The kerosene lamp is burning down to a flicker, mouthing emotions in silent whispers . . .
Its light dances across his face, casting shadows under his eyes and cheek bones as he stares expressionlessly over the top of a typewriter. His hands slide across the keys to fill the room with a steady beat of clicks and clacks and a nostalgia for existence rides every sentence that the rusted arms of the type writer slap together. He's written hundreds of thousands of words and they flow and dance across their pages. He's writing about everything: the people he loved, the past he can only remember in fragments, the emotions that had brought him through clouds stretched out across the sky.
And suddenly gravity's cage opens and he's floating through whirring protons and neutrons, the electrons passing right through him and his palpitating fists grasp emptiness in the spaces between the air molecules. He's not going to catch all of it, he knows that, but he's not giving up, giving in, burning out, burning up. . . . Landscapes unfurl from his mind over the paper and they come out all wrong, so wrong, it's frustrating, every word is a lie and he knows it but he can't stop because he can't stop.
I was six years old, playing in a half-built house. The smell of fresh wood and sawdust in my lungs and the feel of a project, of purpose, of desire for completion sifting through the morning air. And Jacob runs up the steps towards me, firing an imaginary pistol, bang bang he laughs and I dodge the bullets, pulling out my rifle.
He stops typing for a second because she's standing next to him with a cup of coffee, because it's two in the morning and he likes his coffee at two in the morning. He's sweating but he vaguely thanks her and gulps it down as she looks at his transcript. She sees how he shifted tense and she thinks it's a mistake, but she doesn't say anything because he's sweating and his eyes are bloodshot and not seeing, he doesn't even know where he is anymore. He's feeling light shedding its skin, the illusion dissolving in front of the next mirage, the life that caught him by surprise pulling him back into the formless haze. He's slipping from reality as he blindly types on, the words flipping out into further detachments . . .
There was the war and all of that blood, the hospital with men missing arms and boys in wheelchairs. Trevor was a Humvee driver who said he had driven through the wall of the past, firing mortars into ghosts who just laughed. I remember him telling me that "There ain't no way I wasn't going to try and kill all of 'em. Trust me, you don't want them around, you're never safe because they won't go away and they'll always come back." But apparently the ghosts just smiled and glinted like the ocean on a summer day as watermelon sized shells whirred through them. And he told me how the seagulls were squalling for the stars that he couldn't see but felt, and the earthquakes and tremors underneath his feet made it so that his thoughts would wobble and he'd end up making decisions by turning around and stumbling backwards.
The hospital times weren't all bad though. This one time Larry's glass eye fell out and shattered on the ground and we all had a good chuckle like the ghosts in Trevor's adventure and we left our ghosts there laughing forever too. Trevor was eventually discharged with a purple heart and six months later we got the news that he shot himself through the eye. I know he was thinking about Larry's glass eye when he did it and he could probably hear us laughing back then in the hospital with the eye laying in shards on the ground and he must have been out to get us or he wouldn't have shot himself in the first place . . .
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