Chapter One

I would often see her in my dreams. In these dreams she is heavenly and fragile and the temperance of her smile makes my heart ache.

I did not know her name, but it was Lola.

***

Lola is gently stroking my hand as she perches in the darkness. Her skin is velvet and cool to the touch. We are alone. Somewhere in the distance, a child is crying. Lola is crying too, but her sobs make no sound.

“Darling, stay with me,” she says, and taking my hand, jumps.

The scene changes. Lola and I are freefalling off a Manhattan skyscraper, two cosmic smudges blazing through the skyline. The air hitting my face is intoxicatingly perfumed, so I open my mouth for a taste. Wind gushes down my alimentary canal. Mm, musky. It is night-time and the moon is crimson and so is the blood that gushes out of my body once we land. The blood is so warm. It bathes me.  Lola lands with ease. She takes my head in her lap and resumes stroking my hand. She smiles.  My heart aches. I am dying.

“Stay with me”.

***

“Stay with me,” a voice purrs. The voice sounds wrong – it is too smooth, bordering on falsehood. It is coming from within me. I am steering a vintage Plymouth through the countryside and Lola is riding shotgun. Her hair sweeps out in the wind from underneath a checkered scarf and her lips are rouged fire-red with desire. She sports a pair of chunky shades and snaps her gum with attitude as if to say “Baby, I’m not feeling a damned thing”. I know better than that. I know Lola loves me. I hold Lola’s hand as I drive, giving it meaningful squeezes every once in a while.  Loudspeakers descend from the heavens and old Ella Fitzgerald is crooning “I’ve got a crush on you”, but the music is all wrong. The notes blare, slow and droning.

The scene changes. The Plymouth is rocketing out of control and I slam on the brakes, only to find out that there are none. The sky turns red, and amid the screeching of tires, I am hurled onto the road.  The Plymouth crashes into a nearby ditch. Lola must still be in the car, her slender body crushed by its metal frame. Fate is cruel sometimes.

Blood is gushing out of my body. It is so warm. It bathes me. I prepare myself to leave this world, knowing that Lola and I will be together in the next. Don’t worry, my love. My eyelids flutter as I struggle to make last-minute observations.

Down the road, Lola emerges from the ditch, unscratched. She sees my mangled body on the asphalt and walks over, taking lean strides.  The movement in her legs is very sensual. She looks down at me and smiles, stretching.  My heart aches. I am dying. Lola slowly unties her checkered scarf and drops it over my face. It clouds my vision. I hear her heels click as she walks away into the midday sun.

“Stay with me.”  

Silence.

Chapter Two

I would often wake from these dreams with a violent spasm. Today, it is a pulsing twitch that resides in my left eye.  I sit up and command for it to be gone, but it does not obey.  My head is throbbing from the shock of dying twice in one night. My eye twitches in complaint. There is a glass of water and an Advil on the nightstand. I take it. It is ten forty-five; I know this intuitively. There are no clocks in my apartment. A certain synchronism always exists in the world.

It is a Monday and New York City raps at my window, vying for my attention with sounds of industry. I am uninterested. Unemployment has given me the necessary skills to silence her. There are no papers delivered to my door, no trains or planes or cars for me to catch. Even my pager, once the herald to my professional excellence, is forgotten, enshrouded by layers of socks and underwear in the back of my closet. I relax in bed and think of her – Lola.

Lola must be an angel.

No.

She is one of Nabokov’s nymphets sent to lure me to damnation.

Either way, one thing is for certain – Lola exists for me. And this existence is one that is frighteningly real; it shades my thoughts by day and colours my dreams by night.

***

After months of careful self-analysis, I have come to the conclusion that Lola is out there somewhere. There is no other explanation to why my dreams have become so vivid and alarming. Lola exists in the physical world and she is waiting for me.  She is probably sitting in some dead-beat café, flipping through a lit-mag between sips of filmy decaf, waiting for me. Her coffee will get cold as she waits. This thought pleases me immensely. Behind my eyes I see the ghost of her smile and already, my heart aches.

Willing Lola into my life is not a task of simple measure. It wasn’t as if I could inquire of her whereabouts from a wallet pull-out, or find her listed in a phone book. I didn’t even know her name at the time.  There were no definitive approaches to take. When I come across her, if I do at all, serendipity must be at play.  That much was certain.  The rest, helpless.

“Watch out buddy, you’re in this too deep,” I remark to the wall.  Rolling over, I fix my stare at the ceiling and let out a deep sigh.

***

When I quit my job, the trees in Central Park had just begun to bud. Now they were turning a deep gold, reminding me of a Christo installation in the same locale. Two seasons have passed. I have made no efforts to engage with society. I had no landline and gradually left my cellular bills unpaid, thwarting the many attempts made by friends and colleagues to reach me. At first my voicemail filled with messages asking me what I was up to and if I would like to perhaps grab a couple of drinks Wednesday night, but sooner or later everyone took a cue and left me in peace.

The job I had held was not bad at all. Upon dropping out of college, I went straight to work as a copywriter at a small advertising agency.  The agency operated from a single suite in a particular hotel on West Fifty-fourth Street and my office had a great view that overlooked the Museum of Modern Art. There, I drafted mediocre campaigns for mediocre products, with tag lines that read like textbook examples.  The work was not laborious and paid well, but meant nothing. Despite my negative sentiment, I worked diligently and the account I was put on gained market share like never before. Because of this, when I proposed quitting, my boss went as far as to offer me a raise. I declined politely.  I was thirty and I figured that I wasn’t getting anywhere at the agency and I wasn’t about to anytime soon.  

With a considerable amount left in my savings account from my eight years of service, I was in no hurry to find work. I decided to take some time off and unwind. Maybe develop new, meaningful, hobbies. My days passed leisurely. I cooked and enjoyed fine wines. My sleeping patterns improved. I started to develop film for the first time since high school. Things were looking good, until Lola started to appear in my dreams.  Since then, I have been people-watching constantly, haunting parks and aforementioned seedy cafés. My new-found priorities went out the window and old habits soon returned.

***

            I get out of bed and file to the kitchenette. Enough of the morning had passed to make it acceptable to skip breakfast. I open a window to feel the autumn breeze. The winds are temperate with remnants of an Indian summer. A solitary fluffy, white cloud sits in the sky, reminding me of ricotta cheese. I decide on a sandwich for lunch – tuna salad on sourdough.  Maybe a beer.  I whistle the William Tell overture as I arrange slices of bread inside the toaster oven and wait. After Ranz des Vaches the bread is toasted and the condiments diced and I am ready to eat.

            I grab my beer and sandwich to take onto to the fire-escape. Balancing a chilled glass in one hand and my plate in the other, I make clumsy attempts to unhinge the door latch with my foot. Suddenly, I stop, foot in mid-probe. Something is not right. Did I leave the fridge open? No: it’s not that. The air is too crisp, the streets too silent. My senses become augmented.  A neighbour’s dog barks. I realize what is wrong. The phone is ringing.

Setting my lunch on the floor, I wait. It wasn’t possible for anyone to have called me.  I count fifteen muffled rings. The condensation on my glass slowly trickles down and stains a damp spot on the carpet.  It is like time is slowing down.

Ringgg.

There is no point in waiting forever. I turn back into my room and fumble around in the closet for my phone.  

“Hello?” I voice.  

Soft elevator music plays through the receiver. It’s Fitzgerald.

Oh, boy. Sometimes life can be so strange.

august 24, 2010

I am the halfway-child, with both feet firmly planted on separate continents.
You are Pangaea, and you are in deep slumber.
As you drift restlessly, slowly coming undone, I perform the splits until I can be torn into two.

I have work tomorrow :) Fanexpo chyeahhh.

august 22, 2010.
I have a hollow feeling in my stomach. It is the kind you get when you are absurdly nervous, or when you have woken too early in the morning and find that all your muscles are clenched together; but I am and have not said symptoms.

Just relax and think of me, you say.

I’m thinking of you but it’s not going away.