You Are Viewing Dream

“–so just let me out right here, I didn’t come home to deal with this shit!” I say.

We rumble and bump our way in a station wagon that rolled off the assembly line back in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini’s two-hour gas lines.

We drive. Angry pebbles skip and crash along the length of the wagon’s undercarriage, some are kicked up from the wheels and sent flying in our wake. Dense walls of the Pine Barren’s conifered spires on either side of the car endeavor to touch the infinite night sky.

He tests the upper limits of human reflexes on the turns. Our searching headlights fall on the trees ahead of us filling up the windshield, my fingernails dig into the door handle, and a twist of road revealed at the last moment slams me into the passenger-side door as the pitch-pines whip past my ear. The fire in my lungs reminds me to exhale.

Navigating moment to moment, more through feel than sight, he threads the car along what was once a trail for the Lenni Lenape hunting parties. No road-side lights. Kafka on my lap, I could read by the starlight.

He stamps on the breaks sending us into a wheel-locked skid on the loose gravel and I’m vaulted face-first into the dashboard. Eyes sting. My labor to draw air through my nose rewards me with serrated flint-shards of bitter pain against my nasal nerves.

Then punches come. I never see them, I know their direction by where they land on my skull. Backwards punches and downwards strikes and then the elbows that like to come across.

I’m aware that my eyelids have weight and it doesn’t seem worth the effort to keep ‘em up. He grabs the front of my pants, squeezes, yanks me out of the foggy stupor by my balls and twist-drags me back into our father-son moment.

I wail, black out, and come-to again to the tangy pain of another healthy twist.

My shaky hand reaches down for his squeezing fist, I isolate one finger, pull it to me and it pops like a stepped on crayon. Despite my whistling pain, I manage to focus on another finger and decades later he releases his grip.

Capitalizing on the sliver of reprieve, I tumble out of the car and collapse onto the cool dirt road. The sandy road-grit gathers thick and dry in my open, wheezing mouth. He’s already there. Waiting.

He reaches into my pocket with his good hand, takes my keys and wallet, and turns to leave me where I lay.

When he turns to leave I summon all my strength, hop on his back and sink in a rear-naked choke. The old man collapses to his knees but he is not done with me. He reaches back and pushes a jagged finger through my eye. My eye flashes white on contact then goes black but I don’t dare let go. I can’t. To let go is to welcome the End. Instead I squeeze. I squeeze and I pray to Christ for the strength to squeeze some more. The old man goes limp but I still don’t let go.

An Arctic wind gusts down the road and blasts into my face, forcing me to squint my eyes though only eye worth shielding.

I relax my grip, convincing myself the only reason I let go is I’m afraid that I actually got what I wanted and took another persons life, and it’s as simple as that. Sure it is. I love my father and what I don’t like about him I hate in myself. He laid out the best template of how to be a man that he knew how and I pissed all over it.

I look into my arms.

Instead of my father in my grasp, I’m holding a beautiful baby boy whose face looks like mine. The child is looking up at me. Stoic.

We sit. I stare at the child as the sun rises, and the blues and the greys melt into reds and yellows and I see my dad once again. The baby’s weight increases to the point of unbearable as the sun gains height in the sky.

I place the child in the front seat of the car. I shut the door.

And I walk.

She turns to face the man’s profile. “Fuck you, ya little whinny bitch! I can treat ya however the hell I fuckin wanna.”

“Look,” the man says, “Ya gotta stop insultin me an buy me a pack of cigarettes or I’m not gonna help ya.”

The couple is seated directly in front of me in this crowded ball park. The woman, well past her used-by date, can’t pass for attractive even by deep-woods Appalachia standards. The man could be George Clooney for all I know. His back is to me, he’s got a black hoodie on and his arms are folded across his chest.

“Go-ta-hell-ya-sonofabitch!” She says. “Ya never even fuck me anymore so what good are ya?”

“Yer drunk. You don’t really mean that,” Hoodie says.

“The hell I don’t you fuckin FAGGOT!”

Nice. Real classy.

There’s a  young couple sitting next to me. With them, their grade-school kids. Both little girls. On the other side of me, a grandpa is rationing what little time he has left with his grandson. I can bet this afternoon isn’t going at all the way he envisioned it. They’ll be memories alright, just not the right ones.

“Lookit,” Hoodie says, “I gotta get up at 5 in tha mornin ta make sure you got yer paperwork and drive ya to court. All ya gotta do is tell the judge you have the report from tha doctor an he’ll dismiss tha case against yo-”

The woman is flings her purse into the row ahead of them, hitting a balding man in the back of the head.

Are you fucking kidding me? 

“Don’t do me any favors, asshole.” She is laughing. The bald guy hands her purse back over his shoulder without really looking at either the man or the woman.

“You think this is funny?” Hoodie asks. “You can get 8 fuckin months in tha jail, ya stupid cunt!”

Christ, not even I would use that word in public.

The woman shrieks like a strangled cat and beats on the head of her companion.

“Stoppit!” he cries.

Leave her already, damn it!

She continues the beating, bringing her purse into the action with chopping swings.

Ok, I gotta mind my own business. As soon as I get involved they’ll both turn on me.

“Stoppit ya crazy whore!”

The bald man in front of the couple turns in his seat. “Hey! I’m tryin to-” He does not finish his sentence. Whatever he sees is is enough to prompt him to get up and leave. He’s highly motivated,  leaving his jacket and his beer.  The couple doesn’t seem to notice baldy and are now in rare form.

“Promise me you’ll stop abusin me,” Hoodie says, ”an buy me some cigarettes.”

“Okay, I’ll get ya some fuckin cigarettes, faggot.”

“An’ ya gotta gotta stop insultin me,” Hoodie says.

Silence.

“Promise me no more insults,” Hoodie says again.

She says,”I said I’ll get ya the fuckin cigarettes.”

The granddad and the kid get up and leave. Day ruined. I rock back and forth  in my seat, and feel like I’ve just run 100 meters breathing through a straw.  JESUS-FUCKING-CHRIST! Just say you’re sorry, you loopy bitch!

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Thank God!

“YOU FUCKIN FAGGOT!” She flings her cup of beer at Hoodie and the impact splashes brew and foam on the kids seated next to me.

Fuck this!

I say, “Look, you low-class trailer trash! Kill yourselves som-”

Hoodie stands and turns to face me. I see his hands that look like they would belong to any other white guy, and that’s where the relative sanity ends shit gets all Apocalyptic.

Inside the hoodie, Nothing.

The hood is surrounded by a reverse-halo — no clear delineation of hood and the area around it, absorbing light and twisting the very fabric of space-time into it like the event horizon of a black hole. Except there’s no black hole inside the cloak — that would be…something.

The ballpark drops away, the cackling trailer-trash woman dissolves into nothingness, there is no up, down, left right, yesterday, tomorrow. There is just It and me.

My eyes travel down to the hands, both are fists. I must have blinked because in an instant, there’s a curved knife in the right hand that wasn’t there a sliver of a moment ago.

With a decade-and-a-half of Filipino blade arts training I don’t have to think, I go into auto-mode defensive-posture, angling my body and turning my palms inward to protect my veins. Except  nothing happens.  My legs are taking a personal day, my right arm feels like I’ve slept on it and that’s really a bitch cuz’ I’m a southpaw.

A foul breeze emanating from the void reeks of animal urine and carrion, singeing my nose hairs, curling them like a maych has been put to them. My eyes feel like they’ve been flushed out with turpentine.

 Lungs burn with acrid air as if I just tried to smoke a running Hummer by the tailpipe, I remember to exhale.

That hood.

Inside, what I see is absolute, non negotiable, and zero ambiguity. What every soul that ever was has seen and every soul to come will  know.

I see The End.

The breeze from the hood picks up to a gust, carrying on it a sound like two cinder-blocks scraping together. “Not yet,” it says.

As if my perspective is a movie reel with three frames cut out, It’s there and then…gone.

————————————–

I must’vebeen screaming because Amanda is standing at the foot of our bed, wild-eyed and clutching a pillow like a shield to her chest.  My heart has the weight of a Buick in my chest and my throat feel like I’ve been gargling staples.

I don’t reach for the scrap paper and the nub of a pencil next to the bed. I got a head-full of fucked-up dreams I transcribe almost nightly. Never. Never has one been so… visceral. No pencil needed. I will not forget.

Happy fucking birthday. Again.