Monday, August 13, 2012

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 26: What the Fuck Am I Doing Here

XXVI.


Soon the light faded beneath the square brown fence behind the house. I peeked out the window in the midst of conversation and watched the sun rays whisper slowly into the earth. As the sun fell deeper and deeper into the wooden cracks of the fence, Tuan and Wheeler sank further into the artful chaos of conversation. Tuan was becoming more difficult to understand as the PBR amplified his Vietnamese accent, yet Wheeler deciphered the anecdotes with stupefying ease. Moments of laughter and emotional silence bounced between the mustard colored walls, and I sank into the linoleum kitchen, deflated.

My mind stumbled around the day and days that had passed. I could hear Vietnamese Cait Hacket sifting through drawers and picking up heavy objects and heaving them onto different parts of the floor upstairs. What the hell was she doing up there?  I couldn't help but think of her as an imposter, as though she was at fault for sharing the name of our missing Cait. I imagined the real Cait unzipping from the inside of this Vietnamese costume. She'd probably just have a secret smile on her face as she would step out of the plump suit and regain her image as the Cait I knew. She would wonder why I worried. She would strike up a joke or commit herself to a new scheme.

I excused myself from the kitchen and walked down the narrow dark hallway to the bathroom. A dangling chain triggered a single bulb light on the ceiling, which was accompanied by a fan that sounded like an alarm that lacked urgency. I could see my reflection in the high rectangular mirror. My skin looked like paper against the deep green walls, and my hair hung in tired strings loosely around my face. It had been a few days since I'd seen myself, and I almost didn't recognize my own face. I wondered if things truly changed that fast, or if it was just the way I saw things that did.

Next to the bathroom door was a small staircase leading up towards the loud thumps and heaves of Vietnamese Cait. I walked lightly on the wooden stairs and my feet squeaked into the old boards, "rick rack, rick rack, rick rack." Cait must have heard me coming towards her. She peeked her head out into the dark hallway from inside a lit room and screamed something in Vietnamese. She turned and saw me.

"Oh. It's you," she said.

Her voice was a bit kinder now in a way that seemed to surprise both of us as it escaped her lips.

"I'm moving my furniture around." She leaned against the doorway and took a tired breath. "Want to see?"

"Sure," I said. I followed her into the room.

There was a large bed with a heavy black frame on an angle in the middle of the room, mid-move. A dresser was nearly blocking the entrance way, and piles of clothes and knickknacks lined the walls in chaotic graves.

"Wow, this is a lot of stuff," I said.
"Yeah it is. It's really heavy, too, you know. Well the bed is. And the dresser. My dad bought this bed for me a few years ago, and the dresser was my mom's."

I didn't know what to say. She seemed suddenly too comfortable.

"All of this stuff over here was my mom's, too. She was going to throw it away." She put her hands on her hips and looked down onto the piles. I nodded my head. I could see some black and white framed pictures, piles of books, and a delicate jewelry box amongst the things she signaled to be her mother's.

"Want to give me a hand quickly?" She walked towards the bed.
"If you could just pick that side up and move it over here, like this," she said, motioning towards a position on the opposite side of the room.

We moved the bed to where she wanted it, and then we moved the dresser, too.  I was beginning to fear that she'd ask me to help organize all of her things on the floor, too, so I tried to slyly slip back downstairs.

"I think I'll get another beer," I said. "Do you want one too?"
"Oh no thanks I don't drink. I'm drunk after just a sip of a cocktail," she said, smiling as though she'd expected a response.

I said nothing and quickly set for the door. Before exiting I turned once more towards her, waiting, rather fantastically, for my Cait to jump out from inside this impostor. No costume was shed though, and the Vietnamese Cait stood next to her newly arranged furniture, sweating and purveying the new surroundings.

Downstairs the conversation had become intimate. Tuan was clearly weeping, despite a large smile on his face, and Wheeler was slapping the table vigorously with his open palm shouting, "That's FUCKING right! FUCKING right!"

"I think we should go..." I announced with a tone of suggestion. Suddenly I felt an anxiety, a pressure, a claustrophobia. I felt as though we were running out of time in this place. I felt like the time and the mission were slipping away and I couldn't bear to be in this linoleum kitchen. I could no longer handle the mustard walls. Nothing about this place gave dignity or purpose to why we were in Minnesota to begin with. My heart began to speed up and I slipped out the sliding door and into the fenced in back yard. The trees beyond the fence soared above it and shifted in soft chills, shaking the leaves into a frenzy that made me truly want to fly. I knelt down and touched the palms of my hands to the tips of the soft grass. "God. What the fuck am I doing here," I said to myself.

I heard the slider open and there was Wheeler smiling psychotically. "Tuan's gonna drive us to Hacket house number 2. I filled im' in. I told him about the whole goddamn issue. He's gonna drive us there and it's cool," he said. I felt the breath escape my chest in bursts without control. "Okay," I said. We got into a small white car with Tuan and sped down the dark ugly street.

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