8. They Paved Paradise

Can’t sleep. Head’s splitting with words. Linked connections running

inky roots feeling

for overspillage

or is it

slippage?

Short bouts of dry-heaves shake me in fits and starts… and the feelings behind the words…

Bite back, swallow hard: it’s what I do thesedays.

Bite back, swallow hard: to keep from drowning.

Nib poised hooklike fishing words out into the light letters spilling onto the paper splashing. Words. Pages and pages of paragraphs. Not bad for a person who hasn’t spoken more than one or two short sentences at a time

(is that Mahler on the radio?)

eversince

.

.

(no, too morose)

But now isn’t the time. Spin dial. It’s America.

Ventura Highway

in the sunshine

where the days are longer, the nights are stronger than moonshine

you’re gonna go, I know

‘cause a free wind’s blowin through your hair

and the day surrounds your daylight there

freedom’s crying no despair

alligator lizards in the air

.

Trip to the bathroom to pee can’t get a grip slippery hands yet the words keep coming like a chain-gang of dusty men under a heavy sun sweating black marks across these pages quicker than I can turn them. Swallow harder. Repeatedly. The way you do to stop your eardrums popping when the plane plummets in for a landing. But the words fight their way back defiantly like healthy salmon leaping against the current. I gulp again with two fingers down my throat - Upchuck City
.
… here we come… where happy days we count on thumbs… and nothing ever gets us down… How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
.

Wordsminglewave at length at the ones oozingketchuplikeslow through the speaker. Joni Mitchell:

.

Don’t it always seem to go

you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone

they paved paradise

put up a parking lot.

.

Successfully counting cars crawling the street outside: unsuccessfully counting down to abeyance. Sleep is a far-off land I can’t get to from here. What to do? Sick of TV and books. To do what? Wrestle helplessly with hopeless restlessness while awkward boredom abounds?

1. Sad Mr Stevens

.

Awake again. No idea what time it is. Clock flashes. Accidentally unplugged it when tripping over it earlier. Didn’t reset it as I can’t be bothered. What’d be the point?

Dark and silent inside. Outside, too, no traffic (not even a barking dog – out there, or in here), so it must be very late. Or very early. Same thing. See, Time can be tricky when it’s dark outside. And I’m beside myself again. Above, actually.

high up

Me-Above
looking down
at Me-Below on bed. Gazing down at shadowy lump sitting hunched over the bright burst of a circle of light punched like a hole in the surrounding darkness, scribbling in the journal. Gone word-fishing.
Not knowing how or when or why I got here.
There.
Now, then.
I’m getting a bite here and there. Words are nibbling.

Hello down there! Could you reach up a hand and help me down please, a little help?

Me-Below, wrapped in blanket, swaddled in night, drowning in a waterfall of words, witnessing. Watersurge more like – coming up fast… a fountain (pen) spraying linked-letters from unknown depths. Words surfacing so fast they’re suffering from the bends. 

Slow down. Calm down. Count down.

999. 998. 997…

Deeeeep breath.

Come down.

Is this what Judy was talking about? Am I travelling astrally? Has spirit separated from flesh and left my body behind? If so, how did I do it? And scarier still, how do I get back in?

Gather thoughts.

Is this what being dead will be like? Floating about like an idea in the ether, waiting to enter the neural-network of a passing-by head?

Sink like a stone. 

Can you feel the silence… 

Damn that dog. Barking again. Oh for a gun – I could shoot it out of my misery. What time is it? The digits 03:49 glow in the dark. I should be fast asleep inhaling sweet dreams not suffocating in clammy crawling humidity thinking how strange it is, the way it envelops you in its sweaty leather glove and grabs hold of Time like a sponge, squeezing each and every second out of it.

Swapped sweating in bed for staring out open bedroom window and playing I Spy.
I spy with my little eye… something beginning with… S.

My next-door neighbor, Mr Stevens. What’s he doing up so late? The damn barking, probably. And why is he standing perfectly still in the middle of his backyard in boxershorts and flipflops? Squinting to I see, I think I make out a Frisbee in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Behind him, a long, skinny shadow stretches across the lawn like a narrow grave: above, a fingernail moon looking like an incomplete question mark hangs over his bowed head.

Now he’s bending an arm, saying a word - (straining to listen)… I can’t… quite… make out… (but guess to be: Ready) - tossing the disc gently into empty space.

A quick glance over shoulder at bed makes sure I’m not in it and dreaming all this. I mean, come on, what’s going on? What’s the story with Mr Stevens thesedays? I suppose that’s the question on everyone’s lips. Who really knows? I sure as hell don’t.

Gossip around town (tunes on the Devil’s Radio) has it that he’s ‘gone off the deep end’ ever since his beautiful young wife of five years just up and hit the road one day last Christmas, without hint or warning, reason or trace. Made like a banana and split, is how Jack put it. Sadder still, she took their one and only child. A pretty blonde-headed girl of four - four and half maybe. The light of her daddy’s life: the apple of his eye.

Stevens’ moving again, walking dazedly towards the spot where the Frisbee lays, bends over with a grunt, spilling a splash of suds on his feet, picks it up, gazes at it dumbly.

A conspicuously quiet couple were the Stevens’, kind of hard to get to know you could say. Kept themselves pretty much to themselves most of the time. Now that he’s alone, he keeps pretty much to himself all of the time, practically a recluse. Works from home, it’s whispered. Internet related activities, some voices say: drug-running, others counter. There’s a lot of traffic at his door, I suppose - he gets all his groceries and beer and videos and pizzas delivered. He used to be a manager in some bank down the mall. He used to be a husband and a father. I wonder if he knows who he is now.

.

.

Look: He’s putting the bottle down, throwing the plastic saucer again. Soft. Low. Its sailing steady on the still night air… soaring… 10, 12, 14 feet… hitting the grass like a pebble on water… skipping three times. Coming to a halt.

‘Great catch!’ he calls aloud, clapping with a delighted and approving smile.

What’s that? Run that by me again. A sad, strange idea bubbles up and surfaces while a shuddery feeling like a feather-duster brushes my insides as I watch him retrace his steps.

‘Who’s favorite little girl are you?’ he seems to be asking the Frisbee. ‘Daddy’s. Yes, that’s right. And who loves you the most in the whole wide world?’ He smiles and nods his head. ‘Yes. Daddy does. Daddy loves his little girl so very much.’

A neurological pathway lights up, drawing a line that connects my idea to my intuition to what I’ve just seen and heard and Understanding, like a jet, comes in to land. I understand now. Take a nauseating turn for the worse and feel so bad for him. So very sad. Poor sod. He’s playing make-believe, the way a child does, making out as if it’s not today but another, a happier one from the recent past: his little girl on the lawn with him, tossing the Frisbee back and forth, laughing and clapping and being silly. Just like a children’s game.

On knees now. Shoulders rising and falling, head slumping, face falling into cradled hands. Skin on back slides up and down ribcage.

Can’t hear him but I know he’s crying. A shiver runs through me, leaving a trail of deeper feelings: helplessness, horrible hopelessness. But are those my feelings, or am I somehow picking up on his, like a radio picking up soundwaves?

As though receiving orders from outer space, my hands go into motion, tear a page from the back of this book, and on it print ten simple words in purple magic-marker. Folding it quickly into an airplane, my right hand pushes the window open wider. My left, taking care to get the aim right, like a master darts player propels it

… and just look at her go…

                                        on a mission to deliver a spur of the moment message that I hope will help Sad Mr Stevens as it has me in recent times:

TO WEEP IS TO MAKE LESS THE DEPTH OF GRIEF.

Shit!

Aim’s a little off. The plane is going to hit him square on the back of his conk…

but no… wait - 
                      a gust of breeze picks it up, steers it with an invisible hand over the fence and – plonk - into next yard’s swimming pool. Stevens doesn’t notice a thing. I go to make another, but stop before I start. It was a spontaneous action, an off-the-cuff gesture. Doing it again, I feel, somehow, wouldn’t be sincere.

.

.

Try to sleep now… let mind wander…

Wonder if the plane will eventually become sodden and sink to the bottom of the pool, ink trailing behind like purple smoke. And what if it somehow survived and Old Ms Izzard (a skinny, 70-year old spinster who used to be my kindergarten teacher and taught me how to remember the colors of the rainbow in the correct order) found it there in the morning – what would she make of those words?