anti-hero

second person, freshman year, bad (at) endings

May, 2003. $20-winning fiction. Adam liked the concept, but it felt a little contrived, he said. I think I agree. too bad it's pseudo-fiction. maybe my life is contrived.

Wake.

You are walking down the block. You do this often. You walk from your apartment past the dirty park and the playing children on your right and past the staggered office buildings on your left. You do not have a destination. You are not going anywhere. You are not going anywhere often. You are smoking a cigarette, your third of the day. You only smoke five a day. Except when you do not remember how many you have had, and you always have another then. You forget often. You used to remember everything, and then something happened. You have heard the expression that some people use - saying that something awoke in them - but something fell asleep in you. Something important. And it had not woken up in a very long time. This dulled your mind. It dulled your mind more than what you snorted, smoked, and swallowed and it did not bother you very much anymore.
You are not who you once recognized as yourself. You do the childhood trick of staring in the mirror and saying your name over and over again until you can no longer associate yourself with that arrangement of letters that happens to be what you are. Angela is foreign to you. Angela. It does not mean anything, it no longer describes you. You do not transcend. Rather you sink below what you used to be. You are something new now, but it is certainly not something worth being.
You are incapable of specificity. Everything feels familiar. You have a permanent sense of déjà vu, but you can never discern whether this means you have been to this place before. Or perhaps if it means that you are trying to create memories out of nothing.
Before this, you never woke up in places you did not recognize. You never forgot poems you had written, paintings you had finished, or half-finished, usually the latter. You never got telephone calls from strangers who inexplicably knew you and wanted to meet for coffee.
That is where you are going. This just comes to your mind: to meet the stranger for the coffee. You told her, the stranger. You told her that you could not remember her, and she seemed upset. She said you were friends. She said she knew you very well. Once upon a time, she said, she knew Jared.
You remember Jared. You remember your brother’s ubiquitous baseball hat and the way he staggered down the hallway when you were having your 12th birthday slumber party with your three best friends. You remember the way that Jared filled a space in yourself, and you remember finding what he filled his spaces with in a brown paper bag in the backseat of his 1989 silver Volvo two weeks after your birthday party. Today you think that space in you is full of all the things that you cannot remember. You know that is what fills it.
You realize that you’ve passed the coffee shop by half a block. You are not used to having a destination. And you go back, to meet the girl, and have the coffee. In the coffee shop. You walk in. It is orange and brown. You have never been inside this particular coffee shop, but it seems recognizable in some way. Many things do when you cannot particularly remember anything. And you see a pallid girl with yellow hair that grazes her cheeks and threatens to dip into her speckled grey mug full two thirds with something very black. Until she lifts her head to look at you and her eyes seem less tired . You know your face doesn‘t show it, but you remember her. You sit down across from her, on the orange cushion on the brown plastic bench.
As soon as you sit down you entertain the idea of running away. You like running away. You are sure that there is some inherent reason for this, and you have a sense of some lost expounding memory; false or true, you can‘t decide. But you are frozen. This is what occurs when you think of running. You do not know why, but you enjoy leaving. You like watching things come to an end. It’s the beginnings that scare you. This scares you. And she is smiling.

And you are running.
Away from the carousel at Playland in Rye, your jelly sandals slapping against the old cement. You usually take care to avoid the black circles of long-ago discarded gum, and the joints where the slabs of concrete were laid side by side. Now you don’t notice when you almost trip over the root of a tree growing up through the path. When you reach the railing on the pier, you take hold of it with both of your small hands. Rust from the barrier colors your palms as you watch the waves break.
And then you feel hands on your shoulders and Jared’s newly adolescent voice. Why were you running? You wanted to make sure you still could. Why wouldn’t you? You aren’t sure. It just seemed important. So why did you stop?

And you are awake. Not in New York. Not watching waves, not with Jared, and not seven years old again.
You are alone. This has been the routine for almost two years now but sometimes you forget, and stretch your arm out into the darkness instinctively when you wake up in the middle of the night like an infant reaching for its mothers hand.
But you slept soundly and it is morning.
And you’re too preoccupied with your dream last night and this sense of déjà vu.
You can’t eat. Or you don’t think you can. There’s a sinking feeling in your stomach that you could confuse with nausea. You decide that food could fill it. Fill a soul that you don’t believe in, but you like to use the word anyway, and so you eat. Only to become more nauseated. This sinking feeling is new, it’s an indication of some change, and the dream won’t leave your mind. You light a cigarette and go to the window.

You are sitting in the front seat of Jared’s car, playing with rubber bands and plastic bags that he always has stuck between the gear shift and emergency brake. He is moving at the end of summer and said that he would show you what this place is really about before he left. And now you find yourself parked in front of one of the perfectly manicured lawns that leads up to an immaculate white two story house with a three car garage. You know what people do inside these houses? You think Jared must mean something besides eat breakfast and watch television, so you don’t know. Nothing worth doing. You don’t understand. Everyone here’s paralyzed. They aren’t living. You still don’t understand. No, I suppose you don’t. But you will.
As he talks, your brother reaches into the back seat and pulls out a bulging manila envelope. I’ll be back in a second. And he is out of the car and into the white house. You don’t tell Jared that you know what he keeps in those envelopes, because you know how much it would hurt him if you did.
When he gets back in the car, he doesn’t rev the engine right away like he always does. Instead he turns to you and puts his hand on your skinny shoulder and tells you something that you’ll soon forget. Don’t ever live your life like that, Angela.

You’re sitting at your desk, scribbling down what could be as momentous as your lost memories, or as trivial as waking dreams, or perhaps a combination of both. And the telephone rings. You jump at the sound and don’t know what to do, because the telephone hasn’t rung in weeks and that time it was a wrong number. You let it go one, two, three, four times before you answer, or rather pick up the receiver and say nothing. Angela? You are still frozen. Angela, it’s Elizabeth. You’re sorry, but you don’t know an Elizabeth. You are about to hang up. Fuck Angela, stop. I had to track down your whole goddamn family to get this number.
Her language surprises you. You haven’t felt strongly enough about anything in years to say fuck, and you wonder if that means this girl really does care about you. You laugh at the irony of this. Why are you laughing? You’re sorry again, it’s nothing. I want to see you, let’s meet for coffee or something cliché like that. You don’t know, it is very cliché. Angela, please. She gives you an address, a time. Please. You hear yourself say yes, and then you click the receiver back into the cradle, not fully understanding what you have just done.

Elizabeth is sitting in the doorway of your room like you are supposed to do during an earthquake, and she is biting her nails. Her blonde hair falls past her shoulders as she stares at her fingers and apologizes for coming over on such short notice, but her parents were fighting again and she really didn’t know where else to go. You tell her it’s okay. She breathes deeply and you can tell it’s hard for her, because when she’s upset, her asthma gets worse. She apologizes again.
Jared walks down the hall and Elizabeth stops talking, following your brother with her bright eyes. When he goes in his room and locks the door, she turns back to you. There’s something different about him. You nod. But I don’t know what it is. You think about this, and nod again.

You’ve been staring at this wall for seventeen minutes when you realize that it’s all been real. For so long, all you wanted to do was remember. But after a while, the loss had become comfortable. A warm blanket of amnesia. And now you’re lost in yourself again.
You try to think of why you’d remember now. Why not last week, you wonder, or next. The last two years of your life have been routine, no considerable changes besides new neighbors and a Republican-controlled senate, neither of which interested you much either way.
You roll a cigarette up and down the desk, and finally light it with restaurant matches you find in your pocket. You run your hand along the edge of the telephone. There’s a crack in the plastic base and knots in the spiral cord. You look at your finger, gray from the dust you’ve removed, and wonder how you ever got here. And why you can’t leave.

It’s Sunday morning and Jared isn’t asleep in his room. You linger at his door, half-expecting the blankets on his bed to stir, but you’ve already checked them twice.
You open the metal gate to your backyard, the one that guarded your younger self from the dangers of the swimming pool. You let it slam back into the lock as you wander up the little grass hills and toward the concrete lined hole of water. For what reason, you can’t say. Until you see your brother’s hat floating not far from himself, and you freeze. As motionless as him. There’s a brown paper bag by the diving board and his clothes, and you’re running out of the yard and the gate, past your house and down the block.

There’s a pencil in your hand and you’ve been absent-mindedly writing go go go on the compressed chipboard desk. You consider erasing it but instead put the pencil down.
You look at the coat that you dropped last night by the door, a black mess of fabric, and the keys that you know are buried under it. The dirty shoes next to it. You finger the couple of dollars in your front pocket and bite your lip. These are your tickets out of here. These are your means of running away, you already have the reasons, and for the first time, you have a purpose.
You pick up the coat, the shoes, the keys. You write the address on the back of your right hand. You don’t even bother to lock the front door, and you drop your cigarette in the hall on your way out.

You’re sitting on the bed and explaining to Elizabeth about Jared and the swimming pool and the overdose on something K that you can’t remember because your mind is swimming like he couldn’t. She scuffs the floor with her shoe and stares at the digital alarm clock. It is two years later but she had disappeared to California with her mother and new father without even giving you a phone number. So you can pretend like you would have called to tell her when you know you wouldn’t have.
She looks at you for a long time. I’m sorry. You know. You can’t look at her, and if you could, you wouldn’t be able to see her.

You are walking down the block. You do this often. You walk from your apartment past the dirty park and the playing children on your right and past the staggered office buildings on your left. You are smoking a cigarette, your third of the day. You only smoke five a day. Except when you do not remember how many you have had, and you always have another then.
You are incapable of specificity. Everything feels familiar. You have a permanent sense of déjà vu, but you can never discern whether this means you have been to this place before. Or perhaps if it means that you are trying to create memories out of nothing.
Before this, you never got telephone calls from strangers who inexplicably knew you and wanted to meet for coffee.
That is where you are going. This just comes to your mind: to meet the stranger for the coffee. You told her that you could not remember her, and she seemed upset. She said you were friends. She said she knew Jared.
You remember Jared. You remember your brother driving you through the nice parts of Rye, New York, and explaining how people live like they are dead. You remember finding your brother in a coma in your backyard swimming pool, and the brown paper bag that you knew put him there. And running down the block until you couldn‘t feel your legs.
You realize that you’ve passed the coffee shop by half a block. You are not used to having a destination. And you go back, to meet the girl, and have the coffee. You walk in. You have never been inside this particular coffee shop, but it seems recognizable in some way. And you see a pallid girl with yellow hair that grazes her cheeks and threatens to dip into her speckled grey mug full two thirds with something very black. Until she lifts her head to look at you and her bright eyes seem less tired . You remember her.
Elizabeth.
You sit down across from her, on the orange cushion on the brown plastic bench.
As soon as you sit down you entertain the idea of running away. But you are frozen. This is what occurs when you think of running. You do not know why, but you enjoy leaving. You like watching things come to an end. It’s the beginnings that scare you. This scares you.
And she is smiling.
And you are awake.