Something is wrong out there. The eighth stone is weakening. There is no sense telling myself this isn’t so, because every nerve in my body-
Toast crumbs on the kitchen counter, for instance. You line them up with the blade of a knife. Line of sugar on the table, HA! But who knows how many crumbs? How many grains of sugar? Too many to count!!
This must end. I’m going out there.
I will take a camera.
August 11, 2007
The darkness. Dear Christ. It
August 12
Did I see anything? Actually?
I don’t know. I think I did, but I don’t know.
There are 23 words in this entry.
26 is better.
August 19
I picked up the phone to call J., tell him what’s going on with me, then put it down. What would I tell him? Besides: 1-207-555-1863=11. A bad number.
Valium helps more than Neurontin. I think. As long as I don’t overdue it
Sept 16
Back from Motown. Covered with sweat. Shaking. But eight again. I fixed it. I! Fixed it! IT! Thank God. But…
But!
No, but-I WAS JUST IN TIME.
I saw the 3-lobed eye N. spoke of. It belongs to nothing from this world or this universe.
Except I don’t accept this. I let N.’s obsession get a finger in my psyche (it’s playing stinkyfinger with me if you get my little joke) and it has continued to widen the gap, slipping in a second finger, a third, a whole pulling hand. Opening me up. Opening up my
But!
Gods
HATEFUL GODS!
One thing. If I kill myself, what? If it’s not real, the torment still ends. If it is real, the eighth stone out there solidifies again. At least until someone else-the next “CARETAKER”-goes heedlessly prospecting up that road and sees…
Makes suicide almost look good!
October 9, 2007
Better lately. My ideas seem more my own. And when I last went out to Ackerman’s Field (2 days ago), my worries were all for naught. There were 8 stones there. I looked at them-solid as houses-and saw a crow in the sky. It swerved to avoid the airspace over the stones, “ziss is true,” (joke) but it was there. And as I stood at the end of the road with my camera hung over my neck (nix pix in Motton stix, those stones don’t photograph, N. was right about that much, anyway; possibly radon??), I wondered how I ever could have thought there were only 7. I admit that I counted my steps back to my car (and then paced around a little when an odd number brought me to the driver’s door), but these things do not let go all at once. They are CRAMPS in the MIND! Yet maybe…
Do I dare hope I’m getting better?
October 10, 2007
Of course there is another possibility, loath as I am to admit it: that N. was right about the solstices. We are moving away from one and toward the other now. Summer gone; winter ahead. Which, if true, is good news only in the short term. If I should have to deal with such wracking mental spasms next spring…and the spring after that…
I couldn’t, that’s all.
How that eye haunts me. Floating in the gathering darkness.
Other things behind it
CTHUN!
November 16, 2007
Eight. Always were. I’m sure now. Today the field was silent, the hay dead, the trees at the foot of the slope bare, the Androscoggin gray steel beneath an iron sky. The world waiting for snow.
And my God, best of all: a bird roosting on one of those stones!
A BIRD!
Realized only when I was driving back to Lewiston that I didn’t bother counting my steps when going back to the car.
Here is the truth. What must be the truth. I caught a cold from one of my patients, but now I’m getting better. Cough gone, sniffles drying up.
The little joke was on me all along.
December 25, 2007
I shared Christmas dinner and the ritual exchange of presents with Sheila and her family. When Don took Seth to the candlelight ritual at the church (I’m sure the good Methodists would be shocked if they knew the pagan roots of such rites), Sheila squeezed my hand and said, “You’re back. That’s good. I was worried.”
Well, you can’t fool your own flesh and blood, it seems. Dr. J. may only have suspected something was wrong, but Sheila knew. Dear Sheila.
“I had a sort of crisis this summer and fall,” I said. “A crisis of the spirit, you might call it.”
Although it was more a crisis of the psyche. When a man begins to think the only purpose served by his perceptions is to mask the knowledge of terrible other worlds-that is a crisis of the psyche.
Sheila, always practical, said: “As long as it wasn’t cancer, Johnny. That’s what I was afraid of.”
Dear Sheila! I laughed and hugged her.
Later on, while we were doing a final polish on the kitchen (and sipping eggnog), I asked her if she remembered why we used to call the Bale Road Bridge the
“It was your old friend who thought that up. The one I had such a crush on.”
“Charlie Keen,” I said. “I haven’t seen him in a dog’s age. Except on TV. The poor man’s Sanjay Gupta.”
She whacked my arm. “Jealousy doesn’t become you, dear. Anyway, we were fishing from the bridge one day-you know, with those little poles we all had- and Charlie peered over the side and said, ‘You know, anyone who fell off this thing could not fail to kill themselves.’ It just struck us funny, and we laughed like maniacs. You don’t remember that?”
But then I did. Bale Road Bridge became Fail Road Bridge from that day on. And what old Charlie said was true enough. Bale Stream is very shallow at that point. Of course it flows into the Androscoggin (probably you can see the merging-point from Ackerman’s Field, although I never noticed), which is a lot deeper. And the Androscoggin flows to the sea. World leads onto world, doesn’t it? Each deeper than the last; this is a design all the earth proclaims.
Don and Seth came back in, Sheila’s big guy and her little guy, all dusted with snow. We had a group hug, very New Age, and then I drove home listening to Christmas carols. Really happy for the first time in ever so long.
I believe these notes…this diary…this chronicle of madness avoided (perhaps by bare inches, I think I really did almost “go over the bridge”)…can end now.
Thank God, and merry Christmas to me.
