The Last Night of Autumn

            I didn’t want to be here, but I was stuck, temporarily. I was lying on the gray couch in the living room, which was just slightly too short to be able to sleep on without my legs dangling off the side. I had my arm draped across my eyes, but the blinking lights on the Christmas tree were none-the-less irritating, almost painful in the receding wake of my hangover. The lights seemed mocking to me. The lights suggested festivities and happiness which would not come this year, as they had so rarely ever come. Christmas lights were not going to fix what was broken.  

I had the television turned down to a low grade hum. Voices faded in and out. I had several movies recorded onto a VHS tape which I had already seen several times: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Rebel Without a Cause, and Citizen Cane. I had put the tape in and turned down the volume in an effort to help me relax. One of the dogs licked my bare ankle. I opened an eye and watched the scruffy black terrier, Maya, regard me with oil colored eyes and a runny nose. Maya snorted, and whined, and trotted over to the other end of the room.

I noticed my mother standing at the end of the hallway leading into the living room. She had been watching me. Her eyes were red rimmed and puffy. Broken glass, and shattered ceramic glaze glittered along the baseboards and in the corners where she had earlier broken dishes and glasses against the walls and floors. Her hair was matted and oily. I could see her pale scalp beneath her matted hair. Her eyes were bloodshot. She held a bowl of weed and a lighter in her hand and an empty pint of Skyy vodka in the other hand. She walked forward a few steps and set down the empty blue bottle on the ledge next to the stairs.

“Hey,” she said slowly.

“Hey, what’s up? How are you?” I said, trying to be tactful.

“Fabulous, darling,” she said, imitating the main characters from the show Absolutely Fabulous. She was trying to be ironic, but as she spoke, she choked a little and her voice cracked slightly. She wasn’t really slurring her words, but she was speaking slowly, and deliberately. It was apparent to me that she was putting forth effort to keep from crying. As I looked at my mother, I felt a tight tug in my chest and my stomach turned a little. It physically hurt me to see her like this, but I was also anxious. I wasn’t sure where this conversation was heading. I sat up on the couch and as I did my head swelled and became sickeningly lightweight. I felt a whoosh-boom in my head as the Christmas lights blinked on and off. For a moment I thought I was going to pass out. Then I recovered in a few seconds and wondered how long this night would last. I wondered if I could just drink myself to sleep and forget all of this, but somehow I had the feeling I wasn’t going to be able to fade into background tonight.

“Fabulous,” my mother said again. “Where the fuck is your father? That asshole, he’s probably out with his slut, whoring it up. Do you know where the fuck he is? If I find out you knew and didn’t tell me I’ll kick your little ass. You fucking men, I swear, fucking pigs.” She sneered and took in a breath to continue in this way, but I interjected.

“Mom, you know I don’t know where he is. He’s staying in my apartment in Cardinal City while I look for another used car. I couldn’t tell him not to stay at my place after you all let me stay here after the accident.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. She scraped the metal wheel on the lighter against the flint stone until a butane fed flame appeared and she drew the flame into the multi-colored glass bowl as she inhaled. She started coughing and nearly dropped the bowl. “Oh, fuck,” she choked as she bent over coughing. “Fucking ashes, this bowl is cashed. Fuck!”

“Are you ok?” I asked as she recovered.

“Yeah,” she croaked. “Oh god Elliot, what the fuck am I going to do? Fifteen fucking years of marriage, and now this shit. Once a cheater, always a cheater. I got chlamydia from the last whore he stuck his prick into and I won’t fucking put up with that shit again. He told me it would never happen again. Elliot, you better not ever be a fucking cheater.”

“You know I’m not.” I was fucked up in a lot of ways, but I had never cheated. I never wanted to. I guess I was sentimental. I wanted to believe in something.

Headlights flashed through the living room windows from a car pulling into the driveway. The dogs started barking and running in circles, their claws and the pads of their paws clicked and slid comically and ridiculously across the beaten-in wood floors.

My mother looked stunned for a few moments. She was anxious. She wanted to know where my father had been for the past few days. She wanted some miracle explanation, but deep down she knew there wouldn’t be one. We both knew. I felt nauseas. I hoped they were both too exhausted to begin another bout of screaming and breaking things, as had happened a few days ago.

The sound of keys scraping and jangling and opening the door filled the house. The sound of the keys and the barking dogs seemed to hang suspended in the air as if time had begun to stretch. The Christmas lights blinked on and off.

My father stepped through the door, onto the foyer of the split level, into the midst of the barking and jumping and whining dogs. My mother looked down on him and as he closed the door the dogs calmed a bit. The dogs snorted and whined. The wagging tails of the larger dogs struck the walls loudly.

“Where have you been for the last few days?” My mother, Myriam regarded him stiffly from the top of the steps.

Winston responded slowly, “I’ve been out partying with my buddies from work.”

His voice was raspy, but thin and tense. His voice sounded like a cheap, out of tune guitar string that has begun to rust.

My mother replied, “Out partying for three days? Why didn’t you call? You couldn’t call?”

My father started climbing the stairs as he answered, “I’ve just been out partying.”

I regarded my father as he emerged from behind the ledge and reached the top of the stairs. He looked like shit. He was a stocky man with broad shoulders. He had begun to put on a lot of weight over the last few years, but he was intimidating. His mullet fell down to his chin and strands of unkempt hair were clinging to his bushy Fu Manchu style goatee. I had never seen him that fucked up before. His eyes were the color of a bruised, red, Granny Smith apple. He turned his head and gazed at me from some numb, distant place. Then he sat down on the other end of the too-short couch.

“Where the fuck were you Winston? Huh? Little Winnie?” My father hated that nickname.

“I was out partying.” He repeated that phrase as if he were a POW resisting interrogation.

“Were you fucking some other cunt Winnie? Were you out sticking your prick into some other whore’s cunt?”

“I was out partying.”

My mother stood frozen. Winston wouldn’t refute her accusation. He just kept repeating himself. My mother’s tone changed.

“Winston, were you sleeping with another woman?” This was her last effort to save a piece of what she already knew was broken.  

Winston sat silently.

He just sat there.

He stared at the wall.

The Christmas lights blinked on and off.

My mom tried one last time, almost whispering, “Winston?”

He continued to sit as if paralyzed, and finally responded, “I was just out partying.”

My mom’s eyes began to get watery, but her face reflected injury and rage. “You can’t stay here Winston. I don’t care where the fuck you go, but you can’t stay here.”

My father looked over at me with those vacuous, bloody-red, glassy eyes. “Can I stay at your place Elliot?”

“No dad, you can’t. I’m moving back in.”

The Christmas lights blinked on and off.

            My father looked stunned. He sat motionless on the couch. He swallowed hard and blinked. The dogs whimpered and walked slowly from one person in the room to another with their heads down, sniffing and snorting. I sat on the other end of the couch. I tensely waited for my father to start yelling and screaming, but I was surprised by how silent he was. I think he was too stunned, too high, and too tired to be angry.

            My stomach churned and growled. I felt nauseous and hungry all at once. I was beginning to ooze sweat from my palms, but a chill ran through me and a clammy shiver ran from the nape of my neck down my spine and arms. My head throbbed from my lingering hangover.

            “Where am I going to stay?” Winston seemed to ask of no one in particular.

            “I don’t give a damn where you stay, little Willie. You should of thought of that before you stuck your little prick into that whore of yours.”

            Winston looked pallid and defeated. I had never seen him quite like this before. It seemed to me as though he was too tired to care much anymore about losing Myriam. I didn’t care much either. I felt numb. The end of my parents’ marriage was something I had been anticipating for a long time. Mostly, I was angry at myself for letting myself be caught in the middle of this.

            “How does it feel, little Willie, huh?”

            A glimmer of realization seemed to click on in Winston’s mind once Myriam made that last remark. A small spark of anger glinted out from his ruddy, watery eyes. He realized that he needed to leave right away. He turned towards me stiffly, with that even tone of voice he used when he was suppressing his anger.

            “I need to pick up my things from your apartment, Elliot.”

            “Alright, we’ll drive over there.”

            I stood up from the couch and then walked over to the dining room table. I pulled my juniper-green, denim, Carhardt jacket from a chair-back and then put it on. I took my keys out of my pocket. I stared out into the cold blackness beyond the sliding glass doors. I watched the lights from the Christmas tree reflected on the glass as they blinked on an off. I stood in that spot, with my back turned towards my parents, with my hands on a chair-back, staring into the blackness, the blinking lights reflected on the glass, and into the ghost of my own reflection. I was reminded of a poem by Jim Morrison from his book, Wilderness. A friend, Gene, had given me that book after my break-up with Marianne. He was a punk-rocker, with a hippie streak from Philadelphia who had spent a few years surfing and dealing dope at the outer banks. He had book-marked this particular poem:

            “It’s no fun/ to feel like a fool-when your/ baby’s gone. A new axe to my head:/ Possession… A dog howls & whines/ at the sliding glass door (why can’t I be in there?) A cat yowls./ A car engine revs & races against the grain-dry/ rasping carbon protest…”

            The dogs in the house always whined and howled at the sliding glass doors. Sometimes they ran head-long into the glass trying to go either in, or out. Right now, I really wanted out of this situation, but there wasn’t any way out. I was stuck here until I found a cheap jalopy I could cobble together well enough to get me back-and-forth to work.

            “Are you ready Elliot?” I heard Winston ask.

            “Yeah, I’m ready.” I was ready to get this over with. I wanted to sit down in my own apartment, away from my parents, and smoke a cigarette, listen to some music, and close my eyes. I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do once I got to my apartment in Cardinal City.

            My father and I walked down the creaking steps with the dogs scrambling around our feet as we reached the foyer. The water-damaged, parquet wood floors were covered in tufts of dog and cat hair. Bits of cigarette ash and dirt were stuck to the piles of dog hair. The varnish had been worn off in spots by too much exposure to water. My mother liked to leave the doors open when it rained. She would throw wet towels onto the floors in front of the doors, but the floors would still get soaked.

            “Don’t come back, Willie, you asshole. Elliot, don’t you dare bring him back here. I know you fucking men like to stick together. Get out and don’t come back Willie.” Myriam choked out those last few sentences before turning around and walking back into her bedroom.

            We stepped out into the dim, foggy, December night. Nearly all of the leaves had fallen from the tress, except for some of the white oaks, whose brown, colorless, and rasping leaves still clung to gray branches. My parents’ house sulked at the bottom of a cul-de-sac in a bland, suburban neighborhood. It was an eyesore. Knee-high grass grew in patches where there were a countless variety of overgrown vegetation and weeds. An old washing machine sat outside, beside the house which my mother was keeping, because she wanted to make a sculpture out of it. She also planned to plant flowers in the wash bin. So far, she had only removed the outer panels, so the interior of the machine rusted in the shaggy grass, next to the house.

            My father and I walked to the top of the driveway and got into the twenty year old Toyota Camry. The interior of the car was similar to the interior of the house. Dog hair and cigarette ash were everywhere.

            My father and I, defeated, started off towards Cardinal City into the blurry, wet night. We sat silently in the vehicle as I drove. The sound of the worn down windshield wipers sliding across the mist speckled windshield made a grating, depressing sound. I had never been anywhere so silent. The car felt like a coffin that the two of us had buried ourselves in, the black night, a universe of sod covering the grave of our relationship.

            I pulled up to the back lot of the old, run-down, Victorian apartment house. I didn’t say anything. Winston got out of the vehicle, and walked up to the shitty efficiency to gather up his belongings. I sat in the damp cold, my mind blank. I was gripping the wheel, poised like a cornered dog, waiting to get hit. I almost began to feel pity for him, as I sat in there, but I couldn’t quite manage it. I could always hear him in my head.

            “Elliot, you’re a good for nothing piece of shit. You’ll never amount to anything. You little shit. You fucking asshole! Why do you have to be such a loser?”

            I could always hear him in my head, screaming at me, leering at me. A part of me hated him. A part of me hated myself for feeling that way. This shitty efficiency was my way of escaping after 19 years under my parents’ roof. I was desperately clawing my way out.

            Winston got back into the car and said nothing. I drove him to the convenience store on the college strip, where I would never belong, and handed him some quarters to make a call on the pay phone. A bum snickered at him as he stood next to the pay phone with a brief case and brown grocery bag filled with clothes. I pulled out of the lot, grinding my teeth, gripping the wheel with white knuckles, and staring straight ahead into cold, wet, black night. Christmas lights blinked and shined from the windows of closed, empty stores. People stumbled out of warm bars into the slick quiet shine of lights glittering off of wet asphalt.  

            I tried to sleep when I got home.

           

*          *          *          *          *

           

            I opened my eyes and looked towards the cracks of light peeking through the sheets of aluminum foil I had taped to the windows. I didn’t know if it was morning, or early afternoon. Motes of dust floated through the beams of dingy light which illuminated articles of clothing strewn across the floor, odd pictures, and posters on the walls. I closed my eyes again, but I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I didn’t sleep much these days. I heard the creaking of footsteps through the ceiling above me. I heard the sliding glass doors opening on the floor above my room. I did not hear the doors close. I did not hear the pads and claws of the dogs’ feet scrambling and clicking across the parquet floors. I did not hear the dogs whimpering, whining, or barking. I heard the footsteps pass from the floor onto the back deck. The dogs should be moving, making noise, but the rest, after the footsteps, was silence.

            After a few moments, I thought I could hear the slick, sluggish ooze of blood, and bits of bones, through the walls. If I thought such a sound existed, I was thinking in that moment that I could hear it. I began to sweat. I felt a sharp pain in my chest, as if from heartburn, or as if from a needle being slowly pushed from the inside of my heart, out through my chest. I felt for the needle sticking out of my chest, but I could only feel my heart palpitating arrhythmically. Such thoughts of hearing blood in the walls, of expecting needles to emerge from my body, were nonsensical. I should not be thinking these things, but I was thinking them. I felt as if I wanted to rip away from a part of myself that I did not want to be affixed to; the part in my mind that imagined hearing blood in the walls, the part of my mind that waited for needles to rise out of my heart. I noticed that I had soaked my sheets in my own sweat.

           

            Had I fallen back to sleep for a time?

           

            The beams of light cutting into the room through the edges of the aluminum foil had moved, and they illuminated a dark object sulking in a slick pool of black liquid. I held my breath and stared at the thing on the floor. I moved my head glacially, and I held my breath for as long as I could. I waited for my eyes to focus on the thing. I began to breathe imperceptibly through my slightly opened mouth. For a while, I thought I could see the thing breathing, but once I had calmed myself down a little by convincing myself that the thing did not see me, I realized that it was not living. The swelling and receding I thought I witnessed were figments of my terror playing tricks on my mind.  It was dead. It was a dead animal. Its matted fur gave off a rank smell.

            I could no longer lie in my bed. My ear hurt from lying on the sweat-dampened pillow for too long. I tried to force myself to get up. I tried to force myself to confront the dead thing that seemed to rise and swell like the tides of some brackish bay where small, oil covered waves of dead flesh and rotten blood, lapped an ashen, crushed-carbon shore. My thoughts of the blood-sea made me nauseas. The dead thing on the floor was not a sea of dead things and there were no seas anywhere where dead things washed ashore in tides as endless as the days.

             I should not be thinking of these things. I should be riven from the part of my mind which conceived such thoughts, but I needed to know what the thing on floor was.

            I was on my knees next to the thing. I was simultaneously repulsed and drawn to it. The thing still had eyes that looked at me and seemed to move, but there was no life in it. The corpse was covered in blood completely. The corpse was cool and clammy, with matted, sticky fur. As I felt its form, I realized it was a dead dog. Its eyes moved though. It did not breathe, but its eyes moved, and in this moment, I knew the dog had been murdered. It was covered in blood. Its eyes seemed to plead for me to find the killer.

             The black, oily pools that were the dog’s eyes, regarded me from a cool, imperial distance. I held the cold thing’s head in my lap and I gazed into the eyes. I could hear, and feel the icicle fingers of a winter gale screeching over and under a desolate overpass, under which I ran, like an apparition among the shadows of a dying afternoon.

            I held the dead thing’s head in my lap. My fingers were sticking to the long ago bloodied fur. I could not pet the dead-dog-thing, because of the stickiness of the fur. I looked into the oil slick pools of its eyes. The eyes carried me to another place…

            As my ghost ran underneath the overpass, I looked up, into the darkening, rust colored sky, and I gazed at a billboard with an image cast against the fuming strings of pollution which hung against the rust sunset like the wisps of hair of a corpse floating in brackish water. The billboard was a weird advertisement: Naked, dead, bloodless, human bodies hung, apparently, from their feet, which were not shown on the billboard. The arms dangled into the seas of dead flesh and rotten blood pictured on the billboard, the same rancid sea which I had only moments ago been thinking of, which I still, somehow, hoped could not exist. The bodies were hung in a line, the way a hunter would hang rabbits for skinning. The faces were blurry, but the mouths moved, and when they did so, small plumes of fuzzy vine and leathery planes of Kudzu leaves floated out. Some of the vines and leaves floated above the border of the billboard into the devastated sunset, and they flickered like the pixels in an old, portable, UHF/VHF television. Some of the fuzzy vines and leathery planes of Kudzu leaves floated down from the heights of the steel billboard mast, and those scratchy tendrils, and suffocating leaves drifted in a weird, ominous, and flickering manner towards me. As I ran, the flickering vines and leaves entangled me. I was lifted into the sky. I was hung from within the billboard. My blurry, muted face attempted to scream, but only vines and leaves spilled forth.

            Now, I was back with the dog again, I was sweating, and gripping the dead, furry thing. My sweat had mixed with the sticky, blood-matted fur, and black streaks of oily grime streaked my face when I stroked my hair anxiously.

            I picked up the blood-matted-fur-corpse and held it against me. Sticky blood was mixing with my sweat. Blood was smearing all over me. I carried the dead thing out of my room, and struggled with it up the stairs, into the kitchen. My mother was standing in front of the stove, cooking. She either did not see me, or was ignoring me. I laid the dog on the kitchen tiles. As I spoke to her, I was aware of how thick my tongue felt, as if I were speaking underwater. My voice undulated like the wet rustling of leaves and twigs.

            “The dog is dead. Who did this? Why was the dog in my room?” I asked.

            “I don’t know Elliot, but I think you worry too much.” Myriam replied.

            “Don’t you care? What’s wrong with you? We need to find out who did this.” I put my hand on her shoulder to try and get her attention, but as I did so, I gazed into the pots on the stove, and drew back as I saw organs, eyes, and fingers floating in the pots. I almost tripped over the dead thing at my feet and I slipped on the blood-slick floor as I regained my balance. Myriam continued stirring the steaming contents in the pots.

            I left the dead-dog-thing on the kitchen floor. I stumbled down the creaking, blood slick, and blood sticky stairs. I walked into the bathroom to wash the dog thing’s blood off of myself. As I flipped on the switch in the bathroom, the lights revealed bodies hanging from the shower curtain rod. A moving figure seemed engaged in the act of tying up one of the bodies by it’s feet. The figure ran through a doorway at the other end of the shower and I ran after it.

            I emerged from the other side of the doorway and found myself at the base of the waterfall I had known from childhood. This was the waterfall I had known from Iowa. It was in a quiet park off of a gravel road. I remember spending dreamy Saturdays and Sundays here, running on the grass and dipping my hands into the rivulets of clear, cold water that ran down an uneven rock face covered in moss. The figure from the dream was scrambling to the top. I followed it, slipping and scrambling as I went. When I reached the top, I was able to grab the figure, the murder. I spun the figure around, and I gasped for air, as does a drowning man, when I saw my own face looking back at me. I hurled the figure from the top of the waterfall and watched it’s head crack on the rocks at the bottom.

            For a moment the world flashed and blinked. Somehow, I was lying at the bottom of the waterfall, with the cold water rushing over my cracked body. I looked into the sun, and sighed a rasping breath into the air as birds sailed above. The sky went dark.

            When I opened my eyes, I was hanging from a billboard, above an overpass. I was hanging above a sea of dead, rotting bile. I could see myself below, running underneath the billboard. I tried to yell out, but only tendrils and leathery leaves of fuzzy kudzu slithered out of my mouth.

            I woke up in my unheated basement room sweating. It was still early. I quietly got dressed and drove over to Gene’s place.

*          *          *          *          *

            I tried to explain to Gene what I thought about the dream. “So, this is how I travel in my dream sometimes. Maybe I shift from one time to another like a two dimensional man, living on a porous photograph. Imagine there is a film strip of photos on which the man lives. Then, imagine a stack of these strips of film. The two dimensional man is made entirely of molecules that can slip through the substance of the film, as if he were a gas, or a liquid, slipping through pores in a membrane. Now, imagine the membrane, the film, is time, the background (the picture) is the place and setting, and the gas, or liquid is the man. Imagine that the man can focus on one strip of film, and is thereby able to stay on that strip, but if he loses focus for any reason, he can slip from one strip to the next against his will. The man can move involuntarily through time, as if the strips of film were all stacked on each other out of order. That is to say, the films all contain similar stories, but the films are endless and without beginning and they are all slightly out of sync. The further from each other the strips are in the stack, the more out sync with each other they tend to be.

            One last thing; the man is not the only entity that can seep between strips. Other things like trees, or garden ornaments, cars, tulips, or even planets, could slip between strips at various rates, but their so-called molecules are of various sizes, as are the pores in each membrane. Everything is just sort of drifting in the dream world, crashing into different times.”

            I sat down next to Gene on top of the pile of railroad ties. I started rolling a cigarette. I felt more anxious and disconnected than ever. As I told Gene about my dream, I began to sweat. I kept feeling as though I was going vanish, like a puddle evaporating in the sunlight. People who knew me wouldn’t even remember that I had lived. Everything seemed so pointless. Telling all of this to Gene had not made me feel better. I thought the bit about the man moving through time like a ghost through strips of film would come off as a little bit clever, but now that I had said it out loud, I felt hollowed out and meaningless. But with Gene, it didn’t really matter. We had a kind of unspoken agreement: we each could say whatever we wanted to each other, and it was fine. We didn’t pass judgment. Gene was the closest thing to a real role model that I had, because he was ten years older than me and seemed to generally accept me for who I was, although I had no idea who I was. Usually, our conversations consisted of the two of us taking turns spewing out a litany of some sort of mental runoff. Our conversations rarely carried the arc of a coherent conversation. At the very least, I could crash on the couch at his place when I didn’t feel like going home.  

            I looked up into the sky and the full moon looked like a wet, shiny disk of divine thigh, glistening in the holy, pitch night. The moon was so huge, it looked like it was shimmering under water, as if I could just swim up through the sky and touch its glimmering surface.

            Gene held the flask of Evan Williams in his right hand. He teetered at the top of the pile of railroad ties stacked next to the tracks. He had been listening to me in a distracted sort of way; the way someone listens to background music while thinking of other things. Some of the railroad ties would rock slightly, because they were not stacked solidly together. They had been tossed there, next to the tracks, in that lonesome spot of dim woods, behind a furniture warehouse, like a pile of diamond matchsticks spilled onto a bar table. Gene took a drink from the flask and gasped as he screwed the cap back on. Once Gene recovered from taking his shot of bourbon from the bottle, he grinned and chuckled a little bit. He arched his back, and looked into the sky, where the moon was shining down. He howled, convincingly, like a feral dog.

            Gene chuckled again, in a high pitched, clipped sort of way, “He He. Yeah man, I hear ya.” He slouched over the flask, which he held close to his chest, and he rocked back and forth slightly. He continued, “Yeah, that’s some heavy shit man. I don’t know what else to say man. I mean, the world is a pretty fucked up place. Maybe you were travelling to some place and time in the future man, like astral projection.”

            Gene’s comment about interpreting my nightmare as an actual place was not especially comforting.  He continued, “Yeah man, astral projection. That’s how the government spied on the Russians during the cold war. I was trying some of that astral projection the other day, but I don’t think its right to spy on people. I just use it to keep track of who might be trying to watch me man. The government can’t spy on you if you create a mental barrier using astral projection.”

            Gene chuckled again, “He He. Yeah man, the fucking Illuminati, they’re the ones running everything man. They’re spying on me, they’re filling your head with those screwed up dreams.”

            Now, I was the one staring off into space, “Yeah man,” I commented distractedly.            I didn’t give a damn about the Illuminati, which I thought was bullshit. I started to feel sick to my stomach. I was gritting my teeth, and I tore the rolling paper I was trying to form a cigarette out of. Gene was howling softly, almost humming to himself.

            The headlight from an Amtrack train seared the darkness with a beam of light like a small star racing through the empty ditch of woods. The train flitted by, but as it did so, I happened to see through the windows of a dining car. That moment seemed to hang in the air as if I was observing a painting in the gallery of an art museum. A family sat at a decoratively laid out dinner table. A husband and wife sat at either end of the table and a brother and sister sat on either side. They were all wearing formal dress clothes. They ate off of porcelain plates and the food was served out of silver dinnerware. They were all smiling. The family was completely oblivious to me having seen them. If the family had looked out of the window, through the glare of the train car lights, they would have only glimpsed a twisted, insignificant shadow lingering for less than a second along a stretch of empty woods. But for me, the image of the family seemed etched into my consciousness. The metal racket of the train clattering along the tracks and the rude wail of the whistle died away. I stood still, amazed at what I had happened to see.

            Gene was laughing. He shoved the bottle of Evan Williams into my chest.

            “Holy shit dude! Did you see that? What the fuck!? That was fuckin’ weird man! There’s a piece of your dream man, floating by like ghosts, or the Illuminati following us man. Holy shit.”

            To hear Gene talk about my dreams and his theories about the Illuminati together, again, as if they were connected, shocked me.

            “My dream is just a dream man, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Illuminati. I’m just a fucked up dude having fucked up dreams.”

            Gene felt like arguing, “You don’t know that man. Your mind is just closed off man. Your pituitary gland is hardened man, that’s why you can’t see with your third eye.”

            “Damn it dude! My dream doesn’t have anything to do with the Illuminati, or the government, or astral projection, or the Russians spying on me. I was just telling you what I thought about the dream I had. But it’s just that, it’s just a fuckin’ dream man. It’s not real.”

            Gene started to growl and grunt, like an ape. Acting like gorilla was something that he liked to do when he wanted to be ironically threatening. He started shaking his head back and forth.

            “Aw, nah dude. No way. You don’t know anything!”

            He didn’t like to be contradicted. Usually I didn’t care enough to contradict him, but tonight the stress of participating in my parents’ divorce followed by my nightmare had rattled me.

            “The Illuminati is just another scam dude. It doesn’t mean anything.”

            “Your dumb ass dream doesn’t mean anything either!”

            “I never said it did man, but I also never claimed it was real.”

            Gene started jumping on the railroad ties. He was grunting and throwing himself around. I got up to leave, but one of the ties shifted and I stumbled off the pile into the gravel, scraping my palms and arms. Gene started grunting and growling louder. It was his way of laughing.

            “Man, you prick. Dude, fuck this.” I said as much to myself as to Gene. I started walking towards the railroad bridge, back to Gene’s place, where I had left my bike.

            Gene called out after me, “I’m never sharing any knowledge with you again dude!”

            “Fuck you Gene. Push your bullshit onto someone else dude!”

            As I reached the bridge, I could hear another train coming. I started running along the railroad ties on the bridge. There were two tracks on the bridge. The ties between the rails were just empty space, but the space between the two tracks had occasional, inconsistent planks of wood between them. I could hear the train rumbling behind me. I had often raced the trains across the tracks in the past. I would just coast along the ties, not looking down. I never stopped, or doubted myself. In the past, I had always assessed how far away the train was and how fast it was moving. Now, I had recklessly darted onto the tracks without looking, or checking. As the train was crashing down onto me, I slipped and fell. I hit my head on some metal rods and bolts between the two tracks. I felt the train rushing by and I felt a pool of damp liquid soaking my jeans. I couldn’t see my legs as I stared at the freight train creaking and rumbling past. My head spun, and I reached a trembling hand up to my temple and felt the blood running down. I then frantically felt my legs, and realized I was lying in a puddle of rain water.

            I lay prostrate in that cold puddle of dirty rainwater and creosote. I listened to the train rumble away. The rail lights a little ways down the line switched from green to red. I lay bleeding and throbbing in the red glow. I moaned as I slowly turned onto my side and then got onto my hands and knees. I saw Gene between the rails. He was crossing the street below the bridge. He glanced up at me through the beams in the bridge, and then kept walking. The train and Gene both disappeared into the moonstruck pitch of the last night of autumn.