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rj-drive-in · 3 months

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Surcease of Sorrow Department:

There may be new solutions to old problems.

Before my Raven came, I thought that Poe wrote fiction. After it came, I thought I was all alone in the world.

It was bad enough in the weeks and months after Siobhan left and my existence had become such a silent vacuum of despair that I had to sometimes force myself to breathe. Somehow I managed to rent a small apartment after the house went up for sale, but I couldn’t muster the energy to furnish it. Thank god it came with a refrigerator. But there I sat and slept and brooded, on the bare floor, kept company only by the three cardboard boxes of my belongings. All of our friends had apparently been her friends only. No one ever came to offer me comfort or sympathy, or even a tuna casserole. I can’t even begin to describe the feeling of abandonment that was the sum total of my life in those dark days.

What could be worse than that?

The answer to that question came in the middle of the night, in the late autumn after the divorce, as I sat against the wall, replaying conversations in my head for the millionth time. There was a lamp on the floor to my left and an empty pizza box on the floor to my right. The shadows cast by the yellow oval of light from the lamp were like looming gargoyles in an old silent movie. The sliding glass doors of the balcony on the other side of the room were like a gray mirror in which I could see my motionless body propped up like a hobo in the park. When I think of what I was like back then, it scares the hell out of me.

Then something hit the outside of the sliders, making me jump, probably the first time I had moved in hours. I squinted, but I couldn’t see anything beyond my own colorless reflection. Now that I was paying attention, I could hear the wind outside, shifting the trees out back and blowing the dead leaves around. Something had blown against the glass, that was all. An empty pack of cigarettes or juice box.

I settled back with a sigh.

And then it happened again. It almost sounded like somebody was knocking on the glass. A feeling of fear welled up inside my chest and it was almost euphoric in its intensity. It had been so long since I had felt anything, I don’t think I could differentiate between dismay and joy, happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain. Or maybe I welcomed the threat. Maybe I hoped to end up as a story on the morning news, a shocking topic of conversation around the water cooler. That could my way out. That would show her.

Slowly, I stood up and carefully stretched the hours of stiffness out of my arms and legs. If I had been smart, I would have turned off the lamp so that I could have seen through the glass doors. But if I had been smart, I wouldn’t have been sitting alone in a bleak room without a wife or a future. For certain, if I had an ounce of brains in my skull, I would not have walked across that bleak room and slid the balcony door open wide.

But that’s exactly what I did.

Instantly, as the door opened, there was something large and black slapping at my face and I threw up my arms and fell backward onto the floor. A pitiful sob of horror swelled from deep in the pit of my stomach and before I had even hit the boards I had changed my mind about becoming a sad story on the news. I wanted this to not be happening. I curled up into a ball and prepared to beg for my life like the coward I was.

It wasn’t necessary. Whatever had hit me blew on past me and into the room. I heard it hit one of the cardboard boxes that I had never bothered to unpack. My knees and elbows were like jelly, but the animal instinct for self preservation grabbed me and spun me around in a crouch to see what it the hell it was. After weeks of not functioning at all, my mind was going a mile a minute. Maybe somebody’s black satin sheet had blown off their clothesline. Maybe there had been a blanket or a curtain out there on the railing that I had never noticed in my stupor. Maybe a dead branch, still festooned with brittle leaves, had chosen that moment to break off and fly across the yard through my balcony door.

But there it was, right on top of the cardboard box. I stared at it. It took me a minute to fully register what I was seeing. It was a crow, black as night and big as a breadbox, staring right back at me.

I rose slowly and shakily to my feet like an old man. “No way,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now. Please just fly the hell back out of here.”

Then its beak opened and the goddamn thing said, “Nevermore.”

*****

It wasn’t a crow, of course. It was a Raven. Just like in that old poem by Edgar Allan Poe that we all loved when we were kids. The first time I ever heard it was on some Halloween TV special, recited by Vincent Price. Then my mother gave me a book of Poe’s collected works for my birthday. I memorized it for a talent show when I was in junior high school. It even turned up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

And now it was perched on a cardboard box in my living room.

It wouldn’t move no matter how hard I tried to shoo it back out into the darkness, so we ended up sitting and staring at each other all night. It was cold, but there was no way I was going to close that sliding door and cut off the bird’s one exit. In fact, I opened it as far as it would go, to give the thing all the encouragement and room I could.

The next morning, I went downstairs to get some help from my landlord. The apartment I was renting was the converted attic of a three-story house dating back to the 1890s when this area was well to do. The landlord, a middle-aged guy named George Damopoulos, lived on the first floor with his wife. I have no idea who lived on the second floor. I sat on the stairs till I smelled coffee coming from the first floor and then tiptoed down and knocked quietly on his door.

“A crow?” he asked. “No kidding?”

“Or a blackbird,” I shrugged. “Or a raven maybe.”

He grabbed his bathrobe and trudged up the stairs and into my apartment, me following close behind him. There were my three shipping cartons, my lamp, and the empty pizza box, and the open balcony door. But no Raven.

“No bird here, kid,” said Damopoulos with a chuckle. “Guess he flew the coop.” He gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder. “Maybe he’s one of them early birds and he went out for a worm, huh?”

“As long as he’s gone,” I said.

“You really should buy some furniture, kid,” he said as he left. “Time to get a life. I know about the divorce and all, but really.”

“I just need some time,” I said, closing the door.

The Raven swooped back in before I made it halfway to the balcony.

That’s how it went. Nobody saw the Raven but me. I contrived a couple of dozen ways to get people into my apartment so that somebody would see him, just to prove to myself that I hadn’t completely lost my mind. I ordered pizza delivery and Chinese food. I used Peapod for my groceries. I even bought a new refrigerator and a chair, just for the sake of getting some delivery men in there. But whenever anybody else was in the room, the Raven would disappear. And I mean disappear. I quickly found out that it didn’t matter whether the balcony door was open or not, which really scared the hell out of me.

And it was incessant with “Nevermore.”

Whenever I even thought about Siobhan, it would squawk, “Nevermore.” And it wasn’t just that. It would react to any depressing thought, and I had a lot of them. How my friends had abandoned me, how the firm let me go when I said I wasn’t ready to come back from personal leave, how my parents were both dead, how I had nobody in the whole wide world to turn to. “Nevermore.”

The thing was a vampire of self pity.

But the worst part was that I knew it had to be a figment of my imagination. Several times I tried to take a picture of it with my phone, but it wouldn’t photograph-- it wasn’t that I got a picture minus the Raven, I just didn’t get a picture. Before all this happened, I had worked as a family law attorney and I had seen more than my share of mental illness, but I had never heard of a case of Edgar Allan Poe Raven Syndrome. How could I get help for a diagnosis that didn’t exist? As a human being and as a mental case, I was truly all alone in the world.

*****

One of those cardboard shipping boxes contained my computer, which had gone unused in the months since I had moved in. I unpacked it and set it up on a small table that I bought at a used furniture store and began to Google desperately all through the day and night. Just as I thought: There was no information on cases of mental patients who hallucinated Poe’s Raven. There was plenty of information on Poe himself, of course, and his battles with depression and bipolar disorder and substance abuse, but no evidence that he had actually seen the Raven that he wrote about.

Where did you get your ideas, Mister Poe?

Like anybody who badly needed mental health care, the last thing I wanted to do was seek out mental health care. I was on the verge of breaking down and doing it when I finally found something. It must have been an old archived reference in Google’s database or whatever, because I got a 404 Page Not Found error when I clicked on the link, but the fragment that was visible on the search results page was the first thing that had given me hope.

It was a reference to a forum called The Plutonian Shore and the title of the link was “Anybody Else Out There Got A Raven?”

*****

I’m no expert on the Internet and I have only a vague idea of what the Dark Web or Deep Web is, but I know that there’s a lot of competition for attention. There’s thousands of petabytes of data out there with more being generated by the minute and if your site isn’t properly indexed it will sink under the radar like a lead balloon. Especially if it’s on a private server, and pretty much anybody can set up one of those these days. Still, if it’s out there, it can be found; all it takes is time and perseverance and YouTube self-help videos.

And, finally, after days of searching, I did find it. The forum’s web address was a series of sixteen apparently random characters, not something nice and easy like PlutonianShore.com, so it was clear that they weren’t seeking attention. But they weren’t completely dark. They were there to be found for someone who looked hard enough.

At first glance, it was a perfectly standard forum. The color scheme was gray and twilight blue, and the logo incorporated a stylized raven in the design. It was organized in the standard fashion, with sections for the discussion of movies, books, politics, sports, and science, among other sub-topics. But down at the very bottom of the main index page was a section called simply “Raven Research.” The threads inside were accessible only to board members, but the sub-heading said “Studying The Personal Raven Phenomenon.”

Suddenly I felt just like the guy who discovered King Tut’s tomb or the DNA double helix or the first exoplanet. This was a forum for people who had Ravens just like me. They were just like me!

*****

Registration was open, proving that they were keeping a low profile but not completely off the grid. It took me a few minutes to come up with a valid username, since all of the obvious Poe-related ones were taken– for example, a guy named Nevermore was the site administrator– and I finally settled on Mr Scream, because that really suited my state of mind. I used a cropped graphic of the Munch painting for my avatar. I submitted my registration profile, entered the CAPTCHA code, and got a message saying that my request would be reviewed by an administrator.

Then I waited.

I don’t know what I expected– that an administrator would be just sitting there, waiting to approve new members immediately? But it wasn’t long before I began to feel anxious. Maybe they wouldn’t let me in. Maybe it was one of those deals where you had to be invited by an existing member and they wouldn’t approve anyone who wasn’t on their list.

Behind my back, the Raven said, “Nevermore.”

Maybe they had procedures for vetting applicants. Maybe they had ways of checking my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, and would reject me based on that.

“Nevermore.”

Maybe Siobhan was posting about me somewhere out there on the Internet and I didn’t even know about it. Maybe she was telling everyone what a bad husband I had been, how I never wanted to take a vacation, how I avoided socializing with her brothers, how I bought her the same Christmas present two years in a row.

“Nevermore.”

Maybe Siobhan was already a member of the forum.

“Nevermore.”

Okay, now I was just getting paranoid. I stood up and stepped away from the computer, taking a deep breath. This Nevermore guy was a real person out there somewhere. He probably had a day job, very likely a wife and family, some friends, some kind of life. He could be in a different time zone. He might not even check the registrations every day. Maybe he only did his administrator duties on the weekend.

The site was probably just a big joke, anyway.

“Nevermore.”

Please, stop, I thought. My head was aching and I realized that the heels of my hands were pressed against my temples like a vise. Please let me in. Please help me.

“Nevermore.”

Shutting down the computer, I crawled under the blanket I used for a bed and turned off the lamp.

*****

The next morning when I got up, I had no emails. Nor were there any after I made a cup of instant coffee or after I took a shower. Suddenly, I had a terrible thought: They had received my registration request, realized that they had been found, and changed the address of the site so that I could never find them again. In a panic, I brought up Firefox and clicked on the link I had bookmarked.

It was there, just as it had been yesterday. I breathed a sigh of relief.

The Raven said, “Nevermore.”

For the first time, I noticed an email link at the bottom the forum’s main index page. If you need to contact the administrator, it said. I could send them an email, check on the status of my application, make sure that it had been received and was complete.

But I stopped myself. I didn’t want to appear desperate. I didn’t want to seem crazy.

“Nevermore.”

*****

Finally, on the third day, an email from the site’s autoadmin address appeared in my inbox and confirmed my membership. The email welcomed me to the community and directed me to a thread in the social sub-forum where I could introduce myself and meet the other members. It outlined the structure of the board and gave me some tips on where to find certain topics and how to start my own.

My hands trembled as I brought up the Plutonian Shore main page and entered my login information. The page refreshed and there was my avatar and username at the top of the index-- Welcome, Mr Scream-- next to newly visible links to my account control panel and the member directory.

Now that I was logged in, the “Raven Research” sub-forum name had expanded to “This Ungainly Fowl– Raven Research.” I wanted to go straight there and immerse myself in whatever knowledge they had accumulated, but I didn’t want to be rude. The social sub-forum, which was called “Bird And Bust And Door– Sit Down And Relax,” was at the top of the menu, so I clicked there first to follow the instructions in the email. When I entered the “Welcome, New Members” thread, there was an announcement of my arrival, and already there were three welcoming posts from members called Monty Ado, Messier One, and Usherette. I answered each individually. Over the next few days, these greetings would expand to over thirty. Everybody was very nice. Maybe they really could help me.

*****

With my social obligations met, I dove head first into the research forum and didn’t come up for air until the sun was rising and I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I was like a kid let loose in a candy store, excited and greedy and insatiable. There were dozens of threads, some currently active, some dormant for years, covering topics that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Theories about the origin and purpose of the Ravens ran the gamut from Christian theology-- they are manifestations of the Holy Spirit-- to Norse mythology-- they are the myriad offspring of Odin’s Huginn and Muninn-- to the Heinleinian World-as-Myth notion that a critical mass of Poe devotees actually made real the Ravens.

Of course, this was in contradiction to one of the most popular ideas, that Poe actually had a Raven of his own and his poem was no work of fiction.

There were many threads purporting to find evidence of Ravens throughout history, even in the ruins of ancient civilizations. Some, in the vein of von Daniken, included enhanced scans or tracings of hieroglyphs and bas reliefs from archaeological sites in Greece and Egypt and South America, among others. There were those who believed that the oral traditions of American Indian tribes included plentiful references to Raven hauntings. Others found a multitude of veiled or cryptic references to Ravens in more modern literature, from the Victorian Era to the Boomer years, in the works of everyone from Hemingway to Kerouac.

In a similar, but more sensationalistic vein, there was much speculation about which popular celebrities were in the closet about their Ravens, and which celebrity deaths were the result of Raven hauntings.

And I came across one odd thread, dated a couple of years before, from a newbie poster named Alcatraz, who claimed to be haunted by a pigeon rather than a Raven, and that his bird said “Kiss my ass” rather than “Nevermore.” It started off amiably enough, with the regular posters joining in on the gag, but it soon became evident that Alcatraz was a troll. When he didn’t get the reaction that he wanted, he became increasingly nasty. Eventually he was banned from the forum and the thread was locked.

Following this night-long binge, I was exhausted and my head felt full of mud, and I fell into a deep sleep, troubled by dreams of murmuring voices and sepia imagery. But when I finally awoke in the late afternoon-- my Raven staring at me, as usual-- I actually felt refreshed and ready to tackle the research forum again. After some coffee and a Hungry Man microwave dinner, I logged back in and began a more measured review of the threads.

*****

Over the course of the next few days, I studied the research sub-forum in detail, taking notes and using a feature of the board software to create a list of especially interesting topics (and, I admit, a few especially humorous ones). Each topic, of course, had replies and responses, not a few rebuttals, and sometimes very long discussions. But I still had occasional questions, and I posted them. The other members of Plutonian Shore were very generous in their responses, always quick to help a fellow Ravenite (as they called themselves), and never shy about voicing their opinions.

This was how I first met the Bird Sisters.

Everybody referred to them collectively as the Bird Sisters, but their real usernames were Bird One and Bird Two. They were a pair of elderly twins who lived alone together somewhere in Oregon and had been members of Plutonian Shore since its inception. They were very close and were always online together. It was very rare not to see their posts come in pairs. Any time I asked a question, no matter how trivial, they would always answer, even if it was to tell me they didn’t know, or to tease me about asking something silly. Other members would answer my questions, too, of course, lots of them, when they had something to say, but the Bird Sisters were online every day and they answered every single question I had. They were the unofficial and beloved hostesses of Plutonian Shore.

And, as I soon discovered, they were very active in the Bird And Bust And Door social section of the forum.

One day I logged in to find a flashing envelope icon next to my name at the top of the main index page. I clicked on it, remembering reading something about the board having an internal email system, and found that I had received my first private message, and it had come from Bird One.

It said, “You’ve neglected to post in the Tell Us Your Raven Story thread, my boy.” There was a winking smiley at the end of the sentence.

If Bird One said I was supposed to do something, I would attend to it immediately, for the sake of the affection that I had developed for the old lady. I went straight to Bird And Bust And Door and found the thread that she was talking about, pinned at the very top of the page. It was a very long thread, in which every new member had told their personal story of how they had gotten their Raven.

Now I was expected to do the same.

Reading through that thread took hours, and it was a grim and depressing task. No two ways about it, Ravens came in the wake of tragedy.

Most of the time, it was the death of someone close. Our administrator, Nevermore, who had created the board, had been serving in Afghanistan, talking to his commanding officer, when a bullet went through the man’s head. A member named Husky Hound had a newborn infant that seemed to be in perfect health, but developed a fever and had to be taken to the emergency room, where he died for no reason that anybody could ever pinpoint. Baker Mom had a teenage daughter who was in a car accident and bled out in the air ambulance two minutes before it landed. Weeping Guitar’s husband suffered a long and painful death from prostate cancer, living six terrible months longer than predicted. The Bird Sisters had an older brother who had burned to death in a fire more than forty years ago.

Estrangements were common, as well. There was no shortage of members who had suffered through nasty divorces, which was something I could certainly relate to. Many of our members were parents who were out of touch with their kids because of politics or religion or lifestyle choices. Jennifer Juniper’s daughter was part of a millennial UFO cult. Sunflower’s kid had joined an anti-government militia. Cat Lover’s daughter had literally run off to join the circus. Sometimes it worked the other way around, too. Borealis had lost touch with his dad when the old man flew to the Middle East to join al-Qaeda.

Then there were the attempted suicides. Only two board members fell into that category. Zero Sum had not gotten a Raven when her husband died, nor when her daughter disowned her for remarrying to a Black man, nor when her second husband divorced her. But then she sat down in the shower and slit her wrists. When she got home from the hospital a week later, there was a Raven in the bathroom.

The other attempted suicide had gone ominously silent five years earlier.

I really didn’t want to tell my story, but how could I not? So I opened a reply box and began to type, figuring I could get away with a brief, sarcastic summary. After all, it was a story as old as time, right? But in the end it all just flowed out of my fingers, the whole thing, in painful detail: How Siobhan and I had met at a Fourth of July cookout, lived together while I went to law school, got married when I graduated, bought a house when I got a job, and got divorced when I let the job take over my life. How I was great at working toward goals, but not so great at knowing what to do when I got there.

As usual, the Bird Sisters were the first to respond, offering words of understanding and comfort and advice. Other members posted their support, too. Most of them, in fact, if not all of them. To be honest, it felt good to finally get things off my chest. I had been keeping a lot bottled up inside me all those months.

*****

After that, I became much more aware of how active the other sections of the board were. Aside from the social sub-forum, there were sub-forums on Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Science, Philosophy, and Creativity. Despite everything that these people had gone through in their personal lives, there were endless lively discussions about the latest movies and TV shows, contemporary music, elections and ideology, new discoveries in space, and current social trends. Many members delighted in posting their poetry and short stories and art and photography. There were even games where members had to answer trivia questions or figure out puzzles, or even create captions for specific photographs (usually of celebrities and other public figures). I had hunted down and joined Plutonian Shore for the Raven Research section, but that turned out to be the least active section of the board.

One rainy spring afternoon when I got home from yet another botched job interview, I logged in as I did every day and went straight to Bird and Bust and Door. This was where most members checked in on arrival and I had gotten in the habit of doing the same, just to say hello and to see what everyone was up to.

That day brought some bad news, however. Bird Two posted that Bird One had had a severe asthma attack and had been taken to the hospital by ambulance. She was going to be kept overnight for observation and hopefully released the next day. I added my sympathy and well wishes to all the responses already there and, sure enough, by the next afternoon Bird One was resting comfortably at home.

Unfortunately, she continued to have trouble breathing and was back in the hospital two days later. This time she was diagnosed with pneumonia. I learned that, in spite of being twins, Bird One and Bird Two were very different. Bird One was overweight and suffered from a number of allergies, while Bird Two was lean and athletic and apparently immune to just about everything (including, she strongly hinted with a sly wink, venereal diseases). But this had all happened before and Bird One was expected to be fine after two or three days of bed rest and antibiotic therapy.

The next morning, I checked in over coffee, anxious to confirm that Bird One was feeling better and to send along my daily greetings. But her sister had posted just a few minutes before I got there. She said that Bird One had responded well to the antibiotic infusion at first, but then had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and had died shortly after midnight. She said that Bird One had died.

It was shocking, and I was deeply affected. I had to read the post ten times before I was ready to believe it. That nice old lady who had been so helpful and kind to me was dead for no good goddamn reason. Part of me was overwhelmed with grief, while part of me was amazed that I was so affected by the death of someone I had never met face to face. Yet there I was with my forehead resting on my keyboard, crying.

It was the first time in forever that I had cried for someone besides myself.

*****

Needless to say, everyone at Plutonian Shore rallied in support of Bird Two. It was impossible for any of us to attend the funeral, of course, so we held one online in the social forum. We all expressed our condolences and our respects and shared our favorite stories about Bird One-- all the times that she had said something or done something that seemed so simple, yet had such a big impact on our lives. It must have been repeated a million times how much we would miss her.

Bird Two was now all alone in the world and we were all determined to be there for her like she had always been there for us. We got her telephone number and took turns calling her, so that she wouldn’t feel so isolated. Several people who had been through a death in the family before helped her with the arrangements and all of the endless details that had to be dealt with afterwards. A couple of us figured out where her nearest supermarket was and made sure that she always had groceries delivered when she needed them. Someone had the bright idea to set up a GoFundMe page to help her with expenses. Without Bird One’s social security check, her income was essentially cut in half and she was going to have a hard time making ends meet. Eventually she was going to need to move to a smaller place.

It was a bad time, a very bad time. But we managed to get through it.

*****

And that’s pretty much how it’s been in our little community. Things got better, then things got worse, then things got better again-- just like real life. A couple of members from Wisconsin, Nathanial and Kathryn-- some people actually used their real names on the board, which had never even occurred to me when I signed up-- had grown pretty fond of each other and decided to meet up in person. Soon after that they were married, and soon after that they had a kid. Their Ravens now perch side by side. 13th Apostle was officially ordained, but he still posts every damned day. Yaz’s short film about Cthulhu on Jupiter won a Rondo award.

The bad? Samhain was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had to have a double mastectomy and reconstruction, and months and months of painful chemo. It was a miserable stretch, but she made a full recovery and is now having a second childhood to make up for lost time. And poor Greensleeves had a stroke and spent most of a year in the hospital and a very bad nursing home. But she’s home again now and doing well, although she still can’t drive. No more members have died, thank god, but several have lost their parents. We’re all getting older.

Yeah, we’re all getting older. Sometimes I think about how long I’ve been at Plutonian Shore and I just can’t believe it.

Personally, things have improved for me a lot. I got a nice job at a small family law practice in Braintree, which earned me a lot of pats on the back from everybody on the board. I moved to a bigger apartment closer to work, and the Raven followed, still chiming in with the occasional “Nevermore” when my thoughts turn dark. I decided to buy it a perch, which everybody thought was hilarious. A couple of them followed my lead.

One time around Christmas, I ran into Siobhan down at the plaza. We talked for a minute, asked how each other was doing, but we really had nothing to say. I felt like I was talking to somebody from another life and it didn’t hurt me at all.

In the meanwhile, research into the whys and wherefores of the Raven hauntings has continued without interruption. Some new members have joined, each with a new theory that is just as crazy as the old ones: Ravens are the manifestations of Dark Matter. The world is really a massive computer simulation and the Ravens are some programmer’s idea of a joke. Oh, and the veiled references to Ravens in the media keep piling up: The Maltese Falcon was no falcon-- it was Dashiell Hammett’s way of telling the world about his Raven. And does Uncle Billy have a Raven in It’s A Wonderful Life, or what? The celebrity gossip is endless and hilarious. There is an ongoing twenty-page discussion about whether presidents get their Ravens when they leave office or when they’re sworn in.

But the truth of the matter is that after all this time, and all the theorizing, and all the research, we are not one inch closer to solving the mystery of the Ravens. Funny thing about that, it just doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore.

#short story #short fiction #fantasy #horror #edgar allan poe #the raven #rjdiogenes #rick hutchins

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