The Gnome Stories, page 16
Did Joseph know what time it was? Did Shelly? Did it matter?
Let’s press pause on them for a moment and let our Donald land, deplane, walk sweatily through the airport, and find his truck. Let’s let the sun go down a little and give him a head start. Shelly, Hank, and Joseph can wait there for a moment until he clears the corn and sees them. Hopefully he’ll slow and pay attention, lend a hand.
From here you can almost see a glow, a starting, there, an emanation in its beginning stages. It’s all beauty or potential from this far out, everything quiet, so simple, a story problem with an answer. Maybe Donald, slowing and seeing the scene unfold in front of him, will feel like he’s finally part of something he can change, and not just feel insulated from it all in glass or truck or love, in physics or corn or carbonite, not just in his own habits and loosening flesh, but that he is porous to it, to all of it, and even if it’s like Homer’s comparison of bloody battle reduced by distance to swarming bees, an epic simile, it’s his simile, his chrysalis, something for him to emerge from when he’s ready, and hopefully he’s ready now to see, if not to help, as the stars come out above and the stars rise up around them all, and Hank unfurls and Joseph speaks and Shelly steps out of the moment of her shock and teetering car and they all stand there for a minute in the confluence of lights and agree with me that sometimes, without regard for your predicament or prognosis, a thousand bioluminescent winged beetles are—or should be anyway—just about enough.
The Gnome
It started curled up in a little story I overheard: the one about being on drugs out in the woods and finding a disabled kid and bringing him back to your camp and feeding him, believing in your altered state the kid was a gnome. Well, I believed in it and told the story to my husband and his friends on more than one occasion. I kept telling it. I clearly loved to. I couldn’t tell you why. I found out several months later that it was an urban legend and felt the fool, unsure of whether I should tell them this or not. You know a story’s good when it will not abide its end, when it feels like a secret you might keep from your husband and your kid for a very long time indeed. How else to explain how it broke through the retaining wall that kept me from sleep and then took over my dreams—I know it’s boring saying so, but it’s true; you can’t control what holds you when you sleep. It even began to perforate my daily interactions.
Everywhere I went I began looking low and under things for evidence of other lives. Do you know how in the grocery wine aisles wineries have to pay for better placement, at eye level and the shelf below? So all the wines on those shelves—the ones you think you want, the ones most people buy—aren’t as good as you think they are. They’re the wines they want you to want, and they’re never weird or interesting; they’re just wines, and if you want those wines, even or especially knowing this, that says something about you. So the wise know to look at the bottles that are a little harder to see, top shelf and bottom shelf, that don’t present themselves as obviously. I wondered what I had been missing with my eyes up where they always looked, where the marketers knew I looked.
That new looking action felt like a secret, like I was getting away with something. Or getting filled with something new. One house I walked by on my daily walk had a little gnome head at ground level, underneath an unruly pile of marigolds. I’d never seen it until I started looking down. I must have walked by it ten thousand times. Was it just the head, I wondered, sitting atop the dirt, or had someone buried it up to its neck and left it there? And if so, was it for punishment or pleasure? Or had it burrowed down itself and felt comfortable there or was somehow trapped by domestic magic?
They are known to live for centuries, if you trust the lore. Possibly the yard rose around it: possibly it had always been there. Or the intense rains of last week had exposed it. It did have the look of something that had been there a very long time, like before this neighborhood with its racist charter and its specs about acceptably historic paint colors: the gnome’s red pointed cap was mostly bleached now. I told my husband over dinner that a gnome was buried in the yard. That one down right across from school, I said, that we always walked by when we took our son on walks in the evening. Which one? he said. The one with the bashed-up fences that looked like there was always something in there trying to get out. The one with the window into the bathroom where they should really shut the blinds? Indeed. A gnome? Like a garden gnome? I don’t know, I said: just a gnome. Yea high? Red hat? Jaunty bastard? he said. Abouts, I said, and once its hat was red. Now it’s not. Then it’s a garden gnome, he said. He went into an explanation about taxonomy that I ignored.
I was thinking about the thing instead, how old it might have been, how many lives it might have seen elapse without its owners knowing: that’s a kind of magic. That’s just weird, he said. What kind of people would have a thing like that in their yard? I didn’t tell him that it had consumed me, thinking about it. And, more, that I wanted it, wanted to bury it in our yard, for it to have a space in our lives. And I knew I’d soon have to come back and dig it up. Its pointed cap came to mind when I was trying to think of other things, or not to think of anything, like trying to banish an unhealthy fantasy during sex so I could just get off and reassure my husband that he still had it, so he’d finish and I could get on with my evening of thinking about small things. That had become what sex was: a reassurance, a passing between us of something small but important. A relief, too, I guessed. He’d gone on a tangent about his suspicions about the house, how the owners always gave him a weird vibe, the little girl who lived there and how she always looked haunted playing in the yard, and how the dog would come and go, be there for a week and then be gone again for a month. Like where did it go? he wondered. Plus it seemed too large for a yard that small. And it had trashed the fence with its curiosity. Maybe, I said aloud, the dog had dug up the gnome and been banished for it. Or buried it, he said: like a bone.
He was starting to get it, I thought, maybe. So I set it for him as a test, and even as I was doing it, I knew it wasn’t wise, to treat a marriage like this, to set traps within it. How well could he understand my desires? And why was it important even? I didn’t know. Would he pass by the thing on his long run tomorrow and bring a gnome back home to me, or better, bring this gnome, the thing itself inside our house or our yard so we could use its pull for good?
If he did, then it meant he felt it, too, its importance to our lives; then it meant it had wound its way inside him, too, like a little worm invades a world and soon multiplies and has to find a bigger one to live. This is what I wanted to say to him: I wanted him to see more of the world than he did. He was focused on what he thought was important. You couldn’t blame him for that. A life slides you in a slot and you wear a little rut and it gets deeper so that you start to see what you want to see and nothing more. The middlin’ wines on the only shelf you see: they’re pretty good; they do the job. It wears on you, all that other seeing, all that reckoning with all of it, choice, infinity, I thought, and it was easier this way. I had the bandwidth for so little what with the son and walks and lack of sleep and with the death of our beloved pets, all four within a year, like after the first went the others just gave up and stepped out into nothing.
But it was stronger than I thought: the story. The thought of the gnome down in the ground out in the neighbors’ darkened yard.
The night progressed. My son yelled a couple of times and woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep after the latest round of soothing. Where had I even overheard the gnome story? I couldn’t remember anymore. Now that I knew, why hadn’t I told my husband it was not true? It seemed secondary to the bleached thing itself. I could see the moon through the skylight. Surely it illuminated the neighbors’ house as it did our own. I heard the buzzing of another neighbor’s drone and watched it hover over the pool next door, the one where the teenage girls lived and you could feel their evenings trembling with possibility. I wondered: What could you see from there? At night especially?
I thought about our marriage. It meant something, but what it meant I was still not sure. That meaning had been hanging over us for twenty-one years waiting for a sign like this. This was a door. This opened to another life. I give us two days to go through it or one of us would disappear.
Our Song
The best instrument for the music of loss,
which is the best of all music, is a woman’s voice.
—Rick Moody
I no longer believe in memory and don’t believe in fire. I hold my hand to the simulated flame and anticipate the pain. Even though it’s digital it still hurts. It still adds up. All pain adds up eventually until it breaks you. It wires into the nerves, which triggers the flinch, so when I want to do it again—to thrust my hand into it to remind myself how the unreal feels—I don’t, not yet. I’m not sure I’m up for it. I’m trying to test my response: Is it consistent with the one just a moment ago? It’s fake, but what kind of fake? I want to know. Caribou sees me hesitate and laughs, deservedly so, with the awkward repetition of a loop.
Just because I know it’s not real doesn’t make it not real, doesn’t make it not hurt. Caribou’s not real either. She wouldn’t understand. She’s been my companion for this extended recon, but she’s not here, not exactly. I mean, she’s present, but when I push on the thought I have to admit that she’s not here, not like me. Still, I respond to her like a little twitch. I can see her heartlight give a signal and I find myself blinking back. My heartlight clicks out a message in return. It says I’m glad we’re here together. It says it’s almost time to go home.
There seems to be no way up to the surface from this system. I thought there was, and Caribou said so too; we’d observed all the signs: light seeping into the room through seams where light would not naturally occur, like out of the back of a book on a shelf, for instance, or from a toilet lid, and so she thought that this room could lead us into the upper level where we knew we could exit without blowing up the contract, and that was why we were exploring this set of rooms again.
I for one am getting tired of this subdivision: it’s just a bunch of passages that interlock and churn at the same set of difficult, knotted-up memories. We mapped all of them and double-checked our work, except for this room, hoping that on the first pass we were wrong, that we would find an exit here. It took almost a day. So we’re down to this, or else we have to backtrack even farther.
Here’s the flame again. I know I have to put my hand back in and so I do. Caribou’s mouth goes oo oo oo. I wince and wait for the signal to recede. As if to fill the space where the pain just registered, I laugh at it: doesn’t mean it’s real, I say. It’s not even realistic. See here? You can’t see pixels; the system’s too sophisticated for that, but the flame patterns are preprogrammed. The apparent randomness, the occasional little flare-up, is on one of four overlapping loops. When you’ve worked on fire you know the tricks. We watch and it repeats, a heartbeat. See? I say. Caribou looks at me as if to say what do you mean by real? She holds the look for a second longer than is comfortable. We’re stuck here in this anterior passage, which is a phrase I only believe I comprehend. Underneath? Outside? Interior of an ant? But it’s identified on the work order: anterior passageways B142–171 and connective: workup, map, differentiation, emphasis on error.
I place my hand against the wall. Underneath I know it’s flat and colorless—that’s how all of this is, just flat and colorless, wireframes, basically—but it looks and feels exactly like carpeting. I think they called this style shag. I blink. It’s a goldenrod color that I call nausea, and I can’t believe they ever made this, or that if they did they’d ever put it on the floors much less the wall. Why would you carpet a wall? I suggest a fact-check on both coloration and the installation, but Caribou, consulting the databases, says it’s possible: there’s a color called magic pumpkin that was actually used as far back as 1972. People used it on walls sometimes to deaden sound or just for how it looked. Okay, nix that note, I say. We move a little farther in.
We’re in the client’s father-memory. This whole area smells like smoke. It looks like smoke. You can see it curl and get moved around a little in the air. And here he is in a wingback chair, the wing almost as wide as the room from this perspective, the father—not just her father but the very idea of father, the big one, the ur, his face transfixed by something we can’t see at first. When we get closer it will slowly be be be be be be be be be be be (and I have to twitch out of it, that little loop, like a repeating curlicue in space and time, some kind of glitch, I think, in the approach; I make a note) eventually revealed: a pornographic magazine. He’s reading the Letters section. Dear Penthouse, you’ll never believe this but, the first one starts. And even though I know it’s not supposed to be arousing it still gets a little circuit started and I jump.
The client is thirteen in this memory, meaning we are thirteen in this memory with her. What does thirteen mean to her or feel like to her? Well, it’s uncomfortable, like a little crawling in the skin or a song we once liked that won’t go away; she doesn’t feel like she fits in here—maybe anywhere. A warbly bit of a Christmas carol plays from a speaker we cannot see. The corridor is colder than you’d expect, like there’s a window open, or a draft, though there’s no windows or doors except the door we came in through. I note the disconnect. Like her, we shiver. Looking down, I see I’m wearing a long T-shirt with a palm tree on it and some script I can’t read. The hall feels like it’s a hundred feet long, and angled strangely, like in the Mystery Spot, an old tourist attraction up where I am from, in which you crawl around buildings built so as to seem like you’re defying physics: balls roll uphill; kids are dazzled; they ask questions their parents cannot answer. I’m dazzled by the wingback chair. It looms above our heads and I get the reason for the name: it is like spreading wings, though more death’s-head moth than dragon.
The client is into dragons. She has opinions about various colors of dragons, their desires and powers and histories. She knows what pornography is but this is her first encounter with her father in its context. In the section we just left she’s stashed related memories, so we know her father was an amateur pornographer with what looked like an infinite collection that he referred to as The Library. He spent hours organizing it, and she would go through it when he wasn’t home, being careful to place every title back in its precise place, rewind the tapes, replace the stray hairs he placed to mark pages against intrusion: even then she was smarter than he believed; she knew more of his secrets than he knew, so in this way she had—and still has, in her way—power over him. From that memory we got shifted into the tapes she later made and how it felt for her, being recorded like that, on camera, how it reminded her—though surely she would not admit it and might not even realize it—of her father’s extramarital affairs that she tracked and logged and monitored in maroon-colored notebooks without his knowing, and without her really knowing why she did it either, except it seemed important to keep count and to keep track of things, to tally and observe. Eventually she had curated quite a library of his indiscretions.
Even when you want to, you can’t move fast in memory. You’re always slowed to three-quarters speed, sometimes even slower. We’re not yet sure why. In extreme cases you can get stuck in super slow motion, like an inch a minute, slow enough to fool a consumer-grade motion detector. I remember one assignment where the whole level—a trauma level, no less—was like trying to run through a pool of oil. We were trapped in there for what must have been hours just doing a quick inventory of one freaking room. It was difficult to breathe. You had to monitor your air and queue up actions like a minute before they were performed. Thinking raced way out beyond movement: the delay was powerfully disorienting. I had to detox after that and take a break in a neutral space, my heart still racing. I’d be lying if I said you get used to it.
I hold my breath and see how long it takes to gasp. I ask Caribou if she can confirm that this one’s running at about a 3.6. It’s plenty bearable but the room keeps getting bigger. Everything stretches out to approximate the feel of the experience, not its exact dimensions. Memory’s not documentary. We came into our father’s study meaning to ask him about a book that we bought at Goodwill about the history of labyrinths, and why they’re called labyrinths, for instance, and we can see he’s oblivious to us but we don’t yet know why. What’s Goodwill, I ask Caribou. She says it’s where you go to donate the things you have no need of anymore. Possibly apocryphal, she notes; no longer extant. I’ve never seen one, for sure, but that’s not a shocker. I haven’t seen a lot of things. So we creep up to surprise him. He gets larger as we get closer, and we can barely peer over the edge of the chair to see into his lap.
From this vantage point you can’t avoid the cock. It’s just there: an alert dog, a monolith. It’s oversized: they almost always are in childhood memories (you’d be surprised about how many cocks you see in memory). But this one’s veinless and too smooth: it doesn’t look fully real, more like the idea of a cock. As I pay attention to it, it fills in a little bit. Now I see a vein. It’s backscattering impressions from other encounters, responding to my doubt.
Caribou’s lights click on—of course it’s only me paying attention to the cock—and she notes the details of the green-striped couch. She zooms in on its clever patterning, diamonds within diamonds within diamonds, a nice recursion that must end somewhere, at the level of the stitch, but I can’t see that close. Perhaps she can. Sometimes I think I know the end of her abilities and she surprises me. The effect is sharp. There are even stains. Touch it and it’s plush. My hand almost goes into it it’s so soft. She makes a little whir. The feeling of it gets sharper, too, as I run my hand over it, interpolated from other information in the system. As you’d expect, everything gets sharper the closer we are to the client’s eye level. The chair is fantastically detailed, for instance: its wood grain, the beads that anchor the fabric. But the ceiling’s hazy. Who remembers a ceiling, unless you counted cracks or tiles or something?
