‘Pulses Synched and Fading’

Pulses Synched and Fading 

Twenty-third floor. King bed. Watching films with your sweetheart in a room papered red-orange with horseshoes, floating far above the Vegas strip. This is the end of cooking, cleaning, washing, rinsing, sweeping, mopping, and drying ... it’s strange but you actually miss your routine. He digs into a paper bag from Johnny Rockets and you walk over to the window and pull the cotton liner that softens the sun apart, to catch the setting winter sun. Feet sore from walking. You look down upon the expanse of city and boulevards tapering off into desert encircled by mountains. You asked for the highest floor possible to match your spirit, dignified, where the body of work and deadlines and overdue bills and chores and caregiving is felled by the coup de grâce. 

You lose one another out there in the crowds spilling out of hotels. You text him you call him and he says he will find you and you wait and wait like you are six years old again, in the seventies, when your mom used to leave you locked in the car in the strip mall parking lot because you refused to go dress shopping with her. Stubborn and you paid a heavy price for it. Hours later sobbing and fearful like she was never coming back, ever again. It’s the same dagger-to-the-heart like he ditched you when all he really is is disoriented by billboards and lights, Bellagio fountains shooting fifty feet into the air, flagship casinos, mirrors and pixels and music and street performers. You tend to disappear without trying, cutting out like a poor connection. When he finally finds you you refuse his embrace and narrow your eyes and a switch flips and he goes off on you and you trade insults until you break down and cry.

You wiggle your toes in your slippers and yawn. You understand it now for what it was, how it was actually your fault. You were the one who jay-walked that cross street without a care. He was still cautious. He wasn’t gonna risk getting struck by some aberrant tourist in a Tesla truck distracted by all the commotion. 

You get over yourself rather slowly. When you’ve lived through certain traumas, emotions become time-release flashbacks. Any medium can help distract them … midway through the black and white rendition of A Christmas Carol you both fall out. You wake up and go out while he’s sleeping into the tall and electric night, the Flamingo marquee flashing and gyrating … you are no longer who you once were … you will not follow any impulses headlong into danger and excitement … you will not feel the need to get faded and grip the night into dawn. In these moments you are as your brother describes you: Zen. 

You sleep in because you can, here at the tail end of fifty weeks of work. Nobody’s gonna throw open the sash or drop a coin in a boy’s hand to fetch the largest turkey. You dial up room service and rejoice in breaking free from intergenerational family holiday dysfunction. You need not wonder what to do next, there are a thousand possibilities … your thoughts tend to orbit the caseload of fifty or more clients you left in California: the one who lost her baby to medical malpractice … the one whose heart aches with regret … the one who turns to sex work because she cannot get a job … the one forced into early retirement and trying to find his purpose … the kid, anxious with cell phone, picking at the face and pulling out the hair … the neurodivergent who discovered a felt sense of belonging in polyamory … the one who cannot relax, whose body is breaking down long after a childhood disrupted by the narcissistic parent …. These thoughts are not unwanted. If you get inspired you might land on an idea or two that might help someone. You no longer can compartmentalize (and you no longer want to) because letting your career seep into your identity is a key to survival. 

A decade ago you were underwater in debt and experiencing psychosis and unable to work, your equifax scores in the gutter and it was the least of your problems. A possession charge marred your record. You got into treatment and got a therapist and a psychiatrist and took your medication. Executive dysfunction was your middle name. When you got well enough you were hired by a nonprofit and started counseling again, completed a diversion program and resuscitated your standing, appearing several times before the Board of Behavioral Sciences. You stood and spoke from the heart and they listened, half expecting you to falter like the guy who stood up before you and declared with frustration that he did not see the point in all the hoops they made him jump through, he felt put upon, yes, it was true he had a DUI arrest but the piss tests and AA meetings were a waste of time because he didn’t have a problem! You had no such bravado. Addiction was a long game with life or death stakes and - being your own hardest critic - you realized that if you wanted to be given another shot at becoming a licensed professional, you would have to demand of yourself a higher echelon of attention. You confronted the problem head on and thanked them for the guard rails … and they welcomed you back. The only request you made of them (and the only request they refused) was to please strike your dead name from the record. 

Eight hundred miles from home. Visions of Paiute country and solar farms in your head. You are amazed you can actually go places and take annual week-long vacations together in a VW you don’t need to make payments on that turbo charges ahead and does not break down and handles the ascent into snow country and over the Sierras like a champion. People ask you - why not fly? Because. You have to have contact. Feel the grain of the land coming up into the seats through the suspension. This is your thawing meditation. You begin to remember who you are beneath all the go go go, to feel all the feelings you never had time for; the pressure releases and all the threads you cut and buried all year long to survive reconnect … gratitude runs so deep you don’t even need an experience. You are no longer bent on self-destruction, getting in your own way, sleepless, beating your body down. He was like you - didn’t stand a chance and by some miracle learned to love again. You found one another clawing up from the bottoms … you don’t need whistles and bells or VIP anything. 

On the job you got promotion after promotion all the way up to Clinical Director with a corner office and redwood desk. You barricaded yourself in there many a lunch break fighting your imposter syndrome. Your colleagues were mostly congenial but you resonated more with the ones who came to see you, one hour at a time, who reminded you of your past … relying on general government assistance or unemployment … homeless or couch surfing … unable to hold on to anything good … using innovative yet often dangerous methods to get by … in and out of locked institutions and treatment programs … disheveled feeling useless and hopeless … mired in quicksand. They discovered you would not judge them and many opened up. The first sessions were often pure venting to clear the earth for deeper excavations. When a regular suddenly ghosted you and did not return your calls you cogitated and agonized. You could do a welfare check if they had an address or simply go out and knock and their door … if they failed to refill their psych meds, sometimes it meant they were dead. One of the worst parts of your job was calling the county coroner to get a date of death for the incident report. 

Artist Theodoor Grimes

You are jumping up and down on the bed in the lingerie he bought you at the adult video store … you fall into his arms and he holds you … you make out for a while … laughing like hyenas … giddy like kids … then disoriented and wondering what to do … trying to decide … fuck it - let’s take a nap … strange night terrors … waking up stressed like you died in an accident of some kind … time keeps changing speeds ... you wonder, is this the dream of some other reality? You worry it will end in a flash and resign itself to memory. 

You hunger for every second. You wake up at four am when you would normally feed the cats and walk half asleep with your hair strewn about to the lobby to buy a latté at the LavAzza, where the barista winks at you from under her Santa hat, and soft tops you with a generosity of whipped cream. You dip your muzzle in like a horse. You take the cloud on like a fighter pilot and sip until you can see the edge of the paper cup. You whinny and trot past the red-eyed sleepless denizens who shot through space to join you in this strange land … then up, up and away. Let the heavy door shut quietly behind you … deadbolt it … turn on the tv with the volume muted so not to wake him … closed captions. Charlie Brown is walking with Linus through the snow. He’s depressed. Saying how despite it being Christmas he still feels unhappy. He’s so true with his melancholy.

You place your coffee on the marble table between the lamp and the phone and drift back to sleep. Linus takes his thumb out of his mouth to remark on the scene. Isn’t it fascinating, Charlie Brown, how some adults can drink a whole pot of coffee and still fall asleep? 

You are good citizens in the proletariat. Balancers of checkbooks and accounts, massaging your Credit Karma. You winch your student loan out of default and finally pay it off. You have a little nest egg which is sporadically cracked open by unforeseen expenses on car repairs, hospital bills, pet vet bills … home repairs. Being an essential healthcare worker in the midst of the pandemic enabled you to save and scrape up for a mortgage and lock in the low rates before they climbed out of reach. He got his big divorce and somehow kept his house with the help of a lawyer and a reverse mortgage, and kept on working. He had your back and you had his. The day you signed the papers was glorious. Joyful and triumphant. 

Your body relaxes into his and he rolls over with a sleepy groan and away from you. You bury your emotions and press into him. They are only made up in your mind, these waves, cresting and falling until they cease … like what if he doesn’t really love you? You duck down and let them wash over and come up into the foamy hissing brine … inhale and push your hair out of your face and stare down the horizon. Here comes a big one rising fifty feet in the air … its shadow obscures you … you go under with the eyes of a starfish. Don’t let it take you off your feet, Charlie Brown. You dive into the neurosis and confront all its lies … he wouldn’t have road-tripped out into the desert if he did not want to … he would not be up here in the sky with you, if he did not love you. He is notoriously scared of heights!

He is not without insecurities. Like if he sees you super friendly with another guy or irritable and the tone of your voice changes … all that residual energy pushing up and you argue over seemingly nothing, senselessly, and he cannot understand what he’s done but he did not mean it … he gets proud then fearful and angry at you, then lethargic and overcome by inertia. He misses his routine, too. Daydreaming on the highways at two am with eighty thousand pounds of gravel or cement on his back … driving four hundred miles a day opening hatches and switching trailers leaves a dull throbbing pain in his knees and shoulders. He has flare ups and you give him Aleve and take him down to the lobby to distract him. You cash in your Nescafé jar full of change you saved up from recycling and you both play Keno until you tire of it … a well-dressed man in a tailored suit shouts out, winning at craps. A woman in her ugly Christmas sweater smokes endless cigs, drinking complimentary vodka tonics, ass planted in the chair. She dreamily presses the button again and again, betting a single credit on a penny slot until all her pennies are gone … looks up like she can see through all twenty-three floors to a former version of herself in you, saturated in starched sheets, beneath him, crying out … making love up in the sky, for eternity, like nothing was lost. 

You take a shower. He gets in with you and you sing a soap opera at the top of your lungs. There is always physical pain to endure and you teach him a trick where you can visualize the body melting away. Then it’s back to the beautiful madness … you look out the windows at one end of a bank of elevators to see the new kid in town, a real stunner! They call him the Sphere. He has been bought, for sure he’s a walking advertisement, but his Jupiter impression is sensational … he fell out of orbit and burned through the earth’s atmosphere and landed like any other misfit in this town stepping off a Greyhound bus, ass on fire, a helium and hydrogen storm in slow rotation. 

The bell chimes … the elevator fills up, floor by floor, going down … you compliment an Iranian woman on her jeweled necklace. She tells you she came to see a Persian concert and you talk about similarities and differences between cultures until your ears pop. In the lobby you sit down and watch him blow twenty bucks in sixty seconds on a poker game. He will do this again and again, divining a game with faith that it will be the lucky one that gives. He tells you about the old days how when you hit a jackpot you would need a bucket for all the coins pouring from their mouths … now you just get a printed receipt. What a tragedy. 

You walk through a hallway connecting hotels being mopped by a lifesize statue of a custodian … you take a shot of him standing arm in arm with his new friend he calls my comrade, a working stiff just like me … faux cobblestones lead to cigar rooms and crêpe restaurants and cafés … another casino sits under the legs of the Eiffel Tower who tired of France, apparently, and walked across the Atlantic and crashed into the ceiling of the Paris Hotel … all fun and games until someone loses their life savings … a poodle leads the owner around … in the rafters a pigeon takes flight and glides down toward the grass green surfaces then ascends and perches on a cross bar of the Tower. It does not seem to mind being trapped in this luxurious enclave. Like you. Paid for an escape room you do not wish to escape … so you won’t have to contend with the magnitude of things.

Sometimes you are visited by a shadow of regret, the missteps of the past clutching at your heart. It’s not a pretty lens and you cannot change it out and there will be more missteps to come. You think of your carelessness with yourself and others and how you courted danger and adrenaline, and the gods chose many times by a narrow margin to let you live, after you took things too far. 

On a winter day in the Mojave Desert you gotta keep moving if you hope to stay warm, but seasons may as well not exist for Elvis impersonators and feathered ladies in heels. You stay close to your man. He looks distinguished, the dark caramel of his leather jacket against his shock of silver hair. Mexican. Apache. You are wearing your Brooks runners and tights and you are still taller than he is in his boots. You are blurred in the background of tourist photographs and surveillance cameras with your arms crossed in a rose-colored velour hoodie: white girl, simple vanilla, leaning back into railings. 

You pass through a tapestry of accents and dialects: French, British, Spanish and Portuguese, Farsi, Tagalog, Chinese … an American is talking out the side of his mouth. Anybody wan some yeyo? The crowd is getting thick, you have to push your way around but somehow it seems like you never get touched ... your sweetheart played football so all you have to do is get behind him and follow … there’s a man in a wheelchair with a microphone and amp singing along to R&B hits … couples pushing strollers (a stand-up comedian you saw ranted about this: If you bring your babies to Vegas you need to be slapped!) Women in thongs with boas move in for photos … digital billboards project on the sides of hotels advertising upcoming new year celebrations … salespeople at store fronts hawk their wares … men hand out flyers for strip shows … long plastic straws suck up daiquiris getting heads faded all day long into the night … youths turn buckets over and drum fanatically for change. Everybody’s got to make a living … two young women scantily dressed with silver stars covering their nipples. 

You argue in front of the Pinball Hall of Fame. You asked him to be flush for the trip and he said he would and then ran out of cash, and the nearest Wells Fargo is over a mile away. He won’t carry more than a fifty in his wallet and he won’t use any random ATM machine and he hates plastic, doesn’t trust it … stubborn like you. The scent of weed smoke, flower and tobacco pervades the air. You wish you could just drop the whole thing and step on it, but it doesn’t work that way so you put one foot in front of the other and walk off the Strip to the middle of nowhere … it kills you and then dies a natural death … you don’t have anything to say to him that would be kind or nice or loving so you keep your mouth shut. He asks where do we go? You refuse to help. Check your own damn phone and figure it out. There must be consequences. He curses at you and it drives you back into madness in your heart and mind … a mixture of cortisol and despair … all the hurt feelings. Burn the whole thing down. 

Once he’s flush with cash he pays for a cab back to the HOF - to make up for it - and you fall back in sync … on a roll with a 1960’s machine that keeps dropping shiny free silver balls … you are kids again, gleefully switching off and cheering each other on. All the years and you never had a streak quite like this one … an hour later the machine has worn you out … you search the room for a boy or girl (pinball wizards need not apply) and a boy approaches (pockets turned inside out) and you share your sweet dilemma and he looks at you like ghosts, thinking what’s the trick? Finally he steps up and takes over with a smile the size of the Grand Canyon and you continue south to Mandalay Bay … where a few years back a high roller broke out his hotel room window and shot down a concert full of people. You don’t want to talk about it but you do. How being wealthy cannot save you from losing your actual mind. You don’t want to think about violence and mayhem (or elephants) but it’s part of the fabric … 

You hold hands inside the Luxor where it’s spacious and cool and dark, romantic, and stare up to the very point at the top of the pyramid … you cross your arms like Pharaohs entombed in the Valley of the Kings … missing yourselves, the known quantity, the worker bees with the mission. The what ifs come on stage … what if we moved to Nevada? He asks. There’s plenty of work and it’s more affordable. We could make it. 

You are eternally grateful to have a career you are passionate about and a forever partner and these chance adventures … sleeping together in the immaterial light of cable television until it’s time to check out … you forget to drop the key cards into the bin and take them with you … wait! … he hustles over to his comrade before you take the escalator up to the parking garage and offers him words of encouragement and see you again soon I hope … driving back home through the desert with the sunrise behind you and seven eleven coffee … time is turning over like the engine and rolling like the wheels … outposts and cacti and solar farms the dry side of the Sierras … over the hills where they farm the wind with giant windmills … a postmodern Don Quixote … dropping down into the lush central valley to Bakersfield then north on Highway 5, cutting through all the endless farmland. There are rows upon rows of crops and countless men and women laboring long hard days, sun up to sundown, harvesting the bounty of grapes, peaches, apricots, plums, olives, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, tomatoes, lettuce, artichokes, and cotton. You don’t have to see it to believe it but it helps if you do. One quarter of the nation’s food supply comes from here. Many will work here their entire lives long, sending money south to support their families. Some will be deported. Some will become foremen and dual citizens. Some will be appreciated for their contributions … many will not. 

The sky swells up and cries … the wipers full bore by the time you reach Fresno. You stop for gas, jerky and water. He offers to drive and you are thankful you won’t need an energy drink to continue. The storm expands from here to Sacramento where the roads are like shallow rivers and the farmland becomes one giant lake - the Yolo Bypass - an engineering marvel that saves the city from flooding. The clouds have turned the world gray … cars are pulling over … nobody can see more than a couple feet in front of them … fog lights rendered useless. 

The starfish has many eyes. One at the end of each arm. It is incapable of osmoregulation but can focus and respond to light, even when its eyespots are covered. They say the starfish cannot plan its actions. If any part of it senses something attractive it just goes for it and pulls the whole star along. Not unlike addiction. Drawing you into spiraling situations you could not have imagined, let alone planned. 

It all happens so fast. A big rig comes into your lane and pushes your car into a spin on the freeway … 

From one eye you see the material world in all of its pixelated beauty and horror. The temptations and soul crushing poverty and wealth. From another you see your desire. Your impulse to avoid all discomfort and pain. Another shows you what you could not see before, when you were young, discouraged and suicidal. This eye is fearless and loves you fiercely for all that you are, irregardless of how you may be perceived … born into a culture that tends to reduce everyone and thing … binary cognitions because that’s the simplest form to digest … who has time for spectrums and continuums? A world that likes to define you and control you and feed you the latest rendition of some perfectly crafted American way of being … plugged through media that bullies and belittles and wants to knock you off the margins. This eye sees how pain and hardship are inevitable and can be faced, and you cannot fully grow if you deny yourself them. This eye is always open and makes contact with the world. 

He is the unhinged valiant effort that comes from generations of Apache on his mother’s side … he crawls to you to shelter you despite the fatal wounding … you rest your head on his shoulder … laid out in a perfect disaster of car parts and shattered glass, in the middle of Highway 5 North. 

A battalion of headlights, a quarter mile deep and growing … the first responders arrive … the rain and oil run your blood to the edges of the road and off into the ditches to irrigate the farms and give strength to growing crops … your pulses synched and fading. All the inaccessible feelings and memories come on stage and your heart is fuller than ever … you close all your eyes except for one, the one that’s always open, feeling the road through a different suspension … a new lens … not needing a plan or a destination any longer … responding only to the light that the darkness needs to exist, ever present, filtered through the cotton of clouds ….

Twenty-third floor. King bed. Watching films with your sweetheart in a room papered red-orange with horseshoes, floating far above the Vegas strip. This is the end of cooking, cleaning, washing, rinsing, sweeping, mopping, and drying. It’s strange but you actually miss it.

Katya Mills is a nonbinary writer and licensed psychotherapist in California. They like to help people envision and re-author the stories of their lives. Katya holds a literature degree from Northwestern University and their work has recently appeared in Journal X (Cabrillo College), New Words Press, and Meniscus Literary Journal. The characters they create often have marginalized identities and are figuring their way out of a learned self-dislike. Their work can also be found on Goodreads.

Theodoor Gabriella Malaika Grimes (They/He) is a Black gender expansive digital artist known for his vibrant illustrations that center the queer experience under the moniker ggggrimes. Based in the Bronx, Theodoor is entirely self taught. ggggrimes’ work expresses brilliantly colorful, lush, and tranquil depictions of queer life while recognizing the significance of interdisciplinary spirituality and cultural identity held by trans people of color.