Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:58:39 +0000
From: M Williams <kollegekid54321@hotmail.com>
Subject: Living with A Past - Chapter 14

	"The little shit," Pam Colby hissed to herself, scrubbing out an errant
stain on her dining room carpet.  "That -- little -- goddamn -- shit."  She had
just heard the clock in the living room chime 8 o'clock, and this particular
Monday had already been a terrible day.  She was boiling; angry over an
argument between herself and her husband at dinner time.  She had no idea
where Jason was; by five o'clock Phil was already too involved with a glass
of scotch to do anything more than pick at his carefully prepared food and
mutter "Yes, dear."  She had swatted the glass from his hand, he had swatted
his plate to the floor, refilled the glass, and fell into a groggy nap on
the couch in the den.
	"Bullshit," Pam muttered again, scrubbing the gravy from her Oriental rug.
"This is bullshit.  Bullshit work for a bullshit ingrate that needs to learn
to come home on time."  Her head swam in the waves of fury that coursed just
under her skin; she enjoyed imagining the incredible punishment that Jason
would receive when he finally showed his face.  He was gradually getting
worse, she knew.  She didn't know how, but Pam Colby wasn't programmed to be
compassionate or optimistic, and rather decided that he must be getting
worse, and that something needed to be done.
	Those friends -- those haircuts -- those cars -- hardly civilized people, she
thought.  That boy needs to find out what life is really like -- he doesn't
know, but I do.  Life is me cleaning up other people's mistakes so often
that they forget how much I do goddamnit.  I'll give him a taste of what he
thinks he wants.  The little -- she viciously hit the floor with her brush
and swore at herself as flecks of soap popped all over the carpet.  "Goddamn
--," she started, but then the front door opened, and she could hear a low
voice.  Time to find out what the hell was going on.  Pam stayed on the
floor; composed her face into concentrated contempt, and waited for Jason to
pass the wide doorway.  He was making noises out there in the narrow
hallway, but still just out of her sight.  It sounded like he was singing,
no -- humming low to himself.  How dare he come home late and be so happy
about it, Pam thought.  Doesn't he know what I've been doing all day?  In a
sudden rage she flew to her feet and briskly walked to the door, grabbing
her brush so tightly that her hand was red and her knuckles white.  As he
came into sight, she saw that Jason was leaning, smiling, eyes closed,
against the front door of their modest house, humming low under his breath.
He wasn't just happy; he was glowing.  And it pissed her off.
	"And where have you been," she asked, pointed and loud.  He remained where
he was, unmoving, still humming low.  "Answer me," she screamed, beating the
brush into other hand, "where have you been Jason!"
	He slowly allowed his head to loll to the side, and gently opened his eyes,
still humming.  He had an expression of arrival, eyeing this woman with all
the contempt and coolness of a jungle tiger.  It ebbed some of her anger to
see him so calm, but then enraged her to see him so unaffected by his
lateness.
	"Jason Colby -- don't you dare look at me like that -- you think you're just
so cool?  You just look ignorant, and dumb.  Where the hell have you been,
stupid?"  She was malevolently breathing now, harshly gripping the poor
brush and bruising her hands in the heat of her anger.  The coolness had
faded from his eyes, and was replaced by his regular mixture of fear, shame,
defiance, and dependence.  Pam's eyes flared in violent pleasure at the
realization that the calm, unfamiliar man that had entered the house had
faded back into the fearful little boy that she could control, although
Jason still eyed her through his sidelong glance.
	"Not such hot stuff now, are you?  No one likes a ninny, Jason -- take it
like a man.  You have to learn what's right.  You think you can stay out
after school ends with my car?  Do you pay the bills, do you know what a
bill is?  Hell no, hell no!  Pansy high school boys think the world of
themselves, tearing around, being cool, being tough, being trendy -- it just
makes you look like a -- like a -- like a fag, Jason!  Just like your father;
not a pair of balls between you!  Cant you do anything right?"  Jason had
straightened up during her outburst and was now watching her build up a head
of steam that could last for days if he didn't say something.
	"Mom -- I do, I do a lot of stuff right --"
	"Football?  You think that's going to help you?  You think a football
player gets anywhere in life?  Look at your father!  Do something useful"
	"Mom!"
	"You're a drain on this household!"
	"Mom, come on --"
	"Cant you learn to help?"
	"Like how?!"
	"Go scrub the carpet," she said, thrusting the wet brush in his face.  "And
when you're done with that, come back to me, there's more to do.  A lot
more."  Pam Colby bore into his eyes for a moment, put a tentative hand on
his cheek in a reassuring manner, and then gave him a sharp, stinging slap.
"Go," she ordered.  Jason, completely thunderstruck and outraged, looked at
the floor and brusquely brushed past her into the dining room.  He took a
look at the wet stain on the floor, like an entire plate of food had been
dropped, and slowly crawled down to his knees.  He scrubbed slowly for a
moment; sadly, before he heard an annoyed tapping, and looked up.  Pam was
standing there, arms crossed, pointedly tapping her loafer on the floor.  He
suddenly briefly appreciated her sharp features; there was no statuesque
beauty about his mother, but there was a powerful, slender, handsome grace
about her.  Hers was a face that could launch a thousand ships; Helen of
Troy probably hadn't been a conventional beauty either.  And now she was
setting Jason to his job, on the floor, looking up at her, almost pleading,
just, as she believed, as he belonged.  She stopped tapping her foot and,
sharply eyeing him, slid away down the hall.
	In the den, Phil Colby was groaning in his sleep as he napped, hands neatly
folded across his chest.  The door from the hall opened gently as Pam
slipped inside, and then closed again.  She made a hateful face at the smell
of spilled beer and gas, and stopped to look over her prostrate husband.
	"Football?  You think a football player gets anywhere in life?  Look at
your life, Phil, look at me!  Look at us!  Look at your son; another
generation of loser.  No wonder, he was raised by the biggest, dumbest,
regretful losers of them all.  Nothing ever happened right -- I hate us,
Phil, I hate us!"  She allowed the tears to flow, dripping in the solitude
of the den on to her unconscious husband.  He flinched, and broke his clasp
to reach an unsteady hand to his face, then lay still again.  With a scream
of disgust and hatred, Pam angrily slapped her tears off of Phil's face, and
then gave him a sound thump in the chest for the hell of it.  He muttered in
his drunken sleep and his mouth stayed open.  A slight line of drool exited
the side of his mouth, and as it dripped onto his shoulder, she yelled again
at her disgust.  She gave him another sound thump with her fist, and then
kicked the front of the couch.  "I hate you," she shrieked, kicking the
couch; pounding his thick chest, beer belly, and shoulders with her closed
white-knuckled fists.
	The tantrum was visibly bothering Phil, who was called again and again to
the surface of consciousness, but who immediately faded away each time into
his own private hell.  Pam carried on, enraged more and more at her
unresponsive husband, wishing he could register each stinging blow as it
fell from her contemptuous hand.  Finally, she collapsed next to the couch
in a heap of spent, empty tears.  She wiped her forehead with the back of
her sore hands and held her face as she relentlessly but silently cried and
prayed for energy to keep on the defensive.  It was the prayer she'd been
whispering her whole life.

***********************************

	William Renault Montgomery looked at the huge street sign bearing his name.
  Montgomery Avenue, a wide, lush thoroughfare with a heavily treed median,
was calling out to him.  Here was his name on a sign in what had grown out
of the village of Capeton.  Now called Cape Town, the immense stretch of
forested bayside acreage that he had purchased well over one hundred years
ago had somehow fallen out of his possession and been subdivided, and then
grown into a city of it's own.  Bizarre, William thought, that I should have
lived to see this.
	Wandering wonderingly through the immense traffic circle that Montgomery
Ave became at the north edge of town, William started walking down the
beautiful thoroughfare.  He gazed through the wide gates into the park along
the lake, stopped and looked into storefronts of the many tiny shops that
attracted tourists and residents alike, skipped over puddles and nodded to
passersby.  William was in a state of complete awe.  He'd grown used to the
horseless carriages that whizzed down the beautifully paved roads, marveled
at the remarkably bright, steady light in the streetlamps, but couldn't
understand the silver devices that people were speaking into.  He admired
the colorful square light boxes that hung in the intersections, and
speculated that maybe it was carnival time until he realized that the flow
of carriages alternated when the lights did.  All in all the bright colorful
lights, the free and easy way that people walked arm in arm, chatting,
laughing, the trees, the light wind on his face, made William feel truly
alive, and the most fulfilled he'd been since he woke up.  The world, he
thought, is even more beautiful than I remember.  How could I have forgotten
about the colors . . .  Smiling in the breeze, William continued his
mesmerizing trek down lively Montgomery Avenue.

***********************************

	Meghan Williams was typing at her computer when it happened.  A sudden,
light tug in her right eye, like a quick muscle spasm.  She blinked and
rubbed it and went back to writing her sociology paper.  A few minutes
later, it happened again.  Stronger this time, and in both her eyes, as if
they were trying to look to the right without her doing it.  She stopped
typing and rubbed her face, trying to assemble the next paragraph of her
paper in her mind.  Her window was uncharacteristically open, the lacy
curtains of her feminine bedroom waving limply in the breeze.  She rubbed
her eyes and started typing again when it happened a third time, and this
time it was violent.
	Her entire head jerked to the right, her neck muscles cramping with the
unexpected movement, and her right hand flopped down to her side.  She let
out a little yell at the pain and the surprise, and her mind was finally
wholly pulled from her work just as jarringly as her arm had been made to
tremor and shake.  There was a problem here, something possibly serious, but
she would give it a minute and then go downstairs to her parents.  She
flexed her right fist, rubbed her eyes again, and then got up and wrapped
her arms around herself, feeling the cloth of her soft blue sweater as she
looked reproachfully at the computer.
	Too much staring at that screen, she rationalized.  She was shivering and
looked to the right, at her window.  The curtains were flapping now; a
strong wind had come up and was violently pushing into her room.  The wind
was cold and piercing, and hit her like a wave of frigid Lake Erie water,
which caused another slight twitch through her right eye.  She walked to the
window to shut it, but had just gotten there when she was immediately taken
aback by what she saw.
	Though it had been unseasonably rainy for the last couple days, that night
the sky looked unnerving; the biting wind was mercilessly pushing the thick,
low cumulous clouds around the sky like balloons, and where the night sky
shown through the rushing clouds, it was a brilliant deep blue velvet,
pierced by thousands of sparkling crystal points.  Faintly in the distance,
she could see the slightest hint of purple and green lights playing in the
hearts of the lowest, thickest, blackest clouds; clouds that slept grim and
still on the horizon.
	Her right foot started to twitch and her leg began to hurt with the quick,
unwanted motion.  She clutched at her neck for her locket as she watched
rain patchily fall and fog begin to roll down around her middle class
neighborhood.  Some children ran inside their house next door, and the blue
cover of the Williams' backyard pool began to billow with a slow engulfing
sound; like the earth itself was taking a deep breath of the astounding
night.
	Meghan's right side began slowly shaking, first on her skin, and then she
could feel her lungs and stomach fall into the grip of the alarming spasms
that rocked her body and almost dropped her to the floor.  She began having
trouble breathing as her right hand suddenly cramped into a tight fist,
which she beat against her chest as she fought to expand her deflating
lungs.  Clutching at the windowsill with her left hand, her immediate
reaction was to call Jason.  She took one step back, looking at the white
slim line phone sitting on her nightstand, and then had a terrible, rocking
spasm shoot down that leg.  She let out an anguished screech and dropped
down on her left knee, her right leg flexing crazily beneath her.  The
clouds were still rushing around outside, and as she leveraged herself up to
look out the window, she saw that the weather had gotten worse.
	The clouds were flying now; huge things, a mile high and black as death,
were running like frightened animals from horizon to horizon, but always
managing to circumnavigate a medium sized hole in the middle of the sky,
through which shone something that Meghan couldn't identify as her eyes
twitched open and closed and fought for breath.  It looked like the moon at
first, a perfect white circle, but Meghan had looked at the moon often,
usually after making strained love with Jason, and knew that nothing in the
heavens above Earth was that purely white.  The diamond-white stars were
twinkling and shining like diamonds, and as Meghan painfully pulled herself
closer to the window, she could swear that they were moving too.  They were
following graceful arcs, peeking out where they could from behind the
clouds, and looking brighter and kinder and more purely white than anything
she'd ever seen.
	Another spasm coursed through her, this one through her neck, making her
head torque backward and look at the ceiling, and then she started to hear
the whispering.  All at once the pain was over.  The moon bright circle was
larger now, and more yellow.  It cast its ochre pallor over the entire
neighborhood, and as Meghan stood up, perfectly comfortable and relaxed, she
somehow connected the gentle, lively whispering with the beam in the sky.
It was as if the yellow was tinged with blackness, but had a center of pure
bright white, and it was from that center that the whispering laughed with
Meghan and somehow beckoned her.  Carefully, she looked into the shining
orb, and found her eyes were strong now, impermeable and could handle the
strength of even that holy light.  Somewhere in the middle of it, like a
white shadow, she saw movement.  It looked like an arm, perhaps, or a leg,
but she knew that it was a person; that she could feel.  And it was joyously
whispering at her as if from another room, as if from another place.
Curious, Meghan flexed her left foot and found that it not only worked, but
that it felt relaxed and beautiful.  She took a tentative step, all the time
focusing on the light, and found that in one stride she had traversed half
the distance across the heavens and was standing somehow closer to the
light.  Meghan's eyes danced as she focused harder on watching the
whispering shadows that kept slipping away into the light, and she took
another step toward the yellow rim.  In one more stride that bridged the
earth and the heavens, she was standing, curious, nervous, and elated at its
threshold.
	Warm wind was pouring from the entrance, and the white shadows in the white
oblivion were moving quickly, as if beckoning her to follow them.  They were
getting smaller also, and she knew that they were leaving her, and that her
chance, if she took it, may be coming to an end.  She touched the locket at
her throat again, only to find it was gone.  She tried to wrap her arms
around herself again, only to find her sweater was gone and she felt only
the warm, young skin of her smooth, bare breasts.  She lifted one leg into
the oblivion, and immediately the warm wind grabbed hold of it, and she
understood.  She didn't have to go in, but however far she went, she was
bound.  The warm wind embraced her other leg, and then her body as she was
fully engulfed in the gentle air.  Immediately she was clothed in the
softest, most gentle cloth she knew; it was cloth like air; and she was
warm, comfortable, and happy.
	And there, in the vestibule of oblivion, she turned and her gaze fell like
rain down upon her neighborhood, her house, and upon the distant speck of
blue in her house that was her beautiful sweater, lying wrinkled and empty
on the floor by the window.  With a smile that emulated happiness like waves
of warmth, she said a silent goodbye to that neighborhood, her house, her
lone, empty sweater, and all the other things she'd fleetingly known in her
life.  It was beautiful, and it had ended.  The angels' whispers breathed
their sweet warmth breath around her, and she answered the call with a calm,
full heart; turned from the cold raining world and became one more pinnacle
of shimmering diamond light in the sky.  She was gone.