Free In Springdale Town by Robert Freeman Wexler Page B

about living with the knowledge. And Officer Mercurio, what had she said–inconceivable that a character would fall out of its reality. At least I had been here to help send him back to TV land, or whatever the hell it was. But was that his reality...? I jumped up from my train seat. Officer Mercurio, she had said my counterpart was an actor. That was supposed to mean something. And she said he had a past. Implying that I didn’t?
    Sammy wanted me to stay. And despite everything that had happened today, I trusted her. The train door swished shut.
    “No, wait,” I said aloud to the empty car.
    I scrambled over and tried to pry open the door. “I want to get off.” I drummed my hand on the Plexiglas window, yelling for someone to open the door. There had to be a conductor near. Pain shot through my hand–looking down, I saw I had torn my fingernails on the door. With a jerk and shudder, we pulled away from the landing. As we rolled out of town, the tangible darkness, with warm sticky fingers, invaded the train.

Notes
    {Note 1}
    Various Artists, Songs of Route 66: All American Highway and More Songs of Route 66: Roadside Attractions , Lazy S.O.B. 1997 and 2001. This type of music has a certain nostalgic appeal for some. Oh, that open road, the wind in your hair. The feeling, however, loses something in its transcription to a compact disc player in a mid-size, plushy Japanese car that reduces road noise to a happy little hum and is not meant to be driven with the windows down. Still, there remains the satisfactions of the centerline, tires eating distance, and viewing the sky through tinted glass.
    {Note 2}
    The material contained here does not reflect the views of the producers or writers of the show Blake’s River , nor is it meant to be a speculation on any episode of the show that has been or ever will be broadcast. Although the name “Springdale” is used throughout, it does not constitute a representation of any actual Springdale, whatever its geographic locale, or the residents thereof.
    {Note 3}
    We were urged by Anita Fulton Long ( Springdale Town News , October 12, 1999) to “be a little kinder to all those big, bad property developments,” but the denizens of those tombstone monuments need also be kinder to the pedestrians of our town. The garages of these new high rises house those metal monsters which mount a new daily death toll as they roam our downtown streets. Ms. Long is sure “everything will be okay,” but that’s what boosters also told West Lee, Smithville, and Fairmont, which now face mud, flood, and smog in Necropolis. Why not cage the “carbarians” and bury them before they bury us and write our cemetery epitaphs with high-rise signatures in our own city of the dead?
    –Conrad Walker Burns,
    109 Grapevine Street.
    {Note 4}
    A woman took diet drugs and died while attempting to lose twenty-five pounds for her wedding. Something to do while planning the seating arrangements for the dinner? “Let’s put Uncle Martin with the Phillipses–whoops, just lost another pound.” Some months before her death, she began to hallucinate conversations with an idealized version of herself. The counterpart’s history included extensive training in dance and ice skating, culminating in an Olympic figure skating competition in which she won a bronze medal. The woman wrote in her journal: “There is a hardness to her, so lithe, so strong. Jealousy overcomes me. I want her body.”
    {Note 5}
    Remove glasses, contact lens case, and contact lens solution from bag and arrange by sink, glasses to the left, contact lens case and solution to the right. Contact lenses were a constant source of irritation, but vision with them was so much better than with glasses. Eye drops made lens wear more bearable, though late in the evening, especially after a night of poor sleeping, even that was insufficient. Vision correction surgery, the kind that reshaped the cornea, was an option, but the idea of cutting, even with