Dark and Stormy Night

I am just a child standing on a vacant road. I’m standing on it now, just a foot or two from a bale of hay so tall I can hardly see over it. It’s early enough in the morning that the hay stinks in the morning dew. The air is warm in the late German summer. The ground shakes and vibrates because there is an army of giant ants burrowing underneath the asphalt. I want to dig through it, but I left my shovel and pail at home so my tiny spades of fingernail will have to do. First, I must set down my strawberry ice cream cone. The ants must have heard me coming because now their digging has turned severe, and the scoop of ice cream falls out of the cone and runs into the cracks in the pavement. This makes me mad, but then I forget my embryo of a tantrum in the growing noise. Something is coming. It sounds like an airplane. I think for a second that maybe we are going back home.

Now, I’m in a whirl of color and noise and smells so new, I don’t even know to be afraid. Numbers go by and letters along with them, vivid blues and reds and yellows, and the colors fly by with a sound that is so loud, I’m sure grandma can hear this all the way in heaven. I look back in the direction I had come, seeing the face of my father over the top of the bale, his mouth wide, but nothing coming out except the squealing of tires and the screaming of brakes. His mouth moves, but I can’t hear what he says. I do want to hear because I think he might be trying to explain to me why we left mother back in Maine.

When my father first spoke of this day at Nurburgring ten years later, I would learn the perfume that enraptured me that day was a mix of motor oil, petrol and fear as men swerved to avoid a shame that would overshadow both their lives and careers.

I always remember this time when I think of strawberry. Strawberry ice cream take me back naturally, especially Ben and Jerry’s - a satisfied client I’m proud to say. Strawberries on anything set me back too.

➓

“Here’s the Strawberry Red you wanted me to pick up.”

I set the can of paint down at the foot of the ladder my wife is standing on. Heather Hare is drawing the number ten on the wall of our son’s room. Along the wall she has painted a wide strip of finish line checkers running from the light switch to the closet. Now she is painting a series of black numbers on white circles without the benefit of the stencils which I had suggested. Puffs of white meant to be clouds hover above on the ceiling. Everyday is a good day for racing in David’s room.

“Strawberry? I told you Cherry. Nobody paints their race car Strawberry,” she says, too occupied by the act to look away from where her pencil meets architectural canvas.

“I swear you said strawberry.”

I have no evidence. I erased her static-plagued request from my voice mail queue after picking up the can at Aubuchon Hardware. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure she said strawberry. I do think it was a fruit color.

“Cherry.”

Such times as this for Heather are periods of possession during which all concerns for others are put to the wayside in support of a paramount singularity - the creation of the mural. During possession the core of the family would disintegrate sending our daughter to the safety of a friend’s house and our son to a place he only knows, to be rediscovered days later, sometimes undernourished, often in filth.

This night I know where both of them are. Denise is at Smith College moving into her freshman dorm before orientation week, and David, our adoptive five-year-old, is at his ESL speech therapist’s house watching cartoon network and learning to shed a Korean accent.

“I’ll take care of dinner for myself,” I say.

My wife dives down into the mental depths, not even looking down to take pity upon me.

“And I’ll take the paint back to the store.”

Not a peep. It’s like every other day at the races. I hate my wife when she believes she is an artist.

➓

“Would you like to try our new Strawberries and Cream Frappucino®?”

“Just a skim latte and an onion bagel.”

“Right Bob,” the clerk says pointing at me with both fingers in a show of both camaraderie with customers and love of beverage service fun.

I sit down at the corner table like I usually do and open up my laptop. I have eighteen e-mails awaiting attention. I have another five brief and insignificant missives on my BlackBerry.

I check my voice mail on my cell. I have one message from Denise confessing to denting the rear fender of my Volvo station wagon. I feel no anger at this. There will be no questions or investigations - simply thanks that she is unhurt and encouragement to try extra hard to earn good grades in her first semester.

I set all my devices to silent and take a sip of the latte. Outside the window, the arteries of the world pump steel and rubberized corpuscles lubricated by fumes of burnt hydrocarbon. I call my work partner Neil but get his voice mail instead.

“I’m assuming we still haven’t heard back from the Ford people still . . . Stacy e-mailed me saying she thinks they are talking with Campbell-Ewald . . . I think we should send them a new bid . . . Have Shannon make up a new sheet . . . See you in the morning.”

Two weeks ago, before the reports of plant closures and layoffs, the Ford account had been in the can, a given, worthy of popping a bottle of Dom Perignon. They had lapped up every minute of the presentation. I preached to them on the need to focus on the mythos of the road, the freedom of the driver, the adventure the driver begins every fucking time they get behind the wheel. Fuck economy, fuck fuel efficiency, fuck five-star crash and rollover ratings.

The Ford account was a huge deal. Bigger than Dave’s Bar-B-Q Ribs. Bigger than Ben and Jerry’s. Such a score could make an ad shop. It could buy a lot of paint. An ambulance cruises by with its lights flashing but silent, as the rest of the world seems, beyond the glass.

I stare at the excited liquid crystals and read over my most recent child:

Parks piss some people off; relaxing,: Just avoiding the echo- my apartment is vibrating again . Just…stare at the msitubishi a long time, dusk, lights going on and off , and then walk slowly home ; natoriouse nietche dude coming the other way, the beard and all; smile knowingly. They hate it, and then the right bar say, with some math brain you can’t get rid of.

I then find myself writing:

Lot of ambulences tonight. Heading south. wonder where they’re going….6 so far…makes you wonder…

see - I like wittgenstien for dummies more and more…thrill kill barbie hit the spot to but..thsoe are fiction; all that is a seperat genre out of som e banal TV culture..looped..I dunno…they find it…

Somebody once wrote that what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence. Whoever wrote that didn’t have wi-fi access.

On the wall across is another of my wife’s creations. A mural of a woman, plump and reclining on a bed of what appear to be browned peaches, but what I know she meant to be roasted coffee beans. I log on, hit commit, and begin to get high upon the fumes.

My cyber-amigos at Cyber Connections have been kind enough to publish my musings on a game I enjoy and use to both settle international conflict and foster greater global understanding.

Read it . . . Play it . . . Love your fellow man.

The sight of Nathan’s doppelganger forced all the blood to rush out of Nathan’s legs toward the safety of his stilled heart. Spying one’s double is a frightful thing.

Nathan found his double in the lobby of the Elephant Car Wash on Hudson. This was one of those car washes that provides a full service experience while customers wait in a lobby thumbing outdated magazines and drinking tepid coffee, waiting to see their car float by. Nathan was sitting there anticipating his Beamer to cruise by under the huge, spinning brush.

The car was momentarily forgotten as he watched himself approach. Nathan could see that although this man looked almost exactly like himself, the similarity was not quite flawless. The man’s skin was pale, almost yellow, like he had jaundice, and the blue under his eyes betrayed a parade of restless nights. He was also much thinner, by about thirty pounds Nathan guessed, and wore a leather jacket with a tear in the seam of the left sleeve. Everything else was him though, the same brown eyes with flakes of gold, the premature grey above each ear, the distinctive dimple in the left cheek.

“Feel strange?” Nathan’s double asked. He did not appear surprised by this odd meeting and sat down next to Nathan as if sitting with a brother. “I remember how I felt when I first saw you - oh shit!”

The Beamer was doused with soapy water whose ph level had been precisely adjusted to most effectively remove grime accumulated from the city’s streets.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” Nathan answered looking up from the lobby’s dog-eared edition of Forbes. Nathan mused that perhaps they were only similar in appearance, yet were still different in all others ways. In other words, Nathan struggled to believe they were separate persons. Nathan’s ghostly twin chuckled.

Brushes whirled like dervishes, flicking dirt to the floor and down the drain.

“I guess we haven’t. My name’s Nathan. It’s a pleasure to meet you finally.” The doppelganger thrust out a hand in greeting. Nathan only looked at it, shocked by the boniness, the wart at the base of the thumb, the crud under the fingernails. This was some joke schemed by his co-workers back at Brassman Bags, Nathan thought. Someone is watching with a camera somewhere. In a few minutes, his boss will leap from behind a potted palm. The video will be played to help unwind after the next team-building retreat. He is, what was the word . . . punked?

A huge spinning drum of a brush ran over the hood of the Beamer then up over the windshield, removing the splattered remains of insects accumulated along the drive out of the city to Nathan’s lake house.

“Where did they find you? It’s incredible,” Nathan said, moving to touch his double’s face, thinking it to be some sort of Hollywood make-up job. The double slapped Nathan’s hand away.

“Don’t be touching the face. This isn’t some joke, someone fucking with your head and having a laugh at your expense. I even know what you’re thinking.”

“Somehow you know my name, which I suppose wouldn’t be too hard to find out,” Nathan thought aloud.

“I knew to find us here. You’re such a sucker for ritual. You come the first Thursday of each month to get your car washed. There it goes by now.”

Indeed, it was rolling by the window under a curtain of undulating blue strips hanging from the ceiling, soap suds flowing down.

“You’ve been following me?”

“I’m a bit more qualified than the average fucking stalker. I am you. Don’t you think I have sort of right to see how I live?”

“You’re talking in riddles, and I’m going,” Nathan said, slamming the Forbes to the coffee table and rising.

“I read about us in Fortune about eight months ago. You have the article framed on the wall of your office. You made the rag’s list of top ten masters of the universe on Wall Street. Remember, ‘Soaring in the nose-bleed section of risk,’ ‘Master of the deriverse,’ the ‘Genius who structured the chocolate derivative?” What the fuck is a chocolate derivative anyway? So few analysts understand it that you’ve single-handedly led your bank to corner the fucking market. You know how I came across that article? Huh?”

“No.” Nathan wanted to flee the unstable man who knew too much.

“It was in the public library. I was pulling tricks in the bathroom for some brown. When things got slow, I’d sit in the stacks with all the magazine back issues, and there I was on the cover smiling, holding a big chocolate bar, but yet I didn’t remember all this stuff the magazine said I knew how to do. And where was all this fucking green I was making?”

“Listen, I think you’ve just latched onto an idea . . . maybe got yourself some back alley plastic surgery to make the fantasy a bit more real for you . . . but it’s not.”

Nozzles shot streams of warm liquid wax at the Beamer.

“That’s where we’re wrong Nathan. This isn’t a fantasy or dream at all. You remember when you were finally adopted?” the ghostly twin asked.

Nathan thought back to his ninth year. He had run away for two days and slept in a tent in a nearby park. The cops had found him, taken him home to a scared and angry pair of foster parents. The next day Nathan mowed the lawn and begged his foster parents not to call social services. He was adopted three months later.

“Yeah, I see you remembering back. Here’s the kick Nathan - you made all the right decisions. You mowed the lawn, behaved yourself, smiled when the situation called for it. Look what happened Nate? I didn’t mow that lawn, behave myself, smile when a smile would have helped me. I went another way. I wasn’t adopted. I made some bad decisions, a whole life of bad decisions to be honest - I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve been in jail, addicted to everything from oxy to heroin, been stabbed within an inch of losing my life. You’re a smart guy, you know what a decision tree is right? We’re both sitting under it ‘cept you are on the sunny side, and I’m on the dark.”

Outside, one pair of minimum wage workers ran shammies along the Beamer’s fenders, while another pair vacuumed the carpets and leather seats inside. All these services were part of a Wash Deluxe.

“How’s the wife? Is she a good piece of ass still? The kid not getting on your nerves?”

“Listen, you can try to scare me as much as you want, but leave my family alone.”

“Nathan, you don’t see yet. They are my family also. I’ve structured a new deal. I’m getting all my bad decisions washed away today. There aren’t many feeling in the world like starting new. This has been an eye-opening experience getting to meet me. Now, if you will excuse us, our ride is waiting now, and we’ve got to design the next cutting-edge strawberry derivative.”

Nathan walked out the swinging door. Outside, he took his keys from the cleaners. The last specks of detritus, picked up from the floor of the Brassman Bags employee parking garage by Nathan’s Italian leather wingtips, were sucked up into vacuum cleaners. Nathan dropped a ten in the tip box and drove off, leaving something of a dusty shell behind.