Specter

I awake within myself.

There’s someone sitting across from me, with jet black hair lightly tempered by hints of placid gray washing into shore; he has to crane his neck from the clouds to meet my gaze. His hardy smile tells me he’s ready to take on the world at a moment’s notice.

“You’re up! You talk loud in your sleep, y’know.” 

“Are we… there yet?” The words are visceral, drifting languidly through the muggy swamp festering in my mouth without my steering the raft. I’m a specter haunting my own body.

“No, we stopped and I’ve been waiting for thirty minutes on my…” The sentence cut itself short, like the footage had corrupted and a blip of the sequence had been charred beyond recognition.

The orange haze from the sun dangling over my head and the immutable whining and droning from the TV in the corner goad my body’s eyes back into dormancy. I tell myself to snap out of it ‘cause I’m trying to see what happens next. He tells me to give him a break, it’s been three long hours on the road and we haven’t even passed by the weird statue of the burly man holding an ax in the middle of nowhere that always means home’s only an hour away.

Suddenly the doctor, his friendliness oozing through his worn, tattered face, shows up with the remedy. He reverently lowers the vial onto the table. As soon as it lands my companion snaps it up, pouncing on the prize; the acrid, chemical smoke sears his face, stunning him like a cat being spritzed with water before he recollects and gulps it down.

“Here, try some,” he offers.

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Surprised, I take the vial from his hands and let the medicine run down my tongue. I feel it erode the phlegm coating the sides of my throat, scorching earth in a bitter fury, mellowing out and then planting sweet seeds to mend the scars. I reflexively pucker up and then relax my lips, steam billowing up through the gap.

“You like it?”

“Nah. Too sour.”

“Heh, didn’t think you would. But it should keep you up.” He takes the vial back and nearly finishes its contents in the subsequent sip.

I sense a growing annoyance within me, in this body I inhabit. I ask myself what’s wrong; he tells me we’ve been here many times before.

“I’m sick of driving,” I blurt out.

My companion crumbles, bowing his head before picking the pieces back up.

“I know, it sucks. But the people at the hospital told me a couple trips ago we might only have to come by every other week soon. Cool, right?”

I can’t hide my disappointment.

“Look,” he assures me. “I can’t tell you what you wanna hear. But just remember I’m here with you, ok? We’ll stick it out together until we’re out of that place’s hair for good.”

I put my head down on the table. Then, after a couple seconds:

“Tell me the story about the bar fight in Tijuana again.”

My companion laughs, and rolls his eyes back into his memory banks.

“So, I’m with some dudes I sorta knew—but not really—from college…”

Then the faces on the TV dissolve and become soup, their words turning to indiscernible gunk clogging my ears. And the story fades too, assimilated by the mush of words. The sun goes down.

Wait, I beg my outer self. Tell me who the other guy at the table is. But he’s already asleep, leaving me stuck inside myself.

***

I’m older and wiser now. So is my companion: the gray’s unfurled on the sands, demanding attention potently enough to bleed through the most formidable delusions of youth.

The space is the same, only the doctor’s been supplanted by his apprentice, a girl no younger or older than my present body. She brings two doses to the table in her hands, with several others sliding precariously on a metal tray balanced on her arm.

“What happened to the old man?” My companion asks her. That’s a dumb question, he was like 92. Obviously he bit the du-

“I walked in one day and he gave me the keys ‘n said he’s going to the source of his medicine.”

“The source?”

She sets our vials down.

“Yeah. I think it bothered him he spent so long making it and didn’t even know where its ingredients were coming from. So he left to figure that out.”

“Was he family?”

“No. I don’t think he had any left. I was the only one that really knew him, except for the regulars maybe. Cool guy, though.”

She takes the tray to another table. The office is an antique, but people still slip through the museum glass in droves to get their prescriptions when rush hour comes around.

Companion and I’s conversation is uncharacteristically terse. Bored, I strike up conversation with myself instead.

What’s up? I say. I don’t get a response. It was easy to talk to my kid self, but now adolescence has created turbulence between me and my body that I’ve no chance of correcting. It’s bubbling to the top of the kettle, boiled by every nervous glance away from the man at the end of the table and anxious sip of antidote.

No, no, don’t–

The tears are scalding. And then Companion’s a mess too.

“Remember when we’d, uh, we’d come here… on the drive home?” Companion works out through tears.

“I do… of course I do.”

“And now you’re gonna be living on your own–man, it doesn’t sound right when I say it–in the…” –Deep breath–“in the same city.”

“Yeah…”

It’s miserable. I’m sitting and watching as these two fall over the precipice in a waterfall of their own creation. And I just don’t care. I should, because I know this body is me and the man on the other end is important to this body. But I just can’t remember what anything means. I’m skipping to the end of the movie and laughing at my own confusion as no-name characters recite vapid lines in front of me in between crocodile tears.

I want to leave.

But no sooner does my confusion manifest than I am metamorphosing again. Once coddled in my leaky, sodden cocoon and then thrown into the world, I am now a butterfly with tattered wings and crooked antennae like jagged, loose wires.

The doctor’s office has changed covertly; it does not exist in a vacuum. Our provider is ostensibly yearning within the confines of the museum, not wanting to erase what her teacher left behind while growing ever more irritated with the thin dust film spreading itself across every square inch of the place. She fights back in subtle ways: the TV’s still the same relic, but now it’s displaying programming decades beyond its original purview; the sleepy orange lightbulbs have been replaced with fluorescent, white-hot beads boring holes in my body’s eyes; the office hours have changed for the first time in thirty years, opening and closing an hour later to account for the new provider’s circadian rhythm.

Meanwhile my past self fights his own battle between his head and his heart, stumbling over a crossroads as alcohol sloshes around in his bloodstream. I can hear his thoughts running, wild and sloppy and frantic. But I wouldn’t like anyone prying in my mind–even if that person were me from another era–so I decide to talk them out of him instead.

What’re you doing here? I reach out to him through a layer cake of his own dissonance and indecision. My voice finds him.

I don’t know, he responds.

The medicine here’s not gonna make you sober, you know.

I don’t have a prescription today. I’m just here because this place has always made me feel safe, he tells me, his body unresponsive to our conversation.

That’s understandable. What’s troubling you?

A headache. It’s constant, and it numbs every feeling in my brain, good and bad.

Getting drunk’s not gonna make that better.

It does, actually. But never for long enough.

…You ever try, I dunno, CBD instead? I ask him.

Yeah, it calms me down but it makes me even more numb than before. Ideally I’d like to not have to use anything to fix it. 

Mhm.

But I’m stuck with nowhere to go and no one to turn to and trapped in a job I don’t like, so that can’t happen.

He pauses to collect himself.

Do you remember Billy Beale from high school? He asks me.

…No.

Double B? The smartest kid in our class?

…

Nevermind. All that matters is that he ended up going off the rails. Got caught dealing and now he’s in jail. The way I see it, if a guy like that couldn’t figure out how to make something out of his life, then what the hell kind of chance do I have?

C’mon, you know that’s stupid, I reassure him.

Maybe it is. It’s just a thought I’ve had, among others.

I try to remember my headspace at this point in my life, but I don’t even know if I ever got out of the funk he describes in the first place. I’m a spirit adrift–not affixed nor beholden to any body–meandering through past experiences with fog dulling my brain tissue. So I decide that before I can help my past self, I have to bring my present self back to the light of memory.

I’ve been having a lot of thoughts, too. I had visions of being here with a guy, real tall with black hair. I know he’s someone important, but I can’t–

Uncle Johnny, he interrupted. Our godfather. Once Dad died he was the one that had to take us up to the hospital for my treatment.

Treatment for what?

Our cardiomyopathy. Really it would’ve been more sensible for us to stay there instead of going back and forth, but Johnny wanted us to have a normal childhood. Now, he himself was anything but normal.

Yeah, I guessed. Something about a bar fight in Tijuana?

Haha, yeah. That’s only one of his stories. You remember the one about the drug bust he got caught up in?

No, not at all.

Maybe I’ll tell you another time, God, I miss that guy.

What happened? I ask.

…Oh, nothing really. Just haven’t talked to him in a while.

Why don’t you give him a call?

Maybe I will.

It’s completely dark out now, far past closing time. The doctor doesn’t kick us out, though.

Look, I tell him. I can’t give you the solution to your headache, because I still don’t remember it myself. But I’m still here–I got through it somehow. So keep going.

But it’s so hard, he admits. Even waking up in the morning, much less trying to turn this life around.

Nothing’s easy. It wasn’t easy for Johnny, or Double B, or us. But I promise it’ll pay off eventually. And if it doesn’t, at least you can say at the end of your line that you went down trying your heart out.

I feel myself slipping, so I tell him:

Oh, and make sure to thank the lady behind the counter on your way out.

***

Liberated from at least the deepest depths of cognitive doldrums, I return to my present state. My spirit and body are one; my words are my own.

I’m sitting with an old man whose back is draped in gray, near unrecognizable from his preceding incarnations save for the glint in his eyes that shines faintly through his resignation.

The doctor brings us our medicine. I drink.

“Was it always this sweet, Johnny?” I ask him.

He picks his head up and looks into my once-listless eyes dumbfounded. Then his cheeks contort into a smile; he’s out of practice, so the wrinkles take some time to crease themselves like they used to.

“I thought you were really gone,” he says.

“Me too. What happened?”

“You had a heart attack, man. You’ve been borderline vegetative for days, not remembering anything. I brought you here to try and jog your memory.”

I take a deep breath.

“Thanks, Johnny. For everything.”

In spite of the coffee swirling in my stomach I’m exhausted, so I put my head down and say:

“Tell me the story about the drug bust again.”

***

In my sleep I drift again.

The tubes in the TV unravel, cathode rays coiling into a helix ascending into the stars. I follow them, gliding atop a mosaic of primordial dust dying and reforming in front of my eyes. 

I make it to the center of the universe, where a familiar man awaits me. His hands trace the outline of a sphere, a singular coffee bean floating in the void between them. He smiles once I arrive.

“So you really found it,” I say. “The source of your medicine.”

“Yes, and all it took was going to the center of the universe!”

Trees spring from the fertile grounds like hairs on the back of a beast larger than life. Birds adeptly construct nests in their canopies; insects teem within the underbelly; the newly-born sun permeates in scarce quantities through the minute gaps in the leaves. At the center of it all, arabica plants hold the crown jewels.

“Isn’t it fascinating?” He says. “A whole forest–an ecosystem, no less–created solely to protect this one secret in my palms. The animals here like it as much as us; we are very much alike, at least in that regard.”

He breaks the motion of his hands, letting the coffee bean slip away into the farthest reaches of the universe, and turns to me.

“So, how are things down at my shop?”

“Great. Your apprentice runs a tight ship.”

“I knew she would. I wouldn’t leave my life’s work in just anyone’s hands, you know.”

“Naturally.”

“And how are you, friend? I haven’t seen you since you were a boy.”

“I’m well, for now. And that’s all I can ask for.”

He plucks a new coffee bean from its berry, separating the skin from the pulp with his fingers. Fresh coffee falls from the gap in between, pooling at the bottom of a cup woven from stardust. He gives it to me; I accept, ready to wake from my dream and face the world again.