Ragnarök

Twenty-Two: The Inferno

At quarter-to-ten, earlier than the past two occasions, Bernadette's Oklahoma number vibrates his cell. Mason wants to take this call somewhere private, out of the widow's earshot. Normally this would mean his bedroom, but that cold empty catacomb is no longer an option. He settles for the basement, a catacomb in its own right, shutting the door behind him, answering the phone as he creaks downstairs.

She gives no justification for calling this time beyond that she enjoys talking with him. He assures her the feeling is mutual, cushioning the touch of embarrassment heard in her confession. Again, his woes and worries start to trickle from the foreground. He pulls up an overturned milk crate to sit on, his back against the washing machine, cool and smooth through his shirt, and loses himself to the vicarious experience of trucker life.

Bernadette is excited about her upcoming vacation at the Florida timeshare. She's been there once before, not alone but as a guest of her brother's family, and paints for Mason a portrait of the beach hamlet, Lupalito.

"Not a whole lot happens in Lupalito. T-shirt stands, ice cream parlors. Pretty good nightlife for how small it is. I think about five-thousand people live there year-round." She describes the competing music that filters from tiki bars after sundown, the papaya sunsets over blackening water, the chance encounters with alligators along the shoreline or near creek beds. "I'm deathly afraid of all reptiles. That's my only complaint. I mean, they're dinosaurs, aren't they? I know it sounds horrible, but part of me wishes they would die out. The Age of the Lizard is over! Move aside already. We shouldn't have to worry about being eaten by gators in this day and age."

Bernadette is a born talker, a self-diagnosed oversharer, a woman who reveals herself incrementally and unwittingly through her tangents. Just like Liza. Though drawn to this personality type, he's drawn primarily by his inability to relate and cringes to think what would manifest if his inhibitions ever broke down enough that he could ramble in such a way. What conclusions would be drawn from his tangents? What would people see in Mason that he himself has only a vague, repressed inkling of? Would they label him a walking nightmare, a vessel of contagious trauma? Someone it was healthier to avoid?

Adolescence is routinely painted as a period of self-discovery. A cynic might recast it as a period of self-butchery, where you gouge out the more heterodox aspects of your personality, reasoning that it's better to be a spectator than an exhibit.

Once she's exhausted the subject of Florida, Bernadette veers the conversation down a more mystical road. "You know, something strange has been going on since I started talking to you."

"Oh yeah?"

"I've been having this recurring dream. Mind you, recurring dreams are nothing unusual for me. I've been having the same one about being chased by a man in a blue jogging suit since I was four years old. But usually they're spaced out. This one though—this one has repeated note-for-note the past two nights, and I just can't shake the feeling it's going to happen again tonight. It's so lucid. I haven't got it out of my head all day . . . Obviously not, or I wouldn't be talking about it."

"Tell me."

"You won't be annoyed? I know lots of people hate hearing about dreams. Me personally, I'm fascinated by them."

"So am I," he says to be agreeable.

"It starts out I'm in this old hotel. It's real fancy but covered in dust. Like like the place has been abandoned for years. We're talking gold chandeliers, wine-colored carpeting, whitewashed walls, and plenty of windows overlooking this enormous gray body of water.  So I wander around for a while and inevitably get lost. I just can't pin down the layout. There's no entrance, no exit. The door of every suite I try is locked. And every window has the exact same view. It's like the place is built on a really steep island, one that isn't much bigger than the hotel itself. Anyway, bizarre dream nonsense. The second time I had it, I kept waiting for him to appear. I just figured he'd be back. That he was the only one there."