Halien, Part 2

Learning how to copy and paste has changed my life.


THE REST OF IT GOES HERE
“I’m sorry,” Haley said. “Beginner’s luck, that’s all.” And then our eyes met. I raised my beer glass and projected my voice.
“Beginner’s luck? That’s the best shot I’ve seen in a long time.”
She rose from the chair, smiling, saying nothing, and came to me. My heart jackhammered within, I swear I could hear the hot pulse of blood filling me with life. She was not beautiful but the glow of her filled me with excitement and longing, and as she stood in front of me smiling I could smell the faint nutmeg-cinnamon mixture of her musk,
something whispered from my innards--It didn’t come from my head--I will never betray you. “I’m Chuck,” I said.
“They call me Haley,” she said, taking my hand and making it tingle with a kind of inner electricity I still don’t get. “I’m a visitor here,” she said, then held up two fingers for the bartender.
“A visitor?” I couldn’t pry my attention from her face. It was androgynous and baby-smooth, uncannily bluish beneath the bar lights, a smiling Vishnu of indeterminate age. That the bar lights were orange didn’t strike me with concern till later. As for then, suffice it to say I was smitten and out of mind. Was I drugged? No matter. I heard the thud of beers on the wooden counter.
“Suzanna needs a break, Chuck,” Haley squeezed my hand, zapping me to attention. “Could we sit in the beer garden and talk.”
Something odd about her eyes, deep deep blue, almost indigo. “Well, I guess.”
“I really need to talk. Will you talk with me, Chuck?”
And a little too far apart, yet childlike and old at the same time, and filled with pain
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and pitiful need. I lost control. I was being controlled but didn’t care. “Of course, Haley,” I said. “We’ll talk about whatever you wish, and I’ll listen.” We got up and headed outside with our beers. Suzanna blew by us in a huff, flashing me a look of malice, but for the first time in my life I was untroubled by another’s negativity. Haley with those sad and watery and deep and wide indigo eyes seemed all the cosmos I would ever need. I shiver now in my room and turn up the thermostat to eighty, but at the time I was filled with delight like a boyhood memory of Christmas morning. I don’t know if my attempts at explaining can be trusted now. (Chuck eyes again the envelope on the desk and shivers.) Yet I must try. For my sanity I must try. Ok, at the time I was not afraid. We sat at a plastic white table in the beer garden. The baby maple tree was there, shaking in the cold wind. We were alone. She wanted to talk and we talked. One non sequitur after another.
“Nice day, isn’t it, Chuck?” Against a darkening grey sky Haley’s eyes glowed indigo. I am not crazy. Beyond the grey brick wall a porchlight flicked on.
“The air is fresh,” I said, the cold gnawing like a jackal on a bone my balls and brain. My teeth rattled so badly it was hard to take a suck from my smoke, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer her in the negative.
Haley tugged the hood of her brown sweatshirt over her head, thus transforming her appearance to that of a smoking, beer-swigging monk. She turned sideways to me and pondered, a cowl in profile, white smoke drifting from hidden lips. I felt the first pangs of uneasiness in my gut as if I had been wrenched out of the frame of time and space. Only the smoke and the drink grounded me in the real. When she finally spoke again I was
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grateful. I needed the cognitive net of language, without which I would’ve fled her presence right then and saved myself from the agony of the current telling.
“I feel a deep nostalgia, Chuck, for when the thoughts were as fresh as the air.”
“I miss my childhood.” [Oh why did I say that!] “I wish I was five again. I wasn’t so nervous.”
“Do you think I’m crazy, Chuck?” My ears were badgered by an absence. What was missing?
“No Haley. You make it better.”
“Swiss or cheddar?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Which do you prefer?” she said, finally facing me again with those beautiful, unusual eyes.
“Swiss, I guess.” [Maybe she’s crazy.] “It has a distinct, lingering taste. Important for a smoker.” The wind whistled like ghosts in a graveyard making sport. Suddenly I wished we were not alone. I struggled to think of an excuse to leave. Maybe she sensed this.
“I concur, Chuck. We have something in common after all.” And then, inexplicably, Haley laid her cowl-shrouded face on the table and wept in silence. I didn’t know what to think. Instinctively I reached my hand out and rested it gently on her trembling hood. My heart was zapped by a bolt of inconsolable grief. Even now with time and distance and suburban-cloistered sobriety it’s hard to describe. Nothing in my previous experience of thirty-five years prepared me for the empathic pathway that opened
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between us, allowing an exchange of memory-energy; not the actual memories themselves but the intensity, the frequency, the color of them. Dark, lovely colors and the soul-wracking, soul-saving frequency of shared pain. This awful transference might’ve passed in one minute or ten. I was in spiritual double harness being force fed some sustenance I couldn’t understand.