Джоанна Скотт - Excuse Me While I Disappear - Stories

As a young girl, I’d been frustrated that I couldn’t decipher Morse code on my own. Now, as I looked at the tracks left behind by the tern, I laughed at the thought that the lines in the sand might contain a secret message that I couldn’t read. And then, on second thought, I stopped laughing.

I drove back the way I’d come, intending to see one last time the warehouse across Monument Road from the old Mother of Sorrows Church. I saw the church on one side of the road but I didn’t see the warehouse. Thinking I’d missed it, I turned the car around and drove more slowly in the opposite direction. But the warehouse wasn’t there. In its place was a white clapboard house with cottage-style dormers.

Had I been drugged? What happened to the worn, gray warehouse where I’d spent the hour with Terence Farley? Did Terence Farley even exist? Had he suffered the same fate as the supposedly fictitious author named Leslie Klavan, who had been expunged from Wikipedia?

I turned the car around and drove back past the church. There was the white house with peaked dormers. Where was the warehouse?

Why, the cottage was the warehouse, I realized at last. The building looked entirely different. The tilt door had been lowered and the light of the setting sun, which had sunk beneath the heavy cloud bank, brightened the worn facade. The faded sign was blotted in shadows cast by the overhang of the roof.

I drove back to Boston. Later that evening, alone in my hotel room, I pulled out my spiral notebook from my bag and opened to the place where I’d inserted the sheet of handmade paper. It was still slightly damp, its edges beginning to curl. I smoothed it flat against the desk. The blank creamy blue was the limpid tint of the upper atmosphere.

You have to understand, Terence Farley had said. Understand what? Just as I’d imagined finding a message in the tracks left by a bird, now I imagined that somehow this paper contained a clue. Wouldn’t it be a fine trick if the invaluable book I’d been searching for were written on this single sheet in invisible ink? Technology cast its truth in codes that were baffling to the uninitiated. Could it be that every word was squeezed on a single sheet made of repurposed rags? I stared at that perfect emptiness until my eyes burned. My longing to see impossibilities where there was nothing drove my thoughts into a knot of incoherence. Truly, I felt the limitations of my own consciousness as an oppressive physical constraint, to the point of suffocation. The blankness expanded, gathering weight, extending beyond dimension. The sensation I experienced that night is beyond any account I can offer. I don’t even like to remember it. All I will say is that I saved myself by forcing my trembling hands to hold that sheet of paper at its top edge and ripping it in two, then ripping the two pieces into four and the four into eight, et cetera, until all I had left was a fistful of confetti, easily tossed from my hotel balcony and scattered every which way by the wind.

Since my visit to Terence Farley, I have found plenty of books, some of them worth more than others. But the one that would make my years of searching worth it, the book that would pay for an estate on some craggy coast, high above the floodplain, the book that contains a universe, still hasn’t turned up.

There was just me enjoying a bottle of beer. I wasn’t making any trouble. Me in my brother’s Panama shirt, my old Buyers Picks black sneakers, my stepson’s Phillies drawstring shorts ’cause we’re the same height even if we don’t got the same width. And in my bottle: choice hops and water brewed to perfection. I was just walking along going nowhere after Maggie told me, Get out of my sight, loser, I never wanna see you again. Like I got the Billy Penn curse. So it was just me with my bottle of beer, walking along.

Anyway, I’m crossing Vernon Park and I can’t remember if I turn right or left on Greene Street, and then I’m on some street I don’t recognize. I’m thinking about Maggie the whole way. I got a plan for what to say to her now, if I could just find my way back home. But I can’t even tell if I’m heading east or west, and the neighborhood, you know its reputation. Just last week they found a body tied up in a tarp in the woods off Magnolia Street. TV news says the police suspect foul play. Sure, they find a dead body tied up in the woods, and the police think just maybe something stinks? Go figure.

Good thing I got my bottle of beer. Then I see this guy, he looks okay, so I cross the street to talk to him. First I think he’s doing some surveying, then I see he’s got a paintbrush in his hand. I forget to ask him where’s Wayne Avenue ’cause I see him staring at the other side of the street. What did I miss when I was over there? I take a sip of beer and look in the direction he’s looking. All I see is a building, and some more buildings.

I give a juicy burp to let him know I’m there. Watcha painting? I ask.

Those buildings, he says.

Buildings are buildings, I say. Don’t look like much goes on there. Then I think maybe he’s making an ad for some kingpin flipping real estate.

He goes on painting.

You just starting that picture? I ask him. It’s mostly just shapes not filled in yet, and one window, and a lot of sky. But you know what he tells me? He tells me he’s almost finished.

You’re missing a door here, I say, touching the canvas to indicate where it goes.

Please don’t, he says. I’ve ticked him off, but it’s not more than a little smudge I’ve left, nothing worse than a smushed flea.

I watch him for a while. He’s missing three-quarters of what’s there, and he’s already starting to screw the caps back on his tubes of paint. I’m bugged, you know, when a job is left incomplete. What about all those steps, and the billboards, and…? He couldn’t care less. Maybe he’s just bored. That gives me an idea.

How about painting me ? I say. Come on, what is more interesting, a couple company buildings or me? I get my picture painted, Maggie will be impressed. I don’t tell him that. I tell him, I got a face makes the ladies swoon. Now I’m having fun hassling him. Paint me from the neck up, how ’bout, I suggest. He’s putting away his brushes. Wait, I say. I let a UPS truck go past, then I jog across the street and stand in front of the buildings. Now you get a two for one, me and your dumb buildings together, I call to him. You want to paint me in the nude, I say, that’s fine. I take off my shorts and my Panama shirt. I’m down to my boxers. I can see he’s looking at me, he’s got a brush back in his hand. There’s more, I call as I step out of my boxers. All I got on is my sneakers. I take a swig of beer. Here’s a sight deserves to be immortalized. I’m on a roll. God, the beer tastes good. I want to live forever. I do a little dance, until it comes to me that I’m not making it any easier for him swishing around like this, so I stand still, not counting when I need to quench my thirst.

There I am modeling in my birthday suit when an officer of the law comes driving by. He’s probably the same cop that was scratching his head when he found that body tied up and left to rot. He writes a ticket for public drunkenness and tells me to put on my clothes. I hand him my bottle of beer so I can pull up my boxers and shorts. When I’m all dressed I ask for my beer back. And you know what he does? He turns that bottle upside down and pours out what’s left right in front of me, glug, glug, glug. Only then does he give me the bottle back, the fucker. I can hear him breaking up laughing as he drives away.

The painter has been watching the whole scene. I go back across the street with my empty bottle and take in his picture top to bottom, side to side. All he added since the last time I looked is blue where there used to be white inside the window. That’s it. Blue nothing. I went full throttle and now I’m nowhere to be seen. Like I’m so forgettable I’m not even worth the record of my existence. A nobody. But I keep looking, and I start thinking that the blue in the window is not just any blue. It’s a blue so different from the blue of the sky that it’s hardly blue at all. How can I even tell it’s blue if I never saw that same color blue before? I just know. It is bluer than blue, no denying, it’s a real special blue, and it wouldn’t be there without me. Good thing I got taste and can see I’m just what the picture needed to be perfect.