Please Don't Go (2 page)

He sinks to the bottom of the massive pool like a weighted stone, projecting his shaky body from the highest tier of the diving launchpad, resurfacing moments later with a gurgling choke of chlorine water, scanning the edge of the pool to find his dead mother clapping her hands together in triumph, hooting in approval at his first Big Boy Dive. Maybe this is how he would always remember her. By that pool. Cheering him on. Would that be the image that plagued his guilty dreams for all his years?

My mother is dead.

“
You don’t have the heart to deny me my mother’s funeral,” he dared the force that so deviated every physical motion he now made in his life. Awaiting an answer, he rubbed away tears from his frazzled face, sopping the excess moisture into his tan and brown sweater. His captor did not reply, and so he stepped forward again, past his plush sofa, towards the door. Only a door—one foot through, followed by the other foot. And off you go, to wherever your heart so desires.

It pushed back on his chest again, this time with an increased force, insisting that he stay put. “A funeral! One funeral,” he blubbered, falling to his knees and clutching his face with frigid damp hands. “Just this one thing and I’ll never leave you again, I swear it. Please. Please. Please!”

It seemed to gain an almost palpable anger by his saddened beggar-esque statement, a warm cyclone of dirty foul air encircling his kneeling body and hissing in disapproval. The television tipped from its stand, crashing in a solid crunch and sending glassy shrapnel bits of degradation jolting through the air in every cardinal direction. It was creating excuses all about him, reasons to stay where he was- to fix the television; to release his house from the festering odor that ensnared his nostrils. He choked back vomit, the scent of sauerkraut now dawdling amidst rotten eggs and gasoline. The smell was so thick that he believed he could paint the walls with it, were it in a can. She was dunking his head in urine water, sloshing him about in a show of superiority. He would not stand for such ridiculous measures of fortitude.

The demolished television shuffled across the carpet like a diseased elephant, smashing into his couch. It hummed a strange noise, as it was still plugged in to the wall socket, and died for good. This irked him very little. He despised his television and had only bought one out of some unknown necessity that was forced upon him by outsiders who he never spoke to. He dared not say aloud that he was glad to be done with the scandalous tool of brain death. Such a bold statement, that her display of infantile disapproval fell on his deaf ears, would serve to send her into a scalding rampage through his home.

But none of it mattered to him, for it did not change the simplicity of fact.

My mother is dead.

She is away from me. Forever.

My mother is D-E-A-D.

A tattered book flew from the bright white cubby holes and shelves that lined his western wall and housed his “proof of knowledge to visitors,” landing beside his bent throbbing knees, pages splashing open in the twisted entropy of chaotic energy unleashed. The book, one of his favorites from his childhood, was
To Kill a Mockingbird
. He glanced at the tale of his favorite brand of hero, Atticus Finch, with wet drippy eyes, running his fingers through his greasy midnight hair in disbelief. It was a social contract, thrown before him as evidence of his lackluster lifeline as a human being. He would never reach such noble heights as an Atticus Finch. His life was spent on the low road, never standing up for human dignity, not even his own when thrust before the flames of judgment. Was this what it said to him, with her choice of literature? His mind confessed that it was very possible that he was over-thinking the situation and was forever at the beck and call of a hateful, yet meaningless, force. Maybe she simply felt like throwing a book, without any significant choosing. “Please,” he asked of his moist sweaty palms, “Please let me go, for just today. No more, no less.” His voice trembled and he felt weakened. His embarrassment was nothing compared to the sharp sting in his belly.

A few moments later, several other books propelled from his amassed collection of literary adventures, tumbling to his side in a purposeful, ordered pile of venom. “You are a horrible bitch,” he told it, scanning the books for example of his failures.
Crime and Punishment. Great Expectations. Love Story.

His throat tightened, the jagged fingernails of his jailor burrowing into the soft flesh of his once-perfect neck, seeking a hold on his physical being. He gasped for air, feeling his Adam’s Apple, against its will, deepen itself in his esophagus, and flailed his arms in panicked protest. She leaned in close to his face, and the breathing soothed him while he awaited the death that had always waited around every dark corner, in every deep murky crevice of his disastrous life.

Go ahead.

Take me. You’d give me no greater pleasure, to be free of this bond. You’re a monster.

“
You have not yet seen what a monster I can be,” he imagined her whispering to him with bloated milk-dripping breasts pressed flush against his neck and shoulders.

I will resent you forevermore, if this is what you have chosen for me. My mother. The woman who gave birth to me. My mother. My mother is dead, you psychotic wench.

The stench of sauerkraut wafted through the open spaces of his home, as though it was taunting him with the reminder of where he was when he discovered that his mother had perished for no reason whatsoever. And at that point, he began to formulate a revolving-door theory (which he would revisit again and again) that his mother had been killed by the translucent monstrosity that had kept him at bay for so very long—through his sister’s wedding, through his nephew’s birth, through his uncle’s funeral, through his niece’s birth; and now, through his mother’s death day.

Through his mother’s death day
. He imagined her alone in a dank sweaty room, the loathsome coroner lathering hot paraffin wax upon her face to produce her death mask, so that she may live on forever, as though her great-great-grandchildren would one day don the mask in reverie and act out the daily machinations of a woman they had never know. She was no Al Capone or Richard Fucking Nixon, though, he reasoned. She was his mother, and he found comfort in the fact that they only created death masks for the famous, that he would be spared the blistering punishment of having to look into his mother’s face again, even if only a carbon copy of the original. He wished so very much that the motherless and fatherless demon coroner, that prepared his mother’s body (if just in the confines of his confused mind), would leave her be until he could escape his home and give her the respectful caution and preparation that she so deserved.

The grip upon his neck strengthened, as though the thing in his home could hear his very thoughts, interpreting his mental brain waves like a Morse code cypher. The warm breathing on his face shortened, enraged by his callous demands for a quick and victorious demise alongside his mother.
You can do better than that, can’t you? Finish the deed, whore.
Squeeze me like a tube of toothpaste. Send me to see her. We can share the same carriage, Heaven or Hell or bust. Do it!

It gripped harder and he could feel the shaky hesitation in its forearm, pondering if it should abide or release him into a further oblivion of hopeless, hellish entrapment. Did the cat cease to exist when there were no mice left?

I know you can hear me. Kill me. Kill me now, because my mother is dead and I’ve had just about enough of your interminable game. I have nothing left. Kill me. KILL ME NOW!

It growled low, casting a new array of paperback and hardcover books through the air, splattering all over his living room in a complex conglomerate of bitter resentment. He looked about the havoc; his smashed television and litter of obfuscated reading material. The couch had shifted several feet. And the odor. The terrible smell clung to his nose hairs like a dumb-footed mountain climber.

My mother is dead, and this is how you show your love to me? You don’t know what love is.

The grip released.

The doorknob shook in fervent motions, as though taunting him that,
yes, the door works just fine. But you’ll never get there, kiddo.

She leaned in close to his face. The breathing was heavy, but even more so he detected the gaze of the thing that enshrouded his life in confinement.

She was staring right into his eyes, studying his reactions, and there was little he could do to avert his boiling eyeballs from the invisible monster’s gaze. A wordless phrase projected deep into his ear canal, through the waxy bits of filter, and into his brain like a bullet: “Your mother was a
cunt
.”

Part I

I Know Why the Caged Bard Screams

1.

Zephyr lifted a stack of boxes from his hand cart, depositing them on the tiled floor of the pasta and soup aisle of Richter’s Market. Sighing to himself, he placed his hands on his hips, surveying the shelves for a proper restocking strategy. If he pushed the generic spaghetti and ziti to the left some, he would have more room for the abundance of name brand pastas that Mr. Richter had ordered for the month. The townsfolk of Saint Hector were on an Italian kick as of late. Or as they referred to it, in true Mainer tradition, “eye-tal-ean”. When Marcello’s restaurant had closed two months earlier, it had left an unpredictable void (once filled with Gino Marcello’s famous fried mozzarella and homemade “Ragu,” as the patrons referred to it) in the aching, hungry guts of the general populace. Without warning, their mouths had grown vicious, and their cravings could only be quelled by their local grocers. “We’re gonna have them boats in the river next month, just like in Italy. You know, they’ve got them Italian guys who sing love songs and push with the big long oars,” Mr. Richter had informed Zephyr.

“
You mean gondolas, sir.”

Mr. Richter had only nodded, passing judgment on the Big City Education that Zephyr brought to his immediate spheres of influence. Richter was a home-grown man who had educated himself by trial and error. He’d busted his skull more times than he could count, trying to get his business off the ground and profitable. Sure, his reading level was not much higher than that of his ten-year-old son, but that made him all the more respectable in his own eyes, that he could become such a commercial success “without any of those big fancy ten dollah words.” To Richter, Zephyr was that type of intellectual, turtleneck-wearing swine that would vote for a socialist or listen to Simon and Garfunkel. Richter was so disgusted by Zephyr’s closet liberalism that it could ruin his happy day, were he to ruminate on the notion for too long. But when all was said and done, Zephyr worked hard and never complained without good reason, not like the remainder of his staff, all of whom seemed to think they were entitled to a day off work (and with pay!) for a work-related paper cut. What they lacked in work ethic they made up for in piety, and Richter could get behind that.

Zephyr stared at his shelves. Richter had a rule about keeping the shelves overloaded at all times. “We don’t want ‘em thinking we’re ever low on goods, even if
we are
low on something,” he would tell his staff, alluding to the power of image.

“
Little Z to customer service,” the overhead speakers rattled, long overdue in being replaced by a system more modern- maybe even digital. Zephyr had recommended an upgrade that he had planned out on paper, hoping to impress Richter and his advisory staff, but Zephyr had only received chuckling scoffs at his misplaced ingenuity. The CyberAcoustics system that he had recommended would have cost Richter almost nothing out of pocket, with their trade-in program. It mattered very little, the content of his testimonial and research. They would never accept him in any sense as an equal, which would have only crushed his spirits were his job to be the first in a series of steps up Richter’s shaking ladder of economic teeter-tottering. Zephyr shrugged away their stomping out of his ideas. His job was a source of cash, and one that paid the bills well enough. Cash was cash. Bills were bills. Life moved on.

Looking from side to side, he wondered to himself how fast his hands could stack the remaining goods on to the shelves. He gathered reckless stacks of uncooked spaghetti, angel hair, fettuccine, bowties, and ziti into his arms, hurling them on to the shelves without any regard for order or placement. By the time he was through the first of four piles, the overhead speaker repeated its consternation, “LITTLE Z, TO CUSTOMER SERVICE,” with a trailing sigh of annoyance peppered in. Karen Garrity, the current Voice of God, had a certain way of making any man or woman feel terrible about themselves, with nothing but her tone as a weapon. Being only an assistant manager, her career had transcended into the beck and call of her rampant ego in short order. Only three months into her new position and she had already, in the annals of her mind, deemed herself the unofficial queen of Richter’s. She would nitpick around Richter’s good graces whenever he was near her, which he very much reveled in. “Did you see Sean Hannity last night, Mr. Richter? He put that dummy Dowd in her place, didn’t he? She looked like a scared little puppy,” she would say in her most snide voice. If he had asked her to bed with him, Zephyr was almost one hundred percent positive that she would not even break stride in embracing that scandalous endeavor.