by John Decure
“I’m really pissed at you for showing up like this, Mom.”
“And I am so, so very sorry for—”
“Last call’s not for half an hour, and if I don’t get back, they’ll fire me.”
I apologized again and told her to go do her thing. When she left, I sat around for a minute or two before deciding to check out the rest of the place. Might as well, now that I was finally inside the castle walls.
Turns out Ian’s directions were right on the button. The place was one big open space hemmed in by four walls—probably used to be a factory. On one side was a bar packed to the gills with young people. In the middle, more bodies bounced to the beat, which was pretty deafening—rap, I think. Kids dancing like their souls were on fire. The last couple weeks, as my predicament sank in, I’d started to wonder whether my drinking during low times had taken a toll on my body, made me weaker and more open to illness, a breakdown. I’d never know, and though the oncology team steadfastly maintained that this is a random affliction, it bothered me more and more now. History always seems to catch up to me and run me over. My certainty of one sad truth was growing.
I’d done this to myself. I deserved to die.
In two corners were dancing girls on lighted pedestals, grinding to the beat. In the other corner a DJ wearing a head-set commanded a panel full of electronic equipment. Just below the DJ was a pack of men, laughing and jostling and holding folded bills over their heads. I pushed through the tangle of bodies on the dance floor and came in closer to the pack.
Mindy was in the center, balancing a tray full of shot glasses and cups of colored Jell-O as she doled out drinks and made change. “Hey, Worm Girl!” a happy guy with a crew cut shouted. “Take a picture with me! I’m going into the Army in six hours!”
It dawned on me that her outfit was supposed to make her resemble the worm in the bottle.
“Worm Girl, I love you!”
She was raking in the cash hand over fist, a plastic smile glued on her face. I stepped back, content to order a six-dollar club soda and wait near the bar. A joint like this would thin out before closing, same way they always do. This crowd was here to see and be seen. Once the feeling of a happening passed, they’d lack the loyalty to stick around.
Ten minutes later, the place was a ghost town.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Mindy said, setting her empty tray on the bar. “At the very least, I thought you’d respect my wishes. Why am I not surprised you didn’t?”
“Honey, I’m sorry. I have to talk to you.”
“I wouldn’t care if it was twenty years. Fifty. Nothing’s changed.”
Her arms were crossed and her head was turned, as if the DJ was doing something worth watching. But he was wrapping cables over one arm and closing up shop, his head buried in his work. She huffed with frustration when I didn’t budge, and her brown bangs ruffled when she exhaled. On instinct, I reached out to brush them.
“My sweet little—”
Her hand came up and flicked mine away. “Don’t.”
“Mindy, I am so, so sorry. For everything. Much as I want to respect your wishes—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
She stepped back and pointed past my shoulder, across the emptying dance floor and down that same dark, fun-house passage I’d come in through an hour ago.
“I am truly sorry, but I gotta do this, honey.”
“Yes, you can do it. It’s easy. Just put one foot in front of the other and start walking. Okay, do it.”
She may have been full of righteous anger, but I was still her mother.
“No. And if you deny me the five minutes I need with you, I’ll just show up at Ian’s place, and we’ll do this little dance all over again.” Her body coiled like a cornered snake ready to strike. I knew she wanted to get rid of me whatever way she could. But she was still just a kid, Worm Girl outfit or not. My kid. And I was determined.
“Bye.”
“Please listen, then I’ll be gone. Completely gone, like you want.”
She looked a bit tired and defeated. What girl wouldn’t, with a job like hers?
Even in the weak light, she read my disappointment.
“What now? You don’t like the club?”
“No, no, it’s great. I just think… it looks like hard work. Maybe you can do better than this.”
“No lectures, Mom, or I swear, I’ll… okay, that’s it. You win! Just say whatever it is you have to say, and then leave.”
The bones in my body ached like dry, brittle twigs about to snap. I imagined pushing all the pain into my pinkie finger, which I then bit on, hard. Snapped my eyes open and shut to clear the fuzz in my head.
“What is wrong with you, Mother?”
“Huh? Oh. Not feeling well is all.”
“Your face is white. Go home and get in bed.”
I worked on some slow and normal breathing. Then I told her why I’d come, told her about the trial against Dr. Don, what he’d said, how he’d put it all on me, as if I seduced him. Mindy’s face got tighter and crankier as I went on.
“That’s your business,” she said. “Not mine.”
“He’s gonna get away with it if you let him, Mindy. You’re the only one in the whole world who was there, can set the judge straight on what really happened.”
She seemed to be thinking it over, but for me, the option of waiting on her decision was fading fast. The floor kept moving and swaying, an earthquake rumbling through my body. I reached for the brass edge on the bar but missed. The barstool behind me clattered. Mindy grabbed my arm and held me up long enough to slide me onto the stool proper.
“You’re clammy,” she said.
Again the floor rushed up to greet me, but my daughter got an arm around my waist before I went down.
“Jesus, Mom, your scaring me!”
“Please, honey, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Is that blood in your mouth?”
No, no, lemme… I’ll just sit down again, rest—”
“Mom! What is wrong with you?”
“I can’t say. You’ll think I’m taking advantage.”
Gently, she held my head in her arms and stroked my head. “Come on, Mom, how bad could it be?”
Her words, they had the effect of lifting my spirit like the Grace of God. My heart, it nearly burst with loving joy, and it seemed those 40 percent odds should not be ignored, but rather deserved to be embraced.
29
BRADLEE AAMES
Floating, drifting, face-down, I see nothing. Or is this even sight?
Thought—yes, because I’ve composed the question of whether I can see. One question: is this a beginning?
Now a second question: is this the edge of consciousness?
Possibly; and yet, it seems too well-defined, like a higher state of nothingness….
Sensation—not merely the suggestion, but the sensation of floating remains. Instinct, antiquity, a relic of unseeing life… that first echo of feeling from the womb itself, trailed by an outline of… nothing, a wisp, then a thread, then a string of thoughts, unspooling slowly.
Next question: Dreaming? I could be, locked in my imagination, or—worse—deluded. God knows, my mind loves to play tricks on me.
Or not.
Again, a thought constructed and considered. A… yearning, the ache for control—yes, that’s what I need, what I want: control.
Of my thoughts.
Imagine? Why not? It’s a step toward regaining control and besides, wherever I am, I don’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. Experiment with it; set parameters; make it a mental exercise.
Exercise; stimulate; do something!
A prerogative emerging from the deadened space, breaking off from a stifling inertia, even if the act is… as benign as floating…
Imagine: myself in the outline of a leaf, or a surfboard—yes, better yet, a vintage longboard, a foam and fiberglass airbrushed work of art at rest, but ready to be put to use on a down-the
-line mission, a point-break missile poised to glide and carve and swoop and slash, and all I need is a wave.
A wave!
But then, there is no wave without an ocean, and a homing instinct for waves that, among the twisted, heaping piles of bad wiring in my head, still works perfectly well, and that instinct tells me one thing: Wherever this is, I’m nowhere near the sea.
Pragmatism—a good sign: one step closer to control.
So, no waves, no surf, no ocean. I want to curse but have forgotten how, or even the meaning of the word. Fullness, bursting without relief. Oh, to… curse.
Back to the beginning. Backward, boring into a… black hole. Shall we wait? Why, yes, we shall. Waiting I-don’t-know-how-long, no sense that time even exists, except for the distant blunted frustration of the wait.
A thought: Curse. Do it—no one will hear you anyway. Do it.
Curse!
Not a word presents, not a single word.
Goddammit, curse already, you, you… assbite!
Haven’t said assbite since the third grade.
Failure, defeat.
But wait… a detail emerges from a past—which means I have a past, therefore… my existence precedes my essence.
But that I took from Sartre, and… he believes I have no creator. Which cuts against my belief, leading to…
—not one, but two details: pigtails, and shiny black leather shoes, in the third grade. Before a memory can build, the rest fades, and Sartre… rhymes with fart. Not why he was called on, no…
I curse the concave void of nothing at all, curse the erasures on the clean blackboard before me. Time is the backdrop of emptiness, and therefore, cannot be measured, and hence, cannot be recognized or quantified or calculated… and therefore, ceases to exist.
Magnanimously uncomplicated silence—the universe condescending to my insignificance. I… am left alone without excuse—no, Sartre doesn’t just rhyme with fart. The cosmos yawns at my presence, but even if I know this, I feel my insignificance. I exist, with or without time.
But Sartre says I have no creator, and thereby no nature, which means I bear full responsibility for my actions…. Full responsibility, moral ownership—a satisfying notion deeply tied to a struggle I can’t recall, a scrum I’ve engaged in, a fight I can still taste.
But godlessness? Not me.
What I lack is an… exit strategy.
Exit strategy?
Terminology; no, trendy jargon, more like. Where does this crap come from?
My sole exit strategy is imagination. Work it…
No waves, no ocean. Instead, the longboard’s rails lie still, inert, as if the water all around is black and perfectly stock still, frozen, and I have no momentum, nothing to move me, zero traction. Imagine!…
But… is this water, into which I cannot even dip in a finger? Or is it empty, unlit space in some receded, tucked-away corner of my brain now holding me prisoner? Trapped. Calcified, awaiting more thoughts to give details and distinguish… nothing at all.
Just imagine, dammit! Lie face-down—at least that’s how it feels, how the memory chooses to categorize this.
Not that it’s real. Saddened, without tears or a means of self-expression, I wait, wait for what could be hours, days, weeks. Hey, assbite, it could be years.
Did I just curse? I did. Ooh—that’s so much better….
I could be dead; this could be God’s rejection of a soul unworthy. (Yes, Sartre, I said God.) A forever-loop of endless nothing, of knowing nothing. And this teasing Q and A? No game show, no grand prize, no winning to be had from any of this. Just shards and junk and garbage, a dive into the Dumpster out back of the thought factory. No breakthroughs here….
Just an eternity spent chasing trash blown down the alley behind a shut-down brain.
Third-grade highlights.
Fearing the unknown. Guilty about my behavior.
No tears in hell.
Say what?
Still a Catholic, wrapping this guilt up tight. Yeah, so I cursed, said a bad word, however incoherently. The guilt dies out over an eon… or passes in a minute.
I pray, now, remembering the concept. Pray for an exit strategy. An escape. Then light. Then insight. Then acceptance. And finally—what the assbite hell took you so long?—Ah, cursing again, gotta stop that.
Or keep doing it, if it kick-starts a process…
I pray for forgiveness.
Seconds, minutes, generations pass. No way to know anything; uncertainty is the only certainty. I could be dead, but that could be wrong. Dead wrong. Maybe hell is the place where bad puns go to die.
Again, I am floating, but there seems to be no bottom beneath me. Which means I can go even lower than this. Better brace for the worst—why they call it hell…
Then it happens: a ping, a flick of movement as miniscule as a fly rubbing its legs, or dust floating onto the spine of an old law book in the back row of that outdated county library downtown, a silent updraft tickling an eyelash. Barely anything at all, but I feel it, a brush against not my person but my psyche.
A wave?
With me, even in death, or nonexistence, or heaven or hell, it’s always about a wave.
Not the kind you can ride, but more like… the world’s smallest wave, a vibration lapping against my being, then another, just before another age of maddening stillness settles in again. But then, a third, a ping followed by the shape of a sound.
Muffled.
A word.
Keblang.
Floating, taking seventeen years to unscramble the letters, I arrive at:
Blanket.
Rishp tishion.
Floating, wishing I could put this inert wave-riding plank to its intended use, picturing the puzzle:
Prescription.
If I’m dead already, maybe I’m seeing God, and He’s a linguist….
Durrolesttvledred.
Challenging, though a vague familiarity suggests it will not be impossible to unravel. Not worth the effort, or food for my withered, overused, underfed brain? My imagination is cold and overrun with doubt. I resolve to wait here in the dark till the end of time, when the answer to that question will be long since moot. But… the sounds do have contours, an outline, like a row of soldiers marching. Or a rhythmic song. A chant.
I lie flat, or I float… or not. Two years, or the blink of a blind eye staring at that empty blackboard. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
Humor—black humor, my favorite kind.
Progress. But what kind? I’ve got a board, but there’s no ocean, no wave to ride.
Defiance. Feels good, even in these dire straits. Assbiting assbite, man, assbitish assbite.
Assbitish assbite?
Hey, at least I’m cursing again—got all the time in the world to sharpen those very useful skills.
Therrode lustrovll.
As usual, my assbite brain won’t leave me well enough alone. Okay, do something, please, be productive, assbite brain…
Lemme see: it’s a rhythm, da-duh da-duh; a chant. No, the hard consonants don’t roll out with enough pop. Rap music? Can’t be—not without the underlying, cage-rattling beat. The fit is tighter, more precise, as if planned with great precision.
Five minutes, or five hours, or five days later, please go ahead and place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, ’cause I don’t know. Pick the time—any time—but know that in time an answer comes.
Poetry.
In another instant, or God, felt like a month, the words find their contours.
The road less traveled.
My biggest win thus far—not an ocean, not a wave, but… a poem from high school honors English? A ten-page paper, an A-plus effort. My theory? A gentle death wish, expressed so politely, you wouldn’t know it was there unless you thought… subversively. In high school, nobody’s thinking much about death, except maybe a tall skinny friendless girl no one talks to because she looks scary, especially when she’s content to chat with thin air. Nobody but the
teacher, who read the paper to class, saw that old poem as a meditation on dying. So why do these sidewinding thoughts make this detour, to this creaky old poem, now?
Chew on it; (all the time in the world anyway); deduce.
I am unconscious—which is likely, since I can’t see a damn thing.
But… someone is… talking… about blankets.
Prescriptions.
And… reading poetry…
To me.
And I am hearing it.
Three years, the time it took to go to law school, just to figure out this last part.
Law school—I went to law school? Am I a lawyer? A flunk-out, maybe, but… somehow, the law seems familiar but shapeless. Vague.
Floating free—and assbite tired of it, to be frank. But no, I’m no longer a surfboard kissing a sea of empty space. Up meets down in a more logical fashion as slowly… a room, the kitchen in my parents’ house, appears. I cannot feel a thing, but my body, or my thoughts alone, are traveling through a warm, dull mist silently, like… a barefoot child tiptoeing through the shapes of a dining room lost in shadows to the flood of yellow light and shining white tiles and a fridge that will hold something to drink for a girl awakened by a dry throat and a bedroom coat rack that turns into a strung-up zombie as soon as the lights go out.
Full-blown scene, back home: and I am here. In the kitchen, my father is working at the breakfast table surrounded by those ugly wooden chairs with the beveled spokes I used to grip like motorcycle handlebars whenever Mom stepped up with an after-school snack, a reheated wedge of some smoldering creation from last night’s dinner. Jesus, Mom, not that ghastly tuna casserole again, I’d want to protest, though I always opted, in the end, for the silent hunger strike. Skinny girl, she’d say with accusing eyes, you should eat some real food once in a while—and listen, you’d better watch out for those boys, they’ll be after you, never leave you alone if you don’t fatten up.
But Mom is not here now, in the kitchen—nor do any slabs of congealed pasta, or tuna surprise, await my reprove. I sense only a hole, an absence of energy, where she should be.
God rest your soul, Mom, I do miss you….
My dad the lawyer is here, not looking up as he bears down on a document. Working on a case late at night, just as always.