‘Twas a sad day, ’twas, to say goodbye to all this ‘cept I’m not completely gone.  I being this blog and all.

Many of my fellow travelers have requested a new face, a new view, an about face, a rearview, a direction that I, the new narrator of this blog, having taken over from him (was ‘is name Rick?), will be going ’bout my business like it’s nobody’s business but me own.

I’ll listen to Apocalyptica, watch “Lunopolis,” read H.P Lovecraft, review “Hysteria,” and give you a story by the previous author of this blog to tie you over until I kickstart me new one:

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING FICTION CONTAINS REFERENCES TO USE OF LEGAL DRUGS PAST THE LEGAL LIMIT AND ILLEGAL DRUGS BEYOND THE OUTER LIMITS; SEXUAL INNUENDOS; REAL PLACES AND REAL PEOPLE IN IMAGINATIVE SITUATIONS —

PARENTAL CENSORSHIP, LET ALONE GUIDANCE,
IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED PAST THIS POINT.

 

My religion is based on a form

My religion is based on a form,
neither simple nor complex,
Known nor unknown,
A form that can never be perfected.
The form is based on the shape of a wave,
A wave that completes a revolution,
That revolves around an unfixed position.
The wave does not exist
But its form is imitated by physical phenomena.
My religion is based on a few short words —
Everything goes in a circle.

– 3 October 1985

=     ==   ===  ====  ===   ==     =

23 October 1985

I search my brain and find naught
But six terrible nightmares leftover
From a feast of sleep.
I open my eyes and find naught
But what I want to see.
The dreams of a thousand years
Locked in a brain with no hope of escape;
Where do I go from here?
=     ==   ===  ====  ===   ==     =

Modern-day Martyr

Anticipating your reluctant smile
And knowing that we sometimes fail to see
Our love (that drive to satisfy), and while
You wiped away the tears, recalling Lee,
I hugged you tighter. Had they told the truth?
I mean, your brother fell. You know the bridge
Was slippery. You know they cannot prove
He killed himself. Just take your privilege
To put these thoughts aside and sleep tonight.
In time, you’ll have perspective and the strength
To put your brother’s death back in the light,
To recall the times he went to any length
To pull you out of your self-pity. Now
Is not the time for asking “Why?” or “How?”

— 29 October 1985

 

The Artist In Me
The artist in me cannot resist this momentary desire
To put on paper words that burn, words that die, like fire.
The artist in me cannot deny this denial of the work ethic.
What is the work ethic?
What is reality?
I hear people speak of inner worlds and outer worlds,
How one is real, the other false.
I hear myself laugh and laughing.
“We see through the filter of our experience,” one says.
“We do not see the lens through which we look,” says the other.
The one I heard that said the most:
“Reality is only seven letters.”

— 26 September 1985

 

Table of Contents

 

Chapter 1: The Cuckoo’s Nest, Revisited.

Chapter 2: Is This Why I’m Here?.

Chapter 3: The Big House.

Chapter 4: The Snake Pit

Chapter 5: Back to Reality?.

Chapter 6: Hint of an Itch.

Chapter 7: 1201 Pollyanna Avenue.

Chapter 8: Celestial Realm Coffee House.

Chapter 9: Escape.

I. Accept No Imitations.

II. Bittersweet Revenge.

Chapter 10: Real Dreams.

Chapter 11: Quiet Time Room…

Chapter 12: Forever Lost

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1: The Cuckoo’s Nest, Revisited

Karen and I sat in the lobby next to the hospital admitting desk, staring at each other, anxiously holding hands, squirming in our seats, and wondering what they would look like. I expected to see the guys in white coats coming around the corner any minute. I had just admitted myself as a patient in the psychiatric unit of the hospital and had visions of the state mental institutes of the 50s. I could just see them strapping me to a stretcher and taking me away from all I knew and feared.

While we sat waiting, I pondered. What brought me here? So what if I had thought about suicide? All intelligent people face death sometime during their lives. I had not carried the thought to fruition, after all, so why did “they” (that ominous sounding word that strikes fear in the masses) want to lock me up in some dungeon for the insane? I knew I was different but crazy? No way!

We waited for what seemed like hours. Waiting, waiting, waiting . . . waiting forces me, when I can’t find anyone around me to look at, to go over the past, as if somehow I could correct any mistakes I had made. “I failed to kill myself today,” I thought, and reviewed the scene when Karen had called me earlier in the day.

“Hello. This is Lee,” I said in my businesslike voice, the voice I used to answer calls at the office.

“Darling,” Karen blurted, “do you have a gun?”

I hesitated. Do I go ahead with my plans or let my family pull me out of another of my suicide attempts?

“Yes.”

My wife started crying over the phone. “I’ll . . . I’ll have to get call you back,” she sobbed. “Don’t do anything until I call you back,” she said and hung up.

I looked over to my briefcase and thought about its all important contents – an Off Duty .38 Special – how I had planned to shoot myself at work with a note beside me that read, “Another sacrifice for the company.” Was I brave enough to go ahead and shoot myself before my wife called back? Just how important, how strong, how meaningful, was my relationship with my wife compared to the emotional turmoil I was facing? I loved my wife but was suffering this internal battle worth staying alive for her?

While I sat there trying to make a decision about eternal death versus eternal love, my wife called back.

“Darling, I’m coming to get you. I’ll be out front in five minutes.”

 

Chapter 2: Is This Why I’m Here?

Hi there. While nobody seems to be watching or listening, I’ve got to tell you something and you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone because anything can and will be used against you if they want to, you know what I mean? You don’t know me but I think I know a little about you. I can tell you’re curious (why else would you be here?) so I’ll tell you about myself. My name’s Lee. I work for a sewer company. In case anyone asks you, I’m not really here.

Right now I’m sitting at the dinner table in our three-bedroom corporate apartment near Atlanta. It’s about one o’clock in the morning and several folks from our corporate office in Huntsville, AL, are sleeping here tonight. Carter, our resident alien from Deddington, Oxfordshire, England, and sometime engineer, sleeps in a bedroom in front of me. Terrence, my boss and our senior vice president in charge of domestic operations, co-occupies the bedroom behind me with a colleague of mine, Capitula, who hails from Stuttgart, Germany.

Capitula used to work in the international operations group until the Big Layoff and a close relationship with Terrence brought her to our group. You could pick her out in a crowd — manila blonde hair, strong jaw, sharp nose and slender body — the near-perfect embodiment of the Aryan race. I only mention this because I grew up in the South and we still are surprised when we see interracial relationships. By the way, did I mention that Terrence is African-American/black (actually a deep brown)?

Yeah, Terrence and Capitula go way back. They’re ol’ drinkin’ buddies from the early days of our company, when beer bashes were held regularly, starting every Friday at 4:27 p.m. in the front lobby, back when the founder’s sons would just as soon give you a few grams of coke as they would a cash bonus for sticking around with the company through the next crisis. The early 80s were good to all of us who survived. Despite the maturing of our company and elimination of on-site parties, Capitula still drinks pretty hard, coming in late most mornings with a lame excuse about a flat tire or heavy traffic and scenting the hallways with her breath trail of yesterday’s corn mash and fermented potatoes. Terrence, a wackaholic (you know, the wacko who drinks all day and works all night) usually has a barstool warmed up at the local sports bar for Capitula when five ‘o clock rolls around. If they aren’t closing the place down then they’re escorting the other to the nearest out of the way hotel which spouses aren’t supposed to know about. You know what they say…the spouse is always the first to know but the last to find out.

I’ve never heard the full story of Peyton Place but the author must have modeled the community after my company. Every time I walk down the hall I hear about someone who’s slept around or stolen someone else’s boyfriend. There’s no denying we humans are fickle. We try out new lovers like a new pair of shoes or Baskin Robbins’ flavor of the month. Don’t like Ol’ Dependable? Try out Miss Flirtatious or Mister English-Accent. Yes, even Carter, our quiet design engineer, was involved with another employee’s wife, who was also a secretary with the company before the Big Layoff. Speaking of nepotism, I often wonder where nepotism stops and incest begins at our company…well, that is, before the Big Layoff changed all that.

I suppose all companies go through phases. Being a sewer company, we’re closely tied to the environmental movement. Our company was founded in 1975 by an ex-NASA employee who took a space-age measuring device and turned it into a sewer diagnostic tool. Phase One of our company you might call Getting Our Ears Wet. We went from project to project, getting cash advances from one customer to pay off our creditors so we could borrow more money to build equipment for our next customer. Oftentimes we went without pay just so we could stay in business. Instead of paychecks we got expensive pieces of paper that the president called stock (a fancy word for IOU in those days). We figured the stock got better use wiping our butts than saving our ass so we referred to it as TP. Little did we know then that that acronym would change from Toilet Paper to Tons of Profit.

Phase Two was ushered in with the Reagan era and the near abolishment of the EPA (our major source of funding). If we went hungry in the 70s we starved ourselves in the early 80s. Every dollar we made went to the party-till-we-die fund. Then, just when we thought the end was in sight, municipalities suddenly saw us as the godsend to save them construction costs through the use of sewer diagnostics. We couldn’t grow fast enough.

By this time the founder’s sons were fully involved with the company. They convinced their father to go to Phase Three, the Corporate Buyout. In the mid-80s, the founding family decided the only way to stay alive in the business was to get an influx of cash. They spent a few years doing longterm financial planning and finally decided in late 1987 to approach investors about an IPO (initial public offering), about two weeks before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that ended the decade of big spending. Instead, they held on until 1989 and sold 80 percent of the company stock (all privately held) to a Scandinavian firm famous for its grocery store chain and shipping business. All the employees who had held on to their stock became nouveau rich sewer gods. The lucky ones had enough stock saved up to retire. The rest of us got enough cash to buy new cars or improve our homes.

Like cows in a slaughterhouse pen who sense something is wrong, we all dreaded the day when the corporate owner bought out the remaining 20 percent of the company. Phase Four we now call the End of the Family Business. Up until then, we still called the founder Papa (a term the old Bulgarian enjoys to hear when you shout it at him above his deafness). After the full buyout, though, we saw less of the founder and noticed that the new owner was sending lots of financial consultants down from New York to check our financial status and having our books audited annually by Price-Waterhouse. Not that we had anything to fear. We had gone from a 20 million dollar company in 1989 to a 40 million dollar company in 1994, doubling our worth in five years. Unfortunately, as sales grew so did our expenses.

Enter Phase Five, the Big Layoff. Until a few months ago, our president was the eldest son of the founder. Although he had graduated from Stanford with a degree in drama and was more suited to acting than to leading, he provided the right projecting-voice corporate look for our company while most of our competitors still looked like a mom-and-pop operation. He just didn’t know how to run a company. When he could no longer control our rising overhead, our savvy Swedish owner brought in the big guns to clean up the place. At first, we had an interim financial advisor who reviewed our budgets and business plans in detail. When he could only identify the problems and not get our president to resolve them, along came the introduction of Phase Five. A memo came out saying our president would report to the new vice chairman of the company, a guy who had turned around many a dying company and earned the reputation as a team builder and hatchet man (otherwise known as the guy who says, “my way or the highway”). We knew we were in trouble when our president announced he was still in charge, kinda like Alexander Haig, you know, making a fool of himself before a multitude of those who knew better.

A week in the making, the Big Layoff occurred during a sabbatical the founding family was taking in the jungles of Australia. The Monday of that week, the halls were ablaze with the talk of big changes coming. On Tuesday, a list of potential layoffs was floating down the halls. Then, Wednesday, the layoffs began. By Friday afternoon the dust had settled and 15 percent of the corporate office and 25 percent of the international operations group were gone. I lost only one colleague in my group (to make way for Capitula, of course). She was completely shocked because she was one of the ones to get a copy of the original layoff list and knew she was safe. Little did she know she didn’t have the right credentials to “keep up the good work.”

I suppose there’s something to be gained from all this. It pays to have friends in the right places, that’s for sure. Of course, it also pays to keep one’s mouth shut so do me a favor and don’t tell anyone about this. The walls have ears and if anyone finds out that I’ve been giving away family secrets…well, if the tension around here doesn’t kill me, something (or someone) else will. Remember, I did you a favor. I’ve satisfied your curiosity and kept you entertained for a few minutes. I think your silence is a small price to pay.

 

Chapter 3: The Big House

Karen and I looked up. A big man in a green hospital outfit, the kind orderlies wear, came around the corner and looked at us. Karen and I looked at each other and asked each other with our eyes, “Is HE the one?” My heart sped up as if I was biking up Mt. Mitchell. The man walked past us to help an elderly woman into a wheelchair. I breathed a sigh of relief but my heart kept pounding.

My blood pressure had already risen after having to see my parents at home while I packed my bag for a stay at the hospital, a stay of which I had no idea about the length nor why I was going. My parents had come to our house to celebrate the 4th of July and spend a few quiet days with us while they were in town. When I walked into the house, I looked at my parents and saw two mourning doves cooing with remorse. At that moment, my heart started pounding and my face flushed red as my blood pressure increased. I had not prepared for this scene; it was not in my script of the play I had created in my mind, “The Death of Lee Colline: The Tragic Story of a Middle-Class Boob.” I loved my parents but had already put them out of my mind in preparation for a nonemotional suicide.

I had attempted suicide before but had always been stopped by the emotional side of me, the child who threw temper tantrums when he didn’t get what he wanted and knew that death would take away all his chances for getting more toys. This time, strangely enough, the child in me had taken control and told the rational side – the adult – that the suicide preparation was just a game and not something to take seriously. The child told the adult to handle my emotions and hide them from the child, who had no control of my emotions and only used them to make a fuss. To help the child, the adult filed away my emotions in a locked cabinet in a locked room in a locked building in a crowded city and threw the keys into an unfathomable ocean. How was the adult to know that I would survive? He went along with the child because, as I would discover during my stay in the psychiatric unit, the adult was passive and had not been trained in assertiveness. Though responsible for his daily actions, the adult let others make decisions for him.

I knew other sides, shades, or personalities within me would surface and I did not want them to show up while I was at the hospital. Instead of showing my real self (which I wasn’t sure existed), I put on my clownlike face – a mask of sorts which gave me the air of a sarcastic comedian or a clown with a happy face and derogatory demeanor – and pretended everything was “hunky dory.” I had practiced the role of clown for 10 or 12 years and knew exactly how to treat myself and others. Everything becomes funny or part of an inside joke. I always carry this mask with me and use it whenever I become tense in a situation.

“I suppose,” Karen began, trying to fill the void, to keep her mind clear of unwanted thoughts and her fear of loneliness and loss she knew would feel during my hospitalization, “I won’t see you for a day or two while they run the tests on you. Didn’t Dr. Forrest say he’d keep you overnight?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, trying to sound cheerful but unable to hide my fear of the unknown. A wave of anxiety ran through me like a current of electricity. I just wanted to see the men in white coats. I wanted to get on with the psychiatric evaluation the doctor promised me and be cured.

Several people walked up to the admitting desk, giving me an opportunity to watch them and learn more about what other people do.

A young couple walked up, the woman obviously pregnant. They smiled as they answered questions for the nurse. I wondered if they realized they had a new life ahead of them. Had they played different scenarios in their minds about the mistakes they would make with their child? The firstborn child always has to put up with the ignorance of new parents with their baby care books in one hand and a bottle of warm formula in the other. Every move the child will make will be analyzed by the parents. Every bowel movement will be looked at, every wiggle of the toes will be compared to statistical evidence, and every noise out of the mouth will be listened to with anticipation until the parents recognize a word in their native language. How prepared will they be when this new life doesn’t speak English or run across the room?

An elderly man in a blue flannel shirt and beige polyester pants walked up. He talked to the nurse for a few minutes, kicking his dirty right boot against the desk, his face terse and upset. He pointed behind Karen and me. We looked back to see an equally elderly woman bent over in a chair, her face racked with pain, managing a smile for her husband and clutching a red vinyl handbag to her faded, flower print dress. I looked at her for a few seconds and saw a woman who remembers cold walks in the winter back and forth along the path to the outhouse, ants in the sugar jar in the pantry and the cry of the rooster as she got up out of bed this morning. She probably sat there, worried her husband wouldn’t show the nurse their insurance card, hoping they could stop the pain, and wishing her children were here with her.

I turned back around to Karen. I smiled at her, and she returned the smile with a soft, loving look. We both were thinking the same thing, wondering if we would end up like the man with his pregnant wife or like the elderly couple who only had each other for support.

“Are you Lee Colline?” a voice asked beside me as I jerked around to look. A chunky, black woman, wearing a faded T-shirt and tan slacks, stared at me with a questioning look and a smile. She looked like I felt: a clown caught in a room full of serious people.

“Yes.”

“Hi there, then. I’m Betty. I’m your case worker.”

“Oh,” I responded with relief, “I expected a couple of big guys in white coats.”

“We’re nothing like that. In fact, they tell us to wear our street clothes. Is that your bag?”

I nodded. “By the way, this is my wife, Karen.”

They greeted each other.

Betty continued her introduction. “As you’re probably aware, you won’t be staying in the regular part of the hospital. Our psychiatric unit is called Dune Timbers. We don’t have bars on the doors and we’re not a hotel but we’ll try to make you as comfortable as possible.”

“Thanks,” I said wryly.

“Well, if you’re ready, we can go on upstairs.”

“Sure . . . oh, can my wife go with us?”

“Of course. We’re aren’t running a prison here.”

I blushed. I liked the way Betty reacted to my comments. She seemed to have a sense of humor a bit out of the ordinary and made me feel more at ease. At the same time, I wondered how much of her reaction to me was due to professional observation. She carried a clipboard and manila folder with her. I imagined she had already seen my chart or had been briefed that I had attempted suicide and was told to treat me carefully. In any case, she was doing a good job and I appreciated this initial contact at the hospital. My memories of hospitals have always been of people dying and nurses in white outfits. Sometimes I get those confused with my memories of nursing homes that always smell of urine and are filled with old people wandering through the halls.

I was scared. As we walked to the elevators, I was consumed with fear. What if they dissect my mind and can’t put it back together? What if they find out how crazy I am and give up and throw me in a state hospital or torture me with electroshock treatment? I knew as soon as I got the chance, I was going to escape. I was not going to let the doctors tear me apart at their leisure. I just wanted to walk in for a psychiatric evaluation like any normal person goes to a doctor for a physical examination and walk out the same day. I didn’t want a mind biopsy. I still wanted to kill myself before they found out. “Find out what?” I asked myself rhetorically ‘cause I knew I didn’t have an answer. I only knew I wouldn’t have control of my life in the hospital and was scared, more than any other time in my life, of what lay ahead.

As we left the elevator and walked down a hallway, I looked around me and noticed how everything seemed to be in a movie, like nothing was real, and I was experiencing a new three-dimensional holographic projection. Two women dressed in bright house clothes floated by me, their voices trailing behind them like ribbons in the breeze. My face felt like a mask and I held my wife’s hand through an invisible glove. Betty was talking to me and I was answering, or at least my body was answering because I was talking small talk but not realizing what I was saying, while at the same time I was recording a silent movie around me. I thought I knew what was going to happen to me but now . . . my thoughts wandered back and forth . . . should I still try to kill myself at the next available chance? What was Betty trying to tell me? Should I tell my wife I don’t love her anymore because she smothers me?

I noticed we were walking through the maternity ward and laughed silently at the thought of the “baby” my psychiatrist wanted me to delivery. He suddenly took the form of an ancient priest in my mind, trying to exorcise the angry beast within me, chanting and wailing, splashing water on my face, waving crosses over my body as he asked the devil within to leave. Oh, I knew there was something evil inside me, some creature that wanted to control my body and wreak havoc on the world but did I believe I could be healed by a human being? I had no God to save me or a religion to comfort me, just the mystification of the wonders of modern science and its miraculous cures. Unfortunately, the mystification had been fading over the years as I discovered the lack of knowledge we humans have in the 1990s. All this talk of modern medicine and we still have no cure for the common cold!

I wanted to blame somebody for something but what? I couldn’t even figure out what was going on around me, let alone inside me. I was scared somebody would wake me and I would really be dead, that the afterlife is just a series of mental recreations of life on Earth for those who had not lived a complete human life and I was eternally damned to dream of life on Earth. Somehow, though, my wife, Betty, the nurses and patients we passed by – they all seemed to go along with this dream. No one was reaching out to touch the real me, just my apparition.

Betty stepped up to unlock a set of double doors. In each door was a small window with wire mesh embedded within the glass just like elementary schools from the 50s always seem to have. I cringed. What was I about to enter? As Betty fumbled for her keys, I looked through the windows to see a hallway with walls made of glass. The floors and glass looked clean and sterile. Sunshine bounced up and down the hall, laughing at me, pointing its sharp, hot finger at me and daring me to hide behind my shadow. I expected the guys in white would be hiding behind the doors to take me away. Betty pulled a handle and let Karen and me through one of the doors. I looked behind the door and only saw a ball of dust in the corner.

“Welcome to Dune Timbers,” Betty announced cheerfully.

On a wall at the end of the hallway was a sign that read, “Dune Timbers: A Center for Effective Living.”

I laughed.

Betty turned around to look me in the eye. “What’s so funny?” she asked with a hint of caution.

“Oh,” I answered, “nothing really. I just didn’t expect to get hit with a euphemism as soon as I entered the place.” I pointed to the wall.

“Funny, I’ve never really noticed the sign.”

Karen smiled nervously and squeezed my hand. I could tell she was afraid I would say something to excite the nurse. I just jaunted down the hall, daring the sunshine to take my shadow away, knowing the nurse could never hear what I was thinking, since even my wife was deaf to my silent monologues. Still, hospitals have a way of making you feel naked.

Betty checked us through another locked door and led us to a hospital room, room 304. Betty put my bag on the hospital bed nearest the door while I quickly glanced around the room. I looked over at the other bed.

“Are all the rooms semiprivate?”

“No, but if you have a problem with this one . . .”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I just didn’t expect this. That’s all.”

“What did you expect, dear,” Karen asked, while fumbling for a chair to support herself. “I kinda like the place.”

“Yes, well . . . I don’t know. I . . . uh, I didn’t know what to expect.”

“Lee, let me tell you about this place while you’re getting used to it. Your bed can be controlled by the buttons on either side of the bed. The sink on the other wall is for both of you to share, although it doesn’t look as if you have a roommate right now. In the bathroom, you’ll find the toilet and another sink. Next to the toilet is an emergency button. You’ll also find one right there on the wall next to your bed. If for any reason you feel you are in trouble, pull the string. A light will come on in the nurse’s station and someone will come assist you as soon as possible.”

“Can I test it right now?”

“If you really want to, go ahead, but I would rather you not pull it.”

“Okay. Go on with the intro.” I was beginning to feel smug.

“Anyway, I’m gonna have to ask you some questions that may seem ridiculous to you but we need the information to begin our evaluation of you. First of all, I need to take your vital signs. Please roll up your sleeve.”

Betty dropped her clipboard on the bed and walked out of the room. I turned to Karen and breathed a sigh. All the thoughts and activities of the day had made me anxious. I could feel the muscles in my neck were tight and getting tighter.

“I’m not sure if I can take this.”

“Oh, darling,” Karen whispered with tears in her voice, “you’ll be fine.”

“How about you?”

“Don’t worry about me. Let’s get you well first.”

I turned from Karen and sat down on the bed, crossed my right leg under my left and relaxed in a stooped position. I noticed the bedspread and pillow had Brownsburg Hospital stamped all over it as if a kleptomaniac would be discouraged from stealing them. A knot formed in my stomach.

“Well, I can see you’re getting used to the place already,” Betty exclaimed as she came back in the room with a stethoscope and blood pressure gauge. “Most patients pace around a little before they decide to sit down.”

“I’m tired.”

“Yes, I expect you would be. Let’s check your blood pressure, if you don’t mind.” Betty wrapped the Velcro sleeve around my biceps and began pumping. With each pump, I could feel my blood pressure increase. When she slipped the cold amplifier of the stethoscope under the sleeve, I nearly jumped, my nerves were so bad.

“One-forty over ninety.”

“Really?” I asked with honest surprise. “I expected it to be worse.”

Betty slipped the blood pressure gauge off my arm and set it down on the bed. “You might as well get comfortable. I’ve got a lot of questions I have to ask you.” She picked up the clipboard, fumbling through some mimeographed forms.

I looked down at my hands in my lap. They were clasped together loosely like two fern leaves in a forest, growing closer together everyday, rocking in the wind like two dancers on a stage, their movements timed to violins hidden inside speakers hanging from the ceiling. I held up my left hand and flexed the fingers. Computer signals ran from my brain, down my neck, through my shoulder and arm, shooting through the wrist into the fingers – “Bend the first digit of the forefinger, bend the second digit of the forefinger” – while signals came back saying, “Digit one bent, digit two bent.” How did that computer get inside my mind? Was I so crazy that I couldn’t recognize the operations of my own body or was my mission to Earth coming to an end and I was slowly letting go of the human host?

“Okay, let’s run a reality check.”

“What,” I mumbled, looking up at Betty.

“What’s your name?”

“Bob Jones. What’s yours?”

“Okay, look Lee. Just answer the questions for me and we can get this over with, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever you say.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lee Perry Colline.”

“What day is it?”

I looked over to Karen and shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

“What day do you think it is?”

“July 3rd?”

“Good.” Betty checked off a box. “What do you think brought you here?”

“What do you mean? Karen picked me up and drove me over here in her car.”

“You really must be very nervous.”

My eyes widened in anger while I maintained my clownlike composure. “What do you expect from me? I just want to have my psychiatric evaluation and get it over with.”

“Well, Lee,” Betty began, “we can’t officially start the evaluation until tomorrow but part of our policy is to run a small check, something like a physical examination, when you enter Dune Timbers. We need to record your behavior patterns so we can inform the staff how you’re doing?”

“And what if I’m not ‘doing?’”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I meant what I said.” I paused and took a deep breath. “Oh, just forget it. Get on with your questions.”

Betty smiled weakly and rolled her eyes. “Let’s see . . . hmm. Okay,” she said while checking off some more boxes and nodding her head. “Now, if you will just tell me in a few words what you think is your reason for coming here.”

Karen touched my elbow and I jerked. “Sorry, dear,” she whispered.

“I’m still not sure what you mean.”

“What we’re looking for is a brief description, in your words, why you’re here.”

I looked at Karen. “My wife and doctor thought it’d be best.”

“Why?”

“Cause I was contemplating suicide.”

“Uh-huh,” Betty mumbled, as she scribbled more notes.

“I’m just not feeling well right now.”

“Why do you want to kill yourself?”

“Did I say I wanted to kill myself?” I flared my nostrils in anger. Didn’t they realize who they were dealing with? Betty acted like she was dealing with another suicide attempt. I wanted to tell her that I was tired of this body but she’d only ask more questions. I looked at my wife again – maybe I was just tired of living with her, day in and day out, without any intellectual conversations – she raised her eyebrows and gave me a questioning smile. I watched my hand reach over and grab hers. What was happening to me? It was beginning to feel like the time a friend of mine had freaked out on mushrooms.

 

Chapter 4: The Snake Pit

Have you ever been on an adventure of the mind? That is to say, have you ever used drugs that expand your outlook? Or instead, have you ever looked down into the pit of insanity, only to just get away before you were pulled down by a writhing mass of boa constrictors that a second ago was your hand touching the edge of the slimy pit wall? I did, and am barely surviving some of my worst paranoid nightmares, to boot.

A couple of Tuesdays ago, while checking out a new bike shop, I bumped into a buddy of mine, Vincent, a graduate student in geography at the University of Tennessee. He had just finished digitizing the topography of the Frozen Head wilderness area north of Oak Ridge and wanted to take some friends there for a hike. Always interested in exploring the outdoors, I agreed to meet him and his friends the next Saturday at a grocery store near the entrance to Frozen Head.

It’s hard to believe only a few days have passed since our great adventure transpired but the blackness that has traveled up my right arm to my shoulder stabs me in the head with pain as a reminder that the end of my adventure is yet to come.

“Hey everybody, this is James,” Vincent said, introducing me as his friends piled out of a green and white Nova. I walked over to greet them.

“Hi, I’m Lee,” the driver said, shaking my hand, “I live down the block from Vincent.” Lee has red hair, a slim body and glasses. You know, he doesn’t really have red hair, not red like a fire engine, nor red-orange like a pumpkin that you see on some redheads. His hair is more like a golden auburn than red.

Vincent pointed to a couple getting out of the back seat. “This is Jim and Susan. Susan’s a nurse so she insisted on bringing a small first-aid kit.”

Jim walked around the car to greet me. “Nice to meet you, James. I understand you’re a writer.”

“Some people accuse me of that,” I retorted. “I have a column in the Oak Ridge newspaper.”

“Well, we’ll have a lot to talk about. I’m getting my master’s in English lit at UT.”

“Good for you,” I responded flatly, trying not to show the short, stocky fellow that I had no use for those who simply studied the written word.

“And this is Bruce,” Vincent added, as a blond-haired man taller than Vincent reached out and shook my hand vigorously.

“James, I’ve read your stuff and it always entertains me. I especially love it when you trash the government,” Bruce said in an overly loud voice. “I bet you could tell us some stories about what you know but can’t write about.”

“Yeah, but I’d have to kill you afterward,” I replied wryly. Bruce nodded his head and laughed.

Vincent patted Bruce on the back and pushed his way in between us. “Well, James, I hope you brought the goods.”

“Yessirree Bob,” I said smiling, “right here in my goodies bag.” I slapped my hand on the daypack slung over my shoulder.

Vincent turned back to his friends. “Well, guys, if you want to grab some snacks before we go, hit the store. Otherwise, you’re just gonna have mushrooms and water for lunch and I don’t know about you but that’s not even going to whet my appetite.”

We arrived at the wilderness area parking lot just as the sun was topping the ridge nearby. Vincent gathered us around the map he had spread out on the hood of the Nova.

“Okay, the main trail goes this way…”

“Hey, guess what,” Bruce interrupted, “I brought a compass.”

“Great,” Vincent replied with obviously strained patience after having to put up with Bruce’s constant babble on our way over, “but I hope we don’t have to use it. Anyway, the trail just goes up one side of the creek and down the other. I thought it would be more fun if we cross the creek here and climb up the cliff there.” Vincent put his finger on a point where the topo lines were bunched together. “From what I can tell, we should be able to follow this old feeder creek bed to the top. Once we get there we can break for lunch. Does that sound like a good idea?” Everyone nodded in agreement.

“Hey, Vincent,” Lee said in an inquisitive tone.

“What?”

“Will we be able to trailblaze like this, you know, in our condition and all?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. The way I figure it, we’ll start tripping after we cross the creek. That way we can enjoy the scenery as we climb up the canyon. By the time we get to the top we’ll be ridin’ high.”

“Cool.”

“James, if you’ll do the honors,” Vincent said to me with a bow of his head.

I put my daypack on the car, unzipped the front pouch and pulled out a plastic bag full of dried psilocybin mushrooms. “Ta-da,” I intoned as I dropped the bag on the map. “Everybody gets three buttons and five stems and I get ten dollars a head. I think that’s reasonable.”

“Ahem,” Lee said, clearing his throat mockingly.

“Well, that’s everybody but the driver. He gets a five dollar discount for providing the ride.”

“Thank you,” Lee said, as he picked up the bag first, “don’t mind if I do.”

“Since I’m the one with the map, I’ll pass on the big stuff and just eat one button,” Vincent said. “Lee, you and Jim can split my share if you want.”

“Okay,” Lee said, adding another couple of stems to his palm.

“No thanks,” Jim responded, “I don’t feel so good. James, how about you have my share?”

“And someone can have half of mine,” Susan blurted out in her mousy voice.

I looked at each one of them. “So we’ve got a bunch of wimps here today? Okay, I’ll lower my price to five bucks each and that’s my last offer.”

“Oh no, that’s not it at all,” Jim replied in an offended voice, his hand held up in protest. “I really am sick. I almost didn’t come today. I’m perfectly willing to pay the ten dollars. I just don’t want to be throwing up for the next hour.”

“Okay, I’ll only charge five dollars for you and your wife and you can split one of the portions between you.” I felt stupid negotiating a deal because I’m not a drug dealer by any means but I still had to recover what I’d paid for the mushrooms.

Vincent folded up the map while everyone took their mushrooms and gave me their money. “Well, guys, if we want to get a good view by lunch, let’s start eating those ‘shrooms and get out of here. And before we get started, don’t forget to double tie your shoelaces. I don’t want to carry someone out of here because you tripped over your own feet.”

If you haven’t experienced the effects of a hallucinogenic substance, then you might not understand what mind expansion is all about. We’re all so used to walking around surrounded by the filters and walls we’ve build around us that we forget what life was like when we first became conscious. After all, as soon as we’re born, we spend much of our time dividing the world into symbols of Safe and Unsafe to protect ourselves from potentially dangerous outside stimuli and hardly take time to explore our mind when we become self-conscious. As we get older, we take the simplistic, symbolic world we created in the crib and rework the symbols to each new experience. Depending on how well the nature/nurture rhythm has kept us in balance, our symbols may or may not match those of others in our society. When you go through a mind expanding experience – a trip – as an adult, you pretty much hang onto the old symbols you’ve created but you may reshape them slightly; otherwise, if you try to replace or completely redefine them during your trip, which usually only lasts a few hours, you find yourself in a pretty strange land at the end of the journey, like hopping on a Concorde jet and going to a foreign country where nobody knows what you’re talking about. So, if you want to have a good trip, make sure your symbols are in sync with the other travelers. That way, everybody knows the road symbols and can spend time enjoying the scenery instead of getting lost on a dead-end road because of misinterpretation.

We had just gotten to the edge of the creek when out of the corner of my eye I noticed something moving. Because I wear glasses, my peripheral vision is a well-defined, although fuzzy, landscape and is the first place my mind lets go. I knew the effects of psilocybin usually kick in within about fifteen minutes so I jumped on top of a boulder, trying not to step on the miniature bright-green plant world growing there, and jerked my head around to survey the surroundings.

“Something the matter?” Vincent asked, when he noticed I had stopped following him.

“No, nothing. I thought I saw something.”

“Hey, James i-uz tripping, James i-uz tripping…” Bruce sang out.

“Oh, shut up, man,” Vincent snapped.

“Okay, okay, keep your cool.”

“Yeah, Vincent, he must be right,” I said. I waved my hand in front of me in the classic vision test and saw the fading image of my hand and arm pass across my vision. “Yeah, I can see tracers. He’s right.”

Vincent looked around the group. “Anybody else?”

“We’ve been tripping almost since we started,” Jim replied. “Must be ‘cause we’re both so small.” Or stupid, I thought.

“Me, too,” Lee added.

“How about you?” Vincent asked Bruce.

“Well, how do you mean? I mean, I feel sick to my stomach and my throat feels funny.”

“Naw, you’re still getting over the toxic junk in the mushrooms. You’ve got a while to go.”

“What about you?” Lee asked.

“Oh, it always takes me thirty minutes to an hour before my buzz starts. Besides, I didn’t take that much. Anyway, if anybody feels like they’re really tripping out, let me know. We can always stop or go back if we have to.”

“I thought you wanted to go up there,” Bruce said, looking at the cliff a half-mile past the other side of the creek.

“Yeah, well, that’s my plan. Okay, I’m ready to go if you are.”

“Go for it,” I replied as I jumped off the boulder.

We spent the next thirty minutes jumping from rock to rock, trying to find a dry way across the creek. Vincent and Bruce had no trouble with their long legs but the rest of us struggled to make the same giant leaps over swirling, eddying currents that seemed to drop into bottomless pools of deep green water.

“Oh, shit,” Susan exclaimed. We all turned to see she had slipped into a three-foot deep pool.

“Here, I can help you,” Lee said, extending his hand.

“No, that’s all right, we can manage,” Susan responded firmly, grabbing Jim’s arm. Jim tried to grab her other hand but fell in beside her.

Bruce snickered a little bit and then started laughing uncontrollably. Pretty soon, we were all laughing as if someone had decided the bowl of humor was empty and turned on our laughter faucets to fill it up. Bruce reached for Vincent to keep from falling over and knocked both of them into the water. Lee and I both stepped back on the rock and fell on our butts from laughing so hard. You could tell all of us needed this moment as a kind of icebreaker. Up till then, we had carried the stresses of the world with us. Getting wet was like washing the outside world into the creek and uniting us into a single unit.

A thought struck me. “Hey, Susan, since Jim has the backpack, does that mean the food is wet?”

“No, it means we’re going to have creek sandwich soup for lunch,” she said, laughing.

“Oh,” Lee continued, “so instead of Frozen Head we’re going to have thawed thanwiches.”

Jim climbed onto the rock and threw the backpack down. “More like water-pressed than watercress, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, it’s almost time for a break, anyway,” Vincent said as he helped Susan and Bruce out of the water. “Let’s just go straight across the creek since most everybody’s wet and dry out on that big rock on the other side.”

“Oh, so we’re going to have Frozen Head sun-dried sandwiches for lunch?” Bruce asked jokingly.

“Something like that,” Vincent said.

As we rested on the rock, letting our socks and boots dry out, we munched on some apples and raisins. Although I wasn’t hungry, I enjoyed the sensation of eating. Every bite was like injecting the best spices in the world into each taste bud on my tongue. In my mind, I could see the taste regions of my tongue (like a picture out of a seventh-grade science book) send different signals to my brain. My jaw muscles felt like the chugging pistons of a locomotive, rotating my mouth up-and-down, back-and-forth, pulling the food in like drawing in the miles of track a train eats up each day. I could sense the food travel down my throat like dirt through a worm and pass into my stomach, which I could feel gurgling and groaning with delight. Meanwhile, the sun pierced my skin, trying to drive into my bones but was held at bay by layers of cells ready to burst apart and harmlessly scatter the sun’s rays. The nerves of my butt and feet felt a thousand little ants and unknown creatures nibbling on me. I kept seeing the bugs out of the corner of my eye but when I turned to look they were gone.

Vincent laid out the map. “Well, we’re not where I thought we’d end up but I think I can get us to the top this way. I’ve tried to visually pinpoint the way we’ll go but I can’t quite see how the whole trail will lay out because of the trees up ahead. From what I can tell, though, it looks like part of the cliff collapsed not too long ago so we should have plenty of exposed roots and trees leaning over to grab onto.”

“Hey man, hug a root,” Bruce said laughing.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to trace my roots,” Jim said to Susan.

“And I’ve always wanted to dig up any dirt about your past,” she added.

“We’re not going to climb a rock slide, are we?” Lee asked to no one in particular. “I really don’t see why we can’t take the original path. After all, we’ve got all day. Who knows, maybe we’ll have more fun going that way. Maybe we’ll discover a new life form…”

“And maybe you haven’t looked at what’s between us and that part of the cliff. It looks like a solid briar patch between here and there.”

“It didn’t stop Brer Rabbit, did it? If he can hop in the thicket with a fur coat on, surely we can climb through with our boots.”

“Well, I’ll give you the map if you want to try but I don’t think it’s a good idea to mix shorts and thorns.”

“And there’s nothing worse than a woman thorned,” Susan said, giggling.

I suddenly felt a wasp on my back. “Hey, get it off,” I said to Vincent quietly so as not to disturb the stinging insect.

“What?”

“The wasp.”

“Where?”

“On my back. Hurry up,” I whispered desperately.

“I’ll get it,” Bruce yelled out as he slapped my back. “Got it, it’s gone.”

“Thanks,” I said with relief.

“There was nothing on your back,” Vincent said in a puzzled voice.

“Well, he thought there was and that’s what counts,” Bruce said as if Vincent was a little boy and Bruce the first-grade teacher.

“I wonder how long it took for this creek to carve out this valley. I bet there’s one plant here who’s passed down the story of this place from one seed to the next, just waiting to tell somebody. You know, if we took the first path, I bet we could find it. I bet we could get the story of the century. Hey, James, what would a story like that be worth? A thousand dollars? A million?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “someone would have to believe the story would be sellable first. You could maybe try the National Enquirer or some place like that.” I noticed I was discussing rag mags in a serious tone and shut up.

“Yeah, it’s a thought but we’d have to take the other trail to get the story.”

“Lee, if you want to go that way, help yourself,” Vincent replied in exasperation.

“No, no, that’s all right. I never wanted to be a millionaire. I’ll just follow you like a good follower and not complain.”

We put our boots back on, making sure we double tied them, like a hockey team lacing up skates for a game, each one of us looking at the other’s feet to see who was not prepared to go on.

“Bruce, why don’t you pick up the rear this time and let me talk to Lee and James for a while?”

“Sure, I’ll keep Jim and Susan company.”

“We’d like that,” Susan said warmly.

Vincent immediately jumped off the rock and starting marching into the trees. Lee fell in behind him. I did my best to clamber off the seven-foot high rock and catch up while Bruce helped Jim and Susan down. We set off in such a clumsy fashion that I felt we were newborn ducklings waddling off the shore to follow our mother into the water – like good ducklings, we lined up behind Vincent and sailed smoothly along as soon as he set the pace.

The woodland floor was fairly flat and even next to the creek and I knew Vincent wanted to make good time before we got to the cliff so I didn’t interrupt the ensuing conversation between Vincent and Lee. Instead, I let the bubble of their words float out of their mouths and go over my head. In the bubbles, I could see they were comparing the trees and plant life of the present-day woods around us to ancient flora.

“You know,” Vincent’s words said over his shoulder and past Lee to my ears, “that pink plant by the creek…”

“Queen of the meadow?” Lee confirmed.

“Yeah, it looks like it’s been here all along, or been pulled straight out of the fossil bed.”

“Hey, I wonder if its seeds can talk.”

I imagined what the animal life must have been like back then and what they would think of us funny-looking animals walking on two legs. Something rustled in the branches above my head and I shuddered to think what it was – a saber-toothed tiger, perhaps – and kept my head pointed to the ground. I concentrated on watching the ground go by beneath me and wondered how long we’d go before we had to step off this people mover and get on the escalator. I couldn’t figure out why the maintenance people let all the branches, leaves and rocks get on this thing. After all, they’re paid to clean this place up. Well, I thought, typical government workers, spending more time on break complaining about their low pay than doing their job while the rest of us bust our butts to pay the taxes to feed their lazy kids who end up on welfare and then become politicians. When’s the government dependency cycle going to end?

Before I knew it, we were on the escalator but it was not a smooth ride. We had to keep stepping aside to let big boulders pass by. And the handrails were terrible. They were like bedrails, only they were hanging down all crooked and covered with dirt and sand. I remember someone telling me that bedrails were originally designed to look like snakes who guarded the sleepers from evil. You know, that handrail looks like a snake but I know it’s not cause none of this is real.

“Ah, fuck!” I shouted as the handrail seized the back of my hand. I shook my hand from side to side. The handrail let go and fell to the ground. I looked around for it but it disappeared like the other bugs and vermin I’d seen all day. Dizzy from all the shaking, I slipped on the rock that was stuck in the escalator underneath me and fell down. Suddenly, a tidal wave came rushing up the escalator, shot through my hand like it was a keyhole and enveloped my body with pain.

“What’s the matter,” Vincent yelled back.

“I don’t know if I was seeing things but I could swear I saw a snake hanging from James’ hand just now,” Lee replied.

“It was definitely a snake,” Jim added, “and I believe it’s behind that fallen tree.”

Vincent walked over to the tree and peered into the cavity left by the pulled-up roots. “Shit, it’s a poisonous snake, probably a copperhead. I can see the rattler, for sure.”

“I’ve got a snakebite kit in the backpack,” Susan said to Jim.

Jim and Susan fumbled around with the bag while I tried to figure out who had stopped the escalator so high up and so close to the edge of the cliff. “You know I’m going to sue the government for all it’s worth on this one. Whoever designed those handrails put a little too much life into them and didn’t properly label them.”

“What are you talking about?” Bruce asked as he leaned over me. “You’ve been bitten by a snake.”

“Yeah, that’s what they’ll say, just to avoid a lawsuit.”

“Man, are you fucked up or what?”

“Excuse me, Bruce,” Susan said politely. “James, let me see your hand.”

“Hey, don’t touch the evidence. I don’t want the police to say it’s was tampered with before they got here or else I’ll never have a chance to win.”

“Okay, whatever you want. Jim, what do the instructions say?”

“Uh, I can’t find the kit. Are you sure you brought it with you?”

“Oh, gosh, you’re right,” Susan said, knitting her brow with worry. “I took it out when I put the sandwiches in.”

“Hey, I was a Boy Scout when I was a kid,” Lee added.

“And?”

“Well, I remember something about making incisions.”

“Does anybody have a spare scalpel then?” Susan asked perturbed. “No? Well, we need to at least keep his arm as low as possible. James, how do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been fucked over by the government one more time. Not only did that handrail attack me but it injected a special serum concocted by the CIA at a lab in Puerto Rico that’s going to kill me ever so slowly. Fuck!” I said as a jolt of pain throbbed up my arm. “And it has this built-in rhythm of pain to keep me from thinking straight and prevent me from sharing any more of their secrets with the public. I’ve got to get to the office and write down all I know before I die,” I said as I stood up and fell back down.

“Okay, guys,” Vincent said authoritatively. “If we hurry, we can get to the car in about thirty minutes. It’s pretty much downhill all the way to the creek and we can just run through the creek. I don’t think we’ll care if we get wet this time. The Oak Ridge hospital is about forty-five minutes away so we should be able to get James to the hospital in a little over an hour if we hurry.”

“The venom will have already run through his bloodstream by then,” Susan responded with an edge of despair in her voice. “If he has an allergic reaction to the venom…” Her voice tapered off.

“Well, we’ll just have to get there as fast as we can. James, can you walk?”

“Oh, I’ll run if I have to. I’ve got to write down everything I know before their poison gets me,” I said as I stood up on new legs. No matter what, I wasn’t going to let their secret government money get the best of me before I had the last laugh. “If I don’t make it to a typewriter, will one of you write down what I say before I die?” I asked. Staring back at me were a bunch of forlorn faces who, unfortunately for me, were probably too afraid to face Big Brother.

“Hey, I’ll help him,” Bruce said.

“Good. Okay, let’s go.”

We seemed to get to the creek “Star Trek” style – poof and we were instantly transported waterside. Bruce practically carried me over the creek and guided me up the other side to the car.

“Here it is,” Susan said, pulling the giant-sized pill out of the back seat.

“I’m not swallowing that!”

“No, it comes apart. See?” Susan said, separating two suction cups.

“To save time, Susan, why don’t you cut him open in the back seat while I drive us to the hospital, if that’s all right with you, Lee.”

“Hey, I’d rather you drive, considering the condition I’m in.”

Susan and Jim slid into the back seat while Vincent, Bruce and Lee squeezed into the front seat.

“You’ll just have to lay in our laps, I guess,” Jim said, patting his hands on his knees.

I climbed over Jim, sat my butt in the middle and lay my head in Susan’s lap. “Mommy, may I take a nap? I’m tired,” I said to ease the worried look on Susan’s face.

“No, you definitely don’t want to sleep right now. Instead, I want you to let Jim hold your right hand while I try to make two incisions over the puncture wounds and suck the venom out.”

“Well, if you insist, but I’m afraid the government did one thing right for once and efficiently planted the death poison deep in my hand. They knew you’d try to get it out.”

“It’s worth a try, James,” Jim added, concernedly.

“From a fellow lit lover, that means a lot,” I said, trying to conceal a laugh.

Susan gave me a couple of aspirin from her first-aid kit and after I swallowed them she told me to bite down on her leather keychain. I didn’t know why until she pushed the point of the knife into my hand. I almost bit my tongue off through the leather as she made two cuts across my swollen hand and sucked the lustrous flowing blood into a cup. My peripheral vision started getting darker as she filled up the first cup and started on the second.

“Hey, where did the clouds come from?” I asked as the darkest storm I ever saw spread over the car. All of a sudden, everybody disappeared and I was standing in a courtroom.

“James, are you there?” a female judge asked.

“Well, you all are trying to kill me but I’m still here.”

“He’s passed out,” the bailiff said. “Try to wake him up.”

I noticed I was holding a stack of papers under my right arm that was hurting my shoulder. I tried to put the stack down but it seemed to be stuck to me. The harder I tried to drop the papers, the stronger the pain became. “Okay, so you guys are trying to torture me. Well, it won’t work. I’m going to expose your shenanigans as long as I live, that’s all there is to it,” I said to the judge sitting high above me.

“He’s not asleep but he’s babbling on,” the bailiff said.

I continued to argue with the judge for quite a while but she acted as if I was mad, always answering my inquiries and accusations with polite comments and concerns. After I don’t know how many minutes passed, the room began to brighten and Bruce was walking me to a door.

“Tell the nurse he’s been bitten by a venomous snake,” Susan said to Vincent as he darted through the door ahead of me. “Bruce, take him to the nurse’s station. Jim, you and Lee join me in the waiting area.”

Bruce held me up against a counter.

“What is your name?” a woman in a white uniform asked me from behind the counter.

“James Hinson,” I replied automatically.

“Do you have any insurance?”

“I don’t need insurance to argue my case in court. I’ve got all the insurance I need right here,” I replied smartly, pointing to the stack of papers under my arm.

“He’s been babbling on like this ever since he was bitten,” Vincent said impatiently. “I don’t think we have time to fool with the paperwork. Is there a doctor who can see him?”

“Yes, Dr. Adapantha is waiting for him right now but I’ve got to get a quick medical history before we can administer any medication.”

“Look, his doctor is Dr. Samuel Morningstar. He lives here in Oak Ridge. I’m sure you can find his number in the phone book.”

“Fine,” the woman snapped back. “Bill, will you please put Mr. Hinson in a wheelchair and take him to room number five?” she asked a young, burly guy standing next to her.

“Yes, ma’am,” the man answered in a Tennessee hillbilly accent.

As he wheeled me down the hall, I noticed that roaches were all over the place. “Don’t you guys have enough help around here to get rid of these bugs?”

“Well, sir, because of the government cutbacks, we do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

“Government cutbacks? That’s just a lot a political bullshit the politicians are feeding you while they pocket the cash. Don’t you know that?” I blurted out to this big white thug who probably played high school football but was too dumb to go to college.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah, you must be James Hinson,” an olive man in a white coat said to me as I entered the room.

“I assume you’re going to interrogate me with that,” I said, pointing to the stethoscope around his neck. “Isn’t that more appropriate in a hospital than a courtroom. Or are you just going to check my heartbeat every now and then to see if the poison has kicked in?”

“Ah, yes, the poison. Please let me examine your palm.”

“My palm? What are you, a palm reader?”

“No, not your palm. I mean, uh…your hand, yes, that’s it.” The man held my right hand and turned it over. “It looks like you have two large places on your hand that need attention.”

“What are you, a doctor? Can’t you see you’re supposed to find out what I know before I die so you can kill my sources, too? Jeez, what kind of idiots do they hire here?”

“A doctor, yes. I am called Dr. Siran Adapantha. I specialize in nuclear medicine and you need attention to your hand.”

“What?” I shouted. “They injected me with nuclear material! Boy, that just takes the cake.”

“What’s going on?” Vincent said as he walked up behind me. “I can hear James shouting all the way down the hall. Doctor, do you think he’s okay?”

“Okay, yes. He needs attention. I will get a nurse to get attention to his hand.”

“Can’t you see we took care of that, doc? We had a snakebite kit in the car so we just cut him open on the way.”

“Snakebite? Oh, yes, I will get the nurse for the snakebite.”

A moment later a nurse returned with Doctor Adapantha. “Doctor Adapantha is a visiting resident from Pakistan and does not speak English real well so I’m going to help him with the snakebite,” she said to me, as I rolled my eyes, not believing that this whole thing was happening to me. Only last week, I had written a column listing the number of times the uranium processing plant had illegally dumped radiation-hot water into a local creek and here I am now with nuclear poison in my arm and a doctor who can’t speak English. The government folks sure had taken their time planning this revengeful torture.

“Unfortunately, the instructions in the snakebite kit we found are written in Spanish but the doctor says that at this point, he will need to remove the damaged tissue anyway,” the nurse added in her blasé government tone as she prepared a needle on a tray. I shook my head at how well this had all been planned out. “I’m going to give you a local anesthetic so the scalpel cuts will not hurt.”

I cringed, shrinking back into the wheelchair. “How do I know you aren’t going to put more poison in my arm?”

“You’re just going to have to take that chance, aren’t you?”

After my arm fell asleep, the nurse cleaned the top of my hand. The doctor then sliced into the swollen surface of my skin. Not used to the site of my body being cut apart, I passed out while wondering why the government was using the excuse of a snakebite to implement the old Indian torture method of removing my skin.

“I see we’re getting better,” the nurse said, as she knocked on the door and walked in. I looked at her with a blank stare. “Are you still seeing bugs on the wall? I understand you’ve had quite a night.”

“That’s what they say,” I said groggily, having just woken up. I stared at my right hand for a moment, which was covered with a bandage. Then I panicked. “What happened to my arm?” It was black from my wrist to my elbow.

“Well, after the doctor operated on you, we gave you penicillin to prevent infection because the hole was so large…”

“What hole?”

“Doctor Adapantha removed tissue about a half-dollar in size and a quarter-inch deep. Anyway, as it turns out, you’re allergic to penicillin which has caused the capillaries in the skin of your arm to burst, giving you one giant hematoma.”

My God, I thought, they decided not to remove my skin because the nuclear poison was working too well. I’m going to die after all.

“Uh, what time is it?”

“About eight a.m. Would you like some breakfast?”

“No, that’s okay, could you bring me a pad and pencil instead?”

“Sure, but I thought you were right-handed. Won’t writing be a little difficult?”

“Yeah, but I’ll manage somehow,” I said, as I told myself that I don’t care, I’ve got to get this all down on paper before the blackness in my arm takes over my body and kills me.

 

Chapter 5: Back to Reality?

Then, I noticed Betty had been talking. “Huh . . .” I said, as I turned back to look at her.

“I said it’s only natural that you’re a little apprehensive right now. Even so, I’ve got to have some idea why you think you’re here. C’mon Lee, give me a break. Tell me your gut feelings.”

I laughed at the workings of my mind and replied, “My stomach hurts and gas is building up in my intestinal tract. I’ll probably need to urinate in an hour or so and . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said you wanted to know my gut feelings.”

“Lee, Lee, Lee. Are you always this difficult?”

“Can’t you tell he’s upset?” Karen answered.

My shield of humor was doing no one any good but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Ellen, a friend of mine from Knoxville, has accused me of living in a world where I thought only other people were absolutely happy. I remember we were sitting on the steps to the front porch of a house that had recently been torn down by a wrecking ball.

“Don’t you get it? You’ll never be happy like a goddamned idiot,” Ellen yelled in my face. She shook her head and walked a few steps away from me. “If you want that kind of happiness, then you better start smoking a lot more pot.”

I stared down at the floor. I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with Karen, Betty or any of the stuff around me. I wanted to be with my friends who respond to me the way I want them to. All I needed was my imagination and something to write on and my friends would be with me. The question was, which friends did I want? Someone with whom there was no chance of controversy.

Someone like Fredirique?

 

Chapter 6: Hint of an Itch

In a dream the other night, Fredirique left me. I still don’t know why but…well, that’s history now. At least she told me, “I love you,” as I walked away from her.

I’m still freaked out. I mean, here we are leaving each other and she tells me those dreaded three words after the fact, like on a dare or something (as if I didn’t know it already but ours was a relationship where it went unsaid).

We met about five years ago while I was on TDY in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Josef, my business partner, and I shared a hotel room in the seedy part of uptown to save money. We were in town to set up wastewater flow monitors in the sewer overflow pipes along the Susquehanna River to give the city a model of how much raw sewage dumps into the river during heavy rainfall. We worked from dawn to dusk along the river. Almost every day Josef would talk about his girlfriend and how she was really cool but she really wasn’t his girlfriend so I wasn’t supposed to talk about her because she worked in the corporate office and didn’t want people to know she was dating him.

Naturally, I questioned what was really going on because he never seemed to talk to her on the phone or kept in any constant communication with her. Every once in a while he got a letter from her. I read one and she seemed to go on in the he-said, she-said, mode about work. For all I knew, he simply had a crush on her and she didn’t know it.

Late winter in Harrisburg is weird. One day it’s cold as hell, with menacing charcoal clouds threatening to hurl snow at you and the next day the sun is shining and people are jogging the Riverwalk in shorts. I never knew whether to have spring fever, cabin fever or hay fever.

Josef, about five-foot, six, with a near-perfect triangular upper body, suffered from spring fever. He knew he had an attractive body and wore tight T-shirts to show off his chest. Therefore, when the weather was warm, the female joggers tended to look our way when Josef popped out of a manhole, his red hair sending up a spark and his slightly sweaty shirt setting off the flare. He would look around with a sheepish grin. Then he quickly assessed the nearby females as high maintenance, low maintenance, or no maintenance.

If the woman wore designer togs, a perfect hairdo set off by expensive jewelry and jogged provocatively to get our attention, she was high maintenance – a guy would have to spend a lot of money and time to keep the relationship going. If she wore basic shorts and a 10-k run for charity shirt, looking straight ahead as she jogged in Olympic form, she was low maintenance – she just wanted a guy around for the companionship stuff and could handle the rest on her own. If she looked like a whale out of water, she was no maintenance – he didn’t want to have anything to do with her.

Josef prided himself on having a low maintenance girlfriend. I wondered if she would agree.

After several weeks of listening to him go on about her, I asked him why he hadn’t asked Fredirique to come to Pennsylvania. He hemmed and hawed with excuses like, “We don’t waste our money on frivolous trips.” Finally, after his having had to go back to corporate headquarters to pick up some more flow monitors, he asked her to come up and she told him she’d fly up to see him in mid-March.

The day Fredirique arrived, about six inches of snow lay on the ground. I continued to set up the flow monitors along the river with a worker from a local temp agency. Josef took the morning off to go to the airport. After picking up Fredirique, Josef dropped her off at the hotel. He and I finished up early for the day.

I can’t say I remember the exact moment I met her. All I recall was this sudden ball of energy lighting up the hotel in the waning dusk hours. From the moment she showed up, Fredirique stole the show, as it were. Everyone in her presence rotated around her like planets around the sun (the unlucky ones ended up like moths in a flame…crash and burn). The funny thing is she’s not the kind to grab attention. She just comes by it naturally.

That night we went out to a Chinese restaurant. During the meal, I found that she and I shared the same taste in music, one common thread in the fabric of our lives. Josef and Fredirique weren’t exactly lovebirds throughout the evening but I sensed a physical attraction between them that simmered like a cup of coffee ready to be consumed – once the caffeine rush set in, look out. I politely ended the evening early, knowing she had not flown to Harrisburg to see me.

The three of us took off the next day and headed over to Valley Forge, winter headquarters of the Revolutionary Army. Fun was had by all. We joked and laughed our way over the ol’ campgrounds. Thinking back, I don’t remember any exact conversations, just having fun jumping up and down on monuments, making crazy poses for the camera and truly enjoying the camaraderie – a pleasant platonic afternoon.

We decided to spend the evening in Philadelphia. We did a little shopping and eating before heading over to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You might remember the museum steps from the movie, “Rocky,” when Rocky jogs up the steps and does his triumph dance. Of course, we did the same thing, followed by climbing on the lawn sculptures. Josef and I stripped our shirts off and posed next to the Greek gods (thank goodness the pictures didn’t turn out). For our nightcap, we headed over to the club area where we hit a nice jazz nightclub.

“Hey,” I said to the waitress, “we’re from out of town. What’s there to do around here?”

“Oh, there’s this great forum tomorrow. The children of all the great civil rights leaders will discuss where we are today.”

We all agreed that sounded real neat.

“So where are you guys from?” the waitress asked us.

“Alabama,” we chorused.

The waitress turned and walked away from us. We never saw her again. Welcome to Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.

We gave up on the club and caught the French movie (complete with English subtitles) of Gerard Depardieu’s performance as Cyrano de Bergerac. I cried at the end – a great performance.

The next morning, we gave Fredirique a big breakfast sendoff (I remember the paper placemats for some strange reason, mainly because of the corny pictures of tourist stops in southern Pennsylvania). Afterward we had a snowball fight to remember, slipping and sliding down the hotel hallways, dodging snowballs while throwing them back as we fell on our behinds in the snowdrifts.

Josef didn’t talk about her as much after she left. It was as if her recent presence was a recharge for his silence battery. He wasn’t exactly whistling while he worked but he was definitely more fun to work with. We finished the project in a couple of weeks and parted our ways. He headed to Indianapolis and I headed to our corporate office in Huntsville, Alabama.

Although I worked with Fredirique in Huntsville for the next year, we never really saw each other. We were just two more young people working for a young company, keeping busy (too busy). She traveled a lot while I settled down.

Oddly enough, we didn’t hit it off until I left Huntsville. Not exactly “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but something like this: I once had a school girlfriend – we never saw each other after school but we couldn’t do without each other at school. In the opposite vein, when I was sent to Knoxville for six months, I always had my mind on what I could do to impress Fredirique but I didn’t want to be with her, necessarily. I don’t know, this whole thing’s been odd. After all, I have a wife I love dearly so I certainly have no intention to pursue a like relationship with Fredirique. At the same time, I savor my friendship with Fredirique like a good bottle of wine or an out-of-the-way antique store.

While in Knoxville, I wrote her and her friends several stories. She always seemed encouraged by my letters and my tales of Knoxville life. She even inspired me to make a book of my writings. Of course, I knew that part of her enthusiasm and inspiration was just the warmth of her persona shining across the miles. She’s just that way. At the same time, I was willing to accept that energy as my own. You know what I mean…faith is another word for it. I trust that she accepts me the way I am and she reciprocates that trust.

I had another dream about her last night (well, it’s all been a dream, in a way, but this was a real dream). I had told my wife I was going for a walk. A little way from my house, I met Fredirique. We talked for a bit while walking further away from the house. Just as naturally as ever, Fredirique slipped her arm through mine (the guilty part of me made me mentally look back at the house to see if my wife was looking). I continued to talk while she looked up to me with trusting eyes – an odd sensation, to be sure, because II felt like we were meant to be in that situation forever – Platonism personified. But then, whenever we’re really together it feels that way. Fredirique is everyone’s best friend.

 

Chapter 7: 1201 Pollyanna Avenue

I wonder how much my past has an iron-grip on my future.  I mean, no matter how hard I avoid it, in fact, especially the more I resist doing it, I repeat something I’ve done before. You know what I mean.  You see your mom lecturing a girl for using foul language in the playground and you tell yourself you’d never embarrass someone like that in public. Years later you catch yourself telling a little boy to quit calling his sister dirty names in the grocery store checkout line.

I should have seen all the signs this time. I’d been there only fifteen years – a lifetime – before. There was one big difference this time – I’m married. Actually, marriage isn’t always a big difference, but in my mind it’s night and day. After all, I only make that promise once in a lifetime – you know, till death do we part and all-l-l that. Of course, marriage doesn’t stop you from making new friends and saying the same thing over and over. Sure, I’ll keep telling my new friends, “I’ll love you until the end of time,” like another annoying Greek chorus popping up at the end of each scene, so I know love…well, actually something between agape and eros, is the sort of thing I’ll keep sharing in the future. It’ll always be there for me to pass out like wooden nickels (more like the old wooden round tuits my aunt and uncle used to give me that said, “I’ll love you when I get a round tuit.”). A couple of new friends of mine from work, Fredirique and Josef, brought out a lot of the old emotions I thought I had put away for good a long time ago.

Fredirique told her ex-boyfriend to keep his motorcycle stored next to his workout equipment in the garage. [Now that I look back at this, I should have kept the bike there myself because now it just sits in my backyard rusting and rotting away, but hey, I’m getting ahead of myself.] Although Fredirique and Josef had broken up months before…well, they didn’t actually break up cause they were never actually together but…well, let’s just say they quit going out together and he kept his stuff at her house and slept in a bedroom behind the kitchen until he could find a place of his own. Anyway, Josef asked me if I knew anything about motorbikes and I, in my Super-dude-knows-everything disguise, said yes. So off I went on a few quiet Sundays to help, like the blind leading the blind.

By chance the first Sunday, Josef and I figured out how to change the oil. By luck, I also got to see Fredirique’s pad for the first time. She had bought this really neat three-bedroom clapboard cottage in the (dare I say chic?) medical district. In her spare time, she had remodeled the postage-stamp kitchen by opening up the ceiling with a skylight, which added a natural highlight to the ivory tiles she had mortared over the old counter. Like a good writer, I should take you on a tour of the rest of her house but suffice it to say the house looked like the perfect single gal’s hangout – warm and cozy without feeling too much like home.

Fredirique opened the back door. “So, Lee, do you think he’ll ever get his motorcycle fixed?” Fredirique asked as she handed me a fresh glass of tea while I sat in the shade on the steps outside and Josef cleaned up the garage.

“He’d rather sell it to me but my wife won’t let me buy it before I sell the old computer.” I took a sip of the iced tea, thankful for the cool liquid running down my throat on such a hot day.

“She won’t let you?” I inhaled half the tea. “You don’t really let her make the decisions for you, do you?”

“Well, we have this agreement. If it costs over fifty bucks, we have to both agree to buying it.” I gulped down the rest of the tea. “I’ve always wanted my own bike but…well, this one needs some work. If I buy it, do you mind if I keep it here for a while?”

“Mind? No, I don’t mind,” she said with a knowing grin.

Over the next few weeks, Josef and I struggled to get his bike working. We figured out, after he had ridden it two miles away from the house and couldn’t get back, that something went wrong when the engine got warm, probably from the rubber pads over the carbs. In any case, it was more than we wanted to tackle. The next Monday, Josef got a job that required daily transportation – pizza delivery – so I bought the bike for $150 and he bought an old pickup truck. He delivered pizzas for two days and then disappeared the next night, taking his clothes and most of his workout equipment with him.

I spent the following Sunday at Fredirique’s house trying to get the bike working. She wasn’t home so I had the garage to myself. Big deal. I didn’t have anyone to talk with and had no knowledge of things mechanical so I just sat on the workout bench, staring at the handlebars, wishing for a miracle but knowing the angels didn’t help Harley wannabes. Needless to say, I left in frustration.

A few weeks later I found myself at home alone, with my wife gone on a business trip and my cats just wanting to be left alone sunning in the dining room. Bored, I drove over to Fredirique’s house so I could once again heave open the ancient garage door and face the daunting task of solving the mystery of Japanese rice burners. I knew Fredirique wasn’t home so I could work on the bike in meditative peace, sort of like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, only I haven’t read the book so I know about as much about it as I did fixing the bike.

Sitting on the concrete floor in the suffocating heat of that day was bad enough but here I was trying to be a backyard mechanic, skillfully whacking at a stubborn bolt with a broken pair of pliers. After two hours of banging and cursing, I leaned backed, letting my neck rest on the cool vinyl of the weight bench. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, but only momentarily.

In my half-awake state, I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle whose engine noise reminded me of an old Volvo. Didn’t Fredirique own a Volvo, I wondered. The engine stopped and a door opened. With my eyes closed, I couldn’t see the person coming but I imagined someone getting closer.

“Lee, are you all right?” a concerned voice said into my left ear. I looked up to see Fredirique leaning down over me. Caught as I was half-asleep, my mind raced through a multitude of personalities like a cat in a room full of catnip. In the same moment, panic swept through my mind, then relief when I realized I was not under attack by an invisible voice. At first, my platonic self looked at her sisterly eyes but then my caveman self took over and I glanced down at her shirt hanging open, exposing her white bra which, of course, led down to her hips shrink-wrapped in a pair of tight shorts. My eyes continued to slide down her thin white thighs until my self-conscience self took over (pretty well stereotyped by the psychiatrist-obsessed Woody Allen) and I found myself looking down at my hands stained with grease and engine oil.

“Uh, yeah, I just can’t seem to get the engine case open,” I managed to say out of my dried-out throat.

“Why don’t you come inside for a minute and cool off? I can turn the air conditioner on for a little while.”

“Okay,” I mumbled.

“I’ve got some juice leftover in the fridge, if you want some,” Fredirique yelled from her bedroom as she unpacked her suitcase. “There may be a beer or two in there, too.”

“No thanks,” I managed to say, sprawled out on the couch.

“Are you sure?”

I lay there in the cool silence.

“I’ll get it for you, for a price,” she said as she walked up to the couch from behind.

I leaned forward, craning my neck and cocking my eyebrows. “Like what?”

“Well, considering that I’ve let you keep your bike here for over a month and…well, you can see that the air conditioner doesn’t do that good a job.”

“It feels fine to me.”

“Lee-e-e-e,” she said in a nasally, whining voice, “I mean it. When you stop sweating like a pig on my couch, you’ll see what I mean. You won’t feel cold anymore.”

“So, uh, you want me to fix your air conditioner.”

“No, I had something else in mind,” she said in a quiet voice, while beckoning me to the bedroom hallway with her finger.

I sat up on the couch. “So what do you have to drink?” I said as I got up and walked toward the kitchen.

“Lee, come here for a minute, will you? I have something to show you.”

I stopped at the kitchen doorway. What exactly was going on here? Either I was misreading the signals or Fredirique didn’t know when to stop teasing me. I shrugged my shoulders and turned back toward the living room. “What do you want?”

“Come on into the bedroom,” her voice called out.

I stepped into the small hallway and stuck my head in her bedroom. Seeing her unmade bed with the covers piled up made me smile. Miss Architectural Digest didn’t make her bed.

“No, over here,” she said behind my back. I turned around to see Fredirique standing in the bedroom at the other end of the hallway.

I walked up behind her.

“Give me your honest opinion of what you think,” she said, putting her hands on her hips with pride.

“Of what,” I asked timidly.

“Of the room,” she said in an equally quiet voice. “What do you think?”

“Uh, it’s okay,” I said as I walked up to the door.

“Okay?” she asked, dissatisfied with my opinion.

“Well, it’s definitely…green.”

“Is that all you can say?”

I responded in a fake cockney accent, “A lovely shade of hunter green, milady, but your orange and white pool light’s what’s exquisite.”

“Oh, I’m taking that light down. What do you think about the trim?”

“Hmm…a green room with red trim. Is this going to be the Christmas Room?”

She hit me on the arm. “What do you want to drink, silly?” she asked as she bounded out of the room.

A few weeks passed while the world kept spinning and I kept going to work, eating lunch with my wife and contemplating what my next step would be. After all, in a way I was entering new territory. Fredirique presented a predicament – she was younger than I and single. Jusstt because she was a woman and I was a man in this new friendship didn’t necessarily mean anything, though. I had had female friends before. But this time, I’m the one who’s married and it had been so long ago that I last had a close female friend that I had no idea if the rules had changed.

Fredirique peeked her head into my office. “Lee, how long do you plan to keep your bike at my house?”

“Why?”

“Well, you can keep it there a little while longer if you want, but I’d like a little something in return.”

“Do you have another room you want me to criticize?” I asked, laughing.

“No-o-o. You know that old light fixture you saw at my house that you liked? Well, I’ll give it to you if you’ll put a ceiling fan in my house.”

“Uh, you’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not tall enough and since you’re a guy I figured you could do it,” she added with a smirk.

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“Even from me?” Fredirique asked with her puppy dog look.

“Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Karen and I are busy this weekend so I’ll come by two Sundays from now.”

Fredirique spun around in the doorway. “Great, I’ll throw in lunch and you can invite Karen, if you want to,” she emphasized as she turned her head, tossing her hair, and disappeared past the doorway.

I waited a week to tell Karen that Fredirique wanted the two of us to go over to her house so I could put in a ceiling fan. As I expected, Karen gave me a neutral reply. She always says I can find any excuse to get out of working in the yard, like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. When Sunday rolled around, she feigned feverishness and told me not to stay gone too long. I went through the routine of trying to get her to go but she gave me her best “I know when I’m not invited” look, the same look I got whenever I invited her to go bike riding with my college buddy, Vincent.

“Oh, there you are,” Fredirique said in surprise when I knocked on the door. She lay down the book she had been reading and stood up from the couch. “Come on in, it’s unlocked.”

I opened the screen door and stood in front of her in my best handyman clothes – a blue plaid, half cotton, half polyester long-sleeved shirt, a faded-red baseball cap with the insignia of an old resort called Little Switzerland, and blue jeans that covered the top of some old workboots I found in my garage earlier that day. I had dreamed the night before that I had to climb up into the attic to put the fan in and didn’t want to coat any exposed sweaty body parts with fiberglass so I spent that morning looking around the house for used but reliable clothing.

“Well, here it is,” Fredirique said, pointing to a box on the floor. “But before you start, I want you to look at my ‘Christmas Room.’ I finally finished the paint job and put in a new light fixture.”

We walked over to the new bedroom. I was immediately impressed. “You know, the way this looks now, it could be used as a den or something. It’s looks too good to be a bedroom.”

“Yeah, I thought of that, too. By the way, there’s your light.” Fredirique pointed to a fake pool table light sitting on a couple of newspaper pages. “I didn’t dust it off but I did put the screws in with it.”

“Thanks.” I walked back to the living room and looked at her ceiling where two wires hung from a hole in the middle of the room. “So that’s where you want me to put it.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, I may have to go in the attic to secure the fan to the roof beams.”

Fredirique scrunched her eyebrows in a puzzled look as she leaned over the coffee table to pick up a leaflet. “I read the instructions and saw nothing in here about securing the fan.”

I pulled the instructions from her honey-colored hand. “Let me see. I tell you what – if you’ll go ahead and start lunch, I’ll put the ceiling fan in.”

“Okay, but I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.” She walked out of the room while I pulled the ceiling fan parts out of the box. Fredirique returned to the room a few minutes later and started some idle conversation about current movies and such while she sat in the rattan easy chair next to the couch and watched me like…well, I don’t what I looked like to her but she gave her undivided attention to my work, making suggestions when I struggled to fit a fan blade in backward or obviously used the wrong decorative screw.

After wading through the instructions, I managed to get the fan together in about 45 minutes and finally got to the part where I needed an extra pair of hands. I pulled an old wooden chair from next to the fireplace and placed it under the hole in the ceiling. For several seconds, I mentally wrangled over what I should do next because I knew Fredirique would have to be close to me, perhaps even standing on the same chair with me, to help hold the fan in position. Because I valued my personal space, I did not look forward to giving up that space to anyone but my wife. At the same time, I knew I’d look silly trying to put the fan up by myself, especially if I dropped it. I also knew that Fredirique would get a sadistic pleasure making me uneasy by invading my personal space and that at the same time, I would enjoy her sadistic playfulness. Oh, what complex humans we are.

“If you don’t mind getting your fat butt out of that chair…” I quipped.

Fredirique jumped out of the chair, put one hand on her hip, turned and cocked her behind toward me as she looked down. “Is my butt really big?”

“No,” I abruptly replied, angry that she had gotten the best of me already. “If you don’t mind, come over here and hold the fan for me while I put the wires together.”

Fredirique hopped onto the chair with me and looked at my eyes just eight inches away. “What do you want me to do?” The chair creaked in protest. “Do you think this thing will hold the both of us?” she asked nervously. I quickly shook my head and she nodded in reply. “I think I’ll get another chair,” she yelped as she jumped down to the floor.

Phew! The moment of my personal space invasion solved itself. Sometimes, I can’t believe how I value the security of my personal space over the spontaneity of bumping into someone else, no matter what the circumstances.

At that same moment, someone knocked on the door. “Hey Fred, are you home?” a winded voice called from the front door.

“Ed!” Fredirique exclaimed as she sprang for the door. “What have you been doing?”

Ed stepped into the house, gave Fredirique a hug and looked up at me with curiosity. “I just finished a twenty-five mile bike ride with Chuck. He’s taking a cool-down lap around the block. I ran out of water a while back. I hope you don’t mind if I fill up my bottle.”

Fredirique noticed Ed staring at me. “Lee, this is my old boyfriend from college, Edward McLane. Ed, Lee is a friend of mine from work who’s helping me with the remodeling.”

“Nice to meet you, Ed. I apologize for not shaking your hand but I can’t lay this fan down right now,” I said to a perfect specimen of college-age athlete with walnut-colored hair.

“That’s all right,” Ed replied, nodding in my direction. He turned to Fredirique. “I guess I’ll catch up with Chuck. I can see you’ve got company.”

“No, stay if you want. Lee and I are almost finished.”

“I’d better catch up with Chuck before he decides to go twenty-five more miles.”

“Come back when you’ve finished.”

“I’ll see what I feel like,” Ed said as he headed into the kitchen.

Fredirique looked at me, shrugged her shoulders in a “What can I say?” pose and followed Ed into the kitchen while I stood on the chair holding the fan.

After Ed left, Fredirique and I finished putting the fan together. We didn’t know it then but the agape/eros balance had permanently shifted. Plato looked at us from beyond the grave with interest – he had a new experiment to observe.

Fredirique stopped by my office a few days later. “You know, you did such a wonderful job the last time, I wonder if you would mind putting another ceiling fan in my house.”

“Where could I possibly put it? Every room in your house has a new fan or light fixture.”

Fredirique gave me a perky look before she responded, “My bedroom, of course. And please tell Karen she’s more than welcome to come over.” Oh god, I thought, here we go again, in one moment exhilarated and frightened.

“Okay,” I said, “I think I can come over on Saturday this weekend.”

“Great, I’ll have lunch ready for you two when you come over.”

Once again, on the designated day, Karen found a reason for not going to Fredirique’s house. I tried to persuade her to go, if not for herself, then for our marriage, but she rolled her eyes and told me to get out of the house.

When I arrived at her house, Fredirique was pulling weeds out of the liriope lining the walkway that ran from the street to the front porch.

“Hey, Lee, you want to help me?” she asked. I shook my head. “I hate this stuff. You remember my last housemate, David? He used to do all this for fun. Can you believe it?”

“No.”

“Where’s Karen? You did invite her, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, she’s not feeling well today and sends her apologies.”

“Well, I fixed enough stew for an army. I hope you’re hungry. I’m starving after being out here for so long.”

Fredirique decided to go ahead and serve the meal at the antique oak table in her dining room, even though it made the meal seem more formal with just the two of us eating there. Between bites, Fredirique talked about the years she’d spent with her ex-boyfriend, Ed. I stared at the dried flower arrangement in the middle of the table while slowly eating the stew and stewing over the day’s possibilities. What bad outcome, if any, would result from my spending time in her bedroom, standing on her bed, especially when I would need her to stand on the bed with me to hold the fan while I attached the wires?

“Do you mind if I get another bowl?” I asked as I stood up.

“I’ll get it, you just sit down. Besides, you’ll be doing all the hard work today, so you might as well rest now.” Fredirique grabbed my bowl and walked into the kitchen while picking back up on the good times she’d had with Ed at Ole Miss.

“Fredirique,” I interrupted. “if you enjoyed being with him so much, why didn’t the two of you get married?”

“Well, Lee, he…I don’t know. He’s not the same guy I first met.”

“So? Neither is my wife. We all change. Besides, he seems like a great guy with his head on his shoulders.” Unlike your recent boyfriends, I told myself. I tried to remember if there was something about him I missed when I met him. The more I thought about it, he seemed to treat her like he took her for granted the other day. In the middle of all my thinking, I realized I missed what Fredirique had said. “What did you say?”

“Oh, forget it, I don’t want to talk about him anymore. Finish your stew so we can get the fan done.” Fredirique shoved the bowl in front of me and walked away. “I’ll take the parts out of the box for you. This fan’s a little different than the last one so you might want to read the instructions all the way through before you start. They’re on the coffee table. And hurry up and finish, will you, I don’t have all day,” she called out behind me.

I wolfed down the stew as quick as I could and grabbed the instructions on the way to Fredirique’s bedroom. When I got there, I found she had moved the junk she’d had piled up at the end of the bed and replaced it with the same chair I had used to put the ceiling fan up in her living room.

“Uh-h,” I stammered, “I thought I could use your bed to stand on.”

“Well, you thought wrong. I don’t want your dirty shoes on the bed unless you plan to take them off.”

“If you insist,” I said grinning, making a motion to remove a shoe.

“Ha, ha, not funny. Just use the chair.”

“Okay but I still think your bed’s gonna get dirty just from the stuff falling out of the hole in the ceiling.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll get the bathmat to cover the end of the bed.” While Fredirique went to the bathroom, I looked around her room. Against the wall next to the doorway sat her vanity with the usual female props – a hairbrush and old facial makeup items – strewn across the counter. Taped to the vanity mirror were postcards and pictures from around the world. Through a half-open door on the wardrobe against the adjoining wall, I could see a few suits hanging up. I could also see where she had moved the junk – magazines like Good Housekeeping and Interior Design as well as some dress shoes – she had shoved them into the bottom of the wardrobe.

I was removing my last shoe by the time Fredirique got back. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Well, if you look at the hole in the ceiling, you’ll notice it hangs over your bed, not the chair.”

“Oh, okay, but you still have to stand on the bathmat. While you’re putting the fan together, I’ve got a couple of phone calls to make. If you need my help, just holler.”

I watched Fredirique walk back to the living room. So that’s how we solve this situation, I thought. We spend a minimum amount of time together in the bedroom. Smart thinking on her part.

Although this fan was more complex than the last one, I had already figured out the theory of how fans worked so I finished the assembly process in less than 30 minutes. During that time, I listened to Fredirique’s conversation with her sister. I couldn’t hear every word but I could tell she was upset about something. I assumed Ed’s visit a few days earlier and her discussing him with me had made her upset. Whatever she was talking about, I knew that the phone call with her sister was good therapy for Fredirique. She brightened up in a matter of minutes.

“Well, are you done?” Fredirique asked, practically skipping into the bedroom.

I stood up from the bed with the fan in my arms. “Yeah, I was just sitting here waiting for you to get off the phone.”

“So you waited for me? That’s nice. You know, I ought to give you a neck rub for all the work you’ve done.”

I mentally blushed. “Thanks for the offer but we’re not done yet. I still need your help holding the fan.”

Fredirique stepped onto the bed and started jumping up and down. “Okay, where do you want me to stand?” she asked in midjump.

“How about on the chair? I need to connect the wires from the bed.”

“Oh yeah,” she nodded in agreement as she stepped down to the chair. “Give me the fan.”

While we were putting up the fan, I looked out the front bedroom window and noticed an old woman looking back at me from the sidewalk.

“You have curious neighbors,” I whispered.

“Oh yeah, Mrs. Duquette,” Fredirique said in a loud voice. “She has nothing better to do but nose into other people’s business.”

Mrs. Duquette walked on while Fredirique and I finished putting the fan together.

“Well, Lee, I thank you once again for your help,” Fredirique said as she held the door open for me. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Oh, you’d find someone else to help.”

“Yeah, but no one as fun as you.”

“Thanks. Hey, do you mind if I come over tomorrow to get the motorcycle?”

“No, just call me before you come over.”

“Be careful,” Karen said, as I left the house on Sunday. “I wish you’d get someone to help you lift the motorcycle.”

“Oh, I’ll manage. Besides, your brother said he might meet me there after church lets out. If it’ll make you feel better, maybe you can give me a back rub when I get back.”

“Only if you hurry home.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I responded with a kiss as I stepped into the truck.

When I got to Fredirique’s house, I could hear the shower through the screen door. I knocked as loud as I could but got no response. “Anybody home?” I yelled.

“Lee, is that you?” Fredirique yelled back.

“Yeah.”

“Come on in. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

I walked in and sat on the couch. A few minutes later, I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Fredirique standing over me. She was wearing a terry cloth wrap and had a towel wrapped around her head. “Turn around and I’ll give you that neck rub I promised.”

“That’s okay,” I said, embarrassed by my automatic lustful thoughts, “Karen’s already promised to give me a back rub when I get home. I can wait till then. Besides, if you’re going to help, I don’t think you want to load the motorcycle in those clothes.”

“Oh quit being such a fuddy-duddy and turn around. It’s not like I’m going to attack you or something.”

I turned back around to face the fireplace. Fredirique placed her hands on my neck with an iron grip and began to massage my neck like an eagle grabs its prey.

“Ouch, that hurts,” I said.

“This is a Singaporan massage. It’s supposed to hurt,” she responded as someone knocked on the door. Fredirique walked over to the door. “Yes, may I help you?”

“Uh…I was supposed to help my sister’s husband move a motorcycle.”

“Oh, you must be Junior. Come on in. Lee’s here waiting for me on the couch. I was just getting changed,” she said as she walked back to the bedroom. I cringed, imagining what was going through Junior’s mind.

Junior sat on the couch beside me. “Hey, Lee, what’s going on? I thought you’d be ready to move the motorcycle. Karen said you called Fredirique ahead of time to tell her you were coming over.”

“I, uh…I don’t know. I just got here and found her in the shower.”

“You found her where?”

“No, I mean I could hear the shower from the front door.”

“And you walked on in?”

“No, she told me to come in.”

“While she was still in the shower?”

“Well, we’re good friends.” Junior gave me a questionable stare. “I mean, she’s like a sister to me.”

“What was it I heard her say when I came to the door – something about hurting you?”

“She was giving me a neck rub.”

“Like a sister?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, I won’t say anything to Karen about this. I don’t think she’ll understand.”

“Oh, she knows all about this. Uh, I mean, she already knows what Fredirique is like.”

“So that’s why she called me to remind me to come over here?”

“No, she’s concerned about my back. I hurt it the last time I was here.”

“You what?”

“I pulled my back in Fredirique’s bed.”

“I don’t think I want to know about this.”

“Oh…oh, it’s not what you think. Fredirique asked me to put a ceiling fan in her bedroom…”

“And you ended up on her bed?”

“Well, sort of. I guess I shouldn’t have taken my shoes off.”

“Lee, I don’t need to hear anymore. We all make mistakes. I’ll pray to God for forgiveness, if you’d like, and you do the same.”

“Why? I had to take my shoes off to stand on her bed to put the ceiling fan in. That’s all.”

“Then how did you hurt your back?”

“Well, my socks were slippery and after I finished putting in the fan, I slipped off the bed and pulled my back. I didn’t tell Fredirique at the time because I didn’t want her to give me a hard time about being old and out of shape. Besides, it was bad enough that a neighbor saw us together in her bedroom.”

“I still don’t think you should tell Karen.”

“Oh, she already knows.”

“No, I mean about the neck rub.”

“Well, if you say so.”

“Hey guys,” Fredirique said as she stepped out of the bedroom, “why don’t you get the motorcycle out of the garage and I’ll fix you some lunch.”

“Sounds like a great idea,” I said, as Junior and I stood up to leave the house.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8: Celestial Realm Coffee House

Lee leaned back on the couch and counted under his breath while he cradled the phone receiver against his ear. “She’s got to pick up by the fourth ring, or her answering machine will turn on,” he thought.

“Heh-looo,” a familiar voice cheerfully intoned through the earpiece.

“Hey, Fredirique. It’s Lee.”

“Lee! How great to hear from you. I was just thinking I could use a little cheering up right now.”

“Is something the matter?”

“Oh no, I just…well, it’s been a long week. I’m glad Friday’s finally here.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. So do you have any big plans for the weekend?”

“Well, I was thinking about meeting Phillip buck naked at the front door.”

“What?” Lee asked, his thoughts momentarily interrupted.

“Haha. I mean, don’t you think that would be cool?”

“Well…”

“Oh come on.”

“Of course, any guy would be stupid not to like his girlfriend meet him at the door with no clothes on.”

“I might not do it but I still think it would be fun.”

“If you want to give him a heart attack.”

“You’re so funny sometimes, Lee. I’ve got to go right now but will you give me a call in a couple of days if I don’t call you first?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks. Well, I’ll see you later.”

“Good luck with Phillip. I hope he doesn’t attack you at the door.”

“Why? That’s the whole purpose,” she emphasized. “Seeya.”

“Bye.”

Lee paused a moment to see if he could imagine Fredirique meeting him at the door buck naked. Yes, he’d be a bit embarrassed and would do his best to turn his head. Now, if his wife met him at the door, that’d be another matter. She wouldn’t do it anyway. Why encourage Lee’s already strong sexual drive, she would say, he gets excited just by waking up in the morning.

Lee called Fredirique at work on Monday. “She’s gone for a few minutes,” the receptionist replied, “would you like to leave her a message?”

“Yeah, just tell her that Lee called,” he said, hanging up the phone and diving back into the report that had to be finalized that day.

“ADS. This is Lee. May I help you?”

“You called?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Business, I’m afraid.”

“Awww.”

“Sorry. Hey, I don’t have the address of the guy who’s supposed to get this report,” Lee said in a serious tone of voice. He knew that Fredirique kept up with the names and addresses of all the Southeast clients. Although her sales territory only covered Georgia, she still kept in contact with clients in other states as well.

“Oh yeah, you’re supposed to send that report to Phillip.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“Yes, yes. As that hair replacement commercial goes, he’s not just my boyfriend, he’s also a client.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not really. Now do you want the address or don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Just send it to the treatment plant in Charleston.”

“But the project name is St. Charles…”

“I know, but our client is really Charleston.” Lee just started to let a word out of his mouth. “Don’t ask any questions or make any smart remarks. Just send it.”

“Okay. Hey, did I tell you I’m being sent to Birmingham for a few weeks?”

“No, when did you find out about that?”

“On Thursday. I leave tomorrow.”

“Really? That’s awfully sudden.”

“You know our company. At least they let me know I was going.”

“Yeah. Oh, hey, have you gotten anything in the mail from me lately?”

“No, was I supposed to be expecting something?”

“Uh, no. I just wondered.”

“What should I be looking for?”

“Oh, you’ll know when you see it. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” Lee replied, knowing something special must be coming for Fredirique to try to downplay it. “By the way, speaking of Birmingham, did I tell you that Pam and Carl are leaving the company?”

“No!”

“Yeah, they should be leaving in a couple of weeks.”

“I’ll have to call them before they go. Well, I better go. Have a safe trip to Birmingham. If you get a chance, you ought to stop at the Celestial Coffee Shop in the little Five Points area. There’s also a neat restaurant there called Bottega’s. Let me know if you try them out.”

“Sure.”

“If you would just transfer me to voicemail.”

“No problem.” Lee pressed a few buttons and lay down the phone. He began wondering what Fredirique could possibly be sending him in the mail without telling him what it was. A surprise from her recent trip to Ireland, perhaps?

A few weeks later, Lee called Fredirique from Birmingham. “It’s me again.”

“Hey, Lee, you sound so glum. Don’t let work get you down. It’s not worth it. It’s just a job.”

“I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“What’s up?”

“I was just checking to make sure everything was going well with the Dekalb client.”

“They must be doing well. We just signed a new contract for eleven more flow monitors in the Dekalb County basin.”

“That’s great. Hey, I’ve never received anything from you unless you put that job posting for Hong Kong in my mailbox.”

“No, that went out to everybody.” Fredirique’s voice trailed off. “It figures someone must have done something with it.”

“What?” Lee asked, not sure whether Fredirique was talking about the unknown package or something she was looking at in her office.

“Never mind. Hey, have you been by the Celestial Coffee Shop yet?”

“No, but I did look it up in the phone book. It’s called the Celestial Realm Coffee House.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Well, you’ve got to go there. I know you’ll like it. It tends to get a little crowded on the weekends but it should be all right during the week.”

“I want to get to it but I’ve been spending time getting this corporate apartment cleaned up. It was a pig sty when I got here.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, Lee. You usually get out at least one night a week.”

“I know. I do my best.”

“Well, call me when you make it by there.”

Although they only saw each other on the weekends, Lee and his wife, Karen, still quarreled occasionally. Lee and Karen had just finished having a big fight so Lee was thinking, “Oh, how I’d like to call this whole thing quits right now.” They drove into town to cool off and do some errands. Lee dropped Karen off at her office and stopped by ADS to check his mail. Lo and behold (to the satisfaction of his long-running curiosity that started when Fredirique asked if Lee had received something from her in the mail), there lay a card containing the words, “L- Isn’t it funny how we always gravitate back towards one another? Thanks for being such a good friend who understands where I am coming from… F”

Lee spent the next day and a half waiting for his return to Birmingham so he could call Fredirique. He left her a voicemail right away thanking her for a wonderful card.

“Thanks again for the card,” Lee said, when Fredirique answered the phone.

“Oh, you’re welcome.”

“You know, I don’t always know how to interpret our friendship but I know better than to dissect it – after all, the whole is lovelier than the parts much like a cardinal in a tree is much lovelier than one dissected in a laboratory.”

“You sure are poetic today.”

“Well, when I found the card in my mailbox, I…well, I was pleasantly pleased, to begin with. Here was a card from…I’m having trouble with descriptions today…my confidant, my playmate, my friend, or as the French would say, mon ami.”

“Thanks. I guess that was supposed to be a compliment.”

“Yeah,” Lee said, wondering how much more he should say. “I’m in a strange mood today. As always, my mind is filled with a myriad of sensations, expressions, and vague notions, some of which I would like to share with you, some of which I should never say to you and some I don’t know what to do with.

“Okay,” Fredirique said, with reserve.

“Can I be honest with you?”

Fredirique paused. “Of course you can. Why wouldn’t you be?”

“You know what I mean. Do you mind if I share some stuff with you I wouldn’t normally say otherwise?”

“It sounds like you’re going to anyway. You know you can’t embarrass me, so don’t even try.”

“Well, first of all, I wasn’t even sure if the card was meant for me. This card contained words that I appreciate greatly.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“Well, that’s one way to put it, anyway. I never expected to see something like that from you. Needless to say, the card caught me at a vulnerable point because Karen and I had just had a fight. The I-want-to-escape-this-trap-called-marriage part of me focused on the first sentence and immediately interpreted that you were signaling me to gravitate closer to you but then I remembered that you once said you would never marry a divorced man. The I-want-a-playmate-for-life-not-a-wife part of me read the last sentence and sighed, ‘Ah, someone to have a good time in the city with.’ At once I cherished the card and feared the repercussions should my wife find it.”

“Why should you worry about her seeing it? I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate your friendship.”

“Well, maybe I should apologize for making so much out of a two-sentence postcard but I only get a few personal cards and letters a year and practically celebrate the arrival of every one. Of course, getting one from you is extra special, I must admit.”

“Yes, you are in a strange mood. Are you going to see Karen this weekend?”

“Probably.”

“Hmm…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should sit down and talk sometime.”

“We can talk now.”

“No, I’d rather see your face so I can see what you’re thinking.”

“I’m glad that we are still friends.”

“I am too. We just accept each other…”

“As we are. Yeah, I know. I haven’t had a lot of true friends like you. Since you and I have been together as good friends from about 1992 on, we have seen ADS go through a number of changes. We are still here to talk about the changes, which says something about us.”

“That’s true.”

“The only thing is, I don’t whether it’s perseverance or perversity. What about the way we change? Have we changed or stayed the same?”

Fredirique, lost in thought, took a few seconds to answer. “I guess it depends. What are you doing this Thursday?”

“Well, I’ll work all day, go home, cook dinner, and relax, I suppose. Why?”

“I was just thinking, I could leave work early that day and meet you at the Celestial Coffee House around 6 p.m. What do you think about that?”

“Uh…”

“What?”

“That would be cool.”

“Good, I’ll see you then. I’ve got to go right now. Seeya.”

“Bye.”

That night, Lee went home and wrote in his journal, “Although we’ve known each about five years, I feel like I’ve known you for a lifetime. I know the you who is woman (the caretaker, the flirtatious one, the sympathetic person), and the you who is man (cut to the chase, tell it like it is, no nonsense). You see the corresponding traits in me. This recognition builds the foundation for a lasting friendship because our personalities flow throughout the yin and yang of the swirling patterns of persona. Yes, my favorite broom-straw headed Southern woman, I, too, thank you for letting me be myself with you, without having to worry about whether you’ll respect me in the morning or any of that other nonsense that so many male-female relationships get bogged down in.”

Lee left work right at five ‘o clock Thursday afternoon to drive to the Celestial Realm. He wanted to check the place out before Fredirique got there. Following the directions he had gotten earlier, Lee passed by the UAB campus and turned into what looked like a slightly upscale off-campus student housing area. The old Victorian houses looked well-maintained. Although the apartment buildings were obviously of pre-Depression construction, they, too, were good-looking for their age. Ivy-covered lawns lined the small, winding, two-lane streets. Lee knew he was in the right neighborhood. He could see Fredirique living in a place like this. In fact, he could see himself living there. It reminded him of his college days in the student slums of Knoxville.

The Celestial Realm Coffee House looked like the old bottom floor or lobby of an apartment building. A yellow neon sign in the window advertised the name of the store along with a bright, smiling sun. Looking inside the windows, Lee noticed a typical 90s-style college clientele. Everyone wore loose, baggy clothes, long hair, and rings piercing various parts of the body. Lee walked inside and looked around. In the low light, Lee could see that the furnishings looked like the leftovers of an old antique shop — chairs that sagged, old blue and red glass plates lying around, and pieces of art that could have been created anytime in the last century. Light jazz played in the background while the sounds of a cappuccino machine emanated from the brightly-lit kitchen and bar stand in the back.

“This is the first time I’ve been here,” Lee said to a guy with a two-day old stubble of growth on his head, “Do I sit down somewhere or do I order at the bar?”

“Well,” the guy said, obviously amused, “you can sit down somewhere and order or you can sit at the bar and order.”

“Thanks.” Lee noticed a couple of old wingback chairs that faced each other near the front. He picked out the one with the garish red upholstery and sat in it so he would be facing the door.

Fredirique walked in a few minutes later. Lee waved at her and they both smiled at each other in recognition.

“It’s cold out there,” Fredirique said, as she sat in the chair Lee pointed out to her.

“It’s been cold and rainy for the past couple of days.”

“So what do you think of this place? Isn’t it great?”

“It’s actually better than I expected. I’ve been so used to those designed-for-engineers coffee houses in Huntsville that I forgot what a truly cool hangout these places can be.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“So, what brings you all the way to Birmingham that you couldn’t discuss on the phone?”

“Nothing, really.”

“Nothing?”

“I just thought it would be neat to do something crazy on a weekday. I can’t stay too long.” Fredirique picked up a menu. “Have you ordered yet?”

“No, I just got here. What would you suggest?”

“Just whatever you like. You do like coffee, by the way, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Fredirique laughed.

“What’s funny?” Lee asked, smiling back.

“Oh, I just thought it would be funny to meet you at a coffee house and find out that you don’t really like coffee. I didn’t think you were drinking coffee.”

“Well, no, that’s true. I had cut back to help me lose weight.”

“How’s it going?”

“Well, I’ve dropped two belt sizes since I’ve been here.”

“That’s wonderful. Hey, let’s order before it gets too late.”

“Sure.”

“Do you know what you want?”

“I’ll figure it out by the time the guy gets here.”

Fredirique waved to get the attention of the waiter sipping coffee at the bar. “Actually, I think I’ll just have water and a little dessert,” she said to Lee.

“So, now that you’ve sold your house, what are your plans?”

“I don’t know. I’m so excited. I’m not tied down to anything right now for the first time in a long time.”

“Not even to Phillip?”

“I’m never tied down to those guys. You know that,” Fredirique said in a confiding voice.

“I thought you were in love with him.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Of course, I hope you don’t leave ADS just yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Call me insecure if you want. I’m just worried that we’re only work friends.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. How are you doing with Phillip? I hope that your personal relationship with him does not conflict with your business relationship with the former municipality of St. Charles.”

“Oh, pshaw. There’s nothing to worry about there.”

“I was actually happy to hear that you and Phillip are in love. I remember the last time I was in love. Everything else just faded away around me except for her. You know, I’ve been in love with Karen about three times.”

“Really?” Fredirique asked, nodding her head.

“Well, I’m not one of those people who nurtures a constant staying in love with the person who’s near me. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. Too many times, I’ve seen the process of being in love ruined by seeing too many of the other person’s quirks. You like the athletic types so I’m sure that Phillip is right for you. I can’t say much else because I haven’t met the man.”

“He’s great. He treats me right. He doesn’t hang all over me nor does he ignore me. Hey, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Have you ever thought about what it means to be in love? I mean, other than a longing, a burning desire, or…a physical attraction, what, Lee, defines that intense state of mind, body and soul? Some nuns claim to be in love with Jesus. In a class in college, I remember some psychologists claimed that any one person can be in love, that the process is simply a surrendering of one’s desires to another. In part, I agree.” Lee nodded his head. “But I think the true state of in-loveness occurs between two people who simultaneously surrender their individual needs and desires to the whole. I suppose two people could be in love all their lives but if they were too deep in love, they would probably starve to death or go broke.”

“Hopefully, you and Phillip will not starve to death.” They both laughed.

The waiter showed up and took their order.

“While we’re waiting, I wonder if you could tell me something.”

“What?” Fredirique asked, with a smirk on her face.

“If you can believe me, your voice told me the gist of the postcard a few weeks before I got it.”

“I kind of figured that.”

“Do you remember the conversation we had about Josef? You mentioned that in some ways you would rather not know what he is doing so you could go on pretending to think that he is doing well with the little coffee shop we last heard he was running. I know that speaks volumes about you and about life as well. After all, aren’t there a lot of things we’d be better off not knowing so we can go on pretending, wishing for what we want to happen? So, too, I don’t know if I want to know everything that you think about me but (there’s always a but) I don’t want to go on pretending to think something that’s not true. I hope you feel the same way.”

The waiter handed Lee his cappuccino and put the water and baklava on the end table for Fredirique.

Lee sipped his cappuccino.

Fredirique looked at Lee’s eyes for a moment. “What kind of mood are you in tonight?”

“Actually, I feel kind of daring right now.”

“Like you just want to get out of here and do something crazy?”

“Well, we could do that if you want.”

“No, not me, what do you want to do?”

“I want to really and truly talk to you.”

“You know, those guys over there look like they’d be a lot of fun to hang around with. Should I go over there and invite them over?”

“Only if you want a couple of moochers tagging along with us. They look like they’re fresh out of money and are trying to figure out where to get some.”

“What harm would it do to ask them over?”

“None, I suppose, if that’s what you want to do.”

“Seriously, should I or shouldn’t I?”

“Go for it.”

“But you said you wanted to talk to me.”

“What is this, some kind of test? If you really feel inclined to ask those guys over, go ahead. We can always talk later.”

Fredirique grabbed Lee’s arm and walked over to the other table. “Hi there. I’m Fredirique and this is Lee. We’re just here for tonight and are wondering if there’s anything to do tonight.”

“Well,” the guy with shoulder-length, chocolate-colored hair began, “I hadn’t really noticed. There’s probably some narly band playing down at Nick’s.”

“Yeah,” said the blond-haired guy. “I think it’s Wet Mattress Bed. They’re pretty wicked, if you like hardcore.”

Fredirique looked at the brown-haired guy. “So what do you guys do on a Thursday night?”

“Well, I’m just taking a break before I finish studying for my finals.”

“Me, too. We’re roommates over at the Russell Hand Apartments.”

“Good luck, you two. We’ll pass on that kind of fun tonight.” Fredirique grabbed Lee’s arm and dragged him back to the chair. “I forgot that spring break is almost here.”

“Some schools have already had spring break.”

“Well, do you want to see Wet Mattress Bed?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, come on. I didn’t come here to just sit around.”

“I thought you had to leave?”

“No, I just can’t stay too late.”

“Okay, so what do you want to do?”

“Well, if we drove around, you could talk and I could look for something for us to do.”

“Okay.”

“Great, let’s go.” Fredirique stood up and grabbed Lee’s hand. “You don’t mind if I hold your hand, do you?” Lee shook his head. “I don’t mean anything by it. It just keeps the riffraff from asking me stupid questions.”

Lee paid the bill at the cashier’s stand while he looked at the jewelry in the old candy display. Beaded bracelets and other 60s-era items covered the shelves.

Lee walked Fredirique to his car and opened the door for her. After they were both situated in the car, Lee drove out of the parking space.

“Head northwest. That’s where a lot of the action is.”

“Okay.”

“So, what’s on your mind? Apparently, you want to tell me something so spit it out.”

“I think you know that I love you…”

“In what way do you mean, exactly?”

“A part of me loves you like my sister, Elizabeth. Elizabeth and I grew up doing almost everything together until I reached the fifth grade, although she was a couple of grades behind me. Therefore, we have always been very close. I know that several guys, including me, say their first love was their mother and their second love, their sister. Elizabeth knows everything about me, and loves me unconditionally. I would do anything for her and would deal harshly with, more like kill, anyone who would dare to harm her.”

“Well, that’s sweet. I’ll have to meet her sometime.”

“The majority of me that is you, though, the part that constitutes our verbal and physical communication, considers you a mirror reflection of myself. I cannot look in the mirror without breaking into a smile. For this reason, I know we are lifelong friends. Our paths may diverge but we will always be able to pick back up whenever we run into each other.”

“That’s exactly how I feel. Only, we seem to keep running into each other.”

“Yeah, but that’s on purpose.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, somehow I do. That brings up another thing I wanted to say.”

“What’s that?”

“A part of me, not a major part nor an insignificant part, is in love with you. Oh, to be sure, there are parts of me that are in love with a lot of people, based on your theory of surrendering one’s desires.”

“Turn left here.”

“Okay,” Lee replied, turning the steering wheel. He continued, “Because this part of me exists, giving itself up unselfishly, I write stories about you. I don’t believe I am telling you something you don’t already know but I just wanted to say this while I have a captive audience. I hope I’m not scaring you off by this.”

“Not exactly.”

“Unfortunately, there have been others in my life who were not willing to admit they, too, have such feelings for many people at once, not just their loved ones. I am not declaring my love for you or anything like that. I am simply letting you know that a friendship is made of many different outfits and not all of what you and I are made of is Emmett Kelly or Bozo the Clown material.”

“Thanks, Lee, I really appreciate what you are saying. I hope you know that.”

“Well, at this point in my life, you are the person whom I can share everything with. If I am depressed and feel suicidal, I can tell you this without alarming you – you will know I am simply going through a phase. I don’t know that I am the person you share everything with but I believe I will always be around when you have no one else to turn to and will listen to you without judging what you do. What are friends for, after all?”

“That’s true.”

“Well, I hope I haven’t startled you too much by rambling on simply because you took the time to send me a postcard.”

“You’re saying all this simply because of that postcard?”

“I guess so.”

“Do you always react this way? I mean, I didn’t say a whole lot.”

“That’s not what I thought.”

“Well, maybe you’re right. What time is it?”

“It’s almost eight o’clock.”

“What? Well, we better go back and get my car. I’ve still got to drive back to Atlanta.”

“You could stay at the corporate apartment.”

“Is that where you’re staying?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, but it has three bedrooms.”

“That’s all right. I can make it back before it gets too late.”

“Are you sure? I promise I won’t bite. I’m not Dracula. I won’t enter your room and attack you at night while you’re sleeping.”

“Yeah, well, thanks just the same. I don’t have to be in work first thing in the morning, so if I leave now I can still get plenty of sleep at home.”

“Okay, but you’ll miss a great breakfast of shredded wheat, sliced bananas, half a grapefruit, toast with honey, and grapefruit juice with Barleygreen.”

“Mmm, it sounds yummy but I think I’ll pass. Hey, are you working on another story?”

“Yeah, it’s about you, me and Josef in Harrisburg, only I’m kind of the Sam Spade of the sewers.”

“Well, send me a copy when you finish.”

 

Chapter 9: Escape

I. Accept No Imitations

I lay on the wet pavement, with my head bent over the sewer manhole, my hands clutching to my head a hardhat designed for people with short heads, and my back soaking up the cold rain that splattered on the back of my coveralls. I lay there wondering what the hell a guy like me was doing watching another human being slosh around in the excrement of our fellow creatures. I lay there like an innocent victim of a cheap murder mystery with the potential murder weapons – a crowbar, manhole lid and climbing rope – spread out beside me. At any moment, the stranger in the dark trench coat would sneak around from behind the van, grab the murder weapon, bludgeon or strangle me, toss me into the sewer and fade away into a nearby alley, the only clue a drop of blood soon to be washed away by the rain and ground into the pavement by passing cars.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Russ yelled from below.

“What’s the matter?” I called back.

“Goddam drill bit broke again!”

“Okay, I’ll throw down another one. Hang on while I get it.” I walked over to the van and dug through the tools, screws, and other crap on the shelves for several minutes trying to find the drill bit.

“What the fuck’s taking you so long?” Russ screamed like a man burning in hell.

I walked back to the manhole. “If you’d organized your van before we left I wouldn’t have taken so long.”

“Shut the fuck up and throw me the drill bit.”

“I couldn’t find one.”

Russ muttered to himself, kicking his boot against the nearest wall and slamming the hammer in the tool bucket – obviously trying to keep his cool in the process. “Well, I can’t just sit down here all fuckin’ day. Pull me up and we’ll run to the hardware store for supplies.”

I attached the carabiner and ascender to my harness, part of a mountain-climber’s rope system we used, and began pulling Russ up out of the hole.

“Not so fast,” Russ groaned, “you’re crushing my balls.”

After Russ got out of the hole, he stood in front of me for several seconds, staring through his goggles with a look of disgust and hate and rubbing his tattoo of a roadrunner’s head on his right biceps. “If you hadn’t served in the Navy, I’d throw your putrid ass down that hole and weld it shut.”

“Yeah, well fuck you. You and your philosophy degree have really got you ahead in life, hasn’t it?”

“Ahh, just shut up and help me get this shit in the van.”

We decided to stop working and get cleaned up at the hotel. Russ wanted to eat somewhere and then later check out the local bar scene before it got too late. I wanted to see what life breathed in the little town of Harrisburg, with its quaint riverfront community of law offices and art galleries.

While Russ was taking a shower, I sat on the bed, absent-mindedly watching a movie on TV. Some muscle-clad android kept blowing people away with an endless arsenal of futuristic weapons. Between the noise of the TV and shower, I thought I heard a knock but I wasn’t sure.

“Hello?” a voice called out from behind the hotel door.

I waited.

Someone knocked again. Another pause.

“Can anyone hear me in there? I need help.”

“Who’s that?” Russ yelled from the shower.

“I can hear you,” the high-pitched voice of distraught woman called out, “Please come to the door.”

“What the fuck’s goin’ on,” Russ yelled again.

I opened the bathroom door. “I don’t know. Think I should open it?” All I could see in my head was a picture of the Sirens calling from a distant shore.

“I know someone’s in there,” the woman called out, the desperation rising in her voice. “My boyfriend’s dead and I’m scared as hell standing out here.”

Russ pulled back the shower curtain, exposing his drenched, stark white body, which often reminded me of one of those whitewashed statues with little dicks that stand in the middle of Italian gardens. “See what the bitch wants but don’t undo the chain. I wanna get dressed and ready to go while you talk.”

Putting a pissed-off look on my face, I opened the door. “Whatdya want?”

“Hey, look, sorry to ruin your day but someone just killed my boyfriend and I’m afraid to go back to the room.”

“Why don’t you just go to the front desk?”

“Dressed like this?”

I took the cue and ran my eyes over the woman’s body (not that I needed an invitation, either, cause she was damn good-looking). I first mistook her for a biker. Her hay-colored hair, though held back from her face by a leather headband, lay across her shoulders like she’d just stepped off a motorcycle and pulled off her helmet. Her black and white striped nightshirt had obviously worn thin over the years and the threaded ends stopped just above her knees (god, I hate to admit it but I wish she’d been standing in front of a light cause the shirt was almost see-through). Her legs…well, she wasn’t Raquel Welch but they were slim and firm and tan like the rest of her body (besides, I hadn’t seen my wife in a month, not to mention that our supervisor kept going on about the African belief that a male will die unless he has sex every two weeks).

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

“Hey, I just wanna come in for a couple of minutes. What do you say?”

I looked back at Russ leaning against the wall. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded.

“Okay, but just long enough to use the phone.”

“Thanks,” she said as she brushed by me, “I owe you one. By the way, my name’s Thrush.”

“No kiddin’,” Russ said as he looked up from picking his nails. He motioned her to the chair next to the night table, walked over and rolled up his sleeve. “Check this out.”

She leaned forward and looked at his arm. “Cool tattoo. I like it.” She winked at him.

“If you need to use the phone,” I interrupted, “use it. Otherwise, you’re about to head outta here.”

“Just hang on to your horses, mister. My boyfriend’s just been killed and you’re treatin’ me like a criminal.”

“For all I know, you did it.”

Her face scrunched up into an ugly ball and fell into her hands as she began to bawl. “You…you…” she stammered through the wails and sobs, “you bastards are all the same.”

I looked at Russ with a “What do we do now?” look. He just gave his usual shrug and pointed at his watch. I grabbed a tissue from the bathroom and dropped it in Thrush’s lap as her body jerked back and forth with her sobbing like a woman in her last death throes. I turned back to the TV and watched the android blow away more people, this time to the somewhat appropriate sound of crying in the background. Within a few minutes, I lost myself in the movie and forgot about Thrush’s throes.

Russ walked in front of me and broke my TV trance. “I’m going to smoke a cigarette. When the wailing wall stops, let me know.” He grabbed his daypack and walked out the door.

After Russ shut the door, Thrush sat up and cleared her throat. “Thanks for letting me stay…and thanks for the Kleenex, too.”

“Uh, you’re welcome. Look, if you’re boyfriend’s really dead…”

“Ah, come on. I just said that to get in your room. My old man’s just abandoned me and taken all my clothes with him. The fucker even turned in the key.”

“How…”

“All while I went to get a bucket of ice and some Cokes.” She wiped a final tear from her red, puffy eyes.

“Sorry,” I said, giving her a sympathetic look.

“You got any smoke?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know – pot – have you got any?”

“Sorry…”

“Whatdya mean, ‘sorry?’ I can smell it up and down the hall every night.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A couple of weeks.” Thrush shifted in the chair. “Look, I’m not here to play twenty questions. Have you got any or not?”

“How can I trust you?” I asked, standing up from the bed to turn off the TV.

“Yeah, right. Am I supposed to look like Cinderella and ask for some weed?” She stood up, walked over and opened the door. “Where’d your friend go?”

“I don’t know. He said he was going to smoke a cigarette.”

“Is he cool?” she asked, closing the door. She turned around, looking at me with raised eyebrows.

I shrugged. I didn’t know what she wanted but she was beginning to give me the creeps. Here I was, a married man alone in a hotel room with a woman who claimed her boyfriend just left her. I couldn’t ask her to leave without carrying out my Boy Scout sense of duty and at least get her some decent clothes. “Tell you what, I’ll give you a…”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Sure,” I said, rolling my eyes. The girl was too weird for me. I turned on the TV and sat back down on the bed. This time, I fell into some kung fu movie with lots of kicks and punches and dubbed English. Several scenes in the movie passed before Thrush finally came out of the bathroom. I looked at her and was shocked. She had tucked her nightshirt, now covered with green crisscross patterns, into a pair of tight, white, short shorts. Her hair looked neatly pulled back.

“I must say you don’t look half bad.”

“Thanks, my mother always said you get what you want when you look good to a man. I borrowed your toothpaste,” she added, pointing to her shirt.

A chill ran up my back. At that moment, Russ walked in the door. “Man, there’s some pretty weird shit going on out there.”

“Whatdya mean?” I asked, not knowing what was going to happen next.

“A couple of cops are rummaging through the dumpster out back and a couple more are going door to door asking questions.” We both looked over to Thrush.

“Hey, guys. I haven’t done anything. I swear. Just cause I got kicked out…”

Russ burst out, “Kicked out? I thought you said your boyfriend had just been killed.”

“Naw. I just said that to get in here.”

Russ looked at me with that stare again. “Man, I knew you’d get me in trouble.”

“But…”

“Look, I’m going to take Thrush here and sneak her to the van. You stay here and play it cool. I’ll drop her off up the street.” Russ walked to the door and peered out. He turned to Thrush. “Okay, let’s go and don’t start your mouth.”

“Okay, okay,” Thrush whispered.

As I sat back down to engross myself in the finer points of kung fu, I noticed Russ had left his daypack on the bed. Not wanting to leave myself open to prosecution, I opened the front pocket of the daypack and pulled out the baggie of pot. I flushed the pot down the toilet and burned the baggie in the ashtray. I threw the one-shot pipe out the bathroom window. I just sat down before I heard a knock.

“Hello?” an official sounding voice called out from behind the Pandora’s box of hotel doors.

I opened the door. “Yes,” I gulped, facing the two policemen in the hallway, “what can I do for you?”

“Have you heard any unusual noises in the last hour?” asked the policeman on the left with his neatly combed jet-black hair (obviously dyed), thick Tom Selleck mustache and deep facial lines. I looked down at his badge – Bowman.

“No, I’ve been watching TV the last couple of hours.”

The other officer – Krupkowski – looked past me into the room. His blond hair and blue eyes scared me.

“Do you mind if we take a leak?” Krupkowski asked.

“Uh, well, I guess not. Come on in.”

Krupkowski stepped in first, making a beeline to the bathroom.

Bowman stepped in and closed the door. “Appreciate it. We’ve been walking outside here for quite a while, drinking coffee like there’s no tomorrow.”

“Yeah, it’s chilly out there for this time of year,” I added, trying to keep the small talk going.

Krupkowski stepped out of the bathroom. “Do you smell something burning?”

“No,” I said in as natural a voice as possible.

“Yeah,” Bowman said, “I smell it, too.” He looked around the room. He pointed to the daypack and remarked to Krupkowski, “Recognize that?”

Krupkowski nodded.

I gave Bowman a puzzled look.

“See that patch?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I had seen the same emblem tattooed on Russ’ arm.

“Thrush mufflers. Bikers love ’em.”

Krupkowski reached over and squeezed his shoulder. Bowman turned and nodded to Krupkowski, then headed to the bathroom.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll take my turn.”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Krupkowski said as Bowman closed the bathroom door. Krupkowski headed toward the hotel room door. “When he gets out, tell him I’ve gone down for more coffee. Want some?”

“No, thanks. I’m going to finish my movie.”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Funny name,” he muttered as he closed the door.

I sat down for more kicking and punching only to see that the kung fu star had been locked in the dungeon of a Buddhist temple. He sat in the lotus position for days, refusing food and water. He would not speak. I wondered what I would do in his situation. I was not a kung fu star, of course, but I could imagine being punished for my dissident ways as a Chinese student. Just as I saw myself blocking the path of an Army tank, Bowman came out of the bathroom.

“The other officer said he was going for coffee.”

“Okay. Mind if I wait here for him?” Bowman asked, leaning against the hotel door.

“No, go ahead.”

By this time, the kung fu star had fooled the guard that he was too weak to move. When the guard opened the door, he was karate chopped in the neck. “Kung Fu” grabbed the keys and opened all the dungeon doors. He led the other prisoners outside of the temple where they all overthrew the evil villain of the movie.

“Nice thing about these movies, they’re always predictable,” I said as I turned to Bowman.

My heart stopped. Bowman had his gun pointed at me.

“Don’t move,” Bowman growled through clenched teeth. “You’re going to sit right there till Krupkowski gets back.”

I sat and pondered the situation. I tried to figure out what to say to get Bowman to drop his guard so I could knock him out and run like hell. “Look,” I squeaked two octaves higher than my normal voice, “I know who did it.”

“Shut up!”

Krupkowski knocked on the door.

Bowman stepped aside. “Come on in,” he said, keeping the gun pointed at my head.

“You’re right,” Krupkowski said with a smile, “that Eric fellow’s been here a couple of weeks.”

Bowman spit out, “Never mind that. Search the bag.” He motioned the gun toward Russ’ daypack. “He says he know he did it. He’ll be confessing the rest of the story before we even get him to the car.”

“Hey, I never said I…”

“I said shut up.”

Krupkowski opened the front pocket, pulled out a lighter and threw it on the bed. Next, he unzipped the top of the daypack and turned it over on the bed. Out thumped a shirt wrapped around something heavy.

“Careful,” Bowman stated in his official voice, “we’ll need fingerprints.”

Krupkowski gripped the edge of the shirt, pulling upward and letting the object roll out onto the bed. I stared in disbelief at my crowbar.

Bowman stiffened his grip. “Handcuff him.”

I reached for the TV. “At least let me turn off…”

Bowman pulled the trigger.

“Pay attention and slow down. You don’t want the cops to pull us over.”

“Man, I can’t fuckin’ believe it,” Russ managed between laughs.

Thrush shook her head. “I know. Too bad you had to leave the pot behind.”

“After we get all the loot your boyfriend’s been making from those crazy mufflers of his, we can smoke joints from now until forever.”

“Yeah, Eric said he’d share it with me one day. He just didn’t know how.”

Krupkowski grabbed Bowman’s shoulder and spun him around. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“He was reaching for my gun.”

“I doubt that.” He looked at the blood on the walls. “Now what’re we supposed to do about this guy?”

“Who cares? I think I’ve got the murder figured out. He followed…” Bowman slid his gun back in the harness and pulled a small notebook out of his back pocket. “Eric something,” he said, thumbing through the pages, “yeah, that’s it – Eric Heffelfinger. Anyway, he followed Heffelfinger to his room, hit him over the head with the crowbar, dragged him to the chair and tied him up.”

“You’re forgetting one thing,” Krupkowski said as he stooped over to examine the body.

“What’s that?”

“Why’d he do it?”

“How should I know? I’ve got two bodies that aren’t saying a hell of a whole lot right now and…”

“Lee Colline.”

“What?”

“This guy’s name is Lee Colline.” Krupkowski continued to look through the wallet. “And get this, he’s from Landscape, Alabama.”

Bowman laughed, “S-s-sounds like a pretty place to be from. Look, I’ve got to get another ambulance here to pick this guy up. Why don’t you call down to the front desk and see if anyone’s reported any more strange sounds. I’ll meet you at the car.”

Krupkowski continued to look through the wallet. He found the phone numbers of a Russ Engquist, some notes dated the day before, a couple of canceled checks and a photo of a naked woman with black hair and a tan with no tan lines sitting on a motorcycle in someone’s backyard.

“Front desk, this is Bob. May I help you?”

“Yes, This is Officer Krupkowski.”

“Yes, sir, have you found anything? We heard a gunshot a few minutes ago.”

“I’m in room 215 with a possible murder suspect named Lee Colline. I’d like to know if he was registered here and if so, was there anyone else.”

“Hang on a second. I’ll look up the room…yes, Mr. Colline is registered in room 215 as a double occupancy. Is he okay?”

Krupkowski pulled his notepad from the left pocket. “We’re sending for an ambulance right now. By the way, do you have the other occupant’s name?”

“Not here but I can check the phone records, if you wish.”

“Wait. Before you check, can you tell me how long Lee Colline had this room?”

“Yes…two weeks to the day.”

“Can you tell me if he registered before or after Eric Heffelfinger?”

“Well, Mr. Colline registered at 11:00 a.m.”

“And Heffelfinger?”

“Just a moment, I’m looking…Mr. Heffelfinger also registered at 11:00 a.m.”

“Really?” Krupkowski quickly jotted down the dates and times. “That’s interesting.”

“Not really. We usually don’t let new guests in until 11:00 a.m. They were probably just waiting in the lobby.”

“Would you know who was on duty that day?”

“Yes, sir. My daughter, Suzanne.”

“Do you have a number where I can reach her?”

“Well, if you’ll come on down, I’ll have her meet you in the lobby.”

“Thanks. I’d appreciate that list of phone calls, too.”

“No problem.”

“What did I tell you?” Thrush yelled at Russ over the sound of the siren. “Now we’re in trouble.”

“Hey,” Russ said with confidence, “don’t worry about it. I can handle it.”

Russ pulled the van off the interstate freeway and onto the shoulder. He stepped out of the van and started heading behind the van toward the police car.

Bowman pulled the cruiser to a halt and turned off the siren and lights. He threw the door open like a shield, pulled out his gun and stooped behind the door. “Stop where you are!” He pointed the gun at the dark image of the oncoming man.

Russ continued toward the car. “Hey, man, be cool. It’s me.”

“I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Heffelfinger.” Bowman stood up and reholstered his gun.

“Don’t forget, man. The name’s Engquist.”

“Okay, Mr. Engquist. Look, I’ve taken care of Colline but my partner doesn’t accept Colline killed your brother. He’ll start snooping if I can’t give him something.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve taken care of everything. Thrush put some notes in Colline’s wallet that’ll implicate him, for sure. Just go back and make sure he finds them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And remember, I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

“What about my money?”

“You’ll get it when I call you.” Russ walked back to the van.

“What was that all about, Russ,” Thrush asked as she turned up the radio. “That cop looked pretty pissed off at you.”

“He thought I looked like some convict they reported had stolen a van.”

Krupkowski surveyed the lobby. Three or four couples were sharing a couple of couches in the far right corner and watching the fourth quarter of a late college football game. On his near right hung photos of what he presumed to be the previous owners along with some smaller autographed photos of long-forgotten movie starlets. The dimly lit entranceway of a piano bar on his left beckoned the tired and lonely business traveler. A couple of coat racks with the usual array of forgotten raincoats and umbrellas stretched along the wall beside the bar. From there, the counter of the front desk covered the back wall ending in the right corner with the bathroom entrances covering the space between the corner and the football fans. Krupkowski estimated the distance from where he stood at the doorway to the counter covered about 30 feet. The carpet was spotted with old chewing gum and coffee stains.

“Officer Krupkowski?” a woman asked from behind the counter.

He walked on up. “Suzanne?”

“Yes, sir. Dad said you wanted to speak to me.”

“How are you doing?”

“Just fine, thank you.”

“Good. If you’ve got a minute, I’d like to ask you a few questions about some guests you checked in a few weeks ago.”

“Mr. Colline and Mr. Heffelfinger.”

“Yes.” He pulled out his notebook again.

“I don’t remember Mr. Colline very well except that he had red hair. The other man that was with him seemed to know Mr. Heffelfinger. In fact, while Mr. Colline was checking in, Mr. Heffelfinger took the other man into the bar. I could hear them laughing and joking for several minutes before they came back in.”

“Do you know the other man’s name?”

“No, but Dad’s checking the phone records right now. He may be able to find something. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go see how’s he doing.”

“Sure, go right ahead.” Krupkowski looked around the lobby for a place to sit and decided to walk over to the group watching the football game. As he approached them, he noticed the three men looked twenty to thirty years older than the women they were with, who were well dressed, but not like the hookers he was used to seeing in this part of town. They seemed cultured. Perhaps they were passing through town and were fooled by the exterior of the hotel, which still held its beauty as a riverside stop, although long since abandoned for the more lavish resorts in the nearby Allegheny Mountains.

Krupkowski nodded to the group, “Hello there.”

Every member of the group turned to nod briefly before returning to the game. The youngest-looking woman, perhaps no more than twenty years old, who wore faded jeans and a white T-shirt under a light-blue letter jacket, spoke in a manner befitting a well-refined matron, “Hello to you. Would you care to join this misplaced group of Syracuse fans?”

“Thank you, no. I was wondering if you could answer a couple of questions for me in the next commercial.”

The woman nodded and turned her attention back to the game.

Krupkowski sat in a chair between the two couches and glanced over to the counter. The manager’s daughter had not returned so he pulled out his notebook and reviewed the contents of Colline’s wallet. Among the credit cards, he had found a membership card to a private club called The Pink Poodle. Krupkowski wrote a note to remind himself to call the club and see if Colline had been a frequent visitor.

“Hey, Krupkowski,” a voice called from the entrance. Krupkowski turned to see Bowman striding toward the counter. “I loaded the bodies in the ambulance and sent them on…”

“But I never got a chance to look over Heffelfinger’s body,” Krupkowski said in astonishment as he stood and walked over to meet Bowman eye to eye.

“Don’t worry. I called the coroner and told him to remove any items from the body and send them to us at the station. Besides, I found this in Colline’s shirt pocket.” Bowman handed Krupkowski a folded sheet of stationery with an apparent blood stain in the upper right corner. “We’ve got Colline nailed. Looks like blackmail.”

Krupkowski unfolded the letter. A logo of a woodpecker’s head and the words THRUSH MUFFLERS covered the top of the page.

You have caused me much anguish in the past about which I can no longer tolerate. I have enclosed a check for $25,000. I consider this an adequate sum to settle our account and expect you to return the photographs which you have used so well to torment me these past few months. I shall meet you in Harrisburg per our last agreement. In case you have any ideas of causing further trouble, I have made arrangements to insure my wellbeing – you know my connections. Let us, instead, put aside our sibling rivalries and make amends.

Love always

Bowman slapped Krupkowski on the back. “Well, what do ya think? Have we got this guy or what?”

Krupkowski shook his head. “He…well, why don’t you pick up some burgers for us? I wanted to ask some more questions around here.”

“Why?” Bowman asked, flaring his nostrils and trying to control his anger. “Colline obviously was planning to collect his check and cancel this Heffelfinger at the same time.”

“I’m not sure yet. If Colline was getting so much money from Heffelfinger, why did he work for a sewer company? You smelled his room. Above that burnt smell, it smelled like someone had shit in the middle of the floor. It just doesn’t fit.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been watching too many episodes of ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ So the guy was making a few bucks.” Bowman began to drum the fingers of his left hand on the counter. “If he was stupid enough to kill somebody, he was stupid enough to work in a sewer.”

Krupkowski shook his head. “Yeah, well…I just want to get all the details on this. I don’t want to have to come back and follow a cold trail.” Bowman frowned at him. ” Look, I won’t be long. Go get the burgers – make sure they don’t put mayonnaise onn mine – and I’ll be through by the time you get back.”

Bowman turned and walked away, muttering something about brown-nosing superiors.

“Officer Krupkowski?”

Krupkowski turned his head. “Ah, Bob. Have you found anything?”

Bob held up a computer printout several feet long. “Would you believe over a hundred phone calls have been made from room 215 in the past week, not to mention the week before?”

“May I see that?” Krupkowski asked, reaching over the counter.

“Sure, I can’t make heads or tails of all these numbers. I noticed one thing, though.”

“Yes?”

“Most of those calls go to about a dozen numbers.”

Krupkowski looked down the list. “So I see. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take this with me.”

“Not at all. By the way, was Suzanne able to help you?”

“Oh yes, she was quite helpful. Thank her for me, would you? She walked off before I got the chance.”

“No problem.”

Krupkowski pulled a card out of his right shirt pocket. “And here’s my card. If you or Suzanne can think of anything else that might be helpful, feel free to give me a call.”

“Will do.”

Krupkowski folded up the printout and started toward the group on the couches.

“Officer…”

Krupkowski stopped and walked back to face Bob. “Do you remember something else?”

“Well, if you’ve finished with the rooms…” Bob asked, shrugging his shoulders.

“No, leave them as they are. We’ll have some detectives come in later to investigate.”

As Krupkowski retraced his steps, he noticed the group had turned off the television and left the lobby.

Out of the darkness, I felt a pinprick of pain in my head that grew into a throbbing that grew and grew and continued to grow as I gained consciousness. Suddenly, the pain exploded. I opened my eyes and cried out for help. In front of me stood a Doberman with a .38 caliber police pistol for a mouth. The dog was held inches away from my face by a blond-haired, blue-eyed man in a Nazi uniform, yelling at me, “You should have had some coffee!” Then the man let go of the leash, fire shot out of the dog’s mouth and I passed out.

I opened my eyes again to darkness.

“He’s awake,” I heard a voice say a few feet above me, “what do you want me to do?” Then silence wrapped me in the darkness again. I started falling into a bottomless pit with voices all around me calling me to reach out, begging me to grab hold but I felt no arms or legs on my body. In fact, I couldn’t see or feel anything as if I was a dot at the end of sentence that fell off the end of a page back into an inkwell.

“His pulse is normal,” the voice said, removing my quilt of silence and returning my body of pain. I screamed again and someone’s breath the smell of mint and gin brushed across my face and onto my neck.

“He’s attempting to talk. His bandages look pretty tight. Shall I…yes, ma’am. I’ll be right there.”

I blinked and the darkness began to fade. In front of me, I saw diffused light like the moon through thick clouds. The clouds began to clear away. The moon became a light fixture and the sky a dark blue ceiling.

“Hello there,” a voice called from far away. “We’ve been waiting a long time for you to wake up.”

I tried to pick up my head but the pain grabbed hold and knocked me out.

I woke up with a jolt and opened my eyes.

Staring down at me, the Nazi smiled. “You don’t give up, do you? I like that. I hope I can hold out if that ever happens to me.”

I closed my eyes but the voice continued. “We’ve been waiting a long time for you to wake up. Don’t worry, everything’s going to be just fine. We’ve got it all figured out. We know you didn’t do it.”

I opened my eyes and the Nazi was replaced with a police officer. “Oh, it took a while. I couldn’t figure out how you were related to the victim.”

A nurse stepped into my view. “Mr. Krupkowski, we’re not feeling well right now. You’ll have to come back later.”

The officer looked across the bed to the nurse. “Okay, tell you what. You call me when he’s ready to listen for a while.”

“You’ll have to ask the doctor,” the nurse said as another pinprick of pain, this time in my left arm, shot through my body and knocked me out.

“We’ve got a visitor today,” the nurse said in her now irritatingly patronizing voice. “I hope we feel good enough to let him in.”

I blinked my eyes once in agreement.

“Very well, I’ll let him in.” The nurse winked at me and left my view.

“Hello again,” the familiar voice of the officer called out as he entered my field of vision. “I don’t know if you remember me but my name’s Henry Krupkowski but you can call me Hank.”

I blinked.

“Good, good. I can see you’re in much better spirits. Do you remember me coming by the other day?”

I blinked.

The nurse chimed in, “Of course, we do. A gunshot through the cerebrum does not make us retarded, you know.”

I raised my eyebrows.

Hank winked at me and looked at the nurse. “Tell you what, why don’t you check on the other patients while I have a word or two with Mr. Colline here.”

“Very well, but I’ll be back soon.” By the sound of the swishing of her starched outfit, I could tell the nurse left the room in an agitated state of mind.

“Well, well, well,” Hank began in a relaxed voice. “I hope you don’t mind if I have a seat but I’ve got a long story to tell.”

I blinked. He disappeared from my field of view.

“You see, you’ve been the center of attention for the past couple of weeks. By all accounts, you should have been dead or facing the death penalty if it weren’t for me.” He paused. “I know, I would be speechless too, what with the good feeling that comes over you when someone does you an act of kindness that saves your life.” Hank leaned into my view and patted me on my right arm.

“If you could’ve talked a few weeks ago, I would’ve done my job a lot faster. Anyway, I better make this quick before that ol’ biddy comes back.

“Do you remember getting shot?”

I blinked and then winced from the memory.

“Hey, if this is going to bother you, I’ll come back.”

I blinked twice.

“Okay, let me get my notebook out and lay this out as best I can…okay, first of all, I figured out you weren’t the killer when I found out from some people who’d been watching TV in the lobby that they’d seen a woman come in and out of Heffelfinger’s – well, the victim’s room, you know what I mean – all night.”

I blinked.

“Hate to say it but when there’s women involved it’s always complicated. Besides, when the people identified the woman as the one in the photo in your wallet…”

I raised my right eyebrow.

“Oh yeah,” Hank laughed, “I guess you didn’t know that was in there. I kinda figured it was a plant, especially after I called the Pink Poodle and found out you frequented the place to help wives spy on their husbands.”

I blinked several times while trying to laugh.

“Hey, don’t exert yourself. I don’t want you to die on me. You’re going to help me out by appearing in court to point your finger at the bastards and put them in the electric chair.”

I blinked and yawned.

“So anyway, I decided to come to the hospital morgue and check the bodies only to find that you weren’t here. I called the ambulance company we use and they hadn’t received a second call. I called a couple of more and found that you had been registered in the county hospital as a John Doe. I called my partner at home the next day and he sounded strange. I drove over to his place and there was your company van parked in front of Bowman’s house.

“I called in a backup. Then, as I quietly walked past the van to the house, a woman called out to me, ‘Fuckin’ cops! Don’t you guys have nothing better to do than scare the shit out of me? Russ is inside giving your friend Bowman your bribe.’ Then a couple of guns went off inside the house. I ran back to my car and the woman took off with the van.”

I opened my mouth for a big yawn but closed it quickly when I heard the swish of starch come into the room.

“Mr. Krupkowski, it’s almost time for you to go. We’re getting awfully sleepy.”

“Okay, okay. I’m almost finished. Just give me a few more minutes.”

The swish receded out of the room and down the hall.

“When the backup arrived, we surrounded the house and went in to find both Russ Heffelfinger and my partner Bowman unconscious and bleeding. Another unit tracked down the woman a few hours later. She told us everything. She had drugged her husband Eric and then tied him up in the hotel room after she had had an argument with him about sleeping with the other brother, Russ.”

I blinked.

He nodded. “Yeah, I figured you knew about her sleeping around. Then, while you were taking a shower, Russ went over to Eric’s room and struck him in the head with the crowbar from your van. Unknown to me, Russ had bribed Bowman to be driving in the area when we received the call so we would be the first ones there and he could help Russ set you up. Even if the woman hadn’t confessed, the letter in your pocket proved that Russ and the woman – can you believe they called her Thrush? – had been extorting money from Eric.”

“I’m sorry but I insist you leave,” the nurse exclaimed, surprising us both by having snuck into the room.

Hank leaned down to my face. “Don’t you forget, Mr. Colline, that you and I will have our day in court.” He grabbed my right hand and shook up and down vigorously. I managed a weak squeeze and fell back into the darkness.

 

 

II. Bittersweet Revenge

“Murder is sweet. Murder is kind. Murder is a way to get rid of the deadwood so the rest of us can enjoy life. Yeah, I love a good murder, especially when it’s like, you know, committed by some mass murderer. I’ve been saving newspaper clippings on ’em for years. Now, I’m following this new guy down in Florida…”

“What did you say?”

“Shit, man, haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said.” Russ scratched his newly shaven head with his right hand. “You’re just like my brother. He never took me seriously.” He looked around the room. Although he was supposedly in the high risk section of some psychiatric hospital, he had come to recognize this place as just another kind of prison with its bars in the windows and heavy steel doors with small windows so the guards and psychologists could peer in at night. So what if they kept the place clean and sterile, and gave him three meals a day? The beige walls kept getting smaller and closing in on him everyday. He glanced at his roommate, Mike, who sat curled up in his hospital chair with thin, stiff cushions and pumped his head up and down to the beat of the music he claimed he heard from imaginary headphones.

“Don’t you ever take those things off?”

“Shh,” Mike whispered, holding up his left hand, “the news just came on.”

Russ shook his head, slumped further down in his chair and propped his feet on the end of his bed, avoiding the touch of the straps which he had felt across his body on too many nights but which now hung limply off the sides of the bed. “Bunch of fuckin’ weirdos,” he muttered to himself and drifted off to sleep.

I shifted into fifth gear and pulled into the heavy traffic of people heading home for the day. I used to get uptight and dread traffic hour but my new Alfa Romeo Spider seemed to make traffic disappear. Well, the car’s not new, actually. Between my day job fixing sewers and my part-time job as a “family counselor,” I’ll never have enough money to buy a new car. I had made a small bundle of money during my last case, though, in which I had prevented the children of this naive businessman, Eric Heffelfinger, from losing their muffler business to Eric’s new bride and younger brother Russ. With the money, I paid off some bills and still had some left over to put in the bank. I spent a couple of days trying to decide how to invest the money – you know, what stocks or bonds I should buy for a good portfolio – and saw a lovely blond-haired female drive by in an Alfa Romeo Spider. I quickly invested where my money would have the best turnaround time.

Unfortunately, I had been too late to save Eric Heffelfinger. I should have taken Russ’s psychotic fits seriously. He had been working with me for a few months in which he told me how he was going to perfect all these hate crimes he had read about in the news. He kept a scrapbook full of newspaper and magazine stories of grotesque murders that he would read over and over every night.

In one of his drunk rages, Russ told me how he was going to murder his brother and take over the family business. I overheard him talking to his brother’s wife on the phone late one night while I was supposedly asleep. I called his brother the next day and told him about my family counseling business (I hate being called a private investigator). He FedEx’d me a check for $500 the next day and told me to keep track of Russ.

I felt better after Russ had been put away, although not for long, I’m afraid. You see, they determined he was psychologically unfit for trial and put him in the state psychiatric hospital for evaluation. For the past three months after recovering in the hospital from a gunshot wound to the head, I’ve asked myself every night before I go to sleep, “How secure are those facilities?” Why can’t they just put people like him in a dungeon somewhere and throw away the key?

I turned my attention back to the road and pulled off at the Landscape exit. I had decided to take a week’s vacation after the Heffelfinger trial and head back to my hometown for some rest and relaxation. As usual, I went straight to Little Mountain Restaurant for some good pecan pie. I parked right next to the entrance so everyone could admire my car whether they wanted to or not.

“Lee, glad to see ya. Come on in and sit down. I hear tell you’ve been to hell and back.” Billy Slayter greeted me at the door in his dark blue overalls and red flannel shirt. Despite his not having worked on a farm, Billy still insisted on “just being folks.” He knew his customers enjoyed the relaxed down-at-the-farm atmosphere and good barbecue of the restaurant.

“You might say that,” I said, closing the screen door behind me and taking a seat next to Billy on one of the cedar benches against the inside left wall. I nodded to the cashier, an elderly woman who had worked behind the cash registers since I was a little boy, back when the registers were simple adding machines and a cash box. Now, the glow of a computer screen reflected off the woman’s Coke-bottle bottom eyeglasses. I added, “I see the place has changed with the times.”

“You know how it is. Thank goodness, Ethel still has a head on her shoulders. Those new computers confound the daylights out of me.” Billy turned to the waitress sitting next to him. “Fetch this man some ice tea.”

I leaned back on the bench. “It sure feels good to be home.”

The guard stopped before the door to pull his pants up over his belly and tuck in his shirt. He grabbed the keychain attached to the retractable wire on his belt and fumbled through the keys until he found the one marked 1403. He opened a panel on the wall next to the door handle, punched in a security code, and then inserted the key in the door lock. Opening the door, leaned in, and grumbled, “Okay, guys, time for your exercise.” As he stepped into the room, he looked to his immediate right at Mike thumping the arm of his chair. “This time, Mike, see if you can keep from singing along with your music. I want some peace and quiet today. I’ve got a splitting headache.”

Russ woke up from his catnap. “What’s your problem? At least you don’t have to listen to him all fuckin’ day.”

The guard looked across the room at Russ. “And I don’t want any crap from you, Mr. Heffelfinger. Just give me anything today and I’ll beat you so hard you won’t know what happened to you,” the guard said in disgust while patting the billy club hanging from his belt.

Russ stood up, walked around the beds and stopped next to Mike. He automatically held out his left wrist, waiting for the guard to handcuff him to Mike’s right wrist.

Everyday, they got thirty minutes to walk in the little Japanese garden secluded behind a concrete wall from the rest of the hospital patients doing their afternoon calisthenics. Russ hated being handcuffed but he loved the smell of the different plants. He’d asked what their names were but no one had been able to identify the plants so he made up names for them.

Today, Russ chose to recite in his head the names of the plants he had discovered to keep his mind off his plan of escape so he wouldn’t blurt something out for the guard to take back to the psychiatrists. On the way to the elevator, Russ first pictured the garden. The entrance to the garden began with a bamboo arch shaped like the sun setting on the ground. Russ thought more about the entrance and imagined his life was a setting sun and he wanted to scream or tear somebody’s throat out. He decided, as the elevator door opened, that today was his day to begin anew. He bit his lip as they walked out of the elevator, through the lobby and onto the hospital grounds.

They took the path that led some two hundred yards to the concrete wall. As they walked into the garden, out of sight of the hospital grounds, Russ cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, but I want to look at the dragon fingers without dragging Mike along with me.” Russ pointed to a Japanese maple with his right hand.

The guard poked Russ in the back with the billy club before he stuck it back in his beltloop. “Okay, but don’t try any funny business.”

Russ turned around as the guard looked down to pull the keys up. Russ grabbed the guard’s keys in his right hand and jerked as hard as he could, snapping the wire from the guard’s belt. At the same time, Russ gripped the handcuff chain in his left hand and pulled Mike over toward the guard, who was spun around off-balance. Russ swung the end of the wire into his left hand and threw the wire around the guard’s neck. The guard groped helplessly while his face changed colors from white to red to a pale blue as he slumped back against Russ. Russ dropped the guard with a sneering laugh. He unlocked the handcuffs and looked into Mike’s eyes.

“Man, if you ever want to take off those fuckin’ headphones and run, now’s your chance.” Russ stuffed the keys in his pocket and ran toward the garden entrance. He stopped at the arch and broke off a two-foot length of bamboo, which he stuck in his back pocket. He spun around when he heard footsteps behind him. He kicked out with his boot before he realized who he faced.

“Whu…” Mike wheezed as he took Russ’ boot in his stomach. Stumbling backward, he continued, “Where are we going?”

Russ grabbed Mike’s left arm to keep him from falling in the bushes. “Why, you fucker, you aren’t crazy, are you?”

“Hell, no. I was put in here for rapin’ my mama. When I found out they was goin’ to put me in the state pen, I freaked.”

“Cool, I like it. Look, we don’t have much time to get out of here.” Russ kept looking from left to right nervously. “You know your way around?”

“Sure. I didn’t spend all my time in the hellhole. Just follow me.” Mike started walking toward the main hospital building.

Russ grabbed Mike’s left arm as he walked past and turned him around. “Wait a minute. I’m not going back in there.”

“No problem. We ain’t.”

“How can I know to trust you?” Russ reached for the bamboo stick.

“That’s your problem.” Mike looked down at Russ’ hand behind his back. “Look, you kill me and you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Okay, okay. Just tell me where we’re headed.”

Mike turned back toward the hospital and pointed to a ten-foot tall brick wall that ran the length of the hospital. “On the other side of that wall is where the food trucks come and go. I figure we wait till a truck comes through and hitch a ride.”

“It’ll never work. They’ll know we’re missing in an hour or two and tear this place apart looking for us.”

“Hey, you do what you want. I’m headin’ for that wall.” Mike walked on.

Russ stood for a few seconds and thought about Mike’s plan. He looked in the opposite direction at the nearest security fence several hundred yards beyond the Japanese garden. Russ shrugged his shoulders and ran to catch up with Mike.

“Those doctors fell for the fake headsets?” Russ asked, slightly out of breath, as he caught up with Mike, walking next to the wall.

“Not at first. A friend told me about this book called The Cuckoo’s Nest where this guy fakes like he’s real stupid and they keep him in the hospital where things is real cozy. I played stupid like I couldn’t hear nobody and then came up with the headphones when I wanted to hear some tunes late one night.” Mike stopped at the end of the wall and leaned his head around the corner. “Hey, we has a ride.”

 

Chapter 10: Real Dreams

After fifteen years of trying to prove himself in the corporate world, Lee strode onto the stage of his new career.

“Lee Colline,” a voice cried out dully.

“Yes.”

“Please stand in front of the spotlight and read the first three lines but don’t follow the stage directions. We’re not auditioning dancers here.”

“Yes sir,” Lee responded enthusiastically. Lee cleared his throat. In the moment between his last breath and the next, he recalled his first stage experience.

• • • • • • • •

“Hello, everybody, my name is Mrs. Bryant and I’m the new drama teacher at Central High School. Thanks for coming out today. I didn’t expect such a good response but I’m glad to see you.

“Okay, I want you all to know that I believe you have talent but I just don’t have parts for all of you. While you’re reading the parts we’ve selected for you, we’ll, that’s the other judges and I, will be watching to see who fits a certain role. First, we want all the boys to step on stage. The rest of you can wait in the back rows of the theater.”

Lee nudged his friend Phillip who had propped himself against the crow’s nest. “Well, it’s now or never.”

Phillip grunted as he pushed himself up to his feet and shuffled down the theater aisle.

Mrs. Bryant continued, “I want all the tall boys to stand to my left.”

“Well, Phillip,” Lee said with an edge of nervousness in his voice, “I guess we part company here.”

Phillip nodded.

While the guys crowded on stage, the girls were beginning to gather into their usual cliques: the popular girls (mainly the school officers and some cheerleaders), the stuck-up girls (the rest of the cheerleaders, some rich and some wannaberich girls), the who-can-remember-them girls (you know, the ones you can’t remember), and the wild ones (who either dressed as sluts or were ones). Lee looked at them and wondered about which group he wanted to belong to.

“Okay, we’re simply gonna have you read a few lines to hear what you sound like. You don’t have to overact or make wild gestures. Just be yourself and it’ll be a lot less stressful. Let’s start with the dark-haired fellow with the striped shirt. What’s your name?”

“Phillip.”

“Do you have a last name, Phillip?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Uh, do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Morris.”

“Very funny, our first reader and he’s a comedian. You don’t happen to smoke, do you, Mr. Phillip Morris?”

“No, really,” Lee blurted out, “his name’s Phillip Morris. He’s a friend of mine.”

“Okay, Phillip, I want you to read the first few lines…what?” Phillip gestured to his empty hands. Mrs. Bryant turned to her assistant. “Lynn, will you take a copy of the script up to Phillip. He doesn’t seem to have the play memorized. In fact, take this whole stack up there.”

“I want the guys in the front of the line to take one of the scripts and start looking it over, especially the parts of Mr. Vangelder and the two stockboys. You’ll be reading from one of those parts.”

“Okay, Phillip, I want you to turn to the part where Mr. Vangelder and Dolly are in the restaurant, on page 71. Just pick a line and start reading. I’ll read Dolly’s part.”

• • • • • • • •

 

Lee breathed in and began reading. “I ask you again, Inspector. How can one person commit two murders at two different places at the same time? If Mr. Humboldt had such an ability to be in two places at once, why kill someone? Why doesn’t he rob a bank instead and at the same time have an airtight alibi?” Lee paused for imaginary laughter. “Or go on a seemingly boring shopping trip with his wife while making wild, passionate love to his mistress?” Lee paused again. “Now, those you could call motives for dual lives.”

“Thank you, Mr. Colline. Thank you very much,” the director called out with just a slight smile in his voice, “we’ll let you know our decision on Tuesday.”

 

Lee stepped off the stage in his mind and walked down the stairs.  Down to what, exactly?  Down to reality?  And whose reality would he step into?  What masks would he need to wear to project a meaningful stereotype to the person or persons nearby?  Could he protect himself from the probing lies of others?
 

 

Chapter 11: Quiet Time Room

Someone knocked on the door. “Excuse me, Lee, but according to your records, you were supposed to take this medicine an hour ago. Could I ask you to sit up to take it?” the nurse asked me kindly.

“I don’t want to get up,” I responded wanly, rolling away from the door.

“We’ve let you lay in bed for four hours now. I’m afraid that you’ll have to join us sometime and I would love to see you out with the other patients during my shift.”

“The doctor said I could have some peace and quiet today. He didn’t say anything about being interrupted for medicine.”

“Well, Dr. Forrest probably didn’t tell you a lot of things because he knew you have a lot on your mind. Tell you what. I’ll give you a few minutes to wake up while I finish checking on a couple of other people on the hall. How does that sound?”

“Dandy,” I sarcastically mumbled.

As the nurse walked out of the room, I crawled back into my mind, where no one could get me and I could finish what I started, ceaselessly punishing myself for choosing a career that valued my automaton talents over my artistic creativity, reaching a sort of death of self because I didn’t really want to choose death of my body (the latter was only a symbolic, philosophical expression that my family and the sterile, antiseptic medical professionals couldn’t understand).  I’m a writer, for God’s sake, not a murderer!

Chapter 12: Forever Lost

I will always be attracted to someone like you. At the same time I will be repelled by your inadequacies, your humanness. I sit down to write, though, and I only think of you, you who is a reflection of me, a human, yet never completely like me because you are human. How can I ask you to be perfect?

If you stood in front of me right now, I would consume you like a can of soft drink, sucked dry and discarded. You would only provide temporary relief from my thirst and then I would want another. I consume you now, burning my thoughts of you to fuel the writing machine within my head.

You have lived a thousand years in one moment. You blinked your eyes and Rome fell. In one heartbeat, your children gave birth to a hundred generations. Yet . . . yet, yet, yet . . . yet you have one life to share with me, one life of remorse and forgiveness, regrets and love, a life filled with pain unbearable to look at. I want to have all of your pain, not because I want to relieve your burdens but to squeeze them in my hand and watch stories drip out one by one. I am mad with desire.

And don’t think you can run away from me. Once I have reached you, and you know I have, you will always cart me along with you like a monkey on your back. I won’t weigh you down but you will feel my presence all the same. You’ll cringe your neck muscles every time my hot breath creeps down you like a tentacle, feeling for a limb or appendage to grasp. You’ll relax your muscles when I whisper in your ear that I love you. You will love me and hate me.

I never worry about losing you because you are always there for me. Your name is different this time but I don’t care. You will give me what I want – a fleeting moment of humanity – and then I reduce you and our relationship to mere words. Don’t underestimate the humility of words, either. If you think you can escape unscathed then you have not lived. After all, life is painful.

I never lose you but I will miss you when I have used you and our shared moment of humanity is gone. Even now, I sense the emptiness inside of me swell up and beg for escape. I have to fill the emptiness or I have no choice but to die. I will not allow myself to die so I must take a part of you.

I cannot allow myself to live. Other people deserve to live their lives without fear of people like me, a leech.

“I believe we’ll have to commit him indefinitely this time,” the examining doctor told her. “He seems unable to separate fantasy from reality.”

“Can you snap him out of this?  He still has moments where he seems normal.”

“Only time will tell.”

Time stands still at the corner, waiting for the bus. Cliché walks up and asks how long Time has been waiting. “Seems like forever,” he says, shaking his head. Cliché decides to walk on, he has had enough of the watered down years of standing on street corners and telling tall tales.

In the end, we’re all clichés for living.

I cannot help myself. I reject you with one sweep of my hand because I can never have you. I have nothing and hate myself for thinking any different. I am but a collection of entropy states swirling together.

= = = = =

 

All trademarks, registered trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

For all work not originated by the author in this publication, contact the copyright owners about permission, fair use, etc.