NaNoWriMo And The End Of Days--

I wasn't sure if I was going to do this this year. I wanted to spend the cold months, rewriting last years' NaNoWriMo. Something I thought while driving around mowing the lawn and vaccuuming up leaves on our Murray riding mower led to another thought which led to a few scribbled notes which led to first pages...

So what the hell... I'm not in, but if I do decide to get in, I won't be behind.

--The Lights Go Off. The Lights Go On--

-1-

Waking from the coma was much easier than all the other parts. The lights were off. The lights were on. I got baby-spooned small bits of food by strange men and women and I ate. Nurses came and cleaned my ass and welcomed me back. Some reporter came to me and took my picture. She called me a hero. I had to blink my eyes at that. I got trampled by a dozen pairs of boots and I’m a hero. Imagine that? Three and a half months in a coma and you’d think I’d come to some understanding of life’s profundities- and here I am, dumbfounded by a compliment on my second waking day? It’s all a mish mash. Who knew it would all become a mish mash?

Who knew I could get so angry, and “do” those things I think I remember?

I certainly didn’t. Like those retroviruses that erupt under stressful conditions- apparently, I always had it in me. It was hiding in my flesh and waiting for a ripened day and an evil hour where all my circumstances converged into a reason to erupt.

Boy oh boy. I can’t believe I did the things I think I remember. I choked a prostitute. Not to kill her, or anything, but to get her back to her parents. I choked her for her Momma and her angry Daddy. I tried to put the girly back in the bottle. Yeah. I did that and I’m a hero.

I did other things too. Lots of other things. Lots and lots and lots of other things. Wow. Yeah. Every time I think about it, I did some more.

The end of me is down there wriggling beneath a hospital sheet. I suppose it’s my beginning too? That’s where I start and stop. My beginning and my end. It’s where I come into being or disappear. Those are my feet. After that, there isn’t much left of me in that general direction. I suppose I could tell you that my footprints are some of me? If that’s the case, then my feet are near the end of me, but I go on and on. My head must be where I begin then, if that‘s the case? My head that holds my brain and all my thoughts. Sure. That could be where I begin? I think therefore I exist. I have a thought, and it begins me, and my feet leave footprints in the world and I leave me everywhere I go. My lights are off. My lights come on. I can wriggle my toes.

You can’t blame me for my way of thinking. I’ve got nowhere else to go. If I remember, I remember many things that seem like someone else. I remember days and nights filled with revenge and longing and sleeping in cardboard boxes. I remember the roar of the crowds when the lions were let loose. I remember I stood there naked and trembling with my pointy stick crying “Momma”. It troubles me. I mean, I can’t be sure too much of anything.

I was trampled after all. And they say I’m a hero

-2-

Put yourself in my position. Working everyday to come home every night. Signing checks and mailing them off to pay for all of my unasked-for circumstances. It’s a callous convolution. It tumbles like a giant ball and there I found myself, clinging to it’s inner walls and there was where my prison spun and there I was, going round and round like the stripes on a fast food straw. All the purpose in the world hid from me like a cricket in my bedroom. I worked. I worked. I worked. I came home and signed some checks to others working. I worked some more.

Free will never really fit me well. Free will on my back was my father’s overcoat when I was four. It was so big on me it made it hard to move around. I flapped my arms a bunch. But I went nowhere. When I had choices I didn’t see it that way. The lights were off. The lights were on. I followed along. Nobody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up when I was a child. Or they stopped asking me. I can’t remember. I got out of high school and I got a job. I stayed there until there was no job and I got another job. That’s how it went for me. I always got just a job. I got a job and I went to work and I got older. I got married and I got divorced and I got older. I lived.

My last job was driving a street sweeper. It was a good job, as far as jobs go. I got up before light. I climbed into my big machine. I followed the curbs around and around in a different pattern, Monday through Friday. I had five different days doing the same thing differently- over and over. It suited me. It filled my bank account and I wrote those checks. I did a good job. My streets were as clean as anybody’s.

I had lots of checks to sign so I took Saturday jobs in a different rig, driving around the Coliseum parking lot where the lions were. I never stopped to see the lions but I could hear them roar. They were let out onto the field and they devoured people. Fans went crazy. The lions went crazy. I could hear them over the roar of my sweeper motor and the two brushes that swirled round and round.

The worst of the noises though, came through my front window every evening for most of the year. I owned a little house that faced an onramp that led to the freeway that cut through town. Harley Davidson motorcycles with their owners oozing over leather seats like melting figurines all goosed their throttles and shat their awful noises that echoed off the wall that lined the ramp and pounded against my window like a thousand children wanting in. I put a curtain up and another curtain up and a thick blanket I nailed directly to the wall, making my only living room a tomb and the sound just kept pounding in. These were muffler-less men with dirty beards and careless lives, roaring past my house with their stupid arms held up to those stupid chopper-bars. The onramp was steep and short so they got on it. Fire shot out shortened tail pipes and the backfires muscled in louder than the roar.

Of all the choices I never really made, buying that house where I bought that house was one of the worst of all.

-3-

Nurses in the hallways like to giggle. I can hear them murmuring so as not to disrupt their patients’ lives. But the giggling. That’s spontaneous. They can’t help that any more than I can help myself by being here. It comes out of them before they know it and it tumbles into here like a falling stack of rocks. I like to listen to the nurses giggling. It makes me feel better than I really feel. I don’t know for certain, but I think it’s what turned the lights back on. They giggled. They flipped a switch. I sat up and asked the world to please be quiet. There was always lots of noise, but I had been sleeping. For three and a half months, they tell me, things had been very very quiet.

My father raised me and my mother raised me. I had a sister and she died. I had simple friends but never any complex friends. My friends just came over and we went into my room. Or we went outside. We just did stuff that never really had much meaning. We played together. And they went home.

My wife was somewhat like my friends. One day she just went home. We did what we were supposed to do- like we sat together and we had sex together and we listened to each other for awhile.

“I’m tired of this, Walter. I’m going home.”

That’s what I remember. And then she went home.

They tell me I turned forty in my sleep. One of the nurses brought her son in and they sang me happy birthday. It was for kicks, she said. Just something to do. Her son was afraid of sick people, and this, she thought, would help him deal with that. I don’t weigh much anymore and I guess I slept quite peacefully. Kids used to look up to me because I was tall, but now I’m just as tall as the top of my feet. I can stack one foot atop the other and wriggle my toes. That’s about how tall I have become. I guess if you are going to un-scare a kid who’s scared, I would be a good guy to help with that. I mean, I’m not even scary when I’m standing. I never really was.

I walked into a bar one night and broke a bottle on the table and got surrounded by a riotous crowd. I was all lean muscle and cat-like against a man who had bullied many. He had a chest and belly like a stack of tires, but his arms were full of meat and he was an angry man. He shattered a bottle on himself and came after me while the crowd gathered around us.

“Walter! Walter! Walter!” they were all screaming. There was lots of lunging and gashing and blood all over. I cut him in his arms. I cut him across his belly. I cut him down a cheek and he stopped smiling at me. I didn’t want to cut him dead so I kicked him in the nuts. He went down. I karate-chopped the back of his neck and he fell from his knees to lay flat on his belly. For those who had suffered long under his cruelty, there came a roar of applause. Even in the end of fighting, it can be pretty noisy. We all drank beer and celebrated. They dragged the big man out back like a dead bull and dumped him in the dumpster.

I sat up just the once and I tore some muscles in my stomach. My first act after the lights came on was to sit up and “shhh!” something. I sat up and put my finger to my lips.

“Shhh!” I said.

There was no one there but some alarm went off and people soon came running. I was a miracle. I was a spectacle.

“Shhh!” I said. “Please be quiet.”

I had sat up when I wasn’t expected to, and now I can’t. Oh sure, I can push a button and make the bed sit up for me. That I can do. I can only go so far, though, before my stomach really hurts- and so I don’t. When I want to look over my feet, I roll my head forward instead.

The nurses and others around here all wear faded green or pink clothing they like to call scrubs. They look like faded Christmas P J’s to me. Like really faded. Both the red and the green. I remember Christmas. It was the time of year I always cried. It was always a really sad time for me, and I always felt washed out in the same way that these scrubs looked. There was nothing vibrant about our Christmases. We got trees. We gave presents. But we never really sparkled at Christmas time. My sister died in January when she was three. It was early January and she died in her sleep. She died quietly, I remember being told. Her lights were on. Her lights were off. The doctor’s all said it looked like she was leaking blood inside herself. Some of it came to the surface near her abdomen. She had a crimson circle there that looked like one of those red hot birth marks, is what my father said. I was seven at the time. I never got to see that circle.

I suppose it’s why we never liked the holidays. My parents never said as much, but looking back, I think that’s why. When my sister died, my parents lost their sparkle. They went to work. They came home. They signed some checks and watched the television on the weekends. We were a family of three with much stability. We were like a stool in a barn, though. We were practical. We weren’t pretty to look at. But we functioned.

They tell me Mom and Daddy are in Europe. They say they are looking for them to tell them all about me. I told them to leave them alone, that this was the very first time either one of them had ever been anywhere, and I didn’t want to spoil it for them. I was awake now. My lights were on. They could find out all about me, when they got back.

“But you’re a hero, now.” they all protested.

“I’m a hero, now,” I said to them. “And I’d like to be honored in my requests.”

“Very well,” they all agreed. “He is a hero, after all.”

-4-

I was an un-athletic child and I bordered on clumsy. I was a non-gifted child and I hovered near boring. I had acne for sometime and I had lice more than once. I never stood out in school while I attended and I never stood up for things I believed in- and I got by.

People always told me my face looked pinched. There was nothing I could argue for so I simply shrugged my shoulders. I had a pinched face. That was fine. I never understood why people came to that, or why they told me that.

I was able once, though, to get my head through a mail drop-slot in a bank and identify a bank robber. I was just walking by and a cop pulled me aside.

“Hey there,” he said, “you there, with the pinched face. Come here a second, and help us solve this crime.”

“What can I do?” I asked the cop.

“See if you can fit your face in there.”

He pointed at the mail drop-slot. I shrugged.

“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe.”

Everything was sideways and kind of weird as I peeked in. There was a nervous man sweating while he barked and shouted. Tellers were all gathered in a pile, and a single woman was going desk to desk and gathering money and placing it all in a bag. I pulled my head back out and I tore my ears as I did.

“He’s the milkman,” I told them. “That delivers door to door.”

They locked all the exits and brought his mother in, and she talked him into surrendering and I sat and watched from the curb and they never said another word to me about the whole thing. Sometimes having a pinched face can save people and put bank robbers inside of prison cells. If he’s out now, I hope they never tell him it was me that turned him in.

I never pinched a nurse before but the one that just came in is gonna be my first. Damn. Her lights are on. She’s got all the sparkle. I’m a hero now, so she’ll giggle and slap my hand away. That’s how women treat heroes. They slap their hands away but they don’t really mean it.

If I try it now, it might hurt the muscles in my stomach. I think I’ll wait, then, until I feel better.

“Hello Walter. It’s so nice to see you back with us. I’m Caroline. I’ve been taking care of you off and on since you first came in here. “

Her voice has a sparkle too. It’s soft and frivolous like a school girl’s and it matches her face, which is soft and frivolous like a pink carnation. Even in her faded red scrubs- which are a whitened pink and ironed and clean- she reminds me of a prom queen for some strange reason. Or one of those debutantes. Or one of those nice kind of girls, that never really talked much to me before.

“I’ve been talking all about you to everyone, you know…” she’s saying.

I smile. She’s fumbling with my arms and all the tubes there, and I love it.

“This hurt?”

I shake my head.

“Hold still. This will.”

She rips a bandage off my arm. There are holes and bruises there. I don’t remember them being there and I ask her what it all means.

“It looks worse than it is,” she says. “We’ve been poking at you for quite a long time now.”

“Did you think I was going to die?” I ask her.

“No.” She smiles one of those kindly nurses smiles. “We were worried that you were going to live.”