Note From Sleep

shallowed into a long, wide glade of patchy dust and grass. Trees clustered like wounds, masses of rock kept the low, burning sunlight at bay. The garage was bleach-smelling, cheap and dank. She picked up a pack of chewing gun, the cheap kind that denies you flavour on the 4th or 5th chew and greeted the man at the counter. He was wide, asymmetric with a dense, hard face. A cop loitered by the medicine cabinet, munching on a trail of beef jerky. A local bully, was what he looked like. One that pounced at the scream of danger and loitered with the locals whenever he could.

‘Pack of Chester, please.’ she said in a pale, nothing sort of tone. He stood then flopped back down with a pack of cigarettes from the cabinet. She looked at them with a wide glare, shocked at what she had asked for. (A pack of cigarettes now, Felicity? You’re 29 years old with kids, get a hold of yourself. Since we’re sinking to bad habits what about you gamble, too? Hard drugs? I hear heroin is a storm in Redoak.)

‘I.D, miss?’ He asked.

She wasn’t as pleasantly surprised as she had ought to be, as the man didn’t seem genuine and more likely was looking for a bone to pick, she thought. ‘Uh, no. Sorry. I’m actually, uh,’ she flicked a piece of hair behind her ear, displaying herself. ‘30 years old in about 5 weeks.’

‘I can’t sell you this without I.D. Photographic, mind you.’ He knocked his head very slightly toward the cop, who wasn’t paying attention,

The chewing gum was rattling a dance across her fingers. Irritated, she bowed slightly. ‘Fine, leave em.’ (Damn, right. And don’t you f*****g�") ‘What about spirits? Got any?’

‘Plenty, darlin. Pends what you’re looking for. Driving?’

‘Yes, but it’s not for me. It’s a gift for someone.’

The man was tossing glances to the cop. ‘To replace cigarettes? You gift cigarettes huh? Glad I’m not in your household, Happy holidays!’

‘No,’ she was flustered, talking quick and airily. ‘Just�" ‘, she rattled the chewing gum. ‘This.’

‘Dunno bout that missy, got ID? Easy to choke on this stuff.’ He smiled wetly, the cop chuffed a thin laugh and she left, pack of gum bulging in her back pocket. He stared at her from the moment she left the counter to the moment the car door slammed shut. She passed the cop a deflationary nod from her car, as he looked at her with a greasy reddened mouth from the window. What had been a peaceful, indulgent detour had become very frustrating. She was shaking faintly, and her eyes lolled, replaying what she should have said in a very sarcastic mind’s-voice.  (Idiot) She called herself, half expecting the cop to approach, gun in arm with a breathalyser kit and a white rubber glove.

She took a single piece of chewing gum and brought it to her lips, she held it a moment, brought it in and snapped the pellet in half with her front teeth. She pulled the end, it fell apart like an accordion of spider web, she hooked the whole piece into her mouth where she made each chew count.

Long, muscly and soaked. The gum wobbled as if to free itself from her impending tongue. The squelch of the chew was almost audible in the rusty silence of the pull-out by the garage. A sweaty sheen developed along her forehead, and she wasn’t sure that it was the doing of the temperature.

She flicked the ignition and set off along the long dusty trail, with what turned out to be 20 miles left to drive.

 

 

The Voice laughed. ‘Your memories are coming back, huh. Lucky for you.’

                Maybe not, she replied. Memories were a cruel thing. They were also few and far between. She recalled the man at the gas station, the cop and an uncomfortable dinner for two. She was still numb but was now shaking, particularly along her right arm. The voice was a bath and she was soaking in it, no escape.

                ‘So,’ He said. ‘What are we thinking?’

                She tried a smile for size but its cancelled. You know exactly what I’m thinking.

                ‘Absolutely I do. I need you to tell me what you know.’

                Why?

                ‘You gotta get your brain working if you’re going to have a chance of getting out of here, or even making it to the finish line.’

                The finish line?

                ‘The endgame. The point of it all. Don’t you remember the point of it all?’

                No.

                ‘That makes two of us.’

                A smile poked from one side of her mouth, then retracted. The evening was closing in over the sky, a rusty auburn was consuming the Oaktree. It hadn’t shifted an inch all night, maybe the winds were finished.

                ‘The winds pay their dues from the coast and bring with them a warning. When they finish, and the skies clear, you know that your time of solitude is done, and it’s time to move on.’

                What does that mean?

                ‘I don’t know. It came to mind, didn’t it? Your mind.’

                Yes, but from where?

                ‘You need to figure that out on your own, you have to get that head back to work. Maybe the endgame lies in the mystery of your past.’

                That much is clear. The point. The reason I’m here. How…

                ‘How you got here.’

                She slouched as far as she could on the chair but was suspended. The comfort of the leather had worn to the hardness of a metal sheet. The cold of the window was a perpetual uneasy whine. Her head was no longer in pain, but the rest of her was. The drugs had paid their dues and only God knew how long she had slept, or even how long she had sat in that forsaken room talking to the ghost in the shadows.

                She had decided: No, the Voice is not God. But what he was still a question. The Voice her mind conjured was thick, raspy and melancholic. It was a teacher’s voice. No, a mentor. The voice of a man who cared, deeply, but didn’t want it to let on. A man with an ego sizable to the love of his student.

                I wasn’t a fading, drunken wreck on that journey. At least, not for most of it. I wasn’t served.

                ‘And what does that mean?

                I was…

                ‘You have to remember.’

                Where I was going, why I was going, and what happened when I got there.

                The shadows in each corner of the room were foreboding, like enormous monstrous bodies hiding from the moonlight cutting in through the Oaktree. She tried and failed to sleep. Then, 4 hours past, she was cramped and in pain, and passed out.

 

               

               

Felicity Dahmer was asleep at the wheel. Luckily, the car had stopped. In a pocket carved from the split in a barrier, a flat glade of mud was framed by a signpost that read “WELCOME TO REDOAK COUNTY - A PLACE OF GOD, TRUST AND COMMUNITY” and beneath the sign was Felicity, drooling lumps of glut onto her legs. The bottle she was suckling was lying at her feet, sputtering its contents across the floor. 

She dreamed that she was driving. She met the cashier at the gas station, he laughed at her. The cop rose to a foreboding pillar before her, torch in one hand and a set of handcuffs jingling in the other. Her head was pounding painfully. Her dream-self experienced a similar pain, it seemed, as if to foreshadow a dreary morning. The dream-self seemed to go from the gas station to being wrapped in a dark film of grey, cutting off at a window, barred. She was in a wheelchair, looking up at a man, who couldn’t look down at her. “God, Felicity. F**k.” He seemed to cuss for a very long time, she didn’t like it and began to cry, “s**t, f*****g hell Felicity, look at you. F**k. Felicity, holy crap.” He didn’t look down at her, not once. Maybe he was a blind man. A wise, unpleasant blind man. The kind that dooms you to an unhappy marriage with the flick of a tarot card in a hot foreign country. “F**k, Felicity.”

“Who are You?” She asked, finally.

“F*****g hell Felicity!” He wailed and thundered a clenched fist against her right knee.

The sun greeted her in a fiery daze. The heat prickled her eyelids, guiding them open to view a wide, shallow expanse of Redoak County. Spires and bunting trailed along above a landscape of rock and foliage. Her kneecap was hooked onto the steering wheel, moisture built around her crotch, which she assumed hopefully was sweat. Her hair was crusted down her face, flakes of product fled it and gathered in tufts of bubbly white. She cooled herself into a lady-like manner of seating and held the steering wheel tight enough to almost feel it. The pain in her head announced itself, ‘I’m still here,’ it said. At her feet was a moot blotch of black against the grey of the fabric, the bottle lay in the centre with its cap folded up. Ah s**t, she thought, and picked it up. The smell was coppery and stale, not like what she had drank. Perhaps a misguided hybrid of B/O, alcohol and the salty smell of Redoak pouring in. Then, something else announced itself. A dull sting in her right hand. A scum trail of crusted red had built around an indent in whatever joint connected her thumb to her palm, two indents, specifically. She wetted her dry mouth and noticed the steely flavour of blood which remained tethered to her teeth. She muttered an incomprehensible curse and flicked the engine into ignition. 

“F**k, Felicity, look at you,” said the dream voice, which took refuge in her tired, pained mind, like a scab trying to heal but still excreting fluid. “Look at you, f**k.” For a moment she couldn’t tell where the dream-voice ended, and she wound out of the alcove and was pleased that the roads had been salted, she made her way along the commute road to Redoak, the town. It wasn’t often that Felicity, a radio show host, star of the infamously titled “Talk the Talk” which featured decidedly less talking than public sector music, got any further than the border of Alex County when not on business. 6 years ago, Yurok Gillespie of the band ‘Minutes to Midnight’ was holed in motel 4 miles out from Redoak, which she travelled to interview him. Since, Georgia has been her home and place of work. Work, used loosely by her and her listeners, who complain avidly about her “drole, unflattering and lazy” attitude. She was considered a celebrity, though she had little in the way of press attention, unless it her herself writing the articles. She could very easily shop and wander without so much as a ‘Oh, you’re Felicity from “Talk the Talk?” Perhaps a benefit of being vocally recognisable, rather than aesthetically. However, she wondered if a new town would be less forgiving. Maybe she’d be hounded. Maybe they’d smell the liquor on her breath as she left the car, ushering a new scandal and a period off-air. ‘Are you Felicity from “Talk the Talk?” Are you drunk?” The scene played out. The authorities surround her, one tugs the bandage on her upper arm.

“Better get this looked at, Felicity of Talk the Talk,” says a police officer.

“No, it’s fine,’ Felicity replies. “Trust me, it’s nothing.”

“Trust a drunk?” 

She doesn’t know how to reply. Her career crashes, she is exposed for�"

(Stop, Felicity. Stop it. You haven’t done anything wrong. Not yet, anyway, there’s still time. Pull out and turn home.)

In entering Redoak she was greeted by a gift shop on the brink of a junction. The salt in the air was palpable. The houses were quite different to those in Georgia, many side streets swept uphill to dusty streets lined with columns of detached homes, the American Dream comes to mind. The family dog barking on the lawn, the children out back playing ball, the housewife watering the plants in a nightgown as her husband wins the bread. The grotesque portrait of an ideal American family, one which Felicity had ran from her whole life. Redoak Elementary was a shithole, she knew from a distressed caller on her show one Teusday morning, though it didn’t look all that bad. She reached a stop light and eyed the glove compartment on the dashboard. She pawed for the handle, winced, and tugged. Inside, like a wrapped gift displayed under the Christmas tree, was a small folded note. On it, was a track of fine, golden print. She looked back to the road, an angry cluster had formed at a junction and she wound past ushering another verse of horn honking.

She was heading… where?

Towards the tree. She looked back at the note, then shot another glance back to the road. A tree sprouted at the island by the opening to a children’s play park. A tree tossing gargantuan tropical leaves across the shimmering oily road. Fruits hung like summer pebbles begging to be sucked dry.

‘Stay focused, you’re losing it,’ someone said. Who? she was alone in the car with no company but that of the angry commuter driving up her tail. She had to reach the tree and the fruit the Holy fruit

‘You’re waking up.’

 

‘What was on the note?’ asked the Voice. He was closer now, with a duller pitch, as if interested in what she had to say. It was colder now. The rain had turned to a moit slush and was crashing against the window with ferocity. The door was locked, the window was half open, and she was in pain. Sounds about right.

I can’t remember. Is that it? Is that the Finish Line? Whatever was on that note?

‘There’s no way of knowing. You can only remember.’

Remember. Remember. Remember.

What could have been on the note? “Pick up eggs + milk on way home, pls. Tnx, Xx”. She remembered receiving notes like that, but doubted she’d be reading one on the drive to Redoak, hours from home without reason. “MommY pleeze come home wee mis yoo luv from�"" No. that wasn’t it.

What do I do? What brings back memories? How do I remember? Do I go back to sleep?

‘If there was a handy memory switch you’d have used it. You’re pumped full of drugs, in pain and trauma. You’re going to remember in bursts, if at all.’ He sounded pissed, but she didn’t care.

Do you think that’s the finish line?

‘I think exactly what you think. That’s the point of this. And you wanna know what I think? I think that it’s a piece, but it’s not the puzzle.’

Maybe he was right. Maybe he was…

She slept.