Walking the Sleep (2 page)

I came back. Back to the night my body was killed. I watched the blood pumping out of my temple and couldn’t help but laugh a little…it looked like thick tomato juice. This time I heard, for the first time I guess, some screams and the sounds of sirens. I didn’t feel like staying around to watch this. I was suddenly struck by the irony that I had only twenty dollars in my pocket but they left my bottle of Jameson’s whiskey on the ground, although the one was quick to grab my .45 auto.

I watch with fascination as the blood fills the half open plastic bag and surrounds my vanilla Zingers. I just don’t want to wait around to see what happens next so I leave. I walk over and watch a family eating hamburgers at the Yellow Basket. If I felt hungry, I suppose I could eat.

I sit and watch the family eat. This is a good family. Father asks Saul about his day between bites of a double cheeseburger. They are speaking in Spanish and mine is limited the last I remember, but I understand everything they are saying. I should marvel at this. I do not.
So I listen as they enjoy their meal. I learn that Saul is getting straight A’s in biology, has made the soccer team, but wants to play baseball also. I don’t wait to hear the outcome but I think all will be okay with this family. This is a good family.

I think maybe I shou
ld figure out a few things. I head back over to the store where my body was killed. Very peaceful and quiet. Nothing going on here at all. Nothing has happened here. Did it not happen? Did it happen a week ago? Ten years? I feel the frustration coming again. Inside the store I see the man that told me I was dead. He nods as I come in. Another kind acknowledgement from a dead person. How long have I been wandering? Maybe he knows something. Except for the beautiful woman on the pier, I hadn’t spoken to anyone else.

“Thanks for telling me I was dead.”

“Not a problem. I don’t like to see people walking around for years thinking they are shopping. As entertaining as that can be.”

“Aren’t they?”

“What? Shopping? Sure. But there’s better things to do than nothing at all, and there’s nothing sadder than watching a guy stare at a pack of Twinkies for three days.”

“Huh….guess so. I’ve seen some interesting things.
I don’t know how long I might be starting at things now that I think about it.”

“Yes.
Time is a tricky thing. You’ll figure it out. In the meantime there’s a lot to see.”

I started
to ask him how he saw anything if he was always here but then decided it wasn’t my place. I looked around the store and realized I knew it very well. I had been coming here for years it felt like. I finally turned and studied him for the first time. Tall with a strong build, muscular, like a former boxer, or weightlifter. Must have been fifty years plus with grey showing around the temples. He smiled. Again the feeling, I know this person. But I do not. Maybe I do yet through a cloud intermittently scattered with clear patches.

“Why do you stay here?
I mean, if there’s lot’s to see…”

“I get out and about. There’s no hurry.”

“I wander around a lot.”

He smiles and nods. For the first time I see he has green eyes speckled with tiny spots of brown and grey.
Thick square jaw. Nose broken and healed but not set. Crooked to the left, but not menacing. His knuckles are gnarled. The borders between his knuckles are gone, rolled into masses of scar tissue and cartilage.

“You mind if I hang around here for a bit?”

“Not a bit. You can learn a lot here.”

“I just get tired of wandering around all the time. Sometimes it’s good, but when it’s dark..”

“Yeah
. I know. You don’t have to explain. I wandered around a lot before coming here.”

“My head feels kind of stable in here. It’s not peace, but, you know, maybe calmer.”

“That’s good.”

“Thanks.”

He nods and smiles.

“Just remember not to stare too hard at things when you’re out there.”

Back in time? Dreaming? Seeing? I am laughing and smiling. I am standing above myself watching. She is beautiful and loves me. I can tell. She hugs me and tells me something. I laugh and then kiss her. I know her. I loved her. And then she is walking away. She stops and takes one last look at me. Her eyes are sad and her head drops as she turns. She walks away. I can say nothing. I want to tell her to stop. I want to beg her not to go, but my mouth is frozen, and my heart stops beating. I am frozen in pain and despair. It’s too late to speak. And she is gone.

I realize finally that I was walking the sleep again and wonder how long I had been because things around me looked different today. Checked out of consciousness. How long? It’s daytime but what is today. I’m sick of that question now. Things look different. I feel like I’ve been asleep but I do not sleep. There is no sleep. There is walking. There is slipping. Sleep is rest as I recall. Not all sleep of course. But there is a distinct time when a person closes off their consciousness and they slip into rest. This walking, this wandering, is not like that.

Certainly, there is a slipping of consciousness, but there is no rest. It’s a fog that comes and overtakes the consciousness, and then, instead of waking up and maybe having a vague recollection of a dream, like in life, there are just images of places I have walked.
Or I might be staring at a dream, at myself, at the past, and I see but do not always understand what it means. When you have that dream that confuses you, you sometimes try to piece it together, but sometimes I am watching the dream unfold before me in real time. Some good. Some bad.

D
reams of people I have lost. I sit and weep. In these times there is no solace for my soul. I reach and try to find her. I ache deep down and wake up in tears. Slowly I pull my consciousness together. Remind myself that nothing matters here and no one cares. And with these confusing real time dreams I am suddenly snapped back to reality. I remember what he told me. “Don’t stare too long.” I was staring too long.

I think I told you this already but humor me. There is no real sleep here. There are some pleasant times in wandering though. A good dream that becomes part reality. I twilight sleep between dream and awake. Between worlds and states of consciousness. And then I slip.

And I sometimes long for
this kind of sleep. In that place I sometimes see the eyes that loved me. The eyes that cared. So long from me now. They are gone. But in the sleep, I see them. I see her again. That time, when she loved me with her soul. And in the sleep it matters not there that it is all gone, that I will never see that love again in the soft brown eyes, because there, in the deepest places of disconnected images and words, she loves me again. And I can wake from that feeling happy sometimes for a little while. I will snap awake violently conscious. I might be standing in front of a building at lunchtime in downtown Los Angeles. People swarming by me, through me, and I stand there. In the sunlight. Blinking. Adjusting my eyes and ears to the mid-day city.

And I feel
and see the sweetness of a hidden moment in my mind. A time lost and never again, but for a moment, and through a foggy haze of morning happiness. I like starting happy like that. A dream of her smiling at me. When we were laughing and happy. And things were as they should have been. Things as they had once been before I fucked everything up. And some days, after a dream like that, I will sing a song she liked. A song I remember her singing to. Or dancing to. I will walk around with the sound of her laughter in my head.

Sometimes it’s very fuc
king confusing, like today. I try to spend a lot of time in daylight. I don’t like the night very much, so I don’t stay in it unless there is something I need to do. The ravens are active during the daytime, but there’s a far worse and dark feeling most places at night. Not everywhere. Really fucked up souls walk and wander at night. People wearing their death faces. I have to go when I have to. I mean, sometimes I have to wander out at night. Some things only exist at night. Scattered memories and energy left as stains in the asphalt. Blood seeps down and stays there. I can smell blood from a death long ago. I often walk back to the place I got killed late into the night. I can pick up the energy better around the time it happened. I don’t know why. During the day it doesn’t look like anything. At night I can smell my blood mingled with the filth of the parking lot.

Sometimes I feel
what seem like mental directions and wander off. Sometimes it’s nothing and I go back towards the daylight. I try to stay in daylight. Sometimes I go into the night out of sheer boredom when I do not sense evil things.

Once I set off into the night wandering to nowhere in particular. Slipped away. And there I was on the beach in Hawaii. And I
watched the stars blink and twinkle. I watched the moon shine and reflect off the water in Kaanapali. I listened as the soft waves kissed the white sand. If I think hard enough about a place, or a time, I can be there. It takes a lot of energy. I thought long and hard about being in Maui, remembered many things, and found myself there. But it’s exhausting to the point where inevitably, I will fall into a wandering again. For the brief moments I am there, it is quite beautiful and calm. Moments. It could be months. I slip again and then end up back in Orange County, or Northern California, or sometimes in the Arizona desert. If I wake far from home, I will consciously walk back to Santa Ana. These can be long and tiring walks. These are walks where the ravens circle, peer down from dark trees, and hop along behind me at a distance. Watching. Waiting for a weak moment of consciousness.

So, it is with memories here. They can be as clear as the moment they happened, or they can
be confusing and fearfully unsettling. I always seem to know I don’t have to think about anything but I always do. And, inevitably, as I think of things, I end up there. I wander there. Wandering takes months, it takes years, it takes seconds, I have no fucking clue really. Like I said, the time thing really does a fuck job on the brain.

There are always lots of questions I have for myself. Sometimes I ask them out loud to no one. Sometimes I ask them inside my head and they sound like echoes. Then I wonder if I spoke out loud. I look around to see if anyone heard. Sometimes a bird or crow is sitting nearby head bent sideways, and I wonder if they’re listening.

Why was I living in a shitty apartment in Santa Ana? I had a bottle of Jameson’s whiskey, which was expensive whiskey. If I were poor, wouldn’t I have been smarter than to buy expensive whiskey, beer and Zingers?

Why wasn’t I buying malt liquor and cheap whiskey if I were so poor as to have to live in a shithole like this? I hadn’t seen my apartment, but I imagined it had to be pretty shitty. I knew this area well. There wasn’t a whole lot of anything but shit in this area.

Yes, I knew this area years and years and years well…I seemed to know this but not the reason why I knew it. Imagine the first place you can ever remember in life. Maybe some place you know like you know yourself. Now imagine leaving that place, or maybe you have left that place and can see it in your head. Leave it for thirty years, forty, fifty, a hundred….now go back and walk the street you had walked so many times. There’s that garage down the street where a girl let you feel her pussy outside her panties for the first time, or maybe you’re the girl that finally gave in and let him inside the bra. That street. And you will know that place even if everything around that place has changed. I did that as a young man once. I went back to the place I lived when I was five years old. A place I had not seen in twenty years. I walked around. It had changed so much. The giant granite mountain I had stood upon and declared myself ruler, and king, was no more than an outcropping of rock fifteen feet long and two feet high. How many times I had defended that mountain against marauding gooks. Really fucking racist, I know, but it was 1969 and my sisters were fucking Marines returning from Vietnam. That’s what I heard.

“Fucking gooks, don’t never trust no fucking zipper-headed slope, kid!”

I think that fucker was from
New Jersey, now that I know what New Jersey sounds like. Back then I just thought he was a funny guy, who talked funny, and made my sister scream a lot in the other room. She always seemed happy afterwards, so I figured it must be some kind of happy scream. I learned to call them “fuckers” later when I realized why my sisters were making so much noise.

My big black brother, Ronald, told me.

“They’re fucking in there! He’s putting his dick in her coochie hole.”

“Why?”

“I dunno but my brother does it to your sister too sometimes. I snuck a peek.”

“Hmmmm. Must be fun.”

“Yeah, I’m goin’ try it soons I can.”

“Me too!”

“I’m goin’ try it on your sister?”

“She’s too big for you.”

“The one with the red hair?”

“Oh. Huh. She’s really ugly though.”

“Yeah, but I don’t care. Gonna try it.”

Anyway. The Marines were always good to me. They taught me how to take a punch, a little karate, and bought me lots of pizza. And they really enjoyed fucking my sisters, which made them nicer too it seemed.

So many cap-guns, dart-guns, and makeshift stick guns I had gone through defending that granite peak from those gooks. And there I stood as an adult on top of nothing more than a glorified rock. An outcropping of granite. But there was so much there that I knew, and saw, and felt. Because we always leave a part of ourselves in places we spend time in. Those parts will wait for you there and remind you that you once belonged there.

So it was here. I knew I belonged here at one time, but it might as well have been a thousand years ago in this haze. Still you never forget places you stayed in for a period of time.