THE MEDUSA EFFECT

THE MEDUSA EFFECT

CHAPTER ONE

TROUBLE

How did he ever get himself into this, Ethan wondered?  He should grab his wallet and run for it, even if he would freeze his ass off running out there naked in the middle of January.  When he heard the bathroom door closing behind her he felt his heart beating out of his chest.  He stood up as quietly as he could, reaching for his pants at the end of the bed.  He felt like a helpless child dancing on one leg.  Everything in his head was a jumble.  He really didn't how he had gotten to the motel.  The one thing he did know...was that he had to get out. Not even the marks encircling his wrist were enough to make him want to stay.

He slid his foot into his boot, when he noticed the door standing open, just a slit.  He caught a glimpse of her in the mirror.  Her blue eyes glowed in the laboring light.  Her long lashes waxed over her cheeks as she bobbed her head searching for some unseen object.  He couldn't look away.  When he saw her stand, up her slender hip moved into the stream of yellow light.  He felt his head jerk back.  He had wavered, only seconds it seemed.  He watched her running her hands through the thick black hair smoothing it against her shoulders.  She leaned forward with her face close to the mirror.  He trembled at the luscious lips pursed at the image.  His feet turned to clay.

She came out quietly moving toward him.  He was transfixed staring fully at her.  He fell back. She walked around his feet that were resting on the matted carpeting. 

     "You have to go."  She whispered.

     "What?"

     "You're already dressed, I think you should go."

     "Well...I."  His tongue was lodged against his teeth.

The sock dangled from her long silver fingernails as she held it above him.  She let it fall loosely through her fingers then bent over and picked up the other one.  Leaning toward him she shot a look, deep into his eyes.  Ethan felt his thoughts swimming.  He half closed his eyes.  The smell of her floated into him.  She pushed him back further on to the bed, he felt his keys fall into his lap as she dismissed him.  Somehow he made his legs move forward.  Before he could regain his senses he saw her hands on the knob turning it.  He thought if her skin even touched him that he might be burned.  He stood carefully next to her at the door, his hands jingling the ring of keys uncontrollably.  He felt the door thud behind him against his back. 

He shuffled forward, not daring to look when he heard her high top leather boots clicking on the newly shoveled walk behind him.  He skated forward to the curb and felt his way along the car.  When he got in and locked the doors he finally looked up and saw her standing in the walkway.  He knew he would be back, he knew it.  He saw her lips turn up sneering at him.  She laughed and disappeared back inside the open doorway.

Ethan found his way to Front Street.  The rolling hill and the newly fallen snow made the drive precarious. He slowed in front of the Landmark Hotel.  He thought about going inside for a drink.  He wound up sliding past the intersection skidding into the lot across the lane.  He shifted the car into neutral moving forward slowly until he finally stopped in the piling snow, landing almost at Walli’s Fish Market. 

The well-lit pier just past it, with the dark blue water sparkling beside the gray washed building, glimmered under the lamp light.  He pushed the car door open and jutted forward to the water’s edge.  The elongated shadow looming over the strip of water beside the iron-ore loading dock with its hundred-fifty chutes sticking straight up into the stars, beckoned to him.  He walked to the padlocked fence.  He hopped over it easily and slid along the breaches of the broken down dock.  The wooden slats under his feet moved with his weight. Finally he planted his feet the on the cement abridgment under the mammoth structure.  The long skeleton pushed out over two hundred feet hovering like a demon tunneling forward into the dark.  The patterned spokes of light illuminated his steps, propelling him forward until he finally reached the end, where the deep water warbled away from him far out into Lake Superior.

He stared down over the edge.  The rocks under his boot plopped down below the surface disappearing instantly.  He had the surreal feeling that if he stepped out onto the glassy surface he could continue walking on the one streak of light glowing in front of him.  He lowered himself getting onto his hands and knees and put his face down to the surface.  The top of his head seem to float away.  For a second he thought he saw her image in the reflection.  The echoing current beat against the moss covered face of the rock.  The droopy smell of it and the scent of fish, divined a familiar soupy brew.  He shoved his hands down baptizing his blue fingers in the icy water.  He couldn’t get the smell of her off of him.

     “Oh my God!”  He yelled into the lake. 

His breath plumed out in front of him making the words hang on the stillness.  He had lived long enough to understand what love is, but this was something different, something hateful, akin to lust, but deeper.  The vortex seemed to take over, he found himself nose down, with the water lapping inches from his face. A burst of energy suddenly filled him setting him back on his feet.  The toxic stew worked like a steroid.  He pulled himself to his feet and whispered out into the dark that this would be the place he buried her, this devil.

     “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid…”   He clasped his hands together, “I’m cold as shit!”

He heard the buzzing of the street lamp far away under the four tiered bell tower.  He turned looking at the red stone rising, working its way up to the iron bell, culminating in a triangular cap on top of the memorial.  

     “How could I possibly betray my wife that way?”

Tears ran crisscross along his cheeks as he leaned forward looking down at the slate block.  The columns enveloped his confession.  Nothing stirred inside the breached architecture.  He found his way back to the little bridge, crossed over the fence and went back to his car.  It was still running.  The heater had kept it blistering hot.  His cheeks felt stripped of their outer layer.  He was glad to return to the tiny sanctum.  His holy shrine, the beginning of his release cradled him with a vibration that lulled him into a relaxing peaceful sleep for several minutes.  He felt ready to return to Arch Street. 

As he passed by St Paul’s he slowed the Buick to a crawl admiring the oval stained glass windows. The idea struck him, manifesting itself as he rounded the corner from High Street, then he remembered it was midnight and there would be only locked doors and solar lights to greet him.  It was an incredible thought though, that the priest might forgive him for being a piece of garbage, for being so irresponsible and ruining the rest of his life.  He felt bad for his mother, having raised a son so…vapid, so weak.  It wasn’t the first time he’d disappointed her. Standing next to the car he could almost hear her voice bouncing back at him off of the snow as he lingered in the chapel driveway, her shrieking, nagging, awful screeching, reminding him to ‘turn back rather than to perish’.  He watched transfixed on the spitting snow flying in every direction like it couldn’t make up its mind which way to go.

He turned and slipped toward the care.  When he got inside and put it in reverse, the car peeled back across the snow.  He headed the other way knowing there would be only two places open this time of night around there and the one was only just a couple of blocks from there.  The all-night laundromat could be a haven, a place to wash his clothes.  He felt behind him in the back seat for his gym bag and grabbed the sweats and jogging pants.  When he looked back for a second he saw the illuminated screen from his phone.  Vibrating against the zipper, the phone call drew his attention away from the road.  He spun across the lane in two and a half circles, he found himself smiling like he was on the Tea-Cup Ride at the fair.  His front bumper landed on the curb facing the food co-op.  The neat even rows of yellow steel siding smiled at him, grinning as he attempted to back off the embankment.   The front of his car made a long screech as it scratched backwards.  Finally, he was sitting with his headlights beaming on the long glass window.  The light shined in his eyes blinding him.  He steered anxiously into the lane finally winding his way back through the neighborhood.  Nothing looked the same at night.  He found himself at the corner.  A couple of students lumbered out from the Ore-Docks Bar.  He pulled alongside them and asked if they might know how to get him to the laundromat.  When they explained it, Ethan was sure he had went that way already.  He had no choice, but to follow their directions.  He was surprised when he found it right where they said it would be.

He changed in the lavatory, the bathroom glass was like a circus mirror.  The crusted half-melted oblong glass seemed cloudier in the vacant light.  The black circles around his eyes appeared like crayon drawings of a zombie.  He reached toward the image never touching it.  He wondered at the wounds in his face.  Red lines scrolled across his forehead.  He felt for them.  They became invisible again.  The light flickered and his eyes became a quiet blue.  The gentle face his mother used to stroke emerged.  He cradled his face in his slender fingers.  A sudden knock on the door made him jump.

    “Hey, you can’t sleep in there.  This is not a shelter.”

     “Oh, I’m not…”  He cracked the door open and pushed his nose into the slit.  “I’ll be right out.”

     “Okay mister, cause if you don’t come out, my bother Thomas will come in there and get you out.”

     Ethan jerked the handle back toward him.  He scrambled reaching for the items on the floor, “I’m coming, right now.”

He shuffled past her ringing the coins in his pocket.  He put the clothes, including his suit jacket into the washer, even though he hadn’t worn it into the hotel room.  He didn’t want anything that may have rubbed up against the foulness, to be left in his car.  He wanted it all sanitized.  He bought the powdered bleach and dissolved it in the hot water inside the wash machine.  He dipped the rag from the sink into hot bleach.  He went to the car erasing any trace of the encounter with her.   He put the rag to his nose an inhaled.  He could still smell her, like she had the power to hide up there in his sinuses.  He pushed the rag up into his nostrils and sucked in the vapors.  The stinging bleach and the frozen air burned his eyes.  He felt like crying again.  He search everywhere inside of himself for his courage finding it only in the blinking street light, across the street, telling him to breathe in and out, like the pulsing rhythm of his heart might fail were it not for the constant of the stop light.  

    “Hey, mister!”  The attendant shouted to him, “You can come back inside.”

Her kindness was well received.  He ran his cupped hand over his eyes washing downward.  He went back into the warmth, forgiving himself for breaking down.  He sat back on the chair at the end or the row of washers and waited till his time was up.  He threw everything in the dryer just until it got heated up and the wrinkles disappeared.  He pressed them with the steamer and laid them flat in the back of his car.  The light broke across the early morning sky.  In only a month it would stay dark until seven, he thought gratefully. 

The butternut brown t-shirt and black shorts the young man wore stepping outside into the bitter cold was in contrast to the black knitted cap pulled down tightly over his light brown curls.  Ethan watch the youth shudder as he threw his duffle bag into the passenger seat.  He sized up the van with the Yamaha ski carrier attached to the roof.  He surmised that the heater in that thing would never be good enough to merit wearing the unseasonable apparel, even if he was only heading over to a house in the nearby campus.  It was freezing out, despite the appearance of the blatant sun booming in spokes across the tops of the houses.  He remembered when he was in college and Bobbie Jo knitted him an ungodly long scarf out of scratchy gray woolen yarn.  He wore it everywhere.  He was never warmer, he reflected, ever. 

Ethan followed in his car behind the gray smoke of the dieseling van to the corner of Front Street.  It was hard to turn back toward the house when he wished so desperately to go there…to the large rental he once shared with his college friends.  The march across campus trudging through the snow for an eight o’clock class with the heavy backpack weighing him down, it seemed light as a feather to him now.  He would gladly trade it for the chunk of ore riding on his lower back.  He reached instinctively to his hip rubbing vigorously against the ache.  He turned back following Main Street down to his house. 

The driveway was untouched.  The virgin snow sparkled up to the steps, he creased them, spinning into the uphill space in the driveway.    He saw the curtains bobble.  Partner was no doubt yapping inside, creating chaos like he always did when his owner came back from one of his out-of-town meetings.  In only seconds he saw over his shoulder, while he stooped into the back seat to collect his suit bag, his wife’s sleepy face staring out at him.  Bobbie smiled from the window.  He gave her a faint wave and pulled the briefcase from the floor along with the box of giveaways for the clients.  He always brought home the extras for Bobbie to use in the prize box in her kindergarten class.  He doubted she would want them, but when he showed her the emergency tool she shook her head excitedly saying she would give them to the staff as a small momentum for the holidays.  He spent a long time showing her the release button that could shatter a window and the cutter she could use to cut off the seatbelt if she found herself hanging upside down in a crash.  She listened eagerly to the tutorial.  Lastly, he showed her the multi-function flashlight that she could definitely use in the case of any emergency.  She thanked him by climbing onto his lap at the table and kissing him on the neck.  Partner hadn’t stopped whining the entire time.  Ethan pushed Bobbie off of his lap and scolded the ugly mutt until he finally slunk off to his dog bed.   His wife disappeared into the back.  He heard the shower running.  He joined her there running his hands up her slippery back.  He weaved her short hair between his fingers working the shampoo into a good lather and rubbing her neck.  She turned to him and kissed him.  There was plenty of time before she had to go to work.  She pushed her tall frame up against him.  He kissed her and pulled her close.  The water showered down over them.  By six-thirty they were seated on the tall seats at the snack bar eating oatmeal with slivered almonds on top.