BRAKING HARD To Load

by Bloom, Cassandra

  Somewhere in the shadows of my childhood, I heard my father say “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” around an already amused chuckle as he fed the cassette into our VCR for yet another viewing. Though I’d been too young to understand much of what was happening in the movie, I remembered doubling over with laughter each and every time it was playing. That my uproarious wails were shrill, childish echoes of my old man’s own laughter had mattered little then and, in hindsight, mattered even less there in the dying store run by the nosy old hippie.

  There was just something about finding a movie from your childhood…

  Clutching this as one might a treasure, I hurried away from the cup and its silent taunts. Each step carried me deeper into the store and, likewise, deeper into my memories. “Strangelove” playing on the TV—Dad seated in his recliner and kicking his bare feet with each bout of laughter and me lying on my belly the floor, dancing my own feet in little pedaling cycles as I matched his reactions—while Mom and Michael did what they could to ignore the two of us; Mom burying her nose in whatever new vampire novel she’d picked up at the supermarket and Michael furiously mashing buttons on his Game Boy. Each round of laughter would earn a pair of sighs from the two of them, their own mini-ritual played out against ours, and more than likely a shared look of “What are we going to do with them?”

  Though I’d never actually seen this from either my mother or my brother when I was transfixed on the black-and-white ongoings playing out before me, it seemed like just the sort of reaction either of them would have had.

  A small, synthetic squeal drew me to the present, and I realized I’d begun rubbing the pad of my thumb across the DVD’s case. I lingered on it a moment longer, taking in the sight of the conniving-looking man behind his shaded glasses staring down at a round table populated by tense men in suits, before forcing my gaze away. I wanted to try to escape the tight grip of nostalgia it had over me.

  I only succeeded in leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire as I came face-to-face with an ashy-gray rendering of Gary Oldman. The bust, featuring a heavy-lidded and undead vision of the actor as he greedily lapped at a blood-caked straight razor, seemed to stare back at me; thick slash-like letters that all-but cried out “Dracula” staring out beneath a leering, demonic face set into the base of the statue. Then, just like that, I was thinking of my mother and her bookshelf which, along with all the books, housed any number of other vampire-related knick-knacks. Whether she’d owned this particular trinket was something I couldn’t bring myself to recall, but I knew with absolute certainty that, if she had come across it, it would’ve had its own claim on that shelf. With a trembling hand—vampires still creeped the ever-loving hell out of me after all these years—I snatched it up, being careful to keep my fingertips away from Oldman’s fanged and waiting mouth.

  Then, with a fresh set of distractions (none of them wholly uplifting), I made my way past the neon cutouts plastered with neon boasts and salted with neon exclamations to the aging hippie at the front of the store.

  “—system’s been cleared out, I’m afraid,” he was saying to a young woman leaning across the counter. “But what I can tell you is that, if we got it, it’s on the shelves somewhere.”

  “Any idea where?” she asked, sounding eager but not impatient.

  The old hippie shrugged. “Folks been coming and going all day; picking things up, carrying them around, and then setting them back down wherever. Used to be we’d try to put everything back where it belonged, but…” another shrug, “Most of my employees left the day they found out the place was going under. The rest have enough to worry about with trying to keep people from leaving their trash lying around or having sex in the back, where we keep the ‘after dark’ vids,” he made a point of air-quoting the words “after dark” with two pairs of arthritis-chewed fingers.

  “That’s disgusting!” the girl exclaimed. “People are actually leaving their trash lying around?”

  “I know,” I said absently, “I actually had a stare-down with a to-go cup back in the ‘Sci-Fi’ section.”

  “Uhg!” the girl made a face, but a grin that had begun to form as she caught sight of me abandoned her effort to feign any sense of nausea.

  “Yeah,” I went on, setting my DVD and the Dracula bust on an available clearing of counter space in front of me. “Worse yet, the cola they left in it was warm.”

  The girl gave a giggling half-squeal of “ewww!” before breaking out into an all-out laugh. Then, seeing that I was waiting to pay, she stepped back and motioned for me to continue.

  Without any prompting, the old hippie started punching at the keys of his register as he offered a “hmm” at each of my selections.

  Not wanting to try for another conversation with him, I turned back to the girl and asked, “So what is it that you’re looking for?”

  Though I did my best not to seem rude, I felt my mind begin to wander again the moment she said the words “Air Bud.” As she went on, smiling mouth spouting something to do with how much she loved dogs, I leap-frogged through my memories—watching old movies with my dad, cowering under the many threatening gazes of my mother’s vampire shelf, sneaking downstairs with Michael to watch R-rated Schwarzenegger movies after Mom and Dad went to sleep…

  And then to simply watching the clouds ride across the sky with Anne.

  “Hey!” the girl’s voice rose to a nearly painful level, cutting through the memories with a shrill pitch. “Are you okay?”

  Both she and the old hippie were staring at me, and I realized I was staring back at them through a familiar haze of blurry wetness.

  “Y-yeah,” I managed, working to free a fifty dollar bill from my wallet and leaving it on the counter. “Just… It’s just really hot out.”

  Leaving that and my money—despite the more than thirty bucks in change I had coming—I snatched up my new belongings, remembering what I’d said to Danny about buying things that one didn’t really need, and hurried for the door and, beyond that, my chopper. Though the young lady and the old hippie stayed and stared after me, the memories followed; them, and Danny’s words:

  “Least I know I got some enjoyment out of whatever it was.”

  Looking down at the DVD and the bust, I couldn’t help but see them in the same light I’d seen the nearly suicidal turn I’d taken earlier—arguably fun and dramatic, but morbidly self-destructive and pointless in the long run.

  The vision of a smiling, waving beauty was waiting for me at the end of the road even before I’d gotten the bike started…

  Through the haze of heat and tears and the blurred line between the “then” and the “now,” I heard my voice as I once again uttered “fuck.”

  RIDING ON FUMES

  ONE

  ~MIA~

  I’d been here before.

  I wasn’t sure how or where—I thought I would remember being trapped in a hell like this!—but it was too familiar to not be the first time. Not that it being familiar made it any better. In fact, it made it much, much worse.

  I was trapped. It was dark, uncomfortably warm, and there was a smell. The smell, like me, was trapped. It hung somewhere between sweet and sour; reminding me all at once of thawing meat, fresh mulch under a hot sun, and something earthy, ancient. A deep part of my brain chanted that it was the oldest smell in existence, and another part, deeper still, assured me that I’d one day come to contribute to it.

  I knew that smell. I knew it the same way I knew I was on the first step of a twelve-step staircase that led down into deeper darkness; the same way I knew that the surface my hands pounded against was a door that should lead to freedom. And I knew that that door—that freedom—was closed and that it would never be opened; that freedom had been stolen from me. And my brother, Mack—though he was only Malcolm in that moment—was the thief.

  I knew all of these things with such a startling certainty that I also knew I must have been here before. But, for the life of me, I didn’t know h
ow that was possible.

  Trapped. I was trapped in a dark, horrible, smelly place.

  Whimpering, knowing what awaited me down in those warm, smelly depths but also knowing it was all my life amounted to, I turned away from the door and started down the steps.

  One…

  Two…

  Three…

  I counted to myself, talking me down the steps like an instructor working me through the motions of some horrible cycle.

  Four…

  Five…

  Six…

  Only halfway down the stairs to my new world and the voice had gone and summed it all up perfectly. A horrible, nearly precognitive fear took hold of me and I had to take hold of the rough, splintery railing to keep from toppling down the rest of the steps.

  Seven…

  Eight…

  My hand traveled along the railing. As the eighth step became the ninth, it went from rough and splintery to smooth and tacky. It was unnerving, and while my eyes had come to adjust enough for me to investigate the spot where my hand lay I knew not to. Keeping my gaze trained on the darkness ahead, I removed my hand from the surface. I knew it would be better to fall the rest of the way into that black abyss than to let my hand spend one more second on that railing a moment longer.

  I thought of my father’s paint cans. I thought of old Band-Aids. And then I thought I might turn around and try for the door again; thought that maybe Malcolm had let go and I might escape from this place he’d trapped me inside.

  Then something at the bottom of the stairs, something waiting in the darkness, said, “You a whore or not?”

  And suddenly, just like I knew everything else, I knew there was no turning back. There was no escape from this place.

  I cursed Malcolm’s name—curiously calling him “Mack”—and continued down the stairs.

  Nine…

  Ten…

  Eleven…

  The hot, reeking stench seemed to reach out like a living thing and grab me as my foot fell on the second-to-last step.

  Getting it, I took another step—Twelve—and finally dared to take another step into the darkness, away from the stairs.

  Here it was dark. Here I had to look with my hands looking for something or somebody that might help me get out of this place.

  “You got me?” the voice called out, seeming to offer itself to me.

  And then my hands fell upon the soft, stinking mass of a long-forgotten corpse. Gasping at the fresh wave of rot that assaulted my nostrils, I blinked at a sudden wave of clarity—light!—that illuminated my freshly discovered treasure.

  And there, before me, I saw myself. I stared back, naked and dead and rotting—my legs splayed and my body showing signs of recent use—and I held my arms open as a lover might when awaiting an embrace.

  “You found me, Mia!” Dead-Mia moaned up at me, triumphant and elated. “You fou-ou-ou-ound me!”

  Then, seeming ecstatic to answer the question, Dead-Mia leapt at me, grinning wide and exposing a length of latex still occupying the corner of her mouth. “AND I FOUND YOU!” she bellowed, taking hold of me and pulling me into her.

  “JACE!” I cried out, not sure why—not sure if I was in the now or the then; not sure when “now” or “then” were or where the line between them existed—and fought to pull away from myself. “JACE! PLEASE! GET ME OFF OF—”

  ****

  “—OFF OF ME!”

  The cry that escaped my lips was muffled as I fell face first out of one of the hospital’s waiting room chairs. I landed on the floor in a heap, still seeing bits and pieces of that long-abandoned cellar in my periphery. Panting, one part panicked and one part embarrassed, I glanced around, thankful that the hospital was, for the most part, empty. Forcing my legs to work and lift the rest of me up, I began the tolling job of collecting myself. I caught my breath just as the receptionist managed to get somebody to come out to see to me, and I just as quickly waved them away. I figured I’d done enough to embarrass myself already. As I did all of this, I caught sight of my reflection in the polarized glass window behind me. My hair was a mess—I honestly couldn’t remember when I had last brushed it—and my unmade face was pale, sporting dark, worried circles that rode under my eyes. The part of me that was all-too used to staring at myself in the mirror—The whore! I reminded myself before just as quickly dismissing it; issuing yet another reminder that, no, that wasn’t me anymore—thought that what it saw was hideous. The other part, the part that was ecstatic to be free of the lifestyle of the first, thought I’d never looked more beautiful. A little silent war waged within myself regarding which one was right. Then I caught myself off guard, asking how I’d feel if Jace were to wake up this instant and see me like this.

  I clenched my eye shut, looking away from my reflection and once again planted myself back in the seat.

  Touché, I thought inwardly as I reached for my purse.

  I figured a little foundation wouldn’t kill me.

  It had been two days.

  Two, too damned long days.

  And Jace still wasn’t awake.

  He’s never going to wake up. Face it, girl, he’s gone. You were too late.

  I cringed at the thought as the voice of my depression forced itself upon me. I’d decided some time ago that Depression wasn’t unlike a personal mind-rape; you could fight and cry all you want, but it only seemed to make it that much worse when it wriggled its way inside of you. To the core. Making you its own and hurting you every second along the way. Or, of course, you could just sit there and take it—this seemed somehow worse to me, but I was no less guilty than others in allowing it to happen—and just stare, dead-eyed and broken, as it worked.

  Then the after…

  Oh shit, the after!

  The sympathy that you were just so sure was forced or phony. The eye-rollers who were so certain they had it all figured out despite never experiencing the reality of it; they always urged you to shrug it off or forget about it—they (knew) thought a little fresh air or exercise was all it took to drag yourself out of it. Fucking know-nothing assholes! And then there were the fellow sufferers, who almost seemed worse than all the others at times. Oh, they were sincere. There was never any shortage of that, but they’re sincere in the same way a mirror is sincere. You see in them what you hate in yourself, and you’re brought back to it—forced to relive it—and you feel that pain and panic slip back around your neck like a noose and suddenly you’re crying…

  And they call it healing.

  Scab-Pickers Anonymous: join the group therapy and let others get their fingernails under that truly stubborn puppy; we’ll make you bleed yet!

  A ghost from my past asked me why I should care about being raped by my own mind—demanded to know whether or not I was a whore—and my throat tightened and my eyes burned.

  I’d almost forgotten that Depression liked to bring friends.

  When I was around Jace, Depression was too scared to force itself on me; too worried to bring its friends.

  And now he’s probably dead!

  I was about to start crying, but the soft hiss of the automatic doors called to me and I glanced up as Danny walked through. The big, outwardly terrifying-looking man paused to look around, spotted me, and then resumed his massive, purposeful stride around a row of seats to approach me. A mixture of emotions flooded me at the sight: relief at seeing a friendly face as the frontrunner, but I couldn’t deny the narrow-but-deep well of spite and bitterness. Danny had been there in my old apartment as it burned around us. Worse yet, he’d been shot—what?—three, four, maybe even five times! By all accounts he should’ve been the worst off of the three of us—By all accounts he should be dead!—but, nope, he’d almost been out and about before me. And all I’d suffered was some smoke inhalation and a few minor burns!

  Shot, burned, and sucking in God-only-knew how much poisonous smoke, and here he was, the picture of health.

  “That’s me, girlie:” he’d drawled when I’d first seen hi
m after the event, “a big, gay war machine. Like a tank with a giant fuckin’ rainbow painted ‘cross the side.”

  I hated myself for that narrow-but-deep well. It wasn’t an emotional response I was proud to have, but…

  For Jace, I thought to myself, refusing to believe what my depression kept trying to convince me of. I can do this for Jace.

  “How ya doin’, girlie?” Danny asked as he plopped down next to me.

  “Fine,” I replied, lying more with that one word than I thought possible from a single syllable. I hardly recognized my own voice as I said it; it was more of a croak—a dry, sad burping sound—than an actual word. It sounded as dead as I had begun to feel…

  And I hated it.

  I hated my reflection, hated my voice, hated Danny for living so easily through so much while Jace couldn’t even woke up. I hated…

  I sighed, realizing Depression was busy in mid-mind-rape and convincing me I hated everything. Squeezing my eyes shut, I decided to just hate how I felt and leave it at that.

  “Jace’ll come through, just ya wait. He might look like a frilly little faggy-boy, but he’s tough as week old steak, ya’ll see,” Danny assured me, setting one of his large heavy hands over my shoulder. “But he wouldn’t like seein’ ya this way.”

  I glanced down at his hand, marveling out how it seemed to swallow the entirety of the area. It was like seeing a bear rest a paw over a child; it seemed so outwardly threatening and yet, in the moment it happened, too awe-inspiring and captivating to draw away from.

  The laugh that escaped me was humorless and I looked down, ashamed that I had allowed it to slip out of me. Danny just stared at me, his face filled with patience and understanding. But, as briefly as I’d known him, I couldn’t help but understand this to be just the sort of person he was: bizarrely simple in his staggering complexity. Seeming to read my mind, he gently squeezed my shoulder and gave me a reassuring smile. It was caring and sympathetic, but there was something coy there, too; as though he knew something that I would just have to wait to find out for myself.