You’ll find your love for her again you know. I’m sure of it.”
“Aye, you’re right there, friend. Good night to you.”
The next day didn’t start well for Alvin.
His mood was so horrible he’d gone so far as to declare himself “no longer Irish.” Nonetheless, he dutifully went to work, leaving every light in the house turned on as they’d been all night. He grabbed a bag of Mel-O-Cream Donuts and shakily filled a large silver flask with a funky fig brandy from Portugal before he left.
Though it was a beautiful day, the sunshine only served to make a disaffected Alvin look more out of place as he jerked awkwardly across Dublin’s poignant aesthetic. His protruding waistline, replete with blossoming stretch marks pulled across puffy white clouds of fat, took second fiddle to the look of pain on his face. All morning customers asked Alvin what was wrong, but he couldn’t speak about it.
It didn’t help matters that the many pints and whiskeys Alvin had consumed with his new American friend, Archer, were still winding their way through his pores. He hadn’t slept a wink, either, and in fact, he’d been too busy trying not to sleep to worry about being drowsy once morning came. During the long night, as he listened to his mind replay the conversation with Archer about their shared depression and dreams of murderous Indians, it became clear to Alvin that his nightmares were part of some sinister plot. He hoped the man holding the strings was just trying to sell him sleeping pills.
As Alvin drove his truck to the next delivery, images from his dreams rode with him: fierce Indians, noisy like nature, stepped from doors and vanities and slithered from under his bed. He’d known who they were immediately from having watched so many American movies; he still toasted John Wayne any time an American girl talked to him at the Boar’s Head. The Indians circled around his bed, horrifyingly real, their painted faces and smoky breath a shock to his senses. They pulled Alvin from his bed, his head ricocheting off the hard floor as they dragged him from his one-room flat. On the verge of slicing him apart with dull-looking blades, a smallish, pitch-black man shouted for the Indians to stop. The man, his skin a reptilian obsidian, took Alvin’s face in his impossibly large hands and squeezed until Alvin burst from his sleep, dry-mouthed, cold, and with a scream on his lips that left him unable to sleep for the rest of the night.
Exhausted, Alvin stopped at Peet’s for a second cup of scalding black coffee. “It’s like I’ve got déjà vu, and me seeing you twice in the one morning, you bloody old cod,” the clerk said, but Alvin only nodded sadly. Alvin kept delivering office supplies until the need to nap overtook him like a pack of young greyhounds. He’d barely guided his truck to his favorite shade tree – the one with the five-fingered leaves – before he was out, a split second devoted to a prayer that the Indians would leave him in peace to dream of Tatiana.
Naps weren’t uncommon for Alvin. In fact, he took one every day on the job. He said they focused him. And besides, Alvin’s naps could be counted on to last exactly 45 minutes, a short respite in the scheme of things. He would park around one ‘o clock in the afternoon, and minute by minute, his head would loll forward until his apnea-strained breathing would catch so hard he would jolt awake. Wiping his chin and gathering himself, Alvin would head back to Dublin’s streets to finish his deliveries.
Deep in sleep, Alvin was unaware that the brilliant white cab of his truck perfectly reflected the sweat-beaded forehead, black eyes, and cave-black skin of an unusual-looking man walking with an unusually fluid gait. The man, sharp featured, short, and precisely dressed, was the darkest man in the world. His skin was pure black, like some lost bit of space captured in human form. As the man passed the hand-polished truck, he smiled politely at its sleeping inhabitant, ironically, since he knew he was unseen.
Looking at his scratched watch, Alvin was shocked to see it was as late as 4:00 p.m.
Wiping his face, Alvin cranked the keys still hanging from the ignition. He felt the smooth surface of the picture of Tatiana he’d laminated and hole-punched on the key ring. Every time he looked at the picture, he wished it were bigger. He wished it were her skin he was feeling. He wished he knew where she was. How would he ever find a Korean girl, raised in Russia, whom he’d met only by chance on her journey through France?
The truck’s engine fired to life. Alvin’s foot rocking on the pedal gave it a throaty sound like a Harley Davidson, or so Alvin imagined. He wished he were anywhere else. Alvin stopped revving the engine, his eyes fixed on the quiet street reflected in the truck’s large rear-view mirror. Any other day he would have slipped the column’s gear shift into first and sprung onto the streets; now he just sat there. Picking up his cell phone, he pushed at the power button until the home screen popped up. No messages. Alvin let the phone fall from his fingers like a tear.
He looked into the side mirror and pulled it toward him until he could see his face. He tried to repair the distorted reflection with a smile or cough out a laugh. Nothing changed. The look of sorrow on his face seemed permanent, frustration etched deeply like a tribal tattoo.
Alvin was ready to break.
Losing Tatiana was bad, but manageable with the help of a little brew.
But losing his ability to sleep because he was repeatedly murdered by ferocious Indians from some faraway country? That was too much.
The black man strolled around the corner, sniffing at the air. He could not resist a casual backwards glance at the rumbling white truck and Alvin’s fluttering blue eyes.
“I have chosen as well as I could,” he thought. “He will do his job and be back with his kind before he misses a meal. And I will be just in time to clear another field of disbelievers so another ministry can grow.”
While his fingers absently fingered the smooth dashboard, Alvin’s body shook with frustration. As his concentration broke and his hands slipped quietly, restfully, to his sides, the last image of his happy self disappeared. Alvin abruptly slammed the truck into gear and ignored the cough and grind it made in complaint. He resolved to finish his route if it killed him – or someone else.
Alvin looked into his side mirror again, easing brilliantly into the lane despite cars tight on all sides. He shook his head like a wet dog might, desperate to rid himself of the plague of weariness. “Just a wee drop more and maybe I can get some real sleep,” he thought, eyes drooping even as he accelerated his lorry down the narrowest of Dublin’s lanes. A kind of hypnotic recklessness possessed what good sense he had left.
His eyes closed completely. For a fraction of a second, Alvin was asleep at the wheel. That was all the time it took to let the nightmare in.
He woke just as quickly, screaming, stabbing with his fist at the fearsome red face pressing against him. His heart thundered as he swerved to avoid another car.
“Fuck you!” he yelled, his body a quivering spectacle. He slowed the truck almost to a stop. Car horns sounding behind him pushed him through the next stop sign.
“Sleep shouldn’t be a bloody battle, and me only having an hour last night and with nightmares the like of which an Irishman shouldn’t have. And now tha’ bleeding Indians do be haunting me in my own truck.” Tears streamed down his face, his frustration all-pervasive. “It’s not my fault,” he muttered over and over again.
Alvin’s lorry ground through a corner onto O’Connell Street, coming impossibly close to the parked cars lining the curb. Exhausted, Alvin’s head tilted forward as his eyes fluttered open and closed, the edge of his white truck moving still closer and closer to the empty cars. Several pedestrians stepped backward onto the curb, angered by the reckless lorry.
