by D M Robbins
We move to the exit and the bright, noisy day. With the door now open I look at the busyness of the city as heat and humidity attach to my shirt.
“In that dream I keep dying. Do you think we’ve lived, or, I guess, died before?”
He places his hand on my shoulder. “Nan Nan says we leave pieces of ourselves places and can only return to them when we’re ready.”
I nod, pondering this, not entirely sure what it means.
“Thanks, C. I always feel better coming here. I never had a brother, you know?”
“And I never had a sister,” he says, slapping my back.
I laugh, letting go of the door. I step onto the sidewalk to reenter the deep waters of Big City. Confused by this new information, I slip into the flow of pedestrians heading in the direction of Sal’s.
An upside down king… the Phoenix… and what did he say about the Dueling Dragons? My thoughts bulge with noise and information crashing into one another.
But do I really believe in some silly cards?
My head is splitting in two. I try my breathing exercises, breathing deep, feeling my feet on the pavement, feel my breath connecting with my higher self. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
My belly tightens as my taste buds salivate. Thoughts of hunger drag me away. Oh man, one block from Sal’s and I can smell the garlic and homemade sauce. But what did Caesar mean that a storm was coming? I look up, one black cloud does hang low in a blue sky.
Some slick looking guy in a blue suit and black sunglasses stands next to me at the street corner. He smells of money, sizing me up with a scowl like I’m not in his league and don’t belong here. We’re crammed together waiting for the light to change. The walk sign illuminates and a mass of bodies move.
I wonder why he keeps glancing at me. Screw him. I have every right to walk here. It’s a free country, mostly.
He sways his head to music. I look away, but when I look back, he’s panicked. Smoke rises from his hand as the music player bursts into flames. Melting plastic, warbling sounds… he tries throwing it, but can’t let go. It seems glued to his skin, burning his hand.
After several attempts it drops to the ground, the plastic smashing apart. He stomps on the dead device, clutching his burned hand. I can almost feel the pain shoot up my arm.
A group gathers. The businessman bends getting his face closer to the charred remains. He glances up at me then yells at the player. “I won’t do it! He’s too weak looking. No. I said, No!” he shouts again then takes off at a sprint, disappearing around the next street corner.
I can feel anger and confusion everywhere. I know the unseen world is trying to break through. Everything feels on edge.
I turn back down the sidewalk and a thud hits me in the chest—hands knocking me back. Outside a tattoo parlor this giant man with crazy brown curly hair, unshaved whiskers, and flaring nostrils has hatred in his eyes as if I murdered someone he loved.
He waves his hands. “Get the hell out of here! You’re trouble for us,” he says, striking me in the chest again. I stumble toward the curb. He charges me, punching me in the stomach. Air leaves my body. Throat tightens, can’t breathe, eyes water, vision clouds.
People point and laugh. “Check out the big guy. He’s going to kill that dude. Let’s see what happens. Sal’s can wait.” Voices speak from around my age.
I look for a cop or someone to save me, but there’s no one. My parents are gone. I’m alone in this cold world. Something isn’t right. No one has ever come at me before. I’m scared and shaking.
“Look at that freak. He’s so weird,” a couple of other kids say. Older people point and laugh indifferently. “He must have it coming. They always do. Come, Linda, let’s buy you that dress you want.” An older man grabs a woman’s arm. Advertisements play on storefront monitors.
What happened to them? There’s no kindness. Who are these people? What happened to goodness?
Angry Burly Man pushes me again, knocking off my hat. His teeth show within a twisted grin, almost knocking me in front of a city bus. My head whiplashes, feeling the impact in my chest. He’s too big. I can’t fight him using the Tae Kwon Do I learned when I was fourteen.
I plead with him, “Sir, I’m no one. I’m no one. I’m sorry, whatever I did.”
He hovers so close I can smell his B.O. “Go away and don’t come back. Next time I won’t be so nice. Your time is over here, boy. You and your kind.” He laughs. Others join him.
“But I’m just a store clerk.”
“Don’t lie to me.” He tightens a fist to punch: a hand so large it would cave in my face. He then releases his fist and slaps himself in the face. “I hate lies…” he says through grinding teeth, pauses, then stomps back to the shop, slamming the door.
“Me too,” I say to his back, out of breath.
The store lights flip off. Standing in the darkness with arms crossed his eyes dart up and down the block. He then stares at me through the storefront window and chills run through me.
My time is over here? My kind? What does that mean? I don’t have a “kind.”
Embarrassed and ashamed, people stare at me. I need to ask him what he means, but don’t dare. He seems to know something about me. I, me, Reuben, an eighteen year old grocery store clerk. A threat to no one other than myself. A no one. The same chills trickle over me I felt this morning looking at my parents’ picture, remembering the accident.
The black cloud overhead has lifted, and now feel the hot sun burning my scalp.
My head spins and my chest hurts. I’m nauseous and hungry. Is Claremone a dream? Dr. G and my parents always said, “No, No, No. He’s not real.”
In the dark store Angry Burly Man, a stranger, stares out at me.
I turn slightly to elude his glare when a woman’s voice echoes off the buildings,
“They are coming for you, child. They are coming.”
I spin around, looking for her. A voice I’d only heard in dreams. Nothing but city in all directions. Ravenous, I turn for home and run, forgetting about the slices, feeling like a vulnerable animal out in the open.
UNSETTLED AND ALONE
After closing the door to my fifth-floor walkup apartment, my arm hairs bristle sensing someone’s in here. I check for Angry Burly Man inside the closet behind winter coats, long sleeve shirts, behind the shower curtain and bathroom door, though he’d need to be paper thin to fit back there. I check anyway. Under my bed, in the fridge, I don’t find anyone.
In the bathroom mirror I lift my shirt, flinching at the fist size bruises. Movement catches the corner of my eye, I step quickly into the living room which is also my bedroom. There’s no one here, yet I have this eerie sense a crowd watches me from afar, waiting. They shimmer briefly like kicked up dust then disappear. Must’ve been sunlight reflecting off particles. The maid hasn’t come this month to clean.
I should definitely call Dr. Greenblatt. He’d prescribe that awful medicine again, Proxylipitan. To help with my overactive imagination and mood disorders, dumb me down. I didn’t like the way it made me feel, like a stupor after not sleeping for a night.
Calming, feeling safer now, hunger takes over. Scrounging around the cupboard I grab a jar of all-natural creamy peanut butter, expired one month ago. A big perk of the job is taking home expired food. Yum. I lean against the counter eating it by the spoonful.
My mother told me people with anger issues are only scared and injured somewhere deep inside. Was Angry Burly Man scared of me? He sure didn’t seem scared when he hit me.
Maybe a storm is coming, or maybe I’m just having a bad day. Maybe everyone is.
There must be a clue to my past. Something to point me in the right direction. I’m not crazy.
Over at my desk I put the peanut butter down and start looking closer at family pictures, seashells, ticket stubs, pulling out my desk drawer. There may be clues I never noticed. Links. Connections.
I look closer, remembering our tan house and driving into the Woodland Hills Co
mmunity about forty miles from here, where each house rested on less than a quarter acre, with matching two car garage and well-trimmed hedges. It was hard to tell them apart except for the mailbox numbers and different colors.
I was ten when my mother and I walked in the development. A large brown sedan careened out of control. Diving into the bushes, we got cut up as the car skidded to a screeching halt up on the curb. The street sign clanged to the ground a foot in front of us. The driver was a gray-haired elderly man with round head and hairy ears. Leaving the driver side door open, he hobbled over.
“Are you two all right? I pumped the brakes, but I… I don’t know what happened…” He stared at the car with the two front wheels up on the curb and yellow street sign lying on the grass in front of us. The pointy metal tip only a foot from my face.
“I’m terribly sorry. I must be getting old, older.” He rubbed his head in aged confusion as if events and memories were the same jumbled train running through his mind: less distinct, edges frayed, details murky.
“Sir, we’re fine. Just a little shaken up,” my mother said, brushing me off. “Are you, all right?” The bumper of his car had caved in where he hit the pole.
“I… I don’t know,” he responded absently.
She looked at me with accusation in her soft, small eyes. “That was a close call, sweetie. Too close this time.” As if it was my fault.
We fell silent walking home. I glanced back at the man. In the house she made chicken soup then leaned against the counter sipping hers, staring off. There was confusion in her face, pain.
During this time, I thought all kids experienced the same “bad luck” or “happenings,” as my mom called them.
“No, sweetie, they don’t. But why do you?”
Dropping the spoon into the peanut butter jar, an idea strikes me. Wait, that’s what happened to my parents. They lost control of the car, except there were shadows. Walking that day, we had our backs turned when we dived. There could have been shadows, or he might’ve just lost control. Oh, I don’t know.
But that wasn’t the only time. Over the years things would “fall.” She tried making light of them and started affectionately calling me her “little black cat.” A hot iron almost fell on me; the cord hooked on my shoe. Another time when I was three or four, the lawnmower got away from my father and rolled within a few feet of where I played then it shut off. Somehow, I’d always be one step out of reach. But not today.
Cold now, I grab a hoodie, realizing tears are running down my cheeks. Missing them and our home, that boring dull flavorless place, I’d give anything to go back there.
Over the years my parents wondered about me. They’d say I didn’t look like them. “He’s so odd,” they’d say when they thought I was asleep.
But they loved me despite the issues. There was football and hot soup on cold days, and they made sure my hair was properly parted on my way to school.
As the years passed, they’d sit me on the couch and stare. I overheard them once wondering if I’d been switched at birth by the hospital. “A common mistake,” my father said. I laid in bed wondering too.
When I was four or five the night terrors came. I’d sit up in bed screaming. As if being kidnapped or murdered, Robert and Jan would burst in. She’d rock me back and forth, comforting me as I sobbed. My body burned. Her frizzy brown hair tickled my nose. My lanky father with his receding hairline and narrow face would sit until I calmed. Then he’d drape both arms around us. I’d look up afraid for them both.
Late at night they’d slink back to their room, droopy eyed, needing rest for work the next morning. I’d stare at the closet seeing anguished, horned faces, strange and distorted with misshapen eyes, urging me to enter, hearing moaning sounds as if people in pain.
I’d close my eyes tightly, covering my head with a pillow, hearing my dream name hauntingly repeated over and over again, “Clar-e-mone… Clar-e-mone… Clar-e-mone…”
I’d wake the next morning with sun pouring through the windows and a feeling of protective love. The closet only contained sneakers, shirts, and books strewn about.
So much comes back to me now that they’re gone, as if memories are more alive, clearer than when they happened.
I look at a picture of my mother when she was young and in college. I asked her once if she’d ever heard a voice from the sky, beyond the horizon. She looked at me quizzically and placed her hand on my forehead. “No, dear, I haven’t.”
“Oh, okay then. Just messing around.”
At twelve they brought me to Dr. Greenblatt, having tired of these issues. “I just can’t deal with it anymore, Jan,” My father said in the kitchen while I sat at the top of the stairs. “It’s just too difficult.”
Dr. Greenblatt was portly, bald, and sat with a yellow legal pad in his downtown office. He asked a lot of questions and because he was an authority, I answered them.
I told him sometimes I felt like Zeus, but lightning never comes to my hands, like my power has been lost. He sat and nodded.
That’s when they first gave me the pills. In the waiting room he and my mother spoke.
“He has some sort of psychosis, Mrs. Mitchell. Has he hit his head recently?”
“A psychosis, oh no, Doctor. No, he has not.”
After the psychiatrist I was brought to the school counselor then a priest. I was forced to say Our Father Who Art in Heaven until he was convinced I’d said enough of them my soul was saved. I clearly worried him.
There’s commotion on the street below. I get up and stare out the blinds watching people come and go from stores and restaurants. Cars honk. People shout at each other. One guy slams his hands on a car hood. There’s anger in all directions and the television news is always violent, pitting people against each other. It plays on storefronts, buses, lampposts, everywhere I go. I try not to watch, but it sinks in.
Looking up and down the block I wonder, am I really the same as them? Just some schlub working day to day. I’m angry, too, where there’s hurt inside. Rage wells up about my parents and dreams. I don’t realize it but I’m bending the metal of the chair.
To stop the anger, I look at the buildings knowing there’s people struggling inside of them. My hands extend out as an energy within commands me to stop their division and for them to pursue their higher calling.
“This is not their purpose,” I hear that woman’s voice again.
Energy builds from my torso. My knees tremble from its power. My center, or dantian grows warm, expecting buildings to bend and streets to clear. In the reflection my eyes grow wide, fingertips pulsating with the energy of the sun, concentration increasing, yet nothing happens.
Quickly exhausted from the attempt, my arms and eyelids grow heavy. Sweat drips from my brow as I tear off my hoodie.
What an idiot. I have read too many books and must be crazy like my mother and psychiatrist suggested. “But sweet,” she also added, kissing my forehead.
Memories merge and tumble from life to dreams and back again. I’ve seen enough of this day as I shut the blinds to sit upon my chair of metal and cotton, closing my eyes to dream of Narican, my home. Only in dreams have I ever felt free. So I’ll dream. Crazy or not.
THE FRAYING REALM
Hunted, I wake sweating in these mortal clothes, in this meager existence. Flipping on my lamp scanning the room. Shadows shift and bend. Sitting up, the clock reads 5:45 am. Hitting the alarm before it goes off, a sliver of sun rises over buildings along the far river.
Laying in sleepy, dream drenched thoughts, I force myself up, throw on clothes, brush teeth, eat toast with butter, and exit the apartment for my shift at the store.
Feet hitting the hard sidewalk, my stomach churns, inhaling some rotting fleshy stench coming up from a sewer grate. I turn into an alley and dry heave. My first full day being eighteen after my official birth time last night at 11:57. Now achy, sick. Great. I pop in a piece of spearmint gum and keep walking.
It’s early, the city’s still wakin
g up. I like these times. Strolling down the street, breathing deeper, the sickness subsides.
On lampposts imbedded television screens play videos of war, bombs, violence, then sports for a minute then back to the bombs then commercials play new products for us to buy.
It’s as if something is trying to get us riled up, in a bad mood, before the sun is even up. Or maybe that’s all the news there is, but I doubt it.
There’s too much pressure on people. Along the sidewalk car doors slam. A good-looking couple accuse each other of infidelity, though I’ve only ever seen them be kind.
From my street I turn south onto Vexington Avenue and the volume of commuters increases like a widening river, rushing past in skirts and suits. Cars sit and honk, hands angrily slam dashboards waiting for lights to change. One guy on his cell phone bumps into me and continues walking without apology. I almost say something but he’s already halfway down the block. Breathe. Feet on sidewalk. Breathe. Let the river go around.
At the market I yank open the screen door to enter. The store sells the basics: cereals, canned goods, chips, mac n’ cheese, milk, juice, with a small produce area in the rear. It has three aisles five shopping carts deep and mostly serves neighborhood folks.
I begin the day checking stocked items in the aisles to see what’s running low, write out a list, go into the storeroom or take down from shelves above. I rotate the older items neatly to the front while placing new ones in the rear. I find the repetition relaxing: soup, beans, chili. It gives me time to think.
My overall responsibilities include stocking shelves, produce, and cashiering. Mopping up once a week. We rotate the responsibility, but I don’t mind it. After stocking I handle milk deliveries, rolling out hand trucks with milks, creamers, butters, juices. I switch to cashiering late in the morning. Two registers sit up front. Blue countertops with worn wood that show in a few spots. Older women on a budget shop this time of day, making mornings quiet and easy.