The Everborn (8 page)

“
We’re never
close.”

Behind this, in the window, was a poster board declaring midnight meal specials.

Tonight’s was Malibu chicken.

I snatched the notorious letter from my side, along with the organizer notebook and micro recorder and gathered the blank cassettes which slid between the seats during the drive. Without further delay, I abandoned the familiar comforts of my Mustang to the rush of bitter canyon air. My emergence from the vehicle was like a bold step into a foreign world. I felt myself an adventurer suddenly, a discoverer, an astronaut, a visitor to a place which should not ordinarily exist and which perhaps would vanish like a dream into the earliest morning light.

I shut the car door and surveyed the property and I was reminded of my view of the starlit coastline from the Malibu highway before. I breathed in deeply the frosty air, enraptured for the moment by its relaxing freshness until my skin grew numb against its chill. I cast a curious gaze into the dining room windows and spied an elderly man stabbing salad greens with a fork at a corner booth. Before he could catch notice of my scrutiny, I proceeded across the gravel towards the entranceway’s glass double doors.

The glass door to my right hung invitingly open as I arrived beside it, extending its patient courtesy to not only myself but to the coldness I now sought to escape. In passing I thought to shut this door, and I shuffled the belongings I held for a free hand. I reached for its handle, the horizontal bar kind common to emergency exit doors, and I shot a quick glance to the empty vestibule and vacant counter for a self-conscious acknowledgement of approval. I was actually somewhat relieved to find no one there and I cringed to myself as I realized I might not yet be fully prepared to face what I had come here for. As much as I longed for my wife, I feared her confrontation as well. Up until now I had been alone in this and in a matter of minutes the impending company would make real what still to me remained dreamlike.

I drew myself toward the door until my breath became an explosion of white misty cloud upon the surface of the glass. It was as though I’d exhaled any hidden complacencies into a breath-frost which dissolved like water beads heated upon a kettle into ripples of steam. I grappled with my confidence until I willed it to rise. I stared for a moment through the glass at the wispy torrents of life as I knew it, and in my blurred reflection I beheld the fossilizing remnants of a Max Polito that once was. Silent and sentimental, I bade it a final farewell.

I hadn’t expected anything short of a casual entry after this. I gripped the door’s handle, but several futile tugs revealed it was somehow locked into place. Feeling a bit foolish, I would have abandoned my efforts as I had not come all this way to contend with an unruly door. But as soon as I released my grip the door creaked disastrously ajar, christening my entry with a confounding loss of balance; I found myself slipping impossibly backwards, my frozen ass plummeting to a painful collision with the hard entranceway flooring. In striving to retain my grip upon the door’s handle I clumsily lurched forward, further complicating the embarrassing episode as my armful of journalistic accessories slipped from their brown-and-beige-sweatered hammock, splashing across my feet and the encircling tile floor in a bedlam of clamorous grief. Inadvertently, as if to polish off the performance, my restored grip upon the handle issued a faceful of glass which could have shattered had I not at least some small degree of luck and the door locked firmly in place, pitting my nose no more than an inch away from a blue and white endorsement for Diner’s Club.

Time appeared to stop amidst the following silence, and I dared not turn to the presence I felt behind me. I leaned over to retrieve the clutter about me, fighting against the weight of attention which tried to paralyze me, ashamed and distressed of the notion that the unknown itself could come running to my aid at any given moment.

It was not supposed to happen this way.

My organizer notebook lay unscathed amidst a dispersion of microcassettes. My microrecorder had fallen face-down, and I cursed as I raised its rectangular body to find the plastic window severely cracked. Then two AA batteries spilled out from their ruptured compartment.

I failed to notice, at first, the reflected image of the woman before me in the closed entry door’s glass.

I was distracted by the movement of light from her flickering image....I shot my gaze to the glass pane, my full attention seized but for the awareness of my quickening heartbeat.

The woman was approaching me in determined but politely cautious strides, disproportioned into a seemingly impossible distance behind me, beyond me and dwarfish enough to present the illusion of being perched upon my reflected shoulder like a voluptuous human parrot. I spied the front register counter following up in stunted visage upon the view’s horizon. The counter truly could not have been more than several yards away from my crouching back, which logically placed the woman’s actual position a mere few feet from me.

I feared a hand upon my shoulder at any given moment. I could almost feel her breath there. I could almost catch the drifting fragrance of Channel mingled with the sweet scent of familiar hair spray. I could see the shroud of lampblack luster limply draped and shoulder-length, hair framed about flawless Venezuelan features, caressing waves sweeping against tan brown skin and the shoulder straps of an azure autumn house dress.

I sat trembling. Any strength I thought I had in facing my wife suddenly crumbled into chalk dust set adrift from a denuded slate. I was a thunderstruck corpse of petrified flesh and blood beneath the fear of what
actually
might be there, that if I was to turn I would find not my wife...but in fact something else.

My eyes fixed upon her ghostly figure in the glass, my body hunched awkwardly over forgotten research relics. My hearing was by now acutely attuned to the sounds of clanking dishes and the sizzling of grills, sounds fading against the mounting threat of Melony’s voice speaking to me. I was aware of only silence until then, as though someone impulsively popped a quarter into a jukebox selection of kitchen clatter chorus to revive me from my stunned state. Just as instantly, I could smell the aroma of broiled and boiled banquet, as though it had not existed a moment before. All this would have surely antagonized my empty belly into record depths of growling rage if my hunger had not been snuffed beneath the numbing blanket of my wife’s semblance.

As my senses livened to the environment around me, I found myself able to think, able to move. I felt myself capable of spinning to face my wife, to leap upon my feet and embrace her as I should have within the very instant I saw her, to cry out with every emotion suppressed until then by the confusion I had awakened to, to exclaim to the world and to the forces which separated us that I missed her, missed her deeply. I wanted to proclaim that regardless of unknown destiny, I could not face such an appalling isolation from my most precious beloved again and to do so would be an act of unmistakable evil I would fight against to the death.

This resurgence of will was more than enough to encourage any conscious ability to move, if not to face my fears nor to embrace Melony, then to simply get out of the goddamn doorway. And I moved, turning in dilatory incline, my vision panned like a surveillance camera reviving from a power loss.

I continued to turn, even as I sensed the touch of her hand. I felt it upon my shoulder, resting suddenly and comfortably and I had no recollection of it having actually been placed there. It was as though it had been there all along, even before the spectacle of my arrival, fingers molded gently against the arch of my collarbone, subtle palm cupped shallow into the knit sweater-cloaked soft flesh above my shoulder blade. It could be true that this touch alone initiated my ability to move and it had not resulted from my own strength after all.

If this touch called me into motion just steps ahead of my own awareness, this would account for the strange, detached sensation which swept over me, a sensation cruelly overridden in the incessant parallel drawn for me since this whole mess began. It was at this particular moment, however, when time as I knew it broke free from its linear shell and emerged scrambled before me in mismatched fragments.

To perfect a description of what came next, I would have to be dyslexic. Even still, only I could truly read and understand.

But there came a voice: she was speaking to me, and as my eyes drew further into my wife’s direction I knew instantly that the voice I heard did not belong to the woman I knew.

It was the voice of another woman entirely. What she said did not seem directed at me. It was more of a general announcement.

“
We’ve got tonight’s special!”

And as I looked, I saw that what spoke was not human. Whatever it was, it was clearly female and quite curvaceous, but legless and floating upon a bed of invisible currents of warmth, unclothed, its skin gleaming with the luster of polished bronze. It raised its arms to me.

As I dropped further to the floor in a trance of crippling weakness, my vision fell upon the typewritten letter that brought me there.

I lost all consciousness then, but in my last remaining thoughts I realized what the voice had meant.

And I thought of midnight meal specials.

4.

Time Retold At the Motel Untold

My second episode of lost consciousness.

So far to memory.

And no matter the amount of days or hours or chunks of moments then passing beneath linear time’s eternal scrutiny, the occurrence, when I came to, felt like I’d
blinked
out rather than
blacked
.

The abrupt rudeness in my unforeseen dismissal left me with a resentment of having been cheated out of a promise. Had I done something wrong? Had the plans been diverted, relocated elsewhere? Had the torch been passed to a more suitable and less clumsy candidate?

If I opened my eyes, would I find myself home again, shaken to attention by Auntie Emm’s black-and-white realities where all my friends had been with me all along?

It appeared that the scene had made its debut almost as awkwardly as I had made the scene, toppling from what I knew into what I knew the next moment, then into what I was learning still. I was a victim of parody, a parody of myself, an obscene portrayal of mock tangibility suffering sporadic power failures from a projection room in the theatre of my mind.

Jumping the gun of throttled instinct gave way to realizing I had not been rejected and returned to my home after all. My environment remained foreign. I faced a cheap wooden student’s desk, its two drawers planted like two weathered square boxes to the right of the encompassing leg space beneath my view. I faced the swirls of plain plaster yellow of a wall against which clung the desk’s backside, and the wall opened to my left, into a gaping black vestibule which reflected dim movement from deep within its center. An overhead lampshade blossomed from drooping chain links in a tarnished embroidery of rose petals, bathing me in a spotlight of webbed fumes from a cigarette.

Without thinking, I reached towards a desktop ashtray that wasn’t there. I’d quit smoking years ago, sometime in my mid-twenties, and I had to remind myself so.

Someone else was smoking.

The movement of light within the black vestibule upon my next gaze was now a splinter of reflection from a mirror hung over a wash basin.

***

The Watcher made himself known when I turned to face his presence behind me.

He was smoking, exhaling smoke which tumbled and twisted in vaporous streams throughout my realm of lamplight. He was seated at the edge of the room’s only bed, a queen-sized bed, unmoving and silent, his cloaked configuration facing an average-sized rectangular motel room window, his back turned toward me. The drapes were opened, the window was shut, my lamplight’s reflection bouncing blindness off the window’s glass surface together with the circular birch brown embroidery of the bedcovers thrown evenly and smoothly over the mattress and bloated twin pillows.

Cigarette ashes fell from a smoldering filter tipped between fingers tenebrous and pale. It lowered, the figure lowering himself slowly with it, crushing the butt into an ashtray nest half full of smokes previously spent and destroyed upon the bed beside him.

His countenance drawn for a moment beneath a perimeter of light, I beheld the windowed reflection of a wizened and familiar creature, clothed under a thick garment of cotton-white complimentary motel bathrobe, complete with what appeared to be an attached hood shrouding its head like a Bible-land holy man.

My pulse quickened at its very sight, and I was at once frozen in a half-twisted turn against the padded cup of my chair’s wooden back rest. Speechless, I knew only the thrill of enchantment within the presence of destiny’s unspeakable climax of enlightened truth; I could not imagine a sensation more sobering than this, than at long last brought into an intimate confrontation with mankind’s ageless mystery in the flesh.

Rubber-smooth knuckles curved and curled into a lemon-sized fist which lazily lifted to stifle a raspy cough. His lipless mouth could not have opened any wider than the face of my wristwatch. When his mouth closed, it formed a simple, placid, horizontal line.