Eternal Return
by C. M. Barnes
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 4 |
part 1
6/1/16
I’ve never been much for journaling. This might seem strange, coming from a writer, but the idea of sitting down and taking pen to paper — or fingers to laptop keys — for no other reason than to record my thoughts has never inspired me. It seems, somehow, inefficient — which is not to say I am a master of efficiency when it comes to deploying language. My last work, A Short History of Possessed Conquistadors, sold about as many copies as the phone book, but at least it was for sale. As in, somewhere, someone could buy it, read it, and even think about it if she wanted to.
Not so with this. This will only be read by myself and one Dr. Armaru, and even you, good Doctor, might not read every word. Why would you, seeing as this is just an exercise for “getting my thoughts out” so they can be “challenged” for the “distortions and delusions” they contain. What fun! But I’m no Anne Sexton. I’m not even a Plath, and these lines aren’t going to become anything but what they are: a confession made only to myself and to you.
“So it goes,” as one far more famous, mentally-ill writer once put it.
In any case, it is an assignment, part of my treatment plan and, if I ever want my teaching job back — the real way I make my living — I have to do it. Without your professional sign-off, Doctor, I remain only the man who shucked his pants down in the middle of the quad to make a point. What that point was, I don’t really remember. Something about “scholarship,” probably. It doesn’t matter now.
What matters now is that I show progress in my recovery and, thankfully, society is forgiving on this front. If I’d pulled the same stunt even a decade ago — let alone before securing tenure — I would have been out on my ass with a note pinned to each cheek warning the world not to rehire me.
But instead, here I am, typing away like that Sexual City woman with a crush. And, what’s more, I’m doing it with scenic surroundings! Taos, New Mexico in the summer. Or, more accurately, a drafty but magisterial old adobe home rearing up out of the sage grass about five miles outside of town.
I’ve got a million-dollar view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains towering above the window over this desk. I’m told there is a famous ski valley up there that caters to the rich and the famous. No skiers now. Too late in the season, but the view is still magnificent, and my closest neighbor dwells about a half-mile down the road in another mud-walled palace. In other words, plenty of room for self-contemplation.
That neighbor is probably also someone rich, if not famous; a musician maybe, or a filmmaker with plenty of cash who is definitely not a writer/teacher. I think this because someone very rich and famous owns this place. The woman who let me in tonight wouldn’t say who, only that he has a deep connection to the college. So deep, in fact, that he is willing to make his Taos getaway available for the use of exhausted professors in need of recuperation.
“You mean professors on sabbatical,” I said. “Ones doing research for their next book like me.”
“Nope,” she said. “Exhausted ones. I understand professing can be a very stressful profession. Have you found that to be the case, mister?” And then she smiled in a way that seemed a little smug.
I know I should be grateful to my mysterious benefactor, but I know who it is, and his films are terrible. How could I not know the one A-list actor ever to have graduated from the institution that cuts my checks? His name is on half the buildings on campus. His face is on all of the promotional literature that clogs my office mailbox. He is very handsome, also famously young-looking. That is to say, ageless. And this might be why his performances have always struck me as being all the same. Always those same, taut, cocky smiles slicing out under dimpled cheeks. Always that same multi-million dollar inverted almond of a chin.
Oh, well. His house is lovely, and, for the next few weeks, it will be mine. At the end of that time, I will submit this journal to you, Doctor and, based on it, our conversations, and — probably really only — the effect of the medication you have prescribed. I might be on my way to reinstatement, which reminds me: I’m due to take a pill.
Au revoir, Journal. Until next time.
6/2/16
What an uneventful day, which is not to say unpleasant, only absent of event. I toured the house in more detail this morning, taking in its surprising number of oddly-shaped rooms and plethora of external doors. There’s basically an exit from every outer wall into the prickly fields beyond, like whoever designed this place wanted to be free to escape from it into nature anywhere at any time.
I don’t blame him. The mountain view is even more gorgeous in full light, and the surrounding land shimmers with golden sagebrush and verdant yucca. Truly an El Dorado for the eye! The only thing missing is birdsong or really any song at all. I was sitting out on the back porch this morning after jury-rigging some coffee, and all I could hear was the wind in the weeds. Seems like there should at least be some meadowlarks larking, some chick-a-dees chicking. But, no, nothing, not even a prairie dog poking up its little, inquisitive head.
The only thing that stood out were three odd mounds rearing up under the grass out near the fence line. They were lined up in a row that didn’t look natural, and all of them stood about three feet tall over the yard at their highest points. They were each also about six feet long, and I know what you’re thinking, Doctor, but just because they looked like fresh graves doesn’t mean I’m fixating on anything bad!
Besides, they couldn’t be. No one lives out here most of the time — the quality of the spiderwebs in the house speaks to this fact — and the few long-settled clans that do always mark their little family cemeteries with crooked crosses and lopsided cayote fences. (I know this from my previous research.)
These mounds were unmarked, unfenced, and still too high over the earth to already have tall grass on them, not if any hollow corpse space was still settling underneath. Besides, what family would that big-name actor be burying anyway? He’s unmarried, I think, is famously unattached. It would have to be old aunts and uncles from wherever he’s actually from. Not likely.
More likely, it’s just some elaborate septic tank design, or maybe the leavings from one of the times this house’s foundation has been expanded. Definitely evidence of many expansions inside. A lot of uneven step-ups and step-downs between rooms. A lot of walled-off entry ways and random light switches that don’t seem to connect to anything.
I suppose, as the money rolled in, it was tempting to build this place out, although I think it’s hard to improve on these old adobe designs. These places were built smart enough to stay cool under cracking heat and warm through bitter cold. They were built strong enough to shelter many generations against the comings and goings of season, empires, and centuries. They have “good bones,” in other words. Why fool with them now? But it’s not my decision. I’m just the guest; right, Doc? And again, please don’t worry that I think the mounds look like graves!
Not much else to report. Tried to do a little research for my next book, an inquiry — what a professorial word! — into the intersection between Spanish and Indigenous occult traditions in these parts. Surprisingly, there are a few old books lying around the house that might be useful. You know the type: dusty, old leather-bound tomes with cracked spines and arcane titles in dead languages...
I’m only half-kidding, but I’m also setting too much of a gothic scene beneath the beautiful sunset spreading before me. It’s sprawling out like a huge, sweetly-bruised peach crushed down over the mountains. The light is the shade of bloody pink juice, a picture-perfect, postcard sight. And please, spare me the analysis. Sometimes a sunset is just a sunset! I really should send the college a Thank-You note. Maybe it’s even time to apologize for my anti-social behavior. How’s that for progress, eh?
6/3/16
Some interesting events this morning. Actually, they started last night, but I’m not sure how interesting the nocturnal stuff is, so I’ll start with the sunnier side.
I got an email this morning from an old colleague at the college by the name of Hannah. She used to be an assistant professor in my department before moving on to bigger and better things. Apparently, she is back doing some research in the area and wants to know if I’d like to “meet up.”
I’m not sure how to respond for two reasons: 1) I am not purely engaged in scholarship these days, as you well know, having my recovery on my plate as well; and 2) Hannah and I were once romantically involved. That was a long time ago and, since then, I haven’t weathered well. Judging by the little in-box photo that accompanied her email, the same cannot be said for her. She still looks fresh and flushed as a spring strawberry, still whole and able as a plucky grouse; in other words, great. How am I supposed to deal with that, wrinkled and hairless as I have become?
It’s almost noon now, and I still haven’t responded, which is probably good. I wouldn’t want to seem over-eager. Then again, — I have to confess — I am eager to see her again... And frightened of how she’ll see me... And embarrassed by my situation, a regular storm of undergraduate emotions. Who would have thought the pains of youth would rear to strike me again in this unlikely place? I don’t know what I’ll say, but I have to say something. That’s the nature of these predicaments at any age.
Speaking of unlikely, one of those mounds out back looks different this morning. It looks shrunken, smaller, almost as if it had collapsed inward on itself during the night. The grass over the top also seems disturbed, like it was turned over somehow. I noticed it first thing over my morning coffee, and the strangest thing was, I found myself hesitant to walk out and take a closer look. Why this should be, I don’t know.
Probably just a coyote doing a little digging. Those little family cemeteries I mentioned yesterday are always fenced in for a reason. But digging for what? Non-existent prairie dogs? And, if so, why does the mound look collapsed rather than overturned, more like something crawled out from beneath than dug down from above? I have to say, Doc, I experienced a bit of a chill over my morning joe just thinking about that, and it’s been unseasonably warm since I got here.
Of course, this feeling could just be a holdover from last night. What happened last night, you ask? Well, I’d gone to bed late. I’ve been having some trouble sleeping since I got here, a side-effect of the medication perhaps? No sooner had my head hit the pillow then I heard a tap tap tap on the window over my bed.
I know what you’re thinking. A lot of moths out in the countryside this time of year, a lot of big June bugs going bump in the night. But remember when I said there seemed to be no animal life around here at all — not even bugs? It’s still true. I haven’t seen so much as an ant in or around the house, which is a sizeable miracle, given the infestation problems these old adobe places usually have.
But anyway, tap tap tap and then tap tap tap again. It was a rhythmic sound, an intelligent knocking like monotonous Morse Code. I just lay there in the dark, naked — like all intellectuals, I sleep in the nude — listening to it for a while, thinking about tree branches and wind when there are no trees tall enough to tap a window within a mile of here. Then the tapping stopped as suddenly as it had started.
To say the least, I was relieved. It’s not hard to imagine some desperate, drug-addled drifter traipsing through the desert to find this place, executing a clumsy break and enter, and stumbling upon some hapless professor with mental health problems. Were that to happen, I would hardly stand in his way toward the medicine cabinet. But misunderstandings abound in this world, don’t they, Doctor? Deadly mistakes get made, and, when they do, it’s often someone like me, someone who suffers from “distortions and delusions,” who ends up on the slab.
All this was still going through my mind even as my breath slowed, my fingers unclenched the quilt, and the echo of that weird tapping faded in my ears. But then — and I swear this is the truth — I heard a door open in the next room. Not the one that leads into the hall, but the exterior one, the one that goes out into the night.
Then came the footsteps, three heavy ones, like a fat man in muddy tap shoes clomping over tile, sloughing off big, heavy, black curds of dirt. And then, even stranger still, the creak of old bed springs, whiny and rusty as the hinges on a bayou tomb.
What to say next? That I jumped out of bed, seized the closest weapon at hand — I would have had my choice between a Phi Beta Kappa commemorative pen or a tea mug — and stormed into the next to room to confront the invader? No thank you! I didn’t move — not even an inch.
And the strangest thing of all is, sooner or later, I fell asleep. I can’t believe it myself. It seems like an evolutionary impossibility, but I shut down completely. Not froze up, mind you, but shut down. To be honest, I don’t know if this means I have nerves of steel or genes of Jell-O.
Either way, I woke up around sunrise this morning with my head still attached and no blood splattering my sheets. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember what had happened — or at least what I thought had happened — only that it didn’t seem to have affected me in the slightest.
That said, I was still thoroughly troubled, and it took me about an hour to get out of bed, robe up, and go into the next room to find — you guessed it! — nothing. Just the same old wrought-iron bed frame with the big wooden crucifix over the headboard. The mattress and sheets were undisturbed. The old, oaken door to the world beyond was shut and locked tight.
Lest you think I didn’t have my metaphorical sleuthing hat on, there were also no footprints on the tile, no signs of mud or grass or even a lingering, fragrant scent of desert wind. Thus, leading us both to the obvious conclusion that I must have been dreaming. Case closed. Book shut.
I told you, I would have led with this if I thought it was important.
So, now here I sit, pecking away into the early afternoon, still not sure how to respond to Hannah. What is ethical in this case? How much of my fallen state should I reveal? I guess only time will tell, my epistolary friend. Time and my admittedly suspect character.
Adios.
Copyright © 2021 by C. M. Barnes
