Frozen, part three

Wishing Well

October 14th 2009. That’s when she left him.

He hadn’t ever had a relationship before. 35 years and nothing. There’d been girls, and some had stuck around for a few months. But it was hard for him. He’d been raised pretty much alone. Laissez-faire parenting and no real friends. A life of privilege and solitude. Making that ultimate connection – sharing, god forbid, a life – was a tall order. She tried, and he…well, not so much. It lasted a year, and then she’d had enough.

He thought her leaving wouldn’t be so bad. Another disappointment. Another loss. Everything fades away. Entropy increases. He figured he’d go back to the pattern. Work, sleep, movies, masturbation. Weekend evenings cuddling with a book. A month of lonely travel each year. What more was there, really?

She had taught him that there was more, and most of that lesson had been delivered without him knowing it. You don’t know a good thing till it’s gone.

A month after she left, he was rudderless. Nothing comforted him, and nothing even came close to filling the gap left by her sleep-warm body at night, and her foxy grin, and her flashing eyes. The comfort he had found in her arms was unmatched by booze, good books, solitude, and marathons of The Wire.

In an attempt to heal his wounds, he travelled to his old college town in West Virginia. Leaving the hustle of the city behind seemed like a good idea… And if there was a place for a lonely, sad sack, then it would certainly be in the impoverished little mountain town in central West Virginia where he learned to drink, and get high, and have sex. The town was a place where intelligent people went to stop thinking, and backward-looking people went to stagnate in the past. It was a hideaway, a Republican Brigadoon with more bars than churches.

He went there not to hide, but to try and understand what he had lost. And, in a way, to understand what he had gained. Despite his loss, he had come to understand that there was more to life. The only question was how to put that knowledge to use. How to take the next step.

His old English professor had an addition on her house. What was to have been a mother-in-law apartment, completed about the time her mother-in-law had died. Now it was storage and a guest room. Stand-alone, separate entrance, kitchenette. His prof said come on by, stay as long as you like, the only charge is that you supply the wine.

He agreed. He settled in for a month and tried to drink away the memories under the guise of conducting a personal journey.

With little excitement during the day, he took to wandering the nearby woods. All the old haunts of his college days – Bickle’s Knob, Bear Haven, Spruce Knob – places holy and sacred because they represented what his city-bred soul had come to love – the tamed, domesticated outdoors. No traffic sounds, no angry commuters, no rushing, screaming madness. Places where you could lay down on a rock and just listen to your body, and nature around you.

It was in Stuart’s Park, outside of town up along the four-way, where he found the wishing well. He’d parked at the gates then took the footpath down to the small Cheat River. The muddy path meandered with the river, leading up to a clearing where a decorative well had been dug. A natural stone base and well maintained canopy gave it the look of a rural fairytale. The boldly white signs screaming “not safe for drinking” told a different sort of tale.

Beside the well, a tourist sign sat at hip level, canted up so the text and old-time picture were forever staring into the sun and rain. The Plexiglas covering had done little to save the paper inside. Condensation had gathered, mold crept from the sides, and most of the text was faded beyond legibility. “Senator’s Well,” presumably named after one of the robber-baron, turn of the century politicians who raped the state of gas, oil, lumber, and coal: The boomtown oil-rich West Virginia born just before the Civil War and dying a ghost-town death by the 1920’s. A land where rich men could get rich and poor men could spend their low wages at the bar, and eventually die underground.

He peered into the blackness of the well, saw nothing, smelled acrid rot, and leaned back. What a shithole.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a dime. Then, thinking about it, he pulled out a golden presidential dollar. John Adams.

His friends in the UK despised the American habit of throwing money into fountains. They didn’t understand and, throughout Europe, he’d increasingly run into angry signs and dark looks whenever he went to toss a coin. Where’d that wishing well instinct come from? Was it a uniquely American trait? The land of dreams. The land of luck and chance. The very creation of America was a reckless gamble. It’s been a gambling country ever since. Play close to the vest until someone calls your hand. The American way. Maybe wishing wells represented the idea that, in America, you really could be anyone. You could do anything. A black man was President in the most racist and segregated first world nation to ever scar the face of the Earth. An impossible chance. Well, excepting South Africa.

Of course, the wishing well idea flew in the face of the other great American axiom – a penny saved is a penny earned. But, to be honest, that bullshit went out the door in the 1920’s. It was every man for himself now. Roll the die. Cross the Rubicon. Let the ram hit the wall and reap the whirlwind.

He threw the coin into the well. He made a wish. The first thing that came to mind: I want to control time. Pause it, start it up again, and keep moving while it’s paused.

You have to be specific with these things. Like in Bedazzled. The devil is in the details. The idea came from his childhood. An old B-grade TV show about a half alien girl who could stop time by touching her fingers together and get out of sticky situations. Every child’s dream. When that horrible moment hits where you know you’ve fucked up beyond belief and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you know you’re going to get into a world of trouble, hasn’t everyone wanted to just stop everything, then go about correcting the problem?

He heard the coin hit bottom with a splash in what was, no doubt, viciously stale riverwater. Then he looked up at the twilit sky. Throwing money away. What a guy.

He returned to his car, and his little late-mother-in-law apartment. Tonight’s dinner was Maker’s Mark and Ginger Ale, with a dash of lemon. Maybe he’d make some noodles after a while.

He drank deep into the night, watching the town outside his window go to bed in the cold November evening, then letting the endless silence of nighttime in the country seep into his bones, along with generous quantities of Maker’s Mark.

On the way to the toilet, the glass slipped from his hand and he shouted “Motherfucker,” and it was then that the world froze. The glass hung in the air, everything around him stilled, and he stumbled into the couch. He went to touch the glass, plucking it out of the air and looking at it. Then he tipped it to his lips and the last tiny bit of melted ice and Maker’s Mark tumbled down his throat. He smiled. The devil is in the details.