February 12 Sun is out again, a beautiful day. I hope they’re freezing their asses off in the neighborhood.
It’s been a good day for me, as good as any day gets on this island. The fever I had while it was storming seems to have dropped. I was weak and shivering when I crawled out of my burrow, but after lying on the hot sand in the sunshine for two or three hours, I began to feel almost human again.
Crawled around to the south side and found several pieces of driftwood cast up by the storm, including several boards from my lifeboat. There was kelp and seaweed on some of the boards. I ate it. Tasted awful. Like eating a vinyl shower curtain. But I felt so much stronger this afternoon.
I pulled the wood up as far as I could so it would dry. I’ve still got a whole tube of waterproof matches. The wood will make a signal fire if someone comes soon. A cooking fire if not. I’m going to snort up now.
February 13 Found a crab. Killed it and roasted it over a small fire. Tonight I could almost believe in God again.
Feb 14 I just noticed this morning that the storm washed away most of the rocks in my HELP sign. But the storm ended… three days ago? Have I really been that stoned? I’ll have to watch it, cut down the dosage. What if a ship went by while I was nodding?
I made the letters again, but it took me most of the day and now I’m exhausted.
Looked for a crab where I found the other, but nothing. Cut my hands on several of the rocks I used for the sign, but disinfected them promptly with iodine in spite of my weariness. Have to take care of my hands. No matter what.
Feb 15 A gull landed on the tip of the rockpile today. Flew away before I could get in range. I wished it into hell, where it could peck out Father Hailley’s bloodshot little eyes through eternity.
Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha!
Ha!
Feb 17(?) Took off my right leg at the knee, but lost a lot of blood. Pain excruciating in spite of heroin. Shock-trauma would have killed a lesser man. Let me answer with a question: How badly does the patient want to survive? How badly does the patient want to live?
Hands trembling. If they are betraying me, I’m through. They have no right to betray me. No right at all. I’ve taken care of them all their lives. Pampered them. They better not. Or they’ll be sorry.
At least I’m not hungry.
One of the boards from the lifeboat had split down the middle. One end came to a point. I used that. I was drooling but I made myself wait. And then I got thinking of… oh, barbecues we used to have. That place Will Hammersmith had on Long Island, with a barbecue pit big enough to roast a whole pig in. We’d be sitting on the porch in the dusk with big drinks in our hands, talking about surgical techniques or golf scores or something. And the breeze would pick up and drift the sweet smell of roasting pork over to us. Judas Iscariot, the sweet smell of roasting pork.
Feb?
Took the other leg at the knee. Sleepy all day. “Doctor was this operation necessay?” Haha. Shaky hands, like an old man. Hate them. Blood under the fingernails.
Scabs. Remember that model in med school with the glass belly? I feel like that. Only I don’t want to look. No way no how. I remember Dom used to say that. Waltz up to you on the street comer in his Hiway Outlaws club jacket. You’d say Dom how’d you make out with her’? And Dom would say no way no how. Shee. Old Dom. I wish I’d stayed right in the neighborhood. This sucks so bad as Dom would say. haha.
But I understand, you know, that with the proper therapy, and prosthetics, I could be as good as new. I could come back here and tell people “This. Is where it. Happened.” Hahaha!
February 23 (?) Found a dead fish. Rotten and stinking. Ate it anyway. Wanted to puke, wouldn’t let myself. I will survive. So lovely stoned, the sunsets.
February Don’t dare but have to. But how can I tie off the femoral artery that high up? It’s as big as a fucking turnpike up there.
Must, somehow. I’ve marked across the top of the thigh, the part that is still meaty. I made the mark with this pencil.
I wish I could stop drooling.
Fe You… deserve… a break today… sooo… get up and get away… to McDonald’s ,..
two all-beef patties… special sauce… lettuce… pickles… onions… on a… sesame seed bun…
Dee… deedee… dundadee…
Febba Looked at my face in the water today. Nothing but a skin-covered skull. Am I insane yet? I must be. I’m a monster now, a freak. Nothing left below the groin. Just a freak. A head attached to a torso dragging itself along the sand by the elbows. A crab. A stoned crab. Isn’t that what they call themselves now? Hey man I’m just a poor stoned crab can you spare me a dime.
Hahahaha They say you are what you eat and if so I HAVEN’T CHANGED A BIT! Dear God shock-trauma shock-trauma THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SHOCK-TRAUMA HA Fe/40?
Dreaming about my father. When he was drunk he lost all his English. Not that he had anything worth saying anyway. Fucking dipstick. I was so glad to get out of your house Daddy you fucking greaseball dipstick nothing cipher zilcho zero. I knew I’d made it. I walked away from you, didn’t I? I walked on my hands.
But there’s nothing left for them to cut off. Yesterday I took my earlobes left hand washes the right don’t let your left hand know what your right hands doing one potato two potato three potato four we got a refrigerator with a store—more door hahaha.
Who cares, this hand or that. good food good meat good God let’s eat.
lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers
Uncle Otto’s Truck
It’s a great relief to write this down.
I haven’t slept well since I found my Uncle Otto dead and there have been times when I have really wondered if I have gone insane—or if I will. In a way it would all have been more merciful if I did not have the actual object here in my study, where I can look at it, or pick it up and heft it if I should want to. I don’t want to do that; I don’t want to touch that thing. But sometimes I do.
If I hadn’t taken it away from his little one-room house when I fled from it, I could begin persuading myself it was all only an hallucination—a figment of an overworked and over-stimulated brain. But it is there. It has weight. It can be hefted in the hand.
It all happened, you see.
Most of you reading this memoir will not believe that, not unless something like it has happened to you. I find that the matter of your belief and my relief are mutually exclusive, however, and so I will gladly tell the tale anyway. Believe what you want.
Any tale of grue should have a provenance or a secret. Mine has both. Let me begin with the provenance—by telling you how my Uncle Otto, who was rich by the standards of Castle County, happened to spend the last twenty years of his life in a one-room house with no plumbing on a back road in a small town.
Otto was born in 1905, the eldest of the five Schenck children. My father, born in 1920, was the youngest. I was the youngest of my father’s children, born in 1955, and so Uncle Otto always seemed very old to me.
Like many industrious Germans, my grandfather and grandmother came to America with some money. My grandfather settled in Derry because of the lumber industry, which he knew something about. He did well, and his children were born into comfortable circumstances.
My grandfather died in 1925. Uncle Otto, then twenty, was the only child to receive a full inheritance. He moved to Castle Rock and began to speculate in real estate. In the next five years he made a lot of money dealing in wood and in land. He bought a large house on Castle Hill, had servants, and enjoyed his status as a young, relatively handsome (the qualifier “relatively” because he wore spectacles), extremely eligible bachelor. No one thought him odd. That came later.
He was hurt in the crash of ’29—not as badly as some, but hurt is hurt. He held on to his big Castle Hill house until 1933, then sold it because a great tract of woodland had come on the market at a distress sale price and he wanted it desperately. The land belonged to the New England Paper Company.