Читать книгу Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World - Joseph Keckler - Страница 7

INTRODUCTION

MY LIFE IS A HOUSE ON FIRE

When I was three, I watched my house burn down. It was the middle of Michigan winter, after a blizzard. The lights had just come back on after a week-long power outage, and we were all in the kitchen, my mother, father, brother, and I. “I want my dinner,” I announced from the high chair. Speaking was not easy yet—words were slippery, swimming in the air like invisible fish, and I had to trap them with my mouth.

“It’s coming right up,” said my mother melodically. But then there was commotion, and all three of them went tearing up the stairs, leaving me alone for some moments. Next thing I knew, my mother and I were outside. I could see her boots crunching into the deep snow. I was being jostled in her arms and she was carrying me, running speechlessly across a field to the nearest house.

My brother and I watched through the window as flames enveloped our home, while my parents and firefighters ran desperately back and forth across the blaze like tiny ants. “Are Mommy and Daddy going to die?” I asked, though it now baffles me that I’d already acquired a concept of death, or had learned the word “die.” My brother was fourteen years older than I was, practically an adult. He was a smart contrarian and I viewed him as he wished to be viewed—as an authority on all matters.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied, at once dismissing and assuring me. The blaze became bigger, brighter, wilder. And our home, which I’d always taken for granted, never fully seen before, looked suddenly alive, newly illuminated by the very force that devoured it. Now the fire and the house were one thing.

I remember every detail of that evening—dialogue, images, and sensations. Last Christmas, nearly three decades later, I was even able to draw a floor plan of the house on the underside of a piece of wrapping paper. “Yes, that’s right,” my father confirmed.

My family believes the fire may have been sparked by a surge, after mice gnawed through electrical wires during the power outage. Or perhaps it started when my father left a space heater too close to a wall insulated by newspapers, though I only heard mention of this scenario once, many years later on a night when my mother was very angry. In either case, the fire spread through the upstairs so fast it hid its own origin. It proceeded to engulf heirlooms, photos, my father’s poems, my mother’s films. And though my brother had already emerged on the other side of the eternity known as childhood, he was left suddenly with no record of having had one. Nothing of the house was left standing once the fire finished, no objects were rescued, and some jerk even came and stole our birdfeeder in the aftermath, a detail my mother still shakes her head over. I’m not sure what my possessions meant to me at that age, but now they were gone—a blue-feathered cross-eyed doll called Gooney Bird, for example, and all my little clothes, and the old crib I’d managed to break out of every night. (My first sentence was reportedly “Boy go bed now,” but that must have been the first and only time I’ve actually had the impulse to go to bed—usually I just collapse at dawn like some unholy figure, defeated at long last.)

In the period after the fire, we first stayed with my grandparents, then moved into a rented house with yellow aluminum siding, situated next to the local dump, in a small town nearby. My mother recalls with an amused pity that during this time I began to refer to our life in the house that burned down as “the old days.” Though still unable to pronounce my Rs, at four and five I spoke as if I were an elderly man recalling his prime and the forgotten era to which it belonged.

My parents kept the land the old house was on, a few acres, and called it “the meadow.” Throughout my childhood, my dad would take me on trips out to the meadow, which became more and more overgrown as time wore on. There in the tall grass and trees we sometimes discovered curious human objects—a baby shoe, for instance. I wondered if it could have been mine, but my father didn’t recognize it. Who was leading their baby out into our wilderness? It seemed like these lost items were a fruit the land bore. Our expeditions were at once visits to nature, visits to our past, and ritualistic journeys tracing some parallel life in which the house hadn’t burned down and this was our house, our yard. There were primordial glimpses, too: we walked deeper, beyond the property—though I didn’t know where it ended—to a woods and a swamp, where we paid our respects to a formidable snapping turtle that once locked its mouth on a stick my father pointed at it, and would have readily done the same to any finger.

Going back to the meadow would trigger images in my mind, visions of “the old days.” Even now, I have a significant collection of infant and toddler memories, which I understand most people lose. I remember, for instance, swatting exuberantly at building blocks my father had stacked up for me to knock down. I also remember slithering under a Chinese rug in the living room and having my mother tell me I looked “as snug as a bug in a rug”—this was perhaps the first time I heard a rhyme, and it gave me a jolt of pleasure. I believe that I remember so much of my life before the house burned down because that time came to such an abrupt halt—the fire obliterated and yet distilled an era for me.

Later in childhood, I developed a savant-like ability to remember sequences of numbers. I could memorize a phone number by seeing it just one time, so instead of going to the phone book, my mother simply asked me for the number when she had to call the video rental place or Walmart, which she did with surprising frequency. And as a teenager I started imitating the voices of people I knew. To entertain my friends I channeled teachers at school, other kids, odd and beguiling characters I’d encountered. I became the opposite of a celebrity impersonator—I was an obscurity impersonator. As a lively bit of dialogue unfolded around me, I repeated it discreetly under my breath in order to memorize it exactly. Life felt like a story being told to me, something I had to listen to, study, and capture. I became nervously vigilant about keeping lost time alive.

In my adulthood I’ve managed to make a practice, and a career, somehow, of this nagging need to reconstruct certain episodes from my life. For example, I often write about jobs I’ve had, as something of an exercise in reclaiming stolen hours, a resurrection of vanishing images. At these jobs most people around me wished they were somewhere else, which, to me, makes the workplace into a ready-made theater of frustrated desire, the eye of a tornado of somewhere elses. I write about people I know. I write about my mother, for instance—or an abstracted version of her—and her ongoing dialogue with her cats. I attempt to critique this dialogue as art, which I suspect it could be, since I know my mother is still an artist, even if she hasn’t made much since the fire.

I write, too, about creatures and voices I imagine, and about experiences that quietly shattered me in some way, though they might appear trivial on their surface. I dramatize certain of these stories and perform them onstage, over and over. So nowadays, I often find myself in some club, delivering an Italian aria, of my own design, about an overdose on psychedelics I experienced years before. Other times I’m singing in a nonsense language I made up, derived from baby talk, about the harrowing final moments of a five-year relationship. Through all this, I keep coming back to what my brother said to me the night of the fire. Every day I wonder, “What is the meaning of ridiculous?”