Adam Cogbill
Whisper
He sets explosions into thin wind and the sky lights up like summer, but it is
winter here, and cold. The mortars fall into the snow like wounded ducks and
for a moment he wonders if the grass could possibly catch fire, and how much
trouble would he get in if he burned away the high school soccer field.
They were off for Christmas, although no one called it that anymore. He could have
been inside watching the football games his father claimed everyone loved so
much or walking in on his brother and girlfriend -- everyone in the house had to
know what they were doing alone in the basement-- but there were so many
possibilities in the snow, it seemed.
Perhaps too many. Zig finds
himself waiting always for something to happen. He should find a corpse. He
should break his leg falling over a rock and barely survive the days without
food or water or shelter until he is found. He should accidentally kill someone.
Anything that he will live with for the rest of his
life. He considers hitchhiking, or buying a train ticket to an unknown
town or city and watching the news in some hotel lobby, police questioning his
parents about their son’s disappearance. There would be newspaper articles and
search parties, trained dogs and flashlights. He notices the way undisturbed
snow looks, as if nothing has ever touched this part of the earth. No
impression of weight, nothing to be carried, no
burdens or baggage.
He lights another fuse. It’s his brother’s lighter; he has stolen it. His brother
shouldn’t be smoking anyway. His brother smokes for the color of powdered rock
that lingers around his face like a shroud, and his brother smokes to say, “I
hate the holidays” with smoky tendrils slowly dampening the air around him.
Smoking is an accent. His mother must know his brother smokes, how can she not?
You can smell it across the house. The rocket does not make an explosion so
much as a loud rushing sound that make him think of satin pillows in wind
storms. The sirens start before it lands.
They
are not close, but not far either. The rushing turns red and orange, liquid
roses against ash sky. He sprints across the field to the woods, not
because he thinks he’ll be caught but because if he runs, he might fool himself
into getting scared. The faster he runs, the more likely the policemen are out
of their cars and sprinting across the cracked frozen concrete and into the
endless white that ends with their footsteps and then he is over the short
fence in a single vault, lucky not to catch his coat, into the woods and gone.
He
wishes the trees would come alive and reach for him. Their branches are pikes,
eyes appear like yellow ghosts from their trunks, roots emerging from soil to
wrap his ankles and drag him through snow and undergrowth into dark dens of
drunken blackness where nothing seems exactly real, and then he’d be forced to
live with the memory for the rest of his life, attempting to survive in a world
where no one would believe or understand what he’d seen because he was the only
one who’d seen it. It wasn’t that the insane were insane, Zig
thought, they were just alone. They were fine really, but they were by
themselves on uninhabited planets.
He
breaks from the trees onto a cul-de-sac. The sun, for a moment, comes free of
its cloud wardens and runs headlong across the sky, and then disappears again
into white breath and cold air. He walks along the street pulling at car doors.
No alarms go off, no cars are unlocked. He expects this, but just the same, his
pulse jumps for a moment each time he pulls a handle. He thinks about how often
nobody sees what you’re doing, and even more often, nobody particularly cares
what you are doing. It would be so easy to break rules. He could smash windows,
he could rob the couple at the end of the block, he
could take a dump in the street if he wanted. There is nobody here.
He turns onto Manor Avenue. It is beginning to snow
again and he feels as though that foretells something. It is a sign. In books
and movies, when it begins to snow or rain heavily, Zig
expects something to happen.
The
next handle he pulls is unlocked. Because it is snowing,
maybe. He closes the door quickly and looks around. If anyone has seen
him he could be busted, screwed. He hasn’t broken any major rules, but he is
definitely opening up somebody else’s car. It has to be wrong to open a
stranger’s car door, tampering with private property or a minor version of
trespassing, but he’s alone. Nobody is even outside. They are inside drinking
and laughing and avoiding difficult family subjects. His mother’s sofa cover is
probably stained caramel from his Uncle’s Winter Stout. His Uncle is probably
laughing his deep, thunderous laugh that fills the room like a holiday
fireplace.
But
why not isn’t really the question. Rather, how can he not? Such an opportunity
to prove all the impending forces in his life wrong should not be ignored.
He opens the Suburu’s door and climbs inside. He
wants to leave his mark quickly and get out. He could jam a dime into the
keyhole. Maybe steal all the floor mats or pee on the passenger seat. Break off
all the radio knobs. Anything simple and quick, anything easy
to remember, easy to retell. Outside, the snow, falling like flakes of
fish food, calms him. It will fall regardless of what he does in the next
moment, the next year, the previous year, and it doesn’t care what he is doing
but will gently cover it anyway. He envies snow’s ability to change everyone’s
daily schedule.
But the car. He needs something, anything. Something has to
change and they must notice and they have to wonder what they’ve done or who’s
done it and why when how could it happen. He grabs the visor and pulls down
hard but the keys fall into his lap. They land soundless as snow.
He
stares. There are six keys on a nondescript metal circle and a keychain that
reads, I’m not self-centered, I’m just
important. He turns it over as though expecting to find an answer or
explanation on the back, but there is nothing. At home, his brother is probably
snaking a hand under the shirt of a girl who isn’t sure she wants to be where
she is, but maybe it’s better than being alone, so she lets him. His mother’s
face is glowing a gentle red, the color of the
ornamental balls on the tree. She smiles too much and laughs too easily. She
pours more B&B into a sifter because she believes it is important to appear
sophisticated. Perhaps it is sophisticated. The dogs are wrestling on the
living room floor, showing off for anyone who will watch. Snow falls like
shadows from sunless sky and shovels push it away temporarily but it comes back
every winter, and this is why, Zig thinks, snow is
important.
And
it is important that he start this car. He will never forgive himself if he
does not drive the car. Not everyone has this opportunity. How can he live with
himself otherwise? He inserts the Suburu’s key and
kicks off the emergency break and puts the car in drive. He pulls away slowly,
tires forcing the snow into tiny compacts in street crevices. Everything is
soft. Sound is soft and snow and tires and seatbelts that click softly into
receivers and the noises that accompany pulling away from the curb are barely
audible. If the car were snow, it wouldn’t move. It wouldn’t start. But the car
isn’t snow, it belongs to somebody who isn’t self-centered but is important,
and it pulls away from the curb as easily for Zig as
it must for its owner.
He
idles down Manor for a while. Where do you go with a stolen car? You go the
speed limit and you don’t hit other cars, but where do you take it? He
decides, ultimately, you leave it face down in a ditch and walk away unscathed,
or even better, you return it unnoticed to its original space, thereby breaking
all the laws of the universe, which appear not to care much after all. Manor
Avenue is gray and silent. Nobody notices him or the car, and even when he
turns onto School Lane and passes an elderly man shoveling his driveway,
nothing happens. He is driving a stolen
car down School Lane, and isn’t that exciting? People can see him. He is on
parade. Zig realizes that in a moment he will pass
the high school and there are probably cops investigating the fireworks, which,
to them, must have seemed like snow. There will be evidence, but no tangible
explanation or reason. The shells would be covered in snow and there would be
nobody there and suddenly the idea of driving past the police officers seems
like a good idea. And now that it seems like a good idea, he can’t avoid doing
it.
There
are three cars at the school, and he wants to roll his eyes. Fireworks are a big
deal in this town. Just like running stop signs, or jay walking. The red and
blue lights circulate through the passenger window. The officers’ breath
emerges in smoke signals, three of them in the parking lot, hands shoved in the
pockets of their coats. One is laughing. They are just as bored as he. The
shortest cop, whose round face is as red as his hair, speaks with great
animation, as though words are products of his entire body. His stomach jostles
and jounces as he jumps from foot to foot. It looks like he is describing a
monster, a city-sized dinosaur devouring sky rises and penthouses and taxicabs
and pedestrians (he’s actually telling a drinking story he has just remembered, his college days where his roommate set off fireworks in
the hall and the entire building flooded). Zig
watches, disappointed. The officer doesn’t seem to care about who set off the
fireworks and he can clearly see the stolen Suburu
rolling past.
The
car rolls gently by the officers. They don’t look twice because it’s snowing
and everyone is being overly cautious. Zig doesn’t
stare, but he glances at them every few seconds. He wonders what a police chase
would be like. Helicopters and Action News, thirty cops in pursuit. And jail,
that would be something to tell his kids about. But jail also scares him. What
can prisoners do, locked away like that? He has never once wondered about a
prisoner’s desires, dreams, fantasies . They may as
well not exist. He begins to think how, if the owner of the Suburu
sees that his car is missing and phones it in, then the report about a missing
blue Suburu might come over the police radios, and
maybe they’d look up and take more serious notice, ask for the plates, rush to
their cruisers.
So
he speeds up slightly and turns down Mulvin. He
pretends the cops’ radios gurgle and the report comes in, and they realize
they’ve just seen this stolen car. He speeds up and the breaks squeal as he
turns again, down Simon Drive, and he pictures the cop cars showering snow over
cement as they fly out of the parking lot, sirens blazing, describing him to
their partners and radioing dispatch and the stories they will tell their
friends about the kid in the stolen car. He breathes faster and swerves the car
into a driveway, opens the door and rolls out. He is almost back to the street
when he realizes that it is not the perfect crime, it is not worth it without
the final gesture, so he sprints back to the car and takes the keys from the
ignition, returns them to the visor and closes the door. He goes through a
backyard and comes out further down School Lane, and he can picture the cops
fishtailing around corners looking for the stolen car complete with fleeing driver,
and he walks like a ghost down the frozen sidewalk, Zig
Johanson, smooth criminal.
But
he can see the cops, still at the school parking lot. The fat
red-headed guy still talking. They haven’t moved, which is a
disappointment, because it means nobody has reported the car. He’s stolen a car
and parked it in someone else’s driveway, and nobody has noticed. The snow
falls at the same pace, and only the sidewalks and street gradually
disappearing in white are witness.
What
is left to do but go home, Zig wonders, but he doesn’t
want to because home makes him feel like an afterthought, like as long as he
stays out of his mother’s hair and doesn’t bug his brother, feet don’t belong
on the furniture and don’t eat those, his father making business calls even on
holidays, or else his father says I just
want to watch the game for Chrissakes . How can it
be so cliché? If it happens in so many books and movies, how can it possibly
happen in real life? Once people realize it’s been done before, don’t they want
to try something else? He wonders if his mother ever has the urge to make
brownie batter and stick her head in the mixing bowl and eat herself sick.
Maybe his father would like to spray the driveway with water and let it freeze.
They would have to park on the street, but they’d have a personal ice rink
right in front of the house. His brother wants a dog, but what would their
parents do if he didn’t ask, just brought a puppy home? Or better yet, a litter
of puppies? What he wants most is for somebody near him to go crazy, rampage violently
or humorously or disturbingly through the neighborhood with no explanation,
breaking into homes and kidnapping children and smashing glass everywhere. Or
he wants the air to split open in black and green gas, a portal to another
dimension that lets loose zombies and demons and the undead into the real
world. Or maybe the portal opens and Zig is sucked
into a medieval fantasyland where he must learn to use magical powers to
survive an evil witch-queen bent on his demise.
Zig pushes at a stop sign on the corner of School and
Memphis Boulevard for a while. He is not sure what he will do with a stop sign
if he can unearth one, but he’s always thought it might be interesting to have
one. Stops signs, to Zig, seem to exist outside of
the physical plane. Paint and metal with power beyond that of
normal painted metal. Which is fine, of course, but the reason Zig wants one is because he wants to see the void created
in its absence. A missing stop sign is a void, even though there are plenty of
spaces without stop signs that Zig does not think of
as voids. Although he knows nothing will happen except that people familiar
with the neighborhood will drive by and wonder, wasn’t there a stop sign on
that corner? Zig imagines in this empty space a great
tear in the white air, the edges a liquefied rainbow draining to a black
center. The tear exerts gravity over the street corner and the surrounding
houses, the school and the football field. Color is pulled in, it begins to
rain and there is lightning, and even the rain is sucked into the tear, which
doesn’t grow larger but instead begins to glow with terrible force, and
eventually color landslides into the tear where the stop sign once was and the
center cannot support the influx of color and collapses and the tear explodes
back into the world at tremendous force, returning color to the proper places,
but somehow everything is a bit off, and the entire world is out of focus and
flawed and faded and forced into an inexplicably wrong pattern. Probably
nothing at all would happen, but Zig pictures a tear
instead.
Zig gives up on the stop sign. It shakes, but it is
cemented into the ground, and the sign itself is bolted in place with screws
and nuts. It is disappointing that the reason he gives up is that he isn’t strong
enough and not because someone has issued a command, so he looks around for
something else to do, something he shouldn’t be doing because it might disrupt
the fabric of the town, and maybe if he disrupts everything enough, he’ll find
himself somewhere new.
He
ambles down the street, kicking over trashcans left out too long and throwing
rocks close to windows without actually trying to hit one. He doesn’t throw
them hard, and they are not large, so when he does hit a window the rock only
bounces off, and he is surprised to find himself both frightened and
disappointed simultaneously. The snow is still falling, the air is still cold,
and the trees are motionless as metal, branches in rigor mortis poses along the
icy sidewalk. He can see his tracks behind him slowly fading as new snow fills
them, covers them like secrets. He turns down Caroline Avenue, knowing that he
is moving further and further from home, but he thinks this is good. Everything
he has ever read or seen has told him that the only way to experience anything
worth experiencing is to run far away, far enough away that he cannot be saved,
and hopefully he’ll be lucky enough to be unlucky, learn something the hard
way, the respectable way.
There
is a truck in front of a large white house, a long brown truck with the words Monty’s Pest Control on the side. There
are pictures of mice and rats and ants running from a poker game as a giant
hand with Monty tattooed on its palm
slams an enormous ace onto the table. Poker chips and beer bottles and cards
fly everywhere. On top of the van is a large plastic cockroach, a grotesque
brown and black statue with dripping jaws, long antennae and a chipped-paint
shell. Zig looks the house over for a moment, but its
windows and doors are closed. Monty is perhaps inside, crawling through dark
spaces in search of droppings or other signs of particular inhabitants banned
from houses. Zig presses his face against the
driver’s window. It is unlocked, but the prospect of stealing another car is
not as exciting as it had been, possibly because nothing had happened earlier.
Although it is not wrong or illegal, he feels as though he is leaning on an
invisible wall. If he pushes harder the wall may give way, and everything he’s
heard suggests the other side will contain nothing but searing heat and mud and
thin, unbreathable atmosphere. He puts his hands on
top of the trunk and leans his body weight against its frame.
The
truck doesn’t give at all, not that he expects it too. But when the tops of his
fingers touch the plastic cockroach on the roof, it shifts slightly.Zig looks at it, the eyes an evil yellow, the mouth drawn
into a smug smirk as though the cockroach enjoys nothing more than sneaking
into and ruining human homes. Zig grasps it with both
hands and it wobbles.
He
opens the truck door and stands on the driver’s seat. He sees that several of
the screws have rusted or are missing. He wraps his arm around the roach and pulls.
He can feel it move but can’t detach it. He leans back, pushing with his feet
on the edge of the door, but he is not pulling so much as hanging now, head
tilted back so the world appears upside down and cars and houses are upside
down and if there was anyone walking, he or she would be upside down too, all
the houses in the world flip over and are inhabited by large cockroaches who
step on dirty disgusting people who live in the walls and eat leftovers that
didn’t quite make the trashcan, but snow still falls down, the way it always
has, the way it will.
He
jumps off the seat and lets go of the roach, closes the door and begins to walk
away, but already it sets in, the disappointment in himself, his inability to
break the rules, and how will he ever go anywhere without breaking a few rules
and learning the invisible mechanics that guide the hands of the great human
beings who have lived before? How will he absorb the smoke and sunlight and
sand strewn across the world and regurgitate a life worth living? It is not
something that he could have done, but an opportunity temporarily missed, a
chance that still waits, and he needs to tear the cockroach from its holdings
and take it away, he must challenge the invisible forces that hold his world
together in order to discover their true meaning, and here is an opportunity he
may never have again. He is righteous and massive and solid.
He opens the driver’s side door again and
goes through the dashboard. He crawls in back and rifles through work orders
and boxes and sprays and finally finds a toolbox under a large blue tarp. He
climbs to the roof again, screwdriver in hand and begins to work at the screws
that hold the cockroach in place. His hands are shaking and he concentrates on
his breathing. In every crime movie he has ever seen, good criminals are calm,
so he must be calm. He tosses the first screw over his shoulder. He listens for
the creak of the door opening, and the air is so silent that he believes he
will be able to hear even the sharp shuffle of blinds opening if one of the
household decides to look out. Another screw comes undone, and then another,
and he is unscrewing more than screws, he is unscrewing bindings, shackles,
chains, he is unscrewing a symbol, he is destroying and defacing a symbol and
then the screws are out and he yanks at the cockroach, but it appears that it
is still held on partially by an old coat of glue. There are always more
borders to cross, always more walls to knock down, it seems. Nothing is ever
far enough, he should stow away aboard cruise liners and lose himself in
another country. This is what it will take to become a worthwhile human being.
He
jams the screwdriver through the truck’s thin roof. He is able to cut away at
the glue in this way, but the sound of the screwdriver penetrating the metal
echoes throughout the quiet neighborhood. The white snow falls over the white
house. The cockroach is hollow and light. One more jab, and he rips the
cockroach free of the truck and falls away, out of breath. There is nothing
left to do but run, which he does. The truck, which should be forlorn and cold,
door hanging open, seat wet with snow and footprints, says nothing. The
cockroach bounces under his arm.
It
is not until he has turned several corners that he slows down. What should he
do with a giant plastic hollow cockroach? He feels as though he should have
thought of this earlier, but it did not seem important at the time. It is a
trophy, but one that should be kept hidden. He is a fair distance from his
house now, and the police could still be around the school, which he must pass
to get home, but carrying the cockroach in daylight, even in snowfall, seems a
poor idea. Besides, it is bulky and awkward.
It
is getting later, the sun beginning to drop past the horizon, shadows
stretching and melding over the ground. The snow is falling faster now, and
there is a good inch or two covering most of the streets. Zig
hasn’t seen a snowplow yet, which he finds strange, because there are always
snowplows and evidence of snowplows or at least a salt truck. Vehicles of rebellion. Soldiers in a revolution against the
sky’s downward wrath, which is not really wrath but a gentle sigh. Snow falls
in soft sighs. Everything is covered. Mailboxes and grass,
people and dogs and signs. Plastic cockroaches atop an
exterminator’s truck. Real cockroaches that venture
outside. Houses and cars and telephone wires, branches
and manholes, the street, sidewalks, fences and small children running with
uncontrollable vigor.
It
is one of these small, red-faced children who Zig
sees spastically loping into the barren parking lot of the shopping center
ahead. The child appears to be alone, and perhaps a boy, although a bulky green
coat obscures much of what Zig can make out.Zig walks like a zombie: stiff and steady, destination in
mind but in no hurry, as though his arrival is inevitable regardless of time or
space. The cockroach is still under his arm.
The
child is a boy. He is making shapes in the snow with his rubber boots and
talking to himself. It is strange, to Zig , that he
cannot remember being that young, even though it wasn’t long ago. He cannot
remember how the world looked from eyes he once
possessed. Everything has been replaced. The wind has picked up and the
snowfall is heavy now. It covers everything, falls harder and harder, as though
the act of covering certain actions could prevent their effect on the world. It
may seem to the snow that there are brittle breaking points scattered
throughout the world, and it is rare that these breaking points go unbroken for
long, like now, as Zig approaches a breaking point
with his sneering, drooling cockroach.
At
the edge of the parking lot, Zig can see that the boy
is trying to make snowballs, but the snow is too powdery and falls like dust
through his fingers. The entire parking lot is full of dusty, sandy snow that
is a canvas for feet and saliva and urine, a canvas that sprays and twists and
turns and it seems to Zig that everything is a canvas
and does it really matter if one or two specks on the canvas disappear suddenly
and violently, and who could possibly care other than on principle, really in
the greater scheme of things the disappearing speck wouldn’t even be
remembered. Zig imagines the snow suddenly rising
rapidly into a twisting mass of white rage, lashing and howling and ripping at
the small boy caught in the center, cracking bending breaking, boy becomes
blood and bone and burnt skin, boy becomes matter coloring a canvas, red and
brown paint splattering a microscopic piece of the earth in a slightly less
microscopic town in a tiny country in a miniature continent, and that is only
if the solar system itself is not microscopic, so what Zig
wants to know is even if the boy is as unstoppable as snow, why does it really
matter, why cockroaches and why sunlight, why is everything not simply a large
blue box, because wouldn’t that be easier?
The
boy stares at Zig, whose hands are clenched, whose
face is dry and steady. The boy does not look scared, and Zig
thinks that he could, if he wanted, grab the boy and take him somewhere. He
could beat him into the ground. He pictures the boy falling backward, blood
arching from his face into the snow. Snow is always being painted by bodily
fluids. It is always a receptacle, a record of what has happened. This is the
price for being pure: all violence can be seen and recorded on its surface.
Zig offers the boy the plastic cockroach. “For you,” he
says. “You want it?”
“Yeah!”
the boy exclaims. The first thing he does is put the cockroach over his head
and growl.
“That’s
not the sound a cockroach makes,” Zig says.
“Yes
it is.”
Zig shrugs and then laughs because how can he not, with the
boy running aimlessly through the parking lot, cockroach helmet wobbling
awkwardly. The sun sinks lower. Zig is suddenly cold,
as though the temperature has changed. He zips his coat and turns to
go home.
It
is close to dinnertime. It would be so easy to miss. To come home just a few
minutes late, and he has missed dinnertime. Even dinnertime seems a mystery,
why there is a time for it at all, and really it is probably just convenience,
but when he thinks about it, Zig can imagine
dinnertime in large stone letters, set atop a mountain by God and guarded by
thousands of angels. His mother always yells at him for missing dinner. As
though, by missing dinner, he is creating in himself a
tainted piece of genetic code that he will pass to his children and
consequentially to his grand and great grandchildren, and soon the whole world
will be full of people missing dinner, and then where would we be?
But
that will not happen. He’ll be home in time for dinner, and nobody will know
that he moved a car or set off fireworks or stole a cockroach from the top of
an exterminator’s car. It’ll be as though nothing has happened. If not for a
small boy’s laughter echoing around the inside of a hollow plastic cockroach,
the entire day would be a bust. He could knock on his brother’s door and ask him
if he wants to watch television or something, play Monopoly, anything, but his
brother will laugh at him, or he will be making out with his girlfriend. He
could ask his mother to teach him bridge, so that the next time his
grandparents visit, they could all play, because normally Zig
sits on a folding chair and leans over his mother’s shoulder to watch, but
there is a circle of players and he is not one of those. But she will be
cleaning, or working, or reading, or falling asleep on the sofa watching late
night movies and waiting for his father to finish whatever it is his father
does.
There
must be several billion stories in which lives are connected to other lives
through blood and tears and love, and because there are only so many every-day
actions, and only a few more actions that we can relate to, many of these
stories must use the same actions to show that how lives connect and impact
each other. Zig thinks about actions all the time,
and what does one do with a life, what did other people do when they weren’t
doing what he was doing, but more importantly, if he came home late for dinner,
would that be an action that impacted something? But the thing is, he has come
home late for dinner many times, and his mother yells, but then she forgets
about it, because after all, it isn’t that big a deal. He thinks that
ultimately, most things fail to become big deals.
What will happen is, Zig will come home and sit at the
kitchen table with his mother and brother and uncle and father -- if he’s home --
and they will eat, and they will tell stories about their day, or they will
talk about an article they read in the paper, or something they saw on
television or that somebody said. And Zig will listen
and imagine that he is one of those articles, or the infomercial for the
amazing new kitchen appliance that peels onions while baking a cake.
Zig will imagine he is anything or anyone standing on top
of a house, and everything he says, even when he whispers, is the most
important thing anyone anywhere has ever heard.
©2008 by Adam Cogbill
