Cure for the Haunted Man

A literary fiction break up story inspired by my life and filtered into someone else's consciousness.

                Marty walked over past the stacks of asbestos paneling and stood looking off the surface of the roof at the Boston city skyline; the air was a sublime blue full of the mist leftover from a foggy morning.  He took off his hardhat and adjusted it slightly on the crown of his head, trying to avoid the thick plastic bands inside from digging into his temples and hairline.

                His boss was up by the crane, monitoring Saul as he delivered bundles of material wrapped in Kevlar tape up onto the building scaffolding which continuously rose as the building got taller and closer to completion. It was amazing how fast and slow it moved at the same time�"like watching a pot boil, or a turtle try to crawl 100 yards. Eventually, it snuck up on you.

                He shouldered his rig and walked over to the next part of the project he hadn’t started. The concrete supports for the next floor would have to be welded, and Marty had finished setting up the rods with the team and had determined after his lunch break to get started on the next portion. It was 100 degrees on top of the tower, and sweat poured out of his rubber gloves and out from under his welder’s shield like it was coming out of an IV drip with a poked hole. It was smelly, grey water mixed with dead skin and dust and dirt from the inside of the gloves.

                All he could do was focus on his work. He tried not to think of Karen’s face, down in the building in the air conditioning. But when he resolved to put his mask back on and the thermal shielded glass blocked out the sun’s light and the hot white jet of flame, that’s all he could see in his mind’s eye. It was as if all of physical reality was impregnated with her, or that she was its eternal, undying source�"a reality generator�"and her face was like an Easter egg in the programming of existence.

                She just wouldn’t go away.

                Marty focused on the welding and tried to slow down his breathing, being mindful of the jet as he precisely guided it over the area where the two beams of steel met and made a seam. He had to bend slightly to get the torch at this angle, and he felt tension build up in his shoulder blades and terminate in his neck in a knot. He stopped seeing her face, and instead found himself able to only see the joint where the two pieces of metal converged, like an eternal line.

                Saul tapped on his shoulder from behind. He knew it was him by the non-committal, light tap of his fingers. Everyone else on the crew nearly punched him when they wanted to get his attention; most however had the common sense not to interrupt a quiet man wielding a blazing hot torch.

                “Hey man,” he said. “You didn’t take lunch today, did you? You just kind of sat there. You hungry?”

                Marty welcomed Saul’s intrusion and didn’t even bother responding through the muffling mask and equipment. He put down his tools and walked over to a palette of pink insulation wrapped in cellophane and began to take off his mask, sweat pouring out from his beard and running down his neck in countless streams.

                Saul led Marty to his favorite café on Tremont; it was new to him, but not to the street, and wore a faded brick façade and an awning stained with sallow water stains. Marty grabbed a faded oak table near the window, and pulled out his seat and sat down as Saul got out his phone and checked it. A large group of attractive young girls, presumably from Northeastern, ran by with bouncing butts and ponytails flopping up and down against their grey-shirted shoulders.

                Saul walked up to the counter and ordered the usual for them, and when he returned, Marty forked over a $20�"he’d owed him for a case of beer from last weekend and they agreed that this pretty much evened it out. They were both great operators of fuzzy math, and Marty wondered how his life would be different if he could’ve been as precise with understanding covalent bonds or discrete mathematics as he was with his welding. It often seemed that the world was moving by faster than he was, and without any regard whatsoever to his plight or worldview.

                “So,” Saul started in, “I’m a little worried about you.”

                “Haha,” cracked Marty. “You always are.”

                Saul shook his head and laughed, “Well, you’re a nut. But this is a little different. I mean, I can see you moping around like you’re trying to mop the floor with your feet.”

                “Well…”

                “Man cut the s**t. You’ve got to stop loving her man. This b***h is not a good person. She doesn’t love you or care about you in any way. She’s going to get what she wants in life and she thinks she better than everyone, and she thinks she’s better than you. And she’s not better than you.”

                Saul looked away and then locked eyes with Marty.

                Marty got defensive when Saul was like this with him. He felt his chest tighten slightly in response, but his face projected a sense of calm acceptance and belied any sort of discomfort on his part. Marty tried to collect his thoughts, but it felt like a small steamroller was pushing any honest ones he had up against the rear of his skull.

                “She fucked me up. What can I say, it’s been 7 months.”

                “That’s a decent length of time, my man.”

                Marty felt foolish, and went up with Saul to grab their subs. He felt a languid mid-afternoon lull come over his mind, and hoped the chicken parmesan sub would fix it. But as he smelled the steaming mozzarella and breaded chicken wafting up towards his face and opening his pores and reminded him how dirty he was, he decided it would just make him fall asleep.

                They made it back to the site for what would end up being an hour lunch, a bit long by laborer standards, especially with a project under the gun like this. They knew that Mr. Stocker was coming by to survey the site later, the big hotshot who was the proprietor of the building and visited for tape cutting ceremonies and with building inspectors and mayors and god-knew-who else.

                Saul was a bit of an unusual guy in the sense that he was probably the only crane operator Marty had ever met who had a psychology degree and a knack for writing his own poetry. Marty didn’t always understand why exactly he was doing this, but life was a strange and mysterious thing, and men especially seemed to take circuitous paths through it. All around him, Marty thought he saw maleness as an amorphous, dying thing being stretched out to the last, finest filaments of its existence, like a spider web being ripped apart.

                He shouldered his rig and walked back to the beam where he’d started. It was oppressively hot, probably one of the worst days he would have to get through this summer while welding. Not all projects were on exposed roofs, he tried to remember, and the ones that were on exposed roofs in the winter weren’t much better. Not at all, really, he thought.

                He followed the beam with his eye and nailed it like a painter cutting around a piece of trim at the corner of a wall.  The rest of the afternoon melted away in a hypnotic trance, and almost as easily as he’d drifted to work in the morning, he found himself on the green line taking the train back to his dingy apartment, his eyes tracking the buildings passing by in the same fashion that he followed his torch. There was a word for this kind of thing, functional fixedness. No. Maybe Saul had meant something different when he said that, he thought.

                Marty flopped down in bed that night in a heap of wet towels and tossed his hair to the side like a damp mop and closed his eyes. The thought of Karen’s face at the epicenter of the torch, her hair visible outside the liminal space between the flame and the white air around it, bothered him severely.

                Mary saw images dancing across his mind’s eye, Saul’s lips moving, Karen walking towards him on Huntington Avenue. He saw her lips moving with no sound:

                “You were so much more confident when we first met.”

                He replayed the scene in his mind:

                “You were so much more confident when we first met.”

                Her hair was up in a ponytail tucked under a tan fedora with an earthy brown band going around the brim. Her eyes were like obsidian pits to another universe where only black holes existed�"he felt pulled against her like a trash compactor sucking food down its mouth.

                He woke up covered in sweat. Had I been dreaming, he thought?

                No. If anything, it was a nightmare. He rubbed his eyes and glanced at his wall�"where an alarm clock projected the time onto the wall in neon green digits�"1:30 am.

                He looked at his phone�"a few missed calls from Karl and Ben, probably (definitely) asking him to go out. His back ached in the exact spot where the pressure of the weight of the torch impinged on the joints connected to his scapula and shoulder.

                Marty lost patience with the apartment quickly and threw a flannel on his back, walking down the stairs quickly and out onto Huntington, where even the Prudential tower was ruined for him, her face in every window.

                She infiltrates every piece of reality…he thought.

                He continued walking down the street and saw countless storefronts with closed signs flipped facing the glass, a few bars with neon signs and gaggles of smokers outside, and one strange sign�"“Psychic�"tarot readings, relationship advice, etc!” with a little purple crescent moon next to the text.

                He stared at the sign and basked in the lavender colored light sputtering over him from the neon invitation. It was open at this hour, and this made sense to him, as it was a strange and other-worldly domain that probably didn’t have to obey by the same regulations germane to the other establishments on the street.

                Marty walked up the stairs and into the office of the psychic, and saw nobody behind the desk adorned with a mural of small white crescent moons around a silhouetted woman wearing a kind of flowing robe.

                “Ring bell if no one present,” read a sign on top of the desk. Marty did just that, tapping the silver bell once with his index finger, putting his fingers in his pockets quickly and rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet nervously.

                The woman came to the desk. She was younger than he expected; Marty had this image of psychics being down and out women in their later 50s or maybe early 60s who really needed the cash. These were charlatans worn out by the countless road salted winters and too many college students everywhere and just�"New England. But she was blonde and had a mousy, delicate face like her lips were permanently pursed. Her flannel shirt, which confused Marty, but with each second of sensory information he assimilated he started to settle down.

                “Hello there,” she greeted him sonorously, “I’m Helen.”

                “Hi Helen. I’m Marty,” saying this in a quick, brusque, and shy voice and feeling all of those ways as he said it.

                “Well Marty,” she paused, and gave him a look that swelled with an opportunistic smile, “What can I do for you?”

                “I’m not sure. Maybe we can talk about that.”

                He looked out through the storefront pane and saw sparks shoot off the top of the green line as it careened down the street on its antiquated wheels that looked like giant spinning skillets.

                “This way,” she said, grabbing his attention and beckoning him into a room to the right of the desk and down a narrow hallway. The room she led him to was covered in plush blue material like microfiber and red velvet curtains, which from the doorway looked like they were made of expensive material, but Marty knew they probably weren’t. Walls all around the room were adorned with walnut-colored ladder bookcases full of hard covers and tea lights.

                “Well, maybe I want a palm reading or something. I don’t know.”

                Helen was going to say something, but just stared at him, as if she was still trying to process what he’d just posited.

                “My problem is my ex-girlfriend,” Marty continued. “I can’t get her out of my mind. She follows me everywhere. I project her onto buildings, in my vision, in my mind’s eye. It’s like she’s embedded in reality at some kind of deep, molecular level.”

                “I see,” she replied. Marty felt that she did indeed understand, and he was not self-conscious.

                “Give me your hand,” she said.

                Marty put out his hairy hand, a scar on top of his thumb evidence of his only (albeit painful) work accident. She took it in hers and massaged it.

                “I’m going to give you a palm reading. I think you need to start looking forward, rather than backward, and I think this will help.”

                Marty’s hand was limp and relaxed as she began running her soft hands over his labor-ruined palms, made infinitely worse by the torrents of sweat that pooled in his gloves and leached the moisture out of them.

                “This is interesting,” she said.

                “Your primary line here indicates that you have the potential to be very happy. That’s good.”

                She continued feeling along this line with her index finger until she came to what looked like a little tributary or side road off of the main line. She stopped here, and looked up at Marty, and inhaled sharply.

                “Hmm. Now here, this one, this isn’t good. This says that you might kill yourself.”

                She made a face with raised eyebrows and cheeks which said, sorry.

                “Actually,” she said, putting her finger back on the main line that continued past the tributary, I read that a little inaccurately. According to what I’m seeing now, your ex-girlfriend is the one who’s going to kill herself.”

                “Hmm,” said Marty.

                “What’s her name?” she asked.

                “Karen.”

                “Well,” she said, locking eyes with Marty, “I think unfortunately for her sake, Karen is going to kill herself. I’m pretty sure of it, anyways.”

                She started using her ring finger now, and traced a line that ran at the median point of his palm across his hand like Route 66.

                “You, you work in construction, don’t you,” she said, massaging his palm again. His penis filled slightly with blood and tightened against the zipper of his worn jeans, and he felt no embarrassment, but he did sit up slightly straighter on the couch.

                “Yes. I do. I’m a welder. I’ve been doing it for a long time now.”

                “Not that long, I bet,” she said, and smiled. “You’re young. This says that you’re going to leave the business, and elope with a beautiful woman, and that you’ll never think of…” she locked eyes with him again and he nearly felt himself melting, “Karen, ever again.”

                He walked home short $25 (or was it $30?�"he had already forgotten) with her card in his pocket and a chill running down his spine. He ached for a cigarette and reached into his shirt pocket for one and lit it with a pale blue lighter as the white sodium street lamps lit him with a pallid color.

                The night was strangely bereft of noise and activity, as if he was the only one awake. Lying in bed bothered him, and he fingered through the different windows on his phone, and finally lay on his bed staring up at his ceiling, until his edemic eyelids weighed enough to make him fall asleep.

                What kind of f*****g psychic was that, he thought, and laughed, and slept.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

                Waking up, Marty felt especially groggy. He glanced at his right palm, the one the psychic had perused, and wondered how she did that. Obviously it was some kind of scam, or had to be, but he couldn’t help feeling some kind of enchantment in her cryptic advice.

                He threw on a pair of jeans and went for a walk down Huntington, lighting a cigarette and exhaling heavily in long puffs that trailed behind him. A young man pushing a stroller past him shot him an ugly look, and Marty scoffed and took a deeper inhale the next time.

                The Prudential tower came into view and he pulled out his palm and the psychic’s business card. He looked up at the blue and grey metallic monstrosity and tried to picture Karen’s face in the window, but couldn’t. There were no hazel eyes staring back at him from the steel and tempered glass, and there was no lump forming in his throat. Instead, he walked into the tower and rode the elevator up to Karen’s floor at CGI. Marty walked up to the glass front near the receptionist’s desk and saw Karen deep inside the office, her computer glowing against the glass partitions inside.

                Just like her, on a Saturday. He couldn’t stand that.

                Instead, he pulled out Helen’s card and twisted it over in his hand like he often did with paper cups or coffee stirrers. He flipped the card over and saw a main line, a quick right, and then a tributary-like deviation that crossed up to another diagonal line.  It looked like the lines of his hands that she’d traced. Only he looked closer, and he could see little street names scribbled. One was Huntington, near her shop. But another, terminating in a small circle, looked special�"Gainsborough Street, with a small number next to it.

                Marty quickly made his way back down to the street and traced his index finger on his palm and looked at the card, feeling his hand throbbing beneath the worn medians on his hand like little roads. His pace quickened, and he pretended his hand was the map. He crossed the line at the top of this palm onto Gainsborough, and looked up to where he thought the endpoint with the circle would be.

                He walked up to the apartment that he thought was the one, and rang the doorbell. It resonated with a metallic chime, and his heart raced. A woman came down and became visible in the vestibule with red hair, a heavy looking wrought-iron emblem hanging from her neck over an earthy dress and copper earrings. She looked like a witch.

                “Hello,” said Marty. “I’m looking for Helen.”

                “Oh, Helen,” said the woman, “my niece.”

                Marty stared up at her bewilderedly.

                “I met her the other night.”

                “Oh. Where? Out? At a bar?”

                “No. I went to the Studio on Huntington, and she read my palm.”

                The woman pursed her lips and smiled.

                “She gave me good advice, I think,” he offered.

                “She’s not a psychic, I hate to tell you,” the woman said, and tilted back and chortled like a witch.

                Marty looked at the lines on his palm and felt his cheeks fill with a small amount of blood inspired by a combination of mild embarrassment and indignation.

                “She was only in town for the weekend watching the apartment and studio for me. I had her keeping everything under control. Or so I thought. I’m sorry!”

                She laughed to herself. Marty could see, but couldn’t hear much after that, and began backing away from the weathered cement steps and back towards the cracked sidewalk and Gainsborough Street.

                He saw Helen’s face when he stared at his palm again, and pulled out the business card. She’d crudely crossed over her Aunt’s number on the front of the card and written in her own in barely discernible numbers, with a smiley face next to it followed by an ellipsis.

                To be continued, Marty thought, and then he smiled, put the card back in his pocket, and continued walking down the street.