The Rewrite

In the manner of all parking garage stairwells, this one smelled of piss. The odor increased as she descended, flight by flight. Was this because the bottom landing was the most popular place for men to relieve themselves, or because gravity delivered the piss there? Or was it the air itself, thickening the way ocean water becomes oppressive at greater and greater depths, becoming more suffused with piss by percentage of particle, the usual admixture of nitrogen and oxygen and trace elements giving way to the ammonia of every impatient bladder seeking privacy from the streets and alleyways? She imagined, turning another corner on her long descent, sentient floating bladders with little cartoon eyes drifting in from sidewalk level and turning these same corners on a leisurely flight to the bottom landing where they’d hose down the cement with their contents then disappear, intransigent little ghosts summoned to do this one duty in this one place and then vanish forever, the entirety of their afterlife being this stench, as all our afterlives must be. We leave nothing behind but memories and truly horrid smells, she thought, marking the sentence as something to post later online, then just as quickly forgetting it. She had reached the level one door, perhaps a dozen stairs from the true bottom, where only a mysterious red valve wheel and those piss vapors dwelt.

She pushed on the heavy metal door and entered the bleak emptiness of the underground parking level, the lowest and loneliest one. Only a few cars were visible betwixt the numerous cement pillars. A white one with official insignia on it. A dirty red one that appeared to have some kind of semi-permanent residence here. A small truck. A large truck next to her and the door to her left. But mostly, as she had anticipated, empty cracked floor tattooed with flaking yellow lines and spotted with oil stains and tar patches. Though an apt description would be silent, it was the silence of cold air ready to move, faintly humming electrical systems, and potential echoes waiting to resound. The door closing behind her created a thud that ran a lap around the room before escaping upward and away. The exit ramp, she knew, was beyond a partial wall blocking the far forward horizon. If it weren’t for the escape ramp around that wall, this would be a chamber. A tomb.

It was bright enough, by some regulated minimum standard of brightness, thanks to the halogen yellow lighting tucked among the heavy rafters. Brighter indeed, than the outdoors several stories up, where a moonless night sky presided over a shivering and slumbering surface car park, itself lit dutifully by LEDs on metal stalks. The outdoors was a tempting thought best pushed away, though. Her steel courage might not survive the panic of a focus on escape. Her purpose here might be abandoned if she allowed her mind to re-travel the winding, sobbing, uphill run she took from one floor to the next that night, right down the gullet of the car lane, emerging with one shoe and disheveled hair and no coat to guard against the snow. That was ten years ago. What caused her flight was ten years gone. Tonight was safe. Tonight was in the present. The present, by mathematical reasoning, must contain different events than the past. Yes, the past may repeat itself, but only when historians squint and paint with their rhetorical brushes. In reality, each night is a different night. Tonight there would be no need to run. Or perhaps a different need, she thought, grateful to be in gym shoes. Unlike the quip about stinking death, this thought lodged in her consciousness and stayed there.

In addition to the gym shoes — relatively new but still scuffed with some wear — she chose her maroon lined running leggings, a chartreuse high-viz athleisure top, and a warm but slim powder blue jacket to wear. A riot of color, she had thought in her brief mirror glance on the way out the door earlier. She had appreciated the way riot was both violent and funny, as she so often appreciated her own mental words, the way they encased and quarantined and filed away her emotions in little sentences that went in little cabinets inside little rooms in her heart. Her therapist, whose fault this all was, encouraged her to set those emotions loose to run nameless and naked throughout her nervous system like naughty children in a grocery store. She was supposed to just feel things instead of think them. This was, apparently, some sort of important human task to do. They performed breathing exercises and cultivated blank mind states together in that stuffy little office building, but she still secretly described the qualities of the obnoxious white noise machine in the corner instead of inviting whatever nothingness was meant to be achieved.

Now, suddenly, in the dank and blank space of this parking dungeon, she felt that nothingness sweep through her. Despite her layers, she shivered in the passing of this wordless wake. Dread, she tried to assign it, but that word dripped to the floor, not nearly up to the task of containing the sensation. “Dread,” she said aloud, experimentally, too softly to trigger the looming echo of the space. At any volume, nobody was there to hear her.

“Dreadful,” she sort of repeated, and this word did indeed unstick her. She took some steps into the space, toward the corner she was instructed to visit. Just a few steps. Just two, in fact. Two steps.

The corner was not the darkest. That would be the one to the left, where a busted bank of lighting left an unused and unusable patch of pavement between two perpendicular parking spaces, faint traces of diagonal striping marking its pointlessness and making that pointlessness official. No, her corner was ahead and to the right, well-lit and flanked by the small truck and the dirty red car. It seemed obscene to her that it should be the busiest area of this abominable place. Whose cars were these? And why had the truck, despite being of a perfectly suitable size for the marked spaces, parked such that its tires encroached on the site of her profane memorial?

She mentally composed the complaint for her therapist at next week’s session. Some dumb pickup driver had ruined her closure or whatever by half-parking on her spot. Haha, laughing it off with this sardonic complaint. Haha, so funny. Haha, see this wasn’t a big deal to me. Haha. And still she stood. She stood still. No more steps.

Who was he? she wondered, not for the first time, about the man from ten years ago. She knew his face, of course. She knew his build, and race, and hairstyle as it exists frozen in time forever in her mind’s photograph. But there remains no name, no backstory, which, as she explained several times, was the thing that made him scary to her even now. A Man is a frightening creature. In the specifics, all men are pathetic and human, defeatable, easily intimidated, easily triggered, easily soothed. And for the men too complicated to be easily anything’d, well, they weren’t the ones to worry over. Each man, taken in turn, could be dismissed, once you knew the tricks to it. She knew the tricks. She knew all the psychological and physical means for swiping any man to the left. But A Man is a different beast. A Man animated by vague impulse and arising from nowhere — one who knows, in fact, that He has done so, cloaked in anonymity and menace — is a monster. One who, like this bastard, lurks. Look! Look, there behind the red car. A lurking spot. And there again behind that post. They lurk and lurk and lurk and lurch and grab and bite and snarl and press their goddamn guns to your ribs with one hand while the other

She wanted to turn. To leave. Through the stairwell door. But turning meant opening up her vulnerable back to the corner, to all the corners of the dark underground world that teemed with Memory Men now, standing supernaturally still until they didn’t. She looked at the corner without seeing it, enveloped instead with these visions of all the menace Hell could conjure, like a nun in the throes of a terrible ecstasy a thousand years ago, bathed in the vivid ignorant belief that God’s voice would speak into your presence such horrid demons as to test the very coherence of your sinews, rending you apart not with long black claw and slimy white tooth but with terror in all its purity. Wordless, still, the shiver overtook her. She nearly fell to her knees. Throwing an arm out to steady herself on a pillar felt like an act of bravery, but when she did it, it also returned her to the present. To the empty parking garage. To the latest millennium and the rationality of psychoanalysis.

She exhaled without inhaling, blowing out whatever breath she had been holding. “Dread,” she whispered, the word thick with saliva. The assignment was to stand in the parking space and notice that it is safe now and benign. To turn once in a slow circle and then leave with the most confident stride possible. In fact, she had already failed the assignment, which was to confidently stride to the parking space in the first place.

It was a rehearsed moment, in fact, carefully conducted in the therapist’s office where she, like a child or an idiot, was made to walk in through the door and stride confidently to the far corner. She had to do this multiple times, each time trying to picture this parking garage and pre-live this moment. As if the future could be remembered. As if the past could be plucked from its seat and dragged dangling and squirming to a new seat in the future. I hate this, she had told her therapist more than once. A friend even advised she quit this therapist. But the allure of a process and the mention that this process was yet incomplete was all it took for her to do the stupidest exercises again and again.

She needed to sleep, after all. She needed her nights to be made of sleep, undrugged and whole.

“You can blame me, but the person you’re really blaming, or should be, is him,” the therapist would say in response to the more insistent refusals. It hurt to know how correct that was and still feel how incorrect that was. The fucking man didn’t make her practice walking through doors and standing in spots and spinning in slow circles. The fucking man didn’t send her downtown in the middle of the night. That wasn’t the fucking man doing this.

“Fuck you!” she yelled. This one invited the echo. “Fuck. YOU!” Her voice cracked on the second word. Did she hear something stir in the level above?

Was someone there?

She listened carefully for a moment, then said once more, in her regular voice, “fuck you.” She took some confident strides toward the parking space then veered abruptly toward the gap around the wall and bolted up the lane at full and panicked speed around around around around her lungs ten years older and aching with effort in the cold around around slowing just a little which only sparked more panic and a small burst of pathetic extra speed stumbling collapsing tripping falling scraping her knees her shins her wrists sobbing under the streetlamps alone 3 a.m. the city abandoned, ugly, cold, solid, painful, bleeding, broken, stupid, wet, ashamed, ashamed, ashamed, and breathing.