The air is turpentine and burns my nose. I have a mouth sucked dry of moisture and peddles of sand between my teeth (where my tongue is a serpent searching for mice hiding in a row of ragged rocks). My legs warm with devious soreness and my heart beats faster than exertion dictates. I can feel the blood pulsate in the skull my skin cannot seem to fit around. What a mess I got myself into!
I seem to be making no distance at all as the desk lamp (the moon) above me is getting brighter. Is it getting closer? Ashen moon gravel and alabaster chalk dust is spread out over the undefined path in front of me. I tell myself fifteen more minutes until refuge behind my apartment walls. It is my only focus as fleeting as it is (thoughts like weak sea legs on a tumultuous sea). Rocks try to birth into my shoes creating faint angry screams of collision. The earth is pushing up into me as hard as I am pushing down on it.
Cold snot runs from my nose and my eyeballs are solidifying. Petrifying? My chest holds ephemeral bursts of anxiety. Black-inked waves on a purple ocean crashing on a gray shore. Will I ever make it across this desolate expanding land? My mind stops to catch its breath. Suddenly, I am encouraged by the prospect of a flash flood washing me away. Thick muddy brown water like melted ice cream escorting me down predetermined land scars. Sometimes things happen that you cannot stop. Where is that rainy prison cell street walled with old stone buildings and the hand of my next love?
I cough a dry cold cough. I try to focus again on something to ease the anxiety of never getting home and begin to wonder about Bethlehem Steel and the pink and lime green pools of liquid Popp saw on patrol. Those toxins killed Scott’s father (and many men just like him). I can still smell the sulfur from the bronze dust snow that blanketed my father’s dark blue Cadillac as I dug holes with trucks under a gold morning sky. Instantly, I long for the giant rusted thimble that sat behind Madison Wire. I remember those gray days where we would sit inside it and talk about our future not knowing if the soil below the cracked cement was saturated with poison. Those stalwart toxins fed families and bought cars and gave vacations out to the lake it contaminated. I relive my father setting down a plate of pork chops a dozen high for our family of five. It’s all too much to think about. My cheeks sting from the desert whiplash wind.
Boyle picks me up and I decide to act drunker than I am in order to mask the depression that has taken the clarity of my senses away. I feel sick from the mushroom pizza I ate too fast (like a dog). Walking out the door, I imagine the green and brown bubbling fungus foam expanding in my belly when my appendix burst and I was too afraid to wake anyone in the middle of the night. The pain was so white hot it stopped hurting and was replaced swollen numbness and the fear of death. When I returned from the hospital, Ma and Nan made my room so sterile and clean that my personality was almost completely scrubbed away, except for the cracked plaster holes in my sky blue walls the size of my fist. My first act home and healthy was to sit at my desk and weep. The sun poured into my room on that quiet afternoon during the last days of winter as my abdomen stitches itched with warm tingles.
I was content to hide this New Year’s Eve but I know that is not human. I must be a social being. We are social beings (from parlor tricks to speeches of state) that entertain and act out in order to revive our own self worth. I walk down my pebbled stairs and out to Boyle’s truck. I see him sitting there and a sudden sharp anger comes over me. I pull open the door and hop in the cab. We start to talk and I feel better. The tension leaves like the quick dimming of a TV screen before it goes dark. But the day is still light. Seven hours until the New Year. Who was it that broke the mirror at my mother’s house that one New Year’s Eve?
“Should we see what the rest of the cronies are up to?” I ask.
“To be honest, I want nothing to do with them. Oh, they have to check with you and if you’re not coming over they’re not. Fuck that.”
On the drive, I hide behind my sunglasses, afraid to show my eyes. The afternoon is bright and indifferent. We move down rugged twisted roads and pass the remains of the various communes that once infested this valley. Old crooked sheds with faded plywood walls, lounging relics, are surrounded by sad wire fences. Empty chicken coops with failing roofs, forty year old rusted and dismantled pickups, unrecognizable scrap metal sculptures dot the dust lots. Memories lay and die in the shade. Brown thin branches to bare bushes (soon to be tumbleweeds) quiver in the breeze. Some scream. Others sigh.
The bar counter is sticky. An empty package of cigarettes is torn to pieces and spread around the video machine sunk flush into the counter top. Amber, with her hefty chest and young girl (unfamiliar with the world) smile, is picking up the scraps of paper one piece at a time. We sit down and Boyle quietly taps his wallet on the counter as he stares up at the TV. He buys the first round. I watch Amber pour the drafts and begin to feel useless.
“How you holding up?” I ask and take a sip.
“Alright. I guess. I just want the holidays to be over. You know? Just get passed them.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I just don’t have it in me. I told Lizzy to go and buy all the presents for Benny. I wanted nothing to do with it. With him gone, I just don’t give a shit.”
“It’ll get better. Spring, man. Wait until spring.” I raise my glass to Boyle and then chug the pint. I wipe the suds from my lips with the back of my hand. Boyle continues on about the loss of his father and the effect it is placing on his wife, young son, and scattered soul. All the while I stare at drips of beer on the counter, tiny isolated villages containing universes within themselves flickering from yellow to orange under the light. I nudge my mind back to Boyle, to listen and empathize, because it is the right thing to do.
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