He did try to run though. The old man cut between two cars but Alex was too quick for him. He yanked him backwards, clothes ripping in the tumble, and hurdled him mercilessly to the sidewalk where he continued to flog him senselessly. A foot to the throat, another to the ribs, the man tried to stand but Alex kneed him in the leg, elbowed his nose, and sent him spiraling backwards. From the looks of it, the old man hit his head pretty severely on the concrete and would probably have a concussion. I kept running across the street to catch up with them.
“Stop it!” I called after Alex.
“Murray, help me,” I heard the old man say. “Don’t let him hurt me, Murray.”
“You remember me, you fucking bastard?” Alex cried, tears streaming from his eyes as he presented a right and a left hook. A dozen more followed. “Several years ago you killed my father! Nobody else believes me but I saw you kill my father!”
The beaten man tried to cover his face from Alex’s blows, but whenever he moved his arms or hands as a shield Alex worked on another portion of his body, kicking and punching, which only caused him to move his hands as a shield in that direction, and the berserker cycle continued.
“How do you like my crowbar?”
The old man cried for Murray again. He curled into a ball, anticipating each and every blow that would surely fall upon him.
I peeled Alex off of the old man and maneuvered myself in-between them, holding a desperate hand up to stop any further violent advances.
“If this is the man who killed your father, then this is a matter for the police, not for your personal twisted and distorted sense of justice.”
“The police won’t and can’t prove anything.” Alex clearly looked like he wanted me out of the way. He didn’t shove me aside. The old man pushed himself up to his knees, groaning in pain. He murmured something about Murray again. “For the last seven years I’ve looked over my shoulder. I’ve finally found him, the hippie bastard, and I’m not letting him get away again. This isn’t a coincidence!”
“No, you’re right. This isn’t a coincidence. But you have to understand, the police can’t find this man because he can’t be found.”
Alex twitched his head at me. “What are you talking about, he’s right there!”
I held my hand up to block another physical blow.
“What’s going on?” Michael caught up to us. Susan wasn’t far behind.
“How much money you want to bet,” I pointed back to Over the Rainbow where a small crowd of onlookers had gathered and our waitress was still holding her order pad without the hint of a single scribble, “that if the police were to arrive right now and interview these witnesses, they’d likely tell them that you were beating your fists into the air and the ground like a crazy lunatic?”
“From my end of the street, that’s certainly what it looked like.” Michael bent over to catch his breath. “Joshua, who is it?”
The old man rose to his feet, wobbled, folding both arms around his ribs, and hobbled away, groaning miserably. Alex tried to pursue him. I stopped him again.
“Get out of my way. You’re crazy.”
“Alex, listen to me. I don’t know who this man is or where he comes from, but you have to understand something.” I gasped for a breath of air.
“You look like you just swallowed a ghost,” Michael said.
“Maybe I have,” I said.
“You’re crazy.” Alex repeated his accusation. He pushed me aside to start up in the pursuit. But maybe I wasn’t so crazy. The nameless man was nowhere to be found.
“I watched someone crush his skull with a crowbar.” I gave him the simpler explanation. “But there wasn’t any evidence of a murder because he can’t be found unless he wants to be.”
“Is it the homeless man?” Michael said. “Why can’t I see him?”
Now Alex looked like he’d swallowed a ghost.
“Alex, you have to believe me.” I was having difficulty listening to my own words. “I watched this man die.”
2
I was sitting on a concrete wall at Ocean Beach staring westwards towards the setting sun, writing poetry in my black notepad. A girl in a red dress was dashing as quickly as she could away from the incoming waves. I wasn’t able to count any sea lions on Seal Rock. I wrote about that. Wallace Stevens once said a poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. My jeans were rolled high and I had a bottle of whisky in one hand. I hummed the song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, lyrically filling in sea lions for flowers. Elise called me on the phone.
“Co-dependency,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve finally figured it out. I have co-dependency issues.” Elise pronounced co-dependency with an added teaspoon of excitement in her voice. “And an exemplary case of it, too. I’ve read about it and observed it in enough clients that I don’t know why I never saw it before now. It’s so obvious.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that is.” I tried not to let her detect the wavering drunkenness in my voice.
“It’s a psychological condition in which someone is controlled, often manipulated, by another person. In broader terms, it refers to the dependence on the needs of another. It also involves placing a lower priority on my own needs, while basing my happiness almost exclusively on the well being of others. People who envelop this condition are attracted to narcissistic people.”
“If only you’d been dependent on me, Elise.”
“Oh, but Joshua, don’t you see? You’re not a narcissist at all.”
Oh, goodie. I took another drink of whiskey. A cop car rolled to a halt behind me. I tucked the whiskey bottle in-between my legs.
“It’s very common in individuals who grew up in difficult or abusive family circumstances, which makes this, matched with my fear of abandonment, of the utmost extreme.” Don’t forget sexaholic.
The cop car rolled off again.
“Did Doctor Barbara diagnose you with co-dependency issues?”
“No. But why should she? I’m a therapist too, you know.”
“In training, Elise. In training. You’re not a doctor yet. Technically you can’t diagnose anyone until that time, and Barb says you’re a sexaholic.”
“I don’t like that word.”
I let that pass for the moment. “So this is good, right?” I wasn’t enthused. “You know what you have to do and how you can fix it.”
“Yes,” she agreed, and then stopped to think on it. “I’m very sorry about the way I acted at the wedding the other night. I realize now that I was disappointed at the very fact that you bumped into Tom, and not how you responded. It’s not your fault that he showed up at the wedding, and I realize that I abandoned you and not the other way around. I guess I haven’t put much thought into how I would have responded in a situation like that, and for the most part, I’d say you’ve taken it with a fair helping of maturity and civility.”
“That’s nice and all, Elise. But what I want to know is what happened after the wedding, because I think we’re talking about a little more than co-dependency issues.”
She didn’t answer me.
“Are you drinking, Joshua?”
I didn’t answer her.
“You know I don’t like it when you drink alone. Is Alex there with you?”
“No, he’s probably drinking in a bar right now, if not off convincing a tourist that he’s a certified tourist and banging her.” I shouldn’t have said that. He’d apologized for his actions, and I knew he intended to change. But I was tired of giving everyone second chances. The truth of the matter, though, Alex was currently combing the city seeking out his father’s killer. And he wasn’t going to find him.
“That’s horrible. Does he really do that? Does he sleep around while he’s away from his wife?”
“Unfortunately, all the time.” I sighed at the irony.
“Does Gracie know? I guess I can’t be the judge, can I? I’ve done such horrible things. I know I have. I just think she should
know.” She thought on that issue for a moment. “Joshua, is there another girl in your life?”
“My situation hasn’t changed since we saw each other at the wedding yesterday, Elise. No.”
“I’d probably die if I knew you were off with another woman.”
“If only you could hear yourself right now.”
“Joshua, are you drinking? Are you drunk right now?”
I didn’t answer her.
“What did you do after the wedding?”
She didn’t answer.
“Tom followed you to your hotel, didn’t he?”
She didn’t answer.
“The two of you had sex.”
She sighed sarcastically.
“You’re with Tom right now, aren’t you? He’s flying under his wife’s radar again, getting a little pun tang on the side.”
“Joshua, I don’t know what to tell you. You’ll just get angry with me, and I don’t like it when you get angry with me. I just want to hear your voice. You comfort me.”
“I made it absolutely clear. I told you….”
“Don’t say it. Please don’t say it. You don’t know how difficult this is on me. It’s like a drug addiction, Joshua, the co-dependency.”
“Sexaholic, Elise.”
“Stop saying that.”
“You don’t have co-dependency issues.”
“How can you say that? A minute ago I had to explain to you what it was.”
“Maybe you do. But either way, this is all illogical, Elise. None of this makes any sense. And on a side note, it’s amazing how you enjoy diagnosing other people’s problems but can’t look at yourself in the mirror.”
“He gives me things I need that you don’t. And there’s so much that you offer that he could never even dream of having. I know this is hard to hear, but….”
“Elise, nobody on this planet can encompass every little thing that you need. You can’t pick and choose. It’s not a valid excuse to ditch monogamy. You have to be able to walk away from Tom, forever. I’m not going to drag you down the street kicking and screaming and I’m certainly not repeating what I went through last night.”
“Joshua, please don’t make me decide.”
“I take it your decisions been made then. Feel free to call me if you ever change your mind…if I’m not in another monogamous relationship by then. You have my number.”
I hung up.
The sunk sank like a bloated orange bulb into the Pacific Ocean and the little girl in the red coat ran away from another incoming wave. A sea lion barked. I looked for it. It was nowhere to be found. It probably barked just to scoff at me. Elise called me on the phone again. I didn’t answer. I waited for a message, but she didn’t leave one. I thought about the singular sea lion, the hundreds of sea lions that collectively got up after the earthquake and moved to Pier 39, and the setting of the sun. All good things hitch their wagons to find new horizons. Everyone falls into darkness eventually. It was the poet Adrienne Rich who said the moment of change is the only poem. I considered what that poem of change could possibly be.
And then Leah Bishop called me.
By the second ring I’d pulled my wedding band off and slid it into my pocket.
On the third ring I picked up the phone.
Noel J. Hadley is the author of several books of poetry. A nationwide photographer, he has documented weddings in almost every single state of the country. He currently resides with his wife and dogs in Long Beach, California.
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 41