The old man lumbers into the café behind me, with a sweat-stained shirt and a cowboy hat, his worn boots clacking across the old black and white tile. He sits in a faded red booth and opens up the plastic covered menu that hides behind the ketchup and mustard bottles. In a gleaming silver trailer with Christmas decorations still painted on the windows and a bright neon sign, we’re two strangers in a small New Mexican town plagued by poverty and lifted by lavender-hued desert nights and wide, sky blue days. He hums a tune to himself, I think it’s Greensleeves, but I’m not quite sure. My brain is a swollen muddy river and I’m leaning into the banks, clinging to a branch that may or may not hold. Still, the music enters my head like a friendly haint and I know that at some point later on I’ll be humming the same tune, even if off-key.
You’d think that in a place like this food would be cheap, but it’s 3.95 for a cup of soup and 2.04 for a large Coke. Rifling through the bottom of my bag for change, I forego the chicken noodle and ask for a soda, extra ice. My jaw is aching with an infection and I seem to have developed some weird reactions to a mega-strength antibiotic. My kidneys hurt, my tongue is blistered, and I’m bleeding in places I shouldn’t be bleeding. There’s a part of me that imagines just curling up on the side of the highway with the strays cats and the pregnant coyote that’s been drying out near exit #195 for the past two weeks. I feel just that done — with pain, with life, with everything — but my heart is a forceful and charming liar and sometimes I get so caught up in its tales of what might possibly could be that I bypass my own common sense in favor of hearing yet another fairy tale. My heart is Scheherazade, but I am not a king, I am not cruel, and I do not wish to slay it. If I could, I’d take it out before taking my leave—I’d put it in a jar and hand it to someone who doesn’t dream enough, who wishes they could dream more deeply and more often.
I’ve had my fill of Scheherazade. She’s worn out and toothless and not any wiser for all the ravages—she’s forgetful and often repeats herself—but like a wily lover who knows exactly what to say and how and when to say it, I can’t quite quit her. The rest of myself, yes: I could throw my worn, ragged body in front of the trains of Belen or wait until the infection reaches my brain or some other vital organ, and I would be perfectly content. I am more tired than my heart has ever been. I have been done for a long, long time. Done, like an overfull canvas, thick with scenes painted over and over again—muted gray hopes and bright blue potentials, big yellow suns and silver waning moons, violent purple bruises, pale pink promises, candlelit golden romances, soft green grass, stinging or silken flesh tone palm prints, calming desert sands, iridescent moments of perfection, long streaks of black, the cherry reds of blood, tulips, and summer cars. Endless colors, too many jagged slices of life served up from one palette.
The cook smiles at me from across the counter. She has faded tattoos on her arms, bright white teeth, a hefty build, and her hair is slicked back with some sort of grease that smells like a mix of black pepper and chamomile. I’m almost certain that she’s done prison time somewhere. She’s just got that look of someone who was once thrown away and caged. I’ve got that look, too, and we seem to recognize a peculiar fear in each other even though we’re too polite to ask.
“You look like hell,” she says.
“I feel like hell,” I banter back.
“You got anything for the pain?”
“Ibuprofen. It’s not working so well.” A few days ago, when I was in pretty much the same condition, she gave me a packet of B/C – a powdered concoction of aspirin and caffeine to put in my drink. It didn’t help much either but the box she had was three years past its expiration date.
The old cowboy chimes in, asking what happened. I give him the short version through clenched teeth while the cook fills a Styrofoam cup with ice.
“That ain’t right,” he says. “A thing like that that can kill ya.” He tells me a story about an infection he got in Vietnam, from a small piece of shrapnel in his thigh. The bacteria ran through his bloodstream, up to his face, into his brain, and the pain was even worse than the original wound.
“Funny I almost died from that and not from being blasted. So, you in a lot of pain right now?”
“Yeah, I’m hurting. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could just sleep, but I haven’t slept in three days. I think that’s the worst part.”
The cook takes my $2.50 and I tell her to keep the change, as if I have it to spare. “I hope you feel better soon,” she says. I nod and try to smile. The left side of my face is paralyzed.
The old cowboy follows me out the door. “Hang on there, young lady.” He opens the door to his old Chevy truck, pushing his excited German Shepherd back into the passenger seat.
“Now don’t tell nobody where you got these, hear?” He holds two pill bottles in his hand. He pours out several pills from each bottle. “Now these are Tramadol—they’re a pretty light dose, but they’ll help get you through. And these ones are hydrocodone. They’re stronger, and I wouldn’t use them until it’s time to go to bed ‘cause they’ll knock you on your ass if you’re not used to them. Still, they’re not such a high dose that they’ll kill you if you just take one. Don’t take more than that.”
He places the pills in my hand and I thank him. I reach up to give him a hug. He smells old and comfortable and the stubble from his beard brushes across my right cheek. “There, there,” he says, patting my back. “It’ll be all right.”
The tears run down my face as I walk across the parking lot. See? Scheherazade says. Things just aren’t that bad. There are still good people out there.
In the distance, I hear the trains rolling and the cars speeding by on I-25. A chilled wind dries my cheeks. I swallow the kindness of a stranger and let the icy Coke linger in my sore throat. “One dreamless night,” I bargain with my storyteller. “That’s all I want.”
“If I give you that,” she says, “you’ll never come back.”
I know she’s right. I walk slowly, one foot in front of the other, and she matches me beat for beat. We are in rhythm and yet so far apart that I can barely hear her as she starts her next story. Cobalt skies and fields of sunflowers, a little log cabin, a fire and a fresh pot of coffee. A creek with water so clear that you can see the fish swimming. Peace is the absence of pain and want, she tells me, the grace of a day that needs nothing more than itself and it’s coming. Soon.
“I can feel it,” she tells me. “It’s almost here.”
“It’s such an old story. You’ve told that one before.”
She turns silent, leaving only a metronome behind, but I know she’ll be back. To tell me, perhaps, about a mahogany desk or two dogs and the ocean, or fresh sheets that rumble in the dryer on a lazy winter Sunday. She’s a magician and a liar, a trick and a hope, a sloppy painter and an unrepentant trespasser.
The pills help, but I still dream in too much color to sleep.
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