Chapter Thirty

There was a movie on TV.  Men were running around in hides and slashing at one another with swords.  A muscular guy hacked the head off a giant snake, and after he did so a sexy young virgin waited, eager to caress his sweat soaked form.  In the background a black man lurked, the villain, and armor-clad figures rode off into the sunset.

The doctor had given the Remedy some painkillers for his shoulder.  He had washed these down with bourbon, he had fallen asleep in front of the TV, and he had dreamt a strange dream.  His dream resembled what he had seen on television, but it kept going around in a circle.  He would watch the man kill the snake, he would watch the man approach the virgin, but their mutual lust was never consummated.  Instead it was back to the beginning of the sequence, in which the man faced the serpent yet again, in which he approached the virgin, only to have her vanish from his embrace.  And the man in the movie somehow knew that he could never really kill the snake.  The man in the movie also knew that he would never possess the girl.  The Remedy, in his sleep, was certain of this.

        He woke with his head pounding, and his shoulder gratifyingly numb.  He was lying on his back, already dressed for work, with all of his living room clutter slowly collapsing towards the center of the room.  

So much for college, he thought.  Insufficient funds.  Lack of financing.  Broke and without a lifeline.  Other students had family to fall back on.  He had no one.  Or he had only his women, and they were never around for long.

He looked at his watch and realized that it was time to get to work.  It was time to enter the real world yet again.  It was time to get about the business of living.  He tried to make it sound like a call to arms.  But his determination to succeed always wavered, perhaps because he’d not yet tasted any real kind of success.  Again, he had his women, but they were never around for long.

        He had attended the U before his money ran out.  A single semester of glorious college girls and truly epic parties.  He had even studied a bit, entering history classes with all of the required reading tucked awkwardly beneath his arm.  He had applied himself, he truly had.  He had written papers, and he had done his homework.  He had come to most of his classes on time, and he had done his best to earn the good will of his professors.

He had been too loud for the university from the start.  He had come to understand this.  He had caused embarrassment in that institution, and they had used their rules to cast him out.  He had been found in back rooms with teaching assistants.  Drugs were found in his possession.  There had been a few fights, and brushes with campus security.  Many of his professors had been very open in their liking for him, but in the end it wasn’t enough, and he was forced to leave.  Through a certain rule they were able to strip him of his financial aid, and without financial aid he had no way to go on, no way to continue.

And at the root of it all he had really been trying.  He had really wanted to do well.  But he hadn’t fit in.  His inadequacies followed him into the university - his difficulty reading, and his difficulty concentrating, and his difficulty not fucking his classmates and instructors.  So it was goodbye, ivory towers.  Goodbye to dreams of being a teacher, in some humble place, and goodbye to teaching kids like himself how to read.  To teach success, he would have had to experience it for himself.  To help others into adulthood, he would have had to mature beyond his failings.

As he remembered all of this he reached down into the pocket of his jeans to find that his keys were still there.  He took them out and placed the key ring around his middle finger as he got up and stepped through his front door.  He did not lock the door behind him, because he had nothing worth stealing.

He walked down from the verandah outside his front door to a set of cement steps built into an iron frame.  Two flights of these steps led down to the front of the building past a dying acacia, and next to the acacia his car was parked.  He unlocked the car door and stepped inside.

        As he closed the car door he remembered his time at the university.  The university was where he first saw her, at a party given by someone, somewhere.  She was wearing this dress that got everyone’s attention, and his friend was bragging about how he’d gotten her drunk once and fucked her in the ass.  It may have been bullshit.  Then, as he was lifting a cup of warm beer to his lips, their eyes had met, and he knew that he’d be spending the night with her.  It was that obvious.  Her eyes were questioning, but he didn’t need to play along.

        They made love – and it really was that, love – in her dorm room.  That was when he noticed a picture of some other guy on her dresser.  Unhealthy, with glasses, somehow familiar.  He asked her about the picture, and she said that he was very shy, and that they had only gone on a few dates so far.  He joked about the other guy being a fag.  She did not respond to the joke.  

        He smiled at that memory as he pulled out onto the street, turning past a convenience store run by an Ethiopian couple.  Another short street led him to Rainier Avenue, and from Rainier Avenue he passed by several fast food concerns and a couple of self-storage facilities.  An on-ramp provided access to the freeway, and as he merged onto the freeway he saw the two Hills, Beacon and Capitol, scroll backwards through his rearview mirror.  Ahead of him the freeway led into a tunnel, and on the other side of that tunnel was the lake.  The weather was warm, but not uncomfortably so.  AC/DC blared from his car radio, and he had the windows down.  The wind disturbed the litter that occupied his car, and sent stray hairs into his eyes.

She had the most beautiful golden hair.  Something about her thighs made him come alive.  She also had a determination – he knew this, even then – that would prove to be his undoing.  One day she would marry the guy in the picture, she said.  Not him.  He was not worth marrying.  She never said that, about him not being worth marriage, but she had thought it very obviously.  Her thoughts were only half-hidden behind her words.  She was so achingly beautiful, and so determined.

        So long ago, it already seemed to him.  That was already many years before.  And then he had gone broke and had been forced to enter the real world, which never felt very real.  He often thought back to the guy in the picture on her dresser.  He often contemplated the fact that his life had been stolen by this other man.  His happiness, the Remedy reflected, was lying in another man’s house.

        It was the same shit on a different day.  Despite the painkillers, his shoulder began to throb.  He would arrive at work soon, and begin the torturous process of loading boxes into trailers.  All the while his shoulder would be agony, and he would swear, and he would gnash his teeth, and it would be OK to do both because he was usually alone in that trailer.  Stacking and stacking.

        At the opposite end of the tunnel he sped outward into sunlight, and the lanes widened as the freeway continued over a bridge that spanned Lake Washington.  Suburbs planted upon forested hills hugged the expansive lakeshores, and sailboats bobbed over glinting waves.  Along the bridge he approached Mercer Island, the refuge of dot-com magnates and those old enough to have old money.  At the farther end of the bridge the road surface rose up to meet a steep incline, and the winds surging above the lake pressed alongside the speeding cars into a slight ravine that led into another tunnel.

        Occasionally his boss would come in to supervise the stacking.  His boss was very religious, a family man, and he had never been cast out of his paradise.  His boss was a nice enough guy, but devoted in more ways than one.  The Remedy had trouble understanding that kind of devotion.  But then his boss had never had foster parents, had always been loved, and his real parents had probably taken him to church every Sunday.

        He blinked and he was at work, pulling into the sizeable parking lot that stood alongside the large, gray, utilitarian structure that occupied a newly zoned industrial park on the outskirts of Redmond.  Minutes later, he was walking through the hub.  Minutes after that, he was in his trailer once again, sweating.

.  The trailers were assembled around a giant cinderblock building.  Trailers were backed up against square doors in the walls, a door for every ten feet or so.  Trailers were always pulling in and out of the doors.  When the trailers pulled out the cold air from outside flooded into the building, and his lungs filled with the icy breath of winter.

For every door there was almost always a trailer, and inside every trailer was a little man like himself, sweating.  A set of cold rollers, suspended from girders in the ceiling, fed packages onto a chute that led into each trailer, and each set of rollers was connected to a conveyor belt that wound around the building from where other trucks, in the center of the vast building, were unloaded.

        He picked a box from the chute and his shoulder screamed.  A lifetime injury, someone had said.  He should talk to his insurance provider, someone else had said.  There were nights when he could not sleep for the pain, but where the pills stopped working liquor took up the slack.  He was an occasional drinker of binges.  He had binged on occasion.  He set the box at the top of a “wall” he was building inside the trailer.  The computer velcroed to his forearm beeped as it scanned a barcode into a database.  There were other noises, including a grinding noise from the cartilage in his shoulder.

        When he’d made love to her in that dorm room he’d been an erstwhile athlete.  Not on any team, mind you, but he had played and been praised for it.  It was only that he lacked a background in sports.  It was only that his funds had been insufficient.  It was only that his parents had died, and were helpless to help him.  Had they lived, he would have grown into sports, and money, and college.  He would have had that encouragement, or so he imagined.

        He turned around and saw that the chute was clogging up.  Too many parcels passed down to his trailer during peak time.  He worked and worked, scrambled this way and that, only to return the next day and smell the same tang of metal from the hub machinery, hear the same yelling over the inorganic hum.  His boss was a Mormon perhaps.  There was no easy way out.  He despaired for a moment as he tried to adjust his pace.  No more boxes, he thought.  Please don’t let this be my future.

        His boss sent in another man to help him.  The two worked silently through their shared exhaustion.  Union benefits made the burdens of weight and repetition lighter, but against union benefits and higher pay there was always the agony of his shoulder, the agony of lifting and turning.  In the midst of the pain he tried to remember what his dreams had been about.  He tried to think of flashing swords and virgins.