Leaving the Comfort Cafe (26 page)

He leans down for what you think is a peck on the cheek, and the next thing you knows he’s kissing you full on the lips and suddenly you’re back in the middle of your tenth grade fantasy—the crush has noticed you.

Of course, as soon has he does, he ruins it. Because he’s your professor, boss, shrink or substitute.

That’s the ultimate cure. You realize you can’t ever win.

And he can’t either.

TEN THOUSAND NEW YEAR’S EVES

BY

Dawn DeAnna Wilson

Copyright 2011 Carraway Bay Press

First digital edition

All rights reserved.

“Humankind has not woven the web of life.

We are but one thread within it.

What we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

All things are bound together.

All things connect.”

—Chief Seattle, 1855

Part One

December 31

9 a.m. to noon

Mallory

Raleigh, North Carolina

Target Parking Lot

His passport is cool and smooth in my hands, and I send my fingers dancing along the traces of his chin, his cheek, the base of his ear. I rub my thumb along the serpentine swirls of his black hair, drawing back nothing but a calm emptiness without the resistance from his coarse curls. In the photo, I can barely see the small scar on the right side of his lip where, as a child, he was on the wrong end of a grouchy neighborhood cat; it is faint and there is no way it could be seen without knowing it is there beforehand. From there, my thumb moves to my favorite part of the passport, the multicolored letters that dance and swoon in the morning light, intensified by the sunbeams which stream through my windshield. I like the way his name looks. I always have. I told him this the first time we met, but he laughed at me.

“Synesthetes think everything is beautiful,” he told me and scribbled something in his notebook. “The one before you loved eggs just because the way the purple g and the bright yellow e melded together.”

But for me, g is not purple, and my e is more of a soft lilac, so gentle and flowery I can almost smell it. When I told David, he wrote furiously in his notebook. I don’t know why the department doesn’t get him a laptop or one of those iPads. He likes that my e and g are different from the last person he interviewed. At least, he likes it because it lends variety to his research project.

Even his passport number is beautiful. Zero is the only number that is black. Always. Nothingness. Oblivion. My 1 is always red, and David has three of them in his passport number. Blood red. It stands out like a blinking spotlight or fire truck, providing perfect contrast to the zero. All 2s are yellow, a beaming, warm, lemon yellow, so powerful and crisp I can actually taste its sour and bitter brightness on my lips. If his passport number could be improved at all, I would say it needs a few more 3s, which are the same shade of blue as the British Union Jack. My 4 is green, 5 is brown and 6 is purple…but 7, my 7 is interesting.

My 7 is what got David to notice me. My 7 changes colors depending upon what I’m feeling, like my own neurological mood ring. It ranges from the zero black to burgundy to chartreuse to this strange, sickly shade of gray that is the same color as a bruise when it is trying to heal. My 8 is just a softer version of the 7—the same hue, but kind of fuzzy around the edges, and about a half shade lighter. The 7 got me on the radar of the university. On the schedule of Dr. David Yates. He’s even going to try to get them to up my mileage reimbursement because of all the stuff going on in the world that’s screwing with the oil prices. But I don’t mind the drive. Twenty minutes is just the right amount of time to let me gear down from a day of chasing down spreadsheets for Williams and Williams, CPA.

I’m keeping his passport safe for him. He left it on his kitchen counter a couple of mornings ago, right beside the stove. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I wanted to surprise him with breakfast—eggs over easy, free-range farmer’s market eggs from happy chickens, which I swear taste better than anything I buy at the “regular” grocery store. The passport was beside the back right burner on his stove. Who leaves a passport right out in the kitchen like that? It could get overheated and melt and burn up. He’s supposed to keep it in a safe or something, I mean, really—David may be brilliant and all, but he’s a disorganized mess, and the passport would disappear beneath the junk mail Mount Everest on his coffee table if he allowed it, so it only made sense for me to slide it into my purse until I could help him find a safer place to keep it.

I was going to bring it to our next session—the week of Christmas—but he wasn’t in his office.

“You should have known he wouldn’t be in the week of Christmas,” Rochelle told me. “No one’s in the office the week of Christmas.”

“He’s Jewish.”

“Well, the Jews go to Christmas parties, too,” she said. “Some of the hardest partying people I know are Jews.”

Rochelle doesn’t like him. She says Dr. Yates will just write a textbook about my unusual 7 that will be used in universities across the country, and he’ll be nominated for one of those genius grants and fame and fortune without me getting a dollar of it.

Sometimes I’m drawn to the way a name looks the same way some people are drawn to a voice or hairstyle or eye color, which of course, is the whole point of David’s study.

Y = A rich cross between burgundy and russet.

A = A deep purple, the same shade I imagine the biblical Lydia using for the robes and capes she sold to the Romans.

T = A maize yellow—like the crayon that used to come in the Crayola 64-pack.

E = Lilac. My favorite flower.

S = Goldenrod.

Yates. The name reminds me of the poet. David’s name looks like a lilac—flowery, fragrant, and dense like the hundreds of scattered wildflowers blooming deep in a valley. That’s what prompted me to answer the ad in the paper—not the promise of compensation for furthering the advances of science—but the beautiful, flowing colors of his name that seemed to spill off the page and into my lap.

So every Tuesday and Thursday for the last three months, I worked through my lunch hour so I could get off early and beat the rush hour traffic to the obscure office beside the East Campus of Duke University. It’s been interesting. I’ve completed forms, watched black-and-white silent films (I see the subtitles in color, even though the movie is black and white), and basically done the whole rat in the maze thing. Push the lever for cheese. Dodge traffic on the beltline outside of Raleigh to get there on time. Every Tuesday and Thursday…slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

He thinks I’m the most fascinating person in the world. Especially since I don’t see orange. I mean, I see orange. I know the color, I understand what it looks like, but it doesn’t have an association with a name or a letter or number. That surprised Dr. Yates. But everything about me surprises him. He’s surprised that some letters give off a faint taste in my mouth—not a strong one, mind you—just a little hint of flavor, like the remnants of a Tic Tac.

I was surprised when I first learned most people don’t see numbers and letters in color, that the newspaper is just a binary code of black, white and maybe some gray. (Which I guess is why I never got the old joke, what’s black and white and “red” all over?) My newspapers are colorful. Not just photos and graphs and headlines, but every letter meshed together to give the story its own personality and song. I can tell the tone of the story just by looking at the colors.

“I wish I could see what you see,” Dr. Yates told me after our last session. “So dynamic. Such a gift.”

When he gets excited about something he runs his fingers through his mop of curly black hair, causing part of it frizz and stand up in back. It makes him look like a younger and better-looking version of Einstein. Dr. Yates has just gotten his PhD, and he’s coming out of the academic starting gate full force like a Kentucky thoroughbred, optimistic and on fire to change the world. He doesn’t weave in shark-like circles around the psychology department like some of those cynical university research fossils who just want to publish, publish and publish so they can get tenure. David—he lets me call him David, though I don’t think it looks as pretty as Yates—wants to break new ground, learn about the mysteries of the world around him. Every time I speak with him, his deep brown eyes light up with a wondrous spark, as if he were a kid at Disneyworld. The jaded world of academia hasn’t reached his psyche yet.

I flip through the passport to once again see all the places he’s been—once to the Bahamas, once to Canada and five stamps for London. It’s 10 a.m. and Rochelle was supposed to meet me here an hour ago. I wish I had brought a book to read. She said for me to meet her in the Target parking lot for my birthday present. I was born December 29th, so whenever someone makes the extra effort to get me a little something extra after all the frenzied Christmas shopping, it’s kind of special. That’s why I put up with her. I put up with a lot from her. She even meets me in the parking lot instead of inside. I have a hard time with retail stores. Too colorful for me.

When I first told Rochelle Target was too colorful for me, she thought I was being metaphorical. Artsy. She said I’d been spending too much time in the community college poetry classes. I had to actually explain that it was literally too colorful, a complete smorgasbord of sensory overload, and that I’m not able to go into any big box store without having at least two panic attacks.

There isn’t enough Xanax in the world to get me through the Super Walmart.

I do a lot of my shopping online. That way, the colors are confined to my 15-inch screen; they aren’t jumping and diving and leaping at my face with promises of discounts, buy one get one free and last-chance clearance.

Rochelle doesn’t understand. Most people don’t. They don’t realize that I can’t partition my senses like office cubicles—senses are supposed to flow over and around and through a human being, like the yellow-lime that hovers about sixty centimeters from my right shoulder whenever I hear the letter s.

That’s my life with synesthesia. From the Greek: syn = together. Aesthesia = sensation. The senses cannot be compartmentalized. They flow around and above and between, like waves of water, like the mist of rain drizzling on a car windshield, like the syrupy sweet sent of honeysuckle that is smelled long before flowers actually come into view.

She just doesn’t get me. I’m still not convinced she believes my rainbow vocabulary is real, like she thinks I’m making it up to get attention. She hardly has room to point fingers: Rochelle with her ratty black tank tops and abused leather jackets. There are some styles that you should never try once you pass the blue-brown hue of 35, but that’s never stopped Rochelle, and I hate that she looks good with spiky, mussed hair that’s been dyed too black, that jet, ultra dark, Revlon triple X or whatever they call it. It’s too black for her complexion. It’s the kind of shade that only looks good on Asians, blacks or white girls who have perfect, porcelain skin, and Rochelle doesn’t have perfect, porcelain skin. Last time I tried to wear my hair like that, I looked like a Poodle with a bad case of mange.

I met her at church, believe it or not, during a blessing of the animals ceremony. Rochelle isn’t particularly religious, she just volunteers with the Humane Society, and she thought it would be nice to have some of these forgotten shelter dogs blessed. She actually showed up in the parking lot of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church with 15 dogs—all on a leashes, of course—but the leashes were so long and unwieldy that the dogs might as well have been roaming free. Then these dogs saw the other dogs that had been brought to be blessed…along with all the other cats and birds, hamsters and critters and varmints gathered in the front yard of the parish for a blessing delivered via the rector from our Holy Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Everything erupted in one big wave of barking, pawing, jumping, butt-sniffing glory. I was there taking pictures for the parish newsletter. I like animals, but I don’t have pets. My apartment complex asks an additional fifty dollars pet rent a month in addition to the two hundred dollar pet deposit.

I have no idea what Rochelle has gotten me for my birthday or why she has to give it to me in the Target parking lot. I just hope to God she hasn’t picked up one of those huge rescue greyhounds to cram into my one-bedroom apartment. She’s really gotten into this animal rehabilitation since she had the hots for some K-9 cop wannabe from up North. Now she’s obsessed with saving animals that were injured or psychologically forced into early retirement and pairing them with rescue workers who were also injured or psychologically forced into retirement. I guess she likes to fancy herself as a Saint Francis in a leather jacket.

It’s a mild December, but the wind is cold, and I’m not getting out of the car until I see her. Finally, I glimpse her gazelle-like form dashing through the automatic doors, puffing on a cigarette, trying to work in as much nicotine as she can before New Year’s resolutions kick in tomorrow. She sucks in the smoke as if life depends upon it. Her breasts heave out slightly as if they’re looking around the corner to see who may be around, and then, finding no one of any consequence, slowly, assertively, return to their original position. I get out of the car and wave her over to me.

We hug a brief greeting, and she shoves a Target bag into my arms.

“Happy Birthday. Sorry it’s late.”

It’s a 36-pack of Dramamine.

“Um…thanks.”

“It’s not the Dramamine, you dork. It’s a trip. We’ve got a flight to catch. We’re ringing in the New Year right. Times Square. Flight leaves at noon. We got to get hoppin’, and I didn’t want you upchucking all the way to Manhattan.”

“Wait—I can’t go to New York tonight.”

“Why not? What have you got on that glorious social calendar of yours?”

“Dr. Yates wanted—”

“And here we go.”

“What?”

Roach—she likes for me to call her Roach, so I do it sometimes, even though I think it sounds ridiculous—Roach sticks another cigarette into the corner of her mouth and flicks her lighter three times before she gets the flame. Zzst, zzst, pop, spark. Zzst, zzst, pop, spark. I know she can get it on the first try, but I think she does it three times just to annoy me. Her calloused thumb with chipping black nail polish laughs at me as it rolls over the flint. Zzst, zzst, pop, flame. Let there be light. And there is light. Roach scratches the left side of her nose, which used to be where she had a small diamond stud, until it got infected and I had to drive her to urgent care to get it removed. She had waited until it was all nasty and swollen, and I was afraid they were going to have to amputate her nose or whatever they do when your nose turns gangrene. Now it’s just a small red spot, still something to scratch at, but just a small, red reminder of the day she went to a seedy piercing parlor to impress her stupid, wannabe cop crush.