A Roadside Portrait

An old man lived across the road from me.  In the spring he would come out every morning to sit there by the roadside, reading his newspaper and waiting for his grandson to come along and pick him up in a battered orange truck.  From my window I could see a kitchen chair set out there by the mailbox, weathered and worn and weak in one leg, and the old man was there to take his post at six o'clock every weekday morning, regular enough to set a pot of coffee brewing at five till and know that it was done by his arrival.  He was as dependable a part of the landscape as the thicket of trees behind him or the road that ran before him waiting to gather the heat of the day.  He just sat there with his paper, never glancing down the bend to see if the truck was coming or fretting impatiently over his watch.  He was the figure to which all the rest of it was ground.

And so I came out early one morning to set up an easel and canvas.  I had my paints and my brushes, and I started in on the grass and the trees and the morning light creeping into the scene from down the road.  I got most of it done, waiting for the old man to come take his place at the center of the composition.  But six o'clock rolled around and he never showed.  The orange truck never came along.  The crooked kitchen chair sat empty.  I was just one day late.    

Lifetimes Ago

Ever since I'd woken up from that dream, I'd felt like years and years had passed.  I dropped by to see people I knew, and it seemed like they were in completely different places in their lives.  My brother's ex-wife even greeted me warmly at her door, old grudges all forgotten.  She cooked breakfast for a houseful of guests.  They all sat around the kitchen laughing over eggs.  Who were these people?  It was the same with everyone else.  Old friends were all doing new things, working new jobs, telling unfamiliar jokes, stressed over different problems.  I felt adrift, disconnected, alienated from the people around me.  I blinked my sleepy eyes.  All of this overnight?

I chalked it all up to the epic span of the dream itself.  It was that sense that a whole lifetime had passed in my sleep.  I'd only dreamt that years had gone by, and that feeling had resonated upon waking.  I tried to explain all this to my family as they sat around on sunken couches in my grandmother's living room on Christmas afternoon, the garland wound around the bannister, the lights strung along the wood paneling.  My brother sat at a table and nodded over a glass of eggnog, but I could see that none of them really understood what I was saying or how strange it all felt.  It was just a dream.  How could a mere dream throw someone so out of sync?

I figured that if they could see it, maybe they'd understand.  I had sold the movie rights to the dream and I wheeled in the old silver TV with the rabbit ears and everyone gathered around on my grandmother's floor to watch.  The dream had told the story of a dog.  It had been a little puppy when we were all kids crouching there in the grass to pet it.  It was white with patches of black, and it grew as we all grew.  It was a frisky little critter.  There was a scene where it squeezed through a wooden fence and started paddling around in an alligator tank, and we stood outside the fence reaching our hands and yelling out the dog's name and hoping and praying that one of the alligators wouldn't bite it.  On the floor in front of the TV everyone laughed at that part and thought it was cute.  Then the dog got older, even as we all got older and we moved out of the house and went our separate ways, and there it was in the winter twilight all mangy and laying at the end of the driveway in the snow, whining, wondering where we'd all gone.  The credits rolled on this somber note.

After the movie, I went home with my wife.  But things were off there as well.  The place was a cramped basement apartment with high windows.  It wasn't the cozy country house out in Perry that I remembered.  I tried to tell my wife, but she wouldn't listen.  She just dragged me from room to room being playful.  "None of this is right," I told her as she pulled me along by my arm.  There were throw pillows and broken coffee makers and dirty dishes and junk everywhere.  I picked up a discarded towel with my free hand.  "I know that you used to keep the house a lot cleaner than this," I shouted over her laughter, showing her the towel.

She led me into the kitchen, which was just as cluttered as the rest of the place.  The cabinets were all crammed full of open cereal boxes.  The walls were bright yellow and there was an old icebox style refrigerator, the kind with the latch you pop out to open the door.  None of this looked right.  And then I noticed a small room off the kitchen.  "What's this?" I asked my wife.  She shook her head.  She didn't seem to know.  She suddenly grew serious.  I thought I had seen all the other bedrooms and rooms of the apartment on my dizzy guided tour.

I crept into the room.  It was actually more of a hallway, as it led to the laundry room down at the other end.  The light shined down from another basement window high on the wall above and my desk was beneath this window, piled with loose papers and folded laundry, leaving no space to work.  Even the chair was piled with laundry.  But as I got closer, I saw that it wasn't laundry.  There was a bundle of people in the chair, or maybe just their heads.  I brushed back the dark hair from one of the faces and the eyes stared back at me, and then I jumped and jolted and screamed and finally found myself back in my own bed.                       

Our Uncanny Valley

Somewhere in the wilderness out west, my daughter and I found the valley that the creator of the video game The Clones was said to have based the layout of his game on.  The story went that while on vacation, and while ruminating on different project deadlines that he was facing back at work, he had climbed to the peak of one of the mountains surrounding the valley.  When he had reached the summit, he turned back and looked out over the green fields below, and in that whipping wind and the panoramic curve of the Earth, the whole idea for a video game simulating people and life hit him just like that.

Staring out from that same summit, I had a similar inspiration.  I stretched my hand out over the land and explained it all to my daughter.  We would buy up the whole area, and we would create a real world community based on the game.  We'd cut some kind of deal with the company that held the license to the game.  We'd set up the roads just as they were in the neighborhoods of the game, and we'd sell off all the individual parcels of land.  People could come and build any kind of crazy houses they wanted to.  The streets would all be named after references to the game.  There could be shops and thoroughfares where people could buy themed merchandise and furnishings for their homes just like those featured in the game.

I stared out, nodding with satisfaction as if I could already see it all under construction below.  But my daughter was still confused about the whole idea.  She wasn't sure why anyone would go for it, why they would want to come live here.  I just shrugged as we turned to head back down the path that had led us to the summit and I told her, "There comes a point with any simulation, if you take it to one extreme or another, that it eventually coincides with reality." 

The Residents

I was a homicide detective.  Two cops from our precinct had been gunned down while responding to a call to an apartment complex in the city.  My partner and I were trying to track down which apartment complex it was.  We drove out to this one place on the outskirts of town.  The parking-lot was piled with the rusted out shells of abandoned vehicles, as though the place were a junkyard.  The weeds grew tall and wild through the cracks in the pavement.  A four-story brick apartment building looked out over this mournful desolation.  Most of the glass was broken out of the windows and I could see countless corpses piled in the unlit apartments within.  One leg in blood spattered jeans dangled out a window on the top floor; a limp arm in a striped sweater hung from another.  In some spots there were streaks of dried blood running down the side of the building.  My partner and I stood beside our cruiser, looking out over the scene.  "You sure this isn't the place?", I asked.

"Nah, this has been like this for years.  Everybody knows about this," he told me, tossing aside his cigarette and getting back into the car.  As we headed back down the road, the call came in over the radio.  Someone else had found the right apartment complex.  My partner called back in to confirm it.  We got the address of the place, and my partner lit up our flashers and cut right through the traffic.  He knocked back the last cold dregs of his coffee and tossed the styrofoam cup out the window.

It seems everyone was looking to get in on the revenge for the two fallen officers.  Every cop in the city converged on this apartment complex.  The SWAT team arrived in a caravan of armored buses.  Looking at all this commotion, I realized that they weren't just there to arrest whoever had shot the officers.  No.  They were planning an all out massacre.  They were going to slaughter everyone who lived here.  They all poured from the buses and the squad cars.  Even more came scaling over the fence that ran the perimeter of the property, all dressed in bullet-proof black.  And with the sudden muzzle flare of a machine gun, they opened fire in all directions.

Bullets and shells and shattered glass rained everywhere.  Smoke rose in thick black clouds.  Confusion on the ground.  A sudden pause punctuated the action, and a door opened and one of the residents came out in their bathrobe to see what was going on.  There was a moment of hesitation, but then someone opened fire, and then everyone opened fire.  The resident was tossed this way and that by the bullets, but he seemed otherwise unperturbed.  He looked more confused than anything.  He just stared back at us as blood dripped from his robe.  And we all realized it all at once.  These people in this apartment complex, they were all already dead.  They couldn't be killed again.  There was going to be a massacre here.  It was going to be us.

Street Level

Somewhere underground, deep down in the dark in these industrial catacombs of damp concrete walls and rusty pipes, I sat on a couch in a waiting area with my wife and daughter.  There was a lamp in the corner and a bunch of old magazines spread out on the table before us.  I got involved in a petty argument with my daughter while we were sitting there.  We kept our voices hushed in accordance with some strange waiting room etiquette.  She accused me of being lazy, and I took offense.  I enumerated all the things I did for her every day.  She mocked every word I said and threw them back in my face.  She sneered at me in disgust and I grew more and more frustrated with her.  Finally, I snapped at her in a suppressed growl, "I'm leaving!"

Just as I said this, these two women that I used to work with at the plastic factory came walking up to retrieve me from the waiting area.  One of them, I knew, was a notorious cynic, and I knew that she had heard me blurt out "I'm leaving!" so spitefully, and I knew that she would think that it was an awful thing to say to my daughter, to throw such a threat of abandonment in her face, and I knew that she would sit in judgment on me for being such an awful father.  So I tried to play it off.  I tried to make it seem as though I had simply meant that I was leaving my daughter to go to work, not leaving our home and our family and her life entirely.  The cynical woman just gave me a look and a wry smirk.

I got up and followed these women to further perpetuate this pretext that I was going to work.  We climbed up a metal stairwell to another level which was still steamy and subterranean, but much warmer and better lit than the catacombs below.  It was a maze of machinery and metal walkways.  We passed my old boss's office and he stood outside the door with his arms folded across his chest.  He grunted as I approached, as though he had been watching and waiting for me.  I had started working back at my old job on my days off from my current job, juggling between the two.  But now both places had me scheduled for the same hours, and I would have to make a choice between them.  I lifted my head and looked at all the pumping, steaming equipment around me.  How did I end up back here?

It was almost time for the shift to begin, and everyone was headed over to the time clock to punch in.  But I noticed another set of metal stairs off to the side where no one was paying attention.  I climbed them and they took me up to the ground floor where the morning light shone through an open bay. There was no one around.  I walked out of the building and off the property.  I went strolling around the residential neighborhood surrounding the shop, admiring all the grand Victorian houses with flower beds and dogwood trees blooming in their yards.  A pretty girl on roller skates waved to me from across the street.  I turned a corner onto a main road.  The morning traffic streamed by.  I felt like I could float away.

And somewhere below, as though coming up from the storm drain along the curb, I could hear my boss grumbling, wondering where I was, wondering why I hadn't punched the time clock, wondering why I wasn't working now that it was twenty minutes past.  I crouched down beside a tree and tilted my head to listen at the drain and I just laughed.  The pretty girl was skating towards me down the sidewalk, looking like she needed to tell me something.  I turned and stood waiting for her to get close enough to tell me what she had to say.