K Breese - Future Imperfect

I feel the first drops of rain on my skin when the man in the Mexican wrestler mask lays a hand on my shoulder. He squeezes. I turn around to get a good look and he’s there in all his wrestler glory, his mask all purple and shiny.

“What is your deal?” I ask him, sounding much older.

This is surely the future.

“You’re still not ready, Ade. Wires are still crossed. Still foggy.”

“This is just a waste of my future.”

My hands curl into fists and I’m about to knock him on his back when he says, “Storm’s here, Ade. Right on top of us. You still haven’t woken up. Going to take a lot to turn this around. Only you can deny the past and stop the future.”

What happens next is crazy.

What happens next hasn’t ever happened before: I skip ahead, leap over decades, and see myself as I’ll be when I’m old enough to have a kid just about my age. I’m in front of a mirror and I look down and I see something really upsetting, something that makes me want to scream, but it’s hazy.

The image, it just gets all warped and dark.

Blacker than black.

I come to in an ambulance, just Paige at my side.

The EMTs have oxygen on me and one of them is prepping a saline IV and just about ready to put it in my arm. I hate needles and ask him not to. I mention to him that I’ve been in enough ambulances to know it’s not necessary, but he just tells me to lie back and does it anyway. The whole rest of the ride I’m puking my guts up. And I hear howling, but Paige doesn’t hear it. The EMTs don’t hear it.

And I black out again, but this time, nothing.

Just matte black and silence.

At the hospital, it takes me two hours to wake up. But I do. And I’m woozy but okay. My mom shows up shaking, hanging her head, her eyes all wide and bruised looking. She’s brought the Revelation Book and she dutifully records the college vision. I add a little side note that in the trees, I saw a mourning dove. When she’s finished, Mom closes the book and puts it in her lap and smiles through her tears, says, “We’re getting closer all the time, baby.”

My voice all scratched out, I ask, “To what?”

“The end,” Mom says so quiet I can barely hear it.

Paige leaves in the morning. All night she sleeps on the couch next to my mom and anytime a nurse comes in, she jumps up and listens intently. Before she goes she cries on my chest and tells me that I’m breaking her heart. She tells me that I’m really the most selfish person she’s ever met. She whispers, “This is the last time.”

The doctor, she tells me I’ll need physical therapy. She tells me I’ll need some serious medications. She shakes her finger at me and says, “You should be locked up.”

I ask her why she has to blame the victim.

The doctor, she says, “’Cause we’ve seen you in here eight times this year.”

I wish I could say I remember those eight visions, but I’m sure my mom’s got them charted out on her wall. Each of them embellished just for her. The ones I do remember were the ones I squeezed the most Buzz out of. The one with me paragliding over Detroit at night. The one with me crashing a Ferrari into the back of a semi truck. And the one with me tightrope walking over Times Square. All of them meaningless outside of the adrenaline. What’s funny is that lying in a hospital bed right now I’m kind of wondering what else I could have seen. Why only the action? It’s like a child skipping through his favorite movie. What about the other parts? Why haven’t I ever thought of this before? Where else has the guy in the mask appeared?

When my shrink show up he asks to be alone with me and my mom bows out. Sitting on the edge of my bed, Dr. Borgo asks me if I knew how bad things got.

I ask, “Worse than any other time?”

I am of course talking about the bowling alley incident. The time Borgo and I first met. My very first really really bad head injury.

It was last summer when the shit officially hit the fan and the Buzz dependence started. If I went a week without a concussion my skin would be crawling. I was sure, convinced, that if I went a month without hitting my head and riding the high, I’d die.

Mom was happy with every vision.

I pretty much walked the whole city and wore out three pairs of shoes. The whole time just looking for fights or jumping in front of cars or stealing candy from kids with big dads, big bodybuilder dads. I’m not an aggressive person, not a violent or angry guy, and most of the time I’d just throw out verbal abuse to get someone to throw a fist.

People I knew, people like Paige, all got summer jobs. They worked the cash register at the Hungry Elephant at the zoo. They were lifeguards at the JCC. Mowed lawns in Cherry Hills. Had internships they thought would get them into that one special college far away from their parents.

Not me.

Every day Paige would call or visit me at the hospital or bring cookies over to my house. Every day Paige would say, “Next time you’re going to die” or “Next time you’ll be in a coma.”

My summer job was getting my ass kicked.

Kicked from Broadway to Wazee. From Speer to I-70. There was a fight with five bums in the parking garage just off Paris on the Platte. A full-fledged mêleé with skaters on the Auraria campus. A hospital visit after a smackdown with gang-bangers near City Park. Fights with factory workers. With Air Force cadets. With bar backs. With strippers. With drunks. And with football players in a bowling alley.

It was last July, I’d spent the day all jacked up downtown and had taken the bus home but decided to stop at Monaco Lanes Bowling Alley for a soda. It was freakin’ hot out and I was exhausted. Maybe a little confused.

I got a Coke at the bar and sat and watched people bowl. Didn’t take long before I was itching for the Buzz again. Like really frantic. Started a fight with these football players from TJ, they kicked my ass all over the place and the fracas ended with me getting conked on the dome with a bowling ball. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t focused. Smash. Crash.

What I saw in the darkness didn’t seem far off at all. Maybe only days. I was standing in the middle of a street watching the aftermath of a car accident near my house. This guy from school, a guy I’d only recently met, Harold Vienna, was lying in front of a red car. He looked like he was asleep, only one of his legs was bent backward the wrong way, the way it shouldn’t bend. There were people getting out of their cars and covering their mouths to stop from crying or screaming or both. I couldn’t move. My heart had slowed to just this hollow thud, like when you hit the side of an empty can. Just metal in my chest.

And I woke up in the hospital.

The Buzz was pitiful.

Mom was bummed the vision wasn’t focused, wasn’t far out, but she was sympathetic. She said to me, “Isaiah 40:26: ‘Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one falleth.’” Paige didn’t quote any Bible, she cussed me out.

Dr. Borgo came to see me the second day I was there.

Still in my hospital gown, still in bed, feeling sick still from the vision. Back then Borgo had a goatee to go with his black-framed glasses. He’s a black guy and with the goatee he totally looked like Malcolm X. I told him that and he shrugged. He looked me over, asked some questions, and then leaned in and whispered, “You see anything?”

“Like what?” I asked him.

“Like things that haven’t happened yet.”

I wasn’t sure if he was for real, so I said, “Maybe.”

“Thought so. How far out can you see?”