21. Thinking About Not Thinking

And here I am writing I don’t know what, watching a tidal wave of neatly formed letters like boats in the Navy blue sea of ink. In a font resembling Comic Sans.

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Birds twittering have replaced dog barking.
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Exhausted and exasperated by this out-of-the-blue outpouring, I stare at the page and consider the one’s I’ve just deflowered. Words from a David Lynch movie I saw last week at Mikey’s comes to mind. I can almost hear them now, whispered in stereo, in a begging dark voice conjured up by Isabella Rossellini. ‘He put his disease in me.’ That’s what these pages might say if they could talk.
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Look at all the words! This has to be a record. I haven’t spoken – or written - more than half a dozen words at a time ever since The Accident.
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The music on the radio is bugging me. Time to change the channel.
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This song – it’s familiar. From a movie or something. I know the words and sing along, with a slight change to the lyrics:

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I feel it in my bowels

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I feel it in my toes

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Death is all around me

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And so the feeling grows...

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Fountain pen noses forward, struggling stoically across the page, bleeding trails of shiny blueblack blood.
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I am going to die soon. My number has been called. I’m up to bat, but no three swings this time – I’m already out for the count. Death is in the neighbourhood, and we still have that date. When? I’m not sure, but it feels like it’ll be soon enough. I’d guess that the odds of seeing my 18th birthday – nearly two weeks away – are, at best, fifty-fifty. A toss of a coin.

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A roll of the die.


Tired now. Time for Sleep. Until tomorrow then… if I’m still here.

11. Words With Jack

Trying to remember the  date of THE ACCIDENT. Late December last year. Early Saturday evening I remember. Lasagne baking in the oven. Ballgame on TV.

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A couple of hours ago, after dinner in the living room with Jack, I had the longest, most meaningful conversation with him since… how many months ago… Five? Six? Math isn’t one of my hottest subjects - never been good with numbers. If there’s such a thing as ‘mathlexia’, I have it. Looking at numbers or trying to keep track of them in my head is harder than Chinese Algebra. Codes on locks. Credit card numbers. Phone numbers. Pin numbers. But dates, they’re the worst, they really mess me up.

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‘So, Dad,’ I asked, ‘what’s with this shipping out and shaping up business you mentioned the other night? Did you actually say we’re going home?’

‘Absolutely bloody right,’ he assured me, standing by the coat rack wrestling the Mac from his back. He’d apparently stopped off on his way home from Winn-Dixie for a bevy or two.

‘But…’ I countered, looking around the room, hands palm up, shoulders hunched. ‘Check it out: We are home.’

‘Home’s where the heart is,’ he said dismissively. ‘All going ‘cording to plan, we’ll be on home turf in time for your eighteenth.’

He peered around the room and I could detect a look of fondness in his eyes as they lit momentarily upon Mom’s portrait above the mantelpiece.

‘You mighta spent more years here in Miami, but, Godwilling, you’ll become a man - an Irishman - back in the old country, the place of your birth… where your roots are.’ Voice trailed off and eyes went drowning again.

You can count on Jack to get overstimulated whenever the topic turns to Ireland. Slips into what he (and almost all Americans – but never the Irish themselves) call a ‘brogue’ (which, in Ireland, is a type of man’s shoe!). 

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It’s not his original way of speaking but a bizarre hybrid - part memory, part Hollywoodized Irish Accent. I’ve been to Dublin, Galway, Kerry, Donegal, Limerick – and passed through all the counties between - and have never come across anything remotely resembling this artificial American romanticized idea of the way Irish people speak. But Jack’s ‘brogue’ is kind of funny, though – if you’re alone with him, that is. When other people are around its just plain embarrassing, especially if the people around are Irish. Thing is, he can’t do the accent for Jack - and, worse still - doesn’t even know it. He was born in Dublin and all (a ‘Jackeen’) and spent his first 19 years there, but as far as I can make out, he’s as redwhiteandblue as the next guy. Or the guy next door. Family, football, beer, office politics, bar-b-q’s, lawn mowers, bottle of Jack Daniels in the fridge, apple-pie ’n’ ice-cream.

On second thoughts, recalling the current state of Mr Stevens, scratch that.

Scratch the apple pie, too.

I asked why we’re moving all of a sudden and what all this is about anyway (pinching myself to make sure I hadn’t nodded off in front of the TV and was dreaming all this).

‘I’m not under the alfluence of incahol like some tinkle peep I am!’ Smiling a twinkling wink, he negotiated his way in the direction of the stairs. ‘Off to bed now. Beauty sleep calls.’ He started singing lines from Homeward Bound again as he made his awkward ascension:

Tonight I’ll sing my songs again

I’ll play the game and pretend

but all my words come back to me

in shades of mediocrity

like emptiness in harmony

I need someone to comfort me…

3. Back to Ireland?

Got hardly any sleep last night. Mustered barely enough energy to drag myself out of bed and downstairs onto the couch, where I’m positioned horizontally now. Dad’s not here. Not sure whether or not he came home last night. Hope he did and got some sleep and has gone grocery shopping. There’s nothing to eat.

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The other night… when he gave me this journal… what the hell happened? What had he been on about? Had he really said that we’re moving back to Ireland? Has he lost his mind? Have I lost mine? Is Memory, like Death (and Sleep), now playing games with me, too? And – can this be right? – didn’t he say that he couldn’t understand why I didn’t write anymore? Anymore? It’s crazy! He’s must’ve been even drunker than I’d thought. 

He wasn’t nearly that gung-ho about my writing when - for a concentrated three-month period last summer - I actually was. A strange interlude in which I wrote furiously, Judy’s fountain pen in hand, head down, brow furrowed. The only thing I remember Jack saying about it then was that the time I wasted on writing would pay better dividends invested more wisely: studying for instance. But I paid no mind to his discouraging words and scribbled like a man possessed - or is it obsessed? Something with a lot of ‘S’s’ in it anyway.

This sudden U-turn on the matter perplexes me. Instead of trying to talk me out of it, now he’s actually persuading me to write, enlightening me to the joys of keeping a journal. He suggested that I read a book called Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. He told me that when he’d read it a long time ago, he got so inspired that he began keeping a journal the very next day. Didn’t stick with it for too long, though - something he puts down to I.D.D. – imagination deficit disorder – hey ho! But, now… Now, he swears, he wishes he’d kept it up.

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I guess I kind of wish that I had, too. Kept up my writing, I mean. But unlike Jack, it was due to S.L.D. – severe lack of discipline - that it all came to a grinding halt. That was November. About a month before 

THE ACCIDENT! Time out: I hate that word! Despise it. Dread the thought that whenever I think back to last December, that I’ll think: The Accident. Just before The Accident. Shortly after The Accident. (Mental NB: Try to use different words for it, softer euphemisms.)

2. Roadkill

Barking. Oh please, for shit sake, not again! Incessant and persistent, as though it’s been taped and looped.

Maybe there is no dog.

Maybe I’m dyslexic and there is no god!

What if the barking is not out there in the neighborhood, but in here – in your head?

What if I’m really fast asleep and only dreaming that I’m awake? Dreaming and can’t wake up, or awake and can’t fall asleep? Or lost. Somewhere in between.

Stuck in a moment that you can’t get out of…

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… late. In a panic. Hair sticking out wildly from my half-asleep head. Late again. Moving swiftly, passing through kitchen door, swiping brown bag-lunch from countertop as I go, tripping over sneaker’s loose laces hurriedly falling out into acrid Miami morning air, headlong, beneath baking sun, catching myself from falling, straightening up, increasing pace, hurtling into the oppressive embrace of hot dead air. Late, late, for an important date. A test. Oh jeez, please… can’t be late again. If I run… if I just run as fast as I can… it’ll be okay. Everything will turn out fine. Just have to keep running.

… faster… sshh-sshh-sshh-sshh whisper Nike Air’s gliding along the pavement like skimming-stones... Whoosh of cars passing on right, smell of carbon-monoxide making head feel light, varied shades of green (hedges, leaves, lawns) blurring by on left, chest getting tight, and somewhere up ahead in the distance, the sound of a dog barking. Relentlessly.
Running faster still. Unexpected turn right and I find myself beside myself at odds with one another. Being aware of them both brings back the feeling of being In Between. Middle of the road. In the midst of honking horns-screeching brakes-skidding tires. Mist fogging brain. Like the green lawns and manicured hedges that featured a moment ago
... moment? felt like a day!
everything’s a blur.
Running again. Blindly. Breathing hardfast: lungs aflame. Each inhalation fanning the fire, depriving me of oxygen.
Just like that
! – in less time than it takes to print an exclamation mark – everything stops. Abrupt halt. Period. Including me. It’s as if the sun-heated concrete has melted the soles of my sneakers, sticking me to the spot. Wind, traffic noise, barking dog, my own heavy breathing – all swallowed up in the shock of suddenly showed-up silence
Stuck in a moment you can’t get out of
a dusty needle stuck in a scratched groove on a warped record. Looping. Why can’t I move? What’s holding me? Who’s been messing with the controls? Turning down sound. Adjusting contrast: intensifying color and brightness, zooming in for closer inspection, pushing pause button killing movement. Gazing into the luminous blue sky for answers. Something – a feeling – suggests I look down, and looking down is the last thing I want to do, but the stomach-churning dollop of fear hooked to this idea isn’t strong enough to stop me. Unable to help myself, I lower head and cannot believe the sight in front of me.
Judy! Is it? Could it be? Judy, my 15-year old baby sister and only sibling, standing before me in her pyjamas, shimmering like an oasis in the scorching heat, defiant and indignant with hands on hips and legs akimbo, her big furry Betty Boop slippers on her feet… no. Frantic, I wonder – this bizarre hallucination – where it’s come from and why. And the look in her open-wide eyes: blame or forgiveness, love or hate? The light’s so bright I can’t really see eyes winking wildly in the sun
and in the blink of an eye, it's done, she’s gone.
Eyes wander lower. Feet, way down below me miles away distant wear her slippers. Only, I gather on a second, closer look, that it isn’t Betty Boop’s shiny black hair at all: its fur, and it’s not black either, but a saturated shade of red, the deep color of a pool of blood. Other glistening wet colors stimulate my rods and cones – purple, yellow, green, beige, black – and I’m beginning to understand that I’m not standing in Judy’s slippers at all, but something else entirely.
Heart sinks as gorge rises: I’m standing in the middle of a dead dog.
It’s all too bright and vivid.
Eyes smart and slide shut.
Head shakes to scatter the dream, but eyes open to find me still here, in the middle of the street, stuck in place.
The dog my feet are buried in is a young Golden Retriever, lying on its side, ribcage squashed flat against cement. The imprint - a tattoo of the deep-treaded tires responsible - is plainly and horrifically visible.
A twisted, steaming mess of entrails spill out through popped-open stomach and ooze from broken-jawed snout.
Attempt to lift feet but nothing happens. Scream but no sound comes out. Try to look away from the dog’s broken body, but can't stop staring into its bulging eye.
Oh Jesus, Mary and Holy St. Joseph, I say to myself, it’s looking back at me.
But you said it was dead… my self (or a voice purporting to be my self, or the me-beside-myself) counters.
I know I know but look, see, it’s turning its head. Its pop-eye is peering into me - and did you see that? Its mouth moving?
But you said –
I know I said its jaw’s broken and it is - but its mouth is moving. Black lips, pinkredyellow tongue, talking to me without words, in my head, saying its all my fault, I can read its lips - if I hadn’t been late, if I hadn’t run out into the road causing that car to brake, skid and swerve out of control, that this dog wouldn’t be like this.
‘Look at me,’ it says, its one good eye a hernia ready to burst, ‘look at me would you? I’m not supposed to be like this. I’m not supposed to be dead. It should’ve been you. You’re the one!’
Teeth dripping blood and bile, its shrieking howl tearing the silence apart, the dog lunges for my throat.

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Must've woken up then. Popped up like burnt toast.
Still hear barking.