Night Mares in the Wild: Notes Between
Language for Animals VOLUME ONE (The Eonothem.§.2.❡.2.8.) Section Three
Night Mares in the Wild (1)
Notes Between
I
I live in a small cube and come from a family of people with boxes for hearts. This is not a metaphor but a rare and serious genetic condition that causes many behavioral dysfunctions, passed from one generation to the next. It is not without benefits; the boxes are thankfully handy when moving, from one home to the next. After the move, the box is unpacked and emptied. I suppose this is a metaphor. I’ll explain: my heart is an empty box when I am home; but I’m all full of life when I’m in between places.
II
I know a musician and he has box for a heart too. Recently, he said to me, as we walked together in the dumb rain, “What we hear at night with our cave music is all of the notes between. We bring notice to the transits and spaces, but not with sound. For most people, it’s very difficult to find those notes between, difficult to hear them, discover them, play them, appreciate them.”
I sort of want to make fun of my friend for being so sincere, for talking with such deep and unselfconscious emotional weight. Instead I just make a weird noise like maybe a squirrel, but larger. A human sized squirrel.
He continued: “But you know all of this already, don’t you. Don’t you? It’s old news. Your problem, if you don’t mind me analyzing, is different: You can’t hear the resolved tone.”
My hands are cold in my pockets. They’re cold a lot, because my fingers are too long.
I say, “So what if I can only hear the notes between—the secret notes—the notes that are not notes? For me, they are notes, aren’t they? Doesn’t this suggest faulty wiring? What is my between? Is it the whole, the solid thing, the staying‐put?”
He explained: My radical dive into the unknown is being normal—but no one is normal, I say—and he says, what a silly thing to say—so I ask him why—and he tells me that only normal people say such things. “No no,” he continues. “Some people are normal: they hear the notes that they’re supposed to hear and dislike anything that asks them to look, even if only briefly, into the between. The particulars don’t matter. Whole tones are swallowed by a mother and spit out into a child’s face, no—”
“I didn’t swallow my mother’s regurgitated whole notes! Did I?”
“They call them whole because they are complete. Nothing more is needed—”
“That doesn’t really answer my question.”
Things mutate.
“There’s no between, only the center. But you aren’t it. See the paper? Read the headlines.”
THE UNIVERSE IS A SINGLE THING NOT A HETEROGENEOUS AMALGAM OF PARTS
I nod. “I have no parts. Where I belong is where I don’t belong is in a home with a family—”
He grimaced. “Derail your metaphors. Crash them into the earth. Pulverize them until there are no wholes, only dust.”
“Isn’t dust a whole thing?”
“Of course not. Dust can only be dust amongst the swarm—dust is never alone—dust is formless and weightless and beautiful like locust.”
I laugh anxiously. “You mad dog you. What are you going on and on about?” When he doesn’t respond, I ask, “Why can’t I just relax?”
“Relax?”
III
Relax.
Break whole things open.
Relax.
Look inside.
Relax.
Tear out the guts, rub them on your teeth.
Relax.
Keep the thing split open and relax. Stay a while. Sit down and read while your mess festers and molds. It’s not dead; it’s just transforming. I say this to widows all the time, and it always gets a good laugh.
Oh dear departed loved one. I see your body deforming from all the worms inside, but relax. You’re going somewhere; you’re transforming, just as some parables teach, transforming into an angel of moist soil, organic matter for bugs to eat, for the mold to grow, an angel of lichen, an angel of dirt, an angel of—well, you get the picture—
Oh dearly departed: why would I mourn your passing? This life was only a transitory moment too, a freeze frame caught in one small rodent of rot. Fast forward or rewind: you are organic matter molding in two bodies, thrown together into a womb where you stretch your legs—you delicious little infection you!—and the host body rejects this, spits you out, you unknown thing, you ghastly tumor that moves and screams—only the vibrations of a particular form of cellular degeneration—and you grow and you grow and you sprawl out into sex positions to make some new mold (maybe). Then, you grow old. It withers. It withers. It withers. It keeps on withering until it is divine.
When is that? When do I become divine?
After the universe ends, I guess. After we all get sucked back into the big bang—no, the big squelch—the great inhalation. A return to wholeness, a perfect hole.
I am whole—or a hole, or an a-hole?—I am some parts not wholesome, not the sum and not the sun, knot the moon but note the strain, an abalone of something else like silence, or like a tether, or a membrane, or like laughing. Yes, that’s it: like laughing.
Relax.
IV
I am in a cube sometimes wearing glasses there, sometimes weeping in the shower, and sometimes—oh isn’t that quite enough? We don’t need to know where you weep.
Once, I was a teenager, and I wrote all of this down. I thought it was stupid, and threw it away. I was smarter then, less nervous. Still pretty scared and mostly unhappy, I guess. People are terrible things, rotten to the core.
I’m a mess. I want to be a lockpicker because I’m tired of all these kicked-in doors.
Welcome to shelter.
Was your home built for you? Was it built specifically with you in mind? Me? What about my house? No, it was at best built only for “me” as a concept, as an average, as a mean vague thing, and not a thing meant to be here for very long. This house was built for a fresh rotation of hostages, new flavors to trap in its maw of domestic fists….
V
Maw of Domestic Fists
I return to the nightclub where the owner smokes a cigarette outside and says, “What a wild day. What a roller coaster. My wife transformed into soil and for some reason my kids are really upset about it.”
Inside is cold. I’m prepared for that. All the doors are open. I’m prepared for that too. The walls are without fish tanks but have parades of elephants carved into their molding. What character this place has. What a character of a place.
So then the musician said to me, “I tune my instrument in the bathroom—see—because the acoustics are breathtaking—see—but out here everything sounds like suffocation. This is by design.”
“I’ve figured it out!” I say, with a chuckle. “I need to build my own house. Otherwise, I will never feel at home.”
“That’s preposterous!” yelled the nightclub quite suddenly. “I was built for 19th century harlots and their flappy Johns. Look at me now! Now, I am home, and there is not a fish tank in sight. My walls are deep umber and my ceiling a glowy red; imagine you’re in the belly of an elegant whale, scrimshandered by bone worms...”
“So I must find a building that suits me?”
“No! You do not wear buildings,” the nightclub scoffed, insulted and short of breath.
“Building’s old,” the musician whispered. “Don’t get em too worked up, kay?”
“So what then?” I ask, on my knees.
The musician nodded knowingly. “The building chooses you. The building must be at home inside of you…”
“No!” The nightclub raged. “No no no no! Get your head out of your ass.”
I say, “Are we beneficial bacteria, gut flora, or are we an impure entity, a disease that needs to be flushed out?”
“What’s this talk of purity? Purity is for devils afraid to be ugly, but look at em: they’re hideous, even deep down inside.”
A wet cough tore through the air, followed by a comedic spluttering and a slapstick battle between a strange face with a loose jaw and an unruly straw swiveling violently in a glass of disturbed liquid. The creature had been sitting at the bar, listening to our conversation, sipping quietly, scratching its name into its own palm.
“Can I help you, guy?” the musician asked the stranger.
The creature shrugged. “I just don’t think that’s true, what you said about devils. I’m a devil and….” The devil thought for a moment, searching for the errant straw with its sickly pucker. “Well, I suppose it depends on the devil.” It giggled and blew bubbles in the water then looked at us with innocently fevered eyes. “HASHTAG NOT ALL DEVILS.”
The devil fell silent. The musician had long since stopped listening and now tickled the hallway with a lightning bolt. The devil was scared. It ran from sharp things—like the pointy end of lightning―and a thought came to me.
“It’s a metaphor—”
“No!” said the nightclub. “It’s a who-dun-it. A mystery.”
“A mystery?”
“Yes, a mystery. All stories are mysteries. I have six stories. I have a basement story. I have this here main story. I have some storage story up there, and who knows what’s hiding in those nooks! And I have a rich tapestry of mutants living in stories four through six. Mutants with many mysterious skills….”
I was floored. I’d never seen a building stretch itself so high into the sky. This was all so new to me.
“Things mutate,” the musician said.
I became very sick. I wanted to vomit. I ran to the toilet and let swarms burst from my open mouth, my torn stomach. I turned inside out, all rotten on the inside.
Rotten to the very core.
And I was home among alone along the fjord.
VI
What I See Between
There is lightning and everything is still but the night has cost me my burden or my day.