The Splitting Headache
One morning I woke up and I knew you were really gone,” CSNY sing in unison, their voices stacked in a towering pancake of harmonies.
Eddie pats his hand against the door, subconsciously falling into the groove as he nods his head to the music.
I can already tell that he’s hearing this song in a slightly elevated way, every little polyrhythm and tonal shift swirling within his brain.
Meanwhile, I’m just thinking to myself: That sounds really nice.
“Perfect song for your first day as a dead guy,” I say.
Eddie glances over at me, pausing briefly, then erupting in a fit of laughter.
Now that I’ve gotten used to Eddie’s strange wet gurgle, the thing that I really latch on to is his tone. His speaking voice was familiar enough, but hearing him project like this makes everything fall into place. It almost sounds like he’s singing.
“You know, I nearly played keys on this track,” Eddie informs me. “I was crashing up in Laurel Canyon at the time. Stephen asked me to swing by, so I did, but I got in a fight with Neil and then the whole thing kinda blew up.”
“Wait, are you serious?” I ask, unable to hide my excitement.
Eddie nods, then points to an upcoming cross street. “Turn right here.”
His instruction pulls me back into focus, reminding me that tonight is about much more than driving around and reminiscing over quintessential classic rock jams. We’re on a mission.
Now that a thread of connection has been made between us, I find myself feeling a little more comfortable in the presence of this strange companion. He is, after all, a hero of mine, and no amount of decomposition is going to erase that entirely.
We drive down the road a bit before Eddie instructs me to turn again. Soon enough, I’ve slowed and entered a long, secluded lane that runs the length of the tightly packed houses.
Eddie reaches out and switches off the stereo. His single eye is peeled, focused on our surroundings and scanning the homes. Eventually, Eddie motions to a patch of dirt just off the pavement, a place for me to pull over that’s shrouded in darkness.
I park my truck against a long white wall. Large desert boulders rest in the nearby dirt, gathered around an abandoned refrigerator and a massive aloe plant that reaches out with its sharp green arms. A few dumpsters line the cracked alleyway ahead.
“Here we are,” Eddie says, handing over a set of handcuffs. “Lock yourself to the steering wheel. Tight.”
I close the metal links around my hands.
“Don’t ask me any questions,” he continues. “I’m really sorry about those cuffs, sport. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. All you have to do is wait here and not do anything stupid. Can you handle that?”
“Yes,” I confirm. I pride myself on not doing stupid things, so it’s the truth.
Eddie nods and climbs out of the cab. He moves to close the door, then stops. “All you gotta do is drive me around for one night, and then, poof, I’ll disappear,” he reminds me, stretching his fingers out in a simple pantomime as he says the word poof. “This whole thing can really be that simple.”
“I understand.”
Eddie lowers his sunglasses a bit, offering me a wink over the pink, heart-shaped rim before pushing them back onto his face. “Rock ’n’ roll. Don’t draw any attention to yourself.”
With that, he shuts the door and strolls away, disappearing into the night.
The second Eddie leaves my sight, a strange feeling washes over me. It’s similar to what I experienced back at the diner.
Am I dreaming? Is this actually happening?
The events of this evening have been so surreal that it’s honestly hard to tell.
Now that I’m no longer staring at a reanimated corpse as it dances around, the logical part of my brain is beginning to question if he was ever there at all.
Of course, there’s a simple enough way to test this.
As Eddie left me, his instructions were clear: Don’t draw any attention.
I gaze down at the car horn just below my hands, considering how easy it would be to cause a ruckus.
Then again, even if I weren’t bound by some demonic power, is drawing attention the best course of action? Right now, it seems like I’m on Eddie’s good side, and there are much worse things I could be doing than driving around a queer icon.
What about the money?
A hearty punch of disappointment strikes me in the gut. If Eddie and I part ways, I certainly won’t be getting paid in full.
Right now, there are too many unanswered questions to contend with, too many variables churning through my skull. I can’t tackle this whole thing at once, so I need to move through each piece one by one.
I center my focus and gaze down at my hands, commanding them to press the truck horn. Nothing happens. It’s the same feeling I’ve had plenty of times this evening, a complete disconnect between my brain and my body.
“Fuck,” I sigh, thinking of all the places I’d rather be. Visions of Marlo cloud my mind as I imagine her tucked into bed while Noah snoozes loudly on the living room couch, Netflix politely asking if he’s still watching.
I try pressing my hands down again, and again, and again.
Again.
Again.
Aga–
Suddenly, my breath catches. I feel the slightest bit of tension within my muscles, a subtle, almost imperceptible twitch lurking somewhere beneath my flesh.
Unfortunately, the change is so faint that even taking note of it amounts to little more than a heart-wrenching disappointment. This is less “hopeful sign” and more “declaration of the awe-inspiring power I’m up against.”
The resistance makes it feel like I’m struggling to push over some colossal boulder, and every time I press my weight against the object it simply ignores my mass.
It’s possible that the slight tremor in my fingertips was a budge of the mighty stone, but what the hell does that matter? A budge won’t cut it.
I close my eyes and lean back, trying my best to settle and relax, but I’m unable to calm my racing brain. A horde of questions keep rearing up and making themselves known, but eventually one curious thought sticks.
Why did he handcuff me if he could just tell me to stay put?
I consider this for a moment, but it doesn’t take me long to arrive at a decent potential answer. It’s because his powers wear off over time.
I open my eyes and sit up, staring at the car horn below my fingertips. Once again, I try to force my hands down, and once again, I fail. However, the twitch in my muscles is a little more apparent this time around.
“Holy shit,” I murmur.
I glance at the dashboard clock, noting that it’s been four minutes since Eddie left. I try my best to extrapolate what that will mean for my bodily autonomy moving forward, but the calculation is impossible. I barely understand my paralysis in the present, let alone the future.
The next few minutes are spent focusing all my willpower on pushing down the car horn, with mixed results.
To my relief, I actually start to see some real movement, my hand now capable of lowering a few centimeters before drifting back up into its previous position, but every passing moment that I don’t press the horn only increases the likelihood of Eddie’s return.
He said fifteen or twenty minutes, I remind myself as I cross the fifteen-minute threshold.
As if manifested by my own thoughts, I notice a figure emerging from the darkness, my heart skipping a beat as the shape makes its way down the alley. This feeling of alarm is accompanied by a surge of disappointment that my experiment’s been cut short, but seconds later everything shifts again.
The figure walking toward me isn’t Eddie. In fact, he’s not even walking. Instead, I find myself observing a young man on a skateboard, likely around twenty years old. He’s rolling casually over the fractured cement, looking beleaguered after a long night, or maybe a little drunk.
Panic envelops me. I put all the effort I can muster into pressing the horn, my hands trembling as they drop slightly and then lift back up.
I can feel the plastic of the steering wheel as it bumps against my fingertips, the pressure starting to build and then disappearing when my motivation fumbles.
The skateboarder is about ten feet away now, but he’s focused on something else. He doesn’t see me.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Realizing now that the horn isn’t going to work, I try a different approach.
I open my mouth and put all the force of my lungs into calling for him, desperate to produce a sound but coming up short.
I can feel my throat just barely starting to tighten, then suddenly it relaxes as the air’s about to make its way out.
The young man is five feet from my bumper now, casually gliding past on his board as concrete hums under the wheels. He’s looking straight ahead, completely unaware of my presence within the darkened truck cab.
As he passes my window I make one last attempt, putting everything I’ve got into a single burst of sound. I don’t even try shaping it into words, just focus on volume and strength, and to my shock this technique finally produces a lone staccato result.
“Yuh!” I grunt, a primal, one-syllable expression that comes out in a strangled huff. It’s mercifully louder than I expected.
The skateboarder’s head immediately turns.
He drops one foot to the pavement, grinding to a halt as he squints into the truck.
I stare directly at him, trying my best to produce a coherent verbalization but coming up short.
All the resolve I could muster was expelled with that yelp, and now I’m exhausted.
“Hello?” the young man says, stepping closer to my window.
I’m straining with all my might to compel this horrifically sluggish body into action, and it’s only now that I realize I’ve felt this way before, just never in reality. This is the sensation of nightmares, that suffocating quicksand pacing that somehow manifests in only the most hideous dreams.