I am sitting in the kitchen, in the dark.
I feel like I am in a motel.
The refrigerator rumbles like a groggy, forgotten god.
The clock ticks like a memory of a debt owed.
The table shakes as I type these words.
Maybe this is a motel: The motel of life, where every room is a rental, every day borrowed, everything feels foreign.
The darkness is not complete. Besides the light from the computer screen I have a clip-on light pointing at these hands, pointing at the plastic computer keys making their frantic kissing noises as I type onto them.
This is a table at which my family and I played games. Card games like Uno and war; board games like Scrabble, Life, and Monopoly.
As such the memories of experiences at this table are not all pleasing. Games played at this table often lurched off into yelling, fighting, bitching, cheating, and — occasionally — a final act of slamming the fucking games into the drawer and vowing never to play them — or anything else — ever again.
On the other hand something I learned about myself is that the past is no different from the present. I project into both, selectively remembering, selectively nominating one trauma after another to various positions of my psychological cabinet only to find each of them neutralized with a single sentence, a single spoken word.
It’s strange the things you remember. I also remember my sister and me giggling ourselves sick at this table, sometimes with my mother. I remember with pride my great 7th grade Scrabble triumph: the word QUIZ on a triple word. I could not imagine a single word being worth 66 points, but I did it. I did it!
I do not sit at this table as much as I imagined I would when I brought it up here from Florida, but I like to think the time here is well spent. I do not play games here. I write, eat, and read. I feel the breezes blow through the window, and I listen for the sounds of the neighbor’s wind chimes.
It is raining. Rain drops hitting the window sill sound like unused punctuation marks.
A couple of months ago I found a stack of blank papers in the lobby of this building. Someone had left the paper for trash or recycling. It was notebook filler paper, Mead brand — about 300 pages of the stuff.
Remembering a time in my life when free paper was nothing short of gold I decided to seize the blank pages and fill every one of them with something. That something turned out to be mostly words, and it was at this table that I began the desultory job of finding words to possess the pages.
My self-appointed habit of writing about my fascinating existences could be dubbed a fetish for its unhealthy absurdity. Some days my hand can not write fast enough to get even a fraction of the words in my head onto the page, other days the hand just putters along, forcing crap out for the sake of the crap, and solely for the sake of the crap.
Nevertheless I love filling a page, lifting it, and placing it across the table onto a separate pile. The other pile is for the weathered pages, the pages whose constitution is riddled with wordly slashes and daggers. I’ve written through one complete pen. At the head of the table sits a large NEW YORK NEW YORK coffee mug, a mugh which holds the emptied hulk of that pen. The coffee mug serves as a paperweight and as a receptacle for what I imagine will be 5 or 6 pens needed to fill all these pages.
The act of writing, of documenting one’s days, is theater. It is a solitary theater whose acts are played out in retrospect, in the hum of silence while your lovers read the poetry you wrote for them, in the quiet light of a computer screen at which someone far away reads the things you had to say to them, in the traveling of a letter from one post box to the other.
A friend sent me a copy of House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski. Talk about theater. I had described Avital Ronell’s “The Telephone,” explaining how that book (sitting on my shelves since the early 1990s) demonstrated what I imagined the written word could be. Traditional novel formats, I somewhat stupidly announced in defense of The Telephone, made the words prisoner to the page. The strictures of the document served to interrupt and upstage the shape of thought, which I think can be expressed topographically as well as mentally.
I was not given House of Leaves just because of this conversation.
No, my friend was inspired to send this book later, after I shared the story of a strange incident at Calvary Cemetery.
A couple of weeks ago, while standing inside the grounds, I got an e-mail (on my cell phone) from someone who wanted to know where in Calvary an attached picture was taken.
It is not altogether unusual for me to receive such inquiries, though I do not get as many of them lately — and I have never received one while actually there at the yard.
I could barely see the picture. I nearly decided to give up trying to tell where the picture was taken. The picture was very small on my Treo’s screen, the sun shining too bright for me to see it clearly, but I wanted to respond quickly to the e-mail if only to let the person know I was at the cemetery right at that moment, and to ask if she had more information for me to work with.
I responded to the e-mail, saying I thought the photo showed Section 48, but that I would look more closely later. I idled around a bit, then found some shade, which made it easier to see the screen. Here is her picture:
It did indeed appear to be at or near Section 48. In fact I looked at the picture, then looked around to find that I was standing about 30 feet from the spot where this picture had been taken. The picture shows Section 53 at a point where it directly abuts Section 48.
I reported back with that information, thinking that might be the end of the correspondence. I took a photo from what I guessed was the same spot where the e-mailed picture was taken, discovering later that my photo (taken almost exactly a year later) was a virtual copy of hers:
The correspondence continued.
Her brother died before she was born. The spot where I stood (the same spot her picture was taken) was about 20 feet from the burial site of that child.
She sent me the boy’s exact burial location, and I quickly found the grave. I took pictures of it, intending to share one or more of them with my correspondent.
For her entire life her family had prayed to this boy, who died at 1 year of age. They didn’t pray for him. They prayed to him. He was their angel.
With Mother’s Day coming up that weekend this woman had arranged to have flowers placed at the grave site on Saturday. It was her (and the boy’s) mother who wanted this done. No one in her family lived close enough to New York to come visit the grave or to see the flowers, she said, but if I could get pictures…
There is a lot about this scenario which did not make sense to me. How could she not know where the picture she sent me was taken when she had the exact burial location of the child? Also, her e-mails came from her place of work, and based on her e-mail boilerplate lines she did not appear to be all that far from New York.
I asked no questions, though. Why would I?
There are things she does not know about the correspondence — things she does not know I know. In particular: Despite her accurate information about the burial location she did not seem to know the name of the cemetery.
Most people in her position find me by typing something like “calvary cemetery queens” into a search engine. I discovered that she found me by looking for something like “cemetery where the godfather was filmed.”
The funeral scene from The Godfather was, in fact, filmed at Calvary. Our paths might never have crossed without that piece of trivia.
On the following Saturday I made the promised trip to the cemetery. I was a little skeptical that this random arrangement among strangers would actually come through according to plan. Why, I asked myself, would they arrange for flowers to be placed someplace where their best chance to see them was through an unusual scheme such as this?
None of my questions mattered when I got to the site and found a radiant collection of flowers. Someone had done their job well. I took several pictures for all who might want them. I hurried home, thinking the pictures might evaporate or somehow go missing. I e-mailed them as soon as I got home.
I told this story to a friend, who remarked that the child’s last name was the same as that of the author of House of Leaves, an experimental novel that seemed to fit my vision of books that comprise more than just words on the papers.
To be sure this book (which arrived at my 181 the following week) is a strange, swirling carnival of type. An adventure. It looks entertaining, though I am inherently skeptical of anything that gained even a particle of its reputation through the Internet, as may be the case here (according to comments on the inside cover).
I am, in fact, skeptical of any creative work that originated or has roots on the Internet.
At any rate, upon receipt of House of Leaves (or as I call it: “Louse of Heaves”) I promptly took an apple from the refrigerator, washed it, and placed it (still wet) on the book’s cover. This arbitrary ritual was meant to add yet another dimension of physicality to the volume, in the way the pile of papers I found downstairs are now characterized by their encounters with me and my thrashing writing utensils.
It remains to be seen how much farther the connection goes from that infant’s grave to wherever this 700 page extravaganza might send me. I have a mountain of books to get through. Poetry of John Logan, Mark Strand, and Elizabeth Bishop; a short fable by José Saramago, given to me by a chef who named a dish after that author; a massive biography (which I’ll probably never finish) of Ed Dorn; “The hour of Our Death,” by Philippe Ariès.
And, now, the House of Leaves. In conversation I refer to it as “Louse of Heaves,” suggesting nothing to do with Mark Danielewski but perhaps evoking the title of a high school literary magazine. Lousy with heaves, lousy with mental heaving, lousy with … ah whatever. Back to my stack of blank pages.
