The Altonevers

by Frederic Merbe

  Even though out of range of any radio towers, the duo insist on listening to the static, which is disorienting to the senses and sense of time passing. Making Anna feel like she's isolated, stuck in a static moment while continually moving. She Remembers the last few days in snippets of still frames in her mind, though she can hardly tell the difference between them and what she's looking at now. She feels she steadily in a state of perpetuating déjà vu, simultaneously seeing and recollecting what's presently in front of her path. Watching the atlas of stars at night and the sun and moon pass from east to west through each day’s revolution. The waxing crescent of the lunar sphere is the only notable difference, and the only tether for her hang on to her notion causal continuity.

  This morning the moon is full, brimming, bathing in the rays of the not yet risen sun. It's reflection is glowing starkly, throwing neon blue light coating the left of their four faces.

  “Where are we going?” Anna asks.

  “Good question,” Harley answers.

  “We’re headin' to the dance Anna” Popper says.

  “Is it that time already?” Cider asks.

  “Afraid it is,” Harley says.

  “It's a day away ain't it?” Cider asks watching the way the scene of the sky is playing out.

  “Yeah but we wanna get to a hop before the dance. And the closest place is almost a day away,” Harley says.

  “Hop?” Anna asks.

  “Lindy hop,” Cider says.

  “Isn't that a dance?”

  “Oh that's right we haven't told you?” popper asks.

  “Have we?” asks popper.

  “No,” she says.

  “She doesn’t know?” Popper asks playfully “For us, our dance is a different one. Haven’t we told you how we've met before?” he says, nodding his head to the one he calls his sparrow.

  “No. You haven't,” Cider says tossing Anna a humored look of his moonlit face, and striking an orange glow to light a smoke. The duo exchange a glance, and Harley instinctively touches the radio dial, but it’s still nothing but static sailing the airwaves.

  “Our story,” Harley says nodding to the man she calls her sparrow.

  “I was a rough kid,” Popper says, “rough around the edges I guess. Nothing like now,” he looks at his manicured nails. “Blue collar you know. I got into some stuff real early. My first taste of the sour was at thirteen, and skin popping a week after that. A complete junkie by the time I hit fourteen. Wearing the same clothes for years, unclean inside and out. My life was a life in ruins. I horribly bit my nails, emblematic of my appetite of escapism consuming me. My face was always filthy from only bathing in fast food bathrooms, and begging for food when they would close.

  One night I asked one of the dealers I know to lend me a hand in a time of need. He cursed at me, beat me in front of some other dealers to not look weak. In the fight I stabbed him with my needle, bumping him with a day’s fix. He stopped, slowed and fell to the ground convulsing. I ran for my life, as fast I can. Hiding in dumpsters and climbing fire escapes for safety from the hoods and from the law.

  They found me laying in an alleyway, my needle riddled arms looked like I had the chickenpox. I was helpless in the fetal position. Lost in mind splintering pain, in the depths of the skin burning living hell of dope withdrawal. I was so scared and alone, freezing to my bones and on fire at the same time. They took me to a program. I was broken, uncivilized, lashing out at everyone and anyone around me, even those who were trying to help me. I was deemed insane, so they put me in a psyche ward. Heavily medicated, ironically giving me some of the same stuff that was killing me to calm me. Anyway that's where I met my sparrow,” Popper says tapping his fingers on Harley's knee.

  “I heard her call you her sparrow,” Anna says as a question.

  “We are each others,” Harley answers. The deep orange disk of day peeks then pours itself over the horizon, soaking the right of their faces in its rich neon glow. The moon and it's blue light remains, wanting for more of the day’s light to bath in and beam. Both solar objects are paused in the morning sky and staying at the same height, directly opposite each other. Together splashing down their neon glows to glaze each side of their four faces with their light.

  “I was the daughter of a drug dealer, a big one. It was a family operation from what I know,” Harley says in her rasped way of speaking, “one night, when I was eleven, still obsessed with pony’s and that sort of thing, people kicked in the front door. My parents thought was a swat team, it wasn't. From what I overheard the night before my uncle messed up a drop, got caught and dropped a dime on their supplier. They retaliated by sending a death squad to my house and killing my parents. My mother snatched me out of bed and threw me from the second floor window and I ran. They were both slain horribly, the killers were taking their time in bludgeoning them to death. I heard it all from my neighbor's yard, an hour until their screams finally faded. I wandered around lost inside and out for days when I was picked up by a squad car and they put me in the asylum. Where I stayed for six years before I met him, my sparrow,” Harley says resting her hand on Poppers knee.

  “Since the moment I seen her I knew she was for me, it was as though she was the only thing I could see after the day I met her. The only thing in my life at all, everything else is, well...just to be around her was better than any needle ever made me feel. It was serenity. She was my new drug, my only drug. A love like ours in a place like that was against the rules, though even most of the staff was enchanted by our courting. They separated us thinking it would quell or swollen hearts, so we passed notes through other patients. The janitor is a good man.”

  “Here! here! to the janitor,” Harley says pumping her fist in the air.

  “A believer in love,” Popper says, then continues his and her story “for months the only time we could see each other was during the daily recess. So we took to dancing to get as close to one another as we possibly could.”

  “Very close.”

  “To hold one another, to feel her curves, her hips in my clean hands. To smell her hair” Popper pauses, taking a deep breath and wrapping fingers on his lover's knee.

  “To feel his hands on my shoulder's as we stepped together, and know his sneaking whispers and kisses. At first I had to stand on his feet as he lumbered around. It was obvious we didn't know what we were doing, but they knew, everyone knew what we we're doing-”

  “But you two lunatics,” Cider laughs pausing the tale like skipping a record.

  “Ahem,” Harley clears her throat and continues, “In no time at all we learned every dance you could think out, the salsa, the samba, all sorts of line dances. We learned them all in our excuse to hold each other tightly. One day the janitor showed us a new dance, a dance that was irresistible not to try. The Pan-Alto Hop, that to us was the most beautiful dance of all we’d danced. Fast paced, upbeat, and about improvisation in form. The dance seemed to us like a metaphor for our love, our lives. Of being locked away in the regimented confines of an asylum, and doing what we can to be together, to feel free to express ourselves to the other. It was when I, we felt most free, the only time in our broken lives that we could feel, be alive.”

  “To feel free, free as the sparrows chasing each other, courting each other through the trees of the asylum’s courtyard,” Popper says picking up the tale, “The nurses and orderlies, the Whitecoats, and the other patients were our audience, applauding our dances, applauding our love after every performance. I got into a fight with one of the counselors, as retribution he ordered us separated. It was hell, cold and empty, it was living devoid of life itself. We were trading notes again, but it wasn't enough, nothing compared to the invigorating,” he breathes, “soul elevating heights of our hopping, matching each other arm in arm, foot to foot. Within days we crumbled, descending back into our broken selves. I stopped bathing, wearing the same clothes, even biting my nails again. Worthless, in deep psychosis, and not the fun kind either. As was she, catatonic, desponden
t, lost again in the depths of soul defiling depression. This lasted for weeks, their medicines did nothing to us. They couldn't understand why, scientifically anyway.

  The janitor got it. We never actually caught his name, but one night he came to our doors and put us in an empty garbage can one at a time. He took me first, then I waited at the dumpsters, in déjà vu of the days of needle floored alleys. Watching the sparrows of the courtyard from the outside for the first time, waiting for the greatest drug of all, my love. My sparrow,” Popper says nodding to Harley.

  “I got there a half hour after him, we climbed the outer fence and ran through the open fields, hitchhiking as far away as we possibly could. Making it so far from the asylum the sparrows we idolized from our windows as being free, now seemed confined to their little trees. Just as we were confined to that horrible place with it's cold clinical smell, and the nonsensical wailing of the insane, never mind the one's slamming against the walls vainly to alleviate their endless mental anguish. They put an all points bulletin out on us. I was still seventeen and he had just turned eighteen, they said we were both insane. They said he kidnapped me from the asylum, that if we went days without medicine we could become extremely volatile. The janitor got us a month’s supply of mine and his.

  The authorities were everywhere we looked, looking for us. We hid in the alleyways and junkies spot’s that he knew from his past life, before he met me. We used the only things we knew, he was a skin popper, and my know how of my parents stash spots to set up and rob low level dope dealers. Flying low and off the radar. We got by, until one day we seen a flier on a wall for a local dance competition, so we went and won, the highlight of our young lives,” Harley says.

  “It was the week of valentine’s day,” Popper says, “we drove around listening to the radio station’s countdown of love songs for that day of lovers. We put it on a pedestal, our first valentine’s day. The day of lovers, and we were free as birds, freer, together. We were at a parking lot of a gas station in a car we stole when they arrived, a lot of them. Agents sent by the feds for the interstate kidnapping wrap, such bullshit, damn pencil pushers. We had guns, my favorite was an AK 47 that we found in one of the dealer's house's. They were yelling at us through a loudspeaker, for us to surrender and they'll show us leniency. That we'll go to different asylums but not to prison. But I couldn't, she couldn't, we couldn't live. Didn’t want to live that way, without each other.

  I started shooting, and they shot back, allot. I got hit first, dropping the gun. She, my lady, my sparrow, picked up the gun and started shooting back, they got her too. We died that day, in the mid morning the day before valentine’s day. We met Alister, and now we live to dance, forever hopping side by side, together. Though annually, reliving that moment, the moment of the other’s death, our deaths together, on the day before valentine's day, as long as we live.”

  Anna see's in the shadows made by the neon blue and light orange crossing between the duo in the front seat, is growing into the shape of a spectral tree, then sprouting leaves. Spawning small sparrows that follow each other through tiny tangling leaves, flying away just to flap back to their miniature nests.

  WHIZZ crackle pop whiiiizzzz crackle pop crackle. The static fuzz of the radio breaks, popping in and out of a distorted signal. Sounding for a second like a scrambled horse cry. Anna squints toward the sun to see a herd of wild ponies, or mares, galloping past a radio tower standing alone in the distance. Kicking up a dust trail a mile long that rises into the figures of large mares with manes before fading into the air. The static breaks with a whizzing and another pop crackles into a broken signal carrying someone saying “And today we start the whiizzree day val en ines day countdown….sounds of love for every beating heart,” the baritone voice of a disk jockey comes in clearly as he completes his sentence. The sun and moon are now stand in the sky at equal height and size, paused in the same place facing each other. Keeping the four of their faces and the scene lit in their neon glows for as long as the love songs are playing through the lover's countdown.

  “Why are they staying in the sky like that?” Anna asks.

  “You don't know? they're in love, they adore the sight of the other. You haven't seen them Anna? Chasing each other each day through the days and nights. Enamored, until the moon crumbles or the sun explodes, and maybe even after that as celestial dust” Popper says.

  “Maybe?” Harley asks insistently.

  “For all eternity of course,” Popper smiles tapping on his smiling sparrow's knee. The car skids to stop in the middle of a small country town. The duo jump up to stand on their seats.

  “Up we go,” Popper says as he grabs his sparrow's hand and she hops over the windshield, denting the bullet scarred hood of the car. They run off, disappearing into the night for nearly two hours. Leaving the two in waiting with the radio playing through the countdown of old love songs. She scoots over to him, leaning in to nestle her head onto his chest and he wraps his arm around her shoulders. in each other’s embrace, dreamily drifting nearly to sleep, together to the tunes of past loves.

  Bang! then the crunch of metal as Popper runs over the hood to hop in the driver's seat, startling Anna's bed head of carrot hair up from Cider’s shoulder.

  “You guys ready?” Popper shouts, banging on the side of the car to be sure wake the two.

  “Awww, look at little Cider with a dame drooling on his arm,” Harley teases.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says, dusting his shirt off flippantly. Earning a playful smack from Anna to his arm, who then returns to rubbing her tired eyes. Popper's already settled in the driver's and Harley's laces hang at their place over the side mirror. Both well dressed from head to toe for the occasion, him in a pinstriped cream and coffee silk suit. And she's looking sharp in a new wave styled black pantsuit and wide yellow tie. Each having a bit of lavender, he as his handkerchief and she has her cufflinks. The convertibles bull of an engine blows it's nostrils at the turn of the ignition key and rages when Popper revs the engine.

  “Where'd you guys go?” she asks.

  “Eh…” Cider shrugs and Popper says, “Ice cream.”

  “And these suits,” Harley adds.

  “Yeah ice cream,” Cider laughs. They burn rubber. The torque and acceleration force their backs into their seats, fishtailing, Popper turns into the angle to slide almost perfectly to the side. The tires eventually catch to tear through the streets, serenading the slumbering country town with the sparrow's tunes playing as loud as the speakers can shout.

  “Wanna get something to eat?” Popper asks.

  “A last meal?” Harley asks.

  “A diner, like we used to dash from?” he asks.

  “Of course, don't we always?” Harley says. they blow through town after town, each miles apart. Some withered to ghost towns as their local industries became antiquated. You can tell by the main streets lined with antique stores filled with dusty objects, emblems of the town’s memories collected. Otherwise entirely forgotten from time. Anna thinking of how at one time, the antiques were new, freshly lived, alive with the person who possessed them, now they’re gathering dust as the only remains of those people, of just one of hundreds of main streets along this rural roadway.

  Until the Moonlight diner, an Americana diner in the middle of nowhere appears on yonder. It's walls are covered with vintage posters and the jingles of yellowed advertisements. Way out by itself, thirty miles from the last town and twenty miles to the next. Most of the place is covered by grease, reaching from the kitchen grill to the bay windows. The type of place where the waitress is endearingly called by her first name by familiar patrons fellow travelers so often they’re like family to her. The aroma of hash browns and browning sausage mixes with the waitress' stale perfume to overpower even the meals on their plates. The whole gang's sitting in a blue cushioned corner booth by the front of the place, with a view of the sparsely filled parking lot. On the opposite side of the room is the long counter that's lost its patina awhile back.
Filling the middle of the room are rows of four foot high rickety tables set with clean but still calcified glasses of tap water. A few tired truckers are bantering on about the hours and which roads to keep to keep good time. A stressed out single mother who hasn't slept since she had her first child, is trying to corral the two rambunctious kids over a cup of Joe and a read of the paper.

  Anna nibbles on a Linzer tart, staring at the little girl with her mother, who's blowing bubbles in her Milky Way looking milkshake and laughing, Anna admires the child's amusement in simplest of things. Cider swipes a fork and Harley and Popper sit back in their chairs finishing their desserts. Harley burps first.

  “What time is it?” she asks.

  “I don't know, I lost track of the track list a while back. Excuse me, excuse me yes,” Popper says waving for the waitress’ attention.

  “Can you tune the radio to 1.61 please,” Harley asks.

  “That's dead air hun, for as long as I been here,” the waitress says.

  “A hundred dollars says it ain’t,” Cider says.

  “A hundred dollars says a lot of things mister.”

  “Cider!” Anna says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Pay the lady,” Anna demands.

  “What's it for if not for your happiness,” he says, lighting a smoke then reaching into his coat pocket. The server happy to be called a lady by anyone, smiles ear to ear, and wider when she catches the wad of loose bills. All hundreds of very colorful money.

  “Sure thing,” the two a.m waitress, says and moves like she's been on her feet for as long as she’s been alive, and living only for her short lived smoke breaks. Harley drops her fork to her plate, losing her appetite immediately at the smell of Cider's smoke.