Notes (X)

I had another scotch on the rocks and poured another one now. God bless Johnnie Walker, or Mundum bless, or whatever. Keep walking. The task is never done so you just keep walking and keep drinking. I’m gonna tell the Cafe all this stuff, it’s going to work, I just need to edit later but for now keep walking.

So the next part I guess is when it was a bit after midnight and we were all tiring. Salby had stopped making sense. We must have been somewhere around page 100. I think Marsh was reading when we stopped. Let’s say Marsh was reading. And he was reading maybe, here, let me copy paste a bit from page 100

“clest mmdm clest abup with Tommy boysmoke fun with the kidly mddm and more? For it is said that mmembmp. Un in the boy we had a deep palaver canyon, down in clover depths, with precious mineral deposits ridging a central shaft about yea deep and lit only by the luminodes upob from cletes understurm. So then aleatory wreath of charles cadaver was levered above the main netting spread across the wide chasm, his blood as chrism for the new vile chiasm of cletes bull hide rutted formal establishment, arena for us n em to fight oer the bits of charles severed pinnae eyelids and if we so willed even the bit of protruding duodenum, such a cornocopia. such breaksmoke mmp lower in there, so far down the various species of colourated gemstones and he copious luscious calcite deposits, delicious for us n em, pull ord quaver. For itissaid that pull ord quaver, but said among the luminodes that lurk vile and malodorous among the unspeakable folds in the lurleen flesh of clete, master of arms, esquire. selah, it is said, ironical, u n em know, since after all who can say how deep that shaft plunges and thus which correlates it may render among the mites and motes in the intestinal cavities of clete et al, esteemed gentlemen, and so, pull ord quaver indeed, but only, fealk our words, for those not perceiving the long undertow. undertow in full sway, the reticulation of neeting swayed this way and that and the flecks of new seed climbed atop it and among the walls, as mest un know, indeed, clete franz has beckoned and who cannot heed, not us, we swing with the reticulation, mm full indeed, gentlemen.”

So we’d been reading a good ten pages of this shit at this point. We’d been taking it in stride at first but we were beginning to spend less time reading and more time staring at one another, hollowly, wondering what the hell we had gotten ourselves into. I mean, what that guy, Paul, me, had gotten us into. What was the point of reading The Northern Caves. It was all shit like that. We were never going to get to the bottom of it and surely not by just doing some sort of ritual recitation thing like we were doing.

But all that, which had been simmering for twenty minutes or so, came to a boiling head when Marsh yawned.

It was a big yawn, the kind of yawn you’d envision him performing in the midst of typing one of his dismissive Cafe posts—a fuck off Err I’m not enough of a dweeb for this shit yawn. He yawned that yawn somewhere in the middle of that kind of stuff I pasted above—imagine it somewhere in the middle of that paragraph and you’ll get the gist. And we all knew what he was getting at. We were tired. It was past midnight. Most of us had been on planes earlier in the day. We should get to bed. Charles and his protruding duodenum could wait. It could all wait.

Someone said they were tired, perfunctorily. Was it me? It might have been me. But the important thing was that Aaron said:

“No.”

It was sudden and loud and it had the fatalism of the bathroom episode and at once I knew that all was not right anymore. I can’t express this properly, not now that I’m halfway through this new glass of scotch, but it was something like, well—that “end of the line” that Aaron had spoken of was back. There was something final facing us, there in the Sheridan household. It had faced Aaron and me in the bathroom, and I thought I’d escaped it, but that false sense of security had lasted but a few hours.

“I’m not going to sleep,” Aaron said. It was an enigmatic remark. Anyone could choose not to go to sleep if they didn’t want to, after all; no one was forcing him. The group, the circle, was merely expressing a—completely reasonable—post-midnight exhaustion.

“I need to keep reading this, now, with you guys,” Aaron said, and his face was newly plaintive. His voice had cracked, a bit, on that sentimental phrase with you guys.

The circle looked at me. Marsh, weary and pitiless. Ken, eager as always to follow the kids wherever their youthful energy led them. Jenny, distinctly uncomfortable, eyes frantically saccading as if trapped in a corner. Kelsey, small and pale and still, but alert, eyes agleam.

“I think,” I said—I’m pretty sure this is verbatim—“I think it’s really important to Aaron that we keep reading, at least for now. He’s having a hard time, and this is important to him. And we’re his friends. So I think we can do that?”

There were nods. Marsh was not among the nodders. He yawned again, conspicuously.

“Maybe we should brew some more coffee,” I said. “Anyone? More coffee?” I was desperately genial. I did my best to radiate hospitality.

“I would like some,” Aaron said. Crisp pleasant Aaron voice, brought to its fullest form by several cups of coffee already drunk. Mundum bless Aaron. Lodestar in the darkness of this deteriorating party.

“I would like to keep drinking coffee,” Aaron said—same tone of voice—“for as long as it takes to finish reading the three thousand six hundred and forty two pages of the extant manuscript of The Northern Caves. I am sorry but as you all can probably tell I am not in an ideal state of mind, currently. I am not feeling entirely stable these days, I’m sorry to say, and I think that finishing this project, of reading the manuscript of The Northern Caves in its entirety before falling asleep, would be conducive to stability. I apologize for the inconvenience, friends.”

I had stood up, intending to make my way to the counter where the coffee maker was, but now I turned back to the group to assess its response to this monologue. The group was, to a man, staring back at me. I was the appointed interpreter.

“I think,” I said, “that our friend Aaron is having a hard time right now, and we should keep reading, for now. I’m going to set a full pot of coffee brewing.”

I got some grounds from the fridge, filled the pitcher to its brim, poured, nestled a filter into place. Some sort of whispered conversation was taking place behind me.

“If you want to stay up for a long time, I mean,” Kelsey was saying as I sat back down. She was handing something small over to Aaron, who put it, whatever it was, into his mouth.

“Is that safe?” Jenny asked.

“It’s widely prescribed,” Kelsey said. “Shouldn’t be a problem unless you take it chronically.”

“Take what chronically?” I asked.

“Adderall,” Kelsey said, with an impish half-smile.

“It’s my medication,” she continued. “But it makes you stay up. It’s better than coffee. Aaron wants to stay up. I’m helping him.”

“You just gave Aaron drugs?” I asked. I thought back to the bathroom, to the bottle of pills in his hand, pills which he might have taken. My mind instantly conjured visions of emergency rooms and pronouncements of death, and other, parallel visions of an Aaron beyond reason, spinning mad Chesscourt theories on and on into the depths of an unforgiving night.

“Hand me some of that shit,” Marsh said. Kelsey complied.

I glanced at Ken, the de facto Responsible Adult of the group. He was smiling, as if to say: have fun, kids. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t. He was no help. A grown-up Marsh.

“I don’t do drugs,” Jenny said. Kelsey made an appreciative gesture.

“I’ll get you some coffee,” I told her. I wanted Jenny to be comfortable. I did not know how to make this happen.

“Do you want some, GlassWave?” Kelsey asked. Her face was disarming, unassuming. She was forcing nothing on me. Did I want some? It was fine if I didn’t, as the case of Jenny had just proven.

I have just now finished my glass of scotch and there is plenty more in this bottle, Mundum bless Johnnie. I don’t know quite why I did what I did next but what’s done is done. Keep walking.

I guess I was thinking about Aaron, and what he’d said about the end of the line, and about how Spelunk 04! was not going as I’d hoped, and how I didn’t have much but these people, this Cafe. Staying up sounded good. I wanted to stay up with them. I wanted to make amends, to watch over Aaron. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of TNC and its cheap typographical gimmickry, its unsubtle stabs at horror. I wanted to fuck that thing up. I did not want to sleep. I was with Aaron and Marsh and Jenny and, yes, Kelsey too, and I wanted to spend hours and hours with them, days, and I wanted to return to the Cafe with tales of adventure and delight, endless tales. I wanted to make the buzz of the cafe real, to live among the threads. I didn’t have much else. I wanted to go all in.

“Give me two,” I said.

Kelsey palmed me two little orange circles. I got up and poured myself some coffee, which I used to swallow them. I returned to the group.

“Your turn, buddy,” Marsh said to me, with a hint of a grin.

I took the stack. Here we were: Cafe Chesscourt, open past midnight. Stop in anytime. Analyze Salby with the stalwarts. Coffee gratis. Theories and injokes welcome. Home.

An hour passed.

The sense of home, of the Cafe instantiated in space and time, intensified.

It was my turn again, and again, and I was reading:

“Melchior unbound and unbidden unloosed his moorings and shot up and out beyond, and Tom and Sally and Charles watched him fly, agape, and he flew and flew until he hit a pylon of the Plains and died. So much for Melchior.

“‘It’s good to see the body here on the plain’ Sally said ‘because it makes a good separation. Weve all forgotten separation but its all important. Youve got to separate on the one hand the body and on the other hand the flat plain, you see.’

“‘Right you are, sis,’ Tomm said. He looked at the bleak overcast sky and then down at the mutilated Creature and smiled because it was good for separation to occur. ‘Its one of the principles you know of the spire.’

“‘Oh what would we do without that spire Tomm! Oh what would we do without these caves!’ Sally ejaculated.

“‘Lo but Cleanth approaches’ Charles cautioned.

“In the brightness behind the bleak sky was a fierce signal and in the signal was cleanth and in cleanth was somer rex and pulled down he was, out of it all, cleaving higher forces from lower, and good, oh good, oh sally rejoiced and danced upon the corpse of Melchior fallen, a dance of rectitude, full separatrix, glistening in the ersatz dawn brought by cleanth and his men his forces regnant forever impelling and cleaving sky from ground meneath from gynebove piercing into veils beyond veils oh separation the fullness pull us up and redeem us but we are not to be redeemed in it for now because we first must undergo the ninefold transfigurations underwriting the low tone of cleanth matrid and gravid, as it so reads

“CLEANTH OLEAD CLEANTH OLEAD SLAME TODD CLEANTH OLEAD CLEANTH OLEAD SLAME TODD WERE MULL CLEANTH CLEANTH OLEAD CLEANTH OLEAD SLAME TODD EMULSIVE OF THE CLEMS CLEANTH OLEAD CLEANTH OLEAD SLAME TODD”

This incantation went much further down the page and onto the next (and the next) but I chanced a look at the rest of the circle and I saw eyes fixed on me, eyes a bit frightened. I realized that I had been speaking at a fever pitch, nearly yelling.

But I couldn’t help myself. I was excited; I was elated; we were the Cafe; we were open for business; we were solving the riddle of TNC once and for all; we were radiant; we were not the small scuttling humans we appeared to be on city streets, in ill-fitting clothes, with downcast eyes; we were GlassWave and Errant KnightMove and metamarsh and jenni_fur and Sexologian and Ken, who would soon have a handle, for he was one of us.

“Paul,” I heard a voice say, “are you okay?” jenni_fur had said it. Fellow Cafe patron jenni_fur wished to know if I was okay, a noble request, and I was here, ready, to assure her, that I was okay, and indeed I said so in so many words, and perhaps more, perhaps many more.

I believe it was at this moment that what I would later call the separation began.