flashquake Fiction

DEADHEAD
by Phoebe Kate Foster

For as long as you remembered, you’d been different.

Your most vivid childhood memories belonged not to you, but to others. The thoughts of strangers rubbed off on you like fresh newspaper ink on fingers. Your mind was a patchwork of places you'd never been, faces you'd never seen, conversations you'd never had. Some were good — summers spent in the mountains, grandparents telling tales of the old country, the birthday you got a pony. But most weren't.

You'd never slept on a dirty mattress in a tenement with peripatetic rats rustling in the dark, or had a brother with a wasting disease, or seen your Christmas kitten crushed by a drunken father's careless foot — though you could have sworn you had.

Your parents always said you had a vivid imagination and pretend-friends. You'd outgrow it in time.

You had a recurring nightmare that your body was covered with eyes — eyes that saw all, eyes with no eyelids, eyes that never closed, eyes forever forced to see — and you'd awake, soaked in urine and screaming in horror, unable to describe the things you somehow knew.

Never once did your parents ask you why you were so upset. They were just mad at you for wetting the bed. Again.

And you wept even harder, because you knew the untold awful things that had happened to them, too.

***

It only got worse when you grew up.

The everyday world was full of invisible razor edges and unheard screams — and you were never sure when or where you'd find them. You'd walk into a room and sense that something bad had happened there. Emotions left stains that time couldn't fade. Beneath polished facades, people were red and raw, oozing like running sores. You read lines in faces like gypsies read palms. You felt the sad in others like an unabating ache in your bones.

The expensive-suited man hanging on to a strap beside you in the crowded subway would be suspended from a rope tied to the overhead trellis of his redwood deck in his stylish suburb at the end of that December day. You could see him dangling amidst the Christmas decorations he'd carefully hung. It came as no surprise later when you opened the newspaper and saw his photo in the obituaries under the caption: Prominent Executive Takes Own Life.

The store clerk who rang up your purchases had just learned the pain in his gut was cancer. The bride waving and smiling in a shower of rice would rue that day for the rest of her life. You knew the moment your mother passed out of this earthly realm. You sensed the explosion of blood vessels in her brain that suddenly turned her world painfully red and bright, then dark and dead.

In the fast food place, you glanced at the angel face and Bambi eyes of a young girl with her family and could name the pain that was her secret. The sturdy hands that paid for the burgers also pinned her to her bed at night when everyone was asleep and muffled her mouth so no one would hear her cry. But you heard it, loud and clear, as she stood in line, waiting for her Happy Meal.

Just like walking down the street you heard an anguished wail, "Mommy! Mommy! Stop! Stop! I'll be a good boy!" and felt the terror that hurt as much the relentless barrage of blows. You frantically scanned the crowd until you found the two of them, hand in hand, waiting for the light to change — and you looked away, lest you know too much and still be helpless.

Everybody said you were neurotic, reclusive, shy. You knew they'd never be able to understand why you hated crowded places or wouldn't walk down certain streets or didn't want to meet someone they all loved or rejected opportunities with the cryptic remark, "I have a feeling it's not going to work out…"

They pitied you. You were a total deadhead in their eyes — and you knew that, too.

***

Night after night, you dreamed you were hemorrhaging from invisible wounds, crucified like Christ, but you were nailed to an unseen cross, unable to escape, unable to die.

"...let this cup pass from me..."

That was your prayer, every burdensome day, unbearable year after unbearable year.

***

One morning, you woke up, insulated by an impenetrable silence, like after a heavy snow. You vaguely recalled being troubled about something, but couldn't remember what and concluded it must not have been very important.

The faces you saw were all the same, as opaque and flat and blank as stone. On the street, in the train, at the office, in the stores, you were shoehorned in with countless others, but all you felt was the pinch of a tight waistband and a slight pang of hunger.

All day, you floated as lightly and carelessly as a dust mote and chanted a mantra:

"thisisperfectpeacethisisperfectpeacethisisperfectpeace," though it was as meaningless as Muzak in your empty head.

***

Riding home on the train late tonight after a date, you wonder whether you should take that new job or wait for a better offer — or pack your bags and head for the coast — or stay here and move in with that special someone you were with this evening — Why did it take me so long to go out with someone that desirable? you think — then again, on the coast, there are all sorts of people who could easily become special to you, too —

or —

You don't sense that you're being watched by a man with strange eyes and hateful hands and a miscreant mind that has gone where no mind should ever go, who now slips off at your stop and follows you down the dark, deserted street.

Copyright 2003 by Phoebe Kate Foster

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