you never liked Frank but I promise you. He’s not using me.”
“Okay, man. Enjoy your time off while he’s on a tour that you weren’t even asked to play. And jet fuel burns hot enough to melt steel. Give me a cigarette.”
Frank came home at the beginning of October with just enough time to prepare for a short tour of Australia before the year ended. When we left that fall morning to arrive two days later in the spring, Hannah cried in our doorway and I promised to call as soon as I could, as I always did. I then got into a rented van, picked up Frank, Cube, and Chet from their apartments and drove the four of us to New York City where we caught a plane to Los Angeles where we drank Bloody Marys on our brief layover until we got on a plane that touched down in Sydney. Sixteen hours, seven jack and cokes, three action movies, and four percosets later, our heads foggy and our bodies tired and sore and covered in a film as if the sickly breaths of all the other passengers had settled on us like dew. We had not only lost an entire day of the calendar year, but the airline had lost two out of three guitars, the one given to me by my father included. As Frank and Cube and Chet berated and argued with everyone from desk clerks to shift managers to security guards, I lamented on a bench outside of the Duty Free shop in the Sydney Airport arrivals zone.
At least for the time being, the guitar I had been given by my dad was gone. The one that gave me all the elements I had needed to mold a spinning globe, the kin that listened when I spoke, the elder that sang when I needed consolation, the scribe that had recorded every whim, was missing, and there was nothing I could do about it except accept. I felt as if I had lost something more alive and with more function than a mere tool; I had lost both a map of my past and a key to my future. We had given each other purpose and I could no longer protect it as I should have done. Something that intrinsic to who I was should not have been left alone to suffer such disgrace. I should have been there to hold it. I should have bought it its own ticket and sat next to it on the plane as we looked forward to our first tour of a brand new continent. I should have been there to guide it in.
After a dozen overseas calls to my management, we eventually left the airport with a wire transfer from my label for one thousand dollars to buy enough equipment to finish the five-show tour that was scheduled for Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. According to the Australian promoter Nigel, who would serve as Cube’s assistant and occasionally our tour guide, these were the only cities worth hitting on your first run, but as you become more popular you can eventually make your way further inland and even to some spots up North where the rooms are harder for newer acts to fill due to the scarce population of anyone even remotely interested in American music.
The van that Nigel drove from the airport to the hotel sped deftly along the coastline as if applying brushstrokes to a canvas which would eventually merge into a whole portrait of a new world. I had seen beaches and trees and the Pacific Ocean before, but not these particular beaches and not these particular trees and this particular ocean was never on my left as we journeyed south. The further we traveled, the more I felt I was consuming a fruit that couldn’t possibly taste as sweet ever again. I savored every stretch of highway we traveled over, biting off entire mouthfuls of succulent fruit after a famine of a hundred years. Our enthusiasm for such newness was unabashed. Chet smoked out of the window in the passenger’s seat which was on the wrong side of the car that moved on the wrong side of the road and sang abrasively to whatever song came on the radio while Cube laughed on the phone with a friend back home. When he hung up and all was silent again, Frank looked up from the game on his cell phone to ask the typically ignorant tourist question with an earnestness that belied his patronization of things unfamiliar to him.
