The tailgate dropped with a creak and a slam, the cables that held it going taut. There were a few dents and the paint was starting to peel in certain places. Deeper in the bed was worse. Probably should have used a bed liner, but it was too late now. There were no other vehicles around him, save for a car with no rims parked in a remote corner of the lot next to a rusted yellow snow plow. It was hard to say which one had been sitting there longer. They were both waiting for a snow fall. One to cover up its ugliness, the other to feel useful.
An orange sentinel towered overhead, casting light on the miniature savannah that had sprung to life all around, fighting a pitched battle to engulf the pavement. Tiny stalks were hard at work reclaiming territory that once belonged to them. At first glance, the lot appeared barren like a desert, however, like any desert, it was barren only to the untrained eye. In fact, everything around was teaming with life.
MOVIEPLEX loomed out from the distance. The angles on the sign were likely there to draw the viewer’s attention to the logo and enhance it. But now the angular entanglement of metal and lights appeared to cross out the word it once accented, as if signaling that its original purpose was now null and void. Large windows gaped back like pairs of empty eyes, powerless to reverse their fate. A sign advertising a rewards program was partially covered up by a new advertisement, the commercial real estate firm selling the property.
Shoving the assorted clutter back further into the bed, he made a space for himself and sat down, legs hanging over the tailgate. It was quiet. The thick tires and performance motor of a lifted pickup truck off in the distance grew louder and suddenly appeared in front of him for a moment then flashed by in a dull roar. At the intersection the traffic light was yellow. He came out here to think, although it was doubtless a strange place. But at one in the morning, the world quiets down for awhile. Even the proclamations of the permanent defeat of the sleep cycle, made possible by the discovery of electricity and the invention of better artificial light, met a fierce match in human fatigue and burnout. See what happens to people who don’t sleep. They go crazy.
He was almost one of those people. Some nights sleep just evaded him. He could feel the exhaustion in his bones, but the tenseness remained when he closed his eyes. That tenseness went almost unrecognized. Sometimes his jaw was randomly sore when he woke up. Maybe it ran in the family. He remembered his grandma wore a mouth guard at night so she wouldn’t grind her teeth. He wondered about his grandparents. Both sets had now passed away, after living what appeared to be fulfilling lives. “Is my life fulfilling?” His internal voice startled him. It was always posing questions with hard answers. He usually tried not to respond.
He checked his phone. It was a few minutes after one. This was his quiet time; it was almost sacred. He couldn’t always sleep but this was the next best thing. To be at rest in a busy world. Even if that rest meant sitting on the tailgate and watching the occasional car drive by, punctuated by his own thoughts.
He remembered something he had recently read about this rare mental illness. It was an article that was saying that essentially it was a disease where the afflicted person has to attempt to reorder the world from scratch every time they think about anything, leading to a maddening condition of always having to start over in order to attempt to preserve the continuity of memories, yet forgetting the starting point each time because there was no registry of a beginning in the first place. This was terrifying, more so because of the stark, detached medical language it was written in. It was disorientation of the highest order. This wasn’t directly stated in the article, but there was an implication that a version of this could develop in people with no history of mental illness in the family or themselves. It was a kind of acute psychosis that could be brought on by a sudden disorienting event or long-term accumulated sleep deprival. He didn’t know much about mental illnesses or the literature on the subject, but thought it was at least possible that despite all the years of research and progress on the subject, the real work of understanding them was just beginning.
The light turned red. A car slowed to a stop a few moments later. The driver’s impatient idling was evidenced by a continual slow creep forward until he was almost in the middle of the intersection. He creeped out even further and started to accelerate when there was a panicked series of horn blasts which erupted from a tractor trailer barreling down on the car. The driver gunned the engine and the tires spun for a moment, frantically trying to grasp the tarmac but spinning freely. The eighteen wheeler started to swerve and the car’s wheels finally found their grip and leapt forward. The big rig missed hitting the rear of the car by inches and would have undoubtedly spun it around like a top.
He watched all this unfold from the tailgate. The entire event happened so fast that it took him a few moments to process just how close to disaster both participants had been. The smoke from the tires was still hanging in the air and began to make its way to his nostrils. The light turned green. His body sighed and he laid down in the bed, looking up at the few stars that could be seen that night. They were fighting a battle of their own, one against the artificial light struggling for dominance of the sky.