An excerpt from Amber -- by Russell Block
Death finds its expression in every culture, in the far Northwest reaches of Chicago even, and there it manifests itself subtly. In all, it can be found. Granted though the immense specifics vary among the smaller details of horns and fangs, at the corner Walgreens on Touhy, where they have gotten in the earliest, September produce of the American spookiness. This representation of life’s greatest mystery and most profound spectacle comes to take hold when the effusive change of season gives profit to the expression of 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 in another Sunday’s homily. The semis rend a dream sometimes whatever the season. Somewhere, some logic gives reason to their multitudes, to their stops, and the passages of these cabs and trailers on longer berths too. For the one who has his bedroom window overpeering Touhy blocks to the east of the drugstore, no logic accounts for this constant phenomenon of life. One of these to stutter on the road’s decay and thereby wake was the same that brought death, at some late hour, it must have been, while neither of the two walking those same blocks west were around to witness it. For those trucks reversed to the loading door are never seen unloading the store or snarl. In boxes they are taken, put in holding by seniors of the neighborhood in Walgreens uniforms on their first jobs, attire worn many years on since they themselves were ignorant of how these shelfs and racks were stocked. Opened up to various and detailed horrors, some indifferent hour to the end of the workday passed with the unpacking until an aisle got overlooked with gauze manufactured to obscure a wearer’s human eye. With money gotten trough parental allowance, these two, Pip and Sully, go about the aisles picking candy. Obnoxious in the rubber masks section, they continue through the other numbered rows as skulls. It only seemed natural for them to be rung up and worn out. A fight of skittles broke out in the lot. Targeting first the sections between teeth, barrages of the small multicolored pieces flew as early portents of the season’s abundance. As the aim got increasingly mean-spirited, they were of its violence too.
After a day in front of a basement console and screen, wanting for a restlessness the late return to Catholic school has caused, when they still hear weekly homilies but don’t see their friends of the classroom day to day, they argue about what to do. The construction of a new gym with new money extends summer to previously unknown lengths. They re-don the masks and gather their bikes left against the exterior garage wall. It is almost the most paranoia inducing time of the year. The shortening of the day’s light has not set in rationally for what it is, though the weather has changed, for it feels supernatural still. The purest goofiness of boo signs have not made the lawns friendlier with their camp depictions of black cats or crone witches gone into trees. No, it is the dry time of year when every garage crack and native cobweb opens in the spine. The clandestine trespassing a yard over to hide out on a neglected pot, where the corner protected from sight reduces the likelihood of becoming ‘it’ during tag, there, or any number of similarly narrow locales, you could fall through to a place of no return. It is nothing to be afeared, truly, but still a spooky time of year.
The cold whips against a strong, guiding talent for riding handless, arms folded, and with warmth kept in the crooks. The practice continues along a lane two cars can’t pass one another on, but enough spaces at the curb allows for travel - one car coming to a stop there, and deferring to the other’s progress. This would be possible were any cars in motion, which they are not. Behind the forerunner, as he is turning back to look, it also tries the maneuver. They are passing beneath green bracing for its full immersion. Beginnings of change accumulated more obviously above their progress in those branches less sured with chlorophyll or farthest from nutrients. Encouraged to do so, checked behind it for cars through cheesecloth, the death’s head settles down from a height where it was raised on peddles. The second rider almost crashes attempting to hover a pair of hands near the bars. The more horned, the more egregious, of the two skulls, so grotesque it hardly frightens, tilts back, laughing at his friend and calling him an idiot. After swinging around to look for headlights twice, it gets the hang of the actions forward against the exchanging pedals and imbalance, so that they both continue this way. Arms are folded, or arms are held out from the body’s center.
Along the better paved roads and lusher landscaping, where even the strange smell of sod extends to their stream through the road’s middle, strips of reflective material iterating, they can figure their riding. When at the quaint home, they do not knock to announce their visit. Instructed to no longer let the white exterior door to the side door rap when then enter, they almost let it fall, but they carefully ease it into the latch. They hope to give no parent a heart-attack descending the steps to the basement laundry room.
Through the seal of this basement’s door, a hue leaks. It is the blue color of the level they try to beat while the door begins to alter on its hinges, hands reaching around its depth, slowly the bleached moribund twins appearing.Their heads swivel to look the room around for prey. Famous for inspiring a urinary brinksmanship as, and while, the level proves intractable, a tough knack, impossible, the controller changes users on a couch each time their sprite clutches for air, time expires, and they lose one more on the way to game over — the water level is hardly even fun. There is new excitement brought by the pantomime creeping through the room anyways, and the gamesound alternates the panicked warning of final seconds before the demised clutches for the last time, sinking. The friends give up their game, ripping away the masks when they feel it in them to take on the mantle. Sometimes they repeat something a particularly punitive parent said over the summer, and this is especially well-received.
Almost as the interest starts waning, they can just as easily decide to bring this same show to the public, if it might be too late for much in the way of a wider audience. The one boy at home here is golly enthusiastic and starts off to ask his parents permission to leave the house this late. The two looking out through the mesh obstruct the door as those same parents until the ridicule sets in. They sneak out, stopping first at the pantry for snacks. This is well-known among them to be the house with the worst snacks. While the kid who lives here goes for his shoes, they nibble this crud, with skeptical expressions and pass off the item to their neighbor, just so everyone can get a sense of how bad any given thing is. When the other enters with his shoes, gleefully getting one of his favorites for himself, he is happy to take those skeptical expressions in the lightless recess of the pantry as signs of collective good-feeling.
They ride. One remembers, as the doldrum of the usual neighborhood passes, an image of those entities designed for distraction. A carnival on its last night near a strip mall gets conjured during the slow passage. For as rueful of the snacks as they were, this interest, all the way across town, holds their direction and entices their discussion.
Paths there might be more efficient, but their understanding of how to get to the area is vague and has to be gained by landmarks. The Donahughe corner four blocks down and eight over, back across the city line, is their first. This horde notes the impressive neighbor house behind which their innings always unfold. Perhaps only because they have no reason to pass by it in the night, but it strikes of observation the windows are so large. An arrangement of lights typifies the life of a family there. Almost the lights seem to call to mind the characteristics of a face too.
They head on where they are all pretty sure they should go one way. It gets them some distance off from the collection of entertainments when those do come into view. They break off in that direction, now with complete assurance of their destination that manifested itself from the neighborhood and by their navigation. It is this September’s length that has them testing their late hour. Their bikes sound doubly over a bump between barricades. They heap and diffuse through the chorale of machinery and game stalls. The tropes that decorate are not particular to the season, but all feel appropriate.
After that, and following the eerie feeling of the street’s illumination at this hour, the audience here arrive at the carnival after hours, no one seeming to watch their behavior save the figures of the magician and the magician’s assistant, and the revolutionary depiction of an eagle, fife, and drum on the row of chairs an arm keeps level. A monster of incredible indifference casts in dramatic lights and shadows on his copper skin, reaching though for the band in the valley of these graven images; it makes no progress. They stop their collective tour and regather before a rotating tunnel that has an orb entryway over-watched by mystic’s eyes. Hands posturing around the ball’s portent and smoke in the day when the operator is there, their study was inspired by one to take specific note of the bulbs, unlit at this hour, exposed, and higher up in the funhouse’s structure.
For Catholic children of the suburbs, it generally only takes a single opinion to advance through trepidations to undertake collectively in some malfeasance. A majority of the church goers agree even, not to be bound by the institutional strictures or repercussions more specific in the case of working class parents, not tonight. The one to suggest the idea, the one who has a parent in the CPD, experiences a juggling in his upbringing, of self, of duty, expectation and freedom. That he has too many figures of authoritarian overhead in his life and is willing to test those bounds, even with the foreknowledge of an omnipotent entity able to perceive his every thought and moral hazard, gives him a grim eminence among his friends tonight. The night is nervy when the stones are gathered and distributed, even into the hands of those less willing. Bodies act. In an indifferent distance, their target, the bulbs above this funhouse, are immune to each release and a subsequent scuttle or plunk in the grass where they land. Sometimes though, and nearer by the moment, a flight has a vague sense of accuracy, one dark motion streaking past the fixed, pale bulb way up. It only takes several stones rattling the drum on more wayward throws before an unspoken betrayal of their resolve takes hold, this the inspiration of guilt. Some act on their thinking that it would be best to leave. Others remain throwing, half-heartedly. A lights alters in a house behind the attraction. And, if this is coincidence, or if the repercussions have raised the ire of a neighbor to assess hoodlum behavior, not even the most dedicated two, those with death’s tilt looking upward from their foreheads, stick around. In their flight, the curious sound, the vague sense of life too, falls like the stones, some scattered by throws, some abandoned at their feet.
While the world was blind to all this, they return to the basement’s impossible level, where, normally, they would discuss the evening’s every hilarity. Something of a silence falls over their concluding session. There have been nights of greater turpitude, and nights of actual consequences, but this one feels September. It is odd that each of them seems quite, and only concerned, with their own intentions and action in this insipid excursion of life. Anyway, the hour is too late to remain there long. Light by light, the neighborhood returns. Above, the branches of side roads have lost the contrast of their colors to shivering dark. Then home, it feels like something hardly even could be said to have occurred.
