Zee and I drove into the night in search of the mysterious manuscript that he claimed existed. The headlights of his car were angled so low we could just see the median. Even though the bumper lights worked after Zee kicked them—they still sucked. Driving the car with his knees, Zee produced a few bottles of beer from the backseat and proceeded to open and drink heavily from it. He nudged one toward me, but I declined. “I don’t drink and drive,” I said.
The night air was crisp and sweet. It smelled like perfume, and it reminded me of Fia. Fia was a spiritual guide at a coffee shop. She didn’t love me. I think she loved the company, and always took the initiative to call me and ask me out.
But there was no love there.
The first time I had seen Fia perform here spiritual guidance, Zeeble was trying to get a read on the undead philosopher that would come from the back of his mind and engage us all with something to ponder.
“There is only one line that I see,” Fia said, checking his palms. “Why do you think there’s two?”
Zeeble’s eyes rolled into the back of his head: “”Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it.”
“I see,” she responded, and I sipped my coffee, paying attention to her light, almost transparent, features. Everything was so thin, her eyebrows, her lips, her nose and her fingers–wispy–held Zeeble’s hand so delicately. Nothing in my life had been so delicate. All of it a constant fight to brute force my way into a life. Not even a successful one. Just a life.
“Zeeble, there is something strange. Your lifeline has two competing lines occasionally. But sometimes they intersect. How did this happen?”
Zeeble seemed to ponder. “In my middle school library one day, Ms. Katy dropped a book from high up on a shelf while she was inventorying, and it hit me on the top of the head. It just about knocked me out. When I came to my senses, I saw that it was by a man named Henry Gantt, and it was laying on its spine, opened to a page.”
“What did the page say?” Fia asked.
Zeeble quietly pondered, and then said: “We cannot drive people; we must direct their development. The general policy of the past has been to drive; but the era of force must give way to the era of knowledge, and the policy of the future will be to teach and lead, to the advantage of all concerned.”
He added, “It was then I knew that I was destined to help people–or at least somebody.” He thumbed toward me. “It was then that Strabo’s Geography fell off the shelf and that one really knocked me. I didn’t even know what continent I was on anymore.”
As I came to find out, Fia was also a delicate conversationalist. I started with my palm reading and she said I would die young, and that’s all she said. The next time I visited, we talked about the coffee, and she said I would die a little bit older than previously thought. It went on that way for a while. Now, instead of living to only 35 years old, I was supposed to live until 50 years old, which I could, honestly, live with.
Then, some days she seemed sad, and she never said much at all.
I’ve experienced this: the downward spiral, the free-fall. I would say rock-bottom, but it goes so much farther. Falling with a rope around your neck, rock-bottom edges by you pleasantly and you can only see yourself as who you were and not as you are: a falling martyr for those who have yet to experience loss. Even a dynamite reading from a spiritual guide seems explosive when nothing matters much anymore. When a piece of you is gone, insignificance amounts to something.
But Fia was like me. Too impaired to move on. Too involved to stay away.
#
In Strikeout Number One, Gage watched through the glass cube. Always scanning. The dark water stared back. The occasional bottom feeder scooted by cleaning the ocean floor. Gage was hungry, and he was tired. The light never went out. Only darkness came and went over and around from shadow. He cried sometimes because he couldn’t really understand why he was there, stuck in that cube. Nothing came to him, and he would look up sometimes and think that he was seeing the sun, but only a glint from the light above the cube peeked through.
Darkness again, and he slept.
