My Stranger was published in The Licking River Review, Vol. 30, Winter/Spring, 1998-1999, Northern Kentucky University Press.

About 3,975 words

MY STRANGER

G.D. PETERS

Every night I dream about the Grand Canyon, its sculpted mesas and crested buttes rising like great dragons against the black velvet curtains of my eyelids. I stand at the edge of the South Rim overlooking the vast expanse, an endless sea of heroic rock which beckons me to take one step further into eternity, but I am already there.

I watch myself rise in the morning, pulling a frayed tee over once youthful shoulders now stooped from the disappointment of failed hopes and unfulfilled dreams. There is a face staring back at me from behind the mirror, watching me with vacant and lifeless eyes. It seems to smile at me but there is nothing, really, to smile about. My work is steady but I am just a bartender and there is no telling when the owners will scratch their chronic itch to fill the bar with fresh faces. Somehow I have survived years of this but the sand in the hourglass must surely be low. Each month winds to a close with the same age-long worry about where the rent is coming from (though usually, somehow, there is enough to make do). But there are bills on top of that which must be paid, and seldom are.

I live alone, pushing the wheelbarrow of my expectations before me from room to room like radioactive waste, sidestepping pools of spilled desires. There was a time when I swept them with a dustpan back onto the heap, but no more. Now they lie where they have fallen and I step over or around or (mostly) on top of them, trailing neon footprints behind me like the whispered yelps of hungry pups. Days string together like beads on an endless wire, months run to seasons, seasons to years, and the more things change the more they remain the same. I fill the same space I have always filled but it is a small space, and means nothing. Each day is a litany of meaningless gestures: boil the water, wash yesterday’s coffee cup, lift the spent grounds into the basket, the same as yesterday’s yesterday, as the unending river of tomorrows, empty moments filled with tasking hands and grubby fingers, nothing more. I watch myself doing this and wonder whether any of it means anything beyond filling the rank boredom of existence with measure and cadence, and sadly conclude that it does not.

I sleep while dual passions of fear and anticipation wrestle in my mind against a backdrop of brave desires: fleeting images of the Grand Canyon, sweeping vistas of something lost, a panorama of what might have been but never was.

I wake at noon on Saturday and walk around the corner to the restaurant where twelve hours earlier, on a night busier than New Year’s Eve, one of the owners (a good friend of mine, actually) bitched me out for pouring his birthday shots too full, apparently some got spilled.

Well, hell.

After breakfast I sit on my front steps smoking a Backwoods and watching the steady trickle of passers-by. Two rows of alternate-side-of-the-street-parking-suspended vehicles sleep like idle trains in a rail yard. Here comes a middle-aged woman still clinging to a civil, if weary, protocol: neatly parted white hair curled slightly at the shoulders, Abercrombie & Fitch emblem blazer (navy, of course), worn but pressed denim slacks, powder-blue socks, and penny loafers. In one hand she holds a slick, worn leather leash, and patiently waits every step or so on a shaggy Pekinese whose ungroomed coat hangs around it like a frayed quilt.

The Backwoods burns down, pleasing in its smoky and aromatic way. From the other end of the block there is a man approaching. He is wearing faded jeans and Doc Martens, and has a funny, ageless quality about him; he could be old enough to be my father, but there is a bounce in his step which betrays a younger spirit. He walks with an even, measured gait, and carries nothing. I watch as he approaches, altering his course imperceptibly to allow for the aging dog. A horn breaks the still tranquility of the moment and I turn to see a green Toyota double-parked down the block at the schoolyard tennis courts, its driver waving to a pair of teenaged doubles partners who look to be brother and sister. I look back for the man but he has disappeared, possibly into one of the apartments on the block from whence he came. Before dismissing him outright from my mind there is a tug of recognition somewhere, a faint remembrance as if I have seen him before but not here on the block--somewhere else, in a different context. No matter. As often as I sit out here smoking Backwoods I am sure to see him again ere long.

I rise to leave, lifting my arm to flick the little stub into a tree-well, when I am startled: he is here again, the man. He is walking toward me down the block in exactly the same detail of a moment ago, with exactly the same manner, as if time had offered up a mulligan. The Pekinese now is gone so this time there is no side-step, but I am wondering what happened, did he forget something, turn around and go back in the brief seconds it took me to look away? I watch him completely this time, not wanting to miss the disappearing act if it recurs, but it does not. He continues walking toward me, turning his head to face me momentarily as he passes and moves on. He is a curious fellow, to say the least, and I can’t help wondering where it is that I have seen him before, so now he has me thinking. I sit again and fire up another Backwoods, wanting to reflect a moment on this rather odd occurrence as a nice breeze blows through this concrete canyon, pleasing the senses but thwarting my efforts to get the damn thing lit.

Large drops of rain fall from a gray sky like gold coins. Splat…Splat…

It may be this rain is unsure of itself, unsure of whether it wants to fall or just continue to saturate the overhead clouds dangerously. Splat…

For years I have been telling myself it’s time to get out of the city. I’ve been here long enough to have forgotten how long I have been here, and surely by now I am just another stack of printer’s bits queued in a tray at the typesetter’s elbow, waiting to be reborn on the front page of the Metro section: “Longtime Resident Slain In Senseless Attack…” or so forth. So I am thinking about visiting my brother in San Francisco, everyone tells me that’s where I belong but how different will it seem, really, when I am right next to it, inside and up close against the steam pipes and graffiti?

I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’ll go out there. Fucked if I know.

I tend my shifts for two weeks running and wind up back where I started.

Nowhere.

I wake at one on Sunday and my work week is done until Wednesday night, but even the time off is like emptiness (only I am not getting paid for it) and now comes the long wait through a stifling, listless summer until autumn will breathe fresh air into a lifeless set of lungs. Tonight I am drinking again, sitting at the bar having a Bud Light and two fingers of Maker’s Mark and thinking, shit, it’s definitely time to get out of the city. I remember an earlier time when everything seemed simpler. I sit alone swirling expensive bourbon in a rocks glass and wonder whether life was truly better then, or just shined brighter in the greater glow of prosperity’s fires?

The face in the mirror smiles at me; his look is not congenial, but a knowing smile which conveys irony and pathos, as if he knows he is living the life I had planned for myself. As he gazes into my stupefied eyes he is betrayed by his lack of surprise at finding the source of his image dark and brooding, while he himself is smiling and spry. Like flip sides of the same coin we rival one another, his image radiating hope and fulfillment while mine admits only of emptiness and despair.

Where did our paths diverge, and why? Was there a brass ring hanging from some golden bough that I could not grasp, failed even to notice as I rode through the forest, my eyes glazed with awe and blinded by wonder? The life I once envisioned seemed so well-planned, so natural in progression and simple in execution as to appear all but predestined. But destiny, if it does exist, surely has its roots in more fertile soil than the idle fancies of mortal men. How easily was I led from the primrose path, how quickly dispatched to the wild unknown and there abandoned to my own poor judgment, lost and afraid, disoriented and helpless, unable to work my way back to the clearing; unable, even now, to find my way home. Oh, but I know my home, know its location and how it appears, know the texture of its eyes and the tenor of its smile, see its artless disguise every morning in the shadows that lurk behind the blind spot in the mirror, hiding, chiding, mocking me with perfect teeth and a pleasant disposition. This is my other self, happy to be alive and well, thriving on what riches lie beyond my own fingers’ reach, living off the vigorish of another gambler’s lost wagers. In the looking glass, and somewhere beyond, my other life progresses naturally, exactly the way I had planned it for myself, richly rewarding and deeply satisfying, except that it is happening for someone else and not for me. What happened to the confidence and swagger of a young upstart, the accolades and riches that once seemed to beckon from just over the horizon? Now they are gone; or rather, they belong to my rival.

But he is not the only one of us with a secret, for I know where it is he disappears to when the lights go down. Unlike the simple reflection from a pane of painted glass, he does not wholly vanish when the room goes dark, but races back through some portal of time to glory days of yesteryear, where all the dreams I once dared to dream lay hopefully fanned before me. Sadly, however, he has seen my dreams so long shattered that by now he has forgotten his ruse, returning of late to face me clean-shaven and well-dressed, perhaps just back from that long weekend in Barbados that was cancelled in a last moment of weakness and indecision. I stand before him dark-eyed and sullen, a week’s growth of stubble crawling slowly from the pores in my face, a mere shadow of my former self, the image of my image, a reflection in my mind’s weary and time-worn eye.

I can tell by the style of his hair and the cut of his clothes he is still with Janice; he would never have the sense to dress himself so smartly. He eyes me nervously, taking in my unkempt appearance and the caffeine stains that trail like footprints across the limp, faded cotton of my shirt, pondering his good fortune in having avoided the pitfall which is my existence. How nice for him; how radiant and beautiful, as if in one unguarded moment Pinocchio had caught Geppetto in a drunken stupor on a sleepless night, and mocked him with a puppet’s lifeless smile.

That’s all right, because I know something Mr. Mirror Image doesn’t yet know, which is what in the world really happened to Janice after that trip to Barbados got cancelled. Let him dress his dress and walk the walk, the fact of the matter is that after the trip fell through Janice fell in with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks and the only trip she made after that was to the emergency room at Queens County Hospital at the business end of a respirator. So much for Mr. Smile-and-Be-Happy in Fantasy Land.

I can rant and rave about him like this for hours, really. Ultimately, though, it is just a mean-spirited brand of name-calling which serves only to aggravate my frustration, painting with fine strokes and harrowing precision the ugly features of a dismal outlook. I turn a dizzying pirouette in the dense underbrush of ruin, unable to secure one square inch of promise to lay my foot upon. Thus am I defeated before even the first step has been taken.

I calculate this misfortune in conjunction with my disappointment, shifting the heavy tablets from one scale to the other. It does not matter where they finally settle, they are only monuments to the wretchedness and gloom which have become my bedmates. Nothing means anything anymore, and everything means nothing. But unlike the gracious, enduring scenes carved into clay and memorialized by Keats with words of solace and belief, beauty may well be truth, but its converse does not always follow, for the truth can be ugly and malformed, a hideous growth on the face of possibility, draining all hope with a single, telling stroke.

On Wednesday the owner, my friend, calls me into his office to tell me (only in so many words, and only if I read between the lines) that while I am a loyal and trusted employee I am not twenty-three and female, pretty of face and round of figure, and would I mind very much confining myself to the back register from now on?

Well, whatever. Time to move the old gray mare to the back barn. In two weeks I’ll be up in the kitchen holding a wet-nap for the line chef. Actually, the boys mean well, they care about me genuinely, but I suppose business, as they say, is business. They also say every dog has his day, but what can you do when the dog that has yours is a face in the mirror representing the life you dreamed for yourself but never lived? There was a time when I thought everything had been so carefully planned, but somewhere along the way something went horribly wrong, one miscue, a brazen misstep over an unseen line drawn in the sand by the invisible hand of fate, and now I am left at the end of the wire, a caricature of my former self, a comically exaggerated bas relief whose cracked features and overt flaws mock me from behind my own mirror with unveiled disdain. I have come a very long way, and have much farther, still, to go; but like the hapless big game hunter stalking the king of beasts with empty chambers, I realize that I am shooting blanks.

Perhaps these are the wages of time, as exacting as they are inevitable. Beyond this, and much worse, is that I now realize I have been spending more time looking into the mirror of my past than to the prism of my own soul, finding, perhaps, what is behind the glass to be more glorious and alluring than what hangs in a limp bag of skin draped loosely from this brittle trunk of bones.

I am sitting in the East Village at the corner of Stanton and Allen, on a bench outside a little bistro called The Living Room, and I am nobody. The night does not press in around me, but belongs to someone else. A New York City streetlight towers over me, its tall, slender neck curving peacefully streetward, its six-sided trunk resplendent with the regalia of an urban domain: don’t-walk signs facing south and west, street signs, bus schedules, and, on a phallic limb overhanging the intersection, traffic lights controlling the mighty flow of commerce and recreation.

A tight phalanx of musicians has dispersed from the corner. A garbage truck backs noisily to the dumpster across the street, its hydraulics juicing the SoHo tranquility, pumping with veins of power as it swallows the refuse from a bodega on the corner. Traffic ebbs and flows, a tattooed freak with sixteen earrings and spiked hair floats past on a skateboard as if carried on a breeze from some faraway place.

Still, I am no one, and none of this is mine.

In my other life I am at the center of the universe, and the axis of the earth passes gracefully through my soul. In this life I am merely the footman for my stranger. How traumatic to discover my trifling insignificance in the face of all humanity. In this, perhaps, I am not alone; it was not I who discovered the benign indifference of the universe. Yet I derive no great comfort from the pedestrian revelation that, rather than guiding the course of creation, I am simply running with the herd.

I am bartending on a busy Wednesday night when I see him again, my stranger. He walks into the bar during a busy Lady’s Night and stands in the corner for a moment, assessing the bar scene. I am usually accustomed to hawking a customer, raising my hand to flag him down, selling something, putting dollars in the till. But because he is my stranger I am reluctant to break the seal of silence and anonymity beneath which we have mysteriously cloaked ourselves. He stands in the corner watching me, the expression on his face neither giving nor receiving but simply neutral, as if he were a surveillance camera capturing frame-by-frame images with steely precision. My arm is half-raised, stuck at half-mast as if I am frozen in time. My stranger eyes me dispassionately, nodding imperceptibly as if recognizing in my hesitant bearing a chink in the armor, a breach in the mail which must surely one day admit the telling blow. Perhaps he has seen it already struck, for the expression on his face suggests an earlier day, a similar encounter, and at once I am reminded this is not the first time my stranger has seen me this way.

I am returned to the winter of '88 when Janice and I visited Santa Fe, staying at an old adobe ranch her best friend had in the hills outside of town. We spent New Year’s with her and were supposed to fly off for a week in Barbados, but something was brewing inside of me, a disquieting malaise I could not shake.

“You know,” I tell her as we pack to leave, “I’m thinking I might fly down to Phoenix and rent me a car.”

“Yes,” Janice says, knowing this is coming, she’s seen it before so it’s nothing new. She stands at the bedside, her blouse half-draped into a suitcase, her head hung soberly, resigned to the ignominy of what seems inevitable. “Maybe you should do that,” she quietly agrees.

It’s not the best thing I’m doing, really, leaving her to fly back alone while I pack my luggage and my baggage and my simple desire to be anywhere in the universe but New York City and traipse halfway across the great southwest looking for adventure and promise through the lens of a Nikon camera (which I booked from her to boot), but that’s exactly what I do. I rent a Pontiac in Phoenix and stop to load the camera with film and snap pictures of some beautiful butte just outside the Grand Canyon, highlighted by the waning sun, a photographic feast in orange and red through the crosshairs of a focused lens. By the time I pull up to the South Rim it is fifty-five and sunny, the great orange globe still winking at me from the other side of that endless and breathless gorge. I look around thinking, yeah, this is great, I’ve got the next week to explore the Grand Canyon, go down inside the guts and shoot the rapids, really get next to something.

There is an old guy standing by the railing at the edge of the rim. I leave the Pontiac idling and step out to breathe the air first-hand and snap a few photos, and this old guy waves me over.

“Come take a look,” he calls to me, “it’s the most beautiful sight in the world.”

He looks familiar to the back of my mind, this guy does, like I’ve seen him before or something so I am trusting in what he says, but I’m also in a hurry to book a room and get unpacked and I know I’ve got the rest of time to check out the Grand Canyon, I mean, it’s not like it’s going anywhere, really.

At least that’s what I thought in the haste of a lost moment.

“I’ve got to check in,” I call to him, “I’ll be back after that.”

“Might lose the sun,” he says. “Anyway, I’ll be gone by then.”

But I am headstrong and resilient. I drive up to the main lodge and book myself an expensive room overlooking the South Rim. I’ve got to drive up a steep embankment and find the right parking lot and lodge house, but finally I get checked in and unpacked and hang me if the old man wasn’t right, it is dark before I am done.

I hurry down to where the stranger had been but, as he predicted, he is no longer present. But I have taken one of the expensive rooms at the edge of the South Rim and have been assured that when I wake in the morning I will be looking out over the expanse of the world.

Perfect.

Perhaps.

Except that what is perfect in the essence of any one moment must be judged and re-judged by the dispassionate microscope of time, beneath whose lens not even the slightest imperfection escapes notice. I am remembering standing at the edge of the world, searching for the stranger, when suddenly it hits me, he had not disappeared entirely. I now remember more clearly: I remember that I saw him walking slowly from the edge of the world, his familiar form receding on the horizon, his arm wrapped about the waist of a woman whose distant shape and winsome manner bore more than a passing resemblance to Janice.

Now, back at the bar, I watch as my stranger seems ready to leave, and all at once I recognize him, he is the man behind my mirror.

It strikes me that perhaps I should find some way to kill my stranger, to put him out of my misery, but on further reflection it occurs to me that I have, in fact, devoted an entire lifetime to doing exactly this. Perhaps that explains why he eyes me so sadly, wondering how could I be doing this to him? He turns his face toward me as he passes through the door, and while his eyes express both reluctance and pity, I can find not even the slightest trace of hope. I am momentarily startled by the great sorrow his features betray until finally it hits me like a stiff boot in the gut. How thoughtless could I be, how self-centered and tunnel-visioned, how stupid? All this time I have been feeling sorry for myself, moaning and bemoaning my sad fate and sorry lot, jealously despising my stranger for stealing from me my other life, for relishing in privacy and seclusion what I had selfishly coveted for myself, and all the while blind to one singular truth: that while my stranger ridicules me with his endless display of all the dreams I have failed to fulfill, so too must I sadly portend, for him, the man he is destined to become.

THE END