Author: Brad Zellar

Her, she could make an angel out of any ghost.

He didn’t have that gift, unfortunately.

He wished to somehow praise the light, but his night vision was so much keener, the details and sharp fragments of truth emerging from the darkness with perfect clarity.

The smallest breathing thing will take but an instant to understand captivity from every angle. This he understood. Even so, he felt like he was trying to run up an escalator while balancing a tray full of drinks, his mind one of those sloshing glasses. Acceptance would make a bed in him, but wouldn’t stay in it, and would be up and down all night long, wandering from room to room, asking questions.

You might be surprised; people do get up in the middle of the night and call their banks.

In the morning he would walk the streets of the city, looking for anyone with some approximation of his blood running like bulls through their heart. And still, and always, he was left with his one true and hopeless ambition: to discover an entirely new country.

I had plenty of occasion, believe me, to wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. How was is that I found myself living in a garbage scow of an apartment building (crammed with shitheels) that had the nerve to call itself Christ Is Risen Estates? How had I acquired so much confusion?

I, who abhorred complication more than anything, had nonetheless allowed complication and chaos to overrun the quiet, orderly routines that I’d always believed would keep me sane. I was being ruled almost entirely by irrationality, and I could no longer sort out what I wanted or trust my urges. One minute I would believe anything was possible, the next it would all seem utterly impossible.

I more or less forgot how to feed myself, and would go days without eating. I routinely got lost in my own neighborhood, and any attempt to venture out into the city was an unpleasant and unpredictable adventure in disorientation. In the middle of the afternoon on a gorgeous summer day I would find myself looking at revolvers in a gun shop in someplace called Coon Rapids.

I don’t know. My mind was always elsewhere. It always is. Don’t ask me where, specifically, or even generally, it is, but it’s decidedly elsewhere. I’d say I was having a breakdown –that I was, in fact, brokedown– if the whole thing didn’t strike me as such a fascinating adventure, if I wasn’t so keenly aware of the oddness of it all.

Sometimes it almost struck me as magical, as if I’d slipped free of the material world. Some nights I would laugh myself hoarse at the absolute wonder of it all.

I don’t suppose you’ll get this letter before I shove off, Phil, but I wanted to leave you with a few words all the same.

You’ve probably known me longer than just about anyone, and you know that I’ve always been a dreamer. You probably recall that I used to dream about being an astronaut. I had that plastic helmet, the shiny silver spacesuit, and the bright green moon boots –the whole nine yards– and I think I spent one entire summer going around the neighborhood in that get-up.

My old man sent me that outfit from Florida, where he was living with his new wife. I kept the card he sent along with the spacesuit for a long time, but somewhere it got lost in the shuffle. I’d long since memorized the words he wrote on that postcard of a spaceship, though: “They’re shooting rockets at the moon. Soon you’ll be free to go.”

Those words puzzled and thrilled me for many years, and I suppose many of my frustrations and disappointments in life have been directly related to that card and its message. I never wanted anything so bad as I wanted to be free to go, and that fierce desire made it awful difficult for me to live any kind of normal life.

Imagine working at the Woolworth’s when you’ve had your heart set on outer space ever since you were a little boy.

It was impossible, to be honest with you, but I muddled along the best I could.

I finally decided it’s time, though, Phil. It just occurred to me the other morning that there’s really not a thing in this world stopping me.

I’m free to go, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I used to sit around late at night, mulling and wondering, and watching dark things scuttling through the long shadows on the floor. I would try, try, try to get the story straight, my story, but the thing was no longer capable of running anything but crooked, and it ran through some thick patches of brush and fog. I would lose it for months at a time.

I more than once saw that story disappear into a cold, black river in the moonlight, and watched as it climbed right back out on the other side and rambled off into the darkness.

One time I surprised that son of a bitch as it was sitting in front of a campfire, but the instant I sprung out of the woods it dove directly into the flames and disappeared in a shower of sparks and smoke.

It was months before I managed to catch up to my story again. I’d received a tip that it was holed up in a trailer on the Orange Blossom Trail in Orlando, but by the time I could get there aboard a Greyhound bus it had already pulled up stakes. I did, though, find an address for a motel in East Memphis, scrawled on a grocery receipt on the kitchen table.

In Memphis, I barged in on the damn thing while it was asleep in bed. After a strenuous wrestling match I was able to climb back inside the story and inhabit it for eight months before it once again slipped away from me.

I guess folks would say I’ve been lost ever since.

As a child he had been hesitant, self-conscious, and frightened of everything, all products of a certain persuasive calamity of the blood, an inbred insecurity that even the constant certainty that he was loved could not entirely vanquish.

His response to this crippling insecurity was to act up, and in time, as he grew into a late and awkward adolescence, this acting up became a sort of method acting, which in turn morphed into real fearlessness, an indifferent and heedless brand of fearlessness that was often truly wreckless and dangerous in its manifestations.

What was initially a public persona designed to attract attention, eventually became a fierce and private quest for oblivion, almost a desire to transcend his old childhood terrors and insecurities by pushing himself time and again to the brink of senselessness and extinction.

Whenever he stopped moving or pumping chemicals into his body he was bored out of his mind.

Somehow he managed to settle down, and allowed himself to be almost tamed. He learned how to be almost normal, or at least how to conduct himself as an almost normal human being, at which point he recognized the old hesitation, fear, and self-consciousness creeping back into his bored and exhausted brain.

And that, of course, was when he once again became truly dangerous.

Since he lost his job as an aviation mechanic in the late 1980s, Riggs has been a clerk at the International Repository of Regrets. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in almost ten years.

The Repository, housed in a World War Two-era train depot, is a vast place of bad light and spooky, institutional acoustics. Even in the middle of the night –especially in the middle of the night– it is always crowded, and the mood there is generally sour and joyless. The crowd is polyglottal, often dizzyingly so.

Some of the people who stand in the long lines are dead, shuffling in place in stepped-down shoes, often clutching photographs to their breasts. Many of the waiting have grown hoarse from a lifetime of rehearsing and fine tuning their regrets. For the most part, they throw their cigarette butts and the wrappers from the vending machines on the scarred concrete floor.

The International Repository of Regrets is now little but a purely bureaucratic facility, and offers nothing in the way of dispensation, absolution, or second chances. Even as a repository it has long since surrendered any claims of utility.

These days, whatever regrets are unburdened there are merely scribbled haphazardly in the margins of ancient, crowded ledgers, wherever there is room. All attempts at maintaining accurate chronological records have been abandoned.

They will soon enough run out of room entirely, at which point the clerks in their teller’s cages will be forced to simply sit and listen, reduced to the role of secular priests, mostly disinterested and concerned not at all with salvation.

By now, Riggs had heard it all before. All of it, from the truly criminal to the almost unpardonably banal.

Even so, these latter confessions were the things that continued to haunt him, revealing as they did the cumulative, lingering damage that could result from even the smallest childhood disappointments. For instance, there was, in the wee hours of one long night, the old woman who had stood in line for days to tell Riggs of the heartbreak she had suffered owing to the fact that allergies had made it impossible for her to ever hug a dog. Or the younger man, now dead, who was grief stricken over his lifelong inability to throw a baseball to his father’s satisfaction.

Riggs had also encountered individuals –there had been several– whose chief regret in life was one particularly bad haircut.

And so, so, so many people had stood before Riggs and poured out their regret over elaborately planned surprise parties that had been disastrous or poorly attended.

Most distressingly and unsurprisingly, though, love –love lost and faithless love and love gone wrong– continued to be the reason the overwhelming majority of the broken and beleaguered clientele made the difficult pilgrimage to the International Repository of Regrets.