the man with the patchwork heart

he died today. frank. my grandfather. and the man with the patchwork heart was there. there to catch his last tear as it dripped down the man’s sorry face. there even after the old man had chased away every person that had dared to come close. the man thought he was chasing away demons. he missed the one demon that actually mattered; this demon that carefully put the old man’s last tear in one of the jars he had hanging off his belt. “see, frank? see what happens?” the room watched silently with only a slight flutter of the dingy rotting curtains now and again. the couple of books on the shelves had fallen over long ago. the old man shut his eyes and slept. the man with the patchwork heart sighed and turned away. he shut the door to the old man’s one room apartment noiselessly, and as he passed the woman on the stairs she thought he was only a draft of wind. when he stepped onto the street he became just that.

that was my grandfather. that was san francisco. this is new york. a young man who is barely older than a boy is bent frantically over a desk in the corner of a small white room. he is writing songs for an album that will only sell 25 copies. he is so goddamn young, it hurts to watch his scribbles. he thinks big things; big things that will kill him one day. this is cody. this is the old man’s grandson. this is me. the boy looks up. maybe he is thinking of his grandfather. maybe he is not. he keeps writing. he turns a page. maybe this is a song. maybe this is a story.

but this isn’t the beginning.

cody had been wading through a creek he had found in some woods behind a little green house that wasn’t his, at the end of mable street. it was his creek; he was the one who found it. so when he saw the end of the man with the patchwork heart’s long brown coat sweeping through the trees his little six year old mind grew indignant, but when he got to the spot where he had thought he had seen the brown blur, there was nothing. he turned around to go back to the creek and saw the man with the patchwork heart for the first time.

when he got home that night he tried, breathlessly, to explain to his mother about his new playmate. she didn’t believe him. she never really believed his stories when he was this young. he tried to tell her about his warnings. about how one day things would get worse before they got better because that was the way of things. about the lies people would tell him. but his mother wasn’t paying attention. she was only cooking dinner.

as he got older the man with the patchwork heart started appearing less and less. and he made friends in college. a lot of friends. and he discovered whisky and girls. and he discovered that his guitar could get him more whiskey and more girls. and he forgot all about the man with the patchwork heart.

until today. until his grandfather died. so today he picks up a pen, and starts to write a song. or maybe it’s a story.

pink stuff began to fall from the sky. it was big, the size of tennis balls, and fluffy. it was the first time my sister, sarah, had ever seen anything like it, and it amazed her how slowly and gently the stuff floated down. it was somehow even more fragile than the snow she remembered from the previous winter just six months back, and she was more than a little scared to leave the refuge of her favorite tree to go touch it. when she left her house that morning to go dancing through the fields just half a mile from her house there wasn’t a cloud in sight, and when her mother kissed her goodbye her loving eyes were strong and vibrant.

now the sun was disappearing behind those grand, ugly pink clouds and her mother was having a little trouble breathing. sarah tried to hide beneath the roots of this tree. she was scared. she didn’t know why.

now the air tingles with some pink electricity and her father was calling an ambulance.

now the sky is opening its brutal pink mouth and her mother is zipping through country roads.

unconsciousness.

and sarah steps out from behind her tree, the tree she read her first poem under, and she touches the pink.

a little boy sits on the hood of a black rusted car. everywhere around him is trash covered in different shades of black soot: a lamp, a sofa, an old top hat. sometimes the piles reach as high as 10 feet. a couple yards away, a blue angel sits, ignoring the boy. he pulls a pack of cigarettes out, and a lighter. he clumsily tries to light one. it doesn’t work until the fourth or fifth time. the boy watches as the angel does this. he wonders why angels don’t have better lighters. the angel glares when he catches the boy staring and then stands up and walks away. the boy, cody, stands up and walks in the opposite direction.

my mother, in preparation for her own death, dreamed a thousand dreams of those who had died before her. the last dream was her own last breath. this is #631:

todd martin worked in a cubicle, and while it would be hard to imagine any potential danger in this job, it was actually quite risky. you could, for example, be caught in a freak earthquake (despite the fact that this was new jersey) and the ceiling could fall on your head. you could get your tie caught in the printer and it could strangle you. your coffee could be poisoned by a vengeful secretary. you could eat the wrong spinach. someone might send you some anthrax. you could think too hard and have an aneurysm. you could not think enough and your brain could shut down out of boredom. you coul— well, the list was endless, and todd knew each and every one, and to make sure he never forgot, he wrote down every single one on a list he was keeping in an empty drawer.

it was the list that finally killed him. at first it was a joke: on his second or third day on the job one of his new coworkers remarked casually how funny it would be if they had an earthquake in new jersey. todd thought it was funny so he wrote it down. then he saw about the anthrax on the news, and he wrote it down. then he noticed that one of the secretaries was having a really bad day, and he wrote it down. suddenly it became less funny. now he could do nothing but write things down on that damn list. so he lost his job. he lost his apartment. he lost his girlfriend. he forgot to eat. and, one day, he forgot to breathe.

when my uncle stanley first got abducted by aliens it was alarming to say the least. he was real shook up about it the morning after, and the first thing he did was call the local sheriff in his small town somewhere in kansas. the sheriff didn’t believe him. so he called the fbi. they wouldn’t even take his call. so he shrugged it off and tried to go about his life like nothing happened.

the first time he was abducted, he woke up staring at the curtains of a tapestry bed he was lying in. they were pink with little purple flowers arching up towards the ceiling. the sheets matched. he sat up, startled and a little pissed, and pushed his way through to the larger prison outside; a 10 by 10 room with a ceiling that was at least 50 feet above him. the walls and floor were made out of metal and there were no doors or windows or any breaks in the pure sheerness of the thing. there was nothing else in the room but that damn tapestry bed and stan. the walls started to speak in french.

the second time, a couple of months later, it wasn’t really as bad. i mean, they weren’t actually sticking anything uncomfortable up any strange orifices or even cutting him open or anything. in fact, it seemed like they mostly just wanted to talk. about feelings.

“what do you want with me?” stan screamed at those metal walls. “oh… um… sorry if we inconvenienced you at all. we just had some… erm… questions.” the walls said back to him in, startlingly enough, his own voice. “oh. i guess that’s ok.” “so… how do you do… umm… make babies” “well, when a man loves a wom—” “loves?”

stan never had much luck with love. he never really found anyone worth marrying, and now he spent his days fixing small things around town. love was something that happened to young people, and he had missed his chance.

“i guess it’s a feeling that some people have right before they fu— have sex.” “do people ever ‘love’ with things that aren’t people?” “why?”

and then stan suddenly, and unceremoniously, found himself with a terrible headache in the middle of the field behind his house. he didn’t even bother calling the sheriff, but instead made a cup of coffee.

the third time he got abducted by the aliens there were flowers in the room. they were the same color as the sheets on the tapestry bed.

and the fourth time, he never came back.

when our father announced he was going to build a ladder to heaven, the summer after they moved to those black piles, we never doubted him. the way he strode out of the house wearing only jeans and that dirty undershirt he had worn every day since we had moved here (no shoes. he never wore shoes) made it impossible to doubt him. we never doubted him even when he started to stack all that used up trash on top of the tallest point in the junk yard. we never doubted him even when they had to go to our friend’s houses to ask to share a meal because our father had no time for such things. one day, just before the first leaves were starting to fall, he announced that he was finished. we went out to see and, sure enough, it was a pile of black junk that disappeared into the grey sky. “can we climb it?” “no, children, the light will blind you. this ladder is for the angels” and that was the fall that the bright blue angels started coming. at first, we didn’t see them, and when they talked to dad after we went to bed, we just thought maybe it’s the pastor, mr whaley. but then sarah, started seeing them too.

they scream scream screamed down from the roof of 126 mable street, and it made them feel so old. that was really all they wanted: not to have bed times or to be allowed to eat as much ice cream as they could handle. and for those six minutes, in between the moment the first childish screech left their lips and the moment their mother ran up in a frenzied maternal panic, they had all they wanted. and that was enough to last them until sarah went to berkeley and discovered what a sick dream her idealism really was. and that was enough to last them until cody found all the wrong friends and discovered the bitter lover of whiskey. and that was enough to last them.

our grandfather, frank, never asked for a family. frank never asked for much; just a steak here and there and his whiskey at night. frank, definitely, never wanted her to get pregnant. he loved her, i guess, back when he first met her, and who wouldn’t? she was beautiful back then. but now this? well, it was just sort of something that snuck up on him.

he married her. it was simply the right thing to do. he didn’t pretend to be a great man, but he wasn’t a bad man either. he tried to do the right thing. things were rough in america and it wasn’t fair to leave her all alone in this big empty country. this was the right thing to do. so he married her before she started to show, but anyone who could do the math knew something wasn’t right. it wasn’t something you talked about back then.

and then he had this family, and then he had this daughter. but as long as he still had his steak here and there and his whiskey at night he was alright.

she pressed some buttons on her phone and cody, he is a young man now, laughed and she wondered why so he told her: “i’ve been there one million times before. it gets to be the end of the night and you wonder how things got so far. you’re lying on someone else’s lawn; someone you thought you knew, but once you got into his house you realized the whole thing was a lie. it’s been raining and all that wetness is soaking through your shirt and you can feel it all along your back. “you just need to connect to something. anything. “i’ve been there one million times before. you pull out your cell phone and press the button that shows you a list of all your friends, and you press the little down arrow looking for that one person that will understand. “suddenly you realize that you’re back at the top, at a. l. johnson, and she probably won’t understand. she’s only some girl who’s number you got at a party a thousand years ago. “people don’t connect. they don’t know how.”