The Danger of Being Me (28 page)

I climbed out of the Wagoneer. Followed the desiccated slatwood fence that skewed at odd angles after a lifetime of disregard.  And even then that ended, and I pressed on, scaling that flaking hardpan ridge.  I climbed its crumbling face, spilled over the summit, and looked deep into the churning black waters of my own soul.

I blew out a long breath I didn't know I'd been holding.  It was a breath I'd been holding for most of my life, and it dissolved back into the universe.  Just as it should.

A bitter breeze sliced across the beach in fitful flicks and twitches, spitting an abrasive grit into my face.  Four-foot breakers tumbled end-over-end, capped with frothing mist that curled along the coastline.  I looked down at the point where the land ended in unthinking waves, and I gasped.  Because at this late hour, I had finally, mercifully reached the deep and terrible End of the All.

I stumbled down that crumbling dune, staggered across the beach.  Collapsed into the surf that curled along the coast.  The icy sea rushed through my fingers as land and endless waters whispered breathless eroticisms to one another.  The ocean stretched away beyond the borders of the world, beyond the impossible vanishing point over the curvature of the Earth.  Melting into nothingness.

I closed my eyes against the darkness, and saw all of the secrets that hid in the clefts of the world.  Gluons and muons and elegant accelerons.  I felt the elusive texture of eternity and the impossible energy that binds a universe bent on ripping itself apart.  The madness of entropy.  The voice of the universe brushing itself against my mind.

That glacial surge roared through me, swallowed me whole, dashed me to psychoscopic dust.  I was murdered by that crashing blue, beaten to death by ancient waters.  I came unmade, and became at one with all things.

The infinite tide washed me clean, thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before, brought me back to myself and made me whole and real and human again.

I stood again, got my feet back under me.  Ignored my creaking joints as they screamed from a sudden onslaught of age.  I stood at the edge of the deep and terrible End of the All, bathed in the dying reflection of a bleak moon.  Freezing seawater dripped from my fingertips, whipped in the bitter breeze that sliced across the beach.  The soles of my shoes sank into the wet sand as the swirling surf swept up to my shins.  And that was okay.  I didn't mind.

Not even a little.

I stood there with all of America at my back.  Prophecy Creek slept out there somewhere in the unforgiving night.  I drew in a sharp breath, tasted my own fiery immortality, wondered just how far across the Angry Sea Meadowbank really was.  If I could see it if I squinted hard enough.

I shuddered in the piercing cold, and smiled, standing alone on that absurd infinity of sands. I was me once more, perhaps for the first time in my young life, and entirely at peace within this flesh despite the thousand natural shocks that it is heir to.  I stood on that solemn breaking point as waves crashed endlessly.  Everything was right.

It was as close to perfection as I dared to dream.

So I turned once more toward land.

The world stood blank and dark and bold.  All things lay before me, where they belonged, and the madness of entropy crashed at my back.  Just as it should.  I laughed, started deliberately up the beach.  Each footprint sunk into the damp sand, and I glanced down to watch the tide ramble up the shore and brush the coast clean.

I climbed up the arid bank, shivering as arctic saltwater trickled over my goosepebbling skin.  I reached the peak of that crumbling dune, looked back over my shoulder to the end of a continent.  Indifferent waters rolled in, receded, repeated, bid me their brackish farewell.  I scanned the coastline, and smiled.  My footprints were gone.

In the opposite direction, the City flashed against the darkness of that good night.  I picked my way down the descending side of the hardpan ridge, and as the sand crumbled beneath my sneakers, I felt myself step across some intangible border.  Not a line drawn in the sand by people to separate
here
from
there
, but a line drawn forever across my memory separating
then
from
now
.

Separating
me
from
him
.  Because I had climbed this dune eastward as one man, and I was crossing it westward as another.  I felt that in my marrow as clearly as I felt the tears of the sea dripping down the back of my neck into my sodden collar.  A confused, terrified, defiant boy had come to this mythic break in search of incomprehensible answers to unaskable questions.  All he had found were the glittering shards of his own shattered soul.

It was the only truth that had ever mattered.

A cataclysmic confrontation had erupted in the surf as land and endless waters whispered breathless eroticisms to one another, and I had survived the battle. I had taken him in my brackish embrace, and shown him his own horrible truth, and he had rejected it.  Because he was confused; because he was terrified; because he was defiant.

He had rejected his incomprehensible answer.  Rejected himself.  And so I had crashed against him until the fury of his own truth had been too much.  I had gone blind from black wrath, and it hadn't been his fault, but it had been his destruction.  He had come unmade, become at one with all things, and returned to every particle of every world.

I had murdered him there in the breakers, and cast his shattered body into the Angry Sea.  I had to.  Because he had rejected his truth, and it had broken him.  He could not return to his world if he refused to return to himself.

Because I was his truth.

And I was the only truth that mattered.

So I had taken his place.  I had been made whole and real and human again.  I had ignored these creaking joints as I stood under a bleak moon while freezing seawater dripped from these fingertips.  I had left him to be taken by the sea.  I will mourn him, and remember him.

But I will never regret destroying him.

2.

I reached the skewed wooden slats imitating a fence along the edge of a sandswept lane, and found it too strange that the Wagoneer should be just where I'd left it.

I piled back into the vehicle, freezing and emptied and satisfied.  I twisted the key in the ignition and cranked the heater, pressing my weight into the seat.  Sensation crept back into my limbs.  The scar under my arm and the two across my back tightened, and my breathing slowed.

I put the Jeep into gear, checked the mirrors, reversed to the nearest intersection.  My heart clenched inside my chest as I watched that crumbling dune pull away from the windshield.  That was where I had been born, where I had come into this desiccated world for reasons unknown.  It was a place that would enthrall me and terrify me for the rest of time.  It was the site of my first murder.

At the bruised nimbus of a fading streetlight, I swung the car ninety degrees and stopped.  I paused, looked out the passenger's side window, memorized the darkness.  I eased the car another ninety degrees onto the gravelly lane.  The tinselly City loomed in front of me, beckoning me with worthless promise.  Endless waters lapped at my back, a father and a mother wishing me the best.

I pushed the gas, drove back into that short and brutish fray, spilling back out into the eight-lane thoroughfare and turning back in the direction that I'd come.  I sped up, out of the commercial district and several miles further into the neglected fringes populated by the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

No pretense had been painted over these crumbling bricks.  No lurid diversion distracted from this forgotten existence.  Only shadow, and sweet silence.

Further on I spotted a billboard over a battered diner.  A floodlamp had been set out to light the wooden sign reading
SNAKE EYES DINER
in a stylish script.  Someone with just enough talent had once exerted just enough effort to prove that they cared.  And that made me care.  Relate to it, or perhaps find a bit of myself in it.  So I stopped at this place of all places, at this late hour, instead of heading off into the darkness to wherever it was that I was headed, to do whatever I meant to do there.  Mostly, I was hungry, and I had no idea where I was going anyway.

A smaller wooden plate painted with
24HRS
hung from two hooks.  I pulled into the parking lot, rolled over an extension cord snaking across the cracked asphalt from the floodlamp to the door.  I pulled into a vacant spot in front of the door, next to a Ford Bronco with faux-wood paneling.  I shut the car down, grabbed my bookbag off the passenger's seat, climbed out of the Wagoneer.

I followed the extension cord through the door and stepped into the hazy diner.

The restaurant, such as it were, was nearly abandoned.

A clock with a cracked face hung on the wall, ticking its elemental cadence toward four o'clock.  One patron sat on a stool at the counter, wearing immaculate wingtip shoes and a tousled grey suit, working at a plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hashbrowns and nursing a cup of coffee while reading a copy of
The
Press of Atlantic City
.

On his way to work, or on his way home.

I took two steps into the room, and a woman emerged from the kitchen behind the counter with a coffee pot.  She topped off her customer's cup, and spotted me.  She wore her dirty blonde hair cut short, and a t-shirt with a pair of dice showing snake eyes strategically screen-printed over her breasts.  She looked forty, and was probably ten years younger.  She looked like a fallen angel.

The woman flashed me a mercurial smile and waved at the nearly abandoned dining room.  "Take your pick."

I nodded, crossing the diner.  I passed behind the other patron, and the woman asked, "what can I get for you?"

I paused, considered.  I almost asked to see the menu, then saw the plate on the counter in front of the man.

So I told the woman, "I'll have what he's having."  The man grunted a laugh, and I passed by, settling into the booth against the back corner.  I had a view of the door, the counter, the other patron, the kitchen through a window behind the counter.  I felt safe in that corner booth.

I dropped my bookbag on the seat beside me, pulled out my notebook, laid it on the tabletop.  Flipped open the faded green cover to reveal the first page of hand-scrawled annotations.  They were four months old, according to the date scratched into the corner of the page.

I leafed through the pages of disjointed anarchy, bits of thought that I barely remembered scribbling.  Words and phrases were crossed-out, struck-through, written above and below.  Never torn out; never discarded.  Addendums and appendices had been stapled to pages, folded over to fit within the dimensions of the covers.

I flicked through that collection of clippings, picked up pieces along the way until I reached a blank sheet that screamed with untold promise.  Then I unclipped the pen from the spiral binding, scratched the date into the corner of the page, and leaned back against my seat.

I closed my eyes, sighed, enjoyed the pungent bouquet of tobacco and grease.  A few minutes later, the smell of coffee broke through the haze, and I opened my eyes as the woman arrived with my plate.  As she set it and a cup on the table, I asked her, "could you leave the pot?"

She looked at me, then glanced at my notebook, and flashed that mercurial smile again.  "Long night?"

"Looking like it," I said.  She left the pot.  I thanked her, sat forward, poured a cup.  Steam merged into the thin fogbank clinging to the ceiling.  I set the pot down, fished a pair of creamers from the caddy, emptied each into the coffee to turn it a gentle russet color.  I thought of Amber, just for a moment.  My thoughts would surely return to her again before all was said and done, but not now.

I had other matters to consider first.

I tossed away the plastic shells, snatched a dozen sugar packets, tore them open, emptied them into the coffee.  I dipped my spoon, swirled it.  My eyes turned back to that notebook that promised everything and nothing and did not apologize.  I stirred my coffee for thirty seconds like a latter-day alchemist, then tapped the spoon against the rim to produce a musical chime.  Not one else noticed.

I drank the coffee, winced as it burned a trail down my throat.  Warmth radiated out from my gut, creeping into my dark hollows, driving out the last of the Angry Sea's icy aftereffects.  The smog of exhaustion blurring my senses broke open in the sweetness of that heat, burned away like a nightfog by the unforgiving light of dawn.

I launched a vigorous incursion on my plate, leaving no quarter unscathed.  I ravaged villages of hashbrowns, eggs, and eggs, laid waste to the outlying regions of bacon and toast. Then I doused the smoldering wreckage of my hunger with the scalding Snake Eyes house brew.

A bitter breeze sliced through my head and threw my mind open, my brain crackling like a livewire near an open flame.  So I set down my cup, raised my pen.  Wrote.

This story is true, but this book is a lie.

I looked at the line, scratched out across the page in a cramped handwriting that I almost didn't recognize.  It was honest, and that was the only truth that mattered.  So I continued. 
Stories don't have beginnings or endings.  Books do.  Books bend over backward to impose meaning where none exists.  To make sense of the absurd and the arbitrary.  Life is absurd; life is arbitrary.  A good book may be neither, because the more a book is like life, the less it is like a book.

Even the best book is a lie.  Because life is all middle.

I finished the pot of coffee. I had stopped adding cream and sugar.  I drank it straight black, sent it straight to the source.  Even before I got around to flagging down the woman with the strategic t-shirt, she visited my table and traded out my empty coffee pot for a fresh one.  I blinked up at her, and she flashed that mercurial smile of hers.