Archive for July 2008
I was bouncing around on Hulu last night and I found this episode of Nova about the Lost Treasures of Tibet.
Gorgeous.
The sweat in his eyes blurred his vision, making it almost impossible to see through the leaves and branches. Across the greenhouse the twin fans slowly whirled to life again, every ten minutes like clock-work. They came on when the ambient temperature reached 78 degrees inside the man-made jungle, the sound hitting you before the cooling touch of the breeze. After only thirty some odd minutes in here, he was beginning to trust the fans. He stood there, breathing deeply, trying not to focus on anything in particular, just letting his mind see more than his eyes ever could have before.
Then suddenly, there, across the aisle from the conifers, the gravel moves against itself, some one shifted weight, made just enough sound, just enough vibration.
He moves again, across the chat of the walkways, moving with a sinister purpose, holding the extension of his own hand close to his side, the gleam of the knife bright silver against the tan of his chest. Sweat drips from his arms, off his face and down his back, making a dot-to-dot pattern on the white sands beneath the zinnias.
He can see her now, on her knees, crouching, and ready to run again, rabbit-under-the-brush quiet. The smile across his face grows again as his nerves settle, this one has been an issue. She should have been downed in mere seconds, not still running after twenty minutes. The three others had gone like he wanted, they simply accepted the blade, gift given, and taken as it was intended. Of course the one behind the counter screamed, giving this one time to hide, but that was fine, in fact that was delicious.
But, when the little bitch hit him back, brushed the knife away and ran, that was sweetest of all. Finally, prey worthy of the chase.
Now she was close enough to reach for again, he was quiet; his breath was waiting for a moment to escape after he struck out at her again. He could hear the clock ticking, mocking him, thirty minutes; it had never taken so long to finish off a scene before. Now the clock was reminding him again that at any minute someone else could come walking in and make this whole thing a lot messier; something that had never happened before.
Enough of this; finish it.
He covered the ten feet between them in one movement, big-cat like in his lunge. His hands wrapped around her head and the weight of him crashing into her back, it sent them both to the floor in a tangled mass of limbs. He pulled the knife in to her stomach, straining against her arms as she frantically tried to push-pull and turn away in one jumbled motion.
His mind raced as she actually left his grasp, sweat on sweat, slid out from under him in one fluid movement and rolled into the darkness of the green leaves. His legs refused to move, his arms fell slowly to his sides, his head fell one degree at a time, ratcheting down like on a lever system, until his eyes found the scissors sticking out of his gut. They moved rhythmically up and down with the beating of his heart, slowing. Blood danced out of the wound, sprayed and trickled down the blades with the pumping.
Already a pool was gathering at his feet, turning the chalky dust from the gravel a soft muted red color. In a second his eyes where back up, scanning for her, not finding her as fast as he should have, as fast as he always had found the others.
A short choppy laugh erupted from his mouth. “Bitch,” he said quietly. “I will finish this.”
He walked from the greenhouse and in to the shadows of the hot night.
The only sign of his time in the greenhouse lay on the ground. Two, a husband and wife, he had taken in the back near the exit to the ponds. The husband went first, without really understanding. The wife, ah, she knew, she understood the gift. He could see that in her eyes, the clench of her jaws.
The cashier he grabbed from behind, whispering to her as he slid the knife in to her back. Her voice escaped her throat before he could cover her mouth with his right hand. With no more than a tiny shutter she let go. He laid her on the ground softly, reverently.
Now he left the scissors as well, another gift given, and the girl that got away, for now. She was the last gift of the night. Her life would never be the same, if she lived, and he was sure she would; she was like him, different from the rest. She had the will to do more than live; she wanted to win.
She watched him walk out of the greenhouse from her dark hole under the metal desk. The desk the pruning gear, she had found the scissors here, and it was the safest place she could think of when he didn’t pursue her. She was bleeding too, he had slammed the knife into her stomach with so much force that she didn’t even feel the cut, just the sting of her ribs for now.
But she knew enough to realize she needed medical attention and soon. Was he waiting in the parking lot? Hidden in between the cars? Watching from across the street?
It didn’t matter now; she had to move before the bleeding did her in. Too far from the hospital too walk, she had to get to her car, chance him being there in the parking lot. Or maybe just get across the street to the movie theater, once inside she would be safe.
It took longer than she would have thought to stand, feeling every rock under her palms as she pressed her arms in to the floor to stand. Bearing her weight instead of taking it all on her legs, they felt way too weak right now. Getting to the parking lot would be a miracle, much less across the street.
The fans roared to life again, she had first noticed them when she was asking for the perennials, the fans had started and she missed what the cashier had said, forcing her to ask where she would find the flowers again. Now the fans were welcomed though, as she suddenly realized she could no longer hear her own footfall as she slowly walked down the chat covered path.
When she got to the door, she waited a moment, listening for something, anything. She smiled at herself when she realized how stupid she must look.
I guess it isn’t like he’s out there, waiting for me and whistling…
She took a breath, pushed the door open and walked in to the night.
Last night I had a dream that shook me…
It is one of those summer days in Oklahoma when you can see the mirage on the tarmac in front of you, stretching on to the horizon. Lizards and tarantulas are running from one side of the road to the other in an effort to get off of the sun baked road. There is not a cloud in the sky. No chance for shade or cooling rains, just clear blue skies and an oppressive sun that seems determined to pull all moisture from the lands.
I look back into the third row to a man who is telling my grandfather to speed up. He is late for something and agitated.
“Come on, hurry up dammit,” he says to my grandfather, looking at him in the rear-view mirror.
My grandfather looks at him in the mirror and smiles. It is the smile of a demon, something I have never seen on his face before and it terrifies me. My veins freeze, my blood becomes ice as my soul flickers away for a moment. The gas pedal is mashed to the floor and the giant V8 engine explodes with energy as the gas is dumped by the gallon into the carburetor.
I take up a lot of the backseat. I am not a small man. My shoulders more than cover my own seat, giving little room for my grandmother to move around in her own space, but she seems fine with this as she clings to my side. Her hands are in my own now, as she closes her eyes and leans into my arm. She is a small woman, made small by the ravages of time. Her back is bent, and the arthritis has turned her fingers, ever so slightly, to the inside of her hands. Her tears roll down my arm. I am not sure what her tears are for a moment, and I check to see if I am bleeding. (Irrational thought in an irrational dream does not seem out of place.)
“Pull over,” I finally say to my grandfather but he pays no attention to the tiny voice in the backseat. The voice that has just come from my mouth sounds strangely familiar to me, but it is not my own.
I saw myself now as the camera would see me, but this time I am not the 36 year old man sitting beside his frail grandmother, but rather I am the ten year old clinging to her for assurance. There is panic in my eyes and breath is coming faster and faster as terror takes control. That voice that wanted to demand that we pull over was from the mind of a 36 year old former United State Marine, but the voice that had come out, well, that was from the 5th grader who needed his grandfather to hug him.
Again the SUV swerves as my grandfather lists in and out of lucidity. A semi truck carrying crushed cars to a dump is ahead of us for a moment. I can see the cars and I wonder at the lives that they had carried in them for all of those years. Where are those people now, who have they become, are they as scared as I am at this moment?
“I said pull over Grandpa,” this time the voice is right and true, it is my own again and there is command in it. My grandmother looks up and gives me her smile that tells me she is proud and happy of what I have just done. Grandpa looks at me for a moment in the rear-view mirror and then a realization seems to break over his face. He looks at her, suddenly ashamed, and tears well up in his eyes. He turns around in his seat, looking at us instead of in the mirror now, he slows the SUV and pulls to the shoulder.
I open the door as the tires roll to a stop and my feet his the ground with a skid. Pulling my grandmother out from the leather seat I hold her for a moment just to make sure she is steady her and then I reach for the handle on the front door but before I can take hold the SUV roars to life, tires complain as they break free from the tarmac and the world seems to slow around me.
It was at this point that Michael Bay took over directing my dream. In an insane action sequence I race along side the SUV for a moment before I leap onto the shiny chrome back bumper. My grandfather, lost again in his delusions, swerves from lane to lane and back again across the highway, as always in an effort to beat the other drives to the destination. Cars and trucks zoom past me, the drivers, shocked and scared are honking and waving at me as my grandfather races to his goal. Holding onto the car in various ridiculous fashions, a car door handle here, the roof rack there, I make my way from the back of the vehicle to drivers side window with my feet on the nerf bar.
“Stop Grandpa, stop,” I plead with him, one hand on the window and the other holding onto the luggage rack. He looks at me through the window, and for a moment there is nothing there, no memory, not recognition of who I am or even that a person is clinging to the car he is driving, but then, slowly, his eyes soften and his smile returns, my Grandpa wakes up for a moment.
“I can’t, I don’t know how,” he whimpers to me, shaking his head. He is asking for my help, he needs for me to change the situation, but I am stuck there, holding onto the outside of a speeding SUV, lest I fall to my own death. As I look into his eyes for a moment everything is alright again. We are lost in a timeless moment, back on the little acreage where I grew up with him, and he is strong again, younger, and taking care of me instead of weak, feeble and frail with age.
The rev of the engine snaps my attention back to the road and our precarious situation. I look forward on the highway and see a tollbooth racing towards us. It is all cement, glass and steel; unmoving and uncaring that we are about to destroy ourselves as we smash into it at 80 miles per hour in this death trap. I look back to Grandpa and he is lost again, he doesn’t remember that his grandson is clinging to the car, he doesn’t understand that tollbooth is going to kill him in an instant.
In his mind he is driving back to the farm from working at the flour mill in Blackwell. The road is dirt, but recently graded and smooth enough for his daddy’s Chevy. His brothers are with him and they are talking about fighting in Europe again. This thing is going to get out of hand, he thinks to himself as he listens his eldest brother reading the newspaper aloud.
The sound of shearing metal and shattering glass assaults me as we slam into the little air-conditioned room at more than 90 miles per hour. My body is destroyed by a million daggers of glass and metal as the front of the SUV opens a gash in the room. The last sight I see with my own eyes is the generic office wall clock that momentarily hangs on the opposite wall of the booth, 11:40 eternal. It is falling now, in a spastic pirouette of energy as the building around it disintegrates in a cataclysm.
The moment freezes in place; tiny, gleaming shards of glass hang suspended in the air, mixed with perfectly round globes of what has to be my blood. Sound is gone now too, I can no longer hear the road noise, or the engine, or even the sounds of the crash; there is only silence…
The sound of my own whimpers brought me close to waking at this point, but I could not break free from the dream until my wife shook me and held on tight telling me that everything was okay. But, my eyes were open now and the room was dark in the predawn hours… I crawled out of bed, told Abbey to come with me and we went to sit on the porch. I sat there in the muggy darkness, listening to the sounds of a sleeping world, patting my dog as she sat beside me.
