(c) 2008 mykl g. sivak.

A Guide to the Abandoned

I.

In the end of August, before my senior year I rode shotgun
in Isaac’s old two-tone AMC Eagle as he drove away from the Stratford shore
up 108 through Trumbull to the sylvan-side of Shelton down to the valley-side,
across the dirty Housatonic, past brick factories once teeming in industry now dormant,
waiting for the wrecking-ball, the return of American tool and die, or nouveau riche co-opting,
that had not come and left them standing vacant and hollow in the tepid
summer-scented air of that late soft-blue afternoon.

We sped upon the asphalt of 34 in the shade and shadow
of new-growth pines in Orange, past the black waters of Matlby reservoir
and the silent edifice of Yale Bowl into the heart of New Haven’s black ghetto.
The car wove a path through the city’s streets, threading the mesh network
of dorms and old diners, apartment complexes, dead churches and other
vacant factories with lots where intermittent ailanthus grew, chickweed spreading
out across the pavements like oil stains.

I lit a Newport I had taken without asking from Isaac’s pack that sat as usual
in the high center-point of the cranberry vinyl dash. He did not turn as I took it
and lit its tip inhaling, with his grandfather’s silver Zippo—the grandfather who had died,
not long before—at whose funeral Isaac, and his mother and grandmother, had vowed together
to give up the habit of smoking, to defy the very cancer that consumed the man, transformed
his lungs once spongy pink to something hard and tarred black heavy –thick as burnt
beef-tongue marinated in pitch.

It had been an Irish wake, with K of C guardsmen standing Christian-Shi’va, motionless
as English Oak beside stiff log of painted corpse, their ridiculous Napoleonic chapeaux-bras
crested in plumes of purple-dyed feathers flirting with the low ceiling of the funeral parlor,
swaying there like high broad leaves in a subtle summer breeze
We were there in black suits, Isaac and I, sitting on the building’s back steps’
plastic green carpet. I watched quiet as he smoked one by one the cigarettes
from the pack that was said would be his last.

That morning he had shaved his head to bare flesh ritualistically with a straightedge, said in passing
he’d pressed it once hard against his soft inner-wrist, and showed me the mark without meeting
my gaze with his eye. I could see the line that matched the color of the many red speckles,
knicks and razor-burnt patches peppering his white Irish scalp.
The cigarette vow would not stick, and the three-way truce dissolved quickly once
the patriarch was interred to brown earth in a Cemetery beneath the highway, beside Bridgeport dilapidation
and rail tracks rusted, thick with scrub and weed-grasses from decades of disuse.

But now we were driving, through suburb and slum, across backroads that traced the shoreline
up to Guilford to meet his friend Virgil who worked summers at the town dock
pumping fuel into boats. It was 8 p.m. and the air on my arm that cut through it—
that hung from the window outstretched, cigarette tucked between fingers—
felt like summer seawater, in temperature and viscosity. As the sun dipped lower the sky’s colors
melted and mixed like a puddle of sherbet about the sound’s brown waters.
Isaac pulled into the lot, beside an assemblage of European cars.

We sat there for a moment, and he lit a cigarette, closed his eyes as he inhaled, pulled the first deep drag
into his lungs, then looked out through the masts and riggings of yachts and trawler booms.
I thought of the past summer, the hours we’d spent driving through Connecticut’s North West corner,
Isaac sometimes stealing gas from pumps without conferring, speeding away over the hills of Litchfield,
Goshen, past Cornwall farms and fields at midnight that held deer herds of fifty heads or more whose eyes
glowed gold and bodies froze in the Eagle’s yellow headlamp-light before bounding away in a swell
over old stone walls into forest black with night. Isaac cursing beneath his breath for a rifle.

Those nights we’d slept in reclined bucket seats at parkway rest stops, or he in his bed and I on
his parent’s couch, or both of us without tents or sleeping bags atop long felled logs in greenbelt
nooks beside stolen firewood fires, which lit the deep green canopy orange, grey smoke rising to meet
the starry skies above, to avoid sleeping beneath my parents’ roof as often as possible until
the fall semester commenced. I avoided them, tired of there lifestyle, their working-class fatigue,
and their vague expectations, which to me seemed little more than bossiness. Their words
were manipulations, their attempts at affection, suffocation.

He sounded the car horn at a blur in the distance that turned,
jogged to us, took the shape of Virgil, who Isaac had befriended at the prep school
he was sent to after “falling in with a bad bunch” in the Stratford school system.
Virgil wore oil-stained coveralls, beamed Aryan blonde, eyes the blue of glaciers,
He slapped the side of Isaac’s scalp with a black palm and let himself into the car’s back seat.
“Let’s go get some flashlights,” he said through pinched lips as he lit a cigarette. “There’s a place
I want to show you.” Isaac turned the ignition, and drove toward Virgil’s home.

II.

Virgil’s parents’ garage was detached from the colonial house—both shingled in white clapboard
with hunter green shutters beside the windows—they stood at the end of a long drive
that climbed from the main road up a hill thick with trees, a small wood that spread
to cover the acres of property and beyond to the land that surrounded them.
The garage was a garrison of sporting equipment—
lacrosse sticks, soccer balls and hockey skates, fly reels, rods and wicker creels
that hung on leather straps from long nails on the unfinished walls.

Virgil stood atop a tool bench at the rearmost wall, brushing wooden-handled antique tools
aside with his Vans. He reached up and leaned into a wooden canoe that swung back beneath his weight,
swayed in its clothesline yoke, which held it dangling from the broad rafters.
He emerged, leapt down, landed square on concrete, smiling, in each hand an electric lantern.
He bore them like six-guns in the hands of a movie cowboy, flicked them on simultaneously
with his thumbs, beaming yellow light into my eyes and Isaac’s.
“Let’s go,” he laughed. “I want to show you this place.”

We walked with lanterns off, along the darkening path that led away from the back lawn
and cut through the brush of the woods, though the sky still showed lavender, here and there
through the canopy like grape pudding dribbling down through the leaves. Crickets chirped listless
in the cool of the cool of the evening, and in distant spots a bird or another piped.
Little bats twittered, their wings flapping sound of cards stuck in spokes,
through the high braches, and once or twice down near our faces through the fine haze
of gnats and mosquitoes that hovered above us and moved as we moved.

At twilight the woods opened partially before us; against the dark sky stood a house, its structure
only visible in dull patches through the dusky foliage. We moved across a driveway
mostly hidden from sight by yellow grasses, the crumbled asphalt crack crunching
beneath our sneakers’ soles.  Virgil went first, up the bowed and broken steps beneath a veranda
overtaken by vines. Its posts near covered by American Bittersweet, red-berries glowing between husks
of banana yellow, still visible in the dim light. Maple saplings thin as finger with full-sized
bright green leaves stood up through places where porch planks had fallen inward, or split apart rotten.

We walked carefully, feeling with our muscles for signs of collapse, stepping in over upon a flaking
old door--once red now pink through molding patina—fallen inward, rusted hinges dangling mildewed
jamb like overripe fruits.  I stepped behind Isaac into darkness, and the ray of light and dust that shot
out from his lantern expanded in my mind to become the yellow wash of a sun from eleven years prior,
when I followed my cousin Kevin, two years my senior, and Arthur, the eleven year old son
of Portuguese immigrants, through the silver painted chain-link, across the small field of Bridgeport scrub
and litter, to the wide dirt lot of the next street and the deep hole we called “The Ditch.”

It had been dug months earlier by a large yellow backhoe, after the trees that one stood there
had been torn out at their roots. We sank to our bare knees into the loose solid, and slid on our rears,
riding little dirt avalanches down twenty or so feet to the puddles and mud at the base. I recalled climbing,
and on reaching street level seeing Kevin and Arthur, looking up at an old man, in slacks
and white sneakers, little dog on a leash, nodding toward an old olive green house at the back of the lot.
Its roof was half gone, the other half caving and blackened, window panes broken like cartoon teeth, thin white
fabric curtains billowing outward in the hot summer wind.

He told us there had been a fire, a few years earlier, and no one knew the cause.
Said the people who’d lived there had been found dead in their beds baked, seared
like meat without waking.  But the weirdest thing, he told us, was there old German Shepard
that the firefighters found headless, hanging from the wall by a coat hook
jammed through its ribs. He smiled, snorted, spit a wad in the dust.
They never found the head, he added, then turned his back,
walked back through the dirt to the road.

We walked toward the burnt ruins, the hairy tips of tall grasses tickling my nose, till we reached
the steps and open doorway that lead to an enclosed front porch. They dared me to enter,
to cross the porch to the inner doorway, and I said I would do it, which is confusing and strange.
I reached up for the banister, climbed the unpainted wooded steps, and stopped at the door.
I looked back at my companions, who goaded and urged me on, and I stepped into the porch.
Inside was dim brown-yellow sunlight filtered through drawn old shades, the floor was covered
with a mess of yellow newspapers and other bits of ephemera, envelopes and brown bags.

I walked to the inner door, peered into brown shadow,
searched for the coat hook, where the Shepard had hung.
I kept one foot on the porch as I leaned into the dark room,
could barely make out the newspapers on that floor as well.
Then I saw with my eyes a white bordered photograph just a foot
or so inward from the place where I stood. I tried hard to focus,
on the image imprinted upon it, but in the dark light it was difficult.

Suddenly, it seemed to take shape—
the face of a dog, eyes wildly angled, tongue hanging
out from the mouth at its side. I screamed for my cousin
leapt from the doorway clearing in a bound the three steps
as high as myself. When I reached the outside
I saw they had left me they were gone, no where to be seen.
I ran home alone, ditched.

III.
The sun’s light was gone now, and Isaac’s light arced across the house’s interior.
Virgil disappeared around a corner, though now and again, his lantern light would bounce,
off some tarnished old mirror or pane of glass. Inside was a horror, walls and paint peeling
in thick sheets like paper-bark maple, or the bark of white birch. The floor was strewn with rubbish,
like newspaper and tin cans, broken porcelain basins, and conduit. To our left was a parlor packed
just feet from the ceiling, with a large pile of decaying black bags—filled fat with who knows what—
spilling down through the doorways to the rooms that adjoined it.

We climbed over the pile, through the door to the kitchen—its walls all bare plaster—
floor a puzzle of tiles, broken sheetrock from the ceiling that seemed to have dropped
down all at once after simply letting go. We saw Virgil descend through a door to the cellar.
Without a lantern I followed Isaac’s light as he moved back toward the foyer,
then climbed a broken stairway that led to higher floors.
I watched him cling precarious with one hand to the banister,
negotiate gaps two, three steps in distance and height.

I followed, felt the fear that rose in my arteries as I looked down to the black nothingness
flights beneath my body. Down between a riddle of broken jutting joists, long rusted nails
I saw the beam of Virgil’s lamp moving almost twenty feet below. We moved
without stopping through second floor corridors, Isaac’s light shining off half-pane windows,
our momentary reflections like specters—eyes lifeless black sockets, faces flesh upon bones
sans muscle—Isaac walked with a purpose, as if drawn ever higher, to a thin door at our left,
between black bedrooms halfway down the hallway. 

He threw back the door—hinges falling away from the jamb like woodscrews torn
from cooked venison—folding down to the floor thick with dust the color of cigarette ash.
He climbed the attic stairway; I followed, eyes fixed upon his stubbled scalp, not wanting to turn
back to the darkness that hung at my shoulders like a hot heavy curtain, that bled from behind me
into my eyes’ periphery to coat the corridor walls crawling with slithering silverfish, pill bugs,
and albino arachnids. I felt darkness in its incomprehensible entirety breathing down my spine,
as I stepped without effort up the steps to the apex.

The attic was large, unfinished. Isaac shined the light across the floor of bare joists,
walls—bowed boards of the roof—above us loomed cross beams, each a foot square in thickness, at least, each three meters
long and hewn from single trunks. In the high points little brown balls, dangling bats, quivered.
I felt a suffocation—claustrophobic escapeless—stairwell black abyss. It was then that the feeling
that had existed nebulous and shapeless at the back of my mind since we entered the building
finally congealed, took horrid shape: This is a bad place, I thought, and the words,
Something happened here, ran in my mind in a whispered continuous loop.

Isaac tossed me the lantern then disappeared, in a single movement, up into to beams,
then away into darkness. I stood alone, arcing the lantern across the beams littered with stray paper sheets,
rubbish, remnants and moldy collapsing brown boxes. The light fell upon a heap of rotten clothing
in a far corner and I thought of an august, five years prior, when Isaac had rode to my house
on his bike, four miles from Stratford.  His hair was long then, hanging down greasy
in brown locks past his nose. I stood on the back pegs, and he peddled,
up to the old plant beside the projects and the highway.

The gutters of my neighborhood were troughs of sand, drug vials,
used condoms, and torn scraps of hardcore porno pages; the streets patrolled
by rusted white vans driven by drug pushers, gang-members or stalking molesters.
We stashed his bike in the tall grass, walked the trail through the thicket
of belladonna and briar, past tiger lilies, and touch-me-nots, to the hole
in the chain-link that bordered the plant’s vacant lot. We had been there before,
and its emptiness kept pulling us.

Automatic we crossed to a loading dock, asphalt marked with large pentagram,
the red face of Satan grinning from a wall, weird scripts and symbols tracing his horns.
We climbed the dock, to the building’s interior, a huge empty space, the size
of a football field, at least, broad yellow beams of sunlight cutting down through the shadow
and dust to the concrete floor caked inches thick with the excrement of pigeons that fluttered
and cooed from the iron decking above. The concrete walls were a codex
of spray-painted graffiti. Along them lay piles of twisted metal and trash.

We walked the length of the interior, fingers against crumbling concrete, to the furthest corner
away from the dock’s door. In it sat a huge pile of clothing, the wall scattered with dozens
of tiny handprints in red. I knew it was paint, but we agreed they were blood, the record of some
Satanists’ ceremony. Someone heard something, and we agreed to get going, walked back toward
the doorway at the large room’s end. Suddenly from the rooftop fell a thunderous crashing,
then the sound of hundreds of pigeon flapping and fleeing. We both turned around toward the wall
of wings that moved toward us like the waters of an exploded dam.

A bird smashed into my shoulder, and I feel back to the dirty floor, swatting above me,
protecting my eyes. Through the blur of grey motion, I caught glimpse of Isaac, who stood unprotected,
arms at sides, face and chest to the torrent, birds flapping past him, wings brushing his cheeks.
The birds passed through the dock doors with a trickle of stragglers, and Isaac offered a hand
helped me back to me feet. We watched the black mottled cloud move like a fractal above
the highway, until it shrank in the distance, descending among some trees. The sun’s light waned,
and we ran like hell across the tarmac, back through the chain-link to retrieve his bike.

IV.

I could hear Isaac, like a rat in the rafters. The urge of impatience
hot in my head. My foot knocked against something, a small wooden chest,
the size of a breadbox, its jacket of leather peeling in rolls. I flipped the lid open
upon leather hinges, without hesitation to look within. Inside was a mess,
old letters and postcards, cracked fading photographs, and empty envelopes.
Indiscriminate, I pulled out a handful, lined them up in my palms
and slid them into a back pocket.

In that moment Isaac dropped down from the rafters, dangling for a moment from one arm.
He landed like a sparrow upon two foot-spaced joists, flicked open the Zippo, smiling in the wick’s light.
 In his right hand he held a small rifle by its stock—barrel dappled with rust—hammer rusted cocked.
“Let’s go,” he said, as he reached for the lantern. He put the lighter in his pocket. I followed him
down the stairs. Outside in darkness, Virgil sat smoking, orange cherry pulsing dimly in the night.
He sat atop the wooden bed, of a Ford 150 without wheels, vines and branches encasing its corpse, in his lap
what appeared to be an old kerosene lantern. “Find anything good?” he asked.

We made our way back to Virgil’s parents’ property. Said “so long” and got back
into Isaac’s old Eagle. He took off his sweatshirt, wrapped it around the rifle,
and shoved them behind the rear bench seat.
We didn’t speak as he drove, passed the town dock, back through New Haven—
late summer streets vacant in orange lamplight, tenement windows blinking blue from countless televisions.
The temperature kept dropping, and I clicked on the car’s heater—
pulled one final cigarette from Isaac’s near-emptied pack.

The next week was September and my first Senior semester,  and for Isaac, night classes,
having dropped out of high school. He dropped me at my Parent’s house. I waved from the door.
I walked past my father, who slept on the couch before the television, heard my mother in the kitchen
putting plates upon shelves. I sat on my bed, pulled the papers from my pocket.
There were envelopes with postmarks ranging a lifetime, and a single photograph of two men in a yard.
In tones of grey, broad-smiling, they stood beside an old pickup, behind them just out-of-focus
stood the house in which we’d just been.

I scrawled the day’s date upon the photo’s yellowed versa. Then got down on my knees,
reached under my bed to retrieve the old shoebox I kept there, put the photo in the box the beside
photographs and notes that I had collected over the years. I held on to the letters and put the box back,
carried them out of my room. As I passed my father I said hi, and he peeked from his slumber,
waved with a small tired grin. In the kitchen my mother stood in her bathrobe. I walked up to her,
placed the letters on the countertop beside her. “I found these today. Thought you’d like them.”
She looked at me serious, then down at the letters. “They’re really old,” she said.

.