2050, approximately: Jim & Pete (s.)

Jim (#1)

This place can get a little mondogrenous. Every whisper sounds like echoes, sounds like your own memories. You think peoples' voices sound like your thoughts, you think your thoughts are directing their voices. It doesn't help that it doesn't help, but it helps. 

I guess I've been here about 10 years or so. Journals, assignments, groups. There's progress, indefinite progress. They tell you you're getting closer. They tell you you have to keep trying. Kind faces, kind demeanors, with stoic intentions that are confident as commercials but lack the certainty of music repeat the criteria, policies of a larger order and ask for your signature and put you signature into another folder of mondogrenous data while you count the days of counting your days and dreaming of a life of some other freedom. You sign, nod, comply. 

I miss drinking and I don't miss drinking. I miss the way it made me feel, and I'm pretty sure there are other ways to feel like that and that I'll feel like that, again. It's hard to persuade them, the staff, the counselors, the management. It's not that they're deaf, or...abnormally stupid and it's definitely not because I don't know what I'm talking about. That line between "one's too many and a thousand's never enough" comes up over and over and over again you forget what it means even tho there's no way you don't have some idea what it means. It's that old song between acceptance and conformity played so much you forget what you thought the end was going to be. 

Mondogrenous: having the quality of a mondegreen. 

Pete, god love him, isn't the best ally. I mean, he's a little younger than I am--but god of shit he's... He's what: If I'm 28, he's 26? We got arrested at the same time, we'd both been drinking for as long, I don't mean he's violent or greedy: he's just, well, Pete. He's foolish. So, how smart am I? Dumb enough I'm here, smart enough I want to leave. 

If you want to stay, they're super-accommodating. If you want to leave, they get suspicious. With Pete, it's easy, because he doesn't want to leave (not really). He's basically memorized the answers to their questions, and he's never sarcastic or hostile or a little bit rude. He points that soft white face in the direction of their questions and gives them enough they get on with their day. 

I'm more mathematical. I'm trying to be precise. With Pete, they have one more box to check before they go to lunch or leave for the day. With me, they have to write something. I got picked up on a typical D & D in New York, when I was high off my face and I'd been drinking all day and I had a good piece of a bottle of Knob Creek, singing one dumb song and another, and honestly I barely remember it except it made me a resident of South Carolina and I've been talking about my problems, waking up around 3AM and sweeping the floor for program-credit these ten years since. 

Pete came a month or a month and a half, later. 

It was fun to see my friend. Pete can be a dumbass, but he's my friend. He helps me remember things. 

(What things....) 

They make you wait forever. Then they bring you to another room, and you take off all your clothes in front of them, then you put your clothes back on and they tell you to sign something and they acknowledge that you did all that and send you to a different place to wait. (*It's actually kind of freeing. But what you're freed to is almost as hard to explain.) It ends up where you get your regular clothes back and you get this worthwhile sense of relief: you eventually get a bed that not anybody'd ever be happy with only it's just the right amount and you wake up the next morning excited in spite of you've got way, way less to be excited about than the day before. Is it weird? It's fucken weird. 

I...been here about ten years. Pete's time is a little less. All these meals, all these days, all these schedules.... There is no chance we'll get an early-release or parole. Whatever in which fuck that is.

****

I'd be writing rhymes or talking to girls in bars or I guess just sleeping all day (if I wasn't here). I haven't spoken to my mom since I was about four. My dad'll send me a birthday card for my birthday and a Christmas Card for Christmas and put a little money in my commissary for cigarettes. (I think it's just because he feels guilty for letting me be such an asshole and getting into as much trouble as I have... That's at least a little dumb since they're still my decisions and....) 

I keep getting distracted because it sounds like there's bugs or mice in here even tho there's no way there could be bugs or mice in here even tho we're in the middle of the woods since everything is so temperature-controlled I'D be the biggest bug--like a fucken tarantula--and 

Jim says, "Just write what you can remember," and I'm like, "It's all the same shit," and he says, "It doesn't matter, just write it and you'll remember it better so you don't have to try to remember it when/if they ask you questions later," and I'm like, "Who's even gonna give a shit enough they ask me--me of all people--a question like that?" and he's like, " "People on the outside," and I'm like, "You mean like aliens or visitors or monsters and shit?" 

"We're the aliens. We're the monsters." 

He thinks we're gonna get out of here. 

I don't know. 

Alright. The cop story. Me and Jim got our UBIs, as usual, and since there's practically not much you can do with $200 we'd just maybe buy a new shirt or maybe save a few bucks for coffee and breakfast and then just blow the rest in on a couple eighths and smoke some weed and beers and maybe hook-up with a girl (or girls) if we could find them. You know, get in on some Clockwork Orange-level mischief. I AM kinda scared I might be a sociopath in my bones but it's not like I'm planning on kidnapping and torturing and dissecting and murdering executing burying some kid like they do in Arizona or wherever: we were just out late (*like early-morning late) and these bully-fagot cops (*I told him he could swear if it helps, just don't cover the entire page in fucks, fux no matter how you spell it) started picking a fight with us (*A Hundred Percent.) so I swung on the fuckhead. 

I know it's my fault we're stuck in here. Jim keeps telling me not to sweat it. He says we're getting out of here. 

I don't know. 

**** 

Going by the Google-listing of the New Life Center they were in the "Residency Program" of, what Jim mostly recounted from memory of the landscape, what can be ascertained from objective/thirdparty sources, and their both agreeing to reaching Molly's Diner & Airbnb Services: It took Jim & Pete about fourteen (14) hours to clear their hydes from the Social-Slave State of South Carolina, sleeping on the dirt floor of some anonymous public park. Eyes closed with the surrender of a successful effort that never stood a chance. Their firm, agile bodies nurtured by the blood of dreams. Jim could never say anything especially critical of his parents: his father was a generally reasonable man, even after his wife passed away after enduring cancer for a long, long number of years; and what do you say about a woman who dies of cancer before her son has graduated high school? And Pete was only slightly different when it came to personal dysfunctions: Walter Flynn certainly qualified as a disgruntled man, but some might just call him a hardass. He was never physically nor verbally abusive; he might scold his teenage son for his teenage-drinking, but it wouldn't really go beyond that. Pete's mom did leave when he was four. After 2027, we don't know if she changed her name, migrated to Europe, Africa or Australia. Might as well have been abducted by aliens. Aliens up there, way, way up there, in the eternal landscape between hard-to-see maybes and the hopelessly ineffable. Jim woke up first (surprise, surprise) the feral sun burning like a cheap firework in the primitive, insurpassable Appalachian Sky. Pete snored a little. Jim looked for their belongings. Found them. His clothes were somewhat damp, but not enough to be uncomfortable. He had a little trouble moving his arms & legs but there was no pain in the effort. The effort was actually rejuvenating. When he found his way to standing on his feet, the sudden shock of freedom descended upon the challenge of his body in such a way it was as if nausea repaired you to where you were, were always meant to be. He looked at his friend, his friend sleeping, the best friend he'd ever have. 

****

"Hey." 
 "What." 
 "You ever thought about how a watch works?" 
 "What... It just... What?" 
 "I mean, like, they're obvious. They tell the time. Everyone can tell time. How do they work?" 
 Pete said nothing. "I mean, how does someone figure that out?" 
 "That's a good question," said Pete. To risk redundancy: Pete's mom disappeared when he was about 4. He remembers who she was (that she was) but she could've been any dumb/random stranger off the street, for all Pete could tell you. She could of  might as well have been Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar. Pete didn't really have any opinion of her. 
 Jim didn't really have any opinion of her, either. 
 She was a ghost. Like some great-great-great grandparent you never actually met except you knew what country, and maybe what city they were born in. Some person who carried you in their blood, then gave you to another, then gave you to another. 
 Pete listened to a voice kind-of speaking, moving gracefully within the darkness inside him. It gave Pete all the answers to Jim questions, but there was no way he could speak them. Then Pete said, "Where are we going?" 
 "Not here. Grab your shit. We're moving." 

****