The Withering

A Subtle Reminder

2007-03-31T11:59:00.000-07:00

As it happened, those three months of my life were pretty uneventful. For the most part, I kept to myself. In fact, my presence in Fair Haven was barely registered. I had little impact on the town and the town had little impact on me. But the Winter house, on the other hand, was not so forgiving. Every day, it sent subtle hints to my sub-conscious, elusive reminders of the stringy boughs that branched about its walls. Most of the time, I was unaware of its delicate impression.

But at night, just before my eyes fell closed and I drifted into slumber, that’s when I felt it: the rot spilling over, the roots climbing the walls of the house, seeping through the fibers of the wood and creeping their way furtively into the frayed strands of my thought.

At the time, however, I was so focused on just making it through the summer that I didn’t quite realize the obscure effect the house was having on me. And in the end, it wasn’t until I returned to Boston that the full effects of a long summer spent in that house - of an entire lifetime interred there in that wintry casing - finally became apparent.

Arriving back in the city that September afternoon, as I stepped inside the door of my apartment I expected to feel a surge of relief wash over me. I waited for it; stayed stony still at the doorway in anticipation of it, but it never came. Though my summer in Fair Haven had passed without incident, it had left me decidedly on edge, and I had hoped that coming back to Boston would garner some welcome reassurance. However, within seconds of my return that hope had already abandoned me. Immediately, my fingers released their tense grip and my bag dropped heavily to the floor, thudding gruffly on the carpet. The sound jolted me into movement. I stumbled to the couch where I sat, vacantly staring at the walls.

And there I lingered for the longest while. Evening fell, its failing light bathing me in a shadow of bewilderment as an air of deep disquiet filled the room.

The Silent Witness

2007-03-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

Within days of my hesitant return, I started a job at the local video store in Fair Haven’s small town center. It was all I could think of to lessen the cruel longevity of three whole months at home, and as it turned out, Karl’s Video Shop did prove an enjoyably effective diversion.

The manager of the store, Karl McIntyre, was a local businessman in his early thirties, and he and his wife had been living next-door to the Winter family for almost five years now. Most recently, Karl had become the proud father of twin boys. On my first morning back in Fair Haven he spotted me as I was sneaking out of the house early morning - a desperate attempt to avoid breakfast accompanied by the rigid glare of the reverend.

I almost didn’t hear Karl calling out to me - the shrill sound of a newborn’s cry spilled brashly from the open door of the McIntyre home as he hurried down the driveway with what looked like a permanent shrug of perplexity dragging on his shoulders. Exasperation smothering Karl’s weary face, his glance shifted awkwardly from the bedroom window where most of the noise seemed to be coming from, before finally resting on me.

He explained the situation quickly: he needed someone to help out at the video store while he and his wife came to terms with the new members of their family. The work was undemanding and it paid minimum wage.
“You’d be doing me a huge favor,” Karl implored. “Rachel and I really got our hands full here. I’ll stop by the shop as often as I can but really, it’s nothing you can’t handle.”

I glanced back at the Winter house, its tired frame standing deathly still in comparison to the burst of new life rippling through Karl’s home at that very moment.

“Thanks Karl,” I said, decisively. “I’d be glad to help you out. In fact, you’re doing me a huge favor too.”
A surge of elated relief squeezed over Karl’s exhausted features.

Karl hadn’t lied - the work was anything but demanding, and that summer quickly turned into a movie house vacation. A constant supply of theatrical delights lay at my willing fingertips, ready to grab hold of my yielding attention. Any interruption was brief and occasional as the store managed only a sparse set of patrons. And with Karl ever an infrequent visitor, my pursuit of filmic diversion went gloriously unchallenged.

Indeed, so great was the distraction of the video store that it was only as I walked home that I remembered where I was headed, my feet coming to a grinding halt as thoughts of the Winter house suddenly occurred to me. Most days, rather than follow the straight path home, I opted for a detour. It only delayed the inevitable, but as far as I was concerned, the less time I had to spend in that house the better. And so, happily I wandered down to the lake just as the town center was shutting its doors, the sound of keys locking and shutters falling, drowsy chatter and shuffling feet, grazing my half aware ears as I walked the grassy path that diverted my course to the lake.

Once there, I stood in deep repose, a silent witness to the dying embers of sunlight fading in the water. I watched until the mirrored pool disappeared with the onset of darkness, and then began my journey home.

I counted it a good day if I’d managed to miss dinner, but I wasn’t always that lucky. Often I was forced to endure the unbearable - a meal punctuated by the reverend’s persistent lecturing. Every evening it was the same thing. I needed a plan, apparently. I couldn’t expect to be simply handed a job after graduation. These things had to be well organized, decisions had to be made, because I could be damn sure that he wasn’t going to tolerate a slacker for a son.

Determined not to rock the boat, I listened to him grudgingly, but with only one thought at the back of my mind: the only plan I had that summer was to get through it, one agonizing day at a time, until I returned to Boston - hopefully in one piece.

Going Home

2007-03-28T06:14:00.000-07:00

The summer before my final year of college began I went home, back to Fair Haven. I had been back on a number of occasions since I’d moved to Boston - weekends here and there, a few days during the holidays. But not since I’d left for college three years previously had I spent such a lengthy spell in Fair Haven with only my parents and the Winter house for company.

It was an onerous prospect, one which doused all my thoughts with a bitter aftertaste and sent darts of apprehension bursting through my core as that final semester came to a heady close.

In spite of my unease, I had little option but to go. It had been my mother's idea. She had called me late one night to make an earnest appeal on behalf of her loneliness - though she would never admit to this. Instead, she claimed that this summer would be my last opportunity to spend some time at home. Next Summer I’d get a job, settle down in Boston for good, who knows when I’d make it back to Fair Haven then? It was only a suggestion, she had said, she was only thinking of me.

But there was a hint of desperate pleading in her tone, its stain was undeniable, her sorrow so insistent that it caught hold of me, wrenched a reluctant acceptance from my begrudging throat, and I went back; took one last tentative step onto the arid sands of home.

A Cruel Monotony

2007-03-26T05:43:00.000-07:00

Often, I escaped to the harbor. Whenever things got too hectic, too frenzied, the waterfront offered a gentle diversion from the chaotic hub of the city.

Many long hours I spent wandering up and down that peer with an aimless sort of concentration about me, as if any kind of slow, monotonous behavior might force the hand of time to linger.

And gradually, time suffered a slowing down, just as I had hoped it would. But to my dismay, this brought with it a new torment, as now, rather than hoping to spur time onward, I became increasingly obsessed by a need to pull it back.

I couldn’t bear the thought of semesters ending because their conclusion meant only one thing: a return to Cedar Hill, to the Winter house. And every time I went back there I started running again, racing through my time at home until a new escape arose with the commencement of another semester in Boston.

Only then could I return to the harbor, to the eternal ocean deep. There where I was comforted most; there where the boats lived as I did: heading out to sea, only to return to port.

It astonishes me still how long I continued in this vein. All I was ever conscious of was time and how much slow passing was left to me before I would be forced to accelerate once more. But that was time’s great deception: I supposed it would pass any way that I let it. That it was I who controlled time and not the contrary. And it was only in my final year of college that I began to feel otherwise, to sense the cruel monotony of seeing nothing else, the cold isolation of thinking of nothing else.

And little by little an unsettling thought crept after me: I knew only the tedium of time’s solitary company.

Bustle and Peace

2007-03-25T07:01:00.000-07:00

Many things had changed for me in Boston, but many more remained untouched. The very first day I arrived in the city, sitting at the wide open port of Boston harbor I
felt my perception alter, felt the clenched fist that had held me in its grasp for so long, loosening its grip into an open palm.

There was something about the vastness of open space that induced a soft untying of the knot in my chest.

The sea posed an eternity I’d never before been aware of, and I thought it only right that I should savor every moment of this new found freedom, feel the very essence of the open air as it breathed about me. And for me it was freedom; at least I thought it was.

Back then, the city struck me as gloriously dissimilar to the small town experience. My solitary demeanor, which stood out so markedly in Fair Haven, went largely unnoticed here. Boston itself became like a new glass case for me to live in, all the better than the previous one, for this one was real. Here I could be free of the lie that had plagued me in Fair Haven, for the anonymity offered by a busy metropolis protected me - it ensured the lie would not be discovered. Free to live amongst the outside world, I settled quietly into my new life, maintaining always a focused distance from the people and the world around me.

I existed only on the cusp of life, my thoughts invariably occupied, inhabited by something else, by something other than me, and by some time other than my own.

Boston surrounded me with an inconspicuous air, had a de-sensitizing sort of effect on me. The distraction was too great to refuse: it lured my willing feet in and I lost myself in its foreign seas. Deep in the city’s core there gushed a constant current of sights and sounds to swamp me, to bathe me in a shroud of concealment. And it was the dichotomy of the place that intrigued me most; how it defined itself in opposites.

The bustled activity of bars and coffee houses had the same hypnotic effect as the soft lilting of the Charles River. The soaring sight of skyscrapers shifted abruptly to the towered peaks of gothic church steeples. While the gray concrete of building and street morphed freely into the green grass of park and tree.

The city impressed a sweeping aura on me, that somehow it could be all things at once. And while it encapsulated all things, I could be none of them.

I could sink into an ambiguous background where rather than living in the city, the city lived in me. There was a life in there somewhere - my life. But in amongst all that bustle and peace, where was I to find it? It quickly got lost, and so did I, in the smell of coffee beans and sea salt.

Unfamiliar Worlds

2007-03-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

I aimed to spend as little time on campus as I could muster. Classes, however, often got in the way of this objective, and many an instance I found myself staring despondently into a barren table as one of my professors delivered their insipid lectures.

My classics teacher, Professor Stevens, recognized my weak attempt at feigned interest as early as the first day of class. “Your thoughts please, Mr. Winter,” I heard him bellow half way through the lecture. The mention of my name sparked a sudden surge in my awareness and I jerked awkwardly in my seat as I struggled to compose myself. He had been discussing the range of classicists we would be reviewing over the year to come, that much I’d gathered at least, and so I offered him my thoughts on the selection, as he’d requested.

But as I was speaking, the professor began to scratch irritably at his graying beard, his frustration growing with each passing syllable. I was sure that somewhere in his head an imaginary black mark was being crossed against my name. It seemed he’d been looking for the polite answer, the one that failed to deviate in any way from his own, superior opinion. He called me back after class that day to offer a friendly word of advice: “If you want to get far in this class, Mr. Winter, you’ll do well to heed my opinion and not attempt to undermine it.”

I couldn’t help but scoff, though it aggravated him all the more. “I don’t think the likes of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky would agree with that sort of single minded analysis of their work,” I insisted. He glared at me - another black mark crossed against my name. I left quickly before I acquired any more, while in future, Professor Stevens refrained from inquiring after my opinions.

My relationship with other professors followed a similar pattern, but for one or two who enjoyed the challenge of a dissenting voice. In most cases, I was argumentative in class purely for the sake of my own stimulation, for I loathed being told what to read and how to analyze it. Couldn’t help but approach the rigidity of curriculum and reading lists with little more than contempt. To my mind, the library was the only redeeming feature on campus, the one place where I felt boundless and unrestricted.

In between classes, and after too, I withdrew to the respite of the stacks, often abiding there long into the dark night, seeking out unfamiliar worlds within the pages of books, books that no one had recommended, books I’d never heard of before.

The vast halls of Boston City University library were transformed in an instant into the diminutive haven of my Winter house bedroom, and poised in a quiet corner at the back of the hall (preferably beside a window where some welcome offering of natural light could illume the pages) I gradually worked my way through an ambitious pile of select titles, anything that had sparked a measure of slight intrigue in me. But for all that time I spent in concentrated study, a small corner of my attention was continually given to monitoring the clock at the far end of the hall as it counted down the minutes till closing.

The light grew dimmer in the great library hall as evening wore on and the room emptied - table lamps switching off one by one as each person left, time passing as a gradual fading of light.

And later, when finally I arrived back at the apartment, more often than not I was greeted by a noisy gathering of Eric’s friends. Strangers stumbled around me, the campus bleeding of its occupants, their drunkenness an effective aid to the ongoing pretense, while I held one eye firmly on the window scene, watching intently the darkening and the brightening of the sky, one day at close and another at dawn.

The Hooded Wood

2007-03-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

As those first few weeks in Boston progressed, it became increasingly clear that the college experience was to be of little interest to me. Campus life became much like an empty frame I stepped in and out of - it housed a certain aspect of my life, but it would never encompass it. Its initial draw as an escape route was quick to diminish, and soon I felt this narrow campus world descending rapidly into an exercise in the banal.

In an effort to counter this, I studied literature. Though the reverend dismayed at my choice, no amount of heated argument would force me into a world of business or law or anything else. The written word engaged a great fondness in me, in a way that nothing else could. After all, I had spent much of my young life immersed in its dreaming, and now, once again I was content to live in the cradle of its reverie, for it made drowning out the bothersome hum of campus life all the easier.

Eric had been right - the grounds of Boston City University admitted little semblance of real life and often reflected only a mirage of youthful experience, a playful veneer that dutifully hid the reality existing behind the eyes of its students. Our years at university would prepare us for the real world, we were told. But in actual fact, college was merely a brief pause in that real world, an act of pretense that we all readily participated in.

Like a hooded wood entombed in the bowels of a man-made city, I felt as though the college grounds sheltered me unnecessarily, shielded me in a way I didn’t need or want to be, and so I committed to the charade with notably less zeal than my fellow students.

There were days during that first semester when I just sat and watched them as they ambled hesitantly by, each of them congregating in their chosen groups, subsuming into a general appearance that perhaps described a particular identity they wished to portray. But I listened as each party passed and all their talk, so full of arrogant adjectives and plagiarized assertions, and from one group to the next it all sounded much the same to me. It didn’t take me long, however, to block them out completely.

I bunkered down, erased them from my perception, this moving throng of people like a hovering line of ghosts the rest of the world forgot.

The Wanderer

2007-03-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

Despite Eric's previous assurances that I’d have the apartment mostly to myself, I was still amazed at how little I actually saw him during those early days at apartment number seven. Indeed, I could have been living alone for the scant amount of time he spent there.

Eric simply insisted he was taking full advantage of the college social scene, which was no doubt a reasonable and probable explanation. But for some reason, I always felt there was more to it than that. As it turned out, it wasn’t until some months later that my suspicions were finally confirmed, and the enigma surrounding Eric Solomon slowly began to unfurl.

For the moment, however, he remained an elusive wanderer, his continuing tendency to abscond making him remarkably easy to live with.

But this wasn’t the only reason that Eric and I found ourselves naturally attuned to one another’s ways, for despite the fact that we had quite differing dispositions, we each respected the nature of our opposing worlds - Eric didn’t interrupt my need for quiet repose and I didn’t interfere with his many social pursuits. In this respect, my new living situation was the perfect arrangement.

Without really knowing it, I’d gone in search of something entirely different to the intense atmosphere of the Winter house, and with Eric, and with the city of Boston too, I’d found just that.

Here I was free to come and go as I pleased. I had the entire city on my doorstep and no one to answer to, a whole new world to lure me into distraction and nothing to remind me of the life that had led me here.

Moving In

2007-03-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

The following day I arrived at my new living quarters, a bag of clothes on my back and a suitcase full of books dragging on my tired arms. I was carrying everything I had brought with me from Fair Haven and although it wasn’t much, for me it was all I needed.

A scribbled note on the door greeted my arrival. “Welcome to the palace,” it read, “See you when I see you - Eric.” Good thing he’d given me a key the day before, I thought, as I shuffled inside and set my bags down on the floor. I was surprised to find the place reasonably tidy. Even the cardboard boxes had been cleared away, but a brief glance at Eric’s room confirmed my suspicion - a column of boxes had been piled rather haphazardly in the corner, most of which were still firmly sealed.

I immediately set about unpacking my things, determined to feel like I was actually here, in my own place at last. I hung up some of my clothes, untangling a wiry mesh of hangers as I went, while the rest I threw in a pile for laundry. Next, I carefully unpacked my collection of books, lining them neatly along the window ledge and underneath it on the floor. I made up my bed, even went to the store to stock up on essentials - milk, coffee, bread, cereal - all of which had been strangely absent in the kitchen. The refrigerator contained only half a six pack and some old cheese, and there was a bottle of whiskey in a cupboard just recently opened.

When I got back from the store, I made myself a sandwich and sat at one of the windows in the living room, gazing out absent-mindedly over the frenzied activity of evening rush hour.

Darkness set in and I kept watching, the flashing of traffic lights and the bursting of car horns fusing together to form a fascinating kaleidoscope of chaos, the effect of which gradually lulled me into sleep.

It was three days before I saw Eric again, at the apartment anyway. I spotted him on campus once, but only from a distance. When he did finally turn up, curiosity got the better of me and I asked him where he’d been, trying my utmost to sound casual and not too intrusive. But Eric only smirked at the question. “Where wasn’t I?” he replied, relishing the opportunity to evoke a sense of mystery about himself. It was to become something of a mantra for him, that particular reply of his.

But I often got the feeling that the truth was never quite as intriguing as he might have me believe.

A Great Reprieve

2007-03-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

In terms of accommodation, Eric's Corey Street apartment wasn't much to speak of and I doubt I would have had any difficulty finding something a little more welcoming - had I looked around that is. But I felt no desire to search elsewhere. The bad décor and the minimal appliances didn’t concern me much. I was more interested in who I might be forced to share an apartment with, and those few simple words from Eric - 'you’ll have the place mostly to yourself' - were all the convincing I needed.

I headed straight back to Billy’s place, eager to pack my belongings together in preparation for the move. By the time I arrived back in the North End it was late in the evening and my brother’s two-story house lay dark and empty. Billy had become something of a workaholic in Boston and I had no doubt he was still tied to his desk at the office.

Stepping inside, I switched the hall light on, its yellow glow igniting the house with a mark of occupancy and steering the initial veil of darkness up towards the peak of the stairwell. I decided I’d call Billy right away, give him the good news - I’d be out of his hair by tomorrow. But his response to my new living arrangements came as something of a surprise to me, for instead of wishing me luck with an obvious expression of relief in his voice, he paused in dismay, and breathing heavily down the phone line, he mumbled: “You’re leaving already?”

His tone sounded so unbearably wounded that it sparked a sorry picture in my mind: Billy sitting alone on the other end of the line, encircled by the pale light of his desk lamp and surrounded by a flock of vacant desks bathed in absent shadow. Finally, I was forced to remind him that my living here was only ever meant to be a temporary situation. “Of course,” he agreed at last, shaking off his surprise and doing his best to sound detached and resolute.

But he turned painfully quiet then - in spite of himself - and he hung up shortly afterwards.

I had to admit, I was glad to be leaving Billy’s place behind, to be breaking out on my own for the first time. Billy had relocated to Boston a couple of years previously to work as a journalist for a local newspaper, and when the time came for me to fill out college applications, Boston City University seemed as good a choice as any. The fact that I could avoid the insular tone of campus life by staying with Billy only added to the appeal. But after only a couple of weeks of living with my older brother, that appeal was already wearing thin.

It frustrated me how insistent Billy was in maintaining a close link with home. I hadn’t realized it when I was still in Fair Haven, didn’t really notice how often he came home on weekends, how many phone calls he made during the week. But I guess it made sense for him; he hadn’t created much of a life here in Boston. He had his work, his home. That was about it. It seemed to console him to retain some sort of connection with Fair Haven, and with our parents, in a way that I would never fully understand.

Boston was my great reprieve. I had escaped at long last and I didn’t want to be constantly reminded of what I’d left behind.

Corey Street

2007-03-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

As we strolled the two short blocks to Eric’s Corey Street apartment, I shuffled quietly alongside him, only half listening as he happily listed the many and varied advantages of living off campus. I remembered now where I’d seen him before – freshman orientation a couple of weeks previously. How could I have forgotten? In a room full of fresh faced enthusiasts Eric’s inevitably stood out. His scruffy appearance made him seem older than everyone else and there were lines etched deeply into his troubled forehead, lines that no one else seemed to have.

Sitting a couple of rows in front of me at orientation, Eric had sprawled back lethargically in his seat and seemed wholly disinterested in everything around him. I doubted whether he’d sit through the line of tedious speakers to come, but he did. He stayed right till the very end and hobbled jadedly out of the auditorium along with everyone else. He had surprised me that day.

But that was before I knew him. That was before I knew anything of the wealth of contradictions that Eric Solomon carried around with him on his over-burdened shoulders.

Eric’s conspiratorial dialogue persisted all the way to his building and beyond, echoing wryly throughout the cold stairwell as we made our way up to his second floor apartment. We came to a final stop outside door number seven. Up and down the hallway an eerie silence prevailed. Eric put it down to the early afternoon hour. The building was rent out almost entirely to students, he explained, who at this time of day were either in class or still asleep.

It was dark inside. A pair of dismal curtains were draped untidily over both windows in the main living area. Eric snatched them open, sent a circle of gray dust swirling in the beam of light that filtered through the grimy glass panes. Daylight revealed a hoard of cardboard boxes littering the floor, encircling the sparse and mismatched furniture. Some had been opened and partially unburdened of their contents; others remained untouched and tightly sealed.

Eric gave an unapologetic shrug of his shoulders. “Haven’t had much time to unpack yet,” he remarked.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“About a month. As you can probably tell, I don’t exactly spend a lot of time here.”
“No?”
“No,” he insisted, shifting slightly on his feet. “I’ve got a lot of friends in the city - I don’t always make it home. I visit my parents at the weekend too… sometimes.”
He paused and stared awkwardly into the floor, thoughtfully twirling the small silver band on his left index finger. At last he looked up. “On the plus side, it means you’ll have the place mostly to yourself - if you take it that is.”

I took a brief tour of the apartment. The kitchen was unassuming to say the least. A strew of used dishes dotted the sink, a worn out refrigerator buzzed and chugged in the corner. The bedrooms were equally snug with just enough room to hold a bed and a small wooden wardrobe. Back in the living room, the television appeared to be working just fine. The twin windows looked out onto Corey Street and a line of noisy traffic.

I turned to Eric with a satisfied smile: “I’ll take it.”

The Gates of Freedom

2007-03-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Boston. The fall.

“Looking for a way out already?”
A pair of earnest eyes leaned in to meet mine.
“I don’t blame you. This place is like a prison. It’ll consume you whole if you let it. A place like this makes you forget, you see. You lose your perspective. Forget that there’s a whole other world out there beyond these suffocating walls.”

Squinting in the acute glare of the crisp sunlight that was pouring at a tilt over the pebbled campus courtyard of Boston City University, through dazzled eyes I glimpsed the ragged frame of a young male student hovering languidly at my side. His face seemed vaguely familiar to me.

“I’m telling you,” he continued, “freedom doesn’t exist in here. It only exists out there.”
I followed the line of his outstretched arm as he pointed directly at the exit gates on the far side of the courtyard. My confused glance shifted between his fixed expression and the lofty iron gates.
“Rented accommodation,” he explained. And he nodded to the notice board in front of me which was littered with advertisements, all of them offering rooms to rent. “Like I said, I don’t blame you for looking for a way out of this place. It’s like a prison, an artificial prison.”
“Oh... right,” I acknowledged, glaring back at the notice board. To my surprise, I hadn’t even noticed the advertisements or their contents. Too busy whiling away the last few stubborn minutes before my next class began. I must have stared right past them.

“You couldn’t pay me to live on campus,” the freshman went on, barely pulling out the words before a tired yawn engulfed his face. He cast a disgusted glance at the stream of students passing by. “I mean, look at these people. I bet half of them barely step outside campus at all. There is nothing else to them, nothing but this self-contained little village.”
An expectant pause followed and I offered a polite concurrence. “Yeah… I don’t live on campus either. I’m crashing at my brother’s place. It’s in the North End. Just temporary.”

He nodded, pleased, his eyes springing open and sparking into life and bringing new light to his dull complexion. Spurred on by my agreement, he continued his fervent lamentation on the pitfalls of campus living. “Look at everyone running to class as if their life depended on it. It’s like I said, freedom doesn’t exist in here. How can it? It’s a counterfeit world. But try telling that to any of these people… ”

I peered over at the black iron gates as he spoke. Suddenly they developed an ominous sort of appearance and despite the fact that they stood open, I felt strangely incarcerated by their presence alone.

But as soon as I acknowledged it, I shook the notion off, for although I admired this student’s fervor – appreciated his opposing will, too – my opinion of the college experience just wasn’t quite as conspiratorial as his. Although I had to admit, in the few short weeks I had been attending classes, already I had found myself considerably less enamored by the university experience than most other recent campus arrivals. But the reasons for my indifference were rather more simple, for as far as I was concerned, this blinkered life just wasn’t my world. I preferred that place beyond the gates, the place this fellow freshman of mine referred to as freedom.

“The way I see it,” he concluded, “we’ve got four years. Four years before life overtakes us. Prison will come soon enough. I intend to enjoy my time here, before it all turns against us.”

His voice turned quieter as he finished, much less determined than the rest of his talk. I noticed the contradiction in his words: how he saw a prison in here where life didn’t exist, and a prison out there where life did exist. The freedom he was looking for was nowhere to be found.

As he fumbled around in his backpack, I took note of his appearance: torn jeans, crumpled shirt, his face darkened by a rough stubble, his hair matted and disheveled. I guessed he hadn’t made it home the previous night. Around us, the corner courtyard, which neatly enclosed the science and arts buildings at the back end of campus, was beginning to clear. A last spray of stragglers made their way hurriedly up the stony steps at my side. I stole a tentative glance at my watch – it was after three. I was late.

Finally, he found what he had been searching for and pulled a small piece of card out of his tattered backpack.
“By the way, Eric Solomon,” he said, offering his hand.
“Jack Winter,” I replied.
“So, Jack,” Eric said, pinning the card on the notice board. “You interested?”

Future Unknown

2007-03-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

To this day, I still don’t know what it was about the metronome that beguiled me so. All I can say is that it seemed to plant an idea in my head, the perception that I could somehow make time pass more resolutely by simply monitoring the accelerated motion of the dial. Foolish as it may seem, I was utterly convinced of this notion, had no reason to doubt it, for whenever I held that metronome in my eager hands, time invariably seemed to gallop.

It comforted me to see the dial, to know that by its measure, morning would surely come sooner and the house would once again be quiet. But in spite of the solace it offered, it wasn’t long before this practice of monitoring the passing hours had completely overwhelmed my thoughts.

And as it did, the glass case continued to dim. And the world outside grew darker, edging farther and farther away as I paid it less mind.

It was surprisingly easy to forget it. Even my own circumstances fell beyond the reach of my concern as I became increasingly preoccupied by this desire to hasten time. Initially, all I had wanted was to quicken the onset of a new morning. But soon my thoughts expanded, my actions developed a greater purpose, and now I imagined myself being propelled swiftly onwards to some distant future, to some far-reaching place where life would be entirely different from the suffocating walls of the Winter house.

To where this would take me, I hardly knew. The details mattered little to me. My sole discernment was that the future was a place of options, possibilities. A place where I could choose what my eyes would see, what my ears would hear. And that was enough for me, more than enough. All I had to do was wait for it to come.

Every day, I lived with this thought, constantly abiding alongside a desperate need to get to the next place somehow faster than time would allow. Always, I was waiting – for school to be over, for the clock to turn five, for morning to dawn, for Saturday and the respite of a piano lesson to come.

Time was simply too slow for me. It refused to keep up with my sprinting feet, which in my mind were soaring on ahead of it. So I made it go faster; lived one step farther and sooner than everyone else. I wanted to run from each grade to the next, from junior high to high school, high school to college. And I suppose college was the ultimate goal for me, that long sought final leap into freedom. It seemed to be as far away from home as I would ever get. And it stood in eager waiting as the place where time could finally sustain a slowing down.

Piano Sounds

2007-03-13T06:40:00.000-07:00

As I got older and increasingly accomplished at piano, I found comfort in playing through the reverend’s outbursts. It has been Mrs. Liebovitz’s idea, in an indirect sort of way. She was ever at the ready with a helping hand on offer – didn’t have to extend her arm to do it either – and at the end of her lessons I always returned home blanketed by her gentle reassurance. The Winter house didn’t seem so powerful when I had Mrs. Liebovitz’s voice with me. I stored her words in secret; kept them safe in a place of high prominence within the caverns of my young mind.

And that way, as I edged warily home, the rot that laced the frame of the house, drowning my family with its unquenchable despair, appeared altogether less dominant.

When I first got the idea to play over the sound of my enraged father, I had been with Mrs. Liebovitz earlier that day, was sitting in her kitchen at the end of the lesson, feeling as I always did in Mrs. Liebovitz’s house, as if I’d been transposed to an alternate existence. Saturday’s piano lesson was the one time I ever felt completely free of the Winter house’s seclusion. At school or at church its smothering hand seemed to steal after me, but here it loosened its grip. Here, Mrs. Liebovitz stepped inside the glass case to meet me, and for a brief while, that wall of caged glass seemed to disappear.

Now, as I listened to Mrs. Liebovitz muttering away to herself while she darted about her dinky, pale pink kitchen, the Winter house, though just a couple of blocks away, felt like a thousand miles from here. When she finally brought her abbreviated steps to a halt, she slumped down in a chair, took a satisfied gulp of her coffee and leaned in towards me.

“You’ve been quiet today,” she noted. I nodded. It had been a bad week; a flurry of images flashed over my eyes. Avoiding her discerning glare, my eyes sank into the empty table in front of me and she promptly changed the subject. Or rather, she altered her approach to it. She had a suggestion to make, she informed me. A proposal in fact, and it was this: that I could share a bond with the great composers that we had studied, and they with me.

“It is possible, Jack,” she said with a glint of intrigue in her eye. “There is an endless supply of empathy to be found in the chords and the pieces you play. All you have to do is listen carefully enough and the sounds will invoke their feeling in you.”

I scoffed at the remark. I was thirteen, I told her, in case she had forgotten. But she simply smiled in reply, a ‘you’ll see’ sort of smile. And that night, as I struggled to drown out the commotion that was coming from downstairs, I did see.
I turned the keyboard’s sound down low and began to play. Something bold and chaotic it was, and as soon as my fingers touched the cool white keys, I knew Mrs. Liebovitz had been right. It was just like she had suggested - the music seemed to understand, to express a kind of accord with the prevailing tone in the Winter house at such a moment of torment.

I felt consoled by its stormy sound, as though it voiced something inside me that I couldn't let out.

And it was for that exact reason, for the feeling of release it offered, that after that night I turned to my piano with increasing frequency. Time and again I would find myself banging away at the keys, my hands seized by a wild trembling, the music pulsing away inside me. The only problem was, more often than not, the piece I played reached its conclusion long before the reverend had reached his, and I was left then with no other alternative but to return to the dubious comfort of the metronome.

The Glass Case

2007-03-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

It was with this end in mind, prowling somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious, that I began to withdraw from the world around me, taking gradual but steady retreating steps from the everyday life of Fair Haven. I saw no point in participating in that world. Out there, the Winter family, all of us, we were a lie. No one saw who we really were, or what we really were. Inside Cedar Hill, I at least knew the truth, but out there was just a reminder of the lie.

We couldn’t exist out there, not really. The lie cut us off, separated us from everyone else, or so I believed. And this particular notion struck a deep chord with me. Slowly, an idea began to form in my mind. I imagined myself as having been enveloped by some sort of glass case, a windowed captivity that segregated me from the rest of the town, forcing me to look on enviously at the world outside, carrying on without me. Gazing out from behind those paned walls, I looked upon the manner in which other people lived as if it were an unattainable ideal, all the while convinced that I would never belong to their kind of life.

My only hope was that the glass case would one day dim its crisp reveal of the world around me, so that I might not be forced to see what was missing in my life. I didn’t want to be reminded of how my lot differed from everyone else’s. I preferred not to see it at all. And soon I didn’t see. Soon the glass did in fact dim.

And what was meant to be an imaginary refuge, a way to endure the life I’d found myself in by shielding me from the alternative, quickly transformed into a prison, one which forced me to withdraw only further, deep into the burrows of the despairing Winter house.

As a consequence, my bedroom, my lone spot in the world, quickly became the scene of this self-imposed exile. Every day, I returned from the brief interruption of school and succumbed immediately to its offering of sanctuary. I closed the second shutter on the window and forgot about the world out there, continuing on without me, indifferent to my absence.

Instead, I chose to live in the safe haven of other people’s imaginations, working my way hungrily through an ever-increasing library of books. I listened to piano music while I read; recordings of haunting sonatas assisted my eager flight to the paged worlds, steadied my nerve, too, during those tentative afternoon hours before the clock turned five. And once it did, I would close whatever book I happened to be reading, place it to one side and wait to find out – was today a good day or a bad day? I held my breath every evening as the key turned, expecting to hear that gaping pause, praying that I wouldn’t.

But when it did come, I was ready. I had the metronome firmly in hand and was only too willing to fall under its spell. As soon as the dial commenced its flurried ticking, I was enthralled. It captivated me, devoured me whole, for measured by that simple action of the dial, all those darker moments in the Winter house seemed to pass with a forgiving ease, and time elapsed with a speedy resolve I came to yearn for.

The Rotting Stem

2007-03-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Regardless of all these outward displays of piety, there still came the nights when the reverend would arrive home tormented by some unfounded scorn. There never appeared to be any particular provocation on any given day. The rules of the Winter house were always rigorously abided, but in the end that rarely made a difference. And in my struggle to understand the harsh nature of my surrounds, instinctively I turned to the house for answers.

From the moment we had moved in to Cedar Hill, the house had taken on a vivid role in my young mind, and that role grew increasingly sinister as the years passed and as the days it housed turned darker, its four walls becoming like the fifth member of the Winter family, as potent and compelling in its influence as each of its disenchanted residents.

Grandpa Bill’s words stayed with me, re-surfacing now with renewed conviction, and I imagined those roots he once spoke of as having budded from a venomous seed, the poison from which spilled forth from under the house and tied us all to its rotting stem. As I saw it, the Winter house was locked in turmoil, and so, as the house despaired, so too did my father. The withering roots of those aged walls had infected him with its misery, and he in turn expelled that misery onto those of us around him.

It was a terribly innocent conclusion, of course, but as no one offered an alternative, I was left clinging to my own assumptions for the longest time – long after the naivety of childhood had left me. And despite the falsity I see in it now, back then I held to this idea of the house – of its roots, of its poisonous rotting stem – with unwavering belief.

It wasn’t just a possible explanation, it was the only explanation, and everything that happened in the house after that, I perceived it under the influence of this childish contention. The was only one problem with the conclusion I had reached, which was that it posed no possible solution to the situation.

I could see no way of curbing the potent impact of the Winter house, no way to dispossess the reverend of his anger, and so it seemed the only option left to me was to find some way to endure it.

Tattered Secrets

2007-03-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

While outwardly the reverend continued to exude this devoted, albeit slightly aloof character, his private manner, I was beginning to learn, was something quite different. Still, he did his utmost to maintain the pretense at home too as he gathered the family each evening to kneel in our combined solemnity on the living room floor – my mother, Billy and me – each of us listening with our heads bowed and our eyes lowered, while he recited an assortment of doleful prayers.

Incredibly, he appeared to view this daily ritual as proof of his reverence, glaring proof in fact, adequate enough to persuade even us of his integrity. In reality, he was most likely trying to convince himself of it more so than us, his family, and I suppose all this farce was just his way of insisting that he was the man he claimed to be. And maybe he was even arrogant enough to believe he had us fooled, just as he had everyone else fooled. After all, we never gave him any reason to think otherwise. During every prayer session, without fail we each slipped into the same old passive routine of burying our eyes in the carpet while he glowered over us, his hollow black eyes inflamed by the circle frames of his thick glasses.

How could he possibly have known how transparent it was? We all saw it, this fraudulent cloak of shadows he veiled himself with, but we never let him know it – except for one particular occasion. I was thirteen at the time and while my mother and Billy had grown increasingly submissive with the years, I, on the other hand, had grown more rebellious, in my own mind at least if not in anyone else’s. There was little I could do about my present circumstances, I knew that, was painfully aware of it. But even so, I always felt as though I had something over him – the truth.

If nothing else, I knew what he was. And on this particular night, I decided I was going to remind him of it.

He was nearing the end of the prayer session, and just as he was blessing himself, his wrinkled hands moving with the slow, pious curl of his outstretched arm, I lifted my eyes and dared to meet his glare head on. There was an immediate break in his low measured speech as he caught sight of my bold stare. Unwilling to break from their yielding stance, my mother and Billy kept their eyes fixed on the carpet despite the unusual interruption. It lasted only a few moments, just long enough for him to register my defiance. Then, he turned his head away from me and brought the session to a hasty end, racing through the final words, his voice sunken to a husky whisper.

I held my gaze on him until the very last syllable had escaped his dry lips; I would not let his sanctimonious eyes forget, there was no secret still to keep.

A Fading Spark

2007-03-09T06:18:00.000-08:00

I had never shared a particularly close bond with the Reverend Jim Winter. Neither had Billy, as far as I could tell. Our father was more of a presence in the house than anything else, a distant figure-head, I suppose, but one which had influence over every aspect of life there nonetheless.

As reverend, the people of Fair Haven approached him with a measured level of respect. I sensed their high regard and I suppose I was proud of it, proud of him. But now, the great Reverend Winter had turned into this strange and unsettling enigma. I couldn’t figure out how he could preach with such vehemence, pray with such devotion, and still turn so suddenly from that show of piety into something so terrible. How could he inhabit both of these extremes at the same time? It seemed to me impossible, and yet he performed this charade with surprising ease.

Every Sunday, the Winter family attended our local church where each of us were obliged to look on with false sincerity as the reverend preached to the assembled town. It was unnerving how seamlessly he slipped into the role of moralizer.

Sunday’s service was one of the few times I ever detected a strand of satisfaction in his hardened features, when he had that grating rasp of condemnation in his tone.

It sat well with him, somehow, in spite of its hypocrisy. Always, he commanded a timid respect with that judicial voice of his, which seemed to soar forth from his elevated position, dipping down to strike the rest of us below, curling the nerve ends of the congregation and extracting a wary compliance from them.

But in spite of the guarded respect he obtained from the people of Fair Haven, my father’s detached, superior manner inevitably enforced a distance between him and the rest of the town, and over time this commonly practiced reserve spread to the rest of the family too, my mother in particular. But for reasons unknown to me at the time, she accepted this outcome unquestioningly and with an alarming sense of apathy.

At Sunday’s service she routinely lowered her gaze, purposely avoiding the inquisitive glare of other women in the town. And eventually, she would dissociate herself from old friends too, from any attempt, in fact, to break through the wall of segregation created by my father’s icy demeanor. It was almost as if she had constructed a defensive moat around herself, and to my continual disbelief she seemed oddly comforted by the lonely isolation it imposed.

But that was my mother; that was Meg Winter – a fading spark, just waiting to go out.

The Aftermath

2007-03-07T08:13:00.000-08:00

Everything was different after that; different and the same, for we all carried on as normal. The only problem, as far as I could see, was that normal had acquired an entirely new undercurrent.

All the old ways of the house – like the ban on Billy and me entering the study, or the rule against noise in the house after five – suddenly developed this second, more submissive connotation. And in the weeks and months that followed that night, I came to notice it more and more, how all of my mother’s actions carried this underlying subtext.

It was clear now she only ever had one aim in mind: to placate the reverend’s precarious temperament. Sometimes it worked – he retained his usual gruff and disagreeable disposition, while the rest of us breathed easier in the midst of the respite. But there were other times when my mother’s efforts failed, when the reverend fell into a feverish rage and there was nothing she could do to stop it. The odd thing about it was no one ever spoke of it. The situation was never explained to me and no one ever offered any hope that things might change. Nobody, not even my mother, could find the words that would make this one better. And it was under this spell of silence, where so many things were left unsaid, that angry words and scathing hurts were left to fester.

The pain fermented. And brushed aside, it lurked from then on in every darkened corner of the crumbling sheath that was One Cedar Hill.

What troubled me most was that I’d never seen it before, that I was the last to learn of the potent lie that was marring my young existence, a lie that forced my father to inhabit an ugly dichotomy, the reverse side of which had long been kept a dark secret from me. And now that the secret was fully exposed, I was left to wonder alone at the source of all this turmoil around me. But with the naivety of childhood still very much alive in me, I found myself hopelessly incapable of resolving the two conflicting sides to my father.

In The Beginning - Pt 6

2007-03-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

In the dark hours of early morning, I awoke with a sharp chill rippling down my spine, the ghostly presence of the previous night lingering still in the space around me. Choking on that rasping air, I slid out from underneath the covers and stole away to the kitchen.

The door to the back porch was partly open. I saw him straight away, the reverend, just sitting there, worn out on the steps. For the briefest of moments, I thought the noise that came from him was laughter. But it quickly transformed into a convulsive sob, the sound of which I doubt I’ll ever forget. It was wretched. Like a desperate attempt to restrain the dullest of buried pain. I called out “Dad?” without realizing it. The word just escaped from my throat of its own accord.

He leapt up and spun around, his startled eyes ablaze in the dark, until he remembered himself and the light went out. And his eyes turned cold.

In the moments that followed, we simply looked at one another. I stared up into his anguished face and he stared back into mine. But somewhere in the silence between us, a trickle of sound began to reach me: the distant echo of his cruel bellowing. And a hint of memory began to flash in me: the vision of my mother trembling uncontrollably. The anguish I had seen in his face disintegrated. I saw only desolation in his dead features, and all my pity vanquished.

And that’s when I felt it. That’s when I knew just how profound was my propensity to hate, for my small body was suddenly riddled with the deepest of contempt for him. So intense was the animosity that rocked me, I felt it smoldering at the back of my throat. It engorged me, coursing through my veins with each heavy pound of my heart. I hated him. For what he’d done, for who he was, for all the things he’d changed in my life that night without my consent. I hated him. And he must have seen it in my eyes, for he flinched unexpectedly.

“Get back to bed!” he roared at me, shattering the silence at last. And the ferocity of his command sent me scampering wildly up the stairs. But from then on, he knew and so did I. We both knew what his eight year old son thought of him. And we both knew that neither of us was likely to forget it.

It must have shamed him to realize it – he didn’t utter a word to me for almost an entire week.

In The Beginning - Pt 5

2007-03-07T07:46:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t until the front door banged with a deafening blow that I was broken from my trance. The crunch of stepping feet sounded on the graveled driveway and his car sped promptly away. My watch, which was still curled next to me on the floor, now read eight thirty. I wasn’t sure when it had stopped; didn’t know exactly how it had come to an end. All I knew was that it was over and he was gone. And that time measured by the metronome’s dial had been merciful – it had been swift.

I waited a while, then ventured outside my room. Billy didn’t catch me this time. His door, I saw, was firmly shut, and I crept gingerly down the stairwell. It was dark in the house. Just a single spray of light was slicing through the living room doorway, faintly illuming the hallway as I approached. She was sitting in the far corner of the room, my mother, propped awkwardly on a chair by the window. There was a slight rustle in the air – the sound of her jeans as she struggled to subdue her trembling legs. I couldn’t see her face; the lampshade was too dark, and it cast the light downwards into the wine colored carpet. Besides, she switched the light off as soon as she saw me, plunging the room into total darkness. Outside the window, a distant streetlamp lined the garden with a frosty edging. The leaf tips bore a silver glow, and they lay still in the calm of the cool night. My mother, however, was unaware of the peaceful scene at her side;

a flash of chaos still burned in her fiery eyes.

I inched towards her. A shard of glass crunched beneath my feet as I went. With an unsteady hand extended, I reached out into the darkness to touch her. All I wanted was to calm her nervous shuddering, to somehow make her feel better. But she pushed my hand away. “No,” she croaked, her objection barely audible. “The floor needs sweeping, clear the floor.”

I left. Went searching for a brush and returned minutes later, bending down on hands and knees to clear away the mess he’d made. I pricked my finger on the glass that night, fumbling around in the stinging silence, combing the darkness for the broken pieces. But I said nothing of the hurt. Instead, I let the blood drip down my goose-bumped skin and somehow I felt better for it. Because maybe the pain I was feeling would take some of hers away. And if it didn’t, at least I had found somewhere to focus my own. At least I had found a way to not think about it. And I was to get good at that, in all the weeks and months and years that followed. To not think would soon become a welcome reprieve.

In The Beginning - Pt 4

2007-03-03T12:13:00.000-08:00

I stayed where I was, hunched on the floor, hands shaking, heart pounding, crouched in a ball for what seemed like an eternity. The noise downstairs was unrelenting, and every second that passed seemed like one more second than I could bear. I glared at my watch, dismayed at its tired ticking, at the second hand dragging its heels around a heartless square face. Five thirty seven, it read. But it felt as though an entire lifetime had been stolen from me as I sat there with my arms clasped tensely around my stiff knees. It seemed like hours had passed since I heard the car in the driveway, maybe even days, I told myself. But when I looked to my watch again, it read just five thirty nine.

I couldn’t understand it: how could the minutes be so merciless, so unforgiving? Frustrated, I ripped the watch from my wrist and flung it aside with disdain. What was the point, after all? There was clearly no comfort to be found in the listless passing of time. It was too slow, too languid, too steeped in its own purpose to consider me and my concerns, for I just wanted all this to end, to close my eyes and wake up to a new morning, a quiet morning.

I tried shutting my eyes now, but when I re-opened them I was still here, still imprisoned in the locked jaw of this incessant moment.

And worse still, with my watch abandoned on the floor I no longer had anything to focus on, nothing to absorb my panic-stricken thoughts. And so the terrible noise beneath my feet began to slowly engulf the gaping hole in my attention. Frantically, I scanned the room in search of something, anything that might occupy my idle mind. And soon my earnest stare came to a stop, resting itself at last upon the wooden frame of the dormant metronome that was sitting unassumingly on the desk beside my keyboard.

I had never used it before. The metronome was usually kept in the living room, held its customary place atop the black grand piano. When I started my piano lessons, however, my mother had insisted that I take it. I had tried to explain to her I didn’t need it, that the keyboard measured its own rhythm, but she was adamant I have it all the same. I crawled over to it now and plucked it from the desk before returning cautiously to my fixed spot on the floor.

But just then, I heard his step on the stairs. She screamed. He climbed another step. She screamed again, called his name, pleaded with him to come back. And he stopped. Gripping the metronome’s solid frame, a thin layer of sweat moistened the center of my palms; my knuckles turned a ghostly white. At last he retreated and I released a heavy sigh.

My relief, however, was short-lived, for a storm of bitter words erupted below me once more. Hastily, I turned my attention to the metronome that was clasped firmly in my hands. I peered into it, searching in vain for some vague semblance of solace. But what hope could it offer? Discouraged, I lifted my pale, weak fingers and set the dial in motion. And to my surprise, I found myself immediately ensnared by its pendulant swing. Side to side it went, clocking its steady rhythm like a ticking – only faster. I stared into it, my eyes strangely transfixed, and setting it to a quicker pace, the dial swung faster still. It scurried back and forth with such a frantic haste that it appeared to me like an acceleration of the casual second hand motion that cursed my discarded watch on the floor.

And as my gaze held firm the image, everything around me began slowly to fade away. My harsh surrounds diminishing, all that foul clatter disappeared into a dense fog. All I could hear now was the metronome’s frenzied ticking. And all I could see was the metronome’s flashing dial. I was spellbound.

In The Beginning - Pt 3

2007-03-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

The entire house turned deeply silent then; a cold reserve descended throughout. I remember it so crisply. It felt as though there were lines of icicles suspended in the tense air around me.

With everything so rigidly still, even the faint sound of the key could be heard as it turned in the lock and the front door was opened. And then a strange thing happened: a long pause followed, forty, maybe fifty seconds in all, before the door finally fell closed, accompanied by a thunderous bang. Startled, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I’d never heard that before: a long silent pause and then a loud violent bang. That wasn’t right. Every day, my father returned from work at approximately five twenty five. He shut the door after him with a swift precision, imparting no undue clamor, before quickly retreating to his study. Every day he followed this course of events, down to the smallest footstep. Jim Winter had a routine to uphold and right now it was running disturbingly off course. My recall jumped into over-drive searching for a time when his entrance might have proceeded otherwise, but I found myself arriving at an unsettling loss. Today was different, I conceded. And with that, a pang of anxiety sounded in the tight core of my chest.

I sat, frozen to my spot, listening to the reverend’s footsteps as he galloped passed the study and stormed into the kitchen.

There was a brief silence, but gradually it was broken, the rising din trickling through the floorboards beneath my feet and curling my toes with a creeping sense of unease. An argument was developing below me.

I could make out little of what was being said as my parent’s voices were muffled. Their tone, however, was easily detected: my mother’s marked by a pacifying plea, smooth but with a shrill edge to it; my father’s a booming snarl, full of aggrieved hostility. It shocked me how vicious he sounded. Such raw brutality I’d never known before. Bewildered, I did the only thing I could think of - I waited for it to stop.

It had to stop soon, I told myself. It would stop soon. But it didn’t. It got worse. The reverend’s voice escalated to a roar, and then there came a crashing noise, as if a plate or a vase had been smashed against a wall. I jumped to my feet and scurried over to the door, edging it open as softly as I could. They had moved to the living room now, and with the door open their voices were clearer. I could discern only fragments of the reverend’s wild bellowing, but even then, what I did hear made little sense to me – something about the sacrifices he’d made for this family, that he shouldn’t be made to suffer for them, not at the hands of that man. And then, as if to emphasize the point, there came another crashing sound. Louder this time, and more persistent, one unruly shattering after another.

Across the hall from me, Billy peered out somberly through a slivered chink in his doorway, his wide open eyes glimmering in the dim hallway, as fearful and alert as my own. But unlike mine, there was no element of surprise in Billy’s stare. In fact, there was almost a look of tedium on his face, which was strangely lacking in comparison to the sense of disbelief that was permeating mine. His fixed stare faltered suddenly as he noticed me gazing sorrowfully over at him. At once, he shot out from behind the door and raced over to my room, shoving me backwards as he ran so that I fell to the floor with a harsh thud. We both froze, anticipating a response to the noise, but none came. The commotion downstairs was too great – it drowned us out.

Billy bent over me. “Stay in here and be quiet till it’s over,” he whispered, an air of icy resolve in his tone.

I peered fretfully back at him, bemused at the sudden arrival of all this chaos around me. It was a look he seemed to recognize, for he knelt down then and met my eyes, patting me gently on the shoulder, trying his best to convey some feeling of consolation. But in the end, the hopelessness of it defeated him and he turned to leave, his head drooping despondently to the ground as he tiptoed out. I did what he said. He was my older brother after all, five years older. And I figured that was the reason, the fact that he was older, that was how he knew what to do. But the simple truth was Billy had seen all this before.

In The Beginning - Pt 2

2007-02-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

The house appeared gradually from behind the clusters of willowy trees at both its sides, which on breezy days would stoop and stretch, hugging the frame of the house like a crinkled fan opening and closing. My steps slowed to a hesitant stroll as number One Cedar Hill came into full view. By that point I had been living in the house for almost two years, but still, each time I saw it I was taken aback by the sight of those morose gray walls. The structure of the house was fiercely old; its skeletal sheath seemed to creak and moan under the weight of its previous years, whispers of its long troubled past hidden and untold in the aging floorboards.

Back then, my brother Billy and I thought the house a castle, its stature exaggerated by our child’s eyes. Its previous owner was my grandfather, the Reverend Bill Winter, who had lived alone in the house for years, long after his wife had died and their two sons had left. But despite the departure of most of its occupants, the old man remained, all alone in that big house with so many barren rooms; a chasm of empty space to fill and only one solitary figure to fill it.

“Quiet, quiet now,” he used say as he caught Billy and I running in the halls during Sunday visits. And with his unsteady forefinger against his thin, full of lines lips, he’d warn us: “Don’t disturb the roots of the house.” We never dared ask why, though our imaginations spawned many a theory.

He stayed with the house until the very end, Grandpa Bill, just drifted away in his sleep with no one there to miss his presence in the morning. I wondered if even the house knew he was gone. With his soul escaping in such a tiny corner of it, how were the gaping halls to know?
With Grandpa Bill gone, the house then passed to my father, the Reverend Jim Winter, when he took over as pastor of the town, and the Winter house welcomed its latest residents.

Now, as I approached the house, I spotted Billy on the porch, casually pacing up and down the wooden decking and tossing a ball in the air with a reckless sort of disinterest. He stopped suddenly when he saw me, the ball slipping from his grasp and trailing passed my feet as it bounced clumsily down the steps of the porch. Billy sighed and cast a miserable glance at his watch, for my return meant only one thing: it was after five o’clock. He shot a knowing look in my direction before retreating inside, racing up the stairwell and disappearing behind his bedroom door.

I, on the other hand, made straight for the kitchen where my mother was busily preparing dinner. Perching myself at the head of the table, I delivered her a brief greeting before lunging into a detailed account of my piano lesson. I related everything – from the stories Mrs. Liebovitz recited about her children to the notes she had shown me on her grand piano and the rhymes she had taught me to remember their sequence. Standing at the stove and staring out the window into the back yard, my mother responded to the tale with nothing more than distracted nods and half-hearted reactions. Her attention never failed to wane at this time of day, her focus always vanishing behind a thick glaze that coated her tired eyes and blurred the edges of her close surroundings. Not even the excitement of Mrs. Liebovitz’s house was enough to rescue her from that remote place she withdrew to. Dejected, I gave up mid-sentence and echoed Billy’s footsteps up the stairs.

She called after me as I went, a nervous twitch in her voice: “It’s after five Jack, don’t play on that keyboard for too long now.”

I was happy to see my bedroom, appeased as ever by the presence of the familiar. The oblong window at the foot of my bed was sliced in half, one of its pale white shutters lying boldly open, the other timidly closed, while the toppling stack of fantasy books, myth filled and adventure ridden, remained unsteadily aligned beneath the window sill, all present and accounted for, everything just as I had left it. Until recently, this budding collection of books had symbolized the very core of my young existence, but now in addition to that I had a new keyboard to amuse myself with, and here it was sitting pristinely at my desk, just waiting to be played. I positioned myself before the keys and switched the instrument to on.

At once, Mrs. Liebovitz’s voice sang a chorus in my head, encouraging me to lift my shoulders, straighten my back and arch my fingers into the shape of a claw. Loose wrists dangling over the plate, I went in search of the notes I had learned earlier that day, reciting their names aloud from A to G as my hands glided across the keyboard. I was about to commence my second repetition of this when I heard a car pulling up the driveway. I glanced at my watch as Billy had done earlier: five fifteen. He was ten minutes earlier than usual, I noted, as I switched the keyboard back to off, my practice session arriving at an abrupt close. I was disappointed but equally resigned. The reverend had returned from work and we all knew the rules – he didn’t like coming home to a noisy house.

In The Beginning - Pt 1

2007-02-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

I was eight years old when I discovered how deeply I could hate. Eight years old. It doesn’t seem quite possible. The number sounds too innocent, depicts a soul far too new to the world to know something so ugly, so austere. But my memory tells me different. My memory tells me age doesn’t matter where these sorts of things are concerned.

I’ve tried hard to forget about that day, tried and failed, for the taste of it endures, the scent of it too, and the color. Everything. In the past, I often tended to minimize the incident by reducing the tearing animosity I felt to nothing more than childish scorn, perhaps even a spoiled tantrum. Somehow it felt more natural when coated in those lighter terms, but I struggled to convince myself of their merit. Inevitably, images of that day – the day I learned to hate – would come crashing back to me with the boisterous ferocity of a speeding train, and the feeling that was incurred in my small body all those years ago would return with such a morbid intensity that I just couldn’t escape it – I knew it was real. I knew it was genuine contempt I had felt that day. Just as I know now that I continued to harbor that feeling for many years after, let it fester in the quiet depths of me as I lived from day to day with a potent ill-will for the man who was my father, this terrible hatred, so all-consuming, burning on inside me and searing away at the outer threads of my bruised mind.

It was a Saturday, the day I learned to hate. This much I’m certain of as I had just returned from my weekly piano lesson. My teacher, Mrs. Liebovitz, strolled alongside me as we walked the short distance between her house and mine, our arms linked loosely like an interlocking pair of horseshoes.

That summer in Vermont was as bright and sticky as ever; the hot oppressive air breathed down heavily upon the town of Fair Haven, transforming the stretches of grassland into lime colored crunch.

We ambled along at a leisurely pace, Mrs. Liebovitz and I, the luminous rays of sun piercing through the leaf bustling trees adorning the curled street of Cedar Hill on either side. I leapt across the pavement as we went, jumping from one shady patch to the next and forcing Mrs. Liebovitz to break her steady stroll with an occasional hop of her feet, the sudden jerk of movement causing her shawl to fall from her grasp. She insisted on wearing that flower netted garment everywhere she went, no matter how hot it might be, but each time that it fell she managed to skillfully readjust it about her slight shoulders without any interruption to her busy chattering.

My piano teacher for all of three weeks now, Mrs. Liebovitz was an incredibly determined creature. A decidedly short Jewish woman, she was both warmly eccentric and uncannily discerning, with more years behind her than there were in front of her, as she liked to put it. And although I was tall for my age her petite stature made me feel like something of a giant. Each week, I secretly measured my height against hers, eagerly anticipating the day when I would surely tower over her.

“Remember Jack,” Mrs. Liebovitz was saying, recapping the main points of the lesson, “when you practice you must sit with your back perfectly straight and your fingers must always be arched into the shape of a claw.”

Her voice, as always, was high in pitch, her words as elongated as poured honey. It was something I’d noticed about her during our very first lesson – Mrs. Liebovitz never spoke, she sang her words and hummed her tone like a true songbird.

“Next week we’ll move on to chords,” she continued. “Do you know what a chord is?”
I shook my head.
“No? Well, they’re much like people really,” she mused. “You see Jack, if you play a single note it sounds flat, one dimensional. But if you play a chord, three or more notes together, you can hear the texture of it, the richness and the depth.”

I didn’t always understand Mrs. Liebovitz’s unconventional attempts at wisdom, laced as they were with her quirky metaphors and odd reasoning’s. But I liked the way she said those things, as if I was the only person she ever told them to.

As we approached the Winter family home, tucked away at the end of this deathly quiet street, Mrs. Liebovitz said her goodbyes and headed off in the direction of Fair Haven’s small town center. I watched her disappear into the glaring sun before beginning my slow ascent of the curved driveway.

Introduction

2007-02-14T06:28:00.000-08:00

At one of the many beginnings in my life thus far, it was autumn when it all started. The fall. But not only the leaves fell then. A great more was to perish, at first breaking from its wearied roots before finally, by the crying wind, all crumbled away.

Jack Winter. Even my name sounds old. Tired, icy and cold.

For some time now, longer perhaps than even I can divine, my eyes, my blue paired windows to the world without, have felt clouded, my view obstructed by a tired sense of demise dangling precariously over the path of my vision. And so I have found myself drawing slowly inward, retreating to that lonely place within where no one replies to the questions you begin to ask yourself.

I feel so aged – so much older than my twenty four years ought to allow. I feel empty – as though life itself has abandoned me. And here I find myself left alone with only vague and ineffective remnants of my former self remaining, echoing faintly within the empty cavern of my lingering body. I have outstayed my life, or so it would appear. Perhaps at last I should concede the most final of endings draws ominously close. For I can feel it. Every second I feel it – the very limits of my time, my own allotted share, wilting in the tips of my fingernails as it painfully expires. What else can I do then, but lie in waiting for the meager seconds to tick their way out?

Moments steal away from me. I let them pass, unwilling, unable, to keep in step with the reckless pace of the world about me, all things moving so fast, so resolutely onward, while I watch on from the sidelines, loitering alone in the wilderness.

Strange though it may sound, time itself stands before me now as a great adversary. I look back on my short life and I see how it enslaved me. How I battled with it for control, how ultimately I lost the fight. For in the end, in spite of my trying I never got it right, did I? Time either crept too slowly for me, or else it ran too fast. One way or another, I was always cruelly aware of its passing. So aware, in fact, that I once supposed there was no greater enemy, no stronger opponent to life than time. That everything was condemned to suffer a fading, quietly passing out of existence almost as if never in it. But there was always time, wasn’t there? Infinite time, cloaked as always in its anti-life shroud, it never ending while life slowly crumbled.

Someone once told me there is much to savor at journey’s end. But now that I’m here I strain to see it. Lately, I’ve taken to walking the harbor again as I once used to. It feels as though I never left it. The Boston streets are painstakingly familiar to me now. Around here, time is neither fast nor slow but stained by repetition, each of my days leaking drearily into the next. And somehow it feels like I’m always here, wherever here might be – opening the bookstore, walking the peer, listening to the piercing whine of creaking furniture in a barren house. I can’t help but wonder, what is there to savor in such aching monotony? Hasn’t time simply found a new form of enslavement to keep me in its grasp?

I was beginning to think so, beginning to succumb quite willingly to that inevitable fact. But recently I discovered something, early this very morning in fact, and suddenly everything changed. Tucked away neatly in a bathroom drawer, I stumbled unexpectedly upon a lone strand of Ella’s hair, loosely embroiled around a fine-toothed comb. It was a most undistinguished occurrence, I must admit, altogether ordinary in fact. But somehow this simple discovery held enough gentle charm in it to separate today’s morning from all my recent mornings. The very sight of it froze me to my spot, mesmerized me completely, stole my attention away from the menial proceedings of the day.

I untangled the strand, untying it with care as it released from the fixed teeth of the comb, glistening a rich brown in the light as it uncurled like a thread of pure gold.

It was only a small thing, so insignificant really. And yet, in that brief moment of discovery the world didn’t seem quite so trivial. Time didn’t seem quite so destructive, for it hadn’t taken all things away. And I smiled to myself at this humble reminder. So small a thing, but it alone had succeeded in interrupting the unswerving line of repetition that cursed my days. It alone had managed to reconfigure the past at my back and perhaps even the future at my feet.

And standing early morning in the silver bathroom light, I found myself suddenly poised between two contrasting domains – my past, my future – and wondering at the realization that was slowly surfacing within me, that somewhere amidst my most recent of days, somewhere in the aftermath of this new beginning I speak of, I have been introduced to the realm of a new conclusion: that I can live outside of time, if I so wish.