7

 

 

 

 

7

 

 

The longest we ever stayed put in one place was from when I was a toddler to around age five, six at most. Old enough to remember, but not in any solid kind of way. That place in small-town Carris. Our smallholding on the edge of a rural, mountain-locked valley. If I hear or say the word home, this is what I remember. The house, the driveway, the trees. Like a house in a forest, except for the road. The summer thunderstorms, and the way the roof creaked. The warmth inside, burning out.

“Each memory you hold is just a moment that’s already passed,” my mom says. “The only way to be happy in life is to live in the now.”

She would look wise saying this if it wasn’t for her smile. Goofy, with squinted eyes and tongue caught between her teeth. It means she’s planning something, about to say something completely different, because really she’s desperate to change the subject.

“…and now, I say we go get doughnuts.”

“… and now, I say we find out how many channels our Man of the Moment’s TV here has.”

“…and now, I say we raid the liquor cabinet and go check out the pool.”

So we live in the now. Like one of those guru dudes on late-night TV once said. Live in the Now. Making the words echo, backlighting them in spirals of blue and a million tiny flashes.

While I don’t know much about before, I do remember Carris. Or, the sense of it. In a way, I remember our time there like it somehow got burned into me, scars beneath my skin I have to touch and manipulate to find the breadth of them.

You can take a thick, black marker and swipe a big, bold line straight through my life at exactly this split: the time when we were at Carris, and the time after we left. Draw the line like a cliff-edge, straight down ragged and steep and without place for pause. Because it really was like that. Looking at the Before and then at the After, there is no in-between.

***

In those early years, I thought my momma and Auntie Clem and me were the only real people on earth. I thought it was only the three of us who had ideas and feelings. Lives. A crazy kid-belief that all the other folks around were more like automatons than real people. They appeared as we drove into town and then took their positions, played their roles, followed their cues. Everyone we ever saw, whether we knew their names or not. The shop people in town who rang up and bagged our groceries, the guy at the filling station who checked our tires and cleaned our windscreen, the people strolling around with bags in their hands. Standing in clusters, making small-town chitchat. Their actions and movements and words scripted by something Other, recited entirely just for us. When we drove back home after a trip into town, the backseat crammed with shopping bags, me riding shotgun on Momma’s lap, I imagined a dusty darkness enveloping the space behind us the moment it was out of view. A cloud storm of nothingness overwhelming everything, stripping it back to blankness. A void that would stay empty until the next time we approached it, when the smoke would swirl into something solid and again form the rest of the world.

What I mean is, there’s a part of me even now that isn’t sure anyone I meet is actually real. I am, I know. I’ve felt my heart choke its way up my throat, and I’ve seen myself bleed. I know what it is to be alone with my thoughts. They’re real, even if no-one else can look into my mind and read the things I see in here. And I know Momma’s real, because if she’s not real then nothing is. Not even me.

I have something else, too. A third eye set into my forehead, secret and unseen. It sits a half inch above the bridge of my nose. It’s big and it’s round, and it’s the deepest, glossiest black. It shines like it’s wet, even though I’ve never cried out of it. It’s not an eye I use like a normal eye. Most of the time it keeps itself closed, and when it’s closed my flesh-and-blood eyes are open. When it’s open, my normal eyes are shut. What my real eyes show me and what this other eye says is real don’t always match. The way a black and white photograph and its color version can’t be considered identical, even though they’re both of the same thing and were taken at the same time. Sometimes that eye stays open too long, and when it finally closes my normal eyes have trouble recognizing where I am, or who’s around me. The room I’m in might be different. The way I’m lying might have changed. I suddenly have something over me—a blanket, a coat—or something taken away. Sometimes I have marks on my body—around my wrists, on the insides of my thighs. My neck will hurt like I’ve been sleeping wrong for hours without shifting once, the way it is when you fall asleep on a coach in a seat without a proper headrest. I guess when you sleep, your body is not your own.

It’s not so important, what’s real and what’s not, what’s true and what isn’t. It all changes from moment to moment. The road you were just on will vanish behind, and what follows is a dust storm that takes everything over. There’s no point looking back. It’s not there anymore, anyway.

Still. Even when my two normal eyes are open and I’m all the way here and all the way aware, I sense my black eye pulsing. It’s like an itch in the bone, this feeling. Rolling over, buzzing in slow circles. Like a wasp’s nest boiling in honey. Angry. It shows me blood. It sprays a stench of scarlet across people’s faces as they’re talking to me. It drags claws through their eyes. It hurts them, shreds them. I have to watch it like a psychic death-wish. Sick and surreal as a 70s horror film, like the ones that dude by the coast made us watch. I had to pretend I didn’t like them, but I did. What my eye shows me makes me feel the same.

Sometimes I think I keep my head down so much out of a kind of instinct—a fear that someone will look at my forehead, and see the sleeping eye I’m hiding there. I keep my head down so my hair falls in my face. I keep my shoulders up so nobody can glance around my edges. Maybe it’s good I do this, maybe it’s even important. Because when I catch strangers staring at me a certain way—motherly and soft, full of concern and questions—that eye seethes like a thing catching fire. Like it wants to do all my seeing for me. And I don’t know what would happen if I allowed this to happen, but I do know the idea scares me. Worried my usual eyes will die if I allow it, roll right out of my skull and melt down my cheeks, and I won’t be able to see anything solid or colorful ever again. Every stranger a monster. Every smile grotesque.