CHAPTER ONE: Paradox/es
On the school bus maneuvering down the uneven roads on a late wintry afternoon, through small patches of farmland striped with suburban vicinities, sat the boy Trey. He was secluded in the aft-end of the bus, amidst the overwhelming clamor of romping teenagers. Two things were preoccupying his time as of now: one, the eyes of the bus driver that sporadically peered at the boy; and two, his notebook turned to a page with an obscure and somewhat filthy sentence, which, by the way, was written in his hand writing.
He glanced from his handwriting to the rearview mirror in which the piggy bus-driver’s eyes were able to be seen because of the mirror’s tilt. Slipping farther into his seat, he settled on the notepad his wary eyes. Invisible now from the ugly glimpses, more intently on the sentence he focused.
Stuck in the meditative state, Trey continued to peer even when his name was shouted numerous times by a girl named Janet. A girl whom Trey feared was stalking him during the school hours they had class together…
“Trey!”
The notepaper’s fingers pushed on the white of his eyes and plugged his ears. A black and smooth smoke obscured his peripheral sight, and his pained eyes focused only on this sentence both small and disgusting. Consciously, to the boy this served no point; he could manage conceiving, a whole day, thoughts on why it would ever matter, but nothing ever clung as an answer certifiable. Relate this one might to quandaries of the aftermath of death – it’s a certain tangible intangibility. To discover the other side of death, one only needs to die. But how to achieve the gateway to enlightenment of this practice he couldn’t comprehend. He feared he never would.
“Trey! Your stop…”
The fingers let go. Receding to the back of his eyes again were the smoke and the pain. His stomach gulped as he analyzed the tilting of fuzzy sunflower heads his way. Among stupid plants… a god. The faceless eyes chipped away at his flesh, and for a moment stood in their sights unrelenting.
“Trey, this is your stop. I think you might have fallen asleep,” kindly now.
“No I didn’t. I was just… eh… finishing some work and stuff,” lashed an irritated Trey.
“Okay, well, see ya.”
He wrinkled the middle of his brow, looked at Janet and said, “Err… okay.”
Picking up his backpack, through the miserable aisles of stinky children he went as dripping from his chin mechanically was “Sorry” whenever, accidentally, he touched one of their backpacks leaning in his way. When out onto the cold asphalt he stepped, he sighed and cringed reminiscing what just happened.
To the far west, the sun was a flashlight faintly beaming beneath an overcast quilt. Even during the winter in Trey’s hometown, New Berlin, Wisconsin, lately rare were overcast skies such as these, so he took the time meandering about the neighborhood to savor its powdery, grey presence. Usually, the sky was a harsh, bright blue that coalesced so flawlessly with the sharp wind. Flying from the side of the road and settling into the grass, the gravel rhythmically sang Trey a lullaby, and into another state of mental stillness he fell. At the ground he most of the time stared into, but occasionally he glanced to the horizon for the sky’s new allure.
Emerging within his skull ten minutes or so after the excursion began was Janet to cause more disturbances. The gravel stopped singing. She insisted on carving misshapen self-portraits on the dark walls of his skull, sometimes bumping into his raisin-wrinkled brain. The fracas forced Trey numerous times to pause and wince. It came and passed and came and passed. When she was finished, instead of calmly exiting through the nearest ear, she decided to leave a commemorative headache (along with her caricature) by pushing forcibly out the front of Trey’s forehead.
He began to return home now with the massive migraine he carried along that no lullaby could cure.
And out of the deepest of his melodramatic orb of despair, an odd urge he felt to look across the street. Some magnetic pull was pushing the poles of his eyes, which thrust his face as well to the left. There stood a house he hadn’t ever seen before; it was surely not there when he passed by ten minutes ago. Because his eyes were fixed on the ground at the time he passed the house, he considered that he just didn’t see it, but that wasn’t rational either; the area where the house stood, he passed on many occasions during the summer. It was a plain-white 20th century Chicago bungalow. Rotting flora graced the long front porch sheathed in weathering paint, and the closed drapes hid whatever was inside. Despite the slightly unkempt condition about the house nothing was truly remarkable, so Trey didn’t understand why by this manifestation his eyes were so fascinated.
In the temple like a baby in its mother’s uterus, the migraine kicked. Trey wanted to give birth to the overgrown migraine and leave it on the sidewalk for someone else to take care of and eventually throw away as well. Pounding was anywhere he touched, it kicked! it kicked! He must have felt, Get it out!
Fists clenched unwillingly and he slowly, but compulsorily graveled his right fist into his left wrist, as hoping to break some teeth his mouth clamped down sharply. Dissonance to satisfy the dissonance. What he needed was another tonal section, but something more powerful than the gravel.
Janet arrived. Trey blockaded his ear holes and reinforced his forehead. A smirk, rare to be seen in public on this face, attested his victory over the brutality.
So the remainder of the walk back home, Janet continued with her artfully awful functions; the engraving of sentences and words she said, and the refining of her mediocre portrait these included. Clanks and jangles resounded from the inner confines and gave off small headache-inducing tremors that dissipated as fast as they arrived. By such a self-indulgent artist Trey would usually be bothered more than this, but as he considered it the only therapy to the terrible baby-kicking migraines, he persisted. Trey had obscure quandaries of Janet ever since their encounter at the beginning of the school year.
His stomach, back when the skies were a deep sea-blue and the roads reflected a tender ambience during the afternoon, resided near his feet; it was the morning before the first day of senior year. Toddling up the hill toward the bus stop early, Trey wanted to ease his stomach by sitting, swallowing and yawning before stepping on the outlandish tiles of school again, not to mention the rubbery bus. An extra ten-to-fifteen minutes were at his disposal. Off to the orange sky and pink clouds he stared, and attempted to forget about the future and the past and the repeating of histories. Nonetheless, travelling at a steady and fast pace to the stop was the beast of his dreams, and when the stew of anxiety inside of him, boiling, was beginning to cool off, something turned up the heat again and he began to sweat. The ten-to-fifteen minutes in a couple seconds passed by and he had to step inside the monster ravaging the suburban scenery within the next thirty, which were reduced now to only a few milliseconds.
He was the first person on the bus. Except this year. Some imposter stole his seat from the last. “Goddammit” was whispered to himself as he walked by glaring. With her hazel eyes the unnamed girl looked at him and casually gazed back outside from the large yellow creature’s digestive track. Opposite from his former seat was one that he felt was second best at least, and he sat there stashing his airy backpack to the side nearest the window. Brown hair extended to the shoulder of her olive-green tank top; that was the only feature besides the frothy tan of the side of her face he could spot as she leaned toward the passing trees. Leaning the opposite way was her backpack; it would be falling in a couple of seconds Trey supposed. When it did, he snatched quickly another look at her: she had a small pointy nose, and delicate wrists. After a short presentiment of Unnamed turning her face to his own, he suddenly turned to the window as she had been.
“Sorry, one of my notebooks slipped under your seat. Could you–” she said in a hushed voice.
“Yeah,” he picked it up spotting her name.
Janet.
For reasons unclear to him, this event he remembered more clearly than ever – as if it held some type of importance. It occurred to Trey that having to keep her locked in his head would become an annoyance soon. Right now, her existence was trivial, as was the strange house he nearly forgot about (but even as the house was summoned, he managed keeping the migraine-stopper included, too). Musings crossed his mind all of a sudden. Perhaps something of the house, tomorrow after school, would be included his notebook.
Trey slipped in through the open front door of his house, into the foyer. To the right was his mother, Marla, lying on the reclined chair watching the television. She was a private practice lawyer, so some days she stayed at home a few days to rest after grueling arguments in court, most of which she won. Occasionally, he asked how the case went, but stopped doing so recently as the constant queries he found to be growing redundant, after the relentless “Yes” lightly sprinkled with “No”. He didn’t care much anyways. When she heard the door close, she tilted her head to the right and looked as far as she could even though she still couldn’t manage seeing Trey, currently taking off his shoes.
“Hey, how’s your day?” in a lazy but still comforting tone she said, as he made his way into the living room.
“Pretty good,” sighed the boy, slumping softly into the black leather sofa positioned next to the adjacent wall.
After a moment of hearing the rest of what the weather man had to say, she turned down the volume and continued the chat, “Well, what did you do?”
“Eh, not much really. I got a good grade on my physics test. An A.”
“Ah good. D’you study?”
“Nah.”
“Oh, I’ve got lasagna in the oven.”
“I can smell it. Smells good,” Trey nodded and radiated a brief smile.
“Should be done in about thirty minutes.”
“’Kay.”
Even with his socks on, the wood floor to his sensitive feet was too cold, so he reclined the sofa and leisurely watched the news with dimming eyes. Only in this reclusive house at the bottom of the hill did he find himself calm and safe. During the school day, the average number of words spoken, figured Trey, would be a resounding five or six. At home, though, he felt at ease more often to speak, and the only person to speak to, besides himself, was his mother.
Geoff, his father, had been diagnosed with cancer when Trey was only a year of age, and to prevent the family of future dejections, he abandoned them. Marla didn’t express to Trey Geoff’s life. Whether the ignorance was because she followed Geoff’s wishes of protecting the boy or just simply hating the man for his kind abandonment, Trey wasn’t sure. One day when Trey was only in the fourth grade, up his mother’s shelved closet he climbed out of some steadfast sensation that something subsisted in the area that the base of the top shelf hid. After the short adventure, he found, from the era of analog recording, several small cassette tapes and a voice recorder. Marked in sharpie on the name label of one tape was the name Geoff. Down the towering closet leaped Trey and his supplies and immediately he plugged it into the wall and listened.
A man with deep, scratchy voice said, “Hi honey, I know I told you last week about my cancer.” – cough – “I just didn’t tell you that it’s not going to get better. I should’ve. Guess I just wanted there to be a little hope in denial. I love you. And our son, of course.” – cough – “So I don’t want my son to have to be around… when… the time comes. Please don’t hate me for this.”
Tightening around the stagnant air was the little boy’s throat. Into the spot he found them he gently put everything back with eyes opening wide and forehead wrinkling narrow. Still, Marla was sleeping on the recliner, so he awoke her and informed that because of the humidity that summer brought he would be taking a shower. He sloppily departed on all fours like a puppy up the stairs. As soon as the water of the shower head ricocheted with the tiling of the bathtub, he let out his own unhappy showers.
But that was eight years ago. Since then, not once has Trey cried as he felt everything else by comparison was miniscule. Emotions are measurements are concrete crumbs are stones are banal. Going cross-eyed with exhaustion, his eyes he finally closed with his backpack still on and the notebook his teddy-bear for now.
His dream:
Of one plane plume
Riverribbon shrank narrower
Down, up
On horizons, one for me
Eye of you eyes invisible edges
For me
My eyes eye only a narrowing ribbon
But eyes of you see seas unseen, for me
Faded your figure fine, invisible
Horizons wore it
And me from you, too
Saw sunup…up, we both
At once, pinpoint:
Of time
Of sightlines
Ah, vaguely, grasping hands
Written by youormeoryou;
Written by meoryouorme:
Meet me beneath sunface
And westward go
“Trey!” came a voice some thirty minutes later.
~
A temporary grave Janet arose from, pulling off the ghost-sheet, and stretching lethargic, unfeeling limbs, slowly and reluctantly gliding around the circumference of her bedroom, cornering the once-heavenly, now-evil-tempting mattress. No creaks resounded beneath her weightless feet. And even with eyes closed, she elegantly shifted away from any forthcoming obstacles, and into the sleepy hallway made a perfect entrance.
Directly to the left of her bedroom door on the adjoining wall was her parents’ room, closed, and a few feet down the hall was her destination, the bathroom – as soon as she arrived, her nightclothes cascaded from her soft skin in one quick motion. As she rinsed off the weariness and bore in mind that today was the first day of senior year she remained still as calm as possible. Even during the summer she woke up in the early morning, before her parents even, not for any reason of schedule or work for that matter, but simply for contentment of doing something. But today was a schedule, as the rest of the school-year would be, she supposed.
Last year, she traversed each morning and afternoon back and forth to a different school, which was only fifteen to twenty miles away from her present-day one, going by the name of Waukesha West. For joint reasons, her parents felt it necessary to leave the pseudo-city-life, and instead go to an expanding suburban town with a population around 44,000 (at least according to some census she retrieved and believed it to be recent), New Berlin. Reasons included the following: a side-by-side townhouse was their residence and the contiguous neighbors both at night and day often lead loud orchestrations of noise; much closer in New Berlin, compared to Waukesha, the parents’ occupation sites stood, which meant less gas usage per day; where the side-by-side was situated was in a busy district that was perhaps slightly dangerous, according to the paternity, nonetheless. Back at Waukesha West, quite a sum of friends she had amassed over the years to “hang out” with both off and on school hours, so their presence she pined for as they disappeared along with the school, of course, when the summer took over.
When she finished washing up, she took to the tiles and wrapped up in a warm towel, wiping the waterlogged mirror. She stared into her hazel eyes and casually studied the face adorned in lightly-tanned skin, perfection she hadn’t noticed but others often had. Her clothes, involuntarily conveyed and set atop the toilet seat, stuck slightly to her humid body, and as she was fitting her head of long brown tresses through the top of her olive-green tank top, from the unseen wall of her parents’ bathroom (which connected directly to their bedroom) echoed squeaks, followed a few seconds later by a chanting of rapid water.
Tiptoeing down the stairs, the ghostly girl then made herself comfortable in the heavenly white loveseat of the dining room, while a list of AP homework gazed into her. Being only the first day of September, she was already finished with all of what she was assigned by mid-July. Tasks included reading a tome of a novel, drawing a number of pictures, and taking notes on an introduction of a textbook. A diligent worker she was. At first blurry appearance, this lovely shape cluttered in what might seem to be a cloud was the connotation of perfection. The clock across the room read: 7:15. Thirty minutes or so remained until she would wait in her driveway for the bus to arrive and relinquish her in the front of the enormous (not to mention the incessant renovations paid with veiled funds and doomed classes along with their teachers) and acclaimed New Berlin West Middle/High School. For more than a year, the benefits of driving to school she had taken for granted, but this year, due to her inability to pay the parking fee when the brief time of registration had made it necessary, that ended.
Silently, just as before, from the cloud she took wing and into the kitchen to prepare a not-uncommon hearty morning meal of scrambled eggs. A sky dyed orange and blotched with pink cotton balls greeted her outside the window, and she pondered the numerous other people also staring at the same canvas. What if she was the only one?… – No, if present at this pinpoint in time was but one impossibility, it would be that thought. No less than two people were feeding their eyes the skyline.
A few seconds later, she discovered, bewildered, no more egg remnants, and with that her steps she retraced into the dining room and glanced back at the clock. In even more shock than the quickly vanishing eggs, she nearly fell from her pedestal of angelic soaring to see that thirty minutes by the long hand had been devoured.
Setting aside her suspicion, she exited the front door leaving the drama that happened all the while one of her two parents continued their snooze and the other finished showering up. Awaiting her outside was the same tangerine canvas of speckled, pink impastos, if not altered in miniscule ways by time and the atmospheric forces. Underneath the sheet of sky, the bus was coolly arriving and she stepped inside taking a seat near the end. Like a boat, many times the bus turned until at last, someone else mounted the stairs and showed a brief spark of amazement to see her there. He took the seat across hers.
And had begun a conversation.
“That’s strange, I always used to be the first person on the bus. But not just that, you’re sitting in the same seat that I used to sit in.”
“Oh jeez, I’m sorry. Do you want me to get up? I can go to another seat. I knew something like this would happen”, she laughed with a tinge of reproach.
“No, no. It’s okay,” said Unnamed situating himself, continuing, “I’m Trey, by the way.”
“I’m Janet.”
“What grade?”
“Senior now… it seems kind of pointless that my parents decided to move to New Berlin before my last year of high school,” she said rolling her eyes, nevertheless smiling still.
“Cool, I’m a senior, too. Want to check our schedules to see if we got any classes together?”
Her consent was given and they shuffled through their belongings to fish out schedules that were mailed during the summer break. The comparison resulted in their mutual awareness of four out of seven classes together.
“That’s great!” Trey beamed, “For some of them, we can give each other answers for homework before school, ey?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
Neither noticed numerous other students had entered the bus, just as enthusiastic, but in dissimilar ways, of returning to school.
The ghost-girl, so quick to reach out from her pre-school casket of subtle shyness, studied Trey’s face as humming nothingness spewed out of his bottomless cavity, luckily none of which required reply. A modest appearance charmed the boy with unbothered, short brown hair, the same color of eyes, and a tan from summer yard work, not to mention the drab apparel. But even so, his enchanted energy didn’t require a pompous fashion statement to soak his watermark.
Just noticing now the bus almost completely full of students, Janet suppo
~
Apologies I lend to you valued reader; quite sorry I am for the inconvenience of two separate events occurring at one pinpoint in both time and place. Such an occurrence, or occurrences, one cannot meekly expect to ensue in such paradoxical manners without any sort of explanation. And with that, I interrupt the account, or accounts, that I have documented, to perhaps suggest one. Informed by my advisors to do so, I cannot explicitly spell out what this explanation might be. But I wrote “suggest” in that sentence, not “explicitly spell out”, so no harm done.
But this is a cliffhanger I’ve crafted so conveniently at the end of the chapter. Please also be aware that the abruptly disrupted sentence in Janet’s chronicle will continue as soon as this informative intermission has ended. Both the intermission and the narrative will continue in the next chapter.
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