Goldmines by Tyler Barton

   In the early morning, a man well on in years walked down a flight of carpeted stairs that led to the foyer of his modernized and renovated Victorian home. The tall, pointed house was tucked in between many others like it along the city’s birch-lined streets.  The homes made beautiful rows. Outside the sun was beginning to slightly brighten the sky and a few people could be seen walking dogs.

   The man was dressed in a light blue polo shirt with a zipped grey overcoat. In his hand he had a hat which he sat down on the table near the front door. His shoes made small squeaking noises on the hard-wood floor as he took practiced steps towards the kitchen.

   It was strange that with all of his preparation for his usual morning walk—shoes, shirt, overcoat, hat—his pants were clearly absent. His underwear and high brown socks were completely visible as he made his way down the hall. This omission seemed even more unusual when compared to the way he prepared his breakfast. He worked to pour the cereal, toast the bread, and  fill the orange juice to the mid -point of the glass with measured movements that seemed as though he were performing a technical dance routine. Each of his motions was intentional and paced. The house was silent. He sat down on a chair at the table and ate slowly. Looking about himself with eyes wide, he took in his surroundings.

   Every item or moment he recognized weighed itself in his mind. He thought about each fruit in the bowl on the table before he let it go. The sway of the trees in the backyard could be observed through the window from where he was sitting. And they were.

   There were squirrels in the neighbor’s lawn, he noticed.

   All this he seemed to do naturally while he ate.

   Then, for no visible reason, he let go of his spoon, letting it slide into his half-eaten cereal. The elderly man stood up from the table and walked back out to the living room where he sat down in his high-backed, cushioned chair. He stared intently across the room at the large wooden structure that held his personal library. He stared as if trying to remember something or read something far away. This stare continued for a few seconds before he rose and took a book at random from the top of the almost-full bookcase.

   It was a book of short stories and he flipped to the first one.

   He read:

Exotic Fishes

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment.

-Eckhart Tolle

   This story isn’t very complicated. It’s about a young man who learns a lesson. He becomes a better person, you could say.  In ways, I’m sure it’s very much like stories you have heard before but here it is.

   The bed was just too comfortable. Each night he would set an alarm for eight in the morning, as if he actually planned to rise and begin his productive and fulfilling day at that hour. At this time each morning the programmed song on his alarm would bleat its funk-rock tune and he would turn over, stretching wonderfully and shut it off. He would toss the heavy blankets off, roll out of the cushiony bed and walk to the bathroom where he would dispose of the morning’s liquid waste. 

   It felt so relieving to be rid of all that waste. When he walked the short steps from his bed to his bathroom he couldn’t see much of anything. His bleary, sleep-clouded eyes never opened more than a sixth of the way. What was the point of opening his eyes if they were only to be closed again in a few moments? With nothing to see and eyes blinded by lack of effort, he would crawl back into his heavenly bed and smile with sleepy comfort, resetting the alarm for an hour later.

   At nine the sun from outside would be staring straight through the window but that wouldn’t bother him because he would just inch the pillow farther up on his bed, turn to the other side, reset the alarm for ten and close his eyes. It just felt too incredibly pleasing and easy. The feeling of being on the verge of falling back to sleep was  supremely mesmerizing.

   When ten would come, most days he rose and went upstairs and ate a large bowl of sugary cereal. The cereal was gone in three minutes because he ate, for no ascribable reason, terribly fast. Most mornings the bowl would get refilled, and would then become empty again in few more minutes. With his cereal gone, stomach bloated and drops of milk lacing the hair on his chin he would return to his room, to his bed. Back downstairs on his king sized mattress, topped with a feather-down mattress pad and a layering of micro-velvet blankets, he would forget the alarm altogether and sleep again until whenever his body, or his conscience, or whatever it was that woke him up did so. Now he would begin to feel guilty for having spent twelve hours, a half-day, in his bed. This thought would quickly be pushed out of his mind and he would doze or just lay there for another fifteen minutes or so until he got the courage to walk upstairs with his blanket where he would set himself on the couch and turn the TV on.

   And do you want to know something awful? The couch was heartbreakingly comfortable as well.

    It was summer, and he was home from college. So yes, he had a certain unspoken right to be leisurely.  Although if I am to give an honest account of his life in these days, school was cake for him and he was far from a laborious scholar. He got good grades, and read a lot, but did not exert the kind of energy that would require a month’s worth of eleven hour sleeps, mid-day naps, and general idleness.

   It was June of that summer and he had been home now for 34 days.

   Each morning somewhere between the move from the bed to the couch, he felt a pang of restlessness, causing him to feel that he must do something that day.

   He could write but that was so much more difficult than it sounded.

   He could ride his bike but that was often physically straining and  the out of doors seemed to swelter during the summer on those long roads. Anymore bad sunburns and his doctor said his risk of skin cancer would greatly increase. He didn’t even know where the sunscreen was, or if they had any.

   And he wasn’t going to look for something that probably wasn’t even there.

   Reading was something he liked to do, something that made him feel like he was accomplishing something. As he laid down he pulled the novel he was currently chipping away at from underneath the sofa.  What chapter did he last read? The book hadn‘t been touched since last week so, who could know?

   Who could remember?

   Outside it looked sunny and the sky was blue like his eyes. He looked out the window for a few seconds, holding the book peeled open in his two hands. The decision that it was severely hot and uncomfortable out there was an easy and familiar one to make, so he scrunched himself into his horizontal seat, pulled his blanket up and looked at his book.

   Four skimmed pages later, and he was dozing off again.

   When he awoke he felt a little sickness somewhere in him that told him sternly that he had to get up. He rose with the inclination that it was definitely time for lunch although he wasn’t entirely hungry. This excuse of food got him out of the forest green, L-shaped furniture, and lead him to the kitchen. Here he prepared a ham and cheese sandwich and grabbed a bag of carrots in one hand and a bag of chips in the other and walked the comforts out to the living room. Then he went back for his sandwich and also cracked a can of soda.

   There he sat in the easy-chair watching TV and eating like a breathing American statue, alive, but barely. It was around one o’clock now.

   Food had never been something that he had had to work for, and therefore it was never something he savored. Again I say, he ate with a gross rapidity. So when the food was gone he sat back in the chair and sipped from his can, watching the screen and feeling wasteful.

   When he felt like this, or got these sorts of thoughts, he would quickly think of something to do that would take his mind from them. So now he rose and climbed down the stairs, leaving the bags of food, soda can, and collection of crumbs lying beside the lay-z-boy.

   He was about to enter his room to turn on his video-game console when he remembered the new game he had borrowed from a friend was still in the backseat of his car. This made him stop on his path down the stairs and walk out the front door.

   When he opened it he expected to feel a blast of overwhelming heat, a reminder of why he was keeping himself inside, but he did not. There was a pleasant warmth that surrounded him, that dissolved the chilled, plastic feel of air-conditioning. A faint breeze came in from the yard which reminded him of days spent playing roller hockey with his neighbors when they were all younger, before everyone had jobs, or girlfriends, or college, or nothing to do.

   In fact it was about 81 degrees outside and a group of bikers pedaled down his country road like a slim school of fish as he walked towards his car.

   It was about now when he saw a very unexpected something sitting at the end of his driveway.

   It caught his eye and he walked towards what looked like a hefty slice of peanut-butter chocolate cake sitting on a pink paper plate.

   That it was.

   He picked it up and examined it, confused about where it had come from.  It was a flawless pastry and it enticed him. Reasoning that it was probably a small gift from his mom who often lovingly dropped off gifts for him, he reached down towards it, picked it up with his hand and tried it.

   It was delicious.

 

   At this point, the old man in his reading chair placed the book facing down on the arm, leaving it open to the page he was on.  He walked back to the kitchen and saw his bowl sitting on the table. When the spoon was fished out of the milk he sat down and resumed eating his breakfast. The cereal was soggy. He ate the cold toast and again chewed as though chewing were a contemplative meditation. Sipping his orange juice and turning over the words of the story in his mind, he couldn’t help feeling concern and a little nervousness for the character in it. Then he heard the front door open.

   “Hello? Are you up?” his wife questioned in a vibrant tone. As she walked through the living room holding her purse and grocery bag she saw him sitting in the kitchen. “Still eating breakfast? You must have slept in a bit for once. How are you?” she said upon entering the kitchen. She placed the bags on the table.

   “I’m very well. It’s been a pleasant enough morning.  Just been reading.”

   “It looks more like eating to me. Not to mention, in your underwear.”

   He looked down and noticed for the first time that morning that he had failed to fully complete his dress and said in response, “Ah yes, I suppose I did forget those. Luckily I haven’t left yet to take my walk. I got tied up in reading, and yes, breakfast as well.”

   “Well that is a good thing. What are you reading? And are you really eating this, it’s cold.”

   “I-I don’t.. no I am finished. Just about to clean this up. I have yet to take my walk so I’ll be off shortly,” he said. 

   “I’ll take care of this for you,  but put some pants on, please,” she said with a laugh and a smile. He kissed her as he stood and walked out of the kitchen to head upstairs. However, on his way through the living room he saw the book and then found himself back in his chair, reading.

   He continued where he had left off: 

   It was delicious.

   Now he battled the messages his stomach was sending him about being full, not wanting more food, and so forth. He took another bite, and then it happened.

   A pain like ripping flesh, like separation, like separation of cells, like separation of membranes, tissues, muscle, fat, like the separate deaths of every atom, came through his cheek.

   The piercing was lightning-bolt fast; it happened in an instant.  First the finely sharp end of the giant hook poked through his mouth and then the second prick, that of the barb, further opened the hole and the entire metal curve was through his face. All this in a flash, a wink, a bite.

   It pulled up, yanking him by the side of the head.

   I can’t record with words the momentous hurt that he felt in his cheek nor can I describe the flurry of thoughts that rushed through his head as he was lifted off the ground.  Whatever all those frantic transient thoughts were, they added up to about this: Wow!

   The first thing he noticed was everything. His eyes darted around in a hundred different directions and he noticed a spot on the top of his car where the paint was wearing thin. He noticed the perimeter of the house across the street formed a pentagon. What a strange shape for a house, he thought. He noticed dogs barking in adjacent yards, cows in the field down the road, and birds on the telephone wire that nearly touched his head now. One of his neighbors, Mrs. Addleson was out in her yard, bent over her garden. He hadn’t seen Mrs. Addleson in over a year. Somehow, these things occupied his racing mind more than the pain in his cheek.

    He could not focus on the pain, only his surroundings and how everything seemed in its right location. Everything was at a different angle now and it was all very impressive.

   After this fleeting feeling passed he brought his attention to his unfathomable situation and began to yell for help and grab at the hook that had him.

   When he pulled on it and tried to lift himself off it he found he didn’t have the strength or the leverage. The more he pulled and moved, the more the wound grew. Higher, higher he was pulled. Further, further the wound tore.  It ripped slowly and continuously like a never-ending band-aid being peeled back forever.

   When he yelled he managed to obtain only the attention of the neighborhood dogs. They barked but their barks did not help.  In the middle of the day, on a Wednesday, most people were away at work and there was really no one around to hear his cries. Mrs. Addleson looked around herself briefly but then went back to her tending. Higher, higher he was dragged up into the sky. 

   You are probably thinking that a sight like this must have been pretty comical. In a way it was. I mean, I chuckled when the dogs kept on barking, offering their futile help, as he kept getting smaller in their eyes. But honestly it was more sad than funny.

   Even if people had seen him caught and writhing on the line, they couldn’t have done much more than the dogs.  No one could help him now and I admit that was certainly pitiable.

   But there was hope for him yet. There was always hope.

   Now as he was looking down, terrified, he saw the town he lived in growing out from below him. Cars drove down the streets. Some lawnmowers cut through grass as usual. Life in the small suburban community continued without him. There were a lot of houses for what he considered to be his little hometown. There were a lot of buildings he didn’t recognize from up there. Everything looked bigger even though he was being pulled away from it. There were all these expansive fields on the outskirts.

   There was so much he hadn’t seen before. The junkyard that sat sprawling through the southern end of town looked new and dense. There were so many things, so much stuff left there that only needed the hands of someone courageous and determined enough to go into that goldmine and dig it out.

   The woods he used to stare at through the back windows of his middle-school were so much larger than he remembered. Dark green trees folded out for miles. His mind wandered to the trees for some moments and he thought about all the things that could be in there that he’s never seen, that no one has ever seen. Goldmines.

   Unexplored.

   Wasted, he thought.

   The hook jerked and he moved faster.

   Moving further and further away from the comfort of his home, that is to say, closer and closer to sky-blue sky, he began to think about his predicament. He now realized that his connection to this hook was not going to break unless he could find a way to cut the string. Whatever, whoever it was that was reeling it upwards was doing so with haste and constant power. He put his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants and found nothing but lint. His fingers were cut by the taught string when he reached up to try to tear it. They bled.

   He took a deep breath and looked up. The clouds were coming fast.  Down below it was all green and he could see dark blue parts where water bodies lay. “What is happening to me?” he kept asking himself, gasping. Shock had hit him. He was turning clammy and his body vibrated, his ears rang.

   The hook pulled to this side and that as he kicked and fought to make himself more difficult to reel in. All the while he worsened the wound in his pale face. Each tug exponentially increased the pain. It was unspeakable and I will not even attempt to explain it.

   The line tugged strongly to the right and the beautiful weather that he was hanging in began to change. He was moving swiftly now and the air whipped past his face. The sound was like that of sticking your head out of a car window. Wind blew and clouds, darkened grey with rain, gathered nearby above his head. Glancing down from his now incalculable height, he saw the east coast inching away and the rippled ocean taking its place. 

   “What is happening to me?”

   “Why is this happening?”

   “What is going on?”

   He kept muttering these questions to himself, although maybe they were directed at God; or just anyone with a controlling hand in the lives of humans.

   For once he thought that his hands were what was needed to alter the lives of humans, or at least one of them. However his hands were bleeding now. Small drops of blood fell thousands of feet from his sliced fingers into the Atlantic ocean.  If only he could reach up and tear the taught, impossible line.

   An instant later a round of brutal thunder roared out and, from his position in the sky, the sound was momentarily deafening.  He closed his eyes and heard the sounds which translated to a muffled silence. When he opened them again he thought he was dead, or waking up.

   But unfortunately for him, he did not find himself in bed. He did not find himself leaning over to reset his alarm clock. He did not find comfort.

   He would not be pinched out of this nightmare.

   The rain came and it soaked him through. Good news though: his face was numb now and the line began to pull much more slowly, as if holding him there in the inclemency; washing him off, rinsing him out. The last thing he remembered before he passed out was the wind blowing harshly. He was pushed about by the gusts like a flag on a pole.

   The storm passed. As did the night. He hung there, now a dead flag, for hours.

   Eventually, the sun came back and puffy white nimbuses gathered around the unmoving catch hanging by a hook.

   I woke him up, stirred him from his unconscious state.

   When his eyes opened I said to him: “What are you doing down there?”

   He was groggy, confused, scared, wet, hurt, still bleeding, bewildered and angry.

   Add sorry. Add crying. Add sunburned.

   He said he didn’t know. I nodded my head and looked into his weary, wounded face as I cut the line.

   He fell for a very long time. You could have fried an egg in the time it took him to reach the in-ground swimming pool in his back yard.  Do not ask me how he did not die from the impact. Do not ask me anything. I don’t know any more than you do.

   Isn’t that comforting?

   So when he had resurfaced he pulled his nearly lifeless body out of the pool and he lay in the yard. He carefully and painfully removed the huge hook from his cheek, feebly tossing it aside. He lay back in the grass and looked up into the sky for a few minutes.

   It was morning.

   He rose achingly and sauntered through the yard to the back door of his home. Inside his room he walked over to the bed and was about to lie down but he stopped when he saw his reflection in his window. His cheek looked horrific and there was dried blood all over. 

   With fervor and adrenalin he grasped his queen sized mattress and jerked it up from its location. He drug it through his room and squeezed it out the door. He had to fight it to pass it through the threshold of the backdoor.  The bed was flung out into the yard. Next came all the blankets. Then the pillows. Then the gas and the matches.

   Sitting in the yard he watched the mattress burn. The smoke curled swiftly up into the sky. An awful scent was released by the fire and it made his face scrunch up in repulsion. The flames ate the cushion with ease, with one long bite.

    That night he slept on the floor and woke early the next day.

 

   The man was holding the book closely to his face by the time he had finished and when he closed it he saw his wife standing there in front of him.

   “I see you are still making that curious fashion statement,” she said to him as he rose. He smiled and handing her the book, said “It was just such a curious story. I can’t exactly explain it. I liked it, though.” He handed her the book as he stood from his chair.

   His wife placed the collection in its spot next to his other works and said, “I always thought your earlier stories were the strangest.”

   “What darling?” he said absently as he remembered his walk, looking at his hat on the table by the door. He walked over and grabbed the hat and then the doorknob. The door cracked slightly and the mid-morning sun snuck in and drew a ray across the hardwood floor. Seeing then that he was beginning to leave his wife responded, “Hey, not before you put some pants on please. We don’t need to give the neighbors something to talk about.”