Meet Me In Gettysburg — IV

I returned to the Swope Manor rather defeated and depleted of optimism and resumed my shift, terribly depressed. What was just before me was gone. But I was suddenly aware of something I was not aware of before. It was an existential moment. I did not feel as though I was myself, anymore. It was as though I had no sort of autonomy. Rather, that it was simply imbued in me by some greater force than I could not comprehend. I felt as though a robot would feel once he realized he had been manufactured with interchangeable parts.

I muddled around that evening but I didn't feel like myself anymore. And I knew I must do something or else I was in danger of being lost entirely the way people become lost. Lost not to some disease or tragic accident. But to mundanity. To boredom and routine and expectations of nothingness. Of a simple job, a TV show, a pattern of usual behavior, of sleeping in too late, a state of oblivion or hypervigiliance, or watching movies I've already seen before. Of filling my life with fake things. Of waiting in traffic. In lines to things everyone else does. Concerts for some absurdly popular pop-star who is popular because she is popular. Ooh and Ahh. Goo and Ga. So few people make the effort to find what they actually like, or to discover what they actually think. They rely upon being told what to like, what to think, what to eat, what to wear, where to work, and I could not be this way. I could never again allow myself to be that way.

That night in bed the thought occured to me that I was not myself. Rather, Beatrix Barrett had written me to exist. And she knew me to exist, to have been given life by her two thumbs as she sat somewhere and typed her latest novel, of which no title came to mind, other than an unsatisfactory "Meet Me in Gettysburg," which felt woefully inadequate to her. But there she was in Nashville at some winery in a very dark corner, or on the road in Virgina, at a Cracker Barrell sitting on the porch in one of those wood rockers they sell, writing more before she got back on the road, hoping someone didn't say recognize her and ask for an autograph. Or worse. Flirt with her. She wasn't interested in anyone because she was only interested in me. The way I was interested in only her. So every flirtation by anyone else fluttered to either of us only to be devoured by indifference. Her disgust. She had no desire for anyone else but the man she created for herself in the most romantic of ideals, and she disappeared, stayed away, so not to confront the reality of my fictitious existence. I loved and breathed in words on a screen that she had created from desire for something she has never known. 

But here I was writhing in my sheets like a worm in the dirt of my impatience for her. Hoping that I was wrong. That she was not avoiding me because we existed on two different planes of existence. No amount of desire could breathe life into me and she was in another hotel writhing in her bed, having injected herself with another shot that was hopefully not laced with anything so that she might sleep and maybe dream of me. I was a burning hole in her heart.

And as fictitious as I was, how terribly arrogant I felt to feel that way, to assume that is how she felt for me. That she was disgusted by anyone else's advances and with herself for having been with anyone else when she knew all of her life that they were not the one for her because the one for her was and has always been only me. People settle all the time. They make due. They fool themselves into believing that they love someone else when they do not, they could not. How fantastic is the realization that even after we die, love goes on, and the person you've loved in another life is somewhere out there waiting for you in some coffee shop, or library, or restaurant, or karaoke bar. And when you meet them, you'll know. And when you don't, you'll know that, too. What a vacancy they leave. Perhaps the imposter will have similar eyes, or a similar nose, or they will speak a little like the one you are looking for, but a likeness will never do. A subtle similarity will never suppress the desire for the one — the reoccurring one you've been seeking through time like in a game of hide-and-seek. Chasing like you are playing tag, only neither of you seeks to avoid being touched.

Beatrix Barrett has her share of lovers in this lifetime. If this is, in fact, authored by her two thumbs in some Virgina motel, or Cracker Barrell, or roadside rest, let the truth be known. Maybe it was a heroin habit, which she kept secret for 22 years, was the reason she left someone. She had been to all the best rehab centers in the country. The ones in the exotic places like Malibu and Palm Springs. The ones in the middle of nowhere in Nowhere, Wyoming and Bum Fuck Egypt, Texas. Some ranch with horses. She realized she'd have to edit the curse words out later if this ever was to be published.

How disappointing that I am not a real person. That I am the delusion of a junkie writer who is now 40 years old but very attractive and keeping up with appearances. Who is a successful writer with two broken marriages on her record. Hendrix Bailey. Henry Bailey. I should have known. It is a Hallmark Channel movie name. All the memories I have of life, she gave to me. And I can never meet her because I do not exist and there is no delusion powerful enough to bring her to me. Let alone for us to make love, marry and have children. And so I lie in bed, in the Lincoln Suite, sprawled out, wondering when it will be that I simply cease to exist. When the pulsating cursor that is my pulse will give way to a final period. And maybe for dramatic effect, with a "the end" for an epithet. If they make a Hallmark movie about this one, no, not this one. This one isn't a Hallmark movie. Beatrix is probably, after all, in Philadelphia having sex with someone she met at the hotel bar and doesn't love because it is what she has always done and it is what one does to feel when nothing else feels. Because feeling worse is better than feeling nothing at all. Or so she says. She through my mind so she doesn't have to admit it herself. She followed the advice of two too many Cosmopolitans.

But Beatrix is here in Gettysburg and she was expecting to meet a ghost. So maybe she can salvage this love story by deleting that past twelve paragraphs or so and writing of meeting a ghost of my description and they can make love somehow. Just once. Surges of vapor and warm gushes of passionate pressure that culminate into orgasm. Are you allowed to say orgasm on the Hallmark Channel? I suppose a ghost baby would be not too strange for a TV movie. There is a way to do it, surely. Tastefully.

I sit and look out my window until I see the gray Honda she disappeared in slowly drive down the street. It's red brake lights like the red eyes of the mothman bleeding into the night as it thinks to stop. Perhaps she is looking up from the car at me as I stand here, a lace curtain poorly concealing me. She is picturing me in the window. She is writing voice-to-text in her phone's notepad. But she pauses because she doesn't have the words.

She is a beautiful woman and catches glimpses of herself in the driver-side window. The rain soaks her car and her wipers squeak across the windshield. Her makeup is wearing thin and her rebellious dark hair is coming out of the ouchless polyband elastic hair tie it was put up in at some gas station that is now as far away in thought as it is in distance. Her eyes are dry. Her contacts have been in too long. She has slept two accidental hours in the past twenty four — in one of those Cracker Barrell rockers before some employee gently said "ma'am" three times until she woke up to darkness and crickets.

Ma'am — when did she ever become worthy of that insulting honorific. That volitional colloquial slur of madam, which she would have much preferred. Madam B. B for Beatrix.

She parked a little up the street. What will she have me do next. Will I commit suicide in the room, or how would we tragically not meet because we could not meet if I was a figment of her imagination. The realization would then crumble because it was all too much for her and she would end up back at one of those lavish rehabs where everyone tells each other nothing is no one's fault. This was all a way of talking about herself. About her desire for someone who has never been born, without actually talking about herself.

My stomach growled wildly and I realized I hadn't eaten all day. She gave me hunger. She gave me thirst. She gave me desire and curiousity. And she gave me tiredness and an overwhelming desire to sleep so I crawled into bed and slept. And since she was feeling generous, she gave me fantastic dreams of things I've known in this life and loved. The sound of children playing in a park. Of a baby laughing. The lulling drone of motorboat. The chug of a train. The clickety clack of the subway as I nod in and out of sleep planning my escape from New York. Its soft whistle. The gentle squeal of the brakes. A distant dog barking. Wonderful colors and a euphoric sensory overload of every feeling that I would assume was the closest I'd ever feel to talking to God or being high on heroin without the needle and the spoon.

I hoped that in my sleep she would not terrify me. Nor that she would put me back in New York City with Juliana. To make my apologies and to carry on as a corporate lawyer. Or that Juliana would find me and tell me that she was pregnant and I would apologize to John and Laura and leave for New York the day before Amy MacKenzie in the body of Beatrix Barrett checked into the Swope Manor. Our long-awaited reunion, yet again postponed. And though there is nothing like the gift of a child, to spend the rest of my life wondering, wondering, wondering. Perhaps hearing that voice now and then and doing all that I can to suppress it. To not listen anymore because I cannot answer.

And so there I slept, still in my brown suit, as Beatrix Barrett sat in her car parked outside wondering what she was going to do with me. If she was going to make me a father, or kill me, or kill herself, tragically just before we could meet because no other way would do. If she was to meet me and I was simply the figment of her imagination that disappeared upon inquiry, she would have a psychotic break — one from which she would unlikely recover. And I wondered as I woke up and drifted back asleep, if I would even wake up in the morning or if I would dissipate among the clouds of her thoughts in favor of something else. Something she could sell to the Hallmark Channel better than the delusions that she was currently peddling to herself in a drug-induced stupor, pecking away on an old Underwood typewriter in a cheap motel because she is that cool.