HOW TO TELL IF YOU'RE GETTING CLOSE        


          Did I really once own a ’55 Pontiac? I’m not sure. I kind of doubt it now, but then again, the memories of it are so vivid – that car was a gem, saved my ass several times! It’s as if the dream about the Pontiac I had last night has turned my memories to mush and I can’t distinguish events that really happened from events I’ve dreamt or imagined. But one thing’s for sure: I loved owning that Pontiac.

          Any memory, whatever its source – real or dreamt – must be important to me somehow, otherwise I would have forgotten it, along with almost everything that’s ever happened in my life. But why would I remember dreamt events: if my memory is filled with imagined episodes along with events that actually happened, how am I to know if a particular event really happened or not? Am I supposed to believe my mind just because it’s convinced that something remembered is real or not real? My mind must be using some kind of criteria to decide whether certain memories really happened, but who’s to say those criteria are really valid?

          Well, if I can’t be certain what has or hasn’t happened, then I guess I simply can’t be certain. I mean, if I have a memory of something, then that’s what I remember; it must have happened in some way or there wouldn’t be anything to remember in the first place.

          What’s frightening about all this is that my memories are the fundamental basis for knowing who I am and understanding the world. Maybe, if I looked at my memories differently, and gave equal weight to the supposedly imagined events, I’d gain new insights into who I really am. Maybe I should review my life based on those memories, “real” or not, that are most poignant. What does “real” even mean, anyway? Whether or not I’m dealing with a supposedly actual event or an event that was dreamt or imagined, the event itself is long gone, and whatever that event was really like, I have no access to it now, all I have is a memory, and memories are pretty sketchy.

          Anyway, the whole car thing got pretty complex. When I was in college – I don’t know which time, for years I kept dropping out and then going back – I had all these cars, or thought I did, and I couldn’t keep track of them, you know, like how many cars was I responsible for? And which of those were actually mine? And did I still own them, and if so, where were they? It got so bad, when I was in my late thirties, my professor loaned me her car so I could get to class. But I stopped going anyway. I don’t know why. It was a great course, the last one I needed to earn my degree. She really liked me, too, had high hopes for me as a writer.

          It's terrible because I don't think I ever returned her car: at first, I felt too embarrassed, having dropped out of her course. Every few days I’d start gasping for air because I’d remember I still needed to get the car back to her. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer, I was in an absolute agony of guilt, the way I was abusing the generosity of this good-hearted woman who had tried to support me in my precious ambition to be a writer. I simply had to return her car, there was no other choice, embarrassing or not. I grabbed the keys from the kitchen counter and headed out, but when I reached the street, I realized I didn’t know where her car was parked. There were a few cars along the sides of the road, and as I looked for hers, I realized that I couldn’t even remember what her car looked like. Had I ever driven it? I examined the keys in my hand; one had a symbol that looked somewhat familiar: American Motors? If only I wasn’t already late for work, I’d have taken the time right then and there to conduct a thorough search.

          And it got worse because, not too long after, my next-oldest brother Liam called and asked for our grandmother’s Ford back and I got scared because I hadn’t seen that car in years and why did my brother think I had it? I might have driven that car once or twice, but it was never mine. Why was I always the one responsible for these cars?

          But at least I had a clear memory of my grandmother’s car – it was forest green with white vinyl interior, though I wasn’t even sure of that because there was another car I remember that had white interior, not the Volkswagens, another car, maybe a Toyota. Then the Volkswagens.

          All those cars. I mean, it’s really weird, right, why would I have had a bunch of cars? I don’t even like cars. Could it have had something to do with all those plastic cars I played with as a kid? I used to lie on the living room rug, lining the cars up for a race, ten rows deep at the starting line. There were fifty of them: Studebakers, Chryslers, Buicks, Fords, Pontiacs, Lincolns, Mercurys, Dodges, Chevys, and god knows what else. Fiats, I think, and VWs. Pickup trucks too. Yeah, I’d push them around the perimeter of the rug, some cars flipping over, others veering off the track, each car taking greater and greater risks as we neared the finish line. Appropriately, the Corvette was the fastest car, which of course meant that when I pushed, it travelled the farthest. But it also flipped over easily, so it didn’t really win any more often than the other cars.

          I also made up a game where I took a car in each hand and pushed them toward each other, releasing them at the last moment for a head-on collision. The car that stayed upright was the winner and qualified for the next round, until only one car remained, the Smash Champion.

          I’d play on the floor for hours, while cold drafts from the back yard, the basement and the hallway snuck under the various doors like oblivion seeking a foothold. At some point, I’d look up and realize I was alone, only my mother in the room, head tilted back in her armchair, mouth open, snoring. That was when I felt most vulnerable, realizing that I really wasn’t alone, there were spirits milling about and I might be in real danger. So I’d scoop up the cars into their cellophane bag and rush upstairs to join my siblings. But eventually my brother and sister would retire to their beds, leaving me, the youngest, alone at the top of the stairs. And I would slowly edge one car at a time between the bannisters until they fell, disappearing into the darkness and landing with a clack on the hallway floor below, a sound that reassured me there was still something between me and the void. I imagined our house floating in the air. I thought of our planet, also floating, disconnected from everything as we clung to the surface, trying not to fall off. My bed was down on the first floor, but there was no way I was going to brave that journey – what if the floor gave way? Eventually I’d fall asleep in the upstairs hallway, warmed by the hot air rising from below, glad for the hall light that kept the shadows at bay.

*****

          I sit at a desk amid rows of desks, desks like coffins to hold the corpses of pressed soldiers who had no way of avoiding their fate. Thirty desks in a space that occupies one tiny section of an enormous 60-acre building, where 15,000 souls come to die each day. Overhead fluorescent fixtures bathe the expanse in bright light. Somewhere an enormous boiler runs, pumping hot air through pipes, warming the long row of radiators below the windows that stretch the entire length of the room. State of the art 1940’s.

          I peer at the computer screen, my attention fixed on the words and numbers before me, my mind consumed by my task. Across the hall is my boss’s office, one in a series of offices at the end of which is the Director’s larger office, a district of financial and social power. While I study the screen, managers have gathered in a conference room to discuss issues and priorities and expenditures. Decisions of enormous impact are being made.

          There is a sudden eruption of movement as the meeting disbands, managers flowing in various directions to their offices, or out to the manufacturing floor. One manager hangs behind, has a private discussion with the Director. This is the pivotal moment – yes, the moment! – same as all the others, this everlasting, ongoing, time-defying moment.

          And here I am, wasting my moment at this god-forsaken job, analyzing numbers, staring at a screen all day, workin’ for the man, the great corporation, kingpin of shareholder greed. Praise the Lord that it’s Friday afternoon. How did I get myself stuck in this tarpit, supporting a lifestyle I don’t even want anymore? That I never wanted. Day after day, decade after decade. It’s got to stop! I want out! This is not the life I set out to live, and meanwhile the years just flow past, and soon my life will be beyond redemption.

          But I can’t just quit. What about my family? Their lives are just as important as mine. At least the kids are on their own now. God, I’ve thought this through a million times, and nothing ever changes except that the window to salvage my life keeps closing. I don’t even know what I want anymore; I just want to be able to pursue my own interests, rather than stuffing them because of all my obligations.

          As much as I want to just stand up and walk out, I shove these thoughts to the side one more time and lean forward, studying my spreadsheet. But I can’t concentrate on it because my mind goes back to yesterday’s dream and the memories it stirred up. What I can’t understand is why my brother had asked for my grandmother’s car back. That would have been fifteen or twenty years ago he’d asked me for it, so it shouldn’t bother me now. But what puzzles me more and more is why he would have asked me to return a car neither of us had seen in twenty years. Why would he even have thought that car still existed? I just don’t get it. Liam’s request was so irrational, it leaves me with an eerie feeling, and I’m seized by the sudden belief that there is some fundamental aspect about existence that I don’t understand, something I’ve been missing that others know about, that’s right there for the viewing if I can just clear this damn fog that’s obstructing my sight.

          I’m gasping as if I’m suffocating; I feel like my head is stuck inside this plastic bag of awareness and I’ve used up all the oxygen and I desperately need to claw my way out. My body has begun fidgeting uncontrollably: I look around at all the desks and the people moving about, and the work in piles before me and it all seems to exist in some other dimension, and I’m hardly able to turn off my computer, grab my bag and flee.

          I tell myself as I get in my car that it was almost quitting time anyway. I vow, on the drive home, to go to my grandmother’s first thing tomorrow morning. It may be more than thirty years, but I’m going to find that car.

*****

          It was really weird, though, walking around the old place where we used to live. Everything was overgrown, yet the red and salmon azaleas, and the tall yellow irises, were still blooming by the pond my grandfather had dug decades earlier. I was beginning to appreciate why my brother had called asking me to return the car: my grandparents’ estate had been a fairytale world for us, with a small arching bridge that led to an island in the middle of the pond with a now enormous and nearly decrepit weeping willow. I used to catch frogs and pollywogs; I’d watch the muskrat and keep an eye out for the water snake. And now this area by the pond, neglected and becoming overgrown, was nearly feral, making it more make-believe than ever.

          Up by the barn was a row of bushes with little white flowers that fell off like summer snow. We used to hide under its long, draping branches. I remembered that time I shook the branches above us, the petals falling on Carey’s blonde hair like white freckles. She’d protested, of course, but she loved it, laughing and pushing me and shaking the branches above me in turn. Teenagers.

          Then I started to notice all the birds: the grackles on the lawn and the strange crease of the red-winged blackbird’s song coming from the reeds. Robins and flickers and blue jays. I recognized their calls, which were starting to remind me of something and I was thinking, what IS that? If only I can identify what that feeling is, I’ll remember all kinds of important stuff, not only about the birds, but about the cars as well, and the gardens and everything.

          I walked around for a long time, trying to figure it out, up and down the old driveway. I ventured across the lawns to where the marigolds used to be, and the trellis of roses, smelling the flowers that were there once, and the stale moisture that still clung to the ground after all these years. I found where the rainwater used to gush from the gutter downspout and stream down the incline behind my house, leaving a gulley where I played marbles, remembering the time a milk snake slithered past me there and disappeared under the wisteria bush where I’d once seen a dozen or more baby praying mantises. When I was about five, I’d found a fallen log in the woods, just over the stone wall. I would sit on the log as if it was a horse; the bark had fallen off and the weathered red wood was like a leather saddle – it even had a knob for a saddle horn. And there it was that I first confronted sow bugs, living their peculiar lives in the half-rotted tree trunk. This strange world that existed right outside my back door, with these weird creatures, so different from human beings.

          Remembering these particulars from childhood gave me that queasy feeling again, the one where it felt like I was on the brink of some kind of profound discovery. I realized that for me as a child, the world contained layer upon layer of mysteries and wonder. As young as I was back then, I saw things I’ve never seen since; I was more keenly aware, immersed in an extraordinary assortment of sensory stimuli.

          Now I sat down on the soft ground and took off my shoes and socks. Air flowed between my toes. The green grass before me grew in cool clumps, rising up from the dark brown floor of dirt – it all seemed so detailed and lush. There were cairns of balled-up soil left by earthworms. Then I noticed that there was a layer of yellow straw at the base of each grass-clump. I’d been studying the grass for several minutes and somehow had failed to notice these dead strands even though they were right in front of my eyes. It made me realize that I hadn’t really been present to this world of grass and soil in years. I was walking through my life thinking I saw the world, when actually I was seeing very little of it. I didn’t even notice what was right in front of my eyes. What else was I missing? Surely, a lot.

          I got up and continued to wander about the property in my bare feet, shoes in hand, eyes halfway closed, trying to reimagine my childhood, to open up whatever this breathtaking and vague feeling was, trying to break through to… something, I had no idea what. I kept going deeper and deeper inside myself, following some kind of instinct. Being here, in this place, it seemed like my past was emerging, something was about to be revealed. I was getting close too, I could sense it – a whole new dimension or something was about to open up when the new owner suddenly confronted me, telling me to leave because I had unwittingly wandered into what had once been my grandmother’s dining room.

          I related all this to Lyra afterwards, how I had even caught a glimpse of my brother’s Pontiac, hazy and dim but there it was, right where it used to be on the lawn, turquoise and white, sun reflecting off the chrome. I wanted to go back and talk to the woman, tell her how I needed to keep wandering around the property, keep exploring until I could work all this out. I mean I could understand why she was upset, a complete stranger just strolling into her house and poking around. I should’ve asked for permission first, but half my senses were already over on the other side. I would explain everything to her, about the lost cars and the stuff from my childhood – my old dog, the junipers on the ledge, the black baseball glove – everything, so she could understand how it all fit together, how close I was getting. And I’d tell her about the feelings, how I could line them up so they’d form a tunnel and I could start to see everything that’s happened. Because it’s the feelings that are most important. That’s how you can tell if you’re getting close.

___

Charlie Chase has written poetry and prose poetry for fifty years, but has recently turned to fiction because it offers greater opportunity to pursue multiple themes concurrently. Chase earned a BS in English Literature from the University of Connecticut, and has studied Creative Writing at the New School and in the Wesleyan University Graduate Liberal Studies Program. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, won prizes, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Four self-published volumes of his poetry, each with the title Runway Lights, are available on Amazon.