The Echo
May
J.F.K. is dead. Judy Garland, Osama Bin Laden, King James, Chaucer, Hitler, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Nostradamus, all dead, like a trillion others. So am I, but don’t ask if I’ve seen your long lost great uncle or anything. It’s not like that. There’s just foliage out here; vague images and dark outlines in the passing windows, a lot of roadway.
I drive a 95 Nissan Sentra, and it’s an absolute shit-box. Members of my family tease me about it; the pitted back bumper, the broken driver’s side door handle that makes you lower the window and claw out to flip up the exterior release, the lack of a floor mat on the passenger side, the worn felt seat cushions marbled like old dough.
Oh, and don’t fret over the fact that I refer to my wife and kids in the present tense. I engage in this practice only because I think I am trapped in a moment that keeps being played out as if in live time, and my family is no more concerned about me than they were in terms of their “yesterday” or the day before that. And though I can not be utterly sure in terms of hard proof, I am fairly certain that I am indeed deceased because I don’t get hungry anymore. Moreover, I can only recall universalities. I know that killing is wrong, that getting a girl pregnant before you marry her can put a real dent in your plans, that The Who were always better than the Beatles, if not in terms of cultural impact, then by a standard of showmanship and instrumentation, but I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night (if there is such a thing as an “evening” for me any longer). As I alluded to before, I know I have kids, but can’t recall how many. I know my wife is a pale brunette, but I can’t recollect her laugh. I know she has sun freckles dusted across her cleavage, a nondescript suburban ass, and Mediterranean cheekbones she accents with lavender blush, but I can’t remember her maiden name. My whole life, or past life if you will, has been reduced to wallet-sized black and whites, faded and out of order.
Thing is, I don’t miss it. My life. Because even though it seems I am stuck for eternity in this shitty charcoal gray Nissan, there is also a feeling about me (or in me) that I am in transit to a destination. Now, please don’t interpret that as something spiritual, like I am on some cosmic pilgrimage to meet the almighty. I mean that the feeling about me (or maybe imposed on me) is one like I am on my way to work, or the Crate and Barrel, or the driving range for a quick bucket, or the Lord and Taylor because I forgot to get Mother’s Day garbage, and it doesn’t feel anything like eternity. The window is open with my elbow up on the rim, I’m squinting slightly, and the sky is that pale broad canopy of the lightest blue that fills all of us with hope and longing: leisure images of sailboats inching along sun spangled waters, traveling carnivals, picnics, barbecues, graduations, promises.
Here’s the thing. I can’t exit the vehicle without dire consequences.
The first time it happened was quite by accident, pardon the pun, when I rear-ended a big dude in a black Dodge Ram, silver diamond grid contractor boxes bolted to both sides of the back bed, ladder rack on the roof, trash barrels and rusted steel drums filled with rakes and hoes and pole tools and shovels all surrounding a black pock-marked roofing kettle. I’d been cruising along, and had just passed an area where the roadside sound barriers flanked the near spread of woodland like the walls of some majestic fortress, and I had sort of realized in the back of my mind that I hadn’t seen a road sign in awhile. It was the first inkling I’d had that something was odd about this journey, and the first hint that maybe I’d been on this road for longer than what I might have considered “normal,” but just as I started to focus on the fact that I’d been driving without noticing the passage of time, a green sign flashed by, bolted to an overpass, and I realized I’d missed another one, and then traffic before me had come to one of those sudden standstills, and I hit the brakes and screeched the tires.
I skidded, swerved a bit left, and plinked his back bumper. An insignificant little nudge, a Boston kiss.
“Fucking moron,” I heard. Couldn’t see him. The back window was tinted jet black, but I saw his arm from out the driver’s side window, flannel cut on an angle high up at the shoulder in a makeshift short sleeve, bicep hair, beef-bull forearm. The arm went straight up, and then his index finger curved. He jabbed the affair toward the area up and over the roof, toward the breakdown lane. It was an order and he wasn’t kidding. The car in front of him moved forward a bit, and he pulled over, tires making chock ‘n gravel sounds. I followed, stopped, put it in park, kept it running. My heart was thudding a bit and my face was ashen, or at least it felt that way. And I couldn’t find my information in the glove compartment. It was a mess of papers, envelopes, expired insurance cards, parking passes, old directions printed off Mapquest, dashboard flyers to identify me as a parent for summer camp pick-up, and I couldn’t even remember what I was supposed to be searching for in the first place. Did he need my owner’s card? My license? My social security number?
I reached out through the open window, flipped up the handle, and got out of the car.
Everything changed. I wasn’t on 476 or 95 or the Northeast Extension anymore and it wasn’t spring. It wasn’t daytime either. It was late fall, you could tell because there was that smokehouse tang in the air like someone had been burning leaves, and the trees all around me were bare, crooked and spidery, making criss-cross shapes before a low moon. We were on a dirt road cutting through the forest, and the pick up had its blinkers on, leaning slightly right because he’d pulled into a bit of a ditch.
There was a rather brisk wind on my face and I had not brought out anything from my glove compartment. I walked forward, sure I was going to get a lecture, or maybe even a punch in the eye. I was sweeping apologies together in my head, trying for the right flavor, and couldn’t decide between the half-jest “sorry about that,” or the sincere, “Hey friend, my fault, what can I do” kind of thing.
His door opened, and a leg thrust itself out, work boot clapping down to the dirt, jeans with cuff-frays coming behind the heel. He pushed out, gripping the upper door rim, and he had to duck to get out because he was that big, and he was muttering,
“…learn to drive in a fucking girl’s room…”
and he stood and he was turning toward me, and he pulled at his crotch to move the underwear a bit and he had a chain going from his wallet to his belt, and a chest like a grizzly and a long chin-beard and a big bulb of a nose and wood chips in his hair, and he was shaking his head like he was going to teach this little bastard a lesson, and then he looked up and he saw me and his mouth dropped open. He slumped a bit, shoulders curling in and withering, knees knocking in toward each other like he’d just been whacked in the nuts.
“Uhh…” he said. He fumbled back for the open doorway and almost missed, still staring at me, measuring my approach, scrambling sort of sideways for the sanctuary of the truck.
Then I saw it, what scared him. It was only for a split second, and then it was gone, there in his back window, jet black and kicking up gleam from the moon, and I only saw it out of the corner of my eye because I was so focused on his odd retreat, and it was only a flicker because it changed when he broke eye contact. For that one second, it was a creature from some haunted lagoon or lake or swamp, dead, damp vegetation draped over its skull as if dragged up from the bottom of dark waters, fingers long, pointed, water-rotted skin hanging off the bones in tatters and shreds.
It was my silhouette in his back window, and I know it was me because it was mimicking my advance, I could see it at the periphery of my vision, both hands extended out like “what the heck” in response to his cowardly crawl back into the cab, and he broke eye-lock, and I looked at the black outline directly, and it was just me in there now, short hair, pudgy face, I could even see my glasses with the moon reflected in the bottom rim of each lens.
I somehow knew that the rotted figure in the glass had been an image he’d picked up from some TV special he saw when he was six, after he snagged his sister Melinda’s Ranch Doritos and tip-toe’d down the basement even though it was past his bed time and if Daddy caught him, he’d warm up his behind something good. I saw the original horrific images washing over his face in pale lines and shadows just as clearly as I saw the flash forward to his wetting the bed for a year, lying in his own sour dampness with the comforter pulled over his head, breathing all cut and shallow through the little porthole he’d made for his mouth.
The pickup pulled off in a roar, kicking up dirt and road-grit.
I blinked, and it was spring again. I was doing a lazy sixty three miles per hour and the sky opened before me in that panorama of oceanic crystalized blue. There was sloping acreage to the right, wheat or rye moving with the pattern of the breeze, and on the left there was a long meadow with antenna towers in the background. There were cars around me, but the occupants were forms, vague outlines, shapes.
And no road signs. When I concentrated and focused, and bore down, like my Dad used to tell me to do in little league when I couldn’t find the strike zone, I’d see something ahead, that familiar rectangular green with the white outline and the white block letters, and then I’d get distracted at the last minute by a deer crossing sign, or a plane flying low overhead, or a truck passing too close.
After some indeterminable amount of time, I pulled into a Howard Johnsons to get directions, to get a handle on this, to convince myself that what happened with the contractor was illusory, and that finally, I wasn’t the creature from the black lagoon.
I didn’t get further than the parking area.
Originally, the structure had seemed a familiar, charming little piece of commercial Americana, offset from the highway by a grand sort of rotary, restaurant at the far edge, sprawling golf course in the background. Across the way was an antique furniture store and a glass crafter, both a short walking distance from the shopping center with the Wegman’s and the Giant. But when I stepped out and shut my door, I realized I had been mistaken about the surroundings. Everything was gray, and to the left across the highway was an abandoned warehouse, windows darkened, weeds at the perimeter growing out of the cracked cement tire bumpers. Past the motel dumpsters on the far right side, a swarm of cattails and yellow grass led to an area of marsh and tangled woodland. To the right of the place was a rusted cyclone fence with old trashing blown in at the bottom, and beyond that, a drainage ditch and an abandoned quarry, dozers parked up on the mounds, and I remembered that the parking lot seemed full when I entered, yet now stood empty for all but a maroon mini-van with a soccer magnet in one corner of the back window and a Garfield toy with foot suckers in the other.
I walked up to the vehicle, and noticed that my forearms had run over with goose bumps. It was starting to rain, slanted darting drops, and the clouds moving across the sky were running thin shadows along the asphalt.
In the side-view mirror I could see the woman in the driver’s seat, designer sunglasses propped above her forehead, auburn hair in a pony tail, severe eyebrows, delicate face - beautiful like glass, a look of general superiority and disinterest.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me where I am, please?”
I honestly believe she was about to turn toward my voice and acknowledge me, but a piercing scream erupted from the back seat. I didn’t have a good angle to get a look inside past the lady’s shoulder, but when I backed off a half-step I could see through the glass it was a toddler in a car seat, struggling, scratching at his harness, staring at me with wide, rolling eyes.
With Mom occupado, I bent to look in her side-view and saw the strangest, most frightening thing looking back at me on an angle.
I was a playing card, a Jack I think, and I couldn’t tell if I was a heart or a diamond, but I knew for sure I was one of the red ones. My face was elongated, skull-like, shaped like the “Scream” mask, but the eyes were brilliant and savage, close-set and piercing, the drawn lines around the mouth sitting deep and carved like judgments. I was holding a flaming scepter, and my hair was a nest of wriggling snakes.
I stumbled away from the vehicle, out of the kid’s sightline, and I was driving again, back in the burst of landscape unfolding into the bosom of flawless blue sky, warm and mindless, a vacant baseball field on the right, a red barn, a silo, grazing cows.
The boy’s name was Jason MacGonigle, and his mother had been trying to teach him to play “Go Fish” while the tile man was laying a mosaic pattern on the floor in the sun room. It was the Jack of Hearts, and while the African prints in the living room were a comfort, animal shadows like the ones in his story books, this robed nightmare with the skinny face and the big fire-stick had hideous black eyes that followed him even when he pushed it across the table and told Mommie he didn’t want to play anymore.
I knew that he dreamed about the Jack of Hearts that night, and that the dream character was far worse than the playing card itself, elongated, fluid and reptilian, a Disney cartoon gone horribly wrong, and the thing slithered through the cracks outlining the closet door and wore the shadows like a cloak, waiting for Jason to close his eyes so he could rise tall above the bed and claw his dagger-like fingernails straight into the boy’s once rosy cheeks, squeezing and squelching up fistfuls of bloody ribbons that lay in hot spatter across his straining bone knuckles.
So you see now, that I am everyone’s nightmare. I wonder what I did to earn this title, but my past life is a blur. I do know that I am on a real highway with real people who don’t have a clue as to my presence, not really. But how often do we really notice who sits next to us at a red light, or cruises in the neighboring lane at seventy-plus? Looking would be rather impolite, like staring at someone in an elevator when we all know the rising or falling floor numbers are a mandatory study.
Plainly, this is my hell I suppose. I am to stay on this road for eternity, and if I veer off of it, or cause some sort of accident that disrupts my journey, innocent people, real people will pay. This is all a private outdoor prison that is secured by my morals, go ahead, go figure, chew on the irony.
I tried driving off the road and aiming for a tree once. It was one of those humongous oaks that had an “L” shape cut out of the branches to let a power line through, and I got close enough to see two knots in the bark and I put my hands in front of my face, just to get beeped at for my trouble. You see, just before impact I was “sent back” to the two lane thoroughfare I had been driving on all along, and suddenly realized that I had merely drifted a bit over the double yellow. Instinct came into play, and I jerked the wheel to hard right just in time to avoid oncoming traffic, another irony, since I had just tried to kill my already dead self.
I’ve tried driving off bridges, causing head on collisions, making dangerous 360 turns in heavy traffic, all failures. Nowadays I pull one of those just to wake myself up, for the fun of it, to remind myself that I was once a living being who wasn’t stuck daydreaming for hours, years, centuries at a time, driving off to nowhere straight into the blue.
I’ve also caused a multitude of those minor, harmless accidents that get me “real contact,” and I’ve scared the living shit out of more people than I can count. I do it because I have to, because being time deprived is a torture. I do it to remind myself that even though I am stuck in this endless cycle, I’m still real.
Do my victims remember me, or am I the shadow of a dream? Am I merely a bad feeling to recover from…finally, the explanation for unwarranted depression?
In what seems like years ago I cut off three high school girls on the way to put in orders for prom dresses. The red head with the turned up nose and the ¾ moon Alice headband saw me as a cop and feared an invasive frisk outside of the car, a hard rape across the front hood, my dick a transformed Billy club going down my leg, pushing a huge, blunt shape against my trousers. The ash blonde with the nose ring and practiced sour-apple pout in the passenger seat saw me as her own father, drunk again, short sleeved dress shirt drenched with back sweat, shock of gray hair falling across his eye, punching her like a dude again and pulling her out into the brush so she could really get what was coming to her for acting like her mother all these years, and the little cookie in the back, rosebud lips, tiny tits, big teeth, black hair tucked behind her ears, envisioned a hillbilly with a wandering eye, one strap of his overalls unhooked and dangling, taking her by the scruff of the neck and the back of her pants and throwing her into an old van sanded down on its sides to the brown primer splotches, then belching exhaust on the way to his farmhouse basement, then a cage, and some sort of ritual that involved oily puddles, steel clamps, heavy gauge cables, and car batteries.
Of course, I retreated, but I wonder if they swapped stories, argued about my given appearance, called each other “stupid” for being so paranoid. Did they remember being cut off at all? Was my “presence” known, or just “felt?” Or, here you go…did I ever stop them in the first place?
I’ve got to live, and if I am already dead, I need to exist within this realm I have inherited. I can’t ride into the blue anymore, conscious in the unconscious endlessness of a never ending blur going pleasantly and rapidly nowhere.
The question is, what do monsters do when they finally come out of the linen closet, or the attic, or from around the corner of the wood shed? When I was a boy, I was terrified that a nameless, hooded man with yellow eyes and a steel grip was to reach up and grab my ankle if I let it off the edge of the mattress. So, what if he grabbed the ankle? What if I screamed? What if he leaned in close and breathed death into my face? What would be next? Would he ask me my favorite color? Would we talk about God? Would he tear out my throat with his teeth and put me on a road leading straight to the bosom of blue?
Time to find out. I’m going to kiss a bumper, cut off a Kia, give someone the finger. Except this time, I’m not going to walk away at the first sight of transformation in the side view mirror. I’m going to get in the car and tell my victim to drive. Home. Into a life where the streets are named, where engines rest, and where demons, torturers, and rippers are finally granted a timeline, a purpose, a meaning, and an end.
