Shadows Out of Time

The night it happened, sleet and freezing rain had turned half of Oklahoma into a fairy wonderland, if said wonderland had been imagined by Edward Hopper. I awoke in my car in a haze of tequila and beer and bewilderment. All I knew for sure was the time, three a.m., because something, probably my face, had slammed into the dash clock, and now it stared back at me, as blinking and confused as I was. I couldn’t remember much else. Didn’t even recall driving away from the bar, let alone making it from Norman to downtown OKC, evidently on booze control.

The airbag on my two-decade-old Saturn didn’t deploy, but at least I’d remembered my seatbelt. Getting the damn thing unlatched was difficult. Finding the door handle was just as hard. Then, stumbling and sliding away from my heap that now appeared a full foot shorter than I remembered, I could see that I’d bounced off a Nissan Titan and run headlong into a streetlight. Old school, real metal, not that breakaway stuff. Doubt if I even dented the pole. But the huge concavity in my hood looked like Jaws had made an appearance, and my windshield was smashed to shit. The hole where the window used to be seemed to grin at me with shiny blue and green teeth. I stared at my once clear hope of shelter with a kind of confused certainty, desperate ennui, my thoughts strangely sober, my instincts decidedly drunk.

Sleet continued to shovel down out of the ether, and I understood all I had between me and the elements was my USC windbreaker. No hat, no gloves. The tips of my fingers felt like glass. Wind wailed past streetlights, around red brick corners, and the chains on a nearby post office flagpole chattered like rattling bones. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine those two poor boys King Richard murdered in their tower, maybe that song by Gordon Lightfoot, the one about reading minds and a castle dark and a ghost with chains upon its feet.

The survivor bound in filial obligation for some term…

I hadn’t been feeling myself for years. Not since Dad was diagnosed. How long had I been dragging those chains? Just how much of a ghost had I become? Some days it felt like Dad and I had traded places. Didn’t know whether I was coming or going. Right now I really didn’t know. I didn’t recognize anything. It had to be downtown. About the only place with brick buildings and the old-style streetlights, but something was offkilter. And it wasn’t just residual drunk. Didn’t they mothball the downtown post office back in the Eighties? Fuck, and that’s what you’re worried about? Your car is totaled. It’s three in the morning. It’s sleeting. And you don’t have a clue where you are.

I reached in my pocket for my phone, but it wasn’t there, only a handful of tiny tequila one-shots. Fuck, I must have stopped and shitface-shopped at some point. Bet I left my phone there too. I rummaged around the Saturn. Nothing. Just round-edged jewels of glass and blood. I was lucky to be alive. Of course lucky was a relative term at this point. No car, no phone, not a soul around, no shelter from the storm, pain in my forehead, in my back and ribs, lost…Well, when in doubt, start walking. At least that’s what my feet said, so I listened, hoping that actually moving might warm me a little. Alas, that’s when the sleet turned into heavy, blinding flurries, and the lights up and down the block began flickering, then went out entirely.

I trudged ahead, spelunking my way through snow, through the cavern labyrinth made of brick and steel, neon and chrome, wondering what sort of mammoth might roam this technotundra. I wondered what my ancient ancestors might have thought, lost between one multinational glacier and another. Ancestors, parents, father…With nothing tangible to hold onto — the street ahead of me was gone, the buildings themselves might as well have been cliff faces — all my mind had to cling to was a drunken sense of loss I didn’t want to think about, but couldn’t let go.

I’d been awakened this morning — no, yesterday morning by now — by the sound of wind howling its way under our longsuffering, rotting window casings. That, and a sad call from my sister. Later, after I’d hung up and headed in to work, lines from the upcoming production kept running through my head. They ripped back and forth like a wood file through particle board. Like building a set. Like tearing one down.

But, you must know, your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his…