Las Vegas—this unaccredited hell. The aurora of a million slot machines swept over the city. I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t slept since. I’ve never slept. Forgive me. I lie compulsively and I’ll live to a thousand years of age.
I like hotel beds where the sheets are tucked up tight, so it feels like I’m falling asleep in a big white envelope.
Most days, I’m sorry that I’m sent away.
I couldn’t sleep; I watched a woman in a black bikini dive into the cloudy, chlorine-flooded pool in the courtyard. Unaccredited, I thought even. I thought and it tarnished. I thought and when I bring it back now, the thought, it wears a suit jacket a little too large.
I imagined the itchy aura of thousands of businessmen dreaming adultery under rough, floral-patterned comforters, stung with starch. Paper is stung with white. We drove past outlet malls, the sun, moon, other celestial crap!
They met at a Halloween party. They lay down in a graveyard. Think of how loud crickets are for their size—like tiny sirens. She was dressed like a nurse and he was dressed like a Seventies tennis pro.
He kissed her thighs, her breasts, her mouth. Her mouth kissed his mouth. They laughed at the name on the tombstone where they lie. She pulled down his pants and got on top of him. The next morning he sat on the hardwood floor in her living room smoking a cigarette and watching a tabby cat sleep on the pillow inside of a kick drum.
I lie on a raft in the middle an Indiana lake. It’s that lake, circle of trees, soundless day. I return when the bar is closing and the Swiss bartender is giving me dirty look in the soaped-glass mirror, and the jukebox is screaming, and the music passes through me like light through seawater.
When I was eleven years old, we went back to visit our old Chicago neighborhood. Huge oaks still lined the street, but the houses looked smaller, packed closer. I walked into the house where we used to live, sat on the couch, ten or fifteen seconds, then I realized I don’t live here anymore.
She was crying because after three years I no longer wanted to be with her, I briefly thought of my mother leaving my father. Of course she wasn’t my mother, though she resembles her. I never mentioned that incident, about walking into my old house, to anyone, for years.
It’s like it happened in a room with no doors or windows. Researchers say we’re attracted to people who smell like our parents, and because she was short I used to smell her hair when we would embrace, "you smell like you" I would say.
But in the middle of the night, I started telling the truth and suddenly I couldn’t stop. "I feel like I’m in an arranged marriage," I said. "Do you still," she said. "Did you ever," she said. So many reasons to say "yes," but instead I said "no." I didn’t move my lips that way, didn’t form that nasal consonant, the long vowel, suddenly it was just there. And I kept answering "no."
My mother left my father, why exactly, I don’t know. I only remember that every night, through the brick wall that separated our rooms, I could hear them screaming. I heard my mother say, "I feel like my life is wasting away."
She pulled off her panties and put them in her purse. "Have a good show, Ephraim H. Hines," they laughed.
What "I feel my life is wasting away" means I can only piece together from the physics of its reaction. It’s my greatest fear. I only know it was hovered around me when I couldn’t sleep and watched the woman in the black bikini dive into the pool, her body bent under the blue liquid. Immersed in a loose net of molecules.
I heard on the news that all the bees are dying. They just fly away from the hive never to return. I’m tired of them. Deep down I want everyone to fold up into little squares of paper until their centers are too hot to touch.
I do this scary thing. I get in my car intending to go to the store, start thinking of lands of honey, and end up at an old job, a friend’s house that doesn’t live there anymore.
And when I come to, I’m struck with a sudden fear that I might follow the wild blue schematics right out of my life.
Chaz McCallahan is a nom de plum for someone who doesn't want to hurt his mother's feelings if she googles his name.