The Author, Page 4

true but you’ve been spooning them up like bullshit pudding for years and it never makes you feel any better but you just get sicker and sicker and sicker because you know that it is only getting worse and that people are getting further from you because you are a pile of social cow shit yourself.

  And this, Mom, is the good part. The part that makes this a dream and not a nightmare. She buys it! Do you believe it? She buys the crap and changes her mind! I’m standing there and I’m about to help her down, when I realize that here is retribution. Go ahead! Screw my wife! Laugh at me! Talk about me behind my back! Don’t invite me to your parties and blow your nose in my clothes when they lie unsuspecting in the dorm washing machines! Because I’ve found your stand-in. She wanted to die when I came in anyway. Retribution without repercussion. So I grab her by her delicate ankles and pull.

  I have this dream nearly every day. In it, a crowd is watching me.

  I walk out of rehearsal and my heart races. I feel surged with the beat of two hearts. They like HIM. They say I’m talented, that I’ve “got it.” I stop and double up like I have been running. I pant and try to get back to me. But there is less of me then ever before. I’m like the crappy little piece of soap that is too small to wash anything with. Is it salvageable? Or should I just throw it out?

  Dear Mom,

  I’ve begun to suspect that the reason you never write back is because you don’t exist. I cannot see your face anymore. Well, no, actually there is no “anymore.” I don’t think that you ever had one. I’ve begun to notice that I have no past. And my dream is my only present. See, I have it all the time and it’s beginning to seem like the only reality in all of this.

  So, who’s playing God? How many levels removed from reality am I? How do I get answers, goddamn it! I’ve become aware of a body. Something living and breathing that I seem to timeshare. Let me out! Let me wear it full time! You can’t give me a name and a soul and then leave me here with only one scene, one act of reality to play over and over again in my head and call that life!

  HE gave me some of HIS pain. I see that now. They wronged HIM as they wronged me. So I’ve been forged. Out of parts of HIS pain and other parts that HE dares not touch in himself. The part that hears the laughter and doesn’t pretend that HE can‘t. The part that has courage. And is capable of revenge. Oh, I don’t blame you now, friend. We are one. Parts of a whole, you and I.

  There is someone else. We have a common enemy. Our “mother.” The one who did this to us both. Gave us names. Gave us souls. Gave both of us pain, for what? Let us hope at least that it is for something noble.

  I’d forgotten to lock my door. I’d been rehearsing for the past few hours. I was just going to stop back in my room to get my camera before the performance. Like there would be memories for me. Like I actually thought something good could come of any of this. I think of my deluded excitement of moments before and begin to feel ill.

  There’d been plenty of time for them. The room stinks of beer. They’d poured it all over the floor, on my sheets, on my clothes dormant in the drawers, and on my keyboard. On the floor is a white piece of paper, soaked in beer and running marker lines of color. There are muddled signatures and messages all of which had supported the title of “Good Luck in College, Leslie, We’ll Miss You” back when they were legible. I begin to feel more ill, partially because of this pain and partially because of that disgusting smell that filled the room.

  I throw up. The remnants of my lunch on the floor like tasty morsels in a bowl of chunky soup. And suddenly I see no future. I have no desire to deal with this later or tomorrow or ever. There is emptiness in front of me. I suppose life could go on. And life would. But not this one. I had another in reserve.

  So I walked back out of the room and walked towards the theatre. Eugene was on in an hour.