((Fort Rucker, 1979) (Part two to; “Nightmare in Erie”))
Despite the overhanging leafage from the dying vegetables in Staff Sergeant Evens’ garden, his wife was far away, in Minnesota, he was left at Fort Rucker Alabama—kind of abandoned, or stranded, she had taken the kids (her twin boys, now eight years old, and daughter, four years old) and as she had often done, run off. Now he found himself walking around the house, looking at the garden, and the neighbor’s house, it was a quiet and grayish evening; he thought about her with detachment, he remembered she had done this before, always running back—who knows when, was the question? The house was now nearly empty, he stood barefoot nestling close to the window and curtains, held his beer can in his right hand, a Camel cigarette in his left, the newspaper lay by a chair, on an end table, opened to the second and third pages.
Something inside him loved the peace, seldom was it like this, perhaps she had left for his soul’s sake—this was a joke of course, and he began thinking about that, the bachelor life again. Hours went by; he had lost himself in alcohol not really realizing—not a day or week—but over a month had passed. He was if anything, solving some complicated equations, simple problems he had with her, he was no psychologist, but they were coming out. As if flowing under a stone, his mind had been like a spear—blunted—cutting open the personalities in her, and his drunken behavior.
—Perhaps there is a link between anthropology and neurosis, he thought: so he deliberated this one quiet evening during the fifth week of his and his wife’s separation.
—It’s simply looking at your ancestors from far-off, it is a way we often look at things, we want to theorize—; isn’t it? He questioned himself—as if they or she, or he was of the Neanderthal race.
—When we see something antipathetic in mankind, in our spouses, in our family unit, when it is obvious we have no answers for their behavior, we theorize, hypothesize, imagine—; isn’t this so? He questioned again.
She could very much look relaxed, but once she felt his presence for a long period, or any negative presence in particular, she shifted into a mode of pretentious unrest and was at a continued self-destroying nervous tension, near ready for combat, much intensity (all entirely suppressed until the Big Bang). And deep inside of her was recurring resentment on her face whenever she looked at Chick Evens, drinking, or not drinking, drunk or not drunk.
As he sat in the middle of his near empty house, he fell half asleep in the chair—a cot in the middle of the living room, that was all that was left of the furniture, he seen her with deadly yellow eyes, staring at him, a gun over his head, loaded, her in a trance, finger near the trigger, it was a dream that recurred from a point of reality, that took place in Babenhausen, West Germany, a few years back. Not an illusion, just a dream, nightmare, of a suppressed past experience. Thus, her yellow alive eyes were staring at him, in her own mental deflationary prison; unlike her—nonetheless in a like manner, he found himself, trying to get out of a prison, he found himself in— one seemingly and figuratively speaking: made of bricks and motor.
#933 (6-23-2012)
