He Had Glasses

CW: Abuse, mental health issues

This body’s like a rusty car. I’m in the front seat, passenger or not, someone’s moving it. Sometimes I know I’m moving, other times I don’t have a clue. It wandered in quarter mile circles on trampled grass, deep in Al Tech Steel. 300 acres of rusty mills, factories, manors, and train tracks. I stretched out the hand and folded it into a fist. My fist. I’m doing this. White hair on my head danced while the warm breeze blew.

When I’d take a test in school, years back, maybe weeks, maybe a day, towards the end, that first question at the top always gave me trouble. I’d always end up leaving it blank. “Name:” The easiest one. Blank. Blank as the page beneath. Blank as the drawings I’d made of him, that boy who’d take my place when dad drank. Drawings of me in the door way while the white haired boy stared back. If I colored him in, he’d look like me. But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. I dropped my hand without memory of extending it while the warm breeze blew.

The bitter aftertaste of Xanax remained on the tongue. My tongue, I mean. Grass tickled my thins, the tall pampas danced wildly like hedonistic pagans in the moonless night. So free! I stared at how they moved, the waves they left behind, while a train whistle wailed its sad song. The passing freight’s whistle caught the cyclopean, massive steel buildings, half mile long hallways for giants, with triangular roofs and shattered green windows, echoing inside, filling the rusty carcasses with a harrowing tune. The train’s melancholic melody, that single note song of an otherwise silent observer, echoed through the factories, warehouses, and townhouses long disposed while the warm breeze blew.

And while I passed by the tags, the decade old police tape that fluttered like medieval banners, and followed footprints my shoes somehow fit perfectly, I saw her waiting. Her eyes were blue and grey, with deep pupils that seemed to get the tiniest bit wider when she caught me. Her hair was dark blonde, at least I thought. I squinted. I tried to adjust my glasses, but.... Right. I do not wear glasses. Maybe I need to. I can hardly see her. I walked closer. She stared at me but she didn't react. It was like I wasn't here, and she was hallucinating me. But I am here. Eventually, she noticed me, she smiled. Her smile met her eyes. She had two birthmarks on her right cheek. A tiny scar over her brow. Her hair was a mix of blues and purples, dark, dark pupils. I brushed the greasy, yellowing, white hair away and smiled at her as the warm breeze blew.

She said something to me. They were words. Words with no connection to one another, as if reading a dictionary while wildly flipping through its pages, picking spots to stop at random. She blinked, and her pupils adjusted to the dark. I stopped smiling. She didn't. I spoke, too. A voice came out of the body I was in. I said words like she did. Words that seemed right to say. But they were, at the core, just words. Like searching the top 100 least used words of the day on the internet and reading the list in a random order. We spoke in that tongue, a language just for us, though when she'd laugh, she'd become silent as a bludgeoned mime. Quiet. Mute. Then again, her voice would fade back, saying words. Pauses, commas, sentences, laughter. Nodding. She'd nod, too. We spoke and felt a great deal of things while the warm breeze blew.

Sweat dripped from white hair into the body's eyes. I winced and wiped. She waited for me. She always would, always had. I wandered with her. We stepped on snails accidently, little white garden snails, crunching under my weight. They didn't die beneath hers. She was gentler. For a while, every step had a crunch. The tracks left behind that fit my shoes must've been hers, I decided. Soon, we were wandering amongst rocks. Lots of rocks, each one about the size of a golf ball or tennis ball and no in between. This sea of rocks went for miles, forward and back, but from side to side it was no wider than 100 feet. Down the center of the valley were train tracks. They were warm and smelled of oil. We stopped on the railroad to watch the blinking light of the far away freight's caboose, rolling away as the warm breeze blew.

Her brows furrowed. She looked past me with heavy melancholy. Before I could realize, we were back on the roads in that odd place from before, tracking footprints. We were far past where I had wandered before, however. A different road. We exited a tall brick building with its walls caved in, and out onto a path covered in bloodied feathers. It was a tight road, paved in cement, walled in on both sides by low buildings with windows for walls, overgrown with so many curtains of blackened ivy you wouldn't know if a crowd sat on the other side or not. Her ponytail left a trail, like it was underwater. I squinted at her and paused, my mouth twitching, unsure of what to say while my voice say words for me. Each step I rattled like a maraca from all the pill bottles on me. For her hair didn't move when the warm breeze blew.

But things worked differently here. I followed her, staring at the dirt while we exited and turned again, then again, and again. Up and down these old roads we went. To the manor, through the big, long buildings, into fields of pampas grass and past rooftops nobody's ever scaled. Soap. Wac. Adam. Zeus. Adept. Benzo. Lots of names here. I wonder what the girl's name was? I wanted to ask, but when I did, words akin to the type you'd find spray painted on the walls here came out in an order nonexistent. But the question was asked regardless. She responded with words much the same, adjectives and strange nouns, mispronounced or misheard. Oh. Your name is Isadora. That is a pretty name. She smiled when I said something and then we were off as the warm breeze blew.

A wall of graffiti. Trees beyond. Hills so steep that their summits made mountains jealous. We stopped together at the peak, taller than the rooftops, far above the pampas fields. It smelled like chlorine here. There were five red dots blinking in the dark. Sometimes, it looked like four, when the leaves would cover its bottom eye. It looked like a fishline from Providence, or rather, a thin puppet string from heaven, dotted with red eyes to watch us. It was put there to watch us wander while the warm breeze blew.

And wander we did. For atop that summit, the girl with the ponytail looked at me sadly once more. In a white polo shirt and navy blue skirt she wandered, hands folded. She had braces. I noticed when she laughed earlier. But she’d stopped laughing. I wanted to see her braces again. I think what I wanted was to see her laugh again. I wonder what her laugh sounds like? Does it need a sound? Mine had no sound, why should hers? Her socks went up to her knees, her dress shoes were tied. Mine weren’t. The laces slithered behind us like confused serpents, trailing the marks of the sludge we'd wandered through while the warm breeze blew.

Oh. I see. She nodded her head, staring at the ground, at the layers and the fields, rolling out towards the big factories. I took a breath. It was warm. Very warm. But even still, my breath fogged. I breathed out a dust cloud. It made me smile despite what she'd told me. I knew why I was here, why she was here. We were looking for a body. We stopped our idle observation of the doomed ramshackle and continued onwards while the warm breeze blew.

Where the roads all met, the floor was stickiest. It was slippery, too. What are we looking for exactly? It was embarrassing to even wonder, let alone ask. I think I asked. I got an answer so I must have. A dead boy is buried here, somewhere. Buried in the summer time. Well, what does he look like? She looked very sad while we entered the loud, rattling giant's hall of the tall, long factory. Odd flowers, fully green with no blossom, bloomed in the green tinted crescent's light. They crawled out from the sludge we treaded on while the warm breeze blew.

Red cheeks, red nose. He had glasses and dark blonde hair. Like her! It was curly, too. Maybe she's looking for someone close to her. A brother, a friend? My throat felt tighter at the thought. A lover? Someone felt butterflies, fluttering in their stomach. Somehow, she told me he died here, not in any language known to man, but I heard it, buried under the words while the warm breeze blew.

That boy with glasses ran away, from his dad, from me, she said, or thought. He’s here, he must be, where else would he be? He’s buried here, somewhere. Two years since he died here. Butterflies again. Did I feel those? Did she? Are these moths inside of me, drawn to her? We exited the long building into a pampas field, where dandelion seeds took to the sky beside white glittering nebulae while the warm breeze blew.

Make a wish! I closed my eyes to think of one, yet still, I saw her! She turned with a big grin. I opened my eyes. Still there. She didn't like when dandelions changed. She didn't seem to like change. I don't either. We laughed. No sound. A silent film, laughter through gestures alone. Wavy, everything was wavy. Dust sparkled in the dim moon's light. Asbestos! That was it. It sparkled a bit beside the dandelion seeds. We treaded to an alley, flooded over, swampy and crude. Like trekking through the sea of a thousand junkies’ final vomits. To one side, a wall drenched in spray paint and tags decades old, covered in curtains of floral canker, and to our right was a field of dense grass taller than the building to the left. It was too dense to tread, and possibly too wet. The muddy path itself was a marsh. Above were strange, square archways of truss beams. Dangling were ropes, some tied into interesting loops, that swayed like chrysalises as the warm breeze blew.

We treaded back through a discarded library, drowned, bloated books and rats, which we couldn't tell apart, squished beneath me while she checked behind the toppled empty shelves. A building blue and square with a gym, lockers, and bleachers. The floors were dustier than the bottom of a pill bottle. The walls seemed grey, but for the thousands of blue flakes of paint, peeling from the walls, curling in on themselves like thousands of blackening snails frozen in place. It smelled like roadkill there. Some lockers were open, a urinal was smashed in one room, and somehow, we ended up back at the lockers. Oh! A picture of a man and his wife. Maybe his sister. His hardhat was untouched. Dusty. Cracked. Muddy and old. A water bottle with mold. The loose panels slammed like frantic cymbals on a constant loop while the warm breeze blew.

Izzy and I dragged our way through the infirmary, where a bed lay unoccupied. “Dying to sleep,” was spraypainted on its headboard. “Sleep to die,” responded the jagged sharpie writing beneath it. He’s not here. We made it to the collapsed canals, where roads fell in on themselves beneath the weight of chemicals and time. She squatted and stared. Nope. Not down there, either. I looked at the doors, at the walls, at the ceilings. She checked more likely places. The ground, beds, beside dressers or under stairwells. She rolled her eyes. She was getting impatient while the warm breeze blew.

Wandering the roads we'd started on, I carefully placed each step of mine in the prints left from whoever had walked before me. It was always a perfect match. I smiled. Maybe Izzy's doing the same. I checked, only, she left no prints as she went. She must've seen me notice, and great offense was taken. She stopped and crossed her arms, her lids low, her brows creased a little bit. Sorry. She pointed and I followed her gesture with eyes alone to stare at the tall, far away building, with a roof nobody had braved. Maybe he's there, you're right. It's worth a shot. She smiled. I liked her smile. It made me feel different than before. She grabbed my hand and held it, whether she held it tight or not, I didn't know. Her skin was cold. Like she'd just washed her hands, and they'd dried enough so the water was gone but its coolness remained. There was a sigil on her wrist, an odd one. I stared for a bit, and she led me deeper into this odd place, keeping me safe as the warm breeze blew.

We ran down the alleys and crooked roads that lined this place where people go to disappear. A train’s whistle sounded, but I mistook it strangely for a school bell. Or maybe church bells. She was smiling, pulling me along. We can’t run in the hallways, Izzy, we’ll get detention. Dark blonde hair danced while the warm breeze blew.

In fractured green glass in a small doorway, I caught a white haired boy staring back. His eyes sunken and his cheeks scabby and gaunt. His brows furrowed at me, his mouth gaped, he was shocked to see us. To see her. Her. She wasn’t reflected. Izzy let go of my hand. No. Don't go. We still need to find him. I want to help. Please. In the tiny sliver of glass on that green corroded door, the white haired boy stared in dismay. He wore a grey jacket, covered in paint and blood and stains, drawings and tags and numbers, splatters and streaks, holes and stitches.... Faces, too. And an eye. An eye. An eye with two dots beneath it, and a scar over its brow. I looked back to Izzy, to see her reaction, but only my white hair caught the humid air as the warm breeze blew.

The scent of detergent rich in the wind. It was from somewhere far, far away. She was gone. I moved my hand, and the reflection did the same. It's mine. Oh. That body. There is no body, is there? I looked around for my guide, but she was gone. I couldn't recall the feeling of her hand. I stared at my own, instead. At my wrist. Both sides. There was no sigil like there was on hers but I felt incredibly hurt at that fact for one reason or another. I looked up at my reflection. My reflection. That's it. The body, that's not me, but it was my body. And it doesn't exist. Not in this place. There is no boy. My eyes drifted away from the reflection, my shoulder sunk. And in the easternmost reach of Al Tech's Rolling Mill Zone, I stared at the radio tower while the warm breeze blew.

Then the boy wandered. He wandered with no goal in mind. From his backpack, he took out the stolen mask of the father. The goat mask. He covered his scabby face, the white hair that repulsed someone in a church so long ago. The details were muddy, or rather, they were burnt to the ground, but the ash still spelled out the feeling that the whitened hair and burnt scalp chased someone very dear far away one time. I looked at the reflection until I was staring at a tree miles away in the Waste Containment Unit. Soap. Elf. Adam. Benzo. Zeus. Wac. Adept. There were lots of names here. One of them must be his. Mine. I mean mine. Maybe not. I doubt it. I walked until I couldn’t smell the bloodied rubber of the goat mask and continued onward as the warm breeze blew.

I’d curl up in a ball in his skull, then moments pass, and I’m watching him walk away from me, like a camera in a third person video game. He trampled a dandelion while he walked. They just turn white and blow away, he thought. I thought. I couldn’t recall exactly what had happened, or why he was leaving again. Just like when I watched him walk away from Izzy in that church up in Latham 2 years ago. My face relaxed. That’s it. The girl that’d done all she could to teach me kindness existed stared at the boy that took my place. Years ago, she stared at the scars and bruises and the bleached, burnt scalp. How selfishly I wanted that poor, stressed girl who carried the world on her shoulders and then some to somehow save me when I’d already drowned. “You look really different, now,” she’d averted her eyes and walked away, all while outside, the warm breeze blew.

I’m sorry we didn’t find him Izzy. The next thing I knew, I stretched my hand out, balled it into a fist. A rusty car. A broken plate. These footprints fit my shoes. A train’s whistle. Why’s the face all bloody? Looking around corners for someone, something. Dad? No. No. What am I looking for? The sun was rising, maybe setting, where does it set? Where does it go? Then I saw her. I saw her. Smiling, waiting. The train’s sad song echoed in the rusty monoliths. I smiled back while the warm breeze blew.