A Bright House
Chapter 27

Roy “Over Easy” and his roommate, his greatest act of kindness, Rich, coexist within the house beneath a surface appearance of relative calm. The stranger straddles a horror of eternal gratitude for the generosity of the elderly man who took him in, blended with his daily litany of unanswered questions. Who is he? Was he? Where are the details? How will he unbury them? How long will it take? He cannot even identify his own character from within the turmoil of not knowing, not knowing, not fucking knowing. The tattered clothing on his body kept its secrets. Pockets so empty as to cause explosions in his vacuumed memory.

He knew how to read but had no eloquence of tongue. His hands were rough and spoke of hard work. His eyes were haunted and whispered truth untruths in the oversized bathroom mirror each night before he retired to the guest room now his room. Perhaps most maddening of all, he didn’t dream anything that could be recalled. There were morning tantalizers, little scraps of visitation on the astral plane, fogged out faces events and places.

Nothing could be retained or focused for replaying. This then wreaked a quiet havoc on him, though he took great pains to conceal the horrifically raw unplugged sensations from Roy and everyone else that comprised the new reality. There then, Rich experienced an existence of lull time, null time... the process by which he would obtain a new identification and once again become inserted into the cogs of the wheels of the gears of society; this was slowed to a crawl. He didn’t live. He smiled and gave thanks outwardly, then collapsed into the densest blackest hole of himself when Roy’s house fell dark and silent, and he wept.

Rich wept for memories no longer known. In his core he felt the persistent gnaw of a broken heart. Someone had meant something, everything. Where, then? A woman? One of his fingers bore the paler circle of a ring gone missing. This alone stabbed his chest each night before sleep arrived with mercy. He asked Roy to bring him books on the topic of amnesia from the town library. They didn’t assuage his pain. In fact, the more he devoured lamp light pages with an old clock counting time, the further from truth he seemed to drift. It became darkly apparent that nobody knows anything with certainty. Whatever event had stripped him of his own historical records was not giving up its answers.

Rich would become limbo unto itself, surrounded by human kindness, grateful to have a place of recovery where the passing of time would do battle in his psyche. To hope or to perish? It seemed a clear answer. Then arrived the late afternoon of a first April month after his appearance from nowhere into the fabric of Goderich Ontario on the shores of lake Huron. The pivot day. It had become Rich’s habit to stroll downhill to a favorite isolated stretch of shoreline to the north of Goderich, where the rocky makeup of its lonely character suited his moods. The lake itself evoked some tingling yet ever dim awareness of a previous connection to water that must surely be a truth in his mystery.

It was a body of fresh water with every appearance of a sea. It roiled and buckled, sound - smashed the rocky shore, spraying him as he wandered slowly with his eyes fixed for interesting fossils or eroded bits of soda pop glass. It was an expanse that first strange winter, beckoning threatening promising, but never answering his loneliest most fervent heart riddle. Roy had set him up with a part time job in the shipping-receiving department of a busy supermarket, and Rich poured himself into the tasks at hand. His work ethic directly tied to unspoken terrors. He recognized the material of his world; the tools and mechanisms, the vehicles and traffic signs, houses, schools, commerce in motion, the ritualistic patterns of people as they went about doing that which he couldn’t replace within himself to do; living. The truest horror came repeatedly in the knowledge, the chemical molecular certainty, that he belonged somewhere that had been taken from him.

And so, these long walks along the bitterly cold shores of this lake. Walks he knew he wouldn’t take when the warm weather months welcomed tourists back in droves, with their happy frolic, offspring as meaning-tethers, sense of home and identity. For the wintry span of January into that pivotal April afternoon, Rich even dared to remember how to pray. Perhaps not the words or the deity, but the sent wish of it. Something about the brutal beauty of lake Huron and its snowy shoulders had a soothing temperance upon Goderich’s most lost soul. If his new lot in life was to feel so alone, disconnected, and small, then walking beside that horizon filling cobalt body made him microscopic. It was literally cold comfort.

By April of that first seasonal shift in Rich’s new reality shift, he had become a target of interested women both at work and as bypassing figures on the octagonal downtown streets when he was asked to accompany and assist Roy with various errands. Apparently he was an attractive man in several sets of eyes, or at the very least a curiosity providing something of intrigue to cut the common in such a quiet community. One of the cashiers where Rich worked had taken to him with not much subtlety. She would time her breaks for his own lulls between deliveries or shifts where he readied assorted bottles for pick-up, and made it a vaguely threatening new habit to smoke and chat on the back dock.

Rich could not know of his mirroring of a man named Ray Townes, in that he had little experience with the opposite sex to draw upon. Her name, Sheila, seemed to match the curves of her body. It bespoke the forward nature of her eye contact, stray touches from brightly painted nails that she would scratch lightly along his forearm, even accented her curiosity about him that seemed more like hunger. “You really, really can’t remember anything?” she would repeat, staring deeply into him.

He being of few words and probably a charming awkwardness, it only fueled her blatant fascination. She upped the ante with each break time visit. More cleavage suddenly under his gaze, eyes struggling to remain fixed on the pop bottles he sorted as she sat and loitered nearby, smoked with an elbow atop one knee, staring staring staring at him. The shift in April that drives him directly to the lakeshore solace before his scheduled hours are finished, is one where Sheila seems to either lose all self control or gambles wildly. As he mutters in agreement with something she has been saying about overtime pay rates being unfairly low, and as he regains a full standing position after bending to stack grocery overstock on a pine pallet, Sheila’s shoes scuff across the dock floor and suddenly her long fingers are locked across the breadth of his stomach.

He feels the press of her chin into his upper back. The talon like fingernails foreshadow what lies in wait two miles north as she unclasps her digits to scratch boldly, incredibly, along the white button shirt and down into a hooking of her thumbs through his belt loops. Rich inhales sharply, begins to turn but is electrocuted into a full body freeze by the touch of her index fingers through the fabric covering his groin. Right there. Right... then. The first jolt of blood rooted memory occurs. His manhood responds, swelling and instantly. Time stands as still as he does, bearing witness to her low chuckle beneath the hitch in his altered breathing, and she is touching him through the brown slacks. The new length of him. Her nails scratching away layers of foggy confusion into some elemental undeniable truth without name in that panicked sensorial maelstrom.

He breaks through the wall of stilled time to complete his turn, gently pushing at her shoulders. Words die in his throat at the sight of her blazing eyes, and he is taken away from all that he knows of himself moment to moment. Then a memory of what a man is, what a man once had, and what a man can never again relive. It climaxes between their eyes, a dazed dazzle dance in crashing chemicals, before he exhales raggedly to bolt from the back dock area. Another of her throaty chuckles at his retreating backside, another dim echo of the ultimate superiority of her gender, and another piece in his terror jigsaw puzzle.

To the lake, then. In a swath of ultimate horrible freedom. Completely untethered from a world built without his memory. Torn away from anyone who loved him. Still loves him. His coat unbuttoned though winter’s grip is tenacious even in April, Rich departs the place of his employment in a hurry. Huron borne winds assail his eyes and there are excuses then for the tears as he passes curious onlookers in the parking lot of the strip mall only six blocks from the lake. Gradually he attains the navy blue horizon in motion at the foot of a street that has become his avenue of rejuvenation, if only temporarily after each of these long strolls. His breath slows. The grinding clashing synapses abate. To the north he retreads familiar stones, crunching underfoot. Wind feels more like a soul soothing kiss now.

Surf sounds drown out the atonality of his thoughts. This day he walks farther along, well past the normal turn around point, away out beyond the cottages and campgrounds that sit in waiting for late May. He isn’t even thinking of what Sheila did, at this point. He isn’t thinking at all, and that arrives in a most welcome silent nod. Rich stops to zip up the jacket he had hurriedly grabbed from the shopping cart where he slings it once the toil of bottle sorting breaks him into sweat, and he looks at the front of the coat. Not his, but actually a gift from Roy’s past; they were roughly the same size before old age withered his benefactor’s physique. Something about looking at the coat, there in an expanse of iron grey cloud hanging low over violent blue whitecap waters... something in that single glance summarizes the plight of a lost person in a found body.

There is a pang of brittle anguish contained there. Not even the garment on his back belongs to him. He has a delicious impulse, as free feeling as the fast walk downhill was, of wanting to run into the icy waves. Mouth open, eyes seeing once and for all a fucking answer. There is a connection to water. He even takes several steps over the large stones in that direction before stopping at a sound.

A keening from some distance. It ceases before he can follow it with his eyes, but it also halts his impulse. To the north he scans endless vista. Wave and wind crash time-met by boulders broken down over eons into smooth edged pebbles, glass, sand, dust of stars, secrets of god whispers. This man is utterly stopped. He is a reflective soul surface to others whose lives have impacted with the grand mystery of Chapel Perilous. Irrevocable change. As interwoven to each tale as the meaning of every event hinted at but never revealed to the unready. The mortal ever fearing ill prepared. The chrysalids. They who would dare to know all. The ignorant children. Again comes the screeching treble with an effortless slice through lady Huron’s April moan, and this time the lost man who named himself Rich replaces movement in the sky not too distantly. With a wingspan the likes of which his most buried recollections cannot retrieve, it soars high without flapping upon invisible yet always felt winds. Toward him where he is so riveted to the eroded stone scape. Hydroplaning glorious vicious thing awakening him to an awful knowledge that finally, he remembers who he is.