Lost As Usual

 

 

 

 

 

Aiken wakes up naked in the vestibule of a closed tattoo parlor. Not a stitch. It’s cold but he’s more embarrassed than he is chilly. The first thing he sees, his eyes following the wall upwards, is a poster in red and black which seems to have been scratched and clawed by innumerable fingernails, an advertisement for a band named Porcupine Coitus. There are only a few people meandering about – they look like they might be enroute to jobs. There’s the old cigar-smoking man stocking the newspaper box across from the drugstore. A small clump of rather scabby-looking pigeons are directly in front of him, eye-level. Their eyes are odd: the lens flips closed, reopen: translucent eyelids. I have got to find some sort of covering for myself, he thinks, raising himself up on an elbow. And: I have got to get home as soon as possible. Is his mind blurry from something? Maybe. Did he have too much to drink last night? Aiken stopped drinking, years ago. Was there a moment (he struggles mightily with his memory) last night (where was I?) when he decided Oh well just one beer won’t hurt anything after all it’s been so many years and I’m inured to the – to the –

 

A woman walks by, tippy-tap high-heels, but does not notice him. Glad for small favors. The old newspaper man, his eyes like a hawk and about the same color (baby-shit brown), in fact does see him and is slowly crossing the street in his baggy grey trousers, the brim of his 1950s hat in his hand. Perhaps he’ll hand me the hat so I can cover myself up. Instead, when he reaches him, the newspaperman takes off his crease-less jacket, wordlessly hands it over, his cigar’s smoke slowly drifting up. Cigar smoke, so similar to body odor – or is it me? Am I stinking too? What the fuck is wrong here?

 

“Don’t worry too much about it, bud,” the old man mutters in his grandmother’s voice. He sees a bit of a resemblance now as the guy turns away. “I think you’ll find the jacket will cover all the important parts.”  Man was reading Aiken’s thoughts, he realizes later.

 

“Thanks,” he croaks. He ties the arms around his waist, remembering how the kids at school did this with their sweaters, how many hundreds of years ago? Early in the school year, when they wore jackets to fend off early-morning chill but had to remove them in the afternoon . . . what day is today? He feels his testicles contract a bit at the chilly air sweeping up.

 

The newspaperman/grandmother walks on off.

 

He is still wondering what to do. Creeps into the sunlight, lets it warm his shoulders and back. How ridiculous I must look! But no one seems to notice him, and there really aren’t that many people about anyway. The morning sun rising behind a Barber’s milk clock up the street. A church clock chimes, inciting a batch of pigeons to rush up, wheel, pass over his head. The sky is a pristine, autumnal blue.

 

Time to make my way home, he thinks. Time to go. He leaves the vestibule and starts walking.

 

 

The sidewalk is the color of terra-cotta, bumpy, and has black letters on it, but no word is spelled. Reminds him a little of scrabble games. His bare feet touch the edges of Rs and Js. Sometimes he dodges bits of glass. At the corner a girl in dirty jeans slumps against the wall of the old Piggly Wiggly grocery store, smoking a cigarette. She kicks some paper away from her feet, where it has clumped up: not newspaper shreds but clean crisp 8 ½ by 11 inch paper. Good bond.

 

“Hey,” she says as he passes.

 

“What.” He stops. She gives him a sort of up and down look. Aiken thinks she’s quite cute, but the expression on her face reeks with studied cynicism.

 

“Any spare change?” There’s just a hint of a smile at the corner of her wide, thin, bow-like lips. Where once were dimples now reside wrinkles. Somebody said that about Aiken recently. When?

 

Much of his fear, his desire to get home quickly, vanishes for a bit.

 

“Hm,” he mutters. He tries to get his hand down into the pocket of the jacket the old man’s given him. Inside is an pale blue envelope, unclosed, and within that, four crisp new twenties. It does not occur to him to take the money to the old man: this is a present from him. His grandmother would have done that for him. So he says, trying out his smile, “Got change?”

 

“Come with me.” Her voice is really quite musical. He follows her to down the unfriendly, graffiti’d alleyway, behind the huge Baptist church (“sold to Korean Baptists years ago”), around the edge of the delapidated former-YMCA building (“roof blew off years ago, Apriil 8^th in fact, 1974”). Aiken slows his pace to let her move ahead. He’s actually using this opportunity to watch her butt, which has that gracious quality of swaying only a little bit to the left and right of the centerline of her spine as she strides on. Up ahead is an allnight café. He tells her he used to spend a lot of time in such places. ONEIRO might be the name, but it looks like some of the fluorescent letters are burned out.

 

“This place is new. Your name is…?”

 

Freeze of the mind as he wonders if he should give a wrong answer.

 

“Aiken.”

 

“Ah,” she says, “like my aiken heart?”

 

“Right,” he says. “What’s your name?”           

 

“You don’t want to know.”

 

At the café they take the far back booth. Orange and red colors here, nobody present but themselves. Is it even open? Yes, here comes the waittress, a woman with bright birdlike eyes and more wrinkles than a bloodhound. The lights are raw bulbs: no fixtures, but no fluorescence either. He wonders why the streetlamps seem to be the color of the streetlamps from long ago, before the pale pinks of the past few years . . . .

 

“I’ll have a happiness sandwich with joy coffee,” the girl orders, then, turning to Aiken, she says, “have you ever heard Porcupine Coitus?”

 

“I uh just saw the sign for them.”

 

“A great band, you oughta see them. Good harmonica.”

 

“Maybe I will. ” But I have to get home…it’s morning…my wife will already be awake and wondering where I am. Since I quit drinking, I have no ready excuses for being late when I come in. He watches the people walking by, presumably enroute to work, but there’s no great influx of traffic apropos of a weekday’s traffic. Gangly black boy stares at him through the window. Tall old white man with a cane, not enough clothes to keep him warm. Three girls a-loping, four camels clomping, five broken flings! four sparrowbirds, three clenched buns, two – oh enough of this mental flutteration, he’s not paying attention to the girl whose name he does not know.

 

She’s gone. Must’ve gone to the bathroom. He sits propped on his elbows, idly kicking a sugar package around with one rather dirty index finger. How did my hands get so dirty?  And he still had no shoes, he suddenly remembers. But he kicks something beneath the table: her skinny Keds sneakers! Should he put them on? I wish that for just one time I could stand inside your shoes. City workers pause outside the window, a man in a bright dayglow green suit gets out and starts to shout. Aiken can’t quite hear what he’s saying. Detour? Quarantine? Re-settlement? The old waittress smiles at him, crooks a finger as she unties her egg-colored apron and walks out. He is to follow; snagging the Keds first.

 

The worker is making them all line up down the sidewalk; they are to wait for something, an event yet to be named or announced. He looks down the line, sees the dorsal side of a wide variety of people. He gets fidgety, remembers the long queues he had to endure some decades ago, at a theme park one state over, when he took the kids on a holiday. There were televisions nailed to pine trees, there. How long will this go on? What are they waiting for? He thinks of making a run for it. Where did his girl friend, the Porcupine Coitus groupie, get off to? Did she just leave him? Damn, seemed like everyone was leaving him. The line moved a few people; shuffle shuffle. No, this is not good. I must get out of here. He glances up at the top of the 21 Building and sees a group of people doing yoga. What? Why aren’t they in this group? That’s the rooftop yoga I had heard about.

 

 

“Sir?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Sir, could you come with us for a moment?” The man was a bit taller than Aiken, well-built, bald but with a few fragments of pale reddish hair drifting over his crown. He thought he glimpsed a badge behind the dark blue blazer the fellow wore over a casual shirt, and so he agreed to be taken aside from the line, which seemed to stretch far off down the sidewalk. He didn’t like the expressions he saw on the faces of the closer people: relieved fear, quickly averted eyes… Another man further down was handing something out to the people in the line, but Aiken couldn’t tell what it was. Something brown.

 

“Sir, we’d like to ask you a few questions before you get into the system.”

 

What system? “Okay….”

 

“Did you ever study the sect called Sufis?”

 

“Well, yes, many years ago.”

 

“I think the books were by an author named Idries Shah?” The man was consulting a notebook. Aiken wondered at the thinness of his eyebrows, raised a bit as he spoke the question. He hadn’t directly seen his eyes yet. The sun was going down quickly.

 

“Yes, that’s the author.”

 

“The books were Oriental Magic, published by Dutton, and The Sufis, also published by Dutton, correct?”

 

“Yes but I don’t see what – ”

 

“Library records show that you checked out some other books on the subject of esoteric Islamic sects . . . ? Also some music?”

 

It was a question, but Aiken is feeling a bit defensive now. He looks down at the grey jacket still tied around his waist, the Keds on his feet, and it seems imperative that he have some pockets to put his hands into. Instead, a shrug. A little bravado, for inside he’s quivering. “Yes sir, I was studying them quite intensively at the time. They’re quite famous for their -- ”

 

Cold fish eyes.

 

“ – their dancing, at least the Mevlevis, who many in the west know as dervishes. The famous mystic Gurdjieff sort of made their music famous.”

 

“I see.”

 

“The sufis are the esoteric inner core of Islam, devoted utterly to the way of the heart, sir. There’s nothing dangerous or evil about them, so I cannot see why you’re so interested in my – ”

 

A paper bag, the old type used for groceries, comes down over his head. There are no eyeholes. Though his arms are free, somehow he cannot remove the bag. His eyes leap about in the darkness looking for eyeholes, but there are none. It astonishes him that he thinks, as he is marched off, only this: “Roaches lay their eggs in the folds of the paper bags; this is why the stores switched to plastic.” If it were a black plastic bag on his head, he’d probably suffocate. He’s walking now. Hears the static from walkie-talkies, the shuffle of many pairs of feet. Were they all hooded and marching along? Hard to tell. Perhaps he slept a while on his feet. All because I studied the Sufis?

 

 

 

Wake. Had I been asleep? It was all a dream, wasn’t it? Hoorah. Or maybe not. The phrase “perfect chaos” chimes over and over in his head almost as though someone had spoken it. Perhaps Aiken himself had spoken it. What confusion. Ringing, tinnitus. Awake in the dark; he feels for his head – no paper grocery sack. Good: this is good. He raises himself up, hears the sound of bedsprings – maybe I’m back in my bed, curled next to my wife. He sees a line of light where a door must be, moves to the floor, stands up…he can feel vibrations but not large ones. Now he has on clothes, the old man’s jacket and the girl’s shoes are gone. These seem like normal enough clothes, comfortable, but he cannot see enough of them to tell what they look like. Out, then. Aiken pushes the door, it won’t move, then pulls it open (it feels like a motel door) and moves out into what seems to be a department store.

 

It’s a vertical mall, he discovers as he walks about a bit. Elevators at the same place, sporting goods on this floor, menswear on that floor. I am free! It was not what I thought. I’m okay. His body sighs upon itself, the shoulders relax, worry prolapses out of his brain and wiggles away across the floor, an illusion. Time to get on home, then. Stands to reason that one of the floors will be the ground floor, with glass doors exiting out into the bright sunlight of this his native city. He keeps on trying various floors, exploring some of them for other exits, but he can’t find the ground floor. The elevator’s numbered with odd symbols that might or might not be numbers – when he picks the one furtherest to the bottom, where a 1 or a G might be, he winds up at “appliances” or “outdoors.” Something he begins to notice, however, is the presence of officaldom-in-disguise. Two burly guys with pleasant expressions on their faces always seeem to be standing idly about near the elevators, and he’s caught one of them watching him. They’re not the same two guys on each floor, but they have a certain uniformity about them, he notices as he explores this vast vertical department store. And then it strikes Aiken that he might be in the sort of place where they send people who have strayed from being good consumers, as he was often telling people he wanted to stray. “I want to simplify my life,” he was often telling his friends. “I want to own fewer and fewer things; soon I won’t own anything and then I won’t have to work so much . . . ” Occasionally and only jokingly, a friend – was it his wife one time? – might say, “That’s heresy, Aiken. Don’t you want to be a good consumer and help the economy?” No, he didn’t. So now he was in this mall-cum-re-education camp.

 

He began to feel a bit frantic now. I must get home. At least, I must be on the way home. Where are the windows in this place? He found one behind a large tent that had been erected on the Outdoors floor: a longitudinal black rectangle of cloth, whose corner he carefully peeled back.

 

I’m in Hawaii! He could tell by the clouds, by the water, by the island feel outside the window. This was impossible; even though he had dreamt often of traveling there . . . waitaminnit. I’m dreaming, aren’t I?

 

“Wade Manger.” A slick, smooth voice oozes through invisible speakers in the ceiling. Probably cameras up there too. “Wade Manger, report to room two, first floor. Wade Manger.”

 

A rather odd name. The sound was so crisp and clear, and the view out the window so – convincing – that he forgot about his insight into the fact that he was dreaming. But how do I get out of here, how to escape, get back home?

 

A vague despair comes over him, and he slumps down against the window, knees pulled close. Something catches the corner of his vision: very small and fast, brown perhaps in color. Red-brown. A rat? Impossible in such a well-kept place as this. He feels in his back pocket and pulls out – making his sit more comfortable – a wallet which is far thicker than his real wallet. Inside are several credit cards from various banks. His cash was gone. Then he saw the movement again, slipping around a corner: definitely a foot or two this time, but too long to be a rat, and too much the color of a mink stole. He eases over to the corner, quiet, and peeks around. Standing on its hind legs, eyes glistening, is a mongoose. It sees him; Aiken pulls back. He is reminded now of the cartoons he loved so much as a child, the cat and mouse cartoons. He feels almost like smiling, but the desire to get home weighs down his gut as though he’d eaten two bad hot dogs.

 

“Uh, sir?” The mongoose, yes, it’s unmistakably speaking to him from around the corner!

 

Aiken pushes his large, ungainly nose around the edge, smelling fresh paint, and looks at the mongoose.

 

“Wha?”

 

“Do you need a totem animal, sir?” This animal has an accent…is it British? Irish? No – Australian!

 

“Ah, I, uh – ” He’s nonplussed. The creature’s voice is high-pitched, and it occurs to Aiken that it is a female mongoose. The eyes are pretty scary, bright bright red, glistening, with pupils that appear to be either translucent or white….

 

“Sir? It is true that you need help? A way out? Trying to get back ‘ome aren’t we?”

 

“Well, yes, but it looks pretty hopeless right now.”

 

“Do you want to know where you are?”

 

“Yes,” Aiken nodding his head, “I’d surely love to know that.”

 

The mongoose has a habit of beginning to speak before Aiken has stopped speaking: “ – a re-education camp, as you had feared, for those who have given up on the American dream. You might be dangerous to them, you know.”

 

“Not me, I’m – I’m – it’s not – ”

 

“. . . here to straighten you out. You can’t get out, the only way is – well – certain apparent suicide.” He tilts his head back to look up at the black-curtained window. “That’s the only way out. You won’t die if you jump, but you’ll think you will. It just looks that way. A mere fiction of the sense organs, you know . . . .”

 

Aiken scratchs at the lengthy stubble on his chin, plays with the scar where no hair grew. “So I’m supposed to jump out a window and fall no telling how many stories – ”

 

“ –ven stories.”

 

“How many? That’s a terrible habit you have, RikkiTikki, of beginning to speak before the other person is through speaking. Did you know that?”

 

“Eleven. And I’m no Kipling character, for goddamned sure, cobber. Not a cobra-killer either. Just ‘ere to ‘elp. You might even say I’m an aspect of your own psyche, split off in a chthonic spasm to – ”

 

Aiken wonders if he should listen to a talking mongoose who advises him – hasn’t he? or she? – to leap from a great height toward what would be certain death on the sidewalk below. Or perhaps he should just give up, allow himself to be re-educated into consumer culture (of course that’s what all the credit cards are for).

 

“I’m a pretty pragmatic fellow,” he tells the animal. “I don’t know about all this totem animal stuff.”

 

“Well, whatever. I’m ‘ere to ‘elp.” A little shiver of rippling russet fur as the animal unkinks himself and drops the front feet to the floor. “Do what you like, good sir. I’ll mind my own bizzo – just yell if you’re ready to bail out. I’ll give you the drum.” She pads away, seems to vanish into the wall with acute skill.

 

What the hell is she talking about, anyway?

 

He decides to explore all the floors, and does so via the elevators. The closer he comes to the bottom, the tighter security, and there is an utter absence of any sort of entry-way – none of those bright sliding glass areas. He finds the same huge, black-curtained windows on each of the higher floors – why would they have windows but keep them covered like that? To tempt the suicides? Aiken had not considered ending his life in many decades, it was something that just didn’t occur in his thought-processes anymore, but now he had to ask himself in all seriousness if there was a choice to be made: freedom and death, or life without any sort of freedom. Was there a third choice, consisting of becoming the sort of patriotic consumer of material goods that he was supposed to become, here? Yet there were no classes. No one came by to teach him how not to be a economic heretic. Bepuzzlement led to a sort of sleepy despair as he roamed and roamed the various floors, surrounded by shoppers.

 

He made his way back to the floor that contained the mongoose, slumped against the wall beneath a window, and waited.

 

“So,” came the cheery voice, “you wanta give it a burl, eh?”

 

“What?”

 

“You want to try leaping.”

 

“Yes I do.”

 

“You’ve gotta be in the nuddy.”

 

Aiken sighs. “O can you please speak English? I don’t know all these, these – ”

 

“Nude. You must take off all your clothes. I’ll help you with the window.”

 

“Will I die?”

 

“Nah,” says the mongoose, perhaps smiling. “No drama. Not the full quid, are ya?”

 

“Well…” Aiken looks out the window and notices that it doesn’t look like Hawaii anymore, but is a dingy urban area – what he always figured the bleakest areas of New York City to look like. Down below the window is nothing but a couple of kelly green awnings and a sidewalk. He tries to compute the number of stories but cannot. His stomach feels funny now. His clothes are all at his feet.

 

“Quite an old fella you have there, Aiken.”

 

Aiken wishes he understood the mongoose better. He climbs upon the sill, now, and takes some big gulps of air, the phrase the better to fly knocking about in his head. Pulls the large window up. The mongoose is holding the curtain back for him.

 

“G’day.”

 

“Bye.”

 

He leaps and is immediately attended by two large black crows, larger than any he’s ever seen. Their feet are huge and strong and each wrist is held by one crow’s foot; he feels sure there will be some blood there later but at least he has survived the leap. The birds do not look down at him at all; it’s as though he were not there. Presently he begins to look down and enjoy the view – reminiscent of those times he’d come into his home town on a plane – and he tries again to figure out which strip of grey is an interstate and which clearing is a golf course or subdivision. Why it is not the large island of Hawaii, Aiken doesn’t consider. He closes his eyes and drifts a bit, trying to enjoy the ride, wondering how long he’ll be carried along like this. Perhaps they’re taking him home. He is trying to remember whether his parents will be there, wondering how come it’s taken him so long, or if it is his wife and children who are waiting there, also wondering what has kept him.

 

When he lands – the crows just drop him in a field of broomgrass and give a couple of barks as they vanish – he’s about a quarter of a mile up the road from the generational home. The road hasn’t even been paved yet. I always wondered what things were like before my time, Aiken thinks. Where a four-lane U.S. highway passed before, now a narrow, ill-paved two lane tops the hill and begins the curve…where his uncle’s café sat before, at the top of the hill, now sits a dust-covered little structure that he understands to be a bar. He has to pee really badly so he goes around back to where the bathrooms were in his time, but there are no bathrooms there. They were filthy anyway. He pees on the side of the pale brown wall, streaking the dust, then meanders around to the entrance. Only a few old cars pulled up – he can’t reconcile the car’s models with the time – it’s extremely confusing – he gives up trying and just opens the squeaky front door and steps inside.

 

He expects it to be his uncle Howard’s restaurant but it is not; it reminds him a lot of a bar he frequented two decades ago: a corridor of darkness, few doors shooting away from it, opening unto a large, more active room at the far end. Loud music, bright lights, pool tables, screaming people, pitchers of beer and waiters and waittresses hauling about pitchers of beer – bad flat music seeping out of bad speakers stuck into the wall – is that a, what, no, couldn’t be but it is, an old Pong machine with two stools pulled up to it…

 

He goes over the the corner, beneath the old-style telephone, curls up and starts licking his balls. O my god I have become my dog! Someone shrieks, “Get that goddam hound out of here else we’ll have hair in the food.” Aiken gets up and nervously gazes about – realizing now that he’s looking somewhat up toward their heads – and into his mind flashes that look he’s seen on the faces of dogs who are lost, who one sees wandering about the edges of deserted two-lanes or along the sidewalks of closed movie theaters – the look that seeks out in every human face a memory that connects, a flash of recognition – I know you!

 

Yet these people know him. They tell him he must get out – mudcrusted boots kick at him idly, with mild verve. Aiken’s uncle sits at the cash register, watching him leave: a pale-haired man with a cigar, prone to rapid anger as well as humor. Aiken gets to his four feet and shuffles toward the front door, which is held open for him. Behind him comes a waittress with a ragged broom, but he does not see her and shoots out almost under the muddy wheels of a large truck, yelping in fear as he whirls and races back to the back of the old stucco building.

 

Aiken’s brain feels mushy and old, like the 8-year-old beast he feels he has become. Can he find his way home like this? Maybe. He looks up one road that is very short but ends at the top of a hill. Raindrops starts to fall, startling the dust where he sits. He moves to a doorway as the water begins to pelt down hard for what he feels will only be a moment or two. He curls up, black nose to black-tipped tail, sighs deeply with his brown eyes open only momentarily; after the rain has stopped the dog starts to jerk and twitch, red inner lips occasionally visible. In a moment his stomach, almost hairless, begins to make noises.

 

“Wake up, wake up.”

Aiken opens his eyes. The dream must be over. He prepares to roll out of bed, find his pencil and paper, and jot down a few details. But he is not in bed, he’s walking down another street in the same birth-city. Night must have fallen quite a long time ago, and from the configuration of lights, the low raspberry dull glow across the horizon, he figures he’s in a very bad part of town. Yet it’s a part of town he knows well, having worked here for some years. He can find his way home from here. His breath comes in large, whooshes out in big white clouds, and his stride is long. A large warm coat covers his entire body. Who spoke to him, who woke him up?

 

He glances left, right, as he crosses an intersection. Closed ramshackle restaurant, Peyton’s Place, down there – nothing but broken bottles down the other direction. The tops of the city’s half-dozen skyscrapers are just visible: he walks toward them, since by his calculations he lives on the other side of the downtown area. Janice must be wondering where I am; if she woke at this time of morning. That’s unlikely. This is the part of town where there are no tattoo parlors, only shotgun houses, broken-down palaces, red-brick housing projects, boarded up crack shacks . . . the sort of area one would ordinarily not want to be wandering alone in, at midnight, as he is. But Aiken feels a jaunty lack of worry. He wonders if he’ll have the stamina to make it to a place where he might catch a bus or a taxi the rest of the way. He wonders just how cold it might get before morning. And he wonders who told him to wake up.

 

For a long time there is only the sound of his shoes. He is not thinking; not much. Damn. I really thought it was a dream, that I was waking up. He listens for any unusual sound, and as he passes recessed doorways he is careful to peek into them – but somehow he knows he won’t run into anyone. This is the time of morning when everyone is asleep; the only people still awake are night workers, drunks trying to find home (am I drunk? he asks himself, answers No), and that particular brand of people an old girlfriend of his termed night-crawlers, after the worms that crept out of the earth at night – sneaky, illegal people, the undrunks, wretched insomniacs with severe metabolism problems. It’s just a matter of plodding along until he gets home. Just keep on, keep alert, keep moving. Better than having no clothes, right? Right. Better than being imprisoned. No shit. Keep on. Hands plunged deep down into warm pockets, leaning into it.

 

The streets give way to large manufacturing buildings, all closed, and a ferrous smell – pipe plant cranking up for the morning shift. It’s a four lane now. He hears a scrape behind him but pays it no attention, thinking its just the last of winter’s leaves twisting about in the pre-dawn wind. Wish I had a skullcap. And then hears the sound again, stops to turn and see a figure lurching along behind him holding something in front of him. Aiken prepares for fight or flight, unconsciously taking a stance predicated on those instinctive directions, but when the figure moves into the light of a streetlamp he can see it’s a grey-headed old black man with a steering wheel in his hands and a large pack on his back. Something glimmers at the top of the pack: a pale naked doll, arms outstretched, is stuck up there.

 

“Mawrnin’,” the man says, passing him. Aiken turns and has to speed up a little to stay up with the guy. He greets the old man likewise.

 

“Whur you headed?” he asks Aiken.

 

“Other side o’ town.”

 

The man stops at the redlight, but he’s not waiting to cross, they don’t have the light, the traffic has the light. The man is stopping as if he were driving a car. Aiken asks him where he’s going.

 

“Home, just home,” the old man laughs, shifting an imaginary gear. “Damn I hate to drive, don’t you?”

 

“Uh yeah.”

 

They move on at an equal pace, trudging toward the city. The sky seems to be lightening up behind him, which is confusing, for he felt sure he was walking toward the northeast. Was this in fact not the city of his birth? He wonders if he should ask the man with the steering wheel for directions.

 

“Kittykittykitty,” says the man, stopping momentarily as a tortoiseshell cat, mouth holding something that is still alive, crossed the next street ahead of them and continues on ahead of the duo. Now we are three. The cat races ahead and then stops, turns to look back at them, eyes a-glitter. Then it races on ahead again. In this fashion, the three of them continue on toward the city. “Kittykittykitty,” says Aiken, but the animal is skittish.

 

Pace pace pace pace, skritch skritch skritch of feet on the street.

 

“Whur’d that kitty go?” The man with the steering wheel presses his right foot into the earth and stops abruptly. “Damn brakes, need new shoes tha’s for sure.”

 

The cat is no longer visible.

 

“Almost daybreak,” Aiken says, for something to say. He glances around the corner of an auto-parts store as they pass, sees the cat eating the creature it had been carrying.

 

“I’m a mite hongry myself,” the wheel man says. “You hongry?”

 

“Kinda. I wouldn’t mind some eggs and sausage.”

 

The man grins a kindly grin. “Wouldn’t turn it down huh?”

 

“Naw.”

 

“I know a place we might have a bite to eat. I gotta get to work purty soon though. Whur you work, buddy?”

 

“I’m trying to get home,” Aiken says.

 

The man nods and the baby doll above him in the pack nods too, one hand slipping down.

 

“I know what you mean.”      

 

Aiken and the man pause only at red lights, even the ones where nothing is coming, and by now his hamstrings are beginning to tighten and the bottom of his feet to cramp a little. Where is the dawn? Seems there has been plenty of time for the sun to rise. His mind begins to work again, thoughts filtering in, winnowed, filtering out . . .  I guess he carries the wheel ‘cause it makes him feel like he has some sorta control. Nice old guy, though. He shouldn’t get down there in the edge of the road, though, that’s dangerous and will surely get the attention of a cop, sooner or later. The buildings look both familiar and strange, the way a chain food store in a vacation city seems both usual and unusual.  A bus – who called it the cheesewagon – passes, pauses at a light and he can see the kids writing private messages on insides of the fogged-up windows.

 

Just as they are stepping off a curb, an ambulance turns on its siren and Aiken is delaminated. He almost falls as he starts and then he begins to curse the ambulance driver. “Sonafabitch, he didn’t have to turn that thing on right there, he knew we were there, motherfucker probably isn’t even headed to an emergency and they’re in there laughin’ like hell, the goddam – ” going on this way for a while until the wheel man turns and looks at him, quieting his anger with no more than a look and his grey fuzzy eyebrows rising up.

 

“I’m sorry, I – hey, I’m just kinda keyed up ‘cause I been trying for I don’t know how  long to find my way home and I don’t seem able to, no matter where I go I wind up somewhere else, it’s like my entire fate has been goobered up somehow and – ”

 

“Which home are you headed to?”

 

“My home, my only home, the only home I have.”

 

“What is it like there?”

 

“Warm. People there treat me nice. There’s a dog there I feed. Food there for me, too. Soft bed. Security, I guess, a feeling that nothing can bother me. Warm, yeah.”

 

“They’s places like that everywhere. You live with you momma’n’daddy?”

 

Do I look that young? “Naw, man, I got a wife and kids, a job, I’m out on my own and have been awhile.”

 

They are standing, slightly reddened by the first apparent arc of the sun, near an interstate overpass. Aiken feels as though this is their separation point, and that he is about to receive some advice.

 

“I advise you to get up on the interstate there an’ stick out cher thumb.”

 

“Why?”

 

“’Cause that’s your quickest way home.”

 

Aiken doesn’t remember telling him where he lived, but decides, after looking at some signs, that this might be the proper thing for him to do. He thanks the wheel man and shakes his rough hand before climbing the concrete abutment, pulling back a bit of wire fencing, to clamber up on the side of the busy interstate.    

 

 

Takes a while for the first ride to come about, many cars zipping past without a look, some with a blank look, and a very few with an interested look. Aiken reminds himself how he must look to those who pass him by, and he forgives them one after another. There’s a lot of fear in the world, much of it misplaced. He thinks back to the Seventies, his time of hitch-hiking: several fine rides come back into his memory – people who without being asked went out of their way to help him, aid him in some way – and he warmed himself inside with these memories, dim and as inconspicuous as they were. At least no one is throwing anything at him – this also occurred in his hitch-hiking past. After a while of sitting on a wooden block, right arm outstretched, he begins to walk. Sun’s up now, the winter day warming itself despite the windy nature of the roadside, toward which his eyes now turn: a million tobacco-less butts strewn here, along with bits of glass and many tiny twisted metal fragments, shrapnel from the wars of progress. He gets a ride with a quiet man and goes to sleep in the car. Can one dream inside a dream?

 

 

There were no other rides. Aiken walks and the short daylight (we must be in British Columbia) descends quickly into gloomy four-thirty. A quick batch of clouds swing over the horizon, Aiken cursing them since he knows what they are bringing, and seem to catch in the valley: they stop moving and hang in monstrous off-purple peaks and massifs just past the few skyscrapers and TV towers still visible as he moves toward home, southward out of the city over two hilltops. The temperature drops quickly after the sun, and by 7 p.m. a fine snow is falling but nothing is sticking. Aiken has his arm slung out but no one is going to stop for him, he realizes at last (this is a new era in hitch-hiking), and so he puts down his arm and concentrates on walking, which is pretty tough as time passes and the snow starts to accumulate in flattened areas along the roadside. A branch of roadways ahead speak to his problems with knowing which way home is. He takes the one he feels to be the correct road, going as much by what he can see down the straight-away as by the number of the route.

 

"Ophiuchus" says a sign Aiken walks past. "Pop. 5420" He turns and sees that the back of the small sign is coated with ice. Am I gonna freeze to death here? maybe so. Maybe not.

 

It all ends up in a deserted parking lot, pretty spooky except this one is not lit by those bright magnesium lamps you see alongside most highways – they've all been shot out. A small structure the size of about four port-a-johns sits in the middle of the dead-end road, glass on some sides, wood on others, elegant but not overwhelmingly so. A round roof.

 

Threshold priestess – she seems to be tall and thin, adorned in a wrap-around skirt of dark purple paisley, and her head looks like a whippoorwill – she hands him over and he goes inside, lies down on the minimalist carpet in a fetal position, comfortable and breathing easy. He’s wondering why she stays outside, since it’s so much warmer in his little room. He considers her perfume rather angelic. “We’ll be back,” she says. We who? “Stay a while.” He thinks he sees the bird face smile a little; it’s tough to tell for sure. “Dream deep.”

 

Home: the smell of food, the warmth of a bed, a father’s voice at the door saying Get up son it’s time for the bus, clatter of dishes, thump of clothes-hamper, pingpong ball bouncing, an aunt’s stern expression, creak of floor in a certain spot, books hidden under mattresses, dew in the yard in the morning, a dog scratching the back door to be let in, mother sick in bed, brother snoring mouth agape twisted teeth.

 

When he awakes he is covered in little brownish-black snakes whose bellies are yellow, harmless asclepian snakes placed here by People in Charge. They twist and turn and curl and slither everywhere around him, some crossing his chest, some twining up along his forearms, others moving between his big toe and first toe. Ordinarily he would already have recoiled in immediate horror but something restrains and de-alarms his nervous system: these are good snakes, bringing help and a way back home. Aiken actually plays with them for a bit, as a child plays with a puppy. One smallish reptile stops and seems to look directly at him the way his dog did when it was hungry. The split tongue slips out, back, out, back; then it moves away, rejoining the others. It is almost as though he is rolling about in a dark puddle with ochre streaks. The serpents are neither cool or warm to the touch, dry scales like an alive sort of plastic. Aiken closes his eyes again and waits until they have all gone away, and then he gets up and walks out of the small incubatio booth into the night. There’s no road now, no parking lot, but the earth glitters with a thick coating of frozen dew . . . miniscule points of light far away lead him toward a barn he remembers from childhood . . . the neighbor’s barn, certainly. He is home! It’s just a matter of finding the house now, of knocking on a few doors and asking for directions.

 

Before he reaches the barn, however, he notices bird statuary.

 

On boths sides of the path to the barn, their marble eyes catching what little light comes from these predawn stars – there is no moon tonight – stand flightless birds. Who made these things, who put them here? There’s the dodo, a kiwi looking like an ice pick covered with fur, head upturned a bit; to Aiken’s left an emu (they may have gradually lost their need and power for flight because they had no predators), further down a small jackass penguin (flightless birds developed different sorts of defense mechanisms, like the large toes of the ostrich) . . . how odd, Aiken thinks. Someone has erected a veritable statuary hall of flightless birds, one on either side. But where is my home? He knows the house his father built in 1951 must be only a few hundred yards past the barn.

 

He feels a sharp prodding at his back left buttock.

 

It’s the kiwi, alive, poking him. Aiken shrieks and runs, slapping backwards at the bird. They’re not statues! The penguin is far behind, but all the other statues are now quite active and unfrozen and chasing him. He feels the claw of the emu rake the back of his jeans, ripping the denim. Jesus! They’re all after him. They must think I’m a predator. He runs for the bar, hears the rats scurrying in the straw but doesn’t care because the birds are following him, some of them making little piercing calls. I always liked birds. What is this shit? He finds a rudimentary tilted ladder, ahah, can’t follow me now, and pops through a small hole to find himself standing on the mansard roof. Big breath. Whoosh of breath. He sees now a couple of lights far down the way which must be his parents’ home – or at least the home of his grandmother.

 

But the birds have followed, and he feels another sharp peck at his dorsal side – he runs now, hears a skitter of bird feet rushing behind him – he’s really frightened now, moves as fast as he can, hears his shoes thumping across the roof – sees the edge of the barn looming up in the semi-dark, reaches back to grab the necks of two of the closest birds (they’ve caught him of course, he’s not that swift) and as he leaps, falling, from the roof he wrings the necks of the birds, rolling his wrists, I’ll take a couple of them with me by God! and for what seems a very long time he falls, the lifeless fowl clutched in each hand, their necks squishy to his grip.

 

When consciousness arrives yet again, he’s lying at the corner of the barnyard in a pile of stuff that is half feathers and half straw, yellow and white bits of softness. Alive! I survived, he thinks, and checks himself for broken or bloody places. Verdant odor of cold chickenshit. Still night: still a very wide array of stars and the frost on the earth. He walks toward the light he saw from the top of the roof, his step light and with the feeling of a conquering hero warming his gut. I made it! I’m here! That’s what he’ll tell his mother and father – he’ll recount the places he’s been, the escapes he’s made, the adventures and the people and . . . Aiken is full of words, wants to explode with them.

 

At the threshold he stops before knocking, looking closely at the house. It is probably late, and the light is no longer on, but it is most certainly the structure he lived in with his mother and father and brothers for seventeen years. There are three diamond shapes on the front door, the top one glass. The shingles appear to be dark green, but it’s difficult to tell in the dark. He almost expects his old dog to come yowling around the corner but that doesn’t happen. He knocks, softly at first, then insistently, then in a few short loud whacks.

 

Porch-light, bug-yellow, pops on. The door opens. A tallish older woman is there, and though it is not his mother, the eyes are his mother’s eyes – pale grey, wide-open as if held that way (but that was his mother’s normal gaze). And the smell of the room behind her is her smell, an odor that came from very far back in his memory and was unmistakable: female sweat and perfume and coffee and cigarette smoke.

 

“Yes?”

 

“Mm – ” Aiken can’t quite say Mother.

                                   

“Can I help you?” Apparently she does not recognize him – but of course he’s much older, isn’t he? And it may not be her at all. Aiken’s confused, his words curdle inside his throat and he’s struck dumb.

 

Behind his mother stands another figure and it speaks with the voice of his grandfather, “Who’s there Ethel?” He would know that voice anywhere. It’s his father’s father, and the voice is thick with emphysemic gravel and heavy mucus. But when the man moves into the light of the porch he is unrecognizable.

 

Aiken doesn’t know why he asks this question, but he asks it.

 

“Is there anyone named Aiken here?”

 

They think it over a little. The woman he thought was his mother consults with the man behind her, then they turn back to him with the answer.

 

“There used to be someone named Aiken around here, but that was over a thousand years ago.” Aiken is somewhat stunned. He feels something odd between his feet, looks down to see a grey cat sliding through his legs and into the house.

 

“What’s wrong, son?” The two look compassionately at him. Aiken realizes he must look somewhat deflated.

 

“I’m really tired,” he says. “It’s been a long life. I mean night.”

 

“Come on in,” the woman says, wrapping her robe more securely, opening the door wide. “You can rest a while.”

 

Aiken looks at the man. “You’re not afraid of me?”

 

The old man shakes his head, emits a gravelley nah. “She says you look kinda familiar. You can sleep in this room back here. Get the feller some quilts, honey … ”

 

The room he is ushered into is the same room he grew up in as a child: small, windows on two sides, narrow closet containing old easter baskets, footballs, gloves and balls. On one wall is the unique table his brother made from a small door that he hung from the wall via ropes and hooks. Smells don’t lie, Aiken thinks, inhaling the odors that take him back to the days when he lay in bed all night rehearsing conversations with girls he loved. He falls back on the bed, sighs deeply, thanks the departing man and woman, closes his eyes and is almost about to fall asleep again when a small movement at the foot of the bed brings him back.

 

It is the cat, leaping up. It comes right up to his face, licks his chin a couple of times, then curls up on his chest.

 

 

© 2006 Thomas N. Dennis