Chapter Thirteen

Night time.  A parking lot.  No sounds outside the car.

        Outside the confines of this car there was a vast expanse of concrete, wet from a recent rainstorm.  On the other side of this parking lot a cluster of rectangular buildings loomed from the shadows of trees, all two stories high.  The Remedy could discern the nearest of these structures through the humid windows of the car, with the stars framing the limits of the wintry skies.  A cloud drift was passing in from the east, and halogen lamps sent curious patches of incandescence across the puddles at the rim of a dark forest.

        He was in the front passenger seat, dressed in a leather jacket and T-shirt.  He was hunched forward and breathing hard.  His hands gripped and ungripped themselves reflexively, searching for handholds among the vinyl surfaces of the compact he was sitting in, the compact 15 years behind the times.  In his lap a brown head of hair was bobbing up and down, and in the midst of his spasmodic movements he would often reach down to caress this head of hair, or else direct its motions with a gentle push and pull.

After getting fired from his fifth job out of high school, the Remedy entered a local community college.  He was after some kind of vocational certificate, something that didn’t require too much reading.  He was after a piece of paper that might lead to a better-paying job.

Getting this paper required him to be forthcoming about his learning disability.  This shamed him at first, but after a few weeks he realized that community college was full of people with even greater difficulties.  There were the ex-military, working their way through both overpriced textbooks and incipient psychoses.  There were the recently homeless, assisted through a few vocational classes by the state.  There were the high school dropouts, battling various drug dependencies.  There were also the international students, who were often dropouts in their own countries, struggling with both the language and American culture at large.

        Compared to most of these, he found that he had little to complain about.  After all, he had employment of a kind, and he had his looks.  He was young, and the language was not foreign to him.  He as yet had no problems with substance abuse, and he was self-sufficient after a fashion.  He had many reasons to be hopeful.

It was strange, to have felt so defeated for so long, and then to suddenly taste his advantages over others.  He almost always understood the lectures, and the girls were easy prey.  There was always a party to go to, and friends at every turn.

        Two years had passed since his high school graduation, and two things remained the same.  One: he never had any trouble finding women to sleep with, and Two: if he so chose, he could be immensely popular without trying that hard.  There was a warmth about him that others responded to immediately, even the ex-Navy Seal psychos and the girls out of Afghanistan who could barely speak English.  He made friends all over campus, and he did not discriminate when it came to the company he kept.

        Yet as he grew more confident in his surroundings, he also grew more reflective, thinking back over mistakes he had made, and how he might avoid repeating these mistakes in the future.  He began to see himself less as the victim of circumstance, and more as the agent of change.  He began to discern cause and effect in his earlier life, and to understand the role his personality had played in various failures and successes.  He awoke to himself.  He was becoming more aware.

        He shuddered again in the drama girl’s car, and as he concentrated on not coming he began to think about times when his parents had taken him to church, and on other scenes contemporaneous with their being alive.  He remembered a priest from that long-ago church, whose favorite theme had been “turning weakness into strength.”  

It was from that moment, sitting in the drama girl’s car, that he began to think about doing just that.  Many of his previous difficulties had certainly originated in personal weakness, and this personal weakness might be turned to his advantage.  Yes, he’d had some obstacles placed in his path early on, but that was no reason to give up.  It was no reason to despair.  These misfortunes might even be motivations for future accomplishments, so long as he didn’t wallow in them. 

He wasn’t the only guy in the world whose parents had orphaned him.  And he wasn’t the only victim of the social service system.  Neither was he the only person who’d had difficulty reading, and in finding success in school.  There were plenty of people who had endured even greater misfortunes, and who had gone on to do impressive things.

He had stopped mourning his parents many years before.  He had learned how to move past the fact of their death.  He remembered them fondly, and did not blame them for the years of foster homes that followed.  He forgave them for dying.

        Then he came in the drama girl’s mouth, and her wide eyes fixed him with surprise.  His penis slid out of her mouth as she moved her head backward, her lips tightly closed in a frowning expression.

        Her shadowed face looked up at him again with a grimace, her fingers fumbling for the door latch.  She opened the car door and spit his semen onto the wet pavement.  She drank from a bottle of water that she had placed between them.  He deftly placed his member back in his jeans, as she climbed back into the driver’s seat.  

An awkward silence reigned for a moment, but he never apologized for such silences.  To him it seemed only natural that people should run out of things to say to one another.  At least once in a while.

        She wasn’t an especially pretty girl, his companion, but she had the kind of proportions he enjoyed.  She was wearing a pair of torn overalls, and beneath these overalls she wore a knit green sweater.  She had eyes that seemed too large for her long face, and a set of jagged teeth within a mouth that always seemed to be frowning - even when it wasn’t full of semen.  She would perhaps be a fascinating woman one day, but at that time and in that car she was just another of the Remedy’s casual acquaintances, a girl with low self esteem and few prospects.

He wasn’t even sure what her name was.  Cindy or Sandy or something like that.  The girls who starred in community college plays were always pierced somewhere, always had names that started with an “S” or a “C,” and they always acted shy until they were blowing you in their car.

        He had met Cindy or Sandy in his Survey of World History class, and that was when he began to think about the past more, and when he also began to think about his own ambitions.  Maybe, he thought, he might escape the traps set by time.  If he could work hard enough, he might even go to the university.  Maybe he could even study History.  He began to imagine himself as some kind of history teacher, teaching kids with issues, teaching kids who couldn’t read so well.  He would open up their eyes, he thought.  He would show them how to succeed like he did.  He could do it, if he tried.  Sandy or Cindy agreed that this was so.

        “I need to get home,” Sandy or Cindy was saying, “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

        “Sure,” he answered, “I live down by Green Lake.  Is that OK?”

        A set of instructions followed.  Sandy or Cindy lived in the city, but not as far away from campus.  She turned the key in the ignition, shifted into Drive, and began pulling out of the parking lot.  Sandy or Cindy was not much of a talker, so he was once more left alone with his thoughts.

        It was very late, and as Sandy or Cindy followed a winding access road there was only the sound of the car to pierce the silence of the night.  There were trees on the fringes of everything, and the road away from campus seemed deep in the country, even though he knew that housing developments lurked around every turn.  The night echoed with his memories.

        They turned right on Greenwood and traveled south.  Quiet houses full of favored Caucasians sped by the windows.  The Remedy imagined that in each of those houses there was some child dreaming pleasant dreams, and parents drinking wine in the late hours.  After they passed 145^th the suburbs gave way to a commercial strip, with gas stations, rest homes, and the odd corner bar pointing the way back to his apartment, an apartment that was not so much a home as a place to sleep and watch television, a place in which to wait for phone calls at unreasonable hours.  It was a place to avoid being.

He remembered his house before his parents had died, and sitting in his back yard with a fat, bespectacled boy his own age.  They had been playing with toys, and the other boy had broken one of this things.  He remembered asking the other boy why he’d done it, but the fat boy had never answered.  Why had they been there, in the yard?  What was it that they were supposed to be doing?

        He remembered a book that he was supposed to read for school.  The fat boy had given it to him.  One of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventures.  It had been about two children travelling back in time to Ancient Rome.  Yes, that was the book.  They were supposed to do a book report on it, but the fat boy only wanted to play with his toys.

        And then they had argued, and the fat boy had said he was just a stupid boy who couldn’t read good, and that the fat boy didn’t need his help anyway.  And he, The Remedy, had started to cry, and he had told the fat boy to shut up, and to go ahead and write the report himself.  

Had it been a report?  Or some kind of poster?  He had trouble remembering, and the more he made himself remember, the more ashamed he felt.  Turning weakness into strength.  Yes, let that be the reason to move forward, and not a reason to give up.  Turning weakness into strength.

        But Sandy or Cindy had been talking the whole time.  He hadn’t been listening.  “Aren’t you even listening to me?” she was saying, “Don’t you have anything to say?”

        He was slow to recover.  “Of course,” he mumbled, “I have something to say.  I just want to hear more from you.  I… I’m just thinking about it, that’s all…”

        That seemed to pacify her.  Excellent save, he thought.  She began her story over from the beginning, and during the second telling he managed to hold his memories and doubts at bay.  She had been discussing their relationship up to that point, which only extended to the day before.  She was wondering what she should tell her parents about him.  She was wondering if they should move in together.

        And that was when her car pulled up in front of his apartment building.  She let him out, they said their goodbyes, and she drove wordlessly into the recesses of the night.