Purgatory
It was clear that the party was over. The empty bottles, plastic cups, and all the other detritus that littered the backyard alongside the overturned chairs compose in the imagination of the observer whatever they consider an expression of unbridled hedonism. Just beyond the detritus, located such that the observer has very little time to settle into the mental apprehension of the post party state of affairs before they are plunged into the horror of a body floating face down in the swimming pool. I’d say that Evangeline’s dirty thirty party has clearly lived up to its name, so much that the police and emergency responders are now part of the cleanup crew.
They say that true romance is uncertain, unsure, unscripted, unaware, unabashed, and unadulterated. Under this definition, most romance stories might seem inadequate. Romance might avail itself better when stripped of sophistication, perhaps, in the simpleness of plucking a wildflower during a moonlight walk and pinning it to hair afloat in the wind or carrying a damsel along the riverbank or across the puddle next to her doorway or just saying “let’s go” without a grand destination in mind, trusting that wherever it maybe, you’d fill it with the necessary grandeur. Needless to say, the check that I wrote Evangeline for her birthday party cannot be placed in this category. I told Evangeline that I would be presenting at a conference out of the country, and I had only recently realized that it conflicted with her birthday weekend. She didn’t buy this explanation of course and we argued for a while, but I didn’t improve my explanation, that would make my intention more suspicious, so I wrote her a check and watched her reaction. The phrase “money talks” is an understatement, especially in relationships. I simply didn’t want to plan a party neither did I want to deny her the chance of “living it up” at 30, so I wrote a check. Now amidst the raging sirens of police and emergency vehicles and the general chaos that my money had purchased, I only wanted to lay eyes on Evangeline to make sure she is safe. I didn’t want to go in the house before police arrived, moreover, I was petrified at what I may find. A cameraman for the local news station had arrived, and he walked past me many times looking for anyone and everyone to interview. Why he didn’t consider me a potential source is baffling seeing I had been standing in the same spot since his arrival, maybe my “deer in headlights” look steered him away.
When police finally led out the occupants of the house to make formal statements and to further catalog the scene, I saw Evangeline for the first time since I arrived. She was accompanied by a male companion that I hadn’t seen before. One of the party attendees, I suppose. I waved and I started walking towards her, seeing her was the only thing that seemed right in an otherwise unreal experience, like a scene from a horror movie. I barely exhaled from my sigh of relief from seeing Evangeline before I slid into unconsciousness. I remember being hit, and my rapid collision with the ground and nothing else.
I was handcuffed to the chair when I regained consciousness. Pain was coursing through my body so much that I was confident that my skull was fractured and that the microbes in the air were marinating my neurons and reorganizing my neural pathways. Despite my certainty of this nightmarish reality, I was relieved. A dance of microbes in my open cranial vista was far more benign than the company I had kept until moments ago in the universe of my unconsciousness. In my unconscious dream, I had a feeling akin to being dragged through pathways with different palpable characteristics, some felt like corridors, others like streets where many drunken men had fallen, and highways deserted by the city, each pathway sinks me deeper into myself, into my essence, into my biological history, into the stories I once knew but now no longer remember, into the things I had seen before, into guttural sounds, through my birth, into my mother, outside my mother till I could feel her in the darkness, till I could see without sight her form, her elegant structure in the dark.
In the gusting acoustics, she said in unfamiliar tongue to my understanding what I would translate to English as “look”. But it was more than a call to behold something, it was a call to be a part of a view, a view of the past, my mother’s past like it was my own and I was reliving it like a daydream on a Sunday afternoon with no hurry or haste to arrest the dream. In this view, she was a young girl sitting on a riverbank with all the beauty that one might ascribe to a riverbank in a little village surrounded by mountains. Two men appear at her side, one at each side, staring ahead, across the river. I followed their gaze into another view, where I was in the midst of a fight. I was curled up in a different dimension as a part of my mother and felt the two men from the previous view engage in a struggle. I knew why even before I heard my mother say to the man on the right “I can’t give you what you want”. We walked into another view, this time, only with the man on the left, into a familiar place, into my childhood home and I knew right then who the man on the left was, my father. I felt uneven in this view, it was unstable, like the signal was noisy, I heard another call, it was an unfamiliar voice but immediately knew it was the other man, the man on the right, his call rang at my core and a 40-year secret unraveled.
Now, with my current concern focused on saving whatever is left of my cranium, I am relieved from the rendition of the reality that I had journeyed into when the policeman tackled me, and I hit my head on the pavement while walking towards Evangeline. One of the neighbors had described a person of interest to the police and an officer within earshot was confident that I was the person being described. He tackled me to prevent whatever malicious intent my walk towards Evangeline and the male party goer would reveal. It wasn’t long before I realized that my cranium wasn’t open, I only had a concussion, the pavement was made of wood and that saved me, I think. The police released me after Evangeline and the neighbor made official statements absolving me from any wrongdoing and flight manifests proved I was on a 22-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur where the conference I attended was held. As for my vision, according to Evangeline, it was a brief visit to purgatory. This explanation however doesn’t alleviate questions that I now have about my paternity. Could I be a bastard?
