I slip out, under cover of darkness, while the world, the normal world, sleeps in quiet faith that that on which they closed their eyes will return, unchanged, with the reluctant opening of their eyes to morning. Peering into quiet dark from an isolated pool of light, I strain for sound, nervous like a deer. The sound of the engine turning over is an alarm, alerting neighbors that I am out. Triggering imaginations and tongues with my doings during their dreamings.
I face bright red eyes, swollen with tears or lidded with drink, sneaking from under an endless chain of streetlights. Creatures, so rare in daylight, make the sparse population of small, morning hours. No one here is mundane. No one, now, is without detail. I pass a car, blinking yellow lights, empty in mid-turn. Slowing, I look inside. I look for people and I look for answers. My mind drifts to abandoned cars in Belfast or Beirut. I cringe, tense at the thought, the muscles of my leg too strained to accelerate my car past the scene. Could it be terrorism? A car waiting in the district of fast food, motels, strip malls--the heart of commerce, to explode and take my life? A blow for all my fellow citizens who watch, but do not touch, the extravagant life? Waiting to take one life in violent twisting screams of metal and explosive. One hundred people are a list. One life is a biography, a tragedy to replay on the evening news, on television news magazines, on sleazy shows that decry the invasion of my family's life as they invade it. And my life is the most tragic loss of all, because it is my life. Swarms of vehicles with flashing lights extract my body. Reporters look for thems that commit acts of savagery. My unnoticed life becomes heroic. Death elevates me from a creature on the fringes of society, suspect for lacking ambition, for seeking meaning, for seeking happiness, to a noble animal. A good and loving father. A supportive husband above the fray of day to day life. No longer the lazy goldbricker I was with fresh breath in my lungs.
The car lets me pass and so passes my nobility. I breathe shallow, ears listening till turns, buildings, other people stand between myself and retrospective celebrity. I ease back into my anonymity.
Trucks with born-yesterday paint glisten in the artificial light exposing the Kraft parking lot, filled with the third shift. Shiny, new cars that symbolize the labor victories of an earlier generation. Theirs are the hands that fostered the growth of American Industry. They are labor. But they are anomalies in a parking lot overtaken by 20 year old rust, driven by a new generation. What their parents built, these children will see dismantled. They do not dream of college for their children. They do not dream of a life better than their own handed from parent to child and again to their children's children. They dream of survival, hoping corporate America will forget this handful of jobs even while it strips them, like locust strip a field, from the face of America. Hoping this one factory will linger like Leave it to Beaver episodes preserved on some obscure cable channel. Corporate America is the tornado, the earthquake, the flood of the 21st century, leaving disaster, starvation and poverty in its wake.
The parking lot of Wal-Mart is nearly empty and not as empty as it might be at this hour. A haven for sleepless consumption. People pass without speech, smile or glance, eyes directed firmly to the ground. Like dreams unexpectedly exposed, respecting one another's autonomy. We do not speak and we do not wake.
A flood of fluorescence and I know an instinct that assures me roaches are not so far removed from our human tree. We scatter, clinging to shelves, studying standardized packages of everything. Food colored in bright reds and blues draws my attention like a hummingbird to a flower, seeking unadulterated sugar. Cherries more cherry than cherry itself. How does nature not know the flavor of pop-tarts, ice-pops, and charms suckers? I wander through shelf after shelf, looking for something new. An irresistible to which I have yet to surrender. A photograph of my father is in my head. He is by a (what kind of car is that?) on a road that would hardly be called back now, but an artery of America in his childhood. He rode from the middle to the true West and tasted his way from region to region. Candy or soda or cake that was specific to a place, food that has since met with a bad end at the hands of such unlikely villains as Betty Crocker or Sara Lee, murderers, the pair of them.
I scan the toys, extensions of television, with books for those anachronistic parents that tell, in shorthand, what their children should know from hours of clandestine viewing. I daren't even look at the bookshelves.
I watch, tired and unsatisfied, spying on workers re-stocking from the day's trammel and I recognize them. The children of the workers who built American Industry, the refugees of plant closings, the falling middle of our class, selling, hawking, pimping for the industry of other nations. Nations whom we regard with the casual contempt that is our birthright as Americans. We smirk at the "Made in China" tags on our children's teletubby dolls. We are pleased that computers from Singapore are reasonably priced. Televisions, vcrs, microwaves, automobiles flood our shores and no one wonders where we will get the money to buy them, these things we cannot live without.
I look at the woman occupying the check-out counter. The threat of compulsory small talk leads my eyes to search for an inconspicuous exit. A means of escaping the greeters who will cheer my departure and invite my return. I do not want to speak. I do not want to leave the warm comfort of my silent, observing dream. I do not want to be drawn, harshly, permanently, inescapably into this reality. There are no shadows in a Wal-Mart. I keep my eyes down, my shoulders rounded, my ears to myself. I am impenetrable, shuffling past the tired eyes, the graying hair, the market-researched farewells.
I am out in the strange, buzzing light of the parking lot. Cameras bear witness to our trespasses. I slip into the concealed safety of my car and the turning of the engine sounds an alarm to my neighbors that I am like a submarine, submerging, vanishing from the surface of the water to drift, covertly beneath. |