Scene 19

After each of us has backpacked, solo, across southwestern Europe

After all of us have lived recklessly for a 2 to 228 month period

Once we’ve all carried a sleeping child to their bed when we, ourselves, are half-asleep

Once we’ve all moved in together in Arizona.

When the time comes to change our clothes

and rebuild the trees

and put the continents back together.

Christ will come.

Scene 18

It was just as you were walking into this groundbreaking film that all the hype said you just had to see in theaters to truly appreciate. You were with your friend with whom you’d never been to a movie. Engaging in the very polite, oh, it doesn’t matter, where do you want to sit?, you reached a settlement. A half-row empty before the two of you and you thought of all the films you saw with your father always wanting to sit on the end. And what does your older friend say?

Do you mind if I sit on the end?

No, not at all, you say freaked out so that it takes you extra long to unwrap the scarf from your throat.

And you proceed to see it all and hear it, too.

His thin face, bespectacled, and his long fingers clawing into the popcorn or forming a splitter grip around the lid of his mammoth soda to drink from the straw.

How during each preview he’d give you his thoughts on a movie’s potential. Usually, “that looks good,” or “I’d see that.”

And he had to sit on the end because he drank the soda desperately and usually needed one or more bathroom breaks. Slouched in his chair, you can see him turn to the side and back, dipping slightly his head and whispering “I’ll be right back.” And often you didn’t actually her exactly what he uttered, but you know anyway.

And also because he sometimes would be paged to the hospital for an emergency C-section or because of a baby he’d been following who’s hemoglobin was low. And you will always hear, you suppose, a faint beeping when you are watching anything with the lights out for fear that you will be interrupted. And any time you are interrupted you will see him balancing his popcorn between thigh and armrest, laboring to remove the pager remove his hip, holding it back from his eyes a bit as he got older to read the number that scrolled in black on the green field like the digits of an alarm clock awakening one from a dream before sunlight.

So he’d sit at the end to slip out without bothering people, to make a call in the lobby, and return with the verdict; either, we’re going to have to go, or what’d I miss?

You are still cloaked in weary memory when you hear your friend’s phone vibrate against his keys in his coat pocket. He answers it quietly, says “soon,” “okay,” and “goodbye.”

Everything okay? you ask.

To which he responds, “It’s Cynthia.”

You don’t worry too much as the teenaged Cynthia is always involving his wife, a mentor of sorts, in some kind of drama.

It is slightly more alarming when the vibration returns 30 minutes later and he excuses himself to the lobby to talk. When he returns he says,

I’m gonna have to go.

Okay, you assure him. What’s up?

She’s at the hospital. I don’t really know what happened, but she and her boyfriend got in a fight. Jackie’s with her and I’m gonna go stay with her brothers so her mom can get over there.

-Oh no, you think. This keeps getting worse.

Do you want me to come with you? Do you need help? I can stay with the boys so you can go to the hospital.

Every offer is refused.

I want you to stay and see the rest of the movie. This is when it gets really good!

He leaves (the friend, who you forget is two decades your elder,) and you stay to watch the last 45 minutes, wearing plastic-framed 3D glasses, alone in the dark.

When the heroics are finished and the credits roll you stay until everyone else has gone. “I enjoyed it,” you admit, “but it was mostly for the visual stimulation,” you stipulate, “and I don’t think I’d pay 13 bucks to see it again,” you are certain. But you keep all of this to yourself as you are alone except for the middle-aged couple that you see now, standing before the corridor, clearly looking for some specific piece of information in the credits. (“Do they know someone who worked on this?” you wonder.)

You stop in the bathroom and then amble out into the false lights that surround only you and the concession workers. Into the cold, wind, and-

is that rain or snow or what?

you realize you’ve been doing that thing again, that you got over five years ago and thought you’d never need to do again. When you had anxiety and were unimaginably depressed and couldn’t help but have uncomfortable red eyes that looked freezing or allergic, and DEFINITELY awkward. You didn’t think you could control it and eventually when the first good summer came it was gone.

But it’s happened a few times this week and you are just as helpless against it.

At least with this wind there is a reasonable cause for it. You walk the several hundred meters’ distance which you chose to park from the theatre. You open the door and start the car and , just like turning over a record, you start seeing and hearing everything that’s ever happened to you. It is an arterial, pulsing, genetic memory. Because you imagine it as such you can’t help but see a heart stop and turn blue in a museum and an airway close or be emptied or whatever.

You end up weeping on the highway. By the time another song comes on and you reach your apartment the lights are out and everyone is sleeping. You walk into the dark bedroom where your wife is sleeping and hear extra breathing. Knowing it is your son asleep on your pillow, you feel gently around your side of the bed for him.

When your wife startles awake, you ask, “should I take him back?” just to be sure.

After she says “yeah” you scoop him into your arms, like a bride or casualty, and walk down the hall to his bedroom where a small light is on. You pass by his racecar bed, and sit on a folded futon. It has a bed sheet over it because there is no cover on it. It is old, handed down, and you figure someone has had sex or at least ejaculated on it. You hate this, but it is a decent place to sit and read to him and now you want to hold him for a few minutes.

Supporting his skeleton in your lap you lean back and are comfortable. You look at his face and lengthening blond hair and worry. You worry that all the problems you encountered as a teenager that had no solution will come upon him and there will be nothing to do but watch him struggle.

You know that there is no point in the fist-clenching, tongue-biting, unbridled swearing.

Eventually, it is time to put him in his bed. You place his covers over him, kiss the forehead that is sweating (because his mind is racing?,) and leave the room.

Just like putting on a new record you allow yourself to dig up more memory like you are going through pictures or an old notebook with scribble and single sentences.

You decide to stop indulging in whatever this is and try to sleep.

This won’t work, you fear, not yet.