Dream Corpses: 1. The Big Bang

Thus He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and does not return. (Psalm 78:39)

I stood on the shore of the ninth and final green, no more than seven putts from the ventilated zones of non-competition.

With the muscles of thought moving blankly in my head, I lit another Lucky Strike and leaned on my putter, admiring the virginal grass and my little white ball upon it.

You couldn’t have dreamed better grass.

Then Peg shrieked.

The moment registered as a tumbleweed of glints and staccato bursts of wind, punctuated by the snap of my left shinbone.

I buckled and dropped, elbows sponging into the turf.

“Incredible,” a voice moaned, as though floating down from the crowns of the elm trees.  Incredible ... incredible.  My head was alive with the throb of incredibles, which evolved into a timpani of credibles, crescendoing in a sustained and haunting chorus of edible.

When the din subsided, Peg’s face hovered over mine, sprigs of carbon black hair eclipsing the sun.

“Good grief, Encyclopedia Brown,” she said.

My blood dripped onto the green, purpling it.  Peg lugged me into the golf cart and gunned it in the general direction of the parking lot.

“What’s the deal?” I groaned.

“I don’t remember.”  She leaned into the steering wheel, face white in the black noon sun.  “It just flew.”

“Flew?”

“Flew,” she said, her hands clutching the wheel at 11:30 and 12:30, cutting off the blood to her knuckles.  “Just ... flew.  I tried to yell.”  Her lips mutely opened and closed in memory of the moment.  “But nothing came out until it was too late.  Not a peep.  Like the wind was knocked out of me.”

“Tell me about it.”

Quivering, I pulled off my T-shirt and wrapped it around the wound.

Peg hurtled us through a wooded area and ripped across a green, trying to get the most out of our rattling cartoonish cart.

“Dang,” she said, “knock me over with a feather.”

“Way to go on them bumps.”

“Knock me right over.”

We barreled into a sand trap, our bodies lurching into the dash like crash-test dummies.  Peg tried to back out, but the bantam motor merely whimpered, unable to budge the wheels.

Needless to say, not a few heads were turned as I hopped on one leg toward the parking lot, one arm propped across the shoulders of an exceedingly stooped and staggering Peg.

Throughout the previous night and well into the morning, I’d done my best to convince Peg even the most casual athletic pursuits provoke a kind of dread in me.

“You don’t know how to party.  You don’t know how to have a good time,” she’d ughed on the opening tee, whacking a line drive into an elm trunk on our left, bark chips bursting in air.

“That’s just the point,” I’d said, sailing a clump of grass 15 yards down the fairway, my ball trickling after it.

“Fabulous.”

“See?  You do know me.”

She scoped the green for a solid minute, squinting, then shot one into a brook to the right of the fairway.  Her ball broke the surface of the water with a sound like a bullet being fired through a silencer.

“You’ve got to believe, E.B.  A little obscurity is a healthy thing.”

The best parts of the morning, at least until the mishap, had been the parts when we were tooling around in the golf cart.

I might be lying if I said I hadn’t wanted to club Peg with a sand wedge sometime between the hypodermic preliminaries and solidification of my first full-leg cast.  But urges for revenge are short-lived with me; I don’t have the energy.  Some mornings, I’m convinced I’ve risen from the dead for the last time.

“This beats everything,” I told Peg from the back seat of her Oldsmobile, my entombed leg balanced atop a balled-up beach blanket as she drove from the hospital to my flat.  “A busted shin.  This really blows my mind.”

“Hey, I already feel like some kind of ... worthless ... waste,” she said, sailing through the broiled heart of the city.  “Go ahead and turn my fingers into french fries.  Rope me to a couple of big rigs going in opposite directions.  See if I care.”  I clutched the top of her seat as she took a corner on two wheels, trying to beat a red light.  “Well, is that what you’re saying?”

“You should hear what I’m saying.”

“Like I said, I’ll do anything you want—cook, clean, wash, shovel, plow, paint ... hoist.  Anything.  Just give me the word, and I’m your man.  Until mid-August, anyway.”

“What can you cook?”

“My granny doesn’t have to understand what she doesn’t know about.  Am I right?”

The sun-drenched city air ragged on my lungs.

“What can you cook?”

“Does popcorn count?”  Her crinkled hair wafted in the rearview.  “Eggs ‘n’ things?  E.B., whatever you say; you know I’m good for it.  Just be my friend.”

“You should hear what I’m saying.”

“You know what they say about sick minds, don’t you?”  One of her gray eyes flashed like a coin in the rearview.  “Don’t you?”

“Eggs ‘n’ things?”

“They hurt worse than broken bones.”

She screeched into the parking lot of a liquor store.  The cast kept me moored.

“Oh yeah?  Give me my retching hemispheres, I say.  Any damn day.”

Peg slept next to me on the mattress that night, her body blackened in a video twilight, sprigs of hair scented like an altar in an empty church.  While a smorgasbord of analgesics and several units of Macallan 18 saturated my blood, she breathed into my neck, and breezes propped up the drapes like ghosts.

In spite of other disturbances, real or imagined, I knew that, soon, another day would come when on the mattress next to me would be an empty space once filled with Peg, and in my memory only a breath of the fragrance of her hair.

At summer’s end, I knew, she’d load her duffle bags and boxes in the trunk and back seat of her Oldsmobile, hug her granny goodbye and wheel onto the highway, south to the University of Chicago.  And no matter what’d be going on in her head, in my head there’d be only the Oldsmobile and her silhouette behind the wheel, flashing through the trees, chewing up the miles away from home, from me, on the way to manicured concrete and geometric grass in another universe.

Soon, I knew, I’d be lying on the mattress, TV light flickering, drapes fluttering, and more than once I’d pass a hand through the empty space at my side, like a magician proving his magic works.

As someone once said, life is the little stuff that happens between goodbyes.

I’ve driven long distances on starry nights, trying not to think of the empty space in my passenger seat.  I’ve known the loneliness of the long-distance driver, highways winding through wheat fields and woodlands, call-in radio shows pulsing in the dark, frost on the hood of my Plymouth as it penetrates the night, lit by the moon, the stars and the highway reflectors.  I’ve known roadsides in the most haunted depths of night, the electric buzz of insects in the state-owned grass and the intermittent whoosh of tires far away in the black—nothing but that, a dome of stars and the idling of my engine.  I’ve stood on those roadsides, numbering the miles from Peg’s embrace.

On occasion, over thirty-two ouncers and Lucky Strikes on summer nights at Lake Pearl, with the winds bending cedars and the pale green northern lights unfurling like ghosts across the Milky Way, Peg’s tried to talk professional and personal goals with me.  She’s even mapped out the high points of her future.  I’ve tried to add my bit.  Sometimes things connect, and sometimes they just seem to; but either way and any others, it all sounds like sacrament over thirty-two ouncers and Lucky Strikes on summer nights.

While Peg slept on my mattress, the skeletons of angels danced across the pale small of her back.  Crickets chirped in the grass, and summer’s last breezes played in the birch branches.

And for a little while, despite the day, the leg, the coming empty space; for a little while, until night songs in the birches began to fade and Peg’s contours hardened in the light, I inhabited this world I’d dreamed.

An hour before dawn, the rain fell down.  Drops slapped into mud at the base of the dwelling, releasing the smells of soil and root.

The drapes blew inward.  On the floor beneath the window, the pages of an unknown periodical flipped open and closed.  My leg pulsed.  Peg’s heart fluttered against my shoulder.

It's what we want most that we can't have.