17
Sigmund Freud once said that
the goal of all life is death
. If that is the case: mission accomplished. Except for Melanie all whom I have loved have succeeded in their goal and I wait impatiently for my own end. If I were not so afraid of the dark I would end my own life; but I am a coward’s coward. I can only hope that death will sneak up behind me and take me without my knowing it so that I can end the misery that is my existence.
My dreams of late, on the rare occasions I can fall asleep, have included visits from all three of my past lovers. Of them only
Melanie still wishes to make love to me.
Perhaps it is because she is still alive and both Amber and Catherine are dead. None of them visits me with another in the same dream. I think that they are jealous of each other. But Sarah enters all of my dreams at some point or other. Thankfully, she no longer takes on a sexual role. We hold hands and walk and talk. She often asks me why I killed her and I tell her that it was because I love her. She declares her innocence and I am left to speculate. If there is a god in heaven I can only hope that he will have mercy on me for it can be said that right or wrong, taking Sarah’s life was a mercy killing. I didn’t benefit from her death; on the contrary… in taking her life I also took my own.
It was in one such dream that I came to finally forgive Catherine for her transgression.
She told me in a dream that she did not have an affair. She said that she slept with Henry for one purpose only. She wanted to become pregnant. She had hoped that I would never find out and that we could live happily ever after. So much for hopes.
Because I no longer had any reason to stay in Kansas I made the long drive back to Cleveland. I swapped license plates with a Mustang of a similar year at an auto body shop to keep the police from taking notice of my car. On the road back to Cleveland I slept in the back seat of the car rather than venturing the risk of staying in the beds of dive motels. With the doors locked and the car running and the dome light on I was far less anxious than I had once been. Life no longer meant enough for me to concern myself with the demons in the dark. But it was the demons in the dark and certainly not death that I had always feared.
In Cleveland I ditched the car on the west side in a dark alley.
On the day on which I first returned to Cleveland I called
information
from a pay phone. I remember that there was a cold rain outside of what must have been the last working phone booth in the city. I was shivering and soaked from head to toe. I tried to locate Tommy Sullivan. I needed a friend and he was the only man I knew who would be a friend to a man like me, but alas I could not find him.
Wallowing in the sewer of a city, with its seedy poverty stricken drug infested underbelly completely exposed made me crave death even more than I had after I had snuffed out Sarah’s life. And as I spent each horrifying night sleeping in the high corner of the underside of the steel skeleton of the Carnegie bridge scared to death of my own shadow I contemplated a high plunge from the center of the arch. But I found that I was more terrified of the darkness on the other side of death than the darkness of this world.
I ate lukewarm soup at food shelters ladled out by the most kind-hearted people on the planet. To brave the likes of me and the others in the motley mob who shared our meal our hosts must have been saints. We were sinners all: drug addicts, alcoholics, thieves and murderers.
The truth was that I wasn’t living I was waiting to die. I was waiting for the day when the police would show up at my proverbial door and take me quietly away to face the music for Sarah’s sins as well as for my own.
I took some time one Saturday to visit my old neighborhood. After begging some coins from some kind-hearted pedestrians I took the city bus. I visited the baseball diamond. It was overgrown with waist high weeds and the backstop had transformed itself into a collapsed tumble of chain-link fence and rotted timber. Despite its decrepitude I could not help but to wallow in the nostalgia of the place where Catherine and I had first made love.
On a subsequent day I scrolled through the phone book and the internet from a computer at the library trying to find Tommy Sullivan. I tried to trace old acquaintances from the neighborhood and after a great amount of diligence I found Tony Artino. He held no grudge, or so he said, after so many years, but I doubted him because he did not remember Tommy Sullivan at all and he did not recollect his own molestation of Catherine nor did he remember our scuffle in the same manor in which I had. He didn’t remember getting his ass kicked by Tommy and he only remembered fighting me. He asked if I was still crazy and I hung up the phone on him.
I searched the county hall of records for the deed to the home that Tommy’s family had once owned and lived in, a yellow aluminum sided ranch house at the end of our street (the site of a vacant lot upon my visit) nearest the ball field, in the hopes of finding him through his family but the records that far back were inaccurate and poorly kept because I could find no such house and no such owner.
My mother used to ask me why she had never met
this Tommy Sullivan kid
. She wondered if he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination; someone who I had conjured up to fight my battles when things got out of hand.
What a ridiculous notion.
THE END