* * *
I was grasping at Polaroids in a wind storm, and if I happened to snatch one up, the faces that smiled back were unfamiliar. Snapshots from someone else’s family vacation, a birthday party, maybe a wedding reception for a friend. A first date, a first kiss. Bachelor parties and baby showers. All the elements were there, even a slight tug of familiarity pulling my frazzled nerves taught, but the context, the connection was absent. Just before contact those nerve endings would all repel each other with a spark and a whiff of metallic smoke, like jump starting a dead pickup truck on a dry, cold winter night.
I’d stare at one image after another with the same detachment I’d feel towards the evening news. Images flew by without rousing any reaction above the realization I was a little hungry. None of it ever affected me.
This lasted long enough for my eyes to adjust to the dim light in the room, or maybe it was the awareness of the light that caused the photographic funnel cloud to dissipate.
The snapshots fluttered to the ground like ash as an aged off-white on white grid materialized before my eyes; a tiled ceiling. I designated that direction ‘up’ and began to look around the room. To my right, a window, a tattered curtain along one side held snug against the next wall. I scanned the room around to the left where I found a girl curled into a familiar recliner.
Mary?
A handful of photos wisped back into focus; that brunette posing in front of the cathedral, next to a hundred foot spoon with a ten foot cherry on the end, the girl in front of the little red convertible; that was Mary. The oversized cherry, who knows? A sculpture? A rationalization of incongruent thoughts still bouncing around my skull? No idea, but Mary was familiar, she was my girlfriend.
No, that didn’t sound quite right. Another handful of images flitted by; a sunset, the moon over a lake, the reflection of candlelight off an empty bottle of wine, a small velvet box.
A proposal.
A ceremony.
Mary, my wife. She must be.
I let my eyes close for a moment. As good as it felt to remember, anything more than surface recollection took energy and my head was still foggy. I filed that all away and vacantly scanned the room for anything else that would jog a memory without effort on my part.
* * *
Minutes passed and in the dim light nothing made much sense until my eyes made it back to the window. At first I wanted to see a skyline, my eyes strained at the crisp edge of thousands of tiny lights against a jagged, black void. But something was wrong, reversed. The skyline looked like teeth, and the lights were above and all around, not down in the buildings and streets where they belong.
The teeth were pine trees spread across the landscape for miles, the lights were stars. Closer, there was a different kind of blackness along the ground but the window had fogged along the sill. It was impossible to make out.
I looked back to Mary but she was gone. There was no familiar recliner, just my blazer crumpled over a folding metal chair, my scarf balled up and frayed at the end like a hasty pony tail. But it was just a scarf. Mary was never there. I was projecting the familiar, coping, and this likely had to do with the dull ache coursing through my frame.
I couldn’t move and I didn’t have the energy to worry about it so I stared out the window. It seemed like the most likely place for anything to happen. After an unknowable span of time drifting between full consciousness and familiar projection (a clock on the wall put me back in my den, later the musty smell of the room brought back images of my garage, working under a car, then being on the road in the Buick); the lights finally brought me around to reality.
Something was illuminating the woods from within, maybe a mile away and moving closer, some kind of vehicle. After a few moments it broke into a clearing, square headlights and rows of orange lining the cab and wheel arches of a large truck.
The truck went out of view and after a few frantic moments it passed in front of the window maybe a half mile away and then it became clear why the foreground was a different black. The lights had multiplied, reflecting beneath the real truck in some sort of pond or lake.
The lights.
They had been upside down, I’m sure of that. But then that couldn’t be right, it must have been me who was upside down.
I remembered gliding effortlessly through space toward the cab, someone at my feet and someone else with my arms under theirs, my head lolling with each of their steps. That’s how I got here.
Then I remembered the woman at the bar.
* * *
“You know, you look a lot like my,” she wiggled a couple fingers, “like my third husband.”
Her name was Desiree, and this was entirely inappropriate. Her face was overburdened with a particular kind of disappointment, as if someone had cut her off at an all-you-can-eat buffet. An act that her six foot three, two-hundred pound frame would suggest few people had been brave enough to attempt.
She possessed the grace and stature of a Peterbuilt truck, and her wardrobe generally suggested that a Peterbuilt truck might not be all too foreign a concept. (It felt good that I’d guessed right.)
There was her corduroy vest over a red and green flannel with a pack of smokes rolled into the sleeve, the half dozen silver and turquoise rings, the boots, and that name tag whose color scheme matched the big-box store across the expansive parking lot. Then there was the way she leered at the bartender while ordering a pitcher of beer, just before asking if I wanted to join her.
“I got enough to go around,” she winked.
My face, if it hadn’t already, turned to confused stone. I couldn’t think of a less applicable name for this woman.
“Suit yourself.” She pushed the glass toward the bartender and carried the pitcher back to her table.
The weather beaten man next to me smiled in a way that strongly suggested he only smiled after a few beers. He watched her all the way to her table then caught my gaze with a subtle jut of the chin, his dusty blue eyes watering at the edges, salivating, asking permission.
All I could do was shrug and nurse what I swore would be my last glass of Jonnie Walker Blue.
This was right after the smoking ban so every time I thought lusty eyes had finally made his move, a few minutes later they’d slink back inside, exhaling that final lungful of smoke, blue curls enveloping the low hanging, stained-glass, upside-down fruit bowl lighting. They were laughing deeply, joyfully. Glancing over toward the bar, I’d assumed. Sizing me up, I guess.
I remember going to the restroom. The old man had been in there as well.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
But I hadn’t. I’d paid my tab, I’d even left a few bucks for the barmaid. I had my jacket, my scarf, wallet; everything.
* * *
The room explodes into white for a flash until the aging yellow-green hues fall into place, then trails of brownish red stretch down from the crown molding. Squalor materializes around me and my arms pull against handcuffs and I wince, old bruises, flesh worn raw.
Desiree is standing over me, her mouth is moving but the light seems to have flooded my ears for the moment as well.
Finally I can make out enough fragments through her deep Texas drawl, through the audible pain of blinding light and body aches to hear her saying, “So what’s the combination, darling?”
I shrug. When I open my mouth to speak my lips feel large, taste metallic. They peel apart, ”Just take my wallet, my keys, whatever, just-”
“We’ve got your keys, son. But none of them open the case. There’s no key hole.” Her smile disappears, as if I’d just told her “No” to a third brownie. “So how does it open?”
“I don’t know anything about any case.” But as that last word leaves my swollen lips my eyes find a silver briefcase at the foot of the bed. On either side of the case are my feet, handcuffed to the bed frame.
I began to laugh in spite of how exquisitely painful my cracked ribs stab into my lungs.
Desiree’s voice turns sing-song, deep Texas again, “Come on, darling? What’s inside? I just don’t want to damage something valuable breaking into it, so I’d like to know.”
I can’t stop myself from laughing. All these years and it’s somehow landed back in my lap?
“Chester, you stupid motherfucker…” the laughter mixes with tears, the sobs squeezing at my internal organs like a thousand clawed fist, torturing me but unwilling to end it all.
“Hey Earl,” she shouts over her shoulder like she’s calling the hogs in for slop, “E-earl. He’s still playing hard to get.”
As Earl’s shadow blots out the light I remember more than I’d like to about the first time we tangoed in the bathroom, fragments of the ride in the sleeper of the truck’s cab, and the first two rounds of open-the-case while strapped to the bed here.
“Just kill me… don’t make me open the case…”
And right before I black out I see Mary’s face, illuminated from behind and not so much smiling as watching over me with the hopeful notion of getting through this. I’m quite sure I’m projecting onto Mary every last ounce of optimism that hadn’t already bled out of me. Amazing how resilient a soul can be, even after so many centuries, still grasping to this silly body.
As the shadows burst into flashes of light once again, I feel myself scream her name but the sound never reaches my ears.
* * *
© Anthony David Jacques MMX
