A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER IV - Part 1

By Frank Moore circa 1970s

Suzy appeared during my first D.C. visit; she was lonely, caught in this world. But she couldn’t be of this world. She would shatter if she had to stay here much longer.

It was hard to believe she was really real. Really a flesh and blood person. More like a sad spirit with pale, oval face with large, black eyes which went back for ages upon ages. I fell into them with I first saw her sitting on the tower step, just listening, just watching from somewhere far inside herself. Her hair was the only part of her that was happy. Long sunbeams, now red, now yellow. The sun of her hair surrounded the moon of her face. Pale, white milk with streaks of blue. Her hands were like a child’s, with long, fragile fingers. Her body was so fragile, I was afraid she would blow away, vanish into the nothingness where she had come from. She just sat there on the step, bundled up in an old navy coat, looking sadly at me.

“What is your name?” I pointed out on my board. I knew she read it and understood it. She was not ignoring me. She wanted to answer me, but the words would not come out. Her lips moved a little, trying to form words. But she remained mute. Just sitting there looking sadly sad.

“Can you talk?” I asked.

She shook her head gravely no.

“If you want to talk, you could use my board,” I said.

She thought about that for a while, and finally started spelling out words … her finger hovering over the unfamiliar board, trying to find letters. She could talk … that is, there wasn’t anything physical stopping her voice from talking. She just forgot how to talk recently. Sometimes she could get a word or two out. But never around me during the two weeks there. She told me, however, that I was the first person she had talked more than three words to in a long time. She didn’t smile either … for the simple reason that she didn’t have anything to smile about. What reason could there be in a world that shatters you?

The first time, we started holding hands. But it was like holding hands with a China doll because every time I squeezed the slightest bit, she would let out a silent Ouch! I felt a strong tie between us. When I told her I loved her, a timid smile appeared for a moment and was gone again. It was an effort for the smile to push up through the sad mask. Suzy was up and out the door as if she was searching for the smile. She didn’t come back for the next few days, and I almost forgot about her … almost, but not quite. Then about an hour from closing time, Suzy came tiredly in and, sitting down beside me, held my hand. For a long time, she just looked at me. She could have been a vampire … or an angel in some of the Italian paintings … or the mermaid who traded her fins for feet and had to walk on broken glass the rest of her life.

“What do you do?” I finally asked.

“Sometimes I sell underground papers … sometimes I sell pirated records. Maybe I could give you a Beatles or a Dylan record the next time I get some. Sometimes I take grass to different places for someone,” Suzy spelled out.

“How?” I asked.

“I hitch,” she said. But Suzy wouldn’t tell me anything else about her activities. I envisioned a fat member of the Mafia giving little Suzy a brick of grass in a shoebox. Suzy walks slowly to the parkway and puts her thumb out, the shoebox under her arm. A big diesel truck stops to pick her up. Having a little trouble not dropping the box, she scrambles up into the cab and hands the greasy driver a note with a cigar which says, “I can’t talk. I am going to Annapolis.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I must rest now. I’ll lie here a while … then I must go.”

She lay down on the car seat beside my chair. She pulled my hand to hold it and fell asleep. As I sat there, listening to the music, looking down at her … she changed from a woman to a child to a small, sleeping animal back to a woman … I felt like I had someone; and yet, still felt alone. I wanted to make love to her. But I didn’t want to freak her anymore than she already was. That was just a part of the reason. I didn’t know how to ask a girl or how to let it happen. She looked so helpless. I wanted to help her and the only way to help her was for me to be a mirror and keep the channel open. If I asked her to make love to me, the mirror might break, and she might close off to me like she had to the world. That night I wouldn’t risk it. Moe started to close shop. Suzy was still sleeping when it was time to lock up. Moe looked at her for a while.

“Does she want to stay here tonight?” he asked me in a hushed tone, but I didn’t know. “Well, it looks like it would take an atom bomb to wake her. She looks too comfortable to move.”

But as soon as he said that she sat straight up, her eyes wide with fear. It seemed that for a minute she didn’t know where she was. After she adjusted, she motioned to an invisible wristwatch, wanting to know what time it was.

“It’s three in the morning, time for all good girls to be in bed … bad girls, too,” Moe said.

When she heard the time, Suzy was in a panic as if she had just missed a date. She tried to scoop up her things to run out of the store. But her hands just fumbled … and when she finally got her things together and stood up, she walked like she was drunk or dizzy. I didn’t like this at all. Moe didn’t either. He walked up behind her, picked her up and carried her back and sat down on the car seat with her on his lap.

“Now, let’s talk this over like sensible people,” Moe told Suzy. “It’s three a.m. and it’s freezing outside. In other words, it’s not fit for taking a walk. And from the looks of you, you aren’t fit for walking. So, you have two choices. You can stay here and sleep on the car seats while we sleep in the back room to protect your virtues. Or I’ll drive you where you want to go … gentleman that I am. Which will it be? Will you keep us company?”

Suzy shook her head and just looked toward the door.

“O.K.” said Moe, and added to me, “Hold down the fort. I’ll lock the door behind me.”

Moe carried Suzy as he would have carried me and banged the door shut. The record player was still going. “See me! Feel me! Touch me! Heal me!” Moe came back in twenty minutes and woke me up as he unlocked the door.

“A strange chick. She made me let her out at a corner on Pennsylvania and just waited until I drove away to move. It was like she didn’t want me to know where she lives … if she lives anywhere, which I have my doubts,” Moe said.

For a couple of days she didn’t come back. I thought about her a lot … wondering if she had gotten in trouble on one of her trips … wondering how she survived in the city being so frail … wondering about her past. I knew nothing really about her except that her name was Suzy and she was lost in her mind. I kept waiting for her to come back, half expecting to see her every time I looked up from the Mr. Natural comic I was pretending to be reading … and went back to the comic disappointed. Moe felt my disappointment and kept muttering, “You sure can pick ’em.” When I asked him what he thought was the matter with Suzy and how I could help her, he just said, “I’m not saying anything is the matter with her. She is just into her own thing … which I must admit is different.” But Moe wouldn’t give me any advice. To other people, he gave tons of wisdom coated in wisecracks. But I couldn’t get any use out of his B.A. in psychology. He would just say, “I ain’t your mother.” One night, Suzy came in and laid down on the car seats to rest as before. After a little while, she sat up to talk to me.

“Would you believe me if I told you something?” she asked on the board.

“Try me.”

“I hear voices inside of me. They tell me things to do and where to go.”

“That is nothing unusual … there is a voice inside of me too,” I said. I knew what she was talking about and what I was talking about were two different things. But right then, that didn’t make any difference. I wanted to get inside of her private world to guide her into our everyday world … that is if her world wasn’t better than ours.

“Do other people hear vices too?” she asked.

“Kind of.”

“Then you don’t think I am crazy?”

“Yes, you are quite crazy. But I am crazy too … and proud of it.”

“I talked to Jesus yesterday.”

“Inside of yourself?”

“No. I had to walk a long way. I can’t remember where I went or what street the room was on, so I can’t go back again. But I will know where to go to meet Jesus the next time. I always know.”

“Now?” I asked. The creeps were inside me, bordering on fear, but I hoped I acted like we were carrying on a normal conversation … not for the black couple who were standing nearby looking at bellbottoms. They couldn’t hear us because we were talking through the board in another world. But I had to talk naturally about unnatural things for Suzy, to give her the freedom to talk. I didn’t want to shut her up just because inside I felt creepy. “How do you know where to go?”

“The Voices. It was in a white room. Jesus said it is very important now for me to listen to the voices and do what they say. I was going to where he is soon if I’m in the right place when the time comes. The voices will guide me to the place, and then I will shatter.”

There was no mistaking the word shatter. “Please don’t shatter,” I said.

“But I want to shatter and go back to the world I come from. I got nothing here.”

“You have me. I love you.”

“How can you love me?” Suzy asked, her eyes open wide. “I am not real. You can’t love something that is not real, can you?”

“You are real. I can see you and touch you … that proves you are real ….”

I stopped because there was a ball of sadness growing within me. She could have poked holes in everything I said. On acid, I had seen and touched things that weren’t really there. If I was mistaken then, why couldn’t I be seeing things now? She did look like a ghost. I thought these things while I was pointing out the words. I wasn’t doubting my own sanity … or her realness. But if she started trying to argue, I wasn’t sure that I could make her see that, while there are many realities, you got to be in the reality that you find yourself in and live like it is the only thing going. I wished I was like Moe who believed that this flesh and blood world was all there is … there ain’t no more … you better grab it while you can. It would have been easier to pull Suzy into this world if I was like Moe. Why couldn’t I be? I was sweating like a doctor delivering a baby, hoping it wouldn’t be a still birth. I couldn’t talk anymore because of the ball inside of me. I just sat there, looking at her.

“What is wrong?” Suzy asked, looking puzzled. “Why are you sad?”

“I need you here and you are going. Please don’t go. Don’t shatter. Try this world a couple of months more … for me.”

“I can’t promise anything. I might shatter at any second. There is so much pain here. But I want to be with you. I have to go when the voices tell me. But I will come here when I can.”

“And if you feel like shattering, come here to talk to me. Promise?”

“I can’t promise. I think I can … but I can’t promise.”

“I wish I could stay here in D.C. longer,” I said.

“Aren’t you staying here?” Suzy looked a little surprised and a little frightened.

“I’m just visiting over the vacation. I go to college in California and got to go back next Sunday to go back to school. You would like it out there … it’s warm and sunny. I have an apartment with my brother …”

“I wish you could stay,” Suzy said.

After that, Suzy started sleeping overnight on the car seats when she came to the store. I soon learned that she didn’t have any concept of time, except when the voices told her to be at a place at an exact time. She didn’t come back for three days after her last visit. But she thought she had been in only yesterday. She couldn’t remember what she did during the three days. She just walked after she had left to a room where she had slept. When she woke up, she came right back to the shop. So I must be mistaken. Each time she came, Suzy was more open and happier … not happy … but the smile stayed on longer.

---