Today, whenever that may be for you.
or
Last Minute
Contextualization Before the Book Starts
No two iterations have ever been
told the same way, and certainly never truthfully. Never the full truth, anyway. Besides, who in their right mind would ever
believe me? So, each retelling has had
its own aggrandizements, obfuscations, abridgements, editorializations, and
exaggerations. Any element added or
subtracted as required to appease a willing audience.
Now, perhaps for my own sanity more
than anything else, I have taken the time to sit down and recount the whole
story, without embellishment (though, with certain necessary omissions; a
pubescent brain is not always such a polite and socially acceptable mine of
publishing wonder).
In one of her more lucid moments,
Marlin came to me and together we found old journals, kept, as children keep
their written thoughts, for posterity.
Inserted into bound and ringed notebooks were crinkled scraps of aged
paper with half remembered scrawls taken as footnotes when the horrors we faced
were too exhausting to allow for anything approaching coherent thought.
Isabelle, generally too busy for us
these days doing the metaphysical mambo, managed to find time to provide me with
such scribbled remembrances as she could be bothered to recall. She had even, to my immense surprise, managed
to dig up a box of my brother’s effects.
With everything we had collectively
recovered, we were able to stitch together something resembling a chronological
order of our lives up to the point where (relative) stability and (relative) peace
reigned.
Where the pages were torn and the
fugue of years past clouded events, we have done our best to fill in the blanks
(of which there but a few).
Not that it really matters. You will not believe a word of what I am
about to tell you.
No one ever does.
Having said all that, some context
is needed here.
This particular misadventure begins
with fear. This is nothing exciting or
unexpected. Fear is a rational response
to an irrational world. Fear is, at its
core, a survival tactic. Did you know
that humans have the ability to perceive infra-sound and process it as a threat
response linked to an evolutionary throwback when we had to worry about prowling,
growling super predators? Spiders, bees,
guys with mustaches, Australia, all direct threats our existence to be
avoided. To be feared.
As we grow, our fears become oddly
specific with the knowledge we acquire, but early experience shapes fear. Unconstrained, a child’s unhindered
imagination morphs the rational into the irrational, turns a tiny spider into a
hulking monster lurking in the closet.
The older we get the fewer monsters
we believe in, the abstract stops producing more phobias. Somewhere in there, during adolescence, we
stop being afraid of the dark and start worrying about the real world.
But the transition is so blurry
that some carry on into adulthood, complicating lives in unpredictable ways and
ensuring a living wage for therapists.
Sometimes we forget to be afraid and deep down, in the murky depths of
our conscience, stuck between half remembered episodes of cartoons secretly
made for adults (you know the ones) and nostalgia for our favorite toys, lay
dormant our irrational fears.
And they always pick the worst
possible moments to bubble to the surface.
I have never been afraid of the
dark, though I do have a touch of claustrophobia. Sometimes when I go to the beach, I stand on
the shore, feel the hot sand between my toes, listen to the crash of the waves,
look off to the horizon and see the vast blue ocean carry off into the
distance. Then I think, huh, the land
just kinda stops. Right there. I am literally out of land right now. There is not enough of it. Then, I look up and realize that our
breathable atmosphere only extends out to nine kilometers.
Past that, it is too thin.
Past that, vacuum.
Past that vacuum is the limit of
our solar system then our galaxy then the edge of the universe. Oh my god, what do they mean the universe is
expanding? There are boundaries? It’s not finished yet? I don’t care if I will never live to see the
edges, the universe is too small!
Alright, now that I can see that
written down, I am not sure counts as any identifiable form claustrophobia. Less phobia, more an undiagnosed neurological
disorder. Ignoring the batshit insanity
of that example, it is still one of those irrational fears that can be overcome
by taking a deep breath and stepping into the water.
The first of the other two that I
have carried with me is a recurring dream.
I used to have trouble sleeping and there were nights where, as soon as
REM kicked in, my brain would say, “No thanks,” and wake me up just enough that
I could not tell whether or not I was still dreaming or the room was real. The dreams would bleed over into my
semi-conscious state, leaving the room populated by the shadows of people
talking to each other in whispered conversations I was never privy to but
desperately needed to hear. When I tried
to interact with them, the shadows would dissipate, and I would be left
restless in bed with a fuzzy brain.
There were times I wondered if I was going mad, and madness was a
terrifying prospect for a young mind.
Subjectively, I would guess that my
final fear is the most important driving force behind this entire narrative:
Abandonment.
My twin sister Marlin and I were
somewhere around six years old at the time, not too long after our brother
Soren had come into the world and dad’s belly had grown enormous (and mom’s
butt had followed suite). The family was on a road trip through the American
South West to visit grandma. She had moved to the Lilliputian mining town of
Tonopah, Nevada, for some ‘good old-fashioned prospecting,’ as she had put it.
Mentally picturing my grandmother
wading shin deep into a stream to pan for gold held a laughable place in my
heart until I learned that grandma was kind of a slut. Prospecting did not mean
exactly what I had thought.
Ruined innocence aside, the deserts
of the American South West were, and probably still are, unimaginably barren.
There is not a single damn thing out there, save sporadic towns that scream,
“Stop here and get murdered!” Stretches of sand and tiny towns that look like
50’s throwbacks to when the government would test them for nukes. So little
activity you would think the people who lived there had actually been replaced
by mannequins waiting to be melted. Something about the whole scene screamed
haunted and extra creepy with a side of meth because, it is the desert, why the
hell not?
One can only go through so many
bottles of beer on the wall before asking, “MORE desert? Are you kidding me?”
We were out there though, to grandmother’s house we were a-goin. Determined to
find out how many times we could get away with asking, “are we there yet,”
before getting slapped.
Not many, as it turned out.
Dad pulled over mid-trip, late
night, to relieve himself at one of the literally tens of gas stations along
the route and grab himself, “Some god damned coffee. I ain’t pulling over
tonight for sleep. Probably wake up with fang marks and a car full of undead
family members. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let my kids become
vampires.” Safety first, that’s my dad.
What he did not know at the time,
was that I was awake not only to hear his muttered aside, but also that thanks
to an all-day ingestion of an unremembered soda and a consistent refusal to go
when given the opportunity I had to pee something fierce. I was six, stubborn
was part of the charm. Whatever logic had compelled me to hold a full bladder
throughout the course of the day also led me to believe that it was a fantastic
idea to not get caught sneaking out of the parked car into the gas station
behind my father.
Imagine my surprise when I stepped
through door, after having relieved myself in the tiny urinal – in which, on
occasion, to this day, I still relieve myself in on the notion that every once
in a while, I like to pretend I’m a giant – only to watch the tail lights of
our weathered sedan grow dimmer and dimmer as it drove off into the night.
There is nothing at that age to
adequately express the completely awful feeling in my stomach. Absolute despair
comes close, but without a frame of reference, which I did not have, it was and
remains easily the worst emotion I have experienced.
By the time our car had pulled back
into the parking lot, I had been standing in the same spot, flabbergasted and
shaking with the cold of the desert night. I was in such shock; it had not even
occurred to me to go inside and ask for help. Mom and dad were, naturally,
panicking to the point of hysteria.
It had been Marlin who discovered
my significant lack of proximity. She had immediately noticed my absence upon
waking to ask, “Where’s Marcus?” When my parents found me, I rushed past them
straight to my sister and hugged her until she stopped crying.
And shivering.
No comments:
Post a Comment