By Kia Guindon
Terry is in a mood. Eyes drippy with resolve. He looks like he’s one long glance away from trouble. “We’re gonna get out of this place,” he says, “Thelma and Louise style.” I want to tell him we are here voluntarily, that we can leave whenever we want.
“Don’t they die?”
He tells me he doesn’t have all the details sorted yet.
*
I’m in the garden watching the sky leak by. Terry is beside me, combing through the Times. He likes to read the headlines out loud. Something to do with feeling more attuned to the communal suffering of the world.
“Alphabetical or random,” he asks.
“Dealer’s choice.”
He begins, “Killer asteroids are hiding in plain sight—a new tool helps spot them. New Mexico wildfires map an early, record-breaking season. Liviah’s new liver: a family grapples with the girl’s puzzling hepatitis—a doctor prescribed an obesity drug, her insurer called it vanity.”
“What else?”
“There’s one about coral reefs. But I know anything to do with the ocean breaks your heart.”
*
It was my mother who insisted on my stay. Un petit rest, she called it. Chicken soup for the troubled soul.
“You must know what this looks like,” she said in the hospital.
I wagged a finger. “You are misaligned,” I said when what I meant was misinformed.
What happened was this. I was found floating tummy up, far out in the Pacific Ocean. Coast guard pulled up beside my limp, star-fished body and asked, “Miss, are you in need of saving?”
I couldn’t talk but flashed a thumbs up to indicate yes, that would be nice. As my consciousness turned spongy and edgeless, I brushed my tongue along my palate and was comforted by the taste of salt.
*
Terry ate oatmeal with water. That’s what I first noticed. That, and he took long, drawn out spoonfuls. Like he wanted to remember each oat.
“He sure likes to suck out the marrow,” one of the cafeteria ladies said.
I sat down close. His balmy breath was palpable. He kept eating, paying me no mind. We sat like that till his plate was cleared and it was time for group.
I was fed up after a week of smeary oats and silence.
“Good luck Hon,” cafeteria lady said to me.
I followed Terry to the common area. Tracked him through the TV room and rec center. When he settled in the garden I stood in front of him, arms crossed.
“What are you here for?” I said.
“Did you know almost everything on earth, including you and me, was formed from the heart of a star.”
“I thought we consisted mostly of water,” I said.
“That’s what they want you to think.”
“Who’s they?”
“You know.”
“I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”
The sun thrummed down. Terry picked at his skin. I stood staring, resolute.
“What’re you here for?” I repeated.
“DNA, honey,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
*
Truth be told, I wasn’t trying to do what they thought. Problem is my story sounds fake. Even to me. When I think back to that day my brain feels like a vat of air. I remember the ride to the beach. Talking Heads on the radio. Stale stench of summer. Pulling from a bottle of clear liquor. Then the tape zips forward to the bit where I’m saved. Sure, I felt some misery. But it was my baseline. Nothing that would tip the scales.
*
The Chosen Ones join group today. “One, two, God is coming,” they sing, “Fighting for us, pushing back the darkness.”
We are sitting in a circle on plastic chairs. Most of us are wearing what we came in with, minus any shoelaces, necklaces, drawstrings, belts. Terry is beside me, rambling on about time.
“Funny thing is,” he says, “no one knows why we only experience it in one direction.”
A nurse paces, clipboard to her hip. The chalkboard reads: Falling is not collapsing, falling is extending. “Know the signs,” she says, and we all nod along.
“Three dimensions for space,” Terry says, “And only one for time.”
*
This month makes three. Terry and I have a motto now: Maybe they’re born with it; maybe it’s clinical. Talking is prohibited after lights out so we sneak into the TV room with flashlights and blink morse code to each other. We are still learning so most of our words are simple: throat, wave, white.
No one knows Terry’s exact age. But gossip is stock here. Some say he burnt his birth certificate a long time ago on account of the government tracking him. I asked him about it once, but he just said space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.
Others tell tales of Terry selling fake never-before-seen pictures of Elvis. Or harvesting kidneys for the black market. One story lands him in Italy, married briefly to a countess. Whatever the truth, I can tell from his large pores and yellowed fingers that he’s experienced in life. More so than I am anyways.
*
Mother calls. Her voice sounds springy.
“So,” she says, “what’s the cup at today, baby?”
“Quarter empty,” I say.
“Don’t be like that.”
She tells me about Walmart Guy. He has a bump nose and large skull. They go to dive bars and peel off labels of Michelob and play rock paper scissors. Loser eats the label. They are to be married. City hall style. Very little shebang. Next to no rah-rah. It isn’t appropriate to celebrate with extravagance, she says, for a woman of her age.
“And you?” she asks.
I remind her that my environment is not exactly ripe for love.
“Not a single prospect?”
I tell her I have Terry and that he’s like a husband in that we don’t have sex and sling our irritabilities at one another to relieve the pressure in our hearts.
“Oh yes,” she says, “I understand.”
*
We are guests. But that feels like the wrong word. We were not invited nor do we wish to stay. What got us here was a need for a blip of rest. Nothing permanent. Most of us here are happiest when life is like a film. We have an affinity for illusions.
*
Chef makes a thousand eggs a week. Divided by seven, that’s one hundred and forty-two eggs a day. Numbers help. No ambiguity.
“Incoming news,” Terry says between forkfuls of wet yolk.
“Sock it to me.”
“At a dangerous 125 mph, the well-known Britney Spears eludes the police,” he says, his voice all Southern lilt. If I close my eyes, he could be Harry Connick Jr. or maybe Dennis Quaid.
I pencil a three into a Sudoku row. Terry is naming billboard hits from 1959 alphabetically.
“I don’t know why you bother with that crap,” he says.
“Think good, look good,” I say.
He blinks ‘okay’ then ‘yeah right’ at me.
I don’t tell him about my tricks. Memorizing sonnets. Sudoku. Omega 3s. I don’t tell him the average brain’s weight and volume shrinks about 5% per decade after 40 and that I’m halfway there and my odds don’t look great. I don’t tell him about losing the word vacuum. “What’s the name of that machine?” I asked one of the others, “That sucky device that gets all of the dust.” Other things too. Important things. Like the brand of my mother’s perfume. Or the name of my hymen-taker.
What stays, stays. Survival of the fittest. That’s Darwin. What else do I remember? Not much. Was it me or Dostoevsky that said it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time? Terry says memories exist outside of time and space, but I think only the strongest memories endure. No one tells you though if it’s the right things you’re remembering.
*
“I thought of something,” Terry says. “We have to try to imbue our lives with ambition.”
“Do or do not,” I say, “there is a lot of try.”
“Listen, listen, listen,” he says, “ambition gets a bad rap, but channel it correctly and boom.”
“Boom what?”
“Boom, life.”
*
Terry had no moral compass. That was his problem. This was when he lived at the Western tip of the I-90. Tough is what he calls that time. At night he’d tread out into the dark on sodden patches of grass and fix his eyes on the dimmest part of the sky. He wanted to return to dust. Unburdened by time. Be up there, just another star.
That’s all in the past though. Acceptance is his mantra now.
*
“I’m not myself,” I tell Terry before group.
“Who here is?” he says.
Group is a time where the past gets a good going-over. The Chosen One’s have access to the past. Bonafide memory savants, the lot of them. They remember every infraction of morality, small or large.
Terry too. He can rattle off names and dates of birth from his high school rock band.
I want to know if it’s wrong to only recall the shape of a day. Light flaying the sky. Muted pinks and purples out a window. When I watch films I’m left with feelings. No facts. I do not know if the lady was in red or blue or white or green. But I can remember her forlorn face in a mirror. The way she twirls a spoon in a cup of coffee. Even my mother. I have been here long enough to not know if she stands at 5’4 or 5’6. Or if her eyes are flecked with yellow. But I have tucked away moments of her mouth laughing. That I do have.
*
I come clean.
“You just ended up out there?” Terry says.
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t know why?”
“No.”
“There’s gotta be something.” He makes a list. Probable causes. He wants to get to the source.
“Parents?” he says.
“Alive.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Negative.”
“Friends?”
I move my head from side to side. “A few.”
“Hard drugs?”
“Too young.”
He blinks ‘shit’ at me. “Maybe that’s your problem—no fun.”
*
Terry has a plan. We’re going to the beach. Exposure therapy. To confront the scene of the crime.
“Better than any of the cockamamie you’ll get in here,” he says.
The Chosen Ones remind us to be wary of the impurities of the outside world. There is filth everywhere. Terry tells them he’s beyond corruptibility. He was born with sin in his blood.
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” my mother says.
“Better than any of the cockamamie in here.”
“I trust your judgement.”
“I don’t,” I say. “That’s what got me here in the first place.”
*
We arrive midday. It’s still there in all its aqua wonder. Unchanged. We stand gazing out. Undulating waves of blue and green. Miles and miles of water.
“Anything?” Terry says.
I tell him I feel like a croissant. Flakey, layered, a little wet. We are encouraged to use metaphorical language to describe our feelings. Looking at things head on, we are told, can be overwhelming.
“Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf,” he says.
“Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf,” I mimic, an octave higher.
“What I’m getting at, kid, is maybe you’re just sad. And it is not like anything else.”
So I tell him. From the top. The parts I remember. My mother and her men. And then the town. Its people. Sagging faces. About all the ordinary ways life stacks up.
*
I was there all of six months. We didn’t escape. But we didn’t die either.
On my last day Terry blinked the word moist at me.
I thought, I’ll never see him again.
I thought, there’s two ways to deal with the cards you get dealt. Mete life out into measurable acts of compliance. Or use whatever you must to escape the oblong shaped, far away threat that is as real to you as your ten fingers and toes. Be it God or the space-time continuum. To the former, the latter are deranged, wrong, mad.
Pick a word.
Kia Guindon is a Canadian writer based in New York.@km_guindonn