In Place (Issue 12.)
You Can't Walk Home (Issue 2.)
In Place (December 20, 2009. Issue 12.)
The three of us had started the trip in Kansas City. Since we didn’t have a car, we got a ride from our neighbors, a husband and wife who we’d learned liked hitting the bars out there every weekend. They asked if maybe we’d like to join them for awhile, explaining that they knew somebody who would babysit Dylan for a few hours. Sarah declined; the energy of the trip sifted from her body, gathering in nearly palpable arcs of electricity in the back seat of their black Chevy Tahoe. She was ready to get moving. They left us at the K.C. bus terminal. I paused beside a garbage can overflowing with disposable convenience store cups, McDonald’s bags, and empty tallboys as Dylan and Sarah walked inside the squat brick building and our ex-neighbors from Crooked Willow pulled away from the curb. Stretching my legs, I stared at the double doors of the terminal. Nothing about it felt quite right, just running away like this, but I liked the sound of a change of scenes. Sarah had talked about the huge oak trees, the warmth, and the Mississippi that uncoiled like some great god of water moccasins and crept alongside you, keeping you company until it opened its mouth in New Orleans. I liked the excitement in her voice, and I think even Dylan bought it for awhile.
The way she’d talked, Dylan and I were sucked beneath the surface of her words as though she were the river’s current dragging us beneath her. We didn’t fight it, and by the first time we switched buses, that part was done. Sarah’s initial excitement became inexplicable hair-trigger anger. We’d had a stopover in some nowhere town on the tip of Missouri. She snapped at Dylan for spilling bottled water on himself, and then at me for not rushing for paper towels. Sarah went to get some, and I decided to take care of myself. I jostled the baggy of pills in my pocket with my fingers.
I went into a bathroom stall and crushed a forty milligram tablet of oxycodone in cellophane against my lighter and the porcelain. Barely enough. These days it took more like twice that. I quickly swallowed another. When I came out of the bus terminal restroom, for the first time I really noticed how debased everything was. The light was draining all the travelers. It got into their hair and eyes and skin, and made their bodies look like the dead, maybe even to themselves. Their skin was very pale and mottled: a crew of Interstate drowning victims, I thought, and all of us except Sarah were inhumed in the fluorescent light; I didn’t see Sarah. A few people sat in chairs with their trusty luggage beside them, like Sarah was supposed to have been doing. Dylan was one of them with luggage, one of everyone who waited for a Greyhound.
Dylan was seated in a row five chairs down from an old woman whose face was a landscape of furrows. Her head was under a white kerchief, and she was bundled in a heavy brown coat, her arms folded in such a way that she appeared to be hugging her fragile body. Every aspect of her echoed fall’s end; that winter was coming, and that when winter did arrive, there would be no end to it. That there would be one great arctic night that the fluorescent lights couldn’t touch, and that’s it forever, Amen. Dylan seemed engrossed by the pictures in a Little Golden Book while I stood there. Every so often, the old lady glanced at him.
He didn’t even register my presence, or he pretended not to. We both ignored the old woman as though she were a bad omen. My duffle bag lay on the chair beside him, and his mother’s suitcase, which had been flush with his dangling legs, was gone.
“Hi, kid, how you doing?” I dabbed with some paper towels at the little spot on his pants that was still damp from the spilled the water.
Dylan looked up from his book and gazed directly at me. He didn’t say anything. He usually spoke only when it was required of him, and he knew I wouldn’t push the issue. I tried a different question.
“Where’s your mom?”
“Out there.” Dylan pointed to the front doors of the bus terminal.
My eyes followed his finger. Through the glass on the doors, seen from a distance, the exterior lights had turned the night into a milky day.
“I’ll be right back. I’m going to check up on her.”
The kid nodded and got back to his book.
The cold Missouri night stung me in the face when the door swung open. The moisture lingering on my skin from having washed in the restroom felt like shards of glass in the breeze. I was eager to get to the place Sarah had told me it still would be green in late October, but Baton Rouge, our last stop, was a day or more away. If the oxycodone would just kick in, it wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. I kept feeling for the traces of the stuff that wouldn’t make it so bad, traces of the mithridate against a bad life I’d crushed and swallowed before splashing cold water against my face.
Cigarette smoke wafted all around before flooding in the wide open sky. I looked around. There were only three of us outside: Sarah, me, and a man she was talking to. The man wore a baseball cap, torn, baggy jeans, and work boots coated by a dust of cement mix. The dark, thorny tangle of a tattoo crawled up the side of his meaty neck, out of a navy blue hooded pullover. He was strongly built, not much taller than me, but outweighing me by maybe forty pounds. I remembered having seen him when we got off the last bus. He hadn’t had any luggage with him. Sarah’s flower-print suitcase was set between the two of them on the cement. A lonesome cricket hopped past her luggage with spasmodic, desperate movements and fell into the grass. Sarah’s laughter curled and died away with an exhalation of her cigarette and I wondered what it meant. She turned and looked at me.
“—so if you want to…” the man was saying in a deep voice.
“Well…” Her smile foundered with my appearance, her blue eyes on me. I lit a cigarette and approached them. The man just stared at me after I interrupted him and Sarah. I told her that Dylan didn’t know where she was.
“Yes he does,” she said.
There was a vicious pre-tornadic silence. Some cars passed by and we all looked to see if any of them were a bus.
Sarah and the man did not falter, didn’t separate. Sarah looked at me. Her eyes were inscrutable. She sighed and touched my arm, indicating that she wanted to speak somewhere out of the ear-range of the man.
“I’ll be right back,” she said over her shoulder.
The man laughed. “Hell yeah, you will.”
We went to the opposite side of the door, near a bush that had not entirely lost its leaves.
“Okay,” Sarah said, taking a final drag from her cigarette.
My stomach had begun to sink, and I watched her un-self-conscious yet graceful movements as she dropped the butt and ground it out with the toe of her shoe. The chill outside suddenly seemed too much. I began to shake ever so slightly, stiff and miserable and waiting to be better or get better, whichever came first. I didn’t trust Sarah’s aloof gracefulness.
Sarah and I had been living together for two years. We had met in my dealer’s house; she had showed up with friends who were acquainted with Daniel in the most oblique way. Basically Sarah was with a bunch of neo-hippies. They travelled and referred to society as “Babylon.” Several of them had gotten stranded in Crooked Willow after some kind of falling out; the others had headed back to Seattle. Sarah was originally from Louisiana, and during her time spent travelling, the only part of the Midwest she’d come to know was Chicago. The small town had been completely foreign to her.
To make a long story short, we hit it off. I was working as a cook in a small bar, renting a cheap mobile home, and maintaining an ever more difficult habit to keep in check, thanks to Daniel’s oxycodone and occasional black tar. Being so near the interstate, these small satellite towns became minor hot spots for dope. Sarah had nowhere else to go unless she called her parents, which would have been like admitting defeat in her mind. She quickly moved in with me because the idea of defeat was worse than having nowhere else to go. The drugs, she’d joked, were a fringe benefit. Several months later, she’d called her parents and told them she’d straightened out her life, and asked them to bring Dylan to her.
She’d always warned me that she was not going to stick around forever. I’d accepted it at first, but, as time wore on, her promise became more and more unreal. Besides that, I guess her separation from society was always a little less consummate than mine. I’d been fine dividing my time not spent cooking at Mike’s Tavern among the public library, television, and Daniel’s dope. After all, junkies make the best readers and T.V. viewers, provided they’re not nodding or sick. I could spend hours mooning over a single word, a single morpheme, even; and the T.V. generated beautiful, vapid people I liked to look at. I watched them with the detachment of a butcher eyeing a cut of meat. Sarah must’ve been getting bored. I know I would have been under different circumstances.
One day a propos of restlessness, Sarah had decided it was time to go back home. Both of us were stoned. Surprisingly, she wanted me to come with her. We’d live in New Orleans, walk Bourbon Street every night, meet the gypsies in the French Market, go to Café Du Monde, and wander the stores.
“But—”
Sarah had known what I was protesting.
“So rip him off,” she’d said. “You’ll have what you need for the trip down there. Then you can get clean. Just imagine, Mark!”
Everything had gone as planned. Now I looked into her eyes. No warmth. Her dirty blonde hair shook on the breeze like Spanish moss. She wasn’t saying anything beyond that first “okay.” Maybe she was waiting for me to talk.
“We should go back. Dylan’s waiting,” I said.
A warm, dull wave of calmness went through me. About damn time, I thought, though I knew it hadn’t been very long.
“I’m leaving.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yeah, Mark, I’m leaving,” she said impatiently. Her eyes jumped in the direction of the man who waited for her.
“You’re not serious,” I protested. I was being very collected about it. “There’s Dylan. You’ve got some of my stuff in your purse.”
“What do you think?” Her eyebrows rose. This single expression seemed to resuscitate her promise from a long time ago.
“You cannot—you cannot fucking do this to me,” I whispered.
“Why can’t I?”
I tried it from another angle, the rational angle. “Okay: So you’re going to take your four-year-old son with some freak you just met in a bus stop?”
She looked at her shoes for a moment. “No.”
“What kinda person are you?”
She halted. “I’m no mother,” she said. I noticed her give a little shudder.
My anger or desperation, or whatever, bested me. My arm snaked out and my fingers meshed with the sleeve of her jacket. “Look—you have my shit,” I repeated. “He’s your kid. You’re not going.” I was still whispering, but my voice sounded very mechanical to me, like what the voice of one of those old wind-up monkeys with crashing cymbals would sound like if it could talk. Somehow it was just a matter of going through the motions, as if Sarah and I were entrenched in some weird social ritual that had really lost its meaning.
An instant later the man was between us and his much heavier arm knocked mine away. His mouth had turned into a strange, apish hybrid of a snarl and a grin.
“Problem?” he asked.
The cymbals started to crash and I turned and left them. There was nothing to fight.
I walked back through the door. The blast of warm air was overwhelming. I noticed the old woman had gone. Dylan was still sitting where he had been, but he’d closed his book. His legs swung in mid-air. I made a gesture, a half-hearted wave in the kid’s direction as I headed back to the restroom.
I entered one of the stalls and sat down, thinking. Waves of opiate peace and false comfort cushioned each thought. There was money in my wallet, a hundred dollars or so from my last paycheck. I could buy a ticket headed back home. Call someone about the kid. Dylan, I mean. How does somebody leave their kid behind?
I’d been tossed around from foster home to foster home when I was young, getting broken bones, cigarette burns, and misdemeanors. I ran my fingers through my hair and c
almly beat my hamstrings in frustration. When I’d finished bruising myself, the phrase ‘in situ’ kept going through my head. Latin bullshit. I let it flow like a mantra. ‘In place’: like the blank spots before we’re born and after we’re dead; like the space between the crashing cymbals of a wind-up monkey, or the spot where the old lady had been sitting. Waiting in-transit, in place; it didn’t matter where. What a load of shit.
Sarah was gone.
Dylan was out there.
I could go back home, face Daniel, and call the authorities about the kid. Maybe I could stay with acquaintances, couch surf, avoid Daniel…
I stood up and left the restroom. I towered over Dylan in the waiting area. “Sarah split,” I said. His big green eyes looked out with incomprehension. “Your mom left,” I explained and sat down beside him.
Dylan didn’t say anything. He just looked at the doors. I put my arm around him.
Dylan started to cry a little bit. Two hours later the bus came. We got on it and he seemed to sleep soundly enough. In a few days, I realized, I’d be very sick. I probably wouldn’t have enough money to get wherever I was going when it was said and done. His grandparents didn’t know me from Adam. It was strange: That didn’t matter. Everyone was in place. I slept well during the bus ride. My sleep was warm and dark.
You Can't Walk Home (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)
Right now I’m thinking about a pair of silver shoes. The silver shoes at the heart of this meditation are not fictitious, and though they lack the direct experiential link that I have for instance with my present cup of coffee, they overtake the coffee, the room, the cold winter light streaming through the kitchen window. The silver shoes I‘m thinking about at this moment are in a shoebox that did not come with the shoes’ original purchase. This box is sealed inside the bedroom closet of an apartment I am not leasing. They lie neglected in the foreign box, set upon the top shelf of the closet, enthralling my thoughts like a bomb, the promise of its detonator carelessly misplaced.
The shoes are like Dorothy’s silver slippers in The Wizard of Oz; they are imbued with the property of magical transportation. Physically, however, I really don’t think you could get much further in types-- but maybe this is just a lack of imagination on my part, a failure in the undoubtedly artful transforming of Baum’s story into a more prurient fantasy, (which I’m sure has probably been done in a number of pornos, considering the strength of that particular story’s cultural canonization). I see a pair of strappy, silver high-heels, so worn that the inner soles have been loosed like a couple of canines’ tongues that now loll, wagging in a glaze of pale moonlight, beyond the jurisdiction of calendars. They are tattered, scuffed, untouched save for my memory, so, on second thought, they do happen to be fictitious in a sense, since it’s just the reality I concoct here, now, beginning in my head with the language I’ve snagged.
I listen to them clacking on the pavement, headed in to the summer night, neon buzzing and flashing, the movie theater marquis shining upon the lacquered toenails and the silver rings, that encircle several of her little, delicate digits, glinting.
How much of memory is made up? Enough of it’s make-believe, anyway. The dress goes up, arms lifted, yanking it overhead. The garment shuttles across the bedroom, lands upon the chair at the desk where she writes the Great Novel, loved and sweated out through months and years (but at the moment everything literary is forgotten, except, maybe, its raw materials; what is literature, after all, but the heart wrestling itself over some other?). The shoes guide her over the brown carpet, her movements soft and silent, her body an extension of the silver shoes. Silver becomes the only color in the semi-sweet darkness which has flooded the apartment. The world has vacated the premises outside the window. The silver shoes have sovereignty over existence for an hour or more.
The shoes’ heels dig into my chest, tenderizing muscles as I hover within striking distance, the cobra risen from a snake charmer’s basket. Her knees are bent in the air, my presence a ballast to her pleasure or violence or whatever it is she has when she’s worked herself into this state while wearing her silver shoes. The shoes threaten to draw blood, her thighs are a vise, and during the frenzy of movement the little buckles on the shoes introduce themselves to my backside, the sharp edges scraping my ass as I buck into her.
There is a camera flash and the picture is sent. There are the shoes, her feet, her ankles heading out via post office, changing hands from city to city. In my apartment I sit, holding the photograph taken on an anonymous digital camera, a smoking cigarette cocked between the right corner of my trembling lips. I sit on the bed, dumbstruck, wondering over the ransom. In the dingy, toxic lighting of my tenement, the shoes pictured against a hardwood floor exude an elegance which my dumb fingers cannot begin to explicate as I drag them along the lineaments of each strap and curve in the image. A spire of ash from the cigarette falls upon my lap. The shoes seem to ask: ‘well, don’t you miss us now, huh?’ And the answer is yes, a resounding fucking yes. I drop the cigarette butt to the carpeted floor, feeling the unimportance of ashtrays, the sheer absurdity of anything, now that I can think only about a pair of silver shoes.
The coffee is getting cold while I think about the impossibility of making the ransom. Not even holidays and every other weekend with them. Ah, well. Maybe it’s better this way. Just a picture. I won’t have to think about age or wear and tear.