Spirits in the Wires Read Free Page A

memory of the actual experience. The only real, tactile memories I had were of waking last night.
    Panic came rolling up through my body, quickening my pulse, making me sweat, creating a worse confusion in me than I was already feeling.
    Let it go,
that small calm place inside me said.
Stop thinking about it for the moment. Give your body control
—
it knows what to do.
    What did I have to lose?
    I took a deep, steadying breath. Another. I don’t even know how I did it, but somehow I managed to step back from the panic and confusion and follow the voice’s advice.
    I was like a passenger as I made my way to the bathroom, peed and showered. Back in my bedroom, I looked in the closet and was momentarily overwhelmed by the choices. It’s not that there were a lot of clothes— because there weren’t. But there was still too much choice. I was still confounded by knowing exactly what all the various materials were, but not what it would be like to touch or wear them—their texture, their weight, the feel of how the fabric would hang.
    I took another steadying breath and let the decision go. I watched as I chose a cotton T-shirt and a pair of jeans, enjoyed the sensation of the cloth as it covered me. Slipped on a pair of moccasins and wiggled my toes in them.
    It wasn’t until after I’d made toast and coffee and was still drinking the coffee at the kitchen table that the immensity of my disassociation began to ease. It came and went throughout the rest of the day, like the ebb and flow of some inexplicable tide, but the troughs and crests began to even out and calm.
    The oddest thing was how whenever I had a question about something, that calm voice would speak up from the back of my mind in response. Like when I took the coffee from the fridge and I wondered about the beans as I spooned some into the grinder.
    Coffee,
the voice in my head said.
It’s a beverage consisting of a decoction or infusion of the roasted ground or crushed seeds (coffee beans) of the two-seeded fruit (coffee berry) of certain coffee trees. It can also be the seeds or fruit themselves, or any of various tropical trees of the madder family that yield coffee beans, such as
Coffea arabica
and
C. canefora.
    It was like I had an encyclopedia sitting in the back of my head. One that knew everything.
    I didn’t leave the apartment all day. I didn’t dare. I explored its four rooms—bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and the final all-purpose room that looked to be a combination of study, library, office, and living room. I opened the patio door that led out of that last room, but I didn’t go onto the balcony. I simply stood in the doorway and studied the street below, the buildings on the other side.
    Mostly I poked through the books and magazines I found, studied the contents of my purse and the wallet inside it, turned on the computer and explored its various document files.
    It turned out I wrote poetry. A fair amount of it. I’d had three collections published, with enough in these files for at least a couple more, though some of the poems were obviously works-in-progress.
    I also did freelance writing for various on-line magazines and wrote some op-ed pieces for
Street Times,
a little paper produced mostly by street people for street people—to give them something to sell in lieu of asking for spare change.
    I found a financial program and saw that while I wasn’t rich by any means, I had enough money banked to keep me solvent for a few months. When I thought about where that money had come from, my own work history popped up in my head. Dates, places of employment, job descriptions, salary and benefits. But I had no personal, hands-on memories of even one of these places where I was supposed to have worked.
    I closed all the files and turned off the computer.
    After a supper of asparagus, tomato, feta cheese and shredded basil on a small bed of pasta, I was finally able to go outside and sit on