It’s 4:30 a.m. and I am behind. Every day is a never-ending to-do list, scrawled on some snarling infinite scratchpad, yellow, intersected with veins, pulsating a jaundiced, bellowing backbeat, pumping the blood into my shoes and brain. I am a closed circuit. There are scraps of ideas, needs, reactions, reflections, and recollections careening in my skull. I’m here, behind the wheel, and there, behind the desk, and over there, lugging my bags through LAX, and back there, wincing at my own deeds and relieved that I escaped as her breathing quieted, mouth open, frozen, familiar, and beautiful.
A thermite reaction. I remember Mr. H., my eleventh-grade chem teacher cautioning us about the volatility of mixing an oxidizer and a metallic fuel. Chaos and calamity would ensure. If we weren’t careful, and we were certainly not careful.
He was a small man. JC Penny suits, short sleeve sport shirts, and forgettable ties, except the one with sailboats, which no doubt reminded him that someday he would captain a 40-footer on the glassy emerald seas of some south pacific utopia, tanned, with salt in his nose, rather than the acrid, sulfur from today’s lab, and 42 sets of teenage eyes not caring a fuck about his Degas-inspired wet dreams. They, we—I—had our own soggy-bottom dreams, and it didn’t much involve Dr. H. or his greasy coil of black hair, speckled with dandruff, and it sure as shit didn’t involve chemistry, though today we got to blow shit up, so it was a good day, a day when I was the Lord and Lucifer—it was mine to create and mine to destroy. I would remember this day, years later, as I limped to my car, carrying one size 4 woman’s shoe. That day and today are linked by a pyrotechnic event—one borne of chemistry, the other borne of necessity and liberty.
This will be the last time that we will talk, I tell her. For a lot of reasons. Mainly because they’re getting close. I had a cop, red-nosed and heavy, his blue coat a midnight blanket for his blaring brass buttons and badge, come right up to me late last night. Flashed a photo, asked a few questions. I told him I had never seen that face but of course, I was lying. I’ll call in an anonymous tip in a few days. And they’ll find one of your shoes. The searchers need a souvenir from time to time, too.
Before I go, I need you to understand something. It’s very important.
Regardless of where I am, you will be with me. You should never worry about being alone, about feeling lost or forgotten or discarded like a threadbare blanket that’s lost its ability to warm. It’s not the blanket’s fault, you know. You will be in every soft breath I take. You will be my compass to this moment because I’ll know I did not dream this, that I did not dream of you. I did this. This is what being alive feels like. With clear sailing ahead.
I learned a lot from Mr. H. on his boat.
Now it’s time for me to go, and it’s time for you, too.