Marks on a Page
Note: Language and themes in this story are not suitable for younger readers.
I had The Dream again last night.
I greeted it with the silent welcome someone gives an old friend who walks into the usual corner bar at the usual time on the usual day.
As always, the characters were different, but The Dream’s basic plot was the same.
In The Dream I’m not old-ish anymore. I’m my early thirty-something self, my limbs still supple and my stamina still strong. I’m jogging in a crowded park. The light blinks and winks overhead as the clouds pass before the sun at unnatural speeds. Off to my right, a brown river flows. To my left, a train track stretches into infinity.
I’m running down a packed dirt path. With a compulsion that chews at my gut I look at each stranger I pass as I move at my steady pace. None of the people notice me, but I notice them – very much so.
I see a girl. She’s about sixteen and tracing slow, small arcs on a swing. The metal of the swing’s frame is painted an aggressive red that matches her cheeks. The cheeks are angry and peeling with both acne and the chemicals she employs to battle it. It’s a war the girl is losing.
My heart leaps out at her, and I see myself on her swing-seat, looking out through her eyes, feeling the up-and-down in my stomach. I sit in her, and I wonder her wonders. I sit inside her.
I sense she works as a cashier at a local grocery store. A little boy and his mother came through her line last week. The mom rummaged through her purse looking for her shopper loyalty card while the son sat in the shopping cart’s high-chair studying the girl/me.
Just as the mother produced the little piece of plastic with the barcode on its back, the child produced a pronouncement uttered with the authority of a biblical prophet: “There is something very bad on your face.” The girl’s best friend, who also happened to be bagging the customer’s yogurts and Lean Cuisine, studied the countertop and pretended not to hear.
Then I remember how the girl on the swing asked a boy to the Homecoming dance not long before the scene in the store. She asked him face-to-face expecting an answer right then, but he asked her for some time to think about the offer and consider his response. She felt naked and foolish agreeing to his request, but she did.
Three days later the boy declined her invitation to the dance. He did it online and publicly via a snatch of verse that made him temporarily famous in the halls of their school:
Your legs make me think of fuckin’,
But your zits be suckin’.
Because of this
I think of you as a sis.
Gotta say no. Gotta say no.
Can’t go.
Gotta say no.
My heart leaps back to me, and I jog passed her.
A stream of young boys runs across the path fifteen feet ahead of me: One-Two-Three-Four---------Five. The fifth labors across the trail huffing and puffing, forcing his sloppy flesh forward, desperately trying to close the gap between him and his friends. It’s clear to all but him that he has far too much girth and asthma to shrink the space between. He won’t catch up.
My heart leaps out to him, and I am in him, looking down at his yellow and black New Balance, feeling a little spittle gather in the corners of the mouth. I feel the improper, incapacitating closeness of the walls of his chest.
I hear – not through my ears, but in the echo chamber of my skull – the sad music of his movement – right foot thud, jiggle-jerk of the fat mid-section, left foot thud, jiggle-jerk, repeat slower and slower until – at last – full stop. Then it’s just his/my eyes chasing after his friends while his/my mind asks why such things are so.
Then I have a sudden vision from a half dozen years into his future. I’m as certain of this scene playing out in the heavy boy’s life as I am of my own name.
The boy is in his bed. The room is dark, and his bedtime has come and gone hours ago. The boy is under the bed sheet. From the sheet he’s fashioned a makeshift tent with his head acting as the center pole.
If you were watching him from the doorway you’d see his form shadowed on the sheet because of a light he has with him underneath. Is it a flashlight? Is he being sneaky? Is he reading comic books late into a school night when he should be sleeping?
No. The boy in my vision doesn’t have a flashlight. The light comes from a tablet computer’s screen, and he’s not reading The Avengers on it.
The boy my heart has leapt into, the boy who still can’t keep up with his friends at age sixteen, the boy who now wears large men’s pants, that boy masturbates solemnly to what he sees on the screen.
I see and sense it all through his eyes and his flesh – the heavy breasts, the red lips, the too-tight grip, the sad relief that a person’s picture can’t run away from him, the moment of orgasm pushing everything else out of the way – if only for a beat or two.
My heart leaps back to me, I jog on, and in an act of self-defense I force my eyes to loiter on the ground a few feet in front of my rising and falling feet. The park is stuffed with people, but I pretend that I am alone as I run.
I’m exhausted, but I continue to jog anyway. You see, because of the rowdy illogic of dreams I know without a doubt that in The Dream if I were to stop my jogging I would never be able to run again. And if I couldn’t run again, I would never be able to leave the park. And if I couldn’t leave the park, I would be trapped with these sad, pathetic people for all time, and this would not be acceptable, not livable.
So I run on alone, and if I’m not in the park all by myself, at least I’m alone in my sane desire to run beyond its borders and never return.
But then, out of nowhere, I realize I’m not alone, not even in this lesser, imagined way.
There are footfalls beside me, to my left. Their cadence matches my own in a perfect, improbable syncopation. I hear the breathing of another runner – in the nose and out the mouth. First the breathing is a few feet behind my left shoulder, but then it creeps all the way up to the rippled surface of my ear.
For some reason I can’t see anyone out of my peripheral vision. The script of The Dream does not give me the option of swiveling my head, but I know that even if I had the option I would not take it.
Then the breathing transforms into a whisper.
“They’re so foolish. They’re animals with so little God-given fur and yet they pile on all these clothes, all this false fur to mask their shame. It’s silly. They’re silly, but you know this already…
The whisper goes on.
“And, damn, they’re awkward, aren’t they? They long to kiss one another in peace, in romance, in sex. But, a kiss is such an absurd, trivial, and ugly thing. Two of them push their food holes together in a tug-of-war of tongues and clicking teeth. Base. Ridiculous. But you know this already…
“Besides all this, they are so very weak and fragile, are they not? Think about it a moment. You’re so small – just 108 pounds, just a thin, little woman. But you could make a sharp stick from any tree in this park and puncture any one of them and their blood and breath would run out. They would be no more….”
Then there is a chuckle followed by a pause. The pause lasts for a few, long moments and is filled with the breathing and nothing else. Like with the footfalls, the breathing is now in perfect alignment with my own. After a few dozen silent strides, my companion speaks again and takes things in a new direction.
“Like I said, you know all this already. But here’s something you don’t know. You are not one of them. You are from a higher place, a brighter place, a place you have forgotten, a home to which you will return when the time is right and the deed is done. This you did not know, but now you do, and what I tell you is trustworthy and true.”
I continue to jog until I awake.
But I’m not asleep, of course. That part of what I said to you was a lie. The rest of what I told you is true. What is also true is that The Dream is a mimicking of my daily life and has been for years.
I am not asleep. I am awake and at work, which for me is staffing a toll booth at mile 165 of the cross-state Sacajawea Turnpike. I’ve worked the booth forty hours a week for twenty-six years.
I am awake and at work, but at the moment I’m not in my booth. I’m in the break room eating my pastrami on French bread. I wash it down with a Mountain Dew. I realize this is not an old woman’s drink, and I am slowly becoming an old woman, yet I enjoy it all the same.
I’m not asleep, but I am dreaming The Dream anyway, and even though age, gravity, and cellular fatigue have settled deep into me, I am still not a big woman. Nonetheless, it’s been a long time since I’ve weighed 108 pounds. I also haven’t jogged through a public park in almost two decades.
But I used to. And during one of those jogs it began. I saw the people and my heart leapt out of me and I saw into them, and finally I recoiled at their pain and their brute ugliness and drew my heart away from them and back into my own breast. And, yes, an unseen jogger joined me and whispered of my true home and how killing them would be my transport there.
What I didn’t tell you earlier was that I answered the whisper with these words: “That makes sense. It explains a lot. I’ve always wondered if that were the case. I will consider what you say.”
Since then my heart keeps leaping out, and The Dream keeps jumping up and wailing at me at unexpected times and places like an emergency siren suddenly rising up behind me as I drive a city street. Like with the siren, when The Dream cries and rushes up on me, I can’t do anything else until I pull over, give attention to its presence, and let it pass with a quickly mumbled prayer.
Soon I’ll finish my sandwich and soda and return to my booth. Then the flow of people will resume. They will flood passed me one by one, drop by drop, car by car. And my heart will leap out into them again and again.
My heart will leap, and I will see through their eyes and know their life with their guts…
A woman stops at my window. She’s in a faded gray Nissan. The car’s tailpipe is leaking a scent that says her ancient Altima is making its final, valiant stand before giving up the ghost once and for all. One of the rear windows has lost its glass and grown plastic and duct tape to replace it.
The rear driver-side window sports a sticker. The elements and time have leeched its colors, but its faint lettering has become like a hieroglyph on the wall of an ancient Egyptian tomb. In other words, the ancient sticker can still be read by those who study it hard enough, and I feel I have little choice but to study it. The sticker says: Bush / Quayle.
My heart leaps out of me and into her. I feel her frustration at how her WIC seems to dry up a little more quickly with each passing month. I know by heart the desperate, lamenting comedy routine she’s developed around the brutal price points of diapers and cigarettes. During the rare splurge on a happy hour beer the string of jokes always gets her a steady stream of knowing laughs from her friends, and this makes things feel better for a little while.
I know her whole history. I know how she grew up in an apartment periodically heated by the oven. In early November her parents would leave the apartment to go to the local library so they could vote against gays and for weapons. I know their tradition has become hers, and I know she has never connected the sticker on her inherited car with her own experience of poverty; they are two electrical poles between which no spark leaps.
I love her and hate her all at one.
As I make change for her, my heart leaps back into me, and I act on my feelings.
I have a ritual I’ve kept every day I’ve worked here. I keep a stack of clean, white typing paper in my little coffin of a toll booth. The paper is there for the sole purpose of my ritual. In the early dawning light, before I leave home for work (but after I finish my waffle topped with fruit and whipped cream) at the top of an untouched page I write a little prayer. The one I wrote this morning reads like this:
O, Lord, may this beautiful creature of yours
Know You are with him (or her) always
Even until the end of the age.
Amen.
Throughout the day as each person pulls up to give me their money while I give them my heart, I pick up an expensive black ink pen dedicated solely to this purpose, and with it I make a tick mark on the page below the prayer. And I pray the prayer for them. And so it goes on and on until the shift ends and I depart for home.
There is more to the ritual – essential things missing, I confess – but I don’t feel comfortable telling them to you quite yet.
A man in a sleek European vehicle that identifies itself through random numbers and letters (381i, 555m, whatever) stops in front of me. The car window rolls down, and his cologne rolls out. My heart leaps from me and enters him.
He’s on his phone talking to a friend/business associate/peon while he silently, automatically, assesses me sexually: hair graying = no way; tits firm = yes okay; menial job = maybe (her job is pathetic, but low employment status might make her an easy lay).
I know all of this. I know it perhaps more clearly than he does, but I also know more than this.
I know that on his left forearm underneath his cuff-link and sleeve he has a Ren & Stimpy tattoo. Even I am taken aback by the absurdity of such a thing’s existence.
The tattoo is a mistake from a long ago self that has taken on totemic significance for the man in the expensive car. It is a relic of a time now long distant when the man in his European sedan was a goof, a laze-about, a fun, failed person who was not yet a complete asshole.
He keeps the awful tattoo because it reminds him that despite his current success and power he is still that playful long ago man. He is absolutely convinced of this as he hands me his money and scans the side of my ass with eyes hidden by sunglasses.
And he is wrong. He is now just a prick. The other man is dead. As much as the tattoo is an embarrassment to him, he is an embarrassment to the tattoo. I know this. It is sad. I love him and hate him all at once.
So I perform my appointed ritual. I make the prayer and tick the mark, and now I’ll tell you the other part of my ritual, the part I withheld from you before.
During every trip through my ritual, before I take the pen in my left hand and make the mark and pray the prayer, I pat my left hip and feel the hard bump buried under my cardigan, polo shirt, and slacks. I pat the rigid form of a Seecamp LWS .380.
And each time I choose the pen. Each time I choose this place, this flesh as my home. Each time is new. Each time, through a confession made by my shaking hand grabbing a pen, I decide to stay within the borders of the park. I am here. I am not some alien anthropologist awaiting transport home.
Each time is new. Each time there is no guarantee. Each time I refuse to do the deed. Each time I call the unseen jogger’s whispering voice a liar and insist violence is not my ticket anywhere.
The man and his Ren & Stimpy pull away. No one takes his place in front of his window for a while. This is very rare, especially during the daytime when I usually work my shifts. On the rare occasions when there is a break like this I use it to breathe deep.
I rest.
However, this time something unexpected happens, something that keeps me from resting. My heart leaps out of me, but there is no one there to receive it. It circles my booth again and again in great, manic orbits like some sort of astronaut or winged fairy orbiting her home world. Then, for the first time, it enters me – not in its customary return to home-base, but in exploration, in the manner it has used to visit countless strangers over the years.
When my heart enters me, I see a vision about myself. The vision’s setting is a day not too long from now. I am dead and have been so for just a little while.
My nephew Michael sits with his wife at their dinner table. A candle flickers in the center of the table. An open bottle of wine stands between them. My nephew’s eyes are red, and his right hand sits on the table. His napkin is clutched in his fist. He uses it from time to time to dab his face. The mood of the room is quiet, unhurried, and calm.
My nephew is the apple of my eye. When I die, he will be the recipient of whatever small things I have to pass on to the next generation. He speaks to his wife.
“I was going through Aunt Ellen’s attic earlier today. Way back in the corner there was this enormous storage trunk. Locked. Attached to the lid was a note and to the note a key, the key to the trunk. The note was from her. To me.
“I read it, but it didn’t make sense, so I opened the trunk, and in it were stacks and stacks of manila folders each labelled with different dates. And in each folder were pages of typing paper. And on each page was a prayer followed by mark after mark after mark made in black ink. Too many to count. Beneath all the paper I found a handgun – loaded, safety off.
“I read Aunt Ellen’s note again:
Each mark is a person in a car. Each mark is a life – a horror and a beauty. Each mark is a prayer. Each mark means I was with each of them and did not run away. Each mark shows I chose to bless and not to curse. Each of them is good according to Him. Who am I argue? Michael, make a mark for me. Pray for me.
“Good God, what’s that about?” my nephew asks his wife.
Michael’s voice trails off and his wife reaches out for his right hand, but before she can get a hold of it, it’s dabbing his face again.
The scene shifts, and I’m in the park again. I’m jogging like I always am in The Dream. I’m enjoying the smooth movement of my young body. I see the girl on her swing and the boy huffing across my path. I meet a few characters I’ve never dreamt about before. I feel the casting out and reeling in of my heart.
But no unseen running partner ever sneaks up to my side and strokes my ear with his breath.
All I hear is the labor of my own lungs and the sound of my blood blasting through my lively flesh. This is different. This is unearned and good.
I respond to its goodness by continuing to cast my heart out to everyone I see, and sometimes I almost forget to reel it back into my chest. Or perhaps my heart doesn’t feel the need to return so quickly. Or maybe it’s both. At any rate, I’m in uncharted territory as far as The Dream is concerned.
I become lost in the art of it. When, for the first time in all my years, I finally reach the end of the trail – the exit of the park – without a moment’s hesitation I double back and begin another pass through the park.
Somehow there are more people here than there were just a few moments ago. But that’s all right. I run but do not grow weary, and all that I see out ahead of me is love.
I greeted it with the silent welcome someone gives an old friend who walks into the usual corner bar at the usual time on the usual day.
As always, the characters were different, but The Dream’s basic plot was the same.
In The Dream I’m not old-ish anymore. I’m my early thirty-something self, my limbs still supple and my stamina still strong. I’m jogging in a crowded park. The light blinks and winks overhead as the clouds pass before the sun at unnatural speeds. Off to my right, a brown river flows. To my left, a train track stretches into infinity.
I’m running down a packed dirt path. With a compulsion that chews at my gut I look at each stranger I pass as I move at my steady pace. None of the people notice me, but I notice them – very much so.
I see a girl. She’s about sixteen and tracing slow, small arcs on a swing. The metal of the swing’s frame is painted an aggressive red that matches her cheeks. The cheeks are angry and peeling with both acne and the chemicals she employs to battle it. It’s a war the girl is losing.
My heart leaps out at her, and I see myself on her swing-seat, looking out through her eyes, feeling the up-and-down in my stomach. I sit in her, and I wonder her wonders. I sit inside her.
I sense she works as a cashier at a local grocery store. A little boy and his mother came through her line last week. The mom rummaged through her purse looking for her shopper loyalty card while the son sat in the shopping cart’s high-chair studying the girl/me.
Just as the mother produced the little piece of plastic with the barcode on its back, the child produced a pronouncement uttered with the authority of a biblical prophet: “There is something very bad on your face.” The girl’s best friend, who also happened to be bagging the customer’s yogurts and Lean Cuisine, studied the countertop and pretended not to hear.
Then I remember how the girl on the swing asked a boy to the Homecoming dance not long before the scene in the store. She asked him face-to-face expecting an answer right then, but he asked her for some time to think about the offer and consider his response. She felt naked and foolish agreeing to his request, but she did.
Three days later the boy declined her invitation to the dance. He did it online and publicly via a snatch of verse that made him temporarily famous in the halls of their school:
Your legs make me think of fuckin’,
But your zits be suckin’.
Because of this
I think of you as a sis.
Gotta say no. Gotta say no.
Can’t go.
Gotta say no.
My heart leaps back to me, and I jog passed her.
A stream of young boys runs across the path fifteen feet ahead of me: One-Two-Three-Four---------Five. The fifth labors across the trail huffing and puffing, forcing his sloppy flesh forward, desperately trying to close the gap between him and his friends. It’s clear to all but him that he has far too much girth and asthma to shrink the space between. He won’t catch up.
My heart leaps out to him, and I am in him, looking down at his yellow and black New Balance, feeling a little spittle gather in the corners of the mouth. I feel the improper, incapacitating closeness of the walls of his chest.
I hear – not through my ears, but in the echo chamber of my skull – the sad music of his movement – right foot thud, jiggle-jerk of the fat mid-section, left foot thud, jiggle-jerk, repeat slower and slower until – at last – full stop. Then it’s just his/my eyes chasing after his friends while his/my mind asks why such things are so.
Then I have a sudden vision from a half dozen years into his future. I’m as certain of this scene playing out in the heavy boy’s life as I am of my own name.
The boy is in his bed. The room is dark, and his bedtime has come and gone hours ago. The boy is under the bed sheet. From the sheet he’s fashioned a makeshift tent with his head acting as the center pole.
If you were watching him from the doorway you’d see his form shadowed on the sheet because of a light he has with him underneath. Is it a flashlight? Is he being sneaky? Is he reading comic books late into a school night when he should be sleeping?
No. The boy in my vision doesn’t have a flashlight. The light comes from a tablet computer’s screen, and he’s not reading The Avengers on it.
The boy my heart has leapt into, the boy who still can’t keep up with his friends at age sixteen, the boy who now wears large men’s pants, that boy masturbates solemnly to what he sees on the screen.
I see and sense it all through his eyes and his flesh – the heavy breasts, the red lips, the too-tight grip, the sad relief that a person’s picture can’t run away from him, the moment of orgasm pushing everything else out of the way – if only for a beat or two.
My heart leaps back to me, I jog on, and in an act of self-defense I force my eyes to loiter on the ground a few feet in front of my rising and falling feet. The park is stuffed with people, but I pretend that I am alone as I run.
I’m exhausted, but I continue to jog anyway. You see, because of the rowdy illogic of dreams I know without a doubt that in The Dream if I were to stop my jogging I would never be able to run again. And if I couldn’t run again, I would never be able to leave the park. And if I couldn’t leave the park, I would be trapped with these sad, pathetic people for all time, and this would not be acceptable, not livable.
So I run on alone, and if I’m not in the park all by myself, at least I’m alone in my sane desire to run beyond its borders and never return.
But then, out of nowhere, I realize I’m not alone, not even in this lesser, imagined way.
There are footfalls beside me, to my left. Their cadence matches my own in a perfect, improbable syncopation. I hear the breathing of another runner – in the nose and out the mouth. First the breathing is a few feet behind my left shoulder, but then it creeps all the way up to the rippled surface of my ear.
For some reason I can’t see anyone out of my peripheral vision. The script of The Dream does not give me the option of swiveling my head, but I know that even if I had the option I would not take it.
Then the breathing transforms into a whisper.
“They’re so foolish. They’re animals with so little God-given fur and yet they pile on all these clothes, all this false fur to mask their shame. It’s silly. They’re silly, but you know this already…
The whisper goes on.
“And, damn, they’re awkward, aren’t they? They long to kiss one another in peace, in romance, in sex. But, a kiss is such an absurd, trivial, and ugly thing. Two of them push their food holes together in a tug-of-war of tongues and clicking teeth. Base. Ridiculous. But you know this already…
“Besides all this, they are so very weak and fragile, are they not? Think about it a moment. You’re so small – just 108 pounds, just a thin, little woman. But you could make a sharp stick from any tree in this park and puncture any one of them and their blood and breath would run out. They would be no more….”
Then there is a chuckle followed by a pause. The pause lasts for a few, long moments and is filled with the breathing and nothing else. Like with the footfalls, the breathing is now in perfect alignment with my own. After a few dozen silent strides, my companion speaks again and takes things in a new direction.
“Like I said, you know all this already. But here’s something you don’t know. You are not one of them. You are from a higher place, a brighter place, a place you have forgotten, a home to which you will return when the time is right and the deed is done. This you did not know, but now you do, and what I tell you is trustworthy and true.”
I continue to jog until I awake.
But I’m not asleep, of course. That part of what I said to you was a lie. The rest of what I told you is true. What is also true is that The Dream is a mimicking of my daily life and has been for years.
I am not asleep. I am awake and at work, which for me is staffing a toll booth at mile 165 of the cross-state Sacajawea Turnpike. I’ve worked the booth forty hours a week for twenty-six years.
I am awake and at work, but at the moment I’m not in my booth. I’m in the break room eating my pastrami on French bread. I wash it down with a Mountain Dew. I realize this is not an old woman’s drink, and I am slowly becoming an old woman, yet I enjoy it all the same.
I’m not asleep, but I am dreaming The Dream anyway, and even though age, gravity, and cellular fatigue have settled deep into me, I am still not a big woman. Nonetheless, it’s been a long time since I’ve weighed 108 pounds. I also haven’t jogged through a public park in almost two decades.
But I used to. And during one of those jogs it began. I saw the people and my heart leapt out of me and I saw into them, and finally I recoiled at their pain and their brute ugliness and drew my heart away from them and back into my own breast. And, yes, an unseen jogger joined me and whispered of my true home and how killing them would be my transport there.
What I didn’t tell you earlier was that I answered the whisper with these words: “That makes sense. It explains a lot. I’ve always wondered if that were the case. I will consider what you say.”
Since then my heart keeps leaping out, and The Dream keeps jumping up and wailing at me at unexpected times and places like an emergency siren suddenly rising up behind me as I drive a city street. Like with the siren, when The Dream cries and rushes up on me, I can’t do anything else until I pull over, give attention to its presence, and let it pass with a quickly mumbled prayer.
Soon I’ll finish my sandwich and soda and return to my booth. Then the flow of people will resume. They will flood passed me one by one, drop by drop, car by car. And my heart will leap out into them again and again.
My heart will leap, and I will see through their eyes and know their life with their guts…
A woman stops at my window. She’s in a faded gray Nissan. The car’s tailpipe is leaking a scent that says her ancient Altima is making its final, valiant stand before giving up the ghost once and for all. One of the rear windows has lost its glass and grown plastic and duct tape to replace it.
The rear driver-side window sports a sticker. The elements and time have leeched its colors, but its faint lettering has become like a hieroglyph on the wall of an ancient Egyptian tomb. In other words, the ancient sticker can still be read by those who study it hard enough, and I feel I have little choice but to study it. The sticker says: Bush / Quayle.
My heart leaps out of me and into her. I feel her frustration at how her WIC seems to dry up a little more quickly with each passing month. I know by heart the desperate, lamenting comedy routine she’s developed around the brutal price points of diapers and cigarettes. During the rare splurge on a happy hour beer the string of jokes always gets her a steady stream of knowing laughs from her friends, and this makes things feel better for a little while.
I know her whole history. I know how she grew up in an apartment periodically heated by the oven. In early November her parents would leave the apartment to go to the local library so they could vote against gays and for weapons. I know their tradition has become hers, and I know she has never connected the sticker on her inherited car with her own experience of poverty; they are two electrical poles between which no spark leaps.
I love her and hate her all at one.
As I make change for her, my heart leaps back into me, and I act on my feelings.
I have a ritual I’ve kept every day I’ve worked here. I keep a stack of clean, white typing paper in my little coffin of a toll booth. The paper is there for the sole purpose of my ritual. In the early dawning light, before I leave home for work (but after I finish my waffle topped with fruit and whipped cream) at the top of an untouched page I write a little prayer. The one I wrote this morning reads like this:
O, Lord, may this beautiful creature of yours
Know You are with him (or her) always
Even until the end of the age.
Amen.
Throughout the day as each person pulls up to give me their money while I give them my heart, I pick up an expensive black ink pen dedicated solely to this purpose, and with it I make a tick mark on the page below the prayer. And I pray the prayer for them. And so it goes on and on until the shift ends and I depart for home.
There is more to the ritual – essential things missing, I confess – but I don’t feel comfortable telling them to you quite yet.
A man in a sleek European vehicle that identifies itself through random numbers and letters (381i, 555m, whatever) stops in front of me. The car window rolls down, and his cologne rolls out. My heart leaps from me and enters him.
He’s on his phone talking to a friend/business associate/peon while he silently, automatically, assesses me sexually: hair graying = no way; tits firm = yes okay; menial job = maybe (her job is pathetic, but low employment status might make her an easy lay).
I know all of this. I know it perhaps more clearly than he does, but I also know more than this.
I know that on his left forearm underneath his cuff-link and sleeve he has a Ren & Stimpy tattoo. Even I am taken aback by the absurdity of such a thing’s existence.
The tattoo is a mistake from a long ago self that has taken on totemic significance for the man in the expensive car. It is a relic of a time now long distant when the man in his European sedan was a goof, a laze-about, a fun, failed person who was not yet a complete asshole.
He keeps the awful tattoo because it reminds him that despite his current success and power he is still that playful long ago man. He is absolutely convinced of this as he hands me his money and scans the side of my ass with eyes hidden by sunglasses.
And he is wrong. He is now just a prick. The other man is dead. As much as the tattoo is an embarrassment to him, he is an embarrassment to the tattoo. I know this. It is sad. I love him and hate him all at once.
So I perform my appointed ritual. I make the prayer and tick the mark, and now I’ll tell you the other part of my ritual, the part I withheld from you before.
During every trip through my ritual, before I take the pen in my left hand and make the mark and pray the prayer, I pat my left hip and feel the hard bump buried under my cardigan, polo shirt, and slacks. I pat the rigid form of a Seecamp LWS .380.
And each time I choose the pen. Each time I choose this place, this flesh as my home. Each time is new. Each time, through a confession made by my shaking hand grabbing a pen, I decide to stay within the borders of the park. I am here. I am not some alien anthropologist awaiting transport home.
Each time is new. Each time there is no guarantee. Each time I refuse to do the deed. Each time I call the unseen jogger’s whispering voice a liar and insist violence is not my ticket anywhere.
The man and his Ren & Stimpy pull away. No one takes his place in front of his window for a while. This is very rare, especially during the daytime when I usually work my shifts. On the rare occasions when there is a break like this I use it to breathe deep.
I rest.
However, this time something unexpected happens, something that keeps me from resting. My heart leaps out of me, but there is no one there to receive it. It circles my booth again and again in great, manic orbits like some sort of astronaut or winged fairy orbiting her home world. Then, for the first time, it enters me – not in its customary return to home-base, but in exploration, in the manner it has used to visit countless strangers over the years.
When my heart enters me, I see a vision about myself. The vision’s setting is a day not too long from now. I am dead and have been so for just a little while.
My nephew Michael sits with his wife at their dinner table. A candle flickers in the center of the table. An open bottle of wine stands between them. My nephew’s eyes are red, and his right hand sits on the table. His napkin is clutched in his fist. He uses it from time to time to dab his face. The mood of the room is quiet, unhurried, and calm.
My nephew is the apple of my eye. When I die, he will be the recipient of whatever small things I have to pass on to the next generation. He speaks to his wife.
“I was going through Aunt Ellen’s attic earlier today. Way back in the corner there was this enormous storage trunk. Locked. Attached to the lid was a note and to the note a key, the key to the trunk. The note was from her. To me.
“I read it, but it didn’t make sense, so I opened the trunk, and in it were stacks and stacks of manila folders each labelled with different dates. And in each folder were pages of typing paper. And on each page was a prayer followed by mark after mark after mark made in black ink. Too many to count. Beneath all the paper I found a handgun – loaded, safety off.
“I read Aunt Ellen’s note again:
Each mark is a person in a car. Each mark is a life – a horror and a beauty. Each mark is a prayer. Each mark means I was with each of them and did not run away. Each mark shows I chose to bless and not to curse. Each of them is good according to Him. Who am I argue? Michael, make a mark for me. Pray for me.
“Good God, what’s that about?” my nephew asks his wife.
Michael’s voice trails off and his wife reaches out for his right hand, but before she can get a hold of it, it’s dabbing his face again.
The scene shifts, and I’m in the park again. I’m jogging like I always am in The Dream. I’m enjoying the smooth movement of my young body. I see the girl on her swing and the boy huffing across my path. I meet a few characters I’ve never dreamt about before. I feel the casting out and reeling in of my heart.
But no unseen running partner ever sneaks up to my side and strokes my ear with his breath.
All I hear is the labor of my own lungs and the sound of my blood blasting through my lively flesh. This is different. This is unearned and good.
I respond to its goodness by continuing to cast my heart out to everyone I see, and sometimes I almost forget to reel it back into my chest. Or perhaps my heart doesn’t feel the need to return so quickly. Or maybe it’s both. At any rate, I’m in uncharted territory as far as The Dream is concerned.
I become lost in the art of it. When, for the first time in all my years, I finally reach the end of the trail – the exit of the park – without a moment’s hesitation I double back and begin another pass through the park.
Somehow there are more people here than there were just a few moments ago. But that’s all right. I run but do not grow weary, and all that I see out ahead of me is love.