She wiped her eyes, stood up, and leaving the box where it was on the floor, pulled out a second box. In it, she found the dried flower petals of every bouquet he had ever given her and all their movie and concert ticket stubs, but no letters. She huffed, a slow leak of frustration and sadness, and peeked under the bed. Nothing but the dust bunnies.
Next, Sharon searched the night table drawer on her side of the bed, then the one on his side, just to be sure. She dug into the pile of shoes on the closet floor and sifted one by one through the contents of cluttered boxes labeled “Old Bank Statements” and “Important Papers.” She looked under the bed again, in every drawer of the dressers, and behind every major piece of furniture in the room. She repeated the same methodical search in the bathroom (although she knew nothing would be there, but just in case), the guest room, the small towel closet in the hallway, and that third spare room she had intended to use as maybe a craft room (or a nursery, if ever). As she went, she did her best to ignore the lump in her gut. Her cheeks felt cold. She thought to turn the air conditioner down, and then realized she was crying.
There were times since the Official Visit and the letter, since the flag they had given her when he was buried at The Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, that the grief came over her so strong she felt like she was being swallowed alive by a thick, heavy fog – dark, all encompassing, dulling to her senses. It was likely she’d taken out the letters then and set them somewhere to read, and had just forgotten where that was. During those times, it was like moving outside of real time and space, and thus, hard to remember later every little detail of where she’d put things and what she’d done around the house. It was usually less disconcerting to her than it should be, she supposed, but then, she’d never lost something as important to her as the letters.
It took her the better part of an hour and a half to comb through the downstairs as she had the upstairs. She searched the basement and her car. She even searched all of the trash. The letters were just plain gone.
Her head had begun to ache. She was exhausted. Sharon pulled one of Cameron’s t-shirts from the dresser and pulled it over one of his pillows. Then she climbed into the big empty bed, pulling the shirted pillow to her. She didn’t bother with the covers.
She closed her eyes, gave in to the aches within and without, and burst into tears, crying until sleep crept up on and overtook her.
* * * * *
On Saturday, over her morning tea (her stomach, unsettled, put her off to the idea of breakfast), Sharon glared at the stack of bills to be paid and thought about the night before. She’d awoken that morning feeling incredibly drained, more than usual, and knew that it had been a tough night, but found that try as she might, she couldn’t remember why. Something... something had been... taken? Lost? She wasn’t quite sure.
Maybe the feeling came from some part of a nightmare. She certainly had them often enough, when she managed to sleep. Likely, she’d dreamed of Cameron; often, those dreams evolved one of two ways, both equally painful. In the first kind, he would be somehow suddenly mad at her or worse, utterly indifferent to her, and would spend the dream either avoiding her and her attempts at communicating reconciliation or he’d be outright nasty to her, spitefully flaunting his attempts to drive her away. Those dreams were bad, but the other kind were worse. In those, they were blissfully happy and deeply in love, having fun, having adventures, making love, and planning their present and future lives together. She’d wake from the former knowing, at least, that those weren’t true, had only been bad dreams. But the latter...it was harder to be torn into wakefulness after those, to an empty house that was supposed to have been a home and an empty space beside her where all those dreamed moments should have been.
She never dreamed of his death. There had never been the good-bye dream, where Cameron appeared to her to tell her he was okay, that he was safe and would be waiting for her and where he was going was so, so beautiful. Other military wives posted about having dreams like that after, but for her, Cameron was just gone.
Usually when she had those kinds of dreams, it offered her some comfort to go through the box she kept under her bed, the one with all the flower petals from every bouquet he had ever given her, and all the ticket stubs from the movies and concerts they had gone to together. She decided to do that now. Maybe the rest of the day would be easier, and maybe this strange disquiet would dissipate, if she looked through those old memories.
As she walked to the bedroom, Sharon found herself wishing that she had kept Cameron’s letters and emails, as well. He’d never been much of a writer, preferring instead to call or Skype with her when he could. But surely, he’d sent a few cards and letters, hadn’t he? For her birthday, at the very least? She couldn’t remember.
When she pulled the box out from beneath the bed, and lifted the top off, Sharon gasped in dismay. All of her treasures, all of the mementos of their time together, were gone. The ticket stubs and flower petals had vanished. Even the empty Sweet Tarts box was missing.
She moaned, low and mournful, turning the box upside down and shaking it, as if the keepsakes would magically fall out. When they didn’t, she peered under the bed again. Maybe she hadn’t put them back in the box the last time she’d looked through them, or maybe she had the wrong box. She rifled through the nightstand drawers and searched the closet, and eventually all the other rooms in the house, but the treasure box was gone.
Just like Cameron.
Her melancholy lingered for a few hours. She searched for the missing items one more time, but to no avail. She sat in the kitchen and cried over a second cup of tea. But eventually, Sharon decided to get out of the house. She had no particular place to go, but just the act of leaving, of getting away from this temple to Cameron’s memory, seemed preferable to sitting here grieving all day.
She showered and dressed, and managed to hold back tears during the process. Then she grabbed her purse, locked the door behind her, and walked out to the car. As she thumbed the remote to unlock the doors, Sharon noticed a weird stain on her Kia’s rear bumper. Frowning, she touched it. Her fingers came away sticky. The residue felt like bumper sticker glue, but that was bizarre. She’d never had a bumper sticker on the car. She hated those things. She remembered the Yellow Ribbon sticker a friend had given her shortly after Cameron’s deployment. She’d stuck it… somewhere. She couldn’t remember the exact location. Probably in a drawer or on top of the fridge. Maybe even in the box beneath the bed.
Sharon sighed.
Was she sad that the mementos were gone? Of course she was. Each item had been a part of her life with Cameron. But, she reminded herself, she still had pictures of their time together. She still had this home they’d shared. And most importantly, she still had her memories.
* * * * *
On Sunday, Sharon paused on her way down the hall. She’d been stumbling from the bedroom to the kitchen. Her head hurt and she’d planned on making a cup of tea, but something else had caught her attention.
On the wall was a picture frame—the type that held multiple photographs. There she was with her parents. Another showed her with some girlfriends. But there were several empty spaces where photographs were missing. Sharon frowned, trying to remember what they had been. After a moment, it occurred to her they’d been various snapshots of her and her old boyfriend, Cameron. She’d been crazy about him at one time, but then he’d joined the army and...well, she supposed they’d drifted apart. She still thought of him from time to time, but she hadn’t heard from him in…well, a very long time. She couldn’t remember removing the pictures from their frames, but she must have at one point. The frame looked uneven with those empty holes, somewhat...unsettled, and she didn’t that. She made a mental note to find some replacements for them.
Then she continued with her day.
* * * * *
On Monday morning, Sharon left her apartment in North Oakland and drove to work. It was a ritual she repeated five days a week, and had done so since mov
ing into her place. She’d always wanted a house, somewhere to really think of as a home, but it was a big responsibility financially, and she just couldn’t swing a California mortgage alone.
Sharon smiled in bemusement. Wasn’t it funny? She’d dreamed of a house the night before, and a man who shared a home with her. She only remembered snippets of it – pictures of them in frames though the dream-faces were blurred, drawers with his t-shirts, socks, and underwear, a closet with her clothes hanging on one side and his on the other. She remembered a shoebox under the bed where she had been plucking and placing petals from flowers she knew, in the dream, he had given her. And she had been sitting on a big, soft bed in the bedroom with pillows that smelled like his cologne. It had been a pleasant enough dream, although she knew it was little more than her mind fantasizing about a life she wanted, but would probably never really have. She thought for a moment about the man in the dream. She couldn’t see his face, but remembered his arms – there had been tattoos, one of them military. And she thought his name had begun with a C – Casey? Cameron? Chris? Eh, it didn’t matter anyway, she told herself, because it had only been a dream. But the smile had slipped off her face.
Her daily commute took her through West Oakland. While stuck in a backup due to road construction, Sharon happened to glance out the passenger-side window, and saw a house there. It was a cute house, just the kind of place she had always dreamed of living in some day, but for some inexplicable reason, the sight of the place filled her with unease.
Maybe it’s haunted, she thought, and then traffic began to move again and within another block, she’d forgotten all about it.
* * * * *
On Tuesday, the house was gone, but Sharon Coulter never noticed.
OKIKU
“Ichi, ni….”
I can’t remember the last time I slept through the night.
“San, shi….”
I left America to get away. I went as far as I could. I sought out Japan, with its clean, neat lines, its efficiency, and its sense of honor and custom. I didn’t want the teeming crowds, marinated in the dull noises of traffic and footsteps and muttered syllables, eyes and hair and carshine reflecting the electric bright colors of neon advertisements. I didn’t want Tokyo or Osaka. I wanted country villages, trees with delicate leaves, like in the wood prints. Soft sunlight over mountains. Rice land tread only by farmers. Places of history untouched, of wives who once waited for samurai lovers to return from service to the emperor. Quiet places.
“Go, roku….”
The world is round, though, and there is no end destination that is so far away that it isn’t really the beginning of the trip back to where you started. And there is no country so far removed from the world that it doesn’t have its people’s blood soaked into some sunless patch of its own land. We share that, I think, as a species – black holes in our own home-patches of earth that draw in sins and misery and pain. And those things fester there. They gather layers of night, years of silence, decades of waiting or indifference or excuses, and change. They sour like wine to vinegar and become something else. They become anger—driven, hateful, and single-minded of purpose.
“Shichi….”
Sometimes, I can hear screaming in my head.
“Hachi….”
Culmer wanted me forever. In a way, I think he got what he wanted. No place affords the luxury of dreams without his face. I haven’t found a street yet, even here in Takeshi-muri, Chiisagatagun, two hours west of Tokyo by bullet train, where I can avoid the occasional disembodied voice that sounds like him, or the back of someone’s head that is shaped like his. No place is far enough away.
“Kyu….”
There is no place that is home.
* * * * *
I know some modern therapists suggest counting exercises to regain control during times of extreme anxiety or fear. Counting to ten, counting breaths, counting heart beats—this is, I assume, supposed to help you get in touch with your body and your inner sense of control. It’s supposed to help you regain a hold on your sense of logic and reason, which, by its very matter-of-fact nature, is supposed to offer some peace-giving assurance to counteract your irrational worry.
It never worked for me. I tried, at the urging of my therapist before I came here. But the irony is that numbers—or, I should say, stomach-burning knots of tension in my gut and unease in my shoulders when I’m forced to count anything—intensify the anxiety. I daresay the counting ignites a host of memories on top of the anxiety I’d felt to begin with.
For the last six years, I haven’t been able to count past nine.
I don’t mean to say that I can’t balance my checkbook or buy groceries. I can calculate numbers in my head, figure out tips and pay my bills. What I mean is that the actual act of counting from one to ten, out loud or even in my head, throws up a mental roadblock. I can’t get past nine. I know it’s because of Culmer and that breezy late September evening when he changed everything.
Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again. For nine years, I believed that wholeheartedly. There was nothing left for me in the western world, not just in New Jersey, where I had grown up and gone to school, but in America as a whole. In Japan, I could build a new secure life, a sense of home and comfort: house cleaning with the windows open, cool evenings fragrant with acacia blossoms. The mist-shrouded mountains in the background, lanterns giving a soft glow to yards and parks. Dinner domburi—chicken and rice—and a stomach warm with saki. A pleasant telecommuting job of billing and coding.
In America, there was Columbine and Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary School. There were reporters and curious looks on the street and stares in restaurants and libraries and in other places where I was trying to forget what happened by having a normal life. In America, there was Culmer and the nine. Always the nine of them—in my dreams, in the market, at stores, at dinner parties. Always the nine.
Did you know that long before dead bodies rot, they have a smell? I don’t know if everyone can smell it, or if there’s even a scientific name for it, but I know I could smell it that evening. It’s metallic, the sour tang of light sweat saturated in fear, of the remnant drops of a bladder’s contents just enough to dampen clothes but not wet them. That’s not exactly right, but close. It’s a unique smell, powerful, a secret pheromone of death’s onset. That was my memory of home.
And actually, it was that smell that I caught on the breeze, about three days before the 10th anniversary of what happened. It was fleeting, just that home-scent of a person passing by in the Obuse arboretum. It preceded thin, greasy black hair cupping the back of a head, a dingy t-shirt hanging off slumped shoulders, a familiar shuffling walk along the path amid the abundant blooms. I blinked and that shuffling form was still there, moving away from me, in and out of the oncoming dusk and its soft fog.
My stomach dropped, and my heart suddenly began to pound heat throughout my body. Conversely, a winter rush of air froze my heart in my chest.
Culmer was in Japan. He meant to finish his list. Around me, the rest of the arboretum fell away. The chatter of birds was a dull roar in my ears. Culmer had come to kill me.
* * * * *
The first person I met on campus had been a professor of American Lit at Bloomwood Community College up in Wexton where I went to school. He taught an evening class on Wednesdays and Fridays, and in it, American literature meant everything he could cram into a semester from Thomas Payne’s pamphlet to Irving’s Sketchbook right up through Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson. Henry Winston—Hank to friends and Dr. Winston to the rest of us—stood tall, confident, a man grandfatherly of face and General Patton of personality, a man with soft tufts of thinning white hair and a tongue so sharp it could razor-cut your ego in a clean, swift slice long before you realized your stupidity had been called to the floor. I liked him in spite of, or possibly because of, his acerbic wit.
Ironically, Dr. Winston had been discussing the driving motivations of insane
characters in Gilman’s and Faulkner’s work when Francis Culmer strode by the open doorway, backed up, peeked into the classroom, and kept walking. Our professor paid no attention to the gawky boy or the subsequent titters, half-mocking and half-uneasy, that swept the room like a light breeze.
Culmer was generally not the kind of guy people paid attention to if they could help it, not so much because he blended into the crowd, but because he should have and didn’t. Maybe that sounds dismissive, maybe even outright cruel, but I believe there’s a social consciousness, an unspoken pigeonholing of people into social hierarchies. Countless movies of my youth have explored the difficulties of being the popular girl, the jock, the nerd, the brain, the troublemaker. We really do that, though, as sentient beings—package and label for convenient filing in the mind. Culmer made people uncomfortable not because he didn’t conform to normal society, but because he didn’t even conform to normal societal guidelines for being an outcast.
Culmer should have been plain, but wasn’t. His eyes, slow and almost glassy with unfeeling, were set a little too widely apart, his nose a shade too long, his lips just a bit too thin, neither smiling nor frowning but kind of rippling into the oddest expressions. These expressions were difficult to look at. They made a person laugh nervously after a while, or avoid those widely-spaced, empty eyes. His words sometimes held innuendos of off-kilter things, not quite easy or comfortable to answer. It stood to reason, based on the social order we impose on each other, that he should have wanted to blend his oddities into the cacophony of campus life, fade into the background as a listener, an observer. An outsider he certainly was, but he did not vanish comfortably into the periphery of college life. The mind wanted him to be the quiet type, the nerd lost in a sea of faces, to be someone else’s awkward social problem, and he wouldn’t. The mind would scream at him to shut up, in fact, while smiling politely and hoping someone would come by and provide an excuse to remove oneself from the conversation.
Night Movies Page 9