A Strange Reality (Part one: Jack)

Chapter One: Jack

There has always been a question in my mind for as long as I can remember. Something very specific and yet so illusive that it seemed to twinkle in and out of a wavy existence. A question that had a way taking many forms, to pick apart my self conscious mobility until I’d become trapped within a state of underdeveloped and mundane acceptance. It would have me waking up in the middle of my dreams to feel as if I could possibly be on the verge of pronouncing it, only to have it slip yet again beyond the grip of my own understanding of reality. I had always assumed that I would one day find the answers; as if age and experience would eventually uncover the mysteries of my youth for me. But here I am still, asking the same questions and still dreaming the same illusive burden of dreams.

And then I fell in love. Fell so hard that I’d forgotten about all the other elements of my life. She was an enigma. She filled me with a kaleidoscope of desire and I found in her an optimistic appraisal for a new life in which the flowering development of expectations would eventually take control of my entire soul. But in the end I was just left with a broken heart and a new found appreciation for the subtle and important details that were always already there. I was still young though, and still felt as if the weight of the world were crushing. My mind would grow old and the sorrow of my emotion seeped from me like a mound of dripping candles, smashed together in an unrecognizable form of the colors in my life.

When I turned seventeen I left home and never returned. My father would say, with no amount of affection, that It was my own way of shutting out the responsibilities that I should have faced head on. He used to tell me that if I were ever going to escape my problems, I needed to grow up and stop placing the blame on my mother and him. He was right, of course. I blamed them for everything. I wanted to be free and I didn’t even understand what it meant to be free. Hours of my youth were spent floating around in a universe of fantastic proportions. I drank on the beaches of philosophy till the stars swam with possibilities. I danced before the setting moons of the desert, dripping in the rains of LSD, cowering and pleading with what I had believed to be my deliverance. And all the time, the questions were never answered. The meaning of the dreams never revealed.

For years I lived as a unit in a culture of mushrooms, hash, friendships beyond syntax, and deep drum waves of emotion. Living in tents and streets and strange houses. Shifting through the seasons of mental revelations. Terrified and fearless and hopeless and invisible. But I got older. And slowly and without a sudden certainty, things changed. And time seemed to change. And on the eve of one October night the beginning of my life unfolded.

The leaves on the trees had become a striking mixture of deep reds, smooth browns, and an overall vivid wave of brilliant orange. There was a sound on the wind that seemed mournful, and within every gentle breeze came an exhale of sorrow, casting a quiver of leaves to dance and swim throughout the surface of the streets. Twilight had brought a dark blanket of greyness to loom low over the rooftops of old broken homes, homes that had devolved into black shadows of abandoned memories.

Within one home was a flicker of candle light, casting a warm glow through an attic window. It’s light seemed strange and unnatural, like the illumination of a trapped spirit. I cupped the candle flame in the center of my palms, hypnotized in the thoughts that never seem to materialize. Jill sat further than I’d wanted her to, seated on the floor with her back to the wall and her left arm hanging limply over one raised knee. Her head lay slumped over that arm with a shimmer of sleek black jaw length hair, and in her hand, the last remains of a cigarette, barely hanging within the grasp of her finger tips.

I crawled over to her and reached in to lift her head up, cupping her face in my hands as I had done a hundred times. “Jill! Wake up, Jill!” I slapped her in the jaw and her eyes immediately popped wide open. She looked around the room as if seeing it now for the first time. Her cigarette fell to the floor and I stood up to stomp it out. “You lit that and never even took a drag. Are you okay?,” I asked.

“I’m fine,” Jill said flatly. A hint of hostility seeping crisply through her tone.

I tried to divide the darkness in order to see the response on her face, but my sight had not yet adjusted. There was only the light of the candle to reflect the calculating sparkle within Jill’s eyes, and the candle was about to die out. Instead I sat down beside her and looked around the room. The flicker of dying flame made the dimensions of the room swim though the swelling darkness. She scooted up close and looked sternly at me through the deep penetrating depths of her watery eyes. I expected that she wanted to say something but she didn’t. She just stared at me, looking wild and psychotic with intent. I reached into the pocket of my blue corduroy coat and pulled out a pack of cloves, lighting one and then offering the pack to her. She ignored the offer with just a slight shake of her head, and I leaned back against the wall, staring up at the dark water stains that blotted the ceiling. I could feel her eyes boring into me like fingernails on the back of my neck. She obviously had something on her mind and after a few more moments of pointed silence I asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“I was dreaming about Heather and Tod.”

Heather and Tod had died a few months ago in a car accident. It had just started to drizzle and the streets had became slick from the oils when Tod nearly drifted into another car. He over compensated for the turn and they ended up flipping the car three times before landing upside down in a river that ran along the side of the road. They drowned in that river. Either they had been stuck and unable to climb out or they were just too high to realize.

Jill had never talked about it other than the initial acknowledgment of it being a terrible thing to have happened to them. She had grown up with them, gone to the same schools with them, gotten high with them. I remember thinking how unemotional she had seemed about the whole thing. “What about Heather and Tod?”

She reached over and grabbed the pack of cloves. “In my dream ran into Tod’s mom at the thrift store.” She lit one and took a few long drags. “She recognized me before I new who she was.”

“What did she say to you?”

“Well at first she just waved to me. I looked away and pretended not to see because I wasn’t sure, but then the room just seemed to be getting smaller and smaller untill she caught up to me and asked me how I’d been doing. I lied and told her I was finishing up a degree at UCSD.”

I laughed at her like an ass, smoke billowing out my nostrils like a cartoon demon. “Why the fuck would you tell her that?”

She looked sad. “I don’t know. It was just a dream.”

I felt bad for laughing at her. “Well, why lie? Even in a dream. Who cares what she thinks?”

With a sigh and a small shrug she said, “I don’t know. I guess I couldn’t think of anything else to say to her."

“So you made it up. In a dream,” I said. “Who cares? What’s the matter with you?”

She took another few drags and then started to get up. “Let’s get the fuck out of this place,” she said, offering her hand to help me on my feet.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Let’s just drive. We’ll figure it out.”

Her little black civic was parked outside on the dead lawn. Daddy had bought it for her a few years back on her 18th birthday. There was sort of an unspoken understanding between us. I introduced her and kept her domesticated within the sub culture of underground communities, and she was more or less my sugar mama, making it possible for me to stay high and keep on partying without ever having to come down and hold a job. Her grandfather had left her a huge fortune when he died. But she couldn’t touch it till she turned twenty five. That gave her two more years but until then daddy gave her a nice little allowance (on certain terms that must have been about school but wasn't followed) that could support her in a moderately beneficial state of comfort. It also allowed us to maintain a modest circulation of ecstasy with which we reputably sold at parties and clubs. Though I took full advantage, I could never understand why she chose to live this way. But who the fuck was I to question. I chose the same route. I guess it just bothered me because I new I wanted to die. Did she?

Along with the little bit of golden brown we had smoked off foil in the attic, I also took a few hits of ecstasy and as I climbed into the car I could feel it coming on strong. Everything in my vision seemed to be vibrating. My blue corduroy coat started to feel more like a silky pelt of fur on my skin, and a sharp insecure sensation of panic and anxiety began to overwhelm my senses.

Jill climbed into the driver side and then noticed my half faced grin and high arched eyebrows as I struggled to keep my eyes from closing. “Are you rolling?,” she asked.

The only answer I could give was a rub down my legs with the palms of my hands and a slight rock back and forth. She cocked her head to the side and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, then shuffled through her ipod’s music and put on a deep base driven track of club trance. the insecure sensation instantly vanished and my vibrating vision began to trace patterns in the music. I was thrown back in my seat as Jill pealed out off the drive way and accelerated down the street like a beaming combustion of overactive four wheeled energy. The street lamps flew by in a dreamlike streak of electrons and protons, surging us along through a conductor pure exhilaration.

And again, just as I’ve always done in such conscious states of release, I began to drift throughout the deep crevices of my soul, studying my thoughts as if I were a stranger, and staring back into the face of a flawed vision.