The Gray. Hollows Eve. The Lake

It's a gray day, the kitchen-window light filters in anonymously, unwelcome, and I burrow deeper into the blankets afraid, my phone turned off, my costume hanging a hook on the door where it has stayed since the night before, where it glowed in the faint aquarium-glimmer of the television set left on.  Am I dreaming?

 

"I have been to a place beyond words and it looks like this," he said, a modern-day Prometheus in a trucker cap, having been farther down the highway than man is deigned to go.  He held up his hand.  Only forefinger and thumb.  The bar was called the Legends of Light, it smelled like sour mops.  He sat alone, paying for each drink as it came, and paying for hers.

She saw the emptiness in his eyes.  The cigarettes in his pocket.  She said we should sit next to him.  "It'll be fun," she said, "who ever heard of a meeting with a stranger gone awry on Halloween?"

I was dressed as Icarus, my wings tarnished, waxy and frail, ash on my forehead and skeptical.  I followed her perfume around all night.  She reeked of sin and promises,  a slutty demon.

"Hey Joe, buy me a drink?"  His eyes glazed over her chest and the long legs screaming out from under her short skirt.  He laid the cash out meticulously.  I quietly asked for a tumbler, and made sure my mask was straight in the backbar mirror.  Didn't want to be recognized.

"What do you do?" she asked, all smiles a hand on his striped shirt sleeve.

"Drive truck.  You folks?"

"He's a writer and I'm student.  But I'm going to be teacher."  She put the other arm around my neck in a damp embrace.  Perfume was driving my hormones up the wall.  I shrugged her off and finished my drink in a fast swig.

"I don't like schoolteachers," he told us, "Never did get much for good grades.  Teachers got their prejudices like everbody else has, and they never sized me up to be much of anything."

She frowned at this, and downed the drink.  He paid for another two.  Laid down the cash the same as before.  "Like writers ok though.  Know a good story when I hear one."

"Well, I'm not really much of a writer," I confessed, waiting for the debit receipt to sign, "just words mostly."

"Words.  A writer's religion.  A feast for the fantasies of the soul."  That's when he pulled his left hand out of his coat pocket.  "I have been to a place beyond words…" he said, and then he asked us to follow him around back.

 

There is a lake, deep in the chill landscape of my past, where I like to go when I am scared.  The corn is all stubble in the fields and the leaves are all gone.  The clouds over the windshield shout behind their muffled glass "Go away," and we do.  Sitting indoors we wrap ourselves in blankets by the fire, and eat the food we have stored for this winter and we put off life for a while and we tell stories.

 

Looking out over the lake, there is a house.  I told you about it once.  I go there when the sun sets early, when darkness takes over the land.  Seeds disappear into their frosty dreams underground, waiting for their debut in the inferno of spring many months away.  The nights are quiet and long, and even the sun is afraid to interrupt its mysterious domain, keeping out til late morning, when it rises up against the high naked limbs of trees, gangly shadows across a deathly bright sky.

 

            "Here come on, I wanna show you something," and he led us around the bar and to the back where a long brick hallway was poorly lit with little frosty patches of yellow light shone on the black and white portraits on the wall.  Stoic men and ripple-muscled horses.  It was cold but I was sweating.  We stood against a shut door a moment and he pressed his ear to it.  Sounds of scraping metal.  Pushed it open and held it inwards for her but not for me, we entered a large chamber with a concrete floor filled with swaying chains that hung from the walls and ceiling.

     "A holy place," he whispered "is a refuge.  Where the mind is clear we feel closer to God, or truth, or whatever it is that we happen to worship."

     "What do you worship?" She asked.  He grinned like it hurt him and pushed aside a dangling chain, leading us to a dark figure we had not seen draped in the shadows and curtains at the far wall.

     "Pain—  It's the only thing I can believe in."  Her grip on my arm tightened.  I could no longer smell the perfume back here.  A man emerged from the shadows.

"Pleasure, pleasure," he breathed wetly, "Smoking? Smoke?  Anyone have—"  I held out my pack of  Parliaments but the trucker had beat me to it.  A panel on the wall sparked with white light and smoke.  "CP! Cigarette?"  Another man emerged from the curtain.  Younger and frighteningly skinny, almost emaciated.

"Hiya! You folks new here?"  She said yes and leaned in to get a light and show off her cleavage.  "I'm CP and this is my cousin Sy." Sy licked his mouth, he didn't seem to have any lips, and stared at her chest.  His eyes were wide in their cavernous sockets.  They both had long fingernails and patched wiry hair.

"What is this place?"  Young Sy gave a nervous chuckle, and CP quickly scuttled off into the folds of the curtain again.

"The many layers of the city, like the many layers of the air we breathe, are filled with parallel worlds.  Just beneath the surface lies a mystery, lays magic, the hands of fate, the uncanny trickle of desire, the art of lost sounds…"

The blinking and beeping of an electronic switchboard interrupted the Trucker's words.  "I call it Forgotten Gods," said Sy, scooting up close to her as a motor started to rumble and the chains began to whirl in a large spherical shape around the room.  "It's an art project!" he yelled.

The chains draped from the wall began to spiral up and out, taut as if drawn by magnets, and spinning rapidly like fan blades.  Two chains touched and snapped in a loud ZAP of electricity that made us all jump.  She screamed, and I could smell her perfume again.  Sy threw his cigarette into the melee and watched it spark against a link of spinning chain.  Laughing.  The motors got louder and the spinning grew faster.

The hair on my arm rose.  The static on my skin made it feel as if my clothes were floating across the surface of me. She dug her fingers into my arm, I started to bleed.

     "Are we safe?" I asked.  But no one heard me, they were all looking at her as she started yelling and flailing her arms.  She threw her purse onto the floor like it was possessed.  Her cellphone and keys flew out and skidded across the concrete into the middle of the room where a length of chain whacked the phone and it exploded in a shower of plastic parts.

     They turned off the motors and the chains fell dead.  I looked and she was crying.  There was a burn in her side where her purse had been, a cell-phone shaped blackness in the side of her costume.  The boys in the back came out and made a half-hearted apology.  Sy picked up her keys for her.  We walked quietly out and down the hallway, through the bar and out into the cold night air.

 

The sight of stars beyond stars will always resonate with me.  The equity of longing and emptiness, where from a distance everything makes sense.  Unrequited, unrepentant, "the lovers I have left behind, the Minotaurs in the murky maze, and I, Icarus without barriers, seeing no difference from on high between the lover and the fighter, those who miss me and those who hate me."

 

"Shut up," she said then, and I remembered all the barriers of language.  The uncertainty of words.  How the only sun we can fly too close to is the one in our minds.  Fear will keep us all in place long after our conflicts, our planet, our physical barriers are overcome.  As long as we are uncertain with ourselves…

I looked in as we left and the trucker was back in his seat at the bar, stuffing a wad of cash carefully back into his pocket, having laid one prudently on the bar.  Full of stories to tell, no doubt.  Stories I don't want to hear.  The night outside still abuzz with revelers in all their merry disguises.  No one in control, no one leading the horde, men walk alone and women walk in pairs and everyone walks without knowing what is inside anyone's mask.  What is inside the Legend of the Light.

 

I offered to take her home, propelled again by the old raging draw of her perfume, but she refused.

     "That was fun," she said looking me straight in the eye, "But I'm fine.  Have a good night." She ran off down the hill, disappearing into the night.  I held my wounded arm as a gaggle of vampires strode past.  Ghosts raced by.  Time marched on. 

 

Love is not enough, especially not when compared with death.

 

Cepheus, in all his mercurial innocence, married a beautiful woman, too.  It killed him.

 

As I told you, there is a house by a lake that I like to go when I dream.  When our fathers are gone and we become the elder stars in the twilight of the young one's eyes, and the leaves all blow away down the lane and the lake freezes over I watch and listen to the crackling of the ice like the brittle snaps of aging bones.  At night the stars come out and haunt us, begging us to crawl across the wastes of cold and lifeless space.  "Please," they say, in a dialogue expressed without words or language save that of quiet terrifying motivation "give chase and cross," they say, "please come."

 

Scared voices coming from God knows where.  In my mind or somewhere outside.  Sirends in the lonely distance.  I walked around the block for a strained hour or so before deciding to go back in.  Ask just one question of the trucker.  But the bar was gone.  Not closed, vanished. I couldn't find it anywhere.   Retraced my steps, the streets slowly deserted, only lone recylcling bins standing sentry and the late, late, oh so very late hours rolling by like stars in the sky.  I went home. 

 

Quiet in defeat, I hung my wings on the door and turned on the TV for the little comfort of static.

 

Soon it will be morning.  Hollow dreams will give way to another gray and disappointing day to sleep through.  Light peering moodily through the windowpanes while I stay in bed.  Afraid to live.  Content to dream.  Alone, and empty, and afraid.