The table they were situated at was
stained with the residue of earlier experience, and served to reaffirm their
current state of mind—by all means a recognizable and normative state given the
company, and the place, date, and time of present setting. What remained, at
the culmination of an evening of sin and consumption, were the production line
bottles, most nearly empty, the embedded ashen lineage of the leaves of the
Nicotania, and the corpse-like figures of four friends, presumably in their
prime.
Pulling
out the money owed, to the leisurely pot built in good faith and in part
represented by the plastic poker chips neatly stacked in front of each player,
he was seemingly struck by a chord of remembrance, propagated by something
found inside of his overly stuffed wallet; he hesitated before handing over the
cash, holding for a moment longer than was typically usual in his hand, a
folded up piece of paper.
“Ehhh,
like pay up or something.” The combination of downers and psychotropic drugs,
that would for any normal person act to subdue those impatient moments akin to
race, as the potency of such an indelible elixir could never come into question
by those having partaken, and in choosing to partake had felt for themselves
the reverberations entwined with consumption, had somehow done little to ease
his friend’s general state, and this could be noted in the tone by which
his friend chose to respond to so seemingly an inconsequential delay, even at
so fine an hour, even after the innumerable hours of exploitation and abuse
were in the rear view and the sobering up process had begun to take form.
“I
had meant to say something earlier,” he said. “But it seems so now, that it
should very well work out to my advantage, me having forgotten and you as my
audience. I have something wild to share—a little terrifying, but more wild and
bizarre and eerie than scary for sure.”
“Ehhh,
like shutup or something.”
“Seriously,
what does it all mean? If I dare to ask, please elaborate on what it is you’re
saying—I’m somewhat intrigued.”
Clutching
the paper still folded in hand, he continued. “I found this in the library the
other day. From what I can make out, it seems as if it’s from some person’s
daily journal log. The writing is in script and very faint so it took some
inferring and considerable review on my part, but I was at the time doing all I
could do to avoid doing what it was I should have been doing, and so this
person’s journal served to fill my immediate need and then take me away from my
schoolwork, for better or worse.”
“Seriously,
shut up already. The way you talk makes my brain hurt.”
“Hahaha,
dammit Gerard, let him speak. C’mon man, as you were.”
Unfolding,
rearranging and scraping off some of the table’s grime, he de-creased, ironed with
diligent hands, and laid the sheet of paper out off to the side, in front of one
of his friends, barely long enough for this friend to take note of the writer’s
penmanship, though this friend would not begin to mentally map the uncanny
significance of the cursive word till much later.
He
pulled the sheet back and continued. “The paper was like so, unfolded at the time
and to the left of my work station. Note the thick, professional looking paper.
It’s different. It’s what initially caught my attention. I picked it up and
examined it. I aimed to decode what had earlier been written by someone either
dreadfully weak or without sustainable ink.”
“Any
luck?”
“Yea.
As it turns out most of the words were legible, and those that were not, I was
able to infer their meaning as a result of good sentence structure on the part
of our ghost writer.”
“This
sucks. I feel like I’m in grammar class or something. Please shut up. Let’s
play video games or put on a movie. Something, anything but this.”
“DAMMIT
GERARD!!!”
“Yea
seriously, shut up already dumb. Anyways, I typed up the letter so that I could
at some point read it to you and see what you all were to make of it.”
“Dammit,
okay. Let’s get this over with already. Can we at least speed things up?”
“I
dig, giddy up man. Read away.”
He
slowly and methodically folded the original, much to the dismay of his one
impatient friend, eventually reinserting into wallet before reaching into back
jean pocket to pull out the printed version. He then read aloud, uninterrupted,
that which he had before typed.
Oh my, what a lovely day today had indeed proven itself
to be! I awoke to the light and the sun was so bright and the sky so very blue
coming through my bedroom window I couldn’t wait to get outside! I thought
about what my friends would tell me whenever we’d go to the movies or when, on
the rare occasion, we’d venture into the city to take in a show, they’d say: Grannies
didn’t have to brush their teeth or wash their face! At least that is what
their response would be whenever I’d question one of their appearances or make
a face at one of their scents. They’d tell me to blow off and that no one
bothered to look at or care about them so why should I? Maybe they had a point.
Today I gave it a go, as not a moment’s time was to be wasted. Not on such a
beautiful morning!
I rolled out of bed and set out to walk around the
community. Oh, but how wonderful I had felt, and how wonderful I still do feel!
Adventure and uncertainty were in the air today! I went for a spin, not
bothering to tell the children I had gone out.
I parked at a dead end I had many moons ago frequented
daily on my walks to and from school. Oh the familiar sights and smells! The
dead end opened into a field now a state park and the creek; oh the creek! It
was the same cutesy little creek babbling just as I had remembered it had. They
had put a fence up to serve as a divide between creek and path. There was some
garbage in the brush in and around the water: beer and soda bottles mostly. Maybe
the kids were hanging out. Maybe they were trying to clean up the place. Oh,
but it was still my creek!
Oh, to walk along the same path with such vigor as I had
some sixty some odd years before! To know that not so much had changed, that I
hadn’t so much changed, that walking in this same place as I had, way back when,
still offered to me nearly identical surroundings, and thus gave me comparable
joy to that which I so vividly remember feeling long ago. My word, what a
deliciously uncanny feeling!
Oh, and there was Robert! Sweet, handsome Robert. To see
him riding his bike without a care, wearing his debonair grey flannel suit and
looking as young and as handsome as ever. Oh, what a marvelous sight to behold!
To cross eyes as we passed one another, again—he looking so innocent, me
feeling anew—so very alive and reborn. Oh, what a feeling!
Why he had chosen not to speak to me on this day, though
I do recall him giving me a look of distinct recognition, neither mattered to
nor concerned me. Just to have the opportunity to live out again the little
joys of my yesterday, those taken for granted, experiences never fully realized
until years afterward—oh what a treat!
Had Robert ever really been one to act shyly though? He
was never one to not say hello. He loved me from the moment he set those big
beautiful blue eyes of his on me, and had said on several occasions to me that
he would sell his soul to the devil, but if for only to have a word or two with
me.
But of course! Robert couldn’t have been the boy I saw
today down by the creek. He had been dead now for ten years.
“That’s
it?”
“Ehhh,
what?”
“I
know. I thought the same thing.”
“Oh
yea, so like, what’s the same thing?”
“Why
does the journal suddenly stop?”
“Oh
yea, right.”
“I
couldn’t figure it out either. I’ve reread this thing a hundred times. Why end
a journal entry one could already dub as beyond peculiar, in such an abrupt,
unusual manner?”
“We
are certain this is from some old woman’s personal journal right? That it’s not
some form of abstract fiction?”
“Professor?”
“Perish
Gerard. Let’s put it this way—if it is some new form of modernist fiction, I’m
neither hip nor privy to the types of literary devices our ghost writer is
using.”
“Like,
what is a ghostwriter anyway? I thought it was someone who took someone else’s
ideas and worded them well and got paid for it or something.”
“Dammit
Gerard! He means ghost writer—two words. He means he has no idea who wrote this
thing, and neither do I for that matter. I also haven’t a clue as to why he or
she chose to end his or her journal this way, and I have no idea what to make
of all the other whacked out shit going on. Feeling young? Seeing kids on bikes
in vintage suits? I mean seriously, what the fuck!?”
I
had managed to go unnoticed for some time, my silence unquestioned by friends,
which was good for me, as I was incapacitated, the mind soaked in booze, my
speech bound to sound drawl. I must say though, the journal did captivate me,
was to me uncanny, and did lead me to places here on earth and to those
imaginative parts of the brain I had prior to this night regarded as long since
deactivated. I felt the handwriting of the original journal entry come back
into focus, however my wet brain, unable to mentally zoom in on the date before
noticed at the upper right hand corner of the original’s body, instead searched
for and strung together words in the phrase of a question.
“May
I see the original?”
My
friend went into his pocket, pulling out the document and forking it over, it now
becoming my job to unfold and decode the nature and message of our mystery
ghost writer.
“I
know this handwriting. I can feel it in my blood, this knowing. It’s dated
Thursday, March 8, 2012. You were at the library yesterday?”
“Yep.”
“So
the journal was presumably written on the same day you were there, which was in
fact the same day you found this sheet of paper—yesterday, correct?”
“Yep.”
The
words that came to mind thereafter were to the brain shuffled and presented in
question form, and yet, upon the mouth choosing to open for communicative
purpose, the quivering vocal chords, much to my bewilderment, now presented
those very same words as an undeniable statement of truth.
“My
grandma wrote this journal.”—brows furrowing, expressions of the room changing,
as I continued. “We recently discovered
she kept one for the better part of her life, all the while without us knowing
it. She passed away last Friday and was laid down to rest on Monday, god rest
her beautiful soul. You were all at the wake last Saturday, remember?”
“Ohhhh
yea.”
“But
if she had already passed prior to the letter having been written…”
“I
know.”
“And
the library—who brought the letter over to the library?”
“No
one, I mean well, she—my grandma did. She was writing it there. She always went
to the library—we thought, to read—but clearly it was also a place that she
went to do her daily journal writing.”
“No
one was in the room with me when I was there.”
“Okay,
assuming all of this were possible—your sweet, little Grandma having written a
journal postmortem—what about the ending? Why does it suddenly end like that?”
“Ehhh, well maybe she didn’t know she was dead
yet.”
My
brain to this day still has trouble with the full scope of implication
necessitating from Gerard’s statement of profundity.
If
the story here ends once the author knows she is no longer living, once she
understands she can no longer be, here—I’m left to consider the ones like
Robert, those that never got it—and wonder, will they ever?
As
I reflect, I choose now to think of my grandma in this way, as young and
innocent and happy and free from all the pains and loneliness that come with
old age; in a world not found here on earth, in a place that offers to her the
familiarity and joys of her youth, in a sphere that soothes the soul, in a land
where the uncanny are wholly pleasant.
