A Strange Reality (Chapter Two)

Chapter 2: Jill


He had introduced himself to me one morning while I was sitting by myself in a café. I’d been up all night and was in no mood for company but too strung out and mumble fucked to object as he sat down at my table. He pulled a pack of cloves from the breast pocket of his black collard T-shirt. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked with a cheerfulness that made me feel sick.

I absently waved my hand at him in a bitchy gesture that said, do whatever the hell you want, and then tried my hardest to discourage him by refusing to make eye contact. I was doing such a good job of it that I actually felt bad for him and wondered how long he’d continue sitting there before getting the point. I pulled up my black cotton hood and sank into the reclusive privacy of its shadow.

A few minutes passed and neither of us spoke a word. The air was thick with the bitter smell of nostalgia and I soon found it difficult to breath. I had just worked up the nerve to get up and leave when for the first time I turned to look him in the face and found that his eyes were fixed on me. Those deep rusty dark eyes. Fixed on me with a solid penetrating gaze that dared me to panic and shy away. But I didn’t. I just stared right back in defiance, testing my own nerve and feeling a rising excitement in the fluttering pitter patter of my heart. The left side of his mouth curved into the sliced picture of a knowing handsome smile, as if he were reading my emotions spread out before me like spilt words. And I asked him, “why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’ve seen you before,” he stated.

I immediately responded with a lie that barely made it past a whisper, “I get that a lot.”

He took a drag of his clove and blew smoke out at the sun without ever breaking eye contact. “I saw you last night.”

I tried to smile. Tried to act normal. My face felt like a mask that was three sizes too small. I think I was still feeling the thick mind numbing after affects of LSD, my brain tripping over itself through the sticky substance of exhausted thoughts, but I couldn’t be sure. I had been going on well over 48 hours without sleep and I desperately needed to reset my mind. I played stupid. “Saw me where?”

“I saw you dancing in circles on the grass next to the golden Buddha.” He gave me a teasing smile. “You looked like you were in a trance.”

I was in a trance, lost in the folds of space and time. It was the summer beat festival and I remembered spinning around in circles with my arms stretched out to the sky, possessed by the influence of a spinning vinyl record. After so long I had gotten sickeningly dizzy and ended up lying on my back, watching with amazement as my fingers sent ripples through the thick clusters of stars that peppered the night. I still felt the base pounding in my chest as I sat there, hours later in the café, trying to ignore the whispering beats that compelled me to keep on moving to the music that wasn’t there. I was a little embarrassed and could feel my cheeks getting warm with blush. “Ah. So you really did see me.” I was trying to sound friendlier then I felt.

“I couldn’t help but stare. I think you hypnotized me,” he said with another teasing but warm smile, pushing his curly brown hair from his eyes with the flat of his hand.

And just like that, as if some invisible barrier had cracked open, I’d suddenly felt a strange attraction toward him. I still don’t understand why. I’m not the type of person that would be drawn to strangers. But he had such an appealing charm to him. Something that projected itself into the atmosphere like the sound of music. I told him my name was Jill.

Last October we’d found an abandoned house that had been boarded up with no trespassing signs and without any apparent reason we silently scurried into the house like mice. But something felt wrong to me. As soon as we stepped onto the property it felt like someone, or something was watching us. It followed in perfect silence like a secret shadow, melting into the dark edges of my peripheral vision. My imagination screamed with flashing images and terrifying thoughts. Pale, lifeless faces with black lips and empty eye sockets. Grotesquely thin bodies, dimly glowing with stark white silhouettes, glistening and bending and stretching out in agony. All fueled with the intensity of a mind under influence. Jack lead the way, moving swiftly and fluently, leaving me in a desperate race to keep up and allowing no time for second guesses.

We ran around to the back of the house and found a large crack in the wall big enough for us to slip into, and as I stepped inside there was such an overwhelming sensation of physical coldness that I immediately started to shiver. “I don’t think we should be here,” I said, pulling up my hood and hugging my sweatshirt tight around my chest.

Maybe he didn’t hear me. Maybe he didn’t care. Either way he ignored my comment. “Come on. Let’s go check out the attic.”

We made our way carefully through the rubble that was littered about the floor like stacks of split and splintered belongings; as if the ones who had lived there last had decided to destroy the remains of anything left behind. The air inside was thick with an extremely potent odor, but it wasn’t a bad odor. It smelled a little bit like vanilla with a sweet sting, as if I were inhaling particles of mint. I paused and looked back at the crack in the wall, half expecting to see the eyes of an angry ghoul. But beyond the sharp pale moonlight slicing its beam into the crack, there was nothing.

The attic felt safe. Whatever it was I’d felt before remained obscure for the time being. Jack pointed at something in the center of the room. “Look. There’s a candle.” He pulled a zippo out the inside pocket of his blue corduroy jacket and kneeled down to light it. “This place is pretty spooky, eh?”

“Ya, it is. Remind me again why we’re here in the first place?”

“Hey, it was your idea. Not mine.” I didn’t remember ever voicing it out loud but I guess he was right. “Well, whatever. Lets just get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

“What’s the rush?” he said, pulling out a folded piece of tinfoil with a large chunk of something black inside it. “Let’s smoke this first.”

I have no idea how long we stayed in that attic. I drifted in and out of a thick tar like dream, unaware of whether I was awake or sleeping. My body was a warm sun beam, held together in a womb of interior privacy.

When we climbed back into the safety of my little black Civic the teeming radiants of silence scratched at my brain like a thousand whispering insects. I looked at Jack and realized that he was more than simply high. “Are you rolling?” I asked. The answer was clear and I decided to head for the desert.

A Strange Reality (Chapter One)

There has always been a question in my mind for as long as I can remember. A very specific question. Yet something so illusive that it seemed to twinkle in and out of existence. A question that had a way taking many forms, picking apart my self conscious mobility until I’d become trapped in a state of mundane acceptance. I would wake in the middle of dreams to feel as if I could possibly be on the verge of pronouncing it, only to have it slip beyond the grip of reality. I’ve always assumed that I would one day find the answers; as if age and experience would uncover the mysteries of my youth. But here I am, still asking the same questions. Still dreaming the same dreams.

I fell in love once. Fell so hard that I’d almost forgotten about all the other elements of life. She was an enigma to me. She filled my every existence with a kaleidoscope of desire. I’d found a new optimistic appraisal for a life in which the flowering development of expectations would eventually take control of my entire soul. In the end I was left with a broken heart, and a new found appreciation for subtle, but important details. I was still young, but even then I had felt as if the weight of the world were crushing. My mind had grown old and the sorrow of my emotion seeped from me like a mound of dripping candles, smashed together in an unrecognizable form from the colors of my life.

When I turned seventeen I left home and never returned. My father would say, with no amount of certainty, that It was my own way of shutting out the responsibilities that I should have faced head on. He used to tell me that if I were ever going to escape my problems, I needed to grow up and stop placing the blame on my mother and him. He was right, of course. I blamed them for everything. I wanted to be free and I didn’t even understand what it meant to be free. Hours of my youth were spent floating around in a universe of fantastic proportions. I drank on the beaches of philosophy till the stars swam with possibilities. I danced before the setting moons of the desert, dripping in the rains of LSD, cowering and pleading with what I had believed to be my deliverance. And all the time, the questions were never answered. The meaning of the dreams never revealed.

For years I lived as a unit in a culture of mushrooms, hash, friendships beyond syntax, and deep drum waves of emotion. Living in tents and streets and strange houses. Shifting through the seasons of mental revelations. Terrified and fearless and hopeless and invisible. But I got older. And slowly and without a sudden certainty, things changed. And time seemed to change. And on the eve of one October night the beginnings of a story worth telling unfolded.

I remember the leaves on the trees had become a striking mixture deep reds, smooth browns, and an overall vivid wave of brilliant orange. The sound on the wind seemed mournful to me, and within every gentle breeze there was an exhale of sorrow, casting a quiver of leaves to dance and swim throughout the surface of the streets. Twilight had brought a dark blanket of greyness to loom low over the rooftops of old broken homes, homes that had devolved into black shadows of abandoned memories.

Within one home was a flicker of candle light, casting a warm glow through an attic window. It’s light seemed strange and unnatural, like the illumination of a trapped spirit. I cupped the candle flame in the center of my palms, hypnotized in the thoughts that never seem to materialize. Jill sat further than I’d wanted her to, seated on the floor with her back to the wall and her left arm hanging limply over one raised knee. Her head lay slumped over that arm with a shimmer of sleek black jaw length hair, and in her hand, the last remains of a cigarette, barely hanging within the grasp of her finger tips.

I crawled over to her and reached in to lift her head up, cupping her face in my hands as I had done a hundred times. "Jill! Wake up, Jill!" I slapped her in the jaw and her eyes immediately popped wide open. She looked around the room as if seeing it now for the first time. Her cigarette fell to the floor and I stood up to stomp it out. "You lit that and never even took a drag. Are you ok?," I asked.

"I’m fine," Jill said flatly. A hint of hostility seeping crisply through her tone.

I tried to divide the darkness in order to see the response on her face, but my sight had not yet adjusted. There was only the light of the candle to reflect the calculating sparkle within Jill’s eyes, and the candle was about to die out. Instead I sat down beside her and looked around the room. The flicker of dying flame made the dimensions of the room swim though the swelling darkness. She scooted up close and looked sternly at me through the deep penetrating depths of her watery eyes. I expected that she wanted to say something but she didn’t. She just stared at me, looking wild and psychotic with intent. I reached into the pocket of my blue corduroy coat and pulled out a pack of cloves, lighting one and then offering the pack to her. She ignored the offer with just a slight shake of her head, and I leaned back against the wall, staring up at the dark water stains that blotted the ceiling. I could feel her eyes boring into me like fingernails on the back of my neck. She obviously had something on her mind and after a few more moments of pointed silence I asked, "What are you thinking about?"

"I was thinking about Heather and Tod."

Heather and Tod had died a few months ago in a car accident. It had just started to drizzle and the streets had became slick from the oils when Tod nearly drifted into another car. He over compensated for the turn and they ended up flipping the car three times before landing upside down in a river that ran along the side of the road. They drowned in that river. Either they had been stuck and unable to climb out or they were just too high to realize.

Jill had never talked about it other than the initial acknowledgment of it being a terrible thing to have happened to them. She had grown up with them, gone to the same schools with them, gotten high with them. I remember thinking how unemotional she had seemed about the whole thing. "What about Heather and Tod?" I asked.

She reached over and grabbed the pack of cloves. "I ran into Tod’s mom over at the thrift store the other day." She lit one and took a few long drags. "She recognized me before I new who she was."

"What did she say to you?"

"Well at first she just waved to me. I looked away and pretended not to see because I wasn’t sure, but then on my way out she caught up to me and asked me how I’d been doing. I lied and told her I was finishing up a degree at UCSD."

I laughed at her like an ass, smoke billowing out my nostrils like a cartoon demon. "Why the fuck did you tell her that?"

She looked sad. "I don’t know," she said softly.

I felt bad for laughing at her. "Well, why lie? Who cares what she thinks?"

With a sigh and a small shrug she said, "I don’t know. I just couldn’t think of anything to say to her. And then an instant later I realized who she was and it just came out of my mouth like I had no control."

"So you made it up," I said. "Who cares? What’s the matter with you?"

She took another few drags and then started to get up. "Let’s get the fuck out of here," she said, offering her hand to help me on my feet.

"Where to?" I asked.

"Let’s just drive. We’ll figure it out."

Her little black civic was parked outside on the dead lawn. Daddy had bought it for her a few years back on her 18th birthday. There was sort of an unspoken understanding between us. I introduced her and kept her domesticated within the sub culture of underground communities, and she was more or less my sugar mama, making it possible for me to stay high and keep on partying without ever having to come down and hold a job. Her grandfather had left her a huge fortune when he died. But she couldn’t touch it till she turned twenty five. That gave her two more years but until then daddy gave her a nice little allowance that could support her in a moderately beneficial state of comfort. It also allowed us to maintain a modest circulation of ecstasy with which we reputably sold at parties and clubs. I never did understand these ritzy high society type parents who basically handed everything to there kids on a silver platter of fortune. Were they truly that blind?

Along with the little bit of golden brown we had smoked off foil in the attic, I also took a few hits of ecstasy and as I climbed into the car I could feel it coming on strong. Everything in my vision seemed to be vibrating. My blue corduroy coat started to feel more like a silky pelt of fur on my skin, and a sharp insecureness of panic and anxiety began to overwhelm my senses.

Jill climbed into the driver side and then noticed my half faced grin and high arched eyebrows as I struggled to keep my eyes from closing. "Are you rolling?," she asked.

The only answer I could give was a rub down my legs with the palms of my hands and a slight rock back and forth. She cocked her head to the side and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, then shuffled through her ipod’s music and put on a deep base driven track of club trance. My insecureness instantly vanished and my vibrating vision began to trace patterns in the music. I was thrown back in my seat as Jill pealed out off the drive way and accelerated down the street like a beaming combustion of overactive four wheeled energy. The street lamps flew by in a dreamlike streak of electrons and protons, surging us along through a conductor pure exhilaration.

And again, just as I’ve always done in such conscious states of release, I began to drift into the deep crevice of my thoughts , studying my soul as if I were a stranger, and staring back into the face of a flawed vision.

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The Existance Of Thoughts (An Introduction To A Strange Reality)

I once dug too deeply for the answers to questions that weren’t entirely meant to be answered. The sort of intolerable entity’s in secrets that haunt you regardless of whether you act to have them opened or not. But the real question is simply, to be, or not to be.

Yes, of course, I can guess what your thinking. But having bestowed such thought into this simple and used up cliche, I’ve found that the truth of it is packed securely within my own understanding and ideological insight. To me, this Shakespearian quote has something of a double meaning. Or perhaps even an endless use for explanations too fine printed to seek out an exact definition for all of our shrewd dilemmas that have become too hazed over with personal complications to see the black or the white mantle of persona.

Am I to be, or not to be? Not to be slandered with shallow descriptions of where, what, when and why. Such petty revelations that only accomplish themselves to be tossed about for self tortured aspires of mind plunging determination. Or is it a matter of simply existing without answers. To be swallowed in a maze of fantasizing what-ifs and wishfully born disasters. I certainly don’t wish to enchant myself with meaningless false deliveries. Nor to wave frantically with the whipping snap of the white surrendering banner that gloats before us all as if mocking the arrogant affairs of poor mankind.

My will has taken a vision in form that will last long through the spiraling trails towering high in the roads of a gigantic sky. Here were the clouds reach tantalizingly close to the limitless cosmos. In the poetic soul of every demanding desperation. In the choices of which we all must exist. In a strange reality.