I traveled by train to Stuttersville, pulling into the station shortly before sunrise after a restless night. Some people say the gentle rocking of a train lulls them to sleep. Not me. I lie awake listening to the scrape of metal on metal, the rush of air over the cars, listening for all of the sounds that indicate you are on a runaway train accelerating to certain disaster. Finally arriving at the Stuttersville station in those pre-morning hours was like coming into safe harbor from a storm at sea. I was home.
I’d left town to get away from a girl that ran the Tea House with her father. I left town to get my head straight, to find myself somewhere on the highways of the American southwest. Instead I just found dead coyotes and a bad case of hepatitis. I’d been delirious in a roadside hotel just outside of Tucsan. The owner’s mother took care of me there in room number 4. In my fever I was surrounded by demons, most of them looking too much like the father of the girl I was running from. But for the most part, fever deliriums are not what they’re made out to be. Most of the time I just felt frustrated, going round and round in my mind, circular arguments, clammy sheets, the knowledge that I was far from home and slipping into unconsciousness. But then my fever broke and I came out of it, like a boat emerging from a storm into safe harbor. Yeah, I see the parallels.
Okay, so maybe I did see elephants pirhouetting atop telephone poles, and scarecrows doing a mean tap dance down the rows of corn. Maybe I invented a new language from idiotic sounds, shuzzle de bop and de dim bam floozy. Maybe I did find myself in a foreign town of steep hills and nearly vertical streets. I boarded a trolley that laboriously climbed, climbed, climbed, until it reached the apex. What a view, in that split second before the descent. An old drunk drives the trolley, and he frequently drifts off to sleep, awakened only by the blaring car horns as we shoot through intersections against the red lights. He takes another shot from a bottle of rum. His ancestors were pirates, you know, and this infamous bloodline of criminals has diluted itself down to this pathetic figure driving a trolley. Before the trolley crashes through the docks at the edge of the harbor, I leap off while it’s still rolling.
I wander the fishing piers. Great bins of silvery pollock and mackerel, herring and sardine, jellyfish and squid. Mermen cart their catches around in crates, ye traitors of the sea. Where have all the Mermaids gone? Out there in the bay, flipping their glittery green tails in the morning light. Beautiful swelling hips cresting the waterline as they dive deep. I try to steal a rowboat to paddle out to them, to cavort there in the rippling blue water, but all of the boats are filled with pale bloated bodies, flies, and the stench of seaweed. I launch them all out into the bay to let them drift to their final destinations.
Where am I going with this? This is delirium. This is fever. This is like a runaway train that finally rolls to a stop in my home town. Stuttersville.
I leave the station platform and walk across town towards the girl I had been running from. It is in the early morning chill that I crept through wet grass towards the Tea House windows. Inside, a golden light burning from a single lamp in the library. Creeping up to closer, careful not to lean into the light pooling just outside the window, I looked to the two figures inside. The girl, still in her night dress, served up a pot of tea to her father crashed out on the sofa. He was drunk. She nursed him. She had a matronly kind of concern on her face for her father, brushing back a strand of sweaty hair off of his forehead. He wrapped an arm around her waist to pull her close. She peeled back his arm, like some kind of tentacle, and tucked it to his side, then crossed the room to the buffet where she set down the tea pot and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and I froze there crouched at the window, fingertips held up to the glass.
