It was not long after this incident that, for the first time in my life, I went alone to the racecourse which my brother and I had visited together on so many previous occasions. There I watched the horses come parading out onto the track for each race from first to last.
Following the final race of the day, as the horses were leaving the track to return to the area where they were kept in barns, I saw that one of these animals, a roan stallion, had eyes that were the palest and most peculiar shade of gray. When this particular horse passed the spot where I was standing, these eyes turned upon me, staring directly into my own eyes in a way that seemed bitter and thoroughly brutish and which conveyed to me the sense of something unusual, something truly demonic that I could never bring myself to name.
For a time I had been looking to buy a house in which, barring unforeseen developments, I was planning to live out the rest of my life. During this period of house-searching, I found myself considering properties that were increasingly distant from those nearest to them, until ultimately my search for a house in which to live out the rest of my life took place entirely in remote areas miles from the most out-of-the-way towns. I myself was sometimes surprised at the backroad landscapes in which I ventured to investigate some old place where a real estate agent had sent me or upon which I simply happened in the course of wandering farther and farther from any kind of developed region, or even one that had the least proximity to other houses.
It was while driving my car through one of these backroad landscapes, on a windy November afternoon, that I discovered the sort of isolated house which at that point was the only conceivable place where I could live out the rest of my life with any chance of being at peace in the world. Although this two-story frame structure stood in a relatively level and austere backroad landscape, with a few bare trees and a ruined water tower intervening between it and the dull autumnal horizon, I did not become aware of its presence until I had nearly passed it by. There was no sign of landscaping immediately surrounding the house, only the same grayish scrub grass that covered the ground everywhere else in the area as far as the eye could see. Yet the house itself seemed relatively new in its construction, and was not exactly the type of run-down place in which I expected to live out the rest of my life in decayed seclusion.
I have already mentioned that it was a windy day, and, as I stood contemplating that spectacularly isolated house, the atmosphere of that vast backroad landscape became almost cyclonic. Furthermore, the sky was beginning to darken at the edges of the horizon, even though there were no clouds to be seen and several hours remained until the approach of twilight. As the force of the winds grew stronger, the only other features in that backroad landscape — the few bare trees and the ruined water tower — seemed to be receding into the distance away from me, while the house before which I stood appeared to loom closer and closer. In a thoughtless moment of panic I ran back to my car, struggling to open the door as the wind pounded against it. As soon as I was inside the car, I started the engine and drove as fast as conditions would allow. Nevertheless, it seemed that I was making no progress along the route by which I had come to that region: the horizon was still darkening and receding ahead of me while the house in my rear-view mirror remained constant in its looming perspective. Eventually, however, things began to change and that backroad landscape, along with the isolated two-story house, diminished behind me.
Only later did I ask myself where I would live out the rest of my life if not in that backroad landscape, that remote paradise in which a house had been erected that seemed perfectly designed for me. But this same place, a true resting place in which I should have been able to live out the rest of my life in some kind of peace, was now only one more thing that I had to fear.
In addition to the five stories presented here, I also found notes, mostly in the form of unconnected phrases, for a sixth story with the apparent working title of ‘Sideshow.’ Following the manner of the other pieces, this story similarly seemed destined to be no more than a dreamlike vignette, an episode of ‘peculiar and ridiculous show business,’ to quote from the author’s notes. There were other unique phrases or ideas that appeared in these notes which had also emerged in my conversations with the author as we sat in the corner booth of that coffee shop throughout the course of several nights. For example, such phrases as ‘the volatility of things’ and ‘unexpected mutations’ appeared repeatedly, as if these were to serve as the guiding principles of this presumably abandoned narrative.
I suppose I should not have been surprised to find that the author of the aborted narrative had made references to myself, since he had clearly characterized his work to me as ‘autobiographical wretchedness.’ In these notes I am fairly designated as the ‘other man in the coffee shop’ and as a ‘pitiful insomniac who manufactures artistic conundrums for himself in order to distract his mind from the sideshow town in which he has spent his life.’ The words ‘sideshow town’ appear earlier in what seems to be the intended opening sentence of the aborted, or perhaps deliberately abandoned, story. This particular sentence is interesting in that it directly suggests a continuity with one of the other stories, something that, in my notice, is otherwise absent among these feverish, apparently deranged fragments. ‘After failing to find a house in which I might live out the rest of my life,’ the sentence begins, ‘I began to travel frantically from one sideshow town to another, each of them descending further than the one before it into the depths of a show-business world.’
Given the incomplete nature of the notes for the story called ‘Sideshow,’ not to mention the highly elliptical quality that was conspicuous even in the author’s completed works which I had read, I did not search very long for the modicum of ‘coherence and continuity’ that he claimed to assign to the ‘senseless episodes’ forming the fundamental stratum of both his writings and his experience of the world. And at some point these notes ceased to resemble a rough outline for a work-in-progress and took on the tone of a journal or private confession. ‘Told X [a reference to myself, I assumed] that I wrote when I was prompted,’ he wrote.
‘Didn’t mention what might constitue such a prompt, and he didn’t ask. Very strange, since he seemed to display all the subtle qualities of a highly receptive temperament, not to mention those far less subtle traits which were evident from our first meeting. Like gazing into a funhouse mirror: the glaring likeness of our literary pursuits, our shared insomnia, even the brand of cigarette which we both smoked, often lighting up at the same time. I wasn’t going to draw attention to these details, but why didn’t he?’
I recalled that one night I had questioned the meaning of my companion’s statement that everything (in a ‘sideshow world,’ that is) was ‘ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.’ In his notes, or confession, he wrote: ‘No standard exists for the peculiarity and ridiculousness of things, not even one that is unspeakable or unknowable, words which are merely a front or a subterfuge. These qualities — the peculiar and the ridiculous — are immanent and absolute in all existence and would be in any conceivable existent order…’ This last sentence is transcribed thus from the author’s notes, truncated by ellipsis so that he could immediately jump to his next thought, which was written on the same line. ‘Why didn’t X challenge this assertion? Why did he allow so many things to remain on the surface that might easily have gone so much deeper?’ And on the line directly below that, he wrote: ‘Some peculiar and ridiculous fate in a sideshow town.’