Edge of the Ice by Tim Strom
Quinn and I see the same psychiatrist, Dr. Hoerl, and usually compare notes after our individual sessions. We’ve diagnosed him with Intermittent Explosive Disorder. He always flies off the handle, frothing about how we need to develop self-awareness, get sober, and at least try to act normally.
He’s right about the last two things. I don’t mind the court ordering me to see a raving lunatic every Thursday so long as he’s a perceptive diagnostician. Lunatics are right sometimes. But I’m no big fan of self-awareness or discovering who you really are. I think it’s more likely to unmoor you than free you.
Quinn and his girlfriend, Helen, scoff at normal, saying it’s only a construct that a bunch of weirdos invented to control people like us. They keep telling me that we need to shoot for something higher than normal, to blaze with intensity, and all that Kerouac beatnik bullshit about being the mad ones.
I believed that when we graduated, but that was two years ago, and I grew out of it. I got tired of worrying about everything, and I’ve been cold for a long time now. I don’t want to burn like some fabulous yellow roman candle exploding like a spider across the sky. I’d rather have a mind of winter, and a well-managed, routine, comfortable, normal life.
Quinn and Helen are the only real friends I have anymore. We live in Lamprey Bay, a tiny town in northern Minnesota that you’ve never heard of unless there’s something seriously wrong with you. Strange things happen to your mind up here. The North Star blazes above us, that sizzling dot in the black sky that the Eternal Arc-Welder fixed right at the celestial apex so the other stars would have a sense of direction and something to revolve around.
Helen ran away from her family in Canada and came down here to finish high school. Since then the three of us have been on a quest to be different, although maybe it’s just our excuse for never fitting in. Helen says we’ve got to be different, not just seem different, but I’m okay with seems, and am always making up stuff that nobody should take seriously.
I mean, I might be talking with someone I never met before, and the next thing I know I’m telling them I’m Hollis Wolloblah from Pie Town, my family perished in a tragic septic tank explosion, and I’ll start pretending I know everything about septic tank explosions or some crazy thing.
Quinn and I became felons and basically unemployable after we got way too wasted one night, broke into the local pound, and freed all the dogs. Some went running off, but most hung around. It had become home for them, I guess. We started shooing them away until one ran off and got run over. It was awful, but what was worse was the poor mutt got hit by the police cruiser. We ran, but Officers Pherkad and Yildun tackled us, doused us with this stuff like bear spray for being jerkoffs, and slapped the cuffs on us. The Judge gave us probation and sent us to see Dr. Hoerl.
It made getting jobs nearly impossible in a small town. Quinn shovels sidewalks for Klaptown Maintenance. The only job I could find was for Kubilek’s Refrigeration, dancing all day on a downtown sidewalk in a snowman’s costume.
Initially, I filled in for the full-time dancing snowman, Kochab. I was like the apprentice dancing snowman, and had to put up with Kochab’s BO whenever I pinch-hit for him because there was only one costume and the Kubileks were too cheap to wash it. Kochab begged them to let him take it home and wash it, but they wouldn’t trust him. Like he’d run off with their precious dancing snowman costume.
One day Kochab was out dancing on the sidewalk, and made the colossal mistake of glancing at his own reflection in the plate glass window. He had a shock of recognition, seeing himself for the giant frolicking snowman he had become, and it was too much for him. He turned in the stinking uniform, walked home, got his Glock 19, and took an eternal dirt nap. So much for self-awareness.
If you want to become a complete pariah in a small town, try dancing around in a snowman’s costume in front of your former classmates, people you grew up with, and girls you like, imploring them to “C-C-Come in for some C-C-Cool deals!” You can’t explain shit like that to normal people.
I was out there dancing under the glitter of a late January afternoon sun when Quinn ran up and hid behind me.
“Helen’s after me. I pissed her off again. Stop dancing around so I can hide behind you. Act normally.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not in a snowman’s costume.”
Helen came barrelling up the sidewalk, almost knocking people over. She spotted Quinn and started pointing at him, yelling, “My God! Stop him! Szell! Stop Szell! It’s Szell. Der Weisse Engel! Der Weisse Engel is here!” The people on the street thought they were watching a certifiable madwoman. But she wasn’t ticked anymore, and Quinn relaxed.
“Hey, Charlie!” she yelled to me.
“What?”
“You like my new Stormy Kromer?”
“Slick.”
“Does it make my ass look fat?”
“No.”
“You liar! You’re just being nice.”
She was wasted already. My shift was over, so I changed and we all met in the alley to smoke a joint. Quinn started horsing around playing Jeopardy. “In Norse mythology,” he answered, passing me the joint, “he burned down heaven with a bonfire built from green timber and the carcasses of his unenlightened victims.”
I took a thoughtful drag before passing it to Helen. “Who was Crazy Ass God?”
“Correct. Tell him what he won, Vanna!”
“You’ve won a 1974 twelve-ton diesel Elgin street sweeper with adjustable rotating brushes, a 1,500 gallon water tank, and an AM/FM radio!”
We went to the Hole in the Day tavern. We had some drinks, ate, and I asked Quinn if he had seen Hoerl on Thursday.
“Yeah. He gave me some new pills.”
“Are they any good?”
“So-so. They give me a false sense of well-being, but I’ve always had a false sense of well-being.”
“Could I have them? I could use a false sense of well-being.”
“Sure.” He dug in his Polaris snowmobile jacket’s pockets and tossed me the bottle. “I don’t know how anyone survives without a false sense of well-being.”
We wound up at I Drink Therefore I Am listening to the Ambiguous Fictions. Quinn kept buying drinks until I waved him off. “Dr. Hoerl says alcohol won’t solve our problems. Only the drugs he prescribes can do that.”
“How are those pills?”
“I’m starting to get a false sense of well-being, but I’ve taken almost half the bottle.”
“Holy shit.”
“Is that bad?”
“We’ll find out.”
“Look at the Empress.” Helen was on the other side of the table mouthing along to the music, arrayed in purple and scarlet, decked in fake gold, jewels, and pearls, with a golden cup in her hand. “She’s like a stoned Joan of Arc.”
“More like a stoned Tootsie of Arc,” Quinn said. “Still. Terrific . . . uhm . . . utterances. Her heart is a snare, but remarkable utterances.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Come on. We’re young and reasonably healthy. You think about her?”
“Sometimes.”
“That way?”
“Well . . . “
“Ah-ha! J’accuse!”
“Lust is normal.”
“Lecher!”
“Hey, I’m not weird about it. I don’t put on a ball gag first.”
She noticed us looking at her, and raised her eyebrows beneath her Stormy Kromer.
“You’re mysterious, baffling, and cheap,” Quinn explained, “just like Canadian money.”
“I’m sick of people looking at me,” she said. “Looked at, I vanish.”
That’s when I realized I couldn’t remember huge stretches of time. I remembered smoking pot in the alley, eating, drinking, and popping pills, but had no recollection of going from one place to another, or anything in between.
Then it dawned on me that it had always been that way. I didn’t have a continuous existence. All I recalled were disjointed images, fragments, or snapshots. It was like I was a character in a story who existed during the scenes I was in, but had no existence outside those scenes. I was a fictional character stuck in a story some jerk was writing.
I explained it to Quinn and Helen. They thought I was nuts, joking, or delusional from Quinn’s pills, but eventually Helen started seeing things my way. “God,” she gasped. “I’m not an actual person either. I can’t think of anything in between the scenes I’m in.”
“So?” Quinn asked.
“So!”
“It’s normal. Most people only remember splinters of their lives anyhow, slivers of an existence they don’t appreciate, can’t understand, quickly forget, and leave too soon. That’s what you should worry about.”
Then we were sitting three abreast on a small bench under a green light at the end of the breakwater after the bars closed. The breakwater, about 400 yards long, curved out into the lake to make an artificial harbor. The lake was frozen as far as you could see. It was a bright night with a half moon, stars, and the northern lights. A few lights still glinted in town.
“It’s happening again,” I said. “I don’t remember anything after Quinn said we shouldn’t worry about not being real.”
“Don’t start that again,” Quinn mumbled into his can of Schlitz.
“Charlie, your being a fictional character in a story is only a figment of your imagination,” Helen explained.
“But you said . . .”
“I was lying to shut you up because you’re so wasted.”
“But I’ve got these gaps where . . .”
“Charlie, who doesn’t? We’re real! You, me, and Quinn! Look at us! We’re human beings! If I was living in a fucking story, would I pick this one? Relax, okay? I still love you.” She laughed, waving her Petri pint toward the town. “I will row you over to Chillon in the starlight.”
Quinn started clambering down the breakwall.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Helen asked.
“A walk on the ice.”
“Stay here with me.”
“No.” Quinn started walking onto the prairie of lake ice.
“Go watch him, Charlie. He’s drunk.”
I caught up with him. We walked on the ice. The northern lights were slithering green serpents, pink dragons, smokey purple omens and cloudy scarlet portents.
“Can I trust you, Charlie?” Quinn asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“I’ll take that as a maybe. Are you and Helen cheating on me?”
“I’ve got this rare condition where I only remember certain scenes or fragments of things, so who knows?”
“You’d remember that. Trust me.”
“You don’t trust her.”
He laughed. “Jesus, why should I? Remember when she came down here as a runaway? She’d do it with guys so she could sleep in their garages, or for a Happy Meal.”
We reached the edge of the ice. You couldn’t see the water, but you could hear it slurping, like Cerberus with all three heads lapping it up at the River Lethe.
“I need to know,” Quinn insisted.
“Know what?”
“Are you and her doing it?”
“Doing what? Pickleball?”
“No. You bastard.”
“Antiquing?”
He threw a punch but his foot slipped and he missed. I’m pretty big, and have been in too many fights. I hit him in the stomach and he doubled over.
“Go!” he gasped. “I’m done with you two. Go seek the judgment of the great whore that sitteth on many waters.”
That really pissed me off.
Then I was on the breakwater again, approaching Helen. She was watching the sky, with wild green lights arcing into the wilderness of stars above the town’s ghostly reflection on the leaden ice. I sat next to her on the bench and pointed up toward the Auroras that beguiled her. “What’s the score?”
“I’m so stoned.” She pointed at a fossilized fernlike skeleton of a fish. “Shall these bones live? Listen. Hear that?”
“What?”
“The misery in the wind. From all those sleepers.” She waved her pint at the town again. “Poor wretches can’t hear the angels, or know the heavens are full of light, fire, and imagination. Are we alive, Charlie? Are they? Do we exist only to become unmoored and drift into the ether like thoughts? Or evaporate, rise, and dissipate like clouds? Did any of this happen at all?”
I kissed her. She pulled away. “Where’s Quinn?” When I nodded out toward the other shore, she said, “Charlie, I told you to watch him!”
We reported Quinn missing the next afternoon. The cops didn’t care but, when Quinn hadn’t shown up a few days later, Officer Yildun took separate statements from us.
“So he just wandered off into the northern lights?”
“Yeah.”
“How poetic. Like a moth to the flame?”
“Whatever.”
“Elegiac. Making this up as you go along?”
“No.”
“Did you and Quinn fight that night?”
“No.”
“Helen says you did. How much did you drink?”
“None. I’m on probation.”
“She says you were all drinking, and you took Quinn’s pills.”
“He gave them to me.”
“Did you take them?”
“Define ‘take.’ Swallowed or swiped?”
“Either. You aren’t supposed to swallow or swipe pills. You’re a felon on probation.”
“For freeing dogs.”
“For beating the shit out of a kid.” He tapped my file. “You broke a kid’s arm because he didn’t pay Quinn for Quaaludes. Quit lying. Did you sleep with Quinn’s girl?”
“No.”
“She says you did, and Quinn knew about it. She blames you for Quinn’s disappearance, and says you’re a fuckup, but I’m thinking maybe you wanted Quinn out of the picture.”
No one could prove that. Quinn never turned up, and things became even more directionless than before. Helen told me she figured Quinn was dead because all his stuff remained in their apartment, even his best dope. She also said she never wanted to see me again.
People go through the ice up here, literally and figuratively, all the time. Sometimes you never know what happens at the edge of the ice. People who disappear become like ghosts or apparitions. They haunt you, and eventually you’re not sure if they’re real or not. You can never tell when a dripping white angel might arise out of the ice and start hounding you.
Things were too hot for me. I lost any false sense of well-being, and decided to head south. Maybe I could turn over a new leaf in a southern state. Maybe the sun could melt me. Maybe the self-awareness Hoerl prattled on about would start enlightening me instead of just mocking me.
I’m going to stop lying so much. That deal about being a character in a story? I made that up to get a rise out of them. I’m not a good person, but I am a real person. As real as you or me. That’s the one thing I’m sure of.
Lake Superior Writers 