Did you Know that I loved You Part 2
Sean was unfamiliar with longshore beach. There was a longshore beach some one hundred miles north but Sean’s life experience still compelled him to induce (infect) rationality and simplicity into his passengers so he thought (hoped) it might be in reference to an establishment with a similar name. And the perpetually calm and consistently disruptive GPS device attached to Sean’s windshield welcomed panic back into his chest by revealing that only a single destination matched such a name. Sean, who could physically feel the cold that seemed to radiate as heat does from the two passengers, without turning, asked,
“Longshore Beach?”
“Uh huh” replied Jason.
“It’s one hundred and six miles away.”
“Sounds about right.” And when Sean, who was frozen for entirely different reasons than his bodily temperature did not reply, Jason continued,
“It is a beach… I mean, we’re not exactly on the shore.” And when Sean remained static, obviously struck by the situation in a way that Jason failed to understand, he held three one-hundred dollar bills to Sean’s right ear, sliding them between his fingers until they were routinely (normally) taken by Sean. And when the second tangible evidence of legitimacy of sanity was cleared by Sean’s counterfeit-detecting brown marker, he inwardly absurdly outwardly normally shifted his carriage into drive, checked his gasoline level and the neighboring street for a space in oncoming traffic, and merged in silence, the motor threatening to fail its overturns as even the mechanical system carrying the three was temporarily confused and slightly trepid by the situation.
At a red light, Sean tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel, watching a couple cross in front of his cab, only faces exposed between the fattened bursts of cotton stitched and barely contained in their plastic nylon water-resistant shells. The man hugged the smaller woman, whose oversized skiing jacked at first made her appear much larger than the man. They walked awkwardly, oddly torque against the wind and stiffened by the dropping temperatures. Sean looked into his rearview, passively researching his two passengers, both staring out of their respective windows, passively researching the passing world. At least their skin had regained some visual health.
“You boys must be cold” Sean was able to venture into the mirror, finding himself more comfortable to be addressing a reflection of the two rather than their physical bodies. Jason glanced at Greg and in a look of innocent naivety that can’t, even in the furthest depths of human guile, be manufactured ectopically because it relied more on the dark center of the eyes than most other facial expressions but which was, in turn, hidden from Sean by Jason’s sunglasses, allowing him to attach a sane dishonesty to,
“No. Not really.” Jason turned again to Greg and Greg shrugged. He looked at the window and then cocking his head to a thought that must have hung in the air beside his head, thus requiring a physical shift to capture it within the brain, he turned back to Jason, moderately saying,
“Hey did you see the price of silver?”
“Yeah, it’s down with everything else; same with gold.”
“But I thought it’s supposed to go in the opposite direction of the market.”
“Sure but right now it’s all being manipulated, artificially driven down.”
Greg looked at the back of Sean’s seat, thinking, and Jason continued,
“Plus if you look at the rates, it’s gone down, what fifteen percent, while the DOW’s down, what, forty? It’s doing a lot better than most. I think gold’s only down ten percent or so.”
“Well that’s good…”
“My brother works for Bear Sterns, or he did, he says New York City is like ground zero for this. It’s chaos.”
Greg smiled, he pictured a chubby balding man, sweating a sink of fluid into his Armani suit, holding a starbucks coffee and grabbing the tufts of hair lining his forehead as the red numbers went up, inversely to his falling fortune, that fortune that was only possible by the fat piece of shit making money off of other people’s work, success, and ideas. That fortune that afforded him a wife twenty years younger with gigantic plastic tits and the body of a twelve year old.
“There’re a lot of people down there that have lost everything,” Jason continued. Greg saw his fat protagonist arrive home, knowing that it would be empty long before he ceased his Porsche and a quick flashback revealed the barbie gold-digger plastic molded perfection that seemed uglier the prettier it looked had packed some clothing, jewelry, and telephoned its lawyer on the way to its girlfriend’s house. The brief affair between fat-ass and that girlfriend suddenly forgiven, even appreciated because the man was a nothing and to fuck a nothing was unforgivable anywhere but in the presence of another who had encountered the same blemish and together they could forget, to entertain the size of a nothing dick and how nothing smelled and tried to kiss and reminisce on how he had been tortured by a fashioned barbie doll that, completing her transition, at least for him, no longer had a vagina.
“Lots of gold diggers leaving their husbands,” Greg muttered, condensing his vision into some input in the conversation.
No one spoke for the next hour, Sean driving steadily over the snow-lined highway, passing a plow half buried in the ditch, abandoned days ago. He heard the snap of a plastic cap and immediately realized the subtle scent of sunscreen. He looked up into the mirror to see the image of Jason applying white cream to his forehead and nose. Temporarily but only shortly stunned, Sean looked to the sky beside the mirror and admitted to himself that the sun was indeed unabated.
Jason passed the bottle to Greg who had requested its use just as he Jason was finished. Greg applied the sunscreen on his shoulders and nape, passing it back to Jason who was at that moment searching the cooler for a bottle of water. A piece of ice slipped over the back of Jason’s hand, hitting the seat before trailing cool water down its lip and dropping to the floor. And it melted quickly from the salty puddle carried into the vehicle as slush against Jason’s sandal. If Sean had seen that ice cube, melting rapidly into a pool of salty, oily water, it might have occurred to him that the whole reason all of this had entered his life, why he was led to guide two strangers seemingly out of place, or time, outlined and cut from another habitat that inadvertently pasted itself into his own was the essence of duality. It was there for him to see, to understand, and possibly to alter his life, the contradiction of human nature being revealed to him, yet blocked from his vision, by that melting ice.
But Sean only saw the black Hyundai, partially whitened by the thick ice treatment that had been kicked in every direction by the vehicle’s back tires dart into his lane, only inches from his hood, and Sean simply forwent the vision, instead manifesting it himself by melodramatically activating his brakes, overcompensating a lane change and then a quick pass followed by another exaggerated lane change, returning into the view of the Hyundai driver. By the time his attention was freed from the addiction that is anger, the ice had become indistinguishable from any other melted snow off the sidewalk.
When the trinity arrived at Longshore Beach, Jason handed Sean another one-hundred dollar bill and exited the vehicle without a word. Sean watched the bare-backed pair walk slowly down the slatted walkway, gathering snow onto their sandals and bare toes. He almost stayed. He almost left his vehicle, to follow them on foot as they approached the beach, finally entering the sand which wasn’t even visible, to warn them or challenge them, to somehow reveal the discrepancy that existed so apparently between the two shivering beings and the surrounding reality.
But further down the beach, after the wooden slats, where the beach was defined by snow rather than sand, the waves made no intelligible shapes as they crashed foam into foam, or snow into snow, or foam into snow, releasing particles of water that were indistinguishable from ice and Sean wanted, needed, his familiar blinking, constant, reasonable, acceptably broken kiosk.
As Sean performed a three point turn, Jason spread his towel over the snowy sand, churning it under his feet which were freed from the sandals, finally able to fully confront the frozen earth beneath but incapable of understanding its implications. Greg sat down onto his own towel, already somewhat damp from the snow it had collected along the way. He removed a tiny pair of headphones from a pocket in his bathing suit, attached to a device that was only set to repeatedly play Elton John’s Rocketman. As the song began, Jason approached the rabid-looking waves. Greg shielded his eyes from the sun, somehow searching with expectation of results for the young and insecure and terribly illegal patrons of Longshore Beach. He frowned, unable to see anything except snow, water, and foam. And it wasn’t that he couldn’t see the snow but it was that he not only was comfortable with a snow-laden beach but expected it.
Jason returned from the waves, now physically shivering (trembling, seizuring) in that encompassing violent fashion that makes one’s spinal cord ache for days. He pressed his hair back, releasing splashes of ocean water down his starkly white back, following the curves of his shoulder blades slowly, in a viscous manner that wasn’t how ocean water should be on a person returning to a beachtowel. His face was of a ferociously burgundy.
Greg removed one headphone from his ear, listening to Jason’s consensus of the water’s conditions. His words were unintelligible, however, as his tongue had all but become incapacitated. And as Jason fell face first to his towel, still shaking, somewhat dizzily Greg wrapped the headphones around the Rocketman player, set it and his sunglasses onto his now soaking towel that had already stiffened with ice at the corners. He sucked in his stomach, attempting to improve his figure for the short walk. His numb, bricklike feet dug into the snow and sand, no longer receiving enough warmth to melt any snow but instead leaving footprints of a hetergenous mixture of rock and ice. He almost tripped as his stilts of frozen flesh no longer improved his mobility but impeded it, and his fingers were scraped by the unyielding earth and he looked back to Jason, who had turned an inhuman beige, began a clumsy and comical trot, and dove into the arctic waves, his heart ceasing suddenly and permanently from that unforgiving mistress finally freezing his heart.
Jason began to cough, hut his coughs resembled heavy breathing because his throat had lost the ability to constrict. Something about the snow had become uncomfortable. He thought for the first time that perhaps he really was alone on the beach, that it might actually be closed. Perhaps there was an infestation of jellyfish, sharks, contamination, or maybe it simply was not the place he was meant to be. The arose a slight but fulfilling doubt in his mind born from his infantile like to reality, suggesting that perhaps it was time for him to leave.
Jason stumbled to his knees, unable to grasp anything, flailing sand and snow over his towel and cooler, finding it difficult to see. The world appeared glazed, as if he were wearing goggles that had been filled with water. Using the sound of passing vehicles, terrified, numb, and for the first time in his life, homesick, Jason reached the edge of the highway before collapsing unconscious, dying, his right foot cocked sharply inward, its frozen muscle locked firmly in place.
Twenty four hours after Greg’s bloated but stiffened white and blue body was acquired from the frigid ocean waves with a jutted metal hook used to reel large sharks and other decomposing human corpses which, at that point, shared some general characteristic similarities with a shark, the tubular body, blue and white, bulging yet almost hidden black eyes, lips peeled back as though it were strapped into a dentists chair, feet flattened by the thrashing of waves against rock, Sean slowed just before his blinking lighthouse. The snow had calmed significantly under the abundant sunlight and despite the remaining white shell encompassing everything but the passing motor vehicles and people, some students could be seen without jackets or hats, to some extent physically comfortable with their habitat. It was the time where the most insecure women painted their low self esteem into their clothing, donning their shortest skirts months before they were appropriate but only moments later than they would have been deemed psychotic.
Sean hadn’t been able to sleep much the previous night, leaving the day’s events still mainly unincorporated and unsorted. So when his passenger wearing simple jeans and a light shirt with long black sleeves introduced himself as ‘Greg,’ Sean found himself in multiple time zones. Because the physical world held no cards, no hidden agenda or facts, but rather simply and efficiently truthed that the current events were in absolutely no way related to the events of previous times. Everything, in the everything sense that even the most powerful computational centers still lack the computing power to factor, had changed completely. But, like the water is not a pond, this truth was in fact a statement borne of ignorance. The reality was that at some point between donning his light outfit and introducing himself to Sean, a part of Greg was stolen by someone recently deceased.
Proceedural memory was never an evolutionary trait for average daily survival. We don’t retain the ability to repeat common tasks under the heaviest strains of amnesia or cognitive dissonance because everything has suddenly become nothing the organism can handle because the gradual shift of nature and environment demanded that skill remain intact. Rather it was the days that God had peered into the heart of his creation and decided that one more vein could go there, or one less chamber could go there, or maybe a swift kick could relieve the whirring noise, and the sentient no longer found themselves in a state of psychosis but rather the state of normalcy had been replaced with the state of psychosis and to adjust oneself to the sanest point in their life tests every fabric of cognitive, emotional, and spiritual muscle.
So Greg gave Sean his destination and Sean set the clock and Sean drove there because Sean was evolutionarily advanced. And as the neurotransmitters kicked in, the actual angels of myth, the beings that have no real power, that have no real influence on God’s plan, but simply serve as someone who can sit along the center of his divine dart board and use their cursed ability to bring happiness to a person without the need to have the power to change the plan. The plan remains completely intact. The only power left with these angels exists in the junction of life and soul.
With some sense of calm, perhaps just another peak of his previously ingested valium, Sean looked at his passenger seated directly in the center of the back seat, hands on his knees, quietly and dryly sobbing.
