DREAMWORLD

a throwaway halloween story

Harvey lingers inside his pockets as she speaks, hands below the table, tracing the seams of his jeans still damp from crossing the street outside. He nods when when he needs to, maintains her eyes, follows the lines of her silhouette now neon in the bowling alley light. Jill hasn’t stopped speaking since they arrived. Her hair is shorter now, cropped in a bob above her shoulders. Highlights streaked like dried grass. Mountain hay.

Every now and then she jerks at the overhead stereo of bowling screens that all scream STRIKE!!! The lanes below the sit-down deck have light, but in their booth it takes a while for the eyes to adjust to the dark. Jill still laughs like she’s in college, but she speaks like a woman who’s been through the wringer of life. Her voice has a grate to it. A croak that comes from years of a dozen Newport packs too many.

Jill pouts, “I don’t remember you this quiet.”

“These days I listen.”

“Mouth get you in trouble.”

“You could say that, yeah.”

“Hmm the trouble of the mouth.”

“Fist fights. Black eyes.”

“Break it up, break it up,” Jill smiles.

This is how the conversation bounces now. Back and forth. A Wimbledon set of words with stroked meaning. She’s not wrong, is she. The mouth as the site of our unraveling. She’s not wrong, but Harvey can’t shake it. There’s something off about her. Jill in person doesn’t look like Jill online. Not in the way he does.

Harvey keeps it real. Always has. He makes it clear what he wants on his dating profile. No pets. No kids. No filter. You get to know him through the swipe of his carousel album. There he is: him and his truck, a construction site, a mountain valley road with sunglasses perched on the dashboard, a top-down mirror selfie in overhead light, him at a wedding, a little drunk, hitched together with all the women in his life from his stepsister down to his second cousin once removed. A family man. Hint of a ladies’ man. A way for him to get jealousy out of the way early.

And Jill. Jill still has faint traces of her prime. That Daytona light in her eyes, the dimples in her smile, her arms now flecked, sun damage from all those summers ago, those bright years of tanning on the beach towel, midday scorch with an almost empty bottle of suntan lotion between them. Jill’s mottled skin. Her skin is old now. Freckled. She’s a throw away from the college girl who used to smoke gravity bongs in his dorm. But that was long ago. Now he’s a man. A guy who works with what he gets. And Jill. She’s a woman who gestures her way through every major plot point of her life.

And yet, as the drink dulls the mind and in the absence of all this light, Harvey finds there’s something about Jill’s mouth, the spread of her teeth all UV white, that makes him trail his hand inside his pocket to thumb at the saw-toothed ridges of a foil wrapper. He edges the condom inside. The latex snake sealed away in the swallow of its own tail. Eternal Ouroboros, lubricated. He feels it swim and give way along the prods of his stubbed finger.

An Easy Splits & Dirty Birdies sign flickers above a faraway couple. Young. First date maybe. They’re sitting together in front of a knee-high mirror, shoulders screened in vampire cloaks. The guy is helping the girl lace up the loose ends of her bowling shoes and she’s staring down at him, blonde hair down her shoulders, bleached. She has fake blood dribbled down her mouth. Dry blood down the corners of her mouth. It’s too far away to see if she has the teeth to puncture skin. She just sits there wrapped in her cloak and, looking out, her body doesn’t show up in the bowling alley mirror.

Halloween was never Harvey’s thing. Too many costumes. Too many dress up parties. Could never stand the kids, the tutus, the skeleton masks, the way they walk in costume, watching the sunset stretch their shadows across the yard. Hours from now trick-or-treating for another fix of porch sugar. They want it all, these kids. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers bars and a milky way of Hershey’s chocolate swimming in Skittles the color of rainbow Fentanyl. It’s like a painting. A still life of soiled hands digging through a candy bowl in the foyer of a suburban condo.

Halloween had its moments though. Back in Harvey’s day, many of the sorority sisters would dress up as Playboy girls and take tall strides down the hall. The strut of them, nocturnal in their passing. Look at them move, he thought. Look at them go from dorm to dorm with their shadows curved across the walls. They stumbled too, these girls, lugging around uncapped bottles of Jose Cuervo.

Harvey liked the Alice bands. Those with the bunny ears, tall and puffed, the way one always flopped to its side. He followed them around on campus, at house parties, these girls playing make-believe in college land, made up to look like models in a magazine spread, mansion girls in strapless bodysuits, black corsets hugged around their chests, their breasts in push-up busts of rayon satin. They always walked away, didn’t they. Behinds fluffed up and pinched in the bunny-white scut of pom-pom tails.

But that’s all gone now. Harvey in middle-age: a boy in a dilapidated body he cannot leave. Here he stands in the bathroom alone, the lights off, shirtless in the mirror, running his fingers down the graying bramble of his chest and noting traces of his old man in him, the lines of his father’s face in his. And like his old man, he’s out of work at times, old Harvey. But he has his ways. A man has got to find a way.

When work is slow, Harvey walks himself to the beach. He finds his bench and drinks nips of Jim Beam in the afternoon sun. He watches the girls stroll by, legs and dress, side-tie bikinis across the promenade, years like a heavy river between them. His knees ache but they know nothing about the rain. Most days he wakes up tired. He rises and every bend throbs up his spine and pings like a high striker hit at a carnival. Still, he watches them go, these girls, their heads haloed in the sun, the flood of them pouring by like angels in the tint of his Blackfin Costas. It’s not wrong to drink it in, is it. An old man stuck in the running track of his adolescence.

The next round arrives and Harvey’s feeling it now. The lax wave of beer in his eyes. It settles across the bowling alley, a highway mirage at the end of a long and spooling room. The world can be beautiful, he thinks. All of us. We can be young enough if we try. Find a way to forgive and love again. We can turn off the lights in the bedroom and make it dark again, shed away our age, forget the clung of these sinking years. That’s the truth, Harvey thinks. The only way to eternal life.

“So,” Jill says and cups her chin. “You’ve grown.”

“I’ve grown.”

“I’m serious. You have.”

“You think I’m big.”

“Big is not the word.”

“Healthy maybe. Solid.”

“I like stout for you,” Jill says.

“Stout meaning fat.”

“Stout meaning stout.”

“You’ve grown too,” Harvey says.

“I’ve grown.”

“Not in the way I thought you would.”

“Careful now.”

“I’m stout remember.”

“Stout, not stupid.”

“Guess I’m stout enough to listen then.”

“Good boy.”

Harvey nods. “You have grown though.”

“We all grow.”

“Yes, we all grow. But we never change, do we.”

“Maybe not.” Jill says. “But I like to think I have. For the better at least.”

They both take long sips of Miller Lite. Harvey finds the floral coaster. Jill, the glass ashtray with the 8-ball bottom. Objects for them to rest their eyes on as the night quiets down for the first time since they arrived. He must admit it’s good to see her, to be around her again. He could make this work. Shed away the years. He could drink and drink and drink back love into his heart. See what Jill is like after all these expired years of playing house.

“Have to say,” Jill starts, “thought you’d be taken by now.”

“Could say the same.”

“I’ve had my share.”

“A big round table of men.”

“Women too. We’re closer than we think.”

“You swing that way.”

Jill exhales smoke. “I swing that way, yeah.”

“A woman who wants women.”

“Men. Women. Like I said, we’re closer than we think.”

“You swiped right.”

“I was in the neighborhood. Recognized a face. Not a crime.”

“Not a date, then.” Harvey says. “A reunion.”

Jill smiles into the last sip of her beer. She says, “A reunion is a date… is a date… is a date…” as she falls back into her seat.

Her eyes twinkle and there she is again. The Jill of years ago. She looks twenty, barely eighteen. She’s turned into college Jill, old Jill of freshman year. He undresses her with his eyes, for a moment now closed, stripping off her clothes in the night of his skull. There she lies, Jill spread out in the mind of his black duvet, that conscious stream of want, what he can give her and what she needs, his boots in the bowling alley now, stretching under the table, inching close and closer still until his feet are right beside the life of her strapped sandals. Occasionally they touch. A smile. A whimper.

Harvey’s eyes — distant again. The vampire couple are still there, moving between the mirrors and the shoe exchange. They’ve tried on all the alley has to offer but can’t find a bowling pair that fits. That’s the trouble with young love, isn’t it. You’re still in the heat of growing pains. Harvey scans the kiosk, the bowling alley bar, the running picture of walls drilled with pulp posters of well-rounded women and all the semblance of alien men who want to derobe them. Jill sinks into herself. Turns away. She watches rows of bowling pins erupt against a backdrop of darkness. She says, “Wanna play?”

Jill is better than Harvey remembers. Where he throws spares, she knocks them down first try. She turns around after every strike, curtsies, and it’s like all the years fall off her waist and they’re young again. Harv and Jill. Some nights he still wakes up with her name in his mouth, shaking off the highs and lows of a deep-seeded dream: the heydays of college life.

They were off and on back then, skipping class together and getting high on truckstop grass in his 1983 Honda Accord. The brunt of his arm like a snake at the tug of her collar, head and hair pulled together in the lift of her shirt — her breath and his — molten in the interior of that red world, the tape-deck whirring to rewind either RUSH’s Moving Pictures or Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog. It was more than Jill with her clothes off, Harvey thought. It was always more when she was around.

That all changed when he found her topless in the bottom-bunk of her dorm, rocking back and forth in the press of a blocking linebacker, a recent transfer on a Daytona State scholarship. Harvey had slammed the door and looked around for something to break but there was nothing with meaning around so he started kicking at the hinges, trying to boot the drilled fixtures loose. What else could he do. He had to kick the door in. The one he slammed on himself.

Later that night he saw another Harvey in the mirror: a runaway with a cut lip, black eye, purple in the pulp of its bruise. It oozed too with operative tears, a wet coat spread over the outer wound. It hurt. It mattered. What didn’t matter was that he was doing the same thing with Barbara, Jill’s roommate, the hippie girl who rarely showered. Barbara believed that pheromones were the key to having sex and she and Harvey never did it any other way than her on psilocybin—arched on all fours—train of thought nothing more than the give-and-take of animal love.

Harvey rolls a gutter ball. A slow one too. The roll won’t get itself over with. He turns around and Jill is sitting to the side, tapping out secret messages over the cracks of her splintered screen. She’s swiping left a bunch of times. Pause. One right. Now two. Jill looks up from her phone, hair crowned in jungle-colors, spirals of neon LED beaming from the ceiling above. She says, “My turn?”

When they get back to the booth, their seats are still a little warm, still a little worn in with their weight. Jill had double Harvey’s score so he takes her seat and makes her sit opposite him. Loser’s chair, he says, sliding into the fading imprint of her body in the leather.

“You’ve gotten worse,” Jill says.

“You think.”

“See for yourself.” She gestures at the screen.

“Guess I don’t have time for games.”

“Don’t be sour.”

“I’m not,” Harvey says. “I call it as I see it.”

“Well, what do you see now.”

Harvey swallows more beer. She cheated, didn’t she. He studies the slump in her posture, the backdrop of her nails painted black with an assortment of sunflowers. She’s too old to pull it off and he can’t stand himself anymore. Who are they kidding. This is it. This is what’s left.

At this age, there are no more gleaming fish in this sea, only discolored cod that circle the seabeds for a coral reef, some drowned hole, any cavity really to call a home as long as it doesn’t have a family. Maybe that’s why the past is so rejuvenating. A fountain of youth where he can travel back down a blackhole to the best years of his life. Jill lights another Newport and blows mint his way. Harvey follows the ember, the drag of her breath ignited in the coal.

“What do you see,” Jill says.

“I see you. I see Barbara.”

“Barbara”

“You two still close.”

“Close with Barbara.”

The memory rings: a name that tolls the void.

Jill is inside herself now and she’s trying all the doors to find the room that leads to this padlocked memory. Her nostrils flare with the smell of sweat, the spoiled reek of a body in heat, the way it clings to a woman’s skin and wets the cotton lining of a duvet. She can see the girl now. Barbara. The roommate in her dorm. Look now, Barbara isn’t wearing anything. She’s heaving into her bedroom pillow like a dog, her armpits coarse with body hair and the foot of her bed dotted with kick-away clothes.

Jill sees Harvey there. He’s regulating his breath, hunched and topless, biceps curling as his hands stay cupped around the girl’s rippling backside. Jill wants to warn Harvey; his jeans are bunched up at his ankles and he might fall and trip. If he’s not careful, he might hit his head. Jill wants to tell him but she can’t move. She’s stuck and standing there in the doorway, a mannequin swallowing every breath of that pungent air. She thinks, Harv. Harvey. There he is. Her Harvey. His back turned to her forever.

Jill lurches forward in the darkness of the booth. “Barbara!” She says and throws her head back at the sprawled ceiling, spraying a fine rain of spit on Harvey’s hands, his cheek. Jill says, “My old roommate. That hippie girl from college.” A quick sip of beer. “The one you fucked.”

Harvey finds the floral coaster again. His pupils trace the vines of sprouting bougainvillea. “The one. The only.”

Jill rummages through her handbag and pulls out a bricked vape. “God, it’s almost scary how you still remember that.”

“It was a turning point in my life.”

Jill snickers clouds of strawberry shortcake. “I’m sure it was.”

“Well, I lost you, didn’t I?”

“Harvey,” Jill says and reaches for her phone. “That was a long time ago.”

Harvey nods. It could have been yesterday.