from Stealing Marquee Moon
The Octagon House
From what I could tell, whatever purpose the Octagon House once had lapsed a long time before my arrival. It was a large, eight-sided broken-down farmhouse with a sagging roof, wood-rot brown and mottled with green mold, located next to the oldest dead lake in North America. Calling it a farmhouse was like calling a corpse a human being. Yes, but not really. It stood alone near the lake, where it seemed to me a last outpost of some kind, a place where soldiers might bed down for the night on their way to invade another city. The sky above the house was always full of birds that couldn’t settle down, as if they were afraid to stop flying, afraid of what would happen if they did.
Inside the house, the large kitchen smelled of bleach and kerosene. There was a grease-covered stove and a refrigerator with a yellow and black bungee cord wrapped around it to keep the cold inside. The living room was Early Salvation Army with a multi-stained red velvet couch and a brown and orange plaid armchair. Two wooden crates with a white bedsheet draped over them pretended to be a coffee table. On top of the table, a lit candle called to an indifferent moth. There were four bedrooms upstairs, each with wood plank floors and elaborate entranceways, human heads carved into the mahogany door frames. The bathroom was old-fashioned elegant, clawfoot cast-iron tub, doorknobs made of clear glass like cut diamonds, floor a black and white checkerboard.
My friend, who everyone called The Driver, knew I was lurking among the unskilled, and unskilled myself, had fallen on hard times, reliant on the meager government benefits bestowed upon survivors of untimely deaths. Or another way to say it is my mother had finally given up. I was passed out on the couch, but you know how you can sense things even when you’re out cold, and I could tell someone was standing over me. I opened my eyes and turned my head. It was her, arms folded. That’s never good. She leaned in toward me and said, I never should have had you. I was too far gone to feel hurt or take offense. I looked her in the eye and said, You’re right.
She was the hurt one. I left that night and began a nomadic existence, even though I never went very far, just couch to couch, until The Driver put out word that I was welcome to stay with him and a few others in the Octagon House, a place I’d heard of but never seen. Didn’t matter. I’d have a place to sleep and an eight-sided roof over my head. The stars were aligning. The gods were smiling.
I settled in a room that overlooked the dead lake. The lake was a cesspool. It had been murdered by the city and the nearby soda ash factory with daily intrusions of human waste and chemical sludge. It had the brackish quality of old dishwater, and the small waves collapsed when they reached the shore, defeated. But when the sun set, an orange radiance shimmered on the surface. Some of it leaked through the window, and the bed took on the same orange sheen.
My first night, after I settled in, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked out past the green scars of the toxic waste beds. I watched the waves give up, as I contemplated the meaning of a meaningless life, the value of its insignificance. I thought of something my mother used to say whenever someone died. Life is for the living, she’d say, but you could have fooled me.
The Beautiful Days of White Mescaline
A few days after I moved in, a package arrived, carried in the arms of a winged and merciless messenger. I sat on the bed in The Driver’s bedroom and watched him open the package. The Driver pulled out a bag with about fifty oversized capsules that contained a white powder. He looked like a scientist about to invent a bad idea. He said, I’ll be right back, and left the room. When he returned, the bag had lost some of its content. He reached into it, took out a capsule, and twisted it open. He poured the white contents in the glass of water on the wooden desk in front of the window. I looked past him out the window at the sky and noticed a small bird attacking a larger bird. The larger bird was swooping and diving. The small bird darted around it, pecking at the larger bird’s head. The larger bird couldn’t escape the small bird’s relentless attacks. Do birds ever go crazy?
The Driver opened a second capsule and poured the white powder in another glass. We watched the water cloud. Then we drank. We sat and waited for a few minutes. As soon as I decided the powder wasn’t going to kick in, I felt a surge of lightning in my head and a sharp pain in my stomach. I looked at The Driver. There were two distant galaxies trapped in the holes in his face where his eyes used to be. He jerked his head back and forth as if he were being pecked by the small bird. We both doubled over. We ran to the bathroom and threw up in the sink. After a minute, we stopped as suddenly as we had started. I looked up and saw two of the others who lived in the house. They were smiling at us. I turned and saw my face in the mirror. The Driver and the others were in there, too. After a few seconds, I couldn’t tell which one was me. We were all looking at ourselves and wondering the same thing, afraid to move until The Driver pulled me away from the mirror. The others were laughing but not because anything was funny. I thought I might still be in the mirror. I could feel my face shifting in minuscule ways, as if it were made of sand. I thought The Driver looked like an actor in a movie where astronauts encounter a being of pure light and their faces light up in a wash of photons.
We walked to the bedroom. I was convinced I had left myself in the mirror. A few minutes or days or months went by. One of the others stood at the threshold of the room and asked if we could see him. I asked him to look for me in the mirror, but he wouldn’t look.
We took the white powder until it ran out. The world developed a golden cast to it. I thought it was beautiful, but I might have been an impostor, a reflection of my real self. My real self, I feared, was trapped.
The Hum
The Driver owned the only car at the Octagon House, a Chevy Malibu, nearly the same distinct fluorescent green as the waste beds near the dead lake. Painted by The Driver, it was textured with spills and runs. If you looked closely, you could see the universe in the map the paint job made. Me and The Driver used to sit on the grass next to the car and stare at the rear passenger-side door, waiting to achieve a higher level of consciousness that eluded us.
One night, The Driver said, Do you hear that? And I did hear it. Faint, indistinct, a mechanical hum. It seemed to be coming from far away, not from a transformer or some other familiar object that gave the night its artificial din. After a week of contemplating the universe and listening to the hum, The Driver said, This is driving me crazy. We need to find it. We slid our bodies in the Malibu and drove to the highway.
The Malibu was the only car on the dark earth. I said, Whenever I’m in a car, I never feel like I’m going to something. I always feel like I’m going away from something. But it feels like we’re going to something tonight. The Driver said, We sure as hell are, and took the lake road to a deserted area and drove purposefully from back road to back road. We navigated based on our instincts and hoped to end up in the right place. After some futile searching, we came to a road hidden in a wooded area that led to an old landfill. The road turned from tarmac to gravel to dirt. We were surrounded by a canopy of tall pines as if we had entered a different country, Scandinavian or Eastern European, a fairy tale place, the kind where something monstrous lives and terrorizes the locals. We could see a wall of flames sending sparks to the sky in the distance. The Driver turned off his headlights and guided by moonlight followed the dirt road slowly toward the glow.
The Driver rolled down the window. The hum had grown louder, like the rising collective scream of cicadas in a heat wave. Then we saw it, a large furnace of some kind, enormous piles of a white, quartz-like substance on either side of it. Two payloaders scooped the substance and dumped it onto flatbed trucks. The Driver stopped the car. We got out and watched a few trucks strain through their lower gears toward the inferno and disappear.
The Driver gestured for me to follow. We walked suspiciously through the tall grass toward the furnace. I felt a primitive urge to run, my body generating its own low hum. I could see the trucks stopped in the near distance. Rows of klieg lights bloomed on either side of them. The truck drivers got out of their cabs. Then a few workers walked out from behind one of the white piles. They formed a small group and headed toward us. At first, I thought they didn’t have eyes, but it was a trick of light and shadow. I looked over at The Driver who didn’t seem to be afraid. The men wore black clothing with orange vests and matching hard hats. The men stood there looking at us for a few seconds. Then they turned and walked back toward the furnace. They didn’t confront us. They never spoke. They returned to their trucks, as the klieg lights returned us to the night-black sky.
Satan’s Sun Dial
On the way home, The Driver drove at light speed and ignored the signs created to guide one’s judgment, but I didn’t ask him to slow down. It took a while for me to understand this was how we would be driving from now on. We drove through roads lined with pines and birch trees, serpentine in the impending dawn, toward the oldest dead lake in America, when The Driver took a wrong turn.
We ended up on a road of crushed stone and broken glass in the middle of somewhere in the middle of nowhere. We drove past a row of low-lying rectangular aluminum storage bins until there was nothing except dirt patches flecked with scrub pine on either side of the road. What’s that? The Driver said. I looked out the windshield and saw what appeared to be a pig buried up to its neck in the middle of the road. A coven of flies formed a halo around it and performed an elaborate ballet. The head was angled slightly, the snout pointed toward the sun, a shadow stretching out from the head as if telling time in hell.
As we approached Satan’s sun dial, we realized our mistake. The head was off to market on its own. Its body was somewhere else, being sectioned and portioned or sacrificed, while its head was left to dream its porcine dreams in the fast lane of a desolate thoroughfare.
Must have fallen off the slaughterhouse truck, I said.
What slaughterhouse? The Driver said.
Wishful thinking, I said.
We drove past the pig’s head and reoriented ourselves in the direction of the house. It was fairly close and very far away.
Dead Flies
The day the earth cracked wide open, and the waste beds gurgled and spit green toxic waves across the highway, it rained dead flies. The Driver and I sat and watched from the porch. The Driver turned to me and asked, Do you see what I see? As I contemplated the question, the flies on the ground began to stir and buzz and fly toward the sun until there were so many of them in the sky, it was night. The toxic waves began to glow an eerie emerald light that was the only light. It stayed that way until Moses parted the curtain of flies and did the same to the green waves. We saw a winged figure ascend from the lake toward the sun. It dipped and flew across about ten feet above the water until it headed straight toward us. As the figure approached, we could see it was a young man with wings made of feathers and wax, soaring and diving above the dead lake, oblivious to his fate. When Icarus flew by, The Driver said, It must be time for bed. I agreed.
In bed, I listened to the staticky voices that struggled to navigate the inadequate speakers of my silver Zenith. I lay there until dawn, completely still, as the weak frequency faded and swelled. I stared at the small red circle of the indicator light and listened to the bloody iambs of my stupid heart—one two, one two, one two—as ghost ships sailed past in the dead lake on their way back to even God doesn’t know where.
Then a sudden effusion of 14th-century sunlight stabbed through the window. On the sill, dead flies flamed into angels. A mosquito carried my blood across the strange heaven of my room. Someone I couldn’t see spoke my name. It sounded like a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it.
The House Is on Fire
Is there another world as beautiful and dangerous as this one? It’s up to the scientists to find out. In the meantime, while one of the others was explaining to me the tenets of the bullshit dime-store mysticism he had recently embraced, I noticed the house had caught on fire. It was a strange fire in that it never burned anything, but also never went out. I feared it at first and assessed the risk, but no one else seemed to see it. I approached it, but there was no heat emanating from it. I touched it and felt nothing. Once I realized the fire wasn’t going to burn down the house, I adjusted to it. Every room had its share of flames, but I worked around them. At night, I would sit in the great room and, illuminated by the fire, go on with business as usual. I liked it better with the fire.
In the great room of the house there was a painting of the house. After a few weeks of living with the fire, one night as I was walking through the room to the kitchen, I noticed in the painting of the house that one of the curtains was open. I could see a subtle brushstroke of reddish orange and concluded the house in the painting of the house was on fire as well. I wondered how the artist could have known the house would one day be perpetually on fire. I decided the house must have been on fire before, at the time of the painting. It occurred to me that the fire must be something that happened on and off over the lifespan of the house and was happening now as a natural occurrence, a feature of the house.
After I returned from the kitchen, I sat on the couch. The left half of which was ablaze. I looked around the great room. Every quadrant had some variation on the theme. The musty green armchair was smoldering. The liquor cabinet was engulfed in flames. So too the television and the faux coffee table. I felt a great sense of calm, a sensation of being at one with the fire. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hung on the far wall. I was engulfed in what looked like a suit of flames. I felt comfortable, as if I had been unhappy without knowing it until the fire.
By the end of the day everyone was on fire, but I was the only one who seemed to know it. We sat in the great room and listened to songs made of ocean water and mountains. I liked the contrast between our bodies and the music. We listened until we drifted off. When I woke up, the fire was gone. No sign it had ever existed.
The Raincheck Room
Usually, there was nothing left to do. One night, The Driver and I sat on the porch and reminisced about our days as small-time criminals who broke into houses and ran a two-bit drug emporium that catered to friends and enemies alike.
The Driver said, Remember Matchuk?
Jesus, how could I forget.
Matchuk was a gangly reform school graduate with a Hitler haircut, a few years older than us, who lived up the hill from our neighborhood. My mother used to say, You could grow potatoes in his ears. He invited us over to his house one winter day to show us something and took us down to the basement. There was a small cannon like the ones they shoot at football games when someone scores a touchdown. We thought that’s what Matchuk wanted to show us. He ignored it and walked over to a card table. He lifted a plaid coverlet and revealed a wire birdcage. There was a sparrow fluttering wildly inside it, banging back and forth in a panic. Matchuk lifted the birdcage and walked to the stairs. He stopped and looked back at us and gestured for us to follow.
We ended up in his garage. Matchuk started to talk as if he were narrating a documentary.
I found this specimen in the backyard. It had a broken wing. Over the course of the last few weeks, I nurtured it back to health. Today is its release date.
Matchuk’s mother opened the interior door to the garage, interrupting his mock narration. She was wearing a grease-stained white apron over a faded blue and white print dress, her blond hair sculpted to her head like a helmet, a string of pearls around her long neck. You finally getting rid of that thing? she said. Matchuk shot her a look and said, I told you I was. She said, You better, and shut the door with an angry flourish.
I was wondering why The Driver and I were there when Matchuk unclasped the birdcage door. The bird hopped over to the opening and looked around as if it didn’t trust its good fortune. It stood on the band of steel at the entrance of the cage, looked left then right like a child preparing to cross a street, and lifted itself into the air. As it crossed the threshold of the garage, Matchuk grabbed a .22 he had stashed behind a set of golf clubs and shot it dead. The bird landed in the driveway, one of its eyes in a splatter of blood in the snow next to its body.
What made you think of Matchuk?
This place is lousy with birds. Reminds me of him.
I noticed. Whatever happened to that guy?
Nothing good, I’m guessing.
Maybe he got a job with animal control.
Let’s hope not.
He’d be good at it.
Too good.
That night on the porch, The Driver wore the black silk bomber jacket with the red dragon on the back his uncle had brought him as a souvenir from the Korean War, a remnant from our past that gave me the unfamiliar sense of having arrived home.
I see you still have the jacket, I said.
My good luck charm.
Is it working?
It’s inconsistent, but it’s better than nothing.
Later that night, we went to The Raincheck Room, the local watering hole that promised two for one and made no pretense about its purpose. There were fake stained-glass lanterns hanging from the rafters, a beer-soaked pool table and a Foosball table that no one ever played. The building had once housed a funeral parlor, and now it was a halfway house for the soon to be dead or perpetually dying.
When The Driver and I arrived at The Raincheck Room, we verged on the moment without ever arriving in it. We chased it around, stepped into place after place of something that just happened, but the moment avoided us. After a few minutes of senseless looping, we sat down at the bar on seats so precarious that we leaned forward to keep from falling, teetering a little as we watched a movie that beamed on the television above the bar, a cowboy thing with handsome young actors. No one else watched. We were the only ones not standing, not stirring, or sipping a drink.
When the movie finished, we stared at a blank screen. We noticed a staple of regulars who leaned against the bar, affecting awkward significance. Conversation after conversation ended abruptly after a certain nervous gesturer went too far. The slur began in the usual woman. It was time to miss the part we’d be informed of tomorrow as the late-night bar crowd got depressed when the hopeful ordering of drinks was followed by the deflated silence of the going home alone.
We left and drove around the block, The Driver hunched noddingly over the steering wheel.
The radio refused to let someone go. It loved them too much.
Christopher Kennedy is the author of The Strange God Who Makes Us (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2024), Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018) Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011), Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press, 2003), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001). He is one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013), published as part of the Lannan Translation Series. His work has appeared or will appear in many print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Epoch, The Progressive, Plume, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Mississippi Review, and McSweeney’s. In 2011, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University.