People Live Still in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess.
Title: People Live Still in Cashtown Corners.
Author: Tony Burgess.
Genre: Fiction, crime.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2010.
Summary: Bob Clark owns the Self Serve in Cashtown Corners. It's the only business there and Bob is the only resident. He's never been comfortable around other people. Until he starts to kill them. And murder, Bob soon discovers, is magic.
My rating: 3.5/10
My review:
♥ There is a point at which you find yourself, where, and this is not just what I think but this is the way we are designed to think and it's this: if the entire universe, and I mean every corner of every atomized corner of infinity; if everything that is isn't aware of or doesn't understand my most inconsequential, half-formed thoughts, then there is no chance that the highest-formed acts by the noblest mind are greater than gross self-love.
When I scrape tar from the side of my sneakers onto the edge of the island, it passes through the world as both the idea that preceded me doing it but also as a shadow formed by my shoe leaning edgewise, and it forms a commanding ripple outward through all things. It must be exactly this way or the little hand that saves the little face from drowning in a great flood somewhere else is the same as shitting. I exist in an infinite number of times.
♥ She sits at the red light, as dumb as the air around her, and waits. I watch and I am the air around her now. The light turns green. It doesn't just turn green. A chuck of darkness drops in the way of the red and the green rises. These are the moments I watch.
♥ She sees me coming and stops.
I stop. Here we are like two long shadows, minute hands and hour hands cutting into a black and white city. I lift my arm and point to the green light. She is going to play this a little different than you or I might. Roll down the window. Don't roll down the window. Put the mascara away to talk to the man or just wave with it. Smile face or cry face? She has opted for cry face and wave at the man. I turn my point into an upturned hand and the light goes green to orange.
The light goes green to orange.
The light. Goes. Green. To. Orange.
I am not a sentimental man. I'm not a particularly empathetic man. But the light has gone from green to orange and she waits. But the light had been green and now it has gone. That particular interval of green that had been waiting in a throat like the only word ever spoken. The only word that had a hope of pushing aside the tongue. Of treating the meat of the mouth to a brief second of real dancing. And she sat while the mouth crashed like a stricken child and while the ear of these corners, the ears themselves, sharp and perfectly cut to match and vanish-she sat and made her little cry face at me while the ears disappeared.
♥ I have seen the whole world appear green. I have seen the whole world appear red.
One of the things I like to do while I sit in my booth is pretend it's September 11. How awesome is that? Anyone can do it and it's like you have the greatest time for free. Your imagination can do whatever it wants to, of course, and that's how we get things like sex with alligators and people who make baby bridges across rivers of lava. But every once in a while the imagination gets to step over its borders and be something. That happened on September 11. An airplane going several hundred miles an hour, full of people, pierced the side of a building. I like to think about looking out the window of the plane. Oh. Look. There's New York City rising up around me. Buildings so close it looks like the wings are touching them. There's a gentleness to the wings. They are flexible and stretch up slightly as we descend. They are compensating a little, controlling the air flow, making certain that the pressure above the wings is lighter than that below. And the buildings seem to lean slightly away to make room. This flight plan, this design, this cityscape is commercial. Business is done this way. People have to feel secure in order to buy things, to invest their money. We have bought these tickets to ride in order to get places. You see how you think? You are drawing together all the comfort that design has implied and you are stretching your legs and waiting for the chance to stand and walk away.
Then the nose of the plane touches the side of the building. It doesn't wait there but if we'd like, it can. The plane's nose touches the building like a baby whale floats to its mother's side and pushes its nose against to her as if to say, "I'm here, mom." The plane is perpendicular to the building. The building is immovable and sunk into the only footprint it will ever make. It is so tall, though, that it takes on some of the air's properties. The illusion that it moves, that it soars, that it rises. The plane, which now waits quietly, still touching the building, has in fact some of the air's properties and this isn't an illusion.
♥ Big things are only beautiful because they are big. They may in fact be ugly and small and poorly imagined.
♥ He doesn't start this all up until I go. Kids like to live in their own world but the good ones wait until you're gone first.
♥ I put a knee on the back of her neck and haul up hard on the belt. This is pretty much gonna be it for a while. I hold and pull hard, not moving or letting her move. When she does move a little I take advantage and draw the belt righter under her chin. This is how snakes do it. When the prey breathes or tries to escape, the snake tightens. If you never let up and keep applying the pressure, things just kill themselves eventually.
♥ My mind isn't snapped or anything. I'm not particularly afraid of what I've done even though I do know that now, whatever happens, at some point down the road I'm going to have to listen to someone tell me what I've done. That isn't a very nice thought; however it isn't what's happening now. I am sitting on her soft body and I stay like this for quite a while.
♥ I feel good, but it's not that simple. Something very dangerous, something far worse than what has happened just now has been put out of service. We enter into battles without understanding the terms of our survival and when we do survive, when we do what is necessary, when we pull up strong, then all the rest, this cost, this remainder of my life, is only lessened because we did so much more than all the others. We stood while God hammered the sky and we never stopped walking while chainsaws milked our legs and we did something very wrong and awful, but at least it cleared the air. It lifts those that come after. It was us we offered up and no one will ever know this but us.
I think I'm okay with this now. I do feel bad after all. She didn't really deserve to die and I didn't really have to kill her. But this is what hands have done and this is how we move on.
♥ I'm trying to figure out if these events have a finish line. If there's some set of actions I can take or ways I can just lay the facts down so they don't move. Some way to keep everybody calm. It's my responsibility. I'm the one who has to live with this.
♥ The store manager is calling my name. I stop and look. Two police officers who had been talking to the manager turn. I take a couple steps toward them and stop. I may be the person who did this but I'm not the same person. Some monumental shifts have taken place.
♥ The manager's face is fat and smeared so I look at his hands. They are fat and red and moving as if he's breaking invisible sticks over and over again. The one hand leaves its companion for a moment and wipes down the front of his pants, then hands forward. It doesn't grab the air right away but waits, watching the other hand, gauging its rhythms, then it goes up and matches perfectly. I am remembering this morning and some of the difficulty I had being in several places at once. They seemed to have categories for a while. One was thinking about the other. Then there were several different times at once. And another sort of spanned being different and managed to be very clearheaded. This makes me think that even though it's not possible to get things done properly in any one of these arrangements, it is possible to still be yourself, to still know you are here and, most importantly, to care about what happens. These hands are different though. They are clearly aware that the faces are blending forward a bit and that they will still talk to me. The hands will show me a way to stay here.
♥ I turn my face from side to side and watch the sky move. There is always something talking to us from somewhere else. It wants to quiet us. It wants us to know that sad is a frequency and that it picks it up like a radio signal. Then it pours a little room back in along the frequency, a little space around the things that have been touching for way too long. It touches every one of us.
♥ Anyway, so one of the cops gives me a ride and I shoot him with his gun. That totally doesn't sound like it happened. That's very strange to me. Almost as if it's not quite enough to just say it at this particular time. I will try again to see. So. Well, there you go. I got this ride from a nice police officer because I didn't have one and, as it tuns out, it was pretty easy to reach over and grab his gun and shoot it right at his head. So, anyway, he just dies like that. I got a ride from the cop and midway between Cashtown Corners and Creemore I put a bullet in his head. He's dead for sure. Like I said, I killed him pretty much just now and so things are going to get said again pretty soon. But for now let's just not act like we have to see it totally and let's just accept this report.
♥ I make a stern face in the mirror. The cop hat falls forward and I tip it back with two fingers. It's the kind of thing you do before you call someone ma'am.
"Well, ma'am, looks like the problem is people. They just make us nervous and then we kill them. And then we feel better until somebody makes us nervous again. And, well, ma'am, that's the way it lays."
♥ Take stock. I'm going to have to walk somewhere form here. Into the booth. Back to the cruiser. Into the trailer. But then where? I have to not be anymore. Thirty-five litres. I feel the gas getting near the top. Do I die? The trigger releases. Not going to die. You can't just decide to die just because of pressure.
♥ Yes, the things that happened were things that I did. And if I am ever caught and have to stand up in front of you, you'll wonder what goes on in a person like me. That's what I'm listening for now. I am aware that anything I might say I would have to invent. I would say what I think a person like me would say. But for now, I'm just listening. I want to know precisely what I am. And that is what I am right now. Listening silently to myself listening silently. And I agree, it sounds an awful lot like there is nothing to hear but that puts me beside you. We're both very quiet now. We're both just here. I accept this. God, it didn't start this way though, did it?
♥ Something tugs the back of my pants down and in pulling them up I find that I still have the policeman's gun. Guns seem to know when you might use them and they will draw down a little heavier in anticipation. So I point the gun at the house.
♥ It is a kitchen. A woman in a bathrobe leans against a counter, looking out the window and eating toast. A cup of steeping tea steams on a table. She turns and I catch a flash of the satin red beneath the robe and fire. She flops forward, bouncing her head up and off the table before slipping to the ground. She dies. The toast turns in her mouth, then rides in blood across the floor. I fire again at the wall. Twice. I don't know why.
♥ The shower removes everything in seconds. Blood and mud and sweat and shit coils down my legs and makes heavy brown river deltas off my toes to the drain. My shoulders move independently for the first time. My chest heaves out and drops. I cannot change, This is not the time to change. The shower is a dangerous place. The wrong thing to do. If I change, if I reach a different idea about what is happening, then I will be destroyed. I punch the shower off and step out through steam into the bathroom.
♥ I try to pull the large woman by the legs. I want her downstairs, too. Make it easy for God to collect them if they're all in one room.
♥ The moon is halved by darkness. Its silver falls as gold onto corn seas. The seas are calm and carried through the night on long swells. No ships. No land. Nothing under the sky but infinite yellow vegetation in shining sleeves. Where the sun has caught the moon there are no stars but against its invisible profile furious sets of foam turn and spill. A torn cloud grows sideways along the moon's eye. A fine oil is scattered out from the white crawlspace of a half galaxy. The oil is orange and green and gold that sprays behind the moon and emerges toward the unseen sun as a brief map. Black scratched lines that hold for a second then scatter as a million tiny viruses vibrating on the scalp of a whale. Foxes turn their teeth into the ground and slice through the faces of grubs. The insides of headless worms drift up and make cold wet rings around the tiny holes where they had been. People in Creemore have died. Slaughtered. A bomb had gone off in the Foodland and quartered people slam against its beams. The silver path down to the river from Avening is clogged with bleating pigs that can gain no footing in their neighbours' slippery livers. In New Lowell people drink rare cancer and it flows down their cheeks into the dishes of dogs anxious to die. And here in my new house in the corn with my nostrils and lungs frosted red form such deep blood breathing, I drop a stylus into a lizard black pool of vinyl. The speakers hammer to life. Not just the ones here beside me, but from speakers hidden throughout the house, assaulting every cube of air. The voices surge and fall as complete oceans. Despairing and terrible oceans. Entire choirs meet across deep trenches, pitched across time-angry distances into each other. The Bible marches slowly through the house. Its crashing boots throw salt water up the windows. Its tiny armadillo face pokes out from between mountain arms. Religious music. I check. Mozart's Requiem. I look back over the dead five. We have set a trap for God.
The voices soften as I reach the bottom of the stairs. Not human. Each bevelled pipe selects a child and enters his back to blow through bones. Mothers' screams chase past me as I ascend. The kitchen light. Eyes. I open the fridge. Beards. The fridge light. Teeth. The bathroom light. Fingers. The hall light. Shoulders. The bedroom light. Throats and shoulders. Back down stairs over bent spines and open ribs. The hall light. The kitchen. The bathroom. The master bedroom. Another bedroom. Another. Another.
The windows are being pulled inward by a choir that has just drawn its final breath and the glass bows outward driven by the force of my ten thousand lights. I step past the bodies on the beach and lower myself on the pink settee. I face the large window and can see myself again.
And now I wait to see who I can catch first: God or the rest of you.
♥ The idea of dying occurs again. I can't seem to get a picture of how this would happen. I have no fun anymore and even if I did, I can't imagine deliberately pulling the trigger and setting into motion events that end in my brains getting pushed out. I could hang. There are railings and beams in here. Trees and roof edges out there. But then I come to the same moment. The decision to step into air and be suspended by my neck. It's the decision. The simple stepping off. The light squeeze of a finger, it appalls me and makes me shiver. I am calmed by the idea of not being here but I cannot stomach the mechanism that takes me away. I will not die.
♥ I would never speak after that. No matter what they asked. No matter what. I would sit for the rest of my life on whatever chair they put under me and I would never utter a word. Ever. For decades. Ever. I like this idea. It's like placing myself in a cocoon that no one can see. I eat in there and when I move to lie down I sleep in there. I decide that I don't have to wait until they find me to do this. I can start now. I am impatient. I am starting now. I return to the settee and sit. This is the last you will ever see or hear of me.
Before you start laughing at me, please hear me out. I really was never coming back. I really did sit in an invisible cocoon on the settee. I said nothing and I didn't move. Okay, I got up twice to go to the bathroom. And I heated up a can of soup. But I was there for hours. How many do you think? Five? Six? Think of sitting in the same spot for six hours. I did. For sixteen hours. The night descended and there was a thunderstorm. By morning the house was beginning to smell. And I stayed sitting well into the afternoon. Until now. Why did I not stay in the cocoon forever? I can't say exactly, but at some point, bit by bit, it became obvious that no one could do it. In spite of my deep and abiding commitment, a commitment that brought me to the brink of it, I could not do this impossible thing. I was crying at one point and I wanted to say so. But I didn't. The telephone rang and I almost answered it but I didn't. Still, a point came, call it the curvature of the earth, call it an itch on my face, call it what you will, but the point came when I was forced to move and given no choice. Only those of us who have sat at the edge of eternity know the name of the force that shoves you back.
♥ I am listening a little more than I was before. Moving more carefully. When it's possible that your mind is broken it's very important that you get a fix on the nature of that break. You have to develop a second mind to watch the first one. The first one is broken but it's still possible to cobble together a reliable coalition as long as you can hold what isn't apart form what is.
♥ The first dog comes out and makes a short run at the vultures. Broad black wings shoot up and form a wall decorated obscenely with pinkish-purple heads. The dog backs down, but another appears. And another. Soon all of the dogs, maybe eight or ten of them, form a line facing the birds. The vultures seem to know how to share death and they drift off the top of the mound, letting the dogs in.
♥ I hope she doesn't look out because the birds are still eating her family.
♥ Something bad has happened. I realize that this is one of those moments when I should respect her privacy. I should accept that had she wanted to talk to me she would have, but the stakes are too high. She is out there in the world and anything could happen.
♥ "Look, boys Jesse's age are still trying to figure out if they think with the pack or on their own. And that pack is pretty powerful. Some people never leave it."
She smiles. She thinks I'm right.
"And some of us never even figure out where the pack is."
..We don't need Jesse. If Jesse wants to pretend that Patty's not there then it's a great loss to his world.
♥ I used to have trouble around people. All of my life I had trouble. I struggled to know what to say. I would get dizzy and my head would shatter to pieces. And that's what happened to me. It's not much of an explanation and I have to say that I can't really remember the feeling any more. That morning in Cashtown Corners seems so unreal to me now. It felt unreal then too, I'm sure, but now that I seem to be looking after things, saying the right things, thinking clearer, those monstrous events must have happened to another person. Is that possible? I am not him any more. I am who I am now. I should try to keep in mind that it wasn't always this way. It could change again.
♥ This is what happens when you think you are thinking clearly when you are not. I have damaged all my minds now and there is no time to establish a working one.
♥ I have done this before. Discarded myself in order to be here. I have to accept certain things if I am to return properly. First: They are coming to get me. Once I allow that fact then I can begin to make some real final moments possible. They are coming to get me. I have to say something that will help. Like this: You are not going to run. I am not going to run. All the rest of it. The magic. That is coming to an end. My heart is slowing. It doesn't matter what I said to Charlie Baker. It doesn't matter what I remember. I am going to be taken away soon. There are thoughts you can have that actually cause chemicals to be released in your blood that make you feel that everything is okay. And there are thoughts you can have that release chemicals in your blood that tell you that you are going to die. I need to find the thought that releases both. Specific thought, regardless of where it comes from or how it is made true. A simple chain of words and a little bead of plausibility.