Open My Eyes

Titles

1.

In the beginning was Elizabeth, and Elizabeth was in light, and Elizabeth was light.

She sat between the conductor and trumpets in the band room. Her brown hair glowed with her freckles, her eyes level with my chest. Short, unpainted fingernails searched for the cold brass keys on the saxophone while her lips tightly pursed around her mouthpiece. My medicated gaze and mohawk usually frightened girls, but not her.

Besides Elizabeth, what I loved most about high school was playing the drums, being able to control, push, drag, and stop time. In the pocket of a song, I was a wave leading a wall of sound to shore. The musical director noticed my love and asked me to help the 9th and 10th grade jazz band drummers after school.

That was when I first saw her.

She was in the instrument storage room after rehearsal when I approached her for the first time.

My mom would kill me, were the first words she said to me. You’re a junior.

It’s only a two year difference, I said. You think your mom will have a problem with my mohawk?

She smiled. Yes, but not as much as your age.

I’ll shave it off today, I said. I’ll shave off years of my life for you.

Elizabeth tugged on her earlobe, which was slightly bigger than the other. It’s ok. It only matters what I think.

And what do you think? I said.

She placed her sax in its case and gazed up at me. The lights in the room melted around her like butter on warm popcorn. I swam between her freckles.

I think you’re funny.

She crackled in my chest like carbonation all evening. And so, unable to sleep that night, I took my evening dose of medication and hurried out of the house after Mom had fallen asleep.

Bird songs echoed from the darkness like bursts of light from a lack of oxygen as I walked the blacktop to her house. At the end of my street, someone had spray painted ‘Wake up, you’ll find what you’re looking for’ on the pavement. It was old and faded, but still legible. I continued walking, hoping I would find Elizabeth’s house before it rained. After band rehearsal, she had mentioned she lived on Mimicry Lane, no more than a few miles from my house, but I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember, her house number, and the homes on her block were dark in the night. Even white houses looked gray. The moon was hidden, the only light a lone streetlamp that stood at the end of the lane. It was a short street, seven houses connecting two parallel side streets. I unzipped my jacket, warm from the walk, took my woolen gloves off, stuffed them in my pocket, and wandered down the street looking through windows. I prayed Elizabeth might be outside admiring the stars so I could admire her as my own burning light in the dark. She seemed the type who liked constellations and comets.

I hid behind a short, wide bush outside a home with a brightly lit living room. A gray-haired couple sat in front of a television set. The old woman trimmed the old man’s silvery back. Clumps of hair gathered on the buzzer and fell, gathered and fell, gathered and fell. I carried on down the street, picturing Elizabeth thirty years from now, shaving my back, her earlobe glowing silver in the moonlight entering through the window, her warm freckles—

Then I saw her.

The third house on the block. A light blue ranch. A colorful, life-like miniature gnome stood at the base of her steps with a knowing smile. A large maple tree reached across her front lawn. Its roots had broken through the cement sidewalk. I hid behind it and watched from just across her narrow front lawn. The living room was a long rectangle, the walls the color of dirty snow. Her mother sat on the couch watching television—a short, stocky woman with shoulder-length blond hair in a Star-Trek bathrobe. The ceiling lights glossed the hair on her upper lip. Elizabeth’s father was in the background, in the kitchen, cooking with his bald, slippery head engulfed in a billow of steam.

And then there was Elizabeth—standing, glowing, lighting some of the darkness just outside the living room window. She was light. She stood to the left of her mother, looking up at the ceiling as if waiting for it to rain. And then it did. A drop fell from the ceiling, rolled down her forehead, down her cheek. A few more gave way to a steady trickle on her. She stepped aside. Her mom stood and yelled. Fragments of her muffled shouts reached me: Idiot—move away—get in here. Her mother closed the Captain Spock section of robe across her body. Her father turned his moist head from the steam and rushed into the living room. There they were, all three, silent, standing in the middle of the room, staring up at the ceiling, watching the water drip from a cracked sky.

Headlights illuminated my body. A car honked as it drove alongside me. I fell over a surfaced root. The shadow driver lowered the passenger-side window.

Fuckin’ Creeper!

I looked back into Elizabeth’s living room. The three of them came to the window and peered like possums drawn to darkness, their eyes wide, black and glassy.

Elizabeth opened a window and called, Is that you?

Was you me? How did she know? I was still and heard the you echo with the bird nocturnes—you, you, you—is that you who will save me? Is that you who will love me? Is that you who will come to fix the sky, and make it stop raining, or make it flood?

Shame on me, but I just ran, and ran, and ran, and kept running, even after I got home that night, through tosses and turns, through the sound of Mom’s snores, through sleep, and medicated dreams, and Elizabeth staring up at a cracked sky—waiting.

Falling rain fell to falling snow. I’d just received my driver’s license, and I’d promised Elizabeth that I would attend her winter band concert. We stood in the center of the high school’s cafeteria waiting for her moment to play when the red-faced band director barged through the double-wide doors. Everyone in band, get on stage.

Elizabeth reached out her hand, barely grazed the hairs on my wrist, then retreated quickly as if startled by my realness. How are you, Eddie?

When I’m looking at you, I feel like that band director is sitting on my chest.

She laughed, but had to go. We hadn’t reached the kissing stage. I wanted to say something to her, something epic, wanted to tell her I loved her, though I hardly knew her, wanted to kiss her before she left. I was never good at timing. All I could say was, Your dress is pretty. I knew it wasn’t a dress, but I said it anyway.

It’s not a dress, silly. It’s new. Here, feel it. It’s soft.

She grabbed my fingertips with her hand and she rubbed them up and down her velour arm. I trembled—goose bumps.

Does this mean we’re ‘together’? I asked.

She giggled and scrunched her nose. Then she vanished as fast as shadow in fog.

I sat at a cafeteria table feeling lightheaded. It was late. Twenty or so students across the room waited for their moment, their conversations a soft buzz mixed with the distant hum of muffled drums in my head like a dizzy spell. The muted brassy horns of the band echoed from the stage. Your Mom was written in newly inked black marker on the table in front of me. I put my head down, feeling faint.

I opened my eyes in a deli booth with a sore forehead, freezing, feeling like I had been kicked in the stomach. The door to the deli was partially held open by the wind, which soared through it and laid goose eggs on my neck and forearms. I often found myself sitting by open doors, thresholds with freezing wind or rain or snow pouring through them, but always an open door, waiting for someone to walk through.

The store was filled with empty tables. On the other side of the frost-lined window were five copper-skinned men with greasy hair and ripped woolen hats. They huddled close to the window of a pickup truck. A pale man in the passenger’s seat was talking to them, writing something down on paper with a yellow smile and a bead of sweat clinging to his brow. The five shivering, copper-skinned men were huddled in formation as if waiting for a quarterback to give them a play. A drop of tea sat in a Styrofoam cup in front of me next to a shopping list written in my handwriting:

- -those things that hold together wires and things…what the hell is the name? Little ropes. I’ll come back to it…-

-Chicken breast boneless

-V-day card

-low sugar ketchup

twist ties—little ropes are twist ties

Yo, buddy, a voice said.

A large man in a tangerine colored vest with hands like sledgehammers stared at me.

Yes?

Your mom is on your forehead. He stared at the top of my head with a smile like Elizabeth’s lawn gnome. Then he laughed as he headed outside into the cold toward the truck.

I licked my palm and felt for my forehead. I rubbed hard and turned my hand. It was smeared black—School. Elizabeth. The concert. Days ago? Years ago? I could still feel her hand holding my fingers against the soft velour of her outfit. Then my cold fingers tingled. I opened and closed my fist to revive my hand.

A deli worker behind the counter changed the channel on the T.V. A commercial for a car dealership advertised a sale: Like young love, this deal won’t last. The local news appeared. A pale woman stood next to a lake reporting on a father who had drowned trying to save his son. He had broken through the lake’s ice and drowned as well. A tragedy on this holiday, she added.

At the bottom right of the screen: February 14, 9:35 am.The chilling wind from the open door blanketed my body again.

Outside the deli, the copper men spoke to the construction workers in the truck. Their breath formed specters. I searched for a pen in my breast pocket, but found something else, something bulky. A roll of bright orange twine. A Déjà vu. I put it back in my pocket, sucked the last cold drop out of the cup, and left the deli back out into the cold.

2.

Before the beginning, you died, and medication was prescribed, and medication was life.

I might have known who you were at some point. I can’t remember much. Mom has only revealed pieces of you like a shattered stained glass church window. What was Mom like before you died, Dad? I can’t remember that either. Maybe I was too young, or maybe she was too normal. Maybe some things are better left as fragments.

I wonder if you knew you died after you died. I wonder whether you ate ketchup with almost everything, like I do. I never refrigerate it, even though the bottle says to. I don’t need to. My apartment is cold enough. I’m freezing. I’m starving. How sickly I’ve become. I can almost see through myself, like a sliver of white fish in sunlight.

The last morning you were alive appears like headlights hitting reflectors in the night. I sat on our warm kitchen table while you packed your lunch in a brown paper bag. Your dark brown hair was splayed across your forehead. Mom watched you with her hand to her mouth, biting her nails in the entrance of the kitchen.

Adam, you forgot to shave. Don’t get in trouble again, Mom said.

Better do as Mom says, right Eddo? you said to me.

You left the room rubbing your chin. Mom came to the kitchen table. I could never tell when she was smiling because of the stroke she’d had in her twenties that left her mouth droopy on one side, like it had been shot with Novocain. Did it bother you never knowing if she was happy?

The sun came through the kitchen window behind me. It cast Mom’s face in a dull orange hue. She stroked my cheek. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around her. Wind chimes swept through the open window.

You’re going to make a great husband one day, she said.

Your face is orange, I said, opening my eyes.

You’re going to make some girl very happy.

I don’t like girls.

You like me, right?

Yes, I said.

And I’m a girl.

Yes.

So then you like girls, silly.

No, I love you, Mom.

The wind rushed through the window and brushed her hair off her forehead. Her eyes shone like amber gems.

"How do I look? Clean and