Alone Alarm

By

Jonathan Carroll

And they lived happily ever after. Damn it, that was what was supposed to happen! They met, talked, fell in love, he asked her to marry him, she said yes... and that was supposed to be that.

But there are no rules, even if we keep hoping there are. What’s worse, we try to obey what doesn’t exist and end up like him: sitting in an empty apartment, wondering where she is, what she’s doing now now now, sure whatever it is would be sexy, exciting, and nothing she’d ever done with him.

He’d seen the other man. That’s right. Saw her holding hands in public with a guy wearing a Van Dyke beard and a tattoo! He looked like a biker, or a long haul truck driver who wore ventilated baseball caps.

She hated tattoos! At least that’s what she’d said. He remembered her exact words. “Tattoos are icky.” Well, now she was holding hands with Mr. Icky while her husband sat in their living room looking at the floor.

What’s worse, he missed everything about her, even the things he hated. Her long black hairs like odd calligraphy stuck to the rim of the white bathroom sink. Her messy jumble of cosmetics taking up three-quarters of the medicine cabinet. Her stubbornness. That unbearably cute voice when she spoke to the cat. He missed it all.

He tried everything to get over her: Bali, expensive vodka, dating services, the story of Job. The trouble was, he didn’t want to get over her. Didn’t want to stop thinking about her smile, her long fingers, the way she whistled when she worked in the kitchen. He wasn’t through with her yet.

And today was their anniversary. Four years of connubial bliss. He would have taken her out to dinner and toasted her again and again. He would have bought her a present-- something way beyond their budget, but so what? Love is more important than a bank balance. Maybe even a trip. He would have put two plane tickets on the small dining room table and triumphantly announced “Tomorrow we’re off to London!”

The apartment grew bigger and bigger around him as he thought about all this. Soon it felt like he was sitting in the middle of an empty railroad station. All aboard to nowhere! Train leaving on every track!

Sighing, he stood up and decided to go out for a drink. He’d sit at a bar and watch a game on television. Anything to take his mind off her, while hopefully somewhere in his skull his machines worked overtime to figure out just what the hell he should do with the rest of his life.

It was very cold outside and his car wouldn’t start. Luga-luga-lug--- it turned over and over. Nothing. He gripped the steering wheel through the fine leather gloves she had given him for his last birthday. “Come on, you bastard, don’t do this to me! Not tonight.” Luga-lug... Nothing.

Whenever the engine wouldn’t start, she would invariably say “Maybe you flooded it.” Which was the only thing she knew about automobiles-- if you pumped the gas pedal too much, the motor flooded. So any time there was trouble, it must be flooded. He used to kid her about it till she pinched his arm to stop. Once the electric window wouldn’t go down. Very seriously he asked her if she thought it was flooded...

Now he lowered his head to the top of the steering wheel. The plastic was ice cold against his forehead. With no hope at all, he turned the key one more time and the engine sparked to life, Thank God!

As he drove out of the apartment complex, he saw the nasty neighbor she used to call “Mean Mr. Mustard.” Was his wife going to follow him everywhere tonight? Her nicknames for neighbors, “Maybe it’s flooded,” when he drove past the places she’d shopped would her voice call out Yoo Hoo! Were they all going to ride along and torment him?

No. The bar he chose was cozy and friendly. For a few hours he felt like he’d landed back on earth again. A big blond named Cora sat next to him and flirted. Her boyfriend Auggie kept the drinks coming and the three laughed themselves into a night’s friendship. This was the way things were supposed to be! People toasting each other, telling stories, jokes funny enough to make you laugh so hard your eyes closed. He wouldn’t have touched Cora in a million years, but was so grateful to her for saying three times he was her type.

When it was his turn to go to the bathroom, he rose from the stool just as a man’s voice from behind him said “Hi Cora.” The sly tone and intimate timbre said whoever it was had spent some time in bed with big Cora.

Turning, he was appalled to see Mr. Van Dyke Tattoo standing right there.

“Hi, You! Where ya been? What kind of naughty you been up to these days?” Cora said with delight and longing.

Even as they were being introduced, The Wife Stealer didn’t look at him but rather at Cora’s chest. “Hi. How you doing?” He said in a voice that clearly stated he didn’t give one shit how the other man was doing.

All right, this was the moment! The moment to rise up against the swine, against his own wimpy nature, against everything he’d ever been and not done. Stand fast! Grab the fucker by the shirt, drag him to the middle of the floor and Jackie Chan his ass into oblivion. Do something!

Fat chance. There was no Jackie Chan in him, not one chromosome. No Jackie, no John Wayne, no guts, no grandezza or Good Stuff. No bad stuff either-- only gray and useless. Buy it by the ton and use it for land fill. He was only himself, capable of only held breath, flushed cheeks and two clenched fists in the face of the man who had stolen his wife.

He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. All the alcohol he’d had that night burned away and its welcome effects were gone before he was halfway out of the building. He would get in his car and drive. That was a good thing to do. Drive through the pain and humiliation, past road signs and gas stations that kept him going towards the nowhere he needed to go on a night like this.

He’d had his big chance, been this far away from the villain but all he did was huff and puff and blow his own house down. So now he would drive and if he felt like driving all night, alone in a car that wouldn’t start and reminded him of his wife, then all right. He would drive down the night and watch tomorrow rise through the windshield. A tomorrow always brought some kind of hope.

Outside the bar, the parking lot was full of cars although it was half past one in the morning. He envied those happy drinkers inside. That stopped him in his tracks! To his bitter dismay, he realized he envied just about every person on earth right then who was not him.

Before he had a chance to suffer the full effect of that thought, he heard someone come up behind him. He heard a thud and then felt like something had bitten into the back of his head. He collapsed.

There were no dreams. He went straight from registering the first vicious pain, to bright wide awake ‘Where the hell am I?’ But he wasn’t able to actually say the words because something tight was across his mouth and his hands were bound behind him.

Everything was blackness, but he knew he was in something and it was moving. He could hear a car. He was in a car. It took only a few seconds to realize it was the trunk of a car. He was bound and gagged and riding in the trunk of a car after being hit on the head and kidnapped!

He panicked. He shook and twisted and screamed against the tape that covered his mouth. He’d never been more alive in his life. Nothing had ever meant more than getting free of everything that bound him--the tape, the rope, the trunk. If he didn’t get out that instant he’d go mad. But he was reacting-- not just sitting there like a worm and taking it. He was kicking and screaming and flopping around as hard as he could.

Nothing happened. He kept squirming, the car kept moving, but nothing he tried made any difference. Luckily that first tidal wave of panic passed, at least for a short time.

He wondered who the hell would want to kidnap him? He had nothing, knew no one, held no power. What Red Brigades, Aryan Brotherhoods, Shining Paths, cutthroats in general even knew he existed? Should he feel flattered?

Maybe they were angry Arabs set on revenge, and any hapless American would do. Or sadists! They’d take him into a forest along with a suitcase full of... things and when his body was found, even his rescuers would turn away, sick from the carnage. That started him flopping again.

For better or worse, soon after the second fear hit him, the car stopped abruptly. Two doors closed. He could hear no one speaking. He heard footsteps. A key turning in a lock somewhere very near and then the trunk door above him sprung up. His face was flooded with blinding light.

“Get outta there!”

“He can’t get out-- he’s tied up!”

“Uh, oh yeah.”

Both American voices. Familiar.

A moment passed. Then he was yanked to his knees and, rough hands under his armpits, out of the car. Light in his face the whole time, he still wasn’t able to see his abductors.

They laid him on the ground. He was petrified of what was next. One of them kicked him in the side. A hard kick but not a killer.

“Cut it out. Don’t do that.”

“Why? Did you see how he blew it back there?” Again, familiar voices. More than the pain and his fear, his brain overrode everything else by asking “Why do I know those voices?”

The light went out. He blinked fast and hard, trying to regain his burned sight. He made out two, then three sets of feet. One was wearing sneakers. Sneakers like he’d used to have as a teen-- high top, black and white “Converse” brand.

“Take off the tape. Let him talk. It doesn’t matter now if anyone hears him.” Someone laughed meanly.

Sneakers stepped forward and bending down, tore the tape off his mouth in one short brutal pull.

The first thing the man did was scream, but not because of the tape. He screamed because the person who pulled it off was himself.

At seventeen. Seventeen year old him in those Converse sneakers, tired jeans with patches sewn on by his mother, and screaming orange polo shirt his girlfriend had given him for his 17th birthday.

“Surprise, Asshole. Welcome home.’ Seventeen stood up and put his hands on his thin hips.

He’d gained a lot of weight since that time. He remembered buying trousers with a 32” waist and 32” length. Those were the days.

“Look at me.” A deeper voice said, and now he recognized that voice too as his own. How surprised we always are to hear our voices played back on a tape recorder. In the space of thirty seconds he’d heard himself twice-- past and present.

Fearfully, he looked up and saw another him staring at him. He placed this self immediately. A few years back he’d worn his hair like that. And the hideous red plaid blazer. His wife had insisted it looked sharp.

“Do you know who we are?”

Stunned as he was, he couldn’t believe the stupidity of the question. But he didn’t want to piss himself off, so he only nodded. The other nodded back.

“That’s good, because I didn’t. It took me a long time to understand.”

“I got it in a second.” Seventeen announced proudly.

“Shut up, willya? If you’re so smart, how come you’re here?”

From the ground, he watched these two earlier versions of himself glare at each other. It was clear their hatred was mutual.

“And what the fuck are you looking at?” Seventeen growled at him with as much menace as he could muster.

But the man on the ground knew it was all bluff. He remembered how, at seventeen, he had tried so hard to be tough. He hung with a violent crowd who were as prickly as cactus and dangerous as hand grenades. He wasn’t courageous, but he was clever and learned how to fool others into believing he belonged with them, which was enough to get him through those years.

He’d always been clever, but sitting there on the ground in that unthinkable situation, he realized something for the first time in his life-- clever tricks you into believing it’s enough, but it isn’t. For all the shrewd planning and scheming, lying and pretending he’d done through the years, what had it brought him finally? A lost wife, a mid-level white collar job that sounded a lot more interesting than it was, an apartment that looked out on a cut rate carpet outlet. He’d once worked with a sassy woman who’d said in passing “I fucked my way to the middle.” When he first heard it, he thought the line was just witty. Now he knew in one of those crippling life insights that it was true. He had clever’d his way to the middle and that’s where his life was going to stay. Forever.

“Hallelujah! Our boy sees the light.” Seventeen said.

Older him reached down and helped the man to his feet. His knees clicked loudly. “Welcome to the club.”

His vision was now back to normal and what he saw surrounding him on the dark country road was chilling.

There were so many of them. Wearing sneakers and T-shirts, double-breasted suits, Bermuda shorts and Little League uniforms. Their hair was cut in many different ways, their faces went from very thin to almost fat.

But they were all him.

Speechless, he stared at all these different versions of himself. It was like looking at a living photo album. There he was at seven, twelve, seventeen, nineteen. Bell bottoms, long fingernails from the time he had seriously tried to learn to play the guitar after college. There was the arm with the glisteningly fresh cut he’d gotten after falling off his bicycle when he was what, eleven?

All of them were there on that narrow country road at two in the morning, all the versions of this man were watching him or talking quietly amongst themselves. He couldn’t hear what they were saying but knew it was about him. Their expressions ranged from joy to utter disgust.

Using all the power he had left, he whispered to whoever might know the answer “What is this? Why am I here?”

“Because you’re finished. Your time is up. And now you know it.” Seventeen said with a snicker. “Because now you’re like the rest of us: used up and flicked away like a cigarette butt.”

The older one put a hand tenderly on his shoulder. “It’s true. “We’re all one person, but that person grows up or older or whatever you want to call it. Each of us here were only one stage. When that stage was over--”

Seventeen shoved him aside and went up nose to nose with the confused newcomer. “Let me explain, Dufus. You’re too technical. One life is like a pack of cigarettes, like I said. It’s that simple. There are twenty in a pack, right? You smoke one, there are nineteen left. What do you do with the butt? Drop it on the ground and forget it ‘cause you know it’ll burn itself out. Only we don’t burn out. But nobody knows that till they’re here. Like you now. That’s the big secret to life.

“All of us--” The obnoxious boy threw his arm out in a wide arc meant to include everyone nearby “--were in one pack. One life. One man. But not till you’ve been used and thrown away do you get it. Then it’s too late.”

“But am I dead? I mean, is he dead?”

“Hell no! Don’t be so egotistical. He just lit a new cig from your old butt.” Seventeen and some others loved that line and laughed like ninnies.

He had nowhere else to turn but to the man who had touched him kindly before. To his dismay, that one only nodded sadly that the kid’s version was true.

He looked at the crowd. There he was across all those years and so it had to be true. There was no other explanation. “What will happen to me, to him, I mean?”

Someone in the shadows called out angrily “Who knows, man? We’re just supposed to sit around here waiting for the next one to join us. Groovy, huh?”

Groovy? God Almighty, when was the last time he had used that stupid word? The Seventies? Feelin’ Groovy. A Groovy Kind of Love. Groovin’ on a summer’s afternoon...

Help!

This first night of the rest of his life went on but it didn’t end badly. A boy in a Cub Scout uniform, him, started a campfire. Another (in pajamas) brought out boxes of hot dogs and rolls. Seventeen used his switchblade to open everything. Many of them sat around the campfire talking and eating. Some fell asleep, particularly the young ones. Someone tried to get the rest to sing his favorite old songs but another said shut up --not all of us know those songs.

The good part was it felt like the greatest class reunion anyone ever attended. Someone there knew every detail of their one life. The man who had been kidnapped a few hours before had a million questions because naturally he had forgotten so much. They knew the answers to every one of those questions. It was like finding all the little treasures again he had lost along the way.

After hours together, he had his favorites amongst them but that was only logical. Who likes himself all the time? He had always feared death, but if this was the end of the line it didn’t sound so bad. Having cookouts and reminiscing with the boys...

No! It was horrible, terrible! It was Waiting for Godot, only there was no Godot or God to wait for, only another version of him and how much of himself could he take?

That’s when they sprang the last surprise on him, and not a moment too soon! As the first rays of sun shone through the dense forest, they told him to get into the car. He was so exhausted and empty by then he would have done anything they said.

This time different ones drove him back to town. Seventeen had disappeared into the woods hours before and the other kidnapper held a sleeping baby-him on his lap.

They drove in silence into the familiar town. He sat in the front passenger’s seat looking dully out at the place that, until last night, had been his life. They passed his apartment, the building where he had worked, the lanes where he had bowled, the church where he had married.

He didn’t say a word until they pulled up in front of the house where he knew his wife lived with Van Dyke Tattoo. “No, I don’t want to--”

“Sssh! Just watch.” The driver said and lapsed back into silence.

A few minutes later a metallic blue Toyota Corolla pulled up and Van Dyke stumbled out. He was clearly drunk and the lewd smile on his face said he’d been a very bad boy that night. With Cora from the bar? What difference did it make? He struggled towards the front door.

Despite the night’s astonishing revelations, the man in the front seat got so mad again that he cried out “Cocksucker!”

Instantly an amazing thing happened: Van Dyke stopped in his tracks and put a hand to the back of his neck, as if sensing something wrong and strange was very near. He was facing away but slowly turned in their direction.

When the cuckolded man saw Van Dyke’s face, he gasped. Because it was his own face; they were the same person. The only difference was one had a beard, a tattoo, and an attitude. Somewhere along the line he changed and became an outlaw or an asshole or something in between. How had that happened? He couldn’t begin to fathom how he ever would have ended up like that. But living proof was thirty feet away with a hand on his neck and big doubt in his drunken eyes.

For better or worse, the cuckold realized his wife had neither betrayed nor left him. She just loved him as Mr. Bad now. Was she nuts? Everything about this other guy reeked of dirty jokes, cowboy boots, cheap beer and a broken remote control. What’s worse, it was likely he’d spent the night betraying the only woman he had ever loved. How often had this happened? How could he do this to her?

The man in the front seat ground his teeth in fury and without thinking, started to get out. The driver grabbed his arm and held him back.

“You can’t do that. It’s not allowed. We only brought you here because we thought you’d like to see she didn’t really leave you. Well, she did, but--”

“How come I didn’t know it before, when I saw him in the bar tonight? Why didn’t I recognize him then?”

“You can’t until you’ve been with us and learned the truth.”

He was outraged, heartbroken, yet oddly reassured. It was true-- she hadn’t left him, she’d only moved on when he had.

He stared at the lucky drunk on the street and hated him as much as he had ever hated anyone in his life. Even though it was himself, he hated him.

But then something delicious dawned on him and his face lit up like the morning sun outside the car windows. Turning to the driver, he asked “Sooner or later he’ll be used up too, huh?” He pointed to Van Dyke who had turned and was again walking toward the door.

The driver smiled knowingly, that old clever smile, the one he had used all his life. “That’s right, and if you want, you can go collect the cocksucker when his time comes.”

“Right on!” Shouted the one in the back seat, raising his clenched fist in the old 1960’s “Black Panther” salute.

Embarrassed, the two men in the front looked away.