An Affair to Forget

It was a rainy night.  I was talking to my wife before heading out the door for work.  I told her that a co-worker of mine had mentioned someone she might know, some guy named Greg Roland who delivered food to some restaurant that she used to work at.  She said that she didn't know the guy, but I could see that she had gotten this wistful, dreamy smile on her face when I had mentioned his name.  I knew she was lying.  I pressed her on it, but she kept denying it.

I had to get to work.  I was running late, so I figured that we'd pick up the conversation later.  But just as I was about to head out the door, my brother popped up out of nowhere.  He asked if anything was wrong.  I told him that there wasn't, but he insisted that he knew better.  "What, were you listening at the door?", I asked him.  He confessed that he had been, so I broke down and explained the situation to him.  We went to one of the back rooms of the house, where for some reason I had an old copy of this Greg's journal packed away.  We flipped through it, looking for some kind of evidence.  I found an entry from a few years back.  He spoke of a woman; he used a different name, but somehow I knew that he was talking about my wife.

I took the journal to show it to my wife.  I found her in the living room, talking on the phone.  I asked her who she was talking to, and she said, "That was Greg!  He's coming over to pick me up."  And before I even had a chance to ask any questions, she ran out of the house and into the rain.  I stood on the porch and watched her go.  The rain dripped from the gutters.  It was the worst night of my life.

I don't know if I called him or he called me, but somehow I ended up on the phone with this Greg.  At first I tried to be calm and reasonable about the whole thing.  I told him that I understood that my wife was free to make her own choices, and if this was what she thought would make her happy...  Then he cut me off and said, "I guess it's nice to have religion, dude." in the most cocky, patronizing, smart-ass voice that you could ever imagine.  From there it was just one button pushed after another.  I ended up telling him that if I ever got a hold of him I was going to reach up his asshole and tear his throat out.  I was screaming at the top of my lungs at that point, and all red in the face.  I'm pretty sure he hung up after that, leaving me holding the phone.  What was I going to do now?

The Bowling Alley

My Wife and daughter and I went down to the local bowling alley one night.  It was an absolute madhouse, very crowded.  At one point we left our lane for a minute to get something to eat, and we came back to find that someone else has taken our place while we were gone.  We had to move to another lane.  The only one available was the very last one down at the end along the wall which was painted with a black & white silhouette of a guy bowling against a background of light blue stripes.

There was a group of rowdy kids bowling on the next lane over.  They were a little too close for comfort.  They were horsing around, constantly crossing the line and getting in our way.  They were throwing the bowling balls so wildly and carelessly that I was afraid one of them was going to get loose and knock someone upside the head.  When it was my turn to bowl, a couple of them came over to me.  They wanted me to use their bowling ball.  It was a skull suspended in a transparent crystal that was cut into a rough cube shape.  I told them that a ball that shape wouldn't roll down the lane, but they insisted that it just had to be broken in.  The more it got used, the corners and flat edges would eventually get rounded into a nice smooth sphere.

I wasn't buying it.  I decided to go look for my own ball.  This search somehow led me out to the parking-lot.  It seemed that one of the bowling alley's regulars had died, and he had left his truck parked out in the lot with everything he owned in it.  His bowling buddies were picking through the stuff and dividing it up amongst themselves.  As I walked up, I noticed a bowling ball half-buried beneath some clothes in a cardboard box.  I asked if I could have it, and no one seemed to have any objections.  I pulled it out to have a look at it.  It was cream colored and decorated with the characters from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.  Hobbes was on one side; Calvin was on the other with his hand held out, perfectly matching the finger holes on the ball.  It looked pretty awesome.

So I headed back to our lane against the wall, but I when I got there my wife was all worked up.  She said that we had to leave right that minute.  I turned back and looked at the lane as she grabbed my arm and started pulling me to the door.  The boards were all broken up, and down at the end by the pins there was nothing but a pile of brick and dust.  I kept trying to ask my wife what happened, but she was in too big a hurry.  Once we were out into the parking-lot she relaxed and started laughing about what had happened, but she still wouldn't stop to explain and she still insisted that we needed to get out of there.

So she pulled me along by one hand as we hunted for our car, and I clutched my new bowling ball in the other hand.  I was trying to show it to her, but she wouldn't slow down to look at it.  She just kept laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along...and then I woke up, and I swear as sure as I live and breathe, that I was holding onto the top of my head with my thumb and my two forefingers.  Yeah, it took me a minute to figure it out too.  

By the Dashlight

Took a road trip with my father.  He was doing all of the driving; I was in the passenger seat.  We rode with the windows down.  The sky was an inky blue as we turned onto the interstate ramp, the very last remains of the day.  My father flipped on the headlights and lit a cigarette without needing to say a word.  I was busy flipping through the dial on the radio, looking for the country station that he liked.  I had absolutely no idea where we were headed; I was just glad to see him again. 

The Dossier

The woman drove me out to a secluded shack in the woods.  I had been involved with this group for a while now, a little over a year probably.  It had started out as simple casual friendships, playing cards in the kitchen or sitting around watching TV with dopey boredom waiting for someone to show up and drive somebody somewhere.  In other words, it all seemed perfectly normal and innocent enough.  But gradually it became clear after a while that there were ideas and perhaps even beliefs that bonded these people together, something a little off the beaten path.  They were a "Group" with a capital "G."  Sideways glances and conspiratorial whispers in back bedrooms hinted at these things.  Finally it became clear that I was picking up on these secrets, and a decision was made to initiate me to the next level.  That's when this woman with the dark hair took me for a ride out to the woods.

The shack was made up like a roadside motel room.  There was a queen-sized bed in the main room when you came in the door.  There was a little kitchenette in the back with a louvered window that looked out onto the woods.  The dark-haired woman pulled a large white envelope from her coat and tossed it down on the bed.  "These are the pictures of the people who run our group.", she said.  "We only show this to people when we're completely sure they're ready to see it."  She paused, perhaps wondering if she really was sure.  "The last pictures are of our leader, an extraordinary man.  He has lived for 60,000 years and he has a hard time maintaining human form, so I have to warn you that you may be disturbed and confused by what you see.  But we have decided that you're ready."

She directed me to the kitchenette in the back, because she said that I had to view the photographs privately.  She went back to the front room and left me there as I sat down and undid the clasp on the envelope.  It contained a stack of large glossy photographs.  The first couple looked normal enough, like smiling photos from a senior yearbook.  Then I came to the end.  These were smaller, loose pictures, taken with a common home camera.  They were pictures of a small baby who showed clear signs of some kind of congenital birth defects.  I'm not sure exactly how I could tell that.  There was something wrong with the eyes, something wrong with the face, something dull and slack and wandering that suggested brain damage.  I stared in horror at the pictures, not because of their subject, but because of what they told me about these people.  I had to get out of there immediately.    

Portable Radio

I woke up thirsty from my nap, so I went downstairs to get something to drink.  As I stood there with the refrigerator door open, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something seemed wrong about the light coming up from the basement.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  I couldn't tell if the light was flickering or whether that was just a manifestation of my rattled nerves.  I tried to go back upstairs to sleep, but I never got farther than the first step.  I kept going back to the kitchen to stare at the ambient, flickering, light coming up from the basement stairs.  I couldn't shake the feeling.

Finally, I realized that I was hearing very faint music coming from the basement.  The flickering was keeping beat with the music, and then I realized that the light wasn't actually flickering at all.  It was just an auditory suggestion caused by the fact that I wasn't aware that I was hearing the music.  I went down to check it out.  There was a little portable radio sitting on the top of a cabinet.  It was one of those cheap old radios with a handle on the top and a single speaker and an analog dial which spanned the length of it, the kind of radio someone would bring to a work site.  It was playing a harmless, familiar, song, but yet it made me feel uneasy all the same.  I knew that someone had left this radio on, and I knew that if I didn't change the station, they would be lured back here by the music.  And I knew that was bad.

So I started to tune the dial, but instead of it changing the radio station, it changed everything else.  I found myself in the backyard of one of my childhood neighbors.  My wife and my daughter were there too, sleeping on the patchy grass, still wrapped up in their blankets.  They stirred, wondering how we had gotten outside.  My memory was a little foggy, and just as things were starting to come back to me, the screen door at the back of the house came banging open and my bearded old neighbor came rushing out yelling something in a toothless, drunken garble.  Yeah, this wasn't good.  My wife and daughter gathered up their blankets and we started away, waving my neighbor off with our hands and assuring him that we were leaving.

As we were crossing the road, I noticed that I still had the radio.  I tuned the dial again.  Now we found ourselves in a long, narrow upstairs room in a strange house somewhere.  The room seemed to be an antechamber of some sort that opened onto other rooms on either side.  It spanned the width of the house with high, ornate, windows at either end.  In the evening the sunlight would fall through the window at the west end, and at night the streetlight outside would follow suit.  But the morning light would come through the window at the east end of the room, and everything would look different then.  I was anxious to see it.  I was comfortable here.  We stretched the blankets out on the floor below the west window.  Then I clicked off the radio and went back to sleep.