“What if Someone Said....?”
By Robert Bletcher
The things we don’t want to know about ourselves are kept in dark places. Truth lurks in blackness, like deep ocean fish we only catch fleeting glimpses of, and only then when we really try to find them. Once discovered and forcibly illuminated, there is little to do but turn the lights on. Hence, this cathartic exercise.
My name is Theodore Mulholland and until five nights ago, I felt no crazier than anyone else. When the hypothetical overwhelms the tangible, one begins to wonder if consciousness does not create reality, instead of the reverse. Those types of thoughts can lead to the questioning of one’s sanity.
I am an unremarkable man by my own measure, although I’ve achieved some acclaim as a humanitarian and doctor in some circles. A thriving optometry practice in suburban Boston, a wife and two children at BU, put me into the broad category of Boston Brahmin, although I don’t feel it. The societal avenues open to me are extraordinarily uninteresting.
My dissent into the abyss of the Anglerfish spanned only a few hours at the end of a long day and into the beginning of the next.
I’d attended a conference in Buffalo regarding the latest, although I’m sad to say rudimentary, advances in the treatment of childhood glaucoma. My younger sister Kerry suffered with the disease. As I watched her sight slip from her during her formative years, I became interested in helping others with the affliction.
My 8:30 p.m. flight was canceled due to Shatner spotting a Gremlin on the wing I believe. It is hardly relevant why I ended up on the New York State Thruway in a rented Ford Taurus. It was imperative I return to Cambridge post haste. A full slate of appointments awaited me beginning early the next morning. It was already after 10 p.m. when I began the several hundred mile trek east.
If you’ve been on the thruway in the dead of night, you know there is precious little to occupy the fatigued mind. About the time very late night melted into extremely early morning, my thoughts began to hone in on my grumbling stomach. I knew my dining options were going to be limited, especially without exiting the thruway, paying a toll and reentering with another ticket for a future toll or two ahead. Even doing that meant staring a Grand Slam dead in the puss. (Shutter)
That left thruway travel plazas, roadside oasis accessible sans exit. Convenient little pit stops, don’t get me wrong, but the featured establishments were not exactly in Zagat’s top one-zillion. My palette battled my stomach for more than a hundred miles as I drove past one Roy Rogers and Burger King after another, unwilling to risk precious time from the road for mayonnaise slathered circle meat and acute PMDS (post meal distress syndrome).
I blew past beckoning blue signs outlining the various culinary, fuel and lodging options at a rate which seemed like every few miles, but the acuteness of my famine somehow began to space the signs apart. But isn’t that always the way?
At 3:08 a.m. an indicator of pending relief rose from the landscape. Bob’s Burgers was a mere twelve miles ahead. Eating became primal enough that exactly what I consumed was no longer relevant. I pulled into the travel plaza and parked in a nearly fully lot, walked inside and there was..........the rapture.
Where is everybody?
The parking lot was loaded with cars, but the population of the travel kiosk didn’t correspond. The Iroquois stop was home to Bob’s Burgers, a coffee purveyor of some kind, a Dunkin Donuts and a Sbarro Pizza stand. It was morgue quiet. Only unidentifiable machines hummed. The full parking lot indicated I was about to come into contact with “night people.”
Truckers, the unemployable, and folks like myself who found themselves in this space, at this hour, through no doing of their own.
Only Bob’s was open. I stood in front of the back lit menu and my stomach burned with disgust. It was a soulless, primordial moment akin to flight or fight. When I’d made up my mind on the proper course of gastric suicide, in the words of Sir Paul.......I saw him standing there.
What if someone said you had to be him?
A disembodied, androgynous voice erupted from my brain and cascaded down my synapses like pyroclastic flow, destroying all humble abodes constructed of rationality which stood in its path.
He was forty pounds overweight, permanent black marker colored hair threatened to make contact with his shoulders, he wore thick Buddy Holly glasses and his facial epidermal covering was soon to be pock marked. Dandruff was abundant on his shoulders. He was young. Maybe 20, maybe 17, who could tell? His arms dangled at his sides like lamb’s legs hanging in a 19th century butcher’s window. The little hat and the wireless communication device he was wearing completed the picture of human uselessness.
What if someone said you had to work at Bob’s on the thruway at three in the morning?
Clad in a blue uniform with white piping, he was beyond ridiculous. His stitched name tag hung on his man breasts like a badge of apathy and it read “Simon” in red letters on a field of white.
I stared at him and he stared back. The background faded to black and it was Simon and Theodore in a spotlight dance. Something had taken a turn for the creepy and the temperature in the travel plaza fell like ball bearings from a skyscraper. He was so completely without meaning. South American bot flies had more innate purpose than the individual standing before me.
“Can I help you?” he said, monotone, eyelids half open.
“Yes, yes certainly my boy, just one more second.”
I’d long ago decided upon on an arbitrary number corresponding to some greasy concoction.
“Working by yourself tonight?” I asked, having not a clue why I chose to speak.
“Yep”
“What time do you come in?”
“You hitting on me sir?” the kid deadpanned, the slightest of grins pulling the edges of his mouth outward.
I smiled and chuckled uneasily. For a brief instant we exchanged a glance. I felt like I was a demon and he’d gotten a glimpse of my true face. Or vice versa.
What if someone said you had to eat this stuff for every meal for the rest of your life?
My hunger had been replaced with a stomach of butterflies, gnats and hot stinging wasps.
“I’ll have a number three,” I said, a billion miles away.
“You want to gigantic ass that fucker tonight sir?”
“Excuse me?”
The kid looked at me and fought the corners of his mouth, pleased with his impudence. I’d never run across someone whose eyes were so very lifeless, but who possessed the grin of an evil clown.
“What if someone said you had to be me? That’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wouldn’t want to be you,” I said, as I handed over my four or five dollars for my sack of future platelet destroying drugs.
“What if someone said you had to be me, and be here, and work fast food on the thruway at three in the morning? If someone said this had to be your life, what would you do? If you had two choices, be me, or kill yourself?”
I looked into him, but I didn’t speak.
“I can spot a fellow WISSer a mile away dude.”
“I don’t know what that means” I said, unnerved by the prospect of knowing precisely what Simon said.
It started as a kid for me. I don’t recall the first time, but I recall the first time I recall. I was a freshman in high school, ostensibly getting my introduction to Algebra, but truthfully getting an introduction to male hormones. All of the guys in our class had it bad for our raven haired, blue-eyed, perfect hourglass of a 20-something teacher, Miss Crawford. She planted the seed of the WISS in my brain those many decades ago.
“What if someone said your life depended on your knowledge of algebraic equations? That is how you need to think about the material in order to learn it,” she said, one sparkling autumn morning.
That converted to: What if someone said y + b= me and Miss Crawford on top of her desk after school?
That’s when the WISS first ran from one side of my brain to the other, stood there and smiled a devil grin, and scurried off. Innocence and thoughts of the unseen, unfelt, unsmelt, master of the universe co-opting me to be Miss Crawford’s sex slave were replaced by a form of reality.
What if someone said I had to work construction? How do they do it without blowing their heads off?
What if someone I had to be married to Dave’s wife? What a bitch.
What if someone said I had to get a haircut every single day?, what if someone said I was the one responsible for finding a cure for cancer?, what if someone said I had to dress and live as a woman?, what if someone said I had to do everything left handed?, what if someone said I had to eat steak until my intestines burst?, what if someone said, what if someone said, what if someone said.....
If I were on the golf course, maybe, I’d get on a little roll of, What if someone said I to live on the golf course, like a duck or an alligator?
What if someone said I had to swallow a golf ball, shit it out and eat it for a snack?
What if someone said my buddy Dave had to whack me in the shins with his driver, would it break my legs? Would I cry?
Simon continued to speak.
“The What if Someone Saiders dude. Jesus man, you’re thinking it right now. I can see it. The WISSers bear the mark of the beast. It’s underneath our left armpit, 6.....6......6......6, not the sign of the devil, but of the devil’s brother Roger. Roger, he’s the one dude, he’s the one who makes the light switch flip on and off twenty times, he’s the one that makes us walk around our car five times, he’s the one that puts the needle in the groove and leaves it there, he’s the one who laughs at the WISSers.”
“Why would the devil have a brother named Roger?”
“What if someone said he did?”
Simon smiled like the devil, or perhaps Roger, and he laughed, demonstrably.
“Give it to me dude, give me the WISS.”
“What if someone said you had to be you Simon?”
“Someone did,” he said, with that grin. “I’ve got two choices and I’m killing myself, but it’s going real slow.”
His eyes held no laughter. I was desperate to return to my car and be on my way, but something akin to sleep paralysis had me in its grip.
“What if someone said you had to be blind or deaf, which would you choose?” Simon said.
“At this moment, I’d choose both.”
“That’s funny man,” he chuckled, wiping nothing from his chin.
Roger grinned. The eerie hum of a fast food machine served as a soundtrack to what now feels like a piece of street theater.
“What if someone said we had to team up Thelma and Louise style, Simon and dude, out on the open road, pounding a few, giving the ladies what they need? Hey, hey, about this, what if someone said you had to get off at every travel plaza on the thruway and walk inside, just to see, you know?”
The words crawled into me and burrowed deep like one of those things in Chekov’s ear.
“Dude, the WISS lives on this thruway, is all over these kiosks, is all over this planet.”
What if someone said I were trapped in my head?
“Ask the ultimate question dude,” he said. “You got to. There’s no other way when you finally meet someone who has the same goddamn thought every fucking ten seconds. What if someone said this, what if someone said that...there’s an ultimate question. You know it. I know it. Come around back here, I’ll show you.”
His eyes burned alive briefly, then the “screen flickered” is the only way I can describe it, a disruption in the signal. Who I thought I was, was suddenly up for debate. He motioned and I walked around the counter and Simon led me to a room behind the kitchen of the restaurant. He stopped at a steel freezer, turned to me, nodded solemnly and opened the freezer door.
“The ultimate answer, the WISS, lives in here dude,” he said. “This poor old fucker never new what hit him.”
I peered in the refrigerator and saw nothing but stacks of meat and other frozen artery cloggers.
“Nothing is in there Simon.”
“He’s right in front of you,” Simon, said softly, staring into the refrigerator. “Dude, come on man, you know that’s where it all leads, that’s the end game of the WISS....madness, regret, satisfaction, death and mayhem. He’s right fucking there dude. Look at him.”
That’s the last bit of lucidity I recall. I don’t remember feeling rage, exhilaration, insanity, revulsion, nausea or anything at all. The abyss just became too deep to see.
The State Troopers said I left Simon in his freezer, well, pieces of him anyway, as he was a big guy. He wouldn’t fit without a bit of creative manscaping with a butcher knife. I exited the travel plaza, ate my sack of Bob’s with blood covered hands and at about 5 a.m., lights and sirens filled the rear view.
I’m quite certain if I did do that, then Simon is better off, and my guilt is assuaged. It just doesn’t seem like me to chop a guy up and put him in a freezer. But as I indicated at the beginning, perhaps the hypothetical staged a successful coup on the rational part of my brain.
Last night, Miss Crawford stopped to see me. She hadn’t aged...at all.....She looked as she did as if I were in high school. She cried and she asked me why, why, why through a stifled sob, would I do that to a friend.
“A friend? I’d never seen that guy before, “ I said. “He was a guy on the thruway.”
“Teddy, Teddy....”Miss Crawford bawled, holding her head in her hands. “Who do you think you are my poor little thing? I hope you get better Teddy. You’re still so young, you can have a life again someday when you get better.”
It was a strange visit from a woman I thought I’d left in the rear view mirror thirty years ago. I thanked her for coming and she said she would check in on my parents for me now and then.
“My parents have been dead for years Miss Crawford”
“Teddy, Teddy, they’ve been here since you came here, they are right outside the door.”
She tilted her head with sympathy and dabbed her tears.
I ran to the impenetrably thick glass, pressed my eyes to it and saw my mother and father clutching each other and sitting on an uncomfortable looking bench or chairs or something.
What if someone said you could come back from the dead?
There’s so much I don’t know want to know about myself. We keep those things in dark places for a reason.
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