Tamberlin's Account (14 page)

I would rather believe they were in Heaven than ever knowing that.

Jan 25 4:39pm

I woke up with that piano version of
Bells for Her
, by Tori Amos, in my head. I love that song.

But a troubled mind is a place of distortion and my mind has been taking this song the wrong way—in a very wrong way. Just a few of the lines. They won’t quit.

Devotion and resilience transform into fear and repulsion. And betrayal.

They’re saying what many have seen.

But I dream it.

I had a bad dream.

I had a horrible dream.

Most people are victimized by people they know, right? But what if you
know
that a person would
never
hurt you—
ever
? Then
this
happens and faces you love become terrible—people you love die and come back to kill you—to
eat
you and then you have to destroy flesh
you
would never have hurt.

          Good God, that’s miserable. I pity anyone who’s known that. It’s bad enough dreaming it.

They were the people that

Dear God, if they are with you—tell them I love them.

If they are with you, I do not want to know until, by Your mercy, I am too.

I do not ever want to see.

I do not
ever
want to see.

How doomed would I know myself to be if I was ever damned to face a version of them that

Jan 26 9:18am

They said I “was missing out”. Where was the husband? Where were the babies?

I would have them if I found the right man. Not just accept someone to fulfill a social checklist.

Now I think if it was fated because I don't know what position I would be in—or who else I could have lost.

I think a lot about chance and fate.

And there are a lot of good people who never find someone. There are a lot of bad marriages. There are a lot of lonely people and a lot of people content to be single and abstinent.

I have never seen true romantic love. We wish it for people we love.

To expect people to do what you perceive to be normal is ignorant.

I love her, but my one friend slept with more people than
she
could remember—sometimes even by the next day. As far as I'm concerned she was no closer than me to reaching those "milestones"—unless she forgot her pill. I think that’s often a normal reaction after losing innocence and childhood—how do you become a stable adult when you were built without a foundation and your sense of self and trust was ruined.

I wouldn't have minded falling in love—even if nothing I've ever seen collectively/historically has ever made it look like
anyone
has ever found it.

Love almost resembles any other thing of myth or lore, like a genie's lamp, the Fountain of Youth or winning a Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes, which give people something to dream about, but you don't have much evidence that its real—or, to give it some credit,
lasting
.

I believe in desire and loneliness. I think these are the forces that lose all the credit to "love" They are strong and universally understandable.

I think the absence of those forces was what was wrong between my parents and maybe many marriages.

Maybe I give too much power to the word, but I think a lot of people throw it around arbitrarily.

I don't know where this rant came from. Just a little negative today. Holy shit.

Knowing what I know, how could I live with myself if I brought up a child in a family that even moderately resembled my own?

Can a family or marriage be perfect all the time? No.

But why is it that between these legally/sanctimoniously joined people does it seem the strength between them is tolerance. And the social presence so often strikes me as pretending.

Have I envied what my married friends have?

Only when I'm horny.

Jan 27 2:10pm

I told my friends I was going to leave. They said I wouldn't do it.

When I was 17 I left home. I often thought this was about 16 years later than would have been good for me.

I didn't end up in Rhinelander right then, but within the year.

My friends were mad at me. It hurt them. They felt abandoned. But they knew I was hurting too. It didn’t take long before we were okay, but honestly, with how well we knew each other I was a little surprised that some of them held it against me as long as they did.

My parents told me not to bother coming home. I didn't want to. But I wrote, until I felt I could call. I felt I had to do these things—they were family. I didn’t want a relationship with them. But I felt obligated and I felt like I could never really let them go. Maybe it’s because I really believed they wouldn’t have any trouble letting go of me. I don’t believe in throwing people away. But it’s hard when people hurt you and you know you’re not wanted—when its family. I also know I felt guilty just abandoning them because I knew that when I left, they were completely alone because they didn’t have anything to do with any other people up there, either.

So I called them. And I said, like I said, "I love yous" that meant only "we're never totally severed."

After working on a dairy farm—
where they also kept chickens—
I answered an ad to be a roommate with a man who I ended up involved with. Our relationship was born out of our dysfunctional families, loneliness, necessity, and understanding.

I loved his back and shoulders. I'd crawl up behind him and sink against them when we talked about important things.

Jan 28 9:48am

My neighbor's house was nearest when I found the hunter's body. I told them. They called the police.

When they asked, I admitted to my friends that I had found him.

I never talked about it again.

                           
Feb 1 3:27am

I want
that
a Dr. Pepper.                                                       

Feb 2 1:58pm

I talked to him a little on the phone before I drove over to look at the house.

For lack of a better description, the yard looked “quietly” kept. The North and South of that being Jungleland and Sickeningly Immaculate. The house was like any other mid-west townhouse. It was dark brown with white trim. Ranch style. There was a dense growth of lilies around the sides of the house and huge cedar bushes—the growth of either spoke of an earlier owner. The guy I talked to on the phone was in college and had to be younger than any of these plants.

When he answered the door, my first thought was that it wasn’t going to work out. He turned out to be a little older than me, but all I knew at the time was that he was young. I thought two things: He’s going to drive me crazy with insane college buddies… and I was insecure with how handsome he was.

 When a person comes home they should be able to let their hair down, wear ugly clothes and be themselves.

I’d have to stop somewhere on the way home from work to get ready for going home.

Moving away from the front door to show me around, I got my first look at a back I would someday know by heart. At the time it wasn’t that sentimental—and the way I admired him wasn’t at all sensitive. I was 18 and I’d been slapped in the face by a mature sense of attraction.

He kept house much the same way as he kept the yard—there were no illusions about him keeping things spotless—and he hadn’t spazzed out a 30 minute touch up of a trashed house to impress me.

He had a calm and even voice—he was very casual—like I was a friend of a friend he was putting up.

His last two roommates had graduated in May—he was pretty comfortable with the expense of being by himself over the summer. For the first time he looked me right in the eyes when he told me he hoped to get by with just one roommate.

His eyes were intelligent and questioning, and deep and forever like a night without stars. He was reading me. And I have never been able to hide anything—I feel so guilty about everything I feel that I giggle helplessly if I think I’m getting away with something. Or if I’m accused of something I would do, but didn’t—it’s like I get hysterical because I’m guilty of being willing to have done it. Ever play the card game “Bullshit?” I can’t.

Anyway, I was right to take it that this was his way of offering me the room.

And my response was, “When can I come back with my things?”

He smiled, there was something guarded and somehow really honest in it—this was true for those amazing eyes and in his personality too.

It took about a year for me to just be myself completely. By the time I was 20, we got close and things got complicated—I felt the energy of severe weather in him.

He entered a slow downward spiral of self-destruction.

Man vs Self is the cruelest of duels. It often manifests itself in Man vs Man’s Past.

The only way for victory in Man vs Past is to be able to recognize past as something that didn’t have to have any power anymore.

He wasn’t the first person who tried to drug the presence of his past self to win, at least, temporarily.

He tried to be close to me—but we were never “alone”. And I think he hated himself for not being able to get over “it”.

It was horrible when he told me what “it” was—or who it was and who he told and who did nothing.

I told him about my friends—that I couldn’t think of anyone I was close to who hadn’t been hurt that way—one way or another.

I told him that it didn’t matter if we never had sex. Our relationship wouldn’t feel any less intimate. That wasn’t what brought us together. And we’d take our time, until “never” happened.

Feb 5 5:50pm

Rather than pile on the miles to avoid it, it looks like I'll have to face a town tomorrow.

Feb 6 4:22pm

I passed through a long since compromised road block and a number of army vehicles. The signs there were unreadable.

The buildings squeezed in together nearer and nearer—the first sign that I was getting close to somewhere I didn’t want to be.

The second sign was for a speed limit of 45.

The third sign was painted on the side of what had been a really nice two story home. In huge letters that almost filled the entire side of the structure:

THE END HAS COME

The SUV I got from the home by the tiny house Grasshopper invaded has a compass. I have focused too much on keeping it heading south.

The speed limit signs say 45.

I was seeing a lot of vandalism and sarcastic graffiti and miserable ironic signs. A lot of Bible verses were posted on mailboxes, vehicles, scrawled across the sides of houses.

Like—

“Watch therefore: for ye know not what day your Lord cometh.”

—painted on the side of a minivan in someone’s yard.

In the lawn in front of a church the Bulletin read:

 “And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.”

I came to a stop in front of the walkway to the front doors.

The church was mutilated and remains piled on its long front steps.

Remains piled everywhere.

A verse marked Mathew 24:29 was scrawled on the side of the church that said: “Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.”

Then after:

“So we’re all screwed.”

The city lay just beyond a dense row of trees and about a block of houses.

I passed the city limits sign. The name had been altered to include the word "dead" and the population had been marked out with a big "Ø."

A 30mph speed sign was married to the city limits sign. You could have shred zucchini on the points the many bullet exits made in the metal. Like many things before, I couldn’t help but stare at it.

There was a sign on a plastic sand weighed post in the center of the street that said “Camp F”. Something like an ice fishing house was directly behind it and flanking it were roadblocks.

Kitty corner from this intersection was an elementary school. There were mangled tents arranged within the large fenced yard. A few were standing—though some of their frames were bent and/or their canvases torn.

Signs of military involvement or control were mixed into the derelict section of town.

I got out and picked up one end of the road block and rotated it so it was parallel with the sidewalk. I didn't feel rushed back to the truck.

There was emptiness here, it might be false, but it wasn't frightening.

In the snow and with the disorder, I felt like I'd walked onto the set of a nuclear fallout movie.

The truck's engine idled smoothly—the sound was out of place here. I was out of place here. I felt like an alien. It had been so long. I saw towns from a distance.

I got back in and slowly passed through the barricade.

A map was posted on the side of the "fish house," which was actually much longer than it looked. It was about 5 feet wide by about 20 feet. The long wall hosted the tattered map. It was a map of the city, but with new internal boundaries and new names and purposes for the buildings these poor people had probably assumed would stay just what they'd always been.