Anthology Complex (19 page)

After such a long time I start to get up and tell Lynne and her mother
that it's getting late and that I should probably get home, but before I can
really finish my sentence, the flashlight slips out of David's hands and hits
me right on the side of the head. Lynne rushes to me as if I had just been shot
and keeps asking me questions I can't really understand because the flashlight
hit me so hard. After a few seconds of clenching my facial muscles and rubbing
the side of my head, for some reason I begin to laugh.

As Lynne is looking at me confused, wondering if I'm okay, I put my hand
on her shoulder and tell her I'm all right. I continue to laugh and then she
smiles, and then the two little ones start to laugh. The only person who isn't
laughing or smiling is Emily, probably because she thinks Lynne doesn't have
the sense to tell her child to apologize to me, or maybe because David doesn't
have the sense himself. Maybe both.

Lynne asks me again if I'm okay, and then asks me if I would rather stay
instead and spend the night. She tells me that during a blackout, the more
people you have the faster the time goes by. Unable to say no I sit back on the
couch, and then Emily tells David to say sorry to me. David apologizes, and I
can tell he really feels bad. Either that or he is pretending to feel bad to
fool Emily.

We all sit down, the children included, and there is an awkward silence
that passes by until Lynne suggests that we play a game. She goes into the
kids' room and then comes out with some board game I had never seen before, but
it would be the new instrument that helped us kill time. Emily says she is too
tired to play anything and that she was going to go lay down in the bedroom, so
it's just Lynne and her two kids and I.

Throughout the game, while having a decent time with these people, I
continue to think about Silvio and how he might split them apart. How he might
do something to make every thing that is so right now so wrong later.

David and Sarah eventually fall asleep where they sit and only Lynne and
I are awake in the apartment. Maybe in the entire building. Maybe not, I think
Boris works a graveyard shift. Lynne gets up to go use the bathroom, and maybe
six or seven seconds later I get up to look out the window to see how full that
big white dot is. Before I can find the big white dot something else catches my
eye. Far into the distance, way down the road in the middle of the road an
entire tree has fallen from its roots. The entire tree has fallen across the
street, from sidewalk to sidewalk, but has miraculously missed all of the cars.
That's how it looks from here anyway. When Lynne gets out of the bathroom I
tell her to come look at it and she says it's nothing she's ever seen before,
that she wants to take a closer look.

Curiosity must be one of the oldest behaviors of humankind. Not too long
ago, where I was staying then, I had an entire wall full of diagrams of what
could possibly be beyond our universe. My curiosity for things surrounding the
human condition was so severe that I let it get the best of me. Maybe I have
changed, and maybe if I go back there again someday to the time where my mind
was eaten up by fiction, I could do better, but then again the behaviors and instincts
of people rarely change.

According to theories, things like fear, curiosity, self-preservation
and conflict have been around since before the beginning of man and have not
changed in the least. New people are born but the behaviors never die.

Lynne and I get into her car and she drives towards the fallen tree, the
streets are completely empty from pedestrians. I ask her why we are driving
such a short distance when we could have walked it, and she says because she
would like to drive around and see what else the short but powerful storm did.

When we get to the tree, it's even more bizarre than we expected. We get
out of the car and see how the root of the tree just completely exploded. I
start to wonder how many red blood cells this tree is going to stop from doing
their work.

After looking at the tree, we get back into the car and drive around for
a bit, and we come to realize there are fallen trees throughout the town, and
even more than that, many branches laying on the sidewalks. Some parts of the
town are so dark because the street lights have no power. If I didn't know any
better I would say this is beginning to feel like an adventure. Fallen trees,
dark streets.

Lynne turns on the radio and starts to flip through stations, and she
passes by one that catches my attention so I tell her to flip back to it, and
on a radio news station, three men are debating what the real solution to the
war on drugs in America is.

Soon after they begin to talk about how the violence in the city has
increased, and about how two cops were shot and killed earlier today because of
drugs and violence. This makes me wonder where Derek is, and what he's doing
right now.

Chapter 34:

PAGE 2 OF 8, "THE EIGHT DREAMS"

First year, May 4th, I had this dream. I'm sitting on a seat in a subway
car. The car is overpopulated, filled to the max capacity and then some. The
car makes a stop, the stop is named Main. Looking out the window of the car I
see more people who expect to find a seat in this car, but all that happens is even
more population is added to a place that is already overpopulated.

The next stop is Fifth, and even more people get on, and it feels like
the pressure is building, or something is going to explode. I decide to get off
at Center, which is the next stop after Fifth, and as the subway car is driving
away, I turn around and see an advertisement claiming everything that I have
said and done is both meaningless and purposeless, and the unexpectedness of
this event causes me to become lucid.

After I realize that I am dreaming, I begin to think of Roach and the
discussion we had, but I have a hard time remembering his face and the things
he said, most likely because I hadn't yet dreamed page one, but there are so
many factors to consider that I could be wrong.

I decide to search for this man, probably because subconsciously I have
no idea who he is and my mind wants to gain a better understanding of anything
it can't comprehend so that it may adapt and survive. The problem is the only
thing I know is his name.

I go to the edge of the platform on Center and overlook the tracks, and
in the distance I can see the next stop, State. I jump down and begin to walk,
and when I get to State I see many people waiting for the next set of cars.
Looking at these people, looking through them for Roach, literally,
metaphorically and philosophically, I start to think about how most of us live
our lives waiting for things.

Waiting for the right job, waiting for the right person, waiting for
that right moment in your life where everything you have had to go through in
your life all seems worth it now, but these things may never come. Those of us
who aren't waiting are searching, but of course we will never find what we are
looking for. Not usually, anyway. The jokes on us.

After a long time, I've checked Sixth, Park, Seventh and others but I
can't find him, and eventually I give up and go above ground to find a city
wrapped in bright lights and a mature night. To my right I see a bunch of kids
skateboarding, and to my left I see more people waiting for a bus to come. I
begin to walk towards the bus stop, and on my way when I'm almost there I feel
a hand on my left shoulder so I turn around and to my surprise it's Roach, who
tells me he has been looking for me for quite some time.

His clothes are torn, and he has a cup in his hand filled with coins. I
think to myself that this is the generic homeless person that I have come up
with in my mind. "It all matters. Maybe not in the grand scheme of things,
but all the little things you do when you're not waiting or searching, they
bring you closer to sharing a part of your soul with others." After he
says this to me, he walks towards the bus stop and sits next to a lady who is
not really paying attention to her purse.

When the time is right, he slips a piece of paper, a note, into her
purse, and then he walks away. As he is walking away, the bus comes and picks
up all of the waiters, and then it passes by me, and through those large
windows I can see the lady sitting down with her head against the side of the
bus. Maybe she is tired from a hard day's work. I can only wonder what she will
think when she gets Roach's note. Soon after, I wake up.

Lynne flips through the radio station after a few minutes because what's
being said on the radio news depresses her, and she ends up landing on a
classic rock station. I ask her if she likes this kind of music, and she says
it's her favorite kind. She asks me what I like, and I tell her I like the same
kind of stuff.

After some time I notice that we aren't going in the direction leading
back to the apartment building. For a while it's just me, her and whatever song
is playing on the radio. Everything outside of the car is so dark, however we
are in a part of town that still has most of its power on. This blackout
reminds me how when you have no light, time almost seems lost. It is almost
irrelevant likewise to how time in dreams is irrelevant.

Lynne drives into an apartment complex and then finally stops the car in
front of an apartment building and begins to stare at it. It feels like she is
getting prepared to tell me something, and she's figuring it all out in her
head.

I ask her if she knows somebody who lives here, but she says no. She
says that this is where she lived when most of her adult life happened. She
lived here when she lost her foot, when she had both Sarah and David, when she
met Silvio, when she planted her first flower, when her brother died. She says
she comes here every now and then to see if it's changed at all, or in an
attempt to visit the past. This makes me think of my parents' home.

She tells me she always comes here alone at night, but wanted to show
me. She says so much and it feels like she is sharing a part of her soul with
me, but I don't want any part of her soul. I don't want another Julia. After a
while she asks me if I like her, I say yes. How she will perceive that, I don't
know. She then asks me why then haven't I shown her that I do, she asks me if I
am with someone, I say no. Now she is giving me a hug, and doesn't give me a
chance to answer why I don't show it. I thank God.

As she is hugging me, she says it's okay. Then she starts to talk about
how I helped her move her television that one day. How she could tell we would
be good friends. All this time I'm thinking she's a little bit crazy. I'm also
thinking why she is doing this to a person who barely knows her. What makes
someone do something like this?

We drive back home and then part ways on the second floor of our
apartment building. I go to sit on my couch and I grab the television remote
and press the power button. The television won't turn on, so I press it again
but I get the same result. I press it three more times but the damn thing is
broken and it makes me so angry that I throw the remote at the wall and it
shatters.

I know that I'm not mad at the remote or the television, I know that I'm
mad at my life. Some kind of passive aggression that if I don't find a way to
cope with, will end up causing me to do something I will regret.

I know that I fear that the clock is ticking away until I finally make
my way around the entire circle and reach the dot again and completely lose my
mind. I know that I fear that they will give me those pills again that affect
my memory and cause me to forget my dreams. I know that I fear if I go back
there again a switch might turn on and I may not be able to turn it off.

I try to sleep, but I never really fall asleep. I wake up even more
tired than when I laid down my head. Later on in the day the delivery men
deliver my new shelf; they say they tried calling to let me know that they were
coming but they received no answer. I tell them the power went out in the
building yesterday. After they leave, I move the shelf from the living room to
the room that stores the notebooks, and I somehow end up getting a small
superficial cut on my right thumb. I wipe the minimal blood on my shirt and
begin to place the already categorized composition notebooks onto the shelf.