B008M2IEII EBOK Page 2

  I watched him walk down the hall and laugh as they greeted one another. With a sigh, I made the last available move and lost yet another game. With a click of the mouse I restarted another game of solitaire that, statistically speaking, would be yet another losing game.

  ~1~

  By the time I finally passed the blue reflectors stuck to the side of our mailbox, it was dark. The seventeen mile commute gave me time to think and for the most part allowed me to not have to look at people. My headlights washed over the house as I turned around in the small paved circle that took up the bulk of the front yard. I rolled my head around and massaged my neck as I built up the courage leave the solitude of my Ford and go inside. Part of me always quietly dreaded finally arriving at home. It was the same part that hated being around people. I could never identify with anyone, I always felt like an outsider, as if I didn’t belong anywhere. I didn’t have a place in any part of society, not an outcast, just not accepted.

  Erica and I got along well enough to get married and I think we were happy together at first but things slowly changed as I began to fall down the deep, dark well that was becoming my life. I found myself reading more and more into her Darkness and listening less and less to her words. The words she chose never matched what her life essence was saying. I can still never really understand what she is thinking. The fact that I couldn’t read her so well was one of the reasons I was so profoundly attracted to her when we first met. She was a freelance photographer and had won nearly a dozen awards for her work over the seven years we had been together and several more before that time. The simple fact that I did nothing but drag her into my own dark basement of life was reason enough for me to think she could do far better with someone else.

  Our house was dark except for the single porch light and the strobe of a television in the living room window. I find myself flashing back to the day I met the most amazing woman I had ever set eyes on.

  It was more than seven years ago when I had been on a hike up near the Snoqualmie Pass. I like to hike because it is the one place I can comfortably walk and look around without the fear of seeing other people. I had just come around a long blind curve when I saw her setting her camera equipment up on a small wooden bridge. She had several tripods with lights and a camera with the largest lens I had ever seen already set up and she was stringing all of the cords to hook them together. She was taking time-lapse photographs of the small creek and I found myself drawn to her. The Darkness around her was that soft smoky silver-gray I had come to associate with good people. We talked for so long on that small bridge that the passage of time wasn’t apparent until the sun finally set on us and the air became noticeably colder. We laughed and stumbled our way down the trail and wound up getting dinner at a small steak house on the highway. I spoke to her every day after that until she finally agreed to go out on a real date with me. Being persistent wasn’t a trait I had ever shown before so it was strange, and scary, territory for me.

  Lately something has changed and I haven’t been able to figure out what it is. I can see there is something wrong between us, something flickering in the tides of the Darkness but I am unable to read what it is. I feel as if I am standing on a myriad of train tracks but cannot tell which rail the light ahead of me is coming down. I fight with my nearly constant desire to withdraw from her, it’s the main safety mechanism I have used my entire life and over time it is something that comes to me easily if not naturally. I want to pull into my own world and deny everything around me, to be by myself and truly alone. I have been saddled with this curse for as long as I can recall. The older I get the deeper I fall into this pit of despair. I just want to be normal. I want to be able to look at the world around me and pretend it isn’t the dark place I know it is.

  I close the door of my truck with a sigh and single out the house key on the ring. With a familiar sounding solid click, the deadbolt slides open and I walk through the door. The air inside the house comforts me both with its aroma of fresh bread and pasta, and the warmth of a safe home. Closing the door behind me locks the rest of the world out and I feel my body relax slightly. Dinner is ready and she is curled up in her favorite chair with a book. The TV is on with the sound down to just a whisper.

  “Hey Hon, how was your day?” I call out as I hang my coat on the rack by the door. Laptop bag goes on the footstool, keys on the key ring, wallet on the small shelf. I tend to be fairly methodical in my workings. It isn’t some kind of disorder or anything, I just really like things to have their place and know they will always be in the first place I look.

  A soft flicker of white with a hint of silver in the edges of her Darkness as we make eye contact.

  “Quiet, it’s been nice and quiet. No calls but that’s not a bad thing today. I’m really not in the mood to deal with my agent anyway. How about you? Any need to have Frank hauled off in a small box?”

  I smile at her, “Same as usual. Nothing ever really changes down at the ranch. Get turd, polish turd, return shiny turd only to have Frank complain about the quality of my turds.” I kiss her and we embrace briefly, “Something sure smells good in here.”

  “I made your favorite, linguine pasta with that Andouille sausage you like so much, the one that the Smith Butcher makes himself. I simmered the sauce all day, I think you will find it has exactly the right amount of spice for you.”

  The flicker recedes then flares again with a dark gray light when she looks at me. Minor flashes of blues and greens barely visible at the edges.

  I make my way through the living room and into the kitchen, “Did you get down to the river at all today? It looked as if we had some good light outside. At least the few times I actually passed by a window anyway. The cave doesn’t let me see the outside world too much.”

  She puts her electronic reader on the coffee table and walks into the kitchen across the stovetop island from me, “It was pretty cloudy here nearly all day. Have to love living in the foothills. All the clouds just bunch up over our heads. I guarantee the light out on the coast was phenomenal though and I’ll bet that wind made for some great breaker shots.”

  I smile to myself as I think about the clouds bunching over our heads adding to the overall darkness. My sense of humor understandably tends to border on the darker side of life. She kisses me lightly and gives me another hug. Even in what should be a tender moment, part of me can’t help but think there is someone else. I see her forced smile and I know she would be so much happier with another man but deep down inside I won’t let go and I don’t know why. She should be with someone that could let themselves be happy with everything that life has to offer. Someone that could openly laugh at the crazy things in life and not be constantly reminded of the seedy underbelly that I can’t seem to look away from.

  Dinner is filled with the sounds of silverware on dishes with few words spoken. I have never been good at small talk. That is actually kind of a lie. It isn’t that I am bad at small talk; it’s the fact that I am utterly and completely incapable of making small talk. I find that when people engage in meaningless conversation, their minds wander elsewhere. Their shadows will flash and wink as they visit random thoughts making it nearly impossible for me to concentrate on what they are saying. On one hand we are discussing the weather but their Darkness is screaming about some hidden fear, or dreading work the next day, or fantasizing about the waitress that just refilled our sodas. Ultimately I just stand there like a confused child that has lost his ability to speak. It’s like trying to understand someone that is mixing two different languages, and you don’t know either of them.

  I can tell she wants to talk about something but I am scared of what she has to say. I get so conflicted inside when I think about us and where our future may be. Some days I feel as if we are as happy as a couple can be. We laugh and love like nothing matters. Other times it feels like terminal cancer and we should just let it die instead of continuing the pain.

  I see slight flickers of light around the edges with ripples to
the middle of her shadow. The ripples flow out toward the edges and fade into nothing.

  We hand wash the last of the dishes in relative silence. I wash, she dries. With the final pan placed in the rack, she hugs me uncomfortably. I kiss her forehead, “Would you like to go for a walk with me tonight? You are always more than welcome along you know.”

  “Not tonight dear, thanks though. I’m going to finish my book, I’m so close to the end, and then head up to bed early. Feeling kind of tired lately and I know Nancy will call tomorrow about a few new projects. She always sucks the energy out of me.”

  “Nancy does look out for you, though. She has been your agent since before you were famous.”

  “There you go using that word again.”

  “But you are, you have how many awards now?”

  “Remind me again of anyone that actually knows what the name of those awards are or where they came from? I do all right, but I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word famous.”

  More confusing flashes and ripples, “Ok, I won’t be long. I’m just going down by the river trail, my usual to the lake and back.”

  I step out through the rear sliding door and stand on our low deck. The night is slightly overcast now but the air still holds a little warmth. I can hear a dog barking several blocks away but otherwise it is dead quiet. I pull my hoodie over my head, tuck my hands in my pockets and take the one step down to the brick path leading to the back gate.

  I watch the white tops of my tennis shoes flash in the porch light as I make my way across the lawn of our backyard. Looking down always makes moving around easier as I try to tune out as much of the world as I can. There is a certain part of me that I can never seem to turn off. I think it comes from the same place that sees the Darkness. It’s like I’m always aware of things. Not some sort of superpower or anything neat like that. I’m just really aware of details and differences. It seems to take a lot out of me by the end of the day. I get tired very easily. I get annoyed and angry. Eventually, I just get depressed. This cycle continues endlessly and I can’t seem to break out of it. Every time I start back through the chain, I come out just a hair lower than the last time. I wonder if one of these times through the cycle I won’t have the will to face another round.

  With the creak of rusty hinges, I push open the gate at the back of our property and hop a small ditch to a dirt trail. The narrow path winds down a fairly steep hill then meets a nicely paved trail that follows the river down to a nearby lake. I have been on a fairly regular routine of walking this path after dinner every night when the weather isn’t too nasty. There is very little in the way of street lights so the trail tends to be very dark for the four mile loop that it runs. I am all right with this; the exercise is almost as nice as being able to turn off the Darkness around me for a while.

  I feel my feet leave the soft dirt of the patch and hit the hard pavement of the bicycle path. I can’t see anyone to the left or right on the path so with a feeling of lonely relief I turn to the right and begin quietly walking down the path. I know from the many times I have been here that it is one and a half miles to the bench by the lake from this point. After walking nearly a mile, I find my deep thoughts about Erica disturbed by angry words ahead and just off the trail to my right.

  I can hear what sounds as if two men are arguing loudly with each other in the small clearing ahead and just out of view behind the heavy brush and trees. My first instinct has always been to hide in the face of danger so I quietly push through the hedges to my right and make my way through the brush to get a better view but still remain unseen by the men.

  Both men are yelling loudly back and forth and gesturing wildly at each other as they argue. I push just far enough through the hedges to view the two in the partial moonlight as they. The taller of the two is well groomed and dressed very well in a sport jacket and partially open white shirt. He has several thick gold chains that reflect brightly in the moonlight. His bright white button up shirt is so clean it nearly glows. He looks to be in his mid-thirties and has a small soul patch on his otherwise clean shaven face. His black dress shoes have a few scuffs but otherwise look new. He is wearing jeans but they have been pressed and even in the small amount of light there, I could clearly see the pleats. The second man is disheveled with mismatched clothing. Every thread on his body is filthy and both his jeans and shirt have holes in them. His long tangled hair is topped off with a well-worn baseball cap. I can see a fairly well crushed package of cigarettes in the front pocket of his flannel shirt. He has well-worn dirty white high-top tennis shoes, one of which has several strips of duct tape wrapped around it to hold the sole in place.

  The well-dressed man rolls his head as if he is growing bored with the continued arguing from the shorter man. He sighs loudly as he adjusts the cuffs of his sport jacket and speaks in a patronizing tone, “I gave you that shipment with the specific instructions of what to sell it for. You should have three times the amount you just gave me. Do I look like a fool to you? Do I look like someone that will just shrug his shoulders and walk away from a loss like this?”

  The shorter man holds his hands up in what looks like a surrendering motion, “I know man, but I just couldn’t get that much. That’s crazy money the way things are for people today! The people I sell to just don’t have that kind of coin to drop on the good stuff anymore. You know my block. Half the guys there don’t even have jobs! If they could afford that price, they wouldn’t be living in that trailer park to begin with and sure as hell wouldn’t be buying trash rock.”

  Both shadows wink and sparkle as their emotions run rampant. Multiple flashes and ripples. Reds and flashes of deep greens.

  “I absolutely don’t care what you think it was worth, at all. Not one single ounce of my being gives a single crap about what you think. And as far as the quality goes, I take it as a personal offense that you would find the quality of my goods lacking.” He pulls a cigarette out of a silver flip-lid container and lights it with the familiar sound of a matching silver lighter, “I told you what I would expect for the merchandise, you agreed, and you don’t have it now! Either give me the money, all of it, or give me back my product, all of it. Those are your only options, Willy!”

  Several bright flashes around the cores of the Darkness. The edges curl red with sprites of green. At the center a brown smear begins to appear in the ripples.

  I haven’t seen Darkness like this before. I don’t like it at all and realize that I really should not be here, in fact I should not be anywhere near here at all. This is feeling like a very bad place that is about to get much worse, much more violent. I can see it clearly. If it was possible for me to hide any more than I already was, I would do it.

  The well-dressed man takes several long drags of his cigarette as Willy paces around with a concerned look on his face. He flicks the half-burnt cigarette into the bushes where it lands several feet in front of me.

  “Listen. What are the rest of my employees going to think if word gets around that you took my product, sold it, and gave me back thirty percent of what it was worth? Not only that but in direct defiance of the requirements and expectations I had set out? I have an extremely important image to maintain, both in business and in life.”

  “Hey man, I gave you every dime of what I made off that! If you think I’m rippin’ you off just say it dude! You want to call me a thief than you best have the balls to do it to my face!”

  Willy flashes greens and reds with curls of black-mercury from the core.

  I know Willy is lying. I can also see his hand is flexing with a fair bit of anxious twitching near his right pocket. I’m guess he has a knife of some sort.

  “Did you? How do I know you gave me every dime from the sale, huh? How do I know you aren’t keeping product on the side? Maybe for yourself or that pack of losers you move with? Or even more likely, you have cut my product down until it was double what you had, but is now that ‘crap rock’ you claim I try and sell? Tell me Willy, if we are to move forward
through this, issue, how can I ever trust you?”

  The fold I so often see when someone tells a lie rolls around the smaller man’s shadow again.

  “Ya! Sure! You know I sold it man! You want to search me? I ain’t got it man! I sold what you told me to sell and gave you every damn penny!”

  The man rolls his neck again as if he is in need of a massage. Such an odd posture that it seems out of place yet frightening at the same time.

  Another strange ripple across the shadow. I see the second man’s shadow respond in kind.

  For several moments there is a silent pause in their argument. The finely dressed man is staring intently at the smaller man. The smaller man fidgeting as he attempts to stare back. I can see Willy is trying to decide if he wants to take a chance with his still hidden knife or simply turn and run away into the darkness.

  His Darkness flares brightly in a sea of the black mercury. I even see shades of a bright green deep in the center mixing with browns and reds!

  “Willy, the potential for this looking bad is simply not worth the risk. You simply are not worth having on my payroll any longer.”

  The well-dressed man reaches to the small of his back and pulls out a small, black automatic pistol. Willy fumbles with the knife in his pocket but is far too slow and clumsy to beat the other man. With three loud pops, the argument is over. Willy looks down at his chest as he feebly pulls a green handles knife out of his pocket. Blood is pumping furiously out of one of the holes in his dirty T-shirt. He drops the knife and tries in vain to staunch the flow with his hands. With an angry look at the well-dressed man, Willy falls to the ground.

  The well-dressed man holstered his pistol in the small of his back and searched Willy for any extra money. He slid the duct taped shoe off and pulled out a small wad of poorly folded bills, “You really shouldn’t have held out on me Willy, you could have gone far in my organization.”