Hello, everyone. I'm grateful and indebted to all of you still interested in the story that is taking way too long to finish. I like experimenting with styles, and this part, I have to admit, is the horrible result of four different drafts that have gone wrong. I had to stop at the fifth. So, apologies for this part. It's just that things must go down before they come up.
7: A Pendulum's Swing
No man dies of love but on the stage.
-"Mansfield Park", Jane Austen
The rain was still in the air, the night was suffocating, and every part of his body was numb. When he breathed, there was a sound of bone grinding deep inside the cavity of his chest. Inside his chest, in his ears, in his head. He deduced that at least one of his two hundred-something bones had to be broken.
"Are you all right?"
It was a ridiculous question, especially in light of the fact that he almost died, twice, today. Dean answered nonetheless, "No."
He was a young man who hadn't reached his twenties. By default, he was supposed to think he'd live forever.
Forever was such a long word, and he was thinking about temporality.
Morning:
On the way to the school.
He had an interesting close encounter with a literal case of an anvil. Passing by Taylor's store that was going through a major reconstruction, Dean had been minding his own business, which mainly involved ordering his legs to move so he wouldn't be late.
Looking back, he might have heard someone yelling "Watch out!" but minding his own business had taken precedent over actually paying attention to what he was doing and where he was going. Only the slow motion syndrome from various movies he shouldn't have been watching had its toll, and a flash of image of an anvil with a rope swinging down at him like a pendulum hit him in a slow, panoramic vision. He could swear that it came to an inch away from his face before something pulled him down.
"Oh my god, what happened?"
"Are you all right?"
"Dean? You okay?"
"What fell?"
What fell, indeed. It took him a while to register, or to even just comprehend, why there was a sudden rush of activities around him or what the people were babbling about. What had fallen was one of the to-be metal components of the newly dolling-up version of Taylor's store, and instead of Dean, a garbage can met its demise. The only reason he hadn't been totaled seemed to be total luck--
"Use your goddamn eyes, why don't you."
--or not. Jess was in a similar squatting position behind him, grimacing and trying to dust off his pants. It look even longer for Dean to realize that it was Jess who had pulled him down at the crucial moment.
"My god, are you all right?" Someone who Dean should be able to recognize came up to them and tried to pull him up, saving Dean from actually trying to understand that...did Jess just save his life?
His head felt like a second before exploding, and it wasn't because that he could have shared the fate with the garbage can.
A crowd of people began to take over the morning street. Everything seemed a pitch off for some reason. Dean saw and brushed off the people who were fussing over him, all those people he should recognize but couldn't, not when...
He saw Jess, who by now was standing up and ready to saunter off.
It wasn't like Dean was going thank Jess for saving his life. Because he didn't like Jess, and that was never going to change.
Right?
"Jess," someone said. Dean almost turned around to see whose voice it had been, but he didn't have to, because it turned out to be his. It had to be the shock. It had to be.
He didn't expect Jess to stop, but Jess did turn around and met his eyes, half expecting trouble, and may possibly be enjoying the prospect of it. Jess and his standard posture--hands plugged in his pockets, a wrinkled and folded book stuffed inside his pocket, and the overall devil-may-care attitude--was already at place. But there was something else, too. Something disturbingly familiar.
Those dark eyes.
What are you thinking? Dean wanted to ask.
There would be no answer, and he didn't expect one.
In truth, they could do a lot of things together, like swapping notes on how-Rory-dropped-me subject. Had a lot to say to each other, and some of them didn't even require words and possibly have them end up in ER for the day. But this Jess, Dean couldn't understand. He knew preciously so little about Jess, and when Rory had told him about Luke's nephew with odd fascination in her voice a long ago, he honestly hadn't listened at all. And now he thought he didn't want to understand. He had no wish to understand. Just being Jess, casually ignoring people and the things that should matter...those things Dean could never understand. Not even buckets of beer would do the job in this case.
Yet there was this girl who had both of them.
Dean thought about Rory until the moment passed without letting out so much as a vowel and the upcoming crowd divided his space from Jess.
Dean thought about Rory when Jess walked away.
He thought he might just well have understood Jess.
The mentra was--she had you before, she doesn't get to have you again.
It was necessary to repeat.
A few minutes, or hours in his mentalscape, later:
Still on the way to school.
"Not as macho as I thought, and much less testosterone driven. I approve."
It was Lane, easily falling into steps beside him. Dean didn't want to talk to anyone to the extent that rather than actually speaking, he would voluntarily paint himself with a bulls-eye and wait for another anvil. But, this was Lane. Which meant she deserved to be talked to. So he asked, "What?"
Lane, either plain unobservant or deciding to ignore his curt mood: "You and Jess, having a moment. Of the 'We could potentially kill each other but since that wouldn't do any good why don't we just not bother' variety, and all that without a single word?"
"Ah." So Lane saw it, then. So, not so unobservant after all. "Well, it's not like beating Jess down to a pulp is gonna make me feel any less lousy."
"So it's a guy thing, only not really?"
"I guess."
Lane took a long look at him, then tucked her hair behind her ear and let out a frustrated sigh. "Why do people not tell me things? Seal their lips the moment I go near. Is it me? Did I develop a sudden syndrome that makes people compelled not to tell me things? Did I grow a sudden spur that says 'Don't Speak' in a bad, bad imitation of Gwen Stefani and I don't--"
"Lane, breathe," Dean ordered, and Lane stopped, exhaling loudly. It was becoming pretty much over-evident her sanity seemed to be quickly deteriorating from having lousy friends. "Hey," he grinned lightly, "did you just go Rory on me?"
Lane cringed in the way by all definitions should be classified adorable. "If by that you meant very non-subtly and pointedly, and also kind of undeserving-uh-ly, that I just went and turned everything about myself when it clearly wasn't? Yes. Sorry."
Slowly, Dean shook his head. "It's not you. You're a good friend. And...sorry."
Dean didn't think it would be enough, should be enough, for Lane, but she smiled. "Thanks."
The school was still two minutes away, and he still wasn't going to think about the anvil, the literal one and the metaphorical one, that had come his way earlier. He looked at Lane who wasn't all that great at hiding her thoughts from her face. Lane, who looked uncomfortable and insecure and concerned at the moment. He thought he meant what he had said, she being a good friend. So he said, "You can just ask."
A startled look on her face was of course expected, as well as the guilt tracing in her voice. "I wasn't gonna--"
"You can," he assured her.
"And you're not gonna bite me?"
"No biting."
Lane swallowed once, and when she began hesitantly, her voice was crawling back into the voice chamber, "Uh, you know, Rory actually did tell me something. And it was an abridged version if not abbreviated. And I'm kinda having a hard time believing it because that just sounds totally impossible even in Rory's love life standard that you, you know."
"Believe it."
Lane fell into silence, and he suddenly wished they would reach school faster.
"Are you really all right?"
Lane's question wasn't as intrusive as he had imagined it was going to be, and he was sure he wasn't lying when he answered, "I'm fine."
Her eyes searched him for a long moment. She commented quietly, "I'm your friend, too."
"I know you are."
"So you don't have to do that."
"Don't do what?"
"Push people away."
There was something about bystanders who read minds so accurately. This time it was intrusive, even though Lane didn't mean it to be that way, and he didn't feel like going to school any more.
"Come to think of it, I don't feel well," he told Lane, stopping on his track. "I think I'll just go home today. Could you tell Mr. Jones that I had a brush with death and had to recuperate?"
He didn't wait for her answer when he left.
She had you before, she doesn't get to have you again.
Noon:
Bus ride.
On his fifth round, he was about half way through War and Peace, which was either an impossibility becoming possible or he was skipping pages. Whichever it was, he had a plenty of time. He had been taking the same bus and going round and round, ignoring the looks the driver threw at him. He wasn't going to school today. No work today, either. He was blowing the day off.
He rarely skipped classes.
On the first round, crumpled in the seat, he had looked at the scenery until his eyes hurt. When he put his face against the glass window, the ripples of imagery glared back at him in reflection.
On the second half of the first round, he took out the books that had been becoming a permanent part of his backpack and read the crumbled pages.
He didn't understand. He absolutely didn't understand. The people in the stories were all lonely. Every single one of them. They all talked to each other to death, and even the least smart one spoke of philosophy. But when those stories boiled down to the hard precipitates, they all had the same problem. Yet no one understood each other. Nobody said anything, and if anyone did and tried to understand, then he was shut down right away. Such characters made no impressions on others, no reflections on the fact that they tried to make a difference. Nothing made any difference. No reflections. No trace of each other. But some of them tried so damn hard.
So he couldn't understand.
And he didn't understand why the words were suddenly strange and beautiful to him now. They evoked odd sensations from somewhere in his gut. He didn't understand why he was actually reading books. He liked living and doing things, and reading about the fictional (hence created, not real, fake) people who were having a very much better time than he was wasn't supposed to be a good thing. Just because now he knew what vicarious was to his skin, it didn't mean he was any less stupid than a night before.
But these books... He was reading books. Which meant she was everywhere. Rory was everywhere he looked, everything he did. He took after her now.
She was everywhere, and he hated her because, to her, he wasn't.
Sometime between sixth and seventh ride:
Somewhere between Stars Hollow and Hartford.
He got hungry, so he got off and had two hotdogs.
A postcard had arrived a few days ago. It was for his sister from a friend in Chicago.
He thought of Tristan.
The Sun Also Rises, on chapter 2.
She still doesn't get to have you.
Afternoon:
On the way home.
When the time was close to the recess hour of school, he went home, where his parents couldn't discuss his future with him and could not ask him about what happened with Rory, where his sister would still be growing up and trying on different lipsticks that looked quite frankly ridiculous on her. He stopped at the front gate. His truck looked so welcoming that he had to slip inside and feel it once again. His car didn't talk back, and it was always under his control. Always his friend. At least he could have this much.
He wanted to drive.
But not yet. He had to have a normal dinner with his family and pretended everything was all right.
He waited for the night.
Twilight:
Backyard.
His first love was a busted yellow Volkswagen with bumps and irregular scratch marks, family size and far from new, but always dependable and infinitely loved by the eight-year-old boy who had first learned to play with a real engine (albeit a broken one) when he was seven and drove for the first time (albeit very illegally) at nine. Before a brand new toolbox was found under the tree with a note 'With love, from Mom and Dad' in one Christmas morning, he had already experienced the engine hum underneath his skin, the vibration that spoke in length without a single word and explained what the perfection was. He had even learned what it was like to love the black smudges of the car oil that ruined his shirts every time. Dean at ten held the toolbox and thought this love affair was going to last forever.
Forever was such a long word, and he was now thinking about temporality.
"Dean?"
"Yeah."
"Why aren't you making cars anymore?" Clara asked, sitting on a swing and her feet dangling.
The evening sun was sinking and sinking, and Clara's curly blond hair glowed like apparition as it reflected the last of the dying sunrays. Dean watched his little sister from the porch, taking in the summer breeze and the quiet scenery of their backyard without joining her. It had been years since the two of them could sit on the swings side by side; his legs were too long now that he would have to be folded just to fit in.
His tools had been left unused for weeks, rusting and eroding.
His sister, along with his parents, eventually noticed.
He had no answer to give. He said, "Want me to push?"
His sister's smile was brighter than the midday sun.
He pushed the swing gently. Clara would soon grow out of these swings as she had of barbies and crayons. She was already showing the tendency to lean toward lipsticks and perfumes over her stuffed animals. He hadn't decided how to take that just yet.
"Mom and Dad were talking about money again," she said, effectively omitting the word 'eavesdropping' on her method of gathering information, "something about, uh, loan payments."
"Really." Dean made a neutral, non-responsive response. For a reason. Because things like this reminded him that there always were real problems to worry about, not the overwought teenager angst over the dream that no longer made him happy or the expiration date that didn't seem to expire.
"Dean?" Clara asked again.
"Yeah."
"Are we in trouble?"
"No." Not yet, at least. So it wasn't a lie. Not technically.
"They said you're not gonna study engineering because we don't have enough money."
"That's not true." At least, it was not entirely true.
She turned to him, her small face filled with a serious expression. "Then tell me what is."
All kids, at once point, grew up to discover the universal fact: the world was not a rosy place and their parents would not protect them forever. The parents wanted to prolong the moment of realization as long as possible. He thought he didn't want that moment to come for his sister, just as he wanted her stuffed animals to stay instead of lipsticks and perfumes. Irrational, but there it was. Nobody said brotherly affection was supposed to be rational. But the moment he was dreading came at last, and the swing was too small for her now.
He stopped the swing. He came around and kneeled in front of his sister to meet her eyes.
"We can't afford another loan. Remember the loan for Dad's shop? And the mortgage for the house here?" She nodded gingerly and he, too, nodded. "We haven't paid them off yet. We're not in trouble, but we can't afford anything else right now. The money I've saved over the years...well, I can probably make it to community college. And I'm not smart enough for scholarship, not for university."
"But you're smart. You know everything about cars."
He almost smiled at her childish faith in her big brother that he didn't deserve. "Sometimes that's not enough."
She chewed her lower lips, thinking hard, trying so hard to understand.
Eventually everyone grows out of swings, he thought.
He couldn't bear it any more, so he ruffled her hair. "You see, that's why you have to study hard now, become smart. Then you can go to university and...do stuff."
"Like Rory?"
Strange. He remembered anger, what it truly felt like. It was supposed to simmer and boil, sizzle and prickle. Erupting the livid, scorching red-hot on the face and hell on breathing. He felt nothing now. Only his hands were cold.
"Like Rory," he agreed, a thin smile stretching over his face.
"But Dean," Clara's voice sank to an almost inaudible level, "don't you want to be an engineer?"
He thought about his busted yellow Volkswagen. How sometimes it just wasn't enough.
The first day on the internship, they had shown him the test-driving ground.
A week later, they let him use it, taking his fascination as his career interest.
Hammering down cars had become running like hell on countless nights; at some point, the running became stepping hard onto the gas pedal on midnight. He knew about the danger of the shiver that shot through his body when he pushed, pushed, pushed the pedal until he felt something snap in him, the shudder that was neither pain nor pleasure, but something he desperately needed nonetheless. Like reading anything that came to him, like chopping firewood for Christmas which was more than half a year away, like driving madly at night.
"Dean?" Clara leaned close and touched his nose with her index finger. "Is that why you don't smile any more?"
This wasn't temporal, he thought as his sister intently watched him. He loved her, and this wouldn't be temporal.
He touched her forehead with his, and smiled. "Ah, but see? A smile."
She giggled and placed a tickling kiss on his nose.
"Wanna go up high?" he asked.
She nodded eagerly, and he pushed the swing again. Her laughter filled the space they were in. Up and up. Up and away. The swing arched over the sky, coming in and out of the sunlight like a pendulum.
He hadn't stared into the sun that long, but there were sunspots in his eyesight. Blinked once, twice. Then gone. Not tears.
They shouldn't be temporal. His sister, the laughter, the twilight.
And how terribly cliché this all was. But he was a cliché boy by all accounts. Coming up with new and noble ideas to enlighten the world and increase the overall IQ of the humanity were something Rory would do, something that people like Jess or even Tristan might be able to do. Dean wasn't one of them. He was drowning in cliché, and he couldn't mind.
The only thing he did mind was that his sister grew up, the laughter died out, and the sun eventually set, taking out the light from the earth.
Night, still young:
On the road.
He drove on.
From the rear mirror, he saw the lights of Stars Hollow moving farther and farther away. They desperately beckoned at him, like the star from the town legend, but he didn't turn around. Light, light, but no port in the storm. His right foot pressed harder into acceleration, away. The speedometer was nagging at him like the loose shoelace that he always ignored and made him trip over, so he ignored it just the same.
There was no trace of him in her. He made no difference to her, no matter what she told him. He thought of meanings. She didn't love him at all. But that didn't mean anything.
PJ Harvey was blasting off his ears. The glass window rippled and danced with his own reflection.
And it was still dancing when he, from the edge of his eyesight, saw a red blur of something that shot through the dark road of the upcoming intersection like a bullet fired in light speed.
When the familiar hum of the engine became a shriek that begged for his intervention, the tires skidding and screaming against the asphalt with vengeance, he thought he could handle this, as he had always done. When the wheel slipped out from his hands, he thought, he could handle this. When a spot of violent red came to his view, like a slow motion anvil swinging toward him, like a pendulum, he thought, well, here we go again. Well.
When he actually stopped thinking, he imagined a situation. Him, in a hospital, surrounded by flowers and having a conversation, and her, with a tear-stained face running into the room.
"I must've loved you more than we both ever thought," she would say.
He would look up, surprised by her sudden entrance. He would have to look pale and sick, but grave and definitely cool.
She would proceed to his side, her expression a wreck, "You were safe, you know? Not at first, but you just became this safe, safe constant and I liked it, but it wasn't enough. Now that I know it was never safe, because I could have lost you any time. I thought, I thought... I must've loved you more than we both thought I ever did, because I thought...when I heard.. that I might never see you again--"
He would stop her tears by gently saying, "I believe you. Nothing else could make you abuse language like you just did." Because he would know, then, there was some reflection of him in her, a trace.
And he would smile, she would smile, and everything would be just beautiful.
The pendulum stopped eventually.
Time Indeterminate:
Somewhere on the road to nowhere.
He was awake now. Oh, yes, was he awake.
The outlines of things he saw through the windshield--not broken, he thought--were blurred and hazed, and the colors with distinct shades and different intensities were merged together, like a bucket with lots of paints mixed without a dime of thought. He had never seen the world like this. So clouded and dim, devoid of individual colors and shapes.
In this view, red stood out.
A metal pole with a bright red plate that read STOP. Something that the driver of that same red Mercedes-Benz had obviously decided to ignore. The red car had spun out from the road and its rear had disappeared into the side ditch.
When he somehow got out of his truck, between an airbag that had actually worked and the side mirror that didn't stay intact and began to make his way toward the Benz like a blind limp, he thought this was fitting. Poetic justice, or something.
Of course, this had been an inevitability. To be betrayed by what he wanted to trust the most. Repetition wasn't his thing, yet he just kept coming back.
The driver of the other car was unconscious. There was blood trickling down from the man's forehead. Not anyone Dean knew. Older. Bald. Drunk. Dean thought, absurdly, how car accidents were less likely to happen than the deaths by hyperventilation in Stars Hollow and whether it was an honor to set a precedent.
Dimly Dean remembered he wasn't supposed to move anyone who might have a neck injury. But the smell of gasoline leaked all over the vehicle, and he remembered the movies where cars exploded spectacularly. Then he remembered that was never likely to happen like this, and he actually knew things about cars so he should know better.
The man's pulse was beating steadily under Dean's fingertips, and only after hearing the man's groggy answer to his insistent "Are you all right?" Dean got him out of the car.
His legs gave away under him, and he thought he would fall from the face of earth. Breathing wasn't supposed to be this difficult.
He had to call somebody. He had to call--
The moon peeked behind the black cloud, half-lit the shiny road that reflected everything. The stars sparkled, carefree.
He was cold and wet, and he smelled the rain in the air. When had it rained? He remembered the freezing rains from before. The broken skies, the windshield practically attacked by pouring rain, the tires skidding and screaming against the asphalt. It felt the same now. The rain was the scent of earth and trees. Poignant and tangy, mind-cool and sweet and stuffy.
He'd seen in the movies and read in the books that the characters, in their fanciful mood, just lay down in the middle of the road, just like how he was at the moment. The gesture would usually have a meaning, fluttering toward liberation, something like that. He had wondered, fleetingly, what it would feel like. But there was nothing liberating about this. He lied down, not because it had some sort of symbolic meaning, not because it felt like something to do. Because it was the only thing left to do.
When a bunch of people arrived with flashlights and red, someone asked if he was all right.
He was most definitely not all right.
"Hey chief."
He should've been prepared. He should have been, but he wasn't. Currently surrounded by way too many flowers, Dean couldn't see who just walked into his hospital room, but her bright voice was a giveaway.
"Don't get up on my account," Lorelai said, as if he could actually get up from his position. She exchanged brief hellos with his parents and came to his side when they left him alone with her.
When she approached him, she had already taken in his sorry shape, his chest and the cast on his arm. "Wow, Dean, you look..."
"I know. The rumor of my death is greatly exaggerated." He had, by now, mastered the way of lightening up the situation when people came to visit him, not for others' sake, but for his own. Lorelai wouldn't fall for it, he knew, but he had to at least try.
Lorelai watched him, rather thoughtfully, quietly. A quiet Lorelai was a dangerous Lorelai, but she, soon, lightened up. She pulled away a case of video from her rather large handbag and tossed it on the bed casually. "I owe you this."
He picked it up, questioningly. He almost broke into a smile when he read the title.
"The Mummy Returns," she read for him, tossing her hair over her shoulder and looking mightily grave, "Thought you'd want to know how they turn the embalming god Anubis into the keeper of the death."
"Of course," he said finally, after debating whether to actually ask where she got her information and remembering that it wasn't a good idea to ask anything to Lorelai anyhow. "Thanks."
"Your rib?" she asked, her looks becoming soft and her voice gentle.
"Still broken. But healing."
She looked very maternal and almost un-Lorelai like when she said, "I'm very proud of you. You're the town's hero now."
And it wasn't something he wanted to hear. "As proved by the current state of me being stuck in this bed?"
"As proved by the current state of another man stuck in another bed who's probably alive because of you."
"Oh. That."
"You're being awfully laconic."
"It's the Jell-O."
"Yellow, red or green?"
He made a face and she smiled.
He said, "Embalming god Anubis?"
"Yep. Preparing us for our eternal afterlife. Very fashionable."
He said nothing for a long while. If he listened hard enough, he could hear the next door patient Daniel rolling and tossing on the bed.
Lorelai said, "You're a teenager. By default, you're supposed to think you'll live forever."
Dean had to ask, "You read minds, too?"
A smug smile. "It's another skill I've picked up among many when I traveled with gypsies to the New World."
"This is the New World."
"I'm bad with directions."
Another pause, and he said, "Richard?"
"Home, enjoying organic food."
"I think Emily sent me flowers. Those white ones."
"Hey, I chipped in, too."
Another pause, and Lorelai was fiddling with the things on the table beside the bed. She picked up a book, looking perfectly innocent. "Enjoying this?"
He had been wondering when she would ask, and he was actually relieved now that she had. "You can bring it back to her. I'm done. Tell her...thanks."
"Wow, that's it? Must've been some Jell-O." When he said nothing, she said, all fake smile, "Hey sport, you know what? There's a miraculous machine that lets people communicate with each other from, like, distances away. You don't even have to get up. Called telephone. You can use it sometimes. I actually feel generous enough right now to bring one up to you, and you can tell her yourself. Wanna?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"This book is several months too late."
Rory had come the first day he had landed on this bed, straight out from his imagination, with a book.
When he had asked why, her hand that was hesitantly fingering a lock of his hair, as if drawn by an incomprehensible power, as if she couldn't believe he was still here, stopped working. Her mouth opened, as if it could come up with some sort of an answer that she didn't have. Nothing came out. Silence settled between them like a feather softly falling from the sky, not oppressive, but frail and breakable.
Rory had acted the role of the mourning ex-girlfriend who realized too late her feelings so dutifully that he felt like applauding for her.
Dean handed the book to Lorelai.
"The last moment, I thought I could avoid the full collision. I was certain I had the control over my car. I knew I could turn at the right moment. It didn't work. The Benz hit my passenger side and spun out of control. Just like that. I wonder what might have happened if we didn't meet two years ago. If I didn't ask her to help me get a job, if she didn't yell at me about Rosemary's Baby, if she didn't talk about the round cakes. They say the good stuff outweighs the bad. Overall, even a bad relationship is supposed to be good in the end. You know, if I can take them all back now, I would."
Lorelai began, "Dean--"
"It's over."
Everyone grew out of swings.
His first love was a busted yellow Volkswagen with bumps and irregular scratch marks, family size and far from new, but always dependable and infinitely loved by the eight-year-old boy. Dean at ten held the toolbox and thought this love affair was going to last forever. Dean at sixteen took one look at the girl with amazing concentration and thought about forever.
Forever was such a long word, and he was now thinking about temporality.
No more swings for Clara, no more Dean for Rory. No more cars for Dean.
All very temporal.
TBC...
(Things must go down before they can come up, things must go...)