“The sun went down.”
“Here, help me hoist open the paneled door of our telepathy crypt.”
“Let’s go to Safeway, there’s one I saw at the last exit; I want some grapefruit juice.”
I wander around to the alley of the supermarket to find a new box for all my stuff. Suddenly I find that I can’t walk any further, that something bad will happen to me if I round the corner. I lean my palm against the side of the building; I catch my breath which seems to have been taken from me. Some sharp pain pings at my kneecaps from the inside. A tingle washes over my brain and chills my entire body. I peer into the shadows carved out by the overlap of cinderblock wall and orange utility light. I see a shape. Am I supposed to be here, to find evidence? To bear witness? To blaze a trail? Where did I leave my soul that night? In a box behind a Safeway in Spokane. What does a sudden explosion in your pulse mean? What about a lurching of the synapse, is that someone trying to telepathically reach you? Her name was Kim; I had a thing for Kim, but in an indescribable way that was unlike anything else, ever. She seemed to under-perform everyone around her in just about everything, smarts, crafts, she couldn’t fight, she only cooked Hot Pockets… Why her then? There was just a lot of longing, and a lot of curiosity surrounding her I guess you could say. And I could never grasp it; she fell through my fingers. She was more dead than the rest of us, the deadest. Her hair fell in shafts of light through my fingers. In the reflection of her eyes I could see my heart, bursting. I grew up next to her body, came of age in a series of heartbeats when she said the syllables of my name. I found my hand caught in the fold between her ribcage and hip. There was nobody around, it was Sunday morning three years ago and our foster parents were at church. I had fallen asleep next to her the night before; we shared a bed those nights because it was the best way to do it, to sleep soundly beside a body that made little whining noises and turned like a plush engine, spilling gardenia into my face. I brushed across her hair on my pillow, took my hand across shoulder and fatty patch behind breasts, under crook of arm, under covers where her flesh was hot after slow burn of sleep, until my hand found the sad valley between her legs, between everything, and I lingered there and she awoke to this lingering and came to my mouth and we kissed for the first time, outrageously listless with lack of sleep-slash-excess of sleep, two puffy faces inspecting each other for the source of swelling. Irreversible, indelible marks were made on virgin flesh. This was also the summer I think some of our memories and life experiences got switched, our souls transferring in the kiss. This is when I began to wonder if maybe some of my thoughts weren’t really mine, but Kim’s instead.
Now if I stop thinking specific thoughts and stop using my eyes to look at things, I can, perhaps, see her smoking on a murky little Merrill Lake beach all day. Lying face down in the sand. Taking the bus to the mall, lurking around the abandoned foodcourt in the early afternoon dead hour. Sleeping in an empty mortgage office, closed for remodeling. Running with a tribe of teen hobos, insurgent forces with a few teeth and handkerchiefs on sticks, occupying the gutted palaces of the old regime; some are kind to her, some do bad, some do odd beer-soaked things to her in the janitor’s closet. There is no in between. But for gangs of self-styled urchin mystics there is also no day, and afternoons die with your capacity to understand normal people, then you get fucked over by them. And what about us Night People? How do you define what happens to humanity when the sun sets? The coming of night in the Pacific Northwest suburbs yields a weirder, more druggy populace — if only because the few left out are crazy for being left behind.
The source of trauma is always off-the-walclass="underline" trees, moss, rocks, ferns — they all had a hand in it. Storms always begin in the woods and move out, to where the people are. Only parking lots are truly safe, everything else will get leveled. People will leave, go somewhere more useful. And so it’s just parking lots. The world began with parking lots. I used to live in a trailer in the woods, I think for a good amount of time. While I was there I kept thinking I was going to ride up on my bike and it would be gone, there would just be a dead patch on the grass where it used to be hitched. I lived there with Seth, and one day it happened, I rounded the corner on my bike and the trailer was gone. Some dude came out from behind a tree with a wrench and told me to get away; then he started chasing me. I did get away, walked until I fell down. But the next thing I recall is waking up in a strange bed, or on a sofa, kind of wedged in a corner, and there was the smell of coffee burning on a stove — agas flame the only other light except the sun rising, and it made the trees blue, all couched in fog. I felt small, sharp grains of sand or grit under me, shifting on the sofa cushions. I heard a man waking up, then worming over to me… More importantly, I remember growing up in the county foster care system, this is way before any of that stuff. Recovering underage prostitutes were delivered to our house on a weekly basis. I was surprised when my “stepdad” got convicted for this killing. Armed robbery of a trucker stopped on the shoulder of the freeway. The man later died of his wounds. Cops followed a trail of stolen garbage to a house my stepdad used to stash drugs and stereo equipment. There was an article on him in the paper when he was arrested, shit started coming out about a secret family, children fending for themselves in Idaho. On his last day in court, the cops decided he was wanted for an October incident in the children’s shelters in Idaho Falls. There were a dozen giggles from caseworkers, they gathered around us to say thanks and goodbye. They interviewed a girl from Idaho Falls who couldn’t read too well and carried an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus in her womb. We got the gist of the killing, but the girl’s testimony threw us for a loop. After a while both parents were gone so much it was like we were running our own lives in this garish potpourri den. We beat on each other in bed with a big wooden fork and spoon ripped from the kitchen wall. Monday night we had found a way to help ourselves to the Bourbon.