Chapter 51

51

I’m writing this in pencil on a yellow legal pad because, oddly enough, I can find nothing else in a contractor’s spare bedroom. I suppose if I wandered the house for something proper to write with/on I would eventually turn up a pen and paper, but it’s four in the morning and I’ve just woken with a splitting head of wine hangover. In this state, if someone were to give me directions to John’s office desk, I’d still manage to stumble my way off course and into the back yard.

Besides, this house is haunted.

John has become a pack rat over the years, collecting artifacts of time and placing them purposelessly upon mantles and bookshelves all over his home. Each piece of history harbors a specter, an aging apparition with a singular, isolated, story to relay.

It freaks me out.

I can feel them all around me, these ghosts of John’s past, and since we share a portionate piece of life together, a few of them are trying to enter my room by any means possible.

I hear them knocking, clawing and pacing outside the bedroom door. I would be kind enough to let a couple of the good times in if only I could be sure they’d come alone. But they won’t make those kinds of promises. You find yourself letting one memory in and before you know it you’d better put on a pair of flippers. The kind of flood that follows will wash you away in no time.

Eventually, without invitation, I begin to relay stories to myself, the fragments of which enter as smoke that billows in underneath the door. I sit upright in my bed and watch as the cloud envelopes me.

What starts as a shadowy haze becomes something of a projection screen, a dimly lit canvas for the movies of my mind. The reel tickers and flickers like a newsreel from the McCarthy era.

The memories move across the screen, the camera panning past my first scraped knee, my first finished cigarette and my last taste of Coca-Cola. I meet an old woman in a bar sometime during my 22nd year. I remember the hint of patchouli tucked behind her ears and the stale scent of potting soil that came off her breath. Our conversation was brief. We talked about rain. I paid for her drink; she paid me in banter, asking about my current profession. “I write novels,” I watch myself reply. “Oh,” she says in return. “I can’t read.” Suddenly, we both seem utterly alone.

The scene fades to black but the reel is far from finished, spinning and clicking behind my eyes. Suddenly there is a flash of light and Jamie and I are riding on a train in southern Canada. She is wearing a simple blue dress that does nothing to complement the displeasure painted on her face. She turns to me. “Look, if you call me that again I swear to God I’ll throw myself from this train.” She quickly turns away from me and stares absently out the window at a pasture of cows warming in the sun.

The train enters a tunnel and the entire room goes black. I can feel the temperature drop around me, which sends a reactionary shiver that rides my skin like an ocean wave. Suddenly there is something cold, metallic and menacing sitting in the palm of my hand. Whispers begin to surround me, but they’re only clips of sentences like thousands of puzzle pieces from hundreds of incomplete images. None of them fit together. None of them make any sense.

Together they are the overpopulated community of my mind. Every voice I’ve ever heard parading around the room, coming and going as they damn well please. The door is wide open now and the memories are multiplying, swarming around me like I owe them all some sort of favor. I don’t. I’ve paid my dues to them all, but they continue to haunt me like a spectral version of the I.R.S.

And then it arrives.

The one voice I’ve been waiting for.

It calls me worthless and accuses me of common banality.

I have no evidence to convince it otherwise.

“Maybe it’d be better if you just blew it all away.”

I huddle myself around the barrel, my knees tucked in under my chin, and dissolve into the hole where my head used to be.