Lessons from a Godfather

Or, Does This Change Anything At All?

You step out to have a cigarette and the grass looks like AstroTurf and the moth hitting the porch light is big enough to be an alien. You have the refrain to "Killer Queen" playing through your head and could anything be dumber? You don't even like Queen, have maybe heard the full song twice in your life, but there it is on your internal speakers like a drunken college party sing-along that can't hit all the notes. It's 12:30 in the morning and no one is around to tell you not to have another cigarette, and so you do, casting around your head for real and finding only fragments of a dream you had where the basement lighting was Tungsten yellow on wood-paneled walls and the carpeting was soft green shag. There is soap on your hands but you can't feel the water from the faucet.

I have to finish that conversation, you think to yourself, unable to remember what the conversation was or why it would be so important to dive feet-first into dreamland to speak to someone you've never actually met. You search for real and think of sparklers on a campus lawn in Vermont where you have never been. You try again and there are scenes from a vast and towering skyscraper you know you have been to in your sleep. You can hear the murmur of the crowd but you can't feel them pushing their way past you.

Your boyfriend is here, a blinking name on the other side of a computer screen, and you think he's real but you can't see his face. It's getting scrambled with an orange bedroom and laser lights on apartment walls and all the times when between sundown and sunrise stretched on forever. You remember the first time you stayed up until dawn and it felt like a great illusion had been ruined, and all that blank expanse of night-time was really just hours ticking away on a clock, just like always.

You are elbow-deep in deja vu and just writing that down drags you under some more. Black type like small cracks in cement aligns in blocks as if prophesied to be this way half a dozen times before and you're wondering if you're writing this all down or just scrubbing away the blank space to find the words where they always were.

You see time like a glowstick, all lit up at once, filled with bubbles and phosphorescence, and you are in three apartments, a townhouse bedroom, and a picnic table all at once. There are voices around you but you can’t place them, and you are about to get up to do something important but you can’t remember what it is. You turn to the person next to you to ask them but their face is angled away and all you can do is think of the outline of their profile in the artificial light.

You’re in bed and you can’t quite remember if you were about to get up for a smoke or if you just came back inside. You look for real and find the first night you took a hit from a bowl and spent twenty minutes touching the pole of a swingset, convinced at once that you would feel it and you wouldn't, and being proven wrong twice. You find yourself in memory, slipping a yellow Bic lighter into an older man’s pocket, and for the first time you find something to grab on to. Time slips.

You are sitting with this man on a bench and he’s telling you something. You’re either crying or trying not to, and you’re sure you’re answering but you have no idea what you’re saying, but when you look for real you find yourself on the bench.

Does what you feel match what happened? he’s asking. Think about it. Does this feeling change the way the world just worked? Are you upset because of what happened, or because of something you thought was happening?

For the first time on that bench someone is asking you, real or not real? and for the first time out loud you have to answer not real, and it is something of a relief.

It is 1:30 am, and the grass still looks like AstroTurf, but you are forgetting the words to “Killer Queen” and you are quite convinced, face or not, that your boyfriend is real--so is the presentation he hasn't finished tweaking yet. Somewhere there is probably a basement with paneled walls and Tungsten lighting, but you have never been there. Somewhere there is a bench where you sat with a man who lent you a yellow lighter and made you see a moment as it was.

Real or not, the rest of the world goes on, insistent of its existence.