Page 400 - Some Dance to Remember

370 Jack Fritscher

Ryan’s going to bed was a ritual preparation not unlike a little suicide.
He straightened up the house. Ran water on the evening’s collection of
glasses and snack dishes piled in the sink. Washed his face. Brushed his
teeth. Carried a glass of water to his bedside. Stripped down to a tee shirt.
Opened the pill bottle. Swallowed the Valium Dr. Quack prescribed for
him, because, Quack said, the world and he were at odds. He lay in the
bed, waiting for pills to slow the rush of consciousness. His Journal beside
him on the bedcovers.

Signs and omens are everywhere. If my molehill has become
a mountain, it is Mt. St. Helens. Why couldn’t we have been
blown away like that lucky, lucky boy and girl, honeymooners
at last alone, sleeping in each others’ arms in their small tent on
the edge of the volcano. They died the moment when they had
said yes to everything about each other. We haven’t died. Worse.
I sleep alone. He sleeps with someone else. I know I’m losing my
grip. My life has never been so star-crossed.

He had pasted a news clipping on the page. “A ground search of
the volcano area discovered the bodies of two men who had been riding
horseback in the upper reaches of the Green River Valley, about twelve
miles north of St. Helens.” The script was perfectly Ryan and Kick. “One
man apparently was watering the horses at a stream when the mountain
exploded. He dived or was knocked into the water, surviving the initial
eruption. His companion and the two horses were killed instantly. ‘They
were burned,’ the county chief of detectives said, adding that the hot blast
‘burned up the ridge and burned over the ridge. Then it burned down
the other side of the ridge. It took everything.’ The surviving man picked
himself up and stumbled eight miles through the hot ash. But finally,
succumbing to his injuries or the fumes from the ash and gases, he lay
down, covered himself with a sleeping bag, and died. There were huge
blisters on his face.”
Ryan’s own handwriting picked up after the clipping:

So, like that poor man, I’ve been knocked from my high
horse, my companion irretrievably changed, our horses burned
dead, me crawling through ash and gases, but unlike him I can-
not die. I can hardly sleep. I want nothing more than to lie back
and never wake up again. I can’t even take refuge in sex anymore.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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