This wasn't a home - it was a museum.
A museum of shit.
I dragged myself back to the work bench with my notebook. I pulled myself up the bench. I took a long, hard drag from the bottle of whiskey. The bottle and the notebook accompanied me to the stairs.
By the time I made it to the top, I was out of breath and warm with a hazy heightened higher brain. I had never had more than a sip of alcohol before. This was a release into control of something without a care about anything else. Paranoia gripped my boozy organs, not knowing how fragile I still was. I didn't care.
What was left that I could work with?
My notebook was beside the bottle on the table.
I took another drag.
I struggled back into my wheelchair.
Everything was the same. There was the avocado linoleum, the coffee maker, the refrigerator, and the oven. They were practically new when we bought them when I was fifteen. Twelve o'clock blinked on the microwave. I had to drink this house slowly.
My mind fuzzed from the bourbon, and I took up the notebook.
There were lyrics and notes, bad teenage poetry and terrible jokes. It was a mess of junk, thoughts, lists of books to read, movies to see, and musings of a kid approaching eighteen. It was terrible. Who did I think I was? Did I really think I was going to change the world with this junk?
I came to a page with Jenny's phone number.
I closed the basement door, and next to the door was the telephone on the wall.
I had to reach beyond my reach and tip the wheelchair to get to the telephone. I hit it with my fingertips and popped the whole thing off the wall. The cord that attached it to the plate caught the base, and it fell into wires and pieces.
The familiar dialtone.
I began to dial Jenny's number from the notebook until I realized I still had it memorized. I finished without looking.
"Hello?" A friendly and youthful female voice answered. I wanted to respond, 'Jenny?' but revised my answer.
"Hi. I'm sorry this is a weird call, but my name is Todd. Is there a Jenny that lives there?"
"You have the wrong number. There's no Jenny here."
"Okay. I don't want to bother you. Have you had this number long?"
"As long as I can remember - as long as we've lived here."
"Thank you. Sorry, again."
I hung up.
What did I expect?
Practically an entire mortgage could be paid in the amount of time I had spent in the hospital.
I wheeled myself into the living room. The room was taupe with wood paneling, and at its center was a great grey glass television diving bell in a frame. It sat in the room as stout and imposing as a console radio. It was in sharp contrast to the hospital's chalkboard televisions.
With my notebook and the bottle on my lap, I turned the hulk on. The picture slowly hummed to life, and a program on the history station counted down the most important events of the turn of the millennium. I began to feel satisfied, warm, and carefree. I flipped through the notebook.
My adolescent musings were cute and unidirectional. Optimistic fantasy ruminated on every manner of imagined success. My empire of nothing was built from the ground up by a mind that seemed to think that the future was in his hands. Like anything was possible. I molded the clay of vanity and self-image, and here I sat in my wheelchair throne wearing the crown of these dreams.
I was still here, and had the sweetness of hindsight to speak to this child. This child, a child who had everything and the means to do it. Oh, child. The foundation of your empire is built upon the lies of the American Dream.
I would be lucky if I had any time left to reinvent myself in what little time I had left. I lived a siren song, and now I would be lucky for a semblance of drivel.
The announcers on the show began covering the history of Bill Clinton. Apparently he had been impeached for lying under oath about a relationship that he had with an intern at the White House named Monica Lewinsky.
Coincidentally, I was browsing my collection of band names. Looking down the list, I saw "President Member," "All The President's Members," and "Oedipresident." I immediately returned to that high school history class, and writing these ideas.
Learning it was the president's member that seemed to have undone the president was delicious.
I took another pull of bourbon.
Could we have been famous simply by virtue of our band name?
Everything was so much simpler. I had nothing to worry about as a teenager, and yet I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. The weight of success, the weight of making it, and the weight of being able to do all of this with as little effort as possible. These were things that we should have been able to do. If, rather than having this fantasy to become a famous rock star I attended college and tried to align myself with the traditional way of things, there is no question that none of this would have happened. I'm here because of my vanity. John could have gone to coll-
And I noticed that even my thought process was tinged with elements from the fictional dreamverse I existed in for the last twenty-five years. The last twenty-five years felt like only three or four weeks, and in reality all I had to show for any of it is this notebook and the memory of having made a crappy tape and show at a coffee shop.
It was absurd.
At least I graduated high school.
I think?
No. That was after the coffee shop night.
I didn't even have a real or fictional memory of graduating high school. It never happened.
The story was as holy as the holes in my brain and in my existence, and mere nothingness.
The doorbell rang.
I wheeled myself through the kitchen and opened the side door. Standing at the door was a large woman in her late forties with windblown grey hair. It was cool. She wore a jacket that was too large and wintry for the weather. Four plastic supermarket bags hung from her arms.
"Hi, I am Susan King. I'm your new social worker from the state to help you with your transition to your independence. Can I come in?"
I wheeled into the kitchen.
"Can I get you anything? Tea or something? I've been trying to figure this out. I don't know if the oven works - I can't reach the dials or the kettle."
"No, I'm fine, thank you. That's something we can work on." She eyed the bourbon on the table. "Drinking is not a good idea on your first day back."
"Oh, that. I don't drink. It was my dad's. I was going through some things just to see what was here, that's all." She pursed her lips. I was still a little drunk and warm. So I was a forty-something cripple who smelled like booze talking about his booze being someone else's. Oldest trick in the book.
"I've brought you some groceries - just some simple things you don't need to cook. Cup of soup, sandwiches, things like that.
"I will be coming a couple times a week, and right now it looks like you have me from eleven to one on Tuesdays and Fridays. I can stay here and help around the house, or we can do some OT things to help you. I can do laundry, cleaning things, or I can bring you on some errands. I'm here for whatever you need."
"That sounds helpful. Thank you."
"I have some paperwork you need to fill out before I go. Besides that, what would you like to do today?"
The television yammered on in the other room. Television was not productive. Calling my high school girlfriend was not productive. Crying in the basement and drinking my dad's booze was not productive.
I wanted to see Twin Falls. I wanted to go to the library. I wanted to do everything.
"Can we go see the town? Just...drive around and see everything? Is that something we can do?"
"Sure is."
She brought me into the living room, and I filled out her paperwork. It was a stack of income tax statements, disability forms, insurance forms, and all manner of other single copy statements asked, under penalty of perjury, if I was truly paralyzed. Some of the forms were about my parents' re
tirement. They had it held in escrow to take care of my care and the house after their death. I had three quarters of a million dollars in a mutual fund that guaranteed a steady income year to year in addition to the additional Social Security and Disability payments. Apparently the short period I worked at Kinkos allowed me to receive benefits in the event something like this happened. As it stood, I didn't need to worry about money.
This one thing was a gift.
The television continued its endless stream of programming. The show changed to an educational reality show. Historians competed for speed and accuracy in solving historical mysteries in New York City. The prize was a fifty thousand dollar research fellowship and any expenses that the researcher deemed necessary to complete their work. Several dramatic helicopter shots panned over New York.
"What's weird about that?" I asked Susan
She shrugged.
"It looks weird."
"I don't know."
I couldn't place it. The familiar image of the New York skyline was washed over with twenty five years of development and investment in the center of the universe. Of course it would be different.
After we finished the paperwork and shut the television off, we careened through Twin Falls. I drank in the environment, wide eyed through the large window of the van's sliding door. Twin Falls was strip malls, fast food restaurants, and convenience stores bordering the street as we approached downtown. It was still quaint, and seemed more so with new sleek municipal signage. There were people walking. It was nice.
"I haven't seen any of this for so long," I said to Susan.
"You've been away?"
"In a sense. I was paralyzed, in a coma - that's why you're coming to my house now."
"I see," she responded. Clearly they didn't share any back stories with the social workers.
"Do you live around here?"
"Only since I started working for the state about five years ago. I am from Aberdeen."
"Washington?"
"Yes."
"Like Kurt Cobain?"
"Like Kurt Cobain,” she said plainly.
I spotted the plaza where Kinkos was.
"Oh! Stop! Pull in, here!"
We pulled in. Everything in the store looked the same, but the signage was different.
Susan operated the van's elevator and helped me down to the parking lot.
"I'll be right back."
I wheeled into the store. The purple aprons, the Oxford shirts, the retail pegboard, everything was exactly as it was when I worked there. Customers used the self-serve copiers to do their work out of eyeshot of the sales team doing the production behind the counter.
"Welcome to FedExpress. How can I help you?" A thirtyish man stared me down from his perch behind the counter.
"Does Chuck still work here?"
"Who's Chuck?"
"The manager."
"I'm Scott. I'm the manager. Is there something I can help you with?"
"Oh. Oh, no, I was just looking for Chuck."
"I have been here ten years or so. No Chuck." So much for easily getting my job back.
I wasn't sure that I could even work, or when I could go back to work, or what work consisted of. I needed to do something that would keep me occupied even if I didn't need the cash. Making copies in a retail shop wasn't something I'd do for fun.
"Thanks anyway."
I turned around and wheeled away.
I had a hunger to make connections with people. I didn't want to feel so utterly alone. I've traveled through time to this future existence; alone, bored, and devoid of relationships and people I cared about. So what did I do? I called Jenny's parents' phone number in the strange off chance they had the same phone number. I got someone who would drive me anywhere, and I got that person to drive me through town, hoping I would run into someone that I would recognize and get my part time job back at the copy store I worked at as a teenager twenty five years ago.
What was the point?
I passed a couple teenagers fooling with a self-serve copier as left.
It was ludicrous. If my manager was forty-five or so when I worked here as a kid, he would be seventy now. Seventy. Why would Jenny still be around here? Why would I even expect my parents to be alive, and why did I even think it might be fair to blame my loneliness on them?
A paper alighted onto my lap.
I stopped and handed it back to the teens.
"Thanks, man." Two boys. One had black hair over half of his face, a Nirvana Unplugged shirt, and metal paraphernalia hung from baggy pants. The other had spiked brown hair, and wore a striped shirt a couple sizes too big.
"No problem." I glanced at it before handing it back, and it looked like one of our old Dawn Ego posters. "You guys in a band?"
"Yeah, just a small thing. You should come out for it. Here," and they handed the poster back. It was a poorly designed image that was a manipulation of the Mona Lisa with a penis coming out of her mouth. On closer look, it was a clever. A Mona Lisa entirely made of penises. They were called "Moana Liza," and had a free concert Tuesday night at Twin Falls State College's "Eagle Cafe."
"Can anyone go to this? I mean..."
"Oh, yeah."
"I might check it out," I responded sincerely.
I wheeled back out to Susan standing next to the van with the ramp down, and we continued our excursion.
There were two other stops I wanted to make.
The first was the high school. The building had new signage and a somewhat refurbished look. It was now Twin Falls Middle School, and it stood dark. Banners with a variety of maxims were drilled into the concrete on the building, including "listed on the World News 2015 List of 'Best Middle Schools in the USA* (*2451 of 5000 schools)," and "One Hundred Percent College Acceptance Rate* (*of students who applied to college in Twin Falls High School class of 2016, 2017, 2018)."
"What's going on with this place?"
"I think they moved the high school over to the junior high and they refurbished it before moving the students in - swapped them."
"What's with the banners?"
"They're fighting with the charter schools to get students in. It's basically an expensive PR war more than anything."
I studied the posters a little more closely. "These posters don't actually say anything, do they? I mean, I'm sure the junior high is great, but it's misleading."
"Yeah. It doesn't matter. People are stupid. That's the nature of education now, I guess. How the public sees everything and what impact it has on their support of the school rather than the quality of the education or how well the students do. Most people don't notice that."
"When did it change?"
"Bush."
"Incredible."
"Do you want to go see where the high school is now?"
"No, but could you drive me around the building over there? Then I want to go to The Caffeine Machine. Then we can go home."
"What's The Caffeine Machine?" She drove to the back of the building.
"It's near - actually, do you know where Blockbuster is? It is across from that."
"Blockbuster?" It wasn't her fault. She wasn't from around here.
The back of the high school was as it had always been. Parking lot, lined with tall pines. No service roads or drainage ditches.
"Just a dream," I whispered to myself.
"What?"
"Nothing... This is pretty. We can head downtown, now."
I gave her turn by turn directions. The windblown streets were empty residentials devoid of people. Today's Twin Falls was cars and 'for sale' signs.
What happened?
We pulled up to the intersection where the Caffeine Machine was. The facade of the building was gone. Instead, the entire face of the store was painted bright yellow, advertising Kenny's Chinese and Mandarin Food. The place was dead through the plate glass windows. Fluorescent radiation glowed off industrial fast-food type seating that was more utilitarian than comfortable. A few bodies moved around in the kit
chen. Smoke rose from some cauldrons. Delivery men popped in and out of the restaurant. Neon signs blinked with the restaurant's name and phone number. Entire windows were bordered with shocking neon light.
No Caffeine Machine. No art.
No Blockbuster across the street.
"We can head back," I said, "it's not here."
"Did you still want to go to the library?" I forgot about the library.
"No, I don’t have any ID or anything to get a card. Although, I'd like to check my AOL, but I can just do it another time."
"AOL?"
She drove me back home.
For the rest of the evening, she helped me with some strategies to work around my disability. Her goal was to help me exist a little easier. I needed to make food, use the bathroom and shower alone. I needed simple, practical skills, and I needed to take advantage of them when I could. I would've been able to figure out how to do some of these things on my own, but her help made me more efficient.
She left, and I had some more bourbon. It was inviting, and I felt a sense of accomplishment as I slipped into fuzzy world. Everything was soothed with its bite followed by its numbing anesthetic. It was a warm bath. The world pulled her velvet curtains down, and I felt good.
I awoke halfway through the night sweating in my bed.
My heart pounded in my ears as I stared at the ceiling. I wanted to throw up, but I wouldn't be able to get in my chair and make it downstairs to the bathroom. I swallowed and rode it.
My chest pounded a sledgehammer on my ribs, and fear welled up. Light from headlights shone through the window and reflected a bar that chased across on the ceiling and disappeared.
The clock read fourteen minutes past four.
I turned my attention in my head. I refocused to the rock show and the teens. I'd find the bus schedule. Or, I'd just take a cab for ten dollars - I could afford it. I'd figure something out.
My heart beat. Slammed. I was scared of the pound of the booze.
I was scared of the future.
I was scared of death.
I was a skull.
Chapter 19
"This song is called PissPocket."
The noise droned, powering through the song to an audience of one in the The Eagle Cafe. I was the only person sitting in the basement cafeteria for their performance. I eked out enthusiastic applause after each painful, nearsighted, and lyrically incomprehensible song. The three piece band was a mishmash of screaming punk and moany grunge. They were an identity problem, but an identity problem that could definitely play music. I was amazed by their talent as much as disheartened to watch them waste it with the garbage they played.
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