bv knapp

Summary

Patchwork House is a novel in which the narrator – a house – tries to save itself from destruction by manipulating its residents, the town’s denizens and the reader. The house this narrator transitions from a relatively nice Victorian to unpleasant bully and desperate domicile. As progress paves the world. The novel is a cartoon. Those oddities who live in the Patchwork House carry the fire through the madness, and possess the secret answer. And we live in a patchwork age, an age of mixtures, from economies to race to sex and gender to ideas; we are a hybrid world. And the old white way, of course, kicks one last dying spasm as it fades away. Crying and fighting and whining and lashing out. We have arrived at the 21st-century. The 20th ended with this current administration and the anxieties that it has evoked. We live and we love. 

In this Trump Nation, we’re all in reality TV now, in this new uber-capitalist global era, we are cartoon characters and we play along. We express the caricatures of our existence, and we see every single other as one, a type, a character. Therefore, our divisions. We don’t see the well-rounded human, the honest spirit of the other. We see black and white. We see Red and Blue. I have written the book that captures and expresses this moment, though it has taken me ten years to write.

First Pages - Patchwork House first few chapters - plus shot of Charlie Chaplin because he inspires - click Zone Zero below to zip through (like John Malkovich) to my weekly blog

Chapter 1

Wish I were made of brick. You should see those mansions in the nearby neighborhoods of this Midwestern town. Brick does not require paint. Those houses stand, refined, proud of their big river mud. I used to be somebody. I am a Victorian and once, a while ago, people admired my beauty from the street. I am distressed. I hunger for a change and I really can’t move myself. But you know that. And before we truly begin, I know you do not see any lips moving on my structure as I communicate with you. There are methods of conveyance other than anthropomorphic mouths. You humans might call it telepathy or something, in your attempts to understand. I don’t call it anything and here we are. Communicating. Love me. I need you, too. Badly. And note, there are others trying to take this story away from me. They attempt to form the narrative to their own liking. They’ll try to influence you, they will. Don’t listen to them. I am the only source of accuracy because this is my story, it’s mine. My voice the Truth.

  This is a cartoon. Somebody drew this and you watch it. It was initially a graphic novel made into an animated feature based on real events and real people. And two real houses. You have been drawn into it. That verb is literal. You are a part of it. You watch and your colored outline jiggles in the frame. Some complain that computer animation is unrealistic, what with the action shots and the way they survive explosions and all. And gosh if we drew a sex scene, we might have something. Okay, we’ll work on it, we will.  Gotta start with a kiss.

A purple night with an orange cityglow that shimmers, darts like faded sunbursts. There mud, murky puddles wishing they were lakes set in tire-mark depressions, a building going up, scaffolding and a crane, a massive crane. The project manager who offered you his card called it the “largest mobile crane in the Midwest.” Tires taller than NBA tall. This a construction site in the dark. Idle. A mother trying to get her son to sleep went for a drive and she said, “See, the trucks are sleeping - - - the tractors are sleeping - - - the excavator is sleeping - - - the front loader is sleeping - - - the crane is sleeping - - - and, oh, the wrecking ball is sleeping.” The mother, after so many books about trucks and tractors and dozers learned all the names. She’s an expert.  Even when her son’s not in the car she notices the large driving machines. She points out buses and even says “bus” aloud. 

The wrecking ball idle. But not for long. An extremely active wrecking ball. Now there is fog. Fog, of course, swirls. It whirls around the machines, the massive tires, the mud, the scaffolding, the excavated pit, the graded field that will be the parking lot. Wrecking ball dangles on its chain from the tall crane. It is dark. A purple night with an orange cityglow and active fog. Suddenly, the wrecking ball swings back and forth. A discernible swishing sound, in Dolby Surround, wishing in your ears like the wind.

Chapter 2      

            And now you sunlight squint. A bright day and a visible meadow. Prairie grasses grow in the meadow, this land surrounded by encroaching pavement. This last land. This land underneath all of you now. Still there, under your human world, waiting. Cartoon-grow a blade of grass, ascendant through a crack. Give it sound, digital and loud like the last sip through a milkshake straw. A young man runs crazily, leaning forward, arms waving. He has brown skin. It’s milk chocolate. The young man looks over his shoulder. His oilblack hair, bangs cut straight across. His hair. It’s not straight and black like somebody distinctly Chinese, and it’s not curly or Afro kinked and not too wavy dark in some Semitic or Persian or Mesopotamian kinda some. His hair grows and rests somewhere between them, a mixture, hybridized. Meet him at a cocktail party or sit next to him on a plane and you’d be tempted to ask, “Where are you from?” You poor human beings, accustomed to seeing color, thinking of color, power and color, await the answer. Learn how to use your own language! It’s not “racial profiling” it’s racist profiling. Right from the beginning. Who is the hunter and who the hunted? Leave that for your Copernican revolution.

            This young man with the black hair and bangs cut straight across runs from something. Oh, wait, he’s prey. He looks over his shoulder. Kick the Dolby again, large sucking sounds whorl and move from left to right as the instant asphalt chases him. The asphalt, black and macadamed and flowing like lava in a thick, oozing viscosity follows him. It moves along a ravine and spills over into the meadow. It churns like a flash flood. Draw it like a flash flood and make it sound like one. But give it massive heat and he does not wear a lava suit. 

            A rabbit joins the young dark-skinned man. The bunny hops, its eyes open wide and wild. Wait, there’s a deer, a jumping, darting deer, doe brown. Wait, that’s Bambi. What’s Bambi doing here? The first thought is that they’re running from a fire. But we remember the asphalt lava, churning, consuming. With Bambi bounds a Bengal tiger. An elephant trumpets. That next has to be called a swaying gallop for the giraffe. Butterflies by the thousands, like migrating Monarchs in California, accompanied by large flies or bees, I can’t tell which. Are those animals paired in twos? Hard to say right now . . .  this asphalt flood, this absorbing man-produced torrent that never abates (the whispers, underneath the roar: “until it’s too late”. . . tipping point tipping point that’s the point). The asphaltian flash flood closes on the running boy and God’s creatures, your invention. One wonders whose ass fault it is. Damn . . . (longer than a half-stop) the human swarm can shit. The super chunk flood rips at trees and covers grass; trees float, bob, upturn, sink. Hypertext link here: click on it: and it jumps you to another dimension, a connected world, to Faulkner’s descriptions of the Old Man during that time you know. The grass eaten alive.  

            A young woman enters, arms swinging, her eyes as wide as the rabbit’s, her knees high. She is a she, I think, beautiful and odd and not sure of the bathroom. She races, a frantic catching-up, and joins the boy-man. She struggles to reach him, her skin a blur, a blend without boundaries, then does. She stretches out her arms and attains him, both agonizing in their sprint for life, and grabs his hand. They run fingers locked and she pulls him along. She as black as the asphalt blacktop at their heels. She’s purple black like the opening scene’s night. She’s one dark lady, hair proud in that Angela Davis – about time we had a return of some funk. The asphalt smooching their sneaks. Lipping their ankles, tonguing their socks, steaming droplets the vanguard snatching.

            Then they forcefully stop and turn. The two, with God’s creatures behind them, your invention, hold out their hands in the universal symbol of halt. The asphalt rears, quivers, pauses, considers, lives, threatens, holding there suspended. Then a soul-penetrating scream. Howl from the heavens, from beyond the clutter of orbiting satellites, from the ether. The scream shakes the ground under theirs and our feet, buildings shudder, it frightens those who believe Allah and who believe Jesus and who believe other things. The scream rips paper and viewers cringe, sweating with the interpretation of dreams every dream wish fulfillment. And then it stops sharp, boom, gone.

Chapter 3

            Now the real world. At least the images don’t seem to be animated. But they’re clear and shining, maybe the computer has taken over. Maybe it’s live actors Silicon Valley world-elites have animated, their outlines quivering as mouths speak. I can’t tell the difference between this world and that one. Breast enhancements, collagen lips, human growth hormone, pumping with ‘roids, face lifts, Botox, bionics, the desert wars responsible for a rise in prosthetics, crossing borders, mixing lines, migrating between dimensions. When the people speak ay-leets always call them “populists.” The entire world has become a cartoon. It’s a funny race between here and there. We see with clarity and there are two old, extravagantly large Victorian houses. Shadows tell us that the scene was shot in the middle of the afternoon. It is the present day, right now, the very moment you’re reading this, living this, breathing us. You’re getting to know us now. You see me, a house. I narrate to save myself from destruction. I’m telling you how it is. Of course, it’s from my point of view, hard to nail objectivity, and I’m certain that everything a fiction and science a cosmology. We spin our tales and tell ourselves about the world, all of us, even houses. We do exert an influence on the people who live inside us. When the sink clogged and the dishwasher died at the same time a domestic called me haunted. Why govern your lives by superstition, why? You mourn! You grieve! While alive you smell, and even live, your own death.

            Dillsburg, a small college town in the Midwest. Could be Iowa. Could be Indiana. Could be Wisconsin. Could be Missouri. Could be Kansas. The screaming you hear is a female’s scream, of course. The woman shrieks and a man shouts, repeated and indistinct. You can’t see them yet. There are the two houses. I am Windowbee’s house. I am oversized and in disrepair. The Stars & Stripes on my rigid pole clean and pressed. Right now limply hangs in becalmed seas. Windowbee the young man you saw running away from the instant consuming flood. Windowbee lives inside me. You always hope that somebody intelligent and caring lives in you, that some love happens, babies born, that great ideas are formed, that people play music, that they recite poetry, that they care, that the politics of their neighbors don’t reside in a personal top ten. Doesn’t always happen. Or maybe that’s oldschool. I am, after all, a Victorian. 

            That shouting really bothers me. It’s not like I can make them stop. Anyway, let me continue. The house next to me is Maudette’s Patchwork House. It is a large, ornate boarding house with a wrap-around porch for miles. I’ve always wanted one of those. Earthrise flag shibbless in the breeze from a golden flagpole extending from the wall painted purple. One of those flags people have of Frosty the Snowman or a sunflower or a tulip or a carrot or I don’t know. 

            My front door opens, pauses halfway, and then slams shut. You didn’t see anyone. My white paint peeling. I’m reeling with the peeling white. I’ll tell you this now:  in truth, I am afraid to die. My face as brave as I can muster. My interior and exterior walls painted white, my front door white, porch posts so white. There a loud piercing scream. Again. Like a violent shout, like throwing plates, pans and pots during a kitchen fight.

            Windowbee’s bedroom upstairs. Windowbee Unsure, yes the same kid from the cartoon, suddenly sits up in bed straight and sharp. He listens. The screams and shouts come from outside his room, below him. He gasps for breath, the heaving breathing after a sprint. He flips off his covers. Windowbee fully dressed. What a sharp-looking young man, very intelligent and calm. Large brown eyes, that jet black hair. Obvious to me he’s in his mid-twenties, that age when you don’t quite know anything but there simmers hope, and a belief that it’s your world. He furrows his brow and bites his lip. Chews on it would be more accurate. He’s thinking something, a recollection. Those straight-across bangs. Maybe he has the front straightened at the black barbershop in the isolated, dead downtown. The rest of his hair small curls and some sexy wave. What a handsome young man, what an honest good looking kid. I can hear his heart beating.

            Whoa, there’s a hologram. Shit, where’d that come from? Einstein and Michael Jordan embrace in the middle of the room. They hover in a hug. It’s like that Princess Leah moment. Oh, I’ve seen it a thousand times, don’t even start. What my people watch, I see, I learn. I hear it, I feel it in my frame, I am it. You all don’t know your houses, I can tell. I might not always get the context. But you should know there are other dimensions, other ways of seeing. Einstein is shorter than Michael Jordan. These figures are life-sized. Einstein models a basketball outfit. But His Genius wears shockingly tight shorts and His Airness wears huge baggy shorts, the first of its kind, the instigator of a movement. Einstein and Michael engage a kind of jive handshake, still love and life during the urban crisis. Einstein’s classic I-must-be-a-genius frizz goes fro.

            Another loud crash and Windowbee swings his feet to the floor. He does not sigh; he listens for movement like a panther. You can see his ears seeing. The way the brain receives information and summons images. Windowbee on the edge of the bed with his feet firmly on the oak hardwood.

            A new voice interrupts, the articulation of an old Native American, a First Nations still-exister, Indians in unexpected places, speaking with the wisdom of the wind. It’s just a voice. We do not yet see him. A deep voice with more than a hint of mirthful play, always with something to say. The Indian comes, “Ah, boy, there’s my old buddy Windowbee Unsure, about to get himself in trouble again . . .”

            Windowbee stands. He shakes off his sleep. The hologram still dips and hovers and flashes behind him. Now you notice for the first time an electronic ankle bracelet with flashing lights on his left leg. Say “ankle” three times in succession. Stare at the word. It’s a funny-looking word. More than that, though, the ankle bracelet is weird, five small flashing lights. Windowbee runs downstairs. 

            The indigenous vocalization fills our world again. “They call me Cherokee Silversmith, even though I’m Havasupai. I’m his neighbor, there in the boarding house next door. They also say I’m kind of short. We won’t worry about that too much.”

            Windowbee runs down the stairs rapidly, a controlled fall, feet moving like he was pushed but he’s holding himself on the extreme edge, feet on the stairs, sounds. Right hand skimming the banister and left hand’s fingers whimming the faded wallpaper.

            “Windowbee, you see, lives at home under house arrest. He has two strikes against him and —.”

Chapter 4

A flash to another time. I summon images of a federal courthouse in the bright sunshine, marble steps and ivory columns, columns so amazingly white, in a broad blanched building. Along with the sound of wind you are ushered inside. Windowbee stands in front of a judge. Big, fat fucking judge with sagging jowls. He menacingly points a finger at the tiny Windowbee figurine. The judge’s mouth moves. He slams his gavel. The building shakes. Windowbee cringes, more annoyance than tremble. The Dolby Surround pounds the gavel sounds. Whob whob whob in your ears. He’s scary, like Americans painted Soviets. Or Blues hiss Conservatives those climate deniers, women haters and Glock defends. There is super power spread throughout the world. I’m a house a uniter not a divider. Just had to say that right now. Before you see the rest. 

            Hark, the judge speaks! Heralds trumpet the wisdom of the man! (My last exclamation.) “---let it be known in this state that mari-whaah-nah possession with intent to distribute is taken very seriously, young man –.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            We hear Cherokee:  “One more bust an’ it’ll be life in prison. Imagine that? For grass! Jeesus H. Cee. . . I mean, I’ve done time before, way back, for being Indian, but this—.”

            Whoa, there I am again, in the middle of the day in our current time of the good lord god willing. I’m standing straight and tall while you study ol’ dilapidated me. Stretch my sags and wish the peeling coat was painted smooth and right and a little less white. “You know that white house with the elms?” when strong and pretty in a better urban day they used to say and I’d recoil. Just, you know, the phrase “white house” caused a reaction to this colored soul of mine during the frigid wars of our time. And I do not pass.  

            On the porch becomes Priscilla Unsure, in her wheelchair. God, she’s beautiful. Oh, I know, I know, she’s old now, wrinkles and the grey hair, but you can see how she used to look, back there. Got the same last name as Windowbee, we see, but her skin ain’t brown. You’ll ask after you get to know her better. Her face hurt. She blind. Whoops, she’s screaming.  Damn . . .:

            “Leave Windowbee alone! Leave us both alone!”

            The front door crashes open and Windowbee runs into the light. His digital ankle bracelet beeps, flips and blips, there with red digital streaming, like a stock market ticker. He passes his mother and bounds down the porch steps.

            Cherokee’s voice audible, behind you, above you, inside of you.  “Well, well, looks like he’s doing it again. I can’t watch this part.”

            Windowbee sprints from the clutch of an ornery-looking, thin wisp of a man maybe a prison break guy we cannot say him any other way. Has the Marine haircut and everything and prison-issue underwear. I’d like ya’all to meet Lurl Jeffers, Windowbee’s step. He’s Republican and therefore this list of his anti is unbeknownst, so nearly comprehensive. To history, to mankind. He’s a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looks like he was drawn by the Marvel guys. If I could draw I would draw him that way, too. I mean, I’d probably make him snarl, but that would be ridiculous, snarl and saliva. And look, meth not farfetched. Perhaps the abuse isn’t - and wasn’t - his fault. But when you steal land it corrupts you, and will rise inside your system. Even if you wanted to you couldn’t love your way out of it. No penance for entire nations, nor chance for this man.

            Windowbee hares down the sidewalk. Dandelions. Grass browning. Windowbee is pretty darn fast. He’s building up steam. He’s grim with determination. He’s hungry with desire. He’s on fire! And Windowbee throttles into an invisible boundary and there shocks a zapping sound, followed quickly by crackling and fizzing. Shook. His body flops to concrete sidewalk and his eyes roll back into his head and he wibbles like an epileptic, and I know what an epileptic looks like because one lived inside me for years. This epileptic liked bowling, but that’s another story, entirely beyond the scope of this study, way way far away from this tale, totally extraneous. I should tell you about him sometime. Well, you see, he kind of looked like Windowbee, but. . . Wait, sorry. Windowbee, there he is. Shit, poor fellow. Look at him. I mean, that’s electroshock, that’s Nicholson post-lobotomy.  

            Breathing, now calm, Windowbee prone, surprisingly casual. He looks toward his neighbors’ porch, across the American lawn-line where one mows and one doesn’t. That’s Maudette’s. That patchwork house, that mishmash place, that zone of migrants and refugees, fucking boat people and marginal scum. Windowbee drags himself to his feet, lifts a knee, and charges once again. And once more he sprints and hits this invisible wall. Lurl throws his head back and laughs, a hand on the porch post. Priscilla cries softly. She knows this.

            Cherokee scrutinizes the audience, examines you from the big screen, the plasma, the tiny shitbox in a cabin, those early morning cartoon kids shouldn’t be observing this. Cherokee faces you and away from me. I’d shrug if I could. He doesn’t represent me, he just likes to talk. He also considers himself a rapper, even though he’s fifty-seven years-old. I’ve noticed this much: if you’re not careful some of the stuff you do in middle age makes you look ridiculous.

            “Now those of us in the Patchwork House can’t stand it when he does that,” Cherokee says. “It pierces us in the heart, it does.” He pauses, the Unveiler, and says, “But we’re going too fast:  wait a second:  come inside and meet Shelby . . .” He waves for you to follow him. But first.

            Please, let me direct your attention back to Maudette’s boarding house, there in that bright sunlight leaf-wave the street would be quiet were it not for the sound of jackhammers and front loaders and children gazing at arriving and departing dump trucks. No no, we can’t see them. They’re way down the street. There’s Maudette’s bold facade. The earth flag waves. The house mirrors a B&B with the excellent paint job and fancy trim. Fricking artisans the painters. Once upon a time some money went into that place.

            “That’s my beautiful home,” Cherokee sighs. “God, I love that place.”

            A huge – stop – a giant black man, a man, an Afro-American, an African no hyphen American, but the eyes, the color of his blood the color of his jizz, a man, where does he rest on the binary scale I don’t know certainly autistic so maybe nowhere never been laid some people are virgins by chemical default some not, wearing a bicycle helmet exits the house. Very carefully and slowly he lowers himself down the front steps. He turns to his left and walks across the grass, turns again and disappears behind the house. Cherokee can’t help himself: “That there’s Milder. He’s eight and a half feet tall and lumbers like an elephant. But that’s okay by me. Be scary to see a man that size zip around like a hummingbird anyways.”

            Cherokee pivots and leaps up the steps. Inside Maudette’s in a flash. Open the door and see a tiny bedroom. A bunk bed and baseball on the radio, that resonant voice, that summertime feeling, the constant chatter of the ballpark. A very serious only in America. Low and inside; three and two. Cherokee Silversmith reclines on the top bunk. He really is a small Native American, borderlands castaway first nations used to be what is your ID you impossible subject. The freaking land bridge before Bering; the fleeping Havasupai. You, Cherokee, are diminutive. Good for cliff running in the canyons, as young boys they did it, faster than the tourists. His ancestors survived in that land because of the Colorado. If I weren’t so sure that death was near, I’d write a story about rivers, about water, tell you why your private world will never work in the long run. Or, perhaps, this really is a story about water.  Or, I should tell a story about water to stave off death. Save me! I think it all ties together; I’m an associationist. They don’t understand that. Or, if they do, they don’t care. No no, zero hint of moralizing, just living on a planet, just life real and created even in this cartoon land. I need an enhancement, of some sort, any sort. I want some huge tits. Forgive me I’m lead paint infected. I’m thinking that I.

            “Hey, look up, there I am. See me. Sorry I’m not a prettier picture,” Cherokee says.

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