K Breese - Future Imperfect

She goes all the way back, years and years of my fibs all lined up and trotted out like they’re real signs, like this is the road map to Heaven. What’s odd about it though, and what I seem to have forgotten in all my making stuff up, is that the further out she goes, way out to when I’m middle-aged, the visions get darker.

Where she’s got it marked as the Rapture, there are the words “cloudy” and “darkening” and “nightmare.” And what’s uncanny about it is I can only think of the visions I’ve had showing me a future that’s indistinct, murky. I think back to the visions that seemed threatening, the ones that made me frightened. The storm at the beach. I see what Janice showed me and I honest to God shiver right there.

Smoker notices, she rubs my shoulder, says, “It’ll all be okay.”

And suddenly I’m actually paying attention to my mom’s slide show and I’m waiting with bated breath for her to show me what comes next, what happens after the Rapture. When she flicks on the slide of the mental institution I almost fall out of my chair.

“What the hell is that?” I ask, half shouting.

My mom looks at me worried. She says, “It’s from the vision you had after you crashed your car on Ninth Avenue. It was only this past summer. July, I think.”

“I don’t remember,” I stutter. “What did I say?”

Mom looks to Chubby. Chubby looks to Mom. Chubby shrugs.

Flipping through the Revelation Book, Mom says, “It was somewhere right over here, just by… Right, okay, here it is. You said that you saw yourself living in this place. That you were crippled or something but that you weren’t too worried about it because somehow, down deep, really, you knew it was only an illusion. You said there was an angel there, an angel told you.”

“What angel?”

Reading right out of the Revelation Book, Mom says, “A man in a mask told you.” Then mom looks up and grins, closes the Revelation Book and folds her hands over it. “The Lord certainly works in such funny ways.”

There it is, this whole thing already known. The past right here.

If anything, realizing I’ve seen it before and forgotten, it makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me want to run screaming out of the house and smash my head against something hard. I want the Buzz so badly. So incredibly badly.

When the presentation is over and Chubby puts the lights back on, I lean back in my chair and struggle over whether to burst their bubbles. The way I’m feeling, I think I have to.

Smoker asks what I think. If I’m convinced.

Chubby says, “This is why you can’t stop. Jesus will provide you with another love. This girl, she could be sent here for another reason. To distract you. Satan’s certainly been known to do such things.”

I wait for a moment of silence. A few breaths in and out.

And then I say, “Mom, I make up most of the stuff that I see. All those little details that you guys have based this whole presentation on, I made all those up. I didn’t see that dude in the Christ pose. His arms weren’t out. He was squished. And the chrysanthemums? Never once saw one. The sun. The clouds. All of that stuff I made up so you’d be happy with me. So you’d make me dinner. Take care of me. Talk my teachers down.”

Smoker looks to Chubby.

Chubby looks to Mom and Mom just shakes her head.

“You know, you do look tired. You’ve had a long week. Why don’t you go ahead and get some sleep. I’m sorry we bothered you with this tonight… it-”

“Made up, Mom,” I say, standing. “All of it to make you happy. To give you the world you really truly wanted. And for a long time, well, for the whole time, I was fine with it too. I was happy to do it. But not anymore, Mom. My head is clear now. The only future we need to care about, to really think about, is tomorrow. Maybe next week. I’m not going to throw away my life just to make sure I get into the next one.”

Chubby screws her face up.

Smoker nervously picks at the back of her neck.

Mom asks, “Well, what made you so worried about the slide of the mental hospital? You were visited by an angel, you told me so yourself. Please don’t try and backpedal away from it, Ade. I’m here to help you.”

I feel sorry for my mother, but I say, “Lies, Mom. I’m a good actor.”

Mom is breathing quickly. Nostrils flaring. Mom’s in sympathy mode. Only it’s not the kind of sympathy you associate for someone who’s sick. For someone with something terminal or wasting. This, this is the kind of sympathy reserved for people who work really long hours. People who sacrifice themselves for their beliefs. Priests. Kamikaze pilots. The way she looks at me when she’s with it is the way you look at an icon. At a saint. Her eyes are deeper than they’ve got any right to be. Crying without tears. She says, “After all we’ve done for you? You say these things in front of my friends? The only people who really care for you, Ade? The people who-”

But I don’t hear the rest because I’m in my room with the door locked.

And then the slamming begins. It’s Mom’s fists hammering my door. Hammering it so hard that I can hear the wood cracking, I can see the hinges shaking loose. There’re plumes of dust hovering near the lamp by my bed. Mom is shouting all sorts of things. Mostly she’s painting a picture for me of what Hell looks like and how unfortunate it would be for me, for someone so gifted as me, for someone who’ll always be that brown-eyed kid on J.C.’s lap, to wind up stoking the flames with the rest of the sinners. Mom says this, but then, after a pause, she backs down. She tells me that she didn’t really mean it. She tells me that she loves me and appreciates me. She says, her voice muffled by the door and by her ravaged from screaming throat, “All can be forgiven. Let’s talk.”

I don’t open the door.

I lie back on my bed with my arms folded up under my head and I try and sort everything out in my mind. I try and pull the threads together. Try and figure out how there can suddenly be two futures. How I can see myself healthy and happy in one and crippled and tormented in the other. I close my eyes tight and beg my dad to visit. I want to see his young self, his masked self, standing in the corner of my room. I want him to explain it all to me again. Which way is which? Does killing Jimi lead to the happy life? Does not killing him? My head hurts. I massage my eyes, pressing down hard on the giving spheres of them.

After a long time of silence, I hear Mom in her room sobbing. I can hear her praying and I know she’s on her knees with her eyes closed and her head bowed.

I’m sure she’s speaking in tongues.

I’m sure she’s biting the insides of her cheeks until they’re bruised and swollen.

The two of us, we’re both confused in different ways.

The two of us, we’re both hypnotized by something neither of us understands.

When the sun is highlighting the horizon, I climb out my window and drive over to Vauxhall’s place.

Just like in all the teen movies, I throw pebbles at her window in the backyard and duck down into a bush when the light in her mother’s room comes on. I’m throwing rocks for fifteen minutes before I toss a real big one that I worry is going to shatter the window, but only makes a super-loud thud. Vauxhall, in a tank top and Umbros, comes to the window and looks out at me and shakes her head. She opens up and says, “You’re a very bad boy. It’s way too early for breakfast.”

“I know,” I say. “I can’t sleep.”

Learning out her window, her cleavage as pale as the moon, she says, “Watch TV like a normal insomniac or something.”

“I don’t like TV.”

“Play on the computer. Download a movie.”