In Wonderland: A Combination Of Fact & Fiction

“Hmm,” I tell myself, a bit deflated as I look at Canada. The trees are beautiful. The dark greens that I love. My fingers should itch to touch them. But it’s just another interstate, as full of trucks as the rest. Farms and evergreens and fast food. Limestone juts out of the ground. Last night lingers in my mind, interrupting my joy. I’ve entered this leg of my trip feeling grey, dark humor rolling in with the clouds that have massed from further north.

“Nothing like a bit of rape to ruin your day,” I say, tapping out a rimshot on my steering wheel. There’s no working around it now that I’ve released the word. It had been floating in my brain for the last four months, since January. Now, here it is, sitting in my front passenger seat, along for the ride, a shade, silently watching me. It’s been waiting for me to say it aloud. Now, here it is – I’ve breathed life into being.

“Go away,” I tell the shade. The figure remains, hands folded in its lap, watching me. Its face is unfinished and unrecognizable — no eyes, mouth, or other discernible features. It exists in transparent hues of blue and grey, like static from an old television, and is now here, in a moment, quiet and immediate.

“Not now,” I mumble. The shade ignores me, turning its head to look out their window. We drive along in silence.

I’ve forgotten his name now. My brain protecting my heart by blocking this detail. He doesn’t deserve one. His face has been blurred for nine years, perhaps as a blessing. The memory had faded and was covered by worms and dirt, aged and buried by other, more pleasant adventures, where a garden could flower atop it.

It happened when I dug out a box of old photographs hidden under my bed on a winter afternoon, just a few months ago. I flipped through them, smiling at the history of documented adventures until my fingers paused on a photo. I found him standing in my kitchen, smiling with an arm around my waist, a broad grin on my own face.

A proprietary stranger. Now I see it. The photograph was from earlier in the night when he was not yet unmasked as a shark. I remembered the themed party I threw with my roommate in our first off-campus apartment during our Junior year of college. There are five of us standing or sitting around the kitchen table. A red plastic cup is in my hand, and a can of beer is in his.

I laughed at myself, remembering the Inside Out theme of the night, bras and underwear thrown over our pajamas, looking ridiculous and happy, on a night just a month before the towers would fall in New York City. August in Indiana. I remember the humidity. We had the air conditioning on with the windows opened wide. Young and beautiful, our skin smooth, without wrinkles. The neighbors from our building wandered in and out. We played games in the courtyard. The start of another year, edging closer to real adulthood. I sat on my bed, wrapped in a wool blanket, and smiled. But something was there. I flipped to the following picture, and my eyes narrowed. The picture was taken only a few minutes after the first one. I am leaning forward in this one, bending over the table to smile with friends. He stands further behind me, where he cannot touch me. He is only in the background and is removed from the rest of us. He stares at my ass, and his face is rough and ugly.

I dropped the picture onto my bed and saw him for what he was. A vulture. A stranger only seen again when the photographs were printed and put in a box, and then reopened this year. Did I keep them for when I was ready to remember? The absolute clarity of the night, and the newness of it in my vocabulary, tumbled out of my brain, and the word stuck on my tongue – my mouth dry. I couldn’t say it yet, but it was there, and it lived. I saw it for what it was. It sat next to me now, on my bed, looking a bit like the man but with a vulture’s head, that shifted, from bird to shark to man, never settling on one visage. I heard his voice in my ear and felt its grin, sharp as glass. I remember the pain and where it was.

“I remember,” I said, looking at the monster sitting beside me, its head metamorphosing rapidly like a villain in a zoetrope.

I remembered the spider in the corner above my bed, above my head. She was there when it happened – my witness. I watched it start to spin a web. A friendly Charlotte was there to distract me. I used to kill spiders, I thought, looking from the picture to my window. Now, I free them and set them outside. I tried to remember when I started to save them as I watched the white clouds that had stilled themselves outside.

“Get out of your head, Caroline,” Charlotte speaks to me in a small and gentle voice. I glance at the passenger seat, now only covered by bags, and I turn the wheel slightly to my left to drift closer to the safe side of my lane. With a change in plans, I drive straight through to a little inn on the coast, near the bridge to the island, and book a room for the night. I don’t want today to be my arrival. The island is mine, not his. He doesn’t get to ruin my first day here. I tell myself the night was years ago. I am a small stone. There are legions of us, innumerable yet real, along the shores, hidden in the grass, or waiting on the sides of the road. We are in the mountains.

The shade leaves me alone for the rest of the day, but I find myself ushering a daddy longlegs outside my room, leaving it on the balcony. It remains there, greeting me the following day in the same spot, welcoming me with the sunlight.