Born Under a Bad Sign

“Hey Mom- I’m gonna go see if granddad needs anything so, uh, well I just wanted to let you know.”

Silence.

She looked up at me and her faced showed no signs of recognition. It never did. Her eyes empty and unblinking like two glass beads.

I used to have nightmares about those eyes.

Her head turned back to continue gazing through the window at our backyard. A blanket covered her legs and her arms sat resting crossed in her lap. She sat utterly still and would spend whole days such, in utter stasis, resisting motion.

She stopped speaking when I was born, finally giving in to my family’s madness. It had passed down from her father, another who was given too much to bear, causing him to be crushed by his own immensity.

What is this that I was born into? What foul inheritance will eventually descend?

As a small child I would often awake on the bare floor at the middle of my room, covered in sweat and shivering. Finding myself there I would be terrified that I had it inside me as well, a gift too white-hot and terrible to do anything but start a fire inside my head. Back then my grandmother would hear me crying and rush in to console me, wrapping her doughy arms around me and whispering that I would be okay, and that I would always remain strong. She was always dressed in white and would seem so protecting emerging from that darkness, the only family member of mine that always brought light.

But she is gone now. Only pictures and memories of her remain to remind me that some escape. But she didn’t have that blood inside her and I do. And I grew up watching it lay waste to my grandfather and my mother.

As I left my mother’s perch I passed through our living room and wandered past dusty old bins of old records, past wooden frames containing shrouds of the past, and paused for a moment to look at my mother’s grand piano, which sat poised in the room’s corner, black and hungry.

That piano was the only thing remaining that could anchor my mother at all, and her playing had grown less and less frequent as I grew.

When I was very young my grandmother would play me old records or let me listen to her radio. Old pre-electric jazz and ragtime. Sometimes my mother would place herself at the piano and play the songs back perfectly after one listen. She never made mistakes, playing perfectly and with rigor. After playing she would return to sit at the window, staring outside as if nothing miraculous had occurred.

I loved watching her play, her fingers dancing spiderlike and full of energy. The songs never lasted as long as I wished they would.

I exited the house, kicking the door firmly to release it from a grip water-logged and swollen, and I was glad to be outside. The house’s air would sometimes seem to be too thick to think clearly in.

The porch groaned under my weight. Its flimsy wood had been crudely tacked to the side of our trailer and I often imagined that it resisted being attached to the house as much as I did.

I stood for a moment and watched the breeze dance over a field of grass. The whole field was a shimmering beauty, and I wished that I could move like that. It seemed to me for one blood-racing moment that the whole of the field would wrest itself from the ground and rise up as a new creature to amble off, leaving behind particles of dust and the straw-death.

But it didn’t and I felt disappointed that it was only my imagination and frightened that it had seemed so real. Shaking off that unease I walked behind my house, feeling content just to be outside and away.

As I walked towards my grandfather’s home I passed rusted forms of old farm tools, skeletons of old cars, and the old foundations of houses and buildings once raised to the sky but now forgotten. In some places the forms were free of overgrowth so that on certain days their rusted skin could be turned to gold by the light of day. But in other places the weeds had grown too fast and the forms couldn’t, no matter how hard they struggled, tear free from the cruel earth-fingers which pulled them choking into the ground.

Passing these things by I trailed my hand over them, ripping off the tops of weeds and pulling back strings of ivy and kudzu.

I was filled with ambient dread. It was seeping out of the ground. Elegiac southland of dirt-roads and dusty funeral marches.

As I was walking I saw a metallic glint off of the roof of my grandfather’s cabin. The house was the color of wet wood halfway towards rot.

His yard shone white. Covered with discarded and crumpled pieces of paper, stained with ink blotches and scratch marks, it seemed like all color had long ago been drained out of this place. My grandfather lived in the equations and formulas that were scribbled across those papers.

The air around the home was filled with the crackle of electricity due to my grandfather’s insistence on keeping ten or so generators running at all times, the fact that his house was connected to power lines seemingly inconsequential. Great tall spires of lightning rods needled out of the cabin’s roof and he had once told me that they weren’t to keep lightning away from him but to draw it closer.

The effects of my family’s strangeness manifested differently for anyone touched by it. While it had eventually caused my mother to discard language like used trash it was a different sort of beast which had attached itself to my grandfather.

In his youth he was heralded as a prodigy, publishing papers on physics and mathematics at only fourteen. But later in life his genius became to intense for him to bear in a normal fashion, so he isolated himself in this wilderness, bringing along a grudging wife and daughter. Slowly he withdrew from them as well, all in pursuit of his work. He became obsessed with finding one equation which would unify all and reveal all and the rest of his life consisted of waste bins full of failed attempts to chain the world to an equation.

Upon approaching his cabin I knocked heavily on the door and flakes of paint fell on the porch floor. Not expecting an answer and not receiving one I went ahead and entered, pausing to stomp the mud out of the grooves of my shoes.

The house was littered with my grandfather’s obsessions; piles of transistor radios, television sets playing nothing but static, scattered scientific journals and books. And thrown everywhere were sheets of papers containing equations and graphs which covered not only any available desk and shelve space but the floor as well. The only item which spoke of anything other than obsession was a small picture of my grandmother, sepia-toned from aging, which was crudely taped to the refrigerator door with electrical tape.

My grandfather sat on his throne of a decaying arm chair which was slowly losing its stuffing. Wisps of cotton trailed down to the floor to mix with the paper carpet. He sat transfixed watching three different television sets playing broken-signals and static and he did not give any sign that he noticed my entrance.

“Hey.”

Nothing. I went over and touched him gently on his left shoulder, noticing his moth eaten clothes. He shook violently, as if waking from the solipsism of an unintentional daydream.

“Hey, it’s me, I was... you know, I was just seeing if you need anything.”

“Uh-uh,” he grunted, and I knew that he resented me bothering him. I sat for a moment and watched as he continued to stare unblinking at the screens. I could see in his eyes that he had already forgotten my presence, enraptured in those things that only he could see, drawing patterns out of the randomness.

What phantoms and ghost-visages danced before his eyes I never knew.

I turned to leave but upon reaching the door I turned back to look at him again, wondering if I had escaped this thing or if my future was the impending hammer-fall.

He was nestled in the darkness of his home, illuminated only by the electronic glow. The screens’ patterns were reflected on his face and they seemed to alter the lines held there. For a moment his face seemed kinder, lips pivoting upwards in a smile that contained all the warmth that I needed, but the patterns quickly changed and his face returned to normal.

I left him. Drowned man, lost in static, looking for a message with equipment broken and shambled.

Electric lights provide no illumination. Only mirages floating in the distance, beckoning the foolish and the unwary to follow.

It must be so easy to become obsessed with signs and logics that only you can apprehend.

I hope I suffer no such defeat. I will fight it with curses hurled skywards.

What would it be like? Water rushing over your head. Horror must leave at that point, so that all you can do is gaze at the very oddness of it. And very soon you would forget that anything strange was taking place at all.