Note to Self: Tie String Around Finger

By Kacy Curtis

This book is about magic. It is about the persistence of faith, the tenacity of innocence. It is about doowap music and covered bridges and home made ice cream and New England cemeteries and the Bible and Elvis Presley and baseball and Allen Ginsberg and blues and rope swings and orgasms. It is about the dark, silent, ever-flowing river of enchantment and wonder. It is about life and nothing else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 14, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462819850

Kacy Curtis

Kacy Curtis was born in Ashland, Oregon in 1976. He graduated from Ashland High School without having read one book. His overall G.P.A. was a 2.0, but he excelled in all of the violent sports. In 1996, after taking a year off to drink margaritas on Maui and Kaua’i, he attended Southern Oregon University. He dropped out after one semester because it conflicted with his principles and his vices. Since then, he has gotten lost in Yellow Stone National Park, and liquidated his mind on Bourbon Street. He has driven an R.V. across The United States, and cried while visiting Graceland. He is currently living in Portland, Oregon with his girlfriend, and is hard at work on the feel good novel of the year. His hobbies include building rope-swings, eating at Home Town Buffet, barnyard wrestling, and watching Three’s Company. The Half-Life Of Hate is his second novel.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

My name is Raymond Kassel, and I am the author of this book. You, my noble counterpart, are the reader. Already there is this distinction between us. The moment your hands opened this book, the instant your head bent forward and your eyes absorbed the ink upon this paper, there developed a chasm between us. I do not wish this to be so. I feel that a void, a gap between you and I, is not only cumbersome, but also inappropriate. Reader, writer; these labels do not belong here.

I say all of this, for I want you to understand that this is not my story. This is not the product of some forced, contrived, and ultimately banal effort to create fiction. I, like you, am sitting alone in this theater of life, and this tale, which I will attempt to unfold, is but one in the vast legion of mysteries that blossoms before us on this sad, majestic earth. So, as we pull ourselves through this entanglement of life, in search of some strange answer, some utterance of wisdom or truth, know that I am not the author whose image you have in your mind. I do not wear turtlenecks, or snap my fingers at poetry slams. I do not wear wool blazers with leather patches on the elbows, or drink wine while listening to Kenny G on the stereo. I am you and your father. I am your best friend and your perfect stranger. I am the collective pulse of America, the namelessness of the immense, stuttering manswarm, and I will die beside you on this battlefield-playground if it means obtaining insight into this mysterious world.

I find books, despite all their majesty and wonder, still lacking in heart and substance. Books are silent, books are dead, books are nothing but black, crooked symbols, lying adjacent on mute and lifeless whiteness. Let us work together then, you and I, to make this book into something else, something different, something new.

While you are holding it, caressing it, gazing down into the abyss of its pages, see this book for what it really is; the glue of existence, the holy adhesive, which binds each and everyone of us irrevocably together.

This book is about a man named Adrian Owens, who vanished from Portland, Oregon in the summer of 2001. At least that is what I thought the book was about when I began writing it in the fall of that very same year. However, I soon realized that this book is not so much about one man, as it is the society which he inhabited. Therefore, I put forth the idea that you and I are truly the pivotal characters in this paltry, whimsical saga. Adrian Owens, in my earnest opinion, is nothing if not a mirror, reflecting the world which was closing in around him, closing in around us all. This book is about the extinction of drive-in theaters. This book is about the mini-malls and cine-plexus, which lay strewn across this dying land like humanity’s scabs. It is about the all-you-can-eat medication buffets, which have become our answer to everything. It is about a nation who’s soul is dying one citizen at a time. It is about overdraft fees and parking permits and telemarketers and reality television and Starbucks. It is about the vague restlessness, the unspoken moroseness which, somehow, is cultivated in this proud, impossible America.

However, I believe this book to be somehow greater than all of this. I find that within these pages lies more than the portrait of a troubled man. I have faith that these words embody more than a mere commentary on our crippled society. As I peel aside the layers of my intention, in search of some elusive significance, I realize that this book is actually about magic. It is about the persistence of faith, the tenacity of innocence. It is about doowop music and covered bridges and home made ice cream and New England cemeteries and the Bible and Elvis Presley and baseball and Allen Ginsberg and Blues and rope swings and orgasms. It is about the dark, silent, ever-flowing river of enchantment and wonder. It is about life and nothing else.

It would be deceitful to say that Adrian Owens was my friend. It would be a lie if I told you I knew him well. Yet that is precisely why he fascinates me so; the fact that I did not know him. What if nobody truly knew him? What if, in his forty-three years of private, brooding existence, no one was allowed insight into who he was as a man, as a human being. He is the forever nameless, the forever faceless. When I think of Adrian Owens, a dour, misunderstood man, I imagine him as a star; anonymous amidst the clear expansive sky of winter’s night. And like the star who refuses to be obscure, who will not burn passively beside his brethren, and flies, screaming hysterically, across the heavens toward a certain demise, so went Adrian; racing across the nation, hungering for something which had never been his, and leaving behind a fiery wake of tears and madness. I am left with the impression that he was aware of his own anonymity, and, declining a future full of silent desperation, chose to make his mark by charging not from, but toward death, all the while howling with a dull, woeful lunacy.

As I reflect back on the summer of 2001, my soul becomes polluted with feelings of fear, confusion, and of childlike curiosity. The feelings of which I speak are not limited to moments of quiet meditation. They can overcome me at anytime, descending upon me like a soft, nostalgic blanket, knit with melancholy thread. Time and again I am pulled back to the day that I discovered my neighbor missing.

I was sitting at my kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee. The early morning light, delicate and oddly grim, came creeping through the window with an awkward, hushed reluctance. It fell in slanting rays upon the newspaper, which I read with a drowsy absentmindedness. So nonexistent was my attention that I had almost finished reading the article concerning Adrian’s disappearance before the significance, the magnitude commenced to manifest in my mind. Once I understood that it was my neighbor whose mysterious plight I was reading about, I was stricken with a combination of nausea and bitter disbelief.

I placed the paper on the table and stared out the window at an awakening Portland; all dew-covered and hazy in the rosy birth of another morning. It is difficult to describe the sadness I felt at that moment. Portland, laying strewn before me, colliding with the vast desolate northern woods, seemed not the safe, joyful metropolis I had moved to a year prior. Suddenly, it was barren cement, forlorn rooftops, broken dreams, and cold gusts of air whipping in from the Willamette River. The instant I discovered my neighbor had vanished, I felt the unpleasant sensation of reality’s claws scratching at my spine, as though some intangible barrier had been traversed, allowing the outside world, with all it’s somber realism, to invade my private palace, my circle of safety.

I shifted my disheartened gaze to the house adjacent to my own, the house that Adrian had occupied just a few days prior. I thought of his family, his wife and two young sons, who were left behind to scramble aimlessly in the dark, searching in vain for pieces to a hopeless puzzle. What of Mrs. Owens, staring bleary-eyed at her ceiling in the middle of a dead and endless night; lying frigid and awake in bed suddenly too immense for her alone. What of his children, unaware of any grim stigmas attached to their Father’s disappearance, knowing only the vague sadness, the inarticulate void which quivers inside their child hearts. I pondered the universe and, of course, Earth with its pompous sense of self importance, somehow situated in the middle of this unnameable mass. It all seemed like a rude joke, whose only audience is the teller itself. Instantly, the soul of man, the fate of the individual became insignificant in my eyes. It seemed as though men and women could fall from the face of the Earth, leaving nothing but a fleeting void, an ephemeral cavity of nothingness, which the world would fill in, like ocean water seeping into a tide pool. I drank my coffee in mute stupidity, somehow aware of the futility in my dark and ponderous brooding.

Over the weeks that followed, there developed in me an intrigue, a certain fascination concerning this missing man. Far from the morbid wonder that engulfed me that gloomy morning, my interest became something jovial and innocent. Like a child in love with the game of baseball, fascinated by statistics and scores, highlights and commentaries; so I would stroll across my driveway each morning to retrieve the paper, eager to follow the developments in the case.

At that time in my life, I was suffering from minor depression, and the opportunity to live vicariously through the media, to follow this real life story like some well-plotted mystery, was welcomed with relief and gratitude. I was twenty-five years old that summer and had just completed my second novel, however, my efforts at getting published had all been for naught, and I was uncertain where my future lie. Was I to forsake my adolescent dreams of becoming a writer, drag my ambition into the backyard on a loud, rainy night and slit its throat under black, pensive clouds so that I might get on with pursuing a life of mundane normalcy, of consistent paychecks and reliable cars? Or was I to stay the course, pursue my goals even if it meant a future filled with rejection letters, hunger pangs and ugly houses. To be honest, both options seemed entirely unbearable, and thus was my dismal conundrum. Even if I had wanted to pursue my writing wholeheartedly, I was suffering from a wicked bout of writer’s block, which had rendered my mind as empty as my savings account. I was exhausted and forlorn, both emotionally and creatively. And so, through want of an escape, I read my paper each morning like a young boy with his favorite comic, not knowing that it was Adrian Owens, the neighbor whom I had never known, that would eventually solve both my problems.

It happened on an unassuming evening during the decline of September. Prompted by my girlfriend’s pleas to help out with the household chores, I lumbered out the door and into the driveway, my arms laden with a cumbersome load of trash-filled Hefty sacks. I made my way to the alley, which separated the Owen’s house from my own, and laboriously heaved the soggy bags into the dumpster. It was then that I discovered the tattered notebook sitting inside the dumpster on top of a heap of rubbish. Seized by an overpowering curiosity, I reached in and grabbed the notebook. Although I had not the faintest idea what the notebook contained, I felt my heart beat faster; as if somewhere deep inside, I understood that whatever it was would affect my life in a dramatic fashion. I opened the book with sweaty hands, and gasped in rapt bewilderment as I realized I was holding the journal of Adrian Owens.

Looking back on that pivotal evening, I cannot help but marvel at the gentle irony which had already begun to bloom. What I held was a document detailing one man’s demise and yet, in me, it had triggered some hungry, life-affirming instinct; a crude longing for all that lay ahead, a dull thirst for the marrow of life. There, under the belligerent vastness of an infantile autumn sky, I stood motionless, on the brink of eternity; holding in my hands the wretched fragments of some missing soul. With that book I felt the immensity of all that has ever been. Summer died that night, bleeding in my embrace, coughing up hideous wisdom, and from its death sprouted a million hopes and dreams. I watched it die with a smile on my face; I suddenly yearned for the future, the red-yellow melancholy fall, the ever-unfolding tomorrow. I stood in the cement alley and watched the birth of yet another cycle, the perpetual autumn recurring forever. I felt the wind turn cold with truth; sharp and crisp, yet moist and fragrant with sea-salt. I heard the rustling of leaves in the trees, procrastinating their inevitable death, clinging on pathetically to yesterday. There, in a dumpster, in an alley, in a city, in a state, in a country, in a nation, in a world, in a knot of cosmic yarn I discovered a splinter of truth, a shred of reality. I felt inexplicably alive, and somehow irrevocably connected to everything. With a quick glance around to ensure that I had not been seen, I turned to enter my home, but something caught my attention, and I remained pinned in place. The alley in which I stood was dark, yet across the street the gable of a large home still glowed brilliantly, illuminated by the last, defiant flicker of the setting sun. It was as though that gable, that humble apex was the highest point in the entire sprawling Portland. Silently, I stood in the sea of asphalt darkness and watched as the crown of that modest, lowly home burned like a holy beacon. It seemed to glow, to blaze, to smile with a proud, red awareness and I understood that somewhere the sun is always shining; the sun will never cease to bestow itself, light will never desert us.

All that night I sat curled up on my couch, drinking enormous cups of coffee, and reading Adrian’s journal with the fury of a college freshman cramming for mid-terms. When the silent light of first morning reared its grisly head, I found myself still perched upon the couch. During that long, odd night I thought that I was peering into one man’s past, but all the while I was planning another man’s future: my own. For as the city came screeching to life outside my window, as I read the last words scribbled in his notebook, I understood that by doing so I had bound myself to him, I had somehow shackled our souls together. I decided that I was to tell the tale that he could not. I was to serenade the world with the forlorn songs which Adrian had written on the empty roads of an unsympathetic America. I was to take the bittersweet seed of a man who charged headlong toward the bleak monster of fatality, and plant it into the minds of all who would listen; thereby initiating the harvest which will sustain the naked, needy children of the endless hereafter.

However, before I continue any further I would like to return my attention to the notebook, which I found discarded in the trash, in hopes that you, too, will appreciate the miraculous events that helped place it in my possession. This journal which Adrian kept as he made his way across the nation was discovered in a Shell station restroom just outside St. Louis, Missouri. An employee of this gas station, whose name I do not know, discovered the notebook, and, not knowing what else to do, called information and got the phone number of the man whose name filled its pages. Upon calling the phone number which was given to him, he learned of the missing man in Portland and promptly mailed it to Adrian’s wife, whom he had spoken with. From here, it is easily explained. I can only imagine that Mrs. Owens, horror stricken and sorrowful from what she read, was left with no other option but to throw it out.

At the time, however, this information was unbeknownst to me. In my awe-struck eyes, the journal was a mystery all its own, an enigma, a magical artifact that had washed up onto the shore of my solitary existence. I saw the notebook as an entity that refused to share the secret of its own history, and yet it was this not knowing that captivated me so. I felt as if I had become an actor in a play much larger than I could fathom. Propelled by this feeling of complicity, I sat at my computer that very morning and, with the journal by my side, began to write this book.

And so begins the tale of Adrian Owens. It is a story, like all stories, whose origin is elusive, intangible, impossible to trace. I believe that all stories have not a beginning nor an ending. I believe that events simply pile on top of each other, occurrances are stacked in a colossal heap, until finally the tip of this ever-maturing mound erupts forth from the concealing facade of normalcy, over which we stroll so detached and aloof, pleading, screaming, demanding to be recognized, begging to be acknowledged. The roots of this story can be traced to God’s crock pot, in which boiled the primordial stew of creation in the dawn of eternal morning. It has been whispered in caves, uttered in dungeons, and suggested in a million huts. It has lingered in the back alleys of Bourbon Street, witnessing the birth of jazz and the desecration of uncountable, junky souls. It was chanted in the galleys of innumerable slave ships, crashing across the cold, gray, terrifying Atlantic. It has loitered on the grassy knolls outside Jerusalem, gazed with mute indifference as Christ hung bleeding and weeping from the cross of perpetual confusion. It was in the beat-up Jalopy with my Grandfather as he and his family, leaving their dirt-floored cabin in Colorado, headed to California in search of scattered dreams, life, prosperity. It was played on the radio the night your parents first made love, and it will be playing at my funeral. It is the story of humankind, and we, the optimistic assemblage of ghostly authors, scribble our hopes with pens dipped in blood.

Now it is time for me to recede, to shrink, to hide between the lines. Now it is time that I lose myself, become words, enter your head, inhabit your soul. Now it is time for my voice to fade away, so that Adrian’s might be heard. Now it is time for ancient stories to become new again. Now it is time to huddle amongst your loved ones in the crisp, nostalgic October night, and remember the magical America which yearns to exist again.

CHAPTER 2

Adrian Owens

July 17th, 2001

Gas Station Spokane,

Washington

The large screeching thing was gone. It had been gone for an hour. It had gone to work. It had taken the two little screeching things with it. The two little screeching things go to school. All the screeching things had gone. The house was quiet. But I could still hear them. In my head they are always screeching. It is always noisy in my head.

Today is the day I left it all. I knew this day would come. I had felt it getting closer. But I had not thought it through. I had not planned for this. I had not made arrangements. I had acted normal. I had waited patiently. It has arrived. Today is the day I left the screeching things. Today I left everything.

I did not go to the Library today. I work at the Library. I did not go to work today. I am not going to work ever again. The large screeching thing screeched at me when I did not get out of bed. I told it I felt