Chapter

     23

Just before sunrise this morning, they still had the magic. There’s just something about old streetlights. From my window eight floors up, I could see them dotting the acres of trees and park area stretching all the way north to 118^th Street. Only an occasional car could be seen in the park at that hour. Last night my cabby had made four round trips. The last had been the one. By that time, the traffic had become light, and the headlights weren’t washing out the warm glow with which each street lamp bathed its surroundings. They were particularly bright last night.

I’d had him stop somewhere by the lake. As I gazed out the back window, my eyes suddenly drooped shut.  I opened them long enough to hear the cabby warn me to not venture over the hill to the water even though he was only a short distance away. “You don’t want to go over there this time of night, mister. You’re in New York, you know.”

I remember saying, “Keep the meter running,” My heavy eyelids slipped down again.  It wasn’t that I was ignoring him. I just felt safe. I wanted to feel safe. I needed to feel safe. So, I talked myself into being safe.  So I thought.

The lake was still…very still.

It was the kind of quiet you must feel with loneliness, I think. What do I know? I had nothing to relate it to…nothing very far back at least. But, as I walked the perimeter of the lake, the pools of light from the street lamps allowed me to walk in and out of a darkness, a reminder of how my life was at the moment. “Charles...meet Charlie.

Charlie...Charles.” Talking to myself hadn’t happened till now. I’d have to ask Mathews if it was an advanced stage of something. I didn’t know why, but while riding in the cab several miles back, I had gotten this need to talk with them both, Charles and Charlie.

Mathews had really upset me earlier, I guess, because of what he told me about my maybe not being ‘safe’ in Charlie’s world. I didn’t need Charlie’s world. I didn’t like Charlie’s world. Maybe, I thought to myself, I could figure this all out if I just stopped trying to hide or run away from Charlie. But, Charlie, this Charlie Stevens that was on one side of the mirror, the guy too many people thought they knew, this guy scared the hell out of me right now. He was like a virus I wanted to lose...like something that had invaded my body and was trying to take over. I knew Charles didn’t like him, but he was tolerating him. After all, he faced him continually on the other side of the mirror. Then there was me, the referee, the arbitrator, caught in the middle of the mirror, looking at the endless reflections on both sides, reflecting each other. I wasn’t afraid to admit it...at least not out here in the darkness. I wanted to get rid of Charlie. “Charles, I want you to tell Charlie why it’s best he leave.”

       Something inside me said Charles wasn’t very comfortable with the request. He didn’t feel strong enough to force the issue. Charlie had the advantage of knowing who he was. He had the advantage of having at least a few acquaintances. And he had the advantage of being very wealthy.

       Charles knew he had millions, but he wasn’t sure he should touch it...wasn’t sure it was ‘safe’ to touch what could be Charlie’s money, the money that for some unresolved reason had been given to Charles. Charles didn’t have an explanation for it, but he didn’t feel like touching that money. He didn’t feel like it was right. Maybe if it had been an inheritance, or a lottery win, or if he had earned it, but just taking that much money housed in Swiss bank accounts with no understandable reason...well, Charles needed a reason.

“Why do you feel so guilty all the time, Charles? You’re a pain in the ass, you know,” said Charlie.

“You’re the pain,” snapped Charles.

“Me? Take a look at yourself. You’re pathetic. I arrange for you to have all the money you need and you find some reason to refuse it. Look around you. Look at all the people who’d say you were crazy for ignoring the money, Charles.”

“Jesus! You’re more than a pain, Charlie. You’re driving me crazy.  Just go away.  I’ll be fine without the money.

 “I hear ya, Charles. Mistake. Big mistake. You need to sit down and think about that one. Here. A nice bench.”

Charlie had me (whoever that was right now. Damn. Why couldn’t I stop this cacophony of voices in my head.) sit down under a lamp post whose amber glow made the bench look like something lifted from an antique painting...something that would have matched the carnival scene on the toy store balloons. As we sat, bathing ourselves in the light, I looked out over the water. The few skyline reflections shimmered, making the lake alive. A light wind picked up and rippled the water and the reflections that bounced again off this mirror of mind...the three-way mirror that was holding its own hearing.

Charlie wasn’t going to let go easily...and he was excitable. “You’re used to it. The money in your saddlebags has been good to you. The hotel is comfortable. You go and do as you please. You don’t have a money worry in the world. And, Charles… Sara likes it as well. Every woman dreams of loving a wealthy man. Haven’t you heard of the American dream? Your doctor has. He’s having a ball, too, being paid big bucks, my bucks Charles, to analyze the most challenging case he’s ever had. This might even get him back into the good graces of that board that cut his balls off. All because there’s a Charles Randall and a Charlie Stevens. Think about it again, Charles. You’re having the time of your life!”

“Tell him,” I interrupted in as quiet a way as possible. “Tell him what?” said Charles.

“Tell Charlie you understand what he’s saying, but it’s not working that way for you. Go on. I don’t need to tell you what to say.”

He was right. I WAS Charles. I could be and think whoever I wanted. I was without a past. As long as I didn’t have a past, I was whoever I wanted to be. I had a choice. I turned to my left, “I want you to leave Charlie...I’m not going to carry any part of you around with me anymore. I...”

My head whipped to my right. “You what, Charles? Not carry ME around anymore? I’m carrying YOU, buddy. My money. My body. My mind. So, like the doctor said, take a breather. Take a real breather Charles, not a little walk in the park. C’mon.” We stood up. “That cabby is wasting your money. Our money.”

As I stepped away from the bench, the three-way mirror was suddenly gone. I felt panicked. I wasn’t ready for the mirror to be gone. I looked to my left, to my right. The mirror was nowhere. Even the reflections on the water were gone. The skyline was still there, but the reflections were gone. Only a dull gray, a crust of almost white...yes, a cold white crust was all there was where the peaceful waters once were. Suddenly, without warning, the icy waves from my dream exploded through the crust and were bearing down on me from across the lake. A million sabers formed the misty cap of what was now a twisting tidal wave of screaming, agonizing sounds from somewhere unknown. I was staring at the eye of my nightmare. I was on the shore. I wasn’t safe. I ran. Oh, God I ran.

When I woke in the back seat, the nightmare of the incident by the lake was still burning in my head. I had the cabby’s Mets jacket over me, the meter was stopped, and he was sleeping in the front seat. As he too awoke, he said I was out of it for a couple of hours. He thought I had over-dosed on something and let me sleep it off in the back seat. Stuffed in my shirt pocket were the hundred dollar bills I’d given him. I looked again at the picture of his family on the dashboard. Why couldn’t I have it simple like him? God.  I felt lost.  Very lost.  I was holding on by a thread. I cried.

With no regard for Mathews, I caught the next flight back to LA.

“It’s okay.  It’s okay. You’re home now, Charles.” Sara stroked my head and placed it gently on the clean sheets of her bed. I was ready for my first good sleep in days. “Thank you for listening, but Sara,

I need to sleep now.  I’ve got to…call…Mathews…he’s probably… ready… to…kill… me…”

This entry in the journal is probably sounding like I’m more disturbed than before.  But, well, I needed the break. 

Lazily lying in the sun on a mostly deserted beach, cooking with #5 Coppertone while Sara watched the distant surfers riding the waves, was making me feel even more guilty than the sudden departure from New York. I wasn’t sure what had possessed me just hours earlier, but I knew that I wasn’t the same. It was like walking around with a miniature Alien inside my head, an intruder inside my brain that was lying in wait, crouched, ready to spring if I but hinted at challenging it again.

I had thought a lot about the thing that was running amuck in my scull as I flew back to LA. I even picked up a diversion at the airport bookshop that was of some consolation… an old Best Seller, “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN.” The back cover said it all. Share everything; Play fair; Don’t hit people; Put things back where you found them; Clean up your own mess; Don’t take things that aren’t yours;’ and the quote that had me laying close to Sara on the beach right now, ‘When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.

“Sara?” I said.

“Yes, just a second...He’ll never...maybe...”

I raised up to see what it was that had her attention. She had the binoculars pointed up the coast.

Waves. Small compared to my nightmare experience, but noteworthy for the surfers.

I took her binoculars... “Maybe?” The rough shoreline farther up was creating ten to twelve-foot caps. “He’ll never catch it. Wipe out.”

“Charles,” she said, “five dollars says he makes it.”

I handed the glasses back to her. I was tempted to take her up on it, but...I laid back down. “Charles isn’t a betting man,” I said with an air of confidence.

I looked down the coast to where the smog was hanging off shore like a cloudbank waiting to move with a weather shift. Like myself, I thought, it could unexpectedly get nudged, pushed, or thrown at the shore by the changing winds. I wondered what Mathews would think about my nightmare experience at the lake. Sara said she had called him in New York while I slept last night and told him something terrible had frightened me while sleeping in a cab at the lake. Even though she got the impression he was understanding of my sudden departure, I was apprehensive at the thought of his true reaction. He was, after all, a major player in the “Charlie” drama, having pawned himself off on Sobel as me. He had told Sara to just have me relax and “...make sure he takes a REAL breather. He’ll know what I mean.”

So here I was trying to relax, thinking all the time that explaining this last action of mine wasn’t going to be easy. Mathews may not be willing to let the dust settle as easily as Sara thought. He was a pragmatist, and the facts were still coming in on Charlie. He’d be reluctant to let him disappear, just because I was frightened. He’d try to walk me through it. I determined I was going to have to re-enter Mathew’s process as the aggressor. Charlie was going to be kept frozen off shore. Charles was going to find out who HE was, even if it meant more pain, more living out of Charlie until he was no more.