the speed of dark

  The day after Stanley dropped the dog at the pound, his wife left him. He didn’t wonder if things could have gone differently or not, he just kept on like he always did. But he did think of her, while he sat on his lawn chair at night alone, shrouded by the rose bushes he’d planted one summer that climbed all the way up the fence forming a dark green wall. He did miss her, but she was a pain in his ass, always carrying on about something, so maybe he was glad she was gone.

   The nerve of those cops, coming around his place one evening and accusing him of abusing his dog! One of them even stood on the fence balancing himself like a fool against the neighbor’s house trying to get a good look. He asked him, “She always tied up like that on the chain?” Did he feed her enough? Was she allowed to come inside at least at night?

    Stanley defended himself in his thin, almost feminine voice, “I take good care of my dog, she’s well fed, and I never beat on her like half the people in this city do to their dogs.” He pointed at the thin wooden dog-house that he’d built for her, “she can go in there any time she wants!” He demanded to know who’d reported him. Which one of his neighbors called the cops? It was probably those stupid girls in the white house that his wife talked to all the time. But the cops wouldn’t tell him. His wife grew hysterical, and from within the house she wailed, “Don’t take my dog, Bonita, BO-Nee-Taaaaa…please don’t take my dog away from me….” “Shut up!” Stanley yelled, but she kept on.   “We’ll be back with a search warrant.” The cop climbed down from the fence.

  Stanley decided, after a few days thought, that instead of dealing with cops meddling around in his business, he would just give the dog to the pound. She was a pure bred Doberman and would have killed any creep that tried to break in. What a shame, he thought, to give her up, but he could see no other choice.

  Stanley was an electrician and left his house a couple of times a day to go fix people’s electrical problems. But he didn’t like to. He had to work, that was certain, but he didn’t want to work hard everyday just to have it all swept out from under him in his absence. Especially now that his wife and dog weren’t there to keep watch over the house and tool shed.

  He spent his evenings sitting on a lawn chair in front of his house, watching the street. It wasn’t a busy street and when people passed by most of them never even realized he was there. He’d watch them go by, and some times someone would see him, and mutter hello, but mostly no one noticed. He watched for possible intruders. He knew the kids up the street, those gangster kids selling drugs and beating up on each other all of the time, would try to break in if he wasn’t careful. They’d tried before. He’d found them scrambling around and chased them out. He grew angry thinking of what he’d really like to do next time one of those kids tried to break in. He’d set up a nice spot for himself. And he didn’t need anyone coming onto his side of the fence.

  Most days, when he wasn’t working in some neighbor’s apartment, he’d fix up around the place. One year he built himself a weight bench out of wood and old steel pipes, and another he bought a swing that hung on a free-standing frame for his wife’s fortieth birthday. But other than a few large, black trash cans, the space was taken up by his large beige van. He trusted that van more than anything and prided himself on keeping it up and running year after year.

  He’d built the house July of 1973, a perfect brick square with frosted windows. His wife was eight months pregnant and they were trying to build for themselves something of a family. But the time their daughter spent on the earth was only a flash in his memory. He tried not to think about all that anymore; there were other things to worry about. But now and again, he’d get a terrible image of his baby girl dead in his wife’s arms after she’d recovered her from the edge of the lake. He cursed himself for not paying more attention to her that day. And cursed his wife.

   A few months after his daughter’s death, Stanley bought wire fencing from the hardware store and circled his entire property with an eight foot tall metal fence like the kind around a kid’s baseball diamond. He covered the yard with brick and cement. And when he was through with that, he added three rings of barbed wire to the top of the fence.

  He was out back one day, fixing to go down the street to make some routine electrical repairs, when he noticed the mail man waving over at him from the sidewalk. What could he want? Stanley wanted to ignore him. “Just slip the mail through the slot like always.” But the man was insistent, “I have a package for you, Mr. Bennett.” “What is it?” “Here.” The mailman pointed to the ground where there lay a sizeable brown box. “Whatever it is, it’s pretty heavy.” Stanley hesitated, looked around the premises, and at the mailman’s face, then pulled out his crowded ring of keys and unlocked the gate.

  The box was heavy. He carried it with some effort around to the back of the house where he could open it in private. He began to sweat a little, especially his palms. He hadn’t gotten a package in years, not even a letter. All he ever got was bills. The box was taped up heavily with sticky brown packing tape. Whoever sealed it up did a damn good job. He saw that he couldn’t pull the box open with his hands alone and went to his tool shed to get a knife. He laid the knife down on the ground and knelt next to the box to inspect the label. It was clearly addressed to him. The return address, however, held the name of a woman he’d never heard of before, a Ms. Elaine Rodriguez. The label was written in blue marker in a loose cursive. It reminded him of when he was a child first learning to write the alphabet in those cursive loops and circles, connecting each and every letter in a word. Maybe it was some relative of his wife. Maybe it was a mistake.

  He cut the tape along the seams of the box. On the very top of the contents there was a letter folded into perfect thirds. He opened it to find the same cursive of the label and in impeccably straight lines it read:

May 16, 2005

Dear Stanley Bennett,

Hello, my name is Elaine and I guess I can say I was a friend of your father. I am a nurse at Mansfield Care Center in Springfield, Ohio, and I knew your father for about eight years. I am sorry it has taken so long for me to be in touch with you, it took me some time to find where you lived. I must tell you that your father passed away several months ago, in February. I can assure you that he died peacefully. I was there by his side. I didn’t know he had a son until a couple of years ago. He started talking about a boy named Stanley. I would ask him who was this boy he was talking about, but he was never quite sure. You see, your father had Alzheimer’s disease and didn’t have much of a memory even when I first met him. He did remember some things and he was better then. But the way he would say your name, with longing, it was like he ached to know who you are. I felt he could only be talking about his child. He told me once, chuckling, how you tried to make pizza with stones that you found on the sidewalk. He didn’t have many possessions, but he did leave behind this model train set. He couldn’t set it up in his room at the center because his room was so small, but he was allowed to keep it in a box in the closet. I believe he would have wanted you to have it. I hope I have sent this to the correct address, and that it has been delivered safely. I think it may even work. Take care, Elaine Rodriguez

   The package was stuffed full of packing bubbles, some overflowed onto the ground. Stanley put the letter down and began to take out the grey tracks, about twenty in all. Inside the large box were four smaller boxes each with its own old metal car; a great black engine with red trim and three grey-green passenger cars. Each passenger car had a name embossed in gold lettering on its side: Faye, Harriet and Thelma. The passenger cars had squares on the roof that opened and Stanley looked inside each one. Two were filled with tiny black leather seats, and had a tiny bathroom complete with porcelain sink, toilet, and mirror. One car had a miniature bar, tables and a chandelier that hung from the ceiling. The pieces were covered with a slight film of dust. Stanley ran his finger over one of the cars and revealed the color underneath. The silver wheels were lined with red rims that matched the trim of the engine.

  He put the train back into the boxes and looked again at the letter. He studied the writing of this nurse, stared hard until he was no longer reading her words, unable to put it down. His mother had died of some female cancer when he was only eight and he’d spent most of his childhood living in foster homes. He’d never known he’d had a father alive somewhere.

  The yelling of the neighbor hood boys startled him. He could hear them threatening each other, “Think you’re so tough then c’mon!” “Oh, yeah? Let’s have it!” The blaring siren of an ambulance speeding by muffled the commotion for an instant and then trailed off into the distance. Stanley listed to usual sounds of his neighborhood; the vibrating, thumping bass of a passing car, the continuous threats of the neighborhood boys, a child crying. He looked around his place, looked at his weight bench, the empty swing, his van. The shadow of a bird Stanley did not see passed over him.

  He’d gotten a call that morning from a man that owned three or four apartment buildings in the area requesting Stanley to come out and make sure everything was all set to go before people moved in. But he forgot. Instead he hauled the train set into his house and pulled the light switch which lit a single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. The house had no natural light source. Stanley’s house consisted of a room that he used as both a living room and bedroom, and a kitchen. In the main room he had a cot up in one corner, a beat-up floral couch and a television set. He pushed his furniture up against the walls and rolled up the rug that was on the floor, clearing a space for the tracks. He then, piece by piece, fit the tracks together. They had three rails, which he thought was unusual, but then again, he never had a train set before and didn’t know much about them. He saw that there was a special rail that had two little prongs sticking out of it which attached to wires that came out of a black box. He took out the engine and connected it to the three passenger pieces. The train fit perfectly onto the rails.

  Stanley waited for a moment before he turned the switch making the current flow through the tracks. Was this woman right that this old man, who she’d seen through to the last moment of his life, was his father? He turned the switch and the bars connecting the wheels of those trains began to move and spin them around until the train began to plug forward. He turned the switch more and the train went faster. The passenger cars had minuscule lights that lit up, making sparkling little dots that shown through the windows. The train went round the track. Stanley turned the switch back and the train slowed to a stop, the lights flickered off. He remembered he had work to do.

You can’t put your bare vagina in public, step down to the basement, makes visible your breath, you peer around for rats.  Your sister swims naked in dirty water while the cops shout warnings, declarations of trespass, while men push shopping carts full of treasures found in alleys, in streets, in containers full of trash, burn small fires that give rise to thick charcoal smoke, you think, it must be awful, awful, horrible to live under the highway when even the thought of going outside seems to run shudders of ice through your bones, yet you still find it hard to feel gratitude, hard to relish the comforts, pleasures, excesses your birth has afforded, you wonder if its too much to ask your mother to buy you a laptop, decide against it, even though you’re tempted anyway to let others spoil over you, so you can try to make something of yourself, anything, a project to enjoy creating but also, one that will make others know who you are. 

Why do you want that? to clash obscurity, ordinariness, romance, with having a famous name, a boy’s name, and change nothing but your face every once in awhile, escaping, or trying to, the random people who know, who think they know.  Who you really are, and so.

This obsession with being great, being worshipped, a true god, glorified, a rarity among the living, but you know, this is the lie you most try to undo.  This lie of success, grand status, wealth, genius.  You should be happy with family, however volatile, ageing, however deceased, disintegrating, however brilliant or demented, happy with lovers who throw their backs out for you, who only cry when you cannot stop crying, friends who have come to dinner, drink wine feel crazy are insomniatic at the same time with you, in their own beds, merely blocks away, as your mouth dries out, your head aches and your mind races around worrying about your lovers secret own-thoughts, and worrying your sister will drown out of sight, out of grasp, worrying that you will not prevail over your own sanity.  That you will lose what you value most, your mind, the circuits in your brain, the impulses that tell your nerves to hurt and then disappear, just like that.  When you are flailing around at night wishing it didn’t feel so empty, the structure that has erected over time, and now in which you live immersed, conscious, hurting, you wish most of all for some comic relief, that your hysteria would be laughter-the ability to laugh at yourself.  So serious though, so dramatic at these times, no, you would rather kill than laugh.

Mr. Fred has eyes in the back of his head. Everyone else ignores me, so I pay attention to him. Everyone else it feels like is rolling around on the floor laughing, but not Mr. Fred. He is an inventor, he has an imagination. Everyone else is just fooling themselves, even my mom and dad. They get home from work, microwave me and Polly our dinner, they talk about what happens at work and all this stuff that stresses them out, never bothering to explain anything to us. While me and Polly chew up our peas and chicken. Mom and Dad are good cooks, I’ll give them that. And if we eat all of our dinner we always have ice cream or orange slices, or some other good thing for dessert. That’s mainly because they like dessert too. We are not allowed sugar cereal in the morning, like other kids, and we aren’t allowed to watch that movie Dirty Dancing either. But I went over my friend Jen’s house, and her grandmother let us watch it, big deal! After dinner we always watch TV as a family. We have two television sets right next to each other. One is pretty big and in color, this one is the one we watch shows on, and the other one is smaller and black and white, it doesn’t get channels, only snowballs, and that one I play Nintendo on. Sometimes Polly plays with me too, although she sucks at it. We play Legend of Zelda and Super Mario and Blades of Steal. I can beat all of those games already though. Me and my friend Jen are thinking about how we’re going to design video games as our jobs when we get older. But right now we are only ten. I was born in September. Jen was born in April, she’s my best friend, but some times I really can’t stand her, to tell the truth. And Polly, my younger sister is seven. She’s a spoiled brat, and we don’t get along except after we are punished. Then, we are sent to our rooms to calm down, and our rooms are right next to each other, and our closets share the same wall. So, whenever we get in trouble, usually for fighting with each other, and being loud, we sit in our own closets, in the dark under our clothes hanging down, sliding the doors closed, and we talk to each other through the wall. Until Dad feels bad and lets us out early. Well most nights we watch TV, and I play Nintendo at the same time, which isn’t actually that hard, plus you can always pause it. We watch Unsolved Mysteries, and America’s Most Wanted, and then we are sent to bed. I used to sleep with a blanket named Bucky, but Mom says I am too old. But at night in the dark, my door is cracked open and the light of the hall seeps in, I can hear the television still on, and I get freaked out sometimes. Thinking about the people on Unsolved Mysteries, the people who have disappeared, the re-enactments where they show some woman in a long skirt walking down a highway, saying when she was last seen, and it’s always walking down some highway, I swear. I get scared. I know it’s the tree branches scratching at my window, but sometimes I imagine that it’s a skeleton’s hands trying to open the window and I can’t even move. Once I laid there all night trying to scream for my mother, but never made a sound. It would have been easier for me if I could have held onto Bucky a little longer, but I guess Mom is right and holding a blanket is for a baby. So one day I got this idea about Mr. Fred. It was a Saturday, and I made him out of construction paper. He’s a machine. His arms and legs move back and forth, and he wears a hat. Like I said before, Mr. Fred is an inventor. He is planning to build a space ship, and a house for me and my cat Piku. Jen can live there too, but not Polly or Mom and Dad because they don’t understand. Mr. Fred, Jen and I have a club. Its called “Secret Club” and its by invitation only. No one knows about it. At our first meeting, which was in Jen’s basement we made a plan. It was a big plan and it was going to take a couple of months to carry out. We had to be slick.

I know living in trees in daylight Hanging upside down Making wine from distilling pine Cones in water in empty two liter Coke bottles Climbing higher than the boys Any boy in my neighborhood. I know catching softballs Thrown high by my father Who made me feel like I could Catch any I know digging up hamster bones Funerals of rodents and cats Rooms where my best friend Casey’s father Sold coke and Clutter Where “Stay Out” was written silently In the air between her and her father I know father’s of friends Who’ve jumped off high overpasses And haven’t died on the highway Who’ve tried again and found success In abandoning children I know only my own father Who talked to me most when I was a child. I know my mother’s journals I know my mother’s fear of her father How he’s a mean drunk and I know as a child I hated him And was taught I cannot hate But learned instead I cannot sustain hatred. That these things happen Over and over That what was done to you You could do to someone in Return, you fear maybe even your own children. I know, its not always like this, incest And being pursued through fields, long grass And corn, images I can’t put words to Locked in the basement with the Sitter’s boys, and needing the bedroom door Open a crack, too old for night lights And giving my younger sister black eyes My mother trying to reason with me That my age and size were too much for Fighting, until finally she said This can’t go on And I stopped, Immediately. I know aggression, I know it deeply though I’ve never been beaten. I know my mother was loved By a woman in Cuba and loves me Because of this That my aunt speaks to Jesus But she’s not looked at or treated Like other God-fearing women She’s in a hospital or on Anti-pyschotics, Unable to go to church. With A woman who smashed Her baby against the cement Of the sidewalk because God told her And she did her time And she did Don’t read the paper because A man killed his seven year Old daughter in Manatou, Colorado Because he thought she was The devil I can’t respond I think ice cream And batting cages and ordering The largest size And serving it up later To family’s in a town who stared At me like they thought my dirt was gonna Taint their treat And the sad eyes of some of the Children, the little girl’s who’s Smiling fathers touch them in their Homes and then take them out For a dish of chocolate I know the shame of someone Else knowing. Like my sister You cannot kiss me in the car, Lying down, or in the dark. Safety is an illusion and some Of us will die shocked and if that Shock doesn’t wear off The process of mourning may become Beautiful if for once we are no longer Sterile.

Big question of the night:  Do I take a bath now? If I take a bath, my heart will race (does anyone know why that happens? it seems counter intuitive, if your heart is actually intuitive -and I don’t mean like love at first site kind of bullcrap)…so then I also need to take a Xanax, how is that? No, I really do want to know why my heart races when it is supposed to be calming down inside of me, inside of the hot water.  Warm to Hot bath = Calm Sleepiness? No  Is it just the thoughts that keep rolling through unpleasantly inside the brain-y that keeps they hearty feeling like its gonna stop?  Those unreal, fleeting beasts. 

I wish I could just fall asleep. Or, I wish someone would hoist a menthol cig over to me right now. I would be forever happy for a moment. The end.

I was always afraid of my grandfather. As children, when our family would visit him and grandma at their home in Trenton, New Jersey, my sister and I would stay as long as possible in the room downstairs where beds had been set up for us, until we were summoned to be with the adults. I always finished my sandwiches, apricot jam and peanut butter; I always kept my mouth shut. I was afraid of him, physically, he was an imposing man, maybe that was it, because I only found out later, much later, that he had a problem with alcohol, hid his whiskey in bottles behind ceiling tiles, that he was an angry drunk, prone to incredible rages-that he’d tried to rape my mother (and this was only the beginning of the story). I don’t remember if I really saw any of that, but once- and only once- he kissed me, open mouthed, in the garage of my parent’s house, when I was maybe fourteen and once I heard my mother screaming at him about what a brutal, cruel, horrible man he was, screaming at the top of her lungs – my father and sister left the house- and I took her downstairs in the basement to be in the cool air, and then went upstairs to talk to them, my grandmother sobbing quietly on the edge of my parents bed, my grandfather angrily packing their things- and then they left, without saying goodbye. And that was the last time they came to see us. We didn’t hear from them for months until my grandfather called because my grandmother was very sick, she’d had a heart attack only days after they’d left my parent’s house, and was hospitalized. He begged my mother to fly out –he would charter a plane for her- because he thought the love of his life was going to die without seeing her daughter.

may 4th, 2005: approx 11pm i made a shocking discovery! as i sat on the toilet to pee i saw that the wool sock i had folded in my underwear to use as a maxi pad was gone!!

i realized it must have fallen out on an earlier trip to the bathroom that evening (maybe you would call it a hasty, drunken one) and i must have flushed it.  the whole situation, though simple, was hard to comprehend, and in trying to resolve it, lets just say…some nasty water got on the floor. (and even nastier, a coat hanger was involved!!)  i am relieved to report that a proper surgery was performed around four pm on this happy cinco de mayo and the toilet can swallow all of our shit once again.

last night i found out that there is a ship full of vampires crossing the atlantic in search of the blood of jesus.  almost as exciting as that image of mary under the highway on fullerton avenue. actually, i don’t think thats exciting.  however, the thought that it might, possibly, hopefully (i might even pray) stay warm as it is and get hot, is terribly wonderful.

and my period ends friday.

so i’m happy about these things, but very unhappy: that my lovely roommate, husband and friend, sarah is leaving for new york. I can’t bare it.  I also don’t know where my sister is at, and i’m worried about her.  if you see her let her know i am thinking about her.

+A message to all voyeurs: this blog is limited to lies, so go right ahead. 

to really begin recording the days, publically, is going to take some getting used to.  I have several reservations: mainly how can you write your own private thoughts (especially when anxious or drunk!) and not involve the feelings of others?  or far worse, what if you do share and no one ever reads it and you die an unknown, not even with a cult following of loyal, desperate teenagers who knew your name before you changed it to lornalux?