Zerostrata Read online

  Zerostrata

  by Andersen Prunty

  For Gretchen, Supreme Loveymonster, forever

  Zerostrata

  Copyright 2008 by Andersen Prunty

  www.andersenprunty.com

  Eraserhead Press

  205 NE Bryant

  Portland, Oregon 97211

  www.bizarrocentral.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Chapter One

  Coming Home to the Sad House

  The first thing I noticed was Mother, collapsed on the lawn just in front of the porch, a cat on her head. The giant Victorian loomed over the expansive, gently sloping lawn. I stood on the sidewalk, looking through the rusted wrought iron gate. I wasn’t alarmed about Mother. This was not particularly strange behavior for her. She certainly didn’t notice me. She was probably in some kind of narcotic dreamland, waiting for someone to come and rouse her from her stupor.

  I wondered if Father was inside. I wondered if my brother still lived here.

  The place was even more dilapidated than I remembered. It was one of the oldest houses in the neighborhood. One of the oldest and the most shabbily maintained. A dark cloud permanently roiled above it. It was spring. Beyond the perimeter of the yard, the sun poked out from behind the clouds but, standing there, it was dark and gloomy. I looked at the simple black mailbox to my right. Little stickers that had once been an iridescent white but were now gray spelled out our family name: NOTHING.

  That’s right, we were the Nothing Family. One of my ancestors’ cruel jokes. The jokes didn’t end with my ancestors. My mother named me Hansel, after the story. My brother got the name of Zasper. Mother said his name was from a story also but she never told us which one and, despite reading all the books in the family library, neither one of us was able to figure it out. If she was going to name her child after a character in a story, one would think she might keep the story lying about. The numerous times Zasper and I grilled her about this, she would smirk knowingly and say, “Maybe it hasn’t been written yet.”

  In my case, while she may have enjoyed the fairy tale, I still feel it was meanspirited to name me Hansel. Consequently, I have felt like a little boy, lost and wandering through a dangerous forest, since birth.

  I pushed the gate open. It squeaked loudly, the sound both grating and comforting. It was like a welcome, waking Mother from her stupor.

  I walked slowly toward her. I walked slowly because I rarely walked quickly. It was no longer in my nature. Years of injurious clumsiness had taught me to slow down. She stood up from the dewy lawn and dusted off the front of her black satin robe. The cat remained on her head.

  “Hansel,” she said as I drew closer.

  “Mother.”

  I reached her and stopped. There wasn’t a hug or any other sign of open affection. We had never been that kind of a family and ten years of my absence wasn’t going to change that.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I don’t know. I think I spent some time in the desert.”

  “You smell like fire.”

  “I’m kind of thirsty.”

  “Let’s go inside and I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “You have a cat on your head.”

  “I thought you might notice that. That’s my little Tricky. Short for Trick-or-Treat.”

  “You named the cat ‘Trick-or-Treat’?”

  “Sure did. I was out lying in the yard one day and he just came and climbed onto my head. It was painful at first, his claws kept digging in, you know, so I took to wearing this wig and that kind of tones the claws down.”

  “I didn’t even notice the wig.”

  “It’s made to look like my real hair. Are you sure you weren’t in a fire? You smell like you’ve burned up.”

  “I think I would have remembered something like that.”

  “Well, come on in. Let’s stop standing around out here. It’s gross.”

  I followed her up onto the porch, lined with wilted ferns, and into the dusky interior of the house that lay behind the heavy dark wood door.

  Chapter Two

  Coffee with Mother

  Once inside the house, rain began beating down outside. I followed Mother through the entryway and into the Welcoming Room—a room that had always been sterile and empty save for the staircase winding its way up to the second floor. I took a deep breath. Nothing had changed. The house was as lifeless as ever. She turned left, heading into the kitchen. I followed her. Once in the kitchen, she directed me to sit down at the table. Even though this was where most meals were taken it was not the dinner table and it was not fabulously large. It was a small round table that sat in front of a window so one could look out of the house, down the lawn and past the fence and to the sidewalk. The table demanded one to look out of the window and possibly catch a glimpse of passersby, maybe even someone who had some shred of joy left in his life.

  I sat down.

  Mother went to the gray countertop where several pills rested in a pharmaceutical line. She poured a glass of water from the tap, picked up each pill individually and fed it into her mouth until it was full before drinking the water, swallowing all of the pills in one gulp. She came over to the table and sat in the chair opposite mine, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her robe. She lit her cigarette and pulled the ashtray toward her. She rarely had more than one cigarette butt in the ashtray at any given time. She used it to deposit her ashes and crush out the butt before dumping it in the trashcan.

  “Cigarette?” she asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “You don’t smoke anymore?”

  “I don’t think so. No. I don’t know. I can’t remember. I don’t really want one. I feel kind of parched. I don’t want to breathe fire.”

  “Coffee?”

  “No thanks. Some water would be good.” I hopped out of the chair. “I’ll get it.”

  I took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with tap water.

  “So what have you been up to?”

  “I really don’t know. Can we talk about something else?”

  “Like what?” She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled toward the window, staring absently out of it. The smoke, caught in the meager sunlight, curled itself into nefarious blue fingers.

  “I don’t know… How have things been here?”

  “Oh, you know...”

  “No, not really. I’m not sure I know much of anything anymore. Where’s Dad?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes. That’s what I said, isn’t it? Gone.”

  “But where did he go?”

  “Oh, you know your father. An ass. An utter, incomprehensible ass. The day he left he said he was going to become a superhero.”

  “A superhero?”

  “Yes. Do I have to keep repeating myself to you? Have you become hard of hearing in your absence?”

  “No. It just seems a little bit shocking. Was he serious?”

  “Knowing your father, he probably was. He said he wanted to feel like a force of good in an otherwise rotten world. Those were his exact words.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

  She spit out a mouthful of smoke in a sarcastic chuckle. “Hell, as long as his checks keep coming I don’t really care where he is.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Oh, nearly two years now.”

  “Huh.”

  I sat back down at the table, taking a drink of the cool water. It felt good on my dry throat. It felt like the whole i
nside of my body had gone dry. The water slowly trickled down and I felt it run into my stomach.

  “Are you hungry?” Mother asked me.

  “Not really.”

  “I could have Francis cook us up something.”

  “Francis still works here?”

  “Poor gal doesn’t have anywhere else to go during the day. She’s the reason it’s as clean as it is in here. I sure as hell wouldn’t bother to clean any of this stuff up. It’s all other people’s junk anyway. Your father’s. Your brother’s…”

  “How is Zasper?”

  “You can see for yourself. He’s still down in the basement. Hasn’t hardly left since he graduated high school.”

  “I should have been here for him.”

  “He always looked up to you.”

  “I would have buckled under the responsibility.”

  Mother crushed out her cigarette and her eyes seemed to grow a little bit blank.

  “Why did back here you come, Hansel?”

  Her awkward phrasing took me off guard. I thought about asking her why she had said it like that but figured she would be defensive about it.

  “I don’t know. I guess I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. I feel so sad... And lonely.”

  “And you walk or wheel to this place here when you feel sad? On your walks? Or wheels? This is a sad place. More sadder it could turn you.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “So what is it that if you want you could?”

  “I want to feel happiness.”

  I didn’t really know what she had just asked so I didn’t know if I was answering a question or just making a statement out of the blue.

  She let out another one of those sarcastic laughs that sounded more like a cough.

  “Does you really want this happiness thing for yourself there?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  “Then there’s someone that maybe you should look at with your eyes. See. That is. This man. Doc-tor.”

  “Wow,” was the only thing I could really say, now so flabbergasted by her utter lack of clear speech. “Is he the one who gives you all those pills?”

  “Oh not yes. That’s Dr. Calibretti. Who puts pills in my face. He gives me pill money to take to the store.” Prescriptions? “You should go look to Dr. Blast. I can get his telephone call things for you. In a little bit. Or a while. I’m gonna take a little rest.”

  She scooted her chair back and slid onto the floor, completely gone. I guessed our conversation was over and decided to go downstairs and see my brother. I stood up from the table and caught Francis out of the corner of my eye, coming in for her day of dusting, cooking and vacuuming. She saw me and stopped.

  “Hansel? Is that you?”

  “Yeah. How are you, Francis?”

  “Oh, you know. Why are you here?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You shouldn’t be here. Do you know the only reason I come here is to make my own life seem that much happier?”

  “Are you happy… when you leave?”

  “Happier than you could imagine.”

  “What do you do that makes you so happy?”

  “Hansel, I leave this place and just feel happy I am who I am.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean… You’re all defective... or something. That’s what I mean. Forgive me for being so forthright but, since you’ve been away so long, I feel like I can be a little more open around you than I can the rest of them. Look at yourself. You all have everything you could ever want and you’re all miserable.”

  “But maybe it’s because we want more.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe we want what you have.”

  “Haven’t changed a bit, have you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer her. The phone saved me. A horrified look crossed Francis’ handsomely middle-aged face.

  I went over to the black phone hanging on the wall beside the refrigerator and picked it up.

  “Nothing Residence,” I said.

  “You stay away from my daughter,” an old female voice said from the other end.

  “Sorry?”

  “You heard me. Just stay away.”

  I hung the phone up. The woman’s voice filled me with a sense of dread even greater than my usual sense of dread. I looked at Francis and noticed she still wore the same horrified grimace on her face.

  “That phone hasn’t rang in two years. Who was it?”

  “I think it was the wrong number.”

  “Yeah, well, nice to see you again. I have to get to work. Don’t worry about your mother. She’ll wake up in a couple of hours. Remind me to feed that cat though, if you see me again.”

  “Okay.”

  I had stopped paying attention to the cat during my conversation with Mother. Turning back to look at the sad heap on the floor, I saw Tricky was still there, all curled up and sleeping on her head.

  Chapter Three

  Zasper Nothing

  A doorway separated the basement stairs from the rest of the house. Opening the door was like stepping into a different dimension. I couldn’t believe my brother had chosen this area of the house as his quarters. Why not something lofty like the northeast turret?

  Cautiously, I crept down the steep stone steps, all traces of light diminishing as I reached the bottom. Once at the bottom of the stairs, shrouded in this cavelike, absolute darkness, I encountered another door—a heavy, wooden battered thing. Sometimes, as a child, I imagined the other side of the door to be pocked with teethmarks from the rats undoubtedly living there, struggling to get out. It was my instinct to turn the knob and walk into the basement but then I paused to think, “Was he living in the whole basement?”

  Of course he was. That was the only reason I could think of anyone wanting to live in this part of the house. Zasper needed the space for some reason and the basement certainly served that purpose. A sprawling affair, it was as large as the ground floor of the house with no walls. The only obstructions were a few unattractive iron poles descending from the equally unattractive rusted iron support beam running along the ceiling.

  I knocked on the door but Zasper did not answer. Perhaps he was asleep. I heard sounds coming from inside. It was a virtual cacophony. I couldn’t pick out one single sound. That is, I couldn’t tell if it was the television or a stereo or what it was. He certainly wasn’t entertaining a crowd of people. The sound was too loud for someone to be sleeping.

  I knocked again. This time a little louder.

  “Who is it?” His voice sounded dazed, weakly cutting through the rest of the noise.

  “It’s me, Zazz.”

  “Who is ‘me’? I don’t recognize your voice.” I didn’t know how he could hear me at all.

  “It’s me. Hansel.”

  “Hansel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. You can come in.”

  Opening the door, I stepped into the murky twilight of the basement proper. The low light only suggested the chaos strewn around the room, not bright enough to completely expose it. It didn’t help that most of the furnishings were black or gray and there seemed to be a good deal of black cloth covering many objects that might have been some other kind of furniture. The room was lighted by candles only. A few red and yellowish-green lights blinked on and off at various intervals throughout the space. And it wasn’t just physical disarray, either. From everywhere came that sound—a wall of noise. There were voices and some musical things and some things that were just white noise.

  I didn’t see Zasper right away.

  When I found him, I wasn’t incredibly surprised to see him lying on the floor. His bed was immediately above him, piled with books and records… sketch pads.

  “Hey, Zasper, how you doing?”

  “Not so good.” He was dressed in a black jumpsuit and his hair had grown considerably longer since the last time I saw him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well, I
was trying to read but then I read a couple of pages and wondered what the point of turning the page was so I’ve just been reading this same poem over and over again.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Baudelaire.”

  “Good stuff. Which poem have you been reading over and over?”

  He laughed. “I don’t even know what the title is. I had to ask myself if it really mattered if I turned the page or not. I’ve read a countless number of books and look where it’s gotten me. Maybe I should just stop reading altogether.”

  “What is that noise?”

  “That’s the New Music.”

  “The New Music?”

  “My New Music.”

  “It sounds like noise.”

  “No, it’s harmony. Or chaos. I haven’t figured out which one yet. At times it’s beautiful. At other times it’s horrific. And sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense at all. Like now. I don’t particularly like the way it sounds now. See, that’s the beautiful thing about this New Music. There aren’t any albums or songs or titles. There’s never any duplication. It’s always live and always continuous. It can never reach the end… Unless the power goes out. Then I’m fucked I guess.”

  “So what is this New Music?”

  “Well, there’s a television going over there.” He pointed somewhere back into the darkness. “I’ve faced it against the wall so I don’t have to put up with the light and the images. The second you put an image to sound it becomes something totally different. Right now it’s tuned to the religious channel. There is a radio tuned to the classical music station but sometimes it picks up country music and that totally changes the sound. There is yet another radio tuned to static. The static changes constantly. Which is interesting because I always thought static meant something that never changed. Sometimes it sounds like waves and other times it sounds like a high pitched whine and sometimes it sounds like choral chanting. There’s my 200-disc changer filled with music I used to like. It’s set on random so it skips around from song to song. And there’s a record player. That’s the only thing I ever have to actually change but then I figured out a good idea. See, because when I changed it it was no longer totally random, so now I have Francis come down every half hour and change it. I told her not to look at the labels or the album sleeves, just reach into the dark and pull one out and that will be fine. She’s also the one who lights the candles so I don’t have to move so much. She says I’m creepy.”