PART 3.
This is a short story of sorts that might or might not be part of a larger cycle. If so, this is later in the cycle. Let’s say story 5 of 6 — right after “Lisa and her reflection.” This one is a bit rougher than the other two, but they are getting cranked out in real time, warts and all. Again, more meditations on emotions out there… Probably related to trust, since that is what I am reading a lot about these days. But let’s see where these stories go.
Sebastian sat in Lisa’s room. This was a different room than before, and she was packing a duffel bag.
“Sibby,” that’s what she had taken to calling him. “Sibby, don’t you want, I don’t know, something more? I don’t know what it is, but I just know that I need something more. I need to individuate. I need an identity.”
Sebastian sat there on the floor with his back against the wall. He smiled slightly, which was an expression he made more and more these days, even when he wasn’t happy, and looked down at his hands. Lisa was off to a boarding school, and he, Sebastian, was not. He, Sebastian, did not want to hear this language from whichever latest therapist Lisa was being sent to . He, Sebastian, didn’t want something more. No, he didn’t want anything more, and he was pretty sure that he was in love with this girl, Lisa, who was packing her bag in preparation for her life. He didn’t say anything. After all, what was the point? Why tell her about the anger that burrowed into his soul like a growing mass of worms.
***
“Huh?” Sebastian broke from his memories.
Before him the tunnel split into two mouths. Two pits lit back and forth by the dusty beam of his flashlight. The tunnel branched, with one track continuing to the right, and another, picking up and starting down to the left. This didn’t make any sense.
Sebastian flicked his flashlight first in one direction and then the other. One set of parallel paths disappearing into one mouth and another into the other. His flashlight flickered back and forth.
Once upon a time…
“My gosh, stop it!” Sebastian called out loud, his voice echoing down the tunnels, and then under his breath, “Just let it go.”
On a whim, Sebastian chose the left tunnel. Why not? He was up for trying something new this morning.
The last time that Sebastian and Lisa had spoken, it had been an argument.
“How could you understand? You’ve never had to worry about anything!”
“I worry about you!”
“With what? I thought you were Miss No Empathy. Isn’t that what this latest therapist of yours told you?”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Isn’t it? The masks you wear?”
“And you? What about you?”
“Me? I’m the one holding it all together. Me!”
“Uh huh. Is that what you tell yourself?”
“Oh, here it comes. As usual.”
At that Lisa screamed. “Is this how you want me to be?! Does this make you happy!?” She swept her arm across her dresser, sending makeup and bottles of perfume flying across the room.
They both stood staring at each other in the gathered up the weight of a funeral home from the too-rich floral of perfume.
“Sibby, you were supposed to be the one that saw me.”
“Yeah, I see you alright.”
Lisa fetally crumpled to the floor, her body against the wall of the room.
“I can’t bear this. I can’t bear this.” She said this over and over, while she rocked. “I can’t bear this.”
Sebastian stood up and walked to the door. He paused, taking in Lisa, her discarded self slowly bumping against the wall. He shook his head and walked out. The last words he heard from behind him were, “I will never forgive you. Never.”
Once upon a time Sebastian sat on the ledge of the water tower. He was tossing pennies over the ledge. It was the afternoon after his father’s funeral. Lisa’s father had reached out, somehow hearing the news from within whatever life he led now, and he had paid for all the expenses no one thinks about: the pickup of the body, the storage, the cremation.
Sebastian sat there up on the roof, up on the water tower, the city sprawled under and before him. With each toss of a penney, he was telling himself that he was purging a memory. There was Lisa at the airport returning from one of her trips to Europe. She was beaming, black hair, eyes bright, a black newsboy cap on, and hugging a large box wrapped in silver paper – a gift she had carried through customs and metal detectors and across an ocean for Sebastian.
Toss.
There was Lisa sitting in the passenger seat. They were on their way down to her father’s beach house. Sebastian was driving, and Lisa was laughing because they had stopped to get fried pickles. She was holding up a long sliver in wonderment, and then she was playing music from her phone. She would turn towards him, suddenly singing right at his face. He swatted, but she dodged and continued to sing, and sing, and sing.
Toss.
There was Lisa reaching across to hold his hand as they walked down the street. Sebastian had felt embarrassed. It was a sunny day, and the street there in that part of the city was cobble stone, and she held on to his hand, and she wouldn’t let go. His hand. The hand of the son of a father who fell asleep in his recliner. She held his hand, then smiling she had taken earbuds from her purse and placed one in her ear and one in his. “Listen to this.” And mixed in with the city sounds. Mixed in with the pedestrians and cross walks and bikers and cars and storefronts, and a mother who had left, and a future-less boy – mixed in with this, Sebastian heard Lisa’s voice through the earbud. “I recorded this for you,” she said, here, beside him. And as they walked down the sidewalk, down to the bay and along the piers, Sebastian heard Lisa’s voice through the earbud signing a song. He heard it as a gift given. Over and over, she had given herself to him. …And he had not seen. For all his watching, for all his claims of being an artist, a painter, someone who sees — Sebastian had not seen.
With that last thought, Sebastian reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold locket. He looked at it, passed his fingers over the engraved initials, “WR,” and then with a heave, he had thrown it out into the city.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Sebastian out loud. His flashlight was dimming. He banged it a few times against the palm of his hand, and each time the beam briefly brightened. But with one, it gave out altogether.
“Just my luck,” Sebastian muttered. He shook the flashlight a few more times. Did he have extra batteries in his backpack? Of course not.
“Screw it,” he said and tossed the flashlight aside. It honestly wasn’t that big a deal. He could just pace himself stepping across the ties of the tracks, and it wasn’t like the tunnel went anywhere but one direction. If he were careful, he should still make the exit in an hour, tops. Pacing just so, he could perfectly step from one tie to the next. So that is just what he did.
Step. Step.
From one tie to the next.
Step. Step.
But something had changed. The dimmest of glows. But a glow that somehow did not light the tunnel. A wavering just on the periphery of his… Vision? Memory? Awareness?
Step. Step.
Yes, there. There was something up ahead, down in the tunnel and approaching. It slowly grew, formed, and rolled towards him. An undulating and pulsing sphere of color, like a jelly fish floating in the ocean. Colors spreading and dissolving, ebbing and brightening. The object approached Sebastian and then slowly bobbed past, continuing up the way from which he had come, becoming smaller, and smaller, until once again Sebastian found himself in the dark.
“Come on, Sibs. Pull it together,” Sebastian said to himself.
He had heard that prolonged time in the dark could mess with seeing things. The nerves in the eyes firing from boredom and making their own visions like a kid taking markers to a barren wall. He rubbed his eyes and continued.
Step. Step. Step.
Only now the darkness, itself, was sliding. Sliding smoothly past him, as if it were some sort of corporal skin. It glistened darkly like some unimaginably large serpent. And as it slid and heaved past, the dark began to flicker to life with a speckling that resembled dusk fireflies spread across a summer field. And yet somehow the darkness continued to coil and slide past him unilluminated.
Sebastian had never seen the aurora borealis, but he’d seen photos, and that is what he felt he had been transported into. The walls slid past. The fireflies glowed, and one after another were born the colored jellyfish-like blobs of living color drifting past him.
“How does this make sense?” Sebastian thought.
It didn’t, so best to keep walking. Maybe it was fumes from some long-ago discarded oil barrels, or something.
Step. Step.
But now the tunnel convulsed, and ahead Sebastian saw a pin prick of light birthed. It grew and grew and grew larger still, and Sebastian saw it take on the shape of another pulsing and undulating ball. Only this time as it grew and as it approached, it filled the entirety of the somehow still black tunnel.
Sebastian stopped and braced himself into a crouch. The form filled every aspect of his vision, and his last thought before it swept over him was, “Why does these things always happ…”