Rolling in the Dark

Spark: Write about a time you were afraid of the dark or comforted 
someone who was. Feel free to define "dark" any way you'd like.

1980

The Stunt Man. A “bizarre and brilliant black comedy.” In the title role, Steve Railsback. Let me quote again: “Noted for his dangerous, chameleon-like portrayals while possessing the scariest-looking pair of eyes in the business…” Not surprisingly, he was Charles Manson in the 1976 TV miniseries. Which became the highest-rated TV movie of all time.

Until Roots came along the next year.

Regardless.

In the movie, a real stunt man tells Steve, who is playing a stunt man, that when your car goes off a bridge, it will hit the water and float a little bit. Let the camera get that shot. Then, as the car sinks, slowly roll down the window. Let the water pour in. Hold your breath. You want the pressure to stabilize.

Because when you are on the bottom of the river with the windows up and the doors closed, you can breathe, but you can’t get out. The pressure is too great.

Of course, in our glove compartments, now we all have the:

• Original Best Emergency Window Breaker: The LifeHammer Original: Classic Design! or the
• Always Within Reach With a Keychain: The Res-Q-me! or
• The Accutire MS-4520B: More Than Just a Window Breaker! or the
• Multi-Function Safety Tool: The Swiss+Tech ST81010 BodyGard!

We don’t have to think about rolling down the window. We just bust it to bits.

Maybe 21^st century cars don’t sink as fast as cars from the 80’s. Remember all those Japanese minivans swept up in the 2011 tsunami? Bobbing along merrily with the fishing floats and the warehouse crates… looking like a party when you take a fire hose to a ball-pit bounce-house.

2016

Suddenly my car is in the river. The bridge has disintegrated! I wake up, panicked.

“Not entirely clear margins in your follow-up biopsy,” the surgeon said the day before.

“On three sides, we have five-millimeter wide, 100% cancer-free strips. The fourth side is, unfortunately, 0% clear, because the pre-melanoma is larger than indicated. I have to do a little more surgery, a little further to the right.”

For a fearful person with a low pain threshold, surgery is almost unbearable.

So is morning.

I rarely wake up looking forward to the adventure of the day. By rarely, I mean it only happened on three days so far – out of my entire life.

I quit smoking in 1990, and they were throwing Prozac at the resultant, quivering mass. The lowest possible dose at the time was too much for me, so the experienced psychiatrist suggested physically splitting it in half. For a split second, I could actually feel the desired result: I awoke filled with anticipation and excitement. I couldn’t wait to get out of bed. I was in a hurry to start the day. Who knew there were so many things I would want to do? There were not nearly enough hours in the day for them all!

“This must be why humans haven’t disappeared as a species,” I thought. “This is what looking forward to the day feels like.”

It was a glorious day. The next morning, too, was full of eagerness and sunlight. As was the next.

Then… it was over. The meds failed, “fell off,” as all subsequently have. How jealous I am of Charley in Flowers for Algernon. As he sinks back into retardation, his grip loosens on his memories of full-bore living. He gets to drink from the river Lethe.

All I get is meds that stifle my penchant for tipping my head back when I want the molasses to meander into my sinuses, all the way down, filling my lungs.

Waking up with my car in the river Styx resonated with a previous dark, despairing morning.

2013

I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to take the meds that stave off the dimming and drowning of my light. Lying there, it nonchalantly occurred to me: suicide itself would be an act of commission. However, not taking my meds would just be omission.

That thought frightened me so thoroughly that I wanted comforting of the most elemental kind. I reached out to the man from my past whose emotional makeup unfortunately mirrors my father’s. We were enmeshed throughout 1978 and 79 when I lived out west, and were once again – we had reconnected in 2011, scant weeks before the quick decline and death of my father. Throughout 2011-2015, during the phone/email love/hate relationship, he repudiated me often and harshly. So harshly in 2012 after my hysterectomy that I couldn’t bear it, downing three times the prescribed dose of painkillers.

But because I didn’t know any better, I kept returning to him, to what felt like the source.

That morning in 2013, rattled by my thoughts of suicide by omission, I emailed him. He called right away. He comforted. He flowed into my veins like warm butterscotch. It was such a good fix. I relaxed into it.

I said, “Well, you may have cheered me up enough to where I don’t want to kill myself. That might balance out last year when you were so mean to me you made me overdose.”

He laughed. “How come,” he said, “I’m a bad person who feels good about myself even when I do shitty things like that, while you’re a good person who feels pretty bad about yourself most of the time?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But the universe could make things right. Maybe if you start feeling bad about the horrible things you do, I will magically start feeling better about myself.”

“I love you,” he said.

“You despise me,” I responded.

“That too,” he agreed. “Go back to sleep for now. I’ll call you later tonight.”

March 2011

Katsumi Takeda’s car lifts from the pavement mere seconds after he sees the tsunami waters in the rear view mirror. His smartphone records the increasingly wild sloshes, dips, pummels. There is roaring down into a cascade under unseen structures. Then the picture cuts out. In the documentary, Katsumi says: “I remember it being completely dark, and the water pouring in. I escaped from the car. But underwater, I couldn’t figure out which way was up. Finally, my face hit the surface, and I could breathe.”

In another city, the irresistible backwash carries along collapsed buildings, crushed boats and half-submerged cars. Makoto Sawada climbs onto the roof of his floating car, thinking that searchers will have a better chance of finding his corpse if he isn’t in the car when he drowns.

Whorls of debris glide inexorably seaward. The last standing object between Makoto and endless, open water is a truncated bridge span, strewn with wreckage. There is a man stranded on that span.

“Help!” Makoto yells.

The man leans over, stretches out his arms. He shouts. “Jump!”

In a video so shaky you can only tell what’s happening by viewing it frame-by-frame, Makoto jumps. They connect. The man pulls Makoto up onto the broken bridge.

2016

I get up.

Even though I want to, I don’t email the man who enjoys shredding my heart.

I just take my meds.

I might get back in my car, but if I do, I’ll leave the windows open. If it disintegrates, I’ll swim about, hoping I can figure out which way is up. When my face hits the surface, I will be able to breathe. On the count of three, I’ll open my eyes.

There will be a bridge.

One…

It will be strewn with flowers.

Two…

It will be lined with people holding out their arms.

Three.________

 

________

Writing Through the Rough Spots. April 2016.