THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: PROCESSING (Patreon)

I followed her and I shouldn’t have. I know it now. Don’t you think I know? I saw it all. I saw it. 

When I got back from Ecuador, after the departmental (ha) review, the demerol, the hospital, the slippers, and all the things between — which tumbled through reality like clothes in the dryer — I found myself washed up in our house. That is, the house that I shared with my wife, Aimee, and my kid, Dougie, and my dog, Dog(…gie?) 

I had had a rough go of it in the jungle, they said. They told Aimee that I had been subjected to torture by the PCG (I hadn’t), that I had had to shoot a suspect (I had), and that I had been under the equivalent of combat stress when I was chased in the jungle for those 13 days I was gone (true, but I wasn’t being chased by people). The DEA wasn’t going to just let an agent dangle, oh no. They took care of their own. 

Anyway, home. High, and at home. Home high. Buzzing and knocking around. Eyes sliding off every written word and clouding up when people spoke until they were an out-of-focus blob of color making whale noises. In the fuzz. The blankness.

Three months of waking up, shuffling about, waiting to bounce between school mornings (when they go) and evening supper time (when they come back). Between those was a blank where I considered walls for great heaps of time. Emptiness. Humming. Nothing. I’m not going to lie, it was sweet. 

Then the idea rose up, like something from the black. Something alien and round and perfect and without seams. Something spontaneous and perfect and impossible to put away. It just rolled and rolled around my mind.

Somewhere, somehow, I got the idea that there was no there, there. That outside, beyond the bay window that opened every day and every night on fogged water, there was nothing beyond it. No people. No cars. No buildings. Nothing. Just a rolling expanse of bare rock and fog. A void that my wife and son went and stood in for blank hours, only to return home to keep up the charade. 

So I went to see.  Dog barked as I left — right after Aimee did — and I caught up with her on the road. Tailing distance, in the fog, tracking her phone on my phone (I mean, I was a DEA Agent). We rolled past pastures with lost sheep that were et up by the fog banks. Fences, and sketched farm houses at the edge of opacity, perched on hills gobbled up by the clouds. A world half finished. 

She dropped Dougie off, and the school seemed in order, though fogged out. The kids were shadows that leapt and played whose high voices clapped back with flat echoes. Someone had carefully placed the swing-set in a convincing manner, and I watched it for a bit as Aimee watched Dougie play. Then Dougie went in, she went to work, and it was there. A glowing, blue sign hanging in the gray void that read, MIND SYSTEMS. 

I slept, I think.

When I woke, I got out, peed in the bushes and then waited for 5 o’clock. Aimee came out right on time, alone, and hopped in our car. 

Another snaking drive through the fog which seemed strange to me. It felt, for a time, like the entire world was on a tilt, like it was slowly tracking to the left. As if it would spin over in a tumble and spill us all out into the purple clouds. It was dark now, see?

Then, home. But something was wrong as I pulled up the drive slow, after Aimee had already pulled in and gone in. The lights of the house were on (I had turned them off), I could see Dougie in the front window playing with some suction cup thing (and who had picked him up?) And I saw Aimee, lit like a movie screen inside, smiling and laughing and speaking to someone other than Dougie.

Then I saw my car — identical to the car I was in — next to Aimee’s at the house, parked and still.

Then I saw me, making spaghetti and laughing back at Aimee, and being a real person. 

I saw it, and now I can’t go back.  I want to go back.