Demon Box

So he ate supper and went to the cabin. He wouldn’t let me build a fire. Heat bothered his rash, and light was starting to hurt his eyes. So I turned out the light and left him lying there. While we were watching our video tape I couldn’t help but imagine him, stretched out down there in the black and cheerless chill, eyes still wide open, not scratching, not even brooding, really, just lying there.

The movie we were watching was Alien.

The next day Dobbs and I loaded up the pickup for a dump run to Creswell and I went down to stir Patrick up.

“You better bring your bag,” I told him. Again he gave me that you-too-huh-you-fuckin-vampire look, then lifted his duffel from the floor and sullenly swung it up to his shoulder. The harsh right-angle object was no longer outlined through the khaki.

He was so peeved at being hauled away he barely spoke. He got out while we were at the dump unloading and wouldn’t get back in.

“Don’t you want a ride to the freeway?” I asked.

“I’ll walk,” he’ said.

“Suit yourself,” I said and backed the rig around. He stood in the mud and gravel and Pampers and wine bottles and old magazines, the duffel at his side, and watched us pull away, his round gray eyes unblinking.

As I jounced out of the dump I felt those cross hairs on the back of my neck.

The next day he phoned. He was calling from the Goshen Truck Stop, just down our road. He said his poison oak was worse and he was considerably disappointed in me, but he was giving me another chance. I hung up on him.

And last night my daughter said she saw him through the window of the school bus, sitting on his duffel bag in the weeds at the corner of Jasper Road and Valley. She said he was eating a carrot and that his whole face was now painted white.

I don’t know what to do about him. I know he’s out there, and on the rise.

Dobbs and I went carousing this afternoon with ol’ Hunter S. Thompson, who’s up to do one of his Gonzo gigs at the behest of the U of O School of Journalism. We stopped at the Vet’s Club to help him get his wheels turning in preparation for his upcoming lecture—his “wiseman riff” he called it—and we talked of John Lennon, and Patrick the Punk, and this new legion of dangerous disappointeds. Thompson mused that he didn’t understand why it was people like Lennon they seemed to set their sights for, instead of people like him.

“I mean, I’ve pissed off quite a few citizens in my time,” the good doctor let us know.

“But you’ve never disappointed them,” I told him. “You never promised World Peace or Universal Love, did you?”

He admitted he had not. We all admitted it had been quite a while since any of us had heard anybody talk such Pollyanna pie-in-the-sky promises.

“Today’s wiseman,” Hunter claimed, “has too much brains to talk himself out on that kind of dead-end limb.”

“Or not enough balls,” Dobbs allowed.

We ordered another round and mulled awhile on such things, not talking, but I suspected we were all thinking—privately, as we sipped our drinks—that maybe it was time to talk a little of that old sky pie once more, for all the danger of dead ends or cross hairs.

Else how are we going to be able to look that little bespectacled Liverpudlian in the eye again, when the Revolutionary Roll is Up Yonder called?

The Demon Box: An Essay

“Your trouble is—” my tall daddy used to warn, whenever the current of my curiosity threatened to carry me too far out, over my head, into such mysterious seas as swirl around THE SECRETS OF SUNKEN MU or REAL SPELLS FROM VOODOO ISLES or similar shroudy realms that could be reached with maps ordered from the back of science fiction and fantasy pulps:

“—is you keep trying to unscrew the unscrutable.”

Years later another warning beacon of similar stature expressed the opposite view. Here’s Dr. Klaus Woofner:

“Your trouble, my dear Devlin, is you are loath to let go your Sunday school daydreams. Yah? This toy balloon, this bubble of spiritual gas where angels dance on a pin? Why will you not let it go? It’s empty. Any angels to be found will not be found dancing on the head of the famous pin, no. It is only in the dreams of the pinhead that they dance, these angels.”

The old doctor waited until his audience finished snickering.

“More and more slowly, too,” he continued. “Even there. They become tired, these dancing fancies, and if not given nourishment they become famished. As must everything. For the famine must fall eventually on us all, yah? On the angel and the fool, the fantastic and the true. Do any of you understand what I’m talking about? Izzy Newton’s Nameless Famine?”

Dr. Woofner was still asking this straight at me, black brows raised, giving me the full treatment (like a cop’s flashlight, somebody once described the analyst’s infamous gaze). I ventured that I thought I understood what he was talking about, although I didn’t know what to call it. After a moment he nodded and proceeded to give it a name: