Each thought taking its turn in the wind. Late afternoon and dusk covers everything. He passes by and shouts through the window, "There's too much dead wood in these logs."
"It'll dry up before winter."
"You think you'll make it that long?" Not a question.
I learned things from him. Colors and shapes. The truth of the river. That I was born in a hospital for aged men, one of those large converted factories with an entrance like a barn door. It had a hallway running end to end and big open rooms in which the senile and worse counted and lost track of days. "You came home the next day" he said, "and just lay there and let mother rock you and sing. Same way she'd done with so many before."
In rooms of armchairs thick with yellowing newspapers and something always ticking he taught me how to count by the fear in his voice. He would go into the night and the next morning I would take the bus to pick him up and take him to the dam for a swim where we would eat little sandwiches and drink thick drinks that looked like soup. When I got up to leave I wasn’t sure he even knew I was there.
I would listen for the car crash, the one he got out of alive even though the roof was ripped off. When I got to the hospital they had put him in a chair and the doctor asked me if I wanted to hear a joke about his funeral. No, I said, but I’ll see you there. Sometimes I would get a call saying his body was found, that he was dead. I would walk back to the bus stop to pick him up and we would go to the inn I was working at and the sun would rise through the window of the dining room while we drank black coffee.
He gave me money every week but what I really wanted was his secret. The one he said could only be found by digging. I did not understand. Now I’ll likely never know.
He sits up and I feed him more ice. I say, “Do you remember when I couldn’t go home because the guy that sold pencils for a living would follow me in the street?” We sit in silence, the drifting lamplight. This cocktail of memories and smoke. Are you still there? Testing me?
At the top of the hill are buildings that make up the furthest part of the city. At dawn they appear almost white. Gleaming. “Ever been up there?", he says.
“I used to know kids that lived there.”
“We used to smoke in the mines by flashlight.”
I'm pretty sure he’s never smoked. I drive him back and park under the streetlamp and watch a car crawl past. We go inside and I open a bottle and pour us a drink.
“You’ll never have anyone else.” he says and leaves the glass on the table and goes to bed.
I have another drink and go into the lounge to write. I sit on the couch in the dark and put my head in my hands and cry. He's a heavy sleeper so I don't care. Or maybe I'm hoping he'll hear and come in and put his arms around me and kiss me on the forehead. When we were kids my sister and I thought he was the most wonderful person in the world. Perhaps it was because he told us so. I spend the night looking for deals on old video games. I can always write tomorrow.
I'm on the road a lot. My van carries panel ads for some new show called Best Decorated Spouses. Not a bad gig to get paid for touring my own city. At least I don't have to look at the ad.
I'm supposed to be meeting my sister at the restaurant. I park the van and fight the sadness. I see my sister all the time but I wouldn't call it a relationship. I make nice, she doesn't mention him, we eat, we leave. I go in and sit at a booth different from our usual booth. The change of scenery is like being on location. The people look like stock photos on a dating website. Painfully happy. Even the kids. There's no AC and the radio is playing a talk show "--do you miss being editor of one of the few newspapers left in the country? Well Jim, I've gotta be honest--" and the door opens and she finds me without missing a beat and sits as if this table were no different than the one we've sat in for years.
"Waiting long?”, she says. “Oh, hi. Can I get a coffee. Three sugars? Great, thanks."
"Not long."
"Did I tell you I was waiting in line yesterday at the diner down the street from my house and the woman ahead of me asked what I did for a living? She looked at me like a mother who just spotted a hitchhiker. You know? I didn't feel like telling her. Not that she really cared. She had this pink money clip--" Do you remember him? Listening to jazz, reading poems, telling us about Dick Cavett and Doris Day? "--and I thought maybe I could do that. They make a shitload of money. I could have an ice machine installed in my house--"
There are these people. Men for the most part. They have husbands and wives. Kids. Their own businesses. Money and toys. Everything they ever wanted, and they're not unhappy. Just, dissatisfied. So they start searching. Looking for something. But it can't be found so they begin to believe in grace, that there's a page or book somewhere where it’s all laid out like plumbing. The problem is they lack realism, an understanding of chaos I mean. Chaos is the punchline to an inside joke. Which sounds good but being a writer I can't be sure that it's true.
"You want to know the secret?", he says again. The question is lost on me, partly because it's rhetorical. Or seems so. Sense doesn't follow so what else to call it? My best answer is to look around the room at the others who make it up as they go along. One day fine, the next not, but never caring too much. What I wouldn't give to dismiss what doesn't come easy. To go softly when called. What answer in sources other than imagination? Physics, religion, pop culture, history. They can have it. Give me one true thing that hasn't been said. A cosmic metaphor. Some evidence of fantasy. Then we'll talk.
He shifts to one side and looks through the smoke like a comedian. An artist baiting the universe. Does he ache? Doubt? Or is he one of those in whom nothing settles. A songbird knowing the notion of fear but too full of melody to let it land. We care for them but do not worry, suicide alien to their fiber.
He raises his voice. "Can you see it? The families lining the field? Dozens of cops. Soldiers even."
The sun has set and the bottle is empty. Time for bed.
I turn on the lights. Something’s missing. I hear his key in the door. He enters in a rush, a haze that implies a complicated name. A complicated life. The combination guaranteed to keep one out of the spotlight. I hug him, eyes pressed closed, and step back to give him space to dress. In the meantime I dance, my body melded to the floor, my arms wrapping around my neck, the song like lips around my ears. No, I don’t want to talk about it yet. I just want to be lost in these moments. The twisting shoes, this dancing rainbow. Yes, I just want to be lost, if only for a while.
It’s over in seconds. A scenario of heart presented and cast away. We walk back to the campsite, a coyote in the distance the only sound aside from our breathing. There’s an aloofness now, not of hate but of distance. An owl settles above and the future whispers of spending too much time being sure. That there be something to fall back on. No. Not yet. Please, not yet.
We wake to perfect snow, the city in my mind, a classic photograph. Reality shows the cliff instead, sends the cicadas thundering, beating like rain. He moans. His legs are broken but he won’t need them soon. Dakota has been telling us Safety First though I’m pretty sure that isn’t her real name. Do they draw straws? “No fair. I want to be Moose.” Or Iceman. Fishbone. Razzleberry. Anything but Nugget. Focus on the buzzing. Ooo-eeeeeeeeeeee. Whoever called it a chirp never heard one. Ooo-eeeeeeeeeeee. I hoist the pack and start walking. Or maybe it’s a song? A screech then. I’d sign off on that.
I never asked when they stopped looking. Young minds need a break from darkness.
“Freedom.”, she says.
“What?”
“Freedom. Look.” She opens her coat and pulls out a gun. “It’s loaded. Now anything can happen.”
I wish to be on the moon. Or lost in an undiscovered patch of jungle. Anywhere but here.
“Come on.”, she says. “Let’s go.”
“Not if you’re bringing that.”
“I can’t leave it here. Let’s go.”
“Here.” He tosses the pills on the table. They clatter like gravel, spinning and sliding. I take one and lay it on my tongue. How best to savor chalk and strange horizons? Hard swallow and gone.
My brain hops a fence and jogs the icy slope, slides switchbacks and chicanes to stand of aspens that become my very bones.
The man winks, “Wee beastie isn’t she?”
The corner is cold and my back aches. Where did that smile go? I search my pockets, hands swollen and heavy. Like buckets of concrete. A face etched into my heart. Did she leave me here? Lay back. Get a grip. I watch them die around me. The men eating winter grass and meadow rue, the women drinking fetus tea, lysergic bliss. A trade of pale bundles. Legs curled, christened like a hat in a hurricane. Where are you? There. Can you see me? Lashes brush a basted sky. Did you take them too? Handfuls of dirty yellow? Is my mouth even moving? The corner is cold and my back aches.
Two lanes cut a ribbon from mining country back to the city. Pick any direction and you’ll end up where you started, even if the surroundings have changed. There’s a color comic on the seat. Something about heroes and halloween. Costumes doing double duty, archetypal touchstone and plot device both. It sits atop a hand-printed chapbook titled Horatio in Heaven (A King’s Regret). Someday I’ll shop it around. Or not. Wasn’t it said to give every man thine ear, but few thy voice? I am certain of one thing. The ghost is real.
Writing seems at cross-purposes with my body. I once told a doctor that it’s just premeditated masturbation. The jester institutionalized. Not crazy I mean, but yoked and tamed. Mischief put to work like everyone else. He agreed, saying there are studies to prove it. Such is the iron law of--
“Who are you talking to?”, she says. “He’s here to see you. Put some clothes on.”
Footfalls. Loud. Louder than should be possible on velvet. Light pings my eyes, their insides blazing like roadmaps. I am new to ghosts. They smell of loss and linoleum and haunt my breath like wall-to-wall tiles.
“Let’s get him up.”
He looks through me. I could kiss him but don’t. He feels it though, when I touch his arm. A bed forms under me. It’s the wrong bed. Or the right bed in the wrong room.
“I think he has it.”
“The season hasn’t even started yet.”, she says.
“I know, but no harm in checking. He’s been living here long enough.”
My heart thumps with warmth and sickness. The bed spins. An arm on my shoulder. I push but it doesn’t move. A panelled ceiling falls into place and from it comes a shadow. Halitosis on wings.
“Where should we put him?”
“Not in the living room. That’s for damn sure.”, she says.
“Basement then?”
“Yep. Basement.”
“Ok.”
No break in the dark but I know this place. Every corner a milestone, familiar as sitcoms. Its objects reach out to me--the treadmill, bar stools, slanted piles of magazines bearing the universe and its mysteries. The house above the perfect blanket for a mind seeking recall of some detail that will forever and at last settle the sloshing pulse of yearning. Careful. Push too far through crossbeams and ductwork and you might find the gaping maw of emptiness. And that my friends cannot be put back in the bag.
A door creaks from on high and light rushes in like it has been waiting a thousand years.
“Ready to come upstairs big man?”, she says.
“Feels like a bear chewed on my nose.”
Silence.
“Yeah. I’m ready.”
I look at the painting again. Ensos like targets sprayed yellow and red. A hot dog deconstructed. The furnace of nuclear winter. Zen Graffiti says the label.
Next is a mirror painted over with Guernica in reverse except for where the viewer might stand. A statement of some kind. I don’t recognize the face staring back. The blankness.
She stands behind me. A halo of auburn.
“What do you think?” she says.
You scare me. Not because you speak your mind. But because you believe it.
“Huh,” I say. “ Interesting.”
She turns on a heel, leaving a wake of horses and light.
“Welcome to my world,” she says, a little drunk and louder than necessary.
An apartment full of art, letters, books. A birdcage next to the bed. No bird. Two paintings on the floor. Stored or displayed. Latecomers behind me arrayed in sugar skull masks though there’s also a woman wearing a tuxedo and a tall man in a Jim Morrison Is Jesus t-shirt.
Jesus Jim leans close and says, “Who are you supposed to be?”
“An inside joke.”
He leans back.
The night takes its course. Candles wink out at a pace and buzz becomes murmur becomes silence. I have not moved and am the only one left. No reason to stay. No reason to go.
“Go to bed,” she says. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever people talk about.”
“Alright.”
Couch springs vie for nerves. Waffles and coffee from the kitchen. Bustle from the street below.
“Good morning. Ish.”, she says. “Hey, remember the tall guy from last night? Jim something? Anyway, he’s going to do a glow-in-the-dark spider mural on the ceiling for next year. Widows and house spiders. Maybe a recluse or two.”
“Where’s Buddy?”
“Bathroom maybe? He’s got a thing for mirrors--”
SQWAAAAAK
“Yep. Bathroom. Just watch your fingers. He’ll snap them like broomsticks.”
Lemon tiles and a lime head bobbing and turned sideways the better to stare into a single eye shining like the cold eye of God.
“What’s up Buddy.”
bob bob bob bob
The steel doors gently clunk.
“Where’ve you been?”, he says. Sitting there. The world rushing by like rapids.
I sit down across from him, that smile like he’s got life by the tail.
“I saw Buddy.”
“That bird’s gonna outlive me.”
“All of us probably.”
I point at the table to the unopened pack of cigarettes emblazoned with a skull having a smoke over a ribbon that says SMOKING KILLS in decorative script. Tattoo flash turned dire warning. “What’s up with those?”
He tilts his head. A flutter as smile becomes smirk. I wait. I know what’s coming.
"You want to know the secret?"
