Please Don't Go (14 page)

Rattup:
My boy, you have not a sliver of an idea.

Madness. Zephyr furrowed his brow. The man had no faith in his own will power.

Zephyr:
There are ways. She has her ways, and so will we.

Rattup:
You can try, that’s for certain, but I can only assure you that it will mean a great deal of pain for me. My heart cannot take much more of this, Zephyr. I’m an old bag of bones, and the pain she delivers is amplified by that age, excruciating to the point that I pray she’ll take my life away from me. I’ve been fighting this succubus for most of my life, and what would I do if I escaped, anyway? Sit in coffee shops while people stare at a sorry sack of geezer? Read magazines about celebrities who I am not acquainted with? Drink fancy vodka at the bar? To be honest with you, it all sounds pretty boring to me. I am happy where I am. Some days she even leaves me off her crooked agenda. If I keep her contented, her wrath is almost nonexistent. Like I said, she has her ways. You know not what you suggest, and you would laugh like a fool if you could see into the future of what may be by trying to take me from this place. The implications are devastating for a man of my age, in the physical sense but also in the emotional one. My heart can break multiple times you must remember, as all of ours can, over and over. I can’t take another one. It’s a wrenching affair... collecting yourself and starting over. It’s easier this way. Her and I are connected, forevermore. And that is that.

Zephyr:
Did you know her? Who is she? You’ve said you’re connected. In a cosmic way, you said.

Rattup:
Perhaps. I can’t be sure. I have suspicions, but she will not speak to me on the subject. Were I to broach her identity, I would soon find myself strapped to the kitchen table. Or shoved down the basement stairs. Or locked in my bathroom drinking toilet water for days on end. It’s happened before. She would eviscerate me in every conceivable way, I have no doubt. So I tread with soft shoes around her and I don’t get personal with her.

Zephyr:
But you have
y
our suspicions...

Rattup:
Do I????????
(Rattup drew a small smiley face, though it did not seem fitting to the subject matter)

Zephyr:
Who is she?

Rattup:
I’d like that you develop your own theories. But when you do discover them, please keep them quiet. Were you to say that dreadful name aloud, even by accident, I cannot protect you. If that happened, I would also suggest you never return. There is no going back after something like that. Her name is a catalyst, I have found. We dare not speak it.

His face turning to a deadened white, Zephyr felt a fear creeping in his belly that he was walking the line, as Johnny Cash may have explained. He was not quick to write the name, but needed to continue his paper-driven dialogue with his literary mentor. Though she could not read their writing from beyond their plane of existence (as Rattup claimed) or as a derivation of her metaphysical predicament, it still seemed more than dangerous to say her name on paper. Instead, he felt that abbreviating her name to one letter would be a safer approach.

Zephyr:
Is it A from your story? Or the real woman that A’s character was based upon?

Rattup:
Perhaps. That is just a story, my boy. But all stories tell greater truths, and no writer has ever written anything that wasn’t somehow derived from his or her own life. You should know better than most. Do you not create prototypes of characters from those that you keep company with? Your primary school lunch lady? That kid that threw a rock at your face on the playground? Your mother? Your father? Your first love? Your last love? The guy that serves you your morning coffee? Are these all not characters-in-waiting?

Zephyr:
I suppose so.
So
tell me who this phantom is, if that’s the case. Is it A?

Rattup:
So insistent. You’ll know her name when you see it. Those are still just characters in a book. We base our stories on real life, but real life does not choose to base itself on our stories. Surely, you can see that much. Your imagination is running wild on you; better catch up to it before it gets away.

Zephyr:
That’s what I do, same as you. Where are we without imagination? NOW, is it her? A?

Rattup:
You’re a smart boy. You’ll figure it out soon enough. Let me not ruin the surprise too early, for that is terrible writing. Why drag the carrot along when you already know that its pointy and orange? Just read and listen to my stories and draw your own conclusions. All will be exposed, but you best find an ounce of patience. Can we speak on less dour subjects?

Zephyr:
You’re driving me mad, you know that?

Rattup:
But you still haven’t finished my story.

Zephyr:
OK. But...

Rattup grinned at him, snatching the pencil out of his hand. He placed it in the gap between his sprawling goofy white hair and his ear. “When you finish my story, there will be more to discuss. In the meantime, I would very much like to watch
Jaws
again,” stated Rattup, his eyes growing wide at the prospect of indulging in the horrific shark’s tale one more time. He licked his lips as if he could taste the salty intensity that the film brought into his life, as though he had caught the shark himself with a gigantic pole and it had taken to flipping and flopping all over the bottom of his rowboat. He could not look away from the thing. “You wouldn’t deny a crusty chap like me some nerve-racking tension, would you? You think my heart can’t take it? Well, phooey on you!” Rattup proclaimed. He looked to Zephyr, who smiled back. There was
always
time to watch
Jaws
.

“
I’ll get it started for you, but I can only watch the beginning. You can keep the DVD as long as you’d like, watch it a hundred times. Same for all of them. I’ll come bearing a new batch in a few days,” Zephyr replied. “But pace yourself. Some of these flicks may be sensory overload for you.” His advice was a goading barb, but at the same time quite serious. Cinema had come forward with leaps and bounds since Mr. Charles Rattup’s distant youth.

“
A few days? But I don’t need groceries,” Rattup said, his face broken and confused at the notion. Did the boy expect him to eat with a more voracious appetite since introducing him to Bruce the gigantic mechanical shark? “I am stocked to the brim, young man.”

“
I know that. Doesn’t mean I can’t swing by once in awhile, on my way to class,” Zephyr said with a sly grin inching on to his lips. “Anyway, I can start the movie up for you. Pay attention to the controls this time so you can start the movies up on your own, without my help. I only have about half an hour left. I’m meeting Jackie at the bookstore, then we’re grabbing dinner.” In saying this, Zephyr felt a very common darting pang of guilt launch through his more sensitive emotional being. It felt somewhat like bragging, in stating his plans for the evening. He knew that Rattup had no option to engage in such unfettered activities, like a newborn’s parent staying home while their young hip friends went gallivanting at the trendiest clubs. The bookstore comment alone was salty pressure to his gaping wounds, both the physical abrasions and the psychological ones that Rattup had come to drag through the quagmire of his life. Zephyr could picture, in the foggy paintings of his mind’s eye, Rattup visiting one of the newer modern bookstores, which had in the past twenty years sprung from infantile little collections to all-encompassing lexicons of anything and everything that contained the written word. Though it was at the hands of corporate booming, the simple existence of it all, across every genre and purpose, would send Rattup reeling with pleasure, crawling up and down the aisles in awe, as fast as his tired kneecaps would allow him. A kid in a candy shop. It felt imperative that Zephyr would formulate a way to free the man from his chains, to make this a reality someday.

Instead of replying with a tone of sadness at his absent freedoms, Charles whispered with dreamy eyes, “Young love on the march. How much would I pay to be you again? I cannot put a number on that value. All the sand in Egypt. All the stars in the sky. All the drugs in the alleys. All the whores in the gutters. All the fish in the sea!”

Zephyr smiled and pressed the Play button on the DVD remote, angling it to display the button to Rattup, taking the hint from Rattup’s “fish in the sea” reference, for Charles never said anything without a very specific purpose. As though he was in a deep trance, Charles shook his head and affixed his eyes on the screen, ready to be terrified one more time; once again casting away the thoughts of his very real terror, that which surrounded him every day and night. Zephyr thought that maybe it was true, that we all enjoyed the simplicity of lying to ourselves once in a while, even if our lies are in the form of mindless entertainment. Charles, he believed, would agree, were he not so enthralled by Richard Dreyfuss and mechanized monsters.

15.

He had socked away money from his extra shifts, stowing wads of sweaty cash in a coffee can that he kept hidden beneath the kitchen sink, away from Jackie’s prying eyes, because she dared not to venture there since she had witnessed a mouse around Christmas time. Each thin paycheck that Zephyr hoarded was one step closer to his goal, and after three months he had enough to buy a significant enough ring to please Jackie, though she was easy enough to satisfy with even the smallest gesture. Someday he would replace the ring with a more respectable one, but he wanted to act fast, not knowing if it was from nerves or fear, or maybe even both. Zephyr felt as though it should be done sooner rather than later, a nagging sense of readiness that he could not put into actual words, but could not deny either.

Fiddling with the shiny little stone and silver band in his pocket like he would a talisman or rabbit’s foot, he had called his mother as all good boys were destined to do. Her reaction was a mixed hesitance that he sort of expected, “Do you even know this girl well enough yet? You need to think about this some more,” his mother Lana had said with a huff. The phone buzzed with her disapproval, though Zephyr was ready and willing to throw back into her face the story of her and his father’s own whirlwind unexpected marriage, against the wishes of both sets of parents- a hippie elopement at a bowling alley in Massachusetts sometime before dawn. The story was at the tip of his tongue, swirling around his teeth, taunting him to withdraw it from his arsenal of argumentative line items, but not until she started to make threats or crying the atypical pleas of a mother.

His parents, in the days that led to his own birth, were early anarchists with a love for barefoot processions against unjust wars and the harsh riffs of Jimi Hendrix. They had burned bras and recruited for Black Power rallies at one point. Their stories were full of colorful drug addicts and dirty vans, buses, and subways. Flowers in their hair, dancing in their hearts, a sense of serenity in all that they said and did. Mother Earth, or
Gaia
as they once referred to her as, was in their every motivation, and at the heart of everything that was true and just in their collective spirit. But Lana and Lawrence Simmons, the bleeding heart haters of oppressive leaders and ineffective governments, would one day separate themselves from their youthful bliss. They walked a new path, of conservative slacks and an American flag flying in their front yard. They had not gone so far as to vote for the Bush re-election, but had supported him on the first time around. A conservative basis of money and God had overtaken their peace and love movement. Flag lapels had supplanted the daisies in their hair. They were open-minded enough to discuss their viewpoints without stale rhetoric or petty convictions, but still held strong to those beliefs. For this, Zephyr appreciated them, and for everything else, he was revolted. He had watched them transform so much from his earliest memories that he often had to remind them of the state of mind they had started from. They would look at him as if he was speaking of an alien race on a distant planet, unwilling to believe that those people had once inhabited their skins.

“
Take your time. Talk to her about this, don’t just jump in without any forethought! It’s not very wise. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Slow and steady wins the race,” she pleaded, the agitation in her voice becoming more prominent, a sort of nasal undertone that Zephyr knew all too well.

“
Any more of them?” Zephyr replied.

“
Any more
what
?”

“
Cliche sayings. I can give you thousands of them if you want to borrow a few. Drink your milk, stay in school, don’t shit where you eat,” Zephyr gave a taste of polite vitriol back to the woman who birthed him, listening as she huffed at his swearing abilities. The young Lana would have sworn back in revelry, but the stoic and reasonable Lana could only sneer at such filthy words. “I’ve thought about this plenty. You know I’m doing my best up here, and it’s not easy. Jackie’s been there for everything. I know it’s only been less than a year, but I know this one’s
THE
one. You and Dad met her and he told me that she was a catch, his exact words. She’s perfect, and you can’t deny that,” Zephyr reasoned.