The Fear

There’s this old woman who lives in my head, you see.

She’s way, way in the back, so far back there I can’t even reach her, not even when I poke my little pinkie finger up into my nose as far as it’ll go. She’ll back her wheelchair into a corner behind my brain when she hears me comin’, and then she’ll aim at the incoming finger with her rifle, just in case she needs to use it, though she never does and never will and she knows it.

She is from the future. Around the year 2045, best I’ve been able to piece together. And her hair used to be long and red, and she used to have an assortment of jewelry poking into her face and her unmentionable parts. It’s true!  Saw it with my own eyes, I did.

People around here used to talk. Gossip. They’d chatter on about how you’d see her, racing through the streets at dawn on the back of that motorbike of hers, zipping her way to or from the local courthouse, where she would shock and amaze and more than likely, piss everyone off with her MC Escher-ing of the American legal system. She had quite the high opinion of herself back in those days.

Maybe for good reason.

But in 2045, there’s not a soul says much of anything about her, good or ill. In the year 2045, to the extent anyone chances to think of her at all, she’s just that old woman with the rifle and the wheelchair who lives all by her lonesome down the way. And one of these days – could be today, could be next week, but it won’t be none too long, that’s for sure – she will die. She will die and she will be gone, gone, and then somebody else who never knew her will move into her place and toss all her belongings out by the curb and well, that will be that.

So when I hear the wheels on that rusty wheelchair squeaking, it brings me one step closer to understanding what it means to die alone.

To be forgotten. For those proverbial sands of time to cover me up and… Well, you get the idea.

When I hear the wheels on that rusty wheelchair squeaking, it makes me wonder if I might oughta get myself housebroken enough to keep a man around. Maybe plop out a rug rat or two to ensure that someone maintains my picture albums and my diary when I’ve gone off into the Sweet Nowhere.

And frankly, it’s only when I hear the wheels on that rusty wheelchair squeaking that I think those things. No other time never. It’s only then that it occurs to me that I am not safely sealed off and squirreled away inside some sort of special bubble where time stands still.

It’s only then that I get The Fear.

I hear that squeaking, and it sure would be nice if I could crush that senile old bitch. I take a pencil and I poke it fast and hard, right into my ear, hoping to catch her unawares. But even in the wheelchair, half blind and nearly stone paralyzed with syphilis and all, she’s still too sly to get caught by such a cheap stunt.

The thing is, she’s a liar. What she represents, it’s a false fear. The Fear, I mean. Not worth wasting even a pinch of precious youth worrying about.

I remind myself of the long list of things I actually do wanna do. Wonderful, surprising, deviant, unsociable, unhealthy, splendidly selfish things!

Boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, a screaming shitting rug rat – hell, even a pet that needs walkin’ – they’d only impinge on the things I really do want to spend time on. Ten years on and I’d be trying to figure out why it is I still never finished that Great American Novel.

Never freed my fellow Houstonians from bondage.

Never made the world a weirder place to live.

The thing is, that old woman with the rifle and the wheelchair and The False Fear? They don’t take no account of my father, who impregnated his wife three whole times and yet is going to die alone and forgotten, with the sands of time covering him up and blah blah blah…

The thing is, I know damn well the whole idea of “family” is just a scheme Hallmark cooked up to sell more birthday cards.

I know this. I know this now. I knew this last year. I’ve known it as long as I can remember.

But what if I don’t know it in 10 years, when the eggs have all dried up? When would-be babies have gone and bled away? When dust blows through deserted Fallopian tubes where once happy sperms played and bees buzzed and no angels dared to tread?

 

I lift one eyelid as far as it will go and I shoot bug spray – the nasty, industrial-strength kind that makes Third World fetuses grow fifteen legs and camel’s humps – back behind my eyeball. I’m hoping to suffocate that bitch with the rifle and the wheelchair and her False Fear.

I mean, hell, with all the assorted dopes she’s smoked over the years, how strong could her withered lungs be, anyway?

It’s a devil’s bargain: To waste my life compromising to make sure there’s a chance someone will think about me once I’m too dead and gone for it to matter one way or the other.

But still… squeak squeak. Squeak squeak.

The thing is, I’m almost halfway through whatever this is and I still haven’t figured out what Life is yet. I have failed to find the piece of music or the Big Idea that blows the top of my head clean off. I have not smelled sound nor seen what the vibrations behind the veil look like.

I haven’t even… Um, I haven’t… Hold on… I, um… Er…

Wait a sec… Hey! You there!

You kids! Get the hell off my lawn!

I’m warning you! Don’t make me come out there and use this rifle!

Squeak squeak. Squeak squeak…