The NAFTA Blueprint

  * * *

  I drove Helena back to Fayetteville and we both reposed in silence. I agreed to return the following evening for the town hall meeting to learn more about the supercorridors and the citizens’ concerns. I now seemed anxious about what I stumbled on in this small town, it appeared more complicated than what I had imagined, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to take a story of such mammoth significance.

  This story was about corruption―the new growth industry, and powerful people went to great lengths to protect themselves. Throughout the undisturbed drive back home, I reviewed the image of Helena crying in despair like an infant, which now made me think about my own plight. When I walked in through the front door and glanced around the cold empty apartment, I wanted to collapse and tear out my veins, Chloe’s never coming back.

  I walked into the kitchen and fixed a Chopin vodka tonic while I grabbed a handful of ice, it was my preferred drink, and it was Chloe’s drink too. I walked over to the record player and searched for a few records that would trample over my heart fancifully. I then sat on the floor and brooded over my solitude. That’s what people did, right? When your heart’s been torn out of your chest, you continuously exacerbate it until you’ve exhausted the pain and even begin to miss the sting it had once caused. Well, I was going on two years now. I was still ill. She haunted me. Everything reminded me of her wherever I was. Her scent overwhelmed the apartment although she had never set foot inside.

  It appeared as though my senses had been heightened ever since she left, as if I was meant to experience senses which had been dulled by routine. I still kept photographs of her scattered throughout the apartment, I kept the clothes she left behind in a box tucked away underneath my bed. I had even left some drawers empty in a dresser that we shared, which were reserved for her, if she ever came back. My beloved Chloe.

  Whenever the telephone rang at inadequate hours I thought it was her, she used to call often when we had first broke up, when she moved back in with him. I had even missed that, the sadistic waiting around for her to call pleading for forgiveness. She often apologized for making me move to Texas with her and her two children, coaxing me to leave my job with the Los Angeles Times. But I made that decision on my own. Here I go once again, trying to justify whatever she influenced. I was weak and I had allowed her to influence career decisions.

  I had made significant human progress by not calling her at odd hours of the day, inebriated, pledging my perennial love for her. I couldn’t do it any longer. I couldn’t continue reading through her blog-spots and her Facebook page, reading her and her ex-husband’s comments about their delighted reunification. Many miniature words of unbearable torture. Chloe and I made future plans to get married and perhaps have a child of our own, something I always yearned for, but now she had vanished into oblivion while my heart was left in drowning obscurity. I lit a cigarette while I fixed myself another drink, tears rolled down my upper lip until I could taste Chloe’s lips. Maybe it was better if I didn’t seek it out. The thought of Chloe with another man was absolute crucifixion. Cigarette ashes spread about and lipstick-stained stubs reminded me of Chloe, when she smoked in secrecy in the restroom at random hours, perhaps missing her children and ex-husband…I was an escape for her.

  I contemplated and paced and pondered and struggled across the smooth hardwood floor in my apartment. I went into a northern soul routine after I switched over to mid-tempo 45” records which would help me break the cycle of confused betrayal. I used to do the same with some friends back in Los Angeles as well. I remember sliding and stomping across dancehall floors to dance the pain away…nostalgia. Damn it, I needed to work, to crank out a story about the Minutemen Project at the flooded Pan-American university campus to overcome my conquered state. I was a mess. I unfurled a proposed summary without any mention of the supercorridors or the Trans-Texas Corridor…I made it an exclusive about Shawn Hunter. I was fair and accurate and I had built my reader’s trust upon that, it was my Confucian virtuous deed. I then went to bed clothed with a drink resting on the nightstand next to a vintage lamp. It had been a long day.

  3.