A Map to the Past

I’m hiding, and no one knows it.  I guess that means I’m hiding successfully, although I’ve no desire to mince words and parse semantics.  My friend stoically surveys the scene within the Union, and I’m secretly studying him.  He’s a kind enough man, really, prone to bouts of moodiness characterized by stormy rumination.  Today his brow is furrowed and his lips pursed, as if stumped by a particularly intransigent riddle.  He sighs and thwacks his knee with a rolled up copy of the student paper.  Though he never reads it, he likes to pretend that he’s involved in campus affairs.  "Mitchy," he says with a heavy sigh, and then stops.  The pause is pregnant, and I’m thinking he wants me to prod him forward, encourage him to speak.  I don’t; not audibly, but I do cock an eyebrow.  He sighs again.

The sunlight beats through the tall windows.  It dusts the door for prints, leaving dozens of filmy smudges.  The janitors are too busy and too numbed to it to complain, I imagine.  Slumping in my chair until my head rests against the top of the back rest, I study the distant plaster of the vaulted ceiling.  Who cleans that? I wonder, but I’m not really all that curious.  A wasted question, thrown with eyes closed into a featureless fountain.  "Mitchy," he says again, this time a little more insistently.  I’ve no desire to talk with him; his plaintive musings and labyrinthine rationale have begun to wear on me.  Lately, the man has been substituting ambivalence for action, tearing new wounds over old, and then letting them fester.  I know what’s bothering him.  I told him yesterday, mustering all of the earnestness that one can salvage from exhaustion, that there is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to matters of the heart.  It’s kill or be killed, and a kill is nothing more than another brief stay of execution, whether it be earned or stolen.

A peach-fuzzed young man stops at the vending machines, and the clinking of bouncing coins and the whirring of a hungry bill slot reverberates in the empty lobby.  It used to be a dollar and twenty-five cents for a soda, but now it’s a dollar and forty.  It doesn’t matter how much money you make: time inflates the cost of anything and everything, inside and outside of economics and capitalism.  A gaggle of sorority girls, all dressed to the nines, sauntered by the windows.  Winter jackets over black dresses or pleated skirts, I wondered where they might all be headed.  "When do girls get their ears pierced?" I offered into the silence, my eyes tracing the hidden curves beneath the heavy coats.  I probably make them all a cup size too big.  "Is it before puberty?  After puberty?  Are they born with the one piercing, being made free to add others as they or their mothers see fit?  I can’t remember the last time I met a female over the age of twelve that didn’t have pierced ears."

He stares at me for a minute, hiding irritation at my inane question behind a blank and granite facade.  "I don’t know, Mitchy.  I never notice earrings.  I tend to look through them and see the ears."  He stopped, scratching at his coarse and thick beard  "Perhaps it’s a running tally of hearts they’ve broken.  You know, like fighter pilots.  Five broken hearts, and they’re understood to be aces."  Ah, bitterness.  So that’s what has put the pucker in his pout.  A girl.  Just the same, though, an interesting theory.  I might have to put it into a story someday.  A red-haired girl in the distance walks slowly between the cypress trees that line the campus mall, her eyes on her feet.  The trees are smiling, but she is not.  She might not realize it, but her hair fights her hat, straining for the wild tease of the wind.  "That’s not entirely fair," I respond quietly, willing the nameless girl toward a semblance of peace.  "Both genders are up to their elbows in blood."  I’m tired of playing cardiologist, and I turn my attention toward the clock.  The University replaced the analog relics with cold red digital faces, and I prefer the old ones.

The hair slides through my fingers as I tuck it behind her ear.  I dig my face into the crevasse between her jawline and neck, breathing in deeply.  I put my mouth against the smooth expanse of her skin, and I snake one leg to rest comfortably between the two of her’s.  I reach under her arm and up across her full breasts, grabbing on to her hand, the both of them resting beneath her chin.  I stay awake, too, despite my weariness.  No dreams can compare to this.

"I told a girl that I love her on Friday night."  The clock stops as I stare at him.  A certain look of hopelessness invests his face, and I wince away from it.  "Drunk as shit, too, the words came out.  I don’t remember it."  As I hesitantly begin to reply, he leans forward, face intent, features rapt in a peculiar sort embarrassment that borders on horror.  "Get this.  ‘You don’t have to respond, but just so you know, I love you.’  I said that.  Fall down drunk.  A fucking trumpet wearing hundred dollar shoes."  An interesting metaphor.  He either laughs, or he chokes on some bile.  I can’t tell.  I play the scene in my mind, and I cringe.  There is a certain type of man, then, that I remember.  A man who feels the prick of a bayonet to his back, although there’s no blade there to give it.  He continued, although I’m sure I don’t want to hear anymore.  It is sad.  "I don’t know if she said it back.  I don’t think she did.  I don’t know how she could.  Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t, although I think she knows I meant it."  A snarled, sardonic cackle escapes his lips.  "It wasn’t the beer saying it.  The beer was an excuse to say it."  I ask him a wordless question, leaving one eye closed, my head cockeyed and quizzical.  He shakes his head at me, and turns his attention toward his feet.  They are tapping nervously, and the plastic aglets on his shoelaces clack an arrhythmic cadence against the faux marble linoleum tile.  "She just wouldn’t be able to."  He pauses.  "If she wanted to, that is."  Hawking phlegm up into his mouth as if preparing to spit in distaste at himself, he glances around and thinks better of it.  His face twists in disgust as he swallows it back down.  I nearly break out in laughter, but I, too, think better of it.

The clock has ceased listening, now, and has resumed its work.  The chimes on the College of Education building begin to sing, announcing another noon hour to the largely empty campus.  We sit there for a few minutes, busying ourselves with various silent activities.  There is a two day-old copy of the Wall Street Journal laying folded on an end table between us.  Several stock quotes stand out in yellow highlighter, being the work of an industrious student or a professor possessing some scrips or scraps of spare time.  As if time is a tire you could switch out, stuck in place while traffic rushes by.  He fiddles with his phone.  I do not think him texting, and he certainly is not calling anyone.  He’s the type to reread text messages, though, so that is what I figure him to be doing.  His jaw clenches visibly through his cheek, and the tendons and muscles of his neck are flexing and relaxing spasmodically.  They remind me of the denuded action of an upright piano, but I’m not certain why.  Just the same, though, Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor’s chords bust to vehement life in my head.  Perhaps too grand for it, perhaps not, it is there all the same.  He sighs a third time, and then shoves his phone down the cushion of the couch.  Odd.

"You ever see Meet Joe Black?"  At my question, he sighs a fourth time.  "It’s pretty good, actually.  Long, but good.  Claire Forlani wasn’t ever all that good of an actress, but she was fun to look at."  His smile uncoils like a riled viper, and the heat in it makes me squirm.  "I know enough beautiful women, thank you."  Jesus Christ, he’s in a bad mood.  The foyer air sucked the outer door close with a thump, and the second door opened, admitting an elderly man clad in a briefcase and gray beard.  "Did you know that saying "Jesus Christ" in vain isn’t sacrilege?" I inform him impudently, trying to drown his sour mood in waggish scuttlebutt.  "Jesus is the Greek translation of Yeshua.  Obviously, you might have guessed that the English translation of Yeshua is Joshua.  Not to mention the fact that Christ isn’t a name, it’s a title, and…"

"Mitch," he said, purposefully omitting the friendly "y" he liked to add to the end, "I do not give a whorehouse shit."  Whorehouse shit?  I shrug, then, and returned my gaze to the paper.  I’m not reading it, though, only giving myself an excuse for silence.  For thinking, really.  "It’s killing me, though."  His anger had quickly bowed out to despair.  I remember another type of man.  The type who feels the bayonet prick in the middle of his spine, and insists on stepping backward into it, just so he can maintain control.  "There’s a look on her face, Mitchell, that I can’t stand to see anymore."  A group of three students watch me, then, talking to an empty couch, listening to words confabulated from between the cosmic lines.  Concern wars with fear within them, and it is hard to tell which one would win.  Madness isn’t talking to yourself; it’s talking with yourself.  And I’m tired of listening. As I stand up to leave, I reach for my phone shoved into the couch, and I glance back down the Campus Mall.  The red-haired girl is gone, but the trees are brighter, more robust in their color.  It is almost as if the ancient cypresses had borrowed a bit of her.  Against the gray of the winter sky, the leafless boughs coil in and out, a tangle of conflicting directions and a dogeared map to the past.

I realize Phoenix isn’t as couture as they were a year ago, but I love Phoenix and Franz Liszt, so…