I Left My Heart at Terminal Tower
Copyright 2015 by Roman Theodore Brandt
Table of Contents
Re-Entry
I Left My Heart at Terminal Tower
About the Author
Dedication
Re-Entry
I always try to do at least one first in every story that I write: first time writing in past tense, first time writing sci-fi, first time writing a novella, etc. Illumination was my first cerebral storyline, taking place as much in the background as in the foreground, and I've tried to continue that with All the Stars in the Sky and now I Left My Heart at Terminal Tower. This story, however, is the most complex I've ever written. The layers are infinite, and I've tried to write it that way, so that each new read peels away a new layer. If you as my reader never get tired of this story, I've done my job.
I Left My Heart at Terminal Tower is my first story I've written based off of a poem I wrote, which I've included below. I thought the poem would make an interesting story, and from there I decided to see where it would lead me. Well, it's been almost a year. It's been really difficult to write this, because translating this poem to a story has been like wallpapering water. In the end, though, I think it's been worth it. Here, in its entirety, is the original poem.
RE-ENTRY
I waited for you in truck stops,
Carving my name into tile walls
Blood pounding in the veins of my hand.
Gravel lots stretching to the freeways where
Eighteen wheelers rumbled over dead dinosaurs.
I waited for you in forgotten drive-in theaters,
Mammoth white screens blocking out the sun,
Speaker boxes quiet as the stars.
Silent as car radios,
The screen ignites.
I learned secret languages for you,
Black holes folded into your hand,
Unraveling bundles of nerves.
I left my heart at Terminal Tower,
Waiting for subway cars that never came,
Pounding pulse, ribs cracked back and gaping.
I left my virginity in a motel room,
Scratched raw from beards and condoms.
I collected strangers in my backseat,
But I left my lungs in your bedroom,
So I could smell you when I bled on rented sheets.
I performed electric transfusions in the dark,
With your blood circulating sparks inside me
I left my heart on the tracks at Terminal Tower,
And here comes the train,
Thirty years late.
I remember your teeth leaving marks,
Stripping me of muscle tone,
A living autopsy.
My organs lit up
Like Christmas lights,
Glowing blue against the stars.
Transform, you said.
And so I did,
Shining under overpasses,
A satellite burning up in the ozone,
Kissing oxygen for the first time.
Table of Contents
I Left My Heart at Terminal Tower
My bones are so old without him they might as well be dust. I still go to truck stops to smell him, breathe him in, and look for his phone number on the backs of the stall doors. I go to all the places we used to live: motel rooms, burned out bonfire pits, woods that watched us breathing in the night. I've avoided Terminal Tower, though. I've not once gone down the dusty concrete steps to stand on that platform alone, waiting for a train that will never come. The light went out on the southbound number seven, and Cleveland was darker without him. They shut the subway off completely when he left.
I remember his voice in my ear, whispering. "Don't let it consume you." He always said he'd come back, and he did, in little bits and strange places. Once, I found him in Iowa, another time in New Jersey. Once on the beach in California. I lived my whole life around pay phones, aching for each opportunity to let my fingers trace the keypad digits from zero to nine, clutching the receiver, to summon him like a ghost from my memory. "Don't let me down," he always said, so I dial the number and wait.
I dial the number at lonely truck stops next to freeways, with eighteen wheelers roaring past me. I dial the number on rotary phones in empty houses. Once, I had a receptionist dial the number, but she wouldn’t give me the phone, she just stared at me for a few minutes and then hung up, saying, “I think it’s been disconnected.” I thanked her and went home on the number three bus to stare at the wall.
*
Our time still exists in reel-to-reel on the backs of my eyelids, a biological filmstrip in a permanent loop, blurring and fading into a living room, Wyatt and I on the couch watching TV with the phone ringing in the kitchen.
"God damn it, who is this?" Wyatt’s mom said into the receiver.
"She's about to freak out," he told me.
So I said, "I can't blame her."
Her heels clicked across the linoleum, and she appeared in the archway like a mountain of dirty laundry. "Wyatt, for love of Christ. There's another breather on the phone."
"And?" He asked. "Did he keep breathing? Is he still alive?"
She stared at her son for a minute and then put her hands on her wide hips. "Listen, no more of this. It's not safe. I want you to stop."
"Take some pills, Mom."
"I want you to stop,” she said again. He shrugged, and she said, “I'm not going to stand here while strangers find our phone number in a truck stop restroom. It’s not safe."
"Then sit down, dummy."
She disappeared into kitchen. "Listen," she said into the phone. "We don't want any. Are you about done?" She slammed the phone down into the cradle. "For Pete sake."
"He's still alive," Wyatt told me, and then he smiled.
So I rolled my eyes and said, "You're so dumb."
*
Sometimes, we did things I didn’t want to do, but Wyatt wanted to practice magic. He called it magic. It wasn’t always very magical.
"I don't know about this."
He looked up at me, sweaty and tired. "What's not to know? Just try it."
I looked over at our reflection in the bathroom mirror; we were shirtless, palms together, waiting.
"It tingles, I guess," I said, and he laughed.
"You're not trying hard enough."
So I tried harder, and I closed my eyes. I figured that was good enough.
"Focus. Imagine it. It's there," he whispered, and I felt him watching me. "Do you feel anything?"
"Maybe." I opened my eyes and looked around. The bathroom buzzed in the florescent light around us.
"Okay, now, pull your hand away."
But I couldn't; when I tried, it felt like I was peeling my skin off, and it made me sick. My stomach plummeted, icy and full of acid, and I started to panic. "I can't pull away. I'm stuck."
"What's the matter with you?"
"It hurts, Wyatt. I can't do it."
So he yanked his hand away from mine, and something detached, tendrils dripping red, flinging back into the palms of our hands. In each of our hands was a hole, with skin rotating around it, then we stood there with blood dripping down our arms. The holes sealed, and Wyatt started giggling.
"What was that, Wyatt?"
He laughed like crazy and flung the medicine cabinet door open, leaving red prints on the glass. "We did it."
"What are you looking for?"
"Iodine, stupid."
We were teenagers, searching for meaning in the world. Wyatt figured he had just found it, and maybe he’d fill me in later.
*
Once, I waited for him at the old drive-in, with its sile
nt speaker graves blasting static into space. The screen in the distance ignited with flickering images of Deanna Durban, and there we were again, the other cars illuminated white against the gravel.
"What do you suppose they're doing?" I asked, looking over at the next car.
"Don't worry about them, Dusty."
"Oh come on, how about we make something up?"
Wyatt’s eyes were like the stars in the sky, far away and already dead. "Yeah, okay. Let me think a minute."
"Suppose they're running from the law?"
He laughed. "Well they wouldn't be at a drive-in, would they?"
"I guess not," I said. "Unless they're pretty dumb."
"That's it." He looked over at me with his eyes shining in the light from the screen. "They're dumb. They won't live to see twenty."
We sat in silence for a while, and Wyatt put his arm around me really slick, like I wouldn’t notice.
"That'll never be me," he said in my ear.
"Oh yeah?"
"I plan to live forever."
I sighed and leaned back in the seat. "You're looney." I felt his lips on my ear. "Cut it out, Wyatt."
He laughed and started to undo my belt. "It's all part of the human experience," he said.
*
We stayed in an old roadside motel some nights, away from our parents and our lives. I remember one night Wyatt pressed the palm of his hand against mine when he was half asleep on the bed, and it was the weirdest feeling, like fibers unwinding in the dark.
"What's this?" I asked, and he laughed.
"Just you wait."
So I waited, and it started to hurt; I felt my pulse pounding in the palm of my hand, stinging like needles. I tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip.
"Hey, what's this? What are you doing? Let go."
"Just calm down."
I tried to think of anything else. It really started to hurt, and my eyes started to water, my pulse pounding in my ear. “Let go, Wyatt. I’m getting nervous.”
“It’s just practice, Dusty; dying is the hard part.”
“God, that stings.”
“I love you,” he said, locking eyes with me, and I was crying from the pain.
"Say we'll grow old together," I said, because I couldn't think of anything else to say.
He laughed and said, "No promises."
"Say, what is this? You're really starting to hurt me." I yanked my hand away, but it was sealed to his, and it pulled him up into a sitting position. "Hey, let go."
Suddenly, the tissue ripped, letting go, and blood seeped from our palms, dripping down onto the bedspread, painting it like red Rorschach blots.
"What was that?" I asked.
"I'm in you, now."
"Don't be creepy." I watched the skin of my hand rotate and close around the black hole, filling the silence with white noise.
"Just you try to get rid of me, now," He said.
Later that night, I woke to an empty motel room with the phone off the hook, buzzing in the dark. I sat up in bed and looked around at the wallpaper, the chair where our clothes had been thrown and now my clothes sat folded on the cushion. I picked up the receiver and put it back in the cradle. Almost immediately, it started to ring. I let it ring for a minute, jangling in the dark, and then I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear. “Hello?”
There was silence on the other end, and then a click. After that, the dial tone sang to me until I hung up.
I found Wyatt outside, sitting on the sidewalk, watching the traffic on the road outside. “Everything’s okay,” he told me as I sat down beside him. “I know that now.”
*
We went out on the freeway, thumbing for rides and writing his phone number on the backs of toilet stall doors. On the freeway, exits opened and closed, sheet metal veins pumping cars to Las Vegas and New Orleans, Santa Fe and Seattle, forcing on-ramps into creation along the I-70 corridor. We showed up on foot in a little town in Nebraska once and went to local fair, laughing on the Merry-go-round and eating stolen cotton candy. I don't even remember how we got there.
"Everything's going away here," Wyatt said once we got to the top of the Ferris wheel. "We've got to leave after this."
"No, I like it here."
He looked over at me with the downtown lights of this small, sad, forgotten country town twinkling far below us in the dark.
"We're leaving as soon as we get off this thing," He told me. "I mean it; this place is awful."
“Suppose we build a life here?” I asked.
He smiled and said, “Are you kidding? Let’s find somewhere interesting, at least.”
We spent that night in a truck stop curled up in the last toilet stall in the men’s room, our hair greasy from the highway. We stayed on the road for a while. Every rest stop changed me a little, cells peeling away into the universe. Every moment standing on the subway platform waiting for the train, climbing up abandoned fire escapes, sleeping in lost motel rooms, we were together. We were unstoppable. We showered in truck stops with truck drivers and sat under freeway overpasses, listening to the roar of tires overhead. The surface of the earth was pocked with the scars from our midnight bonfires, Wyatt and I in the woods with marshmallows on sticks.
"What do you want to do with your life?" He asked.
"That's a pretty rude question, isn’t it?"
"We never talk about it," he said. "I want to know."
I shrugged and looked around at the shadows between the trees, the ashes rising like angels from the fire, flickering and burning out like meteors. "I don't know. You're living forever and I'll be dead one day, so it won't matter what I do."
"Sure it will."
But then he stopped talking, and the woods were quiet except for the sound of insects far away.
"It's not like I'm never coming back," Wyatt said finally.
"What if you don't?"
"Stop asking me that. I'll be back." He put his arm around me, and the skin on my neck was electricity, sparks igniting, supernovae unfolding in radio silence.
"I don't know how I'll go," he said finally. "When I leave, I mean."
"I don't want to know," I said.
"You wanna fool around?"
I laughed a little. "No, not right now."
So he pulled me closer and I put my head on his shoulder. "Give me your hand," he said after a second.
"Alright, but if I do you, you have to do me."
He laughed. "Just give me your hand."
He took my hand and drew a circle on the skin. "This might feel funny," he told me, drawing the same circle over and over. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the feeling of our skin cells scraping past each other. "You feel anything yet?" he asked.
"Hmm?"
"Open your eyes, you have to watch," he said.
When I opened my eyes, there was nothing at first, but then the skin inside the circle began to swirl and darken.
"What's that?"
"Shhh. Just watch."
The swirling darkness turned into a spinning blackness inside the palm of my hand, spinning faster. "I don't want to do this anymore." I said, and I tried to pull my hand away, but he grabbed my wrist. I watched my hand open into a void. "What are you doing?"
"Do you feel anything yet?"
"Stop it; that hurts." I yanked my hand away, and he let go, but there was still a rotating black void in the palm of my hand. I shook my hand and looked again, watching it spin. "Jesus," I mumbled.
"It's a black hole, Dusty."
I stared at it. "It hurts."
"Don't let it consume you."
I stared at it, and then I looked up at him. "How did you do that?"
"That's where I'm going." He nodded toward my hand, and when I looked, the void was still rotating, but it was getting smaller.
"You're crazy."
"Don’t let it consume you, Dusty," Wyatt said again. He reached for my hand. "Give me your hand."
“I think you’ve done enough to my hand.”
“Listen, just give me your hand,” he said, getting impatient.
"Fix it, Wyatt."
"That's what I'm doing, if you'd give me your damn hand." So I gave him my hand, and he put his palm over the hole, covering it. I swear I could feel vortexes opening, galaxies rotating, made of the same stars I could see turning behind his eyes.
"Don’t leave me," I said suddenly.
Wyatt looked up at me, and I saw Andromeda. "I'll still be here somewhere, I guess."
I thought of all the nights in my bed, his car, his mom's basement bathroom. "It's all ending then."
"I hate being a teenager, Dusty." So he pulled me to his chest and we sat there like saps with our marshmallows burning in the fire. "Don't let it consume you, Dusty. It's not even real."
"What if I can’t go on?" I asked. So dramatic.
We sat there for a while, with the insects singing in the distance, the fire starting to die, and then he said, "Then you transform. Become something new." After a few minutes, he said, "I will come back, though."
We went home a week later, and Wyatt’s mom came out of her house the second she saw us. “You!” She yelled at him, and she shoved him toward the front door. “You wait until your father gets home. If you run away again, I’ll split your ass myself.”
“Come on, Mom, I’m still alive,” he said on his way inside.
She glared at me for a minute. “He’s got his first treatment soon. Did he tell you that?”
“His first treatment?” I asked. He’d never said anything about treatment or illness. “Is he sick?”
She shook her head and went inside, slamming the door behind her.
*
The first treatment is always the worst, that's what they say. It was hard to see him hooked up to machines.
"You look scared," Wyatt said, laughing, and all I could do was smile.
"I guess I am."
"I'm the one who ought to be scared," he said.
"Look at you, going off to war," I told him, and we laughed.
"You're going to feel warm," the nurse boomed from mission control, and the machine started to buzz behind her.
I watched his eyes follow the poison in, through plastic tunnels into his arm. He looked so vulnerable, with tubes under his skin. This was the last moment he would ever really feel okay again.
"It feels like I have to pee," he whispered, kind of panicky, and I laughed a little.