Page 2 of Jacob Michaels is Not Here

Why didn’t I know if Oma’s house was affected?

Why didn’t I know…anything?

Putting one foot in front of the other, I entered Barkley’s, not feeling the heat of the random roaring fires still burning inside. I walked through the vacant and desolate store, stepping over toppled and spilled paint cans, piles of tools, puddles of screws and nails, fallen ceiling tiles and exposed wires, wondering how a once thriving business could suddenly look like a scene from a dystopian novel. I walked down aisles, unsure what I was looking for or how I would find it. The shelves on either side of me littered with detritus and a few lucky products that had not been damaged. The raging fires cast eerie shadows throughout the store as I made my way to the rear of the store.

The check-out counter and register area had completely folded in on itself, a pile of useless technology and wood, charred and sending up wisps of smoke. I stood there, staring down at the piles of…nothing…wondering once again whether or not Lucas had been present when the store had been…attacked? More questions swirled through my head that I knew I would not get answers to that would satisfy my curiosity. The scene laid out before me inside of Barkley’s Hardware let me know that nothing would diffuse my confusion about the things I was seeing. As I strolled through the store, it dawned on me that I could not feel the heat of the fire or smell the smoke. The soot and ash did not settle upon my skin and make me feel dirty. It was almost as though I was removed from the situation in which I found myself.

Exiting through the automatic sliding glass doors into the back area of the store that contained gardening items and lumber was easy. The doors had shattered outward, spraying glass all over the concrete beyond; I merely had to step through the frame of the door. Outside, in the dark of night once again, fires raging in the town around me, I found that the back part of the store was just as bad as the interior. Plants were strewn about, bags of mulch and soil and concrete mix had been blown open, spewing their contents like the world’s dingiest New Year’s Eve party had ended. Standing there just beyond the doorway, I surveyed the damage, still going over a list of questions in my head.

Groaning sounds, as though being broadcast through water, emanated from a few yards away on my right. Without a second thought—though I felt that I was not being led by my own thought processes—I turned robotically on my heels and headed towards noise. In the corner, sat on the floor, his back against a pile of half-disintegrated bags of mulch, was Mr. Barkley. His face was bloodied, half of his face indistinguishable from a flat of hamburger meat as he groaned and gasped, his chest heaving and falling with each panicked breath.

His shirt was in tatters under his overalls, and the legs of the garment were shredded and charred by the fire. Most of his hair had been burned away, and I wasn’t sure that his eye on the wounded side of his face was completely intact. Mr. Barkley looked like he had been worked over by a meat grinder. A meat grinder that had also been on fire. When I approached him, his eyes darted up to mine, stricken with fear. Our eyes locked as he gasped a final time.

“He’s coming.”

Then Mr. Barkley’s eyes closed, his chest heaved one last time, and he went still. Standing there, staring down at the body Mr. Barkley had once inhabited, I wondered why I was not panicking instead of planning to walk back through the store and out onto the street. But that was where I found myself suddenly, unaware of how I had arrived from the back of Barkley’s Hardware. The town was still partially and eerily illuminated by sporadic fires throughout town, but Barkley’s was no longer there. There wasn’t a pile of burning rubble or debris strewn about like after a major catastrophe. The lot to my right, where Barkley’s had been, was now just a slab of concrete on the street, as though waiting for someone to build a new store.

I turned away, something about that blank space made it difficult to keep looking at it. Instead of looking at where Barkley’s used to be, I walked in an even measure down the street towards the Sunny Side Up Café. Why had Carlita been on Main Street in Point Worth? She lived in Toledo as far as I knew. What had brought her to town—especially on a night when something like this would happen? Of course, I had no idea what happened, so how was I to know if Carlita being in town was unusual? In fact, I didn’t know Carlita’s habits or anything about her life in general—other than she was a drag performer—so, it might not have been all that unusual for her to be in Point Worth at all.

My vision suddenly blurred, and I felt a sharp pain right between my eyes, and I stopped in my tracks, wincing at the feeling emanating from within my skull. Instinctively, I bent down and put my hands against my knees, bracing myself as the lightning bolt of pain shot through my head and made everything in front of my eyes dance like I was on a bad acid trip. Firelight continued to dance, making everything I saw look like it was coming from behind a veil of gasoline fumes. As if out of place frames had been inserted into a glitchy reel of film, a dark figure appeared farther down the street, snapping in and out of the movie playing before me.

Shaking my head to chase away the pain and to clear my vision, the figure blinked out of existence and the haziness altering my vision slowly evaporated. I kept my hands against my knee for a few moments longer as I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself. The sharp pain in my head eased until I felt nothing at all. I righted myself and carried on down the street, looking around slowly for the dark figure. Without question, I knew it was crazy, but I knew the dark figure that had appeared in the street. Even with the pain behind my eyes and the hazy vision…I knew it.

Outside of the café, I didn’t bother climbing the steps to enter but instead stepped around them to the side of the café to peer through one of the large windows. Just as I had expected, I was sitting on one side of a booth, and Lucas was across from me. Only, it was Lucas and me as we had been during our high school years. A little thinner, a little lankier, a little more awkward, a lot younger. We were talking animatedly to each other across the tabletop, smiling widely as we kept company with each other there in the Sunny Side Up Café.

Only, that wasn’t true.

The Sunny Side Up Café had not existed when we were in high school.

It had been The Red Rooster Tavern.

We never would have been allowed inside at night at that age.

It had been twenty-one and up after dark.

Neither teenage Rob nor teenage Lucas saw me standing there, staring at them through the window of the tavern. They continued their conversation, hands gesturing wildly and excitedly, smiles shared, stories told, obvious affection passing through looks and body language. I smiled tightly at the scene before my eyes. Lucas and I had never been to The Red Rooster Tavern at night, only during the day. But I liked watching the two of us there together anyway.

Once, Lucas had taken me out onto the lake in a rowboat Jackson Barkley, his grandfather had owned. It wasn’t the only time we had found ourselves in the rowboat on the lake, but we had laid back together and watched the stars and talked about our dreams. We had imagined that each star was a dream we had cast out into the universe, begging for…something…to hear our desires. To grant us a wish. I remembered those dreams. Those wishes. None of my dreams or wishes involved becoming famous—in any way. There had been plenty of wild things I had wished and hoped for, but fame had not been one of those things. A single tear slid down my cheek, and I quickly brushed it away with the back of my hand.

“Do you like remembering?”

I didn’t even start at the sound of the voice.

I had expected it. And I knew the voice.

“This isn’t a real memory,” I replied evenly, my eyes staying on the two boys inside of the tavern.

“No.”

The hooded figure stepped up beside me, its face peering through the window as well. Glancing out of the corner of my eye, I could only see the figure’s nose peeking out from within the depths of the hood. My eyes went back to Lucas and me inside of the tavern.

“Why is it here?” I asked. “This memory?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” The figure replied. “This is the memory of the time the two of you obtained fake identification and, even though Clancy knew you were not old enough, he overlooked it. Your first real date.”

“That never happened.”

“Are you so sure?”