Post by Kyle Shane on Sept 11, 2017 15:51:14 GMT -5
"They say that the old woman in the trailer at the end's a witch," Izzy said, aimlessly kicking a can out of the way in her scuffed Vans, watching it skitter across the chunks of loose quarry stone that formed the driveway of the trailer park. She hugged Kyle's ripped hoodie closer around her body from the late-September chill. The year was 2008, and the girl, scrawny, cute but not self-aware. She had the fringe haircut with striped extensions and tight jeans of a vintage Myspace scene girl. She looked over at her travelling companion, feeling her face flush as she tried to tamp down her instincts. The flask passed between his hand to hers, with a small spark passing between them as his finger brushed hers. But still, her eyes averted nervously back to the darkened trailer. He laughed at her teasingly as he walked towards it, the fixed trailer with the spiky black fence around it's perimeter, the dark red curtains.
"I'll go inside and steal her broomstick."
She punched his arm, "You will not!"
His smile was illuminated by the cherry of the cigarette as he took a pull. That devil-may-care, fuck you attitude of Kyle Shane. Isabel Maria Y Lourdes Rodriguez, age 17, flopped down into the grass, propped herself on one elbow, and grinned across the way at the boy who had been her constant companion since she was thirteen. She knew much and yet little of him. They snuck out of their trailers, side by side, like this on many a night and indulged in stupid teenager things. Hand-rolled spliffs, flasks filled to the brim with bourbon take from a cabinet, late night trips to the Hot topic in the mall just before closing. And their bond grew... and Izzy, the lone girl on Roxbury Ct, found her companion a strange cipher. She told him everything, about her mama, about boys at school, her girly duties, and he listened, with that little smile he gave her around the cigarette... and he told her about himself, too... but there was always a reserve. A holding back from him, an aloofness. So to say she knew him much and little was fair, try as she might to pry out secret fears from him sometimes. But sometimes, Izzy felt, that Kyle was entirely fearless.
I have five nightmares. Five nightmares that haunt me from my sleep to the waking world and stick with me. It drives me forward, these terrors, and in a way nothing can ever hurt me as deeply as the recesses of my own mind. These five nightmares are what drives, what informs, what makes Kyle Shane.
The boy was mimicking her pose, propping his head up on his elbow and looking at her moonishly. She laughed and shoved him over, and, laughing back, he rolled over, grabbed her by her waist, and they wrestled. As she giggled uncontrollably, he let go. There was a tense beat where their faces were inches from touching. He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, and started. Izzy, flush, patted something that was in a hoodie pocket she became aware of, and pulled a book out that he had marked with a creased page. "Arthur Stanley?"
Embarrassed as he was to be hanging on to such nerdy stuff, he grabbed for it, but she pulled it away and held it up to the moonlight. "It's about the causal effects of time, relating to physics and psychology. Give me that, you little..."
Izzy fixed him with a look, revelling in his sudden put off at his game of aloof. "Oh, yeah, do tell..." She said, continuing to hold the book back. His face grew the tight, focused look he had when he was playing Call of Duty, that look of a cat coiling and ready to pounce. He grabbed at it, but after a careful consideration, looked at her openly.
"Have you ever heard of the concept of time's arrow? When you apply it to the universe it means that cause predates effect. It means that everything is always moving forward, towards decay, towards things breaking apart, so as a system advances through time, it will statistically become more disordered. This asymmetry can be used to distinguish between future and past, where things were easier, and when they break down."
She looks at his face, and he's so sad now. She knows when he gets really faraway that he's thinking of the thing with his mom that he won't talk about. So she nudges him, trying to get him out of his funk. "And if you apply it to literally anything else?"
He gathers himself a little bit, the aloofness dropping away to a surprisingly tender and soft glance, as he takes the book back from her hands, leafing through it's pages. He smiles, absently. "But this book argues that a psychological version of time's arrow arises because one has the sense that one's perception is a continuous movement from the past to the future, the unknown. Anticipating the unknown forms the psychological future which always seems to be something one is moving towards, but, like a projection in a mirror, it makes what is actually already a part of memory, such as desires, dreams, and hopes, seem ahead of the observer. So maybe everything in the universe that falls apart isn't lost forever."
Staring at him from her spot in the grass, drawing a lazy line in the sod with a fingertip, she regards him with those big, beautiful eyes. "So maybe there's hope?"
He's so quiet, so into himself. "Maybe."
Izzy lets her grin spread, infectiously, and she hands him the cigarette. "So, the bruja in the last trailer, do you think she commands the undead from in there? Look, her trailer's backdoor is right across from the church boneyard and everything, I bet she communicates with all the lil' graveyard ghosts."
He laughs, pulling out of his funk, and groans "Shut up."
"You aren't scared, are you Kyle?," Izzy said, her beautiful dark eyes, Spanish eyes turned up to him in wonder as she fluffed her red-black hair from an eye. "Not of the witch, not of no undead, notta." Again, she tried to test him, to get him to open up about his fears.
His smirk as he knocked another slug from the AFI symbol emblazoned flask spoke of his utter disdain, the immortal arrogance of the truly young. It was only a small glance down the row of trailers, to his address and the sleeping old man that lay within that said it all, Kyle didn't fear monsters because he lived with one.
That would change that year.
The vodka burned going down his gullet and he felt restless. It wasn't just the pull of wanderlust bringing him closer to leaving, it was the uneasy feeling of darkness emanating from that trailer. "Come on," he said to Izzy, taking her by the hand.
"Where are we going now?" she said, sticking her tongue out in that bratty way. She said, "We gonna go call the Ghostbusters on old lady Cigany and her legion of the doomed? Ooooh." She poked him over and over. He grinned, grappled with her and pulled her down, and they went down in a tipsy, awkward tangle of adolescent limbs. He was suddenly very aware of her body pinned beneath him, her tiny teacup-sized breasts heaving, her dark eyes glittering with a smile hidden in the corners.
"Don't mind me, I'm just an old graveyard ghost," she sighed, relaxing in his grip, and he had stroked her face with something like amusement.
Kyle looked contemplatively at what he saw before him now.
Almost all the trailers had been vacated, if not moved out. The entire park had been bought out and dozens of low-income families had been put out onto the road, forced to pick up stakes and move. His trailer was still there, and he took a few halting steps towards it before he stopped himself. He gritted his teeth, fumbling in the pocket for the pills Krista had given him. He felt the thing deep within the pit of his stomach, like a gnawing and hungry rat tunneling within. Something called him here. It was the dreams of this place.
They were always here with him. The PTSD flashes did not seem to differentiate, and now there were nights he would wake up and reach for that long-gone flask stolen from Hot Topic in the same instant he'd put his hand up to ward away the stinging lash of the belt. Because time's arrow always pulled back, and surged forward, making memories, feelings, and ghosts spread out in front of him.
It was always here with him. This fertile soil was the breeding ground of five nightmare scenarios.
I have five nightmares. Five nightmares that haunt me from my sleep to the waking world and stick with me.
And no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the good, didn't a part of the bad still live in him?
He sank down to sit on the grass, his butt growing wet with late-night dew, overlooking the cemetary rising on the hill behind the old lady's trailer. Yep, it was still there, looking like a haunted house, it's fake siding managing to look dilapidated.
He lay back, propping his head on one arm as he stared into the night sky and let the medicine dull his pain, muttering, "Don't mind me, I'm just an ol' graveyard ghost..."
"Thought you forgot about that," came a harsh voice, someone a lot older, her high teenage voice roughened by cigarettes and disappointment. "You forgot about a lot."
He sat up, looked around. And there she was, Isabelle. The constant companion he had left by the wayside, before Hiro, before Chad, before Array, Krista, any of the sorority chicks. She was watching him guardedly, and he couldn't bring himself for a show of getting to his feet and hugging her or anything so over the top. He just watched her closely.
She sat down next to him.
"You came back because of that place, didn't you?" Izzy said, legs crossed and her arms wrapped around her knees, her head tilting toward the reclusive gypsy woman's trailer.
"You know that the fearsome gypsy witch was just a 90-year old invalid who never left her house because ofher glaucoma. " She bit her thumbnail introspectively. "And then Tim, Ashton, some of the younger boys, they all went there the Halloween after you left and they surrounded the place, trying to get the witch to come out, throwing rocks and messing her place up. And Missus Cigany, she fell down, went into shock, and that was that."
He was quiet. He was trying to gauge her as she told the story flatly, with the deadpan void of tone. Did she blame this on him? Did she wonder what would have happened if he were there?
Izzy traced lines in the dirt with her fingernail, like she had a habit of doing when she was 17, "You got out when you could, Kyle. I get that. But this little part of town always had some horrifying ugliness underlying it. Sexual abuse, drugs... killing..."
He said nothing, just looked into her eyes for the first time. "These things that grow in small neighborhoods like this, these petty little ugly parts that live inside people, they can cut them out and walk away and move on, or they can let 'em grow inside of them, fester into something that eats away at them," she said.
"Can they?"
"If you want. Or you can stay. You can become another ghost of this place."
He took her hand, softly, gently, as if she'd evaporate, "Did you ever get out?"
Her smile was something empty and heartbreaking. "I think it's more important that you tell me that you did, carino. You remember the night we were playing outside of old lady Cigany's trailer and you had that book - the one about causality."
"Time is an arrow," he said grimly, remembering. "It always moves forward, whether you want to hold it back, eventually you let it fly."
"Was it flying towards entropy, like you thought it would?" Her eyes searched his. "Or towards a particular target?" A beat. "How's your life?"
Sensing that it was important that she know this, as if it was unfinished business that, when resolved, would let her rest, he took his time nonetheless in answering. "Sometimes it feels like the arrow metaphor just doesn't work. Feeling a little directionless and at odds with what to do, to be honest. In my day job, I'm in a sort of limbo. Like this week, I go from main eventing on the last show to having the first match of a guy's career, against a weirdo who thinks that he's the OC of a teenage Dungeons and Dragons nerd who controls him by rolling his dice. It's..." He shrugged, not wanting to talk about it.
"You feel stuck, between places." She snorted. "I can relate." Izzy had grown into a beautiful woman, that was certain. He sat there looking at her, her fully developed body, no longer gawky all legs and bones; matronly, adult, in a simple cloth dress. The woman she had become, and could have continued to be, but now was no longer.
"The problem is that you're not disentangling yourself as you were from yourself as you want to be. You get in your own way a lot of times. You chase an idealized version of when things were perfect for you, but they never were. It's why you came here, after all." She said, looking at him honestly. "But even if I admit a certain affection... for how things were... they weren't ever as good enough to want to go back. If you do that enough, you become just another one of the ghosts."
He took the metaphor, but he looked at her, wanting to say but you're real. Instead, he said nothing, and she continued, "You don't have to let the bad parts win, Kyle. You're stronger than this place, you were stronger than any of us came out of this little cul de sac."
He wanted to tell her it hadn't worked out that way. She produced a familiar flask from a pocket.
"So why are you here?" he asked the old graveyard ghost. "You didn't die here... your car overturned on the thruway nine years ago... When you were - "
"Kyle - " she says, putting a solid finger to his lips to shush him, "There is going to be time to get into that. In the next few days, you're going to be visited by some ties to this place that won't let you go. And you're - " she sighed, sadly, her palid eyes rolling up to the sky, "You're going to discover some things about me that I wish you didn't have to find out... but let's save those for later, shall we?"
At that moment, in an office building, a man is sliding a folder out onto his desk. The file reads "Shane / Rodriguez" and as he opens it to the first page, he begins to shake his head and tut. Then, he reaches across the desk for the phone. But that is worlds away from our current cast, and as the young lady said, something to find out in the days ahead.
For now, she asks softly, "You still ain't afraid of no ghosts, Kyle?" as she twined her leg around his.
"Lady," he lied with his old devil-may-care grin, "I ain't afraid of nothing."
"I'll go inside and steal her broomstick."
She punched his arm, "You will not!"
His smile was illuminated by the cherry of the cigarette as he took a pull. That devil-may-care, fuck you attitude of Kyle Shane. Isabel Maria Y Lourdes Rodriguez, age 17, flopped down into the grass, propped herself on one elbow, and grinned across the way at the boy who had been her constant companion since she was thirteen. She knew much and yet little of him. They snuck out of their trailers, side by side, like this on many a night and indulged in stupid teenager things. Hand-rolled spliffs, flasks filled to the brim with bourbon take from a cabinet, late night trips to the Hot topic in the mall just before closing. And their bond grew... and Izzy, the lone girl on Roxbury Ct, found her companion a strange cipher. She told him everything, about her mama, about boys at school, her girly duties, and he listened, with that little smile he gave her around the cigarette... and he told her about himself, too... but there was always a reserve. A holding back from him, an aloofness. So to say she knew him much and little was fair, try as she might to pry out secret fears from him sometimes. But sometimes, Izzy felt, that Kyle was entirely fearless.
I have five nightmares. Five nightmares that haunt me from my sleep to the waking world and stick with me. It drives me forward, these terrors, and in a way nothing can ever hurt me as deeply as the recesses of my own mind. These five nightmares are what drives, what informs, what makes Kyle Shane.
The boy was mimicking her pose, propping his head up on his elbow and looking at her moonishly. She laughed and shoved him over, and, laughing back, he rolled over, grabbed her by her waist, and they wrestled. As she giggled uncontrollably, he let go. There was a tense beat where their faces were inches from touching. He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, and started. Izzy, flush, patted something that was in a hoodie pocket she became aware of, and pulled a book out that he had marked with a creased page. "Arthur Stanley?"
Embarrassed as he was to be hanging on to such nerdy stuff, he grabbed for it, but she pulled it away and held it up to the moonlight. "It's about the causal effects of time, relating to physics and psychology. Give me that, you little..."
Izzy fixed him with a look, revelling in his sudden put off at his game of aloof. "Oh, yeah, do tell..." She said, continuing to hold the book back. His face grew the tight, focused look he had when he was playing Call of Duty, that look of a cat coiling and ready to pounce. He grabbed at it, but after a careful consideration, looked at her openly.
"Have you ever heard of the concept of time's arrow? When you apply it to the universe it means that cause predates effect. It means that everything is always moving forward, towards decay, towards things breaking apart, so as a system advances through time, it will statistically become more disordered. This asymmetry can be used to distinguish between future and past, where things were easier, and when they break down."
She looks at his face, and he's so sad now. She knows when he gets really faraway that he's thinking of the thing with his mom that he won't talk about. So she nudges him, trying to get him out of his funk. "And if you apply it to literally anything else?"
He gathers himself a little bit, the aloofness dropping away to a surprisingly tender and soft glance, as he takes the book back from her hands, leafing through it's pages. He smiles, absently. "But this book argues that a psychological version of time's arrow arises because one has the sense that one's perception is a continuous movement from the past to the future, the unknown. Anticipating the unknown forms the psychological future which always seems to be something one is moving towards, but, like a projection in a mirror, it makes what is actually already a part of memory, such as desires, dreams, and hopes, seem ahead of the observer. So maybe everything in the universe that falls apart isn't lost forever."
Staring at him from her spot in the grass, drawing a lazy line in the sod with a fingertip, she regards him with those big, beautiful eyes. "So maybe there's hope?"
He's so quiet, so into himself. "Maybe."
Izzy lets her grin spread, infectiously, and she hands him the cigarette. "So, the bruja in the last trailer, do you think she commands the undead from in there? Look, her trailer's backdoor is right across from the church boneyard and everything, I bet she communicates with all the lil' graveyard ghosts."
He laughs, pulling out of his funk, and groans "Shut up."
"You aren't scared, are you Kyle?," Izzy said, her beautiful dark eyes, Spanish eyes turned up to him in wonder as she fluffed her red-black hair from an eye. "Not of the witch, not of no undead, notta." Again, she tried to test him, to get him to open up about his fears.
His smirk as he knocked another slug from the AFI symbol emblazoned flask spoke of his utter disdain, the immortal arrogance of the truly young. It was only a small glance down the row of trailers, to his address and the sleeping old man that lay within that said it all, Kyle didn't fear monsters because he lived with one.
That would change that year.
The vodka burned going down his gullet and he felt restless. It wasn't just the pull of wanderlust bringing him closer to leaving, it was the uneasy feeling of darkness emanating from that trailer. "Come on," he said to Izzy, taking her by the hand.
"Where are we going now?" she said, sticking her tongue out in that bratty way. She said, "We gonna go call the Ghostbusters on old lady Cigany and her legion of the doomed? Ooooh." She poked him over and over. He grinned, grappled with her and pulled her down, and they went down in a tipsy, awkward tangle of adolescent limbs. He was suddenly very aware of her body pinned beneath him, her tiny teacup-sized breasts heaving, her dark eyes glittering with a smile hidden in the corners.
"Don't mind me, I'm just an old graveyard ghost," she sighed, relaxing in his grip, and he had stroked her face with something like amusement.
Kyle looked contemplatively at what he saw before him now.
Almost all the trailers had been vacated, if not moved out. The entire park had been bought out and dozens of low-income families had been put out onto the road, forced to pick up stakes and move. His trailer was still there, and he took a few halting steps towards it before he stopped himself. He gritted his teeth, fumbling in the pocket for the pills Krista had given him. He felt the thing deep within the pit of his stomach, like a gnawing and hungry rat tunneling within. Something called him here. It was the dreams of this place.
They were always here with him. The PTSD flashes did not seem to differentiate, and now there were nights he would wake up and reach for that long-gone flask stolen from Hot Topic in the same instant he'd put his hand up to ward away the stinging lash of the belt. Because time's arrow always pulled back, and surged forward, making memories, feelings, and ghosts spread out in front of him.
It was always here with him. This fertile soil was the breeding ground of five nightmare scenarios.
I have five nightmares. Five nightmares that haunt me from my sleep to the waking world and stick with me.
And no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the good, didn't a part of the bad still live in him?
He sank down to sit on the grass, his butt growing wet with late-night dew, overlooking the cemetary rising on the hill behind the old lady's trailer. Yep, it was still there, looking like a haunted house, it's fake siding managing to look dilapidated.
He lay back, propping his head on one arm as he stared into the night sky and let the medicine dull his pain, muttering, "Don't mind me, I'm just an ol' graveyard ghost..."
"Thought you forgot about that," came a harsh voice, someone a lot older, her high teenage voice roughened by cigarettes and disappointment. "You forgot about a lot."
He sat up, looked around. And there she was, Isabelle. The constant companion he had left by the wayside, before Hiro, before Chad, before Array, Krista, any of the sorority chicks. She was watching him guardedly, and he couldn't bring himself for a show of getting to his feet and hugging her or anything so over the top. He just watched her closely.
She sat down next to him.
"You came back because of that place, didn't you?" Izzy said, legs crossed and her arms wrapped around her knees, her head tilting toward the reclusive gypsy woman's trailer.
"You know that the fearsome gypsy witch was just a 90-year old invalid who never left her house because ofher glaucoma. " She bit her thumbnail introspectively. "And then Tim, Ashton, some of the younger boys, they all went there the Halloween after you left and they surrounded the place, trying to get the witch to come out, throwing rocks and messing her place up. And Missus Cigany, she fell down, went into shock, and that was that."
He was quiet. He was trying to gauge her as she told the story flatly, with the deadpan void of tone. Did she blame this on him? Did she wonder what would have happened if he were there?
Izzy traced lines in the dirt with her fingernail, like she had a habit of doing when she was 17, "You got out when you could, Kyle. I get that. But this little part of town always had some horrifying ugliness underlying it. Sexual abuse, drugs... killing..."
He said nothing, just looked into her eyes for the first time. "These things that grow in small neighborhoods like this, these petty little ugly parts that live inside people, they can cut them out and walk away and move on, or they can let 'em grow inside of them, fester into something that eats away at them," she said.
"Can they?"
"If you want. Or you can stay. You can become another ghost of this place."
He took her hand, softly, gently, as if she'd evaporate, "Did you ever get out?"
Her smile was something empty and heartbreaking. "I think it's more important that you tell me that you did, carino. You remember the night we were playing outside of old lady Cigany's trailer and you had that book - the one about causality."
"Time is an arrow," he said grimly, remembering. "It always moves forward, whether you want to hold it back, eventually you let it fly."
"Was it flying towards entropy, like you thought it would?" Her eyes searched his. "Or towards a particular target?" A beat. "How's your life?"
Sensing that it was important that she know this, as if it was unfinished business that, when resolved, would let her rest, he took his time nonetheless in answering. "Sometimes it feels like the arrow metaphor just doesn't work. Feeling a little directionless and at odds with what to do, to be honest. In my day job, I'm in a sort of limbo. Like this week, I go from main eventing on the last show to having the first match of a guy's career, against a weirdo who thinks that he's the OC of a teenage Dungeons and Dragons nerd who controls him by rolling his dice. It's..." He shrugged, not wanting to talk about it.
"You feel stuck, between places." She snorted. "I can relate." Izzy had grown into a beautiful woman, that was certain. He sat there looking at her, her fully developed body, no longer gawky all legs and bones; matronly, adult, in a simple cloth dress. The woman she had become, and could have continued to be, but now was no longer.
"The problem is that you're not disentangling yourself as you were from yourself as you want to be. You get in your own way a lot of times. You chase an idealized version of when things were perfect for you, but they never were. It's why you came here, after all." She said, looking at him honestly. "But even if I admit a certain affection... for how things were... they weren't ever as good enough to want to go back. If you do that enough, you become just another one of the ghosts."
He took the metaphor, but he looked at her, wanting to say but you're real. Instead, he said nothing, and she continued, "You don't have to let the bad parts win, Kyle. You're stronger than this place, you were stronger than any of us came out of this little cul de sac."
He wanted to tell her it hadn't worked out that way. She produced a familiar flask from a pocket.
"So why are you here?" he asked the old graveyard ghost. "You didn't die here... your car overturned on the thruway nine years ago... When you were - "
"Kyle - " she says, putting a solid finger to his lips to shush him, "There is going to be time to get into that. In the next few days, you're going to be visited by some ties to this place that won't let you go. And you're - " she sighed, sadly, her palid eyes rolling up to the sky, "You're going to discover some things about me that I wish you didn't have to find out... but let's save those for later, shall we?"
At that moment, in an office building, a man is sliding a folder out onto his desk. The file reads "Shane / Rodriguez" and as he opens it to the first page, he begins to shake his head and tut. Then, he reaches across the desk for the phone. But that is worlds away from our current cast, and as the young lady said, something to find out in the days ahead.
For now, she asks softly, "You still ain't afraid of no ghosts, Kyle?" as she twined her leg around his.
"Lady," he lied with his old devil-may-care grin, "I ain't afraid of nothing."
