Wilderness of Mirrors

By David Barlow

These stories offer myriad view of ourselves. Men, women, children, teens, adults, oldsters, each with a certain self to face down. From a neo-noir gumshoe to the vast empties of a lost child, a dropped wallet to the end of our universe, Wilderness of Mirrors seeks to mix it up. Of course nobody ever really shakes their own approach, not that they shouldn't try. What you won't find are stories of cruelty. That being said life in time spares nobody; these dings add up to everyone we are not. And that's who you confront in the pinch.

BTW, you want retro-chic? Over the lengthy stretch these were written many have become inadvertent time capsules. Thanks technology!

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Barlow
• Release date: Jul 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370781379

David Barlow

Author, novelist, screenwriter, poet, fiction (and other keywords) David Barlow grew up in the cushy suburban digs of Ridgewood, New Jersey. Graduating up there in his class at Emerson College with a BFA in creative writing he pilgrimaged to Los Angeles for the script business. Skittering through several big Hollywood near-misses David plied a trade in writing copy, PR, and professional collateral. All while honing that edge for prose, verse, etc. Some time now those efforts have been enjoyed from the wilds of New Hampshire.

Book preview

Wilderness of

Mirrors

short stories

David Barlow

© 2016

Cover photo World’s End by Jeppe Hein

Table of Contents

Killer Apps

Last Dream Before Waking

Sentiment Analysis

Blinking Against the Sun

Inoperable

Tree Lover

Almost Everything

SNUFF

Source of Male Aggression

The Last Time I Saw Stevie

Hedging Nature

A Lifetime Original

Prozac Achievers

Preserves

Another Rude Awakening

RidingAlone

Watching that First Balloon Go

Patron Saint of Flat Tires

What Got Me

My Morning Constitutional

Dysappearance

How the Trouble Started

Retrospective

Mr. Mojo Resin

Freefall

Cautionary Christmas Carol

Lost in August

Outside In

When the World Ended

A Lifetime Original

Don Juan Approximately

Killer Apps

It’s not supposed to be this way. As class proto-brain you wore the purple sash, gave that inane speech. A lazy army of peers sat in formation. More than one mimicked your oopsie from the prom. The dawn of the digital age! you declared. Write some code, start a software co, take it public, retire at 30! The jugwine of their attention colored your budding visionary. Then buy a football team, feed Mother Theresa, whatever man!

Surely you orated your way into some action. Girls that night floated by pulsed into the party, only a few paused to say anything at all. No prob. Let them grind away at college, come next commencement you’d be smiling from Forbes.

A pounding at your bus window. High school floods down from whence it came, a guy in a handsewn necktie runs alongside doing everything to make you make them stop.

True determination. It raged in you then like an implacable hormone. After a decade waking with a little more on your pillow each morning those memories are a nag.

The commute lately, lost aspirations parade past like all the women you’ll never have.

Write some code, Goals Part A proceeds apace. 80 hours later your twenties dissolve to featureless weeks and a single endless program. A good company-man with a file of flattery and its annual five. Pathetic to the kid at the podium. In fact the entire senior class catches on, some dweeb stares up pointing, Bro has no clothes!

Startup biz, initial public offering, you had it all for a while. Greenlight from the v/c, an office, an edge. Contracts. Chrissake you were 21. Q3 the dot-com bubble burst. A pharisee at Digital Age top-tenned you on worst investments. A decade now, a full third of your existence on this planet, and that old specter haunts. Tech has no Act Two.

The bus moans on, big belching Gotham awaits you and a million more lumps of coal. Criminal what it takes to reach that frontier town the future still gets invented. Not like the old days when common rubes patent a paperclip and retire to Newport.

The driver hauls into the terminal lost in his strange forever-ride. Nothing bothers him because everything already has. Fasten that trophy overcoat. Your problem is the dream’s dead but you cuddle it all night long.

Chest slopping exhaustion, work the lab-rat maze. Reaching the sidewalk winter bursts fall’s window sharp as glass. Lean into the last nine blocks to your cubicle. All they’ve made off you by now, here’s the kicker: lunchtable blowhards brainstorm the next killer app, three or four of these golden tickets ever roll around your head. Had you a grand for every go-getter who brought to market what you sat on. Of course you need money to make money, that and time.

Get mired and those loud conclusions make a guy old.

The usual group bustles along, soon winnowed to the final five. Simultaneous busses, years now you walk the same streets to the same building, but the elevator stops on different floors so no one interacts. A daily purgatory of smalltalk isn’t what everybody’s missing.

Amidst the mindless school your swim stops.

The knot continues oblivious, leaving you alone and reckless. Boldly turn left. Three extra minutes it takes this way but survival must sometimes indulge that call of the wild.

A heady loss of routine strides your overcoat on like a sepia ad for cologne. The wind shreds through skeletal limbs. Thanksgiving has launched that giant wind-up toy to lumber out the year, a season so joyful a festive ribbon gets printed on beer labels.

Sedate wreaths at each doorway, brownstones press up tight and featureless in denial of the riches within. You should live here, not wizened old crows who reek of lemondrops and endow their cats. Could be you up ahead bounding down steps with the spring of an easy winner. A dark sedan waits to whisk you off to chair the board or save the whales. Pause before entering; that bare-ass schlub across the street can’t but gawk at the likes of you.

Check yourself. Across the empty street a little black lump rests on the sidewalk.

Beeline. A tony men’s purse if that frilly word graduated. Embossed EO dark polished leather reflects a dumbed face. Not even a fishline, and is it fat! Glance around for nosy heiresses. Just walk true determination commands. Walk but do not run.

Was your cubicle ever more womb-like? Safe and routine as the porntreneurs stuffing the spam filter. After opening hassles and typical bitching in the kitchenette, a bland sweep of morning rolls over all, ensuring no interruption for hours.

Taken from your overcoat, a fine brass zipper invites entry. Silk-lining holds five bundles held by blue $10K bands. Nausea mushrooms. Veritable seed money here in your shaky mitts!

Push the paranoia from your lungs. Width of the wad such your thumb can’t feel a dent from the other side. Who might the unwitting benefactor be? NY license, Ernst Oesterhausen seems indifferent his name outlasts most conversations. Vaguely bemused, as if daily spars in the capitalist cage-o-death are for him great sport. A certain dark suit, certain bright tie, windsor knot. His beard the ringer. Great divide exists between unkempt clones at your level and well-shaven execs lording it down. A higher stratum exists, c-levels wear a beard to signify one thing: Such is my power I have reclaimed sway over my grooming.

The big find though ignites your heart. Ernst Oesterhausen President Paradigm Partners A card you can’t stop staring at. Everyone knows Paradigm, boutique venture capital, savvy investments with pop. They financed Art Joffrey’s removable-ink printers. One deal put smitten greenies in his left pocket, grateful profiteers the right. Art Joffrey bought an island down where they wear bikinis to dinner. Because of Paradigm.

Fifty thousand dollars’ durable guilt? Return Ernst’ wallet he’d be surreal with thanks. The only virtuous soul in New York, a rare gentleman. Confronting such kindness one cannot resist Question No. 1: And ahh what do you do? Casually spring on him some killer apps, how could the guy say no? He’d owe you.

Gets better. Men like Ernst are more walled off than the U.S. gold reserves. No need to wrestle appointment secretaries with his home address right here. Same block you found it. Pop by after work, assuming he’s not asleep when you finally finish.

The day floats by like porn, full of riveting detail yet utterly forgettable. The windows are dark as wallets when you log off. A sprinkle of city light fidgets under the cold. The holidays, a curious stretch people revel in deadline. Up here, apart from shiny red balls the marketing chick hooked to her ears it’s the same old day. Catchup.

Code twists such spaghetti through your head, clicking back to human takes effort. When the elevator drops you recall why a flash wants to spark; nerves catch and you tingle. What do you do for a living? Come in, let’s get some clothes on you.

Trophy overcoat flagging, night’s icy daggers go blunt as you stride the browstones. A passerby would assume you complete a last leg of your commute, that behind one of these heavy doors waits a woman whose face aches a male heart. Surely the rewards of true determination litter your life. No pedestrians appear but you apprehend each block as if your own. Fifty thousand bucks in your coat may be worth millions.

Mr. Oesterhausen I have some very good news. He may find you a pesky out to varnish his soul. Mr. Oesterhausen -- Prow of the mighty sidewalk ship flounders. Pronunciation torpedoes your opener? One chance to wedge those credentials and Oe ain’t the king’s English.

Ernst. Found this outside. Again you sail ahead. First names connote that swashbuckling audacity a v/c wants in his stable.

A group unblurs from your company-man eyes. Folks mill the base of another grand stoop. A party inside, guests whose lives flow like gifts from a glorious tree. Next Tuesday your office party. The last few had carols with altered lyrics needling everyone’s peculiars. If that stunted your yuletide cheer, this rekindles it. The address nears Ernst.

That’s no formal wear, warm buzz of partysounds don’t rolls this way. You see hats. Police, an ambulance, lights not even on. Behold your address.

Men huff steamy clouds lugging a stretcher down the steps. Its sheet catches the breeze. Pedigree features, the fearless beard, stop dead in your tracks for Ernst Oesterhausen is no more.

Wind’s tiny daggers regain edge and cold cuts open. Your first corpse revives unbidden bedtime fears. And these personnel, has poor Ernst been done in?

Murder. Never more than a plot-turn, and you back up.

A slam of the hearse-like door echoes grim finality down the street. No mega-deals for Ernst, plucking dreams off the street. Future Art Joffreys have lost their sponsor.

No more in. Your killer apps must contend with militant assistants. Deadlines overhang, you haven’t dared a sickday since last spring’s shaving accident. How is that dropped to plead your case twenty times to twenty men whose vocabulary hinges on no? Gatekeepers paid to quote ten-year-old articles.

The pocket-change he won’t need. Finish out January to collect your bonus then go all-out. It spills frothy soda down your nerves. A second chance has all along been a fantasy, but to quit would be exquisite.

Who looks on a wronged man’s fate seeing only opportunity? The pathetic you who works weekends understands what may be vital to avenge the untimely. The lifespan on a New York sidewalk of a purse that fat? Before it hits the ground some plunderer spent that and more on his new favorite haze. This wallet may be the smoking gun.

Sure smokes with all that cash. Gut the beast. Side pockets of your trophy overcoat still have their protective stitching. The sheaf of notes protrudes lewdly on your thigh. In your own wallet funds erupt an overstuffed clam, squeeze it together but your breast pocket is sewn for lesser means. One bundle in each of four pants pockets, the last in your wallet. With no animating force Ernst’s purse looks dead. A fiver of your own? What street creature leaves change disemboweling a lost wallet?

Confidence reassumes your chest, they’ll think you and Ernst’s suave block come from the same stuff. How powerful it feels, I may have something for the detective. The cop points at a man talking in the doorway.

Glide up beside a balustrade so wrought the marble seems poured in place. Light and warmth flow opulently from the wide door, walls inside hold large frames with violent collisions of color. The detective lacks a cigarette or bad suit but his face betrays the mileage. A trophy overcoat introduces you in a glance.

Relay the story in helpful detail, producing the purse you can timestamp it within five minutes. Can-opener eyes take in more than you say. Examining the vacuous interior he asks was it found this way. Indignation puffs your affront. Did you know the victim? Hearing no siren in your replies he asks an ID to contact you should anything crop up.

Removing your wallet $10K flops it open. John Philip Sousa marches his band through you, those big shiny tubas suck at your lungs. The detective regards you. In the habit of carrying such sums?

Unlikely you’re dying, life passes before you all the same. True determination becomes spokesman for all you’ve ever done, bucknaked before this NYPD homicide detective.

‘Tis the season you explain.

Sousa’s baton pauses.

Hoped to hit Macy’s tonight but got held at the office.

The Brooks Brothers coat Mom bought now ambassador to freedom. The cop says must be awful generous, then someone distracts him.

Your pulse washes away brassy music, the detective gets your card. He corners you with a glance. Come to the station tomorrow. Cement flows down the chute. Make a statement.

You’d mention workload but he’s onto someone else. No prob.

Descending the steps from a great height you cuddle back into quitting. Assistants scurry their gritty concerns. The millstones of doubt everyone carries slip away, you hit the sidewalk and cold rubs windy palms setting you aloft. On your private isle the ocean will hide nothing and shade moves like music across the sand. You can dream slowly and write code as it strikes. Perhaps give something back, weren’t that the plan? Altruism is easier from an island.

Your old commencement speech, naked ambition is no curse. Being unashamed in time comes to everyone; here’s what I got, may we proceed?

Last Dream Before Waking

Over the years Lindsey came to see them like the moody surface of an ocean. She learned to soothe from her class the sudden starts that can churn an unwieldy afternoon. Was quick to marvel at their limitless possibility. And each summer she ached for September when a new wave of faces would roll in around.

Growing up on the sound imbued many a watery reference. Living now hours from the beach Lindsey felt its wet mark persist like a toying mirage. Her latest hatch of fifth graders. The career leap drifting past like a yacht on the tide. Allusion flooded everywhere, even depths of their toilet which overflowed surprise on two girls that morning. Mr. Patronzi their gnomish janitor departed with fulmination for any boy who dare plug it up again. It left the class spooked and reedy, stirring up nerves about the afternoon’s annual play.

Some felt Sleeping Beauty asked too much how Lindsey scripted it to their prime-time taste with commercial breaks. She rehearsed them slowly all spring, adding each element until the whole production became a masterful game at which they alone were expert. Jitters showed all week, prompting her dubious principal Mr. Tambora to dubiate these kids were overtaxed.

She wowed them for years but this was a topper. Unrelated to the dramaturge opening at Cedarbrook, or the minor triumph their dean agreed to attend. Important artists sent their kids there. Cedarbrook offered a real budget, full-fledged teens, and certainty any given audience includes a few pharisees. Didn’t stop there. Lefter Than Thou may emblazon the academy coat of arms. Their code of ethics a manifesto of political correction. How it would quail her mother to see Lindsey taken in as their own.

Irony bent hard when she got the call. Her devout and dogmatic mother estranged these six years drove off the road last night. In a creek not four feet deep she drowned. A bible rushed out amidst the spill as they pried open her door.

Lindsey hung up the voice talking at her, a gasp fluttered darkly about the staff room. The clock ticked away masculine disregard. Dropping to a plastic chair she held herself. Mom!

A fridge motor whirred to life as her throat swelled. It came surging, molten and again on the move, flowing over craggy years that cooled too fast. Mommy’s towering apron, her long fingers, an angel voice singing Nearer to Thee Oh Lord as Lindsey clutched lamby from sleep. She saw bubble baths, lipstick lessons. Matching outfits that lingered into high school.

Her deductions darted a fitful school, Lindsey’s chest went, accusing regret spilled her cheeks. A refusal to carry on with vacation bible school. The fight over college. And Arthur, everything with Arthur.

Memory quickened to a funnel drawing her further from the room. Lindsey had no time. Mom had been for years one thing, a mouthpiece of Jesus’ disapproval. The her to lament left long ago. Tears were stupid, the sniveling blob she could reduce Lindsey to.

Out the windows recess cavorted. Robin Rockamore their lead leapt atop the junglegym pronouncing her lines to any willing expanse. Three fairies couldn’t resist, chiming in as a scene assembled before her laden eyes. The boys had none of it lobbing fart noises. It nudged her, not a laugh really but propitious enough to vie for mood of the room. In the end she lost even Arthur, rendering pyrrhic those awful battles Mom tried to save her soul.

Pulling a tissue got herself together. The red stirrers needed replenishing. The bell would go. Lindsey was twenty-nine.

She got there first. Without them the room struck her an unsettled presence, quiet stumbled around as if for a way out. She stood at her desk. Picnic weather, a June day folks wait for. Toddling the shore in Mom’s shadow, rippled waves tickle your toes.

Kids surged in twitching voltage. All had a question, none were important. She got them seated and a bubbling quiet stared her down. Thank you notes! she announced.

Makeup, wardrobe, sundry cardboard their magic transformed to scenery -- parents had been invaluable. She walked the rows as twenty pencils negotiated vexing script. Good kids, still trying despite that an unhushable zing, antsy as Christmas eve.

Her own yuletide had A and B. Distant days flushed a similar exuberance, then everafter Mom grasped gift-giving as a vast unbeliever plot. Christ’s birthday became marathon sessions of worship. The congregation walked poor neighborhoods around the mall singing not carols but hymns. Hindsight marked it youth’s end.

Ever the gamer Lindsey discovered new satisfactions. Love of service, offering time and care instead of wrapped whatnots. It carried her dutifully to these shores: Teaching, charity, activism. Thanksgivings at the shelter, New Years the hospice, causes and ideals wanted every idle impulse. Altruism she worked to contain but even stabs at romance were reclamations, strange tethers in them she could not release. Leery of her taste, dating got avoided. It was Mom inside, driving to the orphanage ungodly chocolate bunnies Lindsey won at the easter-egg hunt. Sacrifice she was told, leads to heaven.

Other places too. The shadowy backside of that giving, pathetic disempowered corners anyone deserves your all but you, you got nothing. Lindsey countered. Hobbies like taekwondo, climbing, hang-gliding bragged of self. A second-her toned with volition raided every urge not lost to giving until Lindsey didn’t seize the day so much as squeeze it. Before giving most away.

Waging rendered her simplest turns great emancipations. Unshackled loyalties littered her past, their aching call fixed as the murmuring shore that once lulled. Even leaving Arthur was more about principle. Endowed now with finality Mom’s old admonitions plied at Lindsey like shaky hands out for an extra scoop of holiday stuffing.

The clock ticked. The kids’ restraint unraveled. Showtime!

It felt wrong, ambushed by feelings no longer hers. Mother was no more right than she ever was. Would be.

They marched in line up the hall. Kurt bedeviled passing rooms with a warbly Once Upon A Dream, Lindsey shut it down maybe too hard. In the multi-purpose room waited the stage they decorated all week, framed to resemble a giant TV screen with layers of scenery in the wings. What unglued them? All those chairs set in silent readiness across the gym; storming in with much ruckus they commandeered the stage. It reached a zenith when Justin, Raffy and Jerome offered more gassers they vowed to deliver during the mushy part. Lindsey stood wan between her shoulders, their joy an unlikely raft amidst the swell.

Of course she loved her. Mom was a class act, a kind intelligent woman. All that and more, but for self-awareness. Ideology would slip armor-like around. Ambiguity posed moral threat to her unique certainty of God. Did Lindsey go easy, maintain appearance, avoid the subject? No. Her inaugural act of adulthood laid it bare.

Onstage curtains closed, scuffing chairlegs signaled first arrival. The many stresses she’d asked of them began to fray; class runt Kip kept tugging her sleeve; tomboy witch Ashley wanted to add ninja; Raffy’s fart jokes dissolved at finding a rip in the dragonwings Dad made.

What could explain her own prodigal father? They were at church when he bailed. His bereft girl mourned her impending bicycle lessons. Over the years that sense of loss lingered even as she biked fifty miles a week.

Mom never had much humor, her only musters reserved for him. Avoidance of father, daddy, dad ("semi-progenitor") a veil for no kind of charity. Contradiction dripped into Lindsey’s faith, eroding so gradually when she no longer believed passed unnoticed. It tipped at a red light, her world turned. The ache left was enduring and untouchable. She would come to see it in other guises, sore quads that last mile, raging in her ears reaching for the ripcord.

A clutch of voices beyond the curtain thickened to a wall of anticipation. For parents all cutes and high comedy, the school gets extra recess. To Jodi Dawkins seated amongst them it hinged on a certain Cedarbrook touch, unique yet effective.

They seemed out to live-down a bygone tag, School for Wilful Adolescents. Lindsey got a taste driving up for the interview. Dour-faced teens loitered about matching buildings leaning like mops against whatever. Indulged beyond innocence a dark fire heated their eyes.

She attended private schools through college, a card played heavily at the interview. Christian academies yes but it sparked a hunger for tolerance. Healthy imaginations don’t crave purity. Her current play was replete with magic, witches, fairies. Jodi Dawkins listened, scribbling occasionally in her pad.

Kids waited in position with their nerves frazzy in the air. Lindsey checked her watch. What’s she waiting for?

The future is not supposed to stop. Reconciliation doesn’t work that way.

Kip asked to lower the house lights. She nodded. Justin looked to her faltering, then slunk out to introduce. A wave of sound drew him center, as it thinned to smatters he froze beaming. Silence filled with all the doubt of a critic from the Times.

Justin jerked to life padding his lines. On cue Kip pulled the ropes, curtains whooshed to whistles and cheers. Her onstage kids looked at her and she them. A panic she understood, the certainty no one can save you now. Lindsey gave a glassy smile pressing play. Lurched to life a flimsy human mechanism wavered rhythm of the opening number. Conducting from the wings more a pantomime.

Performance came early. She’d stand before the congregation espousing the glories of God. Mom delighted in her witness