Imaginary Friends

by John Marco

  Jamie returned to the trailer and picked up the dog’s dish and headed back to the shed to fill it. Along the way, he tried to remember if he knew either animal’s name and realized that he’d only heard the old man call them either, “damn dog” or “damn horse.” If they had names, he didn’t know them. Or perhaps those were the names the man had given them. He entered the heat of the shed once again and found a large scooper hanging on a peg over the bag of dog food. He took it down and removed two large scoops, putting them in the dish. Damn Dog—or whatever his name was—tried to control his eagerness and sat nearby wagging his tail with such force that it was banging on the side of the shed and making the whole structure shake slightly.

  He took the dish back to the porch and set it down, noting that there was another automatic watering system that filled a bucket for the dog. As the dog set to work on its dinner, Jamie climbed the wooden steps to the porch where he had found the old man yesterday. The rocker was still there; it was now simply empty of its usual occupant.

  The paramedics thought he’d probably died of a heart attack.

  On a whim, Jamie tried the front door. It opened easily, and he peered into the living room of the trailer. He’d never been inside the place and was a bit surprised that the door was open. Not a lot of folks locked up in this part of the country, but someone from the sheriff’s office should have locked the place up and arranged for the animals. Maybe they had and things were just moving slowly. Jamie didn’t know, but his curiosity was alive within him, so he stepped across the threshold, wondering what he would find.

  The living room was dim and cool, and the walls were lined with books. There was a small television on a stand on one wall and, below it, a small stereo. In one corner, there was a desk and chair; the desk was piled high with papers, and the chair looked as though it had been picked up at a garage sale about ten years earlier. A laptop computer was on top of the desk, its lid closed. Beyond the living room was the kitchen, but something else caught his eye, and Jamie stepped forward to look more closely.

  Above the desk was a small painting—a portrait, actually—of a striking woman. Her hair was a fine shade of red, long and flowing past her shoulders in waves and soft curls. Her eyes were the predictable green, but they were lit from within and lighter than he would have expected. Her skin wasn’t porcelain pale but lightly tanned, her lips full, her cheeks flushed slightly with color. She was wearing earrings that dropped in a series of hoops almost to the base of her neck. Perhaps most interesting about her attire was her dress, which began with a circle of cloth around her neck, separating into two, thin straps that connectedto the bodice. The connecting pieces were rings that matched those in her ears, and the brocade pattern of the dress was almost exactly the same shade as the envelope he carried in his back pocket.

  The woman in the portrait was almost sideways, so the whole of her face could not be seen. The shadows of her hair covered part of the image, and her body was turned even more, giving the viewer a glimpse of one uplifted breast.

  She was beautiful in every respect, and Jamie wondered who she was until he saw the finely scripted lines at the very bottom of the image. It read: VALDIS WITH BLOOD ORCHIDS.

  Jamie looked at the image again and saw the red flowers twined in her hair. This was a portrait of Ms. Valdis, to whom the old man had written.

  She wasn’t a fanciful person from some painter’s imagination, a beauty to stare at while the old man sat at his desk.

  She was real.

  Jamie sat down in the desk chair and pulled the envelope from his back pocket. Who would know if he opened it and read it? Who would care?

  “No one,” he said aloud, his voice strange in the confines of the small trailer. “He had no one, and she returned the letter.” Besides, he reminded himself, if he left the letter here it would most likely get thrown away at some point, and the old man’s last words—as a writer?—would never be read. He deserved that much at least. And even if Jamie returned the letter to the post office, it would simply go to the dead file, to be pulped at some unforeseen point in the future.

  Decision made, Jamie leaned back in the chair and carefully opened the flap on the envelope. He felt a tingle of excitement sweep through him, because never once in all his years at the post office had he opened a letter that didn’t belong to him. Opening this one was invigorating, freeing, and in some unexplainable way, sitting beneath the portrait and in the old man’s rickety chair . . . it seemed right.

  Inside were several folded sheets of paper, and as he removed them, Jamie discovered that, as he’d suspected, there was something else. As he unfolded the sheets of paper, the dried petals of a red orchid fell free into the palm of his hands.

  One of the flowers from her hair! he thought. She is real.

  He carefully set the petals on the top of the desk, turned his attention back to the pages in his hand, and began to read:

  Part II: The Geography of Memory

  Dear Valdis,

  Summer is winding down now, and for so long I have wanted to write to you, yet I found myself holding back. I stare at the portrait of you above my desk—do you remember when Sebastian painted it?— and I think that it is best if we remain nothing more than memories of each other. But autumn is coming, and after that winter, and though it does not snow here very often, I suspect that I will be dead long before the first frost.

  So I took up my pen and, with some trepidation, I began this long, long overdue letter to you.

  Here is something I remember: I am standing on the forty-yard line at the high school stadium in late autumn. The air is cold enough to make each exhaled breath a plume of dissipating white. I’m wearing a black leather jacket and indigo blue jeans with a white turtleneck beneath a black wool sweater. You once told me the outfit made me look like an angry preacher. The stadium is empty. Everyone has gone home except whoever is supposed to shut off the lights.

  One by one, the big, white arc lamps go out with an odd, echoing clunking sound, and from where I stand, the announcer’s booth fades into the night first, then the bleachers, and finally, inevitably, the field itself. For a moment, I know what it means to be invisible, what it means to stand in an empty place and contemplate the surrounding darkness as a permanent thing. The season is over, and the lights won’t go on again until next year, and some other young man may be there for the end, but it won’t be me.

  I know you cannot back into the future, but what if the dark road looking back is brighter than the empty road looking forward? What if there is no road forward at all, and the past is all you have? What if the arc lights of your life are going out, one by one, and the cold dark is coming? That is where I am now, in the final days of my life, and I cannot help but look back and remember. I rebuild my memories one piece at a time—a word spoken, the color and cut of a shirt, an unseen but familiar sound in the whispering trees— until the memory I am recalling is whole and is true. I remember what I know, and sometimes, I try to forget, too.

  I wanted, as you know, to be a poet, and I often ask myself if what I wanted to be was really a seeker of truth, of wisdom. In my years, I have discovered that there is little real wisdom to be found in words, only in the experiences we have over a lifetime. Yet there are some truths even I know; you will have to decide for yourself if the truths I have discovered are a form of wisdom, or just an old man’s foolish sentiments. There are moments, times, images I remember; others are gone, like cigarette smoke in a high wind.

  I know you cannot trust a first kiss, but I remember the first time I kissed you. I remember it so well that I can still feel your lips—the curve of them, the faint wetness, the “o” of surprise made by the corners of your mouth. I remember it so well that I can tell you with certainty that you tasted of strawberry cotton candy. I remember it so well that I can still feel the texture of your long, red hair in my hands, and the subtle curve of your body pressed to mine.

  I do not, however, remember what you were wearing or what I was
wearing or the song that was playing on the radio. I do not, sadly, remember what was said just before or just after, nor the precise time except that it was after dark, and in the far distance, the lights but not the sounds of the Hall County Fair could be seen, and not heard.

  You and I had been there—that was why you tasted like strawberry cotton candy—and then we drove out, past cornfields high with summer and smelling green and fertile, to a narrow bridge over the Platte River. Below us, the shallow waters were black and smooth like dark mirrors, and above us, the night sky was filled with the silvers and whites of stars, the odd flickers of satellites, and (though I do not remember for sure) perhaps a planet or comet passing through our field of vision.

  The geography of memory is strange—a land filled with unknown (and unknowable) terrain.

  A number of years ago, I was riding a chestnut Arabian mare in the northern Nevada desert, and she stepped into an unseen (and unseeable) gopher hole. She broke a leg, and as I shot her in the head to end her suffering, the memory of kissing you, my Valdis, for the first time came into my mind, and that is how I know that memory and geography are unreliable sources of information at best.

  I had ridden that path in the desert many times. How, then, could I rely on my memories of you?

  And the voice of memory inside me says, Because Valdis was your friend. You don’t forget your true friends. You don’t forget what happened.

  Is the voice of memory more reliable than memory itself? Than geography?

  I do not think so, not really, but I often pray that it is, that dreams and memory and their voices are reliable. At least where you are concerned. In the absence of any real language, any effective words or wisdom, I can remember you, hear your voice, and know that as the darkness grows and winter comes on, I am not really alone.

  You cannot trust a first kiss, Valdis, you told me that yourself. But I was too young to believe you then, and now . . . now I am too old and too alone to do anything but wish that you had been wrong.

  Do you remember how I used to enjoy driving, especially at night? The sound of the tires on the highway, the switching between radio stations, going from one type of music to another to a talk show about UFO’s, the sleepy sound of the windshield wipers swish-swishing over the glass if it happened to be raining.

  Movement. That was the part I enjoyed. It didn’t really matter if I was going somewhere in particular, but just knowing I was moving. The mostly empty stretch of Interstate 80, running out of the east and heading west, toward the distant sandhills, was perfect for driving at night. Sometimes, the traffic would be so sparse that it was just me and the stars and a radio station from Hastings or Kearney or Grand Island, bouncing signals off the cornfields and playing music just for me.

  I covered a lot of distance in those days, and on some of those long drives, you came along. Do you remember those drives? I didn’t really need the company—I liked driving by myself better than anything—but it was sometimes nice. And, to be honest, your voice was a hell of an improvement over Art Bell’s anyway. You used to sing along to the radio, especially if you were feeling moody, and you’d tune in some late night show playing nothing but ballads.

  Do you remember my telling you that you had a chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes voice? Ha! Valdis, you had a farm girl’s voice: sweet, but not too high, and a little rough around the edges, as though you’d been smoking for a few years or had a little prairie grit in your throat.

  We would move along, and you’d start to sing, and I’d say, “Valdis, you’ve got a chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes voice.” I don’t think you ever really knew exactly what I meant, but I’m old enough now to tell you that for me, your voice sounded a lot like someone singing me home.

  Movement. Distance.

  Sometimes, I think about you and me and those roads we would travel and how the distance between us slowly grew to be so long and so dark, like walking the rows in the cornfields on a night with no moon. But even the greatest of distances can be traveled, and I know this to be true, too, because after so long and so dark, I believe you are still, must still be my friend, and that somehow, despite the distance between us, you came to find me.

  Your voice has returned to me. Sometimes, it is a voice from the past, reminding me of things I have almost forgotten. At other times, it is a voice from the present, calling to me out of the dark shadows of my mind, or a voice from the future, singing of bright light and sunshine on cornfields.

  Your voice, Valdis, is a voice of light and shadow, and I know it well, despite the time that has passed since I last heard it.

  I said before that you cannot trust a first kiss. It makes promises that are rarely kept. It makes promises in the mind and the heart that are rarely kept. A first kiss is the illusion of warmth in the long, white moments before one freezes to death in a blizzard. But each first kiss we experience creates a memory that lasts, it creates images in the mind that last like handprints in wet concrete.

  I shouldn’t have kissed you, but even now, I’m glad I did. That one kiss told me that we could never be lovers, but we would always be friends.

  I am not a doctor or a psychiatrist to explain to you how or why memories work the way they do. Like oxygen or growing older or taxes, memory is something that simply is, existing for each of us so long as we draw breath. I once took the power of memory— its ability to call and be called upon—and that is the road that leads me here, to this moment, this transmissionof my thoughts in these waning days of my time. Take it as you will, but I have traveled the dark highway of my memory, traversed the geography of the night it happened, and while I cannot tell you how or why memories work the way they do, I can tell you that some memories are barbed like fishhooks.

  Some memories won’t let you go, and the more you struggle—to find forgiveness, to forget—the more enmeshed in them you become. Until living with them is all you have, until the memories are your life, your existence. It is an unfair exchange, but it happens, and the real world becomes the shadow you see through lenses tinted dark, a place you live in but never touch, taste or feel. It becomes the memory, too.

  I shouldn’t have kissed you, Valdis, but I did.

  And on that particular day in October of each year, when I would drive north, from Las Vegas to Reno, as fast as the car would allow me, and always—always— alone . . . I shouldn’t have taken you along with me, despite how wonderful it was to see you. But I did.

  You see, the memory of that kiss has stayed with me, but it is not nearly so powerful, so barbed, as the memory of the night I killed you.

  Running into you after so long a time apart, with no words or letters exchanged, ended in your death and with me trapped here in the dark, waiting for my brain to catch up to my body. Waiting for the last of the stadium lights to go out.

  Imagine how thankful, how grateful I must be, that the power of my memories has been able to call you back to me.

  I can hear your voice, and the last thing that is left for me to do is to make sure that you can hear mine.

  Part III: A Break from the Old Man’s Past

  Jamie looked up from the letter with a start, his forehead damp with sweat, though the trailer was cool enough. It wasn’t from the heat, he knew, but from guilt. Reading the old man’s letter to this woman who was dead—and why did he send it anyway?—would be enough to make any man squirm a little. For a man like Jamie, it was enough to make him squirm a lot. This letter was private in a way few letters truly are.

  He looked at his watch and realized that what he should be doing right now was getting in his truck and driving back down the rutted dirt road, heading for the post office and the end of his day. The sun was fat and heavy in the west. Instead, he stood up and went into the tiny kitchen to find something to drink. On the refrigerator, there was a small note taped to the door. Jamie started in surprise when he saw that it read: Mr. Marsters, please help yourself to some lemonade. The glasses are in the top cupboard to your left.

&n
bsp; Bemused, Jamie opened the refrigerator to find a large pitcher of the old man’s lemonade. He took it out, found the glasses where promised, and poured some for himself. He leaned back against the scarred countertop and stared out the window that looked into the area behind the trailer. It was all empty desert except for one large cottonwood tree that had been there so long, it needed no watering—its roots would run deep, deep into the ground, all the way down to the dark aquifer where water hid in the high desert.

  He sipped on the lemonade, savoring the cold, tart-sweet flavor, and wondered how the old man had known to leave him that note. Jamie had never once been inside the trailer; they weren’t friends or even close acquaintances. He just delivered the mail, shared an occasional short conversation, and tried to be kind. He’d felt bad for the old man, living out here with no one for company and no one that Jamie had ever seen stopping by. Somehow, though, the man had anticipated that he would be here, inside his trailer.

  Jamie finished the lemonade and put the glass in the sink, then looked at his watch. He knew that he should be going, but he hadn’t finished the letter to Valdis yet, and he wanted to. She had been a real person, and the old man had killed her . . . and yet he was writing her a letter and sending it as though he fully expected it to reach her. He returned to the living room and the desk chair.

  There were too many unanswered questions for him to walk away now. He had to keep reading, to see if he could find out what was really going on with the strange old man who lived in this tiny trailer and had written a letter to a dead woman.

  He picked up the pages once more.

  Part IV: The Writer Voice

  I know that I have to write about it, Valdis. What and how it happened. But I have missed you so much over these years, the secrets I was unable to share with you, the little things that friends have: comfort in sorrow, laughter at bad jokes, small talk over strong drinks, an understanding look. These are little things, yes, but they are important. I suspect you know this, and understand why I resist putting it all down on paper.