Sleeping Equinoxes Part 3

:: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 1 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 2 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 3 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 4 ::

Every other morning, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, and swam an hour and fifteen minutes, before school. When I stood before the cold, shining pool, it was hard to make sense what I was there for. I knew the water was going to be freezing. Goosebumps crawled over my flesh. Everything in my mind and body screamed not to jump in. And yet I did, singing songs into the brightly lit water.

As I pulled on my swim cap, and mashed my goggles into my eye sockets, the unworded thought would slide into my brain like cold mercury: it's not enough. Your mind is broken, and the hurdles are insuperable.

The thought wasn't always there. Not when I was younger, before the seizure. Semi - suddenly, there was a question. Was I in fact an athlete? Was I capable? I pulled through the water, stroking so that I was not moving my hand, nor the water, but moving the pool as one unit, like a horizontal rock climber. Every stroke took on a new edge.

"One day, you won't be a swimmer anymore, you know that? Not too soon from now, unless you decide to go to the olympics or -" but I cut my dad off.

"I know, I understand that there aren't many adult swim teams," I said to him at the dinner table. It seemed to me like he was angry. I hated it when he got that tone in his voice.

Some mornings, when I only had afternoon practice, I would pack my swimming bag and accidentally hide it in my closet. There was a little access door, in the very back, to the space under the stairs, where my parents stored paint. Then I would get on the bus, so that my ride wouldn't know that I had not taken my swimming bag to school, so that I couldn't be reminded that I had forgotten it.

I swam angry, practicing for the final meet of my Freshman year of High School. I pushed myself beyond my limits. I lapped my teammates in the practice pool. They thought I was needlessly showing off, even though they knew they were far superior swimmers when it mattered. After practice, they wondered whether to exclude me from the circle. I made the decision for them. It seemed like they hated me to me. But it was my own self-doubt.

Coach Lou tried to show me how far I could go. He tried to convince me, driving me home after practice, to put in more time like some of the other great swimmers in our humble team. I didn't pick up the idea that he thought I had the potential to be great if I only would put in the time. I had my own sights set on a shorter goal.

I was determined to drop whole seconds from my 100m breast stroke, my best race.

And yet, just before the taper week, I skipped three practices in a row. After letting my ride to the pool know that I had somehow managed to misplace my bag again, I got on the bus, and went home, relief flooding through me. My mom was furious at me for not going to the pool the morning before, and I wondered if she had said anything to dad.

Suddenly, I wondered if my bag was still in the paint room. When the bus rolled to it's stop, I bolted out of the door, and ran the quarter mile to my house, straight to the door in the closet. It looked unopened. There was no bag inside.

xxx

Carrie was sitting on the floor in my English Class, between two empty desks. Her oval glasses obscured the color of her brown eyes.

“Did you lose something?” I asked. She was sitting upright, watching a cluster of students figure out how the social hierarchy should be reflected in seating arrangement. I asked because I couldn’t figure out why anyone would be sitting on the floor like that. And because she was beautiful.

“Oh, no, it’s all right,” she said. She brushed off with one hand, and slid her backpack over to the desk. She stood up and slid the desk chair to her left. There were many empty chairs around us. I sat down behind her.

I glanced up at her every so often. She was wearing a red button up shirt with photos of Marilyn Monroe on it. Her fingers were stained with charcoal. She was drawing very good sketches of one of the hierarchy girls a few rows ahead of us.

I passed her a snarky note about the teacher. She passed one back. One of her dark brown hairs was in it, and I imagined I could smell it, when she was feigning studiousness, turned forward.

xxx

The day of the race, my father attended. I had four races; the second was the 100m breast. I had a tape Walkman, and I tried to ignore my dad as he pointed out great swimmers, making comments on how hard they must have practiced to get that good.

I did fine in the individual medley, dropping two milliseconds. When I came back, and picked up my book, he asked me why I had slowed down so much on the backstroke. He said if I hadn't been so afraid of the wall, after the flags, that I would have done much better, and maybe even have gotten first place. He said my breast stroke in the third lap looked sloppy, like one lap of butterfly and one lap of backstroke were enough to wear me down.

It made me mindlessly angry. I bore finger marks into the cover of my book, and held my tongue. Just before the second race, what I had prepared for, what I had done to impress my dad, to freeze the unflagging critic in my own self, I leaned over and whispered to my mom.

"I'm going to hit him if he ever criticized me like that again."

She looked at me, tired blackness in her eyes.

I stood on the block, bent, grasping the rough edge, a river of mental images roaring through my mind. I pounded four laps through the pool, pushing my heart almost through my mouth in the third lap. Somewhere during the fourth, someone to my left passed me. I ground molars, feeling myself slow. I pushed harder, straining. There was nothing left. I tried harder.

I gained four milliseconds. I sat there in the water, looking at the time board until someone on the deck called me to get out.

"Good job, Josh," my dad was waiting for me, standing in front of the bleachers. I looked him in the eye.

"You could have dropped the time, but you didn't. You didn't practice hard enough, I guess those are just the choices we make, right?" he said. It sounded like razored mockery to me.

I was 6'5" and weighed roughly 180 pounds. I was thickly muscled, at the nadir of a long swimming career that was about to end. I put the whole of it, all the hours of freezing practice into his left rib, just underneath his left pectoral muscle. He took two reeling steps back.

I collapsed on the floor. I had no seizure.

It took him days to figure out what to do about it. He chose to continue to talk with me. He said if it hadn't been in a public place, he would have fought me as if I were not his son, but an opponent. I didn't believe him.

I quit swimming. My parents had to pay for the rest of the season.

xxx

One afternoon, I came over to her mother’s house and met her sister. We sat in the living room, and talked about music and how much school was a pain in the ass.

Carrie told me she was epileptic, and I did everything but tell her I didn’t give a damn about epilepsy. She thought it was odd, because it was the root of a medical fascination for her.

We went back into her bedroom.

I was kind of shocked at how strange her room was. There were masks all over the wall, and paintings on heavy paper, nailed through odd places to the scraped wood paneling.

She pulled out several medical textbooks from her stuffed shelves, and showed me some diagrams of the brain and some other interesting facts that I didn’t even look at. I was too busy checking out her fifty Beatles tapes aligned like Mayan treasures in a dusted corner.

“You like the Beatles?” she asked when she stopped talking about the effects of ephedrine on Wernicke's Area in the brain.

“I don’t really know, never…” I muttered, suddenly embarrassed.

“Oh, well you should. I could show you which ones are good, and which ones were written by McCartney.” She put her book down and pushed a pile of vaguely feminine detritus under her bed so she could sit down beside me. She accidentally brushed my shoulder while she was looking for something behind her.

“Um, well, my parents were not really into music, and so I don’t really know anything about music past say, the New Kids on the Block,” I said. It sounded shockingly uncool, and I listened to it over and over again in the brief awkward silence. “But I bet I know more Whitman and Wordsworth than you do.”

“Yeah, you probably do, but have you read through Proust?” she said? She leaned across me, and pulled the giant book from her shelf. “You should give it a try. It kind of works with what we were talking about earlier, with memory, and epilepsy. It can get kind of boring, but it’s worth putting in the effort, you know.”

She took off her glasses. I had never really gotten a good look at her eyes before. She leaned my way, but then bent her head, and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“Hey let me see those for a second.”

She handed her glasses to me. I slipped them over my eyes. They were so dirty I immediately took them off. I stood up and cleaned them on my shirt, and turned to look in the mirror.

“They’re so dirty!” I said.

“I don’t notice when I’m wearing them.” She said, “They look nicer on you than they do on me.”

“They’re kind of girly.” I said, “But they do look good.”

“They’re unisex.” She said. They were leopard colored modernized horn rims. “But you they don’t look unisex on you. You look kinda. Gay.”

“Guess so.” I said. I laughed, and she laughed, much quieter, beneath mine. I tossed them on her peeling vanity, and walked out of the room.

“Lets go do something else,” I said.

She followed me out of the room, and picked them up from where they lay.

I walked out into the hall. She said “Hey, wanna milkshake? I make them very well,”

“Well aren’t you hyper-competent. Yeah sure. What kind of shakes ya make?”

“Peanut butter and chocolate. Think we have some left.”

“Oh, my favorite,” I said.

“Really?” she said, pulling an old blender from under the counter. It looked like it might not have been cleaned before it was put away, a few years ago.

“Actually, yeah.”

I sat down at the table, and watched her bare arms as she slid the pieces together, and got the ice cream out.

“So was that dude that you were… talking to at lunch, like um, a boyfriend or something?” I asked.

xxx

From the back seat of Mike's car, I watched his hand vibrate on the shifter. The blood seemed to surge through the veins in his hand. His head was turned, mouth open, lines taut. He was saying something petty, small, and rotten to Carrie, but my thoughts crowded out the words. I strained enough from the tone.

Carrie told me she kept a baseball bat in her room because of him. But he had a car. And she was dating him.

The thought crossed my mind that we might not get to the city today. The slightest lines of fear and resistance around her eyes, behind her glasses betrayed what I was feeling, and I wanted her to look away, so he wouldn't know me, sitting in the back seat.

And since I was betraying him, even by being there, sharing my emotion with her, I fought my own hands to keep them from pushing her face towards the window.

There was a strange smell coming from him. His hair and his eyes were livid, sitting there with no one coming down the road, just the stop sign to justify the space of time in which he could say what he meant to her.

He jammed into the road, tires losing grip and smoke, and I removed my hands from under my butt, and dug them into the cloth and roping of the back seat.

We came close to the ditch on the right side of the road, deep for the Virginia rains, matted with flattened weeds and trash. I caught a short deep glimpse. I could feel coolness begin to rise in my chest, my brain bracing for disaster thinking, and my consciousness pressing down on it, subduing it.

She said "It's no problem."

He glanced over at her twice. I could hear his foot on the gas pedal, sliding back and forth, across the top. Then he slammed it to the floorboard, and we went across the double yellow lines on the road. I watched them snake under the car, sliding to one side of the hood, then sliding across again.

"Hey you ever driven down the middle, man," He said.

"Do it a lot. Fun." I responded.

"How long before a car comes?" he said to Carrie.

"Just," Carrie said.

He whipped it back into the lane, torsion yawing. We drove for a moment, like a trio from a Christmas party.

"Hey, you ever hit a tree in a car man?" Mike said.

"We're probably both equally inexperienced. Aw shit." I muttered.

He broke the yellow fast, driving off the left side of the road. We still weren't far from the neighborhood he and I lived in. I imagined the ambulances pointed away from the twisted primer body of his car.Dirt flew up the body of the car on the right side. We rapidly descending down a small embankment.

Then we whipped back up, and were on the road again. I glanced back at the tree we had elided. He pulled over in a gravel driveway suddenly, and told us to get the fuck out of his car.

We got out, and I pulled Carrie behind the trees as he flicked sprays of gravel against them.

She hugged me, and I felt my body filling with the urge to urinate. We walked back home, and she described to me what new crack looked like.

xxx

Two years later, we were Juniors, standing in the hallway, reading the list of the people who had the option of taking the Advanced Placement English class. I was very excited about it, but I was on the edge of qualifications that the devil, Ms. Reinhardt had specified.

“I got into the AP class, but I’m not going to do it,” Carrie said, not exactly to me.

She looked terrible. She had cut her hair with an electric razor. She had slipped and cut off her left eyebrow. The haircut looked surprisingly professional however. It made me doubt the eyebrow thing was accidental.

“Carrie, you have to. You might hate me, maybe deservedly, but you have to get into this class. I won’t go if I get in, if you want to do it.”

“Please kindly – I’m not. I want to. The regular class.” She turned away from me, and walked over to a girl named Lindsay. She glanced back over at me.

I walked over to the board, and my name was on the list. I took out a black sharpie, and pressed one clean line across my name. It felt like giving the bird to suited men offering scholarships. Like burning money, like giving up any future. Like living with my parents.

I pulled out my bible, taped up and tattered, and pulled out the note I’d been writing and rewriting. I knew it was a bomb, and that it was wrong to say anything to Carrie about dating Lindsay. Between the cocktail of drugs administered by her Psychiatrist, and the hot fishtank she kept in her closet, she seemed to be doing a little better.

They were happy together. I crumpled it up, threw it in a hallway trashcan, and prepared to the bullet points for the next version in my mind.

xxx

I met my future wife, Morgan, whose sane mind was like a slap across the face in the dark, by a cold hand.

The mechanism of human relationships can't be spanned so easily, yet it was reactionary, her love, at first. Reactionary to me. Reactionary to my bland pretension of slight madness, and my sudden excess zeal in Christianity.

On December 31, 1999, I invited both Carrie and Morgan to come with me to the city for New Years. For some reason, Carrie decided that she wanted to go with us. The same as she would have accepted and invitation to an iron maiden.

We took a walk down to the Canal Walk, a favorite place of Carrie's. Her and I had walked down the paths several times, took pictures of one another under bridges, doing handstands, wearing beaver skin top-hats.

We ended up leaving soon, because Morgan pointed out that it was very cold, and couldn't decide where else to go, so we went back to my parent's house. After watching the ball drop, I found my dad's old tequila and gin, and the three of us drank most of what was left before my father came downstairs.

He came down and drank with us for a short time. I accidentally slapped Carrie's glasses off her face, gesticulating drunkenly. They broke on the table. We decided that it was time to put me to bed. We managed to get the couch bed open. I fell face first on it. Morgan and Carrie also fell asleep on the same thin fold-out.

In the morning, only Morgan was there.

xxx

Carrie and I had written letters to each other in notebooks for years. She requested that I give her the last of the notebooks to her, so that when I went off to college, she would have something to remember me by.

Of course, I said that I'd keep in touch with her, and other chit chat.

She asked me to come by her house, to drop it off, and at the last minute, I'd asked her if she wanted to drop by Carytown, in the city. I thought there was a good chance that she'd take me up on it. She did.

I had gotten into several colleges. I was helped by good SAT scores. Carrie had opted not to. I believe that she wanted to stay home and help her mother and her sister with the finances, but it seemed like a decision made by an alien on a foreign world to me.

When people that had known me left for college, they slipped into black holes that unbound them from us. They simply stopped existing, outside of any contact. She knew that would happen between the two of us, and I am sure that she shared some of the relief that I felt.

I parked the car a little ways away from her house, and snuck through her front yard, hard to do in my 20 hole cherry red docs, and tight ass home dyed jeans. I rung her doorbell.

As I rounded her corner, I slipped off the edge of the planter and landed on the outside of my foot. I crunched down hard on the ankle. I was laying on the ground when she poked her head through her door.

She helped me up, and brought me inside. I sat on her carpet, I couldn't seem to maneuver myself to her couch. She was abuzz, running from one room to the next, forgetting where her ibuprofen or aspirin was. She offered me hydrocodone in a joking manner, but I saw her put the bottle back. I should have taken it. It would have been exactly the right thing to do.

"How are you going to get home with your right foot messed up, Josh?"

"Not going home, you're gonna drive me, and we'll get to talk in the car," I said.

"Must not have a lot to say then," she said, almost smiled. It was about five minutes from her house to mine, since her family moved into my neighborhood.

"Maybe not, but we're going to Carytown, remember?"

"I'm not sure that's the best idea. We're going to spend the rest of the afternoon walking on your hideously sprained ankle?"

"Got something better in mind? Honestly, I wouldn't miss it for the world. I really want to go, I haven't been able to do anything with you for far too long."

"What... you sure?" She sounded very unsure of the situation.

"Yep, I'm sure, we should do this. It's not that bad, got these boots, can string em up tight."

We walked through all the stores, and she bought me a hat at an old clothing store.

On the way back, she asked about the notebook. I feigned like I didn't remember it.

"What do you want from me?" She asked, trying to roll up the window of her ancient land whale of a car.

"I guess, just friendship."

"Did you ever want anything more?" She looked over at me for far too long, and I realized tears were running down her face, even though her voice didn't match. I wondered if it was just her bad brain, or emotion that she could excise from her voice.

"Oh, of course, I did, but," thousands of thoughts ran through my brain, turning anything further I could say into outright lies. I didn't want to lie anymore to her.

"Oh, fuck off," she said. It might have been the first time I ever heard her cuss.

Years later, it occurred to me that she was trying to tell me that she loved me.

She helped me out of the car. She forced me to sit down, and when she took a look at my ankle, she got furiously angry with me and told me to get the hell out of her house for lying to her all the time, and for being the biggest fool she ever met.

xxx

We found it difficult to talk to one another, while standing on the ashy soil of our burnt down love. It should have been simple.

Carrie brushed off the bottoms of her muddy feet before putting them back in her goodwill black boots. She swing her nude legs in, started her giant green Oldsmobile Parisienne, slammed into first, and lurched forward. She cranked the window as far down as it would go, and rolled past Lindsay and Newt, who were shaking their legs into their jeans, and wrapping thier damp shirts around them.

"Would you like to get in the car? Thought I'd drive it up for you." She yelled out the window.

Linday glanced over and smiled. Carrie looked out the front window, jaw clenched.

"C'mon Newt, gotta go, think she's freaking out, k?" Lindsay muttered to Newt, buttoning up her shirt, which was becoming translucent with rich people's lakewater. She tossed her bra through the rolled down back window.

Newt jogged around the car, opened the working door, and slid in. "Ja lose your clothes?" He looked down at his dirty toenails.

"I found this vest in the trunk, but nothing else. I'm very sorry about that. Just try to avert your eyes," said Carrie. A tear bisected her cheek.

"It's allright. Don't worry, honey, you can put my backpack over your lap," said Lindsay. She put all her energy to preventing a scowl.

Carrie put the backpack over her lap, and pulled back into the parking lot. The car shuddered twice, and went dead. Carrie cussed, and slammed the roof of the car with her fist seven times.

Nobody said a word.

As she tried to turn over the engine, twisting her key in the ingnition with all her might, and holding it, Newt pushed the pile of books and art supplies around in the left footwell.

"Carrie, here's a pair of jeans. Put 'em on while I fuck with your engine. We'll get this shit started."

"Newt, just let me do it."

"Why don't you let him, it's a good idea," said Lindsay.

"I fucking hate myself," said Carrie. Newt was already outside the car. He pushed the jeans through her window, and turned his head away. He pushed his hand down the inside of the car door, brushing her leg. She didn't move it. It was cold and gritty. He found the hood release and popped it.

He pushed his curly black hair back, fished a rubber band from his jean shorts pocket, and bound it up behind his head. Popped the hood with a screwdriver he had picked up from the driverside floor where it always laid beside Carrie's feet.

He wanted to slide across the hood to the front, but there were a few rust spots, and he was worried he'd tear the paint off the car if his shorts snagged.

He jammed the screwdriver, and pried upwards, even though he new exactly how to shift and jiggle it to get the hood up. He was wishing hard that he could miraculously get it to spring up faster than normal, because he could see her pale skin in his mind, and couldn't handle the thought of catching a glimpse of her lovely breasts again today.

He slid it over, staring at his hands. He got the tip aligned, and pushed it in slowly, then dug it in so that the hood sprung upwards. He shuddered when it did. He glanced at the battery first thing, and sure enough the battery cables were loose, where he'd tightened it last time. There was white corrosion preventing any contact. He knocked it off with the screwdriver, made a mental note to tell Carrie to buy a new cable or she was going to have to buy a new battery, so that he would remember it when he would be able to reliably speak again.

He stood there for a moment and wondered whether she would ever kiss him again, or what it mean that she had done that one night after a drink, on a camping trip. He wondered how strictly she adhered to the lesbian code.

It pissed him off that he would even think that becasue Lindsay and Carrie were so obviously good together, mutually beneficial, even if they were going through some strain in the relationship lately. He hoped that it had less to do with him than it appeared. There was a seizable part of him that wanted the relationship to work. He was glad for the curtain that was the hood of the car was drawn over his little internal-dialog theatre.

xxx

Carrie woke up in the drowsy sun, just half the car off the road. She heard Newt wake up behind her for the same reason that she woke. The ground was bumpy. She could see dirt falling to the road from the dry patches in the rearview.

She shook herself awake, angry, and smacked herself in the face about twice as hard as her conscious mind intended.

Newt tried not to rub his eyes, making sure that Carrie wouldn't see him awake in the back seat. If she knew that he was staying awake because he knew that she had fallen asleep, she would be deeply embarrassed, and that embarrassment surely would work it's way into something self destructive. That was thing he desperately wanted the least of. As he fell deeper in love with her, he wanted to be the one to hurt her, in small, loving ways, to replace the viciousness of her own masochism.

So he laid back against the seat, and slowly righted his head, because he had fallen asleep like a drunk, neck bent under the weight of his head, and it hurt like hell now. There really wasn't much he could do anyway. She was an observant person, surely she was checking to see whether they had awaken. Too much mental game for him. The pain wasn't worth winning it.

He watched the clouds up ahead gather, as they rolled down the road in silence. Someone had switched off the radio. He suspected a tiff between the girls.

Carrie was driving just under the speed limit, steering her boat of a car smoothly down the straight road. He wondered what it would have looked like if she had plowed into the high embankments that lined the road along this part for some distance.

His thoughts drifted off into the clouds, the coming storm, the situation, whatever her could do, a little song, the head of his guitar, where he had stopped the metal fan that one time. He realized that he might have fallen asleep for a bit there.

He sat up suddenly in his seat. He leaned forward.

Carrie was slumped in the drivers seat, a huge amount of saliva running out of her mouth, and she was almost imperceptable vibrating, when they hit the side.

Newt saw it coming, and leaned back, put his arms up on the seat.

He could see the embankment approaching at a strange angle as they crossed the double yellow line. It went disaster-slow.

He watched Lindsay head slam off the dashboard, a blood mark, small, where her lips made contact. He felt the back of the car lift up.

His head whipped around, and he didn't see anything clearly for some span of time.

He was sitting there with his seatbelt for a second, alert beyond normal, brain still processing the fact that he was the only conscious person in the car. It ocurred to him that he had to check and make sure no gasoline could be ignited. He unclipped his seatbelt, and tried to open the door. The frame of the car made it very difficult to do so, but he pushed it open.

After a quick glance under the car, he opened Carrie's door, and dug in her purse. She didn't have her cell phone in it. He wondered briefly where in the goddamn hell it was. He glanced over at Lindsay.

Her face was a mess. There was blood everywhere. The clearness in his mind triply intensified. He could feel and underlying sea of nausea, but it was far underground. Slightly above that was a white panic that he knew was far, far worse. He walked crisply around the car, opened the handle, and it was like frost had developed in between the door and the car in the summer. He kicked the door swiftly. It popped right open to his surprise.

There was blood on the seat. He stared for a split second, then dove into Lindsay's backpack. There was a cellphone. It glistened brilliantly. He dialed 911 like a stoned man carefully getting it right with nervous hands.

He gave them their cursed information. They kept asking him if he was all right. He answered all of them, until they let him go. He was perversely proud that his voice came out clear until the end. He let the phone drop out of his hand, into the dirt. He put one hand up on the open frame of the car, and let tears come out of his eyes.

Carrie surfaced into semi-consciousness. He crawled through the back seat, and put his hand on her shoulder.

She spoke something that almost sounded like English. He looked at her, there were no cuts or bruises, yet. He could tell she was not entirely conscious. She looked much like the time he saw me have a seizure on the bus.

He heard the police come. They pulled him out of the car, and then asked Carrie to get out. They asked her questions, and she was able to answer them to some degree. Newt started to get angry, while they were asking him questions because they were hurt. They seemed to be unable to understand that Carrie had a seizure and needed medical attention.

"Look, we're going to take her in, okay?" One of the police officers said. Newt suddenly focused on him.

"What? She needs to go to the hospital right now," he started calculating options and costs.

"We're going to take her in. It will be better for her that way, sir. If she did in fact have a seizure, then it will be better for her, legally if we take her in, than if she goes to the hospital. If she is declared epileptic, she won't be able to drive. We are not sure that she did in fact have a seizure. So please step aside, sir, and don't make any trouble. You're going to have to do as I say."

Newt realized that the margin for heroics was small and extremely costly.

None of the officers did anything for Lindsay until the paradmedics came, pulled her out of the car, and strapped her to a gurney.

"Oh, god. Is she going to be all right?"

"Sir," said a different officer, "What we're going to need you to do is to drive this car back to your house, and explain the situation to their parents as rapidly as possible. That's the best thing you can do right now."

They put Carrie in the front seat of one of the crown victorias, and drove off with her. Newt watched from the driver seat. One of the officers came and knocked on his window as the ambulance drove off. Gawkers started to pile up past the point where Newt could see them in the rear view.

"Please drive safely on the way home, sir," said the officer.

Newt drove the rest of the way to Lindsay's house. It was the fastest telephone he could get to, because they had taken both Carrie's purse, and Lindsay's backpack.