Inside Your Head: Part II

"Well look at this, a rare site emerges from the ether," Ernie said. "And this rarity must now drink with us. It has no other choice."

Simon was standing in front of their little corner with his hands deep in his pockets and a small smile on his face.

"Evening Ernie, and Jefferson, interesting that you went with the orange bow-tie tonight," he said. And he patted Ernie's shoulder as he slithered between he and Jefferson to sit next to Mary on the red velvet corner bench. She looked somewhat pleased in that coy way of hers, and Simon thought he caught a quick blast of dark raspberry perfume.

"Simon I have to say that it's a shock to see you. You've haven't come in here in a while," she said.

"No, it's definatly me. I've been a bit lost lately."

"And Christ you're soaked. What happened to work?"

"The nuclear plant hasn't imploded has it?" Ernie blurted out with true fear in his glazed eyes.

"I work at the Blockbuster Ernie, you know that," Simon said calmly.

Ernie nodded slowly. "The Blockbuster imploded?"

Jefferson threw an ice cube at his egg shaped head.

"Keep drinking Ernie, calm the nerves a bit," he said.

And Ernie obliged. The air was simmering, and Simon felt a bit of a sting in how much he'd missed this place of coin flipped ideas and random interpretations. Mary even more so. He hadn't even stepped in these doors for a couple of months, but nothing had changed. Nothing ever did.

"What's everyone drinking?" Simon said.

A quick silence fell over them all. Blues beats pummeled the wooden mirrors and sprung sad leaks in helpless drywall. Simon stood up and eyed the nearly desolate bar.

"I'm going to grab a drink," he said.

"I'll join you," she said.

And Ernie quickly launched into what would undoubtedly be an epic speech on the state of the Russian economy and its implications.

Simon could feel Mary grab his soaked undershirt as they meandered over to the cracked corners of the well worn bar. Loners and pretenders were not filling the area as they usually would, and only a small group of diehards had managed to come out in the rain. Simon's shoes stuck relentlessly to the alcohol laced floor and the lumpy textures of peeling hardwood. They arrived at the front of the long bar in silence and Simon drank his first round without bothering to swallow.

"You know, I've missed you," he said.

Mary eyed him deeply.

"Strange way of showing it. Avoiding us all the time," she said.

"I know, I know. I've been pretty disjointed lately."

"Heard you dropped out of school."

"I did."

"And?"

"And I'm not going back."

He looked up at the decaying ceiling and took another swig of his gin and tonic.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Well, they say I'm one of the finer stockers in the history of Blockbuster 317. You should see me hit the Ernest aisle, poetry in motion."

She giggled and kicked him in the shin. A little hard too.

"So Blockbuster to the moon, eh?"

"To the top."

He was pretty sure she was rolling a small ice cube around in her mouth.

"No, I don't know what I'm going to do now. Does anyone know?"

"Yes," she said.

They sat in a quick vicious silence. Drinking faster and stronger. Simon felt no panic, and no thought of his sprawling plastic city down the block.

"Well, I'm not worried about them," he said. "How's your preschool class been going?"

She sighed.

"I killed one of the kids."

"That so?"

"Yeah, he kept on and on about his dog, and snap, I drowned him in a big tub of finger paint."

"Finger paint, huh? Heck of a way to go."

"Ironic too, he was never very good at them."

Simon laughed, a little too hard, and inched a bit closer.

"No, I don't know what I'm doing either Simon."

Eye contact was crisp and pure. Clairvoyant in a fading night, and fleeting in a lost bar with lost people.

"Having no direction is better than having a bad direction," he said.

"It's not purgatory?"

"Only if you let it be."

She finished off her drink in one giant gulp and mockingly slammed it down on the bar top. Simon was still sipping his second one as if there weren't anymore behind that dungeon of a bar.

"Simon, I remember a time when you knew how to drink."

Now he sighed.

"Sobriety's been reckless enough for me lately."

She nodded.

"That's too bad I suppose," she said.

"I've had other things on my mind."

"Are they plastic?"

Simon cringed, but she playfully (and drunkenly) swayed into him.

"I'm kidding, I like your little city."

"Sure you do."

"It makes you happy."

"There are other things that make me happy."

And they kept on like this, sipping their drinks and lingering along the bar. Catching up on time, forgetting about time, killing time. The bar completely emptied out as warm patrons hit the cool rain and amps were packed and shipped off. Lights were brightened and liquor bottles disappeared to live another day. Jefferson had long since ridden off into the night, and Ernie had managed to find a large brightly colored bicycle.

Rain drops popped on lampposts and parking meters blinked with anticipation. Simon wasn't entirely sure how they had ended up locked arm in arm, but they were. And they were the last ones remaining outside Lemmy's Shop as the slender overly-tattooed bartender shooed them out the door and locked it crisply behind them. The lights went dead and Lemmy's Shop fell asleep until the atrocity of another last call. Simon and Mary were alone on the curvy gothic street. An eerie silence floated above the vacant downtown and distant highways hummed a heartbeat. And Simon could feel Mary's heartbeat as she clung to his side outside that dive. His mind was as clear as it had been in months as they slowly started moving in the direction of his apartment, to play with melted wax and sleep for weeks, when she pinched his arm.

"What's that?" she said.

"What's what?" he said.

She pointed directly across the street.

"That."

And there, shining in the now breaking moonlight, was a large slick cylinder of plastic sitting lonely on a cobblestone sidewalk. Waiting to be contorted to variations it couldn't break.

"Looks like a bucket of Lego's to me," he said, and immediately regretted it. He could have said hand grenades or a bucket of severed body parts, and she probably would have lost interest. But Legos….

"They're yours aren't they?" she lit up with a mischievous smile.

"No I don't think they are. Not the type I use."

She giggled.

"Oh I see, so some other geek was wandering around with a bucket full of Legos in a rainstorm."

"Alright, alright, you got me. Now let's get out of here I'm freezing," and he tried to pull her gently down the sidewalk. She was as close to him as she'd ever been.

"Wait, you're just going to leave them there?"

"I don't want them, and you think it's a goofy hobby."

"Maybe, but they make you happy."

He was about to counter, about to say that she was the only thing that made him happy, when she slipped out of his grasp and spun teasingly into the street.

"I'll get them for you," she said.

She playfully danced across the street, kicking puddles and living as pure as anyone could. Simon couldn't help but hold back a small sly smile. And she reached the other side and picked up the cylinder, shaking it mockingly.

"Are you going to be an airport or a car garage," she yelled across the road with a grin.

Then she began dancing back across the street. Oblivious and distant. And Simon heard nothing but silence bouncing off the brick walls, and nothing but silence in his clear satisfied head. But there was a noise, close and menacing. Coming around the sharp downtown curve with fear and desperation. Pistons firing and retracting, gears shifting quickly and without care. And she was only halfway across the road when she finally heard it too. True and real in the moonlight night. And it was running.

And Simon and Mary made a sudden eye contact that would not be broken. For they were frozen in a moment, and they watched as reality suddenly broke headlong into their vision with only one working headlight. The car flew at her, and in a moment it slid viciously as its brakes finally locked up and the lost soul behind the wheel finally saw the silhouette of a girl who once swallowed a large beetle, by mistake, on a warm schoolyard day.

She just didn't have time, and they met in the middle of that slick road. Her head slammed brutally into the windshield and her body blasted towards the sidewalk without hope. The cylinder of plastic she was holding blew open on impact, and they sprayed unnaturally into the air over the desolate street. A violent confetti. And she rolled to a deadly stop along with them, as the car careened into a lamp post and spun out tremendously in a thick puddle. The driver regained control and kicked it back into gear before hurriedly sending the damaged machine into the twilight. The sound of it sputtering and squealing away was all Simon was left with on that suddenly desperate street corner.

He stood motionless. Trembling slightly at the sight before him. His mouth open, his hands clinched to the top of his soggy head, a long distance from the man that he was seconds before.

And he couldn't even feel himself as he ran up to her broken body in the dark sticky street, and he didn't hear himself yelling for help. No one could. He crashed down into a puddle next to her, nearly hyperventilating, and yelling back at Lemmy's Shop. But it was pitch black and empty, and it mimicked the street before him. He quickly searched the contents of the small bag that had mercifully clung to her through the crash in hopes of finding a cell phone. But he simply couldn't find it.

She was twitching on the ground in front of Simon and a steady line of blood was parading out of both sides of her mouth. Her body looked contorted, and her eyes were opening and closing randomly.

Simon was telling her to wake up or hold on. But all he could hear was a high pitched ringing in his ears. In a quiet night, with no one around, he scooped her damaged body off the street and she let out a small distant groan. Her arms dangled as thick columns of water dripped to the ground. Simon eyed the landscape of his apartment down the block and simply began pumping his already sore legs. Feeling no pain, and at a complete loss of what to do next, but just moving.

He was running at full speed, whispering for her to hold on, and yelling for someone to do something. And lights did go in the brick stone apartments as he flew by, but they could not possibly get outside before he passed with her in his arms. And he made it to the small front door of his complex in record time. He swung the front door open with his foot and pure uncut adrenaline. He pounded up the green stairs with her burning in his arms. He put an unusually hard shoulder into his old wooden door and cracked right through it. Breaking the hinges as an immediate but distant pain shot through his weak upper body. And he didn't think she had taken a breath since he'd lifted her broken body from the slick street.

Now he stood shaking in his apartment looking for a place to set her down. But he had no couch, he had no chairs, and he had locked the door to his only other room. And the floor before him was almost entirely covered by a large city of plastic. Airports and highways, fire stations and houses, schools and restaurants, hospitals and skyscrapers. It took up every place in the room where he could gently lay her down, and he hesitated. He hesitated at the pull of it, the time he'd put into it, and the chance that he wouldn't be able to reconstruct it.

But he couldn't get her back. It was the silence in the room that broke him, the roof shuddered with a new wind, and he stomped into his plastic city. Crushing buildings and kicking carefully designed cars. Pieces flew in every direction, filling the air with yet more chaos. He created a large swath in the center and he brushed huge heaps of pieces aside with sweeping kicks. And when the space he created was large enough he kneeled down and gently set her on the ground. Mary was not breathing.

He shot up anyway and ran to his retro phone. He pounded the numbers in. Sitting Bull watched in distress.

"911 emergency."

"There's been an accident, a bad one, cars, pieces of plastic-"

"Sir, calm down."

"And I told her they weren't important to me. And I tried to stop her-"

"Sir."

"And she went across anyway. Stubborn and perfect. And the car didn't have enough lighting-"

"Sir."

"And there wasn't anyone to help me and I needed help. And she needed help-"

"Sir."

He stopped talking. Breathing in and out rapidly, and spinning in circles. Blood and water flowed down every crease and bump on his body. His lungs burned as he gulped for air in the cool room, and then he spun around and looked at the Mary's motionless body. She lay as a fallen queen in the ruins of her destroyed city.

"Sir, we just need an apartment number, we'll be there in a moment."

He paused and took a deep breath in.

"There are still pieces in her hair," he said distantly.

"What? Sir-"

He dropped both the mouthpiece and the earpiece, and they clanged helplessly into the little wooden ledge he'd created for them. He walked up to Mary and sat down slowly next to her. And he closed two wide open eyes with his large un-callused hands. Very gently he picked pieces of perfect plastic out of her hair until he had a small handful. And he clicked two pieces together, and then another two. He looked at the death and destruction before him with small salty tears in eyes. And in the fading candlelight, with the fallen queen resting peacefully in her fallen city, he quietly began rebuilding.