Later Than You Think

It's late- terribly late- when I hear him burst from that tomb of a room with the black drapes and purple light bulbs and lava lamps writhing like worms over the bodies of the dead and posters of warped faces haunting the walls like the departed who refuse to sleep. In his arms, he cradles an unidentifiable heap that flops like the feathers of a huge dead bird blowing in an unacknowledged wind as he walks past my bedroom.

The empty sleeve of his football jersey, waving wraithlike from the pile, beckons me to follow as he strides swiftly down the hall and out the door I've always controlled (in by ten, home before dark, this one may enter, this one may not) into the yard with the fences and gates (not off our property, not down the street, not out of sight, not out of reach) into the night I keep at bay with lights and locks and drapes drawn tight.

As I watch, he inters his burden in the garbage can.

"What are you throwing out?" I ask.

"My past," he replies, and turns away.

I stare down at the compelling evidence of a perfectly constructed life now turned into trash. It's all there, I see - the years of mementoes and memories mingling with the remains of last night's lasagna. The superhero's all-encompassing cape, the jingly-belled cap of a fool, the Cookie Monster costume - the shed skins of childhood's pretend, sliced into ribbons. The Pinewood Derby car that won - broken. Homemade cards with dancing hearts and Day-Glo rainbows saying "Happy. . ." and "Merry. . ." and "I love Mommy and Daddy" - shredded. Crayon sketches of stick figure families with hands linked like chains of paper dolls under smiling skies - crumpled. (Surely we are these, basking in the becoming glow of endless and unbroken golden days, I'd always told myself, as the benign and beaming faces reassured me from their place on the front of the fridge, where everyone who stopped by would be sure to notice.)

The one-eyed stuffed bear that saw everything, saw nothing - now gutted, as flattened and forgotten as road kill. A-plus papers, awards for good behavior, first-place ribbons - sheared in half. The violin - crushed like a corpse and bleeding severed strings. Carefully kept photos, cut into jigsaw puzzle pieces that will never fit back together again: the little snow skier has lost his head, the skinny swimmer is missing a leg, the birthday boy in the pointy party hat bobs bodiless among the balloons, the father has no arms, the mother has no face.

"Why in God's name are you doing this? What's the matter with you?" I cry.

But his ear is already so full of words impacted like wax (listenworktryobeywinsucceed doachievestrivebecome) that he can no longer hear. He walks through the gate and down the street.

"Where are you going?" I scream at his retreating shape. "Come back. It's late."

Without looking back, he turns the corner and is as gone as if he had never been at all.

From the garbage can, accusing eyes ripped from a photographed face watch me like a hostile witness. Defiant, I meet their blinkless stare.

(What do I have to hide? What didn't I do? God knows I tried- )

Then I recognize whose eyes they are and I have to look away.

They are my own, and (oh Jesus) it's later than I think.