Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds

A NovelBy Patrick Lawler

FC2

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Lawler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-168-3

Chapter One

MY MOTHER WALKED DOWN JOY BOULEVARD. MY FATHER WAS A BEEKEEPER.

That year the mayor decided to name the streets after presidents who had been assassinated. He was never satisfied. According to him a town’s character was written across it in the names of its roads. Once the streets were named after berries, so we walked down Choke Cherry Lane or Elderberry Road or Raspberry Way. These names gave us places to live our lives. Girls could be lusted after on Strawberry Street. Boys could smoke cigarettes, watching clouds of hair from the corners of dark red/blue intersections. The mailman would lug his bloated bag down Boysenberry. Places for estrangements and entanglements. Places to meet people or leave people. The mayor made a conscious effort to select the edible berries though some poisoned ones slipped in—which led him to go with the assassinated president idea.

When I was born they named the streets after emotions: my mother walked down Joy Boulevard. My father was a beekeeper. Almost robotic among the bees with his smoke pot and his bee clothes, almost feminine with his netted face. I spent my childhood with bee stings. My mother was a hagiologist studying saints. My sisters would spend afternoons digging for relics in the backyard. The bees were ambassadors from an ordered and enchanted world. They were scholars obsessed with an ideal, always returning to the same roundish, yellow perfection of their lives. Flying alchemists. I know they were important doing their honey dances. I loved and hated them at the same time.

It was impossible to tell whether we lived in the sky or lived in the earth.

All the while, I practiced magic tricks. It was the only time I wasn’t afraid though I wasn’t very good at making things disappear. But I’d call the family together and I’d try hard to make things invisible. It became apparent that I needed practice. My oldest sister played church music. Every day after school this God-sad music would drown the house.

Every Thursday we practiced fire drills. That was when the phrase “Whatever” was first used with its current connotation. I was in love with this girl in my class. I lived for her, the sky of her eyes, her movement, her voice. I told her all this, and she said “Whatever.”

I forgot to tell you we lived in the ground. A glass rain fell around the House. One day I wrote a poem and my mother sprinkled holy water over everything. This was years before my brother became invisible. I didn’t know that he had been secretly rehearsing.

It was impossible to tell whether we lived in the story or lived in the words.

My father asked us to practice fire drills. Every Thursday we knotted sheets together. We would crawl on all fours beneath the smoke from his smoke pot. We memorized the exits. We imagined the linoleum would go gooey with the heat. We practiced breaking glass. One day I would make a list of all the people I didn’t save.

My mother always felt something really good would happen. Years later my father became a bee sipping from an aluminum flower. Mostly we ate honey. My sisters came into the house with these tiny saint bones in their hands. I called the family together for the Magic show. I didn’t have a veil big enough.

It was impossible to tell whether we lived in the filled or lived in the empty.

That was the year they named the streets after the elements: I walked down Fire Lane. One day I would make a list of all the people I wouldn’t save. My father was getting pissed because I wouldn’t write the book. I just said I didn’t have anything to write about. Would you come to live on my side of the moon? I said to the Whatever girl. I couldn’t keep her from vanishing. During one of the fire drills my father made a fire out of my poem. “This will make things more realistic,” he said to the family. Then he turned to me. “Now you’ll have something to write about.” Nothing is as happy as it sounds. That was the year my mother felt certain she was going to win something. She would be cleaning the house for the day they would arrive with the prize. My older sister’s music ate holes in the house. You see, nothing is as sad as it sounds.

MY SISTER SOLVES THE RIDDLE OF THE MINIATURE HOUSE.

That was the year my father bought parts of a used miniature golf course. Once he began setting it up in the back yard, he noticed that it was essentially broken. The windmill had no blades. Paths were worn in the green felt. A clown’s chipped mouth flared. He plopped his red toolbox next to a pile of wood.

Part of the problem was we couldn’t distinguish between a dream and an egg. That was the year we kept losing things. My mother kept losing the prayer we would say to the patron saint of lost things. “Look,” my father said. “We can make a lot of money. People have to play miniature golf somewhere. Why not here?”

“Every daughter needs to study how fire moves through a house,” my mother said, moving her finger over the blueprints.

My father arranged the ramps and cups and miniature train tracks and tunnels and mazes on the green felt carpets. That year I was afraid of being lost. The birds carried bright pieces in their beaks. After my father said there wasn’t enough food, I began eating like a cricket.

That was the year we couldn’t find one of my sisters. The mayor wanted to name the streets in my father’s tiny town. That was the year we hired a person to find us. My father patched the roofs of the miniature village. He collected the golf balls in a bucket, and painted the fake lighthouse so its light would always appear to be on. He hammered paddles on the windmill, and the balls rolled under the porticoes and around the gazeboes. “I’m not sure what you want me to do,” said the man we had hired to find us.

I wanted to cry in front of my grandmother’s bookcase. The world was waiting for me.

The weather spun around the woodpile of my father’s town.

My grandmother watched food wake up on her plate.

“Don’t listen to her,” said our father.

The words in my grandmother’s bookcase pretended to be what they said they were.

In my father’s village, he painted a door over the word “door.”

After painting the clown’s mouth, my father’s hands were bloodred. Once a fire started in one of the miniature buildings. “You’ll never guess where I found her,” said my father looking away from my sister.

“You don’t know anything about golf,” my mother said.

My father spent all of his time with buckets of paint and bags of nails.

My mother said, “The holes are supposed to be there.”

“Don’t walk in the backyard because you might step on a nail. Then you get lockjaw,” my father said. “And you don’t want to get that, or you’ll go crazy and die.”

We walked carefully among the boards that gleamed with the silver tips of bent nails as my father called us out to admire his brightened world. When my father handed her a bucket of balls, my youngest sister said it looked like a pail of eggs. After the birds left us behind, my mother made up some words to say to the patron saint of lost things. No one said that my father’s world still looked broken.

All I know is I didn’t die, and one of the houses had a hole in it where a fire had been. Next to my grandmother’s bookcase I imagined a word rolling slowly toward the thing it longed to describe. My mother said the trick was to determine which holes needed to be patched and which ones needed to be there.

THE ORNITHOLOGIST STANDS WITH HER HANDS CUPPED TOGETHER—PALMS UP—WAITING TO CATCH WHAT SHE IS CERTAIN IS FALLING TOWARD HER FROM THE SKY.

We discovered our neighbors didn’t close their shades when having sex. One body turned into the round ball of the other body. Each brain a piece of flint; each body a piece of flint.

Because my father was a Student Driving Instructor, he always came home with bruises on parts of his body that had been slapped against the dashboard. He used hand signals when talking to me about sex.

At night, our neighbors gnawed on each other.

We were floating bits of time. I didn’t know why anyone would wear a welding dress.

ASK THE HOUSE.

That was the year one of my uncles said he was into kinky sex, “After sex I get a kink in my neck, in my back, in my leg.”

During the day our neighbors yelled at each other.

The TV said: You are so wrong and couldn’t be any wronger.

The Meanwhile Girl lived in a world that was ample and ebulliently fleshy. Afterwards, empty, exhausted, our neighbors became stumps.

ASK THE WINDOWS.

There would be no noise behind the glass. We would have to imagine sound, and I thought it would have to be humming.

My brother left a note on the kitchen table. It said: I suspect suicide will play a role in my recovery.

In town the Dream Palace Theater played the same movie over and over. The screen sulked behind the jittery light.

ASK THE FIRE. ASK THE WICK.

One of my uncles had a tattoo of a naked woman. Eventually after becoming real, she was a naked woman who was once a tattoo. One night she came to my bedroom—on her arm was a tattoo of a tiny man.

My father showed us where the seat belt had dug into his neck. We lived next to the conservancy, and everyday people walked by with violas strapped to their backs. I decided that was how I would one day make love—with a musical instrument strapped to my back.

“I doubt that,” said the Meanwhile Girl.

In winter we watched the windows overflowing. It was like watching the movie in the Dream Palace Theater, except there was no sound—or the little sound there was seemed muffled and foreign. Behind the glass and behind the snow the two naked neighbors touched each other—animals trying to grow wings—radiant and disgusting and mute and resonant. It was as if the flakes of snow floated upward. Oh. We could not look away.

BODIES MOVE INTO EACH OTHER LIKE BIRDS INTO A WINDOW.

We told our parents that we wished we had been adopted, so then we wouldn’t feel so bad about our lack of feelings toward them. Our father said, “It will pass—this lack of feeling thing. I know. I’ve felt the lack myself. And though it takes awhile, eventually it diminishes.”

That was the year the school play was Death of a Salesman, and we looked for hoses in the basement.

If we had been adopted, my oldest sister said that maybe we weren’t real siblings. My brother said parents should come with evidence.

That year a letter arrived in the mail.

That was the year my mother suspected my father had an affair with a toll booth operator. My father always had pocketfuls of quarters. My youngest sister grew next to a mirror. “I wonder what would be a good name for a mother,” she said.

In my grandmother’s bookcase was The Book of Knots.

“Why do you have to be so negative?” my father said. My mother made a list of the ways the world could come to an end. She placed it on the refrigerator with a magnetic sunflower growing out of the supervolcano. At night we imagined there was a sky above us.

My brother left a note on the kitchen table. It read: “I want to find my logical parents.”

“We should always be prepared,” said my mother.

“Exactly,” said my father jiggling his pockets.

Every time I poured a glass of milk I stared at the words “pandemic.” I always felt I lived in a town called Disappearance. My mother said no matter where you are you need to find the spots where God slips through. Every time I opened up the refrigerator door, I witnessed climate change. The book said: A knot is just a string trying to find its way home.

My father said he had to travel the thruway again, and my mother asked him where he was going. I stared at the refrigerator and felt the cosmic ray from an exploding star, sensed my telomeres eroding, heard a black hole gulping.

“How can I be a traveling salesman if I don’t travel?” said my father. My mother pulled the hose off the clothes washer, so that the water splashed on the floor.

“Such beauty,” my mother said. “The way we are so completely uncertain while the earth, arriving at a purposeful clarity, sorts things out to the point where, given our presence, it embraces the purest inevitable conclusion.”

Our “father” and “mother” called us together, and said they had something to tell us.

THE PERSON WE HIRED TO FIND LOST THINGS BECOMES LOST.

I attempted to talk backwards—to have words go back into me—over the teeth and plump tongue, and finally down the trap in the throat. My father worked as a Fool the Guesser when the carnival came to town. That was the year somebody was stealing books from the library.

I was afraid of electricity—the way it snapped inside things unexpectedly. The spark could come out of nowhere. I decided to take books from the library and place them in my grandmother’s bookcase, and then exchange that book for one of hers. The TV said: Nothing is real.

My father looked at my younger sister quizzically. “Dad, I’m eight,” my younger sister said. In school we studied phobias. That was the year we couldn’t find the right words—fear or worry or alarm or panic or apprehension or dread or fright.

Just before the carnival was scheduled to arrive in town, there was a greenish spill from the chemical plant.

The TV said: There is nothing to be concerned about.

The cellar crackled—every outlet, every appliance. I jumped.

With a razorblade I took off the inside pocket that contained the library return card. Then I glued it to my grandmother’s book, and took it to the library. That year I ate like a pencil. For school we had to make a list of things we were afraid of. My list included:

ELECTRICITY FACTS BREATHING TUBES GETTING CAUGHT

I tried to move words around until they resided in their original mouths. I sat with my head in a book. “Thank god it is only his head,” said one of my aunts. “Wouldn’t a lightning rod make sense,” I asked.

I wanted to learn to play a musical instrument. I wanted to learn how to fall.

When they set up the carnival tents in the greenish pool, the clouds in the sky appeared crushed. Believing in books, I had forgotten I was a real person. At night the narrator started talking. At the carnival, the phrenologist read the bumps on our brains. In the cabinets of curiosity carefully constructed worlds came to life like butterflies on the ends of pins. I tried to throw balls through the mouth of the greenish clown. “Step right up.”

Apprehension.

“Wouldn’t a lightning rod make sense?” I asked.

My father said to my brother, “Don’t be a smart ass. It’s not just the Fool. You have to add the Guesser. Fool the Guesser.”

When the storm eventually came, the thunder sounded like panic cracking in two. A whole terrible and beautiful world gushed through me. Lightning ripped open the sky as the green clown sucked the world back into its laugh.

The TV said: Look at the pretty. The TV said: There are no consequences.

The TV said: Worry.

Later my mother stood in front of my father. He looked at her intently. “OK. Not pounds but what about kilograms? You got to admit,” my father said, “I’m getting better.”

My mother grew alarmingly heavy.

I could hear my grandmother when I’d bring her new books to read by her hospital bed. She made a dreadful sound as if she were vacuuming up all the words. That was the year, when if you touched anyone the static electricity startled your skin and you jerked back. When I gulped everything seemed to go backwards. The electricity ran through the TV and ate a hole in the living room.

MOST OF US WILL DIE FROM COMPLICATIONS FROM OUR TREATMENTS.

I lived in a cellar. A house grew out of my belly.

THAT WAS THE YEAR MY PARENTS BEGAN SPEAKING IN A STRANGE LANGUAGE.

That was the year I developed a variety of theories about time. I wanted to think like a train. I wanted to move like a hill.

My father said my brother was a doorstop. My older sister bumped into an inexplicable brightness.

ASK THE HOUSE.

ASK THE TOWN.

That’s the year one of my uncles overflowed behind the windows.

“He deserved it,” said my father.

I tried to hold onto a piece of who I was, as the Therefore Girl flickered past the lockers. I wanted the original. The neglected. The myriad. The world quite frankly needed the world. That was the year our neighbors gave their children away. Garage sales everywhere were filled with doll clothes and broken appliances and stone clocks with garnet gears.

One of my grandmother’s books explained how to become a window. I practiced when I walked next to the shops of the town in the simmering noon sun.

In school I learned the first flying machine was an apparatus made of birds. I learned narratives illuminate the neural connectors of the brain.

If you looked deeply into the cellar you could see a crater where the heart of the world had been taken.

We awakened in a dirt house.

We awakened with rumors of the sky.

We awakened in tomorrow holding onto a very old root.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Cloudsby Patrick Lawler Copyright © 2012 by Patrick Lawler. Excerpted by permission of FC2. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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