The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Scorpion and Water-Bearer - 9/12/04

Sunday, September 12, 2004

In New York, in D.C., in cities and in villages, in the North and the South, in the East and in the West, millions stopped to remember a day three years gone, a day of enormous loss of life, a day of far-reaching chaos, rage, and terror. And those millions grieved. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn and I sat down to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.

God bless America.

Halfway through our efforts to finish bowls of pasta far too large for our health and well-being, I spoke up. She’d just finished talking about her frustrated efforts to raise her LSAT score so she could get into the GWU law school, and I was starting to think she’d never bring up what I really wanted to talk about.

So I said, "Gwendolyn—do you remember our having a conversation just before your taxi pulled up?"

She paused with a great forkful of noodles nearly to her mouth. "Hmm?" 

"Last Friday night— after Cafe Citron." 

"Yes... sure," she said, and down the hatch went the pasta (sausage and mushrooms). The lighting in the room wasn’t too dim, so I could see her face pretty well. Reading it, however, was another thing. Neutral expression, but not necessarily serious. This girl was like the Sphinx with earrings.

She wasn’t going to give me more than that unless I pressed on. So I did: "The part about our, uh, childhood... you said that something happened when we were nine. Something involving me going away. You wanted me to try to remember. Do you remember... asking me to remember?" (God, that sounded stupid.) 

"Oh," Gwendolyn said. She broke into an embarrassed laugh—or what she wanted me to think was one? "I apologize, Mark, I was just drunk. I tend to ramble on about crazy things when I'm in that kind of state. Don’t you?" She’d chosen to pair a Sprite with this meal. She took a sip of it now, as if to emphasize how not in a state for crazy rambling she currently was.

I, however, had just begun my second Amstel. I think it gave me the extra push to keep digging, even if I ran the risk of being a pest. "What did you mean, though? You were obviously referring to something, unless you actually make up stuff when you're drunk." I smiled. 

She laughed again. This time I could tell it was forced.

"No, no, Mark," she said. "I don't know what I was attempting to say. I was drunk. You were too. I think I was just trying to reminisce in a backward, drunk way."

"Reminisce about me going away?” I said. “Seems like an odd thing to reminisce about. As opposed to, say, the time we jumped in the Merrimack naked and got spanked red for it. Don't people usually reminisce about the times they spent with, not without, their friends?"

Gwen brought out a smile of her own, but it was—you guessed it—sphinxlike. "You got spanked. I just got a faceful of my dad's onion breath during the worst lecture of my young life."

"Gwendolyn," I said. "Back to the main topic?"

"You're making way too big a deal out of some asinine thing I said in the middle of the night when I'd had too much to drink. It's truly nothing." She stared at me. That seriousness I'd dreaded was back. The curtain dropped behind the grey eyes, her face went back to full Sphinx mode.

"Sure," I said. "Sure. I get it."

(But I wasn't getting it, goddamn it, and I wish I had pushed her further. Ugh, it's been eating at me ever since. What am I not remembering? What was she reluctant to tell me?)

"Let's jump back to the present," she said in kind of a teasing way. "Are you dating anyone? Or have dated anyone? What kind of girls does Mark Huntley get mixed up with in his adult life?"

"Oh," I said with a sigh, "you're probably going to regret ever asking that question."

Then, I'm ashamed to admit, I blurted out the whole story of Lucy from beginning to end. As if I needed to tune that violin in front of yet another person. But I guess Mark's Greatest Hits is a pretty limited disc, isn't it?

Gwendolyn listened the whole time with sympathy and a few kind words along the way. That brought us pretty much to the end of dinner. Once the check arrived, though, she wanted to spend a little more time chatting. Even after I loaded her ears with the Pfeiger-Zalt saga, can you imagine? And so we left the shopping complex and took a stroll down Wisconsin Ave., turning onto some side streets as we went.

We stopped in front of a weird sculpture on one of those side streets. It was a globe-shaped sort of zodiac device meant, I thought, as either a clock or a sundial (not thinking at the time that a sundial is a clock). It was hard to see in the dark, but I could make out the symbol for my sign, Scorpio. Or rather it was a symbol on top of a symbol: first an embossed image of a scorpion, and then below it, a curvy "M" with an arrow coming out of the right foot and pointing up.

Looking at the Scorpio “M” and the other astrological symbols, hiding behind their more obvious picture-symbol counterparts, made me think of the symbols from my dream. None of those had been familiar to me, of course, and all of these were. But the creepy thought hit me that, in the dream, it was like I’d been looking at part of the zodiac from some other world.

I almost told Gwen about the dream. But first, I asked her if she could pick out the symbol for her sign, Aquarius. She could not. I had to point it out to her: a little person pouring out a big jug of water, and behind it, two jagged lines.

For that reason, I refrained from saying anything about the dream. Don’t ask me why, exactly, that would disqualify her. Maybe I was afraid she’d just think I was a weirdo, for dwelling on it. She’s a spiritual person, our Gwen, but clearly not into symbology and other New-Age hoodoo.

The conversation died then. As we walked back to Wisconsin, we passed a man who was whistling something softly. He nodded at us. A friendly enough encounter, but a few seconds later, when I realized what tune he’d been whistling, I felt a little uneasy. If he’d been singing rather than whistling, these would have been the lyrics:

"When the world is running down / You make the best of what's still around." 

What were the odds that I'd hear that minor hit by the Police, a good twenty years old by now, twice in the space of two days? It just increased the unsettlement factor of the evening, already ramped up by Gwen’s Sphinx routine. And it must have shown on my face. Gwen was all too willing to say good night a few minutes later.

Luckily, I didn't hear the song again today. Otherwise I might have thought I was going, you know, crazy. But I could still be gallivanting down the path to lunacy with this symbol stuff. I did a little research today and figured out that the sculpture we saw last night is called an “armillary sphere.” They used to use those to chart the motion of the stars in the sky over time, the position of the planets, stuff like that. 

Of course that sculpture is just for decoration, to give the people in the fancy apartment buildings nearby something to look down at; it doesn’t actually move. But I keep picturing somebody, somewhere other than here, under a different sky, using a similar device but marked with the symbols from my dream. I got out my pad again and started to draw a diagram of such a device, but stopped in the early stages—asking myself what the hell I was doing.

Anyway. Back to real-world concerns. I’ve got to get another chance to wring the truth out of Gwendolyn. I don't believe that she was just speaking nonsense that night outside Citron. God knows what she’s hiding. If an Awful Incident happened to her when we were kids—I want to know about it. Maybe I can help her. If an Awful Incident happened to me… you know, I’d kind of like to know about that too!

Cherished Reader, the excuse that you only said something because you were drunk is just that— an excuse. There's always a reason. Take it from someone who's said a lot of things he meant to say.

posted by Mark Huntley @ 10:38 PM

---

Thanks for reading this entry. If you liked it, consider voting for it (click the star icon).