Day 57

So I thought I knew what the work relaxation don't think thing meant!  I thought I did.  Now it's becoming work stress freak out like it was.  But the good news is I'm up early, so I can dick around on the internet and take years to get started.  MacMillan's grammar or whatever should help me get it going.  I'm going to try to use a semicolon successfully today in my writing; I will try to use a semicolon.  Just watch for it, I won't advertise.  

So what happens to a character when he realizes he went crazy and runs into the woods?  Let's brainstorm.  Luckily Hurley from Lost is going along with him, although he'll just turn out to be a two dimensional fat guy character eating slices of cheese between pieces of paper like a sandwich. 

So he could find a hatch in the woods.  A hatch is something, because it's not a house, it's a hatch.  So it wouldn't be like him finding the house, which is what normally happens in my goddamn story.  Or finding a motor vehicle.  We still do have no concept at all of where he is in the world, I'm sure about that.  I do want to put this whole story together and just see how ridiculous it reads.  Some of the best stories just go on and on forever with no discernible intentionality.  Right?  RIGHT!  Show must go on says the self deprecating host.

Thinking of taking the TOEFL or whatever it is and going to teach overseas so I can just read and write and no one will bug me.  I do wish people would bug me, though.  Foreigners can bug me.

            The fat man talked to himself in a Wallace Shawn voice.

            “Escaping into the woods?!  Unprecedented!  There’s nothing in those woods!”

            Charles ignored him and scuffed his way around the underbrush looking for an entrance.

            From a window somewhere Mr. Richardson watched Charles out there, at it again.  He thumbed through a file that had a picture of Charles running away from the camera, with “Runaway” written over it in thick black Sharpy.  A gorilla sat in the room with him, probably, considering the lesson learned.

            The big man rustled through the brush like a plastic bag.  His stubby legs only carried him as far as his tiny alligator arms could build momentum.  They swung like pendulums and his mouth moved like a windup doll.

            “Do you think you’re the first one to escape into the woods?  I’ve been escaping into the woods for years!  I’ve been running away before you were crazy!”

            Charles shifted some branches and disappeared into the inner stomach of natures lair.  The fat man hustled after, removing a flashlight from his fanny pack.

            “You’re going to find the utility shack and you’re going to think it’s something more important than it is!”  The man called after him, Charles pioneering the dark trail with a flashlight shining onto his back.

            Sure enough, Charles came into contact with the outhouse-esque utility shack, trying his key in each locked box inside.  He fiddled with the riding lawnmower with his hands, unable to get the thing to budge at all.

            “You need to open the door to get the mower out!  But, it’s basically a beacon.  You get the mower out and they won’t let you graze out here any longer.”

            Charles might as well have been sleep walking.  He slammed the gate to the utility shed, and it rested slightly open.  The moon called him a lunatic with its big bright intrusive face.

            He knew he wouldn’t see Dave if this big boy was around, so he considered this to be the best time to be out exploring.  He grabbed a long thin stick to lead the way with, brushing it along the trail as he walked.

            The fat man managed to push around him on the trail and stand in front of him with arms spread wide.  He scurried around like a cat in a bathtub.

            “You’re going to be wandering aimlessly all night.  If you want me to just show you the entertaining things out here, I will.  Don’t expect any of it to be meaningful, though.  It’s just stuff.”

            Charles nodded and sighed.  He followed the fat man’s terribly slow pace impatiently. 

            “Here’s where they have the eggs,”  He pointed at a hen house.  “No hens, just eggs.  They never cleaned them out.  This area is strictly for the patients.”

            Charles saw a series of cleared out fields, each with structures standing in cleared out fields on the inside.

            “Someone used to live out here, yeah.  We’ve been through all those buildings, nothing in those buildings.  You’re doing what we’ve been doing.”

            Charles saw a slightly larger building with a glowing light inside and his ears perked up.  The fat man shook his head and laughed when Charles ran past him and began peering through the windows systematically.

            “Can’t see anything inside, even with the light!”  Charles called with an exclamation point.  He stubbed his toes on a loose shank of wood, the toeless slippers not protecting his feet.  He found a way in through a window that was already broken.

            The fat man took a seat in the middle of the grass outside the window.  He pulled his legs underneath him and sat in a pretzel, removing a bag of peanuts from his sweatshirt pocket and cracking the shells.

            Charles rummaged inside, testing his key on everything with a keyhole in it.  A counseler with a flashlight caught up to the fat man, who waved him off.

            “He’s ok, I’ll have him back in a little while.”  The fat man stood and whispered to the man with the clipboard.  The man with the clipboard didn’t look happy about it, but departed with a last stern look.

            Charles found a stairwell that looked strangely familiar, and attempted to disbelieve it.  It carried on higher and higher into the corner of the house, each stair seeming to rise higher than the last.  He shut his eyes and turned in the opposite direction, trying to get back to the window he came in from.  Spiderwebs brushed past his arms and as he came close to the dingy walls of the little shack he inhaled dust, it felt like breathing in the cover of an old book.

            He turned around and still saw the staircase, much larger than the rest of the house.  While it was physically impossible for the stairs to exist, they were there nonetheless.  He wondered what the fat man outside would see in its place, or whether he’d see anything at all.

            “Everything alright in there?”  The fat man called in, his head peeking through the window, still munching peanuts.  “It’s getting about time we went back, you know…  Shit.”

            Charles was gone up the stairs again.  The world at the end of the staircase was more significant, more real.  His real life felt to him like being a secondary character in a Jane Austen novel, he was simply providing conflict for the main performers.  He wondered how far he had traveled to reach the hospital, maybe he had been there all along.  Maybe the job wasn’t real, Anne wasn’t real, Mr. Pulp wasn’t real.  Either way, he had disappeared down the upward rabbit hole all over again.

            The fat man pushed his girth through the window and fell through unceremoniously.  Curiously, he noticed a sky-black stairwell ascending out of the wood.  Where it should have made contact with the roof there was no roof or no staircase, it simply vanished into thin air.  The fat man scurried over to the bottom of the case, evil faces popping out of the bottom of it and receding.  He outstretched a foot onto it to test it and it disappeared as he placed it down. 

            As the sun began to rise through the window of Charles’s new room, a group of directors gathered out by the shack and brainstormed.  The mustachoed head doctor held a clipboard with a pen attached, and they talked about excavating this stairwell.  The orderlies acted as Yes Men, nodding and smiling at everything the head doctor said.

            “I’d like to commence this meeting by saying there’s no explanation for what’s inside of the shack, no logical explanation at all.”

            The elderly nurse tried to see through the window of the shack, spotting the red herring of a staircase. 

            “That infernal thing has no place in our real world!”  She cried, pouting loudly and feverishly. 

            The director ignored her pleas.

“First we should really destroy the shack, if no one has any objections.”

            The old man who had lived here since he was a younger man kept his mouth shut. 

            He called a local construction crew who said they could make it by the afternoon.  It was a staterun organization, and it was prestigious to work for the local government. 

The construction crew’s enormous truck pressed onto the main road in the mid afternoon.  It was sunny, the wind on its best behaviour.  An unallowable, ridiculous noise began to emit from the bulldozer as it fired up.  A steam whistle emerging from its side sirened into the air with urgency.

“This is the building you want out of the way, right?!”  The man in the hardhat yelled.  Everyone was wearing hardhats, each one understood the possibility for falling destroyed objects.  “Staircase in the middle of the building needs to be excavated?”

The shack disappeared with a crunch like broken bone.  The sarcophagus crumbled and all that was left standing in its glory was a black stairway that seemed to carry on forever.  It looked like a rainbow, its surface at once reflective and luminous.  The gathering of people standing at a safe distance from the destroyed building gaped upward as the monolithic molding revealed itself layer by layer.

The workers took their time to leave, fixing glances over at the monument like a beautiful girl at the bar.  The moustachoed man raveled and unraveled his moustache around his index finger.

Each person tried unsuccesfully to mount the staircase.  The leaves on the trees changed and no one had succesfully climbed it.  The fat man and the moustachoed man sat at its base in lawnchairs, and soon the entire group from the hospital moved their daily activities into the vicinity of the staircase.  The quadriplegic attempted to crane his head to look out the window but it would not move.  They left him alone in the middle of a room with his bed as its only furnishing.

On days the sky was clear, the staircase seemed to become part of a next floor at about a hundred feet up.  The spectators passed around a pair of binoculars, taking turns gazing up.  Planes flew by intermittently, not effecting the stairways constitution.

“Maybe we should build a big stairway next to this one, then we could see what was on top.”  The fat man said, inserting a checker into the top of his connect four.

“Yes, but what do we do when we get up there?  You just want a closer look?”  Returned the man who couldn’t take his eyes off of a calculator to make eye contact with other people when he was talking to them.

A bird chirped its annoying song, most likely a Top 40 pop tune.

“It’s a shame about Charles though, it really is.”  Mr. Richardson offered to no one in particular.

At night, the stairway occasionally dropped a phospherescent light that disappeared immediately into the ground below.  Attempts to catch these globulous lights would result in their immediate disappearances, like the popping of a bubble.  It reminded the mustachoed chief of the hospital of his son, she was off with his wife now on the east coast, but he remembered when the kid was young and the divorce hadn’t happened yet. 

           My spelling is getting better, there's no red squiggly lines anymore.  Is my writing getting better, though?  Yeah?