Homepage Fiction Poems About Contact


Watchers
by MARSHALL PIOTROWSKI


    “Since I first appeared in that photo, in the viewfinder, I’ve stopped doubting what I’ve seen, and what I see. It was all real, some sort of initiation, a soul-cleansing ritual, a kind of ego-annihilation, and it all happened to me, and, to my massive relief (because obviously I wasn’t always so sure) I’m not one flaccid bit psychotic. I desperately, with the full wholeness of my inner will, wish I could know why they are here, following me, watching me, aligning the stars for me. But I’m trying to get more comfortable with not knowing. It feels real important that I get real comfortable with not knowing. Like I keep reminding myself that no, I don’t need to know everything, and no, I probably don’t need to be afraid of them. I keep reminding myself of that stuff just to drive the point home to my own self. That feels real important. But, I do know some things. I know they are my watchers, or, at least, I call them my “watchers”. And I know they watch me. I know they are the only beings in this universe truly interested in me. Even my soon to be fiancé is fundamentally self-absorbed. My cat hardly registers my existence. And that’s fine for them. But those two specters, those two who alone with me birthed bees, are the only ones intensely invested in what I do, in who I am, the only ones who actually know me and what I’ve seen, felt, tasted, heard, wanted and desired, who know what I’ve created, what I opened my throat for, the great gift to the world that climbed, crawled, buzzed out of my deep depths, out of my blessed, most royal maw, the only ones pulling cosmic ropes, plucking, playing the sharp strings of heaven’s harps all so that I may know a righteous happiness. They are my guardian angels, my Godly marionettes, my magical mysteries, my very best friends, the only ones I will ever truly trust, and I would never trade anything for them. I would do everything, fight anyone, all for them. I would fight ‘til thick red blood ran roaring through the city streets, and I would fight to the bitter last blink of a miserable, tedious, freezing (or burning) death if I had to, if that’s what this all came to, if that’s what they wanted me to do for them, if they wanted me to fight for them in return for everything they have brought me, gifted me, allowed me to win, all this happiness and wealth and all this power and control I now have and hold over my own life. I mean, what do you expect? They gave me my American Dream. And I love them. So don’t any of you get ANY IDEAS about stealing them from me.”
   His voice trailed off in a desperate, wily tone. This was clearly the end of his talk, and the crowd sat, quite understandably, perplexed and concerned, and they winced slightly and silently, giving each other frightened little looks about him. Randal Sellers, the former Portland, Oregon based Regal Cinemas box-office worker, however, exchanged none of these little looks, nor did he wince whatsoever. He’d arrived here alone, on a quite personal quest. Randal’s eyes and mind remained fixed on the speaker. Randal could see him in the picture projected on the wall perfectly well. Randal held a heater under his coat, a thrifted grey peacoat dusted with a fresh, light layer of yellow pollen. Randal could not accept a return to the far too familiar, nearly fatally depressing cycle of minimum-wage wage-labor and cascading debt. There was nothing furtive about Sellers: he felt no guilt for what he was about to do; he was not the cruel system that put the desperation in him. “All the world is a war,” he though to himself. He stood up before anyone else could and aimed the heater at the speaker’s left leg.

[11:29 AM]
   She started talking first.
   “Where the hell did you go? Are you okay? Do you realize how fucking far behind this puts us?”
   The chef let this out in an exasperated rush of breath, a yell of words so quickly exhaled that I barely caught their meaning or sequence.
   “I’m so sorry boss, I– I think I’m having some sort of panic attack?”
           I heard her blow out a big sigh, not in an especially annoyed way, more like she made air go 'woooooooooo' in that high- and then low-whistle sort of way, like a cartoon bomb dropping, into the phone’s mic, which (the non-whistle high-low blow-woo) I believe signaled a sort of reckoning with my capability of possessing big bad personal problems.
   “Well… can you come back in today?” she asked more gently.
           I wasn’t sure, and I almost agreed to go back, but something stopped me, and it didn’t even feel like it was me who stopped me, but what matters is I said I couldn’t.
   I checked the time, 11:30 AM. How had that happened?! It couldn’t have been more than nine minutes since I’d seen 11:00 AM on my phone, and then the girl, the shooting.
    “Fuck,” she said, and paused a few moments, thinking it over, and then, “I need you to come in tomorrow, on time, unless you need to go to the hospital or psych ward or something, and if so you’ve really gotta tell me. Just send a text or something. But otherwise, you’re coming in at 8:00 AM, like normal, and please stay the whole shift, and honestly you’re lucky I’m giving you this chance at all because you know exactly how bad this fucks up today, and dude…you didn’t tell anybody?! We were all really worried, so I’m sorry you’re panicking, but glad you’re physically safe, and you can take today but yeah, I’m sorry, if you’re not on time tomorrow, then I have to let you go. Take care of yourself.” and hung up.
   I sat there shocked, not knowing which facet of my morning was a lie, a fabrication, or some hallucination, and I realized I had run at flat-out full speed for a half-mile to this park and never broke a sweat or cramped a cramp or even panted a pant. My right hand still formed the position of holding a heater (I had answered my phone with my left) and I put down my small computer and ran my hands through my hair. I took desperate deep breaths and tried not to think about anything disturbing at all; I just gazed at the towering pine trees, at the blue-green pond, at the ducks swimming circles, and I liked watching them swim those circles, so unnecessary for a creature many biologists would have you believe possess zero interests aside from eating, fucking, and parenting. The swimming circles as far as I can still tell are a sort of avian equivalent to thumb-twirling, and on that bench I didn’t know what to think or feel, and I sure didn’t expect myself to know what to think or feel either, and I didn’t want to lose my job, but that seemed like the least of my worries that morning.

[2:24 PM]
   My doppelgänger’s hand was soggy too. I noticed a thick, fast, sexual tension, and he shot me looks, little glints of eye flash and rapid brow movements, the type I’ve only ever given when about to get hot with someone, and then I realized I was giving the same, and our hands remained held from when he first grabbed me. We sat still, not moving one bit, and then we broke our gaze to watch the final preview wrap up. The obligatory, somehow always tense reminder to silence our cell phones appeared, and we both produced identical phones from our pockets and turned them off. Fifteen minutes into the movie—which was new but in black and white—we leaned our heads toward each other in a mirrored fashion, and our lips made contact. We moved as one, perfectly mirrored, our tongues chasing each other around our mouths, our lips moving in sequence, trading off ups and downs, our little moans appearing at the same time, in the same tone, and we both deposited a desperate, whispered Feel how hard I am into each other’s left ears, and both our right hands moved up towards our cocks at the same moment. We felt each other, sucked each other’s necks, nibbled each other’s ears, and gripped each other’s (and yet our very own and very familiar) genitalia, squeezing and throbbing in unison. His mouth tasted the same as mine, which I knew because it tasted like nothing, like diving into a pool at exactly your own body temperature on a day when the air was triply also that temperature, and I was unbelievably turned on, the other me obviously was too, and I felt I might burst, but we kept up this heated mysterious play for what felt like an hour. Something stirred in my stomach. I wanted to feel what it was like to fuck me, what it felt like to get fucked by me, but suddenly, both in unspoken agreement that it was over, that we had achieved our required ritual despite neither of us coming, he winked at me, and I felt I had to wink back and did, and he stood, walked down the stairs he had climbed up to reach me, and left the theater. I stayed for the rest of the movie, not paying attention, just wondering whether it was real, what had just happened, knowing I could never tell anybody, wondering what might happen if anybody somehow found out, or if anyone had seen, and I didn’t want incest rumors about some secret twin of mine and myself, and I knew personally it wasn’t anything like that, nothing of the sort—it was something much more complicated, and once the final credits rolled and the ushers ushered me out, I rode the escalator down to ground level like it led to an empty, vapid city, and with the confident strut of someone who’s just about but hasn’t quite gotten laid, but who’s happy for the action anyways, I strolled gingerly into the great outside, unlocked my bike, and transported myself back toward the river.
         I didn’t want to see anyone I knew for the rest of the day entirely, like nighttime too, so I rode to a corner store, bought several cheap tallboys, a lighter, and a pack of Marlboros,  and rode the few miles south to the Sellwood waterfront, where actual sandy trails run parallel to the river and vegetation still beats out the invasive urban concrete. I found a small and secluded beach, and over the course of several hours I burned heaters, scrolled through several separate social media feeds, waded in the water for a few minutes as the sun started its scarlet and bittersweet orange show, and got back out so I could properly warm up before it sank its ass properly down. I had drank roughly seventy ounces of Pacifico Lager before I realized my own personal ass was sunk in the sand, as in I had wobbly legs, as in I was too drunken to stand. Glued, I watched the darkness settle in, that Portland gloam, watched the bats haunt the airspace above the river, and I was glad to be in a quieter part of the city than where I lived, to rest in relative silence.
           At some point, about an hour and several heaters later, I felt less drunk, my body having finished up processing my first tallboy, and I decided it was probably a good time to get my own personal ass up and out of the sand, good time to finally go home, considering it was almost totally dark and considering a small paranoia was cozily settling into my anxious amygdala. I had my bike-lights and everything, so I wasn’t scared of any potential traffic fatality of any unpredictable level of gruesomeness, but I admittedly have always been a bit afraid of the dark, especially when I’m all alone.  That’s when I realized I could no longer move. I tried to stand but I had no power in my legs, and they actually slumped, and then I realized I couldn’t make any sounds other than hard breaths, pathetic little pants. Then I felt a true horror fill my blood and bones as I witnessed the six-year-old girl I met that morning walk straight out of the depths of the river, still dressed in the same clothes, but she was somehow completely dry, dripping no river water, and calmly walked towards me. She held no malice in her face, which I tried to cling to as a reason to be calm myself, but then from behind I heard another set of footsteps which I recognized as my own and watched my clone walk from my back to my front. He turned around at just the correct moment so that he and the girl stopped in sync, shoulder to shoulder (really more like shoulder to hip), about four feet in front of me. Both of their stomachs were visibly distended. I watched myself lean down and whisper something in her ear, and then they both flashed the same big tooth-full smile Shrek bore on the six-year-old’s shirt, and then a massive, horrifyingly thick and hairy yellow and black bee/wasp/hornet type creature crawled impossibly  out of each of their mouths, headfirst, and flew into the forest. The sounds of the heavy buzzing wings were excruciatingly audibly LOUD in my ears, like a chainsaw, and vibrated in my chest like some horrendously small and intimate rave. I wanted to scream; my mind combusted and melted, and I felt like I would go absolutely fucking all caps BERSERK, like I would lose all ability to think and function and would surely, eventually, accidentally (or not) jump out of a high window somewhere, and then they both said Sorry, maybe sensing my discomfort, and turned to the river and walked in as effortlessly and unnaturally as she had walked out maybe only thirty seconds before.
   As soon as the river fully subsumed them, I gained back control of my body, but instead of running for my life or melting into the sand or crying I sat stoically still for five long minutes of horrific shock. I was done with this break-from-reality of a day, done with soggy hands and wet heaters, with the tragically unexplainable and the utterly ridiculous. I really thought about running to the hospital right then. I felt fully detached from reality. Strangely though—and I cannot make sense of this, this being to me the strangest part of everything that happened that day—I felt all the fear I’d ever felt evaporate from and off my body, felt my soul wiped clean of it, of all fear and even pain, and suddenly I felt better and lighter and brighter and more content and assured in my lifepath than I had in over a decade.


   So to answer your great first question, Yes, of course my success is wrapped in a secret. And, can I just say, it’s so great to be here at the Convention of Working American Nature Photographers 2028. Thank you all so much for having me. I’ve loved coming to CWANP for the past few years, and I’m just so excited to speak here for the very first time in front of all you happy cwanpers!  But, to reiterate, Yes, of course my fucking success is wrapped up in a big fucking secret! What, you think I’m one of these Pull Yourself by the Bootstraps/The Market is God/Quotes but Hasn’t Actually Ever Read Adam Smith or Milton Friedman/Tech Tycoon Worshiping/Bootlicker Egomaniacs? You think I genuinely believe I work harder and possess more innate capital-s Strength and Character and Virtue and Willpower and Deservingness and Skill and Talent and the notorious Grit than the many billions of people on Earth who make far less money than I do? No. Fuck that nonsense. And if you believe that bullshit yourself, well then fuck you too. I’ve worked in way too many goddamned restaurants with way too goddamned many talented, wonderful, smart, hard-working, personable, goal oriented, type A, yet still mysteriously poor, struggling people to be that big of an asshole or even within that general genre or realm or region of asshole or even perineum for that matter. It actually all happened to me, not by me, my success I mean, and everything changed on just one wildly lucky day. And on that day, like on most Saturdays during that strained time of my life, my hands were soggy and my wrists were sore. I was sad and tired and twenty-seven years old and the soapy, sudsy, dirty, oily, greasy, technicolor, food-filled, warm, rank, creamily opaque water of the dish pit had saturated the skin of my beaten digits and palms to a ghastly, pale, wrinkled, prunish, ghostly, cut-up, frail, and, especially in the eyes of germs, diminished, sorry, and easily breachable state. While hundreds of dedicated patrons spent upwards of two hours grouped in huddled packs on the light-gray sidewalk of a noisy four-lane thoroughfare (all waiting to eventually get a table at the popular Portland, Oregon brunch haunt Salmon & Pancake),  inside, a crew of thirty or so mostly young people flew behind the scenes and as the main show: a heavily tatted, pierced, and generally attractive cast of bartenders, servers, line cooks, prep cooks, bussers, food runners, two hostesses, two general managers, one chef, one sous chef, three owners, and my people, the dishwashers. That Saturday my hands were something soggy and my wrists were awful sore. Weekends and holidays were always our busiest, longest shifts, our most miserable and well-paying days, and I can and now will objectively report that eight early hours in a steaming, sweating, stinking, stressful kitchen on a burning summer day somehow both inch along and fly away when working with aggressive speed and angst-driven fury.
   My life-course shifted at 11:00 AM. I’d survived the first few scrubbing hours after arriving for my requisite 8:00 AM start thoroughly hungover and possibly and probably either still or freshly high on the previous night's or that morning’s marijuana and stinking of the cigarette  I smoked on the walk over. That morning I arrived on time and poured myself my contractually free coffee  and started cleaning the dishes that the cooks, who arrived at 6:00am each morning for prep, had used and piled in my sink. These usually took forty-five minutes to clean, and almost as if somebody had figured out the rhythm many years before I ever worked there, just as I’d clear the cooks’ pile, the dishes from the 7:30am opening rush would appear. Bussers gave me my daily cue to start looking after dishes from the dining room by quite chivalrously bringing me the first two or three bus-tubs. After that, it was expected that whenever I figured the tubs might be full, maybe every six or seven minutes, I would turn right out of my dish pit (always my domain as soon as I arrived), through the set of classic kitchen swinging doors I worked next to—the sort with small porthole-type windows at face level, the sort that restaurant workers burst out of and into trafficked hallways at dangerously fast speeds—and I’d walk to where the dining room bordered the service station, the service station being the crowded region between the assholes commonly referred to as customers and the main kitchen line, the region where food runners carefully load their hands, wrists, and elbows with heinously hot, heavy plates and bowls of food, where servers rapidly and angrily enter orders into the P.O.S.,  and where bussers fill water cups and stare out with gaping faces into the gaping dining room, searching for the next place they need to quickly and awkwardly and visibly miserably be. From the F.O.H./B.O.H.  border I’d grab hulking bus-tubs full of heavy white food-smeared ceramic plates, blue-tinted plastic water cups with any color of lipstick maybe smeared on the edge, bright blue, pink, and green plastic sippy cups with built-in-straws gnawed down like the end of a fidgety fourth-grader’s pencil (with of course some backwashed apple juice or milk sitting in the bottom) and heavy white Salmon & Pancake branded ceramic diner mugs with remnants of dark-roast coffee and cream to carry back to my sudsy kingdom. Wash, rinse, lift, organize, yell ‘SHARP’, announce ‘HOT’, (and best of all) SCREAM ‘CORNER!’, sweat, curse under my breath, make small talk/develop the next addition to an inside joke/make a weird noise with co-workers in quick quarter-second increments, repeat.
   Dishwashing, in the moment, is the hardest work I have ever performed and ever plan to. I say in the moment because when I finished my shifts, at least I was truly done, without exceptions, until my next shift, free to get piss drunk and ungodly high if I wanted to,  or to plop in front of the television or smartphone if I wanted to, unlike so much supposedly better remote and salaried deskwork. But unlike the deskwork, dishwashing is physically demanding, actually mentally challenging, always exhausting, and the pressure is so great you end up feeling like a helium balloon at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, so you need that relaxing/drunk/stoned time real bad. The entire restaurant  relies completely on the dishwasher doing their job really well. No pans, no food; no forks, no service. If the bleach or the rinsing chemicals in the machine run out and aren’t replaced, people can get sick, food can go back, and every restaurant owner’s, chef’s, cook’s and dishwasher’s personal worst nightmare is of somebody dying of food-poisoning in their holy house of commerce because of something they did, or more likely, did not do. Everybody loses money if you fuck up, so most aren’t shy about making sure you know. Dishwashing is a game of guessing (and eventually instinctually knowing) the flow of which article of kitchen/service ware will run out first and immediately prioritizing its rapid cleanliness and sure deliverance. There are at least twenty moving parts a dishwasher needs to keep track of at all times in the front of their minds, and the first months of any serious high-volume dishwashing job consist of line cooks, prep cooks, servers, food runners, and bussers running back to the pit, usually but not always trying to contain the frantic desperation in their voices and faces, to ask an extremely time-sensitive question of when more clean forks would be coming, or if I could wash this spatula right away and get it back to them, or to let me know we were dangerously low on or even completely, disastrously, out of water cups, and more often than not they all show up with their asks at the exact same time or within a few minutes, and it’s in those minutes that you really get to see who’s great under pressure and who incredibly incorrectly assumed dishwashing would be an easy job. It can be irritating, soul sucking, and sometimes terribly fun work, a truly mentally stimulating assortment of tasks, far more than a crossword or wordsearch could ever hope to be.
   John, one of my favorite servers, had just left after coming in with a joke, a free latte, and an ask for spoons when the girl who changed my life came through the swinging doors. I remember I had just looked at my phone, and it was 11:00AM on the dot. “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” by Soulja Boy  radiated with a tinny, low-quality sonance from where my phone speaker met the inside of a stainless steel sixth pan. So she walks in, this small, unexpecting child, just as Sammie delivered the second verse—I love your complexion, I miss ya, I miss ya, I miss ya—and she can't have been more than six years old and wore a clashing combination of fluffy hot pink tulle skirt and bright green cotton t-shirt showcasing a silkscreened image of DreamWorks Pictures’ masterpiece of a character, everyone’s favorite agoraphobic ogre, Shrek, beaming a big, wide, toothy smile. The child’s blond hair was pulled back in two braids and she wore small glasses with black frames and tiny checkered black and white Vans sneakers.
   Customers, on many occasions, seemed to love accidentally wandering into the dish-pit while looking for the bathroom, and some may have intentionally wandered-in to get a good look at whoever was responsible for the cleanliness of their dining experience, which accident or not was always a disappointing experience for them, so I wasn’t at all surprised to see some rando standing in those doors again, and I did us the favor of speaking first and informed her the toilets were out the other door to the left, down the hallway and to the right. Impossible to miss.
“You should get out of here,” she said as seriously as a six-year-old in a pink skirt and Shrek shirt possibly could.
   "What?"
   “You need to get out of here right now. I already called nine-one-one so you shouldn’t bother to. You should go now.”
   “What?”
   And right then, from the dining room I heard the loud shooting of maybe many guns or maybe just one or two automatics or semi-autos followed by the shouts and screams of hundreds of terrified people, the clatter of white ceramicware shattering and silverware clanging and tables toppling and feet running and curses flying and desperate trampling and pint glasses breaking and the splashes of their loose liquids swashing and I scooped the girl up and ran out of the swinging doors, turned left through the next door and we burst out into the hallway away from the dining room towards the bathrooms and then out of the building through the service door and into the warm but slightly sprinkling outside world and I didn’t stop until we reached a nearby park, Laurelhurst Park. My mind simultaneously froze and raced. I had no clue what to do. I remember thinking that us Americans really should be better informed about what to do during mass shootings, like outside of school as well, and I felt pissed to be so pathetically unprepared for such quotidian Americana. This was my first mass shooting. Is there a scout badge for that? I remember thinking. Or at least some sort of blue checkmark?
We sat on a bench, staring at the duck pond, and I asked her for her parents' phone number, frightened to death that I might have to be the one to tell her they died, and she strangely didn’t seem frightened whatsoever. I figured she was in shock. But instead of giving me a phone number or any vocalized answer, she pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a Shrek-green lighter from a skirt pocket and extracted two tobacco rods from the pack, lit one in her mouth, and gave me the other, which I admittedly wanted badly from the stressfulness of the last few minutes’ events, so I put the heater(see endnote 1) between my lips, leaned down, and she lit it for me.
I remember how my hands were still soggy and prunish, and how my right hand’s middle and index fingers, which held the heater, saturated the paper and tobacco with the sudsy, dirty water still oozing from my epidermis, which coaxed out a little brown stain right near the butt of it. I remember this clear as day. Then it finally hit my stunned self that six-year-olds should absolutely not be burning heaters and especially not Marlboro Reds and so I looked down to ask her how and why she had this early habit for (and access to) cowboy killers but she was gone, and there was no heater in my hand or mouth. I sat still. My phone buzzed in my right pocket and I took it out. An incoming call from my chef charged into my life and I answered it.

[11:30 AM]
    I decided I needed some time on the river, to swim some circles of my own, so I walked home, shaken still from the shooting but confused about if it had really happened, and I tried to calm my nervous, gripping stomach down by repeating “It Didn’t Happen” over and over and over and over again in my head, but this only sent me through a whole different spin of wondering if I was losing my mind, because it felt too real to be fake, and so either I had entered a new reality, basically alone, while still partially in the one everybody else was in, or I was losing my mind, and my sense of the world and reality and even gravity crumbled all around me, crumbled up and down. The light rain had worn itself out and blue skies grew by the second. I walked up to my house and went around to the back, through the side-yard, reached over wood, avoiding splinters, to open the latch on the six-foot-tall gate, grabbed my bike, and left as quickly as I’d arrived. I pedaled west, towards the river, which I only lived about a half mile from, so it took me all of five minutes to be at my favorite dock, the one just south of the Hawthorne Bridge, on the east bank of the river, and the dock was only about half-full on account of the earlier rain,  maybe fifteen half-dressed young adults in groups of two to five with feet hanging in water, and I locked my bike to a bench on the foot and bike path which runs parallel to the river (there is one on the opposite bank as well, both running many miles through the city) and I stripped to my not-too-embarrassing blue and black plaid boxers and eased myself into the chilled, greenish water(see endnote 2). I swam out about twenty or thirty feet, fighting the mild current so I could stay close enough to my clothes to react with some quickness if someone tried to steal my things, which I was uncharacteristically worried about at that moment, and I tried my best to Fucking Relax a Little.
   After a few minutes of floating on my back and treading water, I felt that eerie sensation of being watched, and looked around, to the bike path, and then to the dock, and didn’t see anyone suspicious or standing out or staring, but then, as I glanced around and upwards to the Hawthorne Bridge, sitting over the river in its industrial green metal staunchness, I saw myself, my exact self, wearing clothes that I wasn’t wearing that day but which I did own and wore often, a green and yellow striped polo and shorts made from cut black jeans. He made direct eye contact with me and smiled just a bit with his head cocked to his left like a cat who wanted to bite something. I could make out that he had my same nose piercing, my same leg tattoo even on his exposed shin. I didn’t make much of a face or have much of a startled reaction, as I wasn’t even sure that was the weirdest thing I’d seen that day, but suddenly he took off on a brisk walk to the west, into the heart of downtown Portland, and something in my heart sank. I felt a burning need to follow him, and an all-consuming importance attached to this task, so I swam back to the dock, my face and demeanor deadly serious, and others noticed and gave each other frightened little looks about me as I yanked my clothes and shoes back on with great haste and aggravated grunts, not once pausing on my way back up the dock ramp toward my bike. With my long hair still dripping clean shitless river-water in the sunshine, I climbed on my bike, slung on my helmet, and biked north on the pedestrian path and up the ramp onto the bridge, headed west, in hot, desperate pursuit of my doppelgänger.  
           I rode around the one-way downtown streets for over an hour looking for him, for me, not sure why I so badly had to find him, what caused this fix I had to resolve, but I wasn’t questioning my panicky anxiety: this was some seriously twilight-zonesque shit happening to me. It didn’t quite feel like I was in control of myself, like I was being led around on a string, and I still sometimes have that feeling, but sure enough I finally spotted him as he walked into the movie theater at Fox Tower, and he glimpsed me as well. He shot a smile that went right down my spine and through my brain and nerves, as if all my cerebrospinal fluids had been flushed out by minty ice-water.
I parked and locked my bike and was about forty seconds behind him when I got through the front doors, and we glimpsed each other again as he stood still on the escalator, rising toward the second-floor food counter and the theaters. I strod e briskly to the box office, asked for a ticket to “whatever my twin [was] seeing”, and paid for my viewing of “The Wrought Iron Fence”, a decent looking drama I had seen ads for on Instagram. I hustled quickly up the stairs, skipped the food counter, flashed the ticket to the ticket checker, and entered theater number six. I trekked up the dark ramped hallway that every movie theater I’ve ever been to makes you walk through, and once I had my view of the seats, I scanned across the rows, up and down the theater, searching. There were maybe all of twenty people in there, but I couldn’t see him, so I climbed the stairs to the far back row and took the centermost seat, choosing the back and center so he couldn’t possibly sneak up on me, but after a few minutes of previews, I noticed him, all the way in the frontmost row, craning his neck around to look up and back at me, and he got up without breaking eye contact, his neck seemingly on a strange swivel, and headed to my left, to the stairs, and began to ascend, not quite menacingly but certainly disconcertingly, and my heart pounded hard. I had a pen in my pocket that I held in my fisted hand, and I mentally prepared myself to kill my other self with it if I needed to. He strode up to the row, again with a light smile, and walked toward me. I stood up but stood my ground, and once we were truly face-to-face, only a foot apart, he sat down in the seat next to me, grabbed my hand, and tugged at me to sit back down in my own seat. I obliged. My hand still lightly sogged, never having had the chance to fully dry from the dish pit or the river.

[11:29 PM]
           I rode home from the Sellwood waterfront enrapt in glee, floating across warm, humid air, air which held me in the youthful embrace of undying summer night, a feeling of sticky honey all around. An upbeat playlist blasted in my earbuds and I danced in my pedals, took my hands off the handlebars and stood, arms up above me, thighs gripping my bike’s saddle for balance, and I played with gravity’s threat of bringing me to the ground, and I won. Sweet jubilation. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face, or tell why I felt such wondrous euphoria, but what I sure didn’t do was fight it, and in fact I soaked it up like hot butter in bread, basted in it like a baking holiday bird. I became the proverbial TV-ad paper towel/menstrual pad, absorbing more than everyone else around me possibly could, allowed the substance of the living world to spread all throughout me, to penetrate and infiltrate my being, my every pore, and I embraced it all with a big old bear hug, the type three-year-old kids give to their first true friend or their parent’s leg, and I sang. My own stomach distended from the joyous osmosis. The air whizzed past my ears, and I heard another buzzing, one like the giant bee thing, but this buzz rattled from inside my own stomach, and I happily, ecstatically realized my own giant waspish infant, which had grown from within, and I unhinged my jaw and let it crawl out of me, while still riding my bike standing up and with my hands up in the air of the undying night, and the buzzing again became panickingly loud in my ears and chest, but this was the only uncomfortable part of the experience, and once it squeezed out of me it flew off into the night, toward the mountains, itself feeling a euphoria it had never known, and I cried prideful tears of joy and salt.
   I found myself still joyous in bed when I got home, unable to sleep from the sheer excitement I felt, an excitement to finally live with all that life offered, felt this all even as the sun came up, and shortly after then it was time to walk to work, and then too I soaked up the beauty of the tall trees and the blooming rose gardens between my house and the restaurant, my lips still beaming uncontrollably as if coursing with a charge of raw electricity. I walked into the restaurant on time and thanked my chef for allowing me another chance, my recently brushed teeth and gums on full display, and I poured myself a coffee and started washing. But unlike every other shift I’d ever worked, this time I didn’t curse under my breath, didn’t feel angry towards anything. I barely even thought about the events of the day before. Instead I thought of childhood dreams, ones I had abandoned, of wanting to be an astronaut or artist or photographer, dreams to either gain some serious perspective or to at least work for myself.
   Since that raucous day, a day I now see as my sweet release from insecurity and sin, and over these past ten years, my life progresses as if possessed by a demon of grand luck and fantastic fortune, as if I am now a blessed member of the royal family of the universe. If there is such a family, which would hardly surprise me now, I am surely a member. It was my kismet, but it could have happened to anybody, and it didn’t have to be me. It could be you next. We only know our destinies in hindsight anyways.
   Within a week of that day, my photography portfolio website, which I hadn’t updated with new work in years, was randomly found by several of my favorite photographers and by editors at several large magazines, and I now travel the world for my job. A boy at Salmon & Pancake, Patrick, a food runner friend of mine who I’d had a crush on for forever, came to me, confessing love and feelings and oooey-gooeyness, and we’ve been dating ever since, intensely in love, a romance vaster than I’ve ever imagined—a great plain you couldn’t ever hope to see the other side of, and you wouldn’t want to anyway—and I’m proposing soon. I even won the lottery, several times, not the big jackpots or anything, but I won a lengthy series of $50,000 prizes on scratchers. It doesn’t feel too good to be true, it actually all makes sense. I know they still watch me, because once, while far in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, taking photos for an article in Outside, I was filtering lake water through a pump-style backpacking filter when I saw her, in the same outfit as ever, quite literally on the top of a mountain, looming, looking down at me, casting a shadow that stretched for miles, and then she dipped down over the other side of the ridge and disappeared. I didn’t tell anyone. That time I worried I had hallucinated. But then, about two years later, in Varanasi, while I stood on the Ghats of the Ganges, on assignment for National Geographic, he popped up in my viewfinder, myself, while I snapped a picture of the crowds lining the ancient stone steps on the river. I can still see him clearly in the picture, wearing plain, long, cotton or maybe hemp clothes that I think were meant to help him blend with the crowd, but he looked directly at me, into the lens, when I snapped the shot. That photo made it into the magazine, but nobody else sees him in it. I’ve asked two people if they could see me, him, a tough question to raise without causing concern, but neither saw anybody in the space I pointed to. In fact, I’ll put it up here on the screen behind me. You see where the yellow arrow is pointed? Do any of you see me right there? . . . No? No. No, I didn’t think so.
[END]

Notes:

1. A ‘Heater’, in this case, is slang (the slang with which I grew up) for a gasper, a square, a stog, a tar bar, a cancer stick, the notorious grit, the world-renowned grittle, the unmistakable Cigarette, although ‘Heater’ in other spheres is also vernacular for a gun, a poker player with a big fat winning streak, or a good song.

2. I’d like to note here that although it was raining earlier that day it hadn’t stormed in quite some time, meaning that the river was not in fact dangerously chock full of human piss and shit from the Combined Sewer Overflow system, which dumps raw sewage straight into the river during really heavy rainfall in what the city euphemistically refers to as CSO Events—in my opinion the name Dangerous Levels of Piss and Shit in the River Events, or PSR Events, would much more clearly articulate why you shouldn’t go swimming right after one. Nothing quite as 21st century America as routinely googling to find out whether there’s an excess of piss and shit in the river or not, also IMO.