Strange Awakening by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Chapter 2
I stopped in the kitchen to heat up hamburgers in the condescension to modernism, reflective black, chrome plated microwave with a door-opening button that requires pushing from the wrong side. This is getting to be fun I thought. I originally felt like I was in a morbid, frightening Stephen King book. But this had more excitement potential as I’ve made some kind of contact with a very weird chick. Maybe she lives right next door and wants her house stripped and re-painted. No night visits to the cemetery. My brain heard; “Quit fantasizing and try to do what is essential.” That voice is right, but I still hate it. I wish it would go read a Stephen King book and leave me alone.
The hamburgers were ready and I put them on a plate. I carried them upstairs intending to investigate the two rooms I had not yet seen. I entered a library and put my food down next to the hurricane lamp on a Heppelwhite desk with a Windsor styled side chair. The rest of the room was comprised of full bookcases lining all walls. They were made simply, of no particular style or decoration and held a dark brown stain. The two windows in the room were not shedding any light this time of day as the sun had already passed over one and the other was blocked by dense trees. I put on the hurricane lamp to see that
the collection had a few main sections; baseball, film, religion, rock and fiction classics. That seems pretty ordinary and doesn’t tell me anything except that the occupants have little taste for non-fiction. I wanted to know about the residents. What would be the most revealing thing? Perhaps the smaller erotica section would give some hints. I took a look at one book containing erotic photography dating back to when photography was in its infancy. It covered a smorgasbord of coupling possibilities. Further painfully slow, detailed study indicated that the photos were more eclectic than the initial duets revealed and worked their way into trios, quadruplets and more, indoors and out. Pictures were taken in places like France, Mexico, Russia, China and Texas from the 1920’s to 1940’s. I was shocked. All this variety and coming from all over the globe? I always thought this type of activity was invented in the 1960’s. Oddly, this time I remembered the important stuff. It was strange to look at the photos of these very alive people, while also realizing that by now, most of them are dead. I was beginning to look forward to meeting Diane, or barring that, the lady next door.
I stared out the window facing the trees lost in a daydream, long enough for my hamburgers to get cold. I decided to eat them that way, as I didn’t want to break away from this interesting and potentially useful collection of information.
Further study would be a requirement if I was to have any hope of getting more precisely defined in this all important area.
Realizing that this could be rather time consuming, I decided to defer my academic pursuit and focus on things less complex. I fingered through the religious section and found books ranging from “The Way of the Sufi” to “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” to
“Ancient Esoteric Texts” to “The Bible.” I didn’t feel like getting bogged down in any of them, so I took a look at the baseball section. Titles ranged from “Babe” to “Josh and Satch”
to “Big Sticks,” but, rather than looking for knowledge through anecdotal evidence, I took out a baseball record book and flipped through it. Just the facts, ma’am, only the facts.
When the dryness set in I finished my cold hamburgers and noted that in the rock section I had three different biographies of Bob Marley. Someone must have been looking for something significant to try that many.
I left the library to enter a bedroom with a smattering of Chippendale and country early American furniture. The bed was minimally of the latter variety and was covered with a predominately blue crazy quilt. The most eye catching thing, however was that the walls were lined with built in nondescript shelves and they were full of movies in VHS format. They didn’t seem to be in any particular order, excepting some apparent consideration given to the size of the encasement. I perused
all sections to see that there was a predilection for French, German, Swedish and Spanish titles. American films were the preponderance, probably around 50%, but the foreign weighting seemed disproportionate. I caught myself. That thought presupposes that I’m American. Maybe I’m not. For the time being I’ll assume that I am. I’m also getting a bit worried, as, if my partial and hopefully temporary amnesia was being caused by too much drinking, it’s lasting a long time. I hope I didn’t do permanent damage. I started to think about what I’d be doing if I knew what it was I was supposed to be doing. Try that one. It could be some horrible job. What a thought. If I get straightened out too quickly, I might wind up spending my days making some numbers add up in a bank. If the bosses looked the other way while I smoked some weed outside, this could assuage things, but I’d still prefer to be here for at least a few more days unraveling the mysteries I was now surrounded by.
I started to think about the lady next door with the working middle finger. She could be quite adept with it and was apparently quick on the trigger. And I was just trying to show her some country hospitality. I made a mental note to refer to somewhere around the middle of the erotic photo book to gain more enlightenment.
That thought provoked some staring out one of the two windows in the room. The sun had already passed over to the
western side of the house. Deer were munching on some apple trees across a 200 foot open field. They had already taken all they could reach or shake down and were balancing on their hind legs trying to reach higher treats. I was amazed at how those skinny legs were able to support the well-fed bodies. Their light brown fur contained white markings and was still wet from their drink and dip in the rocky stream, 100 feet to their south. They were beautiful and I watched until something spooked them and they ran into the dense woods, again safe from predators. I wondered what their acutely tuned senses picked up that I couldn’t. Hunters? People they thought might be hunters? What other kind were there? I wished that they were responding to a call from other deer, as I didn’t want to think about possible dangerous trespassers.
It was starting to show the first inklings of twilight and I felt overwhelmingly tired. With eyes half shut I walked back to the kitchen, looking out every passing window for signs of unwanted activity. Sort of glad not to see any I ate part of a hero and drank ice tea. I hoped I could achieve that contentedly full feeling that I liked before going to sleep.
While I ate, I noticed for the first time that there was a radio in the room. I put it on to hear some right wing talk show host berate callers, who for the most part seemed liberal, unsure and wordy. If he didn’t already have enough of an
advantage by having airway experience, the host also had the ability to cut the caller off or talk right over him. It was like a professional heavyweight fighting a lot of nerdy fat kids. I switched channels to hear an interview with the owner of a local brake and lube operation. I surprised myself to see that I actually lasted three minutes of this conversation, before again changing the channel. “Take ten years off with Magic Youth Cream. MYC will cover all wrinkles like no other product in America today. Here we have the testimony of four happy customers.....” I shut off the radio, realizing that it must be some instinctive old survival technique that made me avoid it in the first place. That is apparently entertainment.
In the right mood, it could be found funny. I decided that rather than sleeping on the first floor, as this morning, I would go upstairs for protection. I visualized myself standing at the top of the central staircase beating back invaders. I then remembered the second smaller stairs and didn’t know how I could cover both avenues of assault at once. Fuck it. I’ll figure it out when I need to. I entered the bedroom with the simple Queen Anne canopy bed and highboy and lay down without removing any clothes, got under the covers and after the warmth started hitting me in waves, I fell right to sleep.