Chris DeBolt
A Map Beyond the Edge
There's a difference between a delusion and a dream,
though I don’t understand that right now. This is the winter of 1980, the
thick of adolescence, and I'm spiraling downward fast--stealing vodka from
liquor stores, punching instead of speaking, vandalizing automobiles that
belong to my mother’s boyfriends. Later I will be called a latch-key kid
or socially challenged; now I’m just called a juvenile delinquent or a
little prick. It fits the mood in the country. Everyone is pissed-off,
demoralized: Three Mile Island is setting off geiger counters, the Soviet
Union is strangling Afghanistan, the Ayatollah is holding hostages.
And a policeman is standing in my living room, pointing
a blackjack at my chest. "Ma’am," he says to my mom, "he’s the one." My
mom is a legal secretary, working for the Army at Fort Bliss Texas. She’s
also a forty-year-old single parent; the truth is whatever she wants it to
be.
"Not my son," she says, "I don’t believe it." Her new
boyfriend is also here, standing next to her in battle fatigues, his name
sewn on his chest: Sgt. Hookano. His weightlifter’s arm wraps
around her neck, feigning support, but his smirk in my direction
communicates the opposite. We haven’t spoken much in the three months
they’ve been dating, and when we do our words carry threatening
undercurrents, two males circling, sniffing for weakness.
"Ma’am, my advice is a military school, far, far away."
And with a slow-and-low headshake, the cop is gone.
There’s family tradition in play here, a ROTC academy
not so far-fetched. We’re a nuclear family without the nucleus, my father
having died long ago, the folded, American flag in my possession proof of
his honorable, military service. Or so it's inscribed on the triangular,
plastic cover. Maybe I should also learn to shoot, kill, die honorably on
foreign soil. Maybe the family torch really is mine, waiting just for me.
Apparently my mom has other plans.
"Honey," she says, "It’s going to be an adventure!"
Hookano unleashes a check-mate smile while she explains that he is being
transferred from Fort Bliss to a new post in Kaiserlautern, West Germany.
My mom has decided to move with him, already has a job waiting for her at
Rhein Main Air Base, an Autobahn-hour away from K-Town. "Besides," she
says, "I’m doing this for you, too, you know." She flicks her head at the
space recently vacated by the policeman.
My expression is equally vacant.
"I’m in love," she says, "aren’t you happy for me?"
Tough question to answer. She thinks she wants the truth, but I know
better: delusions are much cleaner.
"Sure," I say.
"I knew you’d understand," she says and kisses Hookano
on the cheek. The living room is invaded with dead space so I finish her
unspoken thought: I knew you’d understand because I’ve already taught
you the key to love. "Physical attraction is the most important part
of a relationship," she told me earlier, after I questioned the scotch
tape on her forehead at night, the jazzercise routines in the morning, the
Star Trek glasses and tanning light on the weekends.
My two older brothers, both pacifists and in college,
decide to skip the overseas military excursion; I'm fifteen and have no
choice. They shake my hand and say, "Good luck buddy, see you soon,"
pretending my trip will only be a long weekend. I’m gone, unable to stay
behind, unable to change my fate: unable to do anything but shred my Van
Halen posters, kick a hole in my door ‘good-bye’ and wonder if, after
being forced to move to West Germany, I’ll have to wear Lederhosen to
school and chew on hard gingerbread for lunch.
I don’t. In fact, everyone here wears Nike and Levis and
drinks beer and smokes pot and gets into fistfights--just like at
home--because it’s an American school, Frankfurt High. The student
population is over one thousand. Surprising, until I learn there are over
one million active duty or military support in Europe right now. "Welcome
to the Cold War," my mom says. Some of these grunts, pilots, and ex-con’s
also happen to be parents, so their children come with them while they
protect our way of life back home. It’s a three-to-five year tour. Sounds
logical, reasonable, even a bit homey and fuzzy when you toss in a
fireplace, hot cider and the KrisKindel Market. Then again won’t we, the
young and the oblivious, be the first casualties if World War III starts?
Reagan claims it’s morning in America, but where I’m standing, within
earshot of a million vodka-drunk Russians with itchy Kalishnokovs, there
is no sky, only military gray.
However I can see the Iranian hostages finally released
onto the tarmac of Rhein Main, though my friends and I miss the red, white
and blue ceremony because we’re throwing up a case of dark beer; I can
hear the concussive explosions after cars are filled with C-4 and driven
onto base by terrorist groups like the Red Brigades, then detonated in
front of dozens of Americans while they walk to work, their remains later
collected in sandwich baggies; I can taste blood when a sexy German girl
tells me at a beer hall to get my capitalist ass back to McDonald’s where
I belong, and in response I throw a liter of beer in her face, laughing
with each punch I take from a gang of proud Arian men, religiously
believing the pain, the bruises, are all well worth it; I can attach
myself to girls who shrug at virginity by fourteen, swallow by fifteen,
and choreograph three-ways by sixteen. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s the
water, the fear, or the Minuteman missiles standing erect, just a glance
away, and aimed due east.
***
Today is my birthday, my sixteenth. I feel old. My
girlfriend Merlina, the (excuse me) love of my life, has promised a
surprise. I guess I should be thrilled, but I’m really miserable, more
insecure than usual, because she is seventeen: I don't know yet what
someone her age, someone with her experience, defines as a surprise. And
to be honest I really don't want to. I’ve heard more than enough about
Merlina already, too many intimate details spread like the plague by the
heartless bastards who’ve already coaxed her into the woods.
We meet at the vortex of military life, the bowling
alley, at five p.m. and nestle within the pounding balls, exploding pins,
pumping fists. Merlina reaches in a bag and hands me my present, a ceramic
beer mug engraved in cursive with I Will Love You
Forever. It’s so useless and beautiful my
eyelids fill.
"Come on, let’s walk," she says, interlacing her fingers
within mine.
"I’ve changed my mind about the surprise," I say.
"It’s out of my hands, sweety."
I squeeze her hand to see if she’s telling me the truth,
but it slips because of sweat.
"Merlina, please don’t. Can’t we just go to your house,
stay in to celebrate?" I ask.
"Don't worry, I’ll be there for you."
We walk past the Officer’s Club, where mom goes for
happy hour, but her car is missing today. The O Club is no different than
any other building on Rhein Main, designed by the same architect who
designed the concrete bunker and gun turret, but to make things cheery
someone decided to paint every wall an off-white color. A perfect screen
to project my imagination, pretend I’m just in an anti-Disneyland, some
deep worm hole of reality where they don't care how tall you are to jump
on the ride.
It doesn’t help.
Merlina does, green, isotope eyes ablaze, beautiful
profile exposed by long, auburn hair blown dry and pulled in twin,
curling-iron waves.
I met Merlina three months earlier in the school office.
She was seeing a counselor, barely treading above the wake of a father who
traded her and her mother in for newer models; I was seeing another and
taking a test--pencil inside the circle please--to determine if I should
be shotgunned into an advanced placement class. We bumped into each other,
physically with our skulls, after ducking the concerned counselor-like
hands reaching to pat our shoulders. We were inseparable immediately: I
fell in love when she sang Journey’s greatest hits a cappella, she with me
when I cracked my knuckles as accompaniment, and we with each other when
we dressed up like clowns for Halloween and made love, for the first time,
in the base haunted house.
"Pretty cold tonight," I say as we walk. Merlina smiles
and my insides glow like fuel rods: one smile, one switch flipped to ON.
Soon we reach the back of the base, near the tarmac
riddled with razor wire and signs warning Eintracht Verboten! F-16’s shoot
up like darts. Massive C-130 cargo planes lumber around like hippos
rooting for water. A sexual escapade near the landing lights, I assume,
the screaming engines, the hypnotic propellers, the possibility of being
sucked into one or shot by an MP for trespassing making this a surprise I
will surely never forget. Instead she steers me left, along the fence
line, toward a parking lot with conic piles of black ice. A sign reads:
Welcome to the Rhein Main Skating Rink, thank you General Davis for
your generous donation. The floodlights underneath are melting snow,
dripping water on the hood of my mom’s car parked out front. My mom’s car
parked out front? I stop, plant my feet.
"No chance," I say.
Merlina pulls on my arms halfheartedly, then shakes her
head. "I’m so sorry," she says, releasing her grip. "Your mom asked me to
help and I couldn’t say no."
"No chance in hell," I clarify.
"I promise," she says, "I’ll be there, right next to you
the whole time."
Merlina and I are standing only twenty feet from the
entrance, and though it’s an outdoor rink there is no sound inside. No
disco music. No metal scraping against ice. No laughter. Only a mute dome
of glowing lights. In my mind I peel back the concrete wall and see them
all, my mom, my friends, waiting for me, looking at their watches,
stamping their feet and blowing into their hands, aching to yell Surprise!
I move backwards.
Merlina stops me, wraps her arms tight around the small
of my back. Her pupils lock onto mine. She says, "Just close your eyes and
jump. She’s doing this for her, not for you."
Blasts of truth occur infrequently in life. When they do
wide paths are cleared between concepts once appearing whole: forgive and
forget, trust and faith, delusion and dream.
There are the delusions, the false beliefs: that America
is always right; that the mirror complimenting you is being honest; that
whatever, whoever surrounds you is an accurate reflection of who you are.
That fucking is just fucking.
And there are the dreams, the fond hopes: that the
crater inside your chest will one day be filled; that pain experienced in
youth is different than that as an adult; that your environment is
ephemeral, the F-16 now launching off the tarmac, leaving behind a rolling
concussions of exhaust, a vehicle that might one day just spirit you up
and away.
I consider what Merlina says, then finally answer, "OK,
let’s go in."
The turnstiles squeal when I move through, thick steel
handles pushing my ass forward in case I’m having second thoughts. Through
a narrow door frame, directly in front, I see the ice rink glowing glacier
blue. I take small steps, to the right and left, the known and unknown.
What should I do, I wonder, when I turn the corner? Should I slap my hands
to my cheeks, round and my lips into an overdramatic O and say you
shouldn’t have? Should I soil myself? Should I jump back, put my palm
to my chest, laugh convincingly, then hug my mom and say thank you so much
I love you for doing this for me?
***
Hours before my surprise skating party I sit quietly in
class, far in back so my advance placement teacher can’t see my red eyes
or smell smoke in my long, greasy hair. My fellow advance-placementeers leave me alone too; in a
class filled with rejects I am rejected. Here the school windows draw my
attention. I know outside winter is low and heavy, but I can’t see it. The
glass has frozen over, brittle elm trees swaying in the wind and etching
intricate designs into the translucent frost.
Mr. Mueller, the AP teacher, is German and depressed at
having to lecture a group of ignorant American kids. He drones instead of
speaks and moves the chalk over the board so limply it never scratches or
makes a sound. Must be interesting because my classmates' heads are
nodding in unison, in faux rapt attention, at every word. What a joke.
Advance placement, we the anointed few who’ve been airlifted to the front
of the pack but are too dumb to know we’re already at war.
Yet here’s the shock: the old man is actually
interesting today. It sounds like a ghost story so I tune in to pick up
some details. Fires, shadows, stick-figure drawings of people in chains.
The Platonic Cave, he writes, underlines. He points to his diagram
and says to the class, "Here we are, all of us, living a lie in the dark."
Nodding heads halt, confused. "But," he asks, wagging
his finger at us, "if anyone ever escapes from the cave, makes it out into
the sunlight--discovers the truth--and tries to explain to the other
prisoners what’s on the outside, what will they say? Wonderful? Release
us? Tell us the truth?" Mueller pauses, then delivers his punch-line with
a smile.
"No, they’ll think he’s insane and kill the
troublemaker."
The crew-cutted ROTC guy sitting next to me gives me a
thumbs-up. "Fuck yeah," he says. He’s ready to kill, the front line his
home. He’s been insisting I sign up, get some discipline, learn to shoot.
Mesmerized by his wild eyes, I wonder if I’m really the killing type, or
the one with the target on my back.
***
Surprise! The rink explodes. Backslaps. Flashbulbs.
Spots in my peripheral vision. My mom moves behind the condiment table and
yells, "All right, who wants a hot dog?" She’s having a ball, movements
fluid, unhindered. She must have hustled over right after work and set
everything up, because she’s still in work clothes, a silk blouse with
matching neck scarf. Her knee-high skirt has a little mustard on it but
she doesn’t notice.
"You all right?" Merlina asks, wrapping her arm around
my waist.
"Never better," I answer.
Hookano saunters up in a camouflaged parka. With his
dark skin and mustache he looks more like a killer Eskimo than an Army
Ranger.
"Happy Birthday buddy," he says, shaking my hand like
it’s a wrestling maneuver. But he doesn’t look at me. "Hello Merlina," he
says, eyes dancing from lips to breasts, the way I’m sure he looked at mom
when they first met.
"Hi. How have you been?" Merlina answers. She catches
herself, looks at me, then down at the ice. Been? Been? The word
implies a prior meeting. My mind rewinds the last three months, backward
voices screeching like crows. Have I ever introduced them before?
There’s nothing but thick silence between the three of
us. Paranoia overtakes my thoughts, a hallucination of Hookano rubbing his
hands over Merlina’s naked body. His tongue tracing lines along her hip.
My diaphragm seizes. Blood drains from my head. But I manage to ask a
question, sounding more like a plea. "You two have met before?"
Hookano takes a long drag off his Marlboro. The trailing
smoke causes one of his eyes to squint. He looks at Merlina, then laughs,
"You want to take that one?"
The hallucination morphs into a concrete image, one
scene at a time scrolling through my head. The two of them drinking at a
bar, holding hands while they walk outside the base fence line, into the
woods, whispering, promising to keep it all a secret.
Merlina looks away. An aftermath in a blink.
My mom suddenly jumps between us and asks, "Having fun
honey? How about this for a sixteenth birthday, huh? Bet none of your
friend’s moms ever did something like this."
My mouth is dried shut.
"Son? Right?"
"Yeah mom," I try, "thanks."
"And my baby even made it." She raises on her toes and
kisses Hookano on the cheek, raking her right hand through his thick black
hair. "Thanks for coming, sweety, I know K-Town’s a long drive at night."
"Never miss a party," he answers with a wink,
"especially when there’s cake."
"But," she says in my direction, "you haven’t even
skated yet. What’s wrong?"
My life fast forwards about ten seconds and I find
myself leaning on the skating rink perimeter for support, twenty feet away
from the group. I must have walked away without answering the question. Or
maybe I did. I don't remember. It’s a blank.
"What’s his problem?" I hear my mom ask, but no response
follows from either Merlina or Hookano. The question simply evaporates
without being answered.
"OK everybody listen up," she yells, ready to make a
speech, but another F-16 launches off the runway and drowns out her words.
I’m still close by and can’t hear a thing, only watch her mouth form words
like a silent movie, "Everybody hold on for a second." A few of my friends
actually do stop to listen--Spar Stormo, Stu Laws, Robin Goodwin--and give
my mom their attention, though by now she can only flail her agitated arms
at the noisy interruption. Finally she gives up and clasps her hands, head
bowed as if praying for quiet. My friends bow their heads too, twisting
their ankles inward to balance on tiny pieces of steel, glancing at each
other and laughing.
Watching this scene I have an urge to say a prayer, even
though I don't think there is a God. I say one anyway: "God, I know this
moment is being branded into my mind’s flesh, but please, you merciless
asshole, please, do not let the scar last an eternity. Amen."
When the plane trails off, a pinprick of orange in black
sky, my mom speaks again.
"Can you hear me? Everybody? Now? OK. Well you might not
believe this but my boy has never ice skated in his life. Crazy, isn’t it?
Well why do you think we’re here? Anyway I have two presents for the boy
and girl who spend the most time helping him learn how skate."
She rummages through a brown paper bag at her feet.
"Let’s see, OK, I have a football for the boy as a prize," she holds it
aloft and twists her arm so that all sides of it can be examined, "and for
the girl a stuffed animal ... what is this thing anyway? My God I don't
even remember what it was I bought. Well it looks like a seal, a stuffed
baby seal is the prize for the girl who helps my little boy learn how to
skate!"
On cue my friends begin sliding over the ice, their
faces blurred into tracers. I watch from the edge and expect them to
smirk, but instead they smile and wave. This could be the most ridiculous
part of the day so far. These are the same friends that break into
Porsches for fun, shattering windows with crowbars, showering glass like
hail onto the sidewalk. These are the coiled friends that attack a group
of Greenpeace protesters, chanting outside the base fence line with
upside-down American flags and effigies of Reagan with missiles embedded
in the temple, and pummel them with baseball bats and homemade
num-chukkas. These are the twisted friends that goosestep through
crosswalks and scream "Heil Hitler!" to taunt the local Germans. Now they
are smiling, waving, ice skating at my birthday party, which, on second
thought, makes absolute sense at a moment when absolutely nothing makes
sense.
***
I’m caught off guard. For the first time in school, in
class, I’m leaning forward into my desk rather than tipping backward. I
want to know more about Plato’s Cave. The sickness of delusions. The
definition of dreams. I need more details, more character analysis, more
backstory. I have questions to ask and I need answers. Right now.
But before I have a chance to ask anything the fire
alarm goes off. Over the intercom, over the racket, our principal, in a
resonant baritone, officially notifies us it’s another bomb threat. He
doesn’t sigh but his voice sounds as if he’d like to. "Single file," he
instructs, "please, everyone walk briskly to the auditorium." Walk
briskly? It’s pandemonium in the hallway, and even worse in the auditorium
where they corral us until everything’s clear. We hear the sirens and
watch the US Army bomb squad, dressed like a commando HazMat team, rush
past us with a kennel of German Shepherds, experts at sniffing out the
Bulgarian plastique that’s hidden somewhere in the school, a trash can, a
locker, a water fountain. We don’t care. We’re the young Americans on the
front lines, humming with teenage energy, kicking, fighting, spitting,
pulling beers and microdot acid out of our own pockets or the billfold
from someone else’s. It’s usually an exciting event, the monthly bomb
scare, the possibility of a large detonation, the loss of life, blood
mixed with cinder block dust causing adrenaline to pump even faster than
normal.
But I’m too distracted to enjoy it anymore.
***
Now here’s where I wrap it all up in a Tiffany-blue box
and move to the big climax.
What did not happen:
My questions went unanswered; Mueller quit when a fake
bomb was found near his class.
I did not grab the stuffed baby seal, tear it in half,
and burn the stuffing in a bonfire.
I did not drop kick the football into the twirling
blades of a propeller.
I did not bring the sharp edge of a skate down onto
Hookano’s head.
What did happen:
I laced up my skates, staggered over the rubber mats,
and lowered myself onto the ice.
Merlina got the seal by default; no one wanted near my
windmill arms.
Hookano got the leftover angel food cake and took it
back to his barracks.
Mom got a hug.
Afterwards I turn down her offer for a ride home. Mom
and I live twenty klicks off base in a small apartment, but transportation
isn’t a problem. I either take the bus or hitchhike, normally the latter
because I usually stay as late as possible to see Merlina, and the last
bus to our neighborhood leaves too early, at ten p.m.
The best spot to hitchhike is just inside the main gate
of the air base, next to a sculpture erected to commemorate the Berlin air
lift in 1948, when millions of tons of supplies were flown in to break the
Russian siege. The memorial is twenty feet high and basically looks like a
large ocean wave made of concrete with finger nodes jutting on top.
Supposedly this represents a bridge from here to there and a twin
sculpture sits in Berlin, reaching out, ready to interlock with this one.
A rainbow kind of thing, only there’s no color, just gray (no pot of gold
at the base either, I checked). It’s not much to look at but it’s a
perfect blank wall for me to lean against, a plain background for the
exiting headlights to spot me, thumb extended.
Sometimes it takes minutes to get a ride, sometimes
hours. It’s worth it, even when it’s below freezing and I have no money
for beer or cigarettes. When I wait a really long time, say into the early
morning hours of night, I collapse a little farther into myself and add
layers and fathoms to the definition of alone. But someone always comes.
And when they do, especially on nights like this, on nights when you
realize the joke is really on you, I’m eager to ride with strangers
because I can pretend to be whoever I want to be. For example when the
kind soul who gives me a ride asks what I was up to this evening, I’ll say
I just stood by the fence line and watched the planes take off.
So you’ll understand if, when I arrive home and hear my
mom fucking a man other than Hookano, a man she must have met somewhere
between birthday party and front door, I keep pretending a little longer.
I ignore the knocking headboard, lie down on my bed and stare at the dark
contours of my ceiling, projecting myself out of this scene and into
another: snapshots of a future life. It is something, my pretend future,
something you should really see.
Yes, but first I have promised a climax.
Early the next morning a coda: toilet flush, tiptoe of
creaking floor tiles, front door open/close. Within an hour my mom knocks
on my door. She asks if I’d like some breakfast, maybe watch some
television, spend quality time. It’s a Saturday in the middle of a nuclear
winter.
I say, "Sure."
She pours us both a bowl of Applejacks, then lies on the
couch for maximum comfort. I sit nearby in the La-Z-Boy. Though our
crunchy-sweet breakfast is loud in my ears, all I can hear is the silence
throbbing between us.
"Mom?"
"Some party last night, huh?"
"Yeah, it was. Thanks again."
"Some party," she says.
Our television station in Germany is the Armed Forces
Network. It’s the only English language station in Europe--reruns of
three-year-old stateside shows like Charlie’s
Angels, Three’s Company--but right now a commercial is on screen. A
soldier in battle fatigues steps forward with a shoulder harnessed
bazooka. The top of the screen displays urgent, macho graphics: The
Stinger. AFN is not ABC, so commercials are about military propaganda,
not capitalism. The soldier turns and, in the distance, the trailing
exhaust of a jet streaks across blue sky. The narrator growls, "The
Stinger: One soldier, one dead enemy fighter jet." On cue the grunt looks
through the scope and fires. In slow motion a missile jettisons from the
bazooka, corkscrews through the air, and blows off the jet’s left wing.
"Mom?"
"How’s your cereal?"
"I want to ask you something," I say.
"Well," she says, "that’s good, because I do too." She
sits up and puts her bowl on the glass coffee table. "I didn’t want to
bring this up on your birthday, but the police called. Some cars have been
broken into. They say it’s you and your friends. Is that true?"
I think of the dozen car stereos currently hiding under
my bed, the violent release I felt when yanking them from the dashboard,
coils, wires, forged metal giving way to raw emotion.
"That’s not what I want to talk about," I say.
"Well I do," she says.
"Mom ..."
"Be honest."
"Who slept over last night?"
Silence. My mom stares hard at the television. A new
commercial is now flashing on screen. FOD: Foreign Object Damage.
An Air Force colonel is standing near a runway, legs apart, arms crossed
at his chest. He points at the screen and says sternly, "Make sure you do
your part for military safety. Keep our tarmacs clean of trash, out of our
jet’s turbine engines. Make sure no FOD is allowed to cripple our
freedom."
"Merlina’s doing this to you, isn’t she?"
"Stop it," I say.
"I just knew she was a bad influence."
"Answer the question, mom."
"It was a friend. Just a friend. Happy now?"
"No. I’m not."
My mom leans forward. "Mister Morals all of a sudden? So
now you’re telling me how to live my life? I know what I’m doing." She
hesitates, as if debating internally, then says with a matter-of-fact
tone. "Hookano’s cheating on me."
She studies my expression. "You look shocked. I'm not.
The only thing I don't know is who he’s cheating with."
"Stop it. I can’t hear anymore."
"Well you asked for it. So now I cheat on him.
Tit-for-tat. It’s the way the world works."
I don’t know anything about the way the world works. Now
all I know for sure is this: delusions and dreams aren't just different,
they're opposites.
It’s the way the world works.
I can tell even mom questions those words. She shakes her head and turns
away. "You just don’t understand," she whispers, closes her eyes, looks
down. "I’m alone. Trying so hard. All alone."
I exhale, "Yeah, I do."
"Oh you do?" My mom lets out a half-hearted laugh.
"You’re so young, so naive. Just wait, you’ll see how tough it all gets.
Life is not one big skating party."
Finally, something that rings true. I look out our
window, now thawed enough to see through the frost, a hazy morning
struggling to clear. I don’t know this yet but just beyond, on the other
side of the Fulda Gap, events are unfolding, tectonic shifts that will
rust thousands of Red Army tanks, topple another delusion. This, in turn,
will break another, a so-called tradition, a military torch finally
extinguished in one family. And yes, something else is dying, something
black inside a young mind, delusions swept away and spit out, allowing
just enough room for fanciful visions, dreams of a different life.
I walk over to the couch and sit next to my mom. Even up
close she looks much younger than forty, like a little girl. She leans
forward, puts her face in her palms. "I want you to know," she says,
sniffling, her make-up smeared, "I’ve really only loved three men in my
life: you and your two older brothers."
I sit for a moment and let that sink in. There are so
many things I can say in response, almost all of them inappropriate.
Instead I jostle her shoulders and try to cheer her up with a joke. "Hey,"
I try, "maybe we three boys were given to you to offset your three
marriages?"
My mom laughs, shakes her head. She looks up, thinks
about it, then laughs again.
I can see our images reflected clearly in the glass
coffee table: a mother and son trying their best in difficult
circumstances, pretending what they’re both saying is true, though both
knowing she was really married four times, and really loved any man that
would love her back.
We’re both too tired to say anything further, neither
having slept much the night before.
I excuse myself, return to my room, lock the door. I lay
down on my bed and stare up. Again the dark contours of my ceiling draw me
in; again I project myself to a time much later than now, to a place just
beyond the edge of the map where once we were taught only tempests lurked.
There I am, can’t you see? Still adrift, watching a distant, future
episode where my beautiful wife and I lie half-asleep in a floating
procession of white, me lazily stroking her hair with one hand, the other
with a finger placed deftly against my lips, a whisper to our glowing,
impatient children tugging at our bedsheets, "Sssshhhh, one more minute,
your parents are dreaming."
Chris DeBolt lives in Los Angeles. He has short fiction
forthcoming in Sweet Fancy Moses and Carve Magazine, and is currently
working on a non-fiction book, his first. |