By Dylan Smith
June 22
Dawn comes late in these woods, the sun slow to rise up over the hill behind my shack. From bed I dreamt about one of the opening passages from the Bible. That bit about dividing the darkness from the light. I woke to a word. The word was Water. Then it was one word followed by another, language like a slow constellation of lightning strikes in my head. I felt graced by the presence of something new and wild in the dark outside my shack. A family of deer in the window, maybe. Or maybe a new word. I rose slowly. A calm flow of light fell through my naked body and I laughed without the language for knowing why. I drank a little water. Built a fire to boil water in the purple morning rocks. Even without any rain, the trees swayed gratefully. I must have still been drunk. I pulled on some jeans. Lit a candle at my desk. And then I realized what had really divided the darkness from the light. It was the word Darkness. The word Light. Coffee brewed in a giant glass jar and some white coals hummed brightly in the gentle summer dark outside. Language had divided me from Alma. Shaped this distance between me and Chris. I went to work on a poem. Words would emerge and I would arrange them. Words with significance in and of themselves. Sculptural words. Words with a visual meaning. I tumbled them onto the paper. Creation. Bicycle. Dancing. Myth. I typed them and I retyped them repeatedly into the typewriter, banging on the keys, the keys making music. Alphabet. Wildfire. Apocalypse. Water. A passageway opened between the poem and my hand and an infinite unity unfolded beyond the body. A structure formed. An archway within. Slowly the windows got more blue.
When I looked up again I saw seven dark deer hiking down the hill toward the barn. I read the poem back to myself. I hadn’t quite captured it yet. I blew out the candle and dug up Alma’s engagement ring from the sawdust and dirt at the bottom of my pocket. I didn’t know why I had the ring. I hadn’t had it for long — I shouldn’t have taken it. I’d been meaning to return it to that red unfired bowl beside Alma’s bed. I held it up to some blue sky between the trees in my window. Something startled one of the deer out there. Its head lurched up from the low swaying ferns, its dark body rearing as it turned — then it leapt out arching into the golden gray blue green. The others followed in slow motion, their thrumping bodies loping up the hill toward the light, and then I heard a deck board groan outside my shack. Somebody was here. My first thought, of course, was Chris. I swung around as the door drifted open and a silhouetted figure darkened the daylight in the doorway. A wordless shadow. An eclipse. I tried to scream as I stood, working Alma’s ring back into my pocket. The figure’s back was turned to me and it was hooded and tall and draped all in black. I couldn’t scream. Nothing came out. My brother, I thought. My killer. And in that moment I thought about the word nightmare in a new way. Like one of the horsemen, I thought. Mare of the night. I closed my eyes. Wasn’t drunk anymore. In fact I felt very hungover. When I opened them again the shadow was still there, only now it was up on its tippy-toes, peering up into the bird’s nest that had been built between the rafters above my deck. Impossibly tall. Weirdly elongate. The figure looked like a thin opening in the air.
“Take me down into the field,” I whispered hoarsely, weakly. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. The figure ignored me. Though I thought I heard it whispering something too. Hissing these strange little bird sounds.
A pale hand emerged from the blackness, and finally I gathered my courage to cry out:
“Come and get me, Chris! I know what you’re here to do. Let’s go down into the field.”
The figure fell back onto its bootheels and, turning toward me, removed its hood to reveal a head of closely shaved hot-pink hair. The unveiled face was horse-like in its length and yet still sort of moonish – like a sickly androgynous vision of Chris – but it wasn’t him. I thought the kid looked profoundly malnourished, not nearly as plump or stately as Chris, and as they passed over the threshold and into my shack I saw for the first time their eyes: they were pale eyes, burning eyes – they were dazzling violet lavender eyes, and like a strange ghostly doppelganger of my brother, they looked about my shack with a smile.
“What the hell are you?”
They looked into my eyes without judgment.
“Nothing. Huh? I dunno.”
“Nothing? You’re not some kind of death vision of Chris?”
“Oh, nope. Nothing like that. Name’s Spitgum. Who’s Chis?”
“Wait — Spitgum?”
“In the flesh, hater. First and last. Don’t hate.”
“Holy shit — I’m so sorry, man. You’re Art’s — wait, I’m sorry — here,” I said, pulling over my fallen chair so they could sit. But as I carried the chair toward Spitgum and the summer light outside my shack they swayed their way straight through me, and toward the poem I’d left lying beside the window.
“Don’t be sorry.” They picked up the page and started to read the poem. “What is this? Art told me you’re a poet, but this is just a list of words.”
“It’s a sonnet, man. But look, Spitgum — I’m sorry I yelled at you like that. I thought you were my brother.”
“I understand. You were afraid. It’s okay.”
Spitgum set down the sonnet. My new telescope stood upright on the windowsill beside the poem. They picked it up and looked out the window through it.
“Woah,” Spitgum said, jerking away from the glass. “Woah — that sun nearly burnt my eye out. Whose telescope was this? A sailor’s?”
I poured myself some coffee and took a seat in the chair. The summer air filled my shack through the open doorway behind me as I took a sip. I set the cup down on a floorboard. The coffee had gone cold. I noticed the imprint of a bent roofing nail in the darkly stained wood. Bird shit on the window screen. I put my face into my hands. Wrangled up a painful breath.
“Probably a pirate’s,” I said.
“Woah. You think so? Can you see Art’s barn from up here?”
“Not now. The leaves block pretty much everything. But definitely in winter.”
“You’ll have a hell of a view of it then.”
“A hell of a view of what?”
I opened my eyes. Spitgum had the telescope trained on me now. The lens magnified the lavender color of their eye. Blown up all wonky and brightly wide open. They looked like Chris’s thin sickly twin.
I could barely fucking breathe.
“Spitgum, put that telescope down. You’re freaking me out. Here. You want some coffee?”
I held out the cup.
“Thanks. But this telescope is the only reason why I’m up here.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Art sent me up here to get it.”
“What for?”
“We can’t get the new well pump to work and now it’s stuck down in the hole. Art thinks with your telescope and his flashlight we might be able to see what’s blocking the way, but whenever I look down into it all I see is stars. A whole night sky’s worth of stars. All the constellations look inverted — or reflected — and there’s this slight trembling of the ground. I also see red lights. Red blinking lights.”
I did my best to process this. Spitgum’s fingernails were painted black and they had sky blue earplugs pressed inside their ears. I wasn’t doing very well.
“Does Art seem alright?”
“Not nearly as bewildered as you. Haven’t seen him since I was a kid though. So how should I know.”
“How did you get up here?”
“Hiked.”
“No — I mean how did you get upstate? I thought you weren’t supposed to be here until the Fourth.”
“Bus. Well, I walked. Walked to the barn from the bus. The fourth of what?”
“What? Of fucking July, man. How did you find the barn?”
“It’s called an iPhone, hater. Google Maps. I saw you holding that wedding ring up to the light.”
“How old are you, man?”
“I don’t have to answer that. Time is fake. Magic is real. I got refried.”
“Refried.”
“Yeah. I’m out there, Billy Willy. My brain got deep fried twice.”
I could hear the baby phoebes chirping in the hopeless rainless godless heat behind me.
There was a quivering quality to the air.
I felt like I was going to cry.
“Please, Spitgum,” I said. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“One time in a blackout I took a megadose of LSD. Got myself stuck in what they call the infinite time space continuum. Fried the holy crap out of my brain. Then a couple weekends later I did it all again. That time I was only brownedout though, so I suppose it was sort of on purpose. All my life. All my life all at once. Part of me’s stuck in that loop. Beginning, middle, end — it’s all happening at the same time for me. Big time. Forever. All at once. Refried.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Spitgum took the cup from my hand. I looked up at them. They’d been smiling down at me and my busted eye. My vision was still cloudy and throbbing. They really did look a lot like Chris.
“Spitgum, why are you dressed like that? All in black robes. It’s summer.”
“I burn too easy. But enough of this talk radio bull shit, Bill. I have to be somewhere by noon. So close your eyes.”
“What?” I said.
“Just do it. Shut the good one first, then slowly the left one.”
What the hell. Why not? I did what they said.
Spitgum held the coffee cup and telescope in their right hand and, with their left, they slowly reached out toward my eye.
“Shut the bad eye now.”
“Seriously, man?”
“Shut up. Slowly. Just do it.”
I did.
“And now, with your eyes closed, Bill, close your eyes…”
I swatted the little freak’s hand away from my face.
“Fixed,” Spitgum said.
“Oh come on, man. Fixed?”
I was blinking a lot. It started to feel like something had happened.
“Yeah. Fixed. Now I need to get back down to the barn. There’s only one meeting at the church today and legally I’m not allowed to miss it. Are you coming?”
“I don’t know. I’m having a hard time accepting the way things are today,” I said.
Spitgum nodded and took a sip of coffee. Slowly though, turning their shaved pink Chris head toward the light, they spit the coffee back up into the cup.
“Spitgum, man. Are you serious?”
It all splashed out onto the floor and all over my feet. But I didn’t care — I didn’t even flinch. Suddenly I could see.
“This coffee tastes like piss dirt.” Spitgum wiped the darkness off their chin. “You shouldn’t be drinking this.”
“Look—” I said.
“No you look, Billy Willy. Spitgum spits the truth. Be grateful. Don’t hate.”
I put my face back down into my hands. Was this what a nervous breakdown looks like? I must be cracking up, I thought. I looked back up at Spitgum. My eye had stopped throbbing completely. The veil over everything had been lifted. Spitgum was honestly the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.
“I think you should come with me,” Spitgum said softly. “Let’s go down into the field, like you said. It’s better than you just sitting up here alone all day doing nothing.”
I looked around my shack. Spitgum was probably right. I thought about Alma. Alma would be down there.
The power must have come from the palm of Spitgum’s hand.
“Alright,” I said. I closed my eyes again. “Alright. Just give me a couple more minutes.”
Spitgum walked over to the book of Word Roots lying open on the floor beside my cot.
“You really don’t have any electricity in here?”
I didn’t answer. I heard them pick up the book.
“Give me a word from the list. I mean, from your sonnet.”
“Not now, man. My eye feels better but I think I’m still having a panic attack.”
“I’m a poet of sorts too, you know. We’ll end up being good friends before the end. Now don’t be a hater. Give me your favorite from the list.”
I peeked over at my unfinished poem.
“Apocalypse,” I said.
“Excellent.”
They flopped the book back over toward the A’s. Ran a long bony finger down the page.
Some time passed. Spitgum seemed to be studying the root. I heard them whispering and clicking their tongue, but they never did read anything aloud.
I started to feel a fever coming on.
Spitgum tossed the book back onto my cot. I watched them discover the postcard of Saint Francis I’d pinned to the wooden wall. They took six steps back and looked at the painting through my telescope. Light glistened in the basin of creek water I keep on the ground for washing up. Spitgum giggled. Then they returned to just hanging over me in my chair.
More time passed. I looked up at them again. They really were just standing there. Leaning on my walking stick. Draped all in black. Smiling down like some silent shining saintly idiot.
“Sometimes it’s like a big shadow on my brain,” Spitgum said.
“What? Jesus Christ. What is?”
“The truth.”
Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.
