I will do this today for me tomorrow.
My head was sealed, hushed, and still.
Mindful.
Watchful.
Tranquil.
The electricity failed yesterday. And I waited, paced, and quit, then I lit slim candles and meandered room to room, in agitated waxy silence, still vibrating, half-man, half contraption, ensnared and haunted by my own hand. If I had a nightcap slung ‘round my skull, I would be Ebeneezer.
Nothing is waiting for me here. Nor there. Every wall is flatly mocking. The omnipresent ceiling, too. The floor is not remotely supportive—I am on my own. My car is captive in the garage. My clocks doze. My phone needs life-sustaining juice. I stand on the front stoop and study the deceased street. I wonder if I am the only one alive. Did that tow-headed kid three doors down survive?
Then, at the end of my leash, my bookshelf, that strong silent bastard, calls me in from the ledge, winks, nods, and extends a hand. Sure, it's from IKEA and missing a screw—maybe two—and the lifetime laminate is flaking, but it is not plugged in. To anything. No cord, no socket, nothing shocking other than it works. The utter plainness of it all—boards and nails, the practicality of the thinking. I’d love to meet the magnificent enduring wizard who conceived of that. And hug it out.
So, as my forefathers did, astride a fire, I sit my ass down and read, eyes craving ink and light. I forget the world outside my crippled shelter. My bones soften; my nerves disentangle. I become an old blanket soothed softly by penetrating body heat. I am a gentle wave lapping a peaceful and deserted beach. From one page to the next, I disappear, reappear, and loiter, dreading nothing. Where did all the friction and humming go? Underground? With the worms and into the clay?
I clapped hands with Ayn Rand and excoriated the primitives, their knuckles dragging across a nation's cerebrum. I saw hordes of squealing hogs in a deplorable pen chomping moldy watermelon rinds, too dumb to come out of the rain, while more rational men walked on the moon. Where is the better story written? Among the stars or face down in the mud?
Then, I wore the masque of the red death, made merry with Edgar Allan Poe, and suffered a cruel demise, blood seeping from my pox-ridden pores. I was a guest of the great Prince Prospero; his castle haven became my opulent and decadent coffin.
Finally, I strolled with George Orwell on a vermin-infested search for Wigan Pier, and my lungs turned black, my back broken, loading coal for two shillings a day. We never got to the pier. It was demolished and sold for scrap. The hollow-cheeked locals still laugh about it in a dilapidated way.
Exhausted by my exultant journey, I fell fast asleep, cradling my books, and I bathed in them amidst the resplendent shadows, the absence, the solitude, my churning altitude grounded, my heart scraped clean, reset. If I should die before I wake…
But I did wake, and the electricity had returned. The whole man—I— became half again, in peril, with too few hands to shield my eyes and ears. I shrunk in the punitive and insufferable glare—unarmed amidst the clamor.
A day without blood.
An armistice, my ask, my sky.
Revolution and resolution.
A white flag in stunning darkness.
I fly.