My upper body is still hanging, practically perched on the front of her hood, my back against the gnarled tree, thick red blood soaking from my torso into the car’s unnaturally green glossy surface with little wisps of smoke as it drains from my body, my heart is still pumping, believing that my body is still intact. My vision falters as I start to get dizzy from lack of blood but I can already tell that her/its body has been created to be the accumulation of all my supposed inner desires. Suddenly it’s as if she’s standing beside me with her lips softly grazing my ear as I hear her finally say to me in a low, slow sultry whisper of sexuality that of course matches her form perfectly, “Icangiveyoueverythingyou’veever-wanted… justsaythewordanditwillallbeyours… youdon’thavetodiehere… thereis-somuchwecandotogether.”
As my own blood begins to fill my lungs it slowly drowns me from the inside, it runs from my left nostril now and bubbles from between my open lips. I only manage to gurgle as I try and speak but my mind is clear and words thunder in my head. I can almost see them flashing around me with a life of their own in the still night air, “Get the fuck away from me beast!”
That’s the point where I wake up knowing beyond all else that something is trying to get inside me while I’m weak. My body is weak from too much emotion and too little food, but I’m meditating now and saying silent prayers. My defenses may be weak but in my waking hours I’ve started to create a mental wall of protection around my body, around my head, my thoughts, my mind and my soul. Get out of my head dream demons; this weakened vessel is not for you. I say this over and over as I build. Over the course of a few days I construct my defense brick by brick, applying a substantial amount of mortar to each of the strong earthen porous bricks that I’ve molded individually with a prayer and fired in the kiln I’ve constructed in my mind. It’s slow going but as I lay the bricks around me, the thick mortar oozes from each crack and hardens as it runs down the wall. As I get closer to completing my wall of protection, the dreams that attack at night intensify in their desperation and brutality. Vivid images of blood and pain, sex, blood, drugs, family, hurting, blood, betrayal and always those infernal fucking unnaturally colored emerald green Mustangs forged in the depths of someplace that’s better not mentioned or put to paper. I’ve awoken several nights yelling and thrashing in my bed. As my wall gets higher tendrils of emerald green plants try and grow up the outer side of the wall, desperate to reach me or deposit seeds that will grow inside and feed. It’s harder and harder to resist so I’ve taken to trying to stay awake during the night and sleep during the daylight where the vivid images are not as strong. I should be done with my wall soon and if I ever find a way to get at the thing/person/devil/beast responsible for having the audacity to fuck with me I will make it pay very dearly.
Jen sent me a letter. Well not a letter, an empty envelope with a 2 inch clipping of an article out of the Denton Record Chronicle that informed me my friend Bobo is dead. Oh it hurt so bad to read that, even touching the already yellowing paper hurt my hands. If only I had been there, been around or been out. Could I have even done anything to help? Oh God, another friend gone, please show mercy and take her into your arms, lead her into your light.
The right answers have always seemed to make sense and come to me a majority of the time, but I have never been smart like this. The world moves around me in patterns and shadow now. I see the ebb and flow of desires, the slow motion reactions on people’s faces in day-to-day life. I’m in tune with something I searched for so long. An eternal invisible dangling carrot taunting me with the hope that it actually exists, I could smell it and hear it swing and even caught a glimpse as I walked through the fog of my life, but it was only when I stopped looking and finally relaxed that the empathic touches to life showed themselves to me fully.
I am in the middle of my war, a modern day version of my real father that I swore I would never become. What did his Purple Heart get him? A whole platoon full of dead friends and nothing to come home to except the sweet succulent bodies of bikini-clad beach women. I’ve built my wall now, the dreams are mine again, the demons cast out.
Necessity is breeding desire. The desire is making me crafty smart and able to feel the energy I have to read people. I have to have an edge that puts me one step ahead or a little bit higher on the brain awareness level. I know when they no longer care. I know the face of apathy, but I also have the desire and the need to take what I want without unnecessary involvement. I pinch it all. I knick it, I shoplift it and I get away, lickety-split, and the adrenaline rush of success is as sweet as any victory in my long forgotten war, as sweet as any drug and as sweet as being happy because it is happiness, energy and life.
I woke up with a thought of true genius fluttering through my head, but twas lost twixt bed and paper. Can you use twixt nowadays without insuring the wrath of the critics? I suppose I will find out. It’s finally time to go and make a home now. I’m not scared anymore.
“In this lucid moment, Epps concentrates and see the world with harsh, objective clarity: all of God’s children are simple animals, of no more or no less interest to the clinical observer than a leaf or a clamshell…”
PART IV
THE REST
So they, meaning them, the powers that be in all their glory, deemed me worthy enough to take my 36 hour pass. Finally. After all the sweat, blood and tears, I am being granted the freedom to roam (under their tightly organized schedule of course) away from the compound for a day and a half. My sister picks me up and we go home where the usual awkward fawning over the wayward son goes on. The “Oh don’t say anything too controversial, he might go crazy and attack us with a heroin gun or something” kind of conversation.
Please.
I finally see and touch my niece for the first time and she fears me because I am old and a relative stranger to her. Jenifer says they watch me closely whenever I interact with her too. I would never have noticed if she hadn’t said that. I wish she hadn’t said that actually. And then we go to the movies, trying to see something or other and I end up riding with Jenifer in her car from my parents’ house to the theater. A couple of miles, tops, and I look around and notice all the details. The faint hint of vinegar scent in the upholstery and the brown flecks of stain. The little droplets of dried smack on the windshield where some of the precious liquid shoots out the end in order to clear the potentially fatal air bubbles from the syringe. I am getting nervous because between us, and the obvious awkwardness of the situation where we have been so often in the past, is the console. The little storage place in her car where she keeps everything—everything that got me arrested. I know at that moment if I open the top of the compartment between us I will find the remnants. The cotton and needles and everything that’s needed and I don’t know what to do. She’s nervous and a little fucked up and I am nervous and scared to get fucked up and there we are in a situation I should not be in. My cells are screaming with ache to peek and look and put something into my veins and I just can’t do it. None of it. Not the casual socializing or talking or love or anything. Not while the console and all of its contents are there between us.
And that’s when I know. All the bullshit from the counselors and numerous attempts to open my eyes come down to this. Would I give my life for hers? Absolutely. I tried for so long. Would I change places with her in a second, be paralyzed never again knowing the intimate contact of sex or even the simple gratifying ease of knowing when to use the restroom? No question about it. But do I destroy our lives together? There it is, the big question. The answer leaves me reeling. I start to shake and I know I have to get out of there. I know I love her. I know it and I know that I always will love her but this isn’t right. This is no longer who I am or what I want to be. I’ve had a revelation, a dream, a will, a need to exist and survive. The knowledge that there is something more. To go back to her will be all there is and we will die.