x. stories within stories

I struggle to find the voice I've forgotten. Writing again is hard, make no mistake. Years have passed since I've started this project. I am not the man I should be. I think of the solid purposeful paths I might have taken and realize that inaction has become my matter of fact mode of being. I am stasis, the ghost I was always afraid of becoming. I am the living dead, unnoticed; the hazy shimmer of motion out of the corner of an eye, the person once known but not worth remembering. I work two jobs and struggle to finish a four year degree. I stopped going to the state university I started eight years ago, but attend a closer magnet building that looks like a temp office, all so that I can live in the same room and board free house as my dying grandmother. Cancer, what killed my father three some odd years ago, that same old story.

I expand on the working situation: Two jobs, I said. The first graveyard shift at a copy shop. When I say it out loud to people it sounds like coffee shop, they're always confused by my saying that. I seldom correct the mistake, leading them along like I'm someone I'm not, because that's what passes for entertainment these days. Ten hours a day, four days a week, with an hour lunch here and there like poor punctuation. I finish up projects the day crew was too busy or lazy to get around to doing. I let myself fall sleep on the job sometimes, when the hours really get to me and there isn't much else to occupy my mind. The place is full of odd fascinations. What people leave behind becomes mine, estranged photographs and badly written letters they go through the trouble of replicating, always seeming to forget. This place is like that, a small ugly copy shop started by an old Korean War vet who just wanted to get away from his nag of a wife. It used to be an office supply store, the big ticket item back in the day was the mechanical pencil. Boxes of unsold merchandise fill a back room which I hide in to read on breaks. The walls are greenish black in places, the lighting what you'd expect when every third long florescent bulb gasps as the end nears.

From there, I open up a local diner as the grill chef. The food is good because I am a good cook. There are regulars who thank the wait staff but never me. I say it's good food, but it's not good for you. I work the fryer as much as I do the grill. Breakfast and lunch food, grease and starch mostly. Some green thrown in for garnish. For each job, I make the state minimum wage of 6.50 an hour, just enough to get by, the total sum of that well below the national poverty line. At least I have the luxury of living rent free without much hassle. The hours I keep make it hard to be there for Grandma. I don't want to talk about her because her dying is really none of your business just yet.

I go to classes in the afternoon, trying to get a few hours of sleep in between until starting all over again. It is not much of an existence. I used to be too tired to think, but now I'm aware of a certain dullness that has crept into my conscious thought, a filter that prevents me from responding to some of the most basic questions people ask me. They think I'm deaf or ignoring them, both of which seem like valid interpretations depending on the situation. I've almost stopped talking to people entirely. The effort to open my mouth and create facial gestures is almost too much these days. Slack like a net, aching for the big catch that pulls me taut.

I used to think a woman would be the thing. I am still a young man, but so much of the desperate yearning long ago used up on names that sting each time I hear them used in public. A fault of mine, falling for a pretty face that displays but an ounce of compassion. Initial sparks are what blind me to the ordinariness of their eventual becoming. I am in love with the idea of a muse, not a real flesh and blood woman. I fetishize electricity in their eyes and live to fall and fall all over again. I know this now, like I've probably always known it, the same mistake I keep repeating. I don't learn, I am a basic creature of bad habit. It keeps me from becoming a man, a grown up, making an honest connection.

Not that I can offer a woman anything beyond my present state of inadequacy. I have no free time, no shiny toys to share, my stories lack warmth, and my sense of humor is pitch black these days, my attention, my eyes, elsewhere. I was never an ugly person to look at. From what others have told me, and I believe truthfully, I am attractive in a big, loving life kind of way. But getting past my stone cold solemn face, my brooding caveman stoop, that can be difficult. I used to love to talk, to carry on about most everything. Now, I've become rigid in my train of thought, either one of two extremes. Trivial entertainments, movies, books, etc. Or intensely personal lines of inquiry. It is a balancing act I may have once been able to pull off, or was once not so forceful in demanding, but now, only the closest of my friends put up with. To strangers and not so near acquaintances, I'm an enigma, and not worth the trouble.

I want you to see me as a ghost, because that's what I feel like. I straddle the line of most every twenty something. I have no great success in life. Life consisting of mostly missed potential, I kept on mostly out of familial obligation. I could have dropped out of life entirely too easy. The easy not being lost on me. Only recently have I gotten the urge to continue, to make something of myself. A competitive spirit, rekindled and aching just to compare and be compared to. I need to know my place again, because I think there is someone else out there living my life.

This is an assignment I make myself complete. I tell you about the moment I almost killed myself because it surprised me a great deal, and I very much did not expect it. I was having a very bad night. At a friend's house I ran into a woman I almost had a thing with. We'd gotten to the point where something damn well should have happened, but didn't. Words that built up and never crashed down on us. Nights spent aching and longing and holding back and afar, the gap never distanced so much as shouted across. We were a bad match, but that's besides the point, because in our moments, there should have been something.

We saw each other across the foyer of the entryway as she entered. A horrible look, unexpected and not at all distant. There was an immediacy in the air, a clashing of eyes and unsaid hellos. Aware of all the unsaid hellos that might have filled the space between us. We settled into a routine of at once calmly listening but never speaking directly to the person, a three second delay of translation going on in the earpiece, calculating and precise. I wanted to find the nerve to leave, then, there, knowing how the resulting evening would go. I stayed and made it so. I predict the future once again. We kept finding distractions and reasons to define individual space away from each other, the resulting collisions revulsions of a mental sense. Edging around each other physically, eye contact never quite established, the sound of the other's voice like an echo, having to repeatedly ask the same question because the words just don't sound close to meaning anything at all.

Simply put, an evening strung together with little pockets of emotional void. The whole mess leaving me feeling empty and broken. As soon as my hands grabbed onto the steering wheel, I was sobbing. Sobbing for minutes before any tears came. My whole chest on fire, hurting. The details of the rain soaked evening, always raining it feels like. The rain occluding and distorting the windshield like tears spread thin over corneas. It was driving home, I felt it. Not just a sudden urge to kill myself, but a growing compulsion that I knew would kill me. I wanted nothing more than to pick up the speed and drive off a cliff. Up until that moment, I could say with honesty that I've never before had a suicidal thought. I never once could justify ending my own life to myself. I'd thought of suicidal people as unknowable, for I could never sympathize. Life was precious, was it not, wasn't I taught this. It was like a simple biological trigger snapped inside and here I was moments from ending myself. There was no reason beside the present unhappiness. There wasn't any thought given, so much more an instinctive biological command, an order I had to follow.

I got home and locked myself inside. Felt the social wine buzz of the early part of the evening wearing off. Found a liter of vodka I diluted pitifully and began drinking. That familiar medical taste, and I knew I'd be too fucked up to brush my teeth before bed. The last sensible thought of the night.

The next day I came across a story in the wastebasket of the copy shop, the stapled copy page of

d.dean

who had written this,


Open 24 hours says the sign to which the door agrees. Walk in and look around before finding a stall to hunker into. Notice the vending machines for cigarettes, local periodicals and tide tables stacked on the floor next to the door, the pages hard bricked together under considerable weight and ever present condensation. The ladies who work here look like retired prostitutes, lingering just out of sight until necessary, knocking their hips back and forth as they approach, insincere caution hard etched around their eyes. Even the regulars don't look them in the face, this place. Named the Apple Peddler, right off the main drag through town, next door to the Greyhound Station. Misery walks in and exhales, that breath lingers. The feeling that nobody wants to be here but there's no where else to go, this is it. The menu is one page laminate, six main dishes. Meat loaf, chicken fried steak, fish and chips, fried chicken, cheeseburger, and club sandwich. They peddle in apple pie, hence the name. Pie and coffee, people drink whole pots here, often multiple. They have that look, pained past the point of confusion, eyes shaking, the thin glisten of surface moisture catching the light and holding it, blinking erratic. Go in and order a cup, it comes out smelling like ozone, too hot to intake.

There is a point in coming here, besides getting out of the rain. Here to see someone, talk over coffee. A neutral ground, away from places that stink of the past. His name Bernard, nickname Saint. He was a boyfriend, then something else, a fascinating person with scary friends. Why she agreed to see him, let him explain.

“You want to be her mother again, you say. Well, you don't come out and say, but that's the only thing this could be about. You taking off like that, seemed awful sudden. Had to get away, had to get help, thoughts going through you perhaps. Heard all about the women's center, you and that lady running it, taking up together, she real nice to you, I imagine. Older I hear, but treats you good. So I'm happy for you, bet you didn't think I was capable, but I am, and I understand now how I did you bad. You weren't so well, last I saw you. Now I see color, honest to goodness life in those eyes. For that I'm glad.”

There is a pause while he gets himself a fresh cigarette. She looks at him. A young man in a body that never fit proper. He sags with twenty extra pounds, facial hair grows in erratic patches. His bottom lip is split with a white scar.

“But you ain't getting her, because she's gone, off to live with relations, better for all of us, which, if you'd think about this rationally for a minute, is the truth. We can play all day at being parents, or not, in your case. We had the chance and we failed pretty awful bad. She was born into a world that ain't hers. And as such her world ain't ours. You knew that I knew she wasn't my flesh and blood. It's obvious that she turned out how she did for a reason, and that reason ain't me.”

Bernard knows she's scared of him so he slumps in his seat, stops flaring his nostrils, deflates his chest, taps his cigarette until the inner fire dies down and smoke dangles.

“I want to know who she came from. I remember we were experimenting with all sorts of messed up no good shit back then, but if you have any idea, tell me now. For her sake, baby. She's getting to that age, and to be honest, I'm getting a little scared.”

She was seventeen when she got pregnant, he was twenty-one. They met for the first time at a party when she was thirteen. He sold her drugs which she sometimes paid for with sex. That first time, her fifteen year old cousin paid for them both. The Saint could get her anything and lived in a world that confused her as much as she enjoyed it all. He traded in favors, lived in houses that weren't his own, drifting casually, often disappearing from Small Wood for months at a time. He existed as much in rumors as he did in the flesh. He was no good, the tone used in over-heard conversations that were about him made it clear that he was not a person anyone wanted to be seen with outside of a party house, a camp bonfire, or a Friday night parking lot beer gathering. He lived out of his truck when he couldn't live off anyone else, arrived in town already a high school dropout at age sixteen from who knows where. Authorities knew of him, hassled him just enough to lend an aura of respect more than he deserved, but never busted him for anything requiring more than a weekend in jail.

He would work at the docks if he needed a steady paycheck, or do handy-man jobs at a local retirement community. Like most young men of Small Wood, he couldn't stay at one thing for very long. There was a rumor going round the high school that he had a twin brother, drowned at an early age while they were both playing on the beach. Whether or not the Saint made this rumor up, the public perception was this. The Saint was sometimes heard speaking to himself, or not to himself rather, but responding to voices no one else could hear. He said that the voices would let him know if a party was about to get busted, or if trouble in the form of an angry ex-boyfriend was on his way over. The Saint had a funny look about him, there was no denying that.

“I mean, I have an idea who the daddy is, I just want to hear you say. Because I need to hear you say.”

Back when he was sneaking over, spending the night, she asked him why he came to Small Wood, he told her that it was because there was someone here he had to meet. Asked if he ever got around to meeting him, he told her, sure. He was the only one, coming over in the dead of night, in through the window, out by daylight.

“So, it must have been him, if you thought it was me, that's what you're saying.”

He could be two people, she knew that from the beginning. The guy sitting before her was a down on his luck loser who got older and was falling apart at the edges. The one she fell in love with was the ageless ghost who crept into her, the one she would never know, whose uncut smile could cut like glass.

“I see him sometimes, you know. Out for a stroll on the beach, on the far end of a grocery store aisle, we catch glimpses of each other. He lives as close as possible to me, I'm always bumping into the same people a minute after he's gone, striking up random conversations on the street with absolute strangers who know more about me than I do, leaving me to sort through the mess he's made of my life. I don't know which of us is the ghost no more. Even if he's not really here, he's done more in this town than I ever will. I mean, he's a goddamn father. Her first word, you remember her first word.”

The baby girl was always looking out windows, never saying a word. They thought her mentally retarded because she seldom ever spoke. She was so frail, stayed away from other children, would only ever go outside if it was raining, but loved the beach, oh did she ever. She was like a seashell, sometimes you had to put an ear to her to know she still sounded.

There were good times that did not last because when she looked down she saw not her child but a monster. She left, not for her own safety, but for her daughter's. She dreamt regularly of drowning her baby, her beautiful baby. A gnawing quiet thought that ate its way through to the surface. She looked into those too large eyes and saw only death. Bernard would never grow up, never see past his failings. He would never understand, never recognize, never make the effort. They were haunted, plain and simple.

“So you didn't come here for her, what did you come here for.”

Bernard paid his tab at the register and waved as he walked out, not noticing as his brother walked in, just a second too late. Her hand quickly went back up, waving him over.



I find no comfort in these words, which is why I keep at them. Night after night, bleeding into morning. Exercises I put myself through, and for what. I get no closer to the truth and fall ever closer to the bleeding edge of it all. Because these are wounds I travel over, my map my goddamn heart, my compass tilting to madness.

I want to know these ghosts, the spirits of failure that live right here in Small Wood. There are two thousand citizens, legacies of last names and land rights. Feuds continued, strife created and played out daily. Since I am here, I have no choice but to look closer. I only know a few dozen friends, neighbors, coworkers, somewhat strangers by name. I'm still an outsider, even more than I ever was. Most of the youth, the culture that I knew, has spread thin across the country, and never come back. I was perhaps the least likely to ever return, and here I am now. Trapped because I'm afraid, and losing family matters, and I've nothing to show for the years in between. I can tell that story now.