IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT | Wayne Kyle Spitzer-2
1015 Words
“What happened to him, anyway? My doppelganger, that is. David One.”
Naomi poured herself another glass of wine and sat back in her deck chair, which was angled toward the lake, as was mine.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I just really don’t. I’m having too good a time. Too nice an evening. I mean, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed basic conversation—basic human interaction. It’s like a high I don’t ever want to come down from.”
She tittered slightly as though remembering something funny before slowly coming down, slowly becoming reflective. “He just lost the instinct, I think. That’s all. He was always such a giant of a man, such a larger-than-life figure; so jovial, so combustible, but then the Flashback came and it just—it just sort of ate him alive. It ate his mind. I mean long before he decided to just wander into the night.” She took a draft of her wine and seemed to savor it, to relish it to her very core. “It’s not a good memory.”
And then she fell silent, too silent, and we just stared into the dark, into the abyss of the lake, nursing our glasses of Avalon Cabernet Sauvignon over the remains of the meal, listening to the fish jump.
“Okay, so you’ve told me about art school and your sojourns as first a groupie and then an escort; you’ve told me about the liaisons—the bad boys and married men and power brokers and political figures; all of whom shall remain nameless; but what you haven’t told me—what you haven’t even come close to telling me—is the one thing I actually want to know, which is a simple, clean, economically-unpacked: why?”
She looked at me pensively, thoughtfully, before shifting her focus to the sky and the Aurora Borealis-like lights, which had been omnipresent since the Flashback. “The short answer is, I don’t know—not really. I mean, I really don’t. I know that I’ve always sensed a ... a ...” I shifted my focus to the dock light—I’m not sure why, perhaps I’d heard a sound. “A kind of pulse; which runs through everything and everyone—like an undertow, as you said so yourself, like a current in a great, black river.” I watched the insects as they ticked off the glass. “A sort of dark animus whose methods are inscrutable but whose power is undeniable, and, also, that I’m attracted to—drawn to, like light to a black hole.” She appeared to follow my gaze. “And I guess sometimes I get sucked in—just completely absorbed—as with the oxycodone. Or with the married doctor. Just utterly overwhelmed.” She turned back to me and we looked at each other. “And I drown. I cease to exist.”
“Which is all the more reason to come with me to San Rafael,” I said. “Look, I know you don’t believe me—but I’m telling you: the encampment is there; or at least it was as of June, which is when I caught the broadcast. And we’re not talking some tent city full of human waste and dysentery, either, but a goddamn stronghold; one full of military people and first responders, hospital facilities, food stores—”
“Uh, hello? The aftershocks?” She grabbed the bottle (our second) and took a swig, having already depleted her glass. “I mean, do you really think those people are still there—all of them? You’ve seen just one small county—from Petaluma to here, by foot—try crossing the entire country on a motorcycle; and then tell me how many people you think there are. Besides, I’ve got everything I need right—”
“Until, when? Until the pantry runs out? Until you’ve got an abscess tooth—or even a whole mouthful—and you want to stick that g*n upside your head; or—say, your appendix fails? I mean, this isn’t sustainable—it never has been. It’s sheer, undiluted madness to think that; and pass me the bottle.”
And she passed me the bottle, after which I took a swig and poured the rest into her glass, then went to the cellar for more—returning with a Woodbridge Mondavi Red Blend to find her swaying to “Upside Down” by Diana Ross (playing from a battered little CD player I hadn’t even noticed she had) and letting a white strap of her halter slip—like a linguini, I thought, and sat down.
“Don’t thing I haven’t noticed it,” she said, slurring slightly, and added, “I see the way you look at me.”
I uncorked the bottle and filled my glass. “You’re a very beautiful woman,” I said—and sat the bottle between us—too hard, I think. “And a talented one. What would you expect?” I watched as she shimmied and did a little pirouette. “And I’m enjoying the conversation—more than you could know. You move beautifully, by the way. Like a cat.”
And then she attempted to spin again but only stumbled suddenly and fell smack into my arms; at which we just looked at each other, she with her boozy, breezy smile and me with an apparent moral dilemma: i.e., should I make a pass at her, like I wanted to, or should I just put her into bed and tuck her away safe (as though she were a simpleton, perhaps, or even a child) like, say, John-Boy Walton might. A dilemma I answered by taking her head in my hands and kissing her—heatedly, hot-bloodedly, restlessly—what a friend of mine used to call a “come f**k me” kiss; because she was no child. And I was no John-Boy.
And then we went to her room and lay together; drunkenly, sloppily, unspectacularly, and after a while, I dreamed: of lightning permeating everything and rain pounding the roof like nails, like hail; of wives and friends and girlfriends and my father—most of whom I hadn’t seen in years; of small, predatory dinosaurs, deinonychuses, with dark skin and wet backs—who held vigil around our bed like cultists, like priests, and who trilled, softly, faintly, as though they were meditating. As though they were communing.
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- Writer
