truthfront

Category: madness

  • Scars

    I watched her fingers trace the angles of my chest down to my abdomen, deep ridges of muscle and bone and patches of coarse hair and skin darkened in thick tracks of scars. I watched her hand grow timid about the stained edges, as if touching the scars would bring back the memory of what had caused them, as if my seeing them each day and feeling about them with my own fingers wasn’t memory enough.

    What happened, she said.

    I thought of lying, about how I fell drunk from a window and landed on some rocks or broken glass or maybe about how I was in a fiery accident or a knife fight and needed surgery to re-stitch the deeply shorn tissue. Something that might make her nod or smile or laugh and then forget it all. But she was gentle and seemed forgiving and so I told her the truth. She listened and was silent for a while and her fingers grew still and rigid on my skin and I regretted telling her almost immediately.

    Are you serious, she said.

    After a few minutes she rose and walked to the bathroom and I breathed the warm air of her departure on the sheets. There was artificial innocence and deep acceptance and years of hurt in her scent. She was like most every other woman. Light framed the closed door, a symmetry of knife edges in the dark. I heard the toilet flush and then the hiss of the faucet. She opened the door and stood in the frame, half-lit and exposed to the darkness, her nakedness stark and emblematic and teetering between the shadow of here and now and the verity of past light.

    I’d better be going, she said.

    She gathered her clothes about her and put them on methodically but gracefully, like I wasn’t even in the room. As if it wasn’t my room. As if she had done this a thousand times in a thousand different rooms just as I was certain she had. The clothes had come off in haste, without ceremony, the sole neutralizing obstacle to will. Now she stepped into them just as quickly and callously but with robotic calculation, like the clothes were a requirement and nothing more, as if they reminded her of her life before she took them off and how this new life was exactly like the old life and nothing like she thought it would be or perhaps hoped it would be. The clothes reminded her that nothing had changed, nothing would ever change. The brief nakedness between lives was her hurried respite from herself, from both lives.

    It was nice meeting you, she said. Call me some time.

    She sat and the edge of the bed sagged beneath her. She reached into her purse and rummaged through it and I wondered if the bathroom light was bright enough to kill moods and strains of moods or if it would even stop there and I could hear the wind whipping through the city outside my window but I could hear nothing more save for the screaming of bedsprings as she stood up and put a folded piece of paper with her phone number inside it on my nightstand. She crawled on the bed toward me and kissed me softly on the cheek and then the side of the mouth and for the first time I understood her intense sadness and its brutal dominion over her young life.

    She walked out the door and shut it softly behind her and I could still smell her pale nomadic skin and her scalp and her breath woven into threads of the moment now lost to us. Her ghost haunted me through the night and so my dreams reverted in myriad to that lonely face at the far table in the coffee shop, that dark, worm-like body of abandon atop mine, shivering with the brief delight of self-sustaining sovereignty of soul. I closed my eyes and traced the scars on my stomach and torso with sudden longing for I never even thought to search her body.

  • Labrynth

    The piece of paper was a perfect white rectangle on the desk in front of me, an empty shape too intimidating to breach. I tried to think, to collapse myself into thought the way I so often do, communicate the credence of my ideas through swift and elegant pen strokes, angry letters and words, sentences and jutting symbols of association. Maybe it was the shape of the blank white sheet obstructing me, its precision so taut and unforgiving, deconstructing the creative process into pure barren silence. Or maybe it was her, the woman to whom the ideas were directed, my love for her so sightless and violent in nature that all rational language died prematurely in my mind prior to its exposure to the influence of the pen.

    My dearest Brooklynne . . .

    No, this is wrong, this is all wrong. This type of beginning is an instant showcase of hollowness. I never speak to her like this, nobody alive speaks like this. If it is practical sentiment I want to relate, defragment these complex thoughts into common meaning, I must find a practical vehicle with which to exchange them.

    Brooklynne, I cannot . . .

    A negative proposition at the forefront sets a malignant tone for the entire letter. I must begin with an authoritative propositional phrase, an affirmation of love. I must lean on the theme of our love, our history together, and push the apology aside until later in the letter, when nothing but an apology would make sense in its reinforcement of the aforementioned.

    *

    I tried to stop thinking and went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine, and then another, a formal release of mental strain, drinking down the crystalline purity of deflation. Then I went back to the study and wrote the letter, discarding the burdens of message and meaning alike, diving headlong into the chasm of blank whiteness, my thoughts stretched outward in time and place until the entire letter was suddenly finished an hour later, lines and curves painted on the page exactly as I wanted them, truth without restraint, love in collusion with purpose. Then I sealed the letter in a blank white envelope and dropped it in the garbage.

    Who reads these letters, I wondered. There must be a thousand letters in this world written each day that just get thrown away, the messages sealed and signed, adoration and violence and meaninglessness perfumed upon the pages. Someone reads these letters, the evidence of our irresolution, our frail whims. The moment we dispose of our ideas and rear them to the heap, the moment we place the neat folded parchment in the trash and expel it from our conscience, someone on the other end is already waiting for it, a reader far more astute than we imagine, the sole cultivator of our discarded feelings and suspended emotions. By not delivering them to the intended recipients we feel as though we’ve rendered the meanings in the letters harmless, we’ve absolved ourselves of our reactionary blunders. But someone finds them and reads them and thrusts meaning back onto the messages. Maybe this person finds pleasure in what they read, as though each hypothetically failed correspondence is a valued discovery, an unexpected unearthing into another’s private life, a magnified examination into the social machine of our culture. The person who finds these letters and reads them keeps them for self-edification. The words on the page and the page in the envelope are raised up to semi-iconic status in their lives, brief but genuine illuminations into the world of private conversations to which they otherwise wouldn’t have been included. He or she who reads the letters finds it much more difficult to discard them than the person who wrote them. For the man or woman who finds the letters and digests their content, their subtle meanings painted in abstract and concrete idiom, these letters are the battery of their operative hopefulness. A line wrought from love and sentiment becomes their personal shining juxtaposition with disenchantment. The pain splayed across the page, the heart-shorn emotion from a love askew, the tender eulogy and the apologetic logic, these are the most vivid and tactile reflections for the reader. The letters were of course written by strangers with the intended audience as strangers and yet the reader feels as though he or she knows them both. The letters strip away the mystery and put a profile to the writers, they put a garbled and imaginary face to the name at the top of the page, the salutation at the bottom. The reader invents living people from the names because the written emotive force is too profound and real to keep them from identifying humanity with the language. These letters are at the vanguard of everything that makes humanity such a tremendous communicative current, they unite us in our solitude and mystery, these letters bind the likes of community and individual, they fully replace the very things the writer of the letters was trying to avoid, that subtle inward heartbreak of not being understood, that feeling that the words didn’t, and possibly couldn’t accurately navigate the complicated labyrinth of feelings within. For the lucky or reluctant reader, the letters are more descriptive and enlightening than the writer could have imagined. This is the only language either of them could ever possibly understand. Some will tell us to bury our pain, others will instruct us to express it. But this is really the only way to learn, the proper way to heal from our emotive wounds. If only we were instructed to recreate our pain in language, construct our meditative ailments out of idea and paper in letter form and then ceremoniously place our arrangements in the garbage rather than the mailbox, this world would be a world of deep committed understanding and empathy. It would be a world where the letter was exalted above all else save the human condition.

    *

    Back in the kitchen I finished the bottle of wine and shattered it on the linoleum floor. After careful consideration, I decided not to remove my clothes and roll around on the wreckage.

  • Muck

    I stretched my hand down to the milky puddle of muck and felt inside. I was expecting to feel bones, soaked and broken shards of human life. There was nothing.

    The sun stung my bare back and the back of my neck and birds harmonized on some nearby perch. I could imagine them gliding through the sky, endless blue tapestry of summer, chasing each other in pursuit of love or sustenance or just because they were programmed to. I felt around in the white water, my arm disappearing at the wrist, then the elbow. There were things floating on the surface, brown and black fragments of revolving life blown from the margins of the city. I watched the fragments rise up from the murky depth and then roll over, dropping down out of sight again. My hand was shaped into a claw down there somewhere in the unknown.

    “What is that?”

    I turned my head up toward the sun and saw the kid. He had bright blonde hair and his face was caked with dirt. He stood before me squinting from the white puddle to me, then back to the puddle again. He sucked on the pinkie finger of his right hand.

    “Huh? What is that?” he said.

    “What is what.”

    “The puddle.”

    “It’s a puddle, kid.”

    “Why is it white?”

    “Get out of here,” I said, and turned back to the white muck. I sloshed my hand around inside and the puddle began to foam about the edges. Little white bubbles, frozen pockets of air and dirt, a ready-made mixture of cellular utopia. There were no bones, no death, no proof of life. The water did not hold my reflection. I looked back and saw that the kid was still there.

    “This puddle,” I told him. “There’s nothing in it.”

    I pulled my arm out and stuck the other arm in.

    “Go get a stick,” I said. The kid ran off to find a stick. I saw him run to the far end of the alley to a small green hill with two trees standing stark against the deep cyanic sky. I turned back to the puddle and immersed both arms down into it. There was nothing.

    “Here,” the kid said, handing me a small stick.

    “Bigger. I need a bigger stick. Longest stick you can find.”

    “This is the longest stick I could find.”

    “Find a longer one,” I said. “There’s got to be a longer one.”

    The kid ran off again. The sun beat down on my back and car tires made ripping sounds on the asphalt on the other side of the alley, in another world and time. A short cool breeze whipped between the buildings and chilled my skin just as the kid returned. He brought me what looked like half of a tree.

    “Where the hell did you get that?”

    “It was in the dumpster.”

    “Give it to me.”

    I extracted my arms from the milky murk and took the giant stick and looked at it, made sure it was sturdy. It must have been eight feet long. I told the kid to step back and then I began to dip the stick into the water, inches at a time, watching it vanish slowly into the white, one then two feet, a void unlike anything else, three feet submerged, a bottomless alien well of whiteness placed here not by man, four feet and still disappearing, and I heard the kid inhale sharply, dumbstruck with awe and curiosity and wonder, and then the stick was almost gone, almost swallowed to my hands, lost down in that white water muck, the consumer of souls and dreams and life and death alike.

    “What is that thing, man?” the kid said. “How deep does it go?”

    I dropped the stick all the way into the water and stood back, waiting for it to come flying back out. The alley and the surrounding streets were silent.

    “Should I go get the cops?”

    I took a look at the kid and then down to the end of the alley. A woman held a plastic grocery bag and stood behind her dog as it crapped against one of the buildings. I looked up to the haunting blue endlessness and heard a siren screeching a few blocks away like a baby coming into the world. I told the kid yeah, go get the cops.

    I watched him run down the alley and hurdle the pile of dog shit and turn the corner and then I took off my sandals and placed them neatly next to me. I put one foot down into the warm white mystery and pulled it out. Then I looked around me and dove into the puddle head first, like a reawakening into a deep cathartic dream where no color exists but to free the mind of fear.

  • Untitled

    When the rain had left she cast her eyes down to a puddle at her feet, her own shimmery reflection. Blue and gray evening sky, air sharpened to cool guillotine clarity. She felt the weight of the world slip away from her as the sky opened up, clouds painted pink and orange with god’s metaphysical exhaust. She watched herself in the water, disfigured by the truth of the moment, and she realized a particular energy flowing up through her, those frozen moments of pure identity, what it means to be alive when the sun sets after a storm and the birds come out to confront their melodious reckoning.

    The cars sat stationary behind her, a line of idling cars stretched back to the curve in the road, waiting for her. She heard them humming in her head and looked up, patience in uniform and an acknowledgment of something greater than themselves, their pocketed moments of scrutiny. Everything made sense. Time collapsed around her, the mirrored figure, the stationary procession of cars, their spellbound drivers, the sky, Earth, the rhythmic pulse of universal energy meeting at the rendezvous of flawed humanity. She took a final glance into the puddle and walked away, watching the drivers steel their machines onward, throbbing vein of continuation.

  • Pretender

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    I opened the door halfway and peered into the shadowed hallway, rows of closed doors disappearing into the darkness, rain splattering on the roof above. I came to investigate the mysterious scratching noise but it was gone, nothing but silence and dust in the hall and so I closed the door, my back pressed against it. Solid shafts of white moonlight shot through the alley window into my kitchen. My feet were cold on the linoleum. 

    Those were the days and nights I pretended at life. I wasn’t actually living. I heard noises that weren’t really there and saw things that were hundreds of miles away or thousands of years in the past. I was a sickly Roman guard in the time of Augustus or I was a truck mechanic in Barstow in the mid-eighties, drinking cheap whiskey and threatening my wife with a butcher knife. I was an apprentice Panther in Chicago the night the cops stormed in and killed Fred Hampton in his sleep. I had all these dreams, I was living vicariously in my sleep, breathing through unfamiliar faces with a stranger’s lungs, seeing things as though I had adopted their histories and experiences and somehow suspended my own. I believed I had control over this. 

    I walked to the bathroom and swallowed another pill, water from a glass on the dusty sink. A brief glance in the mirror was all I needed to know I’d rather not see the real man, the real face. 

    I went back to the bedroom and slipped in between icy sheets, wincing at the muscular contraction in my back and legs. I settled in and lay on my stomach, the spare pillow tucked tightly in the crook of my arm, rhythm of breath, mouth twisted into a beautiful crescent-shaped lie. I wondered what I was going to be next, where I was going to live, under what circumstances I was going to die. I wondered if I would experience love and what type of woman it would be  and what time would feel like on my skin and I didn’t think about my real life, laden with taciturn responsibility. I ignored the bills that had been collecting for weeks in my real life mailbox and I didn’t care when I had last eaten real life food. What concerned me ultimately was descending back into some parallel existence I could occupy without the needless truths and trivialities of the life I really had but never wanted. 

    I had this idea, I told this friend of mine that mental waves are just like radio waves, man, only they travel on a different plane in a separate dimension, all around us. They’re out there. Just like radio and light waves, our thoughts can be intercepted if there is something to receive them. Something that recognizes the data and catches it in flight. I was sure of this. It was my personal scientific experiment. I was the receptor, the gifted one, my life completely fulfilled in subordination to the lives of others. I was the ultimate spiritual medium. I wanted to unstitch time and experience history first hand, catalog the memories, document the universe as the stories were told to me by the people who actually lived them. It would be an endeavor unrivaled in the history of the universe. I told my friend that ever since people had unlocked the mystery of the solar system and defined the hazy and ubiquitous machinery of time, they’d been trying to subvert it. 

    This was the premise. All those other lives were so much better than mine. I was enthralled by the magnificent uncertainty of it all. Each time I swallowed another pill and laid to rest I was frightened by the possibility of not knowing what to expect, where I would end up. 

    I was just happy because I didn’t have to be me. 

    * 

    There’s a cock crowing somewhere nearby, darkness, the smell of animals, dirt. Lying on my back, thick hay needles stabbing my ass, my legs. The sound of running water, chill of morning, eyes adjusting to thin beams of light fighting through cracks in the wall. I’m in a barn. I look around, stand up, acknowledge my nakedness, the wide door opens, giant rectangle of sunshine exploding inward, blinding me. 

    “Well, well,” a man’s voice says. My hands in front of my face, eyes scrunched to fight off the excruciating light. Large silhouetted figures of people. “If it ain’t the great pre-ten-dor.” 

    There is women’s laughter and I feel suddenly vulnerable, exposed. I drop a concealing hand to my manhood but the organ feels too large, it’s humongous, ridiculously grotesque. Violence and death are present in the room, living beings, tangible shadows lurking. 

    “Do you think this man went and got a horse’s dick, or this horse went and got a man’s body?” the man asks the women. He’s moving toward me, holding something long, thin. A rifle or shotgun. The women laugh again and there’s an aura of diamond fire about the man’s silhouette. He wields considerable power, celestial power, and I know without seeing him complete that he’s a traveler, he’s a receptor like me, a dreamer but a killer, perhaps something even more grand. Wanton and unscrupulous. 

    “Horse-man,” the killer says softly, moving toward me, the giant gun in his hands. I can’t see his face. “You should be fuckin’ horses. Not women in this ‘ere county.” 

    He keeps moving toward me and the women loiter in the background, squealing with girl’s delight. The man approaches nearer, nearer, and I’m still standing naked and bare with one hand shielding my eyes and the other hand hovering around my giant snaking sex and I have a sudden lucid understanding of the man’s nature and his influence on history, the spirit of the murder-at-large, transient violence for all occasions and without discrimination, the embodiment of darkness masquerading as brilliantine light. 

    “Go on, now,” he says over his shoulder and the women take a final lasting peek at the freak standing naked in the barn. They leave in quiet reluctance, two dark figures shuffling out of the light, out of sight. 

    “What are you?” I ask the man, and my voice is something like a man’s but not really. There’s an animal resonance in it, a throaty tin shriek boiling up from my chest, the words barely discernible as they leave my mouth. I realize the sound of running water has stopped.

    The man walks in close and his head eclipses the bright light and I can finally see his face and I drop my hand from my eyes. It’s the same face from all dreams, eternal in its youth, a study in perfection, a million arcane and familiar likenesses of everyone that I’ve ever known, the face of those select scenes from all the books ever written in time, the man from the light, the same face that paints every decimated body  hanging on every crucifix in every building and revelation, the same eyes of the glittering mad as they pay reverence to it. 

    “Forget it,” I say, and I close my eyes and the man’s light swallows me entire, the life of the transient dream traveler, my real life as it was lived without moderation or truth of spirit.

  • Untitled

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    Throttled awake by nightmares, these powerful dreams command my participation. Dreams of ridicule and exclusion. Nightmares of a severely practical nature. They descend upon me like latent fire and floodwater, frightening in their tangibility, their believability. I experience them fully and lie awake ruminating once again my precise role in this life. I ponder the nature of the nightmares, their purpose in my world. Have they been born to thrust me into some sort of action or inaction? Fear is a mechanism of creation, a shield against failure. My mind is sending me signals, frightening me out of this trap where ideas fall short, where indolence and stunted creativity are hell because the turning point is always right at my fingertips. Like a stutterer burdened to defend his life with a torturous oratory, the ideas clear and righteous in his mind, the words webs of quicksand on his lips.

    I tell myself to think of the nightmares as a safety net. They leech the sleep away and drain the mind of energy but at the same time resuscitate the deepest channels of recent creative void. This is having a new toy and no batteries to operate it. What results is a haggard presence in this world, a deep commitment unfulfilled, always searching for that next clear idea, that next deep sleep.

  • Dreams

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    I don’t know, doctor. Things just aren’t right. I think the overall problem is compounded by these dreams. 

    So you’ve been having dreams. What type of dreams? 

    Well …  I guess I really can’t describe them. I mean, I’ve never tried to describe them. I probably couldn’t even describe them to myself … 

    You can try here. Just relax, lie down. Close your eyes. Think of yourself as resting easily. Think of the world as black, your body melding into the blackness. Think of the universe as a giant sponge-like void. Think of yourself as water infiltrating the sponge. 

    Infiltrating the sponge? 

    Infiltrating the sponge. Try to control your breathing. Focus on your breathing. Slow. Deep. Easy. 

    This is helping. 

    I know. That’s what it’s supposed to do. I’m a doctor. Think of the world as a giant mound of ice. Think of yourself as a flame, melting into it. 

    Okay. 

    Now try to tell me about these dreams. 

    It’s like I’m in the future, I don’t know when. I’m married to some woman, but I never see her. There’s just this sort of implicit acknowledgment that I’m married to her. 

    You’re not married in the waking world? 

    I’m not. But I’m married in these dreams. 

    How often do you have these dreams? 

    Every time I try to sleep. 

    Are you having one now? 

    No. I’m not sleeping. I don’t think I’m sleeping. Am I sleeping? 

    Tell me about these dreams. 

    Well, there’s this woman. 

    You think you’re married to her. 

    Yes. And I think she’s plotting to murder me. I don’t know how I know this. I’m paranoid in my own home because I’m certain she’s trying to murder me. 

    Are there children around the house? 

    No. 

    What is the house like? 

    It’s just a house. 

    What does it look like? How many rooms does it have? Is it in the city or the country? 

    It’s the house I live in now. A two bedroom one-level in the suburbs. 

    And there’s this woman you’ve never seen that you think is your wife and she’s trying to murder you. 

    She hasn’t actually tried yet. But she’s plotting. I’m sure of it. This is really hard to explain. 

    Go on. 

    And so I lock myself in whatever room I’m in. In any room in the house. To keep her out. I go to the kitchen to cook something or get a drink of orange juice. I lock all the doors I can. There’s a hallway opening in the kitchen that has no door. I turn to face the opening, always within reach of some weapon. The kitchen is the safest even though it can’t quite lock me in completely. All sorts of instruments of death in the kitchen. One can always feel most at ease in a kitchen, even without a crazy wife plotting to kill them. 

    So she’s crazy. 

    I don’t know if she’s crazy or tall or fat. I’ve never met her. I say she’s crazy because crazy people plot. This is what crazy people do. 

    This isn’t true. But please go on about the dreams. 

    I always feel most vulnerable in the bathroom. I feel exposed. No deadly weapons in the bathroom to protect myself. Just a little razor I use for shaving. There are two doors, I lock them both tight. I can’t hear her walking or laughing or breathing but I know she’s there. I can feel her on the other side of one door or another, standing with her eyes closed, plotting. She’s waiting for me to come out of the bathroom because she’s not going in after me. She’s holding a knife. She’s very calm and patient. She will wait until I die just so she can kill me. 

    How do you know it’s a knife? 

    I just know. It’s a giant knife. It shines, even in the dark. Like it gives off a certain amount of light. 

    To be cut is the most invasive of violent acts. Body raped by steel. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    How do you leave these rooms in your dreams? How do you get up the courage to face whatever is on the other side of the door? 

    I don’t. That’s the thing. I wake up because I’m so frightened and tired. I’m tired of waiting to be killed. I’m tired because I wake up, because I have no courage to face her. Each time I try to sleep is a different room, same wife. I wake up still stuck in whatever room I’m in. 

    By not facing our fears we allow time to control us. 

    Sometimes I wake up and I’m holding something tightly. I’m clutching handfuls of bed sheets. I’m holding a book. The pages are creased and torn in my hands. One afternoon I woke up holding a knife that I must have got from the kitchen. I had no prior history of somnambulism. It was a huge knife. I could have killed myself in my sleep. 

    Dreams of violence and paranoia as inward manifestations of our primary urges.

    I always wake up sweating, dying of thirst. 

    Our brain matter absorbs the body’s nutrients and uses them to sustain our doom. 

    These dreams are in the future, doctor. I don’t know how I know. I just know. 

    The future frightens us. We cannot control it. We are fascinated by the violence around us. 

    I want to wake up, doctor. I want to sleep without being frightened all the time. I’m so tired. I want to live in a world where the future doesn’t matter, not even for a microsecond. I want to be able to dream peacefully, forget my backward flaws. I’m tired of stretching out on the crux of this world. I’d rather operate as a vigorous fixture of my own rules. 

    The world we know is created by us. It’s not the real world. It’s the world within the larger world. 

    I can’t sleep during the night because it’s too dark. I can’t sleep at day because the noise blinds me. 

    When we fail to mesh with the world we create, we lose all identity. 

    The strangest thing is that I’m deeply attracted to this woman. My wife who’s plotting to murder me. I see myself making love to her facelessness. She’s silent and holding a giant knife, the shiny point scratches my temple while we screw. 

    Desire is destruction. Our most primitive truth is not to reproduce, but to destroy ourselves. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    Every conflict forces us to either run or stay and fight. 

    I think of what type of offspring we would create. Me and this mad wife. I wonder if one night or day I will wake up and I’ll be on top of her, strangling. I won’t be able to disprove her existence. I wonder if our children will plot with her or against her. I wonder which of the forces of good and evil they’ll adopt. 

    Our identity lies in the liquid shape of our actions. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

     We are the sum of our dreams. Take all the maddening irregularities and add them up. 

    I’m in the bathroom again. I’m locked in. 

    We cannot hide from the truth. 

    The walls are bare, doctor. Pure white. I smell gasoline. 

    Take all the lessons about life you’ve ever learned and watch them burn. 

    The mirror is rimmed with fire, doctor. 

    Our strongest moments of clarity reside in complete submission. 

    So much blood in the tub. 

    We see what we never thought we’d see when we simply allow it to take shape before us. 

    My throat is dry. I’m having trouble breathing. 

    When we are too afraid to kill ourselves we thrust our imaginations into guilt. 

    I’m bleeding, doctor. My throat. 

    Our lives flow away from us in pigmented thickness. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    We spend our entire lives speaking to ourselves. From idea to thought. From thought to language. 

    I’m dying, doctor. 

    Our voices carry eternally. They are the tokens we keep. They add substance to our memories. A whisper becomes a breeze in the cold night across the galaxy. 

    I think I’m falling asleep, doctor. 

    Death is a state of eternal subconscious activity. I think you’re cured. For now.

  • Holes

     

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    I killed the last drops of whiskey in my flask and reached over to the passenger seat for my little red beacon. I put it on the dash and flipped the switch. I didn’t need it, though. Around these parts people know me well enough to know that if I’m following them close enough for long enough I mean to pull them over. I hid the flask away in the darkness of the glove box, pulled out the .38 and hid that in my back pocket.

    The rusted white pickup in front of me slowed to a crawl and then stopped on the shoulder of Highway Six, a one-lane asphalt road and the only road in and out of our little desert town. I turned off the cruiser and took the keys out of the ignition and eased my way up to the young man in the pickup, my hand at my holstered Desert Eagle.

    Sweat had soaked completely through my Stetson and dripped from the lid. My khaki shirt was heavy with moisture, my badge leaning on my heart and glistening in the dry sun. The young man sat idly in the pickup.

    “Hiya, Randy” I said. “We got us a scorcher here, yes indeed.” Randy didn’t say anything. He looked straight ahead through his windshield and the heat vapors dancing on the hood of his truck. His knuckles were white from clutching the steering wheel. He was a good kid.

    “What’re ya doin out here, Randy?” I asked. “I mean, where you headed?”

    “Just drivin’, sheriff,” he said, and swallowed hard. “Nowhere in particulars.”

    “You mind steppin’ out of the vehicle for me, son?” I asked. It was a bold move, but I figured Randy wouldn’t question it. No one around these parts ever questions what I tell them to do. They trust me. I guess that’s the best part about being a sheriff out here. The only thing I ever have to worry about is getting re-elected, and I hardly even have to worry about that.

    Randy stepped out of the truck with his hands at his sides. I could tell he wanted more than anything to hide them in his pockets.

    “Now I’m gonna search you, Randy,” I said. “Don’t make any quick movements, or anything.” I patted his waist and pant legs and searched his ankles and then his back. He wasn’t carrying anything. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.

    “So,” I said, “What did you say you was doin’ out here, Randy?” He put his hands in his pockets and took them out just as quickly. He was jittery, almost like he was hiding something.

    “Just drivin’, sir,” he repeated, and dropped his head.

    “You wouldn’t be tryin’ to get out of town, would you, son?” I asked. A hot breeze ruffled his blond hair. “You wouldn’t be runnin’ from somethin’, would ya?”

    “No sir,” he said, looking me in the face. He could probably see his reflection in my sunshades. He shook his head in small sideways shudders. Somewhere off in the distance, a vulture dropped to the ground in a spiral.

    “Have a seat over there,” I said, pointing to the dirt shoulder behind his pickup, “I’m gonna search your truck.”

    “What’s this about, sheriff?”

    “Just have a seat, son,” I said kindly, and Randy did exactly as I told him.

    I walked around the front of the truck looking through the windshield as though something interested me. Randy watched my every move. I went around to the driver’s side and leaned in, not letting Randy see me pull the .38 from my pocket and place it under the seat. I let it sit there a minute and glanced back at Randy sitting on the hot asphalt. I reached over and opened the glove box and closed it, then dallied a little bit underneath the seat again.

    “Well, I’ll be doggoned,” I said, raising the .38 with the very tips of my fingers. Randy looked at it like he had seen it before. “What’s all this?”

    “It looks like a pistol, sheriff,” he said, and swallowed.

    “I believe it is a pistol, Randy,” I said, the sun burning the skin of my hands. “A .38. What’re you doing with a .38, son?”

    “I’m not doin’ anything with a .38, sheriff,” he said. “It ain’t mine.”

    “Well, it was in your pickup,” I said, dropping the pistol into my front pocket and looking back into the cab of the truck. Randy just sat on the road squinting in the sun, his hands clasped in front of him. He cleared his throat.

    “That’s because you just put it there, sheriff,” he said. A lone cloud drifted over the sun, blanketing the desert in pale shadow.

    “Pardon me, son?” I said, tilting my head. I took a step toward him.

    “I said the pistol was in my pickup because you just put it there, sheriff,” he said. “You know I never carry a gun.” He shifted his weight uncomfortably on the burning ground.

    The cloud passed and the sun shot back into the sky. I hadn’t expected him to say what he had, but I pressed him anyway.

    “If I were you I’d watch my tone,” I said. “You’re speaking to a citizen of the law.”

    “I know who I’m speaking to,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

    I kept silent for a moment, thinking of my next move. I wanted to scare the kid, and he was obviously scared. But I hadn’t expected him to handle everything so well. Suddenly the weight of my clothes, my belt, my hat, all of it was too much to bear in the heat. I was tired. My mouth was dry, my lungs were melting. I knew what I had to do, but I just didn’t know if I’d have the strength.

    “You know,” I said, standing in front of Randy, looking down at him, my hands on my hips, “Tracy Cavanaugh was shot to death last night with a .38.” Randy didn’t say anything. “And I’d be willing to bet that a ballistics test would prove that this here pistol,” I said, patting the .38 in my chest pocket, “is the guilty little party.”

    Randy looked up at my face, the sun beating him down, and then he dropped his gaze to the pavement between his legs. He was looking for something, maybe strength, maybe some sort of cowboy courage that only exists in movies or books, or in real cowboys.

    “And I’d also be willing to wager you was leaving town, Randy. But see, you can’t run from the law, son. And I happen to be the law in these parts and guilty men can’t outrun me. I been chasin’ ‘em down longer than you been alive.”

    “That’s not so, sheriff,” he said. “And you know it.”

    “I know that you was the last one seen with her last night, before she got killed.”

    “I walked her home from Dora’s tavern, that’s true,” he said. “But I wouldn’t ever kill her. She was my friend. We talked the whole way home about how she wanted to leave town on account of her bein’ afraid for her life.”

    “What was she so afraid of in our little town, Randy?”

    “She said she was afraid of you, sheriff.”

    I dropped my gaze as another cloud shrouded the sun. I hadn’t thought this encounter would be so difficult. But I was willing to take it as far as I had to.

    “She said you been touchin’ her and things for a long time, sheriff. Since she was just a baby. She said the last time you did it would be your last because she was gonna kill you dead herself.”

    I took a deep breath and drew it out long, listening to the hiss of air escaping my lungs. I noticed my teeth were gritting hard. The sun lit up the blighted earth again, burned holes on my body.

    “That just shows how stupid you are, son,” I said, staring him down, trying to break him. “You let a dumb girl like Tracy Cavanaugh warp your simple little mind with lies just so she could get what she wanted from you? Now look where you are. You’re alone, son. Like you always will be.”

    I turned my back on Randy and spat on the highway, listening to the warm breeze shift in the canyon. I turned back around.

    “You didn’t even fuck her, did you, Randy? You never even tasted that sweet little bitch, I bet you didn’t. I bet you whimpered like a coward when that little slut made her move on you. You didn’t know what to do. You’re just a stupid boy, son. You ain’t no man at all.”

    “Don’t say that, sheriff.”

    “You probably couldn’t even get your little pecker up, could you, son? You probably ran and cried like a baby when you saw her sweet little bits.”

    “Shut up,” he said, infuriated, and started to stand, hands clenched at his sides.

    “She wasn’t even that good, boy,” I said. “She wasn’t nothin’ like your mama, all ass and juicy as all hell. Your mama was a real trophy, son. Your mama was the rose garden on the other side of the world.”

    Randy stood up and stepped toward me. His face was the color of blood.

    “Easy, son,” I said, and put my hand out. My other hand was at the holstered Desert Eagle at my belt. “There’s a lot of holes in this here desert. Many of ‘em I dug myself. Don’t make me dig another one today. Not in this heat.”

    He took a step back but he was still angry. A few veins pronounced themselves in his neck. His chest heaved with quick, angry breaths.

    “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I told him. “Just turn around and put your hands up in the air. I’m going to put the handcuffs on you so’s we can talk like adults. That’s all it is, two grown men talking on the side of the highway. There’s a way we can both get out of this with our clothes on and our hands clean.”

    He looked at me severely, with something like hatred, and didn’t move at all. I gritted my teeth and stepped toward him.

    “God dammit, son, do what I say!”

    Randy turned slowly around and put his hands above his head. The poor, stupid boy. I walked up to him like I was going to cuff him, but instead I pulled the .38 from my pocket, put it to his temple, and blasted his memories into the hot desert air. I wiped my prints from the gun and applied his to it, and then I looked over the scene to make sure it was clean enough. I walked back to my patrol car to call Ned, the deputy back at the station.

    “Ned, you copy?” After about thirty seconds Ned answered. He sounded like he’d been sleeping at the desk again.

    “G’head, sheriff.”

    “I got bad news, Ned. Randy Parker just done shot himself.”

    “Where at, sheriff?”

    “Just off the Six, past mile marker one-twelve,” I said. “I pulled him over for speedin’ and he was actin’ jittery. I had him step out the car, you know, to see if he’d been drinkin’, and he walked behind his pickup while I searched it for booze. Pretty soon I heard a shot. Scared the bejeezus outta me, Ned. He did it with a little snub-nosed .38. I don’t know why, the poor bastard.”

    “You say a .38, sheriff?”

    “Yeah, Ned. Suicided himself with a .38 right on the side of the road. Damned saddest thing.”

    “Tracy Cavanaugh was killed with a .38, right?”

    I paused.

    “Well, I’ll be go to hell,” I said. “That’s right.”

    “That might explain it,” he said. “I’ll send the cavalry.”

    I switched off the radio and took off my Stetson in the shade of the car. I almost smiled because having to dig another hole in this God awful heat probably would have killed me.