When it’s time to go, you go, race home as fast as you can go. It is never fast enough. Yet there it is, the sweet release of doors slid shut, transmission in drive, all accounted for and the final outfit, the first one to go to the drycleaners or shoved into the back of the closet, depending, soaked in sweat and doused in the exhaustion of sweet, almost cloying release. Is it a life poorly lived that cries out always for what comes next and is gladdest when the best moments seem to have elapsed with little fanfare or notice? This is a question to whisper inaudibly into the wee hours.
Open the front window, but there’s a vacuum and it hurts someone’s ears, drives them to the brink of madness, so open the other window and release them anew. No music can possibly be agreed upon, because what suits one in the wee hours offends the other. Some nights bring pain, blood and guts, tears and snot, but those are not all on the menu tonight. Because it’s a bit different, the air gets progressively sweeter through the last Eastern gasps of Pennsylvania, the relief is a shared one, it’s capacious and inviting.
I’m ready to enter the scene, I’ve been sitting here all along, disconnecting each ball from each socket in my hips and shoulders, detaching my wrists from my forearms, feet from ankles. So now I can grip the seat in front of me, pack my bent legs against the back of it and ask for a terrible, though still-cold, beer.
It’s nice to drink while moving, I muse, and yet I do not miss it when not engaged in the wee hours escape. It’s an act which has a setting and a setting which suggests an act. My participation in it is never obligatory, but always obliging. It also give me something to toast, if not always to toast to, other than the escape itself, which is almost redundant. But there is some truth in redundancy, I whisper into the dark wee hours, and the truth is this: we make space to escape away, then relish being able to escape back. One requires the other, a palindrome of motility, the first half does not make sense without the second.
But now I’m whispering to no one, not no one in particular, but no one at all. This is the darkest dark I know, because it is contained and constrained, limited by the tints on the windows and the shades every fiend within is shedding, the veils every friend within is voiding.
Who do you know, and who knows you? Don’t ask the dark, just drink your bad beer and rejoice that it’s cold, spill a little, just to season the floor mats and because someone else already did. And that someone is laughing from the opposite corner, remembering something that happened two days ago as if handed down from generations, and in a sense, it was. The key skill, I think, the thing that makes us different, I trust, why everyone does not just do this as a matter of course, I want to believe, is that you must put yourself in a coma and then resuscitate at precise moments so that you do not slip under permanently, too far away for the shot in the sternum to bring you back ‘round. I think of myself under the weight of the air in the vehicle, populated with deep sighs, shallow chuckles, anti-lullabies, and vacant stares, out into the darkness, which crushes down with all its velveteen non-weight. This I think into the wee hours darkness, and neither it nor my various confederates answers back, and though I curse their silence, I know that thoughts cannot be answered back, not here at least. A femme voice drifts through the night air, chased away by a cracking peal of laughter, and the age old question: “How do you think it went?”
There’s no answer for that of course, the hours far too wee to even consider how to put words into an order that could satisfy the asker, and responding to that question is strictly about satisfying the asker.
I myself am ready to weep a bit, as I’ve lost something dear and have not discovered the way to make do with the fact of that matter. The range of my comprehension of trauma is that it tends to be inflicted, but obviously it is instead first suffered, then sourced. I have screaming terror packed tight against silent expiration in my memory. It is a different kind of escape, the kind that steals someone away from you unexpectedly, and it escapes in the exhaustion of the wee hours as if magnetically drawn out of me by forces in concert I do not, and am not meant to, understand. The sadness of loss maintains with a gnawing hunger that wants for nothing, the worst kind of hunger, the one that makes Victorian English children rub vinegar on their lips for want of anything to place between them, for a bitter taste in preview of the embrace waiting just hours or days away. This is evil thinking during the escape, it makes my face hot and my body a foreign presence among foreign presences, specters of selves which rush back towards their waiting hosts, saprophytic entities soon to reunite with their sources.
I do not have the luxury of exhaustion, I am always inhaling, where the wind goes, I do not know. I grip the hand of my neighbor, whomever it is, and let them appreciate the tension, so that they’ll know the release, should it ever come.
Poor Old Jeffrey Young asks a question, and he will have to go. Through the tunnel, over the bridge, this will be a tricky one, but it’s the only way. I watch the door slide open, Jack’s lithe lich arm and Vincent Price grin sliding with it, and I wonder if this is actually going to happen, though I know it needs to. The Poor man is wizened, he knows too, and so he concentrates and considers his timing. I would not want to be in his shoes, but I want to see him execute the grand concession to convenience, and I feel the wee hours air, hear the wee hours sound, which becomes a gasp as Jeffrey leaps over the railing, instrument strapped to his side, and waves up to the decelerated van, having pulled out of an incredible dive roll. Cashman shakes his head, knowing we could have dropped him off, possibly even stopping the van altogether, but Dallow nods in approval, this was right, he thinks, that’s how he had to go, so that’s how he went.
It is the logic of the wee hours, it asks everything and gives nothing, it’s a tide pool and has nothing but time, small, small time. And I am small, small against it. I put my hands on the shoulders of the one in front of me, which is always Jack, and he puts one hand across his chest and over mine.
