Oedipussy (19 page)

"Well, it’s your birthday, so... I know that isn't on your mind, but here is a gift for you."

Was it already November sixteenth? November sixteenth, two thousand nineteen. I was forty three years old, in a wheelchair, past middle age and receiving a bottle of bourbon from my physical therapist. It seemed just as I was figuring things out, I was blindsided with discordant natural rhythms that like outward rippling rings meeting opposite windwaves. This lake of my heart reeled with the tug of the moon and the change of the seasons. I was a newborn ignorant to comprehension. It felt both beautiful and uninspiring, bewildering and disorienting. I had a hollow heart swimming in an unpredictable crater-shifting sea of blood.

"It's my birthday. You brought me a gift?"

"I did. No torture today. It's too cold, anyway. That's why I am here." He nodded toward the door where my guests had just left. "How are you doing? Make friends?"

"Sort of. I decided to take on a project with some kids I met at the copy store. I'm back to making music. Well, producing some kids to make some, helping them, covering album costs."

"That's what you did before your accident, right?"

"An hour before the accident, as a matter of fact. I'm pretty sure I hit my head on my amplifier during the crash."

"That’s why you look funny.” He made a joke. “It’s nice to see you live your life. Be you as much as you can. Good. And what else? Did you hear from any of your friends?"

"No. I only tried to get a hold of my old girlfriend, but no luck. I think I came to the realization that she's gone. She has to be a completely different person, anyway. I’m not sure it would make sense to-"

"Write her a letter."

"I did. I don't know what is going to happen with it, or if she is ever going to get it."

"Write another. Write them until you feel better. It will help with the changes. Catch up. Write letters. Write many letters. Write them all and don’t send them. Write them to your girlfriend, and your mom, and your dad, and your band. But write. Write it all down. Have some of this whiskey and write it all down. Write and write and write and become your words. Don't send them. Keep it all hidden."

"Write it all down," I parroted.

"Yes. That will help."

"Okay." I tapped my gift. "Want some of this?"

"No, thank you. I don't drink.” He gestured to the mound of papers and envelopes. “I got your mail from the last month, here. Happy birthday, Todd."

Thom left.

The phone rang.

Chuck was coming back on Monday afternoon to pick up his guitar pedal. He left it at rehearsal and he needed to play around with it when he practiced at home.

I hung up. I returned to the table and sorted through the mail. The pile was mainly crinkled store circulars, junk, form envelopes labeled 'current resident,' or official-looking adverts addressed to my parents in hopes that their senility would lead them to buy this or that thing they didn't need.

The future that I had awoken into still clung to the need for consumer accumulation through the postal mail. With everything delivered wirelessly, what needed to be delivered physically?

Advertisements, evidently.

In the midst of the mound lay my little leaf, lonely and left. My little letter to Jenny was unburied with a friendly fingerpost pointing back at my return address.

'Return to sender, addressee unknown.'

I took the paper bag my liquor arrived in and shoved in the messy pile. The weight of the shuffling papers transferred to my lap, and then the floor.

All that was left on the table was my envelope to Jenny, and a bottle of bourbon.

The streets were cracked and bumpy. Horrible craggly mountainous ice heaves pushed the pavement toward the sky. Sidewalks were an adventure. I needed a Jeep-like wheelchair with tractor wheels and a roll cage. I needed the library. After two hours of riding the mechanical impossibility of getting somewhere, it would be the finest reward.

The air bit through my body, my useless legs insulating the cold like fleshy ice rods up my hips through my core.

Design For All. Universal Design. Dreams of the sixties bled into the next hundred years practically covered a forever of improvements for everyone at the apparent expense of these unbroken sidewalks. It was as if every concrete square was a curb in itself. Mother Nature didn't give a shit about Universal Design.

The decision to make my way to the library on a Monday morning was one of the first times I even felt like wanting to make it out of the house and struggle my way into regular society. In order to get a library card I needed an ID and some mail addressed to me.  I left with my social security card and some mail, and a full chair battery to get me the combined twenty or so miles to the new building and back. I also had a flask of bourbon.

The library hadn’t changed in my years spent asleep.

I pulled up to the steel, glass, and brick structure. Its sharp angle and tall glass half circles exuded a power over everything. The charm, the knowledge, the magic of this building hadn't changed since I was a boy when I rode my bike to do homework. As they erected the new addition, the building hummed with potential.

Everyone had everything at their fingertips.

It is the pure, stolid, magical foundation of democracy that makes the library the house of God; it is the holiest of holies.

The grounds were well kempt, the parking lot smooth and flat. For the first time, I made my way up a public handicapped ramp. I zigzagged around a corner and up to the modern art deco facade. The automatic doors swooshed open into a small foyer and then again into the building itself.

I rode into the lobby and the heat hugged me and thawed my bones. Plants, glass, shiny chrome, and an indoor warmth of mahogany and open organization. The children's room was to my left, the music and multimedia ahead, and upstairs were the stacks. I found thousands of movies on discs along with an extensive collection of CDs in the multimedia area. I cruised decades of music to catch up on, and this would be my school.

After choosing a stack of music, rode the elevator up to the second floor stacks. The doors opened onto a floor of shelf after shelf of gorgeously arranged Dewey Decimal volumes. The biggest tragedy of the past couple decades was that I would never be able to make up for lost time.

Oh, the books.

At what point of life does one recognize their failing in school? I thought back to high school and middle school. Looking at these rows and rows of aromatic books in the romantic lighting, my mind tortured me with how secondary reading always was in my life. Reading was always burdensome under the demands of my overworked teachers under the demands of the curriculum of the state that was under the demands of the people. There was no time to fall in love; no time for the text to touch my humanity.

And here I stood - rather, sat - observing more books than any man could read in a lifetime. How tragic that a third of my years had been stolen by fate, or an accident, or just the grand spiraling universe reminding me that I was a speck of nothing.

So where to begin? Did I begin with tackling the books I never got through that I was assigned? I thought of The Westing Game, Night, Great Expectations, Anna Karenina, King Lear. Where to begin? I hadn’t missed the books. I missed the experience of being human. I'd missed being human, and as the clock ran down there was less and less humanity left.

I didn't care. I needed the answers now, and I only had so much life left.

I coasted to 822.3 and picked up a copy of the complete works. I began there. The heft added a strain to the motors in my chair, but promised to be great calisthenics for the motor of my heart.

I noticed a second circulation desk on the second floor with two librarians. I decided to wheel myself over to see if I couldn't take my materials out and sign up for my library card.

"How can I help you?" The librarian was only a couple years older than I was. I couldn't get over the fact that twenty years ago she would have been ancient in my eyes. I didn't remember her from my youth.

"Hi, yes, I would like to sign up for a library card and take these out."

"Okay. I can give you a card up here, but you'll have to go to the circulation desk to take these out because they have the CD case keys down there. This is mostly the reference desk for help. Do you have proof of residency?"

I produced my social security card and shuffled through my mail. I found my electricity bill, and my letter to Jenny that was returned.

"Wow. Okay, you have an account in here opened in 1990 - actually earlier, but renewed then. It hasn't been used since you took out Stephen King's The Shining. There are some late fees-"

"There are?"

"Yes. Don't worry, we cap them at two dollars. The book was eight dollars back then, but we've replaced it." She looked at me for a moment, and apparently something about my appearance and the big swatch of time that had passed appealed to her. "A new library card is a dollar, and the book is so old that the six dollars wouldn't buy us a new copy of something we already replaced, so...Because it has been so long we’ll just close this account and make you a new one. A fresh start."

She typed at the computer for a while and cross referenced the bill and my social security card, adding "you don't happen to have an ID with your photo, do you? It is okay if you don't since we have the old account with the same information, we just aren't usually allowed..."

I shook my head.

She finished up, and beeped the bar code.

"You're all set," she said as she handed me my new card. "Can I help you with anything else?"

I put the card, bill, and social security card in my lap, and I glanced at my returned letter from Jenny.

"I don't suppose," I said as I passed her the letter from my lap, "since this is reference, can you help me find people?" I handed her the letter that was returned to me.

"I'm not a creep or anything. The story is, I was in an accident a couple decades ago and I was in a coma up until this year." The librarian's eyes fixed on me. "I am still recovering, obviously, but just trying to put my life back together. My parents are dead, my friends from that time are all dead, and this is my girlfriend. I really just want some connection to my old life... Anything."

She nodded, and took the letter from me. "I should be able to help. She’s from here? This address is the last known?"

"Yes. I'd also like to know where my parents were buried. All I know is that they’re dead."

Her attention turned to her computer screen and typed a little, moved her mouse a bit, and continued investigating.

"Why don't you come around here, since you can't see what I am looking at...?

The screen showed lists.

"I actually have your parents' names here on your old account." She switched screens, and to the Times News website. A quick search, and she found their obituaries. "So, they were cremated by Halwell-Crest Funeral Home - I can print their obituaries for you." She turned in her chair to take two pieces of paper off of the printer and handed them to me.

"This is great, thanks."

She switched screens again.

"Now, this is group of databases that you get access to with your library card. It'll show you property records, birth and death records, phone number registrations, criminal arrest records, and hundreds of other things you can look at for your business, checking on tenants, genealogy research, employees, things like that. That’s the main reason we have it, but in this case it's a really great thing to use to find old friends. You can access all of this from home with your library card.

"If you take a look here," she clicked a few things and then pointed to the screen, "I've found a Jennifer Rodgers."

The screen showed an icon of a dragon Ouroboros around an American flag and the company's name, Data USA 2000.

I couldn't believe what I was looking at. There was a tremendous amount of information on the page, so much that it was difficult to see exactly what I should be paying attention to. The librarian began to point at portions of the screen as she was explaining what I should be looking at.

"So, here is her name, Jennifer Rodgers. Over here are her past known addresses - there are three, and one looks like the college, but one of them is this one on your envelope. This is your Jenny. We can cross reference her phone numbers as well, if you like."

"No, that is okay."

"So you’re interested in everything since 1994, so here we have that she has been married and has two children, both girls."

Married? Children? My heart pounded. Of course she moved on - I should be grateful that my parents even believed that I was coming out of this. I hoped she was happy.

"Yes, her new name... Jennifer LeBlanc... and right here and here are her children, Catherine and Ana Leblanc. Her husband's name is Tony LeBlanc."

Even though that settled it in terms of our future that I was never able to have, I still felt like it would be pleasant to see her again. It would be nice to meet her children and her husband. To build a new future.

"Does it say her current address? So I can forward this?"

"Oh," the librarian said, not removing her eyes from the screen. She slowed. Her attitude changed.

"What?"

"I was actually just looking at that. We have one, but... I'll just... Could you bring these down to the circulation desk and check them out and I can meet you out front? Outside?"

I did as she asked. I took the elevator down to the first floor and brought my materials to the desk where I was checked out. I wheeled out through the back lobby and around to the front of the building. The librarian waited for me in her olive pea coat and knit scarf.

"I'm Emma, by the way. I figure I could walk with you to where she is, in case..." She trailed off looking down, presumably at my chair. We began walking west along the busy thoroughfare. The sidewalks on the main street were not as bad as the ones I took to get to the library, so the ride was smooth. "So what happened with, what was it? You mentioned being in the hospital for twenty five years?"

"Coma. I was in a car accident when I was eighteen, and we had a band and our van got into an accident. Everyone died except me. It doesn't look like I'll be playing too much rock and roll, but I'm lucky."

"Everything has changed, huh?"

"Family, friends, music, the world..."

"What changed the most?"

"I noticed it right away. MTV doesn't have music anymore, you can carry computers everywhere and the internet comes from the air, September eleventh… what's that about?"

"Yeah."

She looked at a paper as we walked and we turned left into the downtown cemetery. It had two sections with a public road running down its center. When we were kids we would cut through it to get to the elementary school.

We turned into the graveyard. A cold chill bounded through the headstones as we walked in the silence of the gathering dusk. It was still early. The cold, overcast skies lent an unearthly pallor on the dormant, gray grass. The gray blades delayed the occasional crunchy leaf from its rounds.

When we were at the library I was under the impression that she wanted me to call the funeral home to find out where my parents were, but this would be fine.

Emma stopped. She looked at me.

"So, here we are. Behind the reference desk in public, among all the strangers, and at my desk, and I don't know... It didn't seem appropriate."

Her hand touched mine. The diamond of her wedding band was turned around and bit the top of my hand.

"I'm sorry, Todd."

A simple headstone.

There were clip art flowers.

LEBLANC

Jennifer Ruth

Beloved Wife & Mother