Issue #1 Winter 2002
The Beautiful Distance
by Stephen Newton
Lazarus in the Bathtub, 1969
Uncle Harold was a whistler. He was the great-uncle of a friend of mine in high
school, and had spent most of his life in and out of mental hospitals.
Supposedly his first breakdown was the result of his young wife leaving him for
another man. When I knew him, he would spend his days chain smoking Pall Mall
non-filters and drinking steadily. On the days when I would skip school and go
to visit him, he would sit in the kitchen and tell stories throughout the
afternoon. By evening he was invariably drunk, fading in and out of lucidity,
his memories of the distant past beginning to blur with the present. When ghosts
from buried years began to crowd too close, all vying for attention, and
separating reality from the gibbering shadows got too confusing, Harold would
start to bob his head and whistle tunelessly, a turkey-necked, pop-eyed old man
accompanying some remote rhythm, a barely accessible part of himself. I was a
teenager and he was almost eighty, and we would drink and smoke until the
whistling took over, until he retreated completely, and the stories stopped.
One story Uncle Harold liked to tell
was of a time in the Thirties when he was ice-fishing with some cronies on Lake
George. They were after northern pike, the top of the food chain in Adirondack
waters, a fierce, atavistic throwback of a fish, with a long mouth full of
shark-like teeth. Pike can get to be between twenty and thirty pounds, and
almost the length of a fisherman's outstretched arms. Harold and his buddies had
caught four or five lunkers, monstrous beauties that looked more at home in the
Mesozoic than the Twentieth century, streamlined eating machines that had
survived eons of natural selection intact.
The men didn't kill the fish on the
ice as they caught them that day; when pike are this big, you need a club or a
gun, or you run the risk of a vicious bite. They just left them flopping around
in the snow with panting gills until they froze solid. When it got dark they
packed up their gear and frozen fish and headed back to Schenectady, hitting a
few bars on the way, with the fish stowed away safely in the trunk of the car.
But when they got home, there was a problem—they couldn't clean the fish while
the pike were still frozen solid, and they were too big to put in the freezer.
The fishermen decided to fill a bathtub with lukewarm water, and then gradually
thaw the fish until they were soft enough to filet. By this time the pike had
been out of the water for eight hours, maybe longer. They put the frozen
northerns into the tub, stiff as cord-wood, and then settled in, drinking and
playing cards, a traditional end to a day spent on the North Country ice.
When the sportsmen went in to check
on their catch, however, fillet knives in hand, they had a startling, almost
surrealistic discovery. The pike were alive. The tub was a bone-white porcelain
aquarium packed with slippery, streamlined, whiplash muscle and snapping jaws. I
don't recall precisely how they dispatched the fish. Uncle Harold's point in
telling the story seemed to be the strangeness of it all, the absolutely weird,
unexpected, otherworldly way the fish had survived so long out of water, and the
disconcerting yet electrifying shock of this encounter with resurrection in the
incongruous setting of a bathtub.
Locals up north call pike 'snake
fish,' and they do have a reptilian aspect, a prehistoric quality that sets them
apart. They seem to be a very pure kind of predator, silent and ominous and
strange, as alien as anything from Andromeda or Alpha Centauri, with a kind of
refined yet savage efficiency in killing, but....well, they are still fish, and
one doesn't expect to find that they can go into suspended animation like
astronauts in a science fiction novel. How long could these time travelers
survive, cryogenically preserved like this-years, maybe even decades? Is there
any known limit to the period of possible reanimation if the conditions are
right?
Old Scratch at the Fair, 1987
In the late 1980's I lived for a year
with a young woman in a small carriage-house apartment on the side of a trout
stream outside of Saratoga Springs, NY. Early one Saturday morning in July, we
drove over to a county fair near the Vermont border. We ate fried dough
sprinkled with powdered sugar, walked through barns of prize livestock, and
watched little racing pigs run around a track for their reward of an Oreo
cookie.
My girlfriend thought it would be fun
to go on a ride. I did not, but I reluctantly agreed. This was in a separate
part of the fair, pure carnival, seedy, otherworldly, like crossing over to the
island of the bad boys in Disney's Pinocchio. The ride consisted of rickety
two-seat carts that went around a track which was shaped roughly like a warped
pie-plate—up and down, around and around, faster and faster. As soon as we
were seated, waiting for the ride to start, a stringy, tough looking Carny—lean,
greasy and grimy, nineteen going on sixty—came over to pull down the safety
bar. He then pulled out a baggie full of pills, and with a leering, yellowed,
gap-toothed grin, his simian face pasty and cadaverous in the flashing lights,
asked if we wanted to buy any for the ride. Oh Boy. Now my life was going to be
in the hands of a drug-addled low-life, surely out on parole for doing something
unspeakable.
The ride started, and immediately I
regretted my decision to go along with my girlfriend, because I didn't remotely
trust the people who moved from town to town and tightened the nuts and bolts on
these things, and I especially didn't trust them when they sold drugs to
customers. The pill-pushing cretin was in a little patched-together pilot-house
with a microphone, and after a couple of times around the track, he started
speeding up the ride, laughing maniacally into a microphone the whole time.
Lights were flashing, heavy-metal music was pounding like—well, rock music
similes have gotten pretty tired by now, but imagine a rusty chainsaw cutting
through corrugated roofing tin—while we rocketed and rattled around the track
pressed with chest-compressing force against the back of our seat. The whole
time, the greasy-haired troglodyte was giggling into the booming, over-amplified
P.A. like a young Jack Nicholson on bathtub PCP, and, as completely
incomprehensible as it was to me at the time, my companion was having a blast,
due in no small part to the pole-axed look on my face. I had gone directly into
an episode of "Tales from the Crypt," where, with one of Lucifer's
minions at the controls I was starring in a low-rent tabloid version of the
"Night on Bald Mountain" segment of Fantasia. Beelzebub,
Mephistopheles, Belial, Satan, lord of flies, fallen son of the morning star,
the man in black, Old Scratch himself in one of his infinite disguises, was
stalking the grounds of the Washington County fair somewhere in between the
racing pigs and sausage sandwiches. I mean, who knew?
All Creatures Here Below, 1973
On an August afternoon in the early
seventies I was walking with a friend on his parent's farm in the southern
Kentucky hills, wandering through high meadows straddling broad ridges
overlooking the prime bottom-land of the farm's central valley. It was high
summer, hot and hazy, with a warm breeze blowing through the old oaks on the
hillsides. The tall, unmown ridge-top grasses rustled in dry waves, the faint
whispered hissing of feathered tassels, and the trees were luxuriant, breathing
bountiful and blessed green in the hot Kentucky wind. It was the kind of day
when all the world seems to be ablaze, pulsating with sizzling light, tinged
with fire without and within.
But as we approached the crest of one
of the hillsides we both caught a whiff of something on the breeze that stopped
us like we had walked into a wall. In a way we had, but it was a wall of
molecules, infinitesimal airborne particles, microscopic missiles of decay which
we interpreted as smell when we came into contact with them through our
olfactory apparatus. It was an unmistakable barrage of intense unpleasantness
that hit the sensors in the brain like a fist—pungent, rank, a complex of
stale, repulsive fumes that lodged in the nose and throat, coating the lungs and
stomach. As we got closer the stench got worse, a foul, dank mist, until we were
holding bandannas over our crinkled faces. It was remarkable to me at the time
how far the spraying radiance of putrescence had traveled, how pervasive it was,
and how overpowering the effect was. We had walked at least an eighth of a mile
before we found the cow, lying on its back, legs straight up, hugely bloated and
black in a small, tree-shaded ravine.
The farm was home to about 600 head
of cattle, comprised of around 200 breeding cows, a much smaller number of
bulls, and about 400 calves which were sold for beef when they grew large
enough. It was a good-sized operation, and with this many stock it was nearly
impossible to keep track of all the animals all of the time. The stock wandered
randomly over the hills, wading into the creeks, seeking out, at different times
of the day, the cool dappled shade of the woods, or the warm, unremittingly
clear sunshine of the high hillsides. The meadows were dotted with clumps of
hardwoods, hollows and swales washed by the shadows of cumulus clouds, groups of
cows trailing across in ancient rhythms, timeless in their continuous present,
sinuous and blank in the mercy of their days.
The farm was about 2,000 acres, with
plenty of room for roaming, and they lost four or five head of cattle a year,
mainly due to calving problems, but occasionally one would die from disease or
from eating a poisonous weed. The stage of decomposition of the cow we had found
indicated that this was one of those cases. Carrion feeders, contrary to their
reputation, are somewhat discriminating in what they will eat, and the smell of
death that was so revoltingly overwhelming to us was just a part of a complex
palette of similar scents to the dogs, birds, weasels, rats and skunks, and they
could discern subtle nuances that indicated when the meat was tainted. My friend
thought that the risk of contagion for the rest of the herd was not significant
enough to call a vet for a post-mortem—this was just part of the rhythm of
farm life, the natural cycle.
We left the cow in the ravine, to
whatever further putrefaction awaited it, but I could not leave the smell. It
hung on like an annoying, trashy song that wouldn't stop playing in my head,
palpable as only the memories of scent can be. Surely I must have smelled death
before, out walking in the woods, or by the side of the road, but I did not
recall ever experiencing this intense, gut-wrenching miasma of decay. This was a
strange, unsettling new experience, perhaps because of the sheer size of the
animal and the concurrently high gag factor, but in some other disturbing,
inchoate way it was not new at all. Some inarticulate part of me recognized an
ancient presence immediately.
Hard Work, 1978
Five years later, I was sitting on
the front porch of another friend's apartment in Schenectady, N.Y., drinking
beer, kicking back, a warm Sunday afternoon in early spring far removed from the
Kentucky hills. I was hanging out with two guys I had known since high school,
Dave and Dale, all of us still young, in our twenties, musicians, disaffected
drop-outs, heavy drinkers and recreational drug consumers like everybody else I
knew, and all rebelling, in varying degrees, against what we perceived, at the
time, to be the numbing conformity of middle-class existence. We were all
dangerously susceptible to the short-term pleasures of the intoxicated life, the
seductions of the demimonde, and years later that life, in one way or another,
wound up killing both of these friends of mine. At the time, however, we were
just sitting on the front porch listening to the stereo through open windows,
watching the light in the city fade as we passed the late-afternoon and early
evening in increasingly medicated conditions. Clouds drifting on the horizon,
Howlin' Wolf on the stereo, traffic in the city settling in to a low buzz.
Another guy named Richard whom we all
had known for years came walking by, drifting down the sidewalk, apparently in
some sort of detached fog. He looked numb, shell-shocked, sleepwalking in
daylight, like someone had injected his face with novocaine. Richard had taken a
roommate a few weeks previous, a young man who was a fellow worker at the GE
plant in town, who had just recently broken up with his girlfriend, and needed a
place to live. They were not close friends, just a couple of guys working in the
same shop at the factory who were brought together by convenience.
Richard had left Friday afternoon for
the weekend, returning early Sunday morning. As he came into the apartment he
smelled something strong and gamy, unmistakably bad, rotten, in the kitchen. He
naturally assumed that there must have been a science project from the bachelor
refrigerator—a pot of spaghetti with blue fur, some old cheese erupting in a
miniature Vesuvius of penicillin cultures—that had been thrown out in the
garbage, so he promptly took the kitchen wastebasket and emptied it outside in
the trash can on the porch. His roommate's bedroom was off the kitchen, and as
Richard walked by the open door on his way down the hallway, he noticed his
boarder was sleeping, curled up, facing away from the door. It had been a long
drive home from Vermont, however, so Richard just went to his room and laid down
for a nap without giving the situation a second thought.
Richard awoke a few hours later and
the smell was inescapable, stronger than ever. By now, not so tired and groggy
from the drive, Richard sensed that something was very wrong, and he knew the
pungent fog was not coming from the garbage. He went to the door of his
roommate's bedroom, saw him sleeping in the exact same position as he had been
in hours before, went into the room, and immediately called the police.
When the ambulance arrived, the
paramedics only had to get to the bottom of the stairs before declaring the
victim dead. They knew the smell. After Richard had left on Friday, his roommate
had taken an overdose of pills and had been dead for almost two days. The
paramedics took the body away, there was a brief rundown of police formalities,
and Richard had been walking the streets for a couple of hours, stunned,
blindsided by the events of the day, an ambulatory automaton with a
thousand-yard stare, when he happened by the porch we were on.
Richard's roommate had taken an
enormous quantity of Quaaludes, and after he lost consciousness (or so, for
mercy's sake, we wanted to believe), his stomach had hemorrhaged and he had
vomited up what seemed to be a huge amount of blood, a startlingly large pool,
really, which by now was a coagulated, crusty, blackish raspberry-red mass
spread out over the bedroom floor. Pretty bad. Someone needed to clean it up,
and Dave, Dale and I decided that Richard had been through enough for one day.
When we got to the apartment I, also,
recognized the smell immediately. It was precisely the same as the day years
before on that light-drenched Kentucky hillside. In retrospect it seems
obvious—we humans are mammals, the same, in biological terms, as a cow or
mouse or woodchuck by the side of the road, essentially, and we know that
eventually we are all going to be road-kill as well—but at this moment it was
a kind of awakening, a recognition of origin and destination. I most certainly
had never smelled a decaying dead person before, and as morbid as I could
sometimes be, I doubt whether I had ever really thought much about what one
might formally call the odor of cadaverous decomposition, or about its
connection with our animal brethren nearest to us on the food chain. I had read
accounts of battlefield aftermath and had seen news footage of disaster cleanup
crews with face masks, but the hard-core reality of death had up to this point
never connected in any concrete way with the images from books, movies,
magazines and television. How could it have? I had been quite lucky, up to that
point, and have been since, more or less.
It took us a few hours to clean up
the bedroom, but we got through it. We had to take pails of water and scrub
brushes, gradually dissolving the garbage-can-lid-sized dark island of
coagulated blood on the bedroom floor, and then mop up the...actually, I don't
know quite what to call it that doesn't sound disrespectful and smart-alecky. We
were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, taking shifts at the work. We were
learning some hard things about life that afternoon, but we were also losing
something, paying a price for the passage. Even with the windows open the smell
was thick, tenacious, awful, something that got to you on a cellular level, and
none of us could stay in the room for too long at a time without getting sick.
The final remnants of this young
factory worker's desperate isolation were slowly being erased by strangers,
three equally young men, mopping up his blood in an anonymous upstairs room
filled with the fading afternoon light of a busy city. The dark brownish-red in
the buckets and on the floor finally faded to rose, growing ever more pale, as
we scrubbed and mopped and then dumped and refilled the buckets, until finally
the water was clear, and the floor was clean. I never met him, and I don't
remember his name. When we left the smell had diminished, but it was still
there, faint traces slowly dissipating into the air of the room where he chose
to leave. We had been cleaning up the remains of this body as if somehow the
work was a gift, but it was only a very small thing, an attempt to put a bit of
order in the place of awful chaos and loss, activity where there was only
absence, something in the place of nothing.
After All Hallows, 1984
By the mid-eighties I was in the
southern Adirondacks living in an apartment next door to an old hotel called the
Stony Creek Inn, the social hub of "downtown" Stony Creek, N.Y., a
metropolis consisting of two bars and a general store on three of the four
corners of a mountain crossroads twelve miles from the next nearest town. I was
living with a woman who was one of the owners of the Inn, and spending a lot of
time at the bar as a sort of house musician, a sideman guitar player playing
with whatever musicians came to town, a mix of blues, country, folk, jazz,
honky-tonk, swing, and rock & roll. This was part of the same musical
ethos—coming, that is, out of the same deep-structure and cultural matrix—as
Jerry Garcia playing Merle Haggard and Miles Davis songs with the Dead, Duane
Allman mixing John Coltrane and Blind Willie McTell, The Band playing an old
Johnny Cash murder mystery tune alongside a surrealistic Dylan lament, Emmylou
Harris and Gram Parsons singing songs of heartache and loss by the Louvin
Brothers, or Ry Cooder mixing Hawaiian slack-key, Tex-Mex conjunto, delta blues,
1920's jazz, and Bahamian hymns. This was the music of the border country, a
soundtrack for all the travelers moving through distant river valleys where
cultures meet and refugees follow their hopes and dreams in spite of all that
they know about the danger and darkness that might lie ahead.
The Inn always had a charged,
over-the-top Halloween party, and this year was particularly wild. There were
some gruesome costumes, the yearly convocation of walking dead, along with
ghouls, vampires and space aliens, but others conformed to the lineaments of
different portions of the psychic landscape. I, for example, won the best
costume prize for going in drag, a blonde bombshell shamelessly flirting with
the judges of the costume contest, three macho prison guards from downstate who
were up for hunting season. There were hours of dancing, mercilessly loud
country-rock music, and, at least for this one night, a sort of a Monty Python
drag queen version of the usual upper-Hudson north-woods drunken lunacy. I wound
up the night swozzled, absolutely trashed, pounding down shots at the bar in my
blonde wig, purse, party dress, high-heels and pantyhose, and shooting pool with
knee-walking, commode-hugging-drunk, redneck local loggers. Yikes. Call the law.
The night went very late, and the
next morning, heading bleary-eyed and wet-brained over to Floyd's, the general
store across the four-corners from the Inn, I was met with a macabre, chilling,
hallucinatory sight, as if Toto had pulled the edge of the Wizard's curtain back
to reveal not a bumbling, benign charlatan, but a roiling mass of maggots
swarming over the taut rictus of Auntie Em's face.
Impaled on a spike on a telephone
pole next to the store, smack dab in the center of this sleepy mountain hamlet,
was the head of a Scottish longhair steer, horns swept wide, dull eyes staring
blank, mouth wide open, black tongue lolling out. Under the head hung a rudely
scrawled cardboard sign inscribed with the name of the village nag, a foolish,
meddling old woman called Mother Lorraine. She lived a couple of houses down
from the store, and had called the State Police the previous Halloween when her
house had been egged, plastered, spattered with paint-digesting yolk and
albumen, so this was the retribution of some of the wild boys from the
surrounding hills, the young longhaired loggers who dressed in red and black, in
flannel, leather, wool, and felt, the lads who rattled into town in Toyota
trucks and slouched three-deep at the bar drenched in chainsaw oil, sweat and
sawdust.
I went back across the street to get
my camera and took a whole roll of pictures. But as I developed them in the
darkroom days later, and the image surfaced in the shimmering liquid, rising in
the orange glow of the dim light, unscrolling like a minor fugue, there was a
chilling recognition, as if I had participated in some terrible alchemy, some
awful conjuring that had summoned this face from limbo. There in the tray was
the great archetypal hairy horned face, with absent cloven hooves and tail, a
totem for every other piked head that had ever graced the sunrise of an
unsuspecting town. Alone in the dark, summoning the unholy from the chemical
solutions and film, image and memory fused, calling back a bright Kentucky
hillside and an ominously still, quiet bedroom, and a smell I could no more
forget—as much as I would've liked to—than Lady Macbeth could wash the spots
from her hands.
It is impossible to know, finally,
just what will happen when long dormant memories are reawakened. The past is a
palimpsest of faint erasures. It might recover from its suspended animation and
merely hop around cross-eyed, toothless and brain-dead, a reanimated corpse
laughing mindlessly into an interior microphone plugged directly into the
crackling, electric-blue recesses of the past, while a hapless fool rattles
around and around in persistent circles, pinned to the back of his seat under
the flashing lights, surrounded by the chest-compressing crunch of
hair-straightening devil music, the smell of approaching rain, and jagged flecks
of lightning in the distance. Memories could also, however, come back to life
hungry, cold-blooded and mean, convulsing in violent fits of powerful desire,
flailing around like pike awakening from an Adirondack deep freeze. They might
thrash against each other's protective scales and slam themselves against the
confines of their smooth bone-white enclosure, snapping and tearing at anything
in sight with the sharp, perfectly formed teeth of an ancient, experienced
predator.
Orchids, Feathers, and Stars, 2001
Outside the gates of the fair a car
pulls away, disappearing around a bend, into the green of the corn, the barely
contained profligate breath of summer. A dust cloud rises faintly and then
disappears. The first drops of rain hit the dirt with the smell of ozone, and
the rumble of thunder echoes off of the distant hills.
You saw this once. You were there and
were a part of things. Now that moment is long gone, and remains so until a tiny
glimpse, the smallest motion seen out of the corner of your eye brings it back,
or begins to, the way that midges and fireflies thicken the fading light, yet
are themselves invisible on summer lawns in the dusk. There is a haze on these
summer evenings which one cannot ever really see by directly looking, only by
glancing sidelong, and then only accidentally.
This is the way glimpses are
captured, snared in the net of the past, the mesh that is filled with holes, the
quilt of space held together with knots and string, with glaciers, vines, and
stone, with orchids, feathers and stars. This is how silence does the work that
the rest of our lives leaves undone. The sidelong glance, the overheard
conversation, even the implied threat or the rumor, is full of the space that
asks, and then answers, the questions that certainty denies.
Some days stay with us more than
others. The forgotten past seems to be always potentially there, however,
insistent—even relentless—in announcing the presence of its own conspicuous
absence, impinging upon the present, waiting to be called into consciousness. It
speaks to us in tongues, in runes, in hieroglyphics and blowing sand, in the
language of dreams. We run across dark lawns as the sun is going down, through
piles of dry leaves along the side of the road, and stare at clouds scudding
across the dark October sky. We save our lives, perhaps, with steps we take that
bring us closer to home, movements that approximate prayer. We listen to
branches rub together and know we are hearing music that we have heard somewhere
before—the familiar scratching and rustling whispers, the distant cracks in
the wind. It is the sound of flames in space, the echo of origins and darkness
and light, of first separation and overarching unity. Never again will we be a
part of the heart of things quite as innocently as in this moment, this gift
that floats our feet above the dry grass. A light shines from a porch into the
backyard. It's suppertime. In a smoky valley a freight train, charcoal
benediction for the noise of the world, pulls silence from the stars and clouds,
leaving spiraling nebulae, curling waves of sparks, trailing from its silver
wheels. There is noise in the distant branches, then quiet. Leaves and bark are
separated by empty space in the cold night. In the hills of frost and stone
rolling away toward the distant horizon the present becomes the past while the
past opens up to patiently welcome the present in the beautiful distance.
©2002 Stephen Newton
Stephen Newton is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, where he also directs the Writing Center. His essays and poetry have appeared in The Adirondack Review, BWe, Tattoo Highway, Downtown Brooklyn: A Journal of Writing, College English Notes, and The English Record.