Part 3, Chapter 6 (First Half)

Sorry I'm a bit late again. I started a new job this week and it's left me a drained shell of my former self! Still, here it is; the penultimate update before the start of Part 4.

Don't forget you can buy the whole thing now (revised and updated) for only $1.25, using the links on the right.

I'll upload the second part on Monday.

Enjoy the update,

Dave

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6

It’s early afternoon and I’m on familiar roads; roads I used to cycle along as a child. I remember this bridge and that old crumbling house. Here, on the left, is where they used to hold the summer fair. Now it’s only a damp empty field. There are few houses out here and, consequently, there were always very few people.

Judging by a recently passed church, I must be around ten miles from home. But then the snowmobile’s engine starts to make a loud grinding noise and the machine slows to a walking pace. I curse through my scarf and rock backwards and forward in the vain hope that the motion of my body will propel the piece of crap forwards. Instead, smoke billows out from the engine and it stops altogether. I climb off and look around with annoyance. I’m at a bend in the road. To the left of me, the bank of the road falls down into a small, slow-paced river. The right side leads up to a hill covered with bare-trunked pine trees.

“Fuck you!” I yell the snowmobile and then again at the emptiness around me.

I have no idea how to fix an engine, so I lift my bag onto my back, grab the dirty crowbar in my hand, and start walking.

I count my remaining blessings. The weather has been clear for hours.

Then it snows.

*

I estimate that after fifteen or twenty minutes of walking I’ll have covered a mile. That estimation means I stand to spend at least another three hours outdoors until I arrive at my parent’s place. “Three hours,” I joke bitterly, “may well kill me.” The snow continues to fall and I keep my steady pace through the gathering drifts.

My hands freeze into claw shapes, but I can’t focus on how cold I’m getting, or else it’ll just get worse. I have to put these facts to the back of my mind, into the dark recesses, where I put those other facts like, I am a murderer. The facts aren’t lost. I just push them aside whenever they crop up in thought and replace them with present circumstance or whatever else can catch my attention. I can only do this by maintaining my matter-of-fact, stoic attitude, concerned with practicalities and what I need to do. This works because yesterday’s murder feels so surreal that it could well have been a lifetime ago. I’m a murderer, but when said with stoicism, it could mean as much as, “I once made sandwiches for a living.” I am also agnostic. I am also pro-choice. I also don’t think that matters. “I am a murderer,” only becomes a fact amongst others when I purposefully ignore the consequences and ramifications. Only my bloodied jacket and smeared crowbar make that fact any more real.

*

Three hours is a long time to walk. Three hours is an even longer time to walk when you’re in the snow. This much is obvious.

I’ve wrapped my body from head to foot in scarves, a hat, a jacket, long underwear, and heavy shoes, yet my face still freezes. I can’t feel my toes, despite two pairs of socks trying to retain the heat. The snow gets thicker and thicker as time passes; it sticks to the front of my body in damp clots, and each step I take kicks more snow from the ground.

After an hour of walking, one third of my estimated journey and without spotting any shelter, I feel lightheaded and break into a cold sweat – just like yesterday’s fainting fit in the strange house on the way to Saul’s place. My head spins and my vision blurs. After a few steps, I stumble into the side of the road and fall into a mound of snow, piled high by the wind against the side of a tree.

*

I’ve no idea how long I lay in the snow for, but when I regain consciousness and shuffle to my feet the sun is still high in the sky. I can’t have been here too long. I haven’t turned blue or anything like that. I could have been here for thirty seconds, or five minutes, or twenty minutes. I’ve no idea.

I shudder at the realization of the danger I’m in. Nobody came to help me while I was unconscious. There was nothing to have stopped me from dying in that cold heap, other than my own body’s ability to revive itself. It dawns on me that the pool I’ve been thrown in, this world, where a strange voice yells, “sink or swim,” is deep, so deep, and I could very well keep on sinking if I don’t do something about it. There’s no safety net and nothing, save myself, to pull me back from the brink, should I reach that far. I’m in a new world where catching the flu, and being unable to feed yourself for a while, could very well be your demise. The dizzy spells I’ve experienced take on a new level of severity when I consider the conditions I face. I remind myself, should these lapses continue happening, I may as well be dead next time.

But at this point, right here, all I can do is pick myself up and continue walking. My limbs feel heavy and protest every movement, but to let lethargy win would be certain suicide. And so I just keep walking, pack on my back, cold wind in my face, and walk, and walk, and walk. I don’t resent my situation any more, because there is no way to escape it. I know this journey must end. I must find shelter, company, or something. If I walk for long enough, I’ll find something.

It feels like when you’re stuck on long haul, multiple part journeys. Those connections and waiting times, in anonymous airports, bus stations, and train stations, when there’s nothing you can do to speed up your progress. I recall the utter exhaustion, when I once waited for the time to tick by in the Greyhound station of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the awful town of Niagara, Ontario, with boarded up windows lining the streets, fog in the air, and a dog barking in the distance. The Niagara station closed in the evening and I had to wait outside late into the night, and the neighborhood didn’t look friendly. A long journey like that is a test, but it’s hard to be miserable when you know you can’t improve your situation in the short term. You’re stuck.

And here I am, walking up Highway 79 and then out and down capillaries pointing the way home. I’m in exactly the same situation. There’s nothing I can do except wait out the duration of the walk.

Hours pass and the roads become more familiar. On my left is the home of my childhood friend, Tom Wyndham, and his sister, Holly Wyndham. Holly Wyndham, who I would spy on in my poorly disguised teenage lust; always trying to catch a glimpse of her body. Only once, I saw her in her panties, as she changed clothes. Tom and I would cycle together every day, until he got a car and a driver’s license and our journeys lost their adventurous veneer. While we still cycled, we roamed through the Pennsylvania country. One time we trespassed through a farmer’s field in the early spring, so the juvenile crops were unrecognizable. Spotting our bikes, the mad old farmer ran after us, yelling abuse, waving a shotgun, theatrical. He didn’t catch us, so were fine, but I guess Tom is dead now anyway. As is that old famer. As is Holly Wyndham. It’s not worth stopping at their home. I’m almost back now.

And here is where I would catch the bus to school. Five boys and six girls, every morning through elementary and middle school, waiting in rain and sun for the often-dreaded flash of yellow to come around the far bend. This bus stop indicates that home is only another hundred meters away. I can already see the low roof and fence of my family’s home. I can already see the dark windows where somebody has closed the curtains and blinds. I can already see the snow gathering on the driveway. My father would have never tolerated such a thing.

I approach the front entrance. The car is gone and the house is, by all appearances, empty. I still possess the keys and my numb fingers fumble through my pockets, searching for them. They slip from my grasp, once, twice, as I try to shove them in the lock, and I have to kick away the snow on the doorstep to find them again. Finally, I gain access and once inside I notice that the air is fresh; there’s an open window somewhere. I stroll into the living room and pull open the curtains to light up the drab interior. The room is immaculate, as it always was when I was growing up. There are a few changes here and there, which my parents implemented when my siblings and I began to move away; my parents finally making the place their own again. The kitchen, like the living room, is also spotless. Even the bathrooms smell fresh. I instinctively press the button on the answering machine before I remember there’s no power.

I’m still somehow surprised that I find none of my family in the building, though I knew the place would be empty. All the rooms are clean, and the beds made, as if my family merely left for a holiday.

I go into my old room. Few traces remain of me in here. I moved out three years ago, taking most of my things, and my parents started to use the room for storage. Cardboard boxes sit between my bed and desk, along with piles of books, photos, and CDs. The blue wallpaper reminds me of a former life and a former me where acne was of the upmost importance and I needed a date for whatever it was I did all the time.

I sit on the couch in the living room and contemplate my situation. I take the photos of my friends, family, Emily Jacobs, and Karen Spellman, from my pocket and stand them on the fireplace.

I sit down again.

Now this entire journey seems pointless and impotent. I killed a man so I could sit on this couch in the dimming afternoon. I struggled through hours of wind and cold to be here. A battery-powered clock ticks away in the kitchen. The ticking travels through the door, providing me with a monotony to focus my reality upon. Other than that sound, I’m numb.

Now that I’ve arrived at the end of my journey, fatigue overtakes my body. These few weeks have made me a new man and left me utterly exhausted. But this is the best place to rest; safe and comfortable. There’s no place like home. I sigh, lie back on the welcoming couch and contemplate what to do next. Return to Saul’s home and hope the old hermit will welcome my presence? I can’t call that progress. Return to Pittsburgh, where fifty or sixty disenfranchised men now roam the streets? Perhaps a new group is forming post-Mecca, but I don’t want to be part of any new group, any more than I wanted to be part of the last.

*

Evening encroaches. I find some candles, which my mother stored beneath the kitchen sink, and set a couple down on the coffee table, waiting for a fuller darkness to set in before I light them. Meanwhile, I take one of the candles down to the basement to look for food. I find nothing useful. My family, when they left, took almost everything of use with them. If they were sick, I have no idea why they would leave, or why they would expend the energy to pack up all their vital belongings. If they were healthy, then why didn’t they attempt to contact me? A note on the fridge would have been some consolation.

But I can’t find any clues. My family seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

So I poke around the contents of the basement for while. This is one of my favorite parts of the house, because, although it’s always an uncharacteristic mess, most of the space was given over to me, my brothers, and sister, to use to relax with our friends. A filthy pool table stands down there and old Christmas lights hang from the ceiling. A mini fridge houses drinks, and a small stereo sits atop of it. Huge wooden spools, intended to hold industrial amounts of wire, or pipes, or something, left here by previous tenants, act as tables and chairs. Down here, my friends and I had a chance to escape our middle-class lives, and a chance to act out our cool and rebellious fantasies. Now that I’ve returned home, a changed person after over three years of student life, and several weeks of this surreal after-life. I’m embarrassed by the poster of Che Guevara hanging on the wall and the hip-hop CDs stacked by the stereo system. The basement makes me feel childish and ineffectual again.

I snub the candle and return upstairs. Climbing the same basement steps that would creep me out as a kid, because I always thought a hand would shoot up from between the gaps to grab my feet and pull me down.

I return to the living room and pick a tin of preserved ham out of my bag. I eat it cold, sat on the couch and still wrapped in my winter jacket and hat.

Once the living room is too dark to see comfortably, I light the candles again and stand them back on the coffee table, where their dripping wax ruins the veneer. The new source of light causes the living room’s large windows to act as mirrors on the room’s interior. I walk over to them, pulling my hat and scarf off to inspect myself in the dark and flattering reflection. I admire two weeks of beard growth; the longest my facial hair has ever been.

I close the curtains, partly because I’m unnerved by the thought of somebody staring in at me. Then I sit on the couch, with my tin of luncheon ham, and stare at the ceiling for a while.

I fall asleep with a blanket pulled over me and the can still in my hand.