20
At my Rockaway apartment, I spend time slumped on a chair, in catatonic shock.
I can’t respond to anything.
It feels like I’m in a coma, but still awake.
It feels like I’m dreaming with eyes wide open.
I’m can’t move at all. My neck is rigid, stiff. But I sense my head is going from place to place, traveling without moving. Around the world without leaving.
From scene to scene.
First, a mental hospital and a padded room. Where I’m assessed by a panel of doctors who judge me mentally fit to stand trial for arson.
Then I shuffle in my mind to a court scene with red and gold volumes of law books on shelves behind a judge. I can smell the mint in my lawyers mouth as he whispers a plea deal into my ear. Here my attorney argues that a foreign substance started the condo blaze. The fire’s point of origin was caused by an unknown alien chemical that continues to baffle investigators. So the case never goes to trial. I’m released. An innocent young man.
In my catatonic dream, which seems to be so vivid and true, I’m then abducted outside the courthouse by aliens, body-snatched, taken aboard a spaceship. One of those aliens is Carl Busby who unzips from his body to reveal his jelly-like insides. I always counted him as odd, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Jordan Shamshack is flying with us, too. She is still very human in her beauty. She’s to be my space queen. But I’m told, as we ascend, as we leave the atmosphere of Earth, that her first order of business on a new planet will be to eat me alive. I already see the gleam of hunger in her eyes. So before we reach escape velocity, about to hit our exit speed, I get desperate to go home. As Jordan gives her final backward glance at the land and sea below, I sneak away to a launch pod. It ejects me from the spaceship. This month long dream ends with me parachuting back down to Earth.
Back in my apartment, my mother places the phone next to my ear, while she spoons some clam chowder into my mouth.
On the phone line, I hear the gruff voice of Frank Benzino saying, “After you’ve had enough time off work, after you get some rest, we at Calgon Tech would love to have you back.”
His English accent is missing. He sounds more Australian.
This phone call snaps me out of my frozen catatonic state.
I rush for the security guard uniform that hangs neatly pressed in my closet.
I button the shirt, strap the belt, pin the badge, lace the boots.
My speeding to work is done in anticipation over whether I will see the condos burned to the ground, nothing but ash. As I exit the highway, however, I look upon the same condos still standing, like I never witnessed the spaceship fireballs that destroyed them.
The only difference now is the sign at the front entrance. Where it used to say, The Clear Lake Condo Estate, it now says, Calgon Tech: The Virtuplex.
I’m alone in the trailer for hours without knowing what did or did not happen here. It was a dangerous memory that would not fade from my experience. And yet, I have to move on. I must move on. Something fantastic did happen here. But the aftermath of that fantasy didn’t hold up. Nobody wants to hear about something that was just a dream. We all dream. Get over it.
How long was I gone? Was I gaslighted? Have I been discredited? I don’t know. I now wade in confusion.
I’ve been wondering if anyone actually looks at my security sheets. On slow nights I’ve been toying the idea of using my clipboard as a journal instead. Just to see if anyone notices.
Finally, yes, I jot it down with a pen. This is what I write:
LOG 1: Feeling Lost
“I’ve worked a total of one year without a break from the Clear Lake Condos.
Monday is missing.
Monday is more than missing, it was never there.
The clock speeds ahead.
Tuesday comes and goes.
My mind gets warped by time.
Wednesday has all the feeling of a Friday.
A minute becomes more like a month.
Thursday is a blur.
Two weeks turn almost eternal.
Tuesday comes again.
My mind is dizzy and swimming.
There is snow in the summer season.
Seconds seem to slip by.
On yet another Tuesday.”
I note the clock time as whenever. Then I sign off on it, to make it official.
LOG 2: Feeling Mute
Again I use my security sheets as a journal, since nobody raised alarm about my last entry, yesterday.
“Outside this trailer is all dark. Surrounding the trailer is a deep, deep silence. I let my mind do some thinking, but I only hear faint wind chimes that suddenly stop. The silence is all around me. The lake is still. Time passes by in slow increments. Time stretches out, expands, goes further. Time goes beyond time. The end has no end.
The forest behind me is a fortress of quiet wood. Thinking ahead, I try to picture my life ten years from now, in anticipation. I can’t. My past is gone, since my memory has been set adrift. Or maybe I’m just absent.
From a factory mill, a smokestack in the distance emits smoke without a noise.
The silence is heavy and the darkness almost has a dense weight to it. I wonder how long I can withstand this way too quiet place.
Right now, it feels like time has stopped, like a digital camera is constantly capturing the same moment.
My eyes are starting to see things in frames.
Since nothing has changed in hours, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.
Working this job for one year straight, without a single night off duty, the nights hardly mean anything to me, because I’m sleeping and eating and returning to work.
The drudgery of the routine is embedded in my brain. The routine is a danger to my psyche.”
I just realize that I’ve been scribbling with such a fast scrawl, my words aren’t legible. My words start on my clipboard but cross over to the blueprint drawings that span the workstation desk. So I end my journal entry there, with a little stick man figure of me on the blueprints.
LOG 3: Feeling Numb
Using the security sheets on my clipboard for another journal entry, I write:
“Tonight, I try to fight off the loneliness. I try to fend off that lonesome feeling. This type of effort depletes my will power. I yearn for conversation, any conversation at all. I try to remember the difference between being alone and feeling lonely. I know there must be a difference.
I think of myself as trapped. I can place the dimension of a prison cell, mentally, from the lake to the highway to the condos high on the hill.
Waiting is the worst part.
Every moment is counted for.
Once again, the night is silent.
The trees, they don’t move. The lake, it doesn’t move. The heavy duty machines, still.
As long as I keep still, all segments of time can be lumped together as one marathon night in history.
If I look at myself the right way, I can see the invisible chains, the shackles on my body. With the right pair of eyes I can see the invisible bars that surround the Clear Lake construction site.
This is catatonic despair.
And it feels so frozen because there is no real tool to chisel the ice off my skeleton.
I feel like a nobody from nowhere with nothing to do.
Working here makes me empty out, lose feeling, become numb. The numbness is the result of being here too long, working a solo routine, night after night, drug after smokable drug.
In the zombie zone, I care for nothing right now.
An hour ago, in my truck, I turned on the interior light to look at myself in the visor mirror. I had no expression on my face, just a blank sagging effect, no visible emotion.
My hand lifted up from my lap to my throat, checking for a pulse. I had trouble to locate a throbbing neck vein, which caused me to think I’m dead. Then, opening the dashboard compartment, I found a safety pin to prick my finger with. I stuck myself hard, but no blood came to the surface. That worried me, so I stuck myself again, harder. Blood trickled out.
The blood was blue.”
I end the journal entry there because my tear ducts start to sting from dryness.
LOG 4: Feeling Dead
Looking at my security clipboard, the fresh white sheet, those empty lines, I struggle for words. I eventually manage to write my final entry:
“I sit here in the center of this silence, and the silence has a white-knuckle stranglehold over this entire neighborhood.
Even when astronauts come back to Earth after a long space trip, they need therapy to walk among the human race. This job is like that. I am out there.
Now is the best time for me to confront the serial killer who squats in the condos, Gary Lee Vickers.”