Earliest Childhood: Chapter One of "Ussers and the Echo of Nothing"

Memories from earliest childhood (partly mine, partly fictional): this interview from several years later is the beginning of an experimental novel.

Ussers and the Echo of Nothing

Chapter One
Ussers out of the Blue

So I guess, before we continue, I have to tell you how I got involved in all this gibjabj.

What? Gibjabj? That’s my special word for garbage. Or it could just mean “stuff”, which is really anything. It’s one of my “longspeak” words, like “stoodle-poopid” meaning “stupid” and “prob-kabob-kabayobob-kabayo-bah-bubbita-blubby”, meaning “probably”. Why ask why?

My name is Tony Bradner. You know that already ‘cause you’re doing research for your human interest story about Tondalus. Well, Tony’s not my real name, but I’ll wait until later to tell you why I chose it. I live in the tree-y suburbs north of Seattle, Washington. You know that already too, but you don’t know I call it See-acka-taw-t’lucky, in Longspeak. I’m just about to graduate from Alder Terrace High School (class of 1979), which is a fact tied up with Tondalus and the gibjabj I was referring to at first.

 So, um, I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Really, it’s the best place to start. There might be some irrelevant details in it. But then again, maybe it’ll shed some light on how all of this got started.

So, exactly how far back is the beginning? I’ll skip the big bang and the Cambrian Explosion and the extinction of the dinosaurs and the art of Hieronymus Bosch and the music of Mahler and all that. It’s just extra gibjabj for now. I’ll come back to it later.

Maybe I’ll start with the first thing I remember. Importance to this story: profound. Grand cosmic significance: probably nil.

 

Blue looming, dimensions unknown. Maybe there were two or three white streaks in it, but otherwise it was just blue. It cast no light. It held no darkness. It exuded no joy. It contained no sadness. It held no promise or prohibition. There was no warmth, no cold, no distance, no proximity, no stillness and no motion in it; nothing came before it and nothing came after it. It was just blue — just a single entity of blue, and it is my earliest memory.

 

What? Not so interesting? I thought I described it rather well. Okay, let’s try my next memory, then. I couldn’t have been older than two.

 

Fear. Dread attacking as a blood-freezing moaning sound. It arose spontaneously from the space beyond my crib, beyond the pale walls of my room. It groaned under the door and into the safe space and lingered crying in the half-light of the shaded room.

I awoke, shreds of nightmare still clinging to my ears. Had I imagined the noise?

Moan again, infinitely remote, very near. It burst into dark icicles of panic.

My mouth exploded, “Mom!”

It was only trucks on the freeway, my mother said. She had come into my room and listened, at first not able to hear the faint sigh, then smiling at me with reassurance. The freeway was only a few blocks away and down a hill, she said. There were trucks on the freeway, she said, and they made that hum as they drove by. The sound was nothing to fear, she said as she hugged me and then left from my room.

I was silent in my crib. Sleep began to overtake me again.

The moan returned. It’s only trucks on the freeway, I told myself, but I was not so sure. It was a sound after all, and sound could be my enemy or my friend. Sound could break into my sleep, break into my serenity. Or, sound could soothe me, ease me into slumber, still my anxiety. I sat there in the dim for several minutes, listening. The moan was quiet, but near.

Then I decided that it was my friend, and I went to sleep.

 

Yeah, I had to decide about it. Most sounds affect me in that way: they are either my enemy or my friend. There are no neutral sounds to me. Sometimes I can decide which they are, but usually not.

Sound, prob-kabob-kabayobob-kabayo-bah-bubbita-blubby, is one of the reasons that I got involved in the gibjabj that I keep referring to.

The other reason is the imagination.

Again, I was two or three years old.

 

The dream of the coughing usser. That was my next memory, still from the time before reason.

What was an usser? It was something alive, but not really an animal; not a pet, but nothing wild either. It was rectangular, the size and shape, perhaps, of a flattened shoebox or a large but not very thick book; more like a geometrical solid than an animal, and it clung to walls. It was opaque and beige. On the top half of its front surface was a perfectly hemispherical dome, the same featureless color and texture as the rest of it. I did not know what the dome was for.

Why was it called an usser? I was before the age of linguistic games as I was before the age of reason: an usser was not something that went around “ussing” things (whatever that is). Nor was the name political in any way (those were the times that the two superpowers of the world were haranguing each other as “Godless Communists” and “Decadent Capitalists” — I knew none of that); I did not name ussers after the USSR. The name was as mysterious as the creature itself. It was just called an usser, in the same way that other beings were called dogs or rabbits or goldfish.

 

Usser on the wall. Midafternoonaptime. Watchusser through haffsleepyhafflidded eyes.

People come into the room, many gathering. Curlbrownhair redflowerdresswoman. Bigtanhatman. Tentwenty. Watchlisten.

—The usser is coughing.

—Where is its mouth?

—I’m not curious.

—Cough again many times.

We all walissend to the hackoffinfacting usser as it sathung there, nomooving on the wall.

 

I sat up. I looked around. The people and the usser had gone out of the room as I awoke. I regarded the place on the wall where the usser had been. The wall was blank, with a hint of the interplay of sunlight and shadows of a tree, streaming in from the open window.

Nothing was out of order. I went back to sleep.

 

Well, enough of when I was under the age of two, even though those incidents do relate to what I’m about to tell you. Really.

I’ll fast forward to the age of five, and go to Kindergarten.

 

It was a bright autumn day outside, and the leaves on the big maple tree outside the classroom were deep red. A little breeze was blowing.

Inside of the kindergarten, it was too hot, as always. We sat there around our tables, waiting for the next activity (though at that time I didn’t understand the concept of staying still). The teacher said it was time for an art project.  She handed out shapes cut from colored paper, and told us to paste them on a larger piece of white paper to make a picture.

I stared at the shapes. Red squares, yellow rectangles, green circles, blue triangles. I arranged them in various random ways. They didn’t make anything that I could think of.

Maybe I’d paste a green circle on a yellow rectangle and make an usser; but immediately thought better of the idea. It was too easy, and besides, it was the wrong color — ussers were beige all over, not bright green and yellow.

Actually I knew of nothing that was bright green and yellow.

I looked outside at the maple tree. A leaf fell just as I looked. A rich, vibrant brownish, purplish, red leaf. That was a color worth looking at, not like these bright generic paper forms.

I stared at the paper cuttings again. Hmmm, maybe the green circles were peas. Peas were the only green circles that I knew. So I pasted nine or ten green circles on the paper and a couple of the yellow rectangles around the edges just to make it interesting. I looked at my picture from several angles. Yes, it looked good. Peas coming out of a peapod.

I left my seat to go see what the other kids had made. I found that Ronald had ignored the colors and put the triangles, squares and rectangles together to make a house. Renee had ignored the colors too, and made a person, using the green circle to make a head; the other shapes made the rest of the body. Those were clever, I thought — I hadn’t thought of ignoring the colors.

Marcus had made an airplane. Cynthia had made another person (the green circle was the head again). Samantha had done exactly the same thing. That wasn’t odd, I thought; they were sitting right next to each other.

Moe had made another airplane. Jana had made another house. Todd and Serena had both made people again. Duane had made yet another house. In fact, everyone had made people, houses, or airplanes! What was going on? Only people, houses, and airplanes? Nothing interesting! No animals, no plants, no dinosaurs, no planets, no rockets, no musical instruments, no fireworks, no apple-coring machines. Why was everyone so boring?

And, I realized shortly, they were stupid too — after I’d told Renee that mine was supposed to be peas coming out of a peapod, she laughed at me: “Nobody knows what a peapod is.” And that was true. They were all staring at me. None of them knew what a peapod was.

Wow. I decided I’d need to show them something interesting, so the next day I brought a record of Beethoven to kindergarten. The teacher said she’d take it home and listen to it, but not play it for the other kids. Was that why they were so dull? The teacher was keeping all the good gibjabj for herself?

 

Well, yes, you heard that part correctly. I did bring a record of Beethoven to kindergarten. That may have been the start of the problems.

I had heard my parents play some classical music on the record player, so I asked for a kids’ record player and some records of that “music that grown-ups listen to” for Christmas. My mom and dad obliged. They gave me a used multiple record set called “Treasury of Light Classical Music”. It had an impressionist painting of some people dancing the waltz on the cover, though I knew nothing of impressionism or waltzes. (For that matter, I didn’t know that “light classical music” wasn’t really “classical music”.)

I decided that I liked Tchaikovsky best (though I called him “chai-cow-skee”).

 

Capriccio Italien

By Tchaikovsky

 

Trumpet signals, “Awake!”; brass answer.

‘Cellos intone a sad song.

Stirrings begin. Sounds grow, summiting a mountain, burst of radiance, trumpet signals again “Awake!”

The sad song again. Then silence.

 

Oh, something new. There’s a happy tune.  A little dance with the birds.

More instruments. The happy tune grows.

Other instruments answer. There’s a flute, skittering.

There’s violins, singing.

There’s a horn, calling.

There’s timpani, commenting on the others, bam-boom.

And another happy tune, shining.

 

Something’s wrong. The sad song again.

Repeated notes. Scurrying. A spider in music, slithering across the strings.

Music lurches, staggers, stumbles.

Oh! There’s the first happy tune again, louder! Now all is well!

Now a forward rush, gallop, triumphal galumphing!

Cymbals crash! Din of drums! Awake!!

 

Of course I didn’t just sit there alone and listen to it. Sometimes my mom or dad would listen to it with me (though they always seemed to have something to do, so couldn’t listen as long). I listened to it over and over as I built fanciful cities with my Lego blocks and Tinker Toys.

And usually, Budlaboosh listened to it with me.

Budlaboosh was my friend. Nobody else could see him. He lived in a little house in a little city underneath my bed. His name was strange because people from that city had strange names.

 

I remember a particular incident with Budlaboosh. It was a Saturday, not long after the day of the peapods, when we went out to look for kimlimtimmels. There were a lot of fir-trees in the back yard, which shaded a dirt patch where grass couldn’t grow. That was the best place to find kimlimtimmels, said Budlaboosh, because they came down from the trees during the day to forage among the fir-needles on the ground.

“What do they look for?” I asked.

“Kimlimtimmel food,” said Budlaboosh.

Kimlimtimmels were about the size of dachshunds, though with longer legs. They had a whole bunch of legs, in fact — probably ten, though I never saw one close enough to count them. They had oval bodies and round heads, with kind-looking, almost human faces; their mouths almost seemed to smile. Their ears were high on the top of the head, and stuck up like a cat’s but were longer and tended to curve (indeed, flop) forwards. Their tails were an exact match for their ears — shaped like a cat’s ears at the base, but longer and curving or flopping downwards at the end.

Budlaboosh and I went out early that Saturday morning to look for some kimlimtimmels. The air was damp and chilly, though the sun was already up. My parents were asleep in their room, the way that grown-ups always did when there were more interesting things to do.

Budlaboosh cautioned me to be quiet and not wake them up. I agreed. I didn’t want to have to explain what we were doing. There was no way that they’d know what a kimlimtimmel was, or what we were going to do with one when we found it.

“What are we going to with it when we find it?” asked Budlaboosh.

“Feed it. They like that. Then we’ll play tag or checkers with it, and listen to Tchaikovsky. Then we’ll let it go.”

He agreed that this was a good plan, though he said he didn’t know if they liked to play checkers.

“Of course they do,” I assured him, “…and besides, I thought you were the one that knew all about them.”

“Only where to find them.”

“Oh.”

We put on our clothes and jackets, and quietly padded out of the bedroom and into the hall to the living room, and through the back door. “Don’t let the door make any noise,” Budlaboosh reminded me. I closed it as quietly as I could, and we went out into the fir-scented woodland of the back yard. I grabbed my blue plastic sand bucket from the garage on the way out.

We waited a couple of minutes in the shade, but didn’t see or hear anything. Budlaboosh began humming quietly, then suddenly burst into song.

 

Libbadee, labbadee, labbap skaboo,

Labbap skabunga looooooba.

 

“Shhh!” I shouted. “Mom and Dad will hear you! What is that nonsense, anyway!?”

Budlaboosh’s face reddened. “Sorry.” He was quiet for a minute, and then, “It’s a song to attract kimlimtimmels. It’s in their language.”

“What’s it mean?”

“How should I know? I’m not a kimlimtimmel.”

I agreed that this made sense.

“Look! There’s one!” Budlaboosh exclaimed. Something darted under the pine needles at my feet. I quickly slammed the overturned bucket down on it — missing by nearly a foot as it bolted away and disappeared behind a tree.

We waited a couple of minutes. The animal didn’t seem to want to move from behind the tree, and neither Budlaboosh nor I wanted to approach it lest it spook and scamper away permanently. I passed the time thinking all I knew about kimlimtimmels, which wasn’t much.

“How do you spell ‘kimlimtimmel’?” I queried.

“I don’t know, but I think it starts with a capital kim,” Budlaboosh replied.

“There’s no letter called ‘kim’! It’s a girl’s name.”

“There is so a letter called ‘kim’! Haven’t you read Dr. Seuss!?”

“Oh – On Beyond Zebra…”

“Of course.”

I objected, “But there’s no letter called ‘kim’ in there either. And besides, those aren’t real letters. If you make up a real new letter in the alphabet, you have to make up a new sound for it to stand for.”

“I never thought of that.” He then told me that he could spell ‘thimmel’ and ‘foom’ correctly.

(A thimmel, by the way, was like a kimlimtimmel but it only had four legs. “It has fewer letters because it has fewer legs,” Budlaboosh reminded me. Foom was something else entirely. Foom was what the clouds did when they got tired of raining or snowing.  Foom was large, soft, multicolored blobs that looked rather like cantaloupe-sized pieces of painted popcorn. It fell only on Tuesdays when nobody was looking, and the second you saw it, it would melt into ordinary water. The clouds were very secretive that way.)

A rustling from behind the tree interrupted our thoughts. The animal had emerged, snuffling at the ground. I crept around the tree, trying to position the animal between my house and myself, and stepping lightly to not make any noise. The creature raised its head and glared at me — I’m sure it glared, not just looked at me — and then abruptly scurried towards my house. Budlaboosh ran after it, and I, impulsively, grabbed a stone from the ground and flung it at the running creature, thinking, perhaps, to scare it into running a different direction.

The stone missed the animal and bounced up into air. There was a horrible shattering, smashing, splintering sound as shards of glass crashed to the ground and the rock soared into my parents’ room. I gasped. The animal turned and disappeared under the neighbor’s fence.

 

The next day in kindergarten, I told Marcus what had happened.

“You threw a rock at your parents’ bedroom window!?”

“Yeah, I was trying to hit the kimlimtimmel.”

“What’s a kimlimtimmel?”

I told him.

“Wow. Is it anything like a skubbyloofer?”

“A what?”

“A skubbyloofer. It’s a green walrus about as big as a cat.”

I smiled. So other kids could make up things too.

“Does it like to play checkers?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never played with one.”

“Oh. Does it like Tchaikovsky?”

“What’s that?”

I stared at him. How could he not know? “Music,” I answered.

He stared back at me. “It’s cool to make up animals and things, not music.”

“I didn’t make it up.”

“Well, you’re weird then.” He got up from his seat and walked away.

 

That was odd, I thought, but then again, Marcus was one of those kids who’d made an airplane with the colored shapes because he didn’t know what a peapod was. So, I went home and played with Budlaboosh (while I was grounded for throwing a rock through the window) and imagined what it would really be like to have a pet usser.

 

To read more of this novel: Amazon.com: Ussers and the Echo of Nothing: A Novel in Three "Paintings": 9798592451263: Scribner, Steven E.: Books