Whatever happened to the guy? I’d asked my mom.
Nothing.
Which didn’t make sense to me. How could nothing have happened to a guy who’d killed somebody, accident or not?
As I got older, I filled in the gaps myself, inserting pieces of narrative my mom had left out. I imagined some drunk heckling my father. I imagined my dad angry, just like he got sometimes with me when I bothered him. I imagined him pushing some drunk guy in the bar, and the guy pushing back. Imagined my dad taking a swing and losing his balance and his head connecting with the sharp edge of the bar. Imagined the drunk guy saying it was an accident, and being allowed to go free.
In my mind, this version of my father’s death quickly cemented itself into fact. This was the version I told friends when they learned that my father was dead. This was the version I embellished for an essay I wrote freshman year of college for Advanced Composition 2. That essay (“My Father’s Killer”) ended up being reprinted in the campus English Department quarterly and had the side effect of launching my journalism career when a professor named Jack Seydow encouraged me to write for the campus paper.
And according to that version of the story, the guy who killed my father was just some drunk son of a bitch who threw one punch too hard.
“My Father’s Killer,” I’d hinted at in my essay, was himself. He’d done it to himself. And I had a hard time forgiving him for that.
Pretty much my whole life.
My head felt thick, full of sand. I pressed my palms against my eyes and saw stars and comets and nebulae racing toward me. I wondered how long I’d be here, sitting in this dark hallway in February 1972 before the dream ended. Would the sun come up again and blast-burn another part of me away? My arms? My head? Maybe the sun would finish me off this time?
And then I woke up.
Meghan was staring at me. Her blond hair was damp and smelled like shampoo. The cleanest, most intoxicating shampoo in the world. She was crouched down on one knee and was touching my chest.
“Mickey?”
I blinked a few times, then patted the floorboards just to make sure they were real.
“Yeah. Hi. Uh, how did you get in here?”
“You left the door unlocked. I thought you said this was a bad neighborhood.”
“Most muggers are too lazy to walk up to the third floor.”
She sat down, crossed her legs, then reached out to touch my forehead. I must have been a sight. She takes me first thing in the morning to the emergency room of a hospital. Now she finds me passed out on the floor.
“How are you,” she said.
“I’m okay.”
The look on her face told me she didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either.
“You want anything? I brought some turkey sandwiches. Some Vitamin Water.”
“No, really I’m fine.”
She noticed the turntable, and the Pilot LP. I heard the needle running over and over and over in the final groove.
“Pilot…wow. I think my dad had that album. You been taking a spin back to yesteryear?”
I bit my tongue like you wouldn’t believe.
We stayed there on the floor for a while. I was seriously dizzy—like drunken bed spins without the drinking. The tiny elastic hoses that pump blood through my brain were writhing, throbbing. My mouth tasted like metal, and I could feel the thin layer of sweat beneath my clothes. It wasn’t as bad as this morning, when I woke up in the hospital and it felt like my skull had been cracked open. But I also didn’t want to go moving around too much. Not yet.
I checked the fingers on my right hand. Still attached. Still numb.
Then I finally pushed myself to a sitting position, across from Meghan.
“I’m sorry about what happened last night,” I said. “I didn’t meant to scare you like that.”
“So what happened?”
“I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”
“You don’t remember?”
I remembered a lot of things, but I wasn’t exactly sure they were real. The last thing I wanted was to make this conversation even more awkward. So I lied.
“Last thing I remember,” I said, “I was in bed with you. Wait…that sounds wrong. I was on the couch with you. I nodded off, and what was it. What did I miss?”
Meghan looked at me.
“You were mumbling in your sleep. Saying something like, you can’t hear me, you can’t see me. Then you said something about all of this being a dream.”
“How did I get to the hospital?”
“A little before seven you started convulsing, which really freaked me out. I tried waking you up. You wouldn’t. Then you started screaming with your eyes shut, so I called 911. They asked me if you were on any drugs, but I told them I didn’t know.”
As she spoke, I replayed last night’s dream in my head. While Meghan had been watching me convulse, I’d probably been throwing my shoulder against an imaginary door, trying to break it down. I screamed when my imaginary fingers fell off.
Meghan took me by the shoulders now. Stared hard into my eyes.
“Mickey, I know you’re between jobs and everything, but if you need to see somebody, I can help you out.”
“I don’t need help. I’m just a little tired.”
“Nobody drinks a six-pack then lapses into a near-coma, Mickey. It just doesn’t make sense. You always seem broke…”
“Wait, wait—you think I’m on drugs?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m not here to judge. Jesus, I sound like a therapist…look, I dated a guy in college with a serious problem, and we all got him some help. It took awhile, but he’s doing okay now.”
“Meghan, I swear to you, it’s not drugs. I’m too broke to afford drugs. I had those Yuengling and a couple of aspirin. That was it. You were here with me the whole time, remember?”
“Aspirin, huh?”
“From my grandfather’s medicine cabinet. Unless you think he was doing drugs and stashing them in the Tylenol bottle.”
Meghan touched my face as if she could read minds with her fingertips. I was angry, but part of me softened at her touch.
“Okay, Mickey. Maybe you just need some rest.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
She stood up and started looking through her purse for her keys. As much as I wanted her to stay, I also wanted time to sort through what I’d just dreamed about. All of it was so damn real, so detailed.
“Let me walk you.”
“I’m fine—I’m parked right downstairs. You act like this is Beirut or something.”
“Yeah, I know it’s not Beirut. Beirut has more buildings left standing.”
Meghan leaned down and brushed her lips against my forehead. I reached up and touched her arm, as if my touch could make her linger. But she pulled away quickly and walked to the door. She smiled, told me she’d check on me later.
I pushed myself up off the floor and went to the bathroom for more Tylenol. The two I’d taken before hadn’t done a damn thing—
Wait a minute.
V
The Clockwise Witness
Using a butter knife, I chopped a single pill into quarters, doing the math in my head. Last night, I’d popped four pills, 250 milligrams each. I had weird-ass dreams about cars and women in polka-dot dresses and fat, sweaty doctors that lasted pretty much all night long.