Route 28 Dreamscape. We Are The Dead.
Dusk. Leaving Price Chopper car park, pizza from Cugino’s in the back for Dusty, another late pick up. The passenger door of the truck in front opens, shuts, flaps open again. The truck stutters, slows, as an elderly woman begins to dangle out; jet black hair, pink tracksuit, one arm clinging to the door, the other making wide sweeping motions to a non-existent audience in an empty amphitheater. Eyes like saucers. A diva in her final aria, dying Cio-Cio San. Her foot snags the tarmac and she slow-motion unfurls, a lost bag of laundry, into a heap on the asphalt. It’s all wrong. Everything stops. Everything’s sideways, stranded, in the wrong place. She’s the adulteress before the Pharisees, imploring us not to let him take her. But she doesn’t know his name. She’s that woman in the John Prine song, her knees nailed to some drugstore parking lot. Calling everybody Carl. She’s somebody’s mother. But this is ugly, mean.
“She’s got Alzheimer’s,” he says. “Come on Jennifer, let’s go home.”
“He’s horrible,” she mouths, Munch-eyed, like a mime.
“Get me arrested, Jennifer, who’s gonna feed your dogs?”
I call 911 and stand around waiting for nothing to happen.
“I’m sorry,” I say, to nobody in particular.
“Hey man, I get it,” he says, “you don’t know me.”
Two sets of troopers screech in like the opening titles of a 70’s cop show and I slouch towards the highway in the dark, flashing lights in my mirror, leaving the wreckage to those with the soul to mend it. It can happen anywhere. But it happens here.
‘For if heartaches were commercials,
We’d all be on TV.’
Woke from dreaming slinky of the Dead. Is that wrong? Surely the opposite? The ultimate compliment, them caught in amber, like ice, like fire. She would run from the bedroom across the landing in just her knickers, Marks & Sparks, her arm flailing like a pirate’s cutlass, as she shrieked ‘No looking, Mister Jellybean!’ The slightly younger sister of your first real love. All backcombed, out late, funny, hungover. One time she was standing at the bottom of the stairs and I came up behind her, put my arms around her, like I was going to wrestle her to the ground. Around her ribs, close, y’know, making that bullying brother ape sound, the kind of thing we’d do then I’d chase her and she’d scream. But this time she stayed there. And I stopped being rough and just held her. All warm, the swell of her breasts, and the silence of her accelerated heartbeat on my arms, and mine too. Like a spider’s gossamer thread, it hung and became the sudden shock of bliss, the kind of thing that just happens; and that I now understand to be a finger prodded through the curtain of the infinite. Then gone, and squealing again, and cardboard toast and tea. Such sweetness. She has been dead fifteen years, lost to the world’s bottomless capacity to inflict pain. But nobody else had that moment, nor ever will. Resting our heads for a few seconds on the toe of God.
A kid shat in the swimming pool, now it’s closed. Nausea at crossing the crumbling rubicon of this new episode, I’m wiggling a key in the lock of some house I’m supposed to believe will one day be familiar. Drop my mattress on the floor, climb into a sleeping bag, eat a Big Mac, the only place open after midnight. Smells of mould and regret down here at the skirting-board where all the skin and tears collect. The weight of dust exceeds the weight of settled objects. This is why people build little palaces of their lives, put one shitty brick upon another. To keep this thing at arm’s length. Thank God the destination does not contain the epiphany. If it did, we’d all be like the small town lawyer I was sitting with earlier today; desolate, grey, the skin around his eyes like parchment, doing something weird with his tongue and his teeth. Licking imaginary fentanyl off the window of the microwave. A month ago we were invisible, pulling out of Newcastle into the North Sea for Amsterdam. Arrivals are about death. ‘Most things may never happen: this one will’. Always be eager to depart.
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