by Beth Harden
“Most importantly, just relax and forget that we are here. Okay then, you can close your eyes and use your ears as your guide. Ready?” asked Dr. Brown. “Follow me,” he coaxed soothingly. He was a brave man, I thought, daring enough to accompany me back to a night that had been dead to memory for seventeen weeks now. A bloody corpse of hours buried in its own stench that no digging had exhumed.
“It’s the afternoon of March seventeenth. You have just finished an errand and are walking back up Fountain Street. It’s after six, actually closer to seven o’clock. You arrive at the Welton’s home and are standing on the patio. What do you see as you enter the back door? Is anyone around? What are you wearing?” The questions rolled in like a gentle tide, lapping, lapping at my feet then tugging softly to pull me in. Like a game of Connect Four, my brain was now fixated on dropping red hot clues into place to form a straight line; but each time I set up for a win, a competing thought obstructed the flow. The balls flushed out the bottom and we started over again. My recall resembled the game’s plastic framework machine-punched with holes. It was designed to hold a flashback only fleetingly, just long enough to convince me that might win.
“Now, concentrate. You’re waiting for someone. You hear him walking through the kitchen. Tell me what you see…”
My mind backtracked in a slow creep down a pitch-black path following the voice that led me. I stepped by instinct; all other senses were dead to use. I was fully detached from the conscious present by a batting of dark velvet that seemed to buffer out the fear and hold me safely, gently in suspense. I felt myself slip more fully into neutral, coasting, allowing the time machine to move me closer to the terrible truth.
“Tell me, what is happening. Who is there with you?” asked a faraway voice. My memory circled round looking for a place to make a soft landing but being the novice pilot that I was, I overshot the target zone by six years and crashed into a distant past.
I am sixteen, driving towards a motel with a seedy sign where an eager boy awaits. Premeditating sex was a lot like cruising south along Interstate 95 towards the Carolina border. Wondering as you spot the first sign announcing: South of the Border, 106 miles. Then sometimes later you see it again with gaudy tacos and inverted sombreros splashed in vivid color. South of the Border, 80 miles to go. Then it crops up every few miles with different gimmicks attached. On and on, always the constant reminder that the attraction lies up ahead. And then finally when the exit for South of the Border rolls around and presents itself, you either pull off to see what the suspense is all about or pass on to clear sailing, curiosity behind you now. I’d been coasting along for years, knowing from the start that I would turn down that ramp the first chance I got.
“Someone is waiting for me. It’s a young man,” I heard myself mumble.
“Alright now. Do you see him? Does he touch you?”
The motel is the kind with two stories of concrete balconies like low-slung tiers with door after locked door. The manager is leading me towards the far end to the room reserved for me. He tells me that I can make only one phone call. I realize that I have no way to leave. I am here for the next nine months with other guilty people. I try to tell him he has the wrong person but he unlocks the door and gestures for me to enter. My eyes can’t adjust quickly to the shade inside.
“I’ll be there soon. This will be fun, trust me,” says a voice from behind the bathroom door. I sit on the edge of the flimsy mattress. This is what I’ve been waiting for and wanting, isn’t it? Why do I feel so ill at ease? Someone steps into the room. The steam from behind the cheap shower curtain hugs his profile. It’s like Jesus coming in the clouds. I lift my arms out to receive him. Two other figures emerge from the sauna cloud. This room is only for virgins, they say. You were not invited. I struggle to get up but the bed is so soft that I sink into the foam and can’t get a firm grip on the frame. I lose my sense of balance.
I opened my eyes. It took a handful of seconds to come clear, those moments when subconscious is replaced by reality. I was in my patient room with two middle-aged law enforcement officials who were both peering curiously at me. The seated gentleman, I’d forgotten his name, had a notebook filled with marks like primitive etchings. The other I immediately recognized. Detective Hughes smiled encouragingly.
“You did well, my friend. Today was a good practice run. A few more tries and we’ll get things really flowing.”
“Wait! I remember. He was supposed to visit that night. He had something to give me. I was waiting for him,” I blurted out spontaneously. “It was near seven-thirty at night. The door blew open, but it wasn’t him.”
The professional note-taker jotted a final statement and stood up. He wore the shoes of an academic and the bowed slouch of a humble man. He was someone I could trust. Dr Brown reached to shake my hand but realized he was perched on the bad side with significant paralysis and patted my shoulder instead.
“Excellent. I’ll come back next week. We’ll try this again, Miss Braum,” he said. It was hard to tell if he was pleased or disappointed with the sketchy shorthand that he tucked inside his satchel.
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. I didn’t want my friends to leave. Detective Hughes sensed the anxiety in my half-hearted response. He grasped my foot through the thin linen blanket and squeezed it with reassurance.
“I’ll see you before then, kiddo,” he said. The two men strolled out into the anonymity of the public hallway. Within seconds their distinct footsteps were lost among the generic foot traffic on this wing. Visiting hours were concluding. After he was gone, I worried if I’d ever see him again. Hughes was the author of this mystery. With his help, the prologue to my story could be translated into fact and could tie this whole mess into a cohesive story that might just lead to a happy ending. Without him, it was just a bad read. I prayed he wouldn’t lose interest in it yet.
#
Nine more dark squares had been blocked out in my primitive paper timekeeper. Dr. Brown was back. He dimmed the overhead lights and pulled the flimsy drapes to block out the somber sky. The kind clinician assumed the same position in the visitor’s chair and began a litany of hushed instructions that worked like a lullaby, sending me into a half-conscious slumber. Dr. Brown had a precise idea of what direction he was headed in but unknowingly, he led me back to obscure clues and portends of future unhappiness that had gone into hiding.
“You’re standing in the hallway of the house. You’re walking towards the kitchen. What do you see? Think hard. Focus.”
Pictures. Photos. People from other places. Something’s wrong. Don’t touch. I slip into a nebulous synthetic sleep-state.
I’m sitting on my bed cutting up National Geographic magazines. We were not allowed to destroy these keepsakes. The rule was that they were to be kept as references. Places we could admire but never go to. I had broken the rule. Had cut out pictures of Bataan and Calcutta and spread them on my quilt. The master bedroom is backed up to my headboard. There is a disturbing sound coming from in there. One not heard in this part of the house before. Mom is crying while Dad is trying to talk sense through her hysteria. Why are they so unhappy? They don’t know I’m in here listening. They think I’m dead. Paralyzed by this realization, I sit listening to their voices choke and swell until my mother’s rises a whole octave. A splintering crash shoots us from our beds. I tumble out of my sheets completely naked. There is blood on the floor. I spot the back of Dad’s bathrobe flapping down the stairs and out the front door into the night. Not a shower robe but an over-sized navy windbreaker with a hood. The dressing mirror has shattered, reflecting my face in a thousand different grimaces. Women are somehow attracted to broken parts, things that are not whole. I kneel down in the mess, collecting up the fragments, as if I can somehow mother even glass back into shape.
“When you’re done, scrub off good.” he says. It’s my brother. Sounds like him, but I don’t see his face, only his arms. He must be sick though. Like leprosy, patches of colorless white skin spatters
in three distinct patterns down one arm as he reaches down to touch me.
Once again, I awoke. First came the dream then the interpretation. Dr. Brown shared the facts that I had given him in my deep stupor. They are scrawled on his pad.
National Geographic. Photographs from travels all over the world. India, Africa. Darkness. Black. Like the men in the kitchen. Hoods, not turbans. Tension. Something smashed. Glass on the floor. Typing pages. Papers with lots of words on them. Letters on skin. Three of them.
“He has a birthmark. On his right arm,” I said confidently. Detective Hughes beamed with approval.
#
Dr. Brown set up for session three with a bit less enthusiasm. He’d begun to doubt the therapy would prove fruitful in regards to solving any mystery here. It was obvious that he was a bit disappointed, if not bored by the random tangents my memory was traveling down. Like narrow tributaries that thread off the main flow of riverbed, they were of great intrigue to a mind lost in loops of same-looking rushes, but they weren’t getting us anywhere.
“Let’s give it one last try,” Dr. Brown said as we prepared my descent into sleep. His time must have come at a premium rate unless he owed Detective Hughes a favor. Hughes for his part remained hopeful and encouraging. We started down the muddled path that was the access road to the intangible.
My Dad and I are in the car. The big red Ford sedan. We are going to get something we were out of. He had bent down, looked into the refrigerator, bumping off a few magnets on the door with his head as he straightened back up. Beer, was it? Yes, and cigarettes. But Dad didn’t smoke. We were on our way back from the country market when it occurred to me.
“You forgot the beer,” I said.
“Oh, did I?” he replied, pushing the orange flare of a match up to his cigarette. Ashes flitted by his chin like fireflies. He let the smoke ride up his temples. The pack was on the seat. Camels, no filters. Half a mile from home, he laid the smoking paper in the ashtray and left it there. As we cruised up over the slight incline, the house came into view. Mom was out in the garden with her trowel to the dirt. In that rock-infested soil, she had to dig deep for even a simple crop. She worked in her bra and shorts in the hot sun and the skin between her shoulder blades had toughened like cowhide. She persisted, not even bothering to turn her head when we circled up by the barn.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “Or someone’s going to get hurt.” I turned in alarm. Dad was wearing a Giants hat. But he was a Patriots man, always had been. He grinned, mouth open wide in an insincere way I’d never seen before. Four of the teeth on the right side of his mouth were missing. There was nothing but gum there.
“He smokes Camels. And has missing teeth,” I announced upon awaking. Dr. Brown slid his notebook into his brown briefcase and stood up. He gave Detective Hughes a professional handshake and nodded at me obligingly.
“It’s not an exact science, but we may have something to go on here. Now, your job is to get well, young lady. It’s been delightful to get to know you,” he concluded. Translation: We are at a dead end. The insubstantial little tips you’ve given me describe a million random people. This guy’s getting off scot-free or else he never existed in the first place.
In the following weeks depending on my ability to both concentrate and stay awake, Hughes came to sit and read short bursts of news headings. If I seemed able to absorb it, he’d read the entire article. Hughes was a wingless angel with a sidearm and a radio. Divine appointment had brought us together; it would take hell’s all-out fury to scorch that bond. Why he came back over and over, I had no idea; but I never questioned the fact that he would. My parents visited faithfully, but brought with them the dragged-out look of worry and doubt. They had no voice for playful stories. Fear stuck in their throats so they could only watch and wait. For his part, Detective Hughes’ presence engendered a sense of calm. He walked comfortably among the dirty wrecks of people’s lives on the daily and stepped over tragedy like it was little more than a tumbling piece of litter on the sidewalk; an unavoidable by-product of messy human beings that needed to be cleaned up after. He understood the trauma of transitions, how to stubbornly wait out the change of mood from weighty midnight to thin day. He’d spent a pension’s worth of nights sipping cold coffee, fretting over other people’s losses, finally throwing off his vest and firearm and reaching for his overcoat as grey bands of dawn littered the streets with gradual illumination. Thee hours he dedicated to easing me from the retreating darkness into the safe light of day were what solidified my success, and convinced me that I could do it. I would learn how to purely exist and exhale the shallow gasps of panic through forged patience, firm in the knowledge that peace was always and again attainable. It was as certain as the weather that unfailingly crested over the horizon in all its predictable imperfection.
#
.
A shaft of sun fell directly across the television screen. The Sylvania set had poor reception to begin with and now the picture was all but lost. Grace, the paraplegic, was the first to complain in a howl that sounded like an Arctic moose caught in an ice jam. The other patients soon took up the call. Marlene, the black orderly finally ambled in and yanked the daisy-pattern curtains closed.
“Satisfied now?” she said, scowling at poor Grace who immediately settled back into her secret sing-song. Poor thing! Her car had been herded off a rural roadway by a stampede of dairy cows and she had crashed her brain against a massive culvert drain. The injury had left her with a tongue that perpetually lolled out the side of her mouth and a singular obsession for daytime soap operas with the sound off. But she didn’t know any different and unless something obscured her view of the television and sent her bawling, she was content. I would have gladly traded places with her. I didn’t care a whit for the nonsense that was taking place on that tube. In my opinion, it was nothing but a bunch of cheap talk and white noise to lull us into a daytime stupor. But despite my objections, Marlene knew best and insisted on setting my wheelchair directly in front of the television. The parking brake was clamped on and my feeble grip could not release it. She knew that, I’m certain, which made it all the more fun to leave me there to fumble and figure it out. Nasty nigger! The sting of that word startled me. Where had that come from? It was not a term I had ever used or entertained, yet here it was blinking across my brain. Black people. Suddenly, something clicked. I had been on my way to find them, get to know them. Out of white Maine. To the city. My heart throbbed.
“Nurse?” I yelled. Like shrill macaws, a couple of the elderly female patients mimicked the cry. We all knew it would be a wait. To my left was a large bookshelf made from knotty pine with intricate whorls of ancient pitch. It was an impressive art piece. Depending on the time of day, the rings morphed into winking eyeballs or strange beetles. A bouquet of magnificent day lilies crowded a crystal vase perched on top. A grossly sweet fragrance saturated the day room, but an erratic, jerking journey in my wheelchair to closer inspect the floral arrangement turned up the truth. They were one hundred percent plastic. The sweet odor that permeated the sitting room actually drifted from an air freshener tucked behind the pot. I was fascinated by the collection of paperbacks on the top shelf, mostly Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele books with forgettable titles. In the entire time I’d been here, which was anybody’s guess, not one patient had bothered to take one down and lift the cover. The arrangement of dust on the spines of these useless novelettes remained intact. Our brains were less tuned to romance and far more focused on keeping both eyeballs open. The wear-and- tear these books had endured must have been done in secret at the hands of the lazy nurse’s aides. They sat and talked and sat some more. They knew their careers were going nowhere. On the outside, everyone was on the move. The motion of people living their lives and doing their damndest to keep out of depressing rehab facilities like this one. I sorted them out by the throttle of their engines, the drone of a Cessna banking in flight, the thunder of a Boeing making descent or the vibrato of
a news chopper hovering above the commuters on their way home. Once in awhile, an irritating siren pealed through the darkness, held its breath and shrieked again. Someone was either dying or fighting hard to live.
“Would you look at that!” remarked Annie Mae, RN. She had finally left the comfort of the nurse’s station and meandered the short distance to the day room. At her encouragement, I swiveled my neck slowly back to the breaking news update on Channel 5. Everything seemed so distant and distorted. Little miniature cars and trucks were jammed along a freeway. Dump trucks, sports cars and cement mixers with animated drivers bobbing up and down inside their cabs; what appeared to be a parade of every Matchbox model ever made by Universal Toys all lined up in pretty profile. Squinting hard, I tried to make out the mayhem on the monitor. More staff was tuned in to the story now than on their assigned patients. One bored orderly yawned. I looked to her for a clue.
“Boston’s biggest traffic jam in over thirty years. Thank God I take public transportation,” she said.
Minutes later, the programming returned to the talk shows in progress. At mid-day, a news spot featuring the faces of two black men flashed up on the screen. One looked like a tiger with ragged teeth and dead-set eyes; the other had dark glasses, a frizzy ponytail, thin mustache and a brilliant smile. Good men or bad? It was hard to tell. The first appeared to thrive off punching bloodied swollen faces and dropping bodies down to the mat. The other swayed and smiled, hoping to sing in the White House. The audio coverage was gibberish. Though my ears were acutely tuned and sensitive to vibration and sound, that’s what it remained; just auditory disruptions in one eardrum that bounced too quickly down the tubes. Tyson and Wonder - the names meant nothing. Whenever I fell asleep, these images all returned and intertwined in a bizarre assortment of scenarios interrupted by the face of a man who held huge importance in the plot, but was a stranger to me. It all revolved into a repeating series of mug shots, class photos, horror flicks and love stories.
