As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part XI)

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When a second shock jarred both of us from our daze I managed a quip. “Honey,” I remarked casually, “you’ll never guess what Nobel Laureate author’s risen from the grave and is outside right now trying to kill us!” The window exploded and Renee shrieked. Arms thrust into the room, flesh hanging off them, angry claws tearing and clutching at the impedimenta on the table. Only when the blinds and curtains were ripped down did it occur to me how trapped we were. As I was watching the gray Leviathan mosh at the window, I felt the door jolt and shudder like that of one about to buckle and snap, and I looked about the motel room for some remedy to our crisis. Renee threw a lamp at them.

“What are these things?” Renee yelled. But I wasn’t really listening to her. Grabbing a couch pillow and discovering it was as ineffective as one might have predicted, and the corduroy fabric clenched in my fist, the full weight of goose feathers hammering a zombie limb, I saw Faulkner among the others pushing his head through the window, his gray skin hanging off his face, his crepuscular eyes lolling about in his head like a broken puppet’s, baring his granite teeth. The zombies filled the room, filled us, with a hoarse unearthly squall of unalloyed terror.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Renee shouted.

A hand wedged itself in the door, a striated spear of flesh and bone, its fingers ripping at the fabric on my shirt. “I can’t hold them!”

Across the room Renee yelled: “Where did these guys come from?”

“How should I know?” I said. I had a pretty good idea. She had a floor lamp in her hands now, gripped like a bo staff, warding off the zombies.

“Is it because you stole that change?” she said. I didn’t say anything. The attempts at the door were increasingly, horrifically powerful. “Or the brick. That’s it. Where is it?” I told her.

“I told you not to take it,” Renee said.

“I can’t hold this door any longer,” I said. “Get in the bathroom.” She rushed to my suitcase. Faulkner and the other zombies tried to pile through the window, elbowing each other for primacy. Renee threw my clothes over her shoulders and produced the brick in question and turned towards our uninvited guests with a startling defiance. She presented it like a talisman. There was the chaos of the tempest outside, the piercing groans of the invaders, and a Taco Bell commercial. Faulkner tumbled through the window and over the desk along with an angry black man in a greasy gas station attendant’s uniform. For a moment I thought once they saw the brick they would take it and shuffle out, back to their graves.

I relaxed at the door.

“Take it,” Renee said.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help myself.” I went to stand beside Renee. “Can you really blame me?”

The door opened slowly and a few dark figures stepped across the threshold.

Faulkner turned and looked at me. He took the brick from Renee and considered it, then he again looked at her. Striking, he did soundlessly; the plummeting brick cracked skull and sent blood spraying, but it was noiseless; I felt myself absorbed into a surreal tableau one might see in an art museum. Now I could hear only the sound of Renee hitting the floor with a noise like a sack of potatoes being dropped, and her murmuring This is your fault. She kept repeating it as I dragged her into the bathroom with tears in my eyes. “This is your fault!” she said again, louder, as I propped her up against the wall, watching as I locked the door. “Your fault!” she rasped, the words concussing me with each damning syllable until she groggily turned her head and new streamlets of blood ran down her face. “This is your fault. This is your fault.”


If you've read this through to the end, thank you! I hope you liked it. The story was based on a true story.

As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part X)

This is a continuation. To start from the beginning, click here.


A moment later, after I had retrieved Renee’s Nestea and was bracing myself to reenter the deluge, I turned to meet a shambling rotted corpse.

And I have to say I froze. I stared. I stared like a staring champion who had just been given a doctorate at the Nietzchean Institute of Abyss-Staring. I had a Dr. Pepper in one hand and a Nestea in the other hand, and in front of me, in defiance of everything you or I know about the world, stood a surprisingly intact corpse, surprising because it had been forty-seven years in the grave. I can tell you that my paralysis in that moment was vertiginous, that is to say, a vertigo induced by my utter incapa-freaking-bility to explain how this was even possible: there is no documentation of insanity in my family (save, of course, for this document—I can’t argue I haven’t now gone around the bend) up to now; there is the indisputable fact that after forty-seven years in the grave, there should be nothing of William Cuthbert Faulkner left but a skeleton. So I think I can be forgiven that my first (and only) words to my hero were, “We’re the same height.”

It lurched for me with its carrion claws. I threw the bottles at it, but they bounced off harmlessly. It was clear to me from the grunting and sibilant shuffling that whatever eloquence I may have been expecting was not forthcoming.

I had neither heard nor seen the twenty-odd zombies that had accompanied it, so taken I had been by the encounter. I nearly ran into one as I circled the stairwell to head back to the room, and saw them there, muddying up the yard outside the motel. Darting here and there I avoided their morbid grasping and slid the card through the slot and slid it again the right way this time and opened the door and slammed it behind me. On the TV Shinzon was recounting his early times among the Remans, on the couch Renee had been startled by my sudden entrance, and by the door I was on the precipice of hyperventilating. Thunder rolled and the windows shook. The door absorbed a monstrous collision, nearly knocking me forward as a result. Renee parted her lips in bewilderment, her words hovering in that sensuous, timid space between them.

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part IX)

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V

Seconds before the storm did, we made it to the hotel. Renee was still upset with me about the coins. I marveled at the storm—a wrathful rain, sheets of it, acute and obtuse angles of impact battling it out—banging against the windows as if it wanted in the room with us.

On the couch Renee appeared to be trying to figure some difficult problem out. “You’re just having a banner day, you know that?” she said. “What are you going to do next? Steal that statue from City Hall?”

The water on the window made the yard look like an impressionist painting. I scooped a handful of coins from my pocket, out of which I picked out twelve quarters, enough for two sodas. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Wait,” said Renee. “What?”

I rattled the change in my hand. “Something to drink.”

“It’s pouring out there,” she said.

“Don’t worry. I won’t melt. I can change my clothes if I get wet.”

“I’m still mad at you. First the brick, now this,” Renee said. She threw her legs up on the couch in a resigned huff before stretching for the remote control. “See if they got any iced tea.”

“What’s that? You want an iced tea with my ill-gotten gains?

“I don’t want to be mad on my vacation,” Renee said. “Look. Star Trek: Nemesis is on again. Man, those Remans are scary-looking.”

I was immediately drenched. The second-floor overhang offered zero protection. I sprinted to the vending machine, which was located in the stairwell to the second floor. The concrete space afforded a kind of claustrophobic refuge from the dark tumult about me.

Then something, a shadow draped with power and menace, lumbered across my periphery, lingering just long enough that I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand, and as the cliche goes, I nearly jumped out of my skin when my Dr. Pepper hit the delivery tray. It’s like a horror movie, I thought; Renee will get a kick out of how spooked I just got and her IMDb-database of a mind will be able to spew out a host of fun analogies I won’t get.

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part VIII)

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“Anybody that knows anything about Faulkner knows that he hated dealing with money. It was the bane of his life. He hated that he made more money from his short stories than he did from his novels. He hated having to go work in Hollywood to pay the bills. So what does Joe Average do when he gets to the poor guy’s grave? Throw pennies and dimes on it! I think it’s insulting, frankly.”

“Oh, come on,” said Renee. “Who knows? Maybe he’s grateful somebody gave him some money and he didn’t have to work for it for a change. Maybe he’s lying down there going ‘Thanks!’ You don’t know! This is a stupid conversation.”

“You’re right,” I said; I may have carried this on too long, as is usually the case, but I think I should be commended for not dragging Graceland into the argument, if for no other reason than it shows I’m not a complete numbskull. “I’ll drop it.” Renee warmed after that, taking my picture in front of the tombstone and patiently waiting while I struggled to enjoy the moment. It was the coins, spread out haphazardly over his slab like change at the bottom of a mall fountain, festering in my mind every time I looked down at it, that made me do it; soon Renee said she’d be waiting in the car, that she’d be looking at her magazines and I could take as long as I wanted. She walked down the steps out of the plot.

I joined her, after I finished, and promised her that the rest of the afternoon and the evening was hers. The skies suddenly began to darken; low-hanging clouds the color of steel wool tumbled in hurriedly from the horizon towards us. A strange light, electric and greenish-yellow, saturated the cemetery, the trees, our car. As I shut the car door, I cried “Damn! I think it’s going to rain hard! Look how nasty the sky is. Damn.” Renee nodded in silent agreement, watching the roiling clouds approach until she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She knew, but she asked anyway:

“What is that jingling sound?”

It was me. My cargo shorts were full of change.

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part VII)

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“Ha ha,” I said. “You ever notice how people, every time they visit some famous place, a grave or a monument or something, feel the need to leave coins on it? What is with that, do you know?”

“No idea,” Renee said; she already appeared bored. “Maybe they think it will bring them luck. Obviously it bothers you.”

“It does,” I admitted; I knew that now. “I don’t know why, exactly. It seems kitschy and vulgar.”

“My friend Rebecca leaves stones on her father’s grave,” Renee said. “Do you think that’s kitschy and vulgar?”

“First of all, it’s not the same thing,” I said. “That’s an ancient Jewish tradition. Everybody knows they do that.”

“What about the boat guy?” Renee said triumphantly. “You give the guy coins and he takes you across the river. The mythology boat guy. The dead guy has to pay him.”

“Charon, the ferryman of Hades,” I said. “He takes you across the river Acheron, but you have to give him a silver coin, an obolus they called it, so he’ll do it. Otherwise you wander around down there for a hundred years.”

“You see?” Renee said. “That’s why people do it—”

“No,” I said. “The coin has to be put in the corpse’s mouth. Not on the grave. They don’t say anything about throwing coins on the person’s grave.”

“Whatever,” Renee said, exhaling. “Don’t get so excited about it.”

“I’m not excited,” I said. “It just bugs me. This package of cigarettes here—that doesn’t bug me. Faulkner was a smoker. I even get the whisky thing, even though Faulkner is said to have preferred scotch.”

“I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“My point is that at least some thought went into it,” I said. “Look. If you’re going to leave something behind, leave something that could mean something to that person. Don’t just grab some change from your pocket or your car ashtray and think you’re performing some sacred rite.”

“Oh my god,” Renee snarled in disbelief. She sat down on the stone wall.

I knew how I was sounding to her, but I just couldn’t stop.

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part VI)

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IV

After that we went back to the hotel and made love again and showered and went to have lunch at some fancy restaurant in the Square. And then we would visit William Faulkner’s grave. It was located about three blocks away from the hotel, an easy walk and impossible to miss, according to the girl at the hotel desk. According to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s sign we found, Faulkner’s grave would be located “twenty steps” east of the marker, and it was (and this experience we didn’t have to share, thank God; making a pilgrimage to someone’s gravesite is awkward and strange enough without fellow death tourists. The plot was up a little hill and wedged between yet another hill and an overgrown holly bush; we walked around it and stepped across the low stone wall as if we were stepping onto a dais of some kind. The marble tombstone was modest, made to resemble a Greek temple façade: it could have easily been Renee’s and my names on the slabs in front of the marker, instead of William’s and Estelle’s, although—Renee had pointed this out on numerous occasions—normal people consider it exceedingly macabre to give this arena of life too much thought at our age, what with all the living we had left to do; had she, years ago, through some means of foreknowledge, known or intuited or suspected or in whatever epistemic manner became prescient of her ultimate doom, she would have, as surely I still breathe air, punched me in the face). And leaning against the grave marker, among the broken glass, I saw a wreath and an abandoned pack of cigarettes, and there were coins (some foreign) scattered across the surface of Faulkner’s slab and even on Estelle’s. But I didn’t see any discarded sour mash, and I thought, fleetingly, about the tradition of which I had heard of pilgrims at midnight drinking half a bottle and then pouring the rest onto the tombstone as a sacrifice, a tribute, sitting on the wall and yammering out their deep thoughts beneath the canopy of the white oaks and of the stars and probably irritating the bejeesus out of poor old Bill. But then again I’ll admit I’m a snob, and a pretty big one, too; if we would have met when the man was alive, he would have most likely, certainly would have had little use for my uninspired insights or my fawning, although it’s conceivable he wouldn’t have minded being around Renee. At this point she was playing with her lip, and she said,

“His middle name was Cuthbert? I always thought that was a strange name.”

“I suppose,” I said, crouching to get a better look at some of the coins on the grave; Renee was looking out over the rest of St. Peter’s cemetery. “Maybe that comes from St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Very famous saint, protector of the people…I’m sure the name is Anglo-Saxon. –bert means bright, I know that.”

“And of course,” Renee said. “Elisha Cuthbert plays Kim Bauer on 24. But I kind of doubt that that’s where his parents got it. With him born in 1897 and all…come on, that was a joke.”

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part V)

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After we had toured the rest of the grounds, long after the tour bus and its tourists had gone, I noticed it. It was located approximately a foot in front of the steps to the veranda, and I had tripped on it an hour earlier. Renee had laughed at my misstep and I said,

“You see that brick there? That would be a perfect addition to my classroom.”

“No,” Renee said, pulling me forward; Renee made the querulous face she makes when I say something as a joke that may or may not be a joke. “You’re not stealing stuff on our vacation.”

“It’s a part of the trip,” I told her. I then added: “Get it? Trip.”

The brick was part of a herringbone pattern. There was something off about it. It wasn’t level, maybe a half-inch higher than the others, but it wasn’t a new brick, either. One of the edges was smoothed by time, and it was wonderfully moss-covered in places. There was nothing to anchor it, such as mortar, except for dead leaves and soil and a lone cedar sprig. I wouldn’t, that is, I didn’t even have to pry it loose. Just pick it up. I said, “I’m sorry, Renee. I’m going to take it. The cosmos clearly wants me to have it.”

“Are you asking me for permission?” Renee said. “If you’re going to take it, take it. Just leave me out of it.”

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part IV)

This is a continuation. To start from the beginning, click here.


“You know how I am. If I don’t take pictures it’s like I wasn’t even here.” So we went all around Rowan Oak that morning and I took pictures of everything and from every angle. And Renee was patient. There may have about forty people with the tour bus, and thirty of them were crowded into the house. The docent was a kindly black man, knowledgeable while avoiding pedantry (a trap I’ve never been able to avoid, I must confess; it’s hard for me to resist teaching when I get excited about something. One step into each room was all we were granted; our curiosity was checked by a semi-circular Plexiglas barrier. The interior was pleasant enough, but by our antiseptic, commercially-scrubbed notions of design and décor it seemed stark: remove its Nobel Prize-winning ghost, and the library was provincial and ordinary, the parlor and dining room—the bedrooms too, for that matter—an inarguably genteel throwback in this age of belligerent tackiness and unapologetic ignorance, but lacking any special significance in and of itself, at least until you got to his office; anyone looking on that room, be he cultured or common, seeing Faulkner’s old typewriter staring out through the window on the paddock and post oak barn, seeing the grease pencil marks telescoping a week’s worth of events in World War I France onto two walls, should have been impressed and reflected and thought and reached a special truth, that Art, far from being irrelevant or dead, seeks and collects the best of us. Nonetheless, Faulkner’s office is located next to the bathroom for public use; there was a line for both. You can guess what Renee was waiting for). As he was the only official present, the docent stayed close to the counter to keep an eye on the register, although the visitors were amiable as the elderly on vacation tend to be (thus explaining the line to the bathroom) and his mindfulness owed more to attentiveness to duty than to suspicion. But without the oversight of the docent, and after a quick defeat of my conscience, I granted myself leave to use the flash on my digital camera, ignoring the clear prohibition posted in the entryway, next to Faulkner’s drawings of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson. It was a violation, and I now wish I had been caught and reprimanded; if one of the many track-suited ladies had taken me to task, I would have been embarrassed, irritated even, but surely when the opportunity arose to take the loose brick from the cedar tree walk as a souvenir, I wouldn’t have dared.

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part III)

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III

Morning had arrived, tomorrow had arrived. THE day that would be the last of my life (and you’re saying to yourself, “well if you’re dead how are you telling the story then?”—of course I’m not dead yet, but don’t you worry, it’s coming; I’m trapped in this bathroom, I’m waiting for the inevitable—typing this account out, for what reasons I don’t know, with nothing to be proud of by any means, a confession if I’m going to be honest about it) and the one I had hoped would be accompanied by self-sacrifice or a lack of regrets or prajna or something (the horrors on the other side of the door—vicious and unrelenting—the blood and torn flesh and malignant, soulless eyes, my just reward it seems) but features me sitting in an empty bathtub tapping out nonsense; it had arrived. “I’m amazed there’s other people here,” Renee had said. Never what you would call a belletrist, Renee was always surprised when others shared my interests; there was a tour bus parked at the entrance.

“Hmm,” I managed; I was too mollified by the now of my pilgrimage to be offended. I was in an especially good mood and feeling quite charitable. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little disappointed,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting other people to be here; in fact, I was looking forward to having it all to ourselves.”

“Graceland’s only an hour away,” Renee said.

“I think I can deal.”

We entered the clearing on the south lawn. “I got to be honest,” Renee said. “It’s lovely.”

“It’ll be really pretty in about a month when everything blooms.”

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As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part II)

This is a continuation. To start from the beginning, click here.


Sighing, and without explanation, Renee leaned forward to eject Motley Crue from the deck. She lingered over it, her thumb twitching and scanning the FM band. So much for our deal.

“Well, let me say this,” she deadpanned, still unable to find any music satisfactory to her, “I am just thrilled to be going to this guy’s house. I just know I wouldn’t have enjoyed Graceland at all.”

I thought about telling her that her complaint was an example of a mempsis, a rhetorical device and that, comically, it was a mempsis about Memphis, but I chose to restrain myself. If I hadn’t, she may have brained me with something heavy.

II

Now that you have heard the material cause of my misfortune, learn how the horrible events to follow came to pass.

It was nine o’clock by the time we got to the hotel. (Renee’s mother said it was two blocks from Lafayette Square, and that you’d have to be stupid, blind, or dead to miss it. I can safely say that she’s at least one-third wrong. For now, anyway.)

The room we checked into was on the ground floor, which I was fine with because I thought it would mean less lugging for me. However, Renee insisted everything be brought in that night. I would have been fine with just a toothbrush and the laptop.

“I wish we could have left that thing at home,” said Renee. I was bringing in the last of our things. She was already undressed and in bed. It wasn’t an invitation—the TV was on and she had settled on Star Trek: Nemesis. “We’re supposed to be on vacation.”

“I won’t be up all night. Promise.” I sat on the edge of the bed.

“Meh.”

“I need to do some writing today or it’s going to kill me.”

Renee shrugged. She sat upright, her back supported by pillows, in only her panties, unselfconscious and appearing slightly bored. This blasé, mildly petulant air of hers clinched it. The tableau hit me like a blunt force trauma, and familiar, limbic stirrings pushed their way into my consciousness.

I closed the laptop.

“You know that package store we saw on the way here? Want me to go get something?”

Eye contact, finally.

Her legs grazed each other subtly. Madness.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I could get some Jack Daniel’s or maybe some scotch. Very Faulknerian.”

She straightened somewhat. Then she shrugged again, gesturing with the TV remote.

“Well, hurry along then. Depending on how much Riker is on before you get back, I may have to start without you.”

For Part III, click here.

As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part I)

After many tries with many publishers, after numerous disappointments with many projects, after much internal reckoning, this writer has decided to use the technology available to him to distribute his work as widely as he can. In other words, Ghost Dogg is turning to the Internet Machines to publish his work.

This website will feature my word-o-ramas, mostly short stories, but divided into easy to read sections. This, of course, is a nod to the notion that no one wants to read more than 300 words at a time anymore...sigh...

No, scratch that. Because serialized works have a long tradition, and if writing in such a fashion was good enough for Charles Dickens, then surely the rest of us shouldn't turn our noses.

Enough preamble already. The first story I will be posting is one I'm very proud of. It's called As I No Longer Lay Dying, and I tried to write it in the style of William Faulkner. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

***

As I No Longer Lay Dying

I

RENEE SAID:
Your problem is that you don’t think anything you do means anything. You bop through your life. You don’t look back. You don’t look forward. You barely look around. I’ve come to know that about you—I guess I’ve always known it—but I suppose I need to forgive you for that. I’m too dying to carry that grudge anymore. But don’t forget this is all your fault.

And then she did die.

Strange to say, it was all because of a brick. The subtext here is not at all lost on me. A brick, the literal building block of our civilization, at a time long distant baked under the pitiless Egyptian sun, now shipped from the plant to all points of the compass, making the tombs and defensive walls and city halls possible, in concord with its fellow bricks serves to create, and in violent isolation is used to destroy, as it has me and mine. Better to say though, not a brick but the brick. And while the brick was the cause of our end, it did not cause our end. That came by other means.

Leaving Stone Creek for break was a reprieve. January and February are the dog days of the school calendar, what with the endless slow-march of five-day weeks and the tramp-stomp of the unwilling and unresponsive. Renee’s Pink Floyd marathon in the car grew tiresome, but it wasn’t necessarily a joy-killer. It was off-putting. My students aren’t bricks in the wall—they lack both the discipline and the solidity to be bricks. They’re doughy and largely useless. I could have extended this metaphor even further, but Renee purchased my silence by allowing me to put in Motley Crue.

“Rowan Oak is such a strange name,” Renee said. “The lost colony of Virginia.”

“That’s Roanoke the lost settlement of the Virginia Colony, you mean,” I said, which provoked an eye-roll from Renee. “It was actually located in modern-day North Carolina, and no. Faulkner got the name from The Golden Bough. You see, in Scotland there was this tree called the Rowan tree, and peasants would put a cross of it by their doors to protect their homes.”

“Well, that seems handy. We should do that when we get a house.”

“Seriously?” I asked, but based on the absent way she was flipping through People, obviously Renee wasn’t serious. I always catch on a little late, it seems.

“So,” she said, pausing over Brad Pitt in his swim trunks, “so…because he named the whole place Rowan Oak, does that mean the whole place is protected?”

“It would make sense. Sure, I guess.”

“Protected from what?”

“Hmm? I don’t know. The supernatural?”

“Well, duh,” said Renee, and she closed her magazine. We had spent nearly all day in the car, and Renee’s legs weren’t getting any shorter. “Demons? Ghosts? Zombies? Angry bees?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. “All of it, I guess. I really have no idea.”

For Part II, click here.