The Danger of Being Me

by Anthony J Fuchs

  "There is no one like me," I called out to her retreating back. She didn't turn to face me. "There's just me."

  I watched Gale disappear around a corner, then pushed back through the heavy door into the newsroom. I threw the door open harder than I meant to, and it slammed into the counter. I saw Winnie jump as I entered the room.

  "Jesus Christ, Mike!" Ben blurted.

  Helen looked up at me as I rounded the table again. "Ron Perlman," she said. "From Beauty and the Beast."

  Phil squinted at me. "I see Michael Rapaport."

  "You should get your eyes checked," Helen told him.

  I laughed. Ethan said, "I can't argue against his casting of Owen Wilson. Especially with that nose of his."

  "I'd go with David Duchovny," Winnie said, popping another handful of Reese's Pieces into her mouth.

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. "That is high praise."

  Winnie flashed that broad, endearing smile of hers as Ben snapped his fingers, pointing at me. "Jaleel White."

  "This fuckin guy," Helen said, shaking her head. I collected my chair off the floor and set it back at the table, dropping into the seat. I bent forward over the table on my elbows, reaching for the protein bar as the die clattered across the table toward me. I glanced up to find Ethan grinning. "You gonna roll that thing? It's your turn."

  I turned to Ben. He shrugged, and told me, "Turns out that Lake Como is not, in fact, located in Quebec."

  "No shit," I told him. "It's in Italy."

  He threw up his hands. I laughed, and rolled the die.

  5.

  After second period on Wednesday afternoon, I made it to the Writers Club meeting room four minutes late.

  The thirty desks ringed the periphery of the room in a nebulous circle. Winnie, Phil and Helen clustered around the teacher's desk, which doubled as a snack table with the addition of a two-liter bottle of Ramp and three bowls containing pretzels, cheese puffs, and potato chips.

  Ethan and Ben had claimed seats against the back wall, and Rose Zarenkiewicz sat to Ben's right, laughing along as he recited some undoubtedly well-worn anecdote.

  Across the room, huddled between to a pair of her own classmates, I spotted Regina, her arms folded. The three sophomores sat on the ledge in front of a window looking out on the courtyard from the second floor vista.

  My sister cast a vague glance around the room before she found me. I smiled and nodded. She flashed me a curious look, just for a second, and then she nodded back and smiled. One of her friends looked my way as well, then turned back to Regina, leaning toward her. Regina glanced back to me, laughed once, shook her head.

  Her friend giggled, and I felt a scarlet flush creeping out of my collar as I crossed the room. I reached the seat to Ethan's left and tossed my bookbag into the wire basket under the desk, dropping into the chair. Ben bent forward over his desk on his elbows to look around Ethan at me.

  "I was just telling Rosie about your little misadventure out on Prophet's Point last summer," he said.

  "I hate it when you call me Rosie," she said, laughing.

  "He knows," Ethan told her. "That's why he does it."

  She laughed again. I smiled at the sound. It reminded me why she had received the Jack of Hearts' most recent letter. She had a laugh as bright as a clear morning.

  "You really got struck by lightning?" she asked.

  "The stone got hit," Ben corrected her. "He wasn't even touching it, but it threw him like a fucking shotput."

  I leaned forward onto my desk and asked, "Did he tell you how he shrieked when he thought I was dead?"

  Ethan laughed at that. Rose turned back to Ben with a crooked grin splashed across her lips. "No he didn't."

  "I have never shrieked in my life," Ben insisted. "And certainly not over him." He turned to me. "No offense."

  I waved him off with a laugh as I spotted Dr. Lombardi stepping into the room with his writing portfolio in hand. Three more students followed him in before he pulled the door closed behind them, and I bent to reach for the wire basket under my seat. I unzipped the main compartment of the bookbag, fished around inside it for a moment, and pulled out a notebook with a faded-green cover.

  I laid the book on my desk and flipped the cover open. A pink sticky-note occupied to the bottom left corner of the interior cover, bearing a single sentence hand-written in pencil. Ten words scribbled in a nearly-illegible scrawl read only: "This story is true, but this book is a lie."

  I stared at the note, read the words again, sighed. I considered tearing it out, crushing it in my palm, tossing it into the trash can under the teacher's desk. Then I read the sentence once more, and decided against it. For now.

  Instead, I leafed through the notebook's creased pages, glancing through the disjointed collection of scribblings. Some of them meant nothing; some of them were written in the alien letters of some undiscovered alphabet of my own design. I grinned at some of the bizarre cryptograms that had surely made sense when I had drawn them.

  I turned a page and found another sticky-note, green instead of pink, with nine words scrawled in jagged print: "Upon that timeless island's bloody sand...four brothers stand." I lifted the note away from the page with the pad of my thumb. Beneath it I found what looked like an [I] pushed over on its side, sketched hastily in red ink.

  I laughed, and smoothed the note back down against the page. A few seconds later, Phil slid into the seat to my left with a handful of pretzels and a plastic cup of Ramp, Helen sitting to his left, and Winnie sitting to her left.

  Phil glanced to me. I flashed a grin as Mr. Lombardi took a seat opposite us. He laid his portfolio on the desk, opened it, glanced around the circle. That was all it took. The teenagers milling around the room found seats, and the buzz of murmured conversation dulled and died.

  Doc flashed that warm smile of his and slipped a sheet of paper out of a pocket in his portfolio. "I was digging through the Creek Reader archives a couple of weeks ago," he told us, "and I found something rather amusing."

  He looked up at Winnie, and said, "It seems that Ms. Donne carries on a tradition that goes all the way back to the foundation of our school's student newspaper."

  I glanced past Phil and Helen to find Winnie blushing as Dr. Lombardi went on. "The paper was created in 1916 by a group of three seniors including Woodrow Sykes. In the inaugural issue, he printed four of his own poems."

  He looked back down to the sheet in his portfolio, brushing his hand across its surface as if he was dusting away the decades. "I wanted to open this month's meeting of the Writers Club with one of his shorter pieces."

  Of course no one would object, and no one did. Doc cleared his throat, then read, "There once was a poem so fine that some even said it was mine. It wasn't too strong, and not very long, with such a bad-writed last line."

  Doc looked up from the page and grinned. We waited for several seconds, expecting more, and Doc let us wait until it was clear that there was no more. A few seconds after that, I heard Ethan laugh from my right. The sound of his laughter got Phil laughing, and of course that made Rose laugh just as bright as a clear morning. And then the entire room was laughing at the self-referential absurdity of Woodrow Sykes' adolescent verse. A few students even applauded, and Dr. Lombardi bowed dramatically.

  "So," he said, grinning, "who's next?"

  Rose volunteered, shuffling through a disheveled stack of handwritten pages until she found the one she wanted. She bent forward over her desk on her elbows, tucked a stray ribbon of blonde hair behind her ear, and delivered the 52 lines of a poem she called "Any Other Name."

  After the group had discussed the poem, Rose selected the next reader. She chose Winnie, who held the room in thrall with a beatific villanelle entitled "the Sighing of an Angel," an intimate piece made even more sensual by the breathlessness of Winnie's voice. I spotted the scarlet flush creeping out of Ethan's collar as she read, and saw the grin on Ben's face as he studied the pen in his fingers.

  The discussion lasted th
rough half of the meeting, and ended with a short break so we could catch a breath. Phil topped off his cup with soda, and Helen finished the last of the potato chips before everyone took their seats.

  We each were hesitant to follow Winnie's performance. So after several long seconds of clumsy silence, I raised my hand. Winnie leaned forward to look past Helen and Phil, and she flashed that broad, endearing smile of hers.

  She nodded, pointed to me. I nodded back. I felt my heartbeat quicken in my throat, and turned my eyes down to the open page in my notebook, blowing out a trembling breath to settle the fluttering in the pit of my stomach.

  I saw the words scrawled across the page in a cramped handwriting that I almost didn't recognize. But I knew the words. Of course I did. They were my own words, after all, each one plucked out of the frothing mist that curled along the coastline of my mind, like bits of debris floating on the surf. I had brushed them off and laid them out to dry, and now I saw them all together, all at once.

  And then I saw something else, glimpsed it through the brightest window of my memory, an image I had seen just yesterday afternoon and would never, ever forget.

  I leaned over the desk, gripping its sides. That image flashed inside my brain like heat-lightning, and I spoke to be heard. "Is she a fleeting image in a dream?"

  The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button. Maybe it already was silent, but now I felt the pulse of that silence, smelled the delicate bouquet of its breath. Spearmint and lime flooded my lungs, made me tipsy, and I stared into the caramel eyes of that silence as they looked unflinchingly back into me. I smiled.

  "With gentle russet curls," I went on, remembering, "and pastel lips? Are these infatuations what they seem?" I asked, reading the pretty words I had produced with my fingertips. "Or pretty words produced by fingertips?"

  I didn't look at the group, but I saw them anyway. I saw Dr. Lombardi across the circle; I saw Bellona Meyers sitting to his left; I saw a pair of sophomores, Rob McCall and Shane Washington, in the seats nearest the door. I saw my sister sitting between her friends under the window that overlooked the courtyard, watching me like she didn't recognize me. That might have been true just then.

  So I closed my eyes, just for a moment. And all I saw was Amber's face. I felt myself tumbling into the fragile eternity of those glittering caramel eyes as my mind broke free of its temporal bindings, and I went back.

  Back to a yesterday afternoon where Amber is sitting, still is sitting, in a desk in a classroom in a memory. She pours over a textbook four rows away from me, her right hand scribbling smoothly across a notebook page while her left hand punches the keys of a graphing calculator.

  "She is the shadow of my beating heart," I say, my right hand scribbling smoothly across a notebook page as I write the words in a cramped handwriting that I almost don't recognize. "The echo of my otherworldly soul."

  A pair of chopsticks holds her gentle russet curls in a tattered bun that's beginning to fray. An errant auburn wisp makes a break for freedom and brushes against the desktop between her arms. She pauses in her writing and I pause in mine to watch her erase some notation. To watch as her tongue darts into the corner of her pastel lips.

  Then she goes back to her writing, and so do I. "But everlasting midnight tears apart this delicate mirage that keeps me whole." I watch her, and know that she will be my Beatrice, my Laura, my Dark Lady. I will compose my sonnets for her, and string them like pearls on the endless thread that interlocks all spheres. Centuries from now, doctoral students will write theses on her identity.

  "I call to her in this unspeaking voice," I say, writing, memorizing, immortalizing, and she looks up from her book. She glances past me toward the window over my shoulder, and for one glorious moment, the afternoon sunlight catches the breathtaking honey-gold of her eyes. Those honey-gold eyes. I have to laugh at myself. Poets have glorified eyes since time out of mind, and we will do so for as long as men can breath and eyes can see.

  "I search the endless darkness for a trace, and finding none, I make the only choice," I say as I wonder briefly what it might be like to be her derivative so that I could lie tangent to her curves. And then her eyes find mine. I'm caught, and all I know to do is to give her a gentle smile, because I was staring at her. Of course I was.

  Then she flashes a soft smile at me that is beauteous and genuine, setting me to rights. She seems to hold back a small laugh, and returns to her notebook and calculator. I grin as I feel my fingertips produce more pretty words in the alien letters of some undiscovered alphabet of my own design: "To search eternity to find her face."

  A moment later, the sharp triple-chime signals the end of the day, and everything is suddenly in motion. My view is interrupted by all the shifting bodies in between, and by the time I can see that desk four rows away from me again, she is gone. The classroom empties in a rush, and stare at the raging orange plastic surface where Amber once sat, and I write: "For I am not at all what I would seem."

  Then I opened my eyes, and saw Dr. Lombardi looking at me from across the circle. Watching me remember. And I told him: "I'm just a fleeting image in her dream."

  Doc let out a long breath, and he nodded.

  I expected the discussion of my sonnet to close out the meeting. So when the conversation wound down within a couple of minutes, I had to accept that I obviously had not impressed the group as thoroughly as I had believed.

  As the end of the lunch period steadily approached, Dr. Lombardi closed his writing portfolio. "We've only got a couple of minutes left, so our next reader will have to be our last for the day." He looked back to me and gestured to the circle of desks. "Pick your victim, Mr. Everett."

  I looked around the room, saw no volunteers after a few seconds, and was about to move for early adjournment instead. Then I spotted Regina sitting between her friends under the window that overlooked the courtyard, studying her interlaced fingers on the desk in front of her. I waited for a few extra seconds, and saw her make a decision.

  She looked up, spotted me across the circle, and gave me a short two-fingered wave. I looked at her strangely for a brief moment, and found that I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised. I pointed toward her, shot her a small smile, and said, "Have at it, Ms. Everett."

  Regina pushed herself up in her seat, and continued to study her folded hands. She had brought no pages with her, no notebook, no rubber-banded stack of index cards. She closed her eyes for four seconds, blowing out a thin breath. Helen leaned toward Phil, and whispered around him at me, "I didn't know your sister wrote."

  I shook my head. I didn't know it either. Then Regina lifted her face to the room and looked at us, and recited in haunting free-verse a nightmare she'd once had but could not remember. She spoke of a rickety rowboat upholstered in fuchsia velvet, and a glistening mist that clung to the water and tasted like honey and death. She told us of a shimmery everywherelight shrouding anything beyond a dozen yards in every direction in a billowy fogbank.

  She spoke of a forgotten world wrapped in prophecy and myth, a world-from-before. Her eyes darkened as she described an insane man who spoke a gibberish language that she understood but did not know, and she shuddered as she told of how he threw her into the water and pulled her below the surface and dragged her down toward the bottom of infinity to drown her in a sea of ice.

  She alluded to Hemingway and Dickinson. She stole from Poe and Eliot. She was a child in the kingdom by the sea, locked away in the room where the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo and Hieronymus Bosch and Maurits Escher. She dared to disturb the universe.

  She flirted with Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and Kerouac, and did not apologize. She invoked the unsettled spirits of Hastings and Sexton and Jonkers. She never broke stride.

  And when she was finished, she glanced around the circle of writers, at everyone but me. She slouched back into her seat and laced her fingers together and studied her hands as she told the group, "That was last June I had that nightmare." Sh
e looked up again, and her eyes found me. "The night that my brother went into the hospital."

  I was speechless. I didn't know this girl. She lived upstairs from me, but I knew nothing about her. Her nightmare had saved my life, and I felt overwhelmed by what an abysmal brother I had turned out to be. But I could make that right. I could start tomorrow.

  Absolutely.

  6.

  Twenty minutes before the end of fifth period, I laid my calculus exam down on Mrs. Troshak's desk.

  I dropped back into my seat beside the window, and looked out into the grey afternoon. The sky hung low, the color of brushed chrome, like a massive expanse of dented sheet metal. The color of my own eyes. I smiled.

  I bent to the wire basket beneath my seat, unzipped my bookbag and dug out my faded-green notebook. I found a half-blank page near the back and tapped my pen against the sheet, glancing back out the window. Then I turned to look across the room again, and found Amber four rows away from me, still pouring over her own exam.

  She had finished shortly before I had, but she had taken the time to double-check her work. Now she stared down at the test, her lips moving just the slightest little bit as she confirmed her answers. I watched her, and I smiled.

  I didn't turn away as she glanced up, blinked, and for one brief moment caught my eyes. I saw a small grin tug at the corners of her mouth, and then she looked down at her desk again. I looked down at mine as well, at that half-blank page and the infinite potential that it offered.

  So I wrote. For nineteen minutes, I produced a steady stream of pretty words with my fingertips. My ballpoint pen whispered briskly across the surface of the paper as I composed another sonnet, another pearl to string onto the endless thread that weaves through time and interlocks all spheres. When the poem was fully inscribed, I dashed a title across the page – "One Brief Moment" – in a cramped handwriting that I almost didn't recognize.

  A moment later, the sharp triple-chime signaled the end of the day, and everything was suddenly in motion. This time I climbed out of my chair before my view could be interrupted by all the shifting bodies. I grabbed my bookbag out of the wire basket beneath my seat, stuffed my notebook back inside, and hefted the strap onto my shoulder as I crossed the room to the door.