Headache

Headache

By Jay Seate

I’m back home now, but I can’t sleep. With the remnants of day long sense suspended, I drive around most of the night. Having the streets mostly to myself, I don’t pay much attention to signal lights. They seem extravagant at three in the morning.

I cruise past everything you see in most towns: a strip-mall housing a liquor store, a Mexican restaurant, a tattoo parlor, and an H&R Block, all closed. The businesses are dark but a streetlight casts the reflection of my wheels off the divided walls of glass. Bright lights still burn over a car dealership while pink and blue neon encircles a tired motel sign.

My headaches.

They exist in a dull reality occasionally blasted by internal fireworks. Tonight the streetlights are hurting my head more than usual, so I turn onto a road leading out of town, beyond the skeletons of old farm machinery where brightness will eventually disappear. Occasional overnight porchlights glow from houses set far back from the road, symbols of normal lives, people at rest, or maybe having sex, hopefully looking forward to a future.

The sameness of the landscape is relentless, casting an image of endlessness almost demonic in its despair. The night sky shimmers with mystery and grandeur creating a feeling of both gaining and losing. I flip a cigarette out the window and see the instant it explodes into a white sparkler on the road through the rearview, the way my head sometimes does. I consider turning off the headlights and becoming invisible, letting the purr of the engine stabilize the tired aching thoughts about driving into a void of perfect darkness without a backward glance.

Just a headache? I don’t think so. I was too close to the booms and flashes. The army gave me a prescription and extended leave. My mother dragged me to a church service. Neither pills nor prayers have revealed their wonders to perform. I just need time to heal, everyone says, but going into a crowd proved a bad decision.

Time.

There is too much of it. Headaches make days too long and nights too restless.

Boom. Boom, Boom. Pop a pill and take a drive to nowhere.

There was a girl once, and some friends, none of them enough to keep me home. The military provided a few new friends and a few gung-ho moments. The world of sand and gasoline didn’t make me homesick. I missed little, just my car, the only thing that provided a sense of freedom.

Now I am back, the hum of the motor almost drowning out the sound of incoming missiles screaming my name. Although the effect of the conflicts linger as big as life and twice as ugly, it now seems trivial as a problem bigger than the splintered cranial booms spreads right here at home—a virus from which there is no escape.

I measure my journey’s distance, not in miles, but the one between the man and the boy I used to be. My head is momentarily released from the demon. I think of another woman, almost able to taste her, consumed by her like a fire consumes a house—a remarkable moment within the wonder of being. I pull off the road and bring my car to a stop. I get out and climb on top of the warm hood, the back of my head resting against its windshield. I gaze at the pinpoints of twinkling light. The sky is clear, the stars a hard glitter, as bright as ice chips flung across the heavens. A meteor scratches a path through the array with a white fire. I am poised on some metaphoric fence between reality and the eternal. There are none between me and the stars. Orion, the dippers, Little Bear, Draco, all vast and beautiful giving me a momentary feeling of timelessness, and maybe even immortality—an endless void into which a person could vanish. I wish I’d brought along a beer or two.

Dim light appears in the west. The hills on a distant horizon become silhouetted by the dawn. I transfigure a section into the length of a great sleeping woman; head, breast, a bent knee. Will she rise with the sun and beckon to me? My gaze is fixed. The sun will soon follow, vaporizing the magic. Birds begin to salute the coming day. And what of the coming day’s prospects? I don’t want to go home. My mother is sick. Doctors can’t help. I am sick. Doctors say give it time. There is no more time. I’ll sit here…as long as whatever time it takes for the final explosion in my head or for the virus’s effects to catch up.

My musings are replaced by something down the road. It’s a figure walking toward me. I close my eyes then reopen them to make sure the bleakness of the landscape isn’t messing with my head.

 The figure draws closer, close enough to make out a young boy wearing a T-shirt and jeans. What the hell is a young kid doing out here at dawn?

I sit up on my hood and say, “Hi.”

The kid says, “Hi,” back.

And in a flash, I recognize him.

The kid is me. From twenty years ago, the kid is me. I try to wake up, but am not sure if I want to. Now within ten yards, he smiles and places his bare hands over his ears. I mimic his movements—hands to the sides of my head.

 Then I start to remember: my headache followed by a fever, then chest pains, then trouble breathing, my compromised immune system failing, a gurney, a room with a ventilator, and finally, the darkness of a coma. Only my fevered mind has placed me with my wheels, and yet, my eight-year-old self has come to guide me past this blue bauble suspended in a sea of night to someplace without struggle, to someplace past the blazing stars above where no further harm can intrude.