Please Don't Go (15 page)

He could hear her nodding on the other end, “Yes, I know. She’s lovely, Zephyr. Lovely. I couldn’t ask for more, but that doesn’t mean a thing. People change, and you need to be aware of that. The woman you marry may not be the woman you end up with. I can speak from personal experience that us females can turn ugly given the right circumstances. I’m not saying that’s what’ll happen with you and Jackie, but the potential is always there, hiding behind the curtains.”

“
That could work the same for me. Maybe I’m the psychopath in the making and she’s the one who has to save me from myself,” he replied, placing his hand on his hip, wishing his mother could see that he had made a very valid point and was expressing that notion with his body language. “I know it’s fast, but
I
wouldn’t be the first to go at this rate. It doesn’t mean we won’t make it,” he added, a subtle hint in his words that indicated that he was readying the retelling of his parents’ story, a slight warning that she should not push him or he would set that example before her and trump the entire argument.

“
I see,” Lana replied. Zephyr pictured her sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her Kiss The Cook apron, an icy beer in her hand, smoking a cigarette, hoping in her gut that his father would stay at work late so she would not have to listen to his boring workday stories. For all her preachy rhetoric, she was just as full of sin as the rest of humanity.

“
You see. I bet you do,” Zephyr said with a dollop of of
gotcha
in his demeanor. “I’ve already bought the ring. Got it today.”

“
Wait a tic there, speedy. What did you just say
?
” she asked, and he could hear her snubbing out a cigarette and and the click of a lighter in the ignition of a new one. He was leveraging new stresses upon her. “You should have called me first, before you did anything. I knew I shouldn’t have ever let you go to school up there. Bunch of yokels and dummies, and now they’re sucking you in to their web.”

Zephyr chuckled, “Are you listening to yourself?”

“
Are you listening to
yourself
? I kept my mouth shut when you moved in together, but this is too much, too fast,” she shot back.

“
This doesn’t mean we’re getting married tomorrow. It’s just a first step. Once we’re engaged, we’ll take our sweet time with everything. Finish school next year, maybe even start up our careers before we even get married. We’re not doing this half-assed, but I want to start setting things in motion. You realize I’m an adult now, right?” Zephyr asked of his mother, hoping that she was listening to his words with an open mind and not just wallowing in her own immobile judgments.

“
Careers? You’re both English majors. What the hell are you gonna do with that degree? And both of you? I don’t see much earning potential there, between the two of you,” the calculated, logical side of her insisted.

“
We’ll find jobs,” he replied.

“
Oh yeah, doing what? Correcting improper gerund usage?” she bit so hard that Zephyr could feel her venom from afar.

“
That doesn’t even make any sense. I don’t know what we’ll do, but it’s our place to figure that out, not yours. If you want to live somebody else’s life, then become a Buddhist and await your reincarnation,” Zephyr replied, admitting to himself that his Buddhist statement was dumber than a bag of bowling balls. “I love Jackie. And she loves me. You know what that’s like. It’s scary and confusing, but it’s what life is all about. Getting married on a wing and a prayer, having babies and extending the human race for one more generation. I can’t think of anything better to do with my time. Not the kind of satisfaction that I’d ever get from some shitty, thankless job. Can’t you just support me in this?”

“
That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, having to support you!” she half shouted, half spoke. “You know that your father and I made plenty of stupid mistakes, so I’ll be the one to bring it up, before you do,” she said, at which Zephyr bit his lip, for she had taken the potential wind from his sails in proving the point herself. She explained, “When we got married, we spent the first six months living in his mother’s basement. Do you know how embarrassing that was? Do you know how that damaged our relationship? It was awful. It took years for me to feel independent again. It all stemmed from us being too young to handle that kind of heady responsibility.”

Zephyr could not help but laugh at her point, “But you guys are just fine. Always have been, right?”

“
Well... I wouldn’t say that,” his mother replied, a hidden subtext that Zephyr detected, but did not have the heart to explore. “We’ve had more problems than I would like to admit, especially back when we were eating beans from a can in the in-law’s basement. We had rats down there, Zephyr. You were
conceived
with rats watching us.” This image disgusted Zephyr as much as it did Lana, and they both sat in silence for a moment, picturing something that they hoped to never address again.

“
You’re not going to stop me. I only hope that you support me in some way, if only in the emotional way,” Zephyr stated in his simplest terms, laying it all down on the table and hoping against rejection.

“
We’ll always support you, but you’re acting like an idiot. Fortunate for you, I’m in love with idiots, and I always have been. You can ask your father about that since he’s the King Idiot,” she said, a suggestion of smile in her shaky voice, a sense that she understood his intentions, despite her parental requirement to battle the effortless ascension that all children go through. “You call us right after you do the deed, no matter what she says.”

16.

Charles sat down in his study with careful consideration of his aching hips and knees, at his grand oak desk, with a swirl of dust encircling him. He often did his best writing here, but had recently taken to his common areas with a notebook. Today, he had thought it to be good practice to become familiar with his typewriter once again. The quick bursts of arthritis in his hands had become a nagging multi-horned demon of late, and so he thought that it may be prudent (
from here until the end
, he thought to himself with a saddened face) to alternate days between his handwritten work and his typewriting.

His trusty typewriter was an old Continental with the big fat round keys, circa 1966. The slick black thing was more bulky than it was effective, as Rattup found himself regularly fiddling with stuck or unresponsive keys. Though he had never actually weighed the thing, it was a fair estimate to say that it was sturdy enough to crack a human skull in half, maybe even one of a heifer cow. He polished the black body with great regularity, taking more care in the gleam of his primary tool than he did its actual functionality and efficiencies. She was a gorgeous gal, in every way, and Charles often found himself daydreaming about his Continental as much as some men would their cherry red classic Chevrolets.

He had named the typewriter Jessica at some point during the early seventies, when he was his most prolific on her bouncy ebony letters. Jessica, no last name or middle initial. Origin, unknown. “She just looks like a Jessica,” he had once told a half-drunk (like himself) colleague who had questioned that origin. “Or you can call her Jessie, if you’re the type of fellow who swigs American beer down at the watering hole,” he had added, which his colleague had guffawed at for several minutes.

Jessica had seen better days, but he could not bear to fathom a life without her.

Charles leaned back in his creaky old swivel chair, spinning himself in mad circles, grazing Jessica with his hand as he passed her by once, twice, and three times in succession. When he ceased his childish motions, Charles slid a sheet of paper into the wide slit atop Jessica’s forehead, whispering to himself, “There you go, sweet darling. You’ve been hungry as a horse, I bet. Let’s tell the bitch how we feel about her.”

Before he could begin typing, it was tradition for Charles to crack his knuckles. Though his arthritis hindered this gesture on most occasions, today he was feeling well-oiled and ready to go. Interlocking his fingers and stretching them before himself, he awaited the crisp crack with a brief stint of anticipation. When the gratifying sound echoed through his dinky office space, he smiled. If Dr. Turcotte, his once-in-a-great-while visiting private doctor, could see him engaging in such wretched activities, she would have put both of his hands in straight jackets for the remainder of eternity. She plagued him (though she had not visited in more than a year) with interminable diatribes on the subjects of his blood pressure, his erratic pulse, and his sometimes fatty buttocks that she attributed to his love of ice cream. Turcotte reminded him of a passionate auto mechanic, who treated the car as their own when speaking of it.
It’s a great car, but that transmission isn’t sounding very healthy. It’s too bad really, because it was a good transmission for so very long. A GREAT transmission,
they would say,
casting their eyes down at the grease spots of their garage as if a family member was in the final throes of cancer and there was little that could be done.

Rattup shook his head. Explaining metaphors with further metaphors made his brain matter spin in place. He needed to go easier on his psyche, for he was not the young rabblerouser that had once claimed to have the world by a very flexible puppet string.

When his knuckles were prepared, Rattup found that he would lose himself in his writing, becoming so immersed in the words and stringy tendons of sentences that a form of hypnosis would overtake him. He had once read an article about a form of ataxia, which was described as a disconnection between one’s mind and their physical being, where writers would claim that they could not and would not remember the words that spilled out of them, as though possessed by an invisible demon. The words existed in the air, ready to pluck, and had always existed, seeking a proper conduit to escape their black phantom zone of floating verbs and clouds of conscious thought that surrounded us all. Though he had not uncovered this
automatic writing
in his career, Rattup felt assured by his sturdy wisdom that it was quite possible. Perhaps his student, Zephyr, would unearth this ability in his endeavors.

Unsatisfied with his first crackle, he gave another. His knuckles felt happy enough to continue.

Is it time, old man?
The voice darted into his ear, only centimeters away from him. His shoulder tickled with warmth. He remained still and refused his muscles, listening to his own breathing as he tried to detect hers. She was closer than he was comfortable with, though there was little he could do about it.
Is it time to make me happy again?

“
Yes,” Charles Rattup replied, staring straight ahead like a soldier at attention.

Good. Good. Crack those fingers again, sweet heart. Crack them for me. I like that sound.

With a slow hesitance, he lifted his hands out in front of him, interlocking the fingers again, pulling back with his forearms until they popped. “Good enough?” he asked, his voice dead to the world, void of any passion. She had a way of doing that, of sucking the joyous and warming air from the room, an open door to the abyss of wretchedness. He wished so very much that he could find that door, and approach it with a disdainful eye, announcing to her that they did not live in a barn, slamming it shut.

Yes. That is adequate. Write to me. Write your heart. And then read it to me.

Rattup had been hoping to start a fresh new story, and often she would allow him to do so. With careful monitoring, he would be given access to his former life, if even in just a professional regard. He would pluck his way through a story, that which would never be seen by his non-existent reading public, shove it into a drawer, and never think of it again. It was his skill, his hobby, his happiness. The pursuit of happiness, without reward or repercussion. And on occasion, she would grant him a free ride. But more often than not, Rattup was required to dictate his undying love to her, to speak from his heart to hers. It would buy him several days without painful backlash, for the beauty of his words pleased her so very much. Though it was a forced activity, very much against what Rattup would have been doing with his free time were it just that (
free
), he had grown to enjoy the process of it. It felt to him like he was practicing for something more important, for something that he had yet to write, but was waiting on the very tip of his tongue, at the edge of his mind.

He wrote his letters when she demanded, and without deeper discussion. When this activity had first began, Charles had refused, saying to his phantom captor, “You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. I am a free man! Go back to your hole!” She had not appreciated this insolent tone, and had crushed his left hand beneath the typewriter, lifting it for but a moment of time, faster than the blink of his unknowing eye. After that, he had been unable to write or tap Jessica for several weeks, his purple swollen hand a constant reminder that he was not to stray from the bitch’s desires in thought or action. He would, for however long she craved, write her the love letters and read them aloud as a sort of serenade to his invisible succubus.

“
I’ll write now, if you’d like,” Charles said with a bland tongue, reaching his hands to Jessica and playing her subtle emotions with his fingers. He often wondered if
she
(not Jessica, but his other
she
) would grow jealous of the relationship he had with his Continental typewriter.