Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Postscript, Part 1

For nearly five months Sammy and Boyce have asked me to post again on this blog.  I told them, however, that I finished blogging and the entire Wetherbee Bird Casino had come to a natural conclusion.  They both disagreed with me, and said that I knew for a fact many people thought I had gone off to commit suicide.  To be fair, it wasn’t that many people, and I pointed out to Sammy and Boyce that everyone who thought I was dead was outright pleased about my death, especially that it had come by my own hand.  I figured if my imagined suicide caused a few internet weirdos (and if email addresses can be believed, a U.S. senator) some satisfaction, who was I to ruin it?  Sammy and Boyce made me promise, however, that by the end of the calendar year I would explain what’s happened in these last months.  “What’s happened since August is much more important than anything that happened before August,” Sammy told me.  That may be true, but before August I had reasons to blog.  Since August—none.  Yet, I am happy to appease Sammy and Boyce, so I will write this postscript, broken into three parts because my new environment has got me doing a lot of sketching lately, and it’s gotten to my wrists.

So to my loyal readers who had imagined my neck having long since slipped out of the noose made by a pair of my mother’s nylons, my putrefied body lying undiscovered on the basement floor, I apologize.  Cyrus Wetherbee is alive!

Sammy and Boyce said the great thing about a blog is I wouldn’t need to remind anyone what was happening in August.  After all, five months of reality equals only what gets posted on the web page.  It’s not unlike when I used to listen to my New Order albums and think, “They sound this way whether I’m crying or not.”  This thought comforts someone like Charlotte, but for me it’s very lonesome.

As my hateful readers will remember, I was getting rid of a lot of stuff and then went off to Rachel.  Sammy and Boyce tried to make me understand why this would sound like suicide, showing me what I’d written for over a year.  I still didn’t get it, and only agreed to how such a conclusion would be theoretically possible after they read some of the reader comments at increasingly louder volumes.  Sammy liked to quote his favorite because he really wished he knew the person who wrote it: “Longest and bleakest suicide note ever.”  Sometimes Sammy would stare at the furniture thinking about that reader comment and it sure looked like the love of his life had just gotten on some bus.

If I was ever going to commit suicide, I don’t think it would have been in August.  That would have been an anti-climatic moment.  Though when I think about it, there were some similarities between August and the time I came closest to “flying south,” as my father called suicide or any type of death that could have feasibly been avoided.  My father didn’t really distinguish much about death.  When my uncle would visit and tell him about one of their friends dying of liver cancer, my father called that “flying south.”  When we drove past a motorcycle accident, he called that “flying south.”  When he read about the man who shot himself on the golf course, he called that “flying south” too.  I don’t think he thought mountain climbing and driving without a seat belt were any different than a bottle of pills or a shotgun.  When birds hit the window he’d say “I hope he didn’t fly south,” and we’d both watch for a while to see if the robin was stunned or dead.  Generally it was the latter, and we’d bury him somewhere in the yard.

No, August was no time to fly south, but as I said, there were similarities with the days of thinking about flying south.  Ever since the death of Antonio the bird, I’d been having a lot of dreams about Rachel.  I hadn’t really dreamed about her since the months after I first lost her.  Once a man on a bus, overhearing my unsolicited interpretation of Lance the driver’s dream, asked me why he never has any dreams about watching tv or eating potato chips.  Although Lance didn’t ask for my interpretation, he still liked me, and didn’t like the cut of the jib of this interloper, and told him, “That’s because you watch tv and eat chips all the goddamn day long.  What do you want to dream about it for?”  And while Lance could never be considered a dream interpreter, he was actually quite accurate.  People generally don’t dream about breathing or doing the laundry unless they serve as the background for something unique.  Rachel, much like Sammy and Boyce, was too much a recognized part of my conscious mind to be in my dreams.  But in the months after she left this world, it was too much for my poor brain.

Sammy moved in with me for a while, and Charlotte gave Boyce permission to pretty much do the same.  She would bring Boyce Jr. over, who was just a  little guy at the time, and we’d sit around in silence, and they’d never blame me for anything or tell me that things always work out in the end.  Even with their presence I began to dread the nights because I had dreams of Rachel.  Constantly she was standing far away from me.  I would run after her, right straight to her, but halfway there I couldn’t remember which direction she was.

One night Sammy and Boyce wanted to cook marshmallows in the microwave and eat them with forks, but Boyce forgot to take the fork out when he poked his marshmallow and decided it needed to be bigger.  The thing flashed real quick and just died.  I told Boyce not to worry about it and went down to the basement to bring back an old microwave from the early 1980’s.  When I brought it up neither Sammy nor Boyce could stop laughing.  It was the largest microwave they had ever seen, barely fitting on a kitchen counter.  Naturally Sammy dubbed it The Macrowave, and that night we cooked all kinds of weird stuff in it.  The rest of the night we made a rule to only microwave and eat foods we’d never microwaved before.  We ate pickles, tater tots, cheerios in milk, and corn dogs.  When I woke up the next morning, I told them we needed to do more with the Macrowave.  They asked if all that weird food had kept Rachel out of my dreams.  It didn’t—she was still in my dreams, but this time she knocked on my door with flowers and told me she was sorry.  We needed to do it all again!

That night we tried some different foods, but the result in my dream was even better.  This time Rachel and I were sitting on the couch and talking about people coming over and what we should wear.  We never met the people but I didn’t care.  The next night she and I were driving in a car and she saw a broad-tailed hawk on a fence post and shouted for me stop.  And I did.  And we watched.  And when I woke up I couldn’t wait until the night when we would experiment with the Macrowave and food.  Then Rachel and I were grocery shopping.  Another night we were on a train drinking and watching some woods go by.  And then she was pregnant.  Once she took me to see her entire family and said, "My god, here they are, Cyrus!"  And another night my father was alive and he told her that he loved her very much.

But that’s when Sammy and Boyce told me they wouldn’t let this happen anymore.  They told me I hadn’t even noticed that for over a week I was doing all this food experimentation with the Macrowave all by myself.  And they told me I showed no concern that I wasn’t eating until the night, I wasn’t showering, that I was dehydrated and weak, and that only by threatening to kick the living shit out of Rex Tugwell had they managed to keep my job.  Boyce said, “We’re destroying this microwave, but it’s probably better if you did it, too.”  But I carried on for another night and Rachel was my nurse in a hospital and I didn’t have any legs, but I didn’t care.  And finally Boyce said, “We’re destroying it tonight, you can come with us or you can stay here.”

I didn’t go with them.  I would have changed the locks when they left with the Macrowave but Boyce was a damn locksmith.  When they came back I asked them how they did it and they said they put it on the train tracks by the middle school.  In the middle of the night I took Boyce’s keys and drove his van out to the tracks.  I thought maybe the train hadn’t come, but it had.  The pieces were everywhere, and I thought maybe I should just lie on these tracks.  Maybe.  But Boyce and Sammy were waiting in the back of the van the whole time and told me I needed to come home.  It was a quiet ride home until Sammy said, “By the way, Hamlet, we were waiting for you in the back of that van for nearly three hours.”

I didn’t dream about Rachel again except for a few here and there.  Boyce asked me if I thought the dreams had been from all the food I put on my stomach, or if it was something about the Macrowave itself.  It’s not possible to know, so I told them they should just decide what they thought was the coolest.  They actually did, but they wouldn’t tell me what because they said I wouldn’t like it.  They had both come up with the same thing, and they came up with it very quickly.

Not since then did I have dreams about Rachel, but this past summer they came again.  These dreams weren’t as good as the ones before, so I didn’t care to lose them.  Nearly every time Rachel would be sitting under a maple tree, but her brother stood next to me, and he kept whispering in my ear that this wasn’t the real Rachel.  The real Rachel was dead.  When I told him he was right he would laugh in my ear and the Rachel under the maple tree would run away from both of us screaming for us to leave her alone.  Then I'd wake up alone in bed.

So it was in August that I decided I would go find her.  I borrowed Sammy’s car and drove nearly an hour and a half.  I parked on the south side of a pocket of woods by the state highway so no one would see me because all I wanted to see was Rachel.  I walked through the woods and came to a cemetery.  I’d been there before.  Rachel had taken me only two times before.  I tried to remember which grave it wasif I stood at the right grave Rachel would appear.  I kept looking and looking until finally I found the name Angela McNabb.  That was Rachel’s younger sister who died at just 12 years old.  I stood at that grave and asked under my breath for Rachel to come to me.  I had to wait a while, but she came like I knew she would.  At first I couldn’t look up even though I knew she was near me.  I just kept staring at her sister’s name.  Finally I looked up though, and there she was.  Her face was just like I remembered it.  Like in the dreams.  Like in life.  I told her I thought people like her came in white and could fly.  She smiled and said, “I’m so happy to see you, Cyrus.”  And I just about fainted.