Over the Waterfall

The young boy walked out of his bedroom just after sunrise to find a goat standing on the coffee table in his living room. The goat stood motionless, facing the window as morning light filtered through the curtains. There were goat droppings on the coffee table, along with an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, beer cans, an empty bottle of scotch, and an empty glass with lipstick on the rim.

He looked around but couldn’t see the other goat. That was odd, he thought, there were two goats last night. Maybe the other one had wondered out of the apartment when things were getting crazy. There must have been ten people in the small apartment. He bent down and picked up one of goat poop clusters that lay on the floor next to a half-empty bag of pork rinds. It was surprisingly dry and smelled like musty grass. He resisted the temptation to lick it to see how it tasted. When he looked back at the goat it had turned and was now staring at him. The goat let out a “baa” that startled him. He dropped the goat poop and stepped backwards, his foot landing on the pork rind bag with a crunch. He heard a loud snort and looked over at the couch to see a man sleeping there, under a blanket. The other goat was sleeping next to him, it’s head poking out of the blanket. They looked peaceful. Between their compact, dry poop and cuddliness, he thought goats would make good pets and told himself that when he grew up, he would have a pet goat.

He heard stirring in his mother's bedroom and walked it to find her sitting up in bed. She turned towards him and smiled faintly as he walked in, and he could see that her eye makeup had smeared. She looked very tired, like maybe she was sick. He smelled the cigarette burning in her hand.

She exhaled her cigarette, trying to blow the smoke away from him, but the breeze from her open bedroom window blew it back in his face, burning his eyes. “Good morning, honey,” she said.

“Are you okay mom?” he said.

“Yes, I’m just a little tired,” she said, setting her cigarette in the ashtray and extending her hand. He walked to the bedside and took it. “Things got a little out of hand last night, Eric. I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s okay mom. You were okay last night,” Eric said. He did not tell her he had never seen her like that and that she scared him. He did not tell her she fell over and spilled her drink on him. Eric said what any child would say to ease the pain of their suffering mother. He told her that she was okay, he told her that everything was okay. He lied to her.

Eric’s mother squeezed his and pulled him to her and hugged him. “I’ll get up in a few minutes and make us some breakfast.”

“Mom,” Eric said, “the goats are still here. One is sleeping with Tom and the other one is standing on the coffee table.”

“I’ll have Tom take them home when I get up,” she said softly.

“I like the goats, mom, can they stay a little longer?”

“Sure,” she said, “the goats can stay as long as you’d like”. Then she slid down into the bed and closed her eyes.

***

The bedroom curtains were closed, but Eric could tell by the angle the sun sliced through them that it was late afternoon. He could also tell that he felt like shit. One of the last things he remembered was two guys holding him steady as he staggered down the sidewalk. One was complimenting him on his watch. Eric thought about giving it to him, he didn’t really care about the watch anyway, he started wearing it because it looked cool, but then he started seeing it like an hourglass, its finite volume of sand slipping away. The other one said, “sure buddy, I’ll take you to an ATM, there’s one right around the corner”. He had a vague recollection the ATM was part of some side quest, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He remembered feeling like these were two guys he could trust. Booze made him trust people, which was a nice escape from his normal, sober state of not trusting anyone, especially anyone who was drunk. From a young age he’d developed a healthy respect for the unpredictable nature of life. It wasn’t a matter of if things would turn to shit, it was a matter of when. No matter how good things were going, there was always some knucklehead waiting in the wings to screw it up. Scammers, grifters, duplicitous co-workers, door-to-door salespeople peddling religion, a family member, you name it. And everyone wanted a piece of him. Maybe it was in the way he made eye contact, they sensed weakness, or maybe it was vulnerability, like a pulsating jugular vein tempting a Vampire. Maybe he just wanted to be abused, no, maybe he deserved to be abused. He also remembered tequila, cigarettes, and a flipbook of blurry faces. The rest was of the night was, well, there was no rest of the night. The lights went off, the lights went on, and poof, he was back home in bed with the worst hangover of his life.

Eric’s felt like he’d been infected with every pathogen known to humankind. COVID, flu, Hepatitis, food poisoning, Ebola, common cold…all rolled into one mega-bitch of an illness. This is probably what it felt like to turn into a zombie. Soon he would start bleeding from the eyes. A siren screamed in the distance and Eric wondered if had something to do with him. Maybe it was the police on their way to arrest him for something he didn’t remember doing the night before, or better yet, it was a paramedic on their way to put a drip in his arm and restore his bodily fluids. The siren faded.

A wave of nausea roiled his stomach and he was grateful for the measure of relief it portended. It slithered up his throat like a snake and he started to retch. The feeling subsided momentarily and he rushed naked to the bathroom, where he dropped to his knees and braced himself in front of the toilet. Another wave of retching, and out it came. He vomited violently, ejecting an acidic slurry that left him feeling like he’d been turned inside-out. His eyes watered and he let out a guttural whimper of exhaustion. He could taste the remains of a burrito he vaguely remembered eating the night before. He grabbed a handful of toilet paper and wiped vomit from his mouth. The immediate sense of relief was short-lived. He took several short breaths, retched, and vomited again. He rolled off his knees and collapsed on the floor leaning against the wall, his head next to the toilet paper dispenser. His hands fell limply at his side and he could see an ink stamp on his wrist from an ID check at one of the bars he’d been to. It was an outline of a howling wolf. Jesus Christ, how did I wind up in that place, he thought.

He stood, wavering as he regained his balance, and became aware of a burning sensation on his right shoulder. He could see it was oozing blood. He wiped it off with toilet paper and turned sideways to look at it in the bathroom mirror. It was a fresh tattoo. Sometime the night before he’d gotten a tattoo of a red heart with the word “Mom” written on it in black ink. Oh, right, the ATM side quest. He mumbled a feeble “fuck”, and shuffled back to his bedroom, nearly tripping over his shoes and clothes, that lay in a heap at the side of the bed. He crawled under the covers and curled into a ball. Exhausted, he eventually slipped into a jagged sleep and dreamed the dreams of one who is lost.

Eric found himself in darkened room. A black and white goat stood on a table in front of him, locked in cage with a rusted padlock hanging from the door. Pale light filtered through the curtains, casting elongated shadows of him and the caged goat onto the opposite wall. The goat turned from the window to face Eric

“What is this place?” Eric said.

“This is whe-eh-re we first me-eh-et,” the goat said, in a raspy and distorted voice that oscillated between guttural bleats and barely discernable words.

Eric’s eyes adjusted to the low light. Geometry and proportion were wrong, but Eric recognized the place. Ashtrays overflowed with cigarette buts, empty liquor bottles and broken glasses were strewn on the floor. Eric looked over at an empty couch.

“I know you who you are. Where’s the other goat?” Eric said.

“Tha-a-a-t go-o-at is gone, it belongs to a-an-other,” the goat said. “Come closer so I ca-a-an see you more cle-eh-eh-rly.”

Eric walked slowly until he was just inches away from the cage. He looked into the goat’s black, motionless eyes and could see the reflection of his own naked body. The goat peeled back its lips, exposing human-like teeth and exhaled a hot, wet breath into his face that smelled of liquor and something putrid. Eric retched then fell to his knees clutching the table and vomited on the floor. He wiped vomit off his mouth with the back of his hand and sighed with exhaustion.

“You’re unwe-eh-eh-ll,” the goat said.

Eric pulled himself to his feet, grasped the bars of the cage, and shook it violently. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“I wa-a-a-nt to be freed from this ca-a-age,” the goat said.

“I want you to stop tormenting me,” Eric said.

“Unlock the ca-a-a-ge and we-eh-eh-’ll both be free.”

“I don’t have the key.”

“Lia-a-a-r,” the goat said, “Why do you lie? You lied to he-he-her ba-a-a-ck then and look whe-eh-eh-re it got us.”

“There is no us!” said Eric

“The-eh-eh-re ha-a-as alwa-a-ays been an u-u-us.”

The goat turned back towards the window and stared off into the pale light.

Eric awoke to darkness. He sat up in bed and pulled his legs to his chest in an effort to convince himself that he was returning to the land of the living. But he was no longer in the land of the living. He was trapped in a cage that had been passed down to him. A cage he willingly locked himself into and for which he had thrown away the key. He thought about the caged goat calling him a liar, he thought about lies. Drained, he cried a tearless cry.

***

Eric picked up a map at the entry gate of the sprawling cemetery. When he unfolded it, he saw that it was little more than a rough approximation of the grounds. There were lines for roads and pathways, names that identified the various sections of the cemetery, and a few hand-drawn images of trees and buildings that provided some basic orientation but nothing was to scale. As far as he could tell it had not been updated in many years and was not designed to locate a specific grave site. He couldn’t remember exactly where the grave was, only that it was in an older section of the cemetery.

He started walking, hoping he would recognize something. As he traversed some of the oldest sections, he saw luxuriously large plots with headstones like monuments. Inscriptions indicated that some were city founders, business leaders, and war veterans. A few were from children who lived painfully short lives, “Elisa Johnson, Born April 3, 1861, Died May 10, 1861”. There was a pair of headstones for a woman and a child that died on the same day. He also passed by a new section of the cemetery that was mostly flat, with headstones embedded in the ground, partially overgrown with grass around the edges. Limited space in the cemetery had them so close to one another that Eric imagined their caskets nearly touching underground, closer in death than life for some.

Eric spotted a groundskeeper raking leaves. He described the area from memory to her, and she said it was probably the Oak Grove section and pointed in the direction of a collection of large trees about fifty yards away.

Eric spotted a familiar grouping of headstones and walked over. After a few moments of searching, he found the grave he was looking for. It was marked by a simple headstone that read,

Elizabeth Fields

Born November 17,1935. Died February 3, 1991.

Lived Life on Her Own Terms

Eric sat down on the edge of raised cement border that surrounded the grouping of plots. It was a crisp fall day. Oaks, Sycamores, and Cottonwoods were shedding leaves in the late afternoon breeze. Golden yellow, brown, and orange leaves painted the dormant, gray grass in warm color. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply of the autumn air. He could smell the fertile soil of the cemetery and fallen leaves wet from a recent rain. He imagined a city beneath, where worms and beetles, and other creatures burrowed and built their homes among the dead. He thought it unfair that they should be deprived of the life-giving nourishment of the dead, who would remain sealed in their caskets for decades to come. He listened to the sound of the wind through the trees, chirping of birds, and distant traffic on the road that bordered the cemetery.

After a few minutes, Eric opened his eyes and said, “Hello mom.” A light breeze rustled the branches of a nearby tree and blew leaves across his mother’s grave.

Other than the groundskeeper, Eric had seen only a couple other people. He found the solitude and peacefulness of the place gave him a clarity he’d not had for a long time. He recalled the final months of his mother’s short life and the toll that decades of alcohol abuse had taken on her body. It wasn’t so much that she died, Eric recalled, rather that she had withdrawn from existence incrementally. There was less and less of her every day until, in the end, there was nothing but an oxygen bottle, a feeding tube, and a profound longing for death. He had held her hand as she exhaled her final breath, released at last from the prison her body had become.

“Do you remember the night your friend brought those two goats to the apartment? That was some weird shit, mom. You all were getting bombed while those fucking goats roamed around the place, shitting everywhere and eating cigarette butts and pork rinds. I remember you standing there with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. You were dancing and singing to a Patsy Cline record. I go out walkin’ after midnight, out in the moonlight. Do you remember that?” He remembered how much his mother loved that song. It always made her happy, or maybe it made her sad, he wasn’t sure, but it made her feel, and that made him happy.

“You knew I was lying to you that morning when I told you what you had done the night before was okay didn’t you? You knew none of it was okay, didn’t you?”

The lie Eric told that morning, many years before, was a lie of forgiveness delivered by the only person who really mattered to his mother. So it was a lie she accepted willingly, as if it had come straight from god. It was a lie Eric would tell many times over until he finally accepted the fact that his mother was an alcoholic and the lie no longer held the power to heal. Instead, the lie enslaved and bound them to one another, and he grew angry at being powerless. Her guilt became his guilt and the boat went over the waterfall with both of them in it.

Eric pulled his hands from his coat pockets and rubbed them together nervously. “I’ve hit a rough patch, mom. I let that goddamned goat into my life. I got so good at lying to you when I was a kid, that I became really good at lying to myself. I told myself I could control the goat, but I can’t control it, not any more than you did.”

He tried to swallow the words but were stuck in his throat. Tears pooled in his eyes, and he felt hollowed out, as if his body were collapsing in on itself. Finally, he inhaled deeply and said, “The truth is, mom, I am an alcoholic.”

Saying the words out loud, in that place, shocked Eric into alertness and he felt as if he’d been pulled from an icy lake. He took a deep breath and his eyes widened, taking in his surroundings. He felt the dead around him, their eyes on him now. “I wish you were still here, mom. There is so much I want to say to you. But more than anything, I want to say that I forgive you for letting me lie to you. I want you to rest in peace so that I can live in peace.”

The late afternoon turned to early evening, and a chill settled around Eric that told him it was time to go. He had come to speak the truth to one who knew his lies and he felt a small measure of peace. It wasn’t everything, but it was something. He turned and walked slowly towards the cemetery exit. After a couple minutes, he stopped and looked back at his mother’s gravesite. There, on her grave, stood a goat, looking towards the setting sun.