by Jay Sigler
Looking down towards the lake, I found Frank and Neil. Neil’s college football ring sparkled, reflecting light that was not there. I floated to where they were, not sure if they could see me or not, and hid behind a little wooden shack that faced the long, narrow pier where the two men stood. The shack looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades. Dry, rotting wood was in desperate need of treatment. The window and door frames were sporadically cracked, the paint so terribly chipped in some places that I wondered if they ever had been painted in the first place. Through one of the grime-filled windows, past ancient spider webs, I saw a dirt floor surrounded by old paint cans and tarps. In the middle of the floor was a square outline of what looked like a wooden trap door. Fishing and boating supplies were strewn about uneven wooden shelves hanging off of the wall.
“You really gonna take me out on your boat, Neil?”
“I brought you here, didn’t I? But you have to do exactly as I say. People that ain’t never been on a boat are more likely to hurt themselves just by lack of experience more than anything else.”
“Aye aye, Cap’n.”
“Tell me, you get seasick?”
“I have no idea, Neil,” Frank gulped. “I used to do okay at water parks as a kid.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see, that’s not really the same thing. Just let me know if you’re going to yak.”
“Um… sure thing.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
They made their way down the narrow pier in a single-file line, Frank following Neil. Their footsteps were in sync, their shoes making simultaneous clomping noises on the dry, warped wood of the pier like tap dancers leaving the stage after a performance. Then the footsteps stopped. I chanced a look from my hiding spot. They were gone. The logical assumption was that they had simply walked off the edge of the pier into the water, except I hadn’t heard a splash.
I came out from behind the shack and ran down the pier to have a look. I peered down into the water, which was very still and very black. Further out in the distance, shark fins bobbed to the surface like basketballs suddenly let go after being held underwater. They popped up randomly, swarming in crisscross patterns at speeds that were unnaturally fast. I attributed it to being part of a dream. Thick purple clouds reflected back at me from the cold black water. But when I looked to the sky, there were still no clouds. Keeping an eye out for sharks fins, I dipped my hand into the lake which felt more like oil than water. When I lifted my hand out of the lake there was no runoff; viscous mucus stuck to my fingers.
As I wiped the sticky substance off of my hand, a huge boat floated into my line of vision. It appeared out of nowhere and moved away from the pier towards the middle of the lake. Frank and Neil stood talking at the bow as it passed me. Acting purely on an impulse, I backed up a few steps and took a running leap off of the edge of the pier. Midair, I noticed shark fins circling directly beneath me, waiting. I landed on the boat’s stern in one piece, but not without some trouble. When I hit the deck, the forward momentum sent me rolling into a trough of chum. The trough didn’t tip over, but the impact was hard enough to thrust a whole slew of bloody fish innards out of the bin. I looked to the bow to see if I was caught. Neil was watching Frank pretend he was the king of the world, which I’m sure everyone does their first time on a boat, and they didn’t hear the wet smack of guts slapping the deck. Frozen in anticipation to see if I would be discovered, I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. The misplaced heap of stinking skin and organs jiggled like a Jell-O mold and began to take shape: the familiar shape of a man in a hat and trench coat the same color as the thick disgusting water through which we were sailing.
I rolled under a pile of fishing nets near the side of the boat in an attempt to hide and positioned myself so I could see the entire rear deck in addition to the remaining forty or so feet of the boat's starboard side. Neil descended into the cabin below deck and I watched the newest member of the crew creep towards Frank, his black Converse shoes squishing and sliding through fish guts. Frank still faced the direction of the boat’s travel, arms spread out to hug the wind that held down what hair he still had left on the sides of his head. Although I only saw the back of him, in my mind I could see his eyes closed with a smile on his face, the deep worry lines causing the air to stream past him in all directions. Shawn looked towards the pile of nets I was under, gave me that awful nod I’d grown to hate, and slowly walked towards the front of the boat. It was obvious he knew I was there and wanted me to see what was about to happen. I tried to scream out a warning, but the nature of the dream kept me frozen where I was.
Time slowed down and Shawn made his way to where Frank stood unaware. Along the way, he grabbed an emergency axe and the metal pole used to save drowning passengers from the side of the boat. The instant Shawn's filthy hands made contact with the pole, it turned into a brown and yellow snake. He whispered something to the snake and it went rigid. In one fluid motion, he heaved it at Frank like a javelin. The snake kept its stiff form as it flew straight through the air until it hit Frank in the back of the head. Upon impact, it turned into the wooden staff I'd seen in my other dreams. The staff entered the rear of Frank’s skull with a crisp sound, like twisting a head of lettuce in half. The next sound I heard was like a sopping wet paper towel thrown against a cabinet, created as a hunk of brain exited the hole in Frank’s forehead and slapped against the inner wall of the boat. The staff was held perfectly parallel to the boat’s deck, visible in its entirety except for what was hidden inside Frank’s mind. The split second before gravity took over seemed to last for minutes. Frank appeared to be hanging from the staff, instead of him holding it up. Momentum finally ended the moment and he fell forward. The wooden staff hit the deck and stuck straight up in the air, held in place like a tripod with Frank’s two legs. Gravity called to the blood in his brain and when enough lubrication coated the staff, Frank slowly slid down it onto his face. Shawn ran up behind Frank with the fire axe and I shut my eyes. All I heard was chopping, scraping, and clanking as Shawn made Frank into more chum.
I opened my eyes, determined to get off of that boat. No longer worried about the sharks waiting for me, I fled from the nets and jumped overboard into the thick black water. I expected the worst but the sharks were all dead and floating in the water, their soulless black eyes open, just not seeing me. I swam as fast as I could through the thick goo back to the pier. Scrambling out of the water, exhausted and out of breath, I turned around to look at the boat. I saw that it had turned starboard, with the entire length of the side now facing the pier. The boat’s name, Stanford, was painted in black letters towards the front. Right above the name was Frank’s head, impaled on a decorative bow made of the wooden staff, bobbing up and down with the gentle waves of the lake. He always nodded at just the right places.
Chapter 13
I only registered that I had mistakenly poured orange juice into my cereal instead of milk when I piled the dishes onto the ever-rising heap on the counter and saw pulp at the bottom of the bowl. I didn’t care. My head was pounding; I was too hung-over. For three days after that dream, I’d been drinking enough so I wouldn't dream at all when I passed out. That was how I got by. Between Vicky’s death, my dreams, and missing friends, it was all I could do. I calculated that a fifth of vodka bought me about three solid hours of heavy sleep. Two fifths and I’d be dead. Being a Numbers Analyst, I was able to find the average of the two.
Frank had not been on the train since that dream. The paranoia that accompanied my nightly drinking binges made me confident that Shawn had something to do with the disappearance of both him and the Happy Couple. I watched Shawn watch Neil and Sheila, absorbing everything they said. I could tell that they felt something was wrong, too. Their voices were merely a whisper and they both sounded worried.
“Hey, Sheila, you talk to Frank over the weekend?” Neil tried to sound casual, like he was just passing time, but his voice wavered past the frown he tried to hide.
“Nope. I was hoping you had. Think he’s sick or somethin'?”
“Don’t know. He was supposed to come check out my boat over the weekend, but he never showed up and never called, either. A guy like Frank wouldn't fuck me over like that for no reason. He’s usually good for his word. You sure you ain’t heard nuttin'?”
“I can try emailing him when I get to work. I haven’t seen him outside these past few days,” she said. The greasy wrapper crumpled around the rest of her breakfast burrito as she squeezed it. “You don’t think something happened, do you?” Her eyes widened with worry and she shoved the rest of her burrito in the bag. She seemed to have lost her appetite. I swore I caught just a glimpse of a smile from under that dark brim of Shawn’s hat.
“Nah, probably just sick like you said… I would think.” During that miniscule pause, Neil looked past Sheila to Shawn and decided against saying something more before continuing with a shrug. “Just email him and let me know.”
If those two were so worried about Frank, I was a fucking mess. I digressed to the point where I just stumbled into work late and collapsed hung-over into my chair. The wrinkled noses of people that passed by and the secret whispers outside of my office walls were as obvious as the reasons for them in the first place. I wasn't trying to hide anything, but I made a mental note to use more cologne to cover the smell of Stoli. But cologne wouldn't do much to improve my ever-suffering work. Yesterday my vision had been so blurred that a “1” became a “77” and I messed up an entire equation. I could have killed millions, but more than likely just made the font bigger on a candy bar wrapper somewhere.
Nights continued to be the loneliest time for me. If I wasn't thinking about how to deal with Shawn, I was thinking about her. My wife. My one and only truly best friend in this god-for-fucking earth. Taken from me by some fucking psychopath that was still out there somewhere, going about his day-to-day business. Go to work, come home, kill someone, eat dinner, repeat. We all had our routines. If I ever found this guy, I would kill him, I swear I would. He had taken my Vicky before she was supposed to go and I wanted to take from him what he had taken from me – everything.
The little things were the hardest to get over. These miniscule details that meant absolutely nothing at the time were the grains of salt sprinkled into a huge open gash in my heart. No one yelled at me for squeezing the toothpaste from the middle instead of the end of the tube. No one folded my socks into a ball instead of in a knot because it didn't stretch them. No one scratched my arm from the elbow all the way to the palm in the middle of the night. There was no one. I was in a fucking mess of a house, itching, with socks hanging off of my feet, and a whole fuckload of toothpaste at the bottom of the tube. I was a disaster, I knew it. My co-workers knew it. Fuck, even my imaginary friends on the goddamn train probably knew it. And I didn't care. I gave up.
It was another night sometime in my life. I had my head down hoping that the ceiling would fall in on me. Hoping that by some miraculous sequence of events, a meteor would fall through my roof and just end this all for me. I opened my notebook to jot down these new ideas and saw the original advice that Julie had written in there: “Always remember, do not waste the precious life you are given.” What a fucking joke, I thought to myself, and just to stress how much I meant this, I said it out loud.
“What a fucking joke.”
It was at that point, at that very moment in time, that I became fully aware that I was wasting my life in the catacomb of my own mind, surrounded by the memories of my dead wife and my dead or dying friends. Dead or dying friends that I was doing nothing about. That I was just letting slip out of my life. Dead or dying friends that most likely had families or loved ones of their own, like Vicky was to me. It suddenly dawned on me that I needed to stop Shawn. I had already accepted my life as a waste, but if I was able to save others from the pain I was going through, perhaps I could get some feeling of closure in losing Vicky. Logical thinking told me that I would need more proof than just a few dreams and new shoes. I needed to study Shawn and see what he was up to after our time together on the train ended. For the first time since Vicky’s death, I was beginning to feel like I might still have a purpose.
Chapter 14
The next day I called off work. I planned to follow Shawn after the train ride to learn as much as I could about him. I gave The Stork some shit excuse about needing to catch up on much-needed sleep. Given my almost immediate return to work after Vicky died, he had no objections. He told me to take all the time I needed, not worry about anything at the office, and to call him if I needed anything. As I hung up the phone, I wondered if he had read that line from the manager’s training manual or if he had actually committed it to memory.
Despite not having to go to work, I still got on the train at my regular time, hoping to run into Shawn. As the doors parted and I entered into my tin can of choice, I discovered I wasn’t the only one that missed my friends.
“Hey, Neil, I emailed Frank but he never emailed me back. You ever hear from him?” asked Sheila. I walked up the narrow steps to the single seats and saw that her appetite had regressed even more, noted by the lack of items pushing out the sides of a greasy bag.
“Nope, nuttin’ yet. He's gotta be sick or on vacation or somethin',” Neil said, staring off into nothing. His tone was monotonous and it seemed like he was trying to convince himself as well as Sheila.
“Yeah, maybe he just forgot to tell us.” Her mouth turned into a pouting frown. “You remember when you spent a whole week at that marina protest last year? We didn’t know until after it was over.”
“How could I forget? You gave me so much shit for not telling you. Not that it mattered one goddamn bit. They're still building the fucking thing. Maybe Frank's at some mermaid march?” They tried to remain positive for each other, but their drooping shoulders and wandering gazes indicated that they both thought something was wrong. They just refused to admit it.
Right before the main doors closed, my remaining friend boarded the train. Shawn looked at all of us through the window in one of the doors to our car before he opened them. He stood there with the doors fully open for a few moments and then slowly made his way down the aisle, looking for a place to sit. Sheila and Neil’s eyes dropped to avoid looking at him. Shawn took his seat five rows back and sat facing them, staring.
I had told myself last night that I was going to watch this son of a bitch every minute of the commute, so I did. He had on his same trench coat, hat, and Converse shoes. I attempted to study his face so I could identify him in a police lineup when I got my proof, but it was difficult with his hat on and the steep angle from where I sat viewing him. I could only see his clean-shaven jaw and thin lips pressed together in no particular shape. And that was it, that was all I could see. For the entire commute, he just sat facing Neil and Sheila, expressionless.
As for my plan to follow Shawn and see where he went, I never got my chance. Sometime after the fifth stop, a long screech followed by a large clunk interrupted the ride. It sounded like whatever caused the clunk had been run over as we slid to a halt. Something had detached itself from the train and the abrupt jolt rocked the car from side to side. Sheila and Neil stopped their conversation and, like most of the other passengers, looked around for an explanation. Shawn however, just sat there unmoving, as if he had expected this.
“What the fuck was that?” Neil asked to no one in particular. The train came alive with theories as to what had happened.
“Did the brake system lock up?” asked a woman I didn’t know.
“Did we hit something?” asked an old lady with far too many bags for one bench.
“No way, we would have heard a thud or something. This was metal scraping more metal.”
“Terrorists?”
“Aliens?”
“The end of the world?” The seconds clicked off and the ideas got more ridiculous. It’s amazing what the mind made you think when there was no one around to tell you what was going on.
> “It was just its time to break,” offered Shawn, showing signs of life for the first time during the entire trip. The other suggestions had all been questions. Shawn’s comment was a statement, spoken like he already knew the answer.
A minute later a voice came over the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re sorry to inform you that the train has experienced a mechanical malfunction and will temporarily be out of service.”
The collective groan harmonized around the same tone.
“We realize that this is a great inconvenience to you all and we’re trying to come up with alternate solutions. We have no exact time estimate on how long the repairs will take, but we’re guessing around an hour or two. In the meantime, we have flagged down the train behind us, rerouted it to the opposite rail, and asked it to stop and pick up any passengers from this train. You can either sit it out on this train, or carefully cross the tracks to the other side and squeeze in with them.”
The obvious choice was to get on the other train. Everyone stood up and tried leaving the train at once, which only caused the process to take much longer. I technically didn't have anywhere to go, so I decided to do whatever Shawn did. But somewhere in the sea of sardines trying to escape through the bottleneck, I lost him. He must have slipped out before everyone else, most likely because he had known this was going to happen. Without Shawn, I was in no rush to board another train by any given time, so I decided to stick it out on my current train. After a quick discussion with myself, I decided that 7:30 a.m. wasn’t too early to start drinking and pulled out my flask. A single flask was not enough to drop me into that deep dreamless sleep I longed for, but it was enough to put me to sleep. So I slept. And I dreamt.
