"Shatters"
by
Timothy Stillman
"What if you're not you? What if one morning, tomorrow or 15 years from now, you wake up and realize you're not you and never have been?"
The question was Joel's. Said on an idle blue sky summer day when it seems hands are made of blue blown glass not quite hardened into what they would later become. But of significance, of going through one free cloud or another and seeing what was inside them. Of significance as to any boys age 15 and 16 in the so long ago.
Said while Joel and I sat on the grassy slope of a hill just a mile out of the little town. Side by side as we watched the afternoon collect its butterflies and seeming then to toss them at us--butterflies all leafy gold and autumn tiger eyed suns on their wings. Magic we thought would live forever, then, though not so, not so.
I didn't answer my friend, for it baffled me where Joel came up with these ideas. How his mind was always running like a busy cash register, clicking and clinging bells. Making change and enveloping pieces of the world known and the world unknown into itself, its drawers which were full of sunshine and open smiles, and not the dark delivered air and myopic stares that scored the dime store where my mother worked. Dark in there. Dark and humid there, even when the air conditioner did its best. All those slanted thin wooden squeaking floors and the light so you could barely see what you were shopping for.
I asked Joel, totally non sequiter, wanting to get off the subject of our being goldfish bowls that one day might change inhabitants, and wouldn't that be a scary thing, I asked him how the world was made instead? And he told me, "with a lot of practice." And he smiled that broad smile of his and stretched his bronzed arms up above him and lingered out his fingers as tall as he could make them, "and that is why we have all those planets up there, all those universes. But only this planet they got right."
I didn't know about jingoism them. I thought it was perfect for Joel to say, because he had tons of girlfriends, and I had Joel and one day I would not have him, so soon, and the world would be a gray place with a sky too furry like the abdomen of a black widow spider, I thought then. And it turned out I was right.
Tonight, though, late. And I can't sleep. "The Andy Griffith Show" is on TV land as I write this. I remember the bucolic days of it, and how when a child watching it, I longed for my childhood. Which made no sense. Unless someone else had lived my childhood and had deserted it for me. Or someone else was me now and had no idea what my childhood had been like. Thus, tonight, grasping, trying to remember what can't be remembered. From one totally different tape recorder head to another. How could it?
Joel then had a hero's face. It was a bit squarish and it had a chin dimple, and his eyes were green like the most magical frog's eyes, if frog's eyes are green even. He knew what the world was going through, and he knew what I was going through. His mission was to save only a piece of time. To clock it in his wrist watch and to make time be mastered by him. He believed and he wore long legs encased in Wrangler's jeans and he wore workman shirts that were rolled to the elbows. He preferred red shirts. He wore Keds tennis shoes as all boys back then did.
The thing that pinched me out of my bed tonight was what he said so many years ago. Identity. And the calm passive invention of it that I suppose everybody thinks is their nest in which to rest all the days of their lives. The only home that is truly home until its heart stops beating and that is the end of homes forever and a day.
Back in that sky and green grass and the wind that wiffled his somewhat long dark hair, for he was a rebel in those days, so we thought, it was just Joel being Joel. And me at his side as always, since fifth grade when he had moved here with his parents. He let little useless kids hang round him because he was far older in mind and heart than we, thus diminishing us unintentionally, and he was tall and his hands described stories. Stories that maybe had nothing to do with him or anyone else. Artful ones and conceived ones, as though they had been born straight and full blown in his brain in a mere moment.
I tremble a bit now, thinking. I want to phone him. But I don't know where he is. Because he got caught in a gale of girls and was flown off from me without his even remembering the little beefy kid who had a stutter and who believed it was a good thing being broken because then I could get away with so much. I was wrong. It turned out the opposite way. I tremble because I think I know what he meant. About discovering you are not yourself.
Then you have to give way. Then you have to give up your nest that is your body, but more than that, that is your mind. You've usurped your place. You've in effect, tacitly raped what you thought was yourself, but was not at all. If someone betrays you, kill him. Joel had said that once or twice. He was just a harmless boy, with gangly limbs and a sweet smile, and he was smart and knew just what to say and just when to say it. But now, things came together. They weren't idle words. If someone betrays you, kill them.
He had said it with that whispery kind of silver pebbles run over by a cool stream kind of way. He said it to be outrageous. As he told me that he couldn't watch Saturday morning TV with me because he was preparing for his Saturday night date which would be "hot hot hot." He said it as he said hurtful things to me and then looked at me coolly. Then looked at me as though he had not said what I heard. So I pretended not to hear it. Or not to understand it. Running down the middle of a street in an afternoon summer rain storm, running beside him as the rain cascaded on us and drenched us, as we held our faces up to the sky and opened our mouths for the rain sparkles to dance on our tongues. All of that and so much more were worth a few hurtful sentences.
I think of Joel always. Especially these years. Somewhat down on my luck. Somewhat gripped about the heart, and not knowing where to turn. Joel and memory and silver backing of those mirror memories always made me sadly glad. But what if the memories were backward in those mirrors? What if there was Joel in me and there was me in him? Then? Or now, maybe. And if so, then for how long? How could I be lonely for myself? Well, that was simple. Anyone can be lonely for anyone, even himself, as he used to be. It's done all the time.
Maybe it's always ourselves we're lonely for. And maybe people who have never doubted who they are, have never doubted their identity, and think they pine for someone else, maybe they've got the luck. I almost envy them, now. Yes, I more than envy them. For it's creepy, thinking someone has crawled inside you. A friend. A best friend who took some pity on you from childhood across that wide, wide gulf of time. To hear the phone ringing. Each time I think, Joel. Calling from now or then and saying hey Barry this is Joel remember me? But it's never so. It's always a phone solicitor. Or the librarian telling me that a book I requested has come in.
Sad. And trying to remember that china blue summer sky when Joel said what he did about identities. And trying to remember his adjuration to kill someone who has betrayed you, which was said by him yet again (and the weather gave it an especial weight this time) on a cold late October evening when we were walking down the leaf crackle street, our jackets zipped up tight, the little collars turned up against the neck, and the smell of winter in the air. He didn't say it to scare me. He didn't say it to alarm me any more than he had said other things to scare me or alarm me. He just said them. Things to me. Things others would never believe out of this kind quiet boy. Things I didn't believe when he said them. To me. Even though my cheeks burned red and my brain buzzed angrily.
Everything is reality. Even dreams. Even the finest most impossible memories. We forget. All of us. Things grow a caul on their faces, or a great brush of miasma and parsley sage rosemary and thyme. And after a while, it's too hard work to jackhammer through all of this mud of murky that turns to concrete eventually and betrays us and is cold to us as is all the world. To me at least. And even that all by itself was just once upon a time.
Joel didn't want me. But he took me nonetheless. Maybe yesterday. Maybe last week. And it's not self-absorption that has taken me. And it's not my being so hollow inside that I have to conjure up a madness in me that is to fill me, other wise I shall go floating up through the ceiling of my bedroom and drifting far far into the night sky that will not remember and will hoist me through a funnel and the stars will collide and my world will be officially in its little atom show, over.
Get out of me, Joel. Get out now. My heart can't take it. Too many summers in it getting crossed with too many snowy winters, all stirred with Fall tree branches cold and leafless and jagged with too many angles. Get out of me, Joel. I never did love you that well or that much. Give me my life back. You took it and didn't care and I want it back.
But that day of summer with its glass houses and its glass hands that formulated a hot wind that encompassed us in that hilly meadow, that day when anything could happen and I could still look at the sun for a long time without its making me cry or shoving black specks into my vision, back at that day, the Fall evening of dire consequences came to curdle it. To waste it. And remake it into what it was not. Into what it was.
Joel had said to me, then, as we sat side by side, as he danced his eyes into the season that was a property that I had no doubt at all that he owned lock stock and barrel, had said to me, "Have you ever kissed a girl, Barry?" And I pulled away from him, though only inside myself. I suddenly wanted to go home. I wanted to read a book or watch TV. I wanted to be away from him and from the memory of this, which has now exploded all over me as though I've been blowing a bubble with Bazooka gum and its burst and now I have to scrape it off my face and hands.
There were some other questions he asked. And they weren't said in a mean way. They were said in a curious way. As though suddenly he had noticed I was there, while at the same time he had never known. It was a show. An act. He needed an admirer. He needed a fan who could not look at him long because his sun was too bright, too brittle, too well adjusted for a minor leaguer like me. Someone who didn't matter to him. That was a part of his need, then. It was something at least.
I turned my face, I now remember, from him. And I wished he were not so tall. And I wished he were not so handsome. I wished he hadn't had it easy all his life. That his parents had not had more money than did my mother. That he wasn't so easily popular. I wanted to have those sky blue hands come down and strangle him. I wished him dead.
So, it's obvious that I had to shelve that memory. And that now he/I had found it. And if it was mine, then he would kill me, as he had to kill all the memories that were my life and my past and present and future. I could feel him inside me right now. Like I was pregnant with him. Like he was kicking up summer sod inside me. Telling me to vacate the premises. And summer was a shell. The sky back then so blue and so perfect and so mysterious with that golden kind of late evening July glow of gold that it had seemed the top of a box. And I was being put in that box that was himself and when I was looking directly at it became not him at all, but me, and I was being pressed to the internal walls of myself.
Thinking now, my forehead wet with sweat. But my heart calm. My fingers typing with whatever alacrity they had always typed with. As he is inside me and wants me out. But what if I don't go. What if I don't give up this final, this last thing for him? I gave up everything else for him. Back then. And still right to this very second. I gave up comic books and science fiction novels and magazines and "Playboy" and "Cavalier" and movies and TV shows we had once loved with all our hearts. I hurt my mind, stealing them away from it. Putting up a cordon round the now bomb cratered empty places, reading "Forbidden Area--Until Joel Gives Permission Once More." I gave them up in a hail fire of winter wind storms that came to me when he turned his back and went on his way. And left me with a great roiling pain, like radium that had bled into my bones and which lit up the always night in me with its green sickly sweet glow. That was not a glow to follow myself home with.
And Joel had turned to me that Fall night as we walked on pre or post Halloween night leaves. The night dark and unfeeling. The night suspended like a tent top above our heads. And I gave up Halloween and horror movies and Christmas and my childhood and my energies and my dreams and my fears even. Because he was in each of them. He had once made them golden, but now they were tainted. As with a disease, as though venereal warts had spread throughout them and had disgraced me. Had made me put my head down to the wind or the breeze or the winter and the cold or the summer and the heat. And I had taken his sins into me. And his sins had become me.
My back hurts now. I've taken some time to stretch. I remember Joel. I remember how his name used to be music to me. I remember how I sang "Maria" from "West Side Story" over and again in my mind, and when no one else was around, when Joel was out on a date, and I was home alone, I sang it in my cracked parched voice that tumble weeds seemed blowing across. My sad stupid croaking frog voice. I'll never stop saying Joel.
And I forgave him the last moment of us. Because he said that was all right. To just keep on truckin' and he forgave me. The last time then--He had come over to my house--it was the year he was to graduate high school and go away, far away to college. It was very early on a Saturday morning. The sun was not completely up yet. Was just a little pink doily in a sky that was way over there somewhere. He rang the doorbell a number of time. Off and on off and on and them blaring down on it in quicker quickest succession. I bounded off my bed and got to the door before it woke my mother.
I opened the door just a bit. And Joel was there. My heart sang. Joel had had other things to do for a time. I swung the door open. There with him was his latest girl. Both of them laughing uproariously at me in my stupid pajamas and red eyes and sleep matted hair. I stood there in my bare feet. My pajama fly almost open. My shame reddening my face. I looked down at the door way and the blue porch beyond. The humiliation was not to let me down. The sun was making the sky red. I felt heat inside me. I could not shut the door if I had wanted to. The cool wind plucked me.
They both were drunk and disheveled. She was running her long fingers through Joel's hair that was more conservatively cut those days and they were giggling. He had a half filled bottle of Wild Turkey held tentatively in his swaying left hand. He said to me, between sneaking glances at his girl, who sneaked glances at him, "You're too tight butt, Barry. You gotta loosen up. You gotta swing. You gotta take your first taste." And he offered the bottle to me, and he smelled and his eyes were foggy and he was most unhandsome with all those lipstick smears on his face, and his eyelids hanging half mast. And I hated him and his girl and all his girls. And I was so angry. I've never been so angry. But he had gotten into my heart and he would not leave there. Not metaphorically, I know now, but literally.
Then he thrust the bottle to his lips and took a long swig, most of it spilling down his quivering chin, and his eyes were so luminous and bright and scary like he had turned into a killer. I thought of what he had said, at least one time that I remembered, about killing someone who betrays you. And I feared for my life. I thought he might have a switchblade in his soggy stinky jeans. And then he reached out an arm and threw it round his girl's waist and he told me to open the screen door and come on to the porch. Which I did because I always do what I'm told to do. Especially everything he told me to do.
And he pushed the thin mousy girl up against me. She held to me and she smelled like a brewery and she put her lips next to mine and she opened my mouth and forced in her tongue--and I pushed her away so hard, so goddam hard, she fell on her butt on the blue painted porch floor. And I looked at Joel who was doubled over, laughing. And I hit myself twice with the screen door as I tried to Three Stooges like get it open and get inside. And I remember now. I cut my heel on the door edge as I stumbled inside. I leaned against the door. Hearing their laughter trail off as they left. I leaned against the door and cried. Summers and falls and winters and springs with him came laced with arsenic. He was not a friend, not then, not ever. And the pain in my heart is not him inside trying to break free. And we have not changed identities. Or maybe we have. It's hard to say now. It's late. I'm tired. My thoughts are getting muddled and muzzy.
Joel--rebirthed as a haunted house--inside me. Joel middle aged himself, all the beauty gone, the charm, the athletic prowess, the brain slowing perhaps a bit, not as quick with his wits. Joel who was nothing without us. Without his fans. His admirers. His lovers. And his would be lovers. I think of him as scared. I think of him as running down night tunnels as do I. He more lately. Me, far earlier.
Joel with all those girl and woman fingerprints on him. Joel who was poetry in motion. How I loved to see him in a baseball game. I on the side, never the one played to, but I could at least pretend. Joel who was a wonder of the world who knew how to walk like James Dean and who knew what was up ahead and round the corner, because he was a gauge. He was a needle on a car speedometer. He let us make the choices of what was up ahead, and he made those predictions come true. He was kind of a magician with it. He seemed to live about five minutes or so ahead of where we lived. Maybe he was a paranormal. Who can say?
But Joel inside me. Inside the body and the mind and the heart and whatever is left of my painted wooden soul. Trying to get out. He, my prison. And I, his. It is a nice dream. As I've spent years trying to get him out of me. Though not really. It would be a nice jest of justice. To really make the current him out there come inside and see the pain show that is me. To show him the horror feast that was his legacy in my world. To see how a person can be affected, infected, with the disease of someone like him. Someone, like Joel, who is braced against the beauty of himself. Someone who thinks he will last forever. And doesn't care at all about that little kid who hung around him and hung on his every word and his so rare glance in that little kid's direction. I could have dropped dead in front of him and he would have walked away. Knowing that if I could apologize for that incipient self conscious showboating act, that I would. There's death, and then, there's....death.
And if he's inside me now, trying to push me out, he doesn't win. It's a game I play. Though it's not real, but to me it is the most real thing there has ever been. I've given everything else up. He's poisoned ever moment of every day for me. It's time to start reclaiming myself and the hell with him. But if he is in there, he knows what someone can do to a person without even knowing it--he defined me. It is a war I cannot deflect or see around, much less walk around it. The pain surmounts in me like I can't begin to explain. But if he does know now, he doesn't care. Still and all. The last jest I had held out for. An implosion. See? No physical marks or lacerations or bruises at all. My fault. Not his. Of course. As always. Get over it. Get a life. Move on. Heads up. Forget him. But he is me, don't you see? And that cask of sweet wine was worth, I thought, being bricked in for.
I'm sleepy enough now. I don't have to remember summer childhood skies raining frogs. We hate for reasons. Hate is not wrong. And someday someday I swear I'll find him and I'll shove that Wild Turkey bottle down his throat all the way. But until then, those childhood summer skies rain hell down on my memory, ashes and fire and demons. But that's okay. I'm going to build back. I am. Just wait and see.
We are the persons we loved. And we are the persons we hate. They can never ever be as great as we made them. And they never know this. So, and I will not, the minute I feel I've grown far older than I care to, I will jump ship and leave the relic body to Joel. Neat twist to the dream. Nice to do so. Look and don't touch. Think but don't dream. And welcome to me, Joel. And this age business that's closing in on you, too, Joel. It will be nice to give it up. Is anyone inside you, Joel, that you so desperately want to get rid of? Or not get rid of, because without her, there is nothing left? Isn't the pain unbearably beautiful?
I still love you. And I'm sorry I hurt you.
THE END