Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny (20 page)

And I was there, right in the middle of it
all.

Maddi had cleared off the table and piled the
dishes in the sink, then went into the backyard with her parents.
Scott filled the sink with soapy water and stacked the dishes on
the counter.

“Dishwasher broke?” I asked.

“You’re looking at the dishwasher.” He threw
a dishtowel over his shoulder.

“I’ll wash, if you dry,” I said.

“Deal.” He shifted to the left side of the
sink. I stepped in his place and sunk my hands into the warm soapy
water, grabbed a plate and rubbed it clean with a soft sponge.
Scott rinsed and dried and put it in the cabinet.

It was getting near dark outside. Our
reflections were clear in the window that looked into the side
yard. Mary Ellen and Joey were sitting in fray lawn chairs watching
Maddi throw a slimy ball to the dogs. Scott hardly looked up,
focused on the dishes coming his way. We were in sync, a washing
tandem. Identical twins, the difference only in the color of hair.
Why the white hair? Was it an error in the cloning, or a hint at
my transparency?

How many times had I washed dishes, all
alone, not knowing
I
was washing dishes somewhere else in
the world? And now we were linked, our energy coupled like trains.
His strength was growing, absorbing my own like I was doing to
others, yet I couldn’t tell if he could feel it. He didn’t appear
to be aware of anything other than the dishes and warm water, yet I
experienced him as a massive star whose gravitational pull locked
onto me, unable to free myself. It was only a matter of time before
I was swallowed. I wasn’t sad about that. Wasn’t anything. It
seemed that’s the way things were supposed to be.

Maddi’s laughter drifted through the window
and the dogs barked. And I washed another bowl. Scott rinsed. For
once, I wasn’t saving the world. Maybe it was saving me.

Scott went to his room, upstairs to the left.
This is Scott’s Room
was on the door. The walls were covered
with pictures, mostly hard-edge bands in concert. He was at the
desk, flipping the pages on a skateboard magazine with the likes of
Josiah Gatlyn grinding a handrail and Benny Fairfax nailing
something impossible.

“I can’t wait until I’m done with school,” he
said.

“Where you going?”

“Anywhere but here.” He turned the page.

It was completely dark outside. The lawn
chairs were empty. It took everything I had to stand three feet
away from Scott. The draw was undeniable. I was leaning away from
him.

But it was no longer to be denied.

“I got to go,” I said.

“What about the project?”

I turned, looked into his face.
My
face.
My
eyes. “It’s just about done.”

I stopped resisting, let go of the energy
bundled in my stomach. It flowed like Hoover dam had tumbled. The
influx hit him in the gut. He convulsed like he was about to puke.
His skin was quaking. He was draining me.

“What’s… what’s happening?” He couldn’t get
up, couldn’t get away. He had to sit, to claim what was rightfully
his. I was only his shadow, his reflection, and I had so much to
give.

As the darkness crept over me, I extended my
hand to shake. “Take it,” I said.

His head was shaking.

But he wasn’t looking at my hand, he was
seeing my face. I could not pretend anymore. He saw my true nature,
saw his own face looking back. Even if I wasn’t real, if I was just
a reflection, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to exist.
To feel. To love. I didn’t know what would happen when it was over,
where I would go or what I would become. There was only this
moment. And it had reached an end.

“Go on,” I said. “It’s all right.”

Reality was breaking up, his mind began to
quiver. But he held onto consciousness, not able to comprehend the
impossible moment that appeared out of an ordinary day, his own
self standing in his bedroom, reaching out.

His hand moved slowly. Darkness was taking my
vision as it moved toward my open palm, as if I was dissolving from
the physical world. As if I was returning to the great void of the
moment. I did not see him take my hand. I did not feel his sweaty
palm grip mine.

But I knew when it did.

It was an explosion.

My mind expanded like the Big Bang, scattered
in all directions, through all the elements in a painless
flight.

I did not see. Did not smell. But I was
aware. Felt my life drain away from my body, through my hand and
into Scott. He absorbed what was rightfully his. He was the
original face. My memories would be his. My life was his.

He would remember my father holding his hand
at the fair, how he ate dinner with my mother, watched them bury my
father, and the endless fights in South Carolina. How he fell in
love with Chute. Every moment filled him, became his memories. It
was his life, now.

And when I was empty, his memories began to
leak into my awareness. I saw Scott’s life, from the very
beginning. I experienced memories, both conscious and subconscious,
of his life from the very first breath he took. Felt his body slide
from my mother’s womb, the expansion of his chest and the blurry
face of my mother hovered over him, her fulfilling nipple in his
mouth and the warm embrace of my father.

And I felt the cold fate of his reality.

He was swept away, cuddled in a warm blanket
that was no substitute for the woman who gave birth to him. He was
too young to know that a blind man had plans for him, for all of
us. Pivot took him far away where he was adopted by a warm and
loving family.

His life was not much different than mine,
the struggles were similar, the details different. He was
introverted and righteous, carried a deep yearning to know the
meaning of his life, always sensing something greater was out
there, but found himself stuck in life’s mundane moments.

He got very ill during a swine flu
epidemic.

Fell out of a tree and broke his arm when he
was ten.

Caught a twelve pound bass in Tannerville
Lake.

Hiked Pike’s Peak in Colorado on a family
vacation, had his own dirt bike, carried his sister home when she
was hit with a rock, one he threw, her face covered with blood, the
scar still above her left eye, won an art contest in third grade,
stole a book from school, changed his grades, kissed a girl behind
the garage…

His life settled in my awareness like a new
body of water. Deep and clear. Still.

The darkness was calm.

And I remained. I was still there. I was
still me, still intact.

Complete.

And my consciousness gathered back in Scott’s
room. Perhaps I disappeared during the experience. Or maybe I was
there the entire time, experiencing it on another level. But when I
returned, my feet were on the carpet and my hands at my side. Scott
was on the floor. His eyes rolled back and twitching.

I picked him up, lay him on his bed. Even in
the solitude of unconsciousness, his mind was coping with the
reality of his new memories, the awareness of his true birthright.
He was only human.

You are more than human,
Pivot told
me.
No human could do what you have done, and yet I needed a
human to do it.

I sat next to Scott. He was no longer a
mystery, his mind completely available to me, for he was no longer
separate. I moved my awareness inside his mind and soothed the
conflict rumbling through his being, sorting through the new
memories trying to find a place to be accepted. I gathered all
those memories that he received from me and hid them in the
darkness of his subconscious. One day, he would know them, when he
was ready to see the truth, they would emerge, slowly. One at a
time. But for now, he needed to just be Scott.

Thank you,
I said to him. To me.
Sleeping peacefully in his bed.

I peeked into Maddi’s room where she was
sound asleep, squeezing a doll against her cheek with her thumb in
her mouth, her tongue clicking.

I snuck downstairs where their father was
watching Sportscenter and mother was reading a magazine. They
didn’t hear the floorboards creaking as I stood unnoticed in the
doorway, taking one last moment to experience the family essence
centered in the room. I slipped outside, still unnoticed.

In the middle of the brick street, under the
buzzing street light, I stood on a manhole cover. The stars filled
the sky and night fell quietly on the small town of Tannerville. I
took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the breath of the entire
world, feeling its struggles, its pain and happiness, loss and
gain, birth and death. The human essence contained the beauty of
life, the essence of which contained darkness and light, the pure
joy of life, hidden only by a lack of understanding. But it was
there, not to be gotten, not something that was missing. Only
something that needed to be seen.

And somewhere in the world, I felt every
consciousness struggle with its own existence, each soul rightfully
searching for itself. And among them, I sensed the awareness of
Pivot, like he was everywhere, as if he had yet to gather his body
in a particular place in space and time.

There was another presence out there. This
being was intimately familiar, shining like a beacon, calling me to
join him. He was in Charleston. And he was waiting for me to
arrive. It was a bald man that walked freely down a sidewalk.

Downtown Charleston.

Tourists crowded the sidewalk, holding hands
and walking casually past art studios, pausing in front of picture
windows. They lined up outside Hymen’s Seafood for a late bite or
crowded at Comiskey’s for desert. Just another night.

I was in front of the long market, the
building painted mustard yellow and Charleston green. Pike was
somewhere in the crowd, his presence scattered like a game of
Hide-and-Seek.

A street vendor sawed away on a beat up
fiddle, curled up against the wall with a box of coins in front of
him. Tourists occasionally stopped to toss in a bill, and the guy
nodded curtly. I walked past him, looked down the street left of
the market, recalled the vision of when Pike walked free, trying to
remember what side of the market he was on. But there were no
details in the vision. Just the street. And the girl.

I closed my eyes and leaned against the
building. He has been here already, I could feel him, but what was
he waiting for? In the vision, it was dark and the streets were
crowded with slow moving traffic. A rickshaw bicycle rang a bell.
And there was no fiddle playing, either.

“You want a rose?” A kid held out a palm leaf
torn and folded to look like a beige rose. “Ten dollars for one,
twenty for two.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“All right, how about five dollars for
one?”

The music had stopped. The musician’s box was
still on the sidewalk, filled with coins and his violin. A note was
tucked between the strings.
Looking for me?

Pike’s presence was smeared on the paper like
a fingerprint. He was disguising himself as the fiddle player, but
how? I looked around and then closed my eyes, reaching out with my
mind, feeling each individual presence mingle throughout the
market. I felt their movements, their desires and fears, but none
were Pike.

A stick poked between my fingers. I looked at
the palm rose in my hand. The boy was twirling one. “You want to
buy another?”

“I didn’t buy this one.”

“That guy over there bought it for you, said
you looked lost, like you needed a friend. Said you’d buy
another.”

“Where?”

“Buy another and I tell you.” He held the
rose up to my face. “Ten bucks.”

I knelt in front of him, gently took his
shoulders. I knew his life, and it had been hard. But I couldn’t
change him, couldn’t tap him with a magic wand to make it better.
At the moment, I just needed to see what the man looked like and
where he went. I scanned his recent memory and saw the man was bald
with dark glasses, smiling at the kid like he was looking at
someone else, like he knew I’d see the memory.
You’re so
close.

I looked to the left side of the market
again. There, along the sidewalk, people were hustling out of the
way. I ran across the street, around traffic, between the parked
rickshaws. Up ahead, the bald man.
Pike.
He scattered the
crowd like a bad smell. And then my vision materialized.

The family and the little girl, pulling her
gum out of her mouth, her mother chastising her for it, reaching
down to yank her hand back, not seeing the little man whose force
slammed into them. The father was thrown against a parking meter
and his wife back into him, but the little girl’s hand slipped from
her grip. She tumbled into the road, in front of a car that was
going too fast.

I cut into time, freezing it the instant the
bumper reached her forehead, inches from splitting it open. I
walked through the silent night and removed her from danger, lay
her at her mother’s feet.

Pike’s gone, again.

I returned to normal time. The tires
screeched. The mother screamed. A crowd gathered around the
frightened girl, crying on her mother’s shoulder. I stood beneath
the awning of the storefront where the owners rushed out to ask if
anyone was hurt, they had already called the police. But the
assailant was gone.

Suddenly, I caught a whiff of his presence,
floating on the wind. Across the street, he’d entered the long
market, slipping beneath a canvas curtain. Traffic stopped. A cop
had already arrived on foot, taking a description of the strange,
bald man. I walked unnoticed between the cars, pulled the canvas
aside and stepped inside.

During the day, it was crowded with vendors
and tourists, but at night it was empty and lonely aside from a
bird searching for a place to nest. The city sounds were muffled by
the canvas walls. At the far end, near the side road that crossed
between the buildings, a short man was hunkered over a fat woman
and a display of sweetgrass baskets.