Excerpt from THINGS UNSEEN

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So why did you stop anyway? You didn't know a  god damned thing about me except that I had a nice ass from behind."

"You think so?"

"I know so! You don't know ANYTHING about me so why should I be so... impressed with you that you stopped to give me a ride? Its obvious you have your own interests in mind already, so why should I sit here and be all gracious and thankful to you?"

"Call it chivalry" he said quietly as he looked across the table at her.

"Chivalry my ass." she seethed at him " It's chivalry you use FOR  ass."

"...and yet you still got into the car after knowing so much about me? Your ass that expendable, is it?"

"You know what I mean" she said.

"No, to be perfectly honest I don't know what you mean. If I am hearing this correctly, then you feel that under certain circumstances you are willing to bargain against the likelihood that someone might indeed do what they are doing and that you would be willing to gamble with it if it came right down to it."

"Well I didn't have much choice now, did I?"
    
 "Sure you did. You had all the choice in the world. You chose to blame every driver that passed by you with insensitivity and by default you chose to say you didn't want a ride from a person who wouldn't stop for a  woman  walking in the desert alone, anyway. The other choice was to accuse the one that DID stop by punishing him with the consequences of something that had yet to occur merely by the fact that he decided to do what the others did not. Seems to me you make only one choice no matter what, and that's to make yourself out to look like a victim of circumstances you created yourself while you pass the punishment off to the ones who did exactly what you needed in the first place and the exact opposite of what you were complaining of. Worst yet is that it seems you wish  to retain the sanctity of chastity on the whole when it is in your better interest but  only until it becomes  necessary for you to bargain with it like a commodity to get what you need."

"How do YOU know what I want or need? She glared back at him.

"Because you got into my car. If you had wanted or needed anything else, you wouldn't have done so.... But you did."

"That still doesn't prove you didn't stop just because you saw a nice piece of ass"

"Lady, I see nice asses every day. If I stopped to try and pick up everyone based only on their ass, I wouldn't get any farther than the end of my street, and I'd be driving a city bus full of nice ass."

"So if it wasn't for that, then why did you stop then?"

    The man looked at her exasperated for a moment and then back down into the coffee cup. The movement came across to her as a personal proof that what she had said, rude and to the point as it sounded, even to her, was absolutely true.  He looked out at the window at a family sitting in an old station wagon in the dusty parking lot.

"You see that car over there?"  He pointed by raising his head and gesturing with the end of his spoon.

"Yes"

     "I have seen a car like that every day of my whole life."

"You mean a green station wagon? So? Big deal."

"No I don't mean the car itself, I mean the whole situation being acted out like a play, but that's exactly how most people see what that is. Like it's just a car and that everything else about it goes unnoticed. Course that's exactly how they want others to see it, too. As though all they are is a happy typical family in a happy car going to the scenic outlook of oblivion to take three snapshots, get a postcard to send back to Grandma, and buy an "I was there" T-shirt".

    Well so what? That's all it is. It's just a family on vacation in an old car."

     He stirred his coffee with his spoon keeping it from banging against the edge of the cup. He tried not to have it make that metallic clank he always associated with a diner and hated the sound of. It always seemed like a very depressing sound heard only by those who were so miserably alike that they wouldn't have heard the sound at all. A bit like the typical sound clip for an EKG monitor in any movie requiring the clinical finality of a hospital.

"Look very closely at what you see for just a minute. I'll wait"

     She looked out through the dusty glass window of the diner and tried as hard as she could to see what she knew she couldn't. She just wasn't capable of it, and to be forced to do so for a minute frustrated her. She never thought of herself as impatient, but waiting 45 more seconds seemed like a big waste of time. Finally the minute ended and he spoke again.

"Okay, a minute is done" she said. "What am I supose to see differently from a family on vacation that I didn't see before I wasted my time?"

"

     "How many vacationing women pack their hope chest on the roof rack?"

     The woman looked over and realized that she had completely missed the fact that, indeed, a cedar hope chest was on top of the car. So too, was a wooden rocking chair, and a box marked "pictures". No tent, no stove, no folding nylon chairs or a soot covered dutch oven that typically accompanied a vacationing couple and their children.
     As she looked at the car, she took stock of who exactly was in the car for the first time as well.

     "None. None at all. Nobody takes a hope chest on a vacation. So...what are they doing?" She replied as he took a sip of his coffee.

     The man outside the car, overweight and angry looking, leaned against the front of the hood smoking a cigar in a T-shirt and wiping the dust off the tip of his new alligator boots against the back of his calf. No plan in mind except to do exactly what he was doing now for as long as it took others to continue with what they were doing. The woman stood at the back of the station wagon with the rear door open changing the diaper of a screaming child while attempting to verbally corral the other two to stay close to the car. Neither child cared to even acknowledged her existence. They didn't have to. Mom was too busy to fix it now as much as she ever was, and Dad was too indifferent. The end result was that the two boys learned quickly that as long as there were no consequence to their actions, the parental threat was at most,  merely an audible discomfort.  Apparently the man had learned this too. He seemed completely oblivious to her dilemma of trying to accomplish two things at once with both hands occupied with the one task while raising her voice above of the din to influence the other two. The man simply waited. Not his problem to fix. Raising children is woman's work and always will be. A mans job is to simply provide the opportunity to get it done.

      A tween girl remained in the middle of the back seat as self absorbed as the man but with no reason to deviate from the usual behavioral expectation of any teen. She tapped away on her cell phone making text messages while the two small ear buds of her iPod turned what little there was of  new experiences  into a seething, pink blaring soup.

     "Notice the hope chest is loaded on her side of the car?"

     She glanced back up at the roof of the car and to the spot above the passenger seat.

"Yes"

     Look at the rope on top. Its tied around everything in corded nylon from corner to corner ....except for the trunk."
     "Okay...".  She understood more was going on here than she had  realized before but was untrained in the implications just yet. Her response was a signal to him that she was trusting him implicitly to assemble a picture bit by bit and allowing him to supply the pieces.

     "What's under the rope?"

     She looked on top of the car and tried to discern what it was he saw. A few nondescript boxes covered in plastic, a tool box, a Makita drill, and two small bicycles. Just the usual stuff a guy would own or what kids would need.

     While he waited for her to inventory the contents he asked her a question.

"Can you tell what is the hope chest tied with?"

     She glanced to the chest to notice that it was tied with what looked like fluorescent green shoelaces from the handles of the trunk to the side rail of the roof rack.  As she looked at it he interjected into her observations.

     "What I see is a man who loaded what it was that he felt needed to come with him, but didn't go out of his way to load the hope chest at all. It wasn't even an afterthought to him because the knots holding it to the truck are the kind a woman uses to tie something very important but doesn't know the first thing about tying a knot at all. Except maybe the bow to a pair of child's sneakers. Instead, she does what any woman without a concerned man does and uses the size of the knot to show how important it is. This, like anything else in her life,hopes that by doing the only thing she knows repeatedly, that it will somehow make the knot stronger.

     She looked at the large wads of string at the end of each shoelace.  The end of one lace dangled against the side of the half opened passenger window.  For the first time she ventured an assumption of what she saw based on her own observations and not prompted by him.
     "It looks like she's been trying to hold the end with her hand through the window"

      "And how would you be able to guess that she had?" He asked.

     Immediately the possibility displayed itself as easily as it took to look at the woman's hand as she worked to readjust the jumper onto her small screaming child. She noticed the  deep red impression around the palm and back of her right hand.  The next conclusion came to her as though it was an automatic response. A knee jerk revelation she had never noticed she had the ability to perform on her own before this very moment, but had massive implications to what it was she had been incapable of doing or seeing her whole life. In either case, it wasn't something she would ever be able to ignore again.

     "She didn't even ask him to help her, did she?"

 "My guess is no. If she had, the knots would have looked like all the others. He didn't care enough to do it for her without asking if she needed it there anyway, and she didn't trust him enough to imply her need for it. So she did it herself as best she could."

     "How long could a person hold on to that string like that?

  "I guess it depends on how important the thing is that she ties  to herself is to her. Not to assume too much, but the license plate is from Louisiana...and we are in Oklahoma.

She stared out the window with both a new found admiration  of her ability to deduce combined with shocking terror that usually all it took to see it was that fractional bit of effort. It wasn't really that hard at all, but it had apparently been enough to hide the truth from anyone who didn't care to expend even that fractional bit. Like a constant 'blind man's zoo' where she had spent her whole life feeling as though the was holding a rope only to lift the blindfold and see her grasping a very large elephant.

"My God"

     "The whole situation, unbeknownst to everyone including those who would have shot the man clean out of his alligator boots if they knew about it, has probably been going on longer than we would ever know, but by the age of her kids I'd assume its been going on uninterrupted for at least fifteen years. Day in, day out. Each time the solution could have become a bit better, another child gets dropped into the equation. Sure he has four kids, but she's raising them as best she can, and when she fails, it will be her who will feel responsible for it because she is the only that ever did anything so the cause MUST have come from her. Plain old fact is that even if she did say something to her husband, he can honestly say he didn't do a damn thing to make them this way, but she will never be able  to prove it to him or anyone else that they wouldn't be this way if he had. So there she sits, wiping asses and snotty noses with love while she dabs a napkin to wipe the shit eating smirk and the snotty attitude of a man who spent his single dating life looking for a replacement for his mother rather than for a woman and a wife.

She looked back at him as though she suddenly realized that he had distracted her from the original question she had posed to him.

    "Okay so it isn't exactly what it looks like. So what? What does that have to do with me and why you stopped?"

     He turned away from the redefined spectacle outside and looked right into her eyes.

     " I watch the world like this every day. I look at everything down to its smallest detail and then see how each small piece  affects the other pieces. Most people are very good at hiding the big things because that's all they ever look at themselves. When it comes time to hiding something they don't want others to see or know, they cover the big parts and assume people are basically just too lazy to look at the small things. But small things add up, and small things count. I learned that when you see all of the small things, the big picture is no different  in size than what it is they hope I would see, but because I know how it was assembled, and with what, I used to be a pretty gullible guy, but know I can tell the truth from a lie in a second. A person can try and make me look at what they want me to see, but what I see is closer to the truth. To tell you the truth, it doesn't make me sad at all. it makes me angry. I don't look at the 'whats and the where's, anymore. I look at the 'why's'."

"Why does it make you angry?"

     She found this emotion from him rather odd. She guessed this was not a typical person with typical ideas even if she had implied that he was.

"Because it's condescending"

 "I don't understand. How is what they are doing or trying to cover up condescending. You mean to each other?"

" No I mean it is condescending to believe that there aren't people out in the world who can see the zipper running up the back of this lie. Like the only reason this works for them at all is to believe that they can keep everyone else at arms reach so that they don't get close enough to them, and then believe that they are the smart ones because they can fool us. The plain fact is that the only reason this works at all is that no one is allowed to get anywhere near them to see the truth at all, but they will still believe that they are the smart ones for it. Come to think of it, it isn't that they would say they are any smarter than the next guy. Just smarter than the one they tell the story to."


"Its like the difference between the reflection in a mirror and a really good painting. They tell everyone its a mirror when they hold it up to the world and that it reflects what we see of them, but it's not. It's just a very good painting of what they would like us to see, and as long as they keep it moving around just a bit,and dont let anyone get too close to it, we wouldn't know any different, but hold it still in one place for just a little bit too long, and suddenly anyone can notice that its just a magnificent forgery.


     He let her stare out the window and have the real world percolate into her surroundings.

     "You are right, I didn't even know what your face looked like, but that doesn't mean that I stopped because of your ass. I stopped because you are just like that car out there."

     "She immediately bristled at the association now, but continued.

     "What exactly do you mean "I am just like that car?"

     "Well first of all, you seem to think that the rest of the world is incapable of seeing what it is you don't want them to know while still being able to draw the association that it is me that could be ignored or explained away as an opportunistic pig rather than admit that maybe there was more to me and  something more that I saw in you that you couldn't hide"

     "Like what?" The question came out more as intrigue rather than the defensive posture she had hoped it would sound like.

     "Beautiful 'ass' or not..." he punctuated the severe reference to the word with as much respect as he would have expended to kick a dead cat "... you were walking down that road in a pair of two inch black heels.

"Big deal, Sherlock. Lots of women have heels.

"Yes that's very true, lots do. I'll even venture to bet that almost every woman in America has at LEAST one pair of two inch heels, but you've got to be one sizable dumb ass to decide to go on a stroll through the desert in a pair of them, and if you didn't, then my bet is that someone else caused this impromptu hike through the middle of nowhere. I also know you have been walking on them for most of the morning because they are expensive. A woman who spends the money to buy expensive shoes, doesn't wear them around if they have scratches all over them. Those shoes have scratches up both sides of the heel which tells me that you've taken more than your fair share of twisted ankles for the day trying to maneuver a suitcase and a purse with a rabbit stuffed in the top."

"You think you have it all figured out don't you?"

"No, but you tell me how far off I really am from the truth when I'm finished"

     She stared blankly at the wall behind him as though, for the first time in the history of a diner, that ketchup marks on the wall were more worthy than another humans face.  He was right though, and she could feel the flush to her face and the imperceptible muscle twitch at the edge of her eye that he could not see yet, but that she could feel. It felt as though she were a hand puppet and that someone elses fingers and muscles writhed inside of her head to make her facial expressions.

    "You have two suitcases and a shoulder purse with a stuffed rabbit in the top"

     She glanced down to the side of the table. "Mister Wiggins, her most favorite stuffed animal as a child, sat with one disheveled ear hanging over the top of her bag. The other draped over into his bent plastic whiskers. It stared out at her with  one eye while the other, for reasons unknown, drifted lazily off to the left as though it had the ability to look at two things at once.

     She almost smirked when she caught him making the first of his mistakes about what she was carrying.

     "I only have ONE suitcase" she corrected.

     "Yes, but you HAD two, didn't you?"

     She stared at him in disbelief.

"How did you know that?"

     "Because the one that you have is ridiculously overstuffed. You knew you couldn't carry everything in two suitcases, so you paired down hoping to make it fit into one. I will bet that you don't have a pair of sneakers in there either which is why you opted for the only thing you had left."

    "Okay, your right. What else?"

     "You knew something like this was coming, but not right away. Whoever it was that made you choose this has been slowly gnawing away at you for quite a while. You are more mad than upset. You haven't been crying today,but you have in the past. but now you ARE pissed. If you had planned on leaving today you would have at least been at a bus stop or a train station, but you aren't. That means that since you didn't see this coming immediately, and didn't have time to pack, that right now there is a pile of your clothes on the side of the road in a suitcase within a quarter mile of where it was you decided to get out.

...