The Dow Lady

Near Midnight, 1 July 2014

Holly More lay dying, slumped against a maple tree inside New Town Cemetery. He’d found the idea of committing suicide inside a graveyard amusing. There was something awfully barn door during the cows about it he liked. Something almost tidy, yet mystically symbolic, unlike life. But he supposed that, like everything else he imagined, it had been done before.

His departure was going as planned except for one nagging fact: “Why am I still alive?” Except for his eyes, Holly couldn’t move, not the slightest twitch; the immense hot-shot he injected knocked him out immediately, but he had awakened, which should have been impossible. And yet there he was–again–thinking coherently despite the power of the dope–Still, smack always made things right; it even eased the possibility that Holly had entered a weird junkie eternity. As long as it didn’t wear off he was all for it.

But Holly knew he was alive. He felt a slight breeze against his face, the tree, hard and uncomfortable against his back, the tubing still tight on his right biceps; and he heard the rustling of the night creatures around him. But despite this unexpected return to consciousness, Holly knew that he wouldn’t, couldn’t live much longer. Not with the load he’d delivered to his system. He figured that this must be a brave, futile last stand by his brain against Death. Nice try, but he knew that the laws of science would soon prevail; he was a goner; if a team of doctors began working on him that very instant it wouldn’t change the outcome.

Even though it was a moonless night, Holly could see clearly; the headstones and abundant trees had emerged from the cover of darkness. Nothing glowed in the spectral sense, but it was as though each item had shunned the night. Very strange. He then gazed at the stars through the narrow openings between the trees. And Holly remembered when stars had names. Mizar, Aldeboron, Vega. His father was keen on astronomy and he had passed the interest on to his only child.

A sadness, a keen sense of loss similar to looking up names on facebook and instantly watching faces age many years since they were last seen, came over Holly–a pain underscored by feeling like a dissipated Rip Van Winkle, returning as a stranger and not at all welcomed by the past or the future. Another hurtful reminder of what he wasted and would never get a second chance at repairing. The sadness was a good one and it dared the heroin to do something about it. But trustworthy heroin had no patience with sadness, and it had the innate ability to locate the beauty in lament and convert the coldest, ugliest, guiltiest and loneliest shit into art, which made the sufferer holy. It was, of course, a lie, but it was a hell of a good one.

Anyway, it was too late for anything else but death. He would go never knowing if there were children like him on other worlds wondering the same about him as he had in the backyard long ago. And it didn’t matter–just another pretty forlorn color for the canvas. And although death was taking its sweet-ass time, this still being alive anomaly had its upside. So Holly flowed along, going wherever, whenever the junk took him until it took him for keeps.

And the places it took him:

Holliday James More loved women, but his relationships with them unfailingly led to trouble. He used to complain about his unerring gift for choosing the worst possible lover; late in the game, however, he admitted that the women who were attracted to him had the same personality defect.

The contrary mixings began early. At five, Holly fell under the malevolent spell of his “Step Cousin” Vicki, who was three years older. In a “holy shed” at his step aunt and uncle’s house down the road, Vicki convinced Holly that he and his mother would go to hell because they hadn’t been baptized (even though she had no idea whether they had been or not). She told him it was too late for baptism, but she could help them out if he were to take “ministry” from a Good Christian such as herself. Vicki explained that heathens were not allowed to pray, but she would be happy to pray to God on their behalf. In return for this service Holly became Vicki’s personal slave. Keeping this arrangement a secret from his mother and obedience were vital components of the deal; it was the only hope that Holly and his mother had or they would be left behind on Judgement Day.

Behold a typical ministry session:

Whenever Holly failed to be all the slave Vicki thought he should be, she’d lead him up into the holy shed and “pray for his sin.” The shed was constantly dark and creepy, no matter the time or season. And the atmosphere was enhanced by Vicki’s little girl voice. It sounded wrong, plain evil, when she said stuff like, “Dear Lord and Father–Don’t know what to do about Holly. He won’t mind me like he promised. For his sin, maybe you ought to do something to his mom. She lives at 1321 Farragut Street…”

Here, Holly would break and promise to do better.

Fortunately, Step Cousin Vicki was only in office for about ten months. In the space of seven years, Holly’s somewhat unstable mother was married to six different men including Holly’s father, who vanished one day and did not return until after his mother’s death when Holly was nineteen. During that time he had met all sorts of “step relatives” who were as temporary as rainbows or the flu (depending on how you looked at things). Funny thing was that he and mom never lived outside of Torqwamni County (mainly in Charleston), and yet once a Step was removed from office Holly never saw that person again.

Except for Cousin Vicki.

Twenty some odd years down the line he had a one nighter with a woman he had met in a bar. Upon waking in her bed the next morning, he recognized the faces of Step Aunt Claudia and Step Uncle Jim and Vicki in a picture that had to be taken around the time he had known them on the nightstand. Vicki was still sound asleep–she had called herself Tori the night before, but hearing a common name like Vicki wouldn’t have mattered to Holly; but he did question why she hadn’t hung up on his odd name for a guy. Probably too hammered, he thought as he gathered his clothes. This was followed by a much worse idea, Maybe she knew?

This situation, which happened often in Holly’s twenties and thirties, usually caused him to experience an overwhelming sense of shame. Once he had woken in a strange bed and heard a baseball game on a TV in another room. He remembered Saturday morning baseball games and the feeling that overwhelmed him was as vile as a dream of being buried alive.

Usually he did his best to beetle off as quickly as possible. He had an animal sense that allowed him to wake first and avoid the uncomfortable aftermath. Once, late in the game, he woke too late and saw a horrified look in his temporary lover’s face: “Dear God, I fucked that howler?” But he was pretty good at getting out ahead of that. The clearset memory he had of the blur of dalliances was that it seemed each and every last woman had a dollar store scroll of “Footsteps” hanging on her bathroom door.

Holly had no intention of waiting for Vicki to wake so they could reminisce. Rather pleased with himself, and not at all depressed, Holly whispered “Forgive her father, we hath sinned,” as he dressed and snuck out of her house. In a fit of inspiration, Holly happily peed on the wall of a small shed beside her garage…

And…

…toward the end of the third grade Holly was certain that he was going to die from a burst appendix. He sat third in his row and whether it be by coincidence or the hand of God, the two kids who sat in front of him had emergency appendectomies. One in October, the other shortly after Christmas Vacation.

“You’re next, slice, slice,” Roxanne Passinetti whispered in Holly’s ear at lunch the day after Mrs. West informed the class that Lonnie Mars (who had a face looked as though it had been drawn by Dr. Suess) would be absent for a while due to the same surgery that had made Yvonne Lassiter a star earlier in the term. To make certain that Holly knew what she meant, Roxanne underscored her comment with the slash of an imaginary knife. At nine, Roxanne was already a stunning beauty, but as evil as Pol Pot. No worldlier than he was under Vicki’s command, “You’re next” began to mess with highly gullible Holly’s mind. He began “checking” himself, rubbing his right side so often that it did get a little sore, which also caused the older kids to accuse Holly of playing with himself.

Two things played out to be true: Holly’s appendix was his for keeps; and there was no chance in hell that he’d ever go to bed with Roxanne Passenetti who grew up to be a wealthy supermodel-looking heart surgeon…

…then there was the time he made a fool of himself jumping up and down on an ant log to impress Kim Stuart, just to have every fire ant on Earth run up his pant legs…

And…

…smiling and waving at the pretty girl he recognized from the Subway store just to realize, too late, she was smiling and waving at some guy standing behind him…

…the look on Susan’s face the moment she stopped loving him…

…The Sheriff’s pant leg hiking up and exposing a diabetic scab on his shin as he got out of his car the day the world ended…making eye contact with a toddler in a playpen in a drug house…waking the next day certain that everything in the world had died except him because he had found a way to fuck that up too…

Holly found himself still at his place against the increasingly uncomfortable tree, still high, curiously, still alive. A tiny spark of fear flashed in his mind; he knew what happened to junkies found passed out on public property. But the thought was trivial, nothing more than a reflex.

His past had flashed across his consciousness. It all dropped simultaneously, yet some vignettes lingered for closer inspection, most others blazed by without note. These recollections spanned the entirety of his life save for the darkness of infancy, and, surprisingly, did not always feature his failures with females. At the same time he was aware that he was dying from a deliberate overdose at the foot of a maple tree in New Town Cemetery. The clichés were true: Life is short and it does pass before your eyes at the end, you remember everything…

Then he saw her, in real time. A woman emerged from behind an oak tree. She approached slowly then knelt in front of Holly. Holly tried to summon the energy to speak but could not, she placed a shushing finger to her lips and smiled. All his life he had been searching for a smile like hers; it made sense that he should find it now.

Considering the possibility of a hallucination, Holly remembered the legend about the “Dow Lady,” and that New Town was supposedly her cemetery.

Like the names of stars, the Dow Lady legend was something he had forgotten a long long time ago, and yet it came to mind instantly upon seeing her; there was something about her that could not be; he couldn’t place a finger on it, but she appeared to be inserted and not a part of reality. And yet the world that contained them was perfectly normal; the breeze still caressed his face, the fucking tree was still digging into his upper back and he also could hear the drone of late night traffic on the nearby Corson Street Bridge.

Regardless of who- or whatever she was, the Dow Lady had a lot going for her. Her hair was dark red, what artists called Titian, and was drawn back and worn in a single thick braid, which was looped once around her neck and still had enough length to hang down her back. She was wearing an immaculate white nape to toe dress, something right out of the 19th century–like in pictures of English tea parties, except she wasn’t wearing a hat. He couldn’t see her feet and her hands were bare. Holly reckoned that she had lived long ago, which was puzzling because Holly knew that the Dow Lady had died during World War II. Still, since when must a hallucination make sense?

“What a wonderful face,” thought Holly. Not exactly a movie queen beauty, she was maybe thirty and had fair-skin, a faded splay of freckles and active, intelligent, friendly eyes that were the same color as her hair; her cheekbones were set high, like a cat’s, yet her overall face was shaped in an oval. The whole thing came together beautifully with her fantastic smile; the slightest hint of an overbite gave her smile a leaning forward, just-between-us quality, and it was the kind of smile that manages to personalize itself for its recipient. Holly was certain that no other person ever got the smile she had given to him, nor would he ever see what she showed to others. This reminded him of the bittersweet feeling of falling into unrequited love. Still half-heartedly supporting the hallucination fantasy, he cast about his mind for the face his imagination had kicked upstairs up to play the role of the Dow Lady.

Holly’s fading subconscious called out from the deepest chasm in failing his mind and told him that it was not responsible for this vision; for what it was worth, Dow Lady or otherwise, this was, well, is.

The Dow Lady held her silence and warm gaze, but she eventually glanced at the needle, moving only her eyes, then back into his. She shrugged in a c est sera sera sort of way and her expressive face conveyed It looks like you really did it this time.

Her name was Emma Withe, and she was no more the mythical Dow Lady than she had been Cleopatra. Still smiling, knowing his time had come, Emma took both of Holly’s hands in hers. She had attended death many times; yet each one had its own singular dignity. Life may vulgarly halt by, but death never slouches. Holly was surprised to feel warmth, yet her touch vibrated with a subdued electric pulse that hinted at great power. Holly finally passed out and thought no more. Emma held his hands for a long moment, listening. From holding them she knew that his hands had once played the guitar; effortlessly gave something called “the Vulcan Salute”; caressed and struck; created and destroyed. Lived.

Emma laughed. She was not pleased by the event but at a strange sound she needed to hear that confirmed they had done well. Emma leaned forward and whispered “You remembered everything, darling” and kissed Holly on the mouth at the last beat of his heart.

End Chapter One