Goodnight and Go

The sound of rustling leaves wakes Remy. He looks around the small byway he is laying in. Wind blows roughly about him and he pulls an old jacket around his shoulders to complete his unkempt appearance. He stands and stretches, smelling tomato sauce and meatballs from an edifice nearby. An immediate feeling of nausea fills him up and he remembers why he hasn’t eaten for a while. A strong yen creeps through his body seconds later and Remy checks his pockets for his stash. Coins clank together as Remy pulls out a small vial, which holds only enough left for one last injection. He yanks up his sleeve, revealing years of lacerations. A needle pierces his arm, but he doesn’t even cringe anymore, and it only hurts for a moment. As the toxin enters his body, Remy starts to calm down. A feeling of euphoria hits him a couple seconds later. Remy sits down on the cold gravel ground and closes his eyes, trying to hold onto the good feeling for as long as he can. A couple minutes pass and the feeling fades. Remy rises up and walks around the streets, not paying attention to anything in particular.

After a couple hours of staggering around the streets of Burlington, Remy remembers he’s all out of smack. He starts to quiver at the thought. He formulates a plan. His older brother is on vacation this week. At least he thinks it’s this week that Dane is gone. Remy’s brother Dane had stopped talking to him after he lost his apartment and started shooting up drugs. Remy had tried so hard to appease his family all through his teenage years and felt like he had failed in his parents’ eyes. Dane had been Remy’s best friend until he got married. That’s when Remy really lost it.

Remy continues thinking through his plan. He knows he’s all out of money and that Dane must have some in his house. On an impulse, Remy starts walking in the direction of Dane’s house, on the other side of Burlington. Usually Remy thinks things through, he’s not a very impulsive person. Although when it comes to drugs, he doesn’t have time to think about how to get them, he just has to. He checks his watch, only to find it’s about 6:15. Or maybe not, who knows if his watch even works. Remy continues across town, stopping every once in a while to marvel at the vivid color of the grass and plants. Ever since winter ended and the vernal season began he has been amazed at the brightness all around him.

Thirty minutes later Remy reaches his brother’s small town house. The wind is still blowing strong and the sun has begun to set. Darkness is starting to sweep over the town. It is the kind of weather where you don’t want to be out walking alone.

A fence encompasses the house. Remy could have sworn that the fence was never there before, it must be new. He scales the fence and falls onto the lush green grass of his brother’s freshly mowed lawn. The siding on the house looks different. I didn’t know they had shutters, he thinks. He loops around the house to the back and pulls his sluggish legs up the three steps to the back door. The porch looks different than Remy had remembered, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He rattles with the doorknob a bit but gets it unlocked pretty quickly. Remy is no novice at breaking in. Although he sometimes feels culpable for the things he’s done, he does what he has to do to get his stash.

Remy opens the door and enters the house, seeing a pair of kid-sized shoes that he’s never seen before. Dane doesn’t have kids, Remy thinks to himself. He quickly forgets about the shoes and steps out of the doorway into Danes kitchen. There are drawers under most of the counter space and Remy starts searching for money there. After a couple minutes with no success he decides he’ll check the bedroom. He turns around and walks into the living room and almost faints. A young girl, probably only a decade old, is standing looking up at him, her face completely ashen. The missive she had just been reading is crinkled in one white-knuckled fist, a dog’s leash in her other small hand. Her face remains colorless, but instead the fear in her eyes is replaced by a look of prowess or maybe she is incensed. In Remy’s state of mind he can’t really decipher which. Remy immediately rues his plan to break in. Right then and there Remy wishes he could atone for all his wrong doings and back out the door like nothing ever happened. But he remembers his purpose for breaking in and starts to make up excuses in his mind. The drugs are a bane to his existence; but he can’t stop using them.

They both stand completely still for a moment. She looks oddly familiar, Remy thinks, but where would I know a young girl from? Thoughts race through his mind.

Remy starts to remember a night many years ago probably a decade or more. His phone had rung (that’s when he still had an apartment). His mother’s voice had been on the other end of the phone. She was saying something about being in the hospital, but not to worry it was a completely natural procedure. What did that mean? he thinks. Before he can figure anything out, Remy’s head hits the floor and he blacks out.

Remy wakes up lying in a bed in a completely white room. He feels his body quivering and he can’t seem to make it stop. His heart palpitations can be heard across the room. Familiar looking nurses are standing around him attempting to calm him down. He thinks why do they look familiar? A nurse, the one who looks the most familiar, starts to explain in that way that doctors do, like they think you don’t know anything,

“Remy, you with us? You had a flashback, a hallucination really. You know what that is? It’s like a déjà vu. You were seeing something that you’ve seen before. Right? You used to live in Burlington, Vermont… right, Remy? Do you know where you are now, Remy? You are at the Plainsborro Rehabilitation Center in Connecticut. You’ve been here for almost a year now.”

Remy thinks this explanation over. The quivering begins to subside. He sits up and looks around the room. The same girl he had seen in his flashback is hunched over in a chair in the very corner of the room. She looks up and their eyes meet. The same bright blue eyes he had seen in that house. He looks away quickly and scans the rest of the room. Two older looking people are seated near the door, a women and a man. Both look familiar but again Remy can’t quite place where he’s seen them before. All of a sudden music seems to be playing. Has it been playing the whole time? he wonders. The singers' electronic voices keep saying the words “say goodnight and go”. Remy wishes all the people in his small suffocating room would do the same.

“You know them, Remy?” asks another nurse, pointing in their direction. Remy stays completely still. What is going on? he thinks.

“Those are your parents Remy. You remember them?” Remy’s mother stands up and walks over to the side of his bed.

“We love you Remy” She speaks the words, but Remy doesn’t feel like she really means them. Remy remembers his mother; she was always picking on him when he was a kid. She was overly protective of Remy. Thoughts start racing through his mind again. Why are they here...have I really been here a year? Who the hell is that girl over there? The nurse interrupts his thoughts again and as if reading his mind,

“Remy who’s that?” The nurse points in the girl’s direction.

“I don’t…know. I don’t know.” Remy sits back, dumbstruck by the whole situation.

“That’s Carla…you know who Carla is?” The nurse replies, she says it like Remy should obviously know who Carla is.

“No…no I don’t know any Carla.”

“Carla’s your sister, Remy.”