Mark Tufo - 'Til Death Do Us Part

I whistled a little Zeppelin, When the Levee Breaks I think, maybe a bit of In My time Of Dying , followed by In the Evening , but my song choices started to sound a little ominous so I left it to the professionals. The light never changed in brightness as I trudged on through, at some points I could feel a ‘shifting’ in myself like I was being moved. And occasionally I swore I heard Tracy or the kids, maybe even a bark or two from Henry, but it was so far away it could have been brought along a non-existent breeze from a place that ceased to exist.

At times I felt that the ground I was on was sloped upward but the horizon never changed, odds were my dominant leg was pulling me just enough off course to lead me around in huge circles, learned this in the Marine Corps but without a compass or a point of reference there was no way for me to make any corrections, and I had a sneaking suspicion that even if I had a compass there would be no magnetic North anyway. No it would be much better to believe that I was still somehow on Earth.

If rocks were a life form I would have been inundated, with teeming abundant, prosperous life! But the world I was in was sterile, no sun, no water how could anything survive here. Then had I not stumbled over it I would have completely passed it by. As far as plants go, this would have been the one that the greenhouse threw out after the planting season was over. It would have been at the bottom of the large dumpster in the back of the building covered by the dried manure and broken bags of decorative rock. Right then that little runt of a twisted stick popping up from the soil was singularly the most beautiful thing I think I had ever seen.

I cried as I dropped to my knees to get a better look. No I didn’t cry out, like ‘Aha!’ I actually cried. You know, the kind where moisture actually flows from the eyes…yeah that kind. A starving horse would have passed this thing over, yet, at this moment I would have staked my entire life on it. This represented a chance; if this was alive, there was more…that was for sure. Life is adaptable. Like a typical selfish human my first thought was to pull it up and take it with me, if I could have punched myself with enough force to make it worthwhile I would have.

It took me long moments before I could leave my new best friend behind. We had shared so much. I told him about my plight and he listened patiently. I knew it was a ‘he’ because he didn’t interrupt me once. (I’m dead meat if Tracy sees this—WAY worth it though). I kept moving on, this was a barely habitable place. Although I wasn’t sure if I was still trapped in my mind, or Eliza’s for that matter (though I didn’t know who she was at the time). It was another forty-seven days (or an hour) before I ran across the next plant, it was most assuredly a brother to the one I had met earlier, it was slightly more full-bodied, but it wasn’t going to win any competitions at the Rose Off. I stopped briefly to acknowledge its existence and kept going.

Then I saw something in the far distance scurrying off. ‘Scurrying off’ was just fine with me, that meant it wasn’t coming my way, the best defense I would be able to muster would revolve around some rock throwing and in my High School hey days I hadn’t been able to get a ball much over 65 miles per hour and I know my shoulder hadn’t aged very well. Best I’d be able to do would be a nice bruising before whatever wanted to eat me slammed into my body with teeth a gnashing.

But whatever was going on, I was coming out of the abyss of sterility. The outer fringes of hardy life for sure, but who knows what I would begin to encounter as I kept moving steadily forward, but what were my options? Stay and languish waiting for death, but I wasn’t sure if I could really die here. I’d been walking for hours and I wasn’t tired, thirsty or hungry, I just was.

I was self-aware enough to realize that this woman (who I will now call Eliza going forward) hadn’t physically teleported me to anywhere, but mentally I was on a trip for the ages. And not like any trip I had ever taken in my experimental drug days of college (shit forget Tracy finding this, I’m glad, in one sense, that my dad will never see this, he knew I wasn’t the greatest student in school but he most likely didn’t know why, even at this juncture in life I had no desire to spill the beans on what I used to do).

Mentally I was out to lunch. Was my body still in the ground across from Little Turtle or had Eliza hefted me over her shoulder and was even now bringing me back to her lair for whatever insidious reason she might have? I had no idea. More than likely, I was propped up in the corner of my home drooling excessively after finally having traveled into the deep end of psychosis. How long would Tracy change my diapers before she just put me out of all of our miseries?

I walked on because sitting and reflecting on what was or could be or may be, really just isn’t my way. If you’ve read any of my journals I’m sure you’ve come to the realization that I act first and then have to figure out a way to get out of my newest predicament. Someday I’ll learn not to do that, but my guess is that it will be my last (day).

The pea green color may have been steadily brightening it was difficult to say, if it was happening at all, it was in degrees so slow as to not be registerable. But I just got the feeling that was what was happening. Still didn’t know if it even meant anything, although I would take any sort of light no matter the color over the pitch blackness I had been immersed in earlier. I would have feared any sort of movement in that environment. Looking back on all this now, I’ve got to wonder if Tommy’s hand played in any of this. I can’t imagine that Eliza would have given me any sort of handhold from which to pull myself out of the quagmire she had plunged me into.

The illumination had Tommy written all over it. In the short time that I got to know the boy he had stamped himself indelibly onto my life and the lives of all of those around me. It would have been just like him to risk everything to help a man he barely knew at the time. Although he was much more aware of the bigger picture than I was. I was under the very misguided thought process that I was only dealing with a zombie apocalypse, why and how could I have known any differently. Well like Alex’s meemaw used to say, “When it rains, you get wet.” No wiser words could have been uttered.

I miss Alex. My gut says he’s dead, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to confirm that until I meet him once again topside if the big man deems me worthy. Wow, I’m pretty easily distracted these days. I think a lot has to do with the injuries I’ve sustained. I think for necessity sake I will try harder to stay on task if only to finish this infernal story. Although it’s hard not to miss the ones that have fallen along the way, it’s when I write that the pain becomes acute, focused like the tip of a particularly sharp knife blade, it finds ways to cut and slice, deeply. Sorry. Where was I? Right, I didn’t know it then, but it had to be Tommy’s influence in this alien scape.

Fuck! (I yelled it, then wrote it, that was cathartic.) The puke green light was getting brighter. I think I’ve established that. I was coming across increasing vegetation, nothing that could really even sustain a lone locust but there was a comfort of shared life here. I hadn’t seen anything scurry off since that first time and was now beginning to wonder if I had even seen it or whether it was just my mind trying to establish some sort of normalcy to this void although a Wendy’s or Subway would have been preferable (but not McDonald’s, never them again.)

Still I wandered, much like Moses. (My blasphemy alone in these journals is probably enough to keep me exiled from THE epitome of gated communities.) My guess was I was meant to ‘wait’ in this place while my real self wasted away, would I know when that end came. Would I cease to exist here or would that mean I was now forever bound here. Did the zombie girl have that kind of sway? Could she parlay my soul? I wasn’t much of a people person, but who the hell was I going to issue snide and sarcastic comments to if I was alone. I could always berate myself, it wouldn’t be the first time, but that would get old quick.