Typewriters and Trilobites by Elliot Roothes - HTML preview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Eleven

 

   “It was all spelled out in the candy buttons, Peter. If you would have been paying attention at school where the time traveler disguised as your teacher was trying to pass on the message, you would have eaten the colored dots in the established order, leaving the coded message clearly stated on the paper roll.”

   “Wait, what would I have known?”

   “You would have known that all the stars you see at night were placed their nearly five billion years ago in very specific order and in three dimensional arrangement for one purpose and one purpose only; to spell out a poem that would have led you to the secret of happiness long before you ever created your first online quiz. I you had done so, Casandra might still be alive.”

   Peter woke with a start and found himself sweating copiously, stray bullets of the smelliest liquid lead dripped and crawled down his back and chest as if cold and noxious, slow motion worms were seeking the heart of the dead.

   His hair was all wet and so was his pillow. In the attic space above, he could hear the scratching, clawing and pernicious nibbling of a squirrel that was busy eating away at the Romex wiring above the ceiling. The sound felt like an earwig in his brain.

   It was barely 3 am, and in knowing himself, he knew he would not be able to fall back to sleep readily, so he got up and fixed himself a pot of coffee.

   The early bird gets arthritis, some say…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve

 

   Nothing was doing it for him. He missed Casandra more than anything he had ever missed before, and the only thing he had ever missed before losing her, to his recollection, was his long lost fossil trilobite, the one his grandpapa had given him when he was a boy. Losing that had made him cry, but losing Casandra, as a man, made him feel as if half of him had died.

   The big house was no comfort. He spent most of his time in one room.

   He no longer painted.

   He rarely left the confines of the house.

   The mailman and his neighbor were two of the only people he ever spoke with, and all he ever talked about with them was how he was going to get that damn squirrel if it killed him to do so.

   “Why don’t you just call animal control or an exterminator?”

   “I’d rather not bother,” was his standard reply.

   The people of the future, the time travelers, well, they might tell you that Peter did not do anything about the squirrel because it was the only thing that was keeping him alive. If it had not been for that squirrel, Peter would have had nothing to complain about, and with all his money, his tuition-free university and his fans, one would think he had it all, but since losing his true love, his dear heart’s cockle, he felt no reason to live.

   That squirrel was his savior.

   He just didn’t know it yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Thirteen

 

   Peter disliked the sound of that squirrel in his attic even more than he disliked it when people pronounce letters in words that are meant to be silent, such as when the ignorant try to sound learned by pronouncing the letter T in often. If one is in England, it is correct to do so; doing so in the United States just makes you sound like a fucktard.

   Such behavior often made Peter want to punch that person in the throat.

   It was true, Peter was falling back into his old negative ways ever since experiencing the loss of his wife, but who could blame him? At the start of this book, she’d only been buried for barely six months.

   He was lonely and he was afraid, but even worse, dark memories long forgotten were returning to him during his slumbering hours and he could not for the life of him explain why.

   There was that concrete room in the basement…

   Why was he thinking about that?

   So much was coming back to him. At first the room had been bare aside from a chair and a radio. Then there was a card table centered in the room. He stayed away from that tall wooden door for some weeks, and when he dared to spy again, there was a typewriter on that green card table.

   If memory served him, days after that, he heard clicking noises at night. Noises that reminded him of…

   Perhaps that was the connection? He could now clearly remember that deep in the night he could hear a faint sound coming from below the first floor, like the nibbling away of a squirrel’s teeth upon Romex, clacking away for hours at a time for no reason that he could comprehend.

   “They love the taste of that plastic. Flexible plastics give off chemical estrogens and trick mammals into experiencing something akin to sexual relations. It’s for the same reason that cats love to chew on plastic bags. It’s also the same reason the American alligators are losing their balls and their penises, but that’s another story altogether,” the mailman had told him, quite frankly. He was a very candid man.

   Who can take an attic? Fill it with a squirrel? Add a little Romex wire and fuck up your whole world… the candid man can, and the candid man can because he has all of the facts and he can educate you.

   Peter was fucking annoyed, but at least he had another piece to his puzzle.

   “So that is why I have been having these flashbacks and dreams. It’s that confounded sound!”

   Images of that basement room returned to him and he could suddenly see something he must have blocked out years before. That room! The single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling with the metal hat-like shade that covered barely half of the bulb, that chair, and the card table and the typewriter and the tall wooden door on the far side.

   But there was also something else.

   Once, when his parents were out at some swingers’ party or a church meeting or something, Peter had gone down to the basement where he noticed a single piece of paper resting in the typewriter’s grip. He approached the card table, knelt on the metal folding chair upon one knee, and read the small black words that were embedded in and embossed upon the paper’s bleached white surface. The following is a duplicate of the words contained on that page:

 

 

 

The Story of My Life

By Andrew G. Durant

     This is the story of my life. It all began the day my son Peter was born, but for all intents and purposes, that was actually the day my life ended.

 

   Along with the memory of that single page came a torrent of heat and hot flashes.

   Peter’s palms became sweaty.

   He cried out for Casandra.

   Then he ran to the kitchen and poured himself a scotch and drank the entire helping down in one swallow. Then he poured himself another as he tried to catch up with his breath.

   I’m in Hell, he thought to himself disconcertedly, a year ago to this very day, I thought I was in heaven, but now I am convinced this must be Hell!

   Nothing made sense to him, and the more he drank and the more he listened to the sound of that infernal squirrel’s scratching the more he felt as if he’d go out of his mind.

   He logged onto Facebook and the first post he read, which appeared in the form of a very yellow and sunny meme with a rather nice font style, “Share this post if you hate cancer. Ignore and someone in your family will DIE OF CANCER!”

   Blinking forty some odd times in rapid succession, he had to pause to make sure he had read the post correctly.

   Share this if you hate cancer.

   Yup. Okay, he got that.

   But if you ignore the post, and don’t share it?

   WTF?

   What kind of sick human being would create such a meme?

   With his mind already racing, he began to imagine that surely the FBI or the NSA had means by which they could trace that meme back to the individual who’d created it, locate them at their home and eradicate them and their lineage, and even make the story public, and no one would probably complain. Surely they could and would do that?

   Ignore this and someone in your family WILL DIE OF CANCER!

   He thought; there is no possibility a human being could have written those words. There was no way.

   But then he looked again and realized that someone, some person, and he knew their name because it was right there on his news feed and that person was in fact on his friends list, had actually reacted to the latter statement and, presumably out of fear and superstition, reposted it.

   Ahh, but he had to admit there was that one time after Casandra died that he too had fallen prey to such wicked trickery. Oh, the selfishness of it all. He too, was a guilty fucktard.

   So, instead of calling his friend a fucktard or an apple spot or a loaf pincher or a seat sniffer, he simply typed in the words, “My friend, I hope one day you find the strength to reject such inanity. Whoever pulled at your heartstrings with this meme is a very callous human being. Whatever your loss, I feel for you. We are all subject to the same misgivings. It is a fault of our nature, I am sure. Be well.”

   Peter had a change of heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

   No longer would the curfew breakers get to him, he imagined. No more would the ignorant fucktards penetrate his castle of solitude, his fortress of peace, that is, if it could be said that he had found any. He felt tired, and, as he finally had several years after losing his favored trilobite, the only thing that ever meant anything to him during his formative years, he felt the need to finally let go.

   He got out his easel and paints and his brushes. He opened the curtains and allowed the light in. Then, making a wish upon the softer side of silence, he sat down and started his first painting in a year.

   What he painted was his situation. In each of the paintings that were to arise from his resurrected brush strokes, Peter depicted himself as he was: divested. His divested form took on the appearance of a skeleton. The rest of the imagery was true to life.

   He painted himself as all bones sleeping in the marriage bed. The next was of his skeletal form in a chair with a book. His third attempt at catharsis had him sketching and then brushing out a scene wherein he was standing at the top of a very dimly lit stairwell. In the next he lay drunk on the floor next to an empty bottle and the bride and groom that had once adorned their wedding cake was pressed within his boney white hand. The very next was of a skeletal hand holding a ring.

   With all the drudgery and heartfelt perseverance of one who has truly lost all he had, Peter rose up each morning and painted all day.

   Sunlight came, addressed him hazily and lingered, then parted ways without a hint of goodbye. Outside the windows, the weather change as weather often will, and small birds stopped by just to see what they could see, inside.

   Peter cried more vehemently and more viscerally than at any time he’d ever known. Breaking down in front of his artwork, he would beat his bare hands upon the floor. Crying out to Casandra, her ghost and her spirit, he begged all of high heaven to show him to her once again.

   Then, after the tears and the salt and the pain had subsided, he wiped off his face and painted her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Fifteen

 

   “Cheers, Cheers, raise up your beers, it’s all hell and high water from here…”

   At the end of three months, Peter stood before sixty-three pieces of art he’d created and something inside him beckoned him to show.

   He made a phone call. The first call he’d made since the spring.

   “Hello?”

   “Yes, is this Selene Barchelle?”

   “Yes, speaking.”

   Selene was a wonderful woman who had helped Casandra and Peter organize their efforts to develop the university they’d established in Detroit.

   “Yes, this is Peter Durant calling.”

   She sounded quite delighted to hear from him.

   “Peter! Oh my, how are you? Goodness gracious, I haven’t heard your voice since…” she wished with all her heart she could have said, “Since the funeral,” but she could not as she was out of country and could not attend. She’d sent flowers though. She then rapidly recalled that, in fact, it had been nearly two years since they had spoken. “I am so sorry, Peter. How are you?”

   “I’ve seen better days, but I’ve also seen worse.”

   “It’s all hell and high water from here…”

   “Wonderful. I am so glad you’re okay. What have you been up to?”

   She sounded genuinely curious.

   “Well, I’ve been working again.”

   “Oh, on your paintings?”

   “Yes. And I don’t know how this is going to sound, but I just finished an entire series and I feel a dire need to share them with another set of eyes.”

   “Do you want me to look at them?”

   “I’m quite embarrassed. It seems you have read my mind, either that or I’ve grown quite transparent with age.”

   “Don’t be silly. I’d love to see your work. Are you still at the same address here in town?”

   She sounded more than willing to oblige.

   “Yes. Do you remember the house?”

   “Remember? How could I forget? Do you still have the Dawn redwoods out back? And the irises?”

   “Yes, yes I do.”

   “Are you still a scotch man?” her voice came across as poignant, yet it carried more than teaspoon of... what was it? Hope?

   Slightly embarrassed, Peter replied, “Why yes, I still prefer scotch.”

   “Well, I happen to be in possession of an older bottle of Bell’s that I have been saving, yet dying to open. Shall we say seven this evening?”

   “That sounds about right.” Peter could not believe his luck or his ears. Saving grace was the feeling that resounded within him, reviving his heart in his chest.

   “Then seven it is. Will we be in need of anything else?”

   “That should do just fine, Selene. All I really require is your eyes, your patience, your appreciation… and quite possibly your understanding.”

   “You’ll have all of that and more, Peter, I can assure you. Have the glasses ready. The Bell’s about to ring!”

   Of all the sounds of heaven and Earth, none could compare to the sound of Selene’s voice when she gladly agreed to come by.