4th Base in the 21st Century

The field was vast, thick enough to encompass my abandoned apartment twenty times and again. Metal fences constructed to the tips of their surrounding trees lay in its midst at intervals I couldn't discern. If I'd been flying perhaps I could see them and the shapes they did or didn't form, but I was stumbling far below the heavens.

At one point this field was presumably a ballpark. Its cages tore at the darkening skyline like skyscrapers on a ghost town's sunset, emptied at the tip of a people's hat. This had probably been a place of undocumented joys. At the end of it all, maybe, there just wasn't a reason for anyone to care.

It wasn't difficult for me to imagine why the jovial ballplayers had moved to greener pastures. I'd known many myself back in that single rented room we'd called home. None of them required such elaborate constructs; no metal cages for my piece of mind, no fields and plates and team players at my disposal. In my generation games were pre-packaged.

He was there as he said he'd be, white on black to my dilating pupils, suspended in the haze of obscuring light. An unkempt metal skewer of children's swings framed his languid form, all foreboding and gargantuan to me. Me. Just a set of eyes and the awareness of body. Fear prickled my sallow skin, sweat meeting the sweat of a humid atmosphere.

"Oh, baby, baby,"

His speech was slurred beyond its usual impairment. As I drew close enough to sense the pattern of his inhalations, my adjusted vision afforded me an accurate view: his eyelids parted and relaxed widely, pupils flitting dazedly like wax-melted doll eyes in hyperspeed. His age-sunken mouth, all smile lines and fret from my sunlit memory, twitched as though a cockroach newly sprayed with Raid. Though his emaciated hand gripped the swingset poles, I knew him well enough to know he was shaking.

"I left." And how strange it was to hear my own voice in this black alternate reality, the only human being in sight this wasted mess of a man. For all I knew I was safe in my apartment with Aaron, watching a third-rate psychodrama, only with the deranged actor speaking in my tongue.

"Howssat?" The figure took my hand steadily. I shook now to his rhythm. "You left, howssat?"

"I left Aaron."

Fidgeting arms embraced me, and I nestled momentarily in moist, rank garments; matted hair playing off my face, hands touching the back of a man whose heart galloped inside him. It felt better than anything I'd felt to have his pulsing flesh against my own. Many people would die without this experience, but it wasn't love.

"Here, here, baby," The earnest of his voice shoved the powdery pills into my hands quickly. The poison taste of them parched my tongue and throat.

We sat side by side on the deteriorated plastic swings, our motion a melody of rusty chains in the cryptic silence of the field. I didn't know the man's name and he didn't know mine, but it didn't much matter. I'd known Aaron's full name, taken it for my own and broken him anyway. My substance was transient and fickle. I'd left lovers and loved across the country, barren and burnt like my cigarette butts lining the interstates and city streets of this great dead nation.

The worst of it all was that I wasn't even someone important. I was someone just like you.

Minutes became moments. He asked me to walk with him and we walked, my gait increasingly jerky, moon-walking into a darkness with no peaks with which to mark my progress. Stillframes of Aaron invaded my empty brain, smiles and laughs and trips, the remembrance of a euphoria I'd held which was now surpassed by the hollow man at my side and the burning drug in my belly.

I plummeted to the wet grassy earth arm in arm with my partner. As he pressed my reeling head to the ground, my skull knocked at a firmer material. Losing myself to his saliva at my jaws, I imagined our place in the field finally: a base on the ballpark, a dusty whitish geometric design drawing my mind's eye to flash clips of baseball footage I'd seen on TVs somewhere. Roars of crowds and clinks of metal bats setting solid balls to flight beat in my perceived ears. He was on top of me pushing me hard to the damp weeds; I knew but couldn't feel his touch, I knew but couldn't believe I was dying.

..Yes, I'm here, baby. That's a lovely color on you. ...

..I agree. Well, those ones are so full of calories you know. I'm watching my weight. ....

..She'll grow up just like her father. Absent. I love you Aaron. ..

....You're mine forever. Don't you think $4.99 is a bit much? ....

...Thank you, have a nice day. ....

....Good morning. She likes the ones without cheese, but wait--pass me the butter?--I always said those were best.....

Is it dying you're afraid of?.........

Sun rays blazed through a smoke-stained windowpane, its dirty sheet curtains flowering in a heavy breeze. I didn't recognize the filth of this room, but I recognized the man beside me. He lay convulsing in sleep amongst the piles of papers and fabrics adorning our humble mattress. How I'd gotten here I didn't know. All I knew was that Aaron wasn't here. I'd disappeared again, the figment of so many imaginations. What was here yesterday was gone today, like the ballgames played on deserted fields where adulterers consorted and junkies got high. I didn't know this man's name and he didn't know mine, but it didn't much matter. What mattered was that this was real.