“What’s your middle name?” the mother asked.
“Pablo.”
“Oh, my gosh!” Maddi clapped and pointed at Scott. “Tell him your middle name, Scott. Tell him! Tell him!”
He hovered over his plate, noodles dangling, shaking his head.
“Scott doesn’t like his middle name,” the mother said.
“Can I tell him, Mama?” Maddi asked, bouncing. “Can I? Can I?”
“Picasso,” Scott said. “My middle name is Picasso, isn’t that awesome?”
Maddi slumped in her chair, about as much as I did. Pablo Picasso, one of humanity’s most celebrated artists, a well-spring of creativity, the essence of being human. Would Pablo be whole without Picasso? Could something be creative if it was separated at birth?
And the hits just keep on coming.
“What’s your project about?” the mother asked.
“Ma’am?”
“The school project?”
There was a moment when the family looked at each other, a moment where the new reality faltered and a stranger was sitting at the table. I got out of my thoughts and focused. “Project, oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s a sociology project. We’re supposed to, uh, interview each other about family. You know, your parents and grandparents, where you were born, that sort of thing.”
“That sounds interesting,” she said. “You didn’t tell me about this project, Scotty.”
He shrugged, mouth full.
“We’re adooopted.” Maddi hunched over her plate with a devious smile, not asking for permission to give the answer this time. Her mother told her to pay attention to dinner and Maddi looked at me from the corners of her eyes, her feet thumping on her chair.
The back door in the pantry closed and the father marched into the kitchen. “Sorry, guys. My meeting ran late.” He hung his keys on a rack next to the doorframe and went directly to the stove. While he shoveled food onto his plate, he looked out the window over the sink. “Mary Ellen? Did someone let the chickens out?”
“Oh, the gate must not have got closed,” the mother said. “Maddi, can you get them?”
“I got to do everything.” She dropped her fork on the plate.
“That’s because you’re Cinderella, honey.” She whacked her on the fanny as she went out the back door. “How was the meeting, Joey?”
“You know meetings.” The father sat down and started eating, saying with food in his mouth, “Who’s our guest?”
The mother looked at Scott. He wiped his mouth. “Oh, he’s a friend from school. Stopped by to work on a… project, I think. Um, his name is Socket.”
Joey’s arms were tan and hairy. The fatherly essence was rich and powerful. The energy in the room changed with his presence. It was stronger and tighter, enveloped the whole house. With him at the table, the family was complete. I was whole and unbroken.
“Have I met you?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“So, what kind of name is Socket?”
Maddi and the mother told him about my name and how it sounded like Scott Teck, and the father nodded and listened and laughed. Maddi told their father about the South and how they were learning about the Civil War at school and Scott got up to get more food. Fortunately, no one paid attention that my plate had hardly been touched, how I expertly scattered the food like I’d eaten as much as I could. Instead, I sat back and experienced the flow. The conversation soon turned to Maddi’s classmate that threw up at recess and Scott’s ex-girlfriend working at the grocery store and their mother’s appointment at the church. The sorts of things families talk about at dinner, I suppose.
And I was there, right in the middle of it all.
Maddi had cleared off the table and piled the dishes in the sink, then went into the backyard with her parents. Scott filled the sink with soapy water and stacked the dishes on the counter.
“Dishwasher broke?” I asked.
“You’re looking at the dishwasher.” He threw a dishtowel over his shoulder.
“I’ll wash, if you dry,” I said.
“Deal.” He shifted to the left side of the sink. I stepped in his place and sunk my hands into the warm soapy water, grabbed a plate and rubbed it clean with a soft sponge. Scott rinsed and dried and put it in the cabinet.
It was getting near dark outside. Our reflections were clear in the window that looked into the side yard. Mary Ellen and Joey were sitting in fray lawn chairs watching Maddi throw a slimy ball to the dogs. Scott hardly looked up, focused on the dishes coming his way. We were in sync, a washing tandem. Identical twins, the difference only in the color of hair. Why the white hair? Was it an error in the cloning, or a hint at my transparency?
How many times had I washed dishes, all alone, not knowing I was washing dishes somewhere else in the world? And now we were linked, our energy coupled like trains. His strength was growing, absorbing my own like I was doing to others, yet I couldn’t tell if he could feel it. He didn’t appear to be aware of anything other than the dishes and warm water, yet I experienced him as a massive star whose gravitational pull locked onto me, unable to free myself. It was only a matter of time before I was swallowed. I wasn’t sad about that. Wasn’t anything. It seemed that’s the way things were supposed to be.
Maddi’s laughter drifted through the window and the dogs barked. And I washed another bowl. Scott rinsed. For once, I wasn’t saving the world. Maybe it was saving me.
Scott went to his room, upstairs to the left. This is Scott’s Room was on the door. The walls were covered with pictures, mostly hard-edge bands in concert. He was at the desk, flipping the pages on a skateboard magazine with the likes of Josiah Gatlyn grinding a handrail and Benny Fairfax nailing something impossible.
“I can’t wait until I’m done with school,” he said.
“Where you going?”
“Anywhere but here.” He turned the page.
It was completely dark outside. The lawn chairs were empty. It took everything I had to stand three feet away from Scott. The draw was undeniable. I was leaning away from him.
But it was no longer to be denied.
“I got to go,” I said.
“What about the project?”
I turned, looked into his face. My face. My eyes. “It’s just about done.”
I stopped resisting, let go of the energy bundled in my stomach. It flowed like Hoover dam had tumbled. The influx hit him in the gut. He convulsed like he was about to puke. His skin was quaking. He was draining me.
“What’s… what’s happening?” He couldn’t get up, couldn’t get away. He had to sit, to claim what was rightfully his. I was only his shadow, his reflection, and I had so much to give.
As the darkness crept over me, I extended my hand to shake. “Take it,” I said.
His head was shaking.
But he wasn’t looking at my hand, he was seeing my face. I could not pretend anymore. He saw my true nature, saw his own face looking back. Even if I wasn’t real, if I was just a reflection, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to exist. To feel. To love. I didn’t know what would happen when it was over, where I would go or what I would become. There was only this moment. And it had reached an end.
“Go on,” I said. “It’s all right.”
Reality was breaking up, his mind began to quiver. But he held onto consciousness, not able to comprehend the impossible moment that appeared out of an ordinary day, his own self standing in his bedroom, reaching out.
His hand moved slowly. Darkness was taking my vision as it moved toward my open palm, as if I was dissolving from the physical world. As if I was returning to the great void of the moment. I did not see him take my hand. I did not feel his sweaty palm grip mine.
But I knew when it did.
It was an explosion.
My mind expanded like the Big Bang, scattered in all directions, through all the elements in a painless flight.
I did not see. Did not smell. But I was aware. Felt my life drain away from my body,
through my hand and into Scott. He absorbed what was rightfully his. He was the original face. My memories would be his. My life was his.
He would remember my father holding his hand at the fair, how he ate dinner with my mother, watched them bury my father, and the endless fights in South Carolina. How he fell in love with Chute. Every moment filled him, became his memories. It was his life, now.
And when I was empty, his memories began to leak into my awareness. I saw Scott’s life, from the very beginning. I experienced memories, both conscious and subconscious, of his life from the very first breath he took. Felt his body slide from my mother’s womb, the expansion of his chest and the blurry face of my mother hovered over him, her fulfilling nipple in his mouth and the warm embrace of my father.
And I felt the cold fate of his reality.
He was swept away, cuddled in a warm blanket that was no substitute for the woman who gave birth to him. He was too young to know that a blind man had plans for him, for all of us. Pivot took him far away where he was adopted by a warm and loving family.
His life was not much different than mine, the struggles were similar, the details different. He was introverted and righteous, carried a deep yearning to know the meaning of his life, always sensing something greater was out there, but found himself stuck in life’s mundane moments.
He got very ill during a swine flu epidemic.
Fell out of a tree and broke his arm when he was ten.
Caught a twelve pound bass in Tannerville Lake.
Hiked Pike’s Peak in Colorado on a family vacation, had his own dirt bike, carried his sister home when she was hit with a rock, one he threw, her face covered with blood, the scar still above her left eye, won an art contest in third grade, stole a book from school, changed his grades, kissed a girl behind the garage…
His life settled in my awareness like a new body of water. Deep and clear. Still.
The darkness was calm.
And I remained. I was still there. I was still me, still intact.
Complete.
And my consciousness gathered back in Scott’s room. Perhaps I disappeared during the experience. Or maybe I was there the entire time, experiencing it on another level. But when I returned, my feet were on the carpet and my hands at my side. Scott was on the floor. His eyes rolled back and twitching.
I picked him up, lay him on his bed. Even in the solitude of unconsciousness, his mind was coping with the reality of his new memories, the awareness of his true birthright. He was only human.
You are more than human, Pivot told me. No human could do what you have done, and yet I needed a human to do it.
I sat next to Scott. He was no longer a mystery, his mind completely available to me, for he was no longer separate. I moved my awareness inside his mind and soothed the conflict rumbling through his being, sorting through the new memories trying to find a place to be accepted. I gathered all those memories that he received from me and hid them in the darkness of his subconscious. One day, he would know them, when he was ready to see the truth, they would emerge, slowly. One at a time. But for now, he needed to just be Scott.
Thank you, I said to him. To me. Sleeping peacefully in his bed.
I peeked into Maddi’s room where she was sound asleep, squeezing a doll against her cheek with her thumb in her mouth, her tongue clicking.
I snuck downstairs where their father was watching Sportscenter and mother was reading a magazine. They didn’t hear the floorboards creaking as I stood unnoticed in the doorway, taking one last moment to experience the family essence centered in the room. I slipped outside, still unnoticed.
In the middle of the brick street, under the buzzing street light, I stood on a manhole cover. The stars filled the sky and night fell quietly on the small town of Tannerville. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the breath of the entire world, feeling its struggles, its pain and happiness, loss and gain, birth and death. The human essence contained the beauty of life, the essence of which contained darkness and light, the pure joy of life, hidden only by a lack of understanding. But it was there, not to be gotten, not something that was missing. Only something that needed to be seen.
And somewhere in the world, I felt every consciousness struggle with its own existence, each soul rightfully searching for itself. And among them, I sensed the awareness of Pivot, like he was everywhere, as if he had yet to gather his body in a particular place in space and time.
There was another presence out there. This being was intimately familiar, shining like a beacon, calling me to join him. He was in Charleston. And he was waiting for me to arrive. It was a bald man that walked freely down a sidewalk.
Game Changer
Downtown Charleston.
Tourists crowded the sidewalk, holding hands and walking casually past art studios, pausing in front of picture windows. They lined up outside Hymen’s Seafood for a late bite or crowded at Comiskey’s for desert. Just another night.
I was in front of the long market, the building painted mustard yellow and Charleston green. Pike was somewhere in the crowd, his presence scattered like a game of Hide-and-Seek.
A street vendor sawed away on a beat up fiddle, curled up against the wall with a box of coins in front of him. Tourists occasionally stopped to toss in a bill, and the guy nodded curtly. I walked past him, looked down the street left of the market, recalled the vision of when Pike walked free, trying to remember what side of the market he was on. But there were no details in the vision. Just the street. And the girl.
I closed my eyes and leaned against the building. He has been here already, I could feel him, but what was he waiting for? In the vision, it was dark and the streets were crowded with slow moving traffic. A rickshaw bicycle rang a bell. And there was no fiddle playing, either.
“You want a rose?” A kid held out a palm leaf torn and folded to look like a beige rose. “Ten dollars for one, twenty for two.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“All right, how about five dollars for one?”
The music had stopped. The musician’s box was still on the sidewalk, filled with coins and his violin. A note was tucked between the strings. Looking for me?
Pike’s presence was smeared on the paper like a fingerprint. He was disguising himself as the fiddle player, but how? I looked around and then closed my eyes, reaching out with my mind, feeling each individual presence mingle throughout the market. I felt their movements, their desires and fears, but none were Pike.
A stick poked between my fingers. I looked at the palm rose in my hand. The boy was twirling one. “You want to buy another?”
“I didn’t buy this one.”
“That guy over there bought it for you, said you looked lost, like you needed a friend. Said you’d buy another.”
“Where?”
“Buy another and I tell you.” He held the rose up to my face. “Ten bucks.”
I knelt in front of him, gently took his shoulders. I knew his life, and it had been hard. But I couldn’t change him, couldn’t tap him with a magic wand to make it better. At the moment, I just needed to see what the man looked like and where he went. I scanned his recent memory and saw the man was bald with dark glasses, smiling at the kid like he was looking at someone else, like he knew I’d see the memory. You’re so close.
I looked to the left side of the market again. There, along the sidewalk, people were hustling out of the way. I ran across the street, around traffic, between the parked rickshaws. Up ahead, the bald man. Pike. He scattered the crowd like a bad smell. And then my vision materialized.
The family and the little girl, pulling her gum out of her mouth, her mother chastising her for it, reaching down to yank her hand back, not seeing the little man whose force slammed into them. The father was thrown against a parking meter and his wife back into him, but the little girl’s hand slipped from her grip. She tumbled into the road, in front of a car that was going too fast.
I cut into time, freezing it the instant the bum
per reached her forehead, inches from splitting it open. I walked through the silent night and removed her from danger, lay her at her mother’s feet.
Pike’s gone, again.
I returned to normal time. The tires screeched. The mother screamed. A crowd gathered around the frightened girl, crying on her mother’s shoulder. I stood beneath the awning of the storefront where the owners rushed out to ask if anyone was hurt, they had already called the police. But the assailant was gone.
Suddenly, I caught a whiff of his presence, floating on the wind. Across the street, he’d entered the long market, slipping beneath a canvas curtain. Traffic stopped. A cop had already arrived on foot, taking a description of the strange, bald man. I walked unnoticed between the cars, pulled the canvas aside and stepped inside.
During the day, it was crowded with vendors and tourists, but at night it was empty and lonely aside from a bird searching for a place to nest. The city sounds were muffled by the canvas walls. At the far end, near the side road that crossed between the buildings, a short man was hunkered over a fat woman and a display of sweetgrass baskets.
[Please, leave.] I planted the thought in the woman’s mind.
She looked at me across the great distance. Months of hard work lay on the ground in front of her, and I was suggesting she leave them behind. Pike slowly turned his head, his black glasses like holes on his face.
“Do you mind?” he said. “WE’RE HAGGLING!”
The basket woman placed her bundle of grass on the ground and got up, dusting off her dress, and walked away.
“Great,” Pike said. “That’s just great. Do you know how hard it is to find a quality sweetgrass basket these days?” He shook a dark banded basket at me. “They weave these motherfuckers by hand and charge a ton of money. And she was going to give it to me for free. For free, you understand?”
He was a projection, that’s why I couldn’t locate him. There were no projectors around, so I didn’t know how he was doing it, I just knew I couldn’t locate him. I attempted to penetrate his image, follow it back to the source, but it was empty. Pike dropped the basket and spread his arms, as if to help.
Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny Page 15
