Johnny Wraith Stories

I hopped off the train. From behind rows of small windows, the conductor waved goodbye. I waved back. The train belched smoke, began pulling its cars up the track, and then chugged away into the greater depths of Hades’ tract housing. Still wearing nothing but a canvass sack, I took the stairs off the platform and headed into the suburbs.

Block after block I walked, and still the cramped tract houses all looked the same. It was row after row of continual sameness. At least the blue sky offered my bare back warm sunlight. Block after block I walked, and I just kept walking. Every once in a while I’d turn a corner or cross a street, or look up to see the same front yards and houses. Mostly, I just looked down at the sidewalk and watched my feet taking 3 steps on each concrete slab before stepping over a crack and taking another 3 steps, over and over. There was something to getting into the rhythm of walking, 1,2,3 and 1,2,3 and 1,2,3. With my steps I began saying aloud, “Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.” 3 syllables per slab, 4 slabs each time I said a whole line. Rhythm. That was it! 1,2,3, “Don’t step on,” 1,2,3, “a crack or,” 1,2,3, “you’ll break your,” 1,2,3, “moth-ers back.” 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3… I realized it was Rhythm! 1,2,3,1,2,3… Swim with the currents! Don’t seek answers, but find questions. Stay in motion and the stage curtain will open. Your eyes will be filled with light. I stopped in my tracks and stepped on a crack. When I looked up from my feet, I was standing in front of a familiar house. It was just like the one I’d lived in with my 2^nd wife.

It was so familiar I felt as if I’d traveled back in time, as if I were returning home from work like so many times before. Maybe I really was? The only indication to the contrary was that I was wearing nothing but a canvass sack and bare feet, not a suit and polished wing tips.

I opened the front door. There was my old denim jacket hanging on the coat rack. The familiar silver mirror set in a wrought iron frame was hanging on the foyer wall. Stairs lead up to where I knew I’d find her. My body tensed with anxiety. Oh god, I don’t want to go through this again… My last encounter with Gina had been a horrible one. The last time I saw her. I could sense I was reliving that encounter.

“Johnny! Come on up! I’m in the bathtub!” her voice carried from upstairs.

I sighed with relief when I heard her voice. She sounded happy. Could she really be happy? She sounded like she was glad I was home. Had she decided to love me again?

Old feelings of love flooded my heart and I suddenly felt light and free again. I had loved her. In an instant, I suddenly loved her once more.

“Johnny! Get up here!”

I darted up the stairs, ran down the hall, into the master bedroom, and through the open bathroom door. There she was in the bathtub, just like she had been the last time I’d seen her. She was sitting in tepid water mixed with dark blood. Her wrists were slashed open, and an open package of razor blades lay on the floor beside the tub. I suddenly felt heavy and chained again, cursed with old feelings of grief and guilt.

She wasn’t smiling, as usual, but this time she was alive. Gina’s blue eyes were piercing me with hatred. By her look, I realized she’d feigned her tone of voice to lure me up the stairs, to find her bathing in blood.

“You did this to me!” she accused.

“You cut your own wrists,” I retorted, and in so doing I was surprised how quickly my old combative attitude returned.

“You were never there for me.”

“All you ever did was complain, nag, and bitch.”

“You and all your friends, the drinking, the casino.”

“I liked being happy.”

“That isn’t what life is about. Being happy. Staying away from me because you couldn’t stand how I was or how I felt. For you being happy was being irresponsible, refusing to see things the way they really are, and not being able to understand me.

“We can all choose to be happy. You just wouldn’t ever try. So I gave up.”

“There were too many problems to be happy! How could you have treated me the way you did, when I was suffering so much?”

“What do you expect? I grew tired of all the bullshit, the depression, the constant therapy sessions, the complaining, nagging, and bitching. I could have lived with a year or 2 of it, but you just wouldn’t give up being miserable and blaming me for all of it.”

“It was all because of you!”

“I tried and tried. Nothing I ever did was good enough. I could never change enough. I never showed enough empathy. I couldn’t understand. It was too much!”

“You never listened. You never cared!”

“Like I told you, I couldn’t live with the complaining, nagging, and bitching. The world was nothing but a bad place for you. You wanted me to live in it with you and accept it. Sorry. I couldn’t. Sorry. I wouldn’t. Sorry. I won’t. I’m going to leave you to your own misery, again. There’s too much of it for me here. I’m getting back on the train.”

“You aren’t going anywhere this time!”

“Why not?”

“We have to talk.”

“About what?”

“Our problems. Why you make me so depressed and miserable. Why you made me kill myself.”

“I don’t have any problems, and I never made you do or feel anything.”

“Yes you did! You need to take responsibility!”

“I’m leaving.”

“Just like you did last time?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t leave me! You can’t leave this place! No one can!”

I turned away, walked down the steps, and out the front door. All the while she was screaming this and that. None of it mattered. Issues. Problems. Incurable unhappiness. The misery I had caused. Everything was my fault.

As I headed back to the train platform, the guilt and grief over Gina’s suicide left me. I no longer felt bad about finding her dead in the bathtub, floating in her blood. I’d done the right thing by just calling 911, giving a statement to the police, packing a suitcase, throwing it in the car and driving away. Though I’d ended up with a foreclosure on my credit report, I didn’t care. A mortgage just ties a man down. I’m not sure who took care of Gina’s funeral, or if she even had one.

I sat on a bench and waited for the train to come. I remembered the Gina I’d fallen in love with, the one I’d known before Gina that had fallen apart.

Before she’d changed, there was a time we’d hiked deep into a thick forest of Redwood trees. We had a blanket and a basket filled with bread, wine, cheese, and apples. It was chilly beneath the lofty canopy – not at all accommodating for a picnic, but to our joy we discovered a clearing filled with sunlight and warmth. We threw the blanket down, rolled around in one-another’s arms, laughed, and got drunk on wine. While making love we spotted a stag and a doe in the tree-line shadows. They were watching us, and we them, and we were mimicking one-another’s erotic motions.

I’ll always love the Gina I first met. Somehow she’d died long before I found her body and blood in a bathtub.

Some of us give up the journey. Some of us stay a while and get back on the train.