I have that strangest void for you

Under the dome? The Stephen King novel where a city is put, obviously, under a dome? Was that its title? My valleys look like that tonight. A grey violet light ricochets on a crystal crown of pollutants arching, fading over my head. Houses, all the same, skirt and skirt and skirt with corpsed trees stripped down to their bones all over. I wish my train would choochoo like Disney told me it would, sounding off my valleys, but it hums and buzzes instead. My arrival flies on mosquito wings. Twice or thrice the surroundings vacate and change. Nulled in strips of provincial roads, rarely leading to white buildings with empty perimeters. 

I’m three stops away. Two checks on my message, «mom, ten minutes and I’m home».

There’s always shame in this message. I find myself writing it more and more. In my teens I cut my own cord and swore I’d never go back. It’s hard to admit that there’s no reason for me not to now. I grew lonely in the city. The few I still love would rather see me in the valleys for my own sake and they’re all mostly drifting away anyway. Every day I wake up mourning my catastrophic unmooring. When – we lost if’s saving grace – a solar flare knocks off the power grid or the tap begins spitting mud or a sandstorm clogs my windows or the deathsquads come knocking or my capsule gets so heated it shuts my throat, there will be no one there for me. On that day with my bag of bare essentials on my back stuffed minutes before the crash faces will be blanker than ever, even through tremors and cold sweats. There’s only so much withering I can bear on my own.

One stop. I pick up my stuff – a copy of Robert Walser’s The walk I threw in the seat in front of me, not much – and I go waiting in front of the exit a couple of minutes in advance. Wouldn’t want to miss the end of the line rolling behind the door’s glass and the brakes in my knees. Some rando goes off through my wagon, a razor-sharp jawline on a fading hairline with a Drake fade and his fist in the iridescent pockets of an off-brand puffer jacket. Is there a cutter in his hand? A switchblade in his fake Gucci belt? The train stops. The door clacks open and I’m safe and sound with my guts still belly-blanketed.    

Did a Titan bend the sky black and blue tonight? Did Hyperion, who bore the winds and stars, find a hammer? Was it Cronus, Son-Fucker? I keep my eyes set on the 2-D houses far on the horizon, away from the dome above, to keep balance on the barbed cliff of panic. One step at a time and I will be home, I promise myself. I’ll be making the safety belt click in my mom’s car just like a baby-boy in no time, it’s not that far. One by one each step down the underpass beneath the rails and down a three-steps concrete stair and far away. One by one by one and I exit the underpass jump off the stairs out in the parking lot.

I’m still not used to that red. My mom’s new car sticks out of the rows of dim station wagons like the innermost part of a truncated limb or a blood vessel popping in a grey retina. An American car, red, a little too high above the ground with an “eco” right up there in the name like a marketing tic. It has that hyperoxygenated-nosebleed-napkin-look that naturally offends the eye. Unbearable. Still, the door handle bends nice. It resists the pull a fair amount and that I like.

«Hey! There you are! I didn’t see you coming», my mom’s genuinely surprised. This gives me an out to explain away an unusual dizzying queasiness: she’s ruminating, concerned and unnerved, on the fact that I could have been whoever, standing in front of the open door silhouetted by the dying light with a knife in hand. In times like this, rationalization is cheap and ragged tapestry on pressing brick walls, closing in.

We don’t hug at all as I adjust myself to the seat. We usually never do – not out of coldness or spite, but a certain, provincial Victorian affection – but this time, again, the absence’s unusually felt prickling the opening of the stomach sack like a spider crawling out. I stare at her manly Casio watch for a long while and the car’s not running and we’re dead silent. I shove the book I carry with me on the floor.

«I wanted to give you this. You always say that it hurts you that you don’t even know when he was born or how he looked like. He was a Sagittarius. Can you believe that?!», she speaks tentatively, stumbling on the responsibility of softening a blow that evidently hit her first. She puts her hand in the cupholder and throws something at me. Point blank right in my lap, she doesn’t miss. As the thing smacks against me it sounds off like a plastic keychain. Two ski passes. 1992.

My mom’s face is disquietly beautiful in the top left corner of the first ski pass. Her hair – heavy ash blonde, a shade I never seen on her – frame sunken eyes and cheeks shining like a city after a bombardment. She’s young and in pain and there’s an air of heroin-chic to her that puts me off tremendously. She looks straight at the camera, a mugshot. «You were tired, uh?», I say and no word comes back.

The other ski pass sports a boxy face slashed above the lip by thick Super Mario Bros moustaches. A face I know but wouldn’t recognize in a crowd. A menacing light bounces off the stiff geometry of his bone structure. Puffy eyes reddened in colder climates I can only make out following my intuition and the little inflating balloon those same eyes suddenly push and press against my liver. There’s a strange gravity hunching me on his martial glow.

The way I found out about him still sounds utterly grotesque to me. It happened after another fight with my dad. It was late at night; I was sixteen years old. It could have been about religion or politics or me, things I confronted with sheer instinct but knowing very little about. Eventually, as always, it died down in bad blood. My dad went to his bedroom, grinding his teeth like axes and swords and knives in a rabid fox’s mouth, and I tried to make fun of the situation with my mom. I was somewhat embarrassed. I pushed it too far for no reason, I knew it from the very get go. «I’m actually the mailman’s son, right? Right?!». My mom started sobbing. My life bent out of shape forever.  

«It was the first time we ever did anything together. He loved the mountains, I had never been there in my whole life. I almost killed myself skiing. I hated it so much. I still have no idea how he hid it from his wife. I mostly felt guilty for his kids, though».

Was that why you were so tense the first, and only, time I went on a ski trip in seventh grade, mom? You stood behind me as I stood in front of the gigantic bus doors. They were imposing gates, sliding sideways in front of my shivering body. It was a mordant January. I would have sworn I could hear your tendons tensing up and about to snap, mom. The other kids and their mothers and fathers were mere extras in your looming.

A few hours later I was climbing on the mountain’s side. The bus penetrating the tiniest road clutched between tiny yet towering houses rolling out the windows. Kids’ limbs thrown all over the place and loud loud singing. The bus swung up and down and left and right like a pirate ship on high seas. A spasm rising from deep within my intestines shook me abruptly and then something burning swam up my oesophagus. My tiny mouth opened wide on his own accord. A foul taste rushed to my teeth. My hands jerked up, panicked, in front of my jaws sprung ajar. A dense liquid, yellow-brown-green, cascaded torrentially through my fingers as if something had suddenly popped in my digestive tract. It splashed against my hands and then on my cheeks and eyes and nose. I tried to hold it, mend it, stop the haemorrhage, pull it back in. I swallowed some and it quickly forced itself out again. I was burning in shame. Thicker chunks ran down my palms and down my wrists and down my sleeves and into my jacket and sweater and thermic shirt. Some splashed down my pants and laid there like a cadaver.  I was about to rest my head in my palms, exhausted, but my guardian angel grabbed me by the neck preventing a christening in gastric acid. I was little leper boy for everyone around me for the rest of the trip. On that bus sat the girl I would eventually dump most of my twenties into.

I can’t say anything. I’m asphyxiating, with a fist clenched on the ski passes. I’m only afraid their plastic might cut through my skin and bleed me dry – a weird survival instinct has kicked into gear and taken over me, I guess. There’re puny little ants under my skin running, pricking my flesh. «I see», I say out of an atavic need to pacify my soul and my mom and this world even if I really don’t see anything around me anymore. I try to slide the two things back in the cupholder.

«No no, they’re yours. You don’t want to keep them? I was about to cut them in bits and throw them in the dumpster, but I guess they belong to you. I owe you this much».

I pick my book up. I shove the ski passes right in the middle. She turns the keys and puts a foot on the gas and we drive off.